It would be quite impossible, and also I think quite wrong, to include all types of ghostly sightings into one loose fitting category as there would appear to be several different kinds of apparitions, all possibly having a different cause, and being created in a different way. Apparitions are extremely diverse in their detail and all sightings of such phenomena hold a certain fascination for those who have seen or experienced them, but also for those of us who have not or may never have such an encounter.
Could it be that there are the spirits of dead people, no longer of this world, forced to walk the places where they have lived or died, somehow unable to break their link completely with our world, stuck in a state of limbo between this life and whatever lies beyond it? A popular theory to explain just why we have haunted houses, churches and country lanes, to name but a few, is that those who are forced to return to the earth after their death are all people who have died an unnatural or sudden death and so were unable to completely sever their ties with this life. Taken before their time and wanting to say goodbye to their loved ones or just to touch or talk to those they have left behind one last time before they can pass over to the next life. However much this theory would seem to make sense it seems to be a little too romantic and simple, besides which the evidence would tend to point to some other explanation for one of the most fascinating of all strange phenomena.
As I said earlier there would appear to be different kinds of ghost and the first we will look at is known as the "Crisis Apparition." This is where a person will see a ghost, usually but not always, of somebody known or related to them. Sometimes the witness won't even realise that they are looking at a ghost, while at other times it is apparent straight away, and they become worried for the person's safety.
Some witnesses to crisis apparitions will become so worried by the sighting that they will contact the person they have "seen" or they may find out later by another means that at the time they had seen the apparition, the person had actually died at that very moment, possibly thousands of miles away. Often the person seeing the ghost will not even know that the dead relative has even been ill, or possibly the death may have been the result of an accident such as something as unpredictable as a car crash.
It is possible in some cases for the witness to not realise that they are looking at a ghost because the vision will appear to be solid, as they would in life, rather than the "traditional" semi-transparent form. They may also appear to be doing something completely natural such as opening a door, though the door may later be found to have been locked, or if the lights are on in the room then they will cast a shadow or appear reflected in a mirror. When the ghost doesn't appear in the same room as the witness, it may be seen for example walking up the garden path to the front door, but when the person goes to the front door to let them in they find there is nobody there.
A classic example of the crisis apparition is that which occurred to a young girl in the 1800s while she was out walking along a country lane in England. Suddenly the scene in front of her disappeared and was replaced by a vision of one of the bedrooms in her house which was referred to as the white room. There in the white room, lying on the floor, was her mother who looked as though she was dead. Beside her on the floor was a white lace edged handkerchief and the vision remained with the girl for several minutes. She became so concerned for her mother’s safety that, before she returned home, she went to fetch the doctor to accompany her. When they both entered the white room the scene which confronted them was the same one that the girl had seen earlier, even down to the handkerchief. Her mother had apparently suffered a heart attack and the doctor immediately performed life-saving treatment on her. When the girl’s father returned home to find the doctor there he asked "Who is ill?" as the woman had been in apparent perfect health when he had left her that morning.
It is interesting to note that in these cases the ghost usually appears to the witness as they would appear in life, not as they are at the time, i.e. in the throes of agony, lying down in bed or injured in a car crash, though ironically in the previous case the mother did appear as she was at the time, lying on the floor of the white room. Could this have been in order to convey the urgency of the situation to her daughter? Were it not for this case the occurrence of a crisis apparition could tend to suggest that the dead person is visiting their friend or relative for one final time, but taking this case into account it would appear that the sighting is caused before the point of death, by some sort of signal being sent from the dying person to the witness. This signal could possibly take the form of a telepathic message but why would a dying person send such a message in their dying moments, if indeed they do it voluntarily, and how is that signal transmitted over thousands of miles? The signal would seem to be sent at a moment of anguish, strife or intense emotion, intense enough to act as a cry for help to her daughter to come and save her life after suffering a heart attack.
In 1889 a huge survey was carried out called the "Census of Hallucinations" by the S.P.R. (Society for Psychical Research) in which they asked 17,000 people if they had ever seen a ghost or witnessed any strange phenomena. The results of the survey drew the S.P.R. to conclude that in such cases the ghost or apparition was telepathic and that it could still be classed as a crisis apparition if the vision was seen, or the signal received, up to twelve hours after the time of death.
This would suggest that the signal was transmitted at the time of death, but not received until a "convenient" moment by the recipient. One such case occurred to a Mrs. Paquet whose brother worked in Chicago on a tugboat. She awoke one morning feeling slightly depressed and could not work out why, nor could she shake off the mood. As she walked into the pantry to get some tea she saw her brother standing with his back to her, and as she watched him he appeared to fall forwards and seemed to have rope tangled round his ankles. She became distraught and exclaimed "My God, Ed is dead!" Later on that day when she received official word of his death she found that it had happened exactly as she had seen it, though it had happened a full six hours earlier than her vision. It is possible though that she may have experienced the feeling of unshakable depression at the same time as her brother’s death.
A slight twist on the crisis apparition is the case often referred to as "Steer Nor' Nor' West" and this must surely still be classified as a crisis apparition even though the "Transmitter" and "Receiver" weren't known to each other, and more importantly no death was involved.
A crew member on board a ship in the North Atlantic off the Canadian coast in the 19th Century, entered the Captain's cabin during the voyage and found a young boy at the captain's desk writing in the log book which is a very serious offence. When the man approached the young boy and spoke to him he disappeared before his eyes. The matter was reported to the captain who examined the log and found that indeed somebody had written in it. The words were written untidily across the page and read "Steer Nor' Nor' West." Thinking that it was the seaman he ordered him to write the same words out again, but when he did it the hand writing was completely different to that in the log. Angry at this the captain then ordered everybody on the ship to supply a sample of their handwriting. When all those aboard the ship had done so, still no match for the writing in the log book was found. After much deliberation the captain ordered that the ship change course and follow the instructions in the log book. It was along this new course that they encountered another ship stranded and caught in the ice flow. All those on board were running low on food and in poor health.
They pulled alongside the stranded vessel, and those still alive boarded the rescue boat. As they were doing so the seaman who had encountered the young boy in the cabin spotted another young boy on the stricken boat who looked just like the boy he had seen. When he told the captain this he was laughed away, but he remained so adamant that this was indeed the boy, the captain ordered the boy to write the words down and was amazed when the hand writing was a perfect match to that in the log book. When the boy was asked to explain the matter he was at a loss to do so as all he could remember was that at the time of the sighting he had been asleep in his bunk.
Is this also a type of crisis apparition then, as the boy would indeed have been going through a time of great emotional feeling, and it was this, rather than the moment of death, which triggered the sending of the signal? Though just how he knew in which direction to send the rescue boat is still a mystery.
Another twist on this type of apparition is the case of a Boston travelling salesman who was working at the desk in his hotel room when the ghost of his dead sister appeared before him. As he called her name she vanished. She had appeared perfectly normal as she had looked in life apart from one red scratch on her left cheek. He felt that he had to tell his parents of the experience and went to visit them. His mother became very emotional as he relayed the story to her, and she told him that she had accidentally scratched the girl's cheek a full nine years earlier when she had been preparing the body for burial. Just two weeks later his mother died peacefully.
Could this be the ghost of his sister telling him to visit his mother before it was too late, or more likely was it that his mother had created the image by similar means to a crisis apparition as a way of enticing the salesman home one last time? In cases like these (we will see more later) while there is somebody alive who could have caused the ghost, then we cannot say for sure that the ghost has come from beyond the grave.
The next type of ghost we will look at is one which is seen by different witnesses on different occasions, usually at the same place, sometimes on the same date and possibly even at the same time of day, as though the time and place had had some specific meaning in the "ghost's" life, or death. These are commonly known as "Haunting Ghosts" and the examples of these are many and varied, though most are similar in some detail or other.
One example is the ghost which "haunts" Derbyshire's Taddington Hall. One of the past residents of the hall, a farmer, used to ride to Bakewell Market every Monday morning and would return home later that night much the worse for alcohol after drinking his fill with the other farmers after their days work at the market. However, one particular Monday he must have had more than his usual amount because on the way home he fell from his horse and was later found dead at the roadside by some of the other farmers also making their way home. His wife was at home waiting for him to return as she always did on a Monday and wasn't worried at the late hour, knowing where he was supposed to be and what state he would be in. She soon relaxed when she heard his horse walking into the yard as usual, and on looking out of the window saw her husband obviously drunk staggering towards the front door. She did however become worried when he walked in through the door without opening it.
Shortly after this there was a knock at the door and when she opened it she saw the other farmers who informed her of her husband's fatal accident, and that they had found him dead at the bottom of Bakewell Hill. The farmer's ghost is now said to haunt Taddington Hall at nightfall every Monday, eternally linked to both the time and the place which meant so much during both his life and his death.
Could a ghost have the awareness to appear as regularly as this or could it be that as this was obviously the time of his wife's greatest trauma, that the signal was left by her rather than him, and recurs, only to be picked up at its strongest peak and at no other time when the signal is weaker? Surely the ghost itself isn't governed by the day and time in this way as we know from witnesses that ghosts seem not to be governed by their surroundings as they are in this day and time, but as they were in their own lifetime.
For example, a ghost which walks through a wall is often later found to have walked through an old doorway which has been blocked up since their time on earth, and a ghost which seems to float along the ground rather than walk along it, is often walking along an old floor which is at a different level to that which it is on now, so the ghosts are just walking where they have always walked.
There are simply countless stories of haunting ghosts which occupy the myriad rooms, corridors, stairs and grounds of homes the world over, and for some reason Britain seems to have at least, if not more than, its fair share of such ghosts. This not only seems to lend a romantic kind of air to the ghosts themselves but also the buildings they haunt as well and it seems that no Hall or Castle would be complete without a resident haunting ghost or two. Nothing seems to add a certain something to a ghost story more than a famous ghost in a well-known building such as Hampton Court or The Tower of London, and indeed no book on the subject would be complete without its compliment of stories of famous ghosts. These are interesting not only because of the fact that the ghost itself may be somebody well known, like a former monarch, but also because the witnesses to such hauntings are also usually famous themselves, or in a position of responsibility, and therefore they must surely become instantly credible witnesses whose reputations would be done far more harm than good if they were found to be romanticising about seeing such things as screaming ghosts gliding along the corridors of Hampton Court Palace, as the spirit of Catherine Howard has been seen doing by many subsequent residents of the grand London building.
Howard was one of the five wives of Henry VIII to live at the palace, and indeed it was to be her last place of residence. She was imprisoned there before her execution on February 13th, 1542. It is said that on November 4th of the previous year Catherine escaped from her guards and ran along the "haunted" gallery towards the chapel and pleaded with the king for her life. Her cries were in vain and she was taken back along the corridor to her room, obviously screaming and most upset. The next time she would be allowed out of her room would be on the day of her execution when she was taken to the Bloody Tower and beheaded. A fate not uncommon among the many wives of Henry VIII.
On another occasion many years later when the "haunted" gallery was opened to the public an artist was sitting sketching one of the tapestries which hung there when a hand appeared on it. He quickly sketched the hand before it disappeared, and the ring on one of its fingers was found to be "very similar" to one which was worn by Catherine Howard.
Though Hampton Court Palace can lay claim to several ghosts it is not in the same league as The "Bloody" Tower of London and its surrounding buildings, the home of confinement, torture and of course execution for many years.
One early recorded sighting of a ghost at the tower took place as early as 1241 when the ghost of Thomas A Becket was seen. Certainly most of the ghosts seen at the tower could be caused by the violent and horrid way in which they died, such as Anne Askew who was tortured on the rack in the White Tower and whose screams are sometimes heard today emanating from the building. Martin Tower is home to a ghostly bear which was one of the many animals kept there until the final one was moved to Regents Park's Zoological Gardens in 1834. Martin Tower was also home to another one of Henry VIII's ill-fated wives, Anne Boleyn, who was imprisoned there and whose ghost sits in a dark corner appearing and disappearing, usually on Autumn evenings. She is also seen at many other parts of the tower such as Tower Green which Queen Victoria had railed off as this was the spot where Boleyn was executed, and she can be seen repeating her "last" walk from The Lieutenant's Lodge (now The Queen's House) to Tower Green where she disappears.
Many executions were carried out on Tower Hill such as Anne Boleyn's sister in law Countess Rochford in 1542, Lady Jane Grey in 1554 and the Countess of Salisbury Margaret Pole the Duke of Clarence's daughter whose execution can be seen annually being replayed in all its gruesome details. Pole maintained until the end that she had committed no crime and refused to kneel at the block, saying to the executioner that he had better do his job "as best he could" which he duly did by chasing her around the block taking wild swings at her until she fell dead. The Two Princes buried at the foot of the stairs in the White Tower were murdered, probably by Richard III, in the Bloody Tower and have been seen since, walking silently together hand in hand.
The Traitors Gate has been the scene of a ghostly patrol which is never seen but can be heard in the form of studded boots cracking on the cobbled road surface as they continue to make their patrol from the Bloody Tower to Traitors Gate.
Sir Walter Raleigh is often seen walking across the ramparts between the Queen's House and the Bloody Tower where he was imprisoned in a cell measuring eight feet by ten feet, and in life he would have taken this walk many times for exercise. Raleigh is not the only ghost to frequent the Queen's House, as the ghostly screams of Guy Fawkes and his accomplices can also be heard along with the creaks and groans made by the torturing devices that they had to endure during their merciless interrogation.
Although Britain seems to have many famous buildings playing host to famous spirits, it is certainly not alone in this achievement as America can also stake a claim to host such an attraction.
Perhaps one of the most famous of America's haunting ghosts is that of Former President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, who has appeared to such eminent witnesses as the Kennedy brothers, when neither John nor Robert expressed any belief in ghosts, let alone any great interest in the supernatural. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, which ironically he foresaw and predicted after numerous dreams, he has continued to appear in the White House. The first president to sense Lincoln's presence was Theodore Roosevelt who felt on a number of occasions that Lincoln was with him in a room. The ghost wasn't actually seen though until Grace Coolidge, the wife of the 30th President Calvin Coolidge, saw the ghost between 1923 and 1929. She always saw him in the Oval Office looking out over Pennsylvania Avenue as though deep in thought, and many presidential aides and other White House staff have also seen Lincoln at that same window. Though Herbert Hoover says he never actually saw Lincoln, he claims to have heard him on numerous occasions between 1928 and 1932, describing the sounds as odd, many of them "fantastic." When Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands slept in the "Lincoln room" she answered a knock on the door, and there in front of her stood the dead President who, after doffing his trademark top hat, disappeared. When the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (himself seen in ghost form sat in a leather chair by his son Randolph at his home of forty years, Chartwell at Westerham, Kent), slept in this same room, he also saw the ghost of Lincoln. Between 1945 and 1952 during Harry S. Truman's reign as President, he claims to have heard Lincoln's footsteps, though he also never actually saw him.
Surely the evidence of these many credible witnesses must stand for something, they all surely wouldn't come forth with such stories if they doubted their validity. It is interesting to note that where Lincoln was often seen at the Oval Office window in deep thought, this is where he would have done a lot of his thinking during his reign, and would have made many an important decision at that same spot overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. This isn't the only place that Lincoln has been seen though, he has also been seen by many people in places where they would have been doing a lot of thinking about him.
Lincoln's coffin was carried on a special funeral train that stopped for eight minutes at each station along the way so that people could pay their last respects to him, and there has since been seen a "phantom" train draped in black and carrying the dead President's coffin, and as the train passed along the funeral route, watches stopped for exactly eight minutes.
The ghosts of many other people haunt the place of their deaths, or places which had some great emotional meaning in their life, such as people seen walking into lakes, hanging from gallows or perhaps one of the most frightening when encountered, those seen hitch hiking at the side of the road. There are many documented cases of people picking up these hitch hikers and noticing how quiet or how pale they are throughout the journey, often offering to turn the heating up in order to make them feel a little more comfortable, and then later on they just simply disappear from the passenger seat.
More common than this though, are cases of motorists knocking over hitch hikers they don't see until the last minute or who seem to run out in front of their car, and the drivers hear or feel a bump as they are thrown from the front of the car, but when they stop and return to the spot, there is no sign of a body or even damage to the car. The police carry out their investigations and often the case turns out to be that the scene of the "accident" is the same place where a pedestrian has been killed in the past.
Some apparitions are clearly just that, apparitions, as they appear to be grey or misty or semi-transparent while others appear to be completely life like, and people don't realise until later that what they have seen was actually a ghost, or until the ghost does something unusual such as disappear when spoken to or walk through a wall.
