Paranormal Encounters on Britain's Roads E-Book

Peter A. McCue

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 280

Beschreibung

In this detailed book, Dr Peter McCue reflects on the enormous range of paranormal phenomena to have been reported along Britain's roads, and examines the theory that certain areas seem to be hotspots for such occurrences, such as the A75 and B721 roads in southern Scotland, and the Blue Bell Hill area in Kent. He delves into the sightings of apparitional vehicles; encounters with 'colliding apparitions'; 'phantom hitch-hikers'; out-of-place big cats; phantom black dogs; UFOs; 'missing time' (strange memory gaps); vehicle interferences (such as mysterious breakdowns); and incidents in which drivers and passengers seem to have been translocated in space or time. This thorough book debates the evidence and theories in a critical but open-minded way, and is a welcome addition to the genre.

Leseprobe

PARANORMALENCOUNTERSON BRITAIN’SROADS

Cover illustration: Martin Latham

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Peter A. McCue, 2018

The right of Peter A. McCue to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9780750984386

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Ron Halliday

Preface

1   Fundamentals

2   Phantom Vehicles and Aircraft

3   Colliding Apparitions

4   Phantom Hitchhikers

5   Alien Big Cats

6   Phantom Black Dogs

7   Mysterious Light Phenomena and UFOs

8   UFO Experiences Involving ‘Missing Time’

9   Vehicle Interference

10   A Miscellany of Bizarre Experiences

11   Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Ron Halliday for kindly writing the Foreword to this book. I am grateful to David T. Muir and David Haith for their help with proofreading. I am appreciative of the people who have given me accounts of their strange experiences. Special thanks go to Sean Tudor, for providing information about the Blue Bell Hill apparitions and for permission to use two of his photographs of the area. I’d also like to thank Kevin Goodman, for his photograph of Oldnall Road in the West Midlands, and David Feast, for his photograph of Colloway Clump, Warminster. I’m also grateful to the following, for providing information or assistance: Kathleen Cronie, Rob Gandy, Steve Mera, Alan Murdie, David Taylor, Danielle Thompson and Steve Wills.

Foreword

For centuries individuals – and since the nineteenth century various investigative organisations, the best known being the Society for Psychical Research – have striven to make sense of claims of encounters with ‘phantoms’, ‘ghosts’ and ‘spirits’, entities whose appearance defies, or certainly seems to defy, at first glance, our rational, scientific world.

In Paranormal Encounters on Britain’s Roads: Phantom Figures, UFOs and Missing Time, the author, Dr Peter McCue, has assembled a fascinating array of reported encounters with apparitions from all corners of Great Britain. The spread of sightings is remarkable and begs the question of the nature of the phenomena (or is it phenomenon?) that we are dealing with. It is a formidable challenge to seek to make sense of events of a quite extraordinary nature, but in this work Dr McCue has shed light on one particular aspect the curious phenomenon of encounters with ghosts on the UK’s road network, which may, in its turn, have broader implications for the investigation of apparitions.

It is heartening to note that Dr McCue opens his book with a definition of terms regularly used by those investigating and writing about the paranormal. It is useful both as a guide to the accepted meaning of these terms and in that it makes clear the context in which the author is using these expressions. It gives considerable clarity to the examples he cites and the discussion he gives in relation to these events. One wishes that other authors would be equally explicit, as one of the problems the reader faces when working through a narrative is to be sure that reader and author are on the same wavelength when certain technical terms are being frequently used. Those already versed in the subject will find some of the terms used familiar, for example, extrasensory perception (ESP) and telepathy – nomenclature that has been in use for many years. Others less so, and I mention retrocognition, a term I admit I was unfamiliar with, which demonstrates that one can always learn.

