Ghost Stories

Regular readers know I like to poke around and see what’s afoot in the media at this time of year. Mostly I found only a lot of rather boring short articles providing ‘scientific’ explanations for ghosts, from the likes of Joe Nickell. This one made me laugh:

Shane Rogers and his team from Clarkson University in the US observed similarities between paranormal experiences and the hallucinogenic effects of fungal spores. This may explain why ghost sightings often occur in older buildings with inadequate ventilation and poor air quality.

As did this:

Kesha's Sexy Supernatural Energy

Pop singer Kesha admitted in an interview with Ryan Seacrest that she believes she once had sex with a ghost. "I've got a song called 'Supernatural,'" she explained. "That song was about having sex with a ghost. I lived in this flop house at Rural Canyon and there was this weird energy that lived there, and it used to keep me at night and wake me up. And it progressed into this dark, sexual spirit. It did scare me, but that's part of the fun of it."

Then I came across this piece in the comment section of the Guardian’s website. The article itself is weak, but it was clearly meant to start a conversation, which duly took place. The comments thread is some fifteen pages long, much of it containing personal ghost stories from readers around the world – a sort of global campfire event. For once, the scoffers seemed outnumbered, no one taking much notice of them.

I could comment, but sometimes it’s better just to listen. Here’s a selection:

when i was a kid around 10 my family and me lived with a ghost.. two things really stand out but small things also were apparent like leaving something on in a room leaving the room coming back later to see what you turned on was off...or at night when we went to bed light s turned off.. i was hiding under covers.. you would hear what sounded like a ball bouncing.. the two things that stand out .. my family and me were in the living room watching tv.. when down the hall on a dresser was a newspaper.. the pages were slowly turning one by one. as if someone was reading them.. and this one where there cannot be any doubt.. i was standing in the living room next to my brother.. mom was sitting on the couch.. across to where mom was sitting was a wall about10 feet in front of her.. on the wall we had a plastic ornament of a man.. i was saying to my brother their are no such things as ghosts.. and all of a sudden the ornament was slammed down hard to the ground right next to where mom was on the couch.. 10 feet to where it was hanging on the wall.. i apologized after that..

Here is my story: Believe it or not! I came to live in Brazil in 1991. After visiting a Spiritist Centre for charitable reasons and although a strong agnostic, I became interested in the Spiritist doctrine. (Although it had been prominent in the UK at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the 20th century, with famous scientists amongst others, it has all but disappeared nowadays.) Anyway, shortly afterwards I started doing some psychic writing and I was the biggest Doubting Thomas ever. My writing was produced in a conscious state, often in a dialogue (question and answer form)
"Your friend needs help!"
"Which friend?"
"The one in a wheelchair?"
"Julio?"
"Yes"
"When?"
"Now"
"Now?"
Yes , now!"
"OK"
It was after midnight. I told my wife and said "It's now or never. I need to go to Julio's house to see if this communication is real"
Ok" she said. " but don't go alone... take our oldest son along with you."

I woke him and we quickly set off into town. When we arrived at Julio's house, there was a light on. Not totally bad..... As is customary here in Brazil, I clapped my hands (they don't knock on doors) and Julio's mother appeared immediately at the door.

"You'll think I am crazy but I came to see if Julio needs help."
"Thank God you are here," she replied. "I need to take him to the hospital urgently and there were no ambulances available. I have no money."
"Do you want to go to the hospital now?"
"Yes please"
"Right, let's go."

We went to the emergency at the teaching hospital in a nearby town where a doctor saw Julio and said he was OK to go home with medication but if there was any change we were to bring him back immediately. We bought the medicine at an all night chemist next top the hospital and went home.
I asked Julio's mother if she was religious. She replied that she was and that she had her bible open and had been praying for help all day.
Julio was eight years old at the time. He had hydrocephalus with a valve draining excess fluid from his head to his abdominal cavity. One sign there may be a problem with the valve was if he started vomiting. He had been vomiting all day, hence the mother's worry and the need to get him to the hospital..
Needless to say, I am no longer a Doubting Thomas.

