Antique ghosts

Once upon a time, there was a man who was looking for a house to buy.  He came upon a large home on a lovely piece of land, something that most would consider a mansion, at a very cheap price.  He was interested, but (understandably) suspicious -- at that price, there had to be something wrong with it.

"What's the catch?" he asked the seller.

The owner reluctantly admitted that it had a reputation for being haunted.  Everyone who had taken up residence in the house, he said, had been visited nightly by the horrifying specter of a man in chains, whose appearance was so ghastly that it made sleep pretty much impossible.  Not only that, but even when the ghost wasn't visible, there was a palpable miasma of fear around the house.  No one, the owner said, stayed there long; some had even fallen ill from the effects of the haunting.

The prospective buyer thanked the seller for his honesty, and (to the seller's shock) said he was interested in purchasing the home anyhow.  The owner, simultaneously giving thanks for his luck and questioning the buyer's sanity, sold him the house, and in due time, the transaction was completed and the new owner moved in.

Sure enough, on the first night, the man was awakened by the rattling of chains.  Soon a hideous ghost appeared, an old man dressed in ragged clothes, chains around his waist, his face pale and glowing with a sickly light.  Unmoved, the house's new owner stood his ground, and asked the spirit what he wanted.

The specter crooked one finger as if in summons, then turned away, leading the owner outside, to a place on the property.  The ghost met the owner's eyes, pointed downward -- then vanished.

The next day, the owner contacted the local magistrates, who gave the order to dig at the place the ghost had indicated.  After an hour's hard work, they uncovered a skeleton -- still bound by chains.  Who the man had been was unknown; it was obvious the body had been in the ground for a long while.  But the house's new owner made sure that the skeleton was respectfully unearthed, its fetters removed, and given a proper burial in a cemetery.

The spirit, satisfied, was never seen again.

Sound familiar?  The bare bones (pun intended) of this tale have formed the basis of hundreds, possibly thousands, of folk legends and tales-around-the-campfire.  But what may surprise you is this particular version's provenance.

It was related as a true story about the Greek philosopher Athenodorus Cananites (74 B.C.E. - 7 C.E.) by the famous author, lawyer, historian, and polymath Pliny the Younger (61 C.E. - 113 C.E.), and is one of the very first written examples of a ghost story.  Athenodorus himself was the home-buyer who allegedly sent the spirit to its eternal rest and scored a nice house and property at a bargain-basement price in the process.  (The source is Pliny's Letter LXXXIII - To Sura.)

Athenodorus Confronts the Spectre, by Henry Justice Ford (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Athenodorus Cananites was neither ignorant nor superstitious; he was a prominent Stoic, learned in a variety of fields, and in fact was one of the tutors hired to teach Octavian (later Augustus Caesar).  I don't want to overstate the case, of course.  Even scholarly Greeks and Romans of his time were steeped in the legends of gods, demigods, and spirits, and mostly bought into a worldview that many of us today would consider unscientific nonsense.  But it's interesting that two prominent figures of the Classical intelligentsia are responsible for a story of with same flavor as countless other "restless spirit finds justice and is now at peace" tales told since.

It makes me wonder, though, how all of this got started.  Once the first few ghost stories are told, you can see how people would continue telling them; they're good scary fun, and also, humans are pretty suggestible.  Once your cousin tells you the house is haunted, it's easy enough afterward to interpret every creak and thump as the footsteps of a spectral resident.

But if you go back far enough, someone has to have told the first ghost story.  What could have spurred that?  What occurrence led one of our distant ancestors to decide that Great-Aunt Bertha had come back from the dead, and was still stalking around the place?

Impossible to know, of course.  But what's certain is that just about every culture on Earth tells ghost stories.  True Believers use that as an argument for their veracity; if there was no such thing as an afterlife, they say, why the ubiquity (and commonality of themes) between ghostly tales the world over?  Me, I'm not convinced.  After all, I've written here before about the widespread occurrence of stories similar to "Little Red Riding Hood" -- and no one believes that's because there ever was a wolf dressed up like Grandma waiting to eat a little girl with a basket of goodies.

At least I hope they don't.

In any case, I thought it was an interesting story, not least because it involves two prominent historical figures.  Whether it, and others like it, have any basis in reality very much remains to be seen.  So think about this if you're ever purchasing a house, and the price is way lower than it should be.  Maybe there's a man in chains buried somewhere on the property, and you're about to be recruited by a long-dead specter to fulfill its quest for justice.

Or maybe the roof just needs replacing or something.

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The strange story of Omm Sety

Dorothy Louise Eady was born on the 16th of January in 1904 in a suburb of London, the only child of a tailor and his wife.  She seemed to be a perfectly ordinary little girl until she was three years old, when she took a tumble down a set of stairs and developed a highly peculiar set of symptoms that was to change the trajectory of her life.

She developed foreign accent syndrome -- a real, although rare, condition where stroke or head trauma causes an individual's speech patterns to change, giving their voice a superficially "foreign" accent.  (Significantly, they don't suddenly gain proficiency in another language, despite what's sometimes claimed.)  Weirder still, when she started school, she began demonstrating a knowledge of ancient Egypt that is, at the very least, unusual for a child her age.  She got in trouble for comparing Christianity to the Egyptian pantheon, and was finally expelled when she flat-out refused to sing a hymn about the Exodus calling on God to "curse the swart Egyptians."  She frequented a local Roman Catholic church, until a chat with the priest revealed that she was doing so because the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic mass "reminded her of the old religion," at which point the priest suggested she probably should entertain her reminiscences elsewhere.