In his book, Dr McCue has focused on those sightings of apparitions which have been witnessed on or in relation to roads. To his credit, he has also tackled the controversial subject of ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ or ‘UFOs’. As he states, quite rightly in my view, ‘Some UFO sightings may be apparitional events.’ I can readily confirm that descriptions of UFOs related to me by witnesses bear a definite resemblance to ghost encounters. The object can, for example, be almost wisp-like or translucent, similar to the traditional ghost. On the other hand, UFOs can appear solid – like real nuts-and-bolts machines – and appear to support the belief of some enthusiasts that we are dealing with an alien race of space travellers. However, let us not forget that apparitions – in spite of the subjective inference of the word – can also appear solid as, for example, cases involving the ‘phantom hitchhiker’ reveal, as described by Dr McCue. A fascinating and, one might add, particularly disturbing aspect of the ghost encounter. If a phantom can appear solid and interact meaningfully with its or our surroundings, it raises fundamental questions about the nature of our reality. It doesn’t, if one can be frank, appear to make much sense; but, even so, perfectly rational people, with no axe to grind, have claimed to encounter ‘ghosts’ which appear no different in substance than you or I. It’s a paradox which appears to defy an obvious explanation. Or at least a solution on which there is broad agreement, as there are almost as many different views on the matter as there are writers and investigators! Dr McCue doesn’t avoid these issues, and delivers a stimulating discussion of the theories put forward to account for the appearance of apparitions and other phenomena, such as alleged alien abduction. He explains the difference between a ‘theory’ and a ‘hypothesis’, a separation which is frequently confused by writers on the supernatural, but an important difference to be aware of when assessing the validity of the paranormal experience.

It’s well established that, as Dr McCue puts it, ‘Some people seem to be especially prone to unusual experiences.’ These individuals are known in UFO-speak as ‘repeater witnesses’, although having more than one paranormal experience certainly isn’t confined to UFO sightings. Dr McCue examines this issue in relation to UFO abductees. Why do some people have encounters which defy everyday experience and have them more than once? Is there something unusual about these individuals, as you might expect there to be? It appears not to be the case. As Dr McCue recounts, studies conducted on UFO abductees, comparing them with control subjects, discovered ‘no significant differences between them regarding factors such as emotional intelligence, fantasy-proneness, extraversion, emotional stability, and openness to experience’. This is a surprising conclusion but I would add that it chimes with my own experience of interviewing abductees and others who claim to have had an encounter of a paranormal nature. These individuals usually were not looking for anything odd to happen to them and saw themselves as ‘ordinary’ people who had had an extraordinary experience, one that was frequently viewed as unsettling and even unpleasant.

That does not, of course, mean that supposedly inexplicable experiences involve the supernatural. It’s a ‘taken’ amongst UFO investigators that 90 per cent or more of UFO sightings can be explained by natural phenomena – for example, misidentification of aircraft or planets, reflection of ground lights into the sky, and so on. One view held by sceptics is that if we had all the information about a paranormal encounter, we would be able to explain every incident in a rational way. It’s also suggested that the volume of sightings doesn’t mean the phenomenon exists – an argument put forward in relation to the Loch Ness Monster, for example. These views have to be taken seriously, but to counter that, one has cases, for example, of close encounters, of highly detailed incidents which are harder to explain away by supposed lack of information, an argument which I feel tends towards an intellectual ‘cop out’.

I won’t enumerate the large number of strange encounters given by Dr McCue – that’s what reading the book is for! There are far too many to describe, but they are all fascinating in their own way. The ‘disappearing car’ phenomenon is well documented, but unnerving nonetheless. Here we have a car which hurtles towards you, you swerve to avoid it, and then – glancing in your rear-view mirror – discover that the vehicle has vanished. This – among many others – is one aspect of the ghost phenomenon which puzzles me. Why do ‘phantoms’ appear solid but then ‘dematerialise’? Incidents from across the UK, as documented by Dr McCue, including ghost planes, demonstrate the geographical extent and significant incidence of this class of event. In each chapter, Dr McCue provides useful comments, giving his own view of the various phenomena.

An astonishing variety of objects have been encountered on Britain’s roads, including alien big cats, phantom black dogs, mysterious light phenomena plus vehicle interference. All of these types of incidents, and more, Dr McCue has examined in detail. The variety of incidents is remarkable: a cyclist colliding with phantom horses, a motorist running over a smiling woman on a road in Kent, feeling the impact of the collision, but no one being found there, even following a search conducted by the police. How can one explain such an occurrence?