When travelling round Europe with friends as impoverished backpackers, we stopped off at my friend's penpal's granddad's house in Paris. My friend's penpal told us we can kip in the lounge but not go upstairs to where the comfy beds were. Sod that I thought, when he had gone and everyone else had settled down on sleeping bags on the floor, and went and found a bed upstairs in the dark. As I was dozing in bed, i suddenly felt myself wide-awake, and curiously watched as I was pulled upright in bed, pulled up to standing, floated off the bed and was suspended in mid-air in the corner of the room looking down on the bed. In the bed though, it wasn't my body but that of an old man with short cropped grey hair, pale complexion and eyes closed. There was no fear at all, only curiosity....then nothing. Next morning, I relayed my story to my friends who in turn related to the penpal when he came round to pick us up. He became very agitated, angry even at my having broken our promise to him. His granddad had died in that bed four months previously and no-one had slept in it since. There was no photograph of the granddad in the house, but when we returned to the penpal's house, he showed me a photograph of him then and. of course, it was the same man I had seen lying on the bed the previous evening.

I grew up in a weird creepy house and have lots of stories but know they'll just be torn apart but there is one strange thing in particular that happened which isn't really a ghost thing but anyway. One day I was doing the dishes in the kitchen and I had a like a vision/waking dream kind of thing where my sister burst into my house crying. About 20-30 minutes she did burst into my house crying and everything about it happened in the same way I had imagined it. It wasn't some big trauma or anything and I don't even remember what she was upset about but I often think back and wonder what happened to make me 'see' it before I did.

Mostly I've seen a cat, resembling our beloved late Siamese, but most of the sightings were actually before she died, when she was becoming ill - no, it couldn't have simply been her. During one, I was feeding my hamster and turned to see a Siamese sitting on the kitchen table, just as clearly as reality, I was surprised since I always shut the door to keep her out when caring for the hamster and checked she wasn't in the room first, so looked to the door which was clearly still shut, not understanding how she'd seemingly got in, looked back at the Siamese still sitting on the table, then after a few moments, they just weren't there any more. I think that the room looked different after that, too - the laundry room tidier, which wasn't the only time things seemed to change or more likely shift back after such events. Perhaps it's a kind of access of (your) earlier memories, imprinted on the current scene, or alternatively the space-time disruption theory, if you like.

Sunny afternoon playing chess with my young son. We were in the enclosed veranda, in what was reputed to be the oldest house existing atop the Scarborough Bluffs, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, that is. When a female in a long white summer dress went through the door into the garden. Thinking it was my wife I called out for her to put the kettle on so we could have tea . No response which was unusual. My wife was still upstairs in our bedroom. Seemed strange, as I looked out in the garden. Nobody there. Past it off.

Weeks later at a neighbour's house party. The local councillor's. His wife asked if I had seen our ghost yet. Seems quite well known in the neighbourhood!

Didn't believe in Ghosts before, but do now. Appears she has a history.

Something similar happened to my husband when he was a teenager - the house his parents own used to be a bakery (amongst other things...) and one weekend, he somehow managed to wake up before his parents and went downstairs and was sitting in the living room (which used to be the shop part of the bakery). The door to the stairs started to open, and he thought it was his mum having come down to make breakfast, and went to open the door for her, and came face to face with a woman in a Victorian-style red dress, her hair up, and with a shocked look on her face like she hadn't expected to see him there, just as much as he hadn't expected to see HER. Then she disappeared.

Another time, he was in the kitchen, and saw someone in the living room, walking around where the old bakery counter would have been, also dressed in Victorian style clothes. He thought (again) that it was his mum, and called out to her if she wanted any tea making. When he didn't get a reply, he went in to ask again, thinking she hadn't heard him, and was startled to see she wasn't there. She'd been upstairs the whole time (and obviously not dressed in Victorian clothes) and was confused as to why he was asking if she'd been downstairs at all.
Interestingly, they later found a painting of the woman my husband saw, in that same red Victorian dress, in the attic (loft?) and gave it to the relatives of the previous owner of the house (who they are friends with) thinking it belonged to them. But whenever they try to hang it up, the painting flies off the wall and ends up on the other side of the room, face down, so they've given up even trying and have it stored somewhere. Personally, I think it belongs with that house, but that's just me.