How is it then that these apparitions are seen by different people at the same place? Many believe that somehow a "recording" of the person is left behind during their life time, and that this latent signal is somehow later picked up and replayed in the mind of a "receptive" person under the right conditions, but a lot of ghost sightings occur centuries after the person seen has died, so this latent signal must somehow remain dormant for all this time. A common thought which seems to recur throughout the majority of ghost stories is that the recording of the signal is triggered by some sort of emotional stress, and there can be no place more emotional or stressful than the battlefield in the heat of a conflict. Many believe that this is why there are many tales of haunted battlefields and battle cries being heard at the scenes of medieval battles. A classic example of this phenomena is the scene of the first battle of the English Civil War at Edgehill, Warwickshire, where Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians fought the Royalists led by Prince Rupert in 1643. This would indeed have been a scene of great emotional outpouring as the battle took the lives of 5,000 brave men.
It was a month later when local shepherds saw the battle being played out before their very eyes, but not only could they see the battle, they could also hear the battle cries and the clashing of sword blades and the beating drums. Although the scene appeared to be perfectly real to them there were no bodies left behind on the ground where the men fell.
King Charles I heard about this and, on Christmas Eve when it happened again, troops were sent to investigate the "haunting." Some of those sent had been involved in the original battle themselves and they witnessed the "replay" of the battle, and those who had been involved recognised the compatriots that they had lost while fighting alongside them. One of the men recognised Prince Rupert himself who was still very much alive, thus suggesting that the apparition was not from the afterlife, but caused by something which had been present on the day of the battle and somehow left behind at the time, and not just by the dead and dying but by the survivors as well.
Another more sinister tale of strong emotion leaving behind an imprint on the surroundings is that of the evil land owner "Wicked" Will Darrell. In 1575 Darrell sent for a midwife to deliver a child at his home. The midwife, a Mrs. Barnes, was collected from another town and blindfolded throughout the journey so that she would not be able to retrace her steps and discover where she had been. Once at the house she was led into a bedroom where a masked woman was lay on the bed in the middle of giving birth. Mrs. Barnes was told that she would be well rewarded if all went well, but that she would be killed if the mother were to die during the birth.
When the woman bore a son, Darrell took hold of the midwife and told her that she must cast the infant into the blazing fire on the landing. When she flatly refused Darrell took hold of the child and he himself cast the newborn baby into the flames. The Distraught Mrs. Barnes was once again blindfolded and returned to her home, at which point she promptly contacted the local magistrates and showed them a scrap of material she had been able to take from the curtains in the bedroom, and she described to them the scene she had glimpsed through a window. They were able to recognise the house as Littlecote, a manor house in Wiltshire. However, due to his wealth Darrell was able to bribe the judge and justice wasn't served until later when Darrell was out riding with the hunt one day. He was thrown from his horse and in the fall he died from a broken neck. The scene of his death is now haunted by an apparition of a child engulfed in flames. The house itself, Littlecote, is haunted by the ghost of a midwife clutching a baby, and also by the screams of a woman and baby.
The haunting of the house is quite understandable as the woman, the baby and the midwife were all present here at one time, but just why the scene of Darrell's death should be haunted by the baby, a place where it obviously never visited is a more complex problem. Perhaps as Darrell fell from his horse his thoughts turned to the child, and he became overcome with guilt, but could this have left an image of the child there rather than Darrell himself?
So far what we have looked at seems quite acceptable if we view it with an open mind, people leaving behind images of themselves at places of great meaning to them, but if that is the case then how do we explain ghostly apparitions of inanimate objects such as stagecoaches, buses and even planes. Throughout the years many stories have featured outmoded means of transport, such as old stagecoaches on darkened lonely country lanes and even cyclists. One such cyclist haunts the road at Eyam Dale, Chesterfield in Derbyshire.
One rainy day a man was riding his bike up the steep climb and was amazed when another bike overtook him easily. If this wasn't enough of an insult, the faster cyclist was bone dry and the water appeared to be just running off him, despite the torrents which were falling from the sky and soaking the other rider to the skin. This same bike has also been heard overtaking a stagecoach on the same stretch of road, and the occupants of the coach noticed how they could quite clearly hear the rattling of what sounded to be a positively ramshackle bicycle, yet they could see nothing, even when the sound was right alongside them.
As new and more modern forms of transport have taken over, they too have become the centre for ghost stories and hauntings, the most famous of all of them is that concerning a bright red London bus.
During the 1930s, a phantom bus was seen on the No.7 route at Kensington, London where St. Marks Road meets Cambridge Gardens. This was a notoriously dangerous bend and was the scene of many traffic accidents, some of them fatal. Many drivers involved in accidents there said that they had been forced to swerve to avoid a double decker bus which was coming towards them at high speed. One such driver said that he had seen that all of the lights inside the bus were on, but despite this he could see no driver or passengers on board. After swerving to avoid the bus and crashing into a wall he said that the bus had just simply vanished. Often there were independent witnesses to the accidents, one of whom said that the bus just appeared and headed straight for an oncoming car which swerved to avoid it, crashing into a wall and killing the driver.
The bus was clearly an apparition, and was also seen by a bus depot official who saw it late one night drive onto the depot forecourt, sit silently for a few moments, then just disappear. He said that there was no engine noise at all, it had seemed to just roll by itself.
Just why the bus was haunting this part of London can be guessed at, because when the notoriously dangerous corner was straightened out by the local council, the apparition of the phantom bus was never seen again. Was it a warning of the danger that lay ahead? If it was then why did so many people crash and die while trying to avoid it? How did it manifest itself? Was it a creation of the minds of wary motorists, and if so, was it a collective creation, as many eye witnesses to the accidents also saw the bus. Then of course we are left with the sighting by the official at the depot who wasn't in danger at the time, nor was he even near the notorious black spot.
If we say that these latent signals are left behind at a certain point, then could it be possible that the strength of the signal could fade with time the longer it lies dormant because there is a reported case of this being apparently what has happened? During the 18th Century an apparition of a lady wearing red shoes, a red headdress and a red gown was seen to be walking along a corridor of an English mansion. Over the years though the sightings continued, they were now of a lady in pink shoes, a pink headdress and a pink gown. By the middle of the 19th Century, the apparition was described by witnesses as a lady in a white gown with grey hair. A century later people talked about hearing the swish of dress as if an invisible lady was walking along the corridor and when the building was demolished in 1971, workmen complained of feeling a presence in the old corridors.
Could the ghost have faded with time, and why do all apparitions not follow the same course, or could it be that the signal is being reinforced every time it is picked up by a new percipient, and replayed via them?
The signals can't only be picked up by people but also by animals, we've all seen the scenes in horror films where a dog barks at something that the people can't see, or a cat which is hissing with its hair stood on end, yet the people again are unaware of any danger. This is not as far-fetched as you may think, nor is it done just for effect in films as was proven by an experiment in a Kentucky house which contained a haunted room. The animals used in the experiment were a cat, a dog, a snake and a rat.
The animals were first tested in a room which showed no sign of a haunting and none of them showed any reaction and behaved perfectly normally. Then one by one they were led into the haunted room. The cat was carried in by its owner and on entering a few feet into the room, it leapt onto its owners shoulders, then on to the floor and sat spitting and hissing at the chair in the corner of the room with its hair standing on end on its back.
The dog was then led into the room and once it got a similar distance into the room as the cat it snapped at its owner and continually struggled to get out of the room, and once outside it refused to re-enter the haunted room.
When the snake was placed in the haunted room it assumed an attack posture and focused its attention on the same chair in the corner of the room. It remained in this position for a number of minutes and then looked toward the window. It then backed slowly away, then once again assumed its attack posture.
When the rat was led into the room, it displayed no reaction to the chair or anything else in the room which had affected the other animals, and it continued to behave perfectly normally.
This goes to show that at least some animals can detect a haunting, sometimes which humans are unaware of. Assuming that they are not intelligent enough to perceive a theory of ghosts, can they pick up the recording of whatever was in the room, possibly an emotional occurrence or trauma of some kind. In fact Jimmy Wentworth Day, a renowned raconteur, author and collector of "ghost stories" is quoted as saying "Dogs I always regard as good witnesses."
Another relatively common kind of apparition is what is commonly termed the False Arrival apparition. This occurs when a vision of a person is seen or more commonly heard to arrive at a place, and then later turn up in person. This kind of apparition can occur, as with other kinds not just with human subjects but also with animals, such as people seen riding the horse they will later ride when they turn up in person. A case which takes this even further is one which occurred to a married couple.
Two brothers had married two sisters, and both lived a short distance away from one another. One day a friend was visiting one of the brothers and, while stood at the window, saw the other brother and his wife arriving in their horse drawn carriage. The carriage was being pulled by a horse called Dobbin who hadn't been used for a while as he had been injured in an accident. The brother and wife approached the window and also saw their siblings approaching, recognising them instantly, and they returned to their seats and saw the visitors pass by the window and awaited the knock at the door which never came. This was most unusual as they had never before passed the house without stopping to say hello. Seconds later the visitors' daughter burst in through the door looking very shaken. She said "Oh Auntie, I have had such a fright. Father and Mother have just passed me on the road without speaking."
Not ten minutes later the vehicle was seen again in the same place as before, only this time the visitors had arrived for real with the newly recovered Dobbin pulling the carriage. It was later found that at the time the apparition was seen, the family had just been setting out on its journey. This would seem to link up with the crisis apparition, as some sort of psychic link, only where the ghost is seen at the time of death, here it is seen at the journey's beginning when the visitors would have been anticipating seeing their relatives again.
So we have seen cases where witnesses see an apparition in their surroundings behaving as they would normally do and doing things which seem natural. How then do we explain a sighting of an apparition which is seen not as just an apparition of a person or of a vehicle, but of a whole scene rather than a small part of it.
This very thing has happened a number of times, notably on one occasion in 1926 when a Miss Wynne was out for a walk to explore the countryside near her new home in Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk. She was joined by a friend of hers, Miss Allington, and they decide to visit the church in the nearby village of Bradfield St. George.
They walked through a farmyard and onto a road, and on the opposite side of this road was a high brick wall which ran around a corner and into which was set a large set of wrought iron gates. Through the gates they could see at the end of the driveway a large house set behind some large trees. The house was partly hidden behind these trees but they could see part of the roof and some of the windows which were in the Georgian style.
The next time that they walked along this route they could see no sign of the wall or the house. All they could see were the trees which were growing wild among mounds of earth, weeds and several pools of water, all of which had obviously been there for some time. They enquired about the house but nobody else had ever seen it apart from the two women.
Such cases as this are often referred to as Time Slips but could Miss Wynne and Miss Allington have slipped in time and seen the house as it had been years earlier or, stranger still, as it would be in years to come? Could they have possibly seen the vision through the eyes of somebody else who had been so moved by the sight that they left behind a recording of the sight which beheld them and the recording was then later picked up by the two women? This would apparently seem to hold true as most, but certainly not all, time slip cases are historic rather than futuristic.
Another historic case is that of Mrs. Turrell-Clarke who was one day in the church at Wisley-cum-Pyrford, Surrey singing along with the church service when she was amazed to see the interior of the church regress to a state as it would have appeared hundreds of years earlier. The entire floor was made from soil, the altar was a rough-hewn stone and in the centre of the floor was a group of monks chanting who were dressed in long brown robes. During her experience she felt as though she was no longer taking part in the proceedings but watching the service from the back of the church with a small group of people.
Mrs. Turrell-Clarke later discovered that Pyrford church was once a chapel of Newark Abbey and that the monks had worn black robes, but in 1293 when the church was used by the monks of Westminster Abbey they had indeed worn brown robes. So how could Mrs. Turrell-Clarke have seen an image from seven hundred years earlier? Had she seen it through the eyes of another person in the small group at the back of the church? Was the image left behind and picked up later or, stranger still, had she actually swapped places momentarily? If so then there must have been a person in the thirteenth century wondering where the earth floor, stone altar and chanting monks had gone to, and why the candles where replaced by new electric lighting.
An amazing tale of a time slip which can't be explained by any of these possibilities, and frankly defies any rational attempt to explain it, appears in the book The Mask Of Time written by Joan Forman and features a man she named Mr. Squirrel.
Mr. Squirrel was a coin collector from Norfolk, and one day in 1973 he went to Great Yarmouth to buy some clear envelopes in which he could keep his coins as he had been told of a shop there that stocked what he was looking for. When he walked around the corner and into the street he wanted he was surprised to see that it was cobbled, but the shop he wanted was freshly painted and looked new. Inside the shop was an old fashioned box type till and a young assistant dressed in old fashioned Edwardian clothes with her hair piled on top of her head in a loose bun. He told her what it was that he had come for and she returned with a brown box full of the small envelopes. When he mentioned that he was surprised at how many she had in stock she told him that they always kept a large amount for the fishermen who came in regularly and who used the envelopes to keep their hooks in. He took the amount he needed and was told that it would be a shilling, he noted the use of the old term but thought little of it as decimalisation was still relatively new in 1973. He paid with a new five pence piece which she looked at oddly but took as it was roughly the same shape, size, colour and value as its recently out dated counterpart.
When he left the shop it struck him just how quiet it had been inside with no sound coming in from outside at all, and in fact only his conversation with the shop assistant had broken the silence.
It wasn't until the next week when Mr. Squirrel returned to the shop to buy some more of the envelopes that all the pieces fell into place. This time there were no cobbles on the street and the shop front no longer looked new but appeared rather weather beaten. Inside the shop he was served by an older woman who claimed to have none of the envelopes he had asked for, nor she said had she ever stocked them. Mr. Squirrel still had the ones he had bought the previous week and when Joan Forman tracked down their manufacturers, she was told that they had originally been produced as early as 1914, but were sold as late as the 1920s. So apparently not only had Mr. Squirrel visited an Edwardian shop, but he also had interacted with the sales assistant and, even more amazingly, the small envelopes he bought had travelled back to 1973 with him.
In this case then could Mr. Squirrel have seen the shop as through the eyes of another person, possibly one of the fishermen? Unlikely as the assistant had explained to him that the fishermen often visited her to buy them to keep their hooks in, a fact the customer would have known being such a person. Then there is also the problem that he had interacted with the shop assistant, and not only that, but he still had the evidence of the envelopes in his possession in 1973.
Imagine then, if this had been a true time slip, the look on the face of the sales assistant who examined the coin which Mr. Squirrel had used for his purchase. Not only would the coin's date of manufacture be some fifty years in the future, but the face on the coin would be of a monarch who wouldn't take the throne for over thirty years to come.
So just when we could have an apparent explanation for time slips, along comes Mr. Squirrel to throw his proverbial spanner in to the works. His spanner though can't be as big or do as much damage as that thrown by Victor Goddard (later to become Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard) whose experience of a time slip can't fit into the theory of a recording picked up at a later date, as the sight which met his eyes would not exist until some four years after he had witnessed it.
Goddard was flying in a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hawker Hart Bi-plane Bomber from Scotland to England when he hit bad weather and lost his bearings. In the bad weather and having to navigate by sight he was unsure exactly where he was. What he did know was that he was somewhere near Drem, a World War 1 Air Force Base no longer in use. Goddard knew he couldn't land there having visited the site in his car in the past and seeing the runway was now used as farmland. However if he spotted it he could use it as a guide to get back on course.
He flew below the cloud cover and indeed spotted Drem, only now it was fully operational and the sun was shining down on it. The hangars had all been repaired and he could see four planes on the tarmac, one of which he had never seen before, a Hawker Hurricane which was a monoplane fighter not used until 1935 and all of the planes were painted yellow and the staff on the ground were all wearing blue uniforms as oppose to the usual khaki denim.
Goddard flew on, now sure of his bearings, and landed safely at his destination, but when he reported his sighting, he was told to "Lay off the scotch" and it wasn't until 1938 that Goddard's questions were answered when the Hawker Hurricane entered into service. Training craft were painted yellow to distinguish them from operational ones, a lot of which were housed at Drem which was now made into a training site whose staff were issued with new blue uniforms.
Not only had Goddard seen Drem as it would be in 1938, but he had also encountered it on a fine sunny day rather than during the bad weather that he had experienced and lost altitude to avoid. He had used it to gain his bearings and continue his journey, so not only had Goddard himself slipped in time but also his aircraft had obviously gone with him.
Though this isn't strictly a ghost story as such, is it possible that Goddard and his aeroplane may have appeared as a ghostly sighting to anybody on the ground at Drem on that fine sunny day in 1938 in their new blue uniform?
So most of the examples we have looked at so far would seem to show that ghosts such as crisis apparitions, haunting ghosts and some cases of time slips are images created by the percipient in some way, most likely a psychic message rather than a spirit somehow left behind and picked up later by a sensitive person, whereas other ghost stories would seem to show a life after death or a survival of the spirit.
