N I G H T B R I N G E R . S E
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THE SILENT WATCHERS
As silent witnesses to passions and intrigues through the generations, some buildings seem to give shelter to the shadows of their own past. Along corridors and bulwarks in ancient windswept castles, among the mysterious shadows in obscure country-houses, it seems like the old sins and injustices never dies but still lives like billowing haze among the old stones that saw them being born.
There are ancient legends about haunted houses. But are ghosts real or are they simply human inventions we have created for certain places because they frighten us? There are scientists who said that there really are some houses that is haunted, but the ghosts are only shadow-like projections of especially strong emotions and happenings in the past. The physicist Sir Oliver Lodge had a theory which he published in 1908 that hauntings were "a spirit materalization of a tragedy a long time ago". Lodge and others thought that strong emotions in some way could print themselves in the surroundings and that people with enough sensitivity who lived in later generations, could percieve.
Therefore it might not be that surprising that stories about strong emotions seem to permeate the legends about hauntings. Like the examples that follows shows that ghosts according to the tradition as threatening presages to catastrophes or as reflections of people whose passions in life affected them in such way that they can't keep calm or silent in death: people with evil lusts or remorses - or people who demands justice or can't get peace from their pangs of love.
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