Ghosts: An Endangered Species?

Copyright 2010 by Gary Pullman

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, other 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, they 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 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’s 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 couldn’t 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 isn’t believing, though, or shouldn’t 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 affect upon their testimony that “biases, memories, and beliefs” have. 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’d 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.” 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 the 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, 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.

When deliberate deceit occurs, photographers may also use graphic art 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, or 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,” 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, 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 for this tendency by Jim Alcock, a psychologist: “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 energy they 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. Neither this researcher nor any other 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. Once again, 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.

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 adds, 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. The ghostly phenomena are described, and then a natural explanation is provided for each of the supposedly supernatural elements of the tale. One such account, by Cathy Lubenski, appeared under the title “When your house has spooks, who are you going to call” in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her story included 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. The slime was from a bee’s nest in the attic; the cold spots resulted from an air-conditioner unit’s return airflow; the stench was an effect of dead rats in the wall and trapped sewer gas; the howling was the wind, blowing down a vent. 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, “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.’” 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.” Therefore, according to Occam’s razor, one should not 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. The same applies, of course, with respect to ghosts. The fact that eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation that have been cited as evidence for the existence of ghosts can be explained without reference to these supernatural entities, which are supposed to cause them, 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 are likely to believe in them because they 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, 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 pasts.

Works Cited

Carroll, Robert. "anecdotal (testimonial) evidence." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

---. "electronic voice phenomenon (EVP)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009.

---. "EMF (EMR)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

---. "ghost." The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009.

"I believe spirits use energy to communicate with us. But which energy sources?" Yahoo! Answers. 2009. Yahoo!. 22 May 2009.

Lubenski, Cathy. "When your house has spooks, who are you going to call." The San Diego Union-Tribune 29 Oct 2000: C6. Print.

Randi, James. "spirit photography." An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. 2007. James Randi Education Foundation. 22 May 2009

Ghosts: An Endangered Species?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Figure 1. Double exposure

Source: The Skeptic's Dictionary

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 the murder, other 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, they 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 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 such television shows as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost Hunters. There’s 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 couldn’t 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 isn’t believing, though, or shouldn’t 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 affect upon their testimony that “biases, memories, and beliefs” have. 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’d 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.” 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 the 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, is the “double exposure,” an example of which appears on the article’s webpage (see Figure 1). 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.

When deliberate deceit occurs, photographers may also use graphic art 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, or 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,” 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, 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 for this tendency by Jim Alcock, a psychologist: “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 energy they 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. Neither this researcher nor any other 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. Once again, 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.

Sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation is “produced by such things as power lines, electric appliances, radio waves, and microwaves,” Carroll observes, in his Internet article “EMF (EMT).” Therefore, he adds, 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. The ghostly phenomena are described, and then a natural explanation is provided for each of the supposedly supernatural elements of the tale. One such account, by Cathy Lubenski, appeared under the title “When your house has spooks, who are you going to call” in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her story included 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. The slime was from a bee’s nest in the attic; the cold spots resulted from an air-conditioner unit’s return airflow; the stench was an effect of dead rats in the wall and trapped sewer gas; the howling was the wind, blowing down a vent. 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, “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.’” 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.” Therefore, according to Occam’s razor, one should not 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. The same applies, of course, with respect to ghosts. The fact that eye-witness reports, photographs, electronic voice phenomena, abrupt temperature drops, and sudden increases in electromagnetic radiation that have been cited as evidence for the existence of ghosts can be explained without reference to these supernatural entities, making which are supposed to cause them 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 are likely to believe in them because they 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, 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 pasts.

Works Cited

Carroll, Robert. "anecdotal (testimonial) evidence." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009 http://www.skepdic.com/testimon.html.

---. "electronic voice phenomenon (EVP)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. http://www.skepdic.com/evp.html.

---. "EMF (EMR)." The Skeptic's Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009 http://www.skepdic.com/emf.html.

---. "ghost." The Skeptic’s Dictionary. 23 Feb 2009. 22 May 2009 http://www.skepdic.com/ghosts.html.

"I believe spirits use energy to communicate with us. But which energy sources?." Yahoo! Answers. 2009. Yahoo!. 22 May 2009 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080819160007AAjvMQ7.

Lubenski, Cathy. "When your house has spooks, who are you going to call." The San Diego Union-Tribune 29 Oct 2000: C6. Print.

