The phantoms of Jedburgh Abbey

Jedburgh Abbey is a ruined Augustinian monastery near the town of the same name in Roxburghshire, Scotland, only ten miles from the border with England.  It has quite a storied history.  It was founded in 1118 by King David I (whose father, King Malcolm III Canmore, defeated the notorious Macbeth; whether Birnam Wood ever actually came to Dunsinane is another matter entirely).  It became one of the wealthiest abbeys in the Scottish border counties, and its abbot also made the mistake of supporting William Wallace.  This was a bad combination back then.  After Wallace's tragic defeat at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, the victorious English ransacked and pillaged the abbey. It recovered, only to be sacked several more times, and finally burned (along with nearly the entire town of Jedburgh) in 1523.

Even so -- and despite the Scottish Reformation pretty well doing away with all the Catholic monasteries in Scotland -- part of the building was still used as the parish kirk.  Finally, in 1871, it was deemed unsafe, and a new church was built; the remains of the abbey became a historical landmark, where it attracts tourists lo unto this very day.

It also is the home of a particularly terrifying pair of specters -- which, if you believe the ghost hunters, still sometimes can be seen stalking around the abbey grounds.

Jedburgh Abbey from the River by Thomas Girtin (1799) [Image is in the Public Domain]

King Alexander III of Scotland (1249-1286), whose great-great grandfather David I founded Jedburgh Abbey, had a terrible time of it even judging by medieval Scottish standards, where life was (in Thomas Hobbes's immortal words) "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  He became king at age seven -- never a good way to start -- and his first years were dominated by a fight for power between two factions both determined to gain control over the young monarch.  He married Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of King Henry III of England, but this only served to give Henry incentive to demand fealty from Alexander, entangling Scotland in another of the long conflicts it had with its neighbor to the south.

Along the way, Alexander had what would turn out to be his only real victory; in 1263 the Scots defeated the invading force of King Haakon IV of Norway at the Battle of Largs, and in the treaty that ended the conflict, Scotland gained ownership of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man.

But after that, things started to fall apart.  Alexander's wife Margaret died in 1275, and all three of his children by her had followed their mother into the grave by 1284.  As was typical of the time, Alexander started casting around for a second wife.  His only heir was his grandchild, the daughter of his deceased eldest child Margaret who had married King Eric II of Norway, grandson of the defeated Haakon IV -- but the girl (also named Margaret) was an infant... and still lived in Norway.

Here's where it takes an even darker turn.  Alexander fell for a woman named Yolande de Dreux, the daughter of a French nobleman.  Yolande reciprocated his attention, but there was a snag -- she was already betrothed, to a French knight named Eranton de Blois.  There's no historical certainty about what happened next, but according to the legend, Yolande conspired with one of her father's henchmen, the Comte de Montbar, to get de Blois out of the way, and he did -- via a dagger in the back.

The Abbot of Jedburgh demanded an investigation, but (predictably) nothing came of it.  Yolande was engaged to marry King Alexander, and the ceremony took place in the abbey church on November 1, 1285.

Everything was going forward with the typical medieval pomp and solemnity until the door of the church flew open with a bang, and an uninvited guest strode up the aisle, wearing armor and a tattered and bloodstained cloak.  When he reached the front of the church, the king said in a furious voice, "Who are you?"

At this point the figured lifted its visor, to reveal the decaying visage of a corpse.

De Montbar collapsed to the floor, writhing, and Yolande recoiled -- because, of course, they both recognized the dead man's face.  The specter pointed at Yolande and said, "Ask her.  My curse be on you and on her, the curse of the assassin's victim, treacherously ambushed and foully slain.  Hear me well, unhappy king.  Before three months have passed, they will sing masses for your soul in Jedburgh Abbey and she will be left a widow.  She will suffer the hatred of her people and will forever be reminded of her crimes."

Three months turned out to be an underestimate, but not by much.  On March 19, 1286, the king rode out after dark to join his wife at Kinghorn in Fifeshire, and the next morning was found at the bottom of a steep, rocky embankment with his neck broken.  Pragmatic folks said his horse lost its footing in the dark and threw its rider to his death; the more imaginative said it was the curse being fulfilled.  However it was, the whole thing propelled Scotland into chaos.  Alexander's granddaughter, Margaret, "Maid of Norway," died on board ship during the crossing to Scotland in 1290, leaving no heir to the throne.  The following years of civil war and repeated invasions from England (including the one that ultimately led to the brutal execution of William Wallace) only ended in 1306 with the coronation of Robert the Bruce.

As far as the rest of the "curse," it kind of... didn't happen.  There's no indication that Yolande was hated; she returned to France, where she remarried to Arthur II, Duke of Brittany, had six children of whom five reached adulthood, and lived to age 67 (neither of those a bad accomplishment back then).  She had received land in Scotland as a dowry for her first marriage and continued to manage it from over the Channel, apparently untroubled by the sordid story that was attached to her name.

