he used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it. Yeats was a great believer in Spirits and, accompanied by his friend Lady Gregory, he devoted a great deal of time to collecting and publishing the true ghost stories of the ordinary men and women of Ireland.
Yeats aptly summed up this spectral conundrum. They are elusive and baffling - often choosing to appear before those who least expect to see them and, indeed, those whom you would least consider to be the type of person who would see them. In addition to planning all night vigils, throughout which thermal imaging cameras will be pointed at the spot, Dr Wiseman plans to canvass around 600 visitors in an "attempt to pinpoint the character type most likely to report ghostly sightings".Īnd yet the weight of evidence clearly demonstrates that ghosts do not appear to any specific type of person. Investigating Haunted PlacesĪnd yet, ghosts continue to baffle, fascinate or outright terrify those who chance upon them.Īs I write these words, Hampton Court Palace, has called upon the services of parapsychologist Dr Richard Wiseman, to see if he can explain why several visitors have been taken ill, and fainted, at the spot where the ghost of Henry VIII's fifth wife, Catharine Howard, has long been said to appear. My own opinion is that spirits, wraiths, revenants, spectres, phantoms, call them what you will, are emotional imprints, or recordings, that have been left on the surroundings of various haunted places, and that certain people, whom we call "psychic", are simply more attuned to their wave-length than the rest of us. I honestly do not believe that ghosts are the spirits of the dead coming back to haunt the living. Surprisingly, in all my years of collecting ghost stories, I had never really stopped to contemplate this very basic question. When my first book about haunted places Walking Haunted London was published, a question I was often asked was "Do you believe in ghosts?" I became very intrigued by my possible answer, since it forced me to think - What exactly is a ghost? Are Ghosts Simply Psychic Imprints? The Concise Oxford Dictionary says that a "Ghost" is "an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear to the living, typically as a nebulous image", and I suppose that is how most of us would define it. What is the kind of person that might see this kind of thing, and, for that matter, what exactly is this thing that we call a ghost? I found it rather amusing how these stories were often climaxed with the statement that he or she was " stone cold sober at the time" or the way in which the witness was often described as "very pragmatic, the last person you'd ever expect to see this kind of thing".
These were the second hand accounts, related to me by friends or family of those who had come into contact with ghosts. It Happened To A FriendĪnother aspect of my research that I encountered as I toured Britain's haunted places was what I came to recognise as the "happened to a colleague" syndrome. The majority were somewhat embarrassed, and showed a marked reluctance to talk about something that they were convinced would single them out as slightly eccentric and decidedly odd. Others were very matter of fact, almost blasé, about what had happened. Some felt it had, somehow, made them special and were only too willing to talk about it, often at great length.
What was noticeably different, however, was how those people reacted to their experience. Characters, times and locations changed but the basic essence of the experience didn't. Many of their stories were, more or less, the same. I thought of the people I had encountered at the various haunted places that I had visited, all of whom shared one thing in common - they had seen a ghost. Standing on its crumbling walls, with the raging waves crashing onto the rocks below, I thought back over the previous nine months during which I had journeyed all over Britain and Ireland, listening to accounts of true ghost stories, in search of haunted locations. On a bitterly cold and snowy winter's day, I climbed the muddy and uneven pathway that leads to the mysterious ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle on the wild and windswept Northumberland coast.
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