There have been a surprising number of phantom beast sightings reported by motorists. I’ve certainly interviewed witnesses to such encounters. Interestingly, Dr McCue cites an example of a sighting at Rendlesham Forest, the location of a well-known UFO incident. It’s been suggested by other writers that phantom beasts and UFOs are connected in some way, though that appears as little more than wild speculation. It may be that on some occasions genuine big cats may have been encountered, and Dr McCue cites a case in which ‘a black creature with massive teeth’ crashed into the side of a car, leaving ‘a huge dent’.

Phantom beasts have a long pedigree. Before the appearance of ‘black cats’, phantom black dogs were frequently reported. Dr McCue devotes a chapter to the ‘black dog’ phenomenon, reporting a supposed incident from as far back as 1577. Such is the fame of the phantom black dog in Suffolk, following that legendary encounter, that the creature appears on the town of Bungay’s coat of arms. As Dr McCue establishes, the sightings of the phantom black dog are too frequent and well documented to dismiss. But how do we account for them? Dr McCue once again seeks to provide us with explanations to consider, including the possibility that ‘unconsciously and via ESP, the people concerned learned they were in danger, and … somehow created the apparitional dogs themselves’, an intriguing idea.

In his admirable ‘conclusion’, Dr McCue draws attention to several issues. As he points out, the number of reported cases is simply that – reported incidents. It is impossible to know how many encounters go unreported, but it can be guessed that those we know of form only a fraction of those that have been witnessed. I can attest to this from my own experience of investigating UFO sightings. Often a witness will report an event many years after it had occurred, with the comment, ‘I didn’t know who to tell it to.’ One can judge that a significant number of encounters have taken place where the only recipients of the details are a few friends and relations and the events do not find their way into the literature on the subject.

So can we be sure that the incidents investigated and/or written about are representative of the phenomena? Again, it seems impossible to be sure but, for example, given the number of encounters discussed by Dr McCue, one can sense that a broad pattern is established, and that whilst more examples are always of interest and may fill in gaps in our perception of the phenomena, they would not disrupt the overall parameters.

As Dr McCue suggests, there’s surely a case for believing that particular stretches of road host more strange incidents than others. One may have differing views as to the manner in which that comes about. Are there actually more incidents, or simply more reports of incidents if a stretch of road earns a haunted reputation? But then again, how does a road develop a haunted reputation? Common sense would indicate that ‘something’ is taking place on a road, which witnesses feel they cannot explain in a straightforward way. Dr McCue, in Paranormal Encounters on Britain’s Roads: Phantom Figures, UFOs and Missing Time, has provided a range of ideas and examples of strange incidents, allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusion. It’s a fascinating contribution to a long-standing debate and one which I’m sure will continue for many years to come!

Ron Halliday, Bridge of AllanJanuary 2018

Preface

This book is intended for general readers and for people with a special interest in paranormal and UFO matters. It aims at presenting case material and theories in a clear, objective and open-minded way. I regard myself as a cautious believer in the reality of paranormal phenomena, but I don’t hold fast to any particular theory. In other words, I’m convinced that strange things happen, but I’m by no means certain how and why they occur.

Many of us spend a lot of time on roads. I recall, from my childhood, the liberating feeling that I had from acquiring a bicycle, since it enabled me to travel much further than I could walk. Years later, motorbikes gave me a renewed sense of freedom, and a romantic thrill never quite matched by driving a car. Travel on roads can be enchanting, particularly in scenic areas, such as the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and Snowdonia. But, of course, road travel carries dangers, and tragic accidents and crime are all too common.

The literature on paranormal and UFO experiences is replete with accounts of road users encountering strange phenomena. Such incidents can leave people surprised, bewildered or traumatised. But leaving aside certain UFO close encounters, there are usually no adverse, long-term physical effects. There’s a commonality about many of the reports, with certain features cropping up time and again. To me, this suggests that many of the accounts are genuine. But hard-line sceptics might claim that the commonality arises from hoaxers inventing tales in line with stories already in circulation. Certainly, it’s sensible to be wary about the possibility of deliberate or accidental misreporting. Indeed, in some of the cases that I mention, different sources have given conflicting accounts.

