So we are in the Halloween Season, and since I have been dropping a lot of somber, contemplative, and downright depressing stuff in recent articles, I thought I’d just jump in here with some good ol’ fashioned spookiness.
Besides, it’s the one time of year when most of us can talk about our weird and witchy sides without getting the side-eye from the normal people. Simply put, I dig the dead. After all, there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
And yes, before you ask, I have dug graves. They were not occupied. I’ve never run across poor Yoric or any of his kinfolk. The cemetery is pretty good about keeping track of who is planted where. I have also dug the graves of many of my beloved cats, And I have built tombs for bees and praying mantises, when I was a child. Death and I go way back.
I mentioned that death was never far away in my Appalachian birthplace. This is somewhat a result of a harder life that even today is not mitigated entirely by the conveniences of the modern technological world. But it also is the consequence of having large extended families in close proximity to one another. Because your great aunt Fannie just lived over the ridge, her passing was known and felt by you, and it rippled through the community.
There is a sort of fatalist bent to the people in that part of the world because of that, and certainly it mirrors generations of their forebears living in tiny villages back in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. We are all of us descended from coal miners, dirt farmers, and the wretched refuse of Europe’s teeming shores, quite accustomed to sudden reversals of fortune, loss and sorrow. I am sure this had some effect on my own interest in the macabre and morbid.
Ghosts and ghostly visitations were considered by most a fact of life in my childhood. In a culture that was an amalgam of various Protestant faiths, the survival of the individual soul after death was considered an absolute truth, so these spirits remaining, or returning, to the earth to interact with the living was not in any way out of the ordinary. Traditions such as covering the mirrors (or photos of the dead) in the house were aimed at encouraging the departed spirit to go on about it’s business and ascend (hopefully) to its eternal rest. People often took an indirect route leaving the funeral or the church, in order that the dead might not follow them home.
And yet almost everyone had some personal ghost story to tell, usually about being visited by the loved one shortly after their passing, but in some cases seeing them in later years. My grandmother told me that the night her mother was buried, she had a dream that her mother had come to the backdoor of the house, and was trying to get back in. In this instance, she did not take it as a good sign, but instead assumed it was an evil spirit trying to trick her into letting it loose in the house. Such doppelgangers are not unique to mountain lore.
I personally have been visited in dreams by the dead, often that same grandmother. Modern clinical thought would suggest that this is simply my mind replaying memories. That’s a possible explanation. Yet the nature of human consciousness is not even barely understood by science. As there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy, I do not know what a dream really is, or what my mind really is. I can’t say that it is not a communication with a mind that is no longer in corporeal form.
This is, of course, the basis of the work of the medium, to contact a spirit mind to mind, and provide a conduit for direct or indirect messaging. I have conducted a séance or two in my lifetime, but it’s not my usual practice. I’m not proficient at it, as I don’t consider myself psychically gifted, rather just intuitive and observant. But I do often talk with the dead, and there are times I feel their presence.
A variation on Pepper’s Ghost was invented by cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan for the film Metropolis. In the process, a mirror is used in place of the glass plate. The mirror is set up at a proper angle to the camera. Behind it is a miniature model. Opposite, so that it will reflect into the mirror, is a set that matches part of the model, with actors. This set is positioned far enough from the mirror so that the set and actors “fit” into the space of the model. The reflective substance around the area of the set’s reflection is removed, so that the camera sees the background model, with apparently tiny actors inside it. This was used to create the Molloch sequence shown in my article on masks, as well as many others. Like Pepper’s Ghost, the technique has been disused with the advent of digital compositing and sophisticated projection systems, but it’s a great way to spook up the house for Halloween.
The typical ghost of folklore and legend, however, I have encountered more than a few times, and it’s never been that glowing see-through shade that we all saw in the moving pictures. When I have seen ghosts, they look like regular people who just happen to be there. Sometimes it is just out of the corner of the eye, but other times they walk right past.
I had such an experience earlier this year when I was visiting Salem, Massachusetts. The encounter was hardly dramatic, nor was it witchy (as one might expect). A youngish man passed me on the sidewalk. He was wearing a suit and hat from around the late 1940s. It was near the end of the day, and I was tired, and drained from the sensory overload, and it took me a minute to notice that he was out of place for the crowd, the location, the weather, and the century. When I turned to look after him, he was gone.
Now certainly, in a town like Salem where there are a number of eccentric personalities, this may simply have been a local whose particular affectation was period costume. It might have been an actor on the way to a performance. And they may simply have ducked into a storefront in that moment it took my hazy brain to realize something was odd about them.
But it didn’t feel that way. I was sure I’d seen a ghost.
In reflection I had noticed him coming down the street, in that way that you see something and the rest of the picture seems to be less important, like something you are looking at is yelling out “look at me” – “pay attention to this”.
I don’t doubt the person who passed me was not of that time and place, though what he actually was I cannot with any certainty tell you. It was a great ending to a very powerful day.
Most of my ghost encounters have been of this character. I don’t feel that I have ever run into a malevolent ghost – that is, as the spirit of a dead person appearing to me on the material plane.
But there are mischievous and malevolent spirits out there that “haunt” the usual places, old houses, castles, cemeteries, and the gallows hill. These are the goblins our ancestors believed waited behind bush and tree, waiting to carry off the unwary, to a gruesome fate that might involve a large bubbling pot.