So how do we explain a ghost which goes beyond being seen in an old house and disappearing or a battle being played out, but goes so far as to interact with living people and seem to have an apparent awareness of their surroundings? The best example of an Interactive Ghost is the story of Flight 401. The story features not one but two interactive ghosts, the ghosts of Don Repo and Bob Loft. They were the flight crew on Eastern Airlines Flight Number 401, an L1011 aircraft on its way over the Florida Everglades, when they hit trouble.
The autopilot had been engaged and could be disengaged by simply moving the steering column, and while the men were moving around inside the cockpit, one of them inadvertently knocked the column, thus disengaging the autopilot. The plane then began to lose altitude and dropped to five hundred feet. The two men were unaware of this as the autopilot read out had continued to show their former height of two thousand feet. Although a warning bleeper sounded, Loft didn't hear it through his headphones, and Repo had climbed down into what's called the Hellhole. This is a small compartment under the cockpit where the cabin crew can check to make sure that the front landing gear has locked down properly, which Loft thought hadn't happened. Obviously down there Repo was also unable to hear the warning bleeper.
The sight which confronted Repo from the Hell Hole, the last thing he would ever see, would have been the tops of the trees less than five hundred feet below him. Completely powerless to do anything, he and all those aboard the plane were living on borrowed time. Within twenty seconds all one hundred and one people on the aircraft were dead and the plane lay in pieces in the swamplands of Florida. Did Repo and Loft survive their deaths on December 29th, 1972, as many witnesses who have seen them since would tend to think? Most of the sightings since that fateful night have been on L1011 aircraft, and the majority of them on planes which have use recycled parts of the Flight 401 aircraft.
The many people who claim to have seen, and even spoken to Repo and Loft, as with the people who have seen Abraham Lincoln's ghost, are very eminent, reliable witnesses. These include pilots, flight officers and even the Vice President of Eastern Airlines. Other sightings have been by multiple witnesses, one such incident was that of a Captain and two Flight Attendants who saw and spoke to Bob Loft before he disappeared in front of them. They were so worried by the incident that their flight was cancelled. Repo has also done a disappearing act in full view of a stewardess and a passenger who had enquired about the uniformed man next to her.
Whereas Bob Loft seems content to be seen and occasionally spoken to, Don Repo tends to be more involved. A Flight Engineer was carrying out a pre-flight inspection, as he would normally do, when a uniformed man told him "You don't need to worry about the pre-flight. I've already done it." The Flight Engineer turned to thank his helper and saw the figure of Don Repo.
Another occasion when Repo leant a helping hand was witnessed by a Flight Attendant who saw him in the galley fixing an oven. There was only one Flight Engineer on the plane at the time and he was adamant that he had not been in the galley. Repo was again seen in the galley of a plane on Tri Star 318, a stewardess, Faye Merryweather, saw his face looking out at her from one of the ovens. Very disturbed by this she ran to get two more colleagues, one of whom had known Repo well. All three of them clearly heard Repo speak to them as he warned them "Watch out for fire on this plane." The last leg of the plane's journey was subsequently cancelled due to serious engine trouble, and it was later discovered that the galley on Tri Star 318 had been salvaged from Flight 401.
An independent body, the Flight Safety Foundation was told of the sightings and after its investigations concluded that the witnesses were all trustworthy and experienced and that their testimony was significant. The Foundation's report stated that "The appearance of the dead Flight Engineer was confirmed by the Flight Engineer." Records show that indeed there was a fire on the aircraft.
Do Bob Loft and Don Repo live on after leaving their mortal bodies as it would seem? Do they carry on a crusade to save others from suffering the same fate as themselves? One Captain on an L1011 flight witnessed an appearance by Repo who, before disappearing, told him "There will never be another crash of an L1011... We will not let it happen." Since December 29th, 1972 there has indeed never been any other such crash involving these aircraft.
This case shares a similarity with the No.7 London bus case in so far that it is a warning of possible danger, but the similarity would seem to end there because with the bus many were killed while trying to avoid it while Loft and Repo tried to avoid the loss of life. Also the drivers at the time knew of the possible danger ahead and so could have created the bus themselves, whereas with the L1011 case no danger was apparent beforehand, especially with the fire until Repo's warning.
We can also draw a comparison with another case of a warning of danger, that of a woman, Mrs. Tillotson, who was asleep in her bed in her own home. She was woken in the night by a knocking on the door and, on seeing the late hour, she was immediately both worried and curious. When she opened the door there was her daughter, Helen, who lived across the street standing there looking worried. She told her mother that she must come over to her house straight away so she ducked back inside to get her slippers and when she returned to the door Helen had gone. By now very curious and even more worried she went across the road to her daughter's house to see what was the matter. She was most surprised to see that there was no movement inside the house, and she had to knock several times before getting a response. Helen eventually came to the door and seemed most annoyed at having been woken at such an ungodly hour, "But you came and woke me!" said Mrs. Tillotson confused. As they stood there debating exactly who had woken whom, Mrs. Tillotson's house across the street was destroyed by a massive explosion. The cause was later found to have been a gas leak.
Helen knew nothing of the warning she was supposed to have given her mother and had been asleep all the time, so we must assume that the mother had somehow created the whole thing, could she have smelt the gas in her sleep and sensed the danger, and then in a semi waking state her mind had created the scenario of her daughter calling to get her out of the house? The problem here is that again some knowledge of danger must have been apparent, but why then, when awake and looking for her slippers, could she not smell the gas or sense the danger, or was it masked for her by the story of her daughter in trouble.
Still we are left with the problem on the plane where nobody but Repo knew of the fire risk which, if evident, would have been spotted in a pre-flight check and wouldn't have been apparent to Faye Merryweather or the two stewards she called to investigate with her, especially in the galley away from the engines. Was it the spirit of Don Repo fulfilling his and Loft's crusade to protect L1011 aircraft and all who flew on them?
Is it possible for ghosts to have such an awareness of their surroundings as to be aware of danger? This would appear to be what happened in a Detroit factory in 1964 while a man was walking through the factory on his lunch hour. A giant body press was activated by accident, and just before the motor fitter was killed by the machine he was pushed out of the way by a tall black man with a scar on his left cheek. Later when he told his colleagues of the experience they recognised that the black man's description matched that of a man who had been decapitated by the same machine twenty years earlier while he had been pressing parts for bombers. Though he had been an excellent worker who knew his job well, long hours of overtime had made him drowsy and careless. The fitter said that the black man had pushed him out of the way easily and that he had looked and felt real. So how then could a ghost, if that is what it was, physically push a man? We have a similar problem in the Nor' Nor' West story where a ghost, though that of a living person, physically manipulated a pen and left behind writing in the ships log book. Can ghosts physically manipulate objects or are they really ghosts at all?
Could the scarred black man have been a crisis apparition created by one of the fitter’s co-workers seeing the danger and suddenly recalling the accident of twenty years earlier and feeling a sudden dread? Even if this is the case then we are still left with the question of how a ghost, however it should be created, physically moving a grown man. The most likely explanation is some form of telekinesis or psychokinetic force (the ability to move things with the power of the mind) but who in a scenario like this would be using the power? The fitter himself, one of his colleagues, or possibly his co-workers collectively, and can telekinesis be used to influence a living breathing man or just inanimate objects?
With all the cases we have looked at so far have we seen any proof of an afterlife? Probably the best evidence so far is Repo and Loft, though even in their case some of the encounters don't necessarily show a "survival of death." To say that we truly have evidence of an afterlife we must surely need to communicate with the dead, to receive a message from the "other side." Occasionally we find a case where there is a strong suggestion of an afterlife, and where a survival of death seems to be the most likely explanation.
In North Carolina in 1921 James Chaffin died, leaving everything to one of his four sons. The son himself died a year later leaving no will of his own. Three years later, in 1925, the second son, now the eldest living, was visited by the ghost of his father. The ghost spoke to him and told him "You will find my will in my overcoat pocket." The son then found the overcoat, and stitched inside the lining was a rolled up note. The note said to read Chapter 27 of Genesis in the family bible. When he found the bible and turned to the relevant section, in the page was a second will which bequeathed everything equally to all four sons.
The will was a later one than the original and was hidden where nobody else but the father knew about it. If the second son then didn't know of it, how did he know where to look for it in the coat and then the bible unless he was told to by his father, but could the message have actually come from beyond the grave? The other alternative is that the second son falsified the will in order to get a share of his fathers, then elder brothers fortune, though there was no evidence of this found when the case was looked into by a lawyer hired by a Canadian member of the S.P.R. but the significance of the 27th Chapter of Genesis is that it contains the story of how Jacob deceived his blind father Isaac into granting him the inheritance of his brother Esau.
Even a case like this then cannot be taken as proof of an afterlife as holes can be found in the story, but this is just one of many cases of a ghost telling people where to find wills, treasure and even on some occasions their earthly remains. There can't be many tales though of a ghost identifying his murderer.
September 28th, 1749 was the last day that 30 year old Sergeant Arthur Davies was seen alive. He went to go hunting and never came back, a search for him failed to turn up any sign of his whereabouts and was called off after four days. Due to the nature of the highlands where he went missing with its marshes, crags and strong currents, his body could have easily been concealed in any one of a thousand places so foul play wasn't suspected and the case died down over time until some 10 months later when a shepherd, Alexander Mcpherson, was visited by a man claiming to be the ghost of Sergeant Davies. Davies spoke to Mcpherson and told him that he was the victim of murder, of which no suspicion had been raised before, and he told the shepherd the whereabouts of his remains. Mcpherson decided to look where he had been told to, and indeed found a body at the exact spot. He turned and fled, feeling desperate to forget the whole ghastly business and did nothing further until he was visited by the ghost a second time. However this time the ghost was also seen by Mcpherson's employer's wife Isobel Mchardie.
Davies asked Mcpherson to give his body a proper burial, and again told him that he had been murdered, only this time he gave the shepherd the names of his murderers. He also asked him to contact his friend Donald Farquarson, and when he did get in contact, Farquarson was very skceptical about the whole affair and doubted the motives of the shepherd. Despite his skepticism he decided to follow Mcpherson to the grave and was dumfounded when he recognised the clothing and hair colour on the body of the dead Sergeant Davies. Though they decided to fulfil the dead man’s wish for a proper burial they did not tell the authorities of the alleged murder for various reasons. The main reason being that they didn't want to be seen to be involved in "ghostly goings on," bearing in mind that this was the 1700s and things like that were taken very seriously, and also the situation at the time between the Scots and the English which was delicate to say the least.
As time passed, Mcpherson was fired and his new employer was one of the men Sergeant Davies had accused of his murder, Duncan Clerk. Mcpherson was obviously nervous when in Clerk's company and, after rowing with him one day, he accused him of Davies' murder. Clerk offered the shepherd twenty pounds to say nothing to anyone, and the offer was accepted. Word soon spread though and eventually reached the authorities who put Clerk on trial for murder.
The main evidence against him was the I.O.U. for twenty pounds which he had given Mcpherson, and the two rings from Davies' fingers which were found on the fingers of Clerk's mistress. In addition to this evidence the prosecution found two witnesses, the most amazing fact however is that the court allowed the ghostly evidence of Mcpherson to be included in the trial. An excerpt from the court record book stored in Edinburgh at the General Register House read as follows;
".. the deponent rose from his bed and followed him to the door and then it was as he had been told that he said he was Serjeant Davies who had been murdered in the hill of Christie aboute near a year before and desired the deponent to go to the place he pointed at where he would find his bones..."
Despite all the evidence the two men accused of the murder were acquitted, not due to lack of evidence, but more to do with the hostility between the English prosecutor and the Scottish defender which marred the trial, and the proceedings were further hampered by the hanging of one of the witnesses for an unrelated offence. So despite his efforts Davies failed to see justice done, but what he did achieve was the status of being the first person to testify in a court trial from beyond the grave.
So at last we have proof of an afterlife, or do we? As seems obligatory with these tales, there is always an alternative explanation, albeit an equally puzzling one.
As the murderers of Davies were still alive, is it possible that their feelings of guilt were somehow portrayed to the shepherd Mcpherson who was previously unaware of the murder, and possibly even that Davies was dead? There were certainly at least 2 people who knew of the killing and the location of the corpse, so once again there is no watertight proof that the vision of Davies was created by the dead man himself, but could have been created by the two "guilty" men or the two witnesses produced in court.
The problem with most ghost stories is that as they are passed down through the ages they become only as reliable as not only the person telling it, but also all those who have told it before. Details have a habit of becoming fuzzy, distorted and exaggerated with each telling, details which don't seem important are left out and those which are not so important are told and retold so they become slightly further from the truth each time. What we need then is a ghost story which has remained unchanged though the years, one that isn't told time and time again but is passed by some other means such as visually.
The saying goes that the camera never lies, and the photographs of ghostly images are many and varied, some show clearly defined figures while others show just a hazy mist, all however are most interesting.
Some such photographs are taken when a witness sees a ghost and then tries to capture it on film but not all of these attempts however are successful, others are taken when no ghost is seen at the time and, to the photographers surprise, a ghost is seen on, for example, a family photograph. Many such photographs though can be put down to natural causes such as tricks of the light, exposure problems, faults with the film or careless development of the film. It is interesting to note that some pictures have passed all of these tests and, years after being taken, still manage to defy all attempts to explain them. Could they really be a ghostly image caught on film, surely if a ghost is visible to the naked eye then it would stand to reason that it would also be visible to the camera, as this is in reality a mere extension of the human eye which is able to store a picture for posterity.
If we suppose that a ghost is caused by a psychic effort rather than being the spirit of a dead person then could this psychic image still be captured on film as if it were a physical manifestation? When it is seen at the time of exposure this is reasonably understandable, but when it is not seen at the time of exposure we have a problem once again. Could the photographer be portraying an image himself? Could the signal that he is perceiving be relatively weak so he is unable to portray it physically, but is able to portray it mentally on to the photographic film?
There have been cases of psychics claiming to be able to perform "Thought Photography" by portraying images on to film by the power of thought alone, even under laboratory conditions where they are given a specific image and then made to portray it onto a photographic plate. One of the best examples is Ted Serios who is one of, if not the best exponents of thought photography.
Ted Serios’ best work was produced in the 1960s and 1970s. He would use a Polaroid Instamatic camera so there was no question of him tampering with the film itself, and he would be able to produce images on the film often of faraway buildings, on occasion even when the camera was in a different room to him and pointing into empty space. So could unwitting photographers be producing such examples of thought photography of ghostly images completely by accident, perhaps after picking up a latent signal left behind years before?
We have examined the many and varied types of ghosts, and not all of them appear to have the same cause, but appear to be created in many different ways. Nowhere though have we seen an example which proves "beyond doubt" that they are the spirits of people no longer of this world who are returning from the afterlife as there is always another possible explanation. It is interesting to note that there are surprisingly few stories of ghosts appearing in graveyards where there should surely be many hauntings if ghosts are linked to the dead people they represent. The ghosts in the majority tend to frequent the places that were connected to the person in life rather than in death. One thing is for certain, whatever the cause for ghosts and apparitions the explanation is very likely to be every bit as baffling and unbelievable as if they were somehow the spirits of the dead.
Before we can answer a question we must first know what that question is. Is it that ghosts exist, or is it what ghosts really are? What we must do is answer both questions in order, so if the first question is do ghosts exist then the answer must be yes. There can be absolutely no doubt in anybody's mind that people do see apparitions, both of people and of other things as well such as animals, phantom stage coaches, buses and even buildings. Some are even lucky enough to capture them on film though they're not always aware of it at the time.
So we now come to the second question, what are ghosts? The common belief being that they are the spirits of dead people, and if you should ask a person whether or not they believe in ghosts they will automatically make the connection that you are asking them if they believe that the souls of persons long dead can still walk the earth, so we must try to get away from this common misconception that "ghost" means the spirit of the dead. Though in some stories this would appear to be the case there is no proof of the fact, and though for some reason many people would love this to be true, the argument is far from convincing. So we must then answer the second question: What are ghosts? This one however is not as easily answered as the first question. We have seen that there are different types of ghosts and apparitions and not all appear to have the same cause, some causes being more obvious and simple than others. Whatever kind of ghost we are talking about, it is clear that the human mind, complex as it is, has a lot to do with it. What we will do is perhaps the only thing we can do and that is take each different type of ghost and look at it separately to try and see how the different scenarios differ or compare.
The first we will look at is crisis apparitions, this being perhaps the simplest of all to explain, that is the apparition of a person seen at the time of, or up to twelve hours after their death, and when the ghost is often known to the percipient of the vision. It is likely that crisis apparitions are caused by some sort of telepathic message sent out by the dying person in their last moments of life. We know from E.S.P. experiments that people can indeed "link up" (though with varying degrees of success) over vast distances. One early example of one of these experiments is that carried out around the turn of the century by a Mr. Kirk who had a lady friend to whom he referred to as Miss G., his experiments were reported by the S.P.R.