When i was a kid my family and me lived with a ghost we had quite a few scares.. one time while my family and me was watching tv in the living room. down the hall on a dresser was a newspaper and slowly one by one the pages were turning as if someone was browsing through it.. another time which cannot be any doubt i was standing next to my brother in the living room by the front door.. mom was sitting on the couch.. across where my mom was siting is a wall.. on the wall was a plastic ornament of a man .. i was saying to my brother their are no such things as ghosts.. and all of a sudden the ornament was slammed hard to the ground where my mom was sitting 10 feet across from where it was on the wall i apologized after that

My work colleague's eighteen month old year old daughter always refused to have a bath in his mother-in-law's old house, even to the extent of grabbing hold of the door frame as she was being carried in there. The mother-in-law sold the house eventually and a few weeks later went round to collect the post. The new owner told her that her husband was refusing to sleep upstairs and had made up a bed in one of the downstairs rooms because of the ghost of a woman in a red dress on the landing.

My own mother-in-law was a district nurse and went to visit an old lady. On her way up the stairs a man dressed in old-fashioned attire walked down past her. When she turned to see who it was, he had vanished into thin air. She went into the old lady's room with a shocked expression and the old lady said: "You've seen him then? He came with the clock" and she pointed to an antique grandfather clock she'd had delivered a few weeks previously.

As a younger single mum with a child, I exchanged with a woman who was in a hurry to get out of her house. From the first night, I heard a child crying... it wasn't mine, no other children around, no cats. As time went on, several friends who stayed at the house, heard a crying child. I didn't say anything, but kept copious notes. I also had the feeling that someone was watching me, and my own child was heard talking to someone and referring to him by name, though there was nobody in the family with that name. I then found out that the woman I had changed with had a child that she had neglected. He died. And yes, his name was the one my own child kept repeating. I lived in that house for ten years. The really sad thing for me though is that the woman later neglected a second child who died... but this time, she went to prison.

When I was doing my post doctoral research at a famous west coast university, I encountered a ghost of a close relative. This relative told me stuff regarding "my personal and professional" career in two and a half years. This was details I considered to be very specific, and in fact so outlandish to be impossible. This ghost appeared whilst sitting in my bedroom at around 9 pm west coast time. This close relative "verbally" communicated to me then quickly vanished.

To cut a long story short - Two and a half years time later: it was true.
From being an atheist rational scientist, I became an agnostic!

I am an atheist and do not believe there is anything after death. Some years ago we had a time when we could hear a baby crying. It would happen most often in the evening and several people heard it, both family members and visitors. The baby monitor picked nothing up. It lasted for about three months and then stopped as suddenly as it started. We lived in a detached house at the time and there were no babies nearby in neighbouring houses.

I have no explanation for this phenomenon. I just know what I heard.

We went on the Mary King's Close ghost walk with a couple of friends who were visiting from Peru a while back (this is going back a fair few years, since we haven't lived in Scotland for over 10 years now, and my son is now 19 and he was just a wee thing then...) but we didn't even get a third of the way thru before he went absolutely mental ape shit and refused to go any further no matter what anyone said or did (I didn't even consider it that bad, and I DO believe in spirits), so they had to get someone to come and get us to take us back to the main ground level. I never did get to see the rest of it, tho my husband and friends continued on without us and said it was really creepy and spooky, even without my son's freak-out.

