Vanished into the triangle

My thought process is like a giant game of free association at the best of times, and there have been occasions when I've tried to figure out how I got (for example) from thinking about a news story from Istanbul, Turkey to pondering nettle plants' dependency on phosphorus in the soil, and reconstructing the chain by which I got from one to the other has proven impossible.

But even considering the labyrinthine recesses of my brain, I think I'm to be excused if a link sent to me by a friend immediately reminded me of a short story by H. P. Lovecraft.  My dear friend, the brilliant author K. D. McCrite, messaged me saying "this immediately made me think of you," along with a link to a YouTube video called "Five Strange Disappearances in Vermont's Bennington Triangle."  The video, which is well-researched and pretty damn creepy, is about five unsolved disappearances in rural southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and despite my decades of interest in the paranormal, of which I had never heard.  The victims all were seen by multiple witnesses shortly before they vanished, and in fact one of them reputedly evaporated while on a public bus -- at stop A, he was there in his seat, and by stop B he was gone, despite the bus being in continuous motion the entire time and no one noticing his moving, much less leaping out of an open window or something.

The five -- Middle Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer -- varied in age from eight to seventy-four, and their personal lives had nothing particular in common.  They all disappeared in the late fall or early winter in the region of Glastenbury [sic] Mountain, and with the exception of Langer, no trace of them was ever found despite extensive searching.  Langer's badly-decomposed body was found seven months later, but there was no apparent cause of death.  (The strangest part is that Langer's body was found very close to the last reported sighting of Paula Weldon.)

One of the last known photographs of Paula Welden

Interestingly, even though these five are considered the canonical Bennington Triangle cases, there are at least four other unexplained disappearances in the area -- one in 1942 and three in 1949 -- that some people think are related.  Additionally, the Bennington Banner did a piece on the topic back in 2008, starting with the much more recent account of a local man, an experienced hiker, who got lost for almost a day on a straightforward three-mile hike in the area, and upon finding his way back, reported that he had become disoriented and dizzy.  He ended up stopping for the night, and when the morning came he was six miles away from where he thought he was -- and on the walk back passed landmarks that included "stuff that [he didn't recognize, but] couldn't have missed."

Immediately I was reminded of Lovecraft's wildly terrifying short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," not only because it's about strange disappearances, but because it is set in the same part of Vermont.  The main character, Henry Akeley, writes a panicked letter to a friend that he's been hearing "voices in the air," and has become convinced that there are invisible creatures in the woods stalking and abducting the unwary, and that he's doomed for sure but wanted to let someone know what had happened to him because he's going to go missing very soon, and that the friend should under no circumstances interfere or attempt to help him.  Of course, being that this is a Lovecraft story, the friend says, basically, "Okay, be right over, bro," and it doesn't end well for either of them.

The disappearances -- the real ones, not the ones in Lovecraft -- are well enough documented that they merit a Wikipedia page, and more details (although less in the way of rigor) can be found on a page over at All That's Interesting.  Apparently the area has a bad reputation, at least amongst aficionados of the paranormal; it's supposedly a hotspot for Bigfoot and UFO sightings, and was feared and avoided by the local Native Americans (that bit seems to be an almost compulsory filigree to these kinds of stories).  I also saw more than one reference to alleged cases of "voices being heard on dead-air radio," but I wasn't able to find any independent corroboration of the claim.

But "voices in the air," amirite?  I think I'm to be excused for thinking of Lovecraft's dark tale.

The more pragmatic people approaching this story -- I'm one, which is probably unsurprising -- suspect that if the five canonical cases weren't the work of a serial killer, then it's simply a case of people going off into wilderness and doing something stupid that kills them.  The southern part of Vermont is largely trackless forest, and even though I'm an experienced back-country hiker and camper, I would make plenty sure to have survival gear, water, and food if I went off by myself into those mountains.  I know first-hand how big the wilderness is and how easy it is to get lost or have a mishap.  (Didn't stop me from solo camping in the Cascades and Olympics when I was young and reckless; that I survived unscathed is more a testimony to my luck than my brains.)

Still, there's something about both of those explanations that is unsatisfying, largely because of the completely different circumstances of each disappearance.  Tedford, as I mentioned, vanished from a public bus.  Eight-year-old Paul Jephson was accompanying his mother in a pickup truck as she drove around her family's acreage -- she stopped to do some chores, was gone a short time, and when she came back, the little boy was nowhere to be found.  Langer disappeared while hiking with a friend; she'd gotten wet and decided to make the quick half-mile return to camp to change her clothes, but never got there.  Her body was found near a reservoir several miles away the following year -- in an area that had been searched extensively after her disappearance.

So all in all: pretty freakin' creepy.  Thanks to K. D. for cluing me in to a story that, all paranormal trappings aside, you have to admit is a curious one, and which admits of no obvious explanation.

Oh, and if you're wondering: Istanbul > Byzantine Empire > the Plague of Justinian (mid-sixth century) > the problems with burial of disease victims during an epidemic > bones enrich soil phosphorus > a proposal to use distribution of nettle plants in England to identify mass burial sites of people who died during the Black Death.  See?  Makes perfect sense.

