Bump in the Night

Nonfiction by Peter Jekel 


People who believe in science have a hard time believing in ghosts and the supernatural. 

Sushmita Sen


You go into a house and get a heavy feeling, a feeling of being watched. What on earth could that be? Alternatively, you are sleeping soundly in an old hotel, only to be awoken by the sound of footsteps in your darkened room. What about that apparent face that seems to lurk in the fireplace of the family cottage that was built centuries ago? Or more horrifically, a figure pins you down on your bed. You cannot move. You see something out of the corner of your eye; you could have sworn someone walked by. These are all manifestations of what is commonly referred to as ghosts. Ghost stories have been a part of every human culture going back into prehistory, with tales often told orally and passed from generation to generation.


Ghosts are commonly believed to be the spirits of those who have died, but have not been able to leave the Earthly realm to whatever awaits us. Are there other, more scientific explanations for ghosts?


To explore the possibilities, it is important to look at the range of ghostly spectres that have been reported. The most common types of ghostly manifestations are the unexplained lights that appear seemingly out of nowhere. What is the source of these lights? Some lights are known as orbs, which are essentially translucent balls of light hovering above the ground in no apparent pattern. Parapsychologists, those who study the supernatural, state that many ghosts prefer this form because it requires less energy to maintain than other manifestations. 


There are also vortices, also known as funnel ghosts, which are seen as a kind of swirling white funnel of light that varies in size as it moves. It is most often reported in old homes and buildings. Rods, as their name implies, are other light apparitions that appear as disembodied cylinders of light. Will-of-the-Wisps or Faery lights are seen as floating lights that seemingly travel along air currents. Some believe that they are precursors of bad luck to come, while others claim that they are the wandering souls of deceased humans. They are most frequently found near marshes, meadows, and swampy areas.


Is there an explanation for these lights? We cannot deny the sightings, much as many scientists may wish to do. What are some more rational explanations of these mysterious lights, whatever form they take?


What about the orbs? Is there a rational explanation? They are invisible to the naked eye but often will appear on a photographic image. Likely, this is caused by some stray light or reflections that are picked up by the camera’s sensitive sensors.


Another explanation for mysterious lights, especially the Will-of-the-Wisps found near swamps and marshes, is swamp gas or methane, which is created from ruminant flatulence and decaying vegetation found in swamps and marshes. If this highly flammable gas is spontaneously ignited, it can give off a strange and eerie glow. The Brown Lights of North Carolina, mainly appearing from September to December near the Blue Ridge Highway, are likely an example of this phenomenon.


Another explanation for the unexplained lights could be that they are actually ball lightning, which is one of the most misunderstood natural wonders on the planet. Ball lightning usually measures about fifteen to thirty centimeters in diameter, though some have been reported to be as small as two centimeters and as large as ten meters. Diameters can even vary throughout the observing period, giving the ball of light a pulsating appearance. Most ball lightning fits its namesake and appears spherical or ovoid in shape, but there have been many other shapes reported over the years.


Ball lightning is also reported to come in a number of colours, ranging from green, red, blue, yellow, and even silver and black, with an almost translucent quality towards the center. They usually last about seven to eight seconds, though there are reports of the phenomenon lasting several minutes. The balls of light can be stationary, whereas others move at speeds of up to thirty-two thousand kilometers per hour. The most common speeds, though, are about fifteen to twenty kilometers per hour. Not only can they move fast, but their assortment of motion ranges from a straight line to rotations or twists in very complex patterns.


Some witnesses have stated that the ball lightning seems to take on a somewhat intelligent quality, being somehow aware of its environment, and being attracted to metal or magnetic objects. Like living beings, they can also make noises, usually a crackling or hissing sound. Some will dissipate silently, whereas others will explode with a loud bang. Ball lightning also usually possesses a sulphurous smell like rotten eggs.


In terms of a ghostly quality, the balls can pass through walls, causing no apparent damage, but in other cases, they will burn their way through.