These setbacks didn't discourage her in the least.  A visit to the British Museum as a teenager sent her into raptures; when she saw a photograph of the temple of the Pharaoh Seti I, she said, "There is my home!  But where are the trees?  Where are the gardens?"

Interestingly, most people seemed to tolerate her odd claims, and in fact she studied Egyptian history and hieroglyphics under E. A. Wallis Budge, one of the foremost Egyptologists of the early twentieth century.  Eventually -- perhaps inevitably -- she moved to Egypt, describing it as "coming home."  During this entire period she was plagued by dreams, sleepwalking, and nightmares, including a vision of an entity that called itself "Hor-Ra" and claimed to be the spirit of Seti I.  This spirit proceeded to narrate to her a tale, which Eady wrote down in hieroglyphics, telling of her previous life.

Eady, Hor-Ra said, had once been a priestess of humble origins named Bentreshyt, who had fallen in love with Seti.  Despite her vow of chastity, she had sex with Seti and got pregnant.  Knowing that once her transgression was found out, it was likely she'd be executed -- and in the process, disgrace the pharaoh -- she chose to commit suicide.

Alongside her claims of having been reincarnated, however, Eady did real, honest-to-goodness archaeological and historical work, assisting such brilliant scholars as Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry, earning their respect and also the respect of her friends and neighbors.  She was celebrated for her tolerance, keeping to her own practice of rituals celebrating Ra and Horus and Osiris and the rest, but also fasting during Ramadan and celebrating Christmas and Easter with the Christians.

Whatever you think of her story, Dorothy is kind of hard to dislike, frankly.

Dorothy Eady, ca. 1928 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some pieces of her story do, oddly enough, seem to have some verifiable basis in fact.  She pointed out a spot near the Temple of Seti where she said there'd been a garden in which she'd first met the pharaoh, and later excavation revealed the foundations of a garden that matched her descriptions.  She was brought into a newly-opened room in the temple in complete darkness, and asked to describe the paintings on the walls -- which she did accurately enough to freak out the people present.

Eady -- by then usually known by her adopted name of Omm Sety -- died on the 21st of April, 1981 in Abydos, never wavering from her claims that she was a reincarnated Egyptian priestess.  So what are we to make of her story?

One thing that strikes me is that although her persistence in devoting herself to Egyptian studies was certainly uncommon for a woman of her time, she does not seem to have been in it for fame, money, or self-aggrandizement.  She was unassuming personally, and had no particular interest in making more in the way of income than she needed to be reasonably comfortable.  In fact, Jonathan Cott, in his book about Eady's life called The Search for Omm Sety, quotes William Simpson, professor of Egyptology at Yale, as saying that "a great many people in Egypt took advantage of her because she more or less traded her knowledge of ancient Egypt by writing or helping people out by doing drafting for them for a pittance."

And it also seems certain that she really believed what she was saying.  Unlike a lot of people who make similar claims, she doesn't have the look of a con artist.  Even Carl Sagan, surely a skeptic's skeptic if there ever was one, was impressed, saying she was "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology.  This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy...  However, we must keep in mind that there is no independent record, other than her own accounts, to verify what she claimed."

This, of course, is the sticking point; Sagan is certainly not saying he believes she was reincarnated, just that it can't be rigorously ruled out.  And, more importantly, that there may be no way to prove it one way or the other.  Certainly her knowledge seems uncanny, but it's important to remember that during the 1920s and 1930s there was a significant Egyptomania happening, especially following the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922.  Stories and photographs were circulating everywhere, and it'd be hard for an unbiased evaluator to tease apart what Eady learned through her studies or other media, and what she might allegedly be recalling through strange supernatural pathways.

As you would no doubt expect, the people who already believed in reincarnation use this as one of their favorite examples, while the doubters still doubt, attributing Eady's obsession with Egypt not to a buried memory of a past life but to a blend of genuine curiosity and scholarship with delusions brought on by an early head injury.  For myself, I might be convinced if her odd claim to knowledge had included understanding the Egyptian language prior to being taught it, or some other piece of verifiable information there's no way she could have obtained by ordinary means.  I have to admit, describing the paintings in a newly-excavated room in the dark comes close; but given that others had seen the paintings, and also the commonalities that exist between a lot of examples of New Kingdom-era art, it doesn't quite get there, evidence-wise.  She could have been told what the paintings looked like, or they may just have been shrewd guesses based on her extensive knowledge of Egyptian art and artifacts.

And it does strike me that this is yet another example of James Randi's objection to stories of reincarnation; that everyone in their previous life seems to have been a high priest or priestess or prince or princess or whatnot, and nobody -- as would seem, simply by the statistics of the situation, to be far more likely -- was a dirt-poor peasant in China or India, or someone who died as a child of diphtheria or measles or smallpox.

The fact remains, though, that Eady's case is an odd one.  It doesn't convince me, but it does leave me scratching my head a little. 

However, I'm not so fond of the idea of reincarnation in any case, so maybe it's for the best.  Life is no cakewalk, and especially given that you aren't given any choice who you're reincarnated as, I'd just as soon not press "reset" and start the whole thing over.  If I had to choose an afterlife, I'd go with Valhalla.  Sitting around the table quaffing mead (can you just drink mead?  Or do you have to quaff it?), having mock sword-fights with your friends, and generally raising hell just for the fun of it.

Certainly better than harps, hymns, and halos, which seems to be the only other thing on offer.