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The strange case of the talking mongoose

This week we've been dealing with some pretty heavy topics, so I thought today I'd lighten things up by telling you about a strange incident in the village of Dalby, on the Isle of Man, in the 1930s.

In September of 1931, the Irving family -- James and Margaret, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Voirrey -- started hearing strange noises from the walls.  At first it was just furtive scratching and rustling, but soon they could discern words.  James and Voirrey made some attempt to speak to whatever-it-was, but were alarmed one evening when James said, "What in the name of God can he be?" and heard a high-pitched, thin voice repeat those words back in a singsong fashion. 

I was immediately (and unfortunately) reminded of Brown Jenkin, the mocking, squeaky-voiced demonic familiar of the evil Keziah Mason in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "Dreams in the Witch-House."  But unlike Brown Jenkin, who would happily bite your toes off as you slept, the creature in the Irving house apparently intended them no harm.  Eventually they were able to coax out a small furry animal that was somehow sentient, and (conveniently) spoke English.  It introduced itself as Gef (pronounced "jeff"), and said -- I shit you not -- that it was a mongoose who had been born in New Delhi, India in 1852.

How he got from India to the Isle of Man was never clarified, but after all, that's hardly the only weird thing about this story.

Voirrey reported that Gef was "the size of a rat," but had yellow fur and a bushy tail.  She also claimed -- and her father backed her up -- that Gef had told them that he was "an extra extra clever mongoose," but also that he was "an earthbound spirit" and "a ghost in the form of a weasel," although it's hard to see how he could be all three simultaneously.  He also told Voirrey, "I am a freak.  I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint, you'd be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!"

Supposedly she saw him many times, and none of those things happened to her, so I'm inclined to take his pronouncements with a grain of salt.

Once folks found out about the Irvings' claims, naturally the questions started coming.  It was nothing to worry about, James insisted; Gef had already shown himself to be helpful, doing things like warning them when strangers were on the property, waking family members when they overslept, and even once putting out the fire in the stove when it had inadvertently been left burning after the family retired for the night.  For myself, I'd have been less worried about Gef's usefulness than establishing that he actually existed, but apparently most folks in the area just shrugged and said, "Huh.  A magical talking mongoose.  How about that," and went on about their business.

A few, though, wanted more evidence (fancy that!), and the Irvings were happy to oblige.  More than one person who visited them heart Gef's voice, and some saw signs like a pair of yellow eyes staring at them from underneath a bed.  But the Irvings seemed unperturbed, and said they were perfectly happy having Gef live with them, and rewarded him by leaving out chocolate, bananas, and biscuits for him to eat.

Then, neighbors began to claim they'd actually seen Gef, too.  Two teenagers corroborated the yellow fur and bushy tail, and a villager named George Scott made a drawing of him:

What astonishes me about all this is how seriously people took it.  A few people called it out as a hoax -- one claimed that it was thirteen-year-old Voirrey's doing, that she was an accomplished ventriloquist and had hoodwinked her parents (and everyone else).  Voirrey heatedly denied this, and in fact was still denying it shortly before she died in 2005 at the age of eighty-seven.

But the reports got the attention of the psychic investigators, and that's when the story really exploded.  Harry Price got involved -- you may recall his name from my posts about the haunting of Borley Rectory and the odd story of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall -- and this brought Gef into the public eye.  Price is kind of a notorious figure in the history of psychic investigation, because even the True Believer types have to admit that his approach was a little sketchy, with veracity often taking a back seat to publicity.  And even Price was suspicious about Gef.  The house, he said, was like "one great speaking-tube, with walls like sound boards.  By speaking into one of the many apertures in the panels, it should be possible to convey the voice to various parts of the house."  Price had also made plaster casts of pawprints supposedly left behind by Gef, and sent them to zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock of the Natural History Museum, and Pocock came back with the rather unsatisfying answer that the prints may have come from a dog, but they definitely hadn't been made by a mongoose, talking or not.

The fact that the Irvings couldn't even get Price on their side was significant.  The somewhat more reliable Nandor Fodor, of the Society for Psychical Research, actually stayed in the Irving house for three weeks and saw no evidence of Gef.  He speculated that James Irving may have suffered from dissociative personality disorder, and had orchestrated the hoax, using Gef to give voice to a fragment of his psyche.

Despite all this, the Irvings stuck by their story.  Gef was real, they said, not a hoax, regardless what anyone thought.

James Irving died in 1945, and Margaret and Voirrey were forced to sell the house at a loss -- its reputation for being haunted evidently reduced its appeal to potential buyers.  The next owner, one Leslie Graham, reported that he'd shot and killed Gef, and displayed a body of a furry animal -- but it was black-and-white, and larger than Gef's reported size.

"That's not Gef," Voirrey said.

Naturally, I'm inclined to think the whole thing was a hoax right from the start -- whether by James or Voirrey is unclear.  But what's striking about the case is how many people bought into it.  You would think that if somebody in your town said, "Oh, by the way, I have an eighty-year-old talking yellow mongoose living in my walls, but it's all cool because he does chores for us as long as we feed him biscuits," everyone would kind of back away slowly, not making any sudden moves, and do what they could to get the person professional help.