Randi, James. "spirit photography." An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural . 2007. James Randi Education Foundation. 22 May 2009 http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/spirit%20photography.html

Fallacious Horrors

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, an ad hoc hypothesis “is one created to explain facts that seem to refute one’s theory.” As an example of this hypothesis, the lexicographer of doubt states, “For example, ESP researchers have been known to blame the hostile thoughts of onlookers for unconsciously influencing pointer readings on sensitive instruments. The hostile vibes, they say, made it impossible for them to duplicate a positive ESP experiment.”
A nice bit of pseudo-logic, to be sure, but this one, reported in the same article, is even more unseemly and amusing:

Ad hoc hypotheses are common in defense of the pseudoscientific theory known as biorhythm theory. For example, there are very many people who do not fit the predicted patterns of biorhythm theory. Rather than accept this fact as refuting evidence of the theory, a new category of people is created: the arhythmic. In short, whenever the theory does not seem to work, the contrary evidence is systematically discounted.

The true believer, a stereotypical horror story character--one who believes in all manner of strange events for no other reason than that he wants to believe--often uses the ad hoc hypothesis in reverse. Instead of seeking to explain away facts that refute his theories, the true believer uses them to refute more commonly accepted (i. e., scientific) explanations for various phenomena and effects. For example, a scientific observer might argue that a person discovered his car keys in an unexpected place because he’d forgotten that he’d placed them in this location earlier in the day. The true believer would argue, instead, that the keys’ being found in an unexpected location proves that the house is haunted, for it was the ghosts who haunt the house who’d moved the keys to the new location.

Other examples of fallacious reasoning that can benefit writers of horror fiction include communal reinforcement, selective thinking, subjective validation, testimonial evidence (anecdotal evidence), and wishful thinking. The Skeptic’s Dictionary defines and exemplifies these and many other fallacies as well, but, of course, it is up to the writer of horror fiction to apply them to his or her--or to his or her characters’--thinking in the service of his or her storylines.

Another good source for skeptical wisdom is James Randi Educational Foundation’s An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural.

How to Haunt a House: Part V

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In the four previous posts in this series, we deduced a number of principles, or rules, that apply, in general, to fiction that involves a haunted house. These rules can be used to create a haunted house in both printed and cinematic horror stories.

This post brings these rules together in a simple list that is likely to be handier and dandier than the separate lists in the previous posts. In writing about fiction, especially fiction that is often about supernatural or paranormal events, it’s a good thing to have one’s guidelines readily available.

These nine rules apply to the interior of the haunted residence:

1. It should be spacious--the bigger, the better.
2. It should house many rooms.
3. A haunted house often symbolizes its resident’s state of mind.
4. A haunted house is often associated with the resident’s past.
5. A haunted house may be the portal to another dimension or to hell itself.
6. To be, horrors must be perceived (even mysterious phenomena, whether paranormal or supernatural, must be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and/or touched).
7. A haunted house will probably have an emotional effect upon its resident.
8. The phenomena associated with a haunting should also be associated with the resident and with his or her mental states, moral failings, or personal experiences.
9. A haunting may result from a condition or set of circumstances other than ghostly habitation (mental illness, practical joke, hoax).

These four rules apply to the grounds upon which the domicile stands:

1. Relate the place with death and decay.
2. Ensure that the estate is at least ten acres in size, remembering that the bigger the grounds, the better.
3. Make the estate isolated, and surround it with a high wall or a forest.
4. Associate the house with its resident (the story’s protagonist).

By the way, you might also check out the entries that are relevant to ghosts, poltergeists, and haunted houses in both The Skeptic’s Dictionary and James Randi Educational Foundation’s An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural for information and tips as to how to introduce, maintain, and develop a skeptical parallel to the supernatural or paranormal explanations of the haunting. You may also want to read the Chillers and Thrillers posts “Alternative Explanations,” Parts I through IV. Horror fiction works best, perhaps, when the author gives the reader both a natural and a supernatural or paranormal explanation of the bizarre incidents in a horror story, as we show in “Horror By the Slice: The Lurking Fear” and “Creating Mood in Horror Fiction.”

Have fun in creating your house of horrors!

Alternative Explanations, Part IV: Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part III: Telekinetic Characters,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk claims that some people make concerning their ability to move or affect objects simply by the use of mental powers, an act known as telekinesis. In the final part of this series, we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might challenge the belief that vampires, werewolves, and zombies actually exist.

