GHOSTS Date Added Sensory Phantoms December 2002   When asked to describe what they think a ghost might be, people have very specific ideas in their mind. These are clearly based upon an overdose of Victorian novels, TV series and low-budget movies. As such, the ghost is assumed to be a floating ethereal form, reflected at Halloween by children wearing sheets over their heads, or otherwise a semi-transparent spectre that you can see through and walks through walls. Yet the reality of what an apparition looks like is very different according to witnesses' accounts. The most common problem related by a ghostly percipient seems to be how to recognize that they have not just seen and ordinary person. The ghost generally looks and acts the same as anybody else and is often not known to be a phantom until well into the experience. Then either the figure inexplicably disappears, or else information is discovered to indicate that the seemingly normal  person was at that moment already dead. Ghosts, in other words, are pretty normal and suffer only from the handicap that they are not supposed to be alive. Indeed, most witnesses point out that it is more than possible we could all see ghosts on a regular basis without realizing that we had done so. They would seem so ordinary that under most circumstances we would be unlikely to tell the difference between a ghost and someone just walking down the street. Equally, although the view is that ghosts are visible forms - apparitions - all senses are affected. In the cellar of an old jewellers work shop in the Roman city of Chester several of the staff told Jenny Randles (Author of Paranormal Source Book & Encyclopedia of the Unexplained) about 'George'. Nobody has ever seen him, but he has often been heard, footsteps echoing on a stone staircase, Research after the fact showed that the building, near the city's North Gate, was built atop an old jail where condemned prisoners were kept three centuries before, awaiting the hangman's noose. The belief it seems to be that the footsteps are auditory replays transmitted across time. Ghostly smells are common too. Actress Doreen Sloane tells of the ghost that lived happily in her flat at Birkenhead, seen by all family members but most typified by the phantom cooking smells that invaded the building. And no fewer than one in three recent widows or widowers report smelling their spouse's perfume around the house in the weeks following their death. Sounds are also common, with various well-attested cases of noises from long past battles being heard by visitors to an area who were sometimes not aware that any such battle had ever occurred there. Research by Celia Green of the paraphysical institute in Oxford found that there are ghosts of touch, even taste and emotion, as well as the more common smell, sound and vision experiences. Visual apparitions were particularly common and differed markedly from psychopathological hallucinations, that is those experience by sufferers from mental illness or whilst under the influence of drugs. Ghostly apparitions were far more mundane with less exotic features ascribed to the hallucinations. A typical spontaneous case, one of tens of thousands now documented the world over, comes from Elizabeth Dempster of London. As soon as she moved into an old building in Highgate she picked up its somber mood.. She tried to fight it by repainting the walls in bright shades, but this did not help. Then, one night, she awoke with a sense of a presence in the room. At the foot of her bed she clearly saw a woman in old-fashioned dress wearing her hair in a bun. She could take in quite specific details and despite the dark see the sad, hopeless expression on her face. Then the figure simply disappeared. When researching the history of the house, Elizabeth traced the mysterious woman from a time soon after it was built. Her description matched an Italian woman whose husband had died in tragic circumstances. So desperate was she after this loss that she had locked herself away in the bedroom until she herself passed away. It was as if that terrible concentrated emotion had become bottled up and retained by the building across the years. The emotion itself was perhaps the easiest to tap into, as Elizabeth Dempster did the moment she moved in, but for that one night the conditions were somehow right to allow the new occupant of the house to gain a brief view of its former tenant. BACK TO TOP

Check out the latest Crypt Polls!

   

-»¦«-

F o u n d   a   b r  o k e n   l  i n k ?   L e t   u  s   k n o w