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The dying of the light

In the brilliant, funny, thought-provoking, and often poignant television series The Good Place, a character named Simone, who is an Australian neuroscientist, ends up in heaven (the titular "Good Place") and flatly refuses to believe it.

The whole thing, she claims, is merely a hallucination cooked up by her dying, oxygen-starved brain.  That she died (or was in the process of it), she could believe; but knowing what she does about neurophysiology, it is simply impossible for her to accept that what she is seeing is real.

The more you know about the brain and its sensory/perceptual system, the easier it is to understand how an actual neuroscientist would come to that conclusion.  As we've seen here at Skeptophilia a good many times, what we perceive is fragmentary and inaccurate, and that's even while we're alive, wide awake, and all the relevant organs are in good working order.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, all too accurately, "The human brain is rife with ways of getting it wrong."

Oh, it works well enough most of the time.  We wouldn't have survived long otherwise.  But to assume that what you're perceiving, and (even worse) what you remember perceiving, is at all complete and accurate is simply false.

It gets even dicier when things start to go wrong.  Which was why I was so fascinated with a study from the University of Michigan that was published a couple of weeks ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at EEG traces from comatose patients who had experienced cardiac arrest and died, and the researchers found as the patients died, their brains showed a surge of activity in the regions associated with consciousness and perception.

Gamma wave activity -- associated with awareness -- spiked, as did signaling at the junction of the temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes of the cerebrum.  This area is correlated with dreaming, hallucination, and other altered states of consciousness, and the high activity there might be an explanation for the commonalities in near-death experiences, like the familiar "tunnel of light" that has been reported hundreds of times.

This story was reported in a lot of popular media as providing support for claims that "your life flashes before your eyes" as you die, but that seems to me to be a significant stretch.  For one thing, the study was small; only four individuals, understandable given the specificity of the criteria.  For another, the spike of activity in the temporal-occipital-parietal junction is correlated with altered states of consciousness, but it doesn't tell us what these people were actually experiencing.  And we can't ask them about it, because they're dead.

[Image from Punch, 1858, is in the Public Domain]

So what this says about the experience of dying is in the category of "interesting but very preliminary," and what it says about the possibility of an afterlife is "nothing."  My guess is people who already disbelieve in an afterlife will, like Simone, add this to the evidence against, and the people who already believe in it will add it to the evidence in favor.  In reality, of course, the new study only looks at the threshold of death, not what happens after it occurs.  I'm still agnostic about an afterlife, myself.  I recently read an article written by by Stafford Betty, professor emeritus of religious studies at California State University - Bakersfield, who stated that survival after death was "a near certainty" and that doubters are simply ignoring a mountain of evidence.  "They are so dug into their materialist worldview," Betty writes, "that they refuse to investigate research that contradicts it.  They are afraid of getting entangled in a worldview, often religiously based, that belongs to a past they 'outgrew.'"

Well, maybe.  I've read a lot of the research, and I don't think it's as clear-cut as all that, nor is my skepticism due to my clinging to materialism or a fear of getting trapped in religion.  In fact, I can say without hesitation that if I found out there was an afterlife, I'd be pretty thrilled about it.  (Some afterlifes, anyway.  I'm not so fond of the ones where you're tortured for eternity.  But Valhalla, for example, sounds badass.)  It's more that the evidence I've seen doesn't reach a level of rigor I find convincing.

But I'm certainly open to the idea.  Like I said, the other option, which is simply ceasing to be, isn't super appealing.

Anyhow, the University of Michigan paper is fascinating, and gives us a unique lens into the experience of someone while dying.  It's the one thing that unites us all, isn't it?  We'll all go through it eventually.  It reminds me of the passage from my novel The Communion of Shadows, where the main characters are discussing the fear of death:

“Aren’t you scared?” came T-Joe’s voice from behind him, after a moment’s silence.

“Scared? A little.”  Leandre paused.  “It’s like when I was a child, and I used to climb an oak tree that leaned out over the bayou.  You’re there, hunched on the branch, nothing but the empty air between your naked body and the water’s surface.  It looks like it’s a hundred feet down.  You think, ‘I can’t do it.  I can’t jump.’  Your hands cling to the branch, your heart is pounding, you’re dripping sweat.  You know once you jump it’ll be all right, you’ll swim to shore and in a moment be ready to do it again.  But in that instant, it seems impossible.”  He paused, giving a lazy swat at a mosquito.  “I’m once again that skinny little boy in the tree, looking down at the bayou, and thinking I’ll never have the courage to leap.  I know I can do it, and that it’ll be okay.  Think of all the people who have passed these gates, endured whatever death is and gone on to what awaits us beyond this world.”  He turned around with a broad smile on his face.  “If they can do it, so can I.”

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The spirits speak

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a post that appeared a couple of weeks ago over at the blog Future and Cosmos with the message, "I'm honestly curious to hear what you think of this."

The post had to do with a series of experiments done by a French researcher, Paul Joire, back in the first two decades of the twentieth century.  Joire is an interesting fellow; he was fascinated with claims of the paranormal, but much like the British-based Society for Psychical Research, did his level best to approach things from a scientific standpoint.  That's not to say he didn't have some significant missteps, though.  He invented a device he called a "sthenometer" which he said could detect the presence and configuration of the "nervous force" emitted by the human body, and suggested that it could potentially be used for diagnosis of illness -- but later experiments found that all it was picking up on was body heat.