Vampires are corpses that demons possess and animate, causing them to terrorize the living, upon whose blood they feed, sucking it from their victims’ jugular veins after piercing them with their vampire fangs. Anyone whom the vampire bites also becomes a vampire, an incident that has permitted a mathematician to deliver devastating proof that vampires do not and cannot exist.

According to “Math proves that the Buffy universe harbors no more than 512 vampires,” Costa Efthimiou and Sohang Gandi, authors of Ghosts, Vampires, and Goblins: Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality, vampires do not and cannot exist because, if they did, they would soon “depopulate the earth.” According to the authors, were a vampire to appear on the earth in the year 1600, when the world’s population numbered 536,870,911 people, and this vampire fed upon only one person per month, thereby transforming him or her into a vampire, each of which newly created vampire also fed upon one human per month, transforming him or her into another vampire, the whole human population of the planet would have been transformed into bloodsucking fiends in only thirty months, despite any offset that would be gained by the human birth rate. Therefore, Efthimiou and Gandi conclude:

. . . that vampires cannot exist, since their existence contradicts the existence of human beings. Incidentally, theological proof that we just presented is of a type known as reductio ad absurdum, that is, reduction to the absurd. Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.

Sorry, Buffy Summers, but your career as a “vampire slayer” and the difficult sacrifices it entailed as you sought to defend the world against bloodsucking fiends were totally unnecessary and ridiculous, and you could have had the normal life that you so often claimed to crave. Apparently, you really were nothing more than the paranoid schizophrenic that you were diagnosed to be in one of your television series’ episodes.

Wait a minute! Buffy also fought other paranormal and supernatural threats, including demons, ghosts, werewolves, and zombies. If one or more of these monsters actually exist, maybe she wasn’t completely crazy, after all, and maybe she didn’t waste the best years of her life.

We’ve already dealt with demons, ghosts, and vampires. But what about werewolves and zombies? Might they exist? Somewhere? Somehow?

A werewolf is a animal (or a human) that can switch back and forth from being a human (or an animal) to being an animal (or a human) and is believed to devour humans. (It’s all rather complicated.) Unfortunately, as our spoilsport extraordinaire, The Skeptic’s Dictionary, points out, “there are no documented cases of any human turning into a wolf and back.” The best we can come up with is lycanthropy, a delusion in which its victim believes he’s a wolf, just as a person may believe that he is possessed by demons. Perhaps especially hirsute men have experienced this delusion, adding to the belief that men and wolves are--or, at times, can be--pretty much the same thing. Extreme hairiness does occur, in both men and women (ever heard of the “bearded lady”?), usually as a result of the genetic disorder known as hypertrichosis or such disorders as adrenal virilism, basophilic adenoma of the pituitary, masculinizing ovarian tumors, or Stein-Leventhal syndrome. At least, that’s what your horror story’s skeptical character can suggest to explain the misguided beliefs of others that werewolves are afoot. The Skeptic’s Dictionary article on “werewolves” links to photographs of people who are afflicted with these conditions.

We’re going to conclude our review of paranormal and supernatural phenomena and the explanations that a skeptical character may offer as alternatives to those that claim that these phenomena result from the existence and exercise of mysterious, occult powers by considering the zombie.

According to the drill, zombies are soulless bodies created by voodoo sorcerers. Scientists believe that zombies are actual people who are drugged, kidnapped, buried alive, disinterred, and kept as slave laborers:

The black magic of voodoo sorcerers allegedly consists of chemicals, various poisons (perhaps that of the puffer fish) which immobilize a person for days, as well as hallucinogens administered upon revival. The result is a complacent, paralyzed, or brain damaged creature used by the sorcerers as slaves, viz., the zombies.

The other kind of zombie--the corpse that is revived but without benefit of the soul it once had, seems unlikely (okay, downright impossible) to anyone beyond the age of nine or ten, so if it’s this kind that’s supposed to be running loose through your story’s setting, the skeptical character has every right to cast aspersions upon the view that the antagonists are really and truly revenants. Indeed, his or her failure to do so would be cause to transform this undoubting doubter into a zombie him- or herself.