The experiments took place over a period of 10 days and between the hours of 11pm and 1am every night but Miss G. was told nothing by Mr. Kirk of his experiment during which he would concentrate hard on making himself visible to Miss G. Over the 10 day period the two met on several occasions but neither spoke of the matter, Miss G. was still obviously unaware of what was going on, though she did complain to him of having trouble sleeping and feeling restless.
Mr. Kirk was disappointed in his apparent lack of success at having failed to appear to Miss G. and after the 10 days had expired he gave up. He was however in his office one day and was feeling rather tired after completing some auditing work so he leaned back in his chair and decided to have one last try at his experiment. Not knowing where Miss G. would be at the time he decided to concentrate on her bedroom though it was still only early, between 3:30pm and 4pm. It is Miss G.'s account to the S.P.R. that makes the most interesting reading.
"In the afternoon (being tired by a morning walk) while sitting in an easy chair near the window of my own room, I fell asleep.... I was suddenly quite wide awake, seeing Mr. Kirk standing near my chair, dressed in a dark brown coat, which I had frequently seen him wear. His back was toward the window, his right hand toward me; he passed across the room toward the door...; but when he got about four feet from the door, which was closed he disappeared."
The dark brown coat Miss G. describes was one which Mr. Kirk had indeed worn many times while in her company, though this particular day was one of the very rare occasions when he had worn it to the office.
There can be no more emotional or stressful time than that at the point of death, so in these moments it seems that the psychic message is sent and received by the percipient, sometimes immediately, sometimes a little later, possibly when the percipient thinks about the dying person or possibly, if they are busy at the time, when their mind is clear and able to receive such a message. We know that twins have a strong psychic connection and can feel each other’s pain, happiness and sorrow, and even in the case of the inseparable Yorkshire born twins Greta and Freda Chaplin often referred to as "The Terrible Twins" or "The Pests" finish off their sentences. This "link" would be much stronger than any other as twins are more closely related than any other kith and kin, so it would stand to reason that there would be a certain psychic closeness between all relatives by blood, ranging from twins sharing the womb to distant cousins who may possibly never meet, and this would explain why most crisis apparitions are experienced by people known to the ghost.
The next type of ghost we will look at is the haunting ghost, those which stay faithful to a particular location. The location is usually one which bore a significance to the person in their life such as their home, their place of work or the scene of their death. We know that mental signals take the form of electrical impulses, and can be picked up by receptive people, but could these signals still be in the atmosphere and be detected many years later? Surely the impression must be stored somewhere in the surroundings and not simply floating in the airspace being blown about by the wind, more probably stored on a conscious rather than a physical level.
The many sightings of haunting ghosts seem to show that the ghost is seen to perform in the same way every time it is seen, such as walking along a particular corridor or as in the case of Abraham Lincoln at the same Oval Office window looking out over Pennsylvania Avenue apparently deep in thought, a place where Lincoln would indeed have spent many hours during his time in office, emitting these electrical impulses.
It is most interesting to note that "old ghosts" which have been seen over many centuries obey the laws of physics which were relevant to their time rather than ours, i.e. when a ghost is seen walking through a wall. The point at which the ghost disappeared will later be found to have been the site of an old doorway long since bricked over, or a ghost seen to rise up, apparently floating may be seen at the site of an old staircase no longer there. One such incident which occurred in the North West of England on many occasions was experienced by a woman who lived alone in a large house and heard footsteps apparently climbing her stairs. She could not work out however why there were thirteen definite steps when she had only eleven stairs. In time, she had some work done on the stairs which included a new carpet, and when the workmen pulled up some of the floorboards they found that there were two further steps beneath the current staircase.
The ghost will always be seen to be doing something which they would have done in life rather than walking around a graveyard for instance, suggesting that the origin of the ghost lies in the life of the person and not in their death. The only problem with this though is just how can a signal be left behind by somebody or something and still be picked up many years later? Despite this problem this is indeed what seems to happen and that the haunting ghost is caused in this way. It is also my belief that the original signal is possibly strengthened every time it is picked up, for example, a signal left behind by a now dead person later picked up by somebody else would then become not only the cause of an apparition, but also the percipient themselves shocked to see it will also possibly leave behind not only the original signal but also a signal of their own as a result of their surprise and shock. So there is then two signals left in the same place, and they may be then picked up again by a third person as two signals or one strong one. This would explain how animals can also detect a haunting if it is a mental signal as in the haunted room where no ghost was apparent. The theory also goes a long way to explaining why so few graveyards are haunted, and it is further bolstered by the fact that when battle scenes are recreated, living persons are seen in their battle throes as well as those who perished on the field, so obviously the signal is left by living persons as oppose to the dead. A good analogy used by Arthur C. Clarke is that the eye is like a camera which places an image on the retina which, via the optic nerve, sends a signal of what it is seeing to the brain, but if this situation were reversed and the brain picked up a signal from somewhere, could it then send it to the retina which would think that it is actually seeing it?
The sightings of inanimate objects such as cycles, buses and planes can be likened to such sightings of people who are still alive, in so much as the signal is left behind at the time by somebody else present at the time of the objects existence. For example, a soldier on a battlefield leaving a signal of all those around him including those still alive as well as those who perished on the field, or a person seeing a spitfire returning from a raid leaves a signal or recording of it, and when this recording is later picked by somebody else they see the same spitfire returning from a raid flown many years earlier, but the recording is left behind by the original witness rather than the spitfire or its pilot.
The London Bus apparition may not be included in the same bracket as this apparition was likely created by either the drivers of approaching cars or by passing onlookers, because as the drivers approached the bend at Cambridge Gardens and St. Marks Road they would be aware of the pending danger as would any nearby witnesses, especially those who lived locally as this was a notorious black spot and buses were a regular visitor to the area. It would only take one such onlooker or one driver to leave behind a feeling of danger, or a bus about to crash for any subsequent drivers to be able to pick this up later, and so see a vision of the bus themselves. The curious point about this case though is the sighting at the depot by an official when there was no apparent danger, though the buses were obviously frequent visitors to this spot, and would have been witnessed at this spot by countless hundreds if not thousands of people any one of whom could have left behind a similar signal at this point.
The false arrival sightings would appear to be of the same in origin as crisis apparitions in so far as they are a telepathic signal, but whereas with a crisis apparition it is the time of death when the signal is transmitted and received, in the false arrival it is sent the beginning or the middle of a journey when the mind of the sender is on their pending arrival at the destination and once again meeting those who wait there for the visit. Though the false arrival ghost is often seen I would also include in this category the times that we have all encountered when we find ourselves thinking of somebody we haven't seen for a long time, only for them to either knock on the door or to telephone us, this could be a signal of the same kind though the percipient doesn't see an apparition but merely finds themselves thinking about the visitor or caller.
There we have some possible explanations for relatively common apparitions, but surely one of the most interesting of all ghosts are those seen in time slips where whole houses are seen or in the case of Mr. Squirrel a whole street. Not all the cases included can have the same cause but most typical are the cases of Mrs. Turrell-Clarke, and that of Miss Wynne and Miss Allington. As usual in time slips the women saw a vision of times gone by and in the case of Miss Wynne and Miss Allington they did not even realise they were looking at an apparition until the next time they visited the road where the house apparently was. In Mrs. Turrell-Clarke's case, though she also saw a scene of days gone by, she saw it slowly transform in front of her and then change back again. These are the more typical cases where it is possible to explain them as a telepathic signal and the visions of what the women saw were once seen by somebody else, and the impression of what they saw was perhaps so inspiring to them that they left behind a signal to be picked up later as a vision by somebody, possibly and probably years later under the right circumstances. This could also explain part of Mr. Squirrel's time slip but only up until the part where he interacted with shop assistant. However Mr. Squirrels experience is obviously much more than an apparition as he completed a business transaction during his experience.
Equally unusual was Victor Goddard's sighting of Drem Airfield as it would appear four years later. A possible solution to Goddard's case seems to be a little too far-fetched, but then whatever the solution is, it is bound to be incredible in its own right. Could it be possible that Goddard actually stayed in 1934 all the time, and that it was the people of Drem who had a regressive time slip and saw an old Bi-plane in the skies above them, the plane which Goddard was flying. Could somebody have picked up a recording of a once common sight in the skies above England, and that Goddard was on the other side of the time slip, being, rather than seeing an apparition. Apart from an actual slip in time this is the only other plausible explanation, and if this is the case then in other slips do both sides of the slip see each other or each other’s surroundings?
So once again we come to perhaps the most confusing of all apparitions, that is interactive ghosts. How is it that somebody can talk to, and interact with, a mere apparition? We have seen only one case which is absolutely baffling. Most of these cases feature one or more living persons as multiple witnesses, that of the Detroit machinist involved colleagues in the factory, in the case of James Chaffin we cannot absolutely rule out foul play, and the steps taken seem rather long winded and complicated for a man to go to just to leave a will rather than changing one he had already written. The Arthur Davies case, even though his testimony was allowed in court his murderers were still alive at the time, and it is possible that it was one, or both, of them that could have created the vision seen by the shepherd Alexander Mcpherson, and while there is somebody still alive who knows the details of a murder or death, then we can not say for sure that the evidence came from a ghost beyond the grave. As for the truly baffling case, that is the case of Bob Loft and Don Repo the flight crew on the ill-fated Flight 401.
When the flight engineer doing his pre-flight check saw Repo and was told by him that he had already done the check we could say that this was a "normal" sighting as Repo would indeed have said this possibly many times during his career, and for the final time to Bob Loft, so the flight engineer could have picked up a signal left by Repo himself during his life. This could also explain many of the sightings by passengers on board L1011 aircraft which Loft and Repo flew many times.
The sighting of Repo in the galley oven is slightly different from the majority of ghost sightings in that the head was seen inside the oven itself and the apparition was certainly not acting like most others by acting normally and could in no way have been mistaken for a real person going about his or her normal business such as opening a door or casting a shadow. We can safely assume that Repo had never placed his head inside a galley oven and closed the door. The galley in question was later found to have been recycled from the crashed aircraft, and it is possible that if a signal can be left behind in haunted houses and other buildings then it must be possible for the ghost to be present in the galley, and the galley housed the latent signal which the stewardess Faye Merryweather picked up and was also seen by the colleagues whose attention she attracted. We can accept these incidents at face value for what they are, genuine apparitions, but what is baffling is the warning which Repo gave to the cabin crew of possible fire on the aeroplane. How could anyone else have known about the fire risk at that time? The plane did indeed develop engine trouble later on in the flight and the remainder of the journey had to be cancelled.
It is possible though that a flight engineer checking the engines had noticed a potential problem, and after becoming worried about the severity of it and not bringing it to somebody's attention, he had panicked and regretted greatly the fact that he had not told anybody else, and so he created the vision of Repo himself out of a feeling of dread or guilt, or maybe he did report it and that report was perhaps "lost" by somebody else who later became worried and created the vision, but surely if such a problem had been noticed then the plane would not have been allowed to fly any further without repairs being carried out would it? If there is an alternative explanation to the problem then we must look at it and give it equal consideration, but if this is a possible cause of the vision of Repo in the galley then it is surely as frightening as the prospect of Repo coming back from the dead to warn us of imminent danger. The other problem is the sighting by a fellow captain who saw, and was told by Repo that "There will never be another crash of an L1011... We will not let it happen." A prophecy which to this day has remained true.
Do the spirits of Loft and Repo have a "mission" to fulfil in preventing further accidents involving L1011s, and continue to do so from the "other side"? We would all love this to be true, no matter how unbelievable it may be, and quite frankly there is no other obvious explanation for the events taking place on these aircraft.
So we must accept that ghosts do exist and, for the most part, are not in fact spirits of the dead whos souls have survived death or become locked for eternity in some nether world, but are in fact a telepathic message in the form of a psychic signal which is picked up by somebody else under the right circumstances. With crisis apparitions it is reasonably simple to understand as the signal is both sent and received within a very short space of time, so what we need to look at is just how a signal can be sent or left behind in a certain place in the case of a haunting ghost in such a way and still be picked up sometimes centuries later.
Many experiments have been carried out into psychic phenomena and the powers of the mind, and even when carried out on so called "great" psychics the results have always proved erratic. Even when the subjects were in the same room as, and concentrating hard on, one another, they don't always attain convincing results, sometimes just scraping over the threshold that one would expect if the subjects were just using guess work and the laws of averages. This could go a long way to explaining why a haunting ghost in a house for example does not appear all the time and to every visitor, or does not always appear visible but audible in some instances. A leading researcher into ghost sightings, John Spencer feels that there are a number of ingredients needed for a ghost to be either "recorded" or "played back" because otherwise everybody who ever walked into a particular room would appear at one time or another as a ghost and the room would be full of ghosts.
This would also seem to debunk Eleanor Sidgwick's "Psychometry Theory" where certain people are able to conjure up images of people when they come into contact with objects associated with that person, even though this is a tried and tested process often used in police investigations to catch criminals, the results are again very erratic, and only a rough profile of the person is the usual outcome rather than a perfect image precise right down to obscure details reported in ghost sightings.
John Spencer theorises that the necessary ingredients needed could possibly be the geographical shape of the room, atmospheric conditions i.e. a specific type of location, humidity or temperature, but the most important, and also the most unpredictable, ingredient is of course the human mind. Perhaps only a certain kind or frame of mind is able to create an apparition which would explain why some people see many ghosts in their lifetime while others may never see one at all. Spencer's wife Anne believes that an image is not left by the person recorded but by the person who sees them, as in the case of the man who, while looking out of a window, saw somebody lying in a pond, apparently dead. When he rushed outside to the pond there was nobody in the water. Upon returning to the window he once again saw the same figure lying in the water, so the apparition itself wasn't seen from anywhere but the window, the place perhaps where the vision of the dead body was first seen from and recorded not at the pond side but at the window.
To this day nobody knows just how a telepathic signal is communicated and in the cases of crisis apparitions the mind of the percipient plays a larger part in the vision than the mind of the sender as the vision is never seen as it is sent, i.e. on the deathbed or mangled in a car crash, except in the case of the girl who saw her mother lay on the floor of "the white room" when her mother had collapsed and needed assistance, possibly purposely sending an image of herself in trouble so that her daughter could get help, but it is seen doing normal things so the message they receive is somehow transformed in their mind. The fact that a number of people may see a ghost while another person in the same room may see nothing at all supports the fact that it takes a certain frame of kind of mind to perceive an image and thus receive a telepathic signal.
It is hard to doubt that a signal is left behind, and perceived by not only people but also animals such as the cat, dog, rat and snake experiment, which showed that all the animals, apart from the rat, detected something in the "haunted room."
H. H. Price who was also an Oxford philosopher came up with the theory of a "Psychic ether" which he said would "permeate all matter and space." Price said that this could be imprinted upon with mental images, probably at traumatic moments such as violent death or great emotional torment. With cases of ghosts who had lived a happy and uneventful life, and died a peaceful and natural death, he says that repeated attendance at a scene could also be imprinted upon the psychic ether. He also says that the "impression" when received could take the form of a vision, a sound, a feeling or a physical touch.
This neatly fits in with the sightings of people still living, such as in battles for instance, as the psychic ether would already be impressed upon before their death, which also ties in with Anne Spencer's belief that an image is created by the seer rather than the seen. This could also go so far as to explain inhuman ghosts as if a "sender" can create an image wearing clothes or carrying objects, then they could surely also create an image of a vehicle they were riding in or were near.
As well as Price's theory of a psychic ether, there is a school of thought which believes that we have a "collective consciousness" which all people, at least on some level, are aware of and share a certain part of, and we all have an often latent ability to send and receive messages to and from each other. It is difficult to distinguish between this and the psychic ether as they would appear, in most respects, to be one and the same thing, and if we extend this psychic ether to a level where we all share a part of it, then they do indeed become one and the same.
So rather than a particular room or a particular object holding a signal over time and this being detected, it is likely that the psychic ether or collective conscious offer the best, albeit a still incredible explanation to haunting ghosts and that we do all indeed share some level of mental awareness of one another, this being at its strongest in twins the closest of relatives, and getting weaker the further removed we become. Also there is the added possibility of inherited memory and information which passes down through the generations. Not only does this explain the haunting ghosts but also that puzzling phenomena of ghosts appearing at certain times of day or on certain days of the year, as though on some level we are aware of what has transpired on these particular days in a given location.
An interesting footnote is that haunting ghosts in some cases can be exorcised from houses, or in the case of murder victims if their remains are given a proper burial they seem to find "eternal rest" and bother us no more, so it would seem that if we do somehow have a knowledge of past events then we must also have a knowledge of exorcisms or proper burials so that we no longer perceive a ghost when it has been laid to rest.