But as for Alexander, death didn't bring him any peace.  Both his ghost and de Blois's have been seen on the abbey grounds, despite the fact that even the harshest versions of the legend didn't attach anything blameworthy to either one, and the spirits of the two people who were the real bad guys (Yolande and her murderous co-conspirator de Montbar) are nowhere to be found.  I guess there's no justice to be had, even in the afterlife.

Anyhow, that's today's creepy story, appropriate given that I'm already seeing Halloween decorations in the stores around here.  It makes a good tale even though the great likelihood is that large parts of it were made up after the fact.  But if you ever get a chance to visit Jedburgh, keep an eye out for phantoms.  A medieval king with a broken neck and a bloodied corpse in armor.  Shouldn't be hard to spot.

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Home bizarre

My house is, to put not too fine a point on it, kind of a disaster area.

A friend described it as "looking like a museum run by lunatics."  Part of this is that my wife and I have dozens of interests, so we have a huge amount of random stuff.  Carol is a professional artist (you can and should check out her amazing work here), so between the pens and inks and watercolors and framing supplies -- as well as all the finished pieces -- it takes up a lot of room.  We're both amateur potters, which is a whole other set of supplies and products.  I'm a fanatical book and CD collector, and also a musician with (at last count) five flutes, three recorders, three pennywhistles, a set of bagpipes, a guitar, a djembe, a concertina, and a piano.  I collect masks, and have them hanging on walls all over the house.  Then there's the odd random stuff; just from where I'm sitting, I can see a Bigfoot statue, an antique typewriter, a gargoyle, a bronze sundial, several ceramic statues of characters from Doctor Who and Lost in Space, and a scale model of the Miller-Urey apparatus.

Our house isn't neat, but I can at least confidently assert that it's interesting.

There's also the problem that Carol and I are both housework-impaired.  This is not helped by the fact that we have three large dogs.  When we have guests coming over it's preceded by three days of panic-cleaning so we don't die of humiliation as soon as our guests walk through the front door.  On the other hand, it's a good thing we sometimes do have guests, because otherwise one day we'd go missing, and when the police came to investigate they'd find us both trapped in enormous clumps of dog hair.

We'll never make Home Beautiful, but we did make the May edition of Home Chaotic.

My work station

The reason all this comes up is a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link suggesting that the problem isn't that I have a million interests, the attention span of a fruit fly, and zero aptitude for housework.

The problem is my home needs an exorcism.

At least that's what Australian psychic Catarina Ligato would probably say.  Her vocation is "cleansing" houses of their past inhabitants, who do stuff like creating "negative energy," making rooms feel unnaturally cold, and moving your belongings around.  They can also produce odd smells, although I wonder if we'd even notice that given our aforementioned three dogs.

If Ligato checks a place out and finds it's haunted, she respectfully asks the disembodied ghosts of former residents to leave the place in peace.  She also uses a "crystal wand" and "sacred spray" to encourage their exit.

Kind of the spirit world equivalent of a mop and a can of Lysol, is how I think of it.

"Doing this work is a calling, it’s not for everyone," Ligato said.  "I know other psychics who ended up in psych wards for losing their balance.  [Working in homes] can feel a bit more positive, because you’re helping both the inhabitants and the spirits to find peace."

If you don't want to shell out the cash to hire Ligato (her minimum fee is three hundred dollars) -- or if, like me, you live halfway around the world from her -- you can always DIY it.  Burn some essential oils, she says, play some calm music, keep the windows open, and "declutter regularly."

It's this last one that would be the sticking point for us, because as I mentioned earlier, clutter is kind of our raison d'être.  I mean, I guess it'd be nice to live in a neat, clean house (not that I know first-hand what that's like), but... I like my stuff.  This is my Emotional Security Stuff.  If I were to start doing a Marie-Kondo-style culling, I'd be a little lost.  Okay, maybe I don't need an Indonesian statue of a cat playing a flute, but yeah, Marie, it kind of does spark joy.

So I think the fact that we're constantly misplacing stuff probably isn't caused by the ghosts of former inhabitants moving our belongings around, but more that (1) we have a huge amount of random things strewn everywhere, and (2) we're both kind of scatterbrained.  As far as it feeling cold sometimes -- well, it's an old house, and we do live in upstate New York, which is a four-season climate (the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction).  I don't think I'm ready to pay Catarina Ligato to fly out from Australia to do an exorcism, entertaining as that would be.

I might give the essential oils a try, though.  I doubt it'll help with the overall cleanliness, but maybe it'll help with the doggy smell, which can get pretty intense sometimes.   Every move in the right direction is a good thing.

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Woof

I was discussing the alleged phenomenon of hauntings with a friend of mine, and he said, "There's one thing I've always wondered.  Some people believe that the souls of humans can survive after death, and become ghosts.  If humans can become ghosts, why can't other animals?"