Oddly, that didn't happen.  After the first flurry of investigations and news articles died down, life pretty much continued the same as before.  There was some increase in tourism from people who wanted to see Gef's house, but even that waned as the years passed.  Voirrey took in stride her connection to the Case of the Talking Mongoose, and seemed, on the whole, unembarrassed by it -- and also, never admitted it was a hoax.

So that's our strange tale for the day.  Hopefully a mood-lightener after some of the darker explorations of the week.  Since finding out about Gef, I've been listening for rustling in the walls of my own house, and... nothing.  Just as well.  The last time I heard something like that it turned out to be a family of red squirrels in our attic, which took forever to get rid of.  I don't know what I'd do if we had to deal with a talking mongoose.

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The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late eighteenth century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttelton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition that appeared to him as a brown mist and that "generated a feeling of absolute terror."  He shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttelton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttelton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin.  Beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttelton.

Sad to say for aficionados of "true ghost stories," the likeliest explanation is that the entire thing was spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual reliability as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttelton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what's actually there.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

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Ghost purchases

It seems like every day I'm forced to face the unfortunate fact that I don't seem to understand my fellow humans very well.

All I have to do is to get on social media or -- worse -- read the news, and over and over again I think, "Why in the hell would someone do that?"  Or say that?  Or think that?  Now, I hasten to add that it's not that I believe everyone should think like me; far from it.  It's more that a lot of the stuff people argue about are either (1) matters of fact, that have been settled by science years ago, or (2) matters of opinion -- taste in art, music, books, food, television and movies, and so forth -- despite the fact that "matters of opinion" kind of by definition means "there's no objectively right answer."  In fact, at its basis, this penchant toward fighting endlessly over everything is a good first choice for "things I completely don't understand about people."

As an aside, this is why the thing I keep seeing on social media that goes, "What is your favorite _____, and why is it _____?" is so profoundly irritating.  (The latest one I saw, just this morning: "What is your favorite science fiction novel, and why is it Dune?")  I know it's meant to be funny, but (1) I've now seen it 873,915 times, and any humor value it might have started with is long gone, and (2) my reaction every time is to say, "Who the fuck do you think you are, telling me what my favorite anything is?"

So, okay, maybe I also need to lighten up a little.

Anyhow, this sense of mystification when I look around me goes all the way from the deeply important (e.g., how anyone can still think it's safe to smoke) to the entirely banal (e.g. people who start brawls when their favorite sports team loses).  A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle, though, and that includes the article I ran into a couple of days ago showing that people will pay significantly more for a house if it's supposedly haunted.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The data, which came from the British marketing firm InventoryBase, looked at the prices people were willing to pay to purchase a house with an alleged ghost (or one that has a "bad reputation").  And far from being a detriment to selling, a sketchy past or resident specter is a genuine selling point.  Comparing sales prices to (1) the earlier purchase price for the same property, adjusted for inflation, and (2) the prices for comparable properties, InventoryBase found that the increase in value is significant.  In fact, in some cases, it's freakin' huge.

The most extreme example is the house in Rhode Island featured in the supposedly-based-upon-a-true-story movie The Conjuring, which was purchased for $439,000 (pre-movie) and sold for $1.2 million (post-movie).  It's hardly the only example.  The house in London that was the site of The Conjuring 2 is valued at £431,000 -- £100,000 more than it was appraised for in 2016.

Doesn't take a movie to make the price go up.  "The Cage," a house that was the site of a medieval prison in the village of St. Osyth in Essex, England, has been called one of the most haunted sites in Britain -- and is valued at 17% higher than comparable properties.  Even more extreme is 39 DeGrey Street in Hull, which has a 53% higher appraisal value than comparables, despite the fact that the house has a reputation for such terrifying apparitions that "no one is willing to live in it."

InventoryBase found several examples of houses that were objectively worse than nearby similar homes -- badly in need of remodeling, problems with plumbing or wiring or even structure, general shabbiness -- but they still were selling for more money because they allegedly have supernatural residents.

I read this article with a sense of bafflement.  Now, to be fair, I'd be thrilled if it turned out my house actually was haunted, primarily because it would mean that my current opinion about an afterlife was wrong.  This would require a complete reframing of my worldview, something I think I would find a fascinating challenge.  The problem is, at the same time I'm a great big coward, so the first time the ghost appeared I'd probably have a brain aneurysm, but at least then I could look forward to haunting the next resident, which could be kind of fun.

But if I was in the market for a house, it's hard for me to fathom spending tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars extra for the privilege of sharing my house with ghosts.  No, for the privilege of supposedly sharing my house with ghosts; I'm guessing in the Disclosure Statement there's no requirement for anyone to prove their house is actually haunted.  So I'd potentially be spending a year's worth of salary (or more) just for unsubstantiated bragging rights.

Anyhow, this brings me back to where I started, which is that I just don't understand my fellow humans.  A great deal of their behavior is frankly baffling to me.  Given how poorly I fit in with my blood relatives -- "black sheep of the family" doesn't even come close to describing it -- I've wondered for years if I might be a changeling.  The problem with that hypothesis is that I look exactly like my dad, so any contention that I'm not really his son is doomed to be shipwrecked on the rocks of hard evidence.

