You really have to hand it to the human being.
It is the only animal on the planet, that can lie to itself and believe it.
When it comes to believing in what ain’t necessarily so, ghosts are right there up on the top of humanity’s list.
What is the oldest instinct in any creature? It’s the survival instinct.
What is the only creature that has a new part on its brain (the cerebral cortex), that allows it to have abstract thought, and imagination? It’s the human being.
Put the two of these together and you have a creature with foreknowledge of its own individual extinction. The fear that goes with it, and the abstract thought and imagination to create a lie that there is post mortem survival, when there is absolutely no valid proof of such claim.
May I introduce to you, gentle reader, the world of ghosts.
Now, maybe you don’t believe in ghosts, maybe you do. Maybe you would like to make a ghost out of this author for challenging your belief in the survival of the human being — in some form or another — after death.
Okay, but does anybody believe that textiles have an afterlife?
Does anybody believe that after you throw out the old sweater it travels to a wooly wonderland? Let’s assume not.
Then ask yourself, why is it, in the hundreds of photographs of supposed ghosts, they are always clothed? If anybody assumes double exposure, trick photography — go to the head of the class.
Then ask yourself, how did it come about that so many people were conducting séances and seeking the assistance of mediums to connect to the spirits of the dearly departed in the beginning of the twentieth century — an age of supposed science and industrialism?
It’s not a coincidence, that ‘the rise of spiritualism was in large part a response to the enormous number of young men who were killed in [World War I].’[1]
There’s a good business opportunity in selling spirits to those who have lost loved ones. And as the world never runs out of a war somewhere or another, it doesn’t seem that it’s going to run out of mediums any time soon either.
A bit of history for the believers out there — the Fox sisters.
We’re going back to the mid 19th century for this one, as two sisters gave a big boost to the boogeyman business:
‘Teenager Maggie Fox and her younger sister Kate claimed that there was a spirit communicating with them by making otherworldly raps on the walls and furniture of their house. When their mother asked how many children she’d had, the spirit appeared to rap out the correct number.’[2]
They became famous for their ability, and other mediums got the message and started performing their séances in public.
It was about forty years after the Fox sisters started faking it, that one of the sisters finally came clean and what manifested was, ‘Maggie’s confession to the New York World in 1888 that her and her sister’s communication with the dead had been a hoax — as well as her public demonstration of how she cracked joints to make “rapping” noises — was big news among people interested in spiritualism.’[3]
Now, let’s fast forward into the modern world of people known as ‘paranormal investigators’. They go out in search of ghosts with scientific gadgets that are about as related to the finding of spirits as they are to the determining the price of eggs on any given day in Cambodia.
Television is full of these ghost hunter shows, and the shows are full of something else.
One of the ‘tools’ of paranormal investigation is the ‘Tri-Meter’ which determines changes in electromagnetism, because, as has been repeatedly proven never, ghosts are electromagnetic.
An article in the Skeptical Inquirer, notes that ‘first, there is the ever-present issue that if ghosts did exist (which is still unconfirmed), we have no idea what physical properties they would possess or how they would interact with the environment. Therefore, we don’t know how to test for such entities.’[4]
Therefore, we can put away the remote sensing thermometer, the infra red cameras, and all of the other ‘scientific’ tools of the paranormal investigator.
Besides our ‘investigators,’ we have our mediums who supposedly communicate with our dearly departed — for a price, or a television show.
‘There are several ways a fraudulent medium can fabricate what seems like an accurate reading. The main two are called hot reading and cold reading.’[5]
Hot reading is when the medium does his or her homework in advance, and researches the sucker — I mean seeker — prior to the reading. That isn’t too difficult to do with this prognosticating tool known as the internet.
Cold reading is when the medium gets the message from answers to questions asked, and reactions observed. For example, if your client has a significant amount of calluses on the hands, it might indicate the type of work they do — and don’t.
If the client is wearing religious or occult jewelry, that can be a clue. A wedding ring, cheap shoes, the manner of dress, the posture — all can be clues for the medium.
And for those who claim, ‘But there’s no way Madam Zelda could have known about my grandfather’s pet octopus, Robespierre,’ there is a paranormal answer, but it isn’t spooks.
Perhaps Madam Zelda is telepathic, and if so, she had access to your knowledge and fed it back to you. We have a lot more ‘proof’ of ESP, than we do of G-H-O-S-T-S.
Let’s go to some sound reasoning, as in the sounds one hears in EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomena. This is where, by various nonsensical means, sounds are recorded which are, according to the paranormal investigators, voice communications from beyond.
The scene is always the same. The investigator plays a recording after telling you what’s on it, and what you would have heard without such instruction, becomes the very words the paranormal investigator primed you to believe were being said.
Allow me to introduce you to two real phenomena, paradoelia and phonemic restoration.
Paradoelia, is ‘a kind of misperception caused by meaningless, ambiguous stimuli perceived with meaning.’[6]
Phonemic restoration ‘refers to the tendency for people to hallucinate a phoneme replaced by a non-speech sound (e.g., a tone) in a word. This illusion can be influenced by preceding sentential context providing information about the likelihood of the missing phoneme.’[7]
Translating that mouthful into English, it’s a hallucination. A word is substituted by the mind, for a sound that isn’t a word.
Put those two words together, paradoelia and phonemic restoration, and you will see, appearing before you the actual reality of EVPs.
Why You Should Care
Can there be anything crueler than to deceive the surviving relative of a lost loved one, (for a price) that the deceased is floating around in the great beyond, and that their Filofax is full of things to do?
Can there be anything more ludicrous than aligning scientific measurement devices with post mortem survival theories that are anything but scientific?
The spirits tell me no.
[1] WORLD WAR I AND THE RISE OF SPIRITUALISM Taylor, The Atheist Scholar, https://atheistscholar.org/lecture/world-war-one-spiritualism/
[2] How a Hoax by Two Sisters Helped Spark the Spiritualism Craze Little, 10/3/23 https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ghost Hunting Gadgets Biddle, Skeptical Inquirer 8/2/21 https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/ghost-hunting-gadgets-the-rem-pod/
[5] Are All Mediums Frauds? Windbridge Research Center, https://www.windbridge.org/are-all-mediums-frauds/
[6] National Library of Medicine 4/24/22 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9103170/
[7] National Library of Medicine 11/18/11 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2963680/