Emma Barrett-Brown: Conversations About Ghosts

Ok so as some of you may know from following my work, I have been writing a book of "true" ghost stories for about a million years. I'm still collecting stories so if you have one please do send me an email via the address on my profile :)

I have written an essay for the end of the book to discuss the concept of ghosts and ghost stories further. To add context, in my final year of my psych degree before I moved over to History, I decided to write my dissertation on the development of stories - more specifically ghost stories. In the end I did end up working on something a bit different (but still ghost related!). This essay began then and was tweaked, edited and perfected recently.

In her 2007 research paper on ghosts in folklore, Jeannie Thomas made an assertion which I think is very relevant:

‘regardless of what scholars assert, people will go on narrating anomalous experiences and choosing to believe in either scientific or supernatural explanations.’[1]

This is basically stating that no matter what researchers say, in the end people tend to have very strong opinions about whether ghost stories have a scientific or supernatural cause, but regardless of that, people will continue to tell them! And perhaps this is the case. Paranormal experiences and beliefs are described generally as the belief in, or experience of, phenomena which ‘violate basic limiting principles of science’.[2] That is, that they are outside of what would be considered acceptable if the laws of science are adhered to. In 2009 this view was challenged by a researcher named Irwin, stating that this definition is not adequate and that to dismiss the study of paranormal phenomena is to dismiss any chance to further the understanding of it.[3] It could be argued that these experiences and beliefs are natural in cause, and that the current views and understandings of science are simply not developed enough yet to add explanations. There is also an offshoot of psychology called Parapsychology which tried to find scientific proof of paranormal experiences too. This is where I come into the picture. As a Psychology undergraduate, I had the honour of working with Susan Blackmore (renowned believer turned sceptic through research) to conduct my own study into the way that people perceive ghosts, tell ghost stories, and formulate an understanding of the supernatural, from a psychologist’s perspective. Unfortunately I left the field after my degree but perhaps if I had stuck with it, my career might have been very different indeed!

Whilst the concept of a spirit or ghost has been around for longer than any scholar can pinpoint, the classic ‘ghost story’ as we know it now, seems to have begun development somewhere in the medieval period. It is here that the modern ghost was born and became separate from the medieval understanding of the term.[4] And of course, there was something of a burst of ghost stories too, especially in late medieval (Tudor) England. Henry and his wives who are said to haunt various royal houses, Shakespeare with his plays such as Hamlet. However, it is the long nineteenth century (1770 – 1900ish) which has been identified as the ‘golden age of gothic’. It is here where the ghost story as we now know it really blossomed, and began to take the format we know today.

As to that format, one thing which I have come across more than once, is the notion of ‘common elements’ in ghost stories. These are things which have now become a part of the fabric which makes up the stories themselves and tend to wind themselves into lots of tales. Cliché’s if you like. These cliché’s when they come up, do tend to ring alarm bells for me. In some cases it’s more of a psychological phenomenon where people feel that they need to weave such things into a ghost story to have it taken seriously. For me, however, they tend to do the opposite, although this does not necessarily invalidate the story! ‘I fainted’ or I ‘screamed’ are examples of this. Unless perhaps it was the ghost of somebody very close to a person, for example, fainting is unlikely. In fear, our bodies tend to elicit a fight or flight response and fainting is a very last resort. It’s also actually very unusual for a fear response in this way to result in a scream! Little shouts, or exclamations when shocked, yes, but rarely full-blown screams.

There are, of course, other horror ghost clichés which might make me cast off a story. I might roll my eyes at demons, possession, disembodied voices telling a person to ‘get out’, red eyes, and so on. I’m also very aware that the less impressive stories – knocking, rattles, the old standard things that go bump in the night, are often easily explainable outside of the paranormal.

Another thing I look out for is the escalating story. This is a horror movie format which is often picked up by ghost-story tellers. It starts with a simple thing that wakes a person in the night, then two or three things happen. With each event it worsens, the scares get bigger, the ghouls get more terrifying until suddenly people are forced to flee in the middle of the night leaving all their possessions behind (yes, I am looking at you, Amityville!). Whilst that is an extreme example, it’s amazing how many stories follow this pattern.

Another final thought on this, is that in my years of collecting these stories one thing that I don’t think is that obvious is the actual rarity of the full-blown apparition. That is not to say that I don’t believe it exists, in fact to the contrary there are a few accounts of them in this book, it’s just something I have noticed. More often there’s a bad feeling, accompanied by noises, or partial manifestations. It’s also rarer to see an apparition for a prolonged time as most of the sightings recounted here are very brief and fleeting. This ties in with the work of Wiseman who found an interesting pattern, that of the 30% of the people who claim some belief in ghosts, 15% claim this is due to having had an experience. Of this 15% only a third claim to have actually seen a fully-fledged figure. Of the other 66% of people claiming to have had a ghostly experience, at least half claimed to have experienced something more abstract such as orbs, mists, or shadows.

Due to this, the results of one of the parapsych studies I wrote and conducted was quite surprising. This was a photograph identification study, where people were given pictures of ghostly phenomenon and asked to state if they were real examples or not (they were actually all faked – by me!). This study showed that people were actually more likely to consider a full-apparition to be genuine than an orb etc. This study also showed that paranormal belief was not significantly related to interpreting ambiguous stimuli as paranormal – an interesting finding.[5] Evidence against the theory that paranormal experiences are simply misattributions of ambiguous stimuli, means that people are not, on the whole, mistaking random mists etc for ghosts. If this were the case, then it would be expected that more abstract photographs would have even identified than the more obvious figure pictures.

So what does this all mean? Honest answer, it means that the jury is still out! Currently paranormality and science are still at odds, but no longer the distinct rivals they once were. Whilst science cannot definitively explain the paranormal. It can’t disprove it either and until this changes that ever ongoing debate about the existence of ghost will continue.

[1] Jeannie Thomas. ‘The Usefulness of Ghost Stories.’ In Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (2007)

[2] As first described in 1949

[3] Irwin, Harvey J. The psychology of paranormal belief: A researcher's handbook. Univ of Hertfordshire Press, 2009.

[4] Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth Century England. Routledge, 2015. (introduction).

[5] This study was never published, but I can produce copies on request. Emma Barrett, The Interpretation of Ambiguous Stimuli in Ghost Photography. (Plymouth University, 2014)