And like I said, it's not that I think my own view of the world is sacrosanct, or something.  I'm sure I'm just as weird as the next guy.  It's just that the ways I'm weird seem to be pretty different from the ways a lot of people are weird.

So maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  Other folks are weird; I'm weirdly weird.  Weird to the weirdth power.  This means that people are probably as mystified by my behavior as I am by theirs, which I guess is only fair.

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Rain Woman

I was asked a curious question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, one that intrigued me enough I thought it was worth devoting an entire post to.

Here's the relevant bit of the email (reproduced here with permission):

I know you're not superstitious, and you've written more than once about the necessity of looking for scientific (or at least logical) explanations for things that might seem paranormal.  What I'm more curious about, though, is how you actually feel.  You've probably heard about objects that are haunted or cursed or bring devastating bad luck to their owners.  Sure, your rational brain might be certain that the idea of a cursed object is stupid, but would your emotions agree? 

Let me put it this way; let's say there was something that had a wide reputation for carrying a dangerous curse with it.  Multiple people had reported scary stuff associated with it.  Would you be willing to have it in your house?  Late at night, when you were alone in the house, wouldn't you experience at least a little bit of doubt that maybe you'd put yourself in danger?

So put my money where my mouth is, eh?  No armchair skepticism allowed.  Head into the attic of the haunted house at night and see if I can still talk so blithely about rationalism.

It's an interesting question, because all my life I've felt like I had two brains -- an emotional one and a logical one -- and they are not on speaking terms.  I've sometimes wondered if I went into science as a way of dealing with the fact that my emotions are constantly picking me up by the tail and swinging me around.  And I'll admit he has a point.  All the rational skepticism in the world doesn't make it any less scary when you're in the house alone and you hear what sounds like the creak of a footstep upstairs.

I asked him if he had any particular cursed object in mind -- that it sounded like he was thinking of something specific.  He admitted that this was spot-on.  "Have you heard of Rain Woman?" he asked.

I hadn't, so he told me the story, which I checked out, and it appears to be true -- at least the non-paranormal bits.

As far as the paranormal bits, I'll leave you to decide.

In 1996, a Ukrainian painter named Svetlana Telets was sitting in front of a blank canvas, and an image appeared in her mind of a pale-faced woman wearing a broad-brimmed dark hat, eyes closed, standing in the rain.  Telets found the image strangely compelling, and she began to sketch it out -- later telling a friend, "I felt like someone was controlling my hand as I drew."  She spent the next month refining and adding color, and the result was Rain Woman.

Telets displayed the piece in a local gallery, and it attracted a lot of (positive) attention, garnering several offers of purchase.  She sold the painting to the highest bidder -- only to have the purchaser request a return and refund shortly afterward.  It had triggered waking nightmares, they said, of a figure following them around, always a little out of view, and far enough away that details weren't easily visible.  The figure, they said, never let itself get close.

Immediately put me in mind of the mysterious old woman who follows Ruby Sunday around, in one of the best and most atmospheric Doctor Who episodes ever -- the shiver-inducing "73 Yards."

Telets bought the painting back, and sold it again -- only to have the same thing happen.  It went through multiple purchasers over the next few years, always with the same result.  One terrified temporary owner even offered to pay Telets an additional half of the purchase price to take it back, saying that ever since buying the painting he'd seen white eyes suddenly opening in ordinary objects, eyes that watched his every move.

Eyes no one else was able to see.

In 2008 the painting was purchased by musician Sergei Skachkov, and he kept it, although he reported that his wife made him put the piece into storage after repeatedly seeing a ghostly figure walking around their house at night.

The Russian Orthodox priest Father Vitaly Goloskevich, who knows Telets and several of the temporary owners of the painting, said he is in no doubt that there's something supernatural going on here.  "A person has a spirit and a soul," Father Goloskevich said.  "There are truly spiritual works of art, and there are soulful ones.  And the painting you are talking about represents just such soulful art.  And it doesn't come from God...  The artist puts into the work the mood in which he was at the time of his creation.  And it is not known who led Svetlana Telets at the moment she created Rain Woman."

So, my correspondent asked; would I be willing to purchase Rain Woman and hang it on the wall in my house?

My initial reaction was, "Of course!"  First, I think the painting is kind of cool.  Second, having something with such a strange reputation would be a great conversation starter when my wife and I have guests (being diehard introverts, not a frequent occurrence, but still).  I have a nice collection of beautifully-illustrated Tarot decks, an avocation which comes from the same impulse.

But that wasn't what my correspondent asked.  How would I feel about having the painting in my house -- especially if I was alone with it on a stormy night?  Would my breezy rationalism be quite so staunch then?

If I'm being entirely honest, probably not.  It's not that I think anything real and paranormal is going on with Rain Woman; I suspect the odd occurrences reported by purchasers come from a combination of superstitiousness and suggestibility.  Once one person has claimed the painting is haunted, it makes it more likely that others will experience the same sort of thing (or at least, that they'll attribute anything odd to the painting's evil effects).

