Parapsychology by Caroline Watt

Author:Caroline Watt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780748887
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2016-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

7

Hauntings and apparitions

From the archive …

I live in an old house, and sometimes at night I wake up and see coloured lights flitting about the bedroom. It also seems as though the room turns a bit chilly and I may get goosebumps. I sense that the lights have a kind of ‘personality’, but I’m not too scared. This ‘ghost’ feels to me like a friendly chap, so I just acknowledge his presence, then turn over and go back to sleep. I know I’m not imagining things, because other friends of mine who’ve stayed overnight have had similar experiences. It’s just one of those things that happen in an old house, I expect.

(James, aged 71)

Often, when I tell people that I am a parapsychologist, they tell me about their own paranormal experiences. Many of these are ghostly occurrences. Sometimes ‘ghosts’ are sensed in people’s own homes, like James’s story above. Other ghostly events occur in public locations that have a reputation for being haunted. Despite the popular ‘white sheet’ stereotype, such experiences in fact occur in many different forms and sensory modalities. We also know that ghostly phenomena are not particularly rare: surveys suggest that around 30% of Americans believe that ghosts exist. Parapsychologists have been examining the evidence for ghosts, primarily focusing on locations with a reputation for being haunted. So what factors might lie behind these strange occurrences?

Apparitional experiences

The founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) pioneered the systematic study of apparitional experiences. In 1889, SPR president Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor arranged for over four hundred volunteers to carry out a five-year survey into the frequency and nature of such experiences, and their work remains one of the largest studies of paranormal experiences to date. Over seventeen thousand members of the public were asked whether they had had a vivid impression of seeing someone, or of hearing a voice, but had no normal explanation for their experience.

The 10% of interviewees who reported an apparitional experience were asked to describe what had happened. The Sidgwicks discovered several interesting patterns in their data. For example, more women than men reported apparitional experiences, causing some researchers at the time to argue that women were especially imaginative or sensitive to spirits of the deceased. More recently, this type of gender difference is seen as evidence of reporting bias: because women are stereotypically regarded as more intuitive and sensitive than men, they are more willing to report experiencing an apparition.

Almost a century later, parapsychologist Professor Donald West from the University of Cambridge set out to discover how modern-day apparitional experiences compared to those reported in the Sigwicks’ survey. West’s research was conducted on a more modest scale than its predecessor, and involved asking 850 people whether they had ever seen an apparition, or heard a ghostly voice, but could discover no normal explanation for the experience.

Some of West’s results were surprisingly similar to the Sidgwicks’ findings, with, for example, about 11% of people reporting apparitional experiences, and more women than men describing such experiences.

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