Paul Joire, ca. 1910 [Image is in the Public Domain]

That said, Joire was at least trying to do things the right way.  He was obsessed with evidence of an afterlife, and investigated numerous claims of séances, table-rapping and table-turning, mediumship, automatic writing, and spirit photography, and (again like the SPR) found that the vast majority of them were outright hoaxes.

It's the remaining ones that are interesting.

The article at Future and Cosmos focuses on a series of experiments Joire did with a self-proclaimed medium and four other people as participants/witnesses, where "unseen agents" were questioned and asked for details of their lives and deaths.  The "agents" responded by rapping on the table to spell out in painstaking fashion words and sentences, which were then recorded by Joire.  The gist of the claim is that the information the ghosts were providing was unavailable to anyone at the table, and was only verified as correct after the fact (some were never verified, but never disproven; none, Joire said, was researched and proven false).  You should read the blog post in its entirety, and I don't want to steal the author's thunder, but here is just one of many examples:

Question. Bertolf must be a Christian name. Have you any other name ?
Answer. Bertolf de Ghistelles.
Q. Were you French ?
A. Flemish.
Q, Will you tell us the name of the locality where you lived ?
A, Dunkerque.
Q. Have you been a long time in the Beyond ?
A. Yes.
Q. In what year did you die ?
A. In 1081.
Q. What were you ?
A, Husband of a Saint.
Q. Do you mean that your wife is honoured as a saint, that she has been canonised ?
A, Yes.
Q. What was her name ?
A, Godeleine de Wierfroy.  Can she forgive me ?
Q, You did her harm ?
A. Yes.
Q. You killed her perhaps ?
A, I had her strangled...
Q, Have you found any members of her family ?
A, Heinfried and his wife Ogine, her father and mother.  They have forgiven me.
Q. Is the festival of your wife celebrated anywhere ?
A. Yes.
Q. On what date ?
A, July 6th....
Q, Did you die in a tragic manner ?
A, No, in a monastery.  I remained there nine years.

Joire was able to verify that there was a woman, later canonized, named Godeleine (or Godelive or Godelieve) of Ghistelles, who was murdered by her husband Berthold [sic] and her body thrown down a well; the remorseful Berthold later became a monk.

The author of Future and Cosmos has the following to say about Joire's experiments and conclusions:

[This would require] some extremely elaborate and very hard-to-prepare fraud in which a medium learned and meticulously memorized very many details about deceased figures (some not famous), and then orally recited those details, only pretending to be entranced...  The total number of raps needed to spell out the details above (with one rap per letter) would have been many hundreds, occurring spread out over a long time.  We can imagine no medium manually producing so many hundreds of raps at a table where five people were seated, without being detected by the investigators.

The only other "narrow possibility" we have of Joire's experiments not being actual evidence of spirit survival, we're told, is if the entire thing was fraudulent; i.e., that Joire himself fabricated it all.

Okay, so what do we make of this?

First, I'll agree with the author that if it's a fraud, it's a sophisticated one.  But the problem is in the last sentence; "We can imagine no medium [accomplishing this] without being detected."  Humans are notoriously easy to fool -- consider how readily we fall for the conjuring illusions of a professional stage magician -- especially when we have a vested interest in believing that the thing we're being fooled about is true.  After all, most of us, myself included, would love it if there were an afterlife.  For me, though, I'd prefer that it not be the harps, haloes, and fields of flowers variety.  I'd be thrilled with something like Valhalla, where you get to spend eternity whooping it up with your friends, participating in daily debauchery involving riotous parties, quaffing tankards of mead, and lots of sex.  So despite my general dubious attitude toward claims of spirit survival, I'm not honestly hostile to the idea, and no one would be happier than me if I turned out to  be wrong.

The thing that bothers me with Joire's experiments is the quality of the evidence.  Joire was able to verify the details in a great many of the cases (and there were a lot of cases; his book is apparently 635 pages long), which means that the details on these people's lives were out there somewhere prior to the experiments being run.  The author of Future and Cosmos says that after reading his accounts we'd be "unlikely to suspect so serious a scholar of that type of chicanery," but unfortunately, there is no human who is above suspicion.  A quick google search for "scientific fraud" will turn up hundreds of examples, some of which had people fooled for years and were debunked more or less by accident.  Scientists, sad to say, are no less prone to the temptations to cheat than the rest of us are.  Most people are honest, and do their best to play fair; but you can't start from the assumption that because a person is a scientist, (s)he is incapable of fraud.

What we can rely on, though, are the methods of science.  The rigor of the scientific approach is set up to exclude the drawing of false conclusions, whether because of innocent error or deliberate falsification, and I don't see how the evidence provided by Joire meets the minimum standard we'd require in order to agree with his conclusions (and those of the author of Future and Cosmos).  I recognize that this means his spirit-rapping question-and-answer sessions fall into a catch-22 -- if the actual accounts of the deceased subjects' lives were already out there, it opens up the possibility of foreknowledge and cheating; but if no such accounts existed, there'd be no way to verify that what the "spirits" said was true.  This, however, is an inherent flaw of the experimental design -- one that makes its results fail to achieve any kind of scientific rigor.

Note, though, that I'm not saying that Joire was a dupe or a fraud, or that he didn't communicate with the disembodied spirit of Bertolf de Ghistelles and other folks.  There is the possibility that Joire's accounts are nothing less than the unvarnished truth, and if you're going to keep an open mind, you have to admit that there's no positive evidence of fraud on the part of Joire or the medium.