Science is having difficulty explaining what ball lightning truly is. Some scientists believe that it is an electroplasmoid material, but the problem with this theory is that it doesn’t explain how so much energy can be contained in such a small ball of light. One possible explanation to satisfy the energy discrepancy is that a rapidly rotating electrical field can exist in a plasma material without any magnetic field.


Balls of light appear to have some sort of explanation, but how do we explain the ghosts that have a humanoid form, true apparitions? Sometimes they appear as translucent human beings, often in the clothing of the period in which they lived. They can appear as complete humans, but can also appear headless and even hideously deformed. They rarely last longer than a second before they disappear. The favourite haunts of the spectres are old homes, theatres, and hotels.


Many of these spectres are residual hauntings. These are hauntings whereby the apparition seems to be totally oblivious to its environment and carries out a repeated task for all of eternity. Ghosts that carry lanterns down a dark hallway only to disappear, or ghosts that look out a window as if waiting for someone who never shows up, are just some of the stories told by witnesses of such sightings.


Other ghosts that often are not seen but make themselves noticed, appear to be aware of their surroundings, often impacting the lives of those around them, by not only throwing objects but even actual physical attacks. The name for these intelligent ghosts is poltergeist, German for “noisy ghost.”


How on earth can science explain these events? People swear by them, and people have nothing to gain by saying that they have seen a ghost; in fact, they are often ridiculed. What could be happening here?


One likely theory is sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis happens when we are waking up or falling asleep. It is thought that it is caused by a dysfunction of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, which is a part of a normal sleep cycle; REM is when we dream. During sleep paralysis, we may not be able to move or speak. We may also hallucinate by hearing, feeling, or seeing things that are really not there. Normally, the episodes last a couple of minutes and may happen only once in a lifetime, but in other instances, they are more recurrent.  People who are susceptible to recurrent sleep paralysis include those suffering from narcolepsy, sleep deprivation, stress, drug abuse, and abnormal sleep cycles. Oftentimes, sleep paralysis runs in families.


Very low frequencies can also affect your brain, causing an eerie sensation. You may walk into an allegedely haunted house and feel anxious, thinking you’re perceiving the presence of a ghost, when in fact, it may something as simple as low-frequency sound.  Vic Tandy, an engineer with Coventry University in Coventry, England, had an experience with the unknown when he was doing research at a medical manufacturing facility in the Midlands of Great Britain. He saw a ghost. Being a man of science, the rationalist felt that there had to be another explanation. Fencing being his hobby, he had an idea. He clamped the fencing foil in a vise. He left the room briefly only to return to find the foil vibrating intensely. Tandy concluded that it was low-frequency sound that was causing the effect;a sound too low for the human ear to hear. He found a similar phenomenon in his laboratory where a fan was vibrating at a very low frequency, but with a small adjustment to the fan’s mounting, the “ghost” of the vibrating fan stopped.


How does this fit in with ghostly sightings? Tandy’s research shows that low-frequency sound exists all around us. Many animals, such as baleen whales and elephants, actually communicate over large distances with infrasound. Research has found that when humans are exposed to this low-frequency sound,there can be a physiological reaction, including anxiety attacks. Researchers at NASA have shown that the human eyeball vibrates in sympathy with the infrasounds, which, in turn, creates a slight smearing of the visual field.


Now that we know low-frequency sound can cause distortions of a person’s visual field, is there a reason that it mostly happens in old houses and buildings? A classic haunted house can generate low-frequency sounds by wind blowing through a cracked window along long, narrow corridors where the infrasounds bounce off the walls. Tandy, the originator of this theory, has looked at a supposed haunting in Coventry and found that the physical layout of the building allows low-frequency sounds to be perpetuated, providing an explanation for the apparition sightings.