He's always been a bit odd tho. (when he was about 2, he had a 'conversation' with his Gran-gran who'd just passed away, tho we didn't know it (that she'd passed away, I mean) until about 3 minutes later when the nursing home staff opened the door to the room we were waiting in and told us. Then they asked him who he'd been 'talking' to, and he very calmly said 'I talkin' to Gran-gran' and pointed to the corner where he'd been sitting and chatting away, and all hell broke loose. (Hubby's parents (or any of his family, for that matter) are not religious people at all, but they all went completely nuts when he said this. It's still a matter of contention even now - he still insists he saw her, and they insist he didn't.

I have some stories. I am late to the party, but here goes...
I own an interesting old house that dates back to the 1500s. Four people who have worked in the house have had "experiences." One was a young cleaner who opened the master bedroom door into the hallway to see a middle-aged woman in a black Victorian dress and white apron, with her hair styled in a bun, descending the stairs. She appeared solid, but when she reached the landing below she vanished into thin air. The cleaner was stunned by what she saw—or thought she saw. She went home.

Recently a man doing some work in the attics claimed he distinctly heard someone enter the house and noisily stomp up several flights of stairs. He called out to the "stair stomper," assuming another worker, a younger man, had come by, though he was not expected. There was no answer, so he searched, but the house was empty and the door was locked. No one else was ever there that day—not even a delivery was made. This man did not believe in ghosts, but then another time he briefly glimpsed a woman in the main hall, so now he's open to the idea of them.

Another worker, an older man, arrived one morning to check the house (we were away on a trip) to find a saucepan set upright on the slate floor in the kitchen. The saucepans were always kept firmly stacked upside down in a standing iron rack. The wayward saucepan was filled to the brim with water. No one had been in our isolated house and there were no leaks in the ceiling. No thirsty dogs to drink from it, either. There was no explanation to be found, but certainly there must be one.

There are ancient vaulted stone cellars below the house and the door leading down to them is sometimes found open, even though it latches firmly. I do put that down to the micro climates found in an old stone house.

A previous owner saw an angry-looking man with a dark beard. He was wearing a black old-fashioned suit and he walked into the main reception room and scowled at her. She told him to get out and he vanished. She may have been tipsy at the time.

I had a cleaner who would only work if she could bring her mother or her daughter along for company—she was so spooked by the house. She really was unhappy about it and finally quit.

Is my house haunted? I've never experienced anything spooky there, other than a strong sense of past lives lived in the house. No ghosts, no personalities. The house is very atmospheric in a nice way. Maybe that strong sense of the past suggests things to people. There is a ancient burial mound out front which probably helps!

We have been approached by ghost hunters seeking permission to do an investigation. That's not happening!

My husband's parents' house has several spirits similar to what you're describing (it's Victorian-era as well, tho it's been thru several incarnations as a bakery, a doctor's surgery, and the village post office during its lifetime). My husband has seen a Victorian lady several times, and we both have seen (and heard) a dog in the house which vanishes into a walled-off area into what used to be the butchery. (an area of the house I refuse to go in because it's creepy as hell...) His parents claim it's a fox but what fox is in the house and disappears into a wall? I mean, come on... (never mind that his mum is animal-phobic and won't have animals anywhere near her, let alone wild ones in the house)

I've seen an old man (I'm assuming it's a man, it was man-shaped, tho I never really saw a face. It was pretty evil, whatever it was) at the end of the upstairs hallway, glaring at me one night when I went to use the loo and it scared me so badly I wouldn't go without waking hubby up to come with me after that. He was outside what used to be the doctor's office when it was the surgery.

And we've both heard the old lady who used to live there before his parents bought the place (she died in his parents' bedroom; she was the aunt of the people they bought it from), coughing and hacking away at night in that front bedroom whenever his parents were away. Apparently she used to talk to the Victorian lady in the red dress when she was alive, so she knew there were spirits in the house too. We found this out from the neighbours who used to be her carers. She would sit in her rocking chair and chat 'into thin air', while claiming to be talking to a lady in a red dress, which was the same lady my husband saw multiple times as a teenager. (and nearly walked into once LOL)

I'd definitely believe houses have a way of at least recording the lives of people who lived or passed thru there, if nothing else. Tho it kind of creeps me out to think it might be recording ME at the same time, and I might someday appear as a spirit to someone else. *shudders*

I grew up in a weird creepy house and have lots of stories but know they'll just be torn apart but there is one strange thing in particular that happened which isn't really a ghost thing but anyway. One day I was doing the dishes in the kitchen and I had a like a vision/waking dream kind of thing where my sister burst into my house crying. About 20-30 minutes she did burst into my house crying and everything about it happened in the same way I had imagined it. It wasn't some big trauma or anything and I don't even remember what she was upset about but I often think back and wonder what happened to make me 'see' it before I did.

