No, This Is Not Why We See Ghosts

Yesterday I stumbled across a posting suggesting that ghosts drain power from flashlight batteries to make mass, which is the visible part of the ghost.  I left a comment there, but it seems not to have been approved, so I'll repeat my statements here.  Assuming the flashlight is powered by two alkaline long-life D cells, it has at most about 150,000 J of energy stored in its batteries.  Converted to mass, this is about 1.7 nanograms, or about the mass of a grain of fine silt 9 microns wide -- about 1/20th the width of a human hair.  Whatever someone may be seeing when he reports a ghost, this is clearly not it.

I dealt with similar topics here and here.

Tales from the Darkside

Here's one for Halloween:  The intro is fantastic, better than the episodes.  As for the comments over the end titles, they are simply, but disturbingly, true.

"Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality ...."

Note how this really would not have worked if it had been written in any of the "gender-inclusive" ways that are palmed off on us by the editors of so many new Bible translations and "edited" versions of familiar hymns.

"People live in the sunlit world of what they believe to be reality ...."  No.  This makes it sound like these people are all together, something not implied in the original.

"A person lives in the sunlit world of what he or she believes to be reality ...."  Please.  That one lands with a thud.  "He or she" language is not compatible with spookiness.

"We each live in the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality ...."  Better, since the each means that we do not necessarily all live together, but the "we believe" still feels too comforting.

"Humankind lives in the sunlit world of what is believed to be reality ...."  Ugh.  "Humankind" is not really a concept that feels any more important than Esperanto.  Who would care if Esperanto were to vanish over to the Darkside?

The fact is that in the English language, there really is no good substitute for the "man" (and "he") that is actually used in this clip.

H.P. Lovecraft

I finally made it to the end of The Mountains of Madness, leading to two final observations about the art of H.P. Lovecraft.  

1.  He really seems to have had some sort of deep-seated fear of the sea life.  Most of his monsters live in the sea or have physical characteristics that seem to be inspired by sea creatures.  Cthulhu and Dagon may be the most "human-like" of his monsters, but Cthulhu has tentacles and Dagon is explicitly "half-fish". The "Old Ones" of The Mountains of Madness sound basically like sea cucumbers stood upright and provided with wings and (again) tentacles, and the shoggoth sound vaguely like box jellies -- which, oddly enough, have true eyes.






Most people, however, would not react in a Lovecraftian way.  We may fear jellyfish, but only because they may sting us; we are not driven insane by the mere fact of their existence.  If we could go back in time a half billion years, we would find creatures in the sea that would look to anyone but a specialist like some of the jellyfish found today -- but this inspires only mild curiosity, not existential despair. 

2. In addition to his odd hang-up with sea life, Lovecraft seems to have been completely unaware of what really does make for an unsettling image.  Of course, he can't really be blamed for not having a fully developed idea of the "Uncanny Valley", but even before that name was coined many artists and writers had a strong intuitive feel for it. 





So, for example, look at these dolls.  They're pretty, charming, and, at least to me, kind of creepy.





Storytellers have known this for years; it's why there are so many stories about haunted dolls, some of which are claimed to be true.  No, I am not saying that these claims really are true, but the fact that they can be presented as such with the expectation that they will be believed and the fact that they in fact are accepted by a number of people are indications that these are touching on something in our common psychological make-up. No doubt magical dolls, like the ones famous from Voodoo, have a similar origin. 

So what kind of monsters does Lovecraft give us?  Are they soulless parodies of human beings?  Are they manlike enough to make us first think they really are human, only some indefinable property is vaguely wrong, hinting that the spirit animating them is not, after all, human?  Nope; they're more likely to be colossal (and aeons-old!) shucked oysters, with all their sliminess and seeming formlessness, or perhaps a scallop without its shell, as implied by the presence of odd eyes.

A real monster shouldn't make you think, "That wouldn't be bad fried and served with sides of cole slaw and cheese grits."

H.G. Wells, The Outer Limits, and Contemporary Culture

Several years ago I bought a collection of all the short stories written by H.G. Wells.  They were entertaining, of course, but aside from the ridiculous caricatures of scientists (particularly in "The First Men in the Moon"), a serious flaw became obvious as essentially the only theme explored in his stories:  the denial that man has a nature that sets him apart from the rest of the animals.  G.K. Chesterton dealt with this flaw much more charity than I am inclined to show, noting, "His philosophy in some sense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction."

