Ghosties!

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As a child, I was intrigued by ‘the mysterious’ and that curiosity has never left me. I have tonnes of books right here next to me now on all kinds of mysterious topics. Ghosts, UFO’s, Monsters etc.

What started this interest was a story my mum told me about our old house, which she said was haunted. She says one night, she went to bed and my dad was working nights. She was fast asleep when the alarm clock went off at some stupid hour o’clock. This was odd as it was always set to 5am for my dad to get up for work and it had also been set to the radio, rather than the beeper. Thinking nothing of it, she clicked it off and went back to sleep. Reset the alarm the next morning and had a moan at my dad for messing it up. He said he hadn’t touched it and as usual, me or my brother got the blame.

A week or so later, my mum was downstairs in the early hours making herself a drink as she could not sleep. Oddly enough it was about the same time as the alarm had woken her a few days previously. The house was silent, my dad away at work and me and my brother upstairs asleep in bed.

At the time, the TV and radio was controlled by the old style Rediffusion boxes that you twisted a knob on the wall to control. Obviously it was switched off, when from the kitchen my mum suddenly heard a song coming from the TV. The radio had seemingly switched on. This freaked her out a bit, but what scared her even more was that it was the same song and even the same part of the song that had woken her a few days ago.

The song was Kate Bush’s “The man with the child in his eyes” and the bit that woke her up and played on the radio was the bit in the chorus where she sings, “Ooooh he’s here again. The man with the Child in his eyes.”

That and several other incidents she can recount, made her feel the house was haunted. I never, ever saw or experienced anything odd like that though, despite being hugely keen on the subject.

So, I immersed myself in all the books and frightened myself silly reading about ghosts, UFO’s, Loch Ness Monsters and the Yeti. I remember seeing famous footage supposedly of an American creature called Sasquatch on Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World and spent the entire night crapping myself, convinced there was one looking in my bedroom window as I lay there. The picture on the blog tortured me as a child as it looked so scary (it has since been conclusively proven as a fake).

My interest has continued ever since.

The reason I changed my view from being a total believer, to a non-believer just comes from reading and observation and application of logic. I have seen supposedly ghostly photographs by the plenty, but still I remain to be convinced they are ‘ghosts’ as we define them. I’ve seen the videos on You tube of stuff and there is absolutely nothing to convince me that any of them cannot be explained by conventional means, or are just forgeries.

I watch programmes like “Most Haunted” and weep. This supposedly scientific investigation of the paranormal, is an utter joke. It is nothing of the sort. I think mediums and readers are frauds and charlatans who prey on the vulnerable and use cold reading techniques and other cruel means to allow people to apply meaning to their nonsensical ramblings. Because it is an emotional subject, people WANT to believe, and that is the key. They use that basic fact to their advantage and spin all kinds of comforting tales to audience members who are only too delighted to hear that “Dad is now free from pain and happy and wants you to be happy too”.

I find such things absolutely cynical and manipulative. It infuriates me greatly. Especially since any number of these so called psychics who can contact the dead have never proven their skills scientifically and consistently under any set of controlled circumstances. Indeed many go to great lengths to avoid doing so, in particular that Liverpool based psychic who was on Derren Brown’s series earlier in the year.

That was a particularly revealing show. In it the psychic visits a ‘random’ person who he has personally selected (go figure at how random that is) and he performs a very accurate reading on. It is hugely impressive and does go into specifics about this persons life and although Derren replicates about 95% of what the psychic does using his techniques, he is initially baffled at how the psychic got the extra specific information.

The psychic then goes to meet a person who Derren has selected. Oddly enough, the psychic isn’t in the mood for it. The spirits are not speaking and he feels the person is hostile towards him (they aren’t Brown’s researchers specifically selected the person because they DID believe in spiritualism – Brown like the psychic, had never met the person previously). Brown then provided far better accuracy in his cold reading technique than the psychic did using his powers. Which led to the psychic storming off, accusing Brown of setting him up for a fall and that this was just a cheap shot to try and discredit him. He would have little to do with the show afterwards and the show ended somewhat sourly.

At the end of the show, as the credits rolled, it reveals that a researcher on the show subsequently discovered that the first woman the psychic cold read so accurately, was a former next door neighbour of many, many years to the psychics mother and who were still firm friends and very much in touch. What a coincidence, eh?

So many ghostly pictures are blurred, fuzzy and indistinct that I am never sure if I am looking at a UFO or Ghost. Those that are purported to be amongst the best, certainly those I remember as a child, have now all proven to be fake.

I also puzzle what ghostly beings want to do with eternity. I can think of nothing more terminally dull than spending the next few billion years, opening and closing doors, moving objects from one cupboard to another or appearing as an indistinct blur on a photograph. If that is what living for eternity means, then count me out.

Why can’t ghosts do something useful? Wouldn’t it be nice if we said “Damn! I forgot to get the onions for the Curry tonight.” For an onion to roll down the kitchen surface at you? Why do they have to knock on wooden doors so faintly that you can mistake it for a beetle farting? Why do they prefer to come out at night? Is insomnia a big problem in the spirit world? Why can’t they give you a hand at work?