So the answer to the question do you believe in ghosts should be the same as that given by H. H. Price, Yes, but as for them being the spirits of dead people then the answer is no, and, as Price said, the question should not be do you believe in ghosts?, but do you believe people sometimes experience apparitions?
Could it be that there are the spirits of dead people, no longer of this world, forced to walk the places where they have lived or died, somehow unable to break their link completely with our world, stuck in a state of limbo between this life and whatever lies beyond it? A popular theory to explain just why we have haunted houses, churches and country lanes, to name but a few, is that those who are forced to return to the earth after their death are all people who have died an unnatural or sudden death and so were unable to completely sever their ties with this life. Taken before their time and wanting to say goodbye to their loved ones or just to touch or talk to those they have left behind one last time before they can pass over to the next life. However much this theory would seem to make sense it seems to be a little too romantic and simple, besides which the evidence would tend to point to some other explanation for one of the most fascinating of all strange phenomena.
As I said earlier there would appear to be different kinds of ghost and the first we will look at is known as the "Crisis Apparition." This is where a person will see a ghost, usually but not always, of somebody known or related to them. Sometimes the witness won't even realise that they are looking at a ghost, while at other times it is apparent straight away, and they become worried for the person's safety.
Some witnesses to crisis apparitions will become so worried by the sighting that they will contact the person they have "seen" or they may find out later by another means that at the time they had seen the apparition, the person had actually died at that very moment, possibly thousands of miles away. Often the person seeing the ghost will not even know that the dead relative has even been ill, or possibly the death may have been the result of an accident such as something as unpredictable as a car crash.
It is possible in some cases for the witness to not realise that they are looking at a ghost because the vision will appear to be solid, as they would in life, rather than the "traditional" semi-transparent form. They may also appear to be doing something completely natural such as opening a door, though the door may later be found to have been locked, or if the lights are on in the room then they will cast a shadow or appear reflected in a mirror. When the ghost doesn't appear in the same room as the witness, it may be seen for example walking up the garden path to the front door, but when the person goes to the front door to let them in they find there is nobody there.
A classic example of the crisis apparition is that which occurred to a young girl in the 1800s while she was out walking along a country lane in England. Suddenly the scene in front of her disappeared and was replaced by a vision of one of the bedrooms in her house which was referred to as the white room. There in the white room, lying on the floor, was her mother who looked as though she was dead. Beside her on the floor was a white lace edged handkerchief and the vision remained with the girl for several minutes. She became so concerned for her mother’s safety that, before she returned home, she went to fetch the doctor to accompany her. When they both entered the white room the scene which confronted them was the same one that the girl had seen earlier, even down to the handkerchief. Her mother had apparently suffered a heart attack and the doctor immediately performed life-saving treatment on her. When the girl’s father returned home to find the doctor there he asked "Who is ill?" as the woman had been in apparent perfect health when he had left her that morning.
It is interesting to note that in these cases the ghost usually appears to the witness as they would appear in life, not as they are at the time, i.e. in the throes of agony, lying down in bed or injured in a car crash, though ironically in the previous case the mother did appear as she was at the time, lying on the floor of the white room. Could this have been in order to convey the urgency of the situation to her daughter? Were it not for this case the occurrence of a crisis apparition could tend to suggest that the dead person is visiting their friend or relative for one final time, but taking this case into account it would appear that the sighting is caused before the point of death, by some sort of signal being sent from the dying person to the witness. This signal could possibly take the form of a telepathic message but why would a dying person send such a message in their dying moments, if indeed they do it voluntarily, and how is that signal transmitted over thousands of miles? The signal would seem to be sent at a moment of anguish, strife or intense emotion, intense enough to act as a cry for help to her daughter to come and save her life after suffering a heart attack.
In 1889 a huge survey was carried out called the "Census of Hallucinations" by the S.P.R. (Society for Psychical Research) in which they asked 17,000 people if they had ever seen a ghost or witnessed any strange phenomena. The results of the survey drew the S.P.R. to conclude that in such cases the ghost or apparition was telepathic and that it could still be classed as a crisis apparition if the vision was seen, or the signal received, up to twelve hours after the time of death.
This would suggest that the signal was transmitted at the time of death, but not received until a "convenient" moment by the recipient. One such case occurred to a Mrs. Paquet whose brother worked in Chicago on a tugboat. She awoke one morning feeling slightly depressed and could not work out why, nor could she shake off the mood. As she walked into the pantry to get some tea she saw her brother standing with his back to her, and as she watched him he appeared to fall forwards and seemed to have rope tangled round his ankles. She became distraught and exclaimed "My God, Ed is dead!" Later on that day when she received official word of his death she found that it had happened exactly as she had seen it, though it had happened a full six hours earlier than her vision. It is possible though that she may have experienced the feeling of unshakable depression at the same time as her brother’s death.
A slight twist on the crisis apparition is the case often referred to as "Steer Nor' Nor' West" and this must surely still be classified as a crisis apparition even though the "Transmitter" and "Receiver" weren't known to each other, and more importantly no death was involved.
A crew member on board a ship in the North Atlantic off the Canadian coast in the 19th Century, entered the Captain's cabin during the voyage and found a young boy at the captain's desk writing in the log book which is a very serious offence. When the man approached the young boy and spoke to him he disappeared before his eyes. The matter was reported to the captain who examined the log and found that indeed somebody had written in it. The words were written untidily across the page and read "Steer Nor' Nor' West." Thinking that it was the seaman he ordered him to write the same words out again, but when he did it the hand writing was completely different to that in the log. Angry at this the captain then ordered everybody on the ship to supply a sample of their handwriting. When all those aboard the ship had done so, still no match for the writing in the log book was found. After much deliberation the captain ordered that the ship change course and follow the instructions in the log book. It was along this new course that they encountered another ship stranded and caught in the ice flow. All those on board were running low on food and in poor health.
They pulled alongside the stranded vessel, and those still alive boarded the rescue boat. As they were doing so the seaman who had encountered the young boy in the cabin spotted another young boy on the stricken boat who looked just like the boy he had seen. When he told the captain this he was laughed away, but he remained so adamant that this was indeed the boy, the captain ordered the boy to write the words down and was amazed when the hand writing was a perfect match to that in the log book. When the boy was asked to explain the matter he was at a loss to do so as all he could remember was that at the time of the sighting he had been asleep in his bunk.
Is this also a type of crisis apparition then, as the boy would indeed have been going through a time of great emotional feeling, and it was this, rather than the moment of death, which triggered the sending of the signal? Though just how he knew in which direction to send the rescue boat is still a mystery.
Another twist on this type of apparition is the case of a Boston travelling salesman who was working at the desk in his hotel room when the ghost of his dead sister appeared before him. As he called her name she vanished. She had appeared perfectly normal as she had looked in life apart from one red scratch on her left cheek. He felt that he had to tell his parents of the experience and went to visit them. His mother became very emotional as he relayed the story to her, and she told him that she had accidentally scratched the girl's cheek a full nine years earlier when she had been preparing the body for burial. Just two weeks later his mother died peacefully.
Could this be the ghost of his sister telling him to visit his mother before it was too late, or more likely was it that his mother had created the image by similar means to a crisis apparition as a way of enticing the salesman home one last time? In cases like these (we will see more later) while there is somebody alive who could have caused the ghost, then we cannot say for sure that the ghost has come from beyond the grave.
The next type of ghost we will look at is one which is seen by different witnesses on different occasions, usually at the same place, sometimes on the same date and possibly even at the same time of day, as though the time and place had had some specific meaning in the "ghost's" life, or death. These are commonly known as "Haunting Ghosts" and the examples of these are many and varied, though most are similar in some detail or other.
One example is the ghost which "haunts" Derbyshire's Taddington Hall. One of the past residents of the hall, a farmer, used to ride to Bakewell Market every Monday morning and would return home later that night much the worse for alcohol after drinking his fill with the other farmers after their days work at the market. However, one particular Monday he must have had more than his usual amount because on the way home he fell from his horse and was later found dead at the roadside by some of the other farmers also making their way home. His wife was at home waiting for him to return as she always did on a Monday and wasn't worried at the late hour, knowing where he was supposed to be and what state he would be in. She soon relaxed when she heard his horse walking into the yard as usual, and on looking out of the window saw her husband obviously drunk staggering towards the front door. She did however become worried when he walked in through the door without opening it.
Shortly after this there was a knock at the door and when she opened it she saw the other farmers who informed her of her husband's fatal accident, and that they had found him dead at the bottom of Bakewell Hill. The farmer's ghost is now said to haunt Taddington Hall at nightfall every Monday, eternally linked to both the time and the place which meant so much during both his life and his death.
Could a ghost have the awareness to appear as regularly as this or could it be that as this was obviously the time of his wife's greatest trauma, that the signal was left by her rather than him, and recurs, only to be picked up at its strongest peak and at no other time when the signal is weaker? Surely the ghost itself isn't governed by the day and time in this way as we know from witnesses that ghosts seem not to be governed by their surroundings as they are in this day and time, but as they were in their own lifetime.
For example, a ghost which walks through a wall is often later found to have walked through an old doorway which has been blocked up since their time on earth, and a ghost which seems to float along the ground rather than walk along it, is often walking along an old floor which is at a different level to that which it is on now, so the ghosts are just walking where they have always walked.
There are simply countless stories of haunting ghosts which occupy the myriad rooms, corridors, stairs and grounds of homes the world over, and for some reason Britain seems to have at least, if not more than, its fair share of such ghosts. This not only seems to lend a romantic kind of air to the ghosts themselves but also the buildings they haunt as well and it seems that no Hall or Castle would be complete without a resident haunting ghost or two. Nothing seems to add a certain something to a ghost story more than a famous ghost in a well-known building such as Hampton Court or The Tower of London, and indeed no book on the subject would be complete without its compliment of stories of famous ghosts. These are interesting not only because of the fact that the ghost itself may be somebody well known, like a former monarch, but also because the witnesses to such hauntings are also usually famous themselves, or in a position of responsibility, and therefore they must surely become instantly credible witnesses whose reputations would be done far more harm than good if they were found to be romanticising about seeing such things as screaming ghosts gliding along the corridors of Hampton Court Palace, as the spirit of Catherine Howard has been seen doing by many subsequent residents of the grand London building.
Howard was one of the five wives of Henry VIII to live at the palace, and indeed it was to be her last place of residence. She was imprisoned there before her execution on February 13th, 1542. It is said that on November 4th of the previous year Catherine escaped from her guards and ran along the "haunted" gallery towards the chapel and pleaded with the king for her life. Her cries were in vain and she was taken back along the corridor to her room, obviously screaming and most upset. The next time she would be allowed out of her room would be on the day of her execution when she was taken to the Bloody Tower and beheaded. A fate not uncommon among the many wives of Henry VIII.
On another occasion many years later when the "haunted" gallery was opened to the public an artist was sitting sketching one of the tapestries which hung there when a hand appeared on it. He quickly sketched the hand before it disappeared, and the ring on one of its fingers was found to be "very similar" to one which was worn by Catherine Howard.
Though Hampton Court Palace can lay claim to several ghosts it is not in the same league as The "Bloody" Tower of London and its surrounding buildings, the home of confinement, torture and of course execution for many years.
One early recorded sighting of a ghost at the tower took place as early as 1241 when the ghost of Thomas A Becket was seen. Certainly most of the ghosts seen at the tower could be caused by the violent and horrid way in which they died, such as Anne Askew who was tortured on the rack in the White Tower and whose screams are sometimes heard today emanating from the building. Martin Tower is home to a ghostly bear which was one of the many animals kept there until the final one was moved to Regents Park's Zoological Gardens in 1834. Martin Tower was also home to another one of Henry VIII's ill-fated wives, Anne Boleyn, who was imprisoned there and whose ghost sits in a dark corner appearing and disappearing, usually on Autumn evenings. She is also seen at many other parts of the tower such as Tower Green which Queen Victoria had railed off as this was the spot where Boleyn was executed, and she can be seen repeating her "last" walk from The Lieutenant's Lodge (now The Queen's House) to Tower Green where she disappears.
Many executions were carried out on Tower Hill such as Anne Boleyn's sister in law Countess Rochford in 1542, Lady Jane Grey in 1554 and the Countess of Salisbury Margaret Pole the Duke of Clarence's daughter whose execution can be seen annually being replayed in all its gruesome details. Pole maintained until the end that she had committed no crime and refused to kneel at the block, saying to the executioner that he had better do his job "as best he could" which he duly did by chasing her around the block taking wild swings at her until she fell dead. The Two Princes buried at the foot of the stairs in the White Tower were murdered, probably by Richard III, in the Bloody Tower and have been seen since, walking silently together hand in hand.
The Traitors Gate has been the scene of a ghostly patrol which is never seen but can be heard in the form of studded boots cracking on the cobbled road surface as they continue to make their patrol from the Bloody Tower to Traitors Gate.
Sir Walter Raleigh is often seen walking across the ramparts between the Queen's House and the Bloody Tower where he was imprisoned in a cell measuring eight feet by ten feet, and in life he would have taken this walk many times for exercise. Raleigh is not the only ghost to frequent the Queen's House, as the ghostly screams of Guy Fawkes and his accomplices can also be heard along with the creaks and groans made by the torturing devices that they had to endure during their merciless interrogation.
Although Britain seems to have many famous buildings playing host to famous spirits, it is certainly not alone in this achievement as America can also stake a claim to host such an attraction.
Perhaps one of the most famous of America's haunting ghosts is that of Former President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, who has appeared to such eminent witnesses as the Kennedy brothers, when neither John nor Robert expressed any belief in ghosts, let alone any great interest in the supernatural. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, which ironically he foresaw and predicted after numerous dreams, he has continued to appear in the White House. The first president to sense Lincoln's presence was Theodore Roosevelt who felt on a number of occasions that Lincoln was with him in a room. The ghost wasn't actually seen though until Grace Coolidge, the wife of the 30th President Calvin Coolidge, saw the ghost between 1923 and 1929. She always saw him in the Oval Office looking out over Pennsylvania Avenue as though deep in thought, and many presidential aides and other White House staff have also seen Lincoln at that same window. Though Herbert Hoover says he never actually saw Lincoln, he claims to have heard him on numerous occasions between 1928 and 1932, describing the sounds as odd, many of them "fantastic." When Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands slept in the "Lincoln room" she answered a knock on the door, and there in front of her stood the dead President who, after doffing his trademark top hat, disappeared. When the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (himself seen in ghost form sat in a leather chair by his son Randolph at his home of forty years, Chartwell at Westerham, Kent), slept in this same room, he also saw the ghost of Lincoln. Between 1945 and 1952 during Harry S. Truman's reign as President, he claims to have heard Lincoln's footsteps, though he also never actually saw him.
Surely the evidence of these many credible witnesses must stand for something, they all surely wouldn't come forth with such stories if they doubted their validity. It is interesting to note that where Lincoln was often seen at the Oval Office window in deep thought, this is where he would have done a lot of his thinking during his reign, and would have made many an important decision at that same spot overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. This isn't the only place that Lincoln has been seen though, he has also been seen by many people in places where they would have been doing a lot of thinking about him.
Lincoln's coffin was carried on a special funeral train that stopped for eight minutes at each station along the way so that people could pay their last respects to him, and there has since been seen a "phantom" train draped in black and carrying the dead President's coffin, and as the train passed along the funeral route, watches stopped for exactly eight minutes.
The ghosts of many other people haunt the place of their deaths, or places which had some great emotional meaning in their life, such as people seen walking into lakes, hanging from gallows or perhaps one of the most frightening when encountered, those seen hitch hiking at the side of the road. There are many documented cases of people picking up these hitch hikers and noticing how quiet or how pale they are throughout the journey, often offering to turn the heating up in order to make them feel a little more comfortable, and then later on they just simply disappear from the passenger seat.
More common than this though, are cases of motorists knocking over hitch hikers they don't see until the last minute or who seem to run out in front of their car, and the drivers hear or feel a bump as they are thrown from the front of the car, but when they stop and return to the spot, there is no sign of a body or even damage to the car. The police carry out their investigations and often the case turns out to be that the scene of the "accident" is the same place where a pedestrian has been killed in the past.
Some apparitions are clearly just that, apparitions, as they appear to be grey or misty or semi-transparent while others appear to be completely life like, and people don't realise until later that what they have seen was actually a ghost, or until the ghost does something unusual such as disappear when spoken to or walk through a wall.
