The changing perceptions of ghosts in ghost-lore ancient and modern.
By Richard Holland
Apologies to readers of my blog on www.cfz.org.uk or indeed of Paranormal Magazine (does anyone read the editorials in Paranormal?), but I feel the following is an interesting subject worth gaining some opinions on.
When I was researching my Haunted Wales (published 2005) and indeed subliminally before that, I noticed how differently our ancestors viewed ghosts in their ghost-lore compared to the expectations of the public today. In wales, and I would guess throughout the British Isles, ghosts, goblins and monsters tended to be lumped together: a White Lady, a Black Dog, or a half-human-half-animal Thingummy would all be labelled the same, as a bwgan – or a spook, in English.
Ghosts didn’t follow the rules we expect them to follow today. Although there were many stories told of spirits (ie personalities surviving physical death), it didn’t follow that a ghost was necessarily considered a spirit. Take the following example from The Folk-Lore of West and Mid Wales, published in 1911 by J C Davies. At a lonely moor (pictured), Mr Davies informs us, ‘a poor old woman had been murdered, which was supposed to account for the spot being haunted’. But the moor wasn’t haunted by the spirit or apparition of the murdered woman, as one might expect. Instead it was haunted by ‘a ghost which appeared sometimes in the shape of a cat, at other times as a man on horseback’.
Now, how does that belief tally with the ghosts we are introduced to in TV programmes today, all of which seem to be ‘trapped’ or ‘grounded’ spirits? Even before the boom in paranormal telly programmes, we had become used to thinking in terms of ‘the ghost of Lady So-and-so’, the ‘apparition of Bad Lord Wotsit’ and the like. But ghost-lore was not so clear-cut in centuries past.
Some readers of Paranormal Magazine seem to consider entities like Black Dogs or the Owlman as animals fit for study by cryptozoologists. But, of course, they’re not. And neither is Bigfoot once he starts demonstrating abilities like telepathy of being able run through solid objects (as is often reported). Surely, once the cryptozoologist has determined that such a phenomenon is unlikely to be a real, flesh-and-blood animal, he or she should move on?
Owlman, Mothman, Batsquatch, Pobabawa – such things are spooks. Few would suggest that they were real animals, exotic species yet to be discovered. They are supernatural (assuming that they were ever genuinely experienced).
It’s a good idea not be too keen to categorise paranormal beings. Some ghosts may be spirits, if a spirit world exists. Some may be unexplained glitches in time, and a few might indeed be misidentifications of exotic beasts. Many others, of course, may simply be mistakes or even hallucinations on the part of the witness. Whatever category we may wish to put them in, they are all spooks. We simply do not have sufficient knowledge of their origins or purpose, if any, to make clear-cut definitions.