But honestly, deep down I'm as suggestible as the next guy.  It's part of being human.  Our distant ancestors' brains evolved to interpret anything out of the ordinary as being potentially dangerous; the well-worn example is that if you're a proto-hominid on the African savanna, it's better to freak out over a rustle in the grass when it's only the wind than not to freak out if it turns out to be a hungry lion.

We're all weird amalgams of logic and emotion, aren't we?  I'm reminded of the probably-apocryphal story about the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr.  Bohr was being interviewed by a reporter shortly after he won the Nobel Prize, and the reporter noticed that in Bohr's office, over the door, there was a horseshoe nailed -- with the points upward, of course, to "catch the good luck."  The reporter said, "Professor Bohr, you are not going to tell me that a scientist of your caliber believes that horseshoes bring you good luck."

"Of course not," Bohr deadpanned back.  "But I'm told that horseshoes bring you good luck whether you believe in them or not."

So yeah.  I say I'd be thrilled to own Rain Woman, but truthfully, I'd probably be just as likely to have scary dreams about her as the other owners.  But that's the benefit of having a basically rational mindset, isn't it?  Okay, I'd be scared in the moment, but skepticism is a kind of barrier that stops you from racing too far down that path.

Maybe I'd see ghosts at night just like the other owners did, I dunno.  But what I'm pretty sure of is that the next morning, when the sun was out and the skies were clear, I'd be able to laugh about it -- and leave the painting hanging on the wall.

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A knock on the door

In the terrifying Doctor Who episode "Listen," the Twelfth Doctor and his companion, Clara Oswald, go as far into the future as possible -- just prior to the heat death of the universe -- to rescue a stranded human named Orson Pink who, during the early days of time travel research, accidentally projected trillions of years into the future and then couldn't get back.

But the Doctor notices something odd almost immediately.  It is -- allegedly -- a completely dead universe.  The barren planet Orson's spaceship landed on has breathable air, but he has been, up to that point, the only living entity there.  So why does he have the magnetic locks activated on the hatches, and a message written on the wall saying "DON'T OPEN THE DOOR"?

Reluctantly, Orson tells them that -- impossible as it sounds -- "there's something out there."  He says he's been having auditory hallucinations, and the message is to remind him never to unlock.  And soon they hear it -- a loud knocking, in increments of three.  The Doctor, ever curious about anything mysterious, orders Clara and Orson into the TARDIS, and then shuts off the magnetic locks on the hatch.

As soon as he does, the door handle starts to turn...

The whole idea revolves around the pithy observation that no one is afraid of being alone in the dark -- what we're afraid of is the idea that we're in the dark and might not be alone.

The suggestibility of the human mind is almost certainly responsible for a good many claims of the paranormal.  We hear an odd creaking sound upstairs when we're by ourselves (or think we are), and quite understandably, get spooked.  In that state, we're more likely to attribute the noise to something scary or dangerous.  A ghost, an intruder, some thing upstairs waiting for us to say those famous last words from horror movies -- "I heard a noise.  I'm going to go investigate."

That same sound, heard on a sunny day when the whole family is home, might just elicit a shrug and a comment that "old houses make noises sometimes."  Our emotional state, and the context we're in at the time, make a great deal of difference to how we'll react.

This is probably the explanation for the "high strangeness" reported by astronauts, as recently recounted by "paranormal investigator and esoteric detective" Paul Dale Roberts.  These apparently have included:

• UFOs, one "shaped like a beer can" and the other a "long, white, snake-like or eel-like object"
• what looked like "swarms of tiny glittering fireflies" near the viewport
• a sensation of a mysterious presence, there but unseen, with the astronauts on the ship
• visions of ethereal, semi-transparent "angels" following them
• disembodied voices, repeated knocks, and scratching sounds coming from outside the spacecraft (see why I thought of "Listen"?)

The likeliest explanation for the UFO sightings (especially the "fireflies") is space debris.  There's a lot of it up there, some natural, but much of it detritus from satellites and other human-made objects.  A recent survey estimated that there could be as many as 129 million bits of debris up there in orbit around the Earth (amounting to around eight thousand metric tons), most of it under a centimeter in diameter.  The vast majority is no threat to people on the ground; stuff that small burns up in the atmosphere long before it hits.  It is, however, a danger to spacecraft, and recent ones have shielding specifically to protect the hull from impacts and punctures due to running into all that assorted floating junk.  You may have heard of Kessler syndrome, or a "collisional cascade" (named after astrophysicist Donald Kessler, who wrote a paper about it), where space debris causes collisions that result in more debris, increasing exponentially the likelihood of further collisions -- eventually making it impossible to keep an intact satellite in orbit.

As far as the other "high strangeness" goes, well -- it's probably a combination of the natural noises made by the spacecraft and the overactive imaginations of people cooped up in a tiny metal box hurtling through the vacuum of space.  Astronauts are screened for psychological stability and are highly trained, so they know what to look out for -- but they are still human, and prone to all the odd biases our brains come preloaded with.  No wonder they report some weird stuff up there.

Of course, we can't be sure.  Certainly the universe is filled with mysteries.  But the danger comes in leaping from "space can be a weird place" to "anything unexplained we run across up there must have a paranormal explanation."  Like I said in a recent post, before you accept a supernatural explanation, make sure you rule out all the natural ones first.

