Do you believe in ghosts?
A welcome to Uncanny UK by the editor, RICHARD HOLLAND
‘So, do you believe in ghosts?’
I have been asked that question many times, usually by someone with a doubtful sneer. And I have always given the same emphatic answer - yes!
Then I qualify my answer by stating: ‘Of course, it depends what you mean by “ghost”.’ And it does. Non-believers often assume a belief in ghosts presumes a belief in the afterlife or a spirit world. This is a mistake, however. I believe in UFOs, too, in the broadest sense of Unidentified Flying Objects (for I have seen strange lights in the sky myself) but I don’t believe they are necessarily alien spacecraft.
A spiritualist or medium will assert that all ghostly phenomena are brought about by the presence of spirits, that is to say the souls of people whose bodies have perished. Some stories, especially ones from the 19th century or earlier, present the ghost as a fully aware being, interacting with a living witness. But this is rarely the case. Few ghosts interact with the living in any conscious way. Most seem to be merely images of people or animals with no more soul than the flickering image of a long dead actor on your television screen. Sometimes even the image is absent; the ghost is a sound, such as pacing footsteps, or even a smell, such as the scent of an old-fashioned perfume.
It is possible that a ghost is a purely natural phenomenon, one obeying physical laws we simply do not understand. One idea is that apparitions are playbacks of images recorded in the walls of a haunted room, the mineralogy of its stones providing a similar function as magnetic tape. It is another possibility that ghosts are hallucinatory, that they are a phenomenon of processes in the brain currently unknown to us.
I believe many ghosts may prove to be explained in this latter fashion. Our perception of the world around us is very subjective - stimuli such as light or sound are processed by the subconscious mind which then interprets what those stimuli represent (a rainbow, say, or a clap of thunder) and these interpretations are then related to our conscious mind. Between the subconscious and the conscious parts of our mind there may be, as the saying goes, many a slip betwixt cup and lip.
It seems quite possible that the subconcious may occasionally become confused by some stimulus which it fails to recognise as anything normal. In other words, a witness may see or feel something that simply isn’t there. Such an idea does not preclude the possibility of the received stimulus coming from an external source, however. The ‘ghost’ may be some form of energy field, for example, which the brain responds to but doesn’t know how to process. That might explain why so many apparitions are ladies in white gowns or monks in habits - these commonly seen shapes are the standard way in which the subconscious tries to interpret an unknown stimulus.
Of course, all this pseudo-science must remain pseudo-science while science continues to ignore the existence of ghosts and other so-called ‘supernatural’ phenomena. Personally, I believe there will prove to be several explanations as to the origin and nature of ghosts, not just one catch-all answer. I am open minded to the possibility that one of them may be the existence of a spirit world.
But ghosts are more than theory. That ghosts exist, that they have been seen or otherwise experienced by countless people through countless generations in every country in the world, cannot be denied by any reasonable person.
I have experienced the supernatural myself. And I have met and corresponded with hundreds of perfectly ordinary people from all walks of life who have also experienced the supernatural. I do not believe that all these people are liars or mad or mistaken.
Readers of Uncanny UK are asked to recognise this viewpoint. It cannot be ascertained that every story recounted here is true but nothing is recounted on Uncanny that I, as editor, know to be from an unreliable source (unfortunately, I have found there are many writers one cannot trust).
Readers are invited to send in details of their own experiences of the supernatural, to be published on this website or elsewhere. The truth of these will not be questioned.
So, do you believe in ghosts? If so, you’re welcome at Uncanny UK.
© Richard Holland 2008
Tags: Belief in ghosts, fairies, poltergeists, supernatural phenomena in Britain