Electromagnetic fields can also be a source of ghostly sightings. Swiss scientists did an experiment by electrically stimulating an epileptic patience’s brain. The patient immediately reported a shadow person beside her; in fact, it copied her every move. What was happening here? Though it may sound like a cruel experiment, the research team was looking for the source of the patient’s seizure when they inadvertently discovered something more profound.They had stimulated the left temporoparietal junction of the brain, a section that defines our perception of self. By interfering, the experimenters had altered the brain’s ability to identify itself, thus leading to the creation of a ghostly shadow. Perhaps some form of electrical stimulation of the brain, especially the self-identification area, may be responsible for the perception of ghostly beings.


Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has done a great deal of research in this area. He has determined that exposure to electromagnetic fields creates the impression of ghosts. He has demonstrated this through the use of a device that he co-created with inventor Stanley Koren, dubbed “The God Helmet.” The helmet generates weak magnetic fields in the wearer. The research showed that weak magnetic fields passing through someone’s head for durations between fifteen and thirty minutes can actually cause the wearer to perceive the presence of an invisible entity. Interestingly enough, ghost hunters with their electromagnetic meters often report high energy in areas of suspected ghostly activity.


Another possible cause of people seeing ghosts could be the presence of lowly moulds.  Shane Rogers, an environmental and civil engineer at Clarkson University in New York State, has suggested that the presence of moulds, often a problem in older buildings, often thought to be haunted, can cause symptoms such as irrational fear and dementia. The research is quite preliminary and needs further study, but anecdotally, there appears to be a possible link.


Fire departments across the continent preach the importance of having a carbon monoxide detector in the home, and, in some areas, it is a requirement. It could be that having a carbon monoxide detector might not only save your life but also free you of hauntings by ghosts. Although the research still has to be furthered, proof of such a correlation can be found. In an article from the 1921 edition of the Journal of Ophthalmology, we encounter a family who allegedly lived in a haunted house, often hearing strange voices, furniture being moved, footsteps, and a feeling of a presence in the room. It turned out, upon investigation, that there was a faulty furnace spewing low levels of carbon monoxide, causing the haunting effects. The furnace was fixed, and the home was cleared of its ghosts.  


Now we come to some fuzzier explanations for ghosts, quantum physics. Two scientists, Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and University of Arizona professor,, and Roger Penrose, a University of Oxford physicist,, theorize that the source of human consciousness comes from microtubules in our brain cells. It is those tubules that are responsible for quantum processing within the brain, which, in their interpretation, is the source of the human soul. When a person who has a near-death experience explains the out-of-body experiences and tunnels of light, Hameroff and Penrose suggest that the quantum information contained in the tubules leaves the body and continues to exist. With a ghost, it might be a situation whereby this quantum information that was stored in the microtubules has somehow returned to the physical world.


Another explanation for ghosts also comes from quantum physics. In 1957, Hugh Everett, a Princeton graduate student, came up with the many worlds or multiverse explanation of quantum mechanics. In the quantum realm, an object can appear in many places at once. He extrapolated this behavior of particles to the macroscopic level. Think about this for a moment. You are sitting there reading this article. Your brain is offered a superposition of outcomes, ranging from “put the article away” or “finish it.” The act of deciding which route to take causes you to split into two copies: the one that finishes and the one that puts the article away. In effect, the universe has split into two. Everything in our universe, including you and me, has counterparts in other universes. There are universes where I died at birth or was never even conceived. On the macroscopic level, the universe in which we live behaves as if there were no other. However, at the microscopic or quantum level, the universes are no longer independent and, in fact, affect each other strongly through what is known as quantum interference. Is it possible that sightings of ghosts are fleeting visions of such parallel planes?


Throughout history, all cultures have preserved stories of ghosts or apparitions through oral and written traditions. Campfire traditions often involve the telling of ghost stories. In the Old Testament, a ghostly appearance is mentioned when the dead prophet Samuel is called forth by order of King Saul, preparing for battle with the Philistines.. Homer’s Odyssey also contains moments when the hero, Ulysses, encounters ghosts of the dead. Shakespeare himself did not shy away from the use of ghosts in his plays. In his famous play Hamlet, his father’s ghost demands that his son investigate his murder and seek revenge on his uncle, King Claudius. Shakespearean ghosts also appear in Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Cymbeline. In 1764, Horace Walpole wrote the eerie The Castle of Otranto, often considered to be the first true Gothic tale, with a number of scenes depicting ghosts.