I’ve referenced most of my sources in the endnotes for each chapter. In citing books in the endnotes, I’ve given just the main title and omitted the year of publication and details of the publisher. But this information is provided in the Bibliography, which lists, alphabetically, by author, all the print sources that I’ve cited.

By the time this book is published, some of the Internet items cited in it may no longer be accessible via the addresses given. But by using a search engine such as Google, it may be possible to find them elsewhere on the Internet.

Where publications give just one forename in respect of an author, I’ve cited it in the relevant endnote (e.g. Budd Hopkins). But where multiple forenames or initials have been used, I’ve opted for brevity and used initials (e.g. G.L. Playfair). However, with regard to the Bibliography, I’ve used initials only.

Except where indicated, I’ve used real names in referring to witnesses with whom I’ve had personal contact. With regard to the names cited by other authors, the situation isn’t so clear, since writers don’t always say when they’re using pseudonyms. But where I’m aware that pseudonyms have been used, I’ve indicated that. I haven’t changed any place names, and hopefully that’s also the case with the places mentioned by the authors I’ve cited.

In quoting people, I’ve occasionally edited the material very slightly for presentational purposes, but I haven’t changed the substantive content.

The majority of the photographs appearing in this book were taken by me. In the four instances where that wasn’t the case, I’ve included the name of the photographer in the relevant caption.

Regarding the index, I haven’t included the names of all the witnesses mentioned throughout the book, since some of the cases are little known and, in many instances, the people referred to may have been given pseudonyms.

The scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena is called psychical research, and the manifestations themselves, where deemed genuine, are often referred to as psi phenomena or simply psi. In this chapter, I’ll discuss some basic concepts and theories from psychical research, to help make sense of the case material that’s the main focus of the book. Since many road users have UFO experiences, I’ll also discuss concepts and theories pertaining to the UFO topic. The study of UFO phenomena isn’t traditionally regarded as being within the domain of psychical research, but there’s a considerable overlap, since many UFO experiences have paranormal features.

In passing, it’s worth noting that the term parapsychology is sometimes employed as a synonym of psychical research. However, in the UK, at least, it tends to be used in a narrower sense, to refer to experimental psi research carried out in laboratory-type settings. In terms of this distinction, all parapsychologists are psychical researchers, but not all psychical researchers are parapsychologists. For example, investigators who focus on apparitions, hauntings and poltergeist cases could be described as psychical researchers; but if they don’t carry out laboratory-type research, they might not be regarded as parapsychologists.

Extrasensory perception (ESP)

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is the acquisition of information by non-sensory (i.e. paranormal) means. Judging from spontaneous cases, it often occurs automatically – that is, without any conscious intention on the part of those involved. The information might express itself in consciousness via a thought, feeling, vision or dream. Imagine the following (hypothetical) scenario:

Megan drops off her 4-year-old son, David, at a nursery and then goes to her place of work, the local library. Shortly before the library opens to the public, she has an ESP experience that induces her to return, urgently, to the nursery, where she discovers that her son has had a nasty accident and is asking for her.

In this situation, Megan’s ESP experience could take the form of a sudden feeling of uneasiness and her having an urge to go to her son immediately. Alternatively, a fleeting apparition of David might appear before her, making her feel that something’s badly wrong and that she needs to get to him without delay. Later, she might discover that the apparition appeared at the very time of his accident. Another possibility (if the ESP is of a precognitive type – see below) is that Megan will dream about the accident in advance. If so, it might prompt her to take action to prevent the accident from occurring.

Various types of ESP can be distinguished, at least in theory: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition.