Keep in mind, though, that the Twelfth Doctor and Clara joined a man who was the last creature left alive in the entire universe, and... there was a knock on the door.  Even knowing it was fiction, that scene left me shivering.  Because who knows for certain what's out there in the dark?

Could be damn near anything.

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A plea on behalf of Schrödinger's cat

I'm going to make a dual plea to all y'all:

1. Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural explanation for something, make sure you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first.
2. Before you try to apply a scientific explanation to an alleged paranormal phenomenon, make sure you understand the science itself first.

I stumbled on an especially good (well, bad, actually) example of what happens when you break both of these rules of thumb with "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb's piece, "Into the Multiverse to Search for Ghosts: Are We Seeing Parallel Realities?"  The entire article could have been replaced by the word "No," which would represent a substantial gain in both terseness and accuracy, but unfortunately Knibb seems to think that the multiverse model might actually explain a significant chunk of supernatural claims.

Let's start out with the fact that he joins countless others in misusing the word dimension to mean "some place other than the regular world we see around us."  To clear this up, allow me to quote the first line of the damn Wikipedia article on the topic: "the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it."  We live in a three-dimensional space because three measurements -- up/down, right/left, forward/backward -- are necessary to pinpoint where exactly something is.

So saying that something is "in another dimension" makes about as much sense as saying your Uncle Fred lives in "horizontal."

Then he goes on to mention the quantum multiverse (also known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation), the bubble universe model, and brane theory as possible scientific bases for explaining the paranormal.  First off, I'll give him as much as to say that these are all legitimate theoretical models, although the three have little to nothing to do with each other.  The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory arises because of the puzzle of the collapse of the wave function, which (in the Copenhagen Interpretation) seems strangely connected to the concept of an observer.  Physicist Hugh Everett postulated that observer-dependency could be eliminated if every quantum collapse results in a split -- every possible outcome of a quantum collapse is realized in some universe.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christian Schirm, Schroedingers cat film, CC0 1.0]

Then there's the bubble universe model, which comes from the cosmological concept of inflation.  This theory suggests that our current universe was created by the extremely rapid expansion of a "bubble" of inflating spacetime, and that such bubbles could occur again and create new universes.  Finally, brane theory is an offshoot of string theory, where a brane is a higher-dimensional structure whose properties might be used to explain the apparent free parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

These three models do have one thing in common, though.  None of them has been supported by experimental evidence or observation (yet).  For the first two, it very much remains to be seen if they could be.  In Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, the different timelines are afterward completely and permanently sealed off from one another; we don't have access to the timeline in which a particular electron zigged instead of zagging, much less the one where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after.  The theory, as far as it goes, appears to be completely untestable and unfalsifiable.  (This is what led to Wolfgang Pauli's brilliantly acerbic quip, "This isn't even wrong.")  

And as far as the bubble universe goes, any newly-formed bubbles would expand away from everything else at rates faster than the speed of light (it's believed that space itself isn't subject to the Universal Speed Limit -- thus keeping us science fiction aficionados in continuing hopes for the development of a warp drive).  Because information maximally travels at the speed of light, any knowledge of the bubble next door will be forever beyond our reach.

Be that as it may, Knibb blithely goes on to suggest that one of these models, or some combination, could be used to explain not only ghosts, but poltergeists, "audible phenomena," déjà vu, the Mandela Effect, sleep paralysis, and cryptid sightings.

Whoo-wee.  Sir, you are asking three speculative theories to do some awfully heavy lifting.

But now we get to the other piece, which is deciding that all of the listed phenomena are, in fact, paranormal in nature.  Ghosts and poltergeists -- well, like I've said many times before, I'm doubtful, but convincible.  However, I'm in agreement with C. S. Lewis's character MacPhee, who said, "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."  A lot of "audible phenomena" can be explained by the phenomenon of priming -- when the mind is already anticipating a particular input (such as a creepy voice on a static-y recording) we're more likely to perceive it even if there's nothing there in actuality.  (As skeptic Crispian Jago put it, "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there.")  Déjà vu is still a bit of a mystery, but some research out of Colorado State University a few years ago suggests that it's also a brain phenomenon, in this case stemming from a misinterpretation of familiar sensory stimuli.  The Mandela Effect is almost certainly explained by the plasticity of human memory.  Sleep paralysis is a thoroughly studied, and reasonably well understood, neurological phenomenon (although apparently scary as hell).

As far as cryptid sightings -- well, y'all undoubtedly know what I think of most of those.

So the first step with all of these is to establish that there's anything there to explain.  The second is to demonstrate that the scientific explanations we do have are inadequate to explain them.

The third is to learn some fucking science before you try to apply quantum physics, inflationary cosmology, and string theory to why you got creeped out in a haunted pub.

Okay, I'm probably coming across as being unwarrantedly snarky, here.  But really.  There's no excuse for this kind of thing.  Even if you're not up to reading peer-reviewed science papers on the topics, a cursory glance at the relevant Wikipedia pages should be enough to convince you that (for example) the bubble universe model cannot explain ghosts.  Misrepresenting the science in this way isn't doing anyone any favors, most especially the people who seriously investigate claims of the supernatural, such as the generally excellent Society for Psychical Research.