How is it then that these apparitions are seen by different people at the same place? Many believe that somehow a "recording" of the person is left behind during their life time, and that this latent signal is somehow later picked up and replayed in the mind of a "receptive" person under the right conditions, but a lot of ghost sightings occur centuries after the person seen has died, so this latent signal must somehow remain dormant for all this time. A common thought which seems to recur throughout the majority of ghost stories is that the recording of the signal is triggered by some sort of emotional stress, and there can be no place more emotional or stressful than the battlefield in the heat of a conflict. Many believe that this is why there are many tales of haunted battlefields and battle cries being heard at the scenes of medieval battles. A classic example of this phenomena is the scene of the first battle of the English Civil War at Edgehill, Warwickshire, where Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians fought the Royalists led by Prince Rupert in 1643. This would indeed have been a scene of great emotional outpouring as the battle took the lives of 5,000 brave men.
It was a month later when local shepherds saw the battle being played out before their very eyes, but not only could they see the battle, they could also hear the battle cries and the clashing of sword blades and the beating drums. Although the scene appeared to be perfectly real to them there were no bodies left behind on the ground where the men fell.
King Charles I heard about this and, on Christmas Eve when it happened again, troops were sent to investigate the "haunting." Some of those sent had been involved in the original battle themselves and they witnessed the "replay" of the battle, and those who had been involved recognised the compatriots that they had lost while fighting alongside them. One of the men recognised Prince Rupert himself who was still very much alive, thus suggesting that the apparition was not from the afterlife, but caused by something which had been present on the day of the battle and somehow left behind at the time, and not just by the dead and dying but by the survivors as well.
Another more sinister tale of strong emotion leaving behind an imprint on the surroundings is that of the evil land owner "Wicked" Will Darrell. In 1575 Darrell sent for a midwife to deliver a child at his home. The midwife, a Mrs. Barnes, was collected from another town and blindfolded throughout the journey so that she would not be able to retrace her steps and discover where she had been. Once at the house she was led into a bedroom where a masked woman was lay on the bed in the middle of giving birth. Mrs. Barnes was told that she would be well rewarded if all went well, but that she would be killed if the mother were to die during the birth.
When the woman bore a son, Darrell took hold of the midwife and told her that she must cast the infant into the blazing fire on the landing. When she flatly refused Darrell took hold of the child and he himself cast the newborn baby into the flames. The Distraught Mrs. Barnes was once again blindfolded and returned to her home, at which point she promptly contacted the local magistrates and showed them a scrap of material she had been able to take from the curtains in the bedroom, and she described to them the scene she had glimpsed through a window. They were able to recognise the house as Littlecote, a manor house in Wiltshire. However, due to his wealth Darrell was able to bribe the judge and justice wasn't served until later when Darrell was out riding with the hunt one day. He was thrown from his horse and in the fall he died from a broken neck. The scene of his death is now haunted by an apparition of a child engulfed in flames. The house itself, Littlecote, is haunted by the ghost of a midwife clutching a baby, and also by the screams of a woman and baby.
The haunting of the house is quite understandable as the woman, the baby and the midwife were all present here at one time, but just why the scene of Darrell's death should be haunted by the baby, a place where it obviously never visited is a more complex problem. Perhaps as Darrell fell from his horse his thoughts turned to the child, and he became overcome with guilt, but could this have left an image of the child there rather than Darrell himself?
So far what we have looked at seems quite acceptable if we view it with an open mind, people leaving behind images of themselves at places of great meaning to them, but if that is the case then how do we explain ghostly apparitions of inanimate objects such as stagecoaches, buses and even planes. Throughout the years many stories have featured outmoded means of transport, such as old stagecoaches on darkened lonely country lanes and even cyclists. One such cyclist haunts the road at Eyam Dale, Chesterfield in Derbyshire.
One rainy day a man was riding his bike up the steep climb and was amazed when another bike overtook him easily. If this wasn't enough of an insult, the faster cyclist was bone dry and the water appeared to be just running off him, despite the torrents which were falling from the sky and soaking the other rider to the skin. This same bike has also been heard overtaking a stagecoach on the same stretch of road, and the occupants of the coach noticed how they could quite clearly hear the rattling of what sounded to be a positively ramshackle bicycle, yet they could see nothing, even when the sound was right alongside them.
As new and more modern forms of transport have taken over, they too have become the centre for ghost stories and hauntings, the most famous of all of them is that concerning a bright red London bus.
During the 1930s, a phantom bus was seen on the No.7 route at Kensington, London where St. Marks Road meets Cambridge Gardens. This was a notoriously dangerous bend and was the scene of many traffic accidents, some of them fatal. Many drivers involved in accidents there said that they had been forced to swerve to avoid a double decker bus which was coming towards them at high speed. One such driver said that he had seen that all of the lights inside the bus were on, but despite this he could see no driver or passengers on board. After swerving to avoid the bus and crashing into a wall he said that the bus had just simply vanished. Often there were independent witnesses to the accidents, one of whom said that the bus just appeared and headed straight for an oncoming car which swerved to avoid it, crashing into a wall and killing the driver.
The bus was clearly an apparition, and was also seen by a bus depot official who saw it late one night drive onto the depot forecourt, sit silently for a few moments, then just disappear. He said that there was no engine noise at all, it had seemed to just roll by itself.
Just why the bus was haunting this part of London can be guessed at, because when the notoriously dangerous corner was straightened out by the local council, the apparition of the phantom bus was never seen again. Was it a warning of the danger that lay ahead? If it was then why did so many people crash and die while trying to avoid it? How did it manifest itself? Was it a creation of the minds of wary motorists, and if so, was it a collective creation, as many eye witnesses to the accidents also saw the bus. Then of course we are left with the sighting by the official at the depot who wasn't in danger at the time, nor was he even near the notorious black spot.
If we say that these latent signals are left behind at a certain point, then could it be possible that the strength of the signal could fade with time the longer it lies dormant because there is a reported case of this being apparently what has happened? During the 18th Century an apparition of a lady wearing red shoes, a red headdress and a red gown was seen to be walking along a corridor of an English mansion. Over the years though the sightings continued, they were now of a lady in pink shoes, a pink headdress and a pink gown. By the middle of the 19th Century, the apparition was described by witnesses as a lady in a white gown with grey hair. A century later people talked about hearing the swish of dress as if an invisible lady was walking along the corridor and when the building was demolished in 1971, workmen complained of feeling a presence in the old corridors.
Could the ghost have faded with time, and why do all apparitions not follow the same course, or could it be that the signal is being reinforced every time it is picked up by a new percipient, and replayed via them?
The signals can't only be picked up by people but also by animals, we've all seen the scenes in horror films where a dog barks at something that the people can't see, or a cat which is hissing with its hair stood on end, yet the people again are unaware of any danger. This is not as far-fetched as you may think, nor is it done just for effect in films as was proven by an experiment in a Kentucky house which contained a haunted room. The animals used in the experiment were a cat, a dog, a snake and a rat.
The animals were first tested in a room which showed no sign of a haunting and none of them showed any reaction and behaved perfectly normally. Then one by one they were led into the haunted room. The cat was carried in by its owner and on entering a few feet into the room, it leapt onto its owners shoulders, then on to the floor and sat spitting and hissing at the chair in the corner of the room with its hair standing on end on its back.
The dog was then led into the room and once it got a similar distance into the room as the cat it snapped at its owner and continually struggled to get out of the room, and once outside it refused to re-enter the haunted room.
When the snake was placed in the haunted room it assumed an attack posture and focused its attention on the same chair in the corner of the room. It remained in this position for a number of minutes and then looked toward the window. It then backed slowly away, then once again assumed its attack posture.
When the rat was led into the room, it displayed no reaction to the chair or anything else in the room which had affected the other animals, and it continued to behave perfectly normally.
This goes to show that at least some animals can detect a haunting, sometimes which humans are unaware of. Assuming that they are not intelligent enough to perceive a theory of ghosts, can they pick up the recording of whatever was in the room, possibly an emotional occurrence or trauma of some kind. In fact Jimmy Wentworth Day, a renowned raconteur, author and collector of "ghost stories" is quoted as saying "Dogs I always regard as good witnesses."
Another relatively common kind of apparition is what is commonly termed the False Arrival apparition. This occurs when a vision of a person is seen or more commonly heard to arrive at a place, and then later turn up in person. This kind of apparition can occur, as with other kinds not just with human subjects but also with animals, such as people seen riding the horse they will later ride when they turn up in person. A case which takes this even further is one which occurred to a married couple.
Two brothers had married two sisters, and both lived a short distance away from one another. One day a friend was visiting one of the brothers and, while stood at the window, saw the other brother and his wife arriving in their horse drawn carriage. The carriage was being pulled by a horse called Dobbin who hadn't been used for a while as he had been injured in an accident. The brother and wife approached the window and also saw their siblings approaching, recognising them instantly, and they returned to their seats and saw the visitors pass by the window and awaited the knock at the door which never came. This was most unusual as they had never before passed the house without stopping to say hello. Seconds later the visitors' daughter burst in through the door looking very shaken. She said "Oh Auntie, I have had such a fright. Father and Mother have just passed me on the road without speaking."
Not ten minutes later the vehicle was seen again in the same place as before, only this time the visitors had arrived for real with the newly recovered Dobbin pulling the carriage. It was later found that at the time the apparition was seen, the family had just been setting out on its journey. This would seem to link up with the crisis apparition, as some sort of psychic link, only where the ghost is seen at the time of death, here it is seen at the journey's beginning when the visitors would have been anticipating seeing their relatives again.
So we have seen cases where witnesses see an apparition in their surroundings behaving as they would normally do and doing things which seem natural. How then do we explain a sighting of an apparition which is seen not as just an apparition of a person or of a vehicle, but of a whole scene rather than a small part of it.
This very thing has happened a number of times, notably on one occasion in 1926 when a Miss Wynne was out for a walk to explore the countryside near her new home in Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk. She was joined by a friend of hers, Miss Allington, and they decide to visit the church in the nearby village of Bradfield St. George.
They walked through a farmyard and onto a road, and on the opposite side of this road was a high brick wall which ran around a corner and into which was set a large set of wrought iron gates. Through the gates they could see at the end of the driveway a large house set behind some large trees. The house was partly hidden behind these trees but they could see part of the roof and some of the windows which were in the Georgian style.
The next time that they walked along this route they could see no sign of the wall or the house. All they could see were the trees which were growing wild among mounds of earth, weeds and several pools of water, all of which had obviously been there for some time. They enquired about the house but nobody else had ever seen it apart from the two women.
Such cases as this are often referred to as Time Slips but could Miss Wynne and Miss Allington have slipped in time and seen the house as it had been years earlier or, stranger still, as it would be in years to come? Could they have possibly seen the vision through the eyes of somebody else who had been so moved by the sight that they left behind a recording of the sight which beheld them and the recording was then later picked up by the two women? This would apparently seem to hold true as most, but certainly not all, time slip cases are historic rather than futuristic.
Another historic case is that of Mrs. Turrell-Clarke who was one day in the church at Wisley-cum-Pyrford, Surrey singing along with the church service when she was amazed to see the interior of the church regress to a state as it would have appeared hundreds of years earlier. The entire floor was made from soil, the altar was a rough-hewn stone and in the centre of the floor was a group of monks chanting who were dressed in long brown robes. During her experience she felt as though she was no longer taking part in the proceedings but watching the service from the back of the church with a small group of people.
Mrs. Turrell-Clarke later discovered that Pyrford church was once a chapel of Newark Abbey and that the monks had worn black robes, but in 1293 when the church was used by the monks of Westminster Abbey they had indeed worn brown robes. So how could Mrs. Turrell-Clarke have seen an image from seven hundred years earlier? Had she seen it through the eyes of another person in the small group at the back of the church? Was the image left behind and picked up later or, stranger still, had she actually swapped places momentarily? If so then there must have been a person in the thirteenth century wondering where the earth floor, stone altar and chanting monks had gone to, and why the candles where replaced by new electric lighting.
An amazing tale of a time slip which can't be explained by any of these possibilities, and frankly defies any rational attempt to explain it, appears in the book The Mask Of Time written by Joan Forman and features a man she named Mr. Squirrel.
Mr. Squirrel was a coin collector from Norfolk, and one day in 1973 he went to Great Yarmouth to buy some clear envelopes in which he could keep his coins as he had been told of a shop there that stocked what he was looking for. When he walked around the corner and into the street he wanted he was surprised to see that it was cobbled, but the shop he wanted was freshly painted and looked new. Inside the shop was an old fashioned box type till and a young assistant dressed in old fashioned Edwardian clothes with her hair piled on top of her head in a loose bun. He told her what it was that he had come for and she returned with a brown box full of the small envelopes. When he mentioned that he was surprised at how many she had in stock she told him that they always kept a large amount for the fishermen who came in regularly and who used the envelopes to keep their hooks in. He took the amount he needed and was told that it would be a shilling, he noted the use of the old term but thought little of it as decimalisation was still relatively new in 1973. He paid with a new five pence piece which she looked at oddly but took as it was roughly the same shape, size, colour and value as its recently out dated counterpart.
When he left the shop it struck him just how quiet it had been inside with no sound coming in from outside at all, and in fact only his conversation with the shop assistant had broken the silence.
It wasn't until the next week when Mr. Squirrel returned to the shop to buy some more of the envelopes that all the pieces fell into place. This time there were no cobbles on the street and the shop front no longer looked new but appeared rather weather beaten. Inside the shop he was served by an older woman who claimed to have none of the envelopes he had asked for, nor she said had she ever stocked them. Mr. Squirrel still had the ones he had bought the previous week and when Joan Forman tracked down their manufacturers, she was told that they had originally been produced as early as 1914, but were sold as late as the 1920s. So apparently not only had Mr. Squirrel visited an Edwardian shop, but he also had interacted with the sales assistant and, even more amazingly, the small envelopes he bought had travelled back to 1973 with him.
In this case then could Mr. Squirrel have seen the shop as through the eyes of another person, possibly one of the fishermen? Unlikely as the assistant had explained to him that the fishermen often visited her to buy them to keep their hooks in, a fact the customer would have known being such a person. Then there is also the problem that he had interacted with the shop assistant, and not only that, but he still had the evidence of the envelopes in his possession in 1973.
Imagine then, if this had been a true time slip, the look on the face of the sales assistant who examined the coin which Mr. Squirrel had used for his purchase. Not only would the coin's date of manufacture be some fifty years in the future, but the face on the coin would be of a monarch who wouldn't take the throne for over thirty years to come.
So just when we could have an apparent explanation for time slips, along comes Mr. Squirrel to throw his proverbial spanner in to the works. His spanner though can't be as big or do as much damage as that thrown by Victor Goddard (later to become Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard) whose experience of a time slip can't fit into the theory of a recording picked up at a later date, as the sight which met his eyes would not exist until some four years after he had witnessed it.
Goddard was flying in a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hawker Hart Bi-plane Bomber from Scotland to England when he hit bad weather and lost his bearings. In the bad weather and having to navigate by sight he was unsure exactly where he was. What he did know was that he was somewhere near Drem, a World War 1 Air Force Base no longer in use. Goddard knew he couldn't land there having visited the site in his car in the past and seeing the runway was now used as farmland. However if he spotted it he could use it as a guide to get back on course.
He flew below the cloud cover and indeed spotted Drem, only now it was fully operational and the sun was shining down on it. The hangars had all been repaired and he could see four planes on the tarmac, one of which he had never seen before, a Hawker Hurricane which was a monoplane fighter not used until 1935 and all of the planes were painted yellow and the staff on the ground were all wearing blue uniforms as oppose to the usual khaki denim.
Goddard flew on, now sure of his bearings, and landed safely at his destination, but when he reported his sighting, he was told to "Lay off the scotch" and it wasn't until 1938 that Goddard's questions were answered when the Hawker Hurricane entered into service. Training craft were painted yellow to distinguish them from operational ones, a lot of which were housed at Drem which was now made into a training site whose staff were issued with new blue uniforms.
Not only had Goddard seen Drem as it would be in 1938, but he had also encountered it on a fine sunny day rather than during the bad weather that he had experienced and lost altitude to avoid. He had used it to gain his bearings and continue his journey, so not only had Goddard himself slipped in time but also his aircraft had obviously gone with him.
Though this isn't strictly a ghost story as such, is it possible that Goddard and his aeroplane may have appeared as a ghostly sighting to anybody on the ground at Drem on that fine sunny day in 1938 in their new blue uniform?
So most of the examples we have looked at so far would seem to show that ghosts such as crisis apparitions, haunting ghosts and some cases of time slips are images created by the percipient in some way, most likely a psychic message rather than a spirit somehow left behind and picked up later by a sensitive person, whereas other ghost stories would seem to show a life after death or a survival of the spirit.
So how do we explain a ghost which goes beyond being seen in an old house and disappearing or a battle being played out, but goes so far as to interact with living people and seem to have an apparent awareness of their surroundings? The best example of an Interactive Ghost is the story of Flight 401. The story features not one but two interactive ghosts, the ghosts of Don Repo and Bob Loft. They were the flight crew on Eastern Airlines Flight Number 401, an L1011 aircraft on its way over the Florida Everglades, when they hit trouble.