Telepathy

Telepathy means direct mind-to-mind communication. For example, someone might sense feelings, or pick up information, from a distant friend or relative, or might mentally transmit an image to that person. On occasions, the communication might involve more than just two individuals. Telepathic interaction may occur among animals, and there’s evidence suggesting that telepathy can occur between people and their pets.1 Norris McWhirter, an author and editor, had what may have been a telepathic experience in 1975. He was at home and suddenly slumped into a chair. He recovered a few minutes later, but the police then rang to say that his twin brother, Ross, who lived 6 miles away, had been shot dead.2

It might be wrong to think of telepathy as some sort of mental radio in which thoughts, images or feelings are transmitted across space. It may be that individual human beings and other sentient animals are fundamentally part of one collective mind, and that our sense of individuality is illusory. If so, a person’s thoughts, feelings or impressions may be potentially available to everyone else. The fact that we’re not constantly aware of one another’s thoughts and feelings could be because some sort of filtering normally operates.

Clairvoyance

The word clairvoyance comes from French words meaning ‘clear seeing’. Psychical researchers use it to refer to a form of ESP in which someone acquires information about a physical situation elsewhere, but without using the physical senses or telepathy. Imagine, for instance, a computerised experiment in which: (1) Randomly selected letters of the alphabet are displayed, one at a time, on a screen in an empty room while a subject – let’s call her Julie – is located elsewhere and tries to discern what they are; (2) Julie registers her guesses by pressing the appropriate keys on a computer keyboard; (3) A computer records the number of correct guesses, but without anyone ever knowing (by any normal means) what letter was displayed on the screen at any given point (thereby excluding telepathy). Now, if Julie scores significantly above (or below) what would be expected by chance, we might infer that she has displayed clairvoyance (or that someone else has obtained the information by clairvoyance and has conveyed it to Julie telepathically). However, another possibility would be that, via psychokinesis (a ‘mind over matter’ effect), Julie has influenced the selection of target letters or has made the computer record an incorrect number of supposedly correct guesses.

At first sight, clairvoyance seems very different from telepathy, since it entails direct awareness of physical events. However, if the physical world is ultimately a construction of the collective mind of humans and other sentient creatures – a sort of sustained hallucination – knowledge of every aspect of it may be known to the collective mind. Accordingly, there may be no fundamental difference between telepathy and clairvoyance, since both may entail becoming aware of what the collective mind already knows.

Precognition

Imagine another experiment. Every 10 seconds, Julie guesses the identity of a letter of the alphabet that will be randomly selected by a computer after she has made her guess. If she’s capable of precognition (acquiring information, paranormally, about the future), she may score significantly above (or below) what would be expected by chance. Again, though, if the results significantly differ from chance expectation, another possibility is that psychokinesis (PK) has come into play, enabling Julie – presumably unconsciously – to influence the selection of target letters or make the computer record an incorrect number of supposedly correct guesses.

Jenny Randles mentions a possible instance of precognition involving a friend of hers. The friend was driving on the M62 motorway near Warrington, Cheshire, and, for no apparent conscious reason, swerved into the fast lane. Seconds later, a truck that had been ahead of her shed its load, which bounced across the carriageway where Randles’ friend would have been if she hadn’t veered into the fast lane.3

Precognition raises intriguing theoretical questions. If events can be foreseen, does the future in some sense already exist, and is our sense of free will illusory? Or could it be that precognitive experiences are essentially predictions about the future, based on current information that’s gleaned, unconsciously, by telepathy or clairvoyance? Another possibility is that the information about what’s going to happen in the future comes from an omniscient higher intelligence.

Retrocognition

There are accounts of people temporarily experiencing their surroundings as if they’d gone back in time. Psychical researchers refer to this as retrocognition, although such incidents are better known as time-slips. The late Andrew MacKenzie discusses an incident from 1957 in which three youths possibly saw a Suffolk village (Kersey) as it had been centuries before. The main informant, William Laing, first contacted MacKenzie about the incident in 1988. Michael Crowley, one of the other witnesses, didn’t remember the occasion clearly, but provided some corroboration of Laing’s recollections. However, it seems that the third person, Ray Baker, recalled little or nothing of the village.4

A correspondent informed me about a puzzling incident from the summer of 1939. It may have been a time-slip. She and her future husband were in the habit of going for evening walks through the Camperdown Estate near Dundee. On the occasion in question, they entered a clearing in a wooded area and saw a summer house made of logs, with a paved path leading up to it. The next evening, they went the same way. But much to their dismay, they couldn’t find the summer house. My informant wrote: ‘Search as we did do, we never, ever found [it]. For ages after that we looked and looked […]. But never did we find it.’ Was the summer house there all the time, in a woodland clearing that the couple repeatedly failed to relocate? Or could their experience have been a shared hallucination? If so, what produced it, and did the hallucination represent a scene that actually existed at some point in the past? Or did the couple literally go back in time for a short period? We shall probably never know.