As far as whether there's anything to any of these allegedly paranormal claims -- well, I'm not prepared to answer that categorically.  All I can say is that of the ones I've looked into, none of them meet the minimum standard of evidence that it would take to convince someone whose mind isn't already made up.  But I'm happy to hear about it if you think you've got a case that could change my mind.

Just make sure to tell the ghost not to get shy if I hold up a camera or a thermometer.

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Passageways

I was asked a couple of days ago by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia if I'd ever heard of The Backrooms -- and if so, if I thought there was "anything to it."

I hadn't, but told him I needed clarification about what exactly he was looking for.  "Anything to it" is, after all, a little on the vague side.

"You know," he said.  "Something legitimately creepy.  Something more than just people getting freaked out over nothing, and then making shit up to explain why they're scared."

So I said I'd look into it.

The Backrooms turns out to have originated as a "creepypasta" -- a strange, usually first-person tale related as if it were true, that then gets passed around on the internet and kind of takes on a life of its own.  (Two famous stories that originated as creepypasta are Slender Man and the Black-eyed Children -- both of which I thought were cool enough that I ended up them using in my novels, in Signal to Noise and Eyes Like Midnight, respectively.)  The Backrooms has to do with someone who stumbled into an empty, fluorescent-lit space that didn't obey the regular laws of time and space; partitions changed position, doorways opened up or closed when you weren't looking, angles shifted and turned in unpredictable ways.  (Reminds me of the evil city of R'lyeh from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, where the geometry is so skewed you can't even tell what's horizontal and vertical.)

It was a place, they claimed, where you could "noclip out of reality" -- "noclipping" being a video game term where a character can pass right through a solid wall.

The original post was accompanied by the following photograph:

Well, the internet being what it is, pretty soon someone found that there was nothing paranormal about the photograph; it was, in fact, an empty furniture sales room in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that was being renovated into a hobby store.  But the garish lighting, sickly yellow cast, and odd angles definitely give a surreal air to the photograph.

I'm not sure I would want to be alone at night in that place, rational skeptical attitudes notwithstanding.

The Backrooms (at least while it was empty) is a good example of a "liminal space" -- a place that appears to be a mysterious passageway to somewhere else, somewhere not quite of this world.  Consider how often that trope has been used in fiction -- H. G. Wells's "The Door in the Wall," the Wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, the hotel corridors in Stephen King's The Shining, and the weird labyrinth of empty streets leading to the door of Omo's barber shop in the Doctor Who episode "The Story and the Engine" are four obvious examples -- and much of the eeriness comes from the fact that while you're there, you're alone.

Just you and the twisted geometry of spacetime that rules such places.

"Liminal spaces include empty spots, like abandoned shopping malls, corridors, and waiting rooms after hours," said architect Tara Ogle.  "These are spaces that are liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another.  While there, we are standing on a threshold between how we lived previously and new ways of living, working and occupying space.  It's understandable that we react emotionally to such places."

Liminal spaces, it seems, are to architecture what the uncanny valley is to faces.

Despite my reluctance to attribute any of this to the paranormal, I'm no stranger to the feelings evoked by places that seem to be caught between the real world and somewhere else.  I've described here my odd reaction to spending an afternoon in the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in northern England, an experience that felt quite real even though there was no scientifically-admissible evidence that anything untoward was going on.

In fact, for a skeptic, I have to admit I'm pretty damn suggestible.  I suspect I went into science as a way of compensating for the fact that my emotions are like an out-of-control pinball game most of the time.  So while on the surface I might seem like a good choice to accompany you into the investigation of a haunted house, I'd probably react more like Shaggy in Scooby Doo, leaping into the air at the first creaking floorboard and then running away in a comical fashion, my feet barely even touching the ground.

Be that as it may, in response to my reader's question: I doubt seriously there's "anything to" The Backrooms and other liminal spaces besides people's tendency to react with fear to being in odd situations, which (after all) includes being in a completely empty, fluorescent-lit furniture showroom at night.  I don't think you're going to end up passing through a doorway into an exciting fantasy world if you go exploring there.

Which is kind of a shame.  On the other hand, you are also unlikely to meet creepy little twin girl ghosts or an evil barber who wants to use your imagination as a power source.  So like everything, I guess it's a mixed bag.

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Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Sometimes my mental processes are like a giant exercise in free association.

I've always been this way.  My personal motto could be, "Oh, look, something shiny!"  When I was a kid my parents had a nice set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and in those pre-internet days I used them for research for school projects.  So I'd start by looking something up -- say, the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- and I'd notice something in the article, which I'd then have to look up, then I'd notice something there, and so forth and so on, and pretty soon I was reading the entry about the mating habits of wombats.

My younger son inherited this tendency.  Conversations between the two of us resemble a pinball game.  More than once we've stopped and tried to figure out how we got from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes the pathway is just too weird and convoluted to reconstruct.  Maybe that's why I love James Burke's iconic television series Connections; the lightning-fast zinging from event to event and topic to topic, which Burke uses to brilliant (and often comical) effect, is what's happening inside my skull pretty much all the time.