My ghost story - the great hairy wart on my otherwise rational scheme of things.

When travelling round Europe with friends as impoverished backpackers, we stopped off at my friend's penpal's granddad's house in Paris. My friend's penpal told us we can kip in the lounge but not go upstairs to where the comfy beds were. Sod that I thought, when he had gone and everyone else had settled down on sleeping bags on the floor, and went and found a bed upstairs in the dark. As I was dozing in bed, i suddenly felt myself wide-awake, and curiously watched as I was pulled upright in bed, pulled up to standing, floated off the bed and was suspended in mid-air in the corner of the room looking down on the bed. In the bed though, it wasn't my body but that of an old man with short cropped grey hair, pale complexion and eyes closed. There was no fear at all, only curiosity....then nothing. Next morning, I relayed my story to my friends who in turn related to the penpal when he came round to pick us up. He became very agitated, angry even at my having broken our promise to him. His granddad had died in that bed four months previously and no-one had slept in it since. There was no photograph of the granddad in the house, but when we returned to the penpal's house, he showed me a photograph of him then and. of course, it was the same man I had seen lying on the bed the previous evening.

Psi and the Far-Right

Here’s a philosopher who’s attracting interest in psi research circles. He’s Jason Reza Jorjani, half-Iranian by birth and professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches on science, technology and society. The Parapsychological Association has reviewed his book Prometheus and Atlas, commending ‘his scholarship, his breadth, his commitment to the problem of the place of the supernatural in our thinking, his jazzy and spunky but serious style’. Jeffrey Mishlove has interviewed him three times on New Thinking Allowed. The Society for Psychical Research invited him to give a talk, and subsequently published a lengthy essay by him in its journal.

Why all the excitement? It’s largely because it’s unusual to find a philosopher of Jorjani's readability and erudition holding a big vision in which an acknowledgement of psi phenomena plays a major part. This comment by parapsychologist Charles Tart gives an idea:

Jorjani’s book is not casual reading, but it’s not a swamp of philosophical jargon and word games either. If you’re interested in the roots of both Eastern and Western cultures, and the conceptual systems driving so much of modern culture, including spiritual culture, it’s an excellent book. Particularly, Jorjani is aware of parapsychological phenomena, the specters as he calls them, which official culture tries to banish, but which are very important to our full understanding of humanity and reality. These “ghosts” just won’t go away in spite of our extensive use of “magic words,” masquerading as reason, to banish them!

Jorjani is familiar with psi research, referencing among other things experimental PK work by Robert Jahn at Princeton, the Stargate remote viewing program and Stephen Braude’s scholarly analysis of early mediumistic studies. But I think he’s less interested in the details than in its implications, that materialism is an imposter, a sort of upstart ideology that has succeeded by suppressing knowledge about ‘the spectral’, as he calls it. He’s good on the part played by key individuals in this, such as Freud who ‘deliberately and duplicitously’ concealed evidence of psi interactions that he knew to be true; and Kant, who was deeply influenced by Swedenborg, but publicly debunked him to protect his chances of getting tenure.

Even Descartes, who developed the mechanist framework that became the basis of modern materialism, nevertheless understood from his experience of precognitive dreams that this could not be the whole story; he just chose not to follow that up. But times change, Jorjani says, and in the modern era, thinkers like Henri Bergson and William James, have resurrected the idea of psi phenomena as being part of the natural world.

