N I G H T B R I N G E R . S E
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PHANTOMS WROUGHT BY CRISIS
The phantom encounters
Throughout history, from one end of the earth to the other, people have reported seeing apparitions, ghosts, and phantoms. Many accounts of such sightings eventually took the form of folktales. And those tales, often broadly embellished, fostered a popular impression of terrifying specters wafting like smoke through countryside and town, infecting the very atmosphere.
Often enough, an aura of evil or grim vengeance seemed to surround these phantoms. They were envisioned as chain-rattling night creatures implacably bent on redressing some injustice committed during their lifetime. That was the stuf with which to scare small children - and raise more than a few adult hairs in the bargain. It was all hair-raising, to be sure. The question of truth, however, was rarely probed deeply.
Yet that question has always hovered close to the edge of the tales. Do these apparitions have some basis in reality? Does their undubitable power as entertainment conceal more fundamental powers - forces that still lie beyond human understanding, mechanisms still to be defined? In the late nineteenth century, students of the paranormal began to collect and analyze reports of thousands of sightings and visitations. It was their conviction that apparitional appearances deserved serious investigation. One of these researches, Frederic W. H. Myers, wrote: "Whatever else a 'ghost' may be, it is probably one of the most complex phenomena in nature." That sentiment is still widely shared, and the process of gathering a body of evidence continues to this day.
The documentation is highly provocative. A large number of phantom encounters involve some sort of life crisis, most frequently the ultimate crisis of death. Quite often, the apparition seeminly makes itself known at the very moment or within a few hours of death, as claimed by the family residing in Clapham. And as with that family, the viewers, or percipients, often knew and loved the departed. In many other cases, apparitions have reportedly returned - sometimes years after death - to deliver messages to the living, to honor death compacts made in life, to seek justice, or merely to reassure loved one that all is well in the world beyond the grave.
Yet phantom appearances seem not to be the province only of the dead. Frequently, apparitions of the living have been said to manifest themselves for no particular reason and with no particular intent; people have seen their doubles, or doppelgängers, separated from the body and performing mundane tasks, entirely oblivious to the observer - or observers, for such spontaneous phantoms have on occasion been witnessed by groups of people.
And then there are the rarest of all phantom encounters, the hauntings, so designated because a specter seems to inhabit a building or locale, revealing itself over time to percipients who did not have any connection with the apparition during life. Hospitals, museums, mansions, and houses of all sorts, dilapidated or not, have been the supposed abodes of ghosts, which may take the form of humans or animals - or indeed may appear in any physical form at all, including that of long-sunken submarines or spectral armies fighting ancient battles.
It is easy, of course, to scoff at reports of encounters with apparitions. Disbelievers hold that if no case is supported by absolutely perfect evidence, then every case should be assumed to have a normal explanation; the sum of any number of zeroes, the skeptics hasten to remind us, remains at zero. The contrary view is that although each case may be imperfect, the sum of the evidence is cumulative; a single bit of thatch may be weak, but many together can make a sturdy roof.
Moreover, argue the proponents, advances in modern physics may provide an intellectual framework within which such things will be understood. Writes Dr. Christopher Pedler, a noted British physiologist and science fiction writer: "The real trouble is that people won't believe in anything they can't explain. The old rules of physics - where God winds up the system to let it run like clockwork - may produce new technical advances. But they just can't contain the new discoveries. Ghosts, for instance, may be like a footprint which some event has left imprinted in time."
Whatever the explanations may be, the investigators believe that they are gaining ground. As the well-known parapsychologist Louisa Rhine put it in 1981: "Parapsychology is the Cinderella of the sciences. The stepmother, Science, has never favored her. She got a late start and the big sisters like physics, chemistry and biology almost coldshouldered her out of recognition. It remains to be seen if any fairy prince will rescue her."
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