But as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Unless you're starting by assuming your conclusion, you'd need more than this to buy what Joire is saying.  So as far as the possibility of a fun-filled Valhalla waiting for me, I'm going to have to temper my enthusiasm and wait for better data.

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Memento mori

A few days ago I was out for a nice run when my iPod started sending me a rather unsettling message by playing, one after another, "100 Years," "Dance in the Graveyards," "O Very Young," and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," which -- for those of you who don't listen to the same music I do -- are all songs about dying.

I'm not superstitious, but I have to admit I was a little careful when I crossed the road to look both ways and make sure there was no eighteen-wheeler bearing down on me.  I got home safely, but it's no wonder that since then I've been thinking about death and the odd beliefs associated thereto.

I am not just referring to religious concepts of the afterlife, here, although as an atheist I am bound to think that some of those sound pretty bizarre, too.  I've heard everything from your traditional harps-and-haloes idea, to being more or less melted down and fused with God, to fields of flowers and babbling brooks, to spending all of eternity with your dead relatives (and it may sound petty of me, but considering a few of my relatives, this last one sounds more like my personal version of hell).  Then, of course, you have the much-discussed Islamic 72-virgins concept of heaven, which brings up the inevitable question of what the virgins' opinions about all of this might be.  All of these strike me as equal parts absurdity and wishful thinking, given that (honestly) believers have come to these conclusions based on exactly zero evidence.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dguendel, Leipzig, Old St. John`s Cemetery, historical gravestone, CC BY 3.0]

But today, I'm more considering the rituals and traditions surrounding death itself, aside from all of the ponderings of what (if anything) might happen to us afterwards.  I was first struck by how oddly death is handled, even here in relatively secular America, when my mom died fourteen years ago.   My wife and I were doing the wrenching, painful, but necessary choosing of a coffin, and we were told by the salesman that there was a model that had a little drawer inside in which "photographs, letters, and other mementos can be placed."  There was, we were told, a battery-powered light inside the drawer, presumably because it's dark down there in the ground.

Carol and I looked at each other, and despite the circumstances, we both laughed.  Did this guy really think that my mom was going to be down there in the cemetery, and would periodically get bored and need some reading material?

Lest you think that this is just some sort of weird sales gimmick, an aberration, in another odd coincidence just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an article that appeared a while back in Huffington Post describing an invention by Swedish music and video equipment salesman Fredrik Hjelmquist.  Hjelmquist has one-upped the coffin with the bookshelf and reading light; his coffins have surround-sound, and the music storage device inside the coffin can be updated to "provide solace for grieving friends and relatives by making it possible for them to alter the deceased's playlist online"...

... and are also equipped to play music streaming from Spotify.

The whole thing comes with a price tag of 199,000 kroner (US$30,700), which you would think would put it out of the price range of nearly everyone -- but there have been thousands of inquiries, mostly from the United States and Canada, but also from as far away as China and Taiwan.

Oh, and I didn't tell what the name of Hjelmquist's creation is.

CataCombo.  And no, I didn't make that up.

Now, I understand that many of the rituals surrounding death are for the comfort of the living; the flowers, the wakes, the songs at funerals, and so on.  But this one is a little hard to explain based solely on that, I think.  Is there really anyone out there who would be comforted by the fact that Grandma is down there in Shady Grove Memorial Park, rockin' out to Linkin Park?  I would think that if you would go for something like this, especially considering the cost, you would have to believe on some level that the Dearly Departed really is listening.  Which, to me, is more than a little creepy, because it implies that the person you just buried is somehow still down there.   Conscious and aware.  In that cold, dark box underground.

To me, this is the opposite of comforting.  This is Poe's "The Premature Burial."

The whole thing brings to mind the Egyptians' practice of placing food, gifts, mummified pets, and so on in the tombs of departed rich people, so they'll have what they need on their trip into the afterlife.   But unlike the Egyptians, who had a whole intricate mythology built up around death, we just have bits and pieces, no coherent whole that would make sense of it.  (And again, that's with the exception of religious explanations of the afterlife.)  As a culture, we're distinctly uneasy about the idea of dying, but we can't quite bring ourselves to jump to the conclusion, "he's just gone, and we don't understand it."

I was always struck by the Klingons' approach to death in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  As a comrade-in-arms is dying, you howl, signifying that the folks in the afterlife better watch out, because a seriously badass warrior is on the way.  But afterwards -- do what you want with the body, because the person who inhabited it is gone.  "It is just a dead shell," they say.  "Dispose of it as you see fit."

Me, I like the Viking approach.  When I die, I'd appreciate it if my family and friends would stick me on a raft, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean, and then have a big party on the beach afterward with a lot of drinking and dancing and debauchery.  That's probably all kinds of illegal, but it seems like a fitting farewell, given that I've always thought that Thor and Odin and Loki and the rest of the gang were a great deal more appealing than any other religion I've ever run across.  But if that turns out to be impractical, just "dispose of me as you see fit."  And fer cryin' in the sink, I am quite sure that I won't need a reading light or a Spotify account and surround-sound.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is especially for those of you who enjoy having their minds blown.  Niels Bohr famously said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  Physicist Philip Ball does his best to explain the basics of quantum theory -- and to shock the reader thereby -- in layman's terms in Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different, which was the winner of the 2018 Physics Book of the Year.

It's lucid, fun, and fascinating, and will turn your view of how things work upside down.  So if you'd like to know more about the behavior of the universe on the smallest scales -- and how this affects us, up here on the macro-scale -- pick up a copy of Beyond Weird and fasten your seatbelt.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The naked and the dead

Do you believe in ghosts?  Would you rather not wear any clothes?