It’s not surprising that all this should strike a chord with many parapsychologists. But there’s a twist. Earlier this month a video emerged of Jorjani giving a half-hour talk to ‘Identitarians’ in Stockholm. This is a big deal. Identarians are a European ultra-right, openly racist movement, not large, as far as I can tell, but with strong roots to anti-Islam and anti-immigrant parties in other countries, at least two of which – Poland and Hungary – are in government. The video has been posted on the website Righton.net (slogan: ‘Putting the action in reactionary’), where it rubs shoulders with full-on, foaming Trumpism.

I listened to this talk to see just what psi phenomena might have to do with extremist right-wing politics. Jorjani repeats the view he expresses elsewhere, that parapsychologists have fatally underestimated the effects on society of psi phenomena – the fact that, as he puts it, that their research opens up ‘the ultimate epistemological abyss’. But he goes further in painting an apocalyptic vision of psi, first being harnessed to bring down the current socio-political order, then to replace it with a sort of psi-mediated utopia. A society in which ESP played an active part would be utterly transparent, he suggests, since it would mean the end of secrets and lies, and also of crimes, because the thought police would have precognitive knowledge of them and take steps to prevent them. PK could prove a deadly means of destroying enemies, producing ‘first rate psychic assassins’). All this, he considers, would pose an intolerable threat to the liberal democratic political order, which ‘would be absolutely incapable of enduring such a situation… Not since witches were burned at the stake have we had a legal framework that even considers such possibilities.’

A crude attempt of this kind has already been seen, he contends – in the brief flowering of the Nazi ideology. The party grew out of the Thule Gesellschaft (Atlantis Society), which was founded in Munich towards the end of World War I, and which merged theosophical ideas with German ultra-nationalism. Its largely secret membership, which included some top German scientists, believed that Atlantis was the ‘lost homeland of the Nordic master race that descended from the heavens’. Its ambition was to overthrow ‘the dogmas of revealed religion and the outdated rationalistic enlightenment concepts of liberal individualism with a new politics’.

Unencumbered by scientific doubts about psi, Himmler and others enthusiastically promoted psychic warfare – psychics based in Berlin are said among other things to have pinpointed the location where Mussolini was being held prisoner by Italian anti-fascists, facilitating his rescue – an early forerunner (if true) of the Stargate military remote viewing program, which Jorjani also references here.

To Jorjani, this is potentially a blueprint for a new order coming about through a ‘spectral revolution'. He concludes:

However catastrophically they failed, these first postmodernists understood that the key to overcoming modernity lay in a psychical revolution in the sciences, but also that such a scientific revolution cannot come about unless society has been radically reorganised into a hierarchically integrated organic state.

A caveat: this is a short talk, outlining provocative ideas that would need a good deal more elucidation to pin down. They’re apparently intended to inspire a particular audience but seem somewhat unclear and inconsistent, and indeed, what I’ve outlined here may not fairly represent his thinking. (They’ve certainly surprised parapsychologists, and I assume there’s nothing of this in his book.)

But it seems clear enough that Jorjani is pointing out to extremists the advantages to them of psi’s power to disrupt. If and when the science establishment can no longer block it, the liberal democratic order will be overwhelmed, and this will open the way for the development of a new order of which they dream. The Nazis tried and failed; but others in the future may succeed.

What do we make of this? One immediate thought is that Jorjani’s idea of what psi might be capable of vastly exceeds the known facts. He talks as though an arsenal of psychic superpowers awaits for humanity to exploit, just as soon as it stops pretending that psi doesn’t exist. Oddly, it’s the same mistake that some sceptics like James Alcock make – to argue that psi, if true, would be calamitous: a world in which certain universal norms can no longer be relied on. But the evidence from a century of a half of research indicates, on the contrary, that psi is extremely elusive, fickle and unreliable. There’s nothing to suggest that the mere act of acknowledging its existence will change that, let alone release some transformative power in which it becomes the bedrock of a future utopian technology.