Many of the classic ghost stories that are popular in Western culture even today come to us from Victorian-era Great Britain. Several writers such as Sheridan Le Fanu (An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street), Henry James (A Turn of the Screw), Elizabeth Gaskell (The Old Nurse’s Story), Amelia Edwards (Was It an Illusion?), Robert Louis Stevenson (The Body Snatcher), Charlotte Riddell (The Open Door), Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol) Rudyard Kipling (The Haunted Rickshaw) and M. R. James (Lost Hearts) all wrote numerous tales of haunted houses and ghosts. M. R. James, who continued his supernatural writing well into the early nineteen hundreds, came up with a set of “rules” that a true ghost story must follow, though all Victorian-era authors writing about ghosts had a role in establishing a standard of ghost story telling that persists to today.


Perhaps the best-known of the Victorian ghost stories is Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol. In it, a miserly man, Scrooge, who sees his destiny after a visitation of a series of ghosts. The first ghost, Jacob Marley, a former business associate of Scrooge, appears to him, foretelling the visitations by a series of ghosts. These ghosts tell of the horrors to come to Mr. Scrooge should he not change his ways. It has been adopted into numerous plays, movies, as well as alternative and modernized versions of the tale.


Several modern ghost stories can be dubbed classics of the genre, including Stephen King’s The Shining, about a family who moves to a vacated hotel in the Colorado winter wilderness to care for the building during the off-season. James Herbert, an English writer of horror fiction, created a character, David Ash, an investigator of the paranormal, who appears in several novels, including Haunted, The Ghosts of Sleath, and Ash. Peter Straub wrote the simply titled A Ghost Story, about a group of elderly gentlemen who harbour a horrible secret. Shirley Jackson wrote a truly modern-day classic in 1959, the quintessential ghost story entitled The Haunting of Hill House, about a group of very different characters who stay in a haunted house as part of an experiment by a scientist who wants to prove the existence of the supernatural. It has been adopted in several movie depictions; perhaps the best one was the first, directed by Robert Wise in 1963, called The Haunting.


With all of the potential scientific explanations for ghosts, it is not surprising that science fiction writers have taken up the challenge of writing about ghosts in their stories over the years. Not that this area has been exhausted. The wannabe science fiction writer has a number of avenues to take should they wish to write a science fiction ghost story.


The 21-gram Experiment, carried out by Massachusetts physician Douglas MacDougall in 1907, proposed a method of weighing a person just before and immediately after death in order to find the weight of a soul. He was able to obtain these measurements in only six instances and came up with the weight of 21.3 grams, though his conclusions have not stood the rigors of the scientific method. 


Authors, such as Charles Stilson, have looked to the application of technology to capture a ghost or human soul, as seen in his 1917 short story, The Soul Trap. In 1931, André Maurois wrote The Weigher of Souls, which also deals with the idea of scientists capturing the human soul with a trap. More recently and in a similar vein, we have Romain Gary’s The Gasp.


In Barrington Bayley’s The Rod of Light, it is a robot that seeks to trap a human soul in order to gain self-awareness. 


The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane deals with an experiment seeking to communicate with the dead that ends tragically. Like any good classic ghost story, it is also set in a remote Maine farmhouse. Communication with the dead can also be found in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. Here, a company allows for a consciousness to be preserved in a sort of half-life, able to communicate with the living.