Do you want to combine the two?

Apparently there's a subset of ghost hunters who think that's a great idea.

You might wonder what on earth could generate this idea.  Here's how Paul Cagle, writing for The Aenigma Project, describes it:

Some people believe that certain spirits feed on negative emotions and therefore when you are scared you give them more power to manifest.  Could this be part of the reason?  Being naked in a dark place, unable to see anything around you and searching for ghosts could certainly create feelings of uncertainty and perhaps inadequacy.  But is that enough negative juju to cause something to manifest?  Does feeling vulnerable and embarrassed generate the same energy as being anxious and scared?  Is enough negative energy generated no matter the emotion?

This strikes me as a little weird, even if you accept the fundamental proposition that there are spirits of the dead still hanging around.  Isn't the point that they appear where they want to, for their own reasons?  I always thought the idea was that ghosts tended to hang around where they died, or places they liked when they were alive, and so forth.  If they were attracted to naked people, you'd think that nudist colonies would be rife with ghosts.

It would also make me much less likely to use my hot tub.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gallowglass, Medieval ghost, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, it's not that I have anything against nudity per se.  I've always been pretty comfortable with skin showing, and in my twenties, I would have been captain of the Coed Skinnydipping Team.  Even now, I tend to wear the legally permissible minimum amount of clothing.  I remember the subject of my running around all summer without a shirt came up while we were chatting with friends, and I said, "I guess I'm kind of a closet nudist."  My wife gave me the slow single-eyebrow lift, and said, "Closet?  Kind of?  You guess?"

On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about prowling around a graveyard in the middle of the night without any clothes on.  I'm not so much worried about scandalizing the inhabitants, given that by definition, they're dead.  My general opinion is that the evidence for hauntings and the afterlife is fairly slim, although I have an open mind on the subject -- and in any case, if ghosts want to kind of ooze around the place and appear unexpectedly, they can't reasonably expect not to be shocked at what they see on occasion.  I'm more concerned by the fact that most ghost hunting seems to occur at night, for what reason I have no idea, and around upstate New York the nights are either (1) cold enough to freeze off body parts you might still have a use for, or (2) warm and muggy and buzzing with mosquitoes.  Not very enticing either way.

It also brings up the question of whether ghosts themselves are naked.  You usually don't hear about naked ghosts -- they seem to favor antiquated and/or filmy garments that swirl about in a dramatic fashion -- but it's a little strange to consider why that is.  Do they appear in the clothes they died in?  If so, I'm going to be a hell of a lot more careful about what I wear, because I don't want to take the chance of spending eternity in a ratty tank-top and a worn pair of cargo shorts.  Or are ghosts clothed in the garments they liked best?

If that's the case, I'm putting in my request for a kilt in the afterlife.  I've never owned a kilt but I think they're wicked cool.  If I could have a claymore to go with it, that'd be even better.  Then I could really scare the shit out of any naked ghost hunters who showed up.

I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has a better perspective on naked ghost hunting.  I'm pretty curious about the afterlife, and while the skeptical part of me figures that at some point I'll find out one way or the other, it'd be nice to hear from experts.  Clothed or not.

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Aptly enough, considering Monday's post about deciphering scripts, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Steven Pinker's brilliant The Stuff of Thought.  Here, experimental psychologist Pinker looks at what our use of language tells us about our behavior and neural wiring -- what, in fact, our choice of words has to do with human nature as a whole.

Along the way, he throws out some fascinating examples -- my favorite of which is his section on the syntax of swearing.  I have to admit, the question, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?" is something I've never thought about before, although it probably should have given that I'm guilty of using the f-word a lot more than is generally considered acceptable.

So if you're interested in language, the human mind, or both, this is a must-read.  Although I'll warn you -- if you're like me, it'll leave you thinking, "Why did I just say that?" several times a day.

Notes from the other side

Dear Readers:

I'm going to take a short break, for the rest of the week -- but I'll be back next Monday, November 26, so keep sending me links and ideas!

cheers,

Gordon

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A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that I knew was going to be good even before I opened it, because it was from a site called Daily Vibes.  First, one of my pet peeves is the way people use words like "vibration" and "frequency" to basically mean "any damn thing we want," and I figured the "vibes" part presaged a lot of that sort of thing.  But I was even more excited when I perused their home page and saw a list of recent articles, which include the following:

• "What Does Your Zodiac Sign Reveal About Your Innermost Thoughts?"
• "How You Sit Can Reveal Your Personality"
• "Five Gemstones Traditionally Used to Clear Negative Energies"
• "Five Ways Crying Makes You Stronger"
• "Have You Seen a Feather Tattoo?  Here's What It Can Mean"

So I started reading the various posts, and very quickly ran into a troubling problem: what if your zodiac sign says basically the opposite of what you learn from how you sit?  Because I found that the way I like to sit means I'm outgoing, dynamic, dress well, have high goals and aspirations, and have a difficult time taking criticism.  My zodiac sign, on the other hand, says that I'm mysterious, aloof, and secretive, hard to get to know, and very moody.  So am I both?  Or somewhere in the middle?  Because right now, I'm confused as to whether I should smile and schmooze with people, or wear a black cloak and just give people a meaningful raised eyebrow to make them uncomfortable.