What I agree we should be concerned about is the effects of a widespread belief in psi, and the potential of that to generate insecurity and distrust. But one of the ingredients of the fear of psi, it seems to me, is the inability to adopt a balanced view of it, at least in the first instance. The idea of it is so radical, it tends to promote radical ideas, in the absence of understanding based on responsible research. What’s needed is education, to encourage public understanding of what it is, and its limits, and persuade advocates not to make overheated claims.

I’m not sure exactly what Jorjani means by radical reorganisation into a ‘hierarchically integrated organic state' (perhaps because I’m not familiar with far-right jargon), but I assume it’s nothing good. Like many people, I worry about what we increasingly see in some countries and circles, a fashionable fatigue with democracy, its messiness and compromises, and a yearning for some better form of government. The term ‘illiberal’ society touted by Hungary’s Viktor Orban pops up in the European media – not necessarily approvingly, but it reinforces the notion that it’s now a legitimate ‘thing’ – and similar ideas are starting to get exposure in the US, with the publicity the ‘alt-right’ is getting from the Trump campaign. In reality, surely, there’s no alternative to liberal democracy that would not sooner or later lead to secretive, corrupt authoritarian government and economic stagnation, and that would take decades to overthrow.

It would be little short of tragic if these repulsive endeavours were to enlist psi research – a little and struggling scientific discipline – as the basis of a core ideal. It’s unhelpful enough for ‘psi’ and ‘occult’ even to appear in the same sentence, without the addition of ‘Nazi’, ‘Himmler’ and ‘SS’, and no modern, forward-looking enterprise, as I believe psi research to be, can afford to be linked to fevered Atlantean fantasies. Of course people are free to say what they like. But if this is what Jorjani really thinks, I can’t see the psi research community continuing to embrace him with quite the enthusiasm it’s been showing until now.

Facelift

I do a lot of Web reading these days on my iPhone, an ideal way to fill otherwise wasted moments on trains and buses, standing in line in supermarkets, etc. So I thought it was more than time to give Paranormalia a facelift and make it responsive to smaller screens.

Easier said than done. Eight years ago there didn’t seem much to choose between Wordpress and Typepad. So I chose Typepad. Now Wordpress rules the world, and Typepad… is still Typepad. Wordpress users can choose from scores, possibly hundreds of themes designed to be responsive; Typepad has two. Unless you pay extra, as I’ve had to, in order to get a handful to choose from. Grrr.

None are what I’d have chosen, and I did think seriously for a while about migrating to Wordpress. In the end, I found one that just about works. (It’s only a blog, let’s not get too precious.) It’s still not working as intended on phones, but I think I know what the issue is, so hopefully that will happen soon. A work in progress.

Reborn as Twins

Here’s an intriguing case of the reincarnation type reported in an Indian national news site.

It concerns two 15 year old cousins who lived next to each other, and who accidentally drowned while playing near a pond in 2010. Recently, two twin boys aged five turned up on the doorstep of the two families claiming to be the cousins reborn. The families now accept this, as the twins recognised family members and accurately answered questions about the cousins’ past life. One of the fathers says the twin claiming to be his son reborn remembers ‘everything’, for instance that he’d kept his brown wallet inside a trunk in his room, which turned out still to be there. The boys also took them to the place where the cousins had died.

These are skimpy details, such as you’d expect to find in a short news report, and easy to dismiss if you disbelieve this sort of thing. But the report has a lot in common with cases documented by Ian Stevenson and other researchers, as can quickly be seen from this collection of brief case studies I compiled for the Psi Encyclopedia: the quick rebirth after accidental death, the compulsion to contact the families of the previous life, the families’ belief in the truth of the claim, based on numerous accurate details too small and intimate to be known by strangers. (There's another, general article on the topic by Professor Jim Tucker.)

It’s exactly the sort of case that researchers might usefully follow up, in which case there’s reason to think it would develop into the kind of richly evidenced narrative that characterises Stevenson’s country case study collections. A downside is that the contact has already been made, when ideally that event would be closely observed by some disinterested third party. But that rarely occurs, and at least this case has the merit of having developed in recent days – many (most?) of Stevenson’s cases were months or years old by the time he was able to investigate them. It occurs to me to wonder how much of this sort of work, if any, continues to be carried out in India and other countries where such cases surface.