Ghosts are equated with being spirits of the dead. What happens to these disembodied spirits has been imagined by a number of science fiction authors in their explanations of what might be awaiting us in our afterlives. Bob Shaw had probably written the most complete science fiction story about the afterlife in his The Palace of Eternity, where the hero of the story goes on a posthumous journey to another realm or plane that proves to be associated with the hyperspace used by starships. Rudy Rucker, in his White Light, describes mathematical interpretations of the afterlife to eventually construct a metaphysics that includes the afterlife. Five Fates, an anthology edited by Keith Laumer, has stories by Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert, and of course, Keith Laumer himself. Each of the stories begins with the protagonist dying in the opening paragraph. Philip Jose Farmer, in his expansive Riverworld series, covers the thought that godlike aliens resurrect humans to an alien world with a long river. Fictional as well as well-thought-out historical figures are found within the stories.


Afterlives, edited by Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson, is full of stories by science fiction authors speculating on the afterlife. Time of Passage by J. G. Ballard, Gregory Benford’s Of Space-Time and River, and Watson’s own The Rooms of Paradise are especially moving. The Rooms of Paradise speculates that your afterlife is determined by how you have died. Watson also wrote Deathhunter about a future where, not unlike today, there is a religious belief in the afterlife; however, the taboo of this society is to question it. The protagonist, in spite of official censure, is researching the nature of death. What he finds is not what is taught in the houses of religion.  


Technology figures strongly in science fiction, where there are attempts to upload the personalities of the dead. Then there are the stories about implanting the personality of a dead person into a human body. Robert Sheckley’s Immortality Delivered and James Blish’s A Work of Art are about attempts by future scientists to recreate the personality of a long-dead person and implant it in a human body.


The current dean of science fiction writers, Robert Silverberg, has a number of stories that look at technology being used to survive a physical death. His Recalled to Life involves a technology that will allow the resurrection of anybody within twenty-four hours of death, as long as the death was not due to a brain trauma. His Born With the Dead is about the use of medical science to revive anybody. Finally, his novel, To Live Again, is about being revived without the revival of the physical body.


In a twist of technological revival of the dead, Richard Cowper’s The Tithonian Factor describes an inferior technology that assures that people live on after death. Here, the story follows people who have accepted this inferior technology to ensure their immortality.


Along the technology front, several authors have looked to computer technology to create their ghosts as well as versions of an afterlife. John Varley wrote Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, about people who can deposit their memories into a computer. When they die of murder or accidental death, a cloned copy is made, and the latest memory is played into the clone. William Gibson’s Neuromancer describes a dead computer hacker’s personality, which is returned as a disembodied ghostly lifeform. Much along the same line is the Readme novel by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson has also published a sequel to the novel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell; he created a fictional land called Bitworld where the digitized souls of deceased humans can exist.Both Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels and Iain Banks’ Surface Detail describe afterlives of torment that are inflicted through electronic means not unlike the Biblical Hell.


Several science fiction authors have imagined not a technology to ensure an afterlife, but created aliens where the afterlife is assured by their very biology. Poul Anderson’s The Martyr, George Martin’s A Song for Lya, Gwyneth Jones’s A Planet Called Desire, and Nicolas Yermakov’s The Last Communion are several stories that fit this category. Joe Haldeman changed this idea up somewhat. Instead of an alien biology ensuring an afterlife, he has created an entire ecosystem on Venus (part of Gardner Dozois and Martin Greenberg’s Anthology, Old Venus) that ensures an afterlife.


Whatever science and science fiction can throw at rationalizing the belief in ghosts, a majority of people still believe in the afterlife and in ghosts, in spite of numerous alternative scientific explanations for the apparent phenomenon. Perhaps we need to believe in an afterlife in order to give our lives here on Earth their meaning. However, we are forever trapped on our side of the equation here on Earth until that fateful day arrives when it all ends. What happens? Religions the world over seek to explain the afterlife; however, many require people to have faith, as there is no good evidence of its existence. Belief in ghosts may be what provides that bridge from the living to the afterlife. They provide a sort of “physical manifestation” of the afterlife, and many of us want to believe that when we finish our terms here on Earth, there is something beyond.





References



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