Then I had to give a look at the one about crying, because I'm one of those people who is very easy to launch into a complete tear-o-rama.  My wife was at an art show this past weekend, so Saturday evening I decided to sit on the couch with my dog, drinking wine and watching Dr. Who.  I rewatched one of my favorite episodes, "The Girl in the Fireplace," and ended up hugging my dog and sobbing into my wine glass.

Okay, it's a pretty sad episode, but geez.  I mean, it's not like it's the first time I've seen it, or anything, so you'd think I'd have been somewhat immunized.  But no.  There I sat, blubbering like an idiot.

At least my dog understood.

Anyhow, I was curious about what Daily Vibes had to say about crying, and I was heartened to find out that because I cry a lot, I don't care what other people think about me, and I'm brave.  I also learned that crying "relieves stress and pent-up emotions... [removing] negative emotions and [instilling] positive ones."  In that respect, we're told, "it's almost as effective as sex."

So next time your significant other is feeling amorous, you should turn to them and say, "Not now, honey, I think I'd prefer to have a nice long cry instead."

Oh, and if you have a feather tattoo, you're "strong, independent, courageous, and cherish freedom."

Anyhow, all of this is sort of beside the point, because the article that my friend sent me the link to was none of the above, but was to a post called "Five Signs Your Deceased Love Ones Are Trying to Help You."

Naturally, I was curious about what they thought were signs that Grandma Bertha was still hanging around, and I suspect you are, too, so without further ado:

1.  Animals Acting Strangely.

If this were true, it would mean my house has been continuously haunted for years, because in my experience my pets act strangely all the time.  For example, I went outside this summer because our coonhound, Lena, was having a complete barking fit, dancing around yapping like mad.  I thought she had a possum cornered, but no.  When I came up to her, I found out she was barking at...

... a stick.

To be fair, it was a pretty ferocious-looking stick.  But still.

2.  Poltergeist Activity.

I hear bumps and creaks and knocks in our house all the time, but I think that's mostly because (1) it's an old house, and (2) there's a family of squirrels that we have been unable to evict from our attic.  I haven't seen anything else really suspicious on this front, so this one would have to be in the "no" column for me.

On the other hand...

3.  Electronics Acting Up.

I am halfway convinced that my mere presence makes computers malfunction.  My school computer, for example, frequently and unpredictably decides to draw little gray Xs on all of my document icons, and the only solution is to restart the computer, which takes fifteen minutes because this particular machine is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel.  It's kind of a relief to find out this is caused by ghosts, because I was beginning to think I'm just a techno-idiot.

4.  Vivid Dreams.

This one is also in the "yes" column for me.  Last night I woke up in the middle of the night because I was dreaming that I was defending our back yard from a flock of very threatening owls.  So my dreams tend to not be just "vivid," but "really fucking weird."  And if this is Grandma Bertha's fault, I wish she'd lay off, because I need my sleep.

5.  Extrasensory Perception.

For this one, the site says, "ESP is a pretty wide umbrella in terms of definition. It can mean a bunch of different things.  But in this case, it’s as if the spirits in our lives put ideas in our heads before we can have them."

Well, I'm always coming up with strange ideas, which is why I'm an author, because I can write out bizarre ideas that pop into my head and people pay me to read about them.  But I don't think that's ESP.  It may be, as one of my friends once speculated, because I was dropped on my head as a baby.

So the checklist for whether my house is haunted generates mixed results, which I suppose is to be expected.  Myself, I think it's not haunted, although my younger son swears that he's seen a shadowy figure out of the corner of his eye, moving about in our basement.  Maybe that's Grandma Bertha, I dunno.  If it is, I wish she'd stop simply oozing about the place and do something useful, like telling me her chocolate fudge recipe, which I've tried unsuccessfully for years to reproduce.

But I need to wrap this up, because I have to go see what Lena's barking at.  Maybe it's another stick that is attempting to launch a vicious attack on her.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.

Musical post-mortem

A few years ago, I wrote a piece in Skeptophilia about people who claim they're channeling the spirits of dead musicians, writers, and artists, so that we can get a chance to enjoy additional works by our favorite dead creative types.

So according to these folks, Beethoven is still composing, not just decomposing.

One of the folks I looked at in this post was Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a British housewife who (despite little in the way of musical training) said she was writing -- if you believe her, a better word would be transcribing -- new works by Bach, Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy.  Some people have been extremely impressed, even baffled, by her ability; pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

Not everyone, however, is as taken with her compositions.  André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, said, "If the newfound compositions are genuine, they would best have been left on the shelf."

Rosemary Brown in action

So this has been one of those enduring mysteries that the believers say is absolutely convincing and the scoffers say is a ridiculous false claim.  But until now, no one has tried to do any kind of rigorous analysis of her work (or, if you believe Brown's story, the very-posthumous works of Bach et al.).

Enter Carleton University Ph.D. student Érico Bomfim.  Bomfim has undertaken a detailed analysis of Brown's compositions, with the aim of finding out if there's enough commonality with known works by famous composers to be at all confident that there's something otherworldly happening here.

"She claimed to be in touch with the spirits of those composers," Bomfim said, in an interview with  CBC Radio's All In A Day.  "She claimed to be able to talk to them, and she said that they were dictating pieces to her...  It's certainly a possibility [that it's a hoax], and that's certainly what the skeptics think about it, but the thing is, she [wrote] one piece [in front] of the cameras when BBC was recording, and it's quite a complex piece."

Bomfim believes that Brown's lack of musical training supports the possibility that her claim was true.

