Tom
Corbett
Professor
Gary Pullman
English
101E, 8:30-9:45
6
August 2013
Ghosts: An
Endangered Species?
For
various reasons, from humanity’s earliest days, the spirits of the
dead, or ghosts, are alleged to have visited the living. Some return
to avenge their murders, others to warn loved ones of impending
catastrophes, and still others to assuage guilt so powerful that it
has survived the grave. If one can believe the stories associated
with ghosts, these spirits have haunted everything from ancient
graveyards and medieval castles to modern mansions and hotels. Short
story writers, novelists, and screenwriters would have their readers
and audiences believe that some ghosts have a sense of humor while
others are somber, indeed. They have appeared in--or have been the
subjects of--literary works as diverse as William Shakespeare’s
Hamlet and Macbeth, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas
Carol, H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Henry James’ The
Turn of the Screw, Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story,” Stephen
King’s The Shining and Bag of Bones, and Dean
Koontz’s Odd Thomas. Ghosts have appeared as guest stars, so
to speak, in such movies as Topper, Poltergeist,
Beetlejuice, Ghost Busters, The Sixth Sense, The
Others, An American Haunting, and many others, and in
episodes of such television shows as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,
Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost
Hunters. There is no doubt about it: ghosts have not only been
reported throughout history, but they have also enjoyed plenty of
airtime. The virtual omnipresence of ghosts is curious when one
considers that such entities may not actually exist. Although men and
women who believe in the existence of ghosts offer such evidence for
their existence as eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice
phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in
electromagnetic radiation, this evidence can be explained without
reference to the entities that are supposed to cause them, which
makes the actual existence of ghosts questionable at best.
Since
the beginning of time, people have claimed to have seen ghosts, and
believers in the existence of spirits of the dead declare that so
many people could not be deceived or lying in providing eye-witness
testimony. It does seem likely that some--perhaps many--such
eyewitnesses really do believe that they have seen ghosts.
Seeing is not believing, though, or should not be. Scientists regard
eyewitness testimony, or anecdotal or testimonial evidence, as they
prefer to call it, as being notoriously unreliable. In “anecdotal
(testimonial) evidence,” an Internet article concerning such
evidence, Robert T. Carroll points out that “anecdotes are
unreliable for various reasons,” including the distortion that
occurs as accounts are told and retold, exaggeration, confusion
regarding “time sequences,” “selective” memory,
misrepresented “experiences,” and a variety of other conditions,
including the effect upon their testimony that “biases, memories,
and beliefs” have. In the same article, Carroll also suggests that
gullibility, “delusions,” and even deliberate deceit also make
such testimony “inherently problematic and usually. . . impossible
to test for accuracy.”
Most
people who investigate reports concerning the presence or appearances
of ghosts also seek to photograph them. It has been said that cameras
do not lie, but the problem with photographic evidence is that it is
easy for photographers to doctor film. In his Internet article
concerning “spirit photography,” James Randi gives an example of
a rather crude attempt by some spiritualists to fool folks into
believing they had captured the apparition of the deceased author of
the Sherlock Holmes short stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, as
himself a spiritualist, was a frequent focus of “spook-snappers”
who “claimed to summon him up after his death in 1930” (“spirit
photography”). The problem, Randi says, with their evidence is that
it is “apparently a cut-out of a reversed photo placed in what
appears to be cotton wool”; otherwise, the spirit photograph
“agrees in detail, lighting, and expression with the original”
photograph of Doyle which was taken in the author’s “prime”
(“spirit photography”). In other words, the photograph is a fake.
A favorite technique among those who create fake spirit photographs,
Carroll points out in his online article, “spirit photography,”
is the “double exposure,” an example of which appears on the
article’s webpage. A double exposure occurs when the
same film is exposed to first one, and then another, object, with the
result that the image of the second object overlays or overlaps the
image of the first object; both images appear to have been
photographed together, at the same time and in the same place.
However, pictures of supposed ghosts sometimes result from the
photographer’s own incompetence or “natural events,” rather
than deliberate deceitfulness, Carroll concedes, including “various
flaws in camera or film, effects due to various exposures,
film-processing errors, lens flares (caused by interreflection
between lens surfaces), the camera or lens strap hanging over the
lens, effects of the flash reflecting off of mirrors, jewelry. . .
light patterns, polarization, [or] chemical reactions” (“spirit
photography”). When deliberate deceit occurs, photographers may
also use graphic arts software or computer graphics software to
deliberately manipulate photographs that are uploaded from the camera
into a computer.
If
neither eyewitness testimony nor photographs prove the existence of
ghosts, perhaps electronic voice phenomena (EVP) do so. A
sophisticated term for tape-recorded voices, EVP demonstrate the
presence of ghosts, some contend, since sensitive instruments have
recorded the disembodied voices of apparitions. However, as Carroll
indicates, in his Internet article, “electric voice phenomenon
(EVP),” skeptics point out that such sounds may not be voices at
all, but may be nothing more than the results of “interference from
a nearby CB [citizen’s band radio] operator or cross
modulation”--one radio station transmitting over another station’s
broadcast. Likewise, Carroll points out, in the same online article,
EVP may be nothing more than a listener’s interpreting “random
noise” as the statements of a disembodied voice or voices. In the
same Internet article, Carroll cites the explanation by Jim Alcock, a psychologist, for this
tendency: “When our brains try to
find patterns, they are guided in part by what we expect to hear. . .
. People can clearly ‘hear’ voices and words not just in the
context of muddled voices, but in a pattern of white noise in which
there are no words at all.” It seems that, for these reasons, EVP
is just as problematic as the proof of ghosts’ existence as
eyewitness reports and photographs have been shown to be.