The autopilot had been engaged and could be disengaged by simply moving the steering column, and while the men were moving around inside the cockpit, one of them inadvertently knocked the column, thus disengaging the autopilot. The plane then began to lose altitude and dropped to five hundred feet. The two men were unaware of this as the autopilot read out had continued to show their former height of two thousand feet. Although a warning bleeper sounded, Loft didn't hear it through his headphones, and Repo had climbed down into what's called the Hellhole. This is a small compartment under the cockpit where the cabin crew can check to make sure that the front landing gear has locked down properly, which Loft thought hadn't happened. Obviously down there Repo was also unable to hear the warning bleeper.
The sight which confronted Repo from the Hell Hole, the last thing he would ever see, would have been the tops of the trees less than five hundred feet below him. Completely powerless to do anything, he and all those aboard the plane were living on borrowed time. Within twenty seconds all one hundred and one people on the aircraft were dead and the plane lay in pieces in the swamplands of Florida. Did Repo and Loft survive their deaths on December 29th, 1972, as many witnesses who have seen them since would tend to think? Most of the sightings since that fateful night have been on L1011 aircraft, and the majority of them on planes which have use recycled parts of the Flight 401 aircraft.
The many people who claim to have seen, and even spoken to Repo and Loft, as with the people who have seen Abraham Lincoln's ghost, are very eminent, reliable witnesses. These include pilots, flight officers and even the Vice President of Eastern Airlines. Other sightings have been by multiple witnesses, one such incident was that of a Captain and two Flight Attendants who saw and spoke to Bob Loft before he disappeared in front of them. They were so worried by the incident that their flight was cancelled. Repo has also done a disappearing act in full view of a stewardess and a passenger who had enquired about the uniformed man next to her.
Whereas Bob Loft seems content to be seen and occasionally spoken to, Don Repo tends to be more involved. A Flight Engineer was carrying out a pre-flight inspection, as he would normally do, when a uniformed man told him "You don't need to worry about the pre-flight. I've already done it." The Flight Engineer turned to thank his helper and saw the figure of Don Repo.
Another occasion when Repo leant a helping hand was witnessed by a Flight Attendant who saw him in the galley fixing an oven. There was only one Flight Engineer on the plane at the time and he was adamant that he had not been in the galley. Repo was again seen in the galley of a plane on Tri Star 318, a stewardess, Faye Merryweather, saw his face looking out at her from one of the ovens. Very disturbed by this she ran to get two more colleagues, one of whom had known Repo well. All three of them clearly heard Repo speak to them as he warned them "Watch out for fire on this plane." The last leg of the plane's journey was subsequently cancelled due to serious engine trouble, and it was later discovered that the galley on Tri Star 318 had been salvaged from Flight 401.
An independent body, the Flight Safety Foundation was told of the sightings and after its investigations concluded that the witnesses were all trustworthy and experienced and that their testimony was significant. The Foundation's report stated that "The appearance of the dead Flight Engineer was confirmed by the Flight Engineer." Records show that indeed there was a fire on the aircraft.
Do Bob Loft and Don Repo live on after leaving their mortal bodies as it would seem? Do they carry on a crusade to save others from suffering the same fate as themselves? One Captain on an L1011 flight witnessed an appearance by Repo who, before disappearing, told him "There will never be another crash of an L1011... We will not let it happen." Since December 29th, 1972 there has indeed never been any other such crash involving these aircraft.
This case shares a similarity with the No.7 London bus case in so far that it is a warning of possible danger, but the similarity would seem to end there because with the bus many were killed while trying to avoid it while Loft and Repo tried to avoid the loss of life. Also the drivers at the time knew of the possible danger ahead and so could have created the bus themselves, whereas with the L1011 case no danger was apparent beforehand, especially with the fire until Repo's warning.
We can also draw a comparison with another case of a warning of danger, that of a woman, Mrs. Tillotson, who was asleep in her bed in her own home. She was woken in the night by a knocking on the door and, on seeing the late hour, she was immediately both worried and curious. When she opened the door there was her daughter, Helen, who lived across the street standing there looking worried. She told her mother that she must come over to her house straight away so she ducked back inside to get her slippers and when she returned to the door Helen had gone. By now very curious and even more worried she went across the road to her daughter's house to see what was the matter. She was most surprised to see that there was no movement inside the house, and she had to knock several times before getting a response. Helen eventually came to the door and seemed most annoyed at having been woken at such an ungodly hour, "But you came and woke me!" said Mrs. Tillotson confused. As they stood there debating exactly who had woken whom, Mrs. Tillotson's house across the street was destroyed by a massive explosion. The cause was later found to have been a gas leak.
Helen knew nothing of the warning she was supposed to have given her mother and had been asleep all the time, so we must assume that the mother had somehow created the whole thing, could she have smelt the gas in her sleep and sensed the danger, and then in a semi waking state her mind had created the scenario of her daughter calling to get her out of the house? The problem here is that again some knowledge of danger must have been apparent, but why then, when awake and looking for her slippers, could she not smell the gas or sense the danger, or was it masked for her by the story of her daughter in trouble.
Still we are left with the problem on the plane where nobody but Repo knew of the fire risk which, if evident, would have been spotted in a pre-flight check and wouldn't have been apparent to Faye Merryweather or the two stewards she called to investigate with her, especially in the galley away from the engines. Was it the spirit of Don Repo fulfilling his and Loft's crusade to protect L1011 aircraft and all who flew on them?
Is it possible for ghosts to have such an awareness of their surroundings as to be aware of danger? This would appear to be what happened in a Detroit factory in 1964 while a man was walking through the factory on his lunch hour. A giant body press was activated by accident, and just before the motor fitter was killed by the machine he was pushed out of the way by a tall black man with a scar on his left cheek. Later when he told his colleagues of the experience they recognised that the black man's description matched that of a man who had been decapitated by the same machine twenty years earlier while he had been pressing parts for bombers. Though he had been an excellent worker who knew his job well, long hours of overtime had made him drowsy and careless. The fitter said that the black man had pushed him out of the way easily and that he had looked and felt real. So how then could a ghost, if that is what it was, physically push a man? We have a similar problem in the Nor' Nor' West story where a ghost, though that of a living person, physically manipulated a pen and left behind writing in the ships log book. Can ghosts physically manipulate objects or are they really ghosts at all?
Could the scarred black man have been a crisis apparition created by one of the fitter’s co-workers seeing the danger and suddenly recalling the accident of twenty years earlier and feeling a sudden dread? Even if this is the case then we are still left with the question of how a ghost, however it should be created, physically moving a grown man. The most likely explanation is some form of telekinesis or psychokinetic force (the ability to move things with the power of the mind) but who in a scenario like this would be using the power? The fitter himself, one of his colleagues, or possibly his co-workers collectively, and can telekinesis be used to influence a living breathing man or just inanimate objects?
With all the cases we have looked at so far have we seen any proof of an afterlife? Probably the best evidence so far is Repo and Loft, though even in their case some of the encounters don't necessarily show a "survival of death." To say that we truly have evidence of an afterlife we must surely need to communicate with the dead, to receive a message from the "other side." Occasionally we find a case where there is a strong suggestion of an afterlife, and where a survival of death seems to be the most likely explanation.
In North Carolina in 1921 James Chaffin died, leaving everything to one of his four sons. The son himself died a year later leaving no will of his own. Three years later, in 1925, the second son, now the eldest living, was visited by the ghost of his father. The ghost spoke to him and told him "You will find my will in my overcoat pocket." The son then found the overcoat, and stitched inside the lining was a rolled up note. The note said to read Chapter 27 of Genesis in the family bible. When he found the bible and turned to the relevant section, in the page was a second will which bequeathed everything equally to all four sons.
The will was a later one than the original and was hidden where nobody else but the father knew about it. If the second son then didn't know of it, how did he know where to look for it in the coat and then the bible unless he was told to by his father, but could the message have actually come from beyond the grave? The other alternative is that the second son falsified the will in order to get a share of his fathers, then elder brothers fortune, though there was no evidence of this found when the case was looked into by a lawyer hired by a Canadian member of the S.P.R. but the significance of the 27th Chapter of Genesis is that it contains the story of how Jacob deceived his blind father Isaac into granting him the inheritance of his brother Esau.
Even a case like this then cannot be taken as proof of an afterlife as holes can be found in the story, but this is just one of many cases of a ghost telling people where to find wills, treasure and even on some occasions their earthly remains. There can't be many tales though of a ghost identifying his murderer.
September 28th, 1749 was the last day that 30 year old Sergeant Arthur Davies was seen alive. He went to go hunting and never came back, a search for him failed to turn up any sign of his whereabouts and was called off after four days. Due to the nature of the highlands where he went missing with its marshes, crags and strong currents, his body could have easily been concealed in any one of a thousand places so foul play wasn't suspected and the case died down over time until some 10 months later when a shepherd, Alexander Mcpherson, was visited by a man claiming to be the ghost of Sergeant Davies. Davies spoke to Mcpherson and told him that he was the victim of murder, of which no suspicion had been raised before, and he told the shepherd the whereabouts of his remains. Mcpherson decided to look where he had been told to, and indeed found a body at the exact spot. He turned and fled, feeling desperate to forget the whole ghastly business and did nothing further until he was visited by the ghost a second time. However this time the ghost was also seen by Mcpherson's employer's wife Isobel Mchardie.
Davies asked Mcpherson to give his body a proper burial, and again told him that he had been murdered, only this time he gave the shepherd the names of his murderers. He also asked him to contact his friend Donald Farquarson, and when he did get in contact, Farquarson was very skceptical about the whole affair and doubted the motives of the shepherd. Despite his skepticism he decided to follow Mcpherson to the grave and was dumfounded when he recognised the clothing and hair colour on the body of the dead Sergeant Davies. Though they decided to fulfil the dead man’s wish for a proper burial they did not tell the authorities of the alleged murder for various reasons. The main reason being that they didn't want to be seen to be involved in "ghostly goings on," bearing in mind that this was the 1700s and things like that were taken very seriously, and also the situation at the time between the Scots and the English which was delicate to say the least.
As time passed, Mcpherson was fired and his new employer was one of the men Sergeant Davies had accused of his murder, Duncan Clerk. Mcpherson was obviously nervous when in Clerk's company and, after rowing with him one day, he accused him of Davies' murder. Clerk offered the shepherd twenty pounds to say nothing to anyone, and the offer was accepted. Word soon spread though and eventually reached the authorities who put Clerk on trial for murder.
The main evidence against him was the I.O.U. for twenty pounds which he had given Mcpherson, and the two rings from Davies' fingers which were found on the fingers of Clerk's mistress. In addition to this evidence the prosecution found two witnesses, the most amazing fact however is that the court allowed the ghostly evidence of Mcpherson to be included in the trial. An excerpt from the court record book stored in Edinburgh at the General Register House read as follows;
".. the deponent rose from his bed and followed him to the door and then it was as he had been told that he said he was Serjeant Davies who had been murdered in the hill of Christie aboute near a year before and desired the deponent to go to the place he pointed at where he would find his bones..."
Despite all the evidence the two men accused of the murder were acquitted, not due to lack of evidence, but more to do with the hostility between the English prosecutor and the Scottish defender which marred the trial, and the proceedings were further hampered by the hanging of one of the witnesses for an unrelated offence. So despite his efforts Davies failed to see justice done, but what he did achieve was the status of being the first person to testify in a court trial from beyond the grave.
So at last we have proof of an afterlife, or do we? As seems obligatory with these tales, there is always an alternative explanation, albeit an equally puzzling one.
As the murderers of Davies were still alive, is it possible that their feelings of guilt were somehow portrayed to the shepherd Mcpherson who was previously unaware of the murder, and possibly even that Davies was dead? There were certainly at least 2 people who knew of the killing and the location of the corpse, so once again there is no watertight proof that the vision of Davies was created by the dead man himself, but could have been created by the two "guilty" men or the two witnesses produced in court.
The problem with most ghost stories is that as they are passed down through the ages they become only as reliable as not only the person telling it, but also all those who have told it before. Details have a habit of becoming fuzzy, distorted and exaggerated with each telling, details which don't seem important are left out and those which are not so important are told and retold so they become slightly further from the truth each time. What we need then is a ghost story which has remained unchanged though the years, one that isn't told time and time again but is passed by some other means such as visually.
The saying goes that the camera never lies, and the photographs of ghostly images are many and varied, some show clearly defined figures while others show just a hazy mist, all however are most interesting.
Some such photographs are taken when a witness sees a ghost and then tries to capture it on film but not all of these attempts however are successful, others are taken when no ghost is seen at the time and, to the photographers surprise, a ghost is seen on, for example, a family photograph. Many such photographs though can be put down to natural causes such as tricks of the light, exposure problems, faults with the film or careless development of the film. It is interesting to note that some pictures have passed all of these tests and, years after being taken, still manage to defy all attempts to explain them. Could they really be a ghostly image caught on film, surely if a ghost is visible to the naked eye then it would stand to reason that it would also be visible to the camera, as this is in reality a mere extension of the human eye which is able to store a picture for posterity.
If we suppose that a ghost is caused by a psychic effort rather than being the spirit of a dead person then could this psychic image still be captured on film as if it were a physical manifestation? When it is seen at the time of exposure this is reasonably understandable, but when it is not seen at the time of exposure we have a problem once again. Could the photographer be portraying an image himself? Could the signal that he is perceiving be relatively weak so he is unable to portray it physically, but is able to portray it mentally on to the photographic film?
There have been cases of psychics claiming to be able to perform "Thought Photography" by portraying images on to film by the power of thought alone, even under laboratory conditions where they are given a specific image and then made to portray it onto a photographic plate. One of the best examples is Ted Serios who is one of, if not the best exponents of thought photography.
Ted Serios’ best work was produced in the 1960s and 1970s. He would use a Polaroid Instamatic camera so there was no question of him tampering with the film itself, and he would be able to produce images on the film often of faraway buildings, on occasion even when the camera was in a different room to him and pointing into empty space. So could unwitting photographers be producing such examples of thought photography of ghostly images completely by accident, perhaps after picking up a latent signal left behind years before?
We have examined the many and varied types of ghosts, and not all of them appear to have the same cause, but appear to be created in many different ways. Nowhere though have we seen an example which proves "beyond doubt" that they are the spirits of people no longer of this world who are returning from the afterlife as there is always another possible explanation. It is interesting to note that there are surprisingly few stories of ghosts appearing in graveyards where there should surely be many hauntings if ghosts are linked to the dead people they represent. The ghosts in the majority tend to frequent the places that were connected to the person in life rather than in death. One thing is for certain, whatever the cause for ghosts and apparitions the explanation is very likely to be every bit as baffling and unbelievable as if they were somehow the spirits of the dead.
Before we can answer a question we must first know what that question is. Is it that ghosts exist, or is it what ghosts really are? What we must do is answer both questions in order, so if the first question is do ghosts exist then the answer must be yes. There can be absolutely no doubt in anybody's mind that people do see apparitions, both of people and of other things as well such as animals, phantom stage coaches, buses and even buildings. Some are even lucky enough to capture them on film though they're not always aware of it at the time.
So we now come to the second question, what are ghosts? The common belief being that they are the spirits of dead people, and if you should ask a person whether or not they believe in ghosts they will automatically make the connection that you are asking them if they believe that the souls of persons long dead can still walk the earth, so we must try to get away from this common misconception that "ghost" means the spirit of the dead. Though in some stories this would appear to be the case there is no proof of the fact, and though for some reason many people would love this to be true, the argument is far from convincing. So we must then answer the second question: What are ghosts? This one however is not as easily answered as the first question. We have seen that there are different types of ghosts and apparitions and not all appear to have the same cause, some causes being more obvious and simple than others. Whatever kind of ghost we are talking about, it is clear that the human mind, complex as it is, has a lot to do with it. What we will do is perhaps the only thing we can do and that is take each different type of ghost and look at it separately to try and see how the different scenarios differ or compare.
The first we will look at is crisis apparitions, this being perhaps the simplest of all to explain, that is the apparition of a person seen at the time of, or up to twelve hours after their death, and when the ghost is often known to the percipient of the vision. It is likely that crisis apparitions are caused by some sort of telepathic message sent out by the dying person in their last moments of life. We know from E.S.P. experiments that people can indeed "link up" (though with varying degrees of success) over vast distances. One early example of one of these experiments is that carried out around the turn of the century by a Mr. Kirk who had a lady friend to whom he referred to as Miss G., his experiments were reported by the S.P.R.
