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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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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Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a shallow dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations. Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick-looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

Nota bene: I'm not saying ghosts, or spirits, or the afterlife, don't exist or, even more, can't exist.  Just that there's an alternate plausible explanation for these experiences that relies on nothing but known science.  As skeptic Robert Carroll put it, "Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural account of the world, you had better make sure that you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first."

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

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Ghostsquatch

At the end of yesterday's mashup of alien invasions and giant superintelligent (and malevolent) bugs, I wrote that I couldn't guess what might be the next bizarre woo-woo hybrid, but speculated that it might be ghost Bigfoots.  I picked that largely because it sounded ridiculous.

As of this writing I have now been emailed three times by loyal readers of Skeptophilia that yes, there are people who believe in spectral Sasquatches.

It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the cryptid world that the Ghost Bigfoot Theory became more than just a fever dream of mine because of Nick Redfern, author of Contactees: A History of Alien-Human Interaction, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, Three Men Seeking Monsters, and about a dozen other titles on similar topics.

But to set the stage, a bit of explanation.  You almost certainly know all about such familiar cryptids as Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, and Champ, and if you're a regular reader of this blog you likely also have a good working knowledge of some less familiar ones -- the Bunyip, Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, LizardMan, Sheepsquatch, the Beast of Gévaudan, Black Shuck, and Cadborosaurus.  You are probably also well aware that there has never been a bit of hard evidence for the existence of any of them.  All we have is sketchy eyewitness accounts, grainy photographs, and videocamera footage so shaky it looks like it was taken by a person who had just consumed about a quart of espresso.

What explains this dearth of tangible proof for any of these mysterious creatures?  There are two possible explanations that come readily to mind:

1. None of them actually exist.
2. The eyewitness accounts, photographs, and video clips aren't of actual, live cryptids; what people are seeing are the ghosts of prehistoric animals.

Well. I think we can all agree that option #2 is a pretty persuasive scientific explanation, can't we?  Redfern clearly thinks so.  He writes of a discussion he had with his friend, Joshua Warren, on the subject:

Could it be that certain animals of a strange and fantastic nature seen today are actually the spirits or ghosts of creatures that became extinct thousands of years ago?  As fantastic as such a scenario might sound, maybe we shouldn’t outright dismiss it.

Indeed, paranormal expert and good friend Joshua P. Warren, the author of the highly-relevant book, Pet Ghosts, told me that he had extensively investigated a series of encounters with apparitional, ancient animals on farmland at Lancaster, South Carolina – one of which seemed to resemble nothing less than a spectral pterodactyl.  Josh seriously mused upon the possibility that the ghostly presence of certain extinct animals might very well help explain sightings of monstrous beasts in our presence to this very day.

“Maybe Bigfoot is a phantimal,” said Josh to me, utilizing a term he uses to describe ghostly beasts, “perhaps even the ghost of a prehistoric creature, similar to the enormous extinct possible ape, Gigantopithecus, or maybe even the spirits of