Perhaps
the abrupt drop in temperature that some ghost hunters have both felt
and recorded will prove more convincing evidence of the existence of
the spirits of the dead. According to an anonymous “paranormal
researcher,” who writes, in answer to a question posted on Yahoo!
Answers, it is believed that such “cold spots” result from
ghosts’ draining of energy sources, such as electricity, as a means
to produce sounds or to speak. Supposedly, the anonymous writer says,
the energy the ghosts draw from the environment heats their own
energy, but this heat is then dissipated by the sound effect the
ghost produces with this borrowed energy. However, neither he nor any
other researcher seems able to explain how a disembodied spirit--that
is, an entity that has no lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, or
lungs--can speak, even if it does help itself to ambient energy
sources. Carroll finds such evidence to be less than persuasive. In
his Internet article, “ghost,” he notes that “many people
report physical changes in haunted places, especially a feeling of a
presence accompanied by temperature drop and hearing unaccountable
sounds” and, agreeing that such people “are not imagining
things,” he, nevertheless, discounts the notion that ghosts are
responsible for these phenomena. Instead, he says,
Scientists who have
investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes
and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as
empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency
sound waves (infrasound) produced by such mundane objects as
extraction fans (“ghost“).
Sudden
increases in electromagnetic radiation are “produced by such things
as power lines, electric appliances, radio waves, and microwaves,”
Carroll observes, in his Internet article “EMF (EMT).” Therefore,
he suggests, the idea that ghosts somehow cause such radiation seems
unlikely, and, indeed, “some think that electromagnetic fields are
inducing the haunting experience” (“ghost”).
Occasionally,
as a Halloween feature, some newspapers or television shows spotlight
a supposedly haunted house in which ghostly phenomena are described,
but then a natural explanation is provided for each of the supposedly
supernatural elements of the tale. One such account, by Cathy
Lubenski, appears in The San Diego Union-Tribune, under the
title “When your house has spooks, who are you going to call?”
Her story includes reports of slime oozing from walls, cold spots,
lights flashing on and off, doors opening by themselves, knocking
inside walls, foul odors, and howling. Were one living in a house in
which such phenomena were occurring, it might well seem that the
residence was indeed haunted. Instead, each of these phenomena had a
natural cause, not a supernatural origin, as Lubenski explains in her
article: The slime was from a bees’ nest in the attic; the cold
spots and opening and closing doors resulted from an air-conditioner
unit’s return airflow; the flashing lights were the effects of
shorts in the electrical system; the stench was produced by dead rats
in the wall and trapped sewer gas; and the howling and knocking
sounds were caused by the wind, blowing down a vent (I3).
Philosophers
advise people to adopt the principle of Occam’s razor, which says,
essentially, that one should never consider more possible causes than
the number that are necessary to explain why something happens. As
Carroll points out, in his Internet article on the topic, “Occam’s
razor is also called the principle of parsimony,” and “it
is usually interpreted to mean something like ‘the simpler the
explanation, the better’” or “as most people would put it
today, ‘don’t make any more assumptions than you have to’”
(“Occam’s razor”). To demonstrate the principle, Carroll offers
this example: “[Erik] Von Däniken could be right: maybe
extraterrestrials did teach ancient people art and engineering, but
we don’t need to posit alien visitations in order to explain the
feats of ancient people” (“Occam’s razor”). Therefore,
according to Occam’s razor, one should attribute “art and
engineering” to the human intelligence and ingenuity that men and
women develop as the result of their evolutionary, genetic and
environmental inheritance (“Occam‘s razor“). The same applies,
of course, with respect to ghosts. Eye-witness reports,
photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops,
and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation have been cited as
evidence for the existence of ghosts. However, these phenomena can be explained without
reference to such supernatural entities, a fact that makes the actual existence
of ghosts questionable at best. Therefore, one can conclude that it
is more likely that ghosts do not exist than to suppose that they do.
Nevertheless, some folks are likely to continue to believe in such spirits,
because ghosts add mystery to the everydayness of ordinary life, they
suggest that there is some sort of existence after death, and they
make interesting literary and dramatic characters that enliven short
stories, novels, and movies. Likewise, they are convenient symbols of
such emotional and psychological states and experiences as guilt,
regret, and remorse; of the memory of traumatic past experiences; and
of actual historical events. In the sense that human beings are, to
some extent, products of their own previous experiences and of
historical affairs, they are haunted, after all--by the ghosts
of their own pasts.
Works Cited
Carroll, Robert.
“anecdotal (testimonial) evidence.” The Skeptic's Dictionary.
5 Jun. 2012. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.
---. “electronic
voice phenomenon (EVP).” The Skeptic's Dictionary. 29 Mar.
2011. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.
---. “EMF (EMR).”
The Skeptic's Dictionary. 19 Dec. 2011. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.
---. “ghost.”
The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 11 Jan. 2013. Web 1 Aug. 2013.
---. “Occam’s
razor.” The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 18. Feb. 2012. Web. 1
Aug. 2013.
---. “psychic
photography (spirit photography).” The Skeptic’s Dictionary.
9 Dec. 2010. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.
"I believe
spirits use energy to communicate with us. But which energy sources?"
Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! 1 Apr. 2009. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.
Lubenski, Cathy.
"When your house has spooks, who are you going to call?"
The San Diego Union-Tribune. 29 Oct. 2000: I3. Print.
Randi, James.
“spirit photography.” An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and
Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. James Randi Education
Foundation. 1 Jan. 2007. Web. 1 Aug. 2013.