Distinguishing between different types of ESP

When ESP occurs outside controlled laboratory settings, it will generally be impossible to know whether it’s of a telepathic, clairvoyant or precognitive nature. Take, for example, the aforementioned incident involving Norris McWhirter. Subconsciously, he may have been clairvoyantly monitoring his brother’s physical circumstances. The analogy of a radar installation monitoring a section of airspace comes to mind. If so, there may have been no mind-to-mind communication (telepathy) between the twins. Precognition is another possibility: McWhirter’s mind may have reached into the future and anticipated that he was about to receive bad news about his brother. However, as explained above, in terms of a theory involving a collective mind, there may be no fundamental difference between telepathy and clairvoyance; and precognition could, perhaps, be explained in terms of unconscious prediction based on telepathically or clairvoyantly acquired information, or of information being fed to people by a higher intelligence.

In the hypothetical case of Megan and David, one of the scenarios involved the mother seeing an apparition of her son and later discovering that he’d had an accident at that very time. In the parlance of psychical researchers, this would be described as a crisis apparition case, and it’s not hard to find reports of seemingly real incidents of that type.5

It would be beyond the scope of this book to go into detail about laboratory-based experimental psi research, but Dean Radin, a parapsychologist based in the USA, provides a readable account of it in his book Entangled Minds. Suffice it to say that there appears to be considerable evidence for psi from such studies.

PARANORMAL PHYSICAL EFFECTS

Psychical researchers have endeavoured to elicit psychokinetic (‘mind over matter’) effects experimentally. For example, in 1972, some members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set about trying to do this. They created an identity for a fictitious spirit communicator (a seventeenth-century aristocratic Englishman, whom they named ‘Philip’). This was to help circumvent ‘ownership resistance’, a hypothesised reluctance that people might have to identifying themselves as the source of paranormal activity. They met frequently over an extended period and eventually elicited physical phenomena, such as raps and large movements of a table. But they didn’t seriously believe that a disembodied spirit was responsible.6

Remarkable manifestations have allegedly occurred in the presence of physical mediums. For example, the Scottish-born medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86) reportedly produced a wide range of phenomena, such as levitation of his own body, levitation of furniture, materialisations, luminous appearances and percussive sounds.

Spontaneous episodes of disruptive physical activity of a paranormal kind are known as poltergeist outbreaks, although some writers prefer the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK). One of the best-known British cases from recent decades involved a mother and her four children occupying a council house in Enfield, on the northern fringe of London. Phenomena such as object movements, disturbance of bedclothes, the appearance of pools of water, and human levitation were reported. The manifestations occurred between August 1977 and the autumn of 1978, with a brief recurrence sometime later.7 But given that poltergeist episodes are generally quite brief, the Enfield case wasn’t entirely typical.

Poltergeist phenomena are often attributed to a living agent, a ‘poltergeist focus’, if such a person can be identified, which isn’t always the case. It’s often assumed that the manifestations reflect psychological tension or changes associated with puberty, and that they are produced unconsciously by the focal person. But they may be produced consciously in some instances. A seventeenth-century poltergeist case in Wiltshire, England, in what’s now known as North Tidworth, seemed to involve conscious agency on the part of a living person named William Drury, although he didn’t appear to have been on the scene when the manifestations occurred. The case could, perhaps, be construed as one of malicious witchcraft.8

The notion that poltergeist phenomena are generated by living people hasn’t gone unchallenged. Some people argue that discarnate spirits may be involved. Another possibility is that some sort of tricksterish, higher intelligence plays a role. (In referring to a higher intelligence, I mean one that’s more resourceful than we are. I don’t mean to imply that it’s necessarily morally superior.)