Sources Cited in the “Alternative Explanations” series.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters
Ghosts, Vampires, and Goblins: Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality

Alternative Explanations, Part III: Telekinetic and Levitating Characters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part II: Clairvoyants,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk alleged clairvoyance. In Part III, we will take a look at how the skeptical character in your horror story may seek to dismiss or provide a natural explanation for alleged telekinetic characters such as Stephen King’s Carrie White and levitating characters such as Regan MacNeil.

Telekinesis refers to the alleged power of some individuals to move or affect material objects with nothing more than the power of their minds. Uri Geller is one such individual. He claims to be able to bend spoons and to perform other feats involving material objects (keys and stopwatches are favorites) by exercising his mind alone.

Scientists have a simple explanation for apparent telekinetic feats in relation, at least, to such objects as pencils and other lightweight things: the supposedly telekinetic person surreptitiously blows on the object that he or she seeks to move.

According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, Uri Geller met his match when he appeared on The Tonight Show. The host, Johnny Carson, was a former professional magician, and he switched the stock of spoons that Geller had brought to the show to bend with a supply of Carson’s own. Geller decided that he was not up to snuff that night and refused to try to bend the unfamiliar spoons. Carson and a fellow professional magician, the famous debunker James Randi, suspected that Geller had “softened” his spoons before bringing them onto the show, which prompted Carson to make the switch.

Randi got into a protracted and controversial public argument with Geller that included a series of lawsuits filed by each party against the other and a chapter in Randi’s book on hoaxes and frauds, Flim-Flam, or The Truth About Geller. In addition to the blowing-of-lightweight-objects explanation that some scientists have advanced to discredit apparent telekinesis, your horror story’s skeptical character may wish to employ some of Randi’s debunking arguments, among which is that Geller, in handling the spoons, surreptitiously bends them.

Another who has exposed Geller’s apparent trickery is Massimo Polidoro, a founder of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CICAP), who discovered a videotape that shows Geller, who appeared on an Italian television program to demonstrate his telekinesis by bending a key and stopping a watch with nothing more than an exercise of his mental powers, apparently cheating at one of the tasks: “Geller can be seen taking out the stem of the watch to move its hands, maybe thinking that the move went unnoticed.”

Surreptitious blowing, bending, and using sleight-of-hand tricks seem to explain the inexplicable powers of Uri Geller, but what about those who claim to be able to rise into thin air and float or hover without benefit of any mechanical devices--in other words, to levitate themselves through the application of telekinesis? What might your horror story’s skeptical character say about this alleged paranormal ability? The Skeptic’s Dictionary attributes levitation to the use of “’invisible’ string, magnets, and other trickery.”

One of the most chilling levitation scenes occurs in The Exorcist, in which Regan MacNeil levitates out of her bed and hovers within a foot of the ceiling, shocking the priests who have been called to her house to exorcize the demon--or legion of demons--who are inhabiting her body. In her case, according to the film, at least, the devil made her do it, but how else can people levitate--or pretend to levitate themselves, others, or objects?

Saints are alleged to have levitated themselves, as have Indian fakirs. Likewise, witches claim to be able to make their bodies--or objects--float off the ground and soar through the air. (When witches levitate, it’s known as transvection.)

In one levitation trick, a magician used a steel beam to support his assistant, whom he was claiming to levitate. After she was horizontal above the stage floor, he passed a hula hoop around her body, from her head to her feet. The section of the hoop that he held between his hands had been removed so that the resulting gap could be passed “through” the beam, creating the illusion that there was no obstruction to impede the passage of the hoop. The result was to make it appear that the woman really was floating unsupported in midair, or levitating. The effect was quite amazing--until the magician revealed how he’d accomplished the trick. In a videotape on The Skeptic’s Dictionary website, famed magician Chris Angel demonstrates another method of levitating.

Your horror story’s skeptical character could challenge a levitating character by suggesting that the trick is accomplished in one of these ways or by the use of another technique. Magicians have worked out several variations by which to make themselves, other persons, and even inanimate objects “float” in, through, and around in thin air--or seem to do so.

Sources Cited and Further Reading:

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters

In Part IV of “Alternative Explanations,” we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might debunk claims that such creatures as vampires, werewolves, and zombies exist.

Alternative Explanations, Part II: Clairvoyants

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Alternative Explanations, Part I: Demons and Ghosts,” we considered ways by which skeptics seek to debunk these paranormal or supernatural phenomena. In Part II, we will take a look at how the skeptical character in your horror story may seek to dismiss or explain alleged clairvoyants.