There’s a fair argument that such hauntings are more akin to the popular idea of the tulpa. Much of modern magical thought employs this word, derived from, inaccurately, a Tibetan concept, interchangeably with words like servitor or egregore.
These Chaos magic ideas essentially assert that it is possible to create a more or less autonomous force using focused thought. These forces are believed to be capable of carrying out the magician’s will without a direct or constant intention. This might be similar to some elder concepts of the familiar spirit, but in the case of a haunting, it is the raw psychic force generated by a location, event, or person(s) that remain as a roving presence.
The angry ghost is now a trope of paranormal shows, occupying abandoned prisons and mental hospitals where the trauma and abuse of malevolent treatment is common. The pain, suffering, and madness of the inmates has taken on a life of its own. That such things continue to exist in the abandoned places is perhaps because in our own experience of the “ghosts” we feed more psychic energy into it, keeping it alive for generations.
I had the experience the first time that I visited His Majesty’s Tower of London of encountering a malevolence that occupied a part of the stairwell in the Bloody Tower. As I ascended I was almost overcome by a powerful dread. My heart raced. My hair stood on end. The entire time I was in the room at the top, I felt like there was something stalking around in the corners. This was broad daylight, with a number of other visitors. The only other person who noted the presence was my wife, who, while not as odd as myself, does admit experiencing these things from time to time.1 Though she plays it down now, she admitted to having played with two young boys at the Tower when she was a child. Like the man from Salem, they were gone inexplicably. Our family believes that these were the two princes Edward V and Richard Duke of York, who had supposedly been murdered by the usurper Richard III.
Curiously, when we returned a few years later to take our daughters, the presence was not there. I can only assume it was wandering some part of the vast ancient castle. That there should be unhappy dead in such a place is not surprising. The Norman White Tower was erected by William the Conqueror in 1066 on the remains of a Roman fortress. It has been a prison, torture chamber, and place of execution, often with the heads of the dead displayed on pikes on her outer walls. Indeed, the celebrated ravens of the Tower are descended from those corvids who came for the sweet morsels of beheaded criminals. The Tower Guard tell many tales of spirits and spooks that inhabit the place. Whether these are actual personal experiences or retold folklore depends on the person.
One would think if horrible death were a prelude to haunting that this old block of good English Oak would be swarming with the vengeful spirits of it’s victims. In an age when strangling, burning, and drawing and quartering were considered acceptable means of capital punishment, and the prelude to execution was often weeks or months of torture and imprisonment, the swift moment at the block may actually have been a merciful end to torment.
Image By Fabio Alessandro Locati – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
The Tower, of course, is much associated with Henry VIII and the subsequent, often tragic, Tudor dynasty. In the break between Henry and the Church of Rome, there followed many years of attendant bloodshed. Henry’s second wife and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower, and is said to roam the grounds. But she was not the only victim of the English Reformation. The persecutions and executions marked the reign of each succeeding monarch, and eventually contributed to the Witch Persecution in Salem in a later century.
When we visited England with our children in the mid-2000s we also went to Henry’s other palace, Hampton Court. This sprawling Tudor marvel is associated with ghosts. One is supposed to be Jane Seymour, who succeeded the beheaded Anne and gave birth to Edward, the son Henry had shed his previous two wives to get. Tragically she died from complications a few days later, and is said to haunt the stairway up to her chambers.
A second ghost is that of fifth wife Catherine Howard. Howard was much younger than the aging king, and is supposed to have openly flaunted extramarital relations. She was also beheaded at the Tower, but according to the story, her spirit replays the desperate attempt to get Henry’s mercy by running screaming down one of the hallways. Henry was engaged in prayer in the chapel on the floor below, and she never reached him.
I have seen neither of these ghosts, but on approaching the doors of that chapel at a later point in the tour, our family all experienced that same feeling of fear and dread that I had felt on the previous visit to the Bloody Tower. There is what is termed as a “cold spot” in that hallway near the chapel. It could, of course, be just a factor of the antique structures air currents. But none of us wanted to go into the chapel at the point. We satisfied ourselves with a swift look in the door, and then went on out to the warmer and merrier kitchens.
I don’t as a general rule frequent abandoned prisons and mental asylums, so I can’t relate any of the stories of those places that are so popular in the public imagination. I think there is a certain carnival sideshow fascination with places like this, and I am not certain to what extent this mystique is not creating the psychic phenomena, or at least perpetuating it. The link in the earlier paragraph on the tulpa leads to a long anthropological article on the subject of popular fascination and the possible creation of thought-form beings. It’s verbally more dense and clinical than even the kind of stuff I write, but if you are up for a challenge, I think you’ll find it interesting. As a bonus it invokes both Mulder and Scully, and the Winchester brothers. How often are you going to find a legitimate scientific article like that? Look for the connection with contemporary occult author and practicing sorceror Jason Miller near the end.
Again this time of year is a busy one for me. It’s my favorite holiday almost immediately followed by my favorite birthday, and also is that time of year when all the obligations and goals of the previous several months either come to fruition or need a final push. I hope you continue to find these articles of some interest. I will be back next week for another one before the doors to the other world swing fully wide.