The experiments took place over a period of 10 days and between the hours of 11pm and 1am every night but Miss G. was told nothing by Mr. Kirk of his experiment during which he would concentrate hard on making himself visible to Miss G. Over the 10 day period the two met on several occasions but neither spoke of the matter, Miss G. was still obviously unaware of what was going on, though she did complain to him of having trouble sleeping and feeling restless.
Mr. Kirk was disappointed in his apparent lack of success at having failed to appear to Miss G. and after the 10 days had expired he gave up. He was however in his office one day and was feeling rather tired after completing some auditing work so he leaned back in his chair and decided to have one last try at his experiment. Not knowing where Miss G. would be at the time he decided to concentrate on her bedroom though it was still only early, between 3:30pm and 4pm. It is Miss G.'s account to the S.P.R. that makes the most interesting reading.
"In the afternoon (being tired by a morning walk) while sitting in an easy chair near the window of my own room, I fell asleep.... I was suddenly quite wide awake, seeing Mr. Kirk standing near my chair, dressed in a dark brown coat, which I had frequently seen him wear. His back was toward the window, his right hand toward me; he passed across the room toward the door...; but when he got about four feet from the door, which was closed he disappeared."
The dark brown coat Miss G. describes was one which Mr. Kirk had indeed worn many times while in her company, though this particular day was one of the very rare occasions when he had worn it to the office.
There can be no more emotional or stressful time than that at the point of death, so in these moments it seems that the psychic message is sent and received by the percipient, sometimes immediately, sometimes a little later, possibly when the percipient thinks about the dying person or possibly, if they are busy at the time, when their mind is clear and able to receive such a message. We know that twins have a strong psychic connection and can feel each other’s pain, happiness and sorrow, and even in the case of the inseparable Yorkshire born twins Greta and Freda Chaplin often referred to as "The Terrible Twins" or "The Pests" finish off their sentences. This "link" would be much stronger than any other as twins are more closely related than any other kith and kin, so it would stand to reason that there would be a certain psychic closeness between all relatives by blood, ranging from twins sharing the womb to distant cousins who may possibly never meet, and this would explain why most crisis apparitions are experienced by people known to the ghost.
The next type of ghost we will look at is the haunting ghost, those which stay faithful to a particular location. The location is usually one which bore a significance to the person in their life such as their home, their place of work or the scene of their death. We know that mental signals take the form of electrical impulses, and can be picked up by receptive people, but could these signals still be in the atmosphere and be detected many years later? Surely the impression must be stored somewhere in the surroundings and not simply floating in the airspace being blown about by the wind, more probably stored on a conscious rather than a physical level.
The many sightings of haunting ghosts seem to show that the ghost is seen to perform in the same way every time it is seen, such as walking along a particular corridor or as in the case of Abraham Lincoln at the same Oval Office window looking out over Pennsylvania Avenue apparently deep in thought, a place where Lincoln would indeed have spent many hours during his time in office, emitting these electrical impulses.
It is most interesting to note that "old ghosts" which have been seen over many centuries obey the laws of physics which were relevant to their time rather than ours, i.e. when a ghost is seen walking through a wall. The point at which the ghost disappeared will later be found to have been the site of an old doorway long since bricked over, or a ghost seen to rise up, apparently floating may be seen at the site of an old staircase no longer there. One such incident which occurred in the North West of England on many occasions was experienced by a woman who lived alone in a large house and heard footsteps apparently climbing her stairs. She could not work out however why there were thirteen definite steps when she had only eleven stairs. In time, she had some work done on the stairs which included a new carpet, and when the workmen pulled up some of the floorboards they found that there were two further steps beneath the current staircase.
The ghost will always be seen to be doing something which they would have done in life rather than walking around a graveyard for instance, suggesting that the origin of the ghost lies in the life of the person and not in their death. The only problem with this though is just how can a signal be left behind by somebody or something and still be picked up many years later? Despite this problem this is indeed what seems to happen and that the haunting ghost is caused in this way. It is also my belief that the original signal is possibly strengthened every time it is picked up, for example, a signal left behind by a now dead person later picked up by somebody else would then become not only the cause of an apparition, but also the percipient themselves shocked to see it will also possibly leave behind not only the original signal but also a signal of their own as a result of their surprise and shock. So there is then two signals left in the same place, and they may be then picked up again by a third person as two signals or one strong one. This would explain how animals can also detect a haunting if it is a mental signal as in the haunted room where no ghost was apparent. The theory also goes a long way to explaining why so few graveyards are haunted, and it is further bolstered by the fact that when battle scenes are recreated, living persons are seen in their battle throes as well as those who perished on the field, so obviously the signal is left by living persons as oppose to the dead. A good analogy used by Arthur C. Clarke is that the eye is like a camera which places an image on the retina which, via the optic nerve, sends a signal of what it is seeing to the brain, but if this situation were reversed and the brain picked up a signal from somewhere, could it then send it to the retina which would think that it is actually seeing it?
The sightings of inanimate objects such as cycles, buses and planes can be likened to such sightings of people who are still alive, in so much as the signal is left behind at the time by somebody else present at the time of the objects existence. For example, a soldier on a battlefield leaving a signal of all those around him including those still alive as well as those who perished on the field, or a person seeing a spitfire returning from a raid leaves a signal or recording of it, and when this recording is later picked by somebody else they see the same spitfire returning from a raid flown many years earlier, but the recording is left behind by the original witness rather than the spitfire or its pilot.
The London Bus apparition may not be included in the same bracket as this apparition was likely created by either the drivers of approaching cars or by passing onlookers, because as the drivers approached the bend at Cambridge Gardens and St. Marks Road they would be aware of the pending danger as would any nearby witnesses, especially those who lived locally as this was a notorious black spot and buses were a regular visitor to the area. It would only take one such onlooker or one driver to leave behind a feeling of danger, or a bus about to crash for any subsequent drivers to be able to pick this up later, and so see a vision of the bus themselves. The curious point about this case though is the sighting at the depot by an official when there was no apparent danger, though the buses were obviously frequent visitors to this spot, and would have been witnessed at this spot by countless hundreds if not thousands of people any one of whom could have left behind a similar signal at this point.
The false arrival sightings would appear to be of the same in origin as crisis apparitions in so far as they are a telepathic signal, but whereas with a crisis apparition it is the time of death when the signal is transmitted and received, in the false arrival it is sent the beginning or the middle of a journey when the mind of the sender is on their pending arrival at the destination and once again meeting those who wait there for the visit. Though the false arrival ghost is often seen I would also include in this category the times that we have all encountered when we find ourselves thinking of somebody we haven't seen for a long time, only for them to either knock on the door or to telephone us, this could be a signal of the same kind though the percipient doesn't see an apparition but merely finds themselves thinking about the visitor or caller.
There we have some possible explanations for relatively common apparitions, but surely one of the most interesting of all ghosts are those seen in time slips where whole houses are seen or in the case of Mr. Squirrel a whole street. Not all the cases included can have the same cause but most typical are the cases of Mrs. Turrell-Clarke, and that of Miss Wynne and Miss Allington. As usual in time slips the women saw a vision of times gone by and in the case of Miss Wynne and Miss Allington they did not even realise they were looking at an apparition until the next time they visited the road where the house apparently was. In Mrs. Turrell-Clarke's case, though she also saw a scene of days gone by, she saw it slowly transform in front of her and then change back again. These are the more typical cases where it is possible to explain them as a telepathic signal and the visions of what the women saw were once seen by somebody else, and the impression of what they saw was perhaps so inspiring to them that they left behind a signal to be picked up later as a vision by somebody, possibly and probably years later under the right circumstances. This could also explain part of Mr. Squirrel's time slip but only up until the part where he interacted with shop assistant. However Mr. Squirrels experience is obviously much more than an apparition as he completed a business transaction during his experience.
Equally unusual was Victor Goddard's sighting of Drem Airfield as it would appear four years later. A possible solution to Goddard's case seems to be a little too far-fetched, but then whatever the solution is, it is bound to be incredible in its own right. Could it be possible that Goddard actually stayed in 1934 all the time, and that it was the people of Drem who had a regressive time slip and saw an old Bi-plane in the skies above them, the plane which Goddard was flying. Could somebody have picked up a recording of a once common sight in the skies above England, and that Goddard was on the other side of the time slip, being, rather than seeing an apparition. Apart from an actual slip in time this is the only other plausible explanation, and if this is the case then in other slips do both sides of the slip see each other or each other’s surroundings?
So once again we come to perhaps the most confusing of all apparitions, that is interactive ghosts. How is it that somebody can talk to, and interact with, a mere apparition? We have seen only one case which is absolutely baffling. Most of these cases feature one or more living persons as multiple witnesses, that of the Detroit machinist involved colleagues in the factory, in the case of James Chaffin we cannot absolutely rule out foul play, and the steps taken seem rather long winded and complicated for a man to go to just to leave a will rather than changing one he had already written. The Arthur Davies case, even though his testimony was allowed in court his murderers were still alive at the time, and it is possible that it was one, or both, of them that could have created the vision seen by the shepherd Alexander Mcpherson, and while there is somebody still alive who knows the details of a murder or death, then we can not say for sure that the evidence came from a ghost beyond the grave. As for the truly baffling case, that is the case of Bob Loft and Don Repo the flight crew on the ill-fated Flight 401.
When the flight engineer doing his pre-flight check saw Repo and was told by him that he had already done the check we could say that this was a "normal" sighting as Repo would indeed have said this possibly many times during his career, and for the final time to Bob Loft, so the flight engineer could have picked up a signal left by Repo himself during his life. This could also explain many of the sightings by passengers on board L1011 aircraft which Loft and Repo flew many times.
The sighting of Repo in the galley oven is slightly different from the majority of ghost sightings in that the head was seen inside the oven itself and the apparition was certainly not acting like most others by acting normally and could in no way have been mistaken for a real person going about his or her normal business such as opening a door or casting a shadow. We can safely assume that Repo had never placed his head inside a galley oven and closed the door. The galley in question was later found to have been recycled from the crashed aircraft, and it is possible that if a signal can be left behind in haunted houses and other buildings then it must be possible for the ghost to be present in the galley, and the galley housed the latent signal which the stewardess Faye Merryweather picked up and was also seen by the colleagues whose attention she attracted. We can accept these incidents at face value for what they are, genuine apparitions, but what is baffling is the warning which Repo gave to the cabin crew of possible fire on the aeroplane. How could anyone else have known about the fire risk at that time? The plane did indeed develop engine trouble later on in the flight and the remainder of the journey had to be cancelled.
It is possible though that a flight engineer checking the engines had noticed a potential problem, and after becoming worried about the severity of it and not bringing it to somebody's attention, he had panicked and regretted greatly the fact that he had not told anybody else, and so he created the vision of Repo himself out of a feeling of dread or guilt, or maybe he did report it and that report was perhaps "lost" by somebody else who later became worried and created the vision, but surely if such a problem had been noticed then the plane would not have been allowed to fly any further without repairs being carried out would it? If there is an alternative explanation to the problem then we must look at it and give it equal consideration, but if this is a possible cause of the vision of Repo in the galley then it is surely as frightening as the prospect of Repo coming back from the dead to warn us of imminent danger. The other problem is the sighting by a fellow captain who saw, and was told by Repo that "There will never be another crash of an L1011... We will not let it happen." A prophecy which to this day has remained true.
Do the spirits of Loft and Repo have a "mission" to fulfil in preventing further accidents involving L1011s, and continue to do so from the "other side"? We would all love this to be true, no matter how unbelievable it may be, and quite frankly there is no other obvious explanation for the events taking place on these aircraft.
So we must accept that ghosts do exist and, for the most part, are not in fact spirits of the dead whos souls have survived death or become locked for eternity in some nether world, but are in fact a telepathic message in the form of a psychic signal which is picked up by somebody else under the right circumstances. With crisis apparitions it is reasonably simple to understand as the signal is both sent and received within a very short space of time, so what we need to look at is just how a signal can be sent or left behind in a certain place in the case of a haunting ghost in such a way and still be picked up sometimes centuries later.
Many experiments have been carried out into psychic phenomena and the powers of the mind, and even when carried out on so called "great" psychics the results have always proved erratic. Even when the subjects were in the same room as, and concentrating hard on, one another, they don't always attain convincing results, sometimes just scraping over the threshold that one would expect if the subjects were just using guess work and the laws of averages. This could go a long way to explaining why a haunting ghost in a house for example does not appear all the time and to every visitor, or does not always appear visible but audible in some instances. A leading researcher into ghost sightings, John Spencer feels that there are a number of ingredients needed for a ghost to be either "recorded" or "played back" because otherwise everybody who ever walked into a particular room would appear at one time or another as a ghost and the room would be full of ghosts.
This would also seem to debunk Eleanor Sidgwick's "Psychometry Theory" where certain people are able to conjure up images of people when they come into contact with objects associated with that person, even though this is a tried and tested process often used in police investigations to catch criminals, the results are again very erratic, and only a rough profile of the person is the usual outcome rather than a perfect image precise right down to obscure details reported in ghost sightings.
John Spencer theorises that the necessary ingredients needed could possibly be the geographical shape of the room, atmospheric conditions i.e. a specific type of location, humidity or temperature, but the most important, and also the most unpredictable, ingredient is of course the human mind. Perhaps only a certain kind or frame of mind is able to create an apparition which would explain why some people see many ghosts in their lifetime while others may never see one at all. Spencer's wife Anne believes that an image is not left by the person recorded but by the person who sees them, as in the case of the man who, while looking out of a window, saw somebody lying in a pond, apparently dead. When he rushed outside to the pond there was nobody in the water. Upon returning to the window he once again saw the same figure lying in the water, so the apparition itself wasn't seen from anywhere but the window, the place perhaps where the vision of the dead body was first seen from and recorded not at the pond side but at the window.
To this day nobody knows just how a telepathic signal is communicated and in the cases of crisis apparitions the mind of the percipient plays a larger part in the vision than the mind of the sender as the vision is never seen as it is sent, i.e. on the deathbed or mangled in a car crash, except in the case of the girl who saw her mother lay on the floor of "the white room" when her mother had collapsed and needed assistance, possibly purposely sending an image of herself in trouble so that her daughter could get help, but it is seen doing normal things so the message they receive is somehow transformed in their mind. The fact that a number of people may see a ghost while another person in the same room may see nothing at all supports the fact that it takes a certain frame of kind of mind to perceive an image and thus receive a telepathic signal.
It is hard to doubt that a signal is left behind, and perceived by not only people but also animals such as the cat, dog, rat and snake experiment, which showed that all the animals, apart from the rat, detected something in the "haunted room."
H. H. Price who was also an Oxford philosopher came up with the theory of a "Psychic ether" which he said would "permeate all matter and space." Price said that this could be imprinted upon with mental images, probably at traumatic moments such as violent death or great emotional torment. With cases of ghosts who had lived a happy and uneventful life, and died a peaceful and natural death, he says that repeated attendance at a scene could also be imprinted upon the psychic ether. He also says that the "impression" when received could take the form of a vision, a sound, a feeling or a physical touch.
This neatly fits in with the sightings of people still living, such as in battles for instance, as the psychic ether would already be impressed upon before their death, which also ties in with Anne Spencer's belief that an image is created by the seer rather than the seen. This could also go so far as to explain inhuman ghosts as if a "sender" can create an image wearing clothes or carrying objects, then they could surely also create an image of a vehicle they were riding in or were near.
As well as Price's theory of a psychic ether, there is a school of thought which believes that we have a "collective consciousness" which all people, at least on some level, are aware of and share a certain part of, and we all have an often latent ability to send and receive messages to and from each other. It is difficult to distinguish between this and the psychic ether as they would appear, in most respects, to be one and the same thing, and if we extend this psychic ether to a level where we all share a part of it, then they do indeed become one and the same.
So rather than a particular room or a particular object holding a signal over time and this being detected, it is likely that the psychic ether or collective conscious offer the best, albeit a still incredible explanation to haunting ghosts and that we do all indeed share some level of mental awareness of one another, this being at its strongest in twins the closest of relatives, and getting weaker the further removed we become. Also there is the added possibility of inherited memory and information which passes down through the generations. Not only does this explain the haunting ghosts but also that puzzling phenomena of ghosts appearing at certain times of day or on certain days of the year, as though on some level we are aware of what has transpired on these particular days in a given location.
An interesting footnote is that haunting ghosts in some cases can be exorcised from houses, or in the case of murder victims if their remains are given a proper burial they seem to find "eternal rest" and bother us no more, so it would seem that if we do somehow have a knowledge of past events then we must also have a knowledge of exorcisms or proper burials so that we no longer perceive a ghost when it has been laid to rest.
So the answer to the question do you believe in ghosts should be the same as that given by H. H. Price, Yes, but as for them being the spirits of dead people then the answer is no, and, as Price said, the question should not be do you believe in ghosts?, but do you believe people sometimes experience apparitions?
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