Well, after pointing out the obvious problem that I'm not really the right person to state with authority what a soul, human or otherwise, could or could not do, I mentioned that there are many cases of supposed hauntings by animals.  The most famous of these is the haunting of Ballechin House in Scotland.

Ballechin House shortly before its demolition [Image is in the Public Domain]

Ballechin House was a beautiful manor house, built in 1806 near Grandtully, Perthshire, Scotland, on a site that had been owned by the Stuart (or Stewart or Steuart or Steward, they seemed to have spelled it a new way every time the mood took them) family since the fifteenth century.  The story goes that a scion of this family (sources point to his being the son of the man who had the house built), one Major Robert Steuart, was a bit of a wacko who had more affection for his dogs than he did for his family.  That said, he provided quarters for his sister Isabella, who was a nun -- I'm not sure why she wasn't living with her fellow sisters in a convent, but some claim that it was because she'd had an illegitimate child and gotten herself, um... de-habited?  Anyhow, she lived with them for a time, finally dying and being buried on the property.  As for Major Steuart, he apparently took enough time away from his dogs to marry and have at least one child, John.

As the Major got older, he got more and more peculiar, and finally started claiming that after he died he was going to be reincarnated as a dog.  One runs into these ideas pretty frequently today, but back then, it must have been a sore shock to his nearest and dearest.  So this partly explains why when the Major did go to that Big Kennel In The Sky, his son John rounded up all of the Major's dogs and shot them.

I say "partly" because I fail to understand how, even if you believed that the Major was going to be reincarnated as a dog, killing dogs that were currently alive and therefore presumably none of whom were actually the Major, would help.  But that's what he did.

And boy was he sorry.

Almost immediately thereafter, John Steuart and his family and servants began to experience spooky stuff.  They heard doggy noises -- panting, wagging of tails, sniffing, and the really nasty slurping sounds dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene.  (Okay, I'm assuming that they heard that last sound.  I certainly hear it enough from my own dogs.)  Steuart's wife several times felt herself being pushed by a wet canine nose, and reported being in a room and suddenly being overpowered by a strong doggy smell.

Other apparitions began -- the sighting of a ghostly nun, all dressed in gray, in the garden; doors that would open and close by themselves; and the sound of limping footsteps (the Major apparently walked with a limp).  Steuart himself was not long to worry about them, because he was killed in an accident, supposedly the day after hearing a knocking sound on the wall.  (Maybe it was a coded message from the Major that meant, "The dogs and I can't wait to see you!")

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the creator Spettro84, Ghost-BlackDog]

In the 1890s the hauntings were investigated on the urging of a certain Lord Bute -- I can't figure out whether by that time Bute was the owner of the property, or just a busybody.  Thirty-five psychics descended upon the house, which created such a cosmic convergence of woo-wooness that you just knew something was gonna happen.  And it did.  A Ouija board spelled out "Ishbel" (recall that Major Steuart's sister who was a sister was named Isabella, and recall also that this entire family seemed to have difficulty with spelling their own names).  The psychics experienced various doggy phenomena; one of the psychics, who had brought her own dog along, reported that one evening her dog began to whimper, and she looked over, and there were two disembodied dog paws resting on the bedside table.

I'd whimper, too.

In the interest of honesty, it must be recorded that the house was let several times during this period, once to a Colonel Taylor who belonged to the Society for Psychical Research, which is known for its skeptical and scientific approach toward claims of the paranormal.  And Taylor's diary, sorry to say, records that he slept in the Major's bedroom on more than one occasion and experienced nothing out of the ordinary.

Be that as it may, Ballechin House acquired the reputation of being "the most haunted house in Scotland," and by the 1920s became impossible to rent.  It fell into increasing disrepair, and finally was torn down in 1963.  I think this is a little sad -- I'd have loved to visit it.  I might even have brought my dogs. My puppy Jethro is highly alert, even if he has the IQ of a loaf of bread, and would certainly let us know if there were any other dogs present.  I see no reason why it would matter that the canine residents of the house were a bunch of dogs who, technically, were dead.  The "doggy smell" would be adequate motivation for him to bark his fool head off, as would the whole leaving-your-front-paws-on-the-nightstand thing.

So, the believers in Survival seem to, for the most part, believe that dogs have an eternal soul.  However, this opens up a troubling question.  Why stop there?  If dogs have an eternal soul, do cats?  (Several of the cats I've owned seemed to be more of cases of demonic possession, frankly.)  How about bunnies?  Or weasels?  Or worms?  Or Japanese beetles?  (I'd be willing to believe that if there are gardens in hell, there'll be Japanese beetles there to eat the roses.)  I find this a worrisome slippery slope.  It may be a cheering thought that something of Woofy's nature will survive his demise, even if he terrorizes the guests with sticking his spectral wet nose into said guests' private regions, but I'm not sure I want to be stung by ghostly yellowjackets, or have to spray my plants for ghostly aphids.  The real kind are enough of a problem.