That said, I do not feel Science has all the answers. Far from it. I think there are some mysteries and forces at work in our universe that we don’t understand. All of which are perfectly natural, provable, observable and yet still equally weird. I just don’t feel we need anything supernatural to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

I also firmly believe that people have a right to believe what matters to them in this matter. Regardless of what I think or what I feel is proven, I know others will disagree. That is their total right and there is only one set of evidence to lay against the other. I have no problem with people believing in ghosts, fairies or whatever. I do have a problem with those, who I think, abuse these beliefs for personal gain or in the name of ‘entertainment’. Or who purport to be performing a rigorous scientific study when they are simply not doing so.

So, back to my mum. What happened in our house. Firstly, I think my brother or I (though I cannot remember doing it) probably altered my mums alarm clock by pressing the buttons. We used to do this a lot playing “Space ship” as children. We’d go into a room, jump on a bed and pretend it was a spaceship and press any buttons, real or imaginary, we’d find to control it. My betting is that we did this and unknowingly, changed the alarm to the middle of the night.

As for the second incident. Many times when you clicked our rediffusion set, the handle would hover between two stations and stay there, before clicking into one place or another, often when switched off late at night, my dad would switch it off but it would stick between off and channel 1, (BBC 1) or Channel 12 (Radio 2). My guess is that when switched off, it stuck between channel 12 and the off setting and clicked onto channel 12 when my mum was downstairs.

As for the song? Coincidence. Yes a convenient answer, but not that really that convenient. The song, at the time, was in the charts and received a lot of radio play at the time. Now, ask yourself, how many times on the way to or from work, do you hear the same song thats in the charts on the radio?

Coincidences happen all the time, it is just how you choose to reference them that makes them anything more than that. Here’s just a few...

Finnish twin brothers, aged 71, were killed in identical bicycle accidents along the same road two hours apart, police said. "This is simply a historic coincidence. Although the road is a busy one, accidents don't occur every day," police officer Marja-Leena Huhtala told Reuters. "It made my hair stand on end when I heard the two were brothers, and identical twins at that. It came to mind that perhaps someone from upstairs had a say in this," she said.

This is a similar story of coincidence, not of twins but of two brothers. In 1975, while riding a moped in Bermuda, a man was accidentally struck and killed by a taxi. One year later, this man's bother was killed in the very same way. In fact, he was riding the very same moped. And to stretch the odds even further, he was struck by the very same taxi driven by the same driver - and even carrying the very same passenger!

Joseph Aigner was a fairlly well-known portrait painter in 19th century Austria who, apparently, was quite an unhappy fellow: he several times attempted suicide. His first attempt was at the young age of 18 when he tried to hang himself, but was interrupted by the mysterious appearance of a Capuchin monk. At age 22 he again tried to hang himself, but was again saved from the act by the very same monk. Eight years later, his death was ordained by others who sentenced him to the gallows for his political activities. Once again, his life was saved by the intervention of the same monk. At age 68, Aiger finally succeeded in suicide, a pistol doing the trick. His funeral ceremony was conducted by the same Capuchin monk - a man whose name Aiger never even knew.

In 1858, Robert Fallon was shot dead, an act of vengeance by those with whom he was playing poker. Fallon, they claimed, had won the $600 pot through cheating. With Fallon's seat empty and none of the other players willing to take the now-unlucky $600, they found a new player to take Fallon's place and staked him with the dead man's $600. By the time the police had arrived to investigate the killing, the new player had turned the $600 into $2,200 in winnings. The police demanded the original $600 to pass on to Fallon's next of kin - only to discover that the new player turned out to be Fallon's son, who had not seen his father in seven years!

The stories of identical twins' nearly identical lives are often astonishing, but perhaps none more so than those of identical twins born in Ohio. The twin boys were separated at birth, being adopted by different families. Unknown to each other, both families named the boys James. And here the coincidences just begin. Both James grew up not even knowing of the other, yet both sought law-enforcement training, both had abilities in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and each had married women named Linda. They both had sons whom one named James Alan and the other named James Allan. The twin brothers also divorced their wives and married other women - both named Betty. And they both owned dogs which they named Toy. Forty years after their childhood separation, the two men were reunited to share their amazingly similar lives.

And the odd thing is, these things happen all the time. Sometimes we don’t notice them, sometimes we do, but it is us that gives them meaning, but in a world of odds and chances, it is inevitable that some odd things happen some of the time! It would be truly weird if they didn’t!

So the upshot of all this is that I don’t really believe in ghosts, fairies, angels or anything like that. I don’t mind those who do, particularly if they draw comfort from it, but that is a different matter. Scientifically, there is no proof I am aware of that convinces me otherwise that they exist in any reliable and measurable form. That doesn’t mean science knows everything, but rather that science doesn’t.

And like those who believe in ghosts, fairies and angels, I find that very comforting.