"[S]he didn't seem to have a very deep musical knowledge," he explained. "She just had some piano lessons, she was not a trained composer.  So it's quite hard to believe that she would be able to write that kind of piece, especially if we keep in mind that it's close to Liszt's late style."

And she wasn't just able to mimic Liszt's style.  Bomfim said that her talent for writing in the styles of famous composers was uncanny.

"To reproduce so many styles [of classical music], that never happened... There's not any other case besides Rosemary Brown.  There are many musicians that are able to imitate styles, but mostly ... it's a humorous practice, playing Happy Birthday To You in Beethoven's style.  But those are trained musicians, and they didn't show themselves to be able to write lots of new musical pieces in lots of different styles...  Rosemary Brown's case is absolutely unique, and that's why I believe it really deserves close attention from musicology."

I definitely approve of Bomfim's general approach.  No claim should be rejected out of hand, although some of them can be rejected pretty quickly (as Christopher Hitchens put it, "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.").  Word-analysis software has become pretty good at figuring out who wrote passages of text using information such as word choice, word length distribution, and sentence structure; I know (much) less about any sort of musicological approach to the analogous question with compositions, but I would imagine the same sort of thing could be done there.

My intuition is that Rosemary Brown was a talented fake, or possibly simply delusional.  But intuition isn't evidence, and it'll be interesting to see what Bomfim comes up with.  And if it turns out that deceased composers are still writing music, no one will be happier than me.  For one thing, I hate that I've pretty much run out of new things to listen to by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vaughan Williams.  For another, it would mean that my writing career won't be over when I kick the bucket.  It might be harder to find a publisher after I'm dead, but at least I might be able to find a competent medium to talk into being my locum.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Looking for LTR with a guy who is sexy, handsome, athletic, and dead

A loyal reader sent me an email yesterday that said, "Dude.  You think it's weird that there are people who want to get hot & heavy with Bigfoot.  Check this out."

The reference, of course, was last week's post about Bigfoot erotica, which, tolerant guy though I am, left me feeling a little incredulous.  So as you might imagine, I could barely wait to click on the link, which brought me to an article by Paul Seaburn over at Mysterious Universe...

... about a woman who is trying to have a baby with a ghost.

I am not making this up, although she clearly is.  I mean, no one would be happier than me to find out we get to have sex in the afterlife, but realistically speaking it seems pretty unlikely.  If there's an afterlife at all, and at the moment I'm even a little dubious about that.

The woman's name is Amethyst Realm (I'm still not making this up), and she lives in Bristol, England.  Last year she apparently gave up trying to hook up with flesh-and-blood guys, and put an ad on OKCupid, specifying her preference for a lover as "deceased."  At least that's what I'm assuming she did, because last year she claims she had sex with twenty different ghostly men.

The first time kind of caught her by surprise.  After ditching her previous (live) boyfriend for being away too much, Amethyst Realm decided to go for a long walk.  "One day, while I was walking through the bush, enjoying nature, I suddenly felt this incredible energy," she says.  "I knew a lover had arrived."

What happened then is what any of us would do, provided we had a screw loose; she got naked right there in the underbrush and did the horizontal tango with her invisible friend.  She had repeated hookups with this particular ghost -- and then did some comparison shopping.  I guess there's no chance of catching an STD from a ghost since they're already dead, so if spectral sex rings her bell, more power to her.

But then she decided it was so good that she had to take the next step -- namely, getting pregnant.

"It’s pretty serious," Amethyst Realm says.  "In fact, we’ve even been thinking about having a ghost baby.  I know that sounds crazy but I’ve been looking into it and I don’t think it’s totally out of the question."

It should be a relief, I guess, that at least she knows it sounds crazy.

This does bring up some questions, however.

1. Is the baby going to be half dead?  If so, which half?
2. What happens if Amethyst Realm and her lover argue after the baby's born, and he wants split custody?
3. Would it work the other way -- for a live guy to impregnate a female ghost?
4. If you can get pregnant from ghostly sex, why didn't she get pregnant any of the other dozens of times she did it?  Did she make her lover stop at the Rite-Aid and pick up some condoms beforehand?  If so, you have to wonder what the counter clerk thought about selling birth control to a ghost.  Although honestly, I guess it's no more awkward than selling it to embarrassed teenage boys.
5. Why am I spending my time wondering about all of this?

Of course, it bears mention that the idea isn't new.  The tradition of incubi and succubi goes back to the Middle Ages -- the former are male demons who take advantage of sleeping women (the name comes from the Latin verb incubare, "to lie on top of"), and the latter female demons who do the same to sleeping men (from succubare, "to lie underneath").  (Being visited by a succubus was one explanation given to young male adults getting wet dreams, when the actual explanation is that young male adults are so perpetually horny that they can go from zero to orgasm in ten seconds flat even when they are technically unconscious.)

Incubus by Charles Walker (1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So Amethyst Realm didn't come up with the concept, but there's no doubt that she's enjoying it.  Which, I suppose, puts it into the "If It Makes You Happy" department.

However, I hope this is the last time I get sent a link about people having paranormal sexual experiences.  I guess chacun à son goût and all that sorta stuff, but myself, I prefer that my lovers are (1) human, and (2) alive.  If that makes me narrow-minded, I guess that's the way it is.

Oh, one more thing.  Amethyst Realm might want to consider adopting a different name if she's serious about finding a nice ghost to settle down with, because her current one sounds like one of the worlds from Super Mario Brothers.  If I was a ghost looking for a LTR, I don't think I could take someone named "Amethyst Realm" seriously, however determined she was to get into my, um, shroud.

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]