The same thing was evident when I saw The Outer Limits, particularly the new incarnation of that series.  Once again, every episode seemed to be about how human beings aren't at all special, we're just like dogs and cats, or maybe cattle, or maybe mosquitoes.  The writers somehow failed to pick up on the fact that this makes for really uninteresting stories.  It may be true that in an episode of Gunsmoke one could always be sure that Marshall Dillon would come out on top, the only question being how, but at least one got the feeling that both Marshall Dillon and the ideas he represented really mattered.  The Outer Limits was just as predictable, only the human protagonist was guaranteed to fail, and the "moral of the story" was that none of the characters or ideas mattered a whit.  If that's the case, why should anyone bother watching?  The ideas that all life on earth is doomed to extinction, that the earth itself will be vaporized in a few billion years when the sun goes through its giant phase just before its fires are extinguished and it begins the slow process of cooling to absolute zero, and eventually the Heat Death of the Universe will destroy all matter and meaning -- all these ideas can suit a certain mopey blue mood, but they don't make for gripping drama. 

This is not to deny that there is a role for stories that, for example, rebuke mankind for being less faithful than a loyal hound, or for the heart-rending stories of elephants clearly grieving for their dead.  However, far from dismissing the importance of loyalty or the loss of death, they reinforce it; they do not suppress human nature, they elevate the nature of certain animals.  There is a qualitative difference. 

It seems to me that the preoccupation with denying the reality and importance of human nature can be explained in large part by the desire to reject our natures and re-invent ourselves.  This is what I meant in my earlier post about Psalm 100:3.  This is evident not only in the "gay marriage" movement -- the number of active homosexuals, let alone those who wish to enter into some kind of "gay marriage", is far too small to explain the changing political environment unless this has something to do with the desires of those who are not homosexual -- it is also visible in the push for using human embryos as experimental matter.  Modern man is like Brother Cavil from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, unhappy and angry at the fact of his own creation and willing to do terrible things as a result.

Ghost Stories in Modern Fiction

Over the years I have become convinced that modern writers simply do not know how to tell a proper ghost story.  The problem almost always lies in an inadequate philosophical background.  Many writers today appear to be materialists, so they are left with only physical terror and psychological thrills, but no true horror.

This is probably most evident in the modern treatment of vampires.  The two most important things to remember about vampires are

• vampires are dead, and
• vampires are demon-possessed.

Vampires are not just kinda pale and moody.  They are not merely infected with a virus.  There is no hope of them being or becoming a good guy.  If you write a story like that, you are not really writing a story about vampires.  In almost all modern "vampire" stories, the "vampire" is clearly not really dead; they're angst-filled teenagers or twenty-something jerks.

As another example, take pretty much anything written by H.P. Lovecraft, who seems to appeal chiefly to boys between 12 and 21.  His ideas for horror seem to boil down to the following: 

• Big is scary.
• Old is scary.
• Tentacles are scary.
• Big words from the thesaurus are scary.

That's pretty much it; if you agree with his ideas, he's a genius of the horror genre -- otherwise he's an enormous bore.

Fortunately, there are good stories out there, too.  Some of the best come from M.R. James, who had precisely the knowledge of ancient and medieval religious beliefs, writings, and practices to give his stories a proper depth.  So when the villain in "Lost Hearts" writes a reference in his diary about the purported magical practices of Simon Magus as recounted in the so-called Recognitions of Clement, it is a bit creepy to discover that there really is such a book and that it says exactly what is quoted in the story.  Also, as is conceded in the story, this book, though of ancient origin, is not a genuine work of Pope St. Clement. 

Another excellent writer of ghost stories had his own interesting story to account for the learning evident in his writings.  Robert Hugh Benson was the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury; after his father's death, he converted to the Catholic Church and became a priest, then a monsignor.  His book The Necromancers is an excellent warning against the Spiritualism of his day and the "ghost hunting" of our own.  

Perhaps my favorite work of his pertaining to ghost stories is A Mirror of Shalott, which begins with an instructive philosophical argument between several priests, some of whom were entirely skeptical that ghostly appearances occurred as in popular tales, and others of whom were more accepting.  They agreed, however, that each evening one of them would recount some odd event from his own experience. In fact, I suspect that these are indeed fictionalized versions of accounts Msgr. Benson heard firsthand; something like one of them happened separately to a friend and to me. 

An important thing to remember is that a proper ghost story is always a morality tale.  Usually, the ghost appears to exact punishment on someone for a serious offense, which may be murder, greed, inappropriate curiosity, dabbling in sorcery, or something similar.

Creepy Huntington

Huntington, WV may not exactly be a ghost town, but it is a town that has seen distinctly better days.  It also has spots where ghosts are reported to walk.  Two of these, the Keith Albee Theater and the Frederick Hotel, may or may not be haunted, but they are indisputably creepy.