A clairvoyant is a person who can see things beyond the limits of ordinary vision, including things that haven’t taken place yet (precognition) or things that have occurred already (retrocognition). One might say that he clairvoyant is blessed with phenomenal foresight and hindsight. These powers are said to derive from psychic abilities, except when they are given to one by the devil, and are (except in the devil-made-me-do-it instances), as such, paranormal, rather than supernatural, in nature.

In its’ Voice of Reason series, Live Science’s “Choosing Psychic Detectives Over Real Ones,” by Joe Nickell, discusses the remote viewing capabilities that psychic detectives allegedly have. According to the article, psychic detectives use a variety of once “discredited techniques” to acquire their visions of tomorrow, yesterday, and far away, including “astrology. . . spirit guides. . . dowsing rods and pendulums . . . psychometry,” or the use of “psychic impressions from objects connected with a particular person,” and “auras,” noting that neither “such disparity of approach” nor “specific tests” offer “a credible basis for psychic sleuthing.”

Clairvoyants are regarded as having been successful by naïve law enforcement officers on occasion because they fall for a technique known as retrofitting:

. . . this after-the-fact matching -- known as "retrofitting" -- is the secret behind most alleged psychic successes. For example, the statement, "I see water and the number seven," would be a safe offering in almost any case. After all the facts are in, it will be unusual if there is not some stream, body of water, or other source that cannot somehow be associated with the case. As to the number seven, that can later be associated with a distance, a highway, the number of people in a search party, part of a license plate number, or any of countless other possible interpretations. . . . Many experienced police officers have fallen for the retrofitting trick.

In addition, psychic detectives, Nickell, maintains, rely on a number of other simple, but sometimes-successful ploys:

Psychics may also enhance their reputations by exaggerating their successes, minimizing their failures, passing off secretly gleaned information as psychically acquired, and other means, including relying on others to misremember what was actually said.

Your horror story’s skeptical character may also critique claims of the paranormal and supernatural nature of clairvoyance by debunking the sources that clairvoyants claim for their powers: “astrology. . . spirit guides. . . dowsing rods and pendulums . . . psychometry,” or the use of “psychic impressions from objects connected with a particular person,” and “auras.” If the underlying source for clairvoyance can be shown to be false, any powers that are said to derive from these sources must also be seen as false or non-existent.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary gives a succinct definition of “astrology”:

Astrology, in its traditional form, is a type of divination based on the theory that the positions and movements of celestial bodies (stars, planets, sun, and moon) at the time of birth profoundly influence a person's life. In its psychological form, astrology is a type of New Age therapy used for self-understanding and personality analysis (astrotherapy). In both forms, it is a manifestation of magical thinking.

Even in William Shakespeare’s time, it was difficult for educated people to believe that the movements of heavenly bodies had any cause-and-effect on people. “The fault. . . lies in ourselves, not in the stars,” he has Julius Caesar tell Brutus.

Astrology is an ancient and complex system, and, as such, it cannot be completely debunked here, but some critical notes that your horror story’s skeptical character could address to the clairvoyant who maintains that his or her power to see past, future, or distant events include these, which appear in The Skeptic’s Dictionary’s essay concerning “astrology”:

Astrologers emphasize the importance of the positions of the sun, moon, planets, etc., at the time of birth. However, the birthing process isn’t instantaneous. There is no single moment that a person is born. The fact that some official somewhere writes down a time of birth is irrelevant. . . . Why are the initial conditions more important than all subsequent conditions for one’s personality and traits? Why is the moment of birth chosen as the significant moment rather than the moment of conception? Why aren’t other initial conditions such as one’s mother’s health, the delivery place conditions, forceps, bright lights, dim room, back seat of a car, etc., more important than whether Mars is ascending, descending, culminating, or fulminating?. . . . Why isn’t the planet Earth—the closest large object to us in our solar system--considered a major influence on who we are and what we become? Other than the sun and the moon and an occasional passing comet or asteroid, most planetary objects are so distant from us that any influences they might have on anything on our planet are likely to be wiped out by the influences of other things here on earth. . . . Initial conditions are less important than present conditions to understanding current effects on rivers and vegetables. If this is true for the tides and plants, why wouldn’t it be true for people?