APPARITIONS AND HAUNTINGS

Apparitional experiences are often one-off events. The term ‘haunting’ or ‘haunt’ is applied to cases featuring recurrent manifestations, of an apparently paranormal nature, that seem to be linked with particular places rather than specific people. Although clear-cut physical phenomena are reported in many haunt cases, the manifestations are sometimes wholly, or predominantly, of a sensory character (sights, sounds, tactile impressions, etc.). Hauntings vary in duration, some being very long-running.

Theories about apparitions

Transient materialisations

Apparitional figures have sometimes been caught on film.9 If a supposed photograph of a ghostly figure is deemed to be genuine (i.e. not the result of deliberate fakery or a trick of the light), there would appear to be two possibilities: a mysterious force affected the camera, making it record something not present; or some sort of transient materialisation occurred. Similarly, a supposed recording of ghostly sounds could be the result of a mysterious force affecting the recording apparatus; or it could be an actual recording of physical sound.

If apparitions and ghostly sounds have a degree of physical reality, it’s not surprising that they’re often perceived collectively (i.e. by two or more people at the same time). However, there are also cases in which this doesn’t happen – where, for example, not everyone present sees a phantom figure. Of course, such instances don’t accord well with the notion that apparitions have a physical aspect.

Myers’ theory

Frederic Myers (1843–1901) was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. He suggested that in some apparitional cases, an aspect of the agent (the person whose apparition is seen) might actually be present in the space where a phantom figure is discerned or where a ghostly sound is heard. However, it’s not clear how those present would ‘see’ or ‘hear’ such a presence. Myers suggested that an unknown form of supernormal perception, not necessarily involving the normal senses, comes into play.10

Telepathically engendered hallucinations

Some psychical researchers – for example, the late George Tyrrell (1879–1952) – have suggested that apparitions are hallucinations engendered by telepathy. Imagine, for example, that a man has a fatal road accident at midday and that his wife, at home some miles away, has a fleeting vision of him at that time. In terms of a telepathy-based theory, it might be conjectured that the husband thought of his wife at the time of the accident, earnestly wishing that he could be with her, and that, via an unconscious telepathic process, this resulted in her hallucinating him.

As noted, apparitions are often perceived collectively. For example, if a driver sees a phantom figure on the road ahead, passengers in the car might also see it. This isn’t easy to explain in terms of a telepathy-based theory. Tyrrell argued that the explanation ‘lies […] in the fact that spectators, by their physical presence, become relevant to the theme of the apparitional idea-pattern and, because relevant, are drawn into it’ (emphasis as in the original).11 This isn’t very clear, but the essential idea, from the perspective of Tyrrell’s theory, is that the apparitional process tends to mimic ordinary perception. If a wife were looking at her husband in their living room, any visitor present would be expected to see him as well. Therefore, if the wife sees an apparition of her husband, a visitor might be drawn in (via telepathy) and see it as well, because that’s what would happen if the husband were physically present.

Tyrrell argued that the agents behind apparitional events could be either living people or the surviving selves of deceased persons. Discussing a haunting in Cheltenham, he stated that he could see no plausible agent other than the surviving self or personality of a deceased woman whose appearance and habits the apparition reproduced.12 He suggested that the ‘ghostly theme’ in such a case is one of ‘brooding reminiscence’, with the ‘ghostly drama’ being ‘that of the agent’s figure performing long familiar actions in a familiar place’ (p. 143). But regarding another case with haunt-type phenomena, he suggested that the agent was a living person, a cook, whose departure from the afflicted household was followed by a cessation of the phenomena. Noting that, even in the Cheltenham case, ‘unintelligent noises developed during its peak period’, Tyrrell suggested that some hauntings may be complex, ‘being partly the reminiscent type of ghost of a deceased person and partly the poltergeistic type originated by some living person on the spot’; and he speculated that, ‘Possibly the one type stimulates the other in some way’ (p. 145).