It's a wonder I ever get anything done.

The reason this comes up is because I was chatting with a friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, about trying to find a topic for Skeptophilia that I hadn't covered before.  She asked if I'd ever looked at the role of mirrors in claims of the paranormal.  I said I hadn't, but that it was an interesting idea.

So I started by googling "mirrors paranormal," and this led me to the Wikipedia article on "scrying."  Apparently this was the practice of gazing into one of a wide variety of objects or substances to try to contact the spirit world.  The article says:

The media most commonly used in scrying are reflective, refractive, translucent, or luminescent surfaces or objects such as crystals, stones, or glass in various shapes such as crystal balls, mirrors, reflective black surfaces such as obsidian, water surfaces, fire, or smoke, but there is no special limitation on the preferences or prejudices of the scryer; some may stare into pitch dark, clear sky, clouds, shadows, or light patterns against walls, ceilings, or pond beds.  Some prefer glowing coals or shimmering mirages.  Some simply close their eyes, notionally staring at the insides of their own eyelids, and speak of "eyelid scrying."

I think next time I'm taking a nap and my wife wants me to get up and do chores, I'm going to tell her to leave me alone because I'm "eyelid scrying."

Yeah, that'll work.

Anyhow, what scrying seems like to me is staring into something until you see something, with no restrictions on what either something is.  It does mean that you're almost guaranteed success, which is more than I can say for some divinatory practices.  But this brought me to the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," because they apparently recommended mirror-scrying as a way of seeing who was exerting a positive or negative effect on you, and believed that if you stared into a mirror you'd see the faces of those people standing behind you.  This was preferably done in a dimly-lit room, because there's nothing like making everything harder to see for facilitating your seeing whatever it was you thought you were gonna see.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On this site, there is a list of famous members, and to my surprise one of them was Charles Williams, a novelist who was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  His novels Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve, The Greater Trumps, The Place of the Lion, and War in Heaven are fascinatingly weird, like nothing else I've ever read -- a combination of urban fantasy and fever dream.  He was also a devout Christian, so his membership in the Golden Dawn strikes me as odd, but I guess he wasn't the only one to try blending Christianity with neo-druidic mysticism.

At this point I felt I was getting a little far afield from my original intent, so I decided to leave Wikipedia (with its multiple internal links and temptations to wander) and found a site about the history of mirrors and their uses.  On this site I learned that there's a tradition of covering all the mirrors in the house when a family member dies, to prevent the dear departed's soul from becoming trapped in the mirror.  The problem is, if the deceased's spirit wants to hang around, it can simply sidestep -- there's a whole lore about spirits and other paranormal entities which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This immediately grabbed my attention because it's the basis of my novella Periphery.  The idea of the story is that an elderly woman decides to have laser surgery to correct her nearsightedness, and afterwards she starts seeing things in her peripheral vision that no one else sees, and which disappear (or resolve into ordinary objects) when she looks at them straight-on.

The problem is, these things are real, and alive.  And pretty soon, she realizes that one of them has become aware that she can see it -- and it starts to stalk her.

*cue scary music*

This led me to look into accounts of "shadow people" who exist on the fringes of reality and are only (partly) visible as dark silhouettes that flicker into and out of existence in your peripheral vision.  From there, I jumped to a page over at the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe about "static entities," which are not only vague and shadowy but appear to be made of the same stuff as the static on a television screen.  I don't want to steal the thunder from Brent Swancer (the post's author) because the whole thing is fun reading, but here's one example of an account he cites:

All of a sudden I had a really powerful urge to look at the end of the hallway.  We had recently brought a coat stand from a bootsale and this was in the middle of the hallway now.  As I stood there I saw a human outline but entirely filled with TV like static, I remember little bits of yellow and blue in it but was mainly white and it came out of the bedroom on the left and was in a running stance but it was really weird because it was in slow motion and it ran from the left to the back door on the right.  As it ran it grabbed the coat stand and pulled it down with it and it fell to the floor.  I was just standing there after in shock...  I ran to my sister and told her what happened and when we went back to the hallway the stand was still on the floor.  That was the only time I saw it, I don’t know why I saw it or why it pulled the stand down, it was all just surreal.  I did have some other experiences in that house that were paranormal so maybe it was connected.

But unfortunately at the end of this article was a list of "related links," and one of them was, "Raelians' ET Embassy Seeks UN Help and Endorsement," which is about a France-based group who believes that the Elohim of the Bible were extraterrestrials who are coming back, and they want the United Nations to prepare a formal welcome for them, so of course I had to check that out.

At this point, I stopped and said, "Okay, what the hell was I researching again?"  The only one in the room with me was my puppy Jethro, and he clearly had no idea, because he's got an even shorter attention span than I do.  So my apologies to K. D., not to mention my readers.  The whole mirrors thing was honestly a good idea, and it probably would have made an awesome post in the hands of someone who has an ability to stay focused longer than 2.8 seconds and isn't distracted every time a squirrel farts in the back yard.  But who knows?  Maybe you learned something anyhow.  And if you followed any of the links, tell me where you ended up.  I can always use a new launch point for my digressions.

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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