Huntington's fortunes were tied to those of the steel industry.  In the early 20th century, times were booming.  The Frederick was finished in 1906, and the Keith Albee in 1928.  Both were built in a style that would have been seen as opulent at the time, but gaudy today. When the American steel industry collapsed, Huntington went into a tailspin.  I am told that 30 years ago, the population was 100,000; it recently slipped below 50,000.  This leaves the city with an extended infrastructure but an insufficient tax base to support it, along with scores of abandoned houses that have lately become targets for an arsonist.

The Frederick has marble stairways and a large collection of animal heads in the main lobby, but the only time I've actually gone inside it looked like the steps had not been mopped for about 20 years.  The Keith Albee is made of dark woods, with elaborately carved gilded decorations that leave dark nooks and shadows.  For several years, but ending this year, the Marshall University College of Science held a commencement ceremony in the Keith Albee, and these are the only times I have been there.  

A must hangs around both.  Maybe that somehow accounts for the creepiness of these places; perhaps the creepiest place I've ever been was the old Science Building on the campus of Texas A&M University-Commerce, and that place had a real problem with mold.  Certainly there is an effect that may be due to the movies:  there is something about this decayed opulence that feels really creepy -- sort of a Haunted Mansion effect. 

Based on a Dream from January 2012

Back when I was in grad school, we used to do a lot of canoeing. Usually there would be four of us: Sam, who was doing research in the same office as me; Josh, who had an office down the hall; Josh's girlfriend Lisa; and me.

Thursday and Friday there had been rain showers for the first time in about a month. The local creeks and rivers had been low, with sand bars and roots making any canoeing difficult, but by the time the skies cleared on Saturday they had risen, and we had a good time. We canoed about a dozen miles downstream, and sunset was only a half-hour away when we finally pulled out at a bridge. Sam's car had been left at the put-in spot, so Josh and Lisa drove him back to pick it up while I stayed with the canoes.

There wasn't much to do, and after maybe twenty minutes I wandered up the landing to the road to see if I could see anyone coming. It was still too early for the others to be back, though, so I started back down, when I was surprised to notice that someone had pulled off on the other side of the road. It looked like they must have come from an antique car show; both their car and their clothing looked like something out of the 1950's.

There was something about them that seemed wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. The people looked normal enough: two young men and two young women, who might have been their girlfriends or sisters (they all looked vaguely Italian to me), and an older man who may have been one of their fathers. The two women, one of whom was visibly upset, held back near the car with the older man. The two young men had gone down to the creek, where they threw in something small. My uneasy feeling seemed to be strongest about these two. They were doing something else, but I couldn't see or hear very distinctly what that was.

No one had noticed me yet, so I went back down quietly to the canoes. My friends got back a few minutes later, and before long we had the canoes packed away and were headed off to find something to eat. As we pulled out, I noticed that the “Italians” were gone. Also, even though our cars were leaving ruts in the muddy ground, there were no such ruts on the other side of the road.

I didn't think about the “Italians” again until several days later, when an errand took me out of town and I came back around dusk by the same road. I was surprised to see they were pulled off at the side of the bridge again. I slowed down in case they were having car trouble, but as I got closer I saw that they were doing exactly the same thing I had seen them do that previous day. What's more, even though I was on their side of the road, it looked like they could not see me. Glad of that, I sped off again.

The next day at work I mentioned all this to Sam. At first he thought I was kidding him, but when he saw I wasn't, Sam wanted to see for himself. I met up with him again after supper and drove him out to the bridge; we both thought that the time of day might be important.

Sure enough, there they were again, going through exactly the same motions as before. I slowed down to about one mile per hour, but I was not willing to come to a complete stop. After a couple of minutes, I sped back up, never to see them again. “Got it!” Sam said.

He had had the sense to take down the information from the car's tag. It took him two months, but Sam was eventually able to identify the “Italians.” They turned out to be an immigrant family of Hungarian gypsies. The tag was from 1955, and its owner was a widower who had two adult sons and a grown daughter. The older son was married, but his wife divorced him the next year.

Most surprising to me was the fact that they were all still alive, though the father was now nearly ninety. Well, almost all of them, anyway: I had some strong suspicions about the small thing that was thrown into the creek, but no way of knowing for sure.

EDIT:  Revisiting this old post, I'm not sure why I held back a few details.

1. I am pretty sure that the "small thing" thrown into the river was a dead baby, the result of either abortion or infanticide.  This would have been the child of the older son, and what happened at the bridge was the reason his wife left him.  The baby had been essentially a sacrifice in some sort of black magic ritual.
2. Although all the adults were "still living" ... well, that was only true in a biological sense.  Their souls were still stuck at the bridge, conducting the evil ritual over and over again. 
3. The creepy feeling had been because of points 1 and 2.