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The mirror crack'd from side to side

I know there are a lot of reasons why people believe weird shit.  It's tempting to settle on the self-congratulatory solution of "Because they're dumber than I am," but I always hesitate to go there because (1) there are lots of inherent biases in our cognitive systems that you can fall for even if you're perfectly intelligent, and (2) I know all too well that I fall for those same biases myself if I'm not careful.

That said, I was sent a link by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia describing something apparently some people believe that left me saying, "Okay, that is incredibly stupid."

The link was to a story by Brent Swancer over at Mysterious Universe called "The Bizarre Tale of the Haunted Website."  Swancer's article goes into considerably more detail, but the bones of the story are as follows.

In the eighteenth century, there was a little girl whose name was "Repleh Snatas."  Repleh had a birthmark on her face that the locals said was the mark of the devil, and people started looking askance at the entire family.  The dad became convinced that his daughter was possessed, and locked her in a room full of mirrors to drive the demons out (as one does), but every morning when he'd check on her the mirrors were all cracked and she was as evil as ever.  Ultimately he killed the girl and his wife and finally himself.  The locals refused to give any of them a proper burial, but tied the three bodies to a tree all facing in different directions and let 'em rot right there.

Once again, as one does.

But Repleh was not so easily vanquished.  She disappeared into mirrors, and if you look into a mirror at night sometimes it will crack and in the fractured reflection you'll see her standing behind you, kind of like what happened to Daughter of Mine at the end of the extremely scary Doctor Who episode "Family of Blood."  Then someone started a website about Repleh, and it does weird stuff like not loading properly or actually crashing your computer.  Even if it loads it's still freaky, with collages of scary photographs of creepy children and hair-raising horror-movie-style background music.  And if you go there, you risk getting Repleh's attention, because she's still hanging around, apparently, and if she thinks you're getting too curious she might kill you.

Reading this elicited several reactions from me:

• "Repleh Snatas" has to be the least convincing fake name I've ever seen. A third-grader could figure out that it's "Satan's Helper" backwards.  What were her parents' names, Tnatsissa Snatas and Dneirftseb Snatas, or something?
• The whole girl-in-the-mirror thing is just a variation on the old kids' game of "Bloody Mary," wherein you stare into a mirror at night and say "Bloody Mary" ten times in a row, and nothing happens.
• A website not loading properly wouldn't indicate much of anything to me, because my computer does weird things like random slowdowns and page crashes pretty much all the time.  My guess is that it has nothing to do with mirrors or creepy ghost kids, but it may mean that I need a new computer.

I went to the website, which is (unsurprisingly) www.replehsnatas.com, and got the following message:

Before going to replehsnatas.com, there's one more step.  By clicking the button below you'll go through a standard security check, after which you will be redirected to Chrome store and will be given the option to install Secured Search extension.  This extension will offer you a safer web search experience by changing your default search provider.

And my response to that was, "How exactly stupid do you think I am?"  I closed the window, meaning that I never got to see the actual page, but it was better than getting whatever malware or virus this was pointing me toward, which would undoubtedly result in my computer running even worse than before.

Despite all this, apparently there are tons of people who think Repleh Snatas is real.  Over on Quora there's a whole discussion of Repleh and how you shouldn't mess around with her website because she's eeee-vil.

Even though I wasn't successful at getting into her website, I was able to find a couple of photographs that are said to be of the wicked Repleh Snatas.  (Yes, I know she supposedly lived in the eighteenth century, before the invention of photography.  Stop asking questions.)  Here's one of them:

The only problem is that this is actually a photograph of Princess Juliana of the Netherlands (who eventually became Queen Juliana).  This would be more obvious if the people who created the Repleh website and added the image hadn't photoshopped out the handwritten words "Princess Juliana" which are (I shit you not) written across the top of the original.

Here's the other one:

And this one is a still-shot of the actress Helena Avellano from her movie Moondial.

So old Repleh is kind of batting zero, here.  This has not stopped dozens of people from writing about her on True Tales of the Paranormal websites, which I will leave you to find on your own, and wherein you will read multiple accounts of the evil Repleh showing up in mirrors and generally scaring the bejeezus out of people.

As I said, I'm not usually going to point fingers at people for slipping into occasional credulity, as long as they're open to correcting themselves when they see what is actually going on.  We all do it; it's part of human nature.

On the other hand, to believe in Repleh Snatas, you have to have the IQ of a PopTart.  I've read some unbelievable paranormal claims before, but this one has to win the prize for sheer goofiness.  So my tolerance of people's foibles can only be stretched so far.