The really striking feature here is the double rebirth, by people closely connected in the previous life. There are two connected cases in Stevenson’s Turkish collection, a husband and wife who were murdered in the same crime, but these seem to have been reborn into different circumstances (Ismail Altinkilic and Cevriye Bayri). Here, by contrast, we have cousins who were also close friends, reborn as twins.

A more tantalising parallel is with the case of the Pollock twins, one of two dramatic 1950s cases that helped fuel a fascination with reincarnation in the West, along with the Bridey Murphy hypnotic regression case. This is a well-known story, but the details are worth restating. Briefly, in May 1957 John and Florence Pollock lost their two daughters Joanna, 11, and Jacqueline, 6, who were run over in the street by a car driven by a suicidal woman. In October 1958, Florence Pollock gave birth to twin girls. John immediately noticed a birthmark on the face of the younger twin, a thin white line running down her forehead, that corresponded closely to a scar on the face of the younger of the dead girls that had been caused by a fall at age two. The older twin had a birthmark – a brown patch resembling a thumbprint – in precisely the same place where the older of the dead girls had had an identical birthmark. Since the twins were found to be monozygotic (from one single egg cell, and therefore genetically identical), this sort of physical difference was not to be expected.

Four months after the birth the family moved away. When the twins were aged three their parents brought them back to the town for a visit. According to John Pollock, they appeared familiar with the streets and with the location of landmarks such as the school and a playground, before these came into view. When, later, the twins were given dolls that had belonged to the dead girls, one accurately recalled the names that their previous owners had given them.

There were also sinister reminders of the tragedy itself. On one occasion the girls appeared terrified by the sight of a car that, although stationary, appeared to be coming towards them, screaming, ‘The car! The car! It’s coming at us.’ In another incident, their mother came upon one of them cradling the other’s head in her hands and saying, ‘The blood’s coming out of your eyes. That’s where the car hit you.’ At age five, the memories abruptly disappeared. The children were in their teens when they learned about the full circumstances from their parents, and know as little about the truth as anyone else.

The outstanding – and somewhat unnerving – feature of the Pollock case is that it appears to have been premeditated – in a literal sense. John Pollock, a Catholic, had developed a belief in reincarnation that naturally brought him into conflict with his priests. He became obsessive about this and started praying for God to send him a sign if reincarnation was true. After the tragedy occurred, Pollock first felt that it was God’s judgement on him for praying for proof of reincarnation, but became convinced nevertheless that this would be the sign, and that the girls would be reborn to him and his wife. Florence’s pregnancy naturally reinforced this belief, which he clung to, even though the odds against twins were 80 to 1, and doctors could find only one heartbeat and set of limbs.

I first read about this case in a sceptical book on past life memories by the British historian Ian Wilson, Mind Out of Time. I recall at the time (some thirty years ago) finding the story absurd, and John Pollock’s behaviour an appalling example of New Age gullibility. Later, I supposed that this jaundiced view had been encouraged by Wilson, but when I went back to check quite recently I wasn’t so sure. He points out, as he could hardly avoid doing, that all the information comes from Pollock himself, and as a fervent believer in reincarnation – someone who passionately wants it to be true – he’s hardly a credible witness. Yet I sense that Wilson is nevertheless quite impressed by it – his main target in the book are memories elicited by hypnotic regression.

The case clearly can't be held up as evidence. Despite its obvious similarities with the body of research – rebirth shortly after tragic death, curiously coincidental birthmarks, phobias related to the manner of death, familiarity with locations known to the previous personality, the quick fading of memories – its grossly histrionic features make it an outlier. But that's what makes it so striking. The chief thought I’m left with – a shocking one, if we're to accept this as a true account – is the extent to which obsessive thoughts might translate into real events in our world, and at what terrible costs for the people involved.