Clairvoyance of a type, known as remote viewing, was once popular with the U. S. federal government, which has way too much taxpayer money on its hands. Supposedly, remote viewing clairvoyants, supplied with nothing more than paper, pencils, and map coordinates of distant points of military or intelligence interest could sketch whatever actually existed on these sites. The Federation of American Scientists published the findings of a study of remote viewing’s effectiveness. The study concluded that the remote viewers’ sketches were sometimes interpreted according to the researchers’ own familiarity with the targets, which made them believe that the drawings were more detailed and accurate than they were; that results that included information supplied by historical sources were always ,ore accurate than results that required predictions on the part of the remote viewers themselves; and that sketches were too vague and general to be of any use to the military or intelligence agencies. The agencies underwriting these experiments in remote viewing--at taxpayer--meaning your and my--expense discontinued them as unworthy of continued research.

The same conclusions might well be reached with regard to the efficacy of clairvoyance in general, since remote viewing is a specific type of the same activity.

Although the use of spirit guides need not include channeling, the criticisms against channeling may be directed against the idea of spirit guides as well. The language and dialect that spirit guides use is often at odds with the time period from which they are alleged to hail. The Skeptic’s Dictionary offers an example:

1987, ABC showed a mini-series based on [Shirley] MacLaine's book Out on a
Limb, which depicts MacLaine conversing with spirits through channeler
Kevin Ryerson. One of the spirits who speaks through Ryerson is a contemporary
of Jesus called "John." "John" doesn't speak Aramaic--the language of Jesus--but
a kind of Elizabethan English.

The banality of spirit guides is also susceptible to doubt:

One of MacLaine's favorite channelers is J. Z. Knight who claims to channel a
35,000 year-old Cromagnon warrior called Ramtha. . . . Some of her patrons pay
as much as $1,000 to attend her seminars where she dispenses such wisdom as "[we
must] open our minds to new frontiers of potential."

Shouldn’t spirits who have gone on to enlightenment utter proverbs equal in wisdom to those of Buddha and Christ?

Dowsing rods and pendulums--what would such dubious devices have to do with clairvoyants’ supposed abilities to see past, present, and remote events? Nothing, other than the use of dowsing rods is supposed to help their users detect subterranean substances such as oil, water, and metal. According to The Skeptic’s Dictionary:

In 1949, an experiment was conducted in Maine by the American Society for
Psychical Research. Twenty-seven dowsers "failed completely to estimate either
the depth or the amount of water to be found in a field free of surface clues to
water, whereas a geologist and an engineer successfully predicted the depth at
which water would be found in 16 sites in the same field."

The same article also recounts an experiment in which

James Randi tested some dowsers using a protocol they all agreed upon. If they could locate water in underground pipes at an 80% success rate they would get $10,000 (now the prize is over $1,000,000). All the dowsers failed the test, though each claimed to be highly successful in finding water using a variety of non-scientific instruments, including a pendulum. Says Randi, "the sad fact is that dowsers are no better at finding water than anyone else. Drill a well almost anywhere in an area where water is geologically possible, and you will find it.

It seems clear that dowsing is a highly dubious enterprise, but, even if it works, what has it to do with seeing future, past, or future events? None that many can detect.

Not to be deterred, if astrology, spirit guides, and the use of dowsing rods and pendulums can’t explain how clairvoyants can do what they claim they do, maybe clairvoyance is the result of psychometry. According to psychometry, by handling objects associated with a person, the handler can discern facts about the property’s owner, often by seeing the owner’s aura, the “a colored outline or set of contiguous outlines, allegedly emanating from the surface of an object.”

Most critics--including your horror story’s skeptical character, perhaps--associate psychometry with magical thinking, selective thinking, cold reading, subjective evaluation, and shot gunning, all of which themselves have fatal logical and scientific flaws. Like many paranormal and supernatural beliefs, clairvoyance is interlinked with a complex of other such ideas and attitudes, which makes debunking it in a space less than that of a large volume difficult, if not impossible.

Therefore, the reader must take upon him- or herself the task of researching these lesser, but related, topics. To assist the aspiring horror writer in this task, we list these sources:

The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Live Science
Federation of American Scientists
NOVA Online
MythBusters

In Part III of “Alternative Explanations,” we’ll consider how your horror story’s skeptical character might debunk claims about other paranormal and supernatural phenomena.