So I'm issuing a challenge to the supernatural believers out there: c'mon, folks.  Up your game.  You can do better than this.  Hell, a sufficiently motivated elementary-school student could do better than this.  The quality of your claims has really been falling off lately.  I'm expecting some better material to work with.

Get with the program, people.

  

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Pearlin Jean

Appropriate to the day, I thought I'd tell you about an interesting (and quite cordial) exchange about ghosts I got into with a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

He's an open-minded sort but definitely more likely than I am to credit tales of the paranormal, especially those having to do with hauntings.  We talked a little about some of the better-known ghostly claims, and he said, "The thing is, how could all of those stories be false?  Okay, I'm willing to admit that a lot of them are.  Maybe most.  But what you're telling me is that of all the thousands of allegedly-true ghost stories out there, one hundred percent of them are fabrications.  That seems to me to take more faith than a belief in ghosts does."

My answer was first to correct a misapprehension; I don't disbelieve all those claims.  As he points out, at least for some of them, we don't have hard evidence that they are hoaxes, because there's no hard evidence of any kind.  My position is that none of the ones I've seen meet the minimum standard that science demands.

And that's it.  If your grandmother's sister's best friend's husband's second cousin saw a ghost with her own eyes, that's all well and good.  It might be true.  It might be that she made it up, or that she was tricked by a fault in human perception (heaven knows, there are enough of those), or that whatever it was she saw has a perfectly natural, non-ghostly explanation.  That's where we have to leave it: we don't know.

But.

As skeptics, the default belief is that what you see around you has a natural scientific cause.  When something goes bump in the night, and you can't figure out what that bump was, you fall back on "well, it must have been an animal or a tree branch hitting the roof or something like that."  You don't jump to it being the ghost of the old lady who owned this house in 1850 and died after falling down the stairs unless you have some pretty damn good evidence.

There's one other issue that confounds our ability to accept tales of hauntings, and that's the unfortunate talent humans have for embellishment.  Hey, I'm a novelist, and I know all about that; there's no story that can't be made better by adding new twists and turns and details after the fact.  What this does, though, is to obscure any facts that the story does contain, and leave you with no real knowledge of where the truth ends and fiction begins.

One hallmark of a story like this -- that may have started out with bare-bones truth, but grew by accretion thereafter -- is when there are several versions of the story.  Take, for example, the Scottish legend of Pearlin Jean, in which the main characters were very real.

The central figure of the story is Robert Stewart (or Steuart) (1643-1707), 1st Baronet of Allanbank (Berwickshire).  Stewart was a nobly-connected merchant in Leith, and like a lot of rich folk of the period, when he was a young man his parents sent him to do a tour of continental Europe as part of his education.  He spent some time in Rome, but apparently while in France did another thing that young men often do, which was to have a torrid affair, in this case with a young woman named Jean (or Jeanne).

The liaison was never meant to be permanent, at least not by Stewart, and he made it clear he intended to return to Scotland to take his place in the upper crust.  But after that, things kind of went awry.

If you've read any traditional ghost stories, you can probably predict what happened next -- Jean dies, and Stewart ends up being plagued by her vengeful ghost.  But the way this happens depends on which version you read.  Here are three I found:

• Jean was a nun in the Sisters of Charity of Paris, and in fooling around with Robert had broken her vow of chastity.  She tried to follow him home but he rebuffed her, and while trying to get aboard his carriage as he was leaving Paris fell underneath and was killed when the wheel hit her in the head.  Her dying words were, "I'll be in Scotland afore ye!", perhaps after taking the low road to Loch Lomond.

• Robert left Jean in France (in this version very much alive) and made it back to Scotland, but Jean followed him, as jilted lovers in ghost stories are wont to do.  Her death in a carriage accident happened on Robert's home estate of Allanbank in Scotland.

• Jean not only followed him back to Scotland, but brought with her the baby she'd borne after their illicit hanky-panky.  Stewart killed the child, and distraught, Jean threw herself beneath the wheel of the carriage.

Afterward, the ghost -- nicknamed "Pearlin Jean" because of the dress of gray pearlin lace she wore, which in one version of the tale had been given to her by Robert Stewart -- followed her lover around, generally making his life miserable by appearing at inopportune times (although is there an opportune time for the ghost of your dead mistress to show up?), slamming doors and running up and down the staircase.  On one occasion -- at least in one iteration of the story -- Stewart got the crap scared out of him after returning home from a drive, and when he was ready to climb out of the carriage was stopped cold by an apparition of a woman in a lace dress with blood all over her face.  He was frozen in place until one of his servants came out to see what was amiss and the ghost disappeared.

Creepy tale, no doubt about that.  But what part of it is true?

Alleged ghost photograph, most likely a double exposure (1899)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Robert Stewart was a real person, that's certain enough.  As far as Pearlin Jean -- who knows?  I find it a little suspicious that Stewart is known to have married twice, and both of his wives were named Jean.  (Both of them were solidly Scottish, however, not French.)  His first marriage was to Jean Gilmour, daughter of John Gilmour of Craigmillar, and his second to Jean Cockburn, daughter of Alexander Cockburn of Langton.

But who knows?  Maybe the guy just had a thing for women named Jean.  "Hey, babe, how about a tumble?... *pauses*  Wait a minute, is your name Jean?  Oh, okay, then, let's have at it."

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when people remembered Stewart's relationships with two (real) women named Jean, adding a third just sort of happened.

The difficulty here is that some parts of the legend are true, and of the remainder, there might be bits of it that are as well -- but which bits?  Needless to say, I'm not buying the ghostly business, and even with the tragic but non-supernatural parts -- a rich young man's dalliance with a poor and vulnerable young woman, that led to her death -- there are too many different versions to know exactly what did happen and what were later embellishments or outright fabrications.

And the problem is, a great many ghost stories are like this.  Multiple versions, and no real scientifically admissible evidence.  So my friend's comment that some of them could be true is a possibility, but figuring out after the fact which ones is very often an impossibility.

This is why with modern claims of the paranormal, I'm very much of the opinion that any reasonably coherent ones deserve exploration when they happen, rather than waiting until afterward and the inevitable human tendency toward embellishment (and outright misremembering) occurs.  I fully support groups like the excellent Society for Psychical Research -- they're committed to investigating claims from the standpoint of scientific evidence, and are unhesitating in calling a hoax a hoax.

So I'm open to being convinced.  Yes, it might take a good bit of convincing, but as with just about everything, if presented with adequate evidence I'll have no option but to accept that my default position -- that there is a natural, non-paranormal explanation -- was wrong.

But thus far, Pearlin Jean and the hundreds of other stories like it just aren't doing it for me.  Sorry if that diminishes the frisson of the season, but that's the way I see it.  On the other hand, if when you're out trick-or-treating tonight, you see the apparition of a bloody-faced woman dressed in tattered gray lace step out of the shadows -- well, good luck to you, too.

  

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Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How the hell are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there.  "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

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Ghost shortage

I sometimes get grief from readers because of my tendency to dismiss claims of the paranormal.

In my own defense, I am convincible.  It just takes more than personal anecdote and eyewitness accounts to do it.  Our memories and sensory-perceptive apparatus are simply not accurate enough recording devices to be relied on for anything requiring scientific rigor.  I find myself agreeing with the hard-nosed skeptic MacPhee in C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength:

"My uncle, Dr. Duncanson," said MacPhee, "whose name may be familiar to you — he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland — used to say, 'Show it to me in the word of God.'  And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table.  It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences.  And granting his premises, he was quite right.  I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles.  If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

So it's not that I'm rejecting anything out of hand, nor saying that your story of seeing your Great Aunt Mildred's ghost fluttering about in your attic last week isn't true.  What I'm saying is that thus far, I personally don't have enough evidence to support a belief in ghosts.  Neither the attempts at rigorous study I've seen, nor my own individual experience, would be at all convincing to someone who didn't already have their mind made up.

And, if you believe an article I just ran across yesterday, any opportunities I might have for changing my opinion are waning fast.

According to paranormal researcher/nuclear physicist Paul Lee, the United Kingdom is "running out of ghosts."  Lee, author of The Ghosts of King's Lynn and West Norfolk, has been tracking paranormal activity in Britain since January 2020, and has seen a marked decline in reports.  "I've been contacting all the reportedly haunted locations on my app, and asking if the residents, owners or staff have experienced any unexplained activity," Lee said.  "So far I've had almost eight hundred replies, and even some supposedly highly haunted places like Conisbrough Castle in South Yorkshire, the Ettington Park Hotel in Stratford -- said to be one of the most haunted hotels in the UK -- and Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly, say they haven't experienced anything in the last few years."

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

As far as what's happened to all these spirits, Lee says they may have "moved on."  I guess, like in The Good Place, anything gets boring after a while, and after a few centuries of scaring the shit out of tourists, the ghosts are probably eager for a change of venue.  On the other hand, Lee cautions, just because a particular ghost hasn't been heard from in a while doesn't mean it's gone permanently.  "It may be that ghosts can be recharged," he said.  "You sometimes hear stories of ghosts suddenly reappearing again after many years' absence."

So it could be that this is just a temporary lull, and the ghosts will all come back at some point.  Maybe when the Tories get voted out.

But you have to wonder, of course, if there's something more rational going on here, like the fact that people are wising up to how easy it is to slip into superstition and credulity, and attribute every creaking floorboard to the tread of a spectral foot.  While there are groups that approach these sorts of phenomena the right way (the Society for Psychical Research comes to mind), there are so many more that look at claims of hauntings as a way of turning a quick buck that maybe people are just getting fed up.  Shows like Ghost Hunters can't have helped; week after week, they go to supposedly haunted sites, wander around brushing aside cobwebs and waving their flashlights about in an atmospheric fashion, and like Monty Python's Camel Spotters, every week find conclusive evidence of nearly one ghost.  Despite a zero percent success rate, they always high-five each other for a job well done at the end of the episode, counting on the fact that viewers will already have forgotten that they'd just spent forty-five minutes watching nothing happening.

So maybe there are fewer ghost reports because people are getting smarter about what actually constitutes something worth investigating.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Anyhow, I wish Paul Lee the best of luck.  If the sightings don't pick up, he'll have to go back to nuclear physics to make ends meet, and that would be a damn shame.  And to reiterate my first point, it's not that I'm saying what he claims is impossible; no one would be happier than me if there turned out to be an afterlife, preferably on the beach and involving hammocks, sunshine, the minimum legally-allowable amount of clothing, and drinks with cheerful little paper umbrellas.

In the interim, however, I'll keep looking for hard evidence.  And if tonight I get visited by the spirit of your Great Aunt Mildred and she gives me a stern talking-to, I guess it will serve me right.

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The haunted sentry box

A while back, my wife and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the lovely island of Puerto Rico.  On the way there, Carol asked me what I wanted to do while we were in San Juan.  I thought about all the possibilities -- lounging on the beach, swimming, snorkeling, hiking, seeing the sights -- so of course what I said was, "I want to see the Haunted Sentry Box."

I first ran into the tale of the Haunted Sentry Box of Old San Juan when I was perhaps twelve years old, and happened upon a copy of C. B. Colby's book Strangely Enough.  This book is a whimsical, often scary, sometimes hilarious account of dozens of "true tales of the supernatural," each only a page or two long.  It was one of my first encounters with someone who claimed that ghosts, UFOs, and monsters could be real, and is one of the things that started me down the long and twisty road that led to Skeptophilia.  (I still have my battered and much-reread copy.)

The Tale of the Haunted Sentry Box is chilling in its simplicity.  In it, we hear about a sentry "many years ago" in the fortress of San Cristóbal in the oldest part of San Juan, who was assigned duty in one of the stone sentry boxes that jut out from the main wall.  He was reluctant, we're told, because it was a lonely post, and he had a "feeling of foreboding."  And sure enough, when another soldier went to relieve him some hours later, the sentry box was empty.  His superiors were certain the man had deserted.

One of the sentry boxes on the wall of San Cristóbal.  I have to admit, it wouldn't be a job for the claustrophobic.

So the second soldier was assigned to take the missing man's place, and a watch was set on the wall overlooking the sentry box.  Only shortly afterwards, a searing light blazed from inside the sentry box, shining out through the slit-like windows, and a "piercing scream" split the night.  The watchman roused his superiors from sleep, and they ran to investigate.  The second soldier was now missing as well -- the inside walls were "black with soot," and there was a strong smell of sulfur.

The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.

See why I wanted to go there?  So we hiked on over to San Cristóbal, paid our five bucks' admission fee, and explored the ancient walls and rooms of the fortress.  But although "La Garita del Diablo" was marked on maps -- proving that Colby hadn't, at least, made the story up himself -- we couldn't find the actual item.

Me, exploring one of the non-haunted sentry boxes of San Cristóbal.  I detected no soot, sulfur, or traces of missing soldiers.

Finally, after perhaps an hour of wandering around, I decided to ask in the souvenir shop (of course there's a souvenir shop) about the Haunted Sentry Box.  Could I have directions for how to get there?

The young woman behind the counter looked alarmed.  "Oh, no, no," she said, her eyes wide.  "We do not allow anyone to go there, sir."

"Really?" I said.  "Why?  I was hoping to see it for myself."

"It is not allowed," she said firmly.  From her expression, she looked torn between crossing herself and forking the sign of the evil eye in my direction.

She added reluctantly that there was, however, a point on the exterior wall where one can lean out and peer down toward La Garita del Diablo, if I was so determined to blight the memory of my visit with such a place.  Eager to so blight myself, I followed her directions to the wall's edge, and leaned over.  And here it is:

Not impressive at this distance, perhaps.  And I wasn't able to pick up any presentiments of evil through my binoculars when I scanned the place.  No black smoke curling up from the windows, no leering face in the shadows of the door.  It looked just like all of the other sentry boxes we saw, both in San Cristóbal and in the big fortress of El Morro only a mile westward along the coast of San Juan Harbor.

So the whole thing was a little anticlimactic.  Here I hoped to give Satan a good shot at me, and I was prevented from doing so by some silly regulation about protecting the tourists from being vaporized.

I'm happy to say that the remainder of the trip was wonderful, and I did get to spend a lot of time lounging on the beach in swim trunks, drinking coconut rum, and trying unsuccessfully to get rid of all the sand stuck to my legs.  We also spent a happy half-day hiking in the El Yunque Rain Forest, only an hour's drive to San Juan, which is a must-see for birders and other nature lovers.

But I have to confess to some disappointment about the Haunted Sentry Box.  So near, and yet so far.  Not only did I not get incinerated by Satan, our airplane crossed the Bermuda Triangle (twice) and we didn't disappear.  You know, if the world of the paranormal is so eager to interact with us living humans -- and to give a skeptic his well-deserved comeuppance -- they really aren't taking these opportunities very seriously.

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Hello Dolly

Despite my tendency to fall into the "dubious" column with respect to most paranormal claims, I'm always appreciative of anyone who is more of a believer who nevertheless wants to see any evidence analyzed the right way.

That's my impression of The Anomalist, a website I check regularly for news of the weird.  It acts as a sort of clearinghouse for recent stories of odd or unexplained phenomena, but is really good about presenting all sides of the story -- and for calling out bogus claims as such.

Take, for example, some stories that appeared there having to do with the alleged phenomenon of "haunted dolls."

For a lot of us, dolls are right up there with clowns in the "oh, hell no" department.  Their blank, unresponsive faces and fixed expressions land right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- we tend to perceive a face that is human-like, but not quite human enough, as being more frightening or repellant than a face that has fewer distinctly human features.  (Think of a doll's face as compared to a teddy bear's, for example.)  So we're already in scary territory for a good many folks.

Add to that the possibility of the doll being possessed, and you're looking at "scream like a little child and run away."

It's no wonder that the recent creepy Doctor Who episode, "The Giggle," featured a doll called Stooky Bill.  Stooky Bill was real enough -- he was a ventriloquist's dummy that was used by Scottish electronics pioneer John Logie Baird as a subject for the first-ever image transmitted over a television signal -- but in the episode, Stooky Bill (and his wife and "babbies") are brought to life by an evil alien called the Toymaker (played to perfection by Neil Patrick Harris).  The scariest scene in the entire episode was when the wife and children dolls first talk to, then attack, companion Donna Noble in an empty room as she and the Doctor are trying to escape the labyrinth where the Toymaker has trapped them.

Something about their still, expressionless faces, that even so are moving and speaking, is absolutely terrifying.

A while back The Anomalist looked at a couple of examples of the haunted doll phenomenon.  The first is a World War II-era ventriloquist's dummy head called "Mr. Fritz" kept in a glass cabinet by its owner.  The owner started getting suspicious when he'd get up in the morning to find the cabinet door open, so he set up a camera to film it when he wasn't around.

The result, even if you're suspicious it's a fake, is pretty fucking creepy.  The glass door swings open, Mr. Fritz's eyes pop open -- and then his mouth moves.

After this, the owner apparently took the doll head out of the case and put it in a cabinet "secured by heavy chains."  Why this was necessary, given all that happens is the door opens and the face moves, I don't know.  It's not like it had arms and legs and was walking about unassisted, or anything.

Still, I understand the apprehension.  Skeptic though I am, I don't think I'd want to sleep in the same room as that thing, heavy chains or no.

Then we have a British doll named Scarlet, who has been recorded using an "Electronic Voice Phenomena" (EVP) recorder -- and what she supposedly says indicates she should have her prim little porcelain mouth washed out with soap.

In a video of the doll, we get to hear playback of the alleged EVP.  Not only does she supposedly say her owner's name (Linzi), she says such things as "fuck off," "you're fucked," "shut the fuck up," and "fuck this."

So apparently Scarlet is even more fond of the f-word than I am, and that's saying something.

Anyhow, I listened to the recording several times -- and I'm just not hearing it.  I could barely make out "Linzi," but all of the alleged obscenities sounded like white noise to me.  And that's the problem; as is pointed out in The Anomalist, there's a good explanation for a great many alleged EVP claims, and that's apophenia.  The human mind is a pattern-finding machine, which means that sometimes we'll see patterns when there's nothing there but chaos. (You can think of our tendency to see faces -- pareidolia -- as a special case of apophenia.)

With Scarlet, people are already primed to hear something meaningful, so the static pops, clicks, and hums the EVP recorder plays back are interpreted with this bias.  Especially when we already know what the doll allegedly said -- it's all listed right there in the article.

Put simply, you can't miss it when I tell you what's there.

The Anomalist provides a link to an article in The Skeptical Inquirer about this very tendency -- looking at particular cases of EVP claims and analyzing why they're probably nothing more than our tendency to impose order on chaos.

So unlike a lot of sensationalized sites about alleged paranormal phenomena, I can hold up The Anomalist as a place that has the exact right approach.  I'm probably still a bit more dubious than the site owners are, but by and large, we both have the same touchstone for accepting a claim -- logic and evidence.

And a bit of healthy skepticism about humanity's capacity both for getting things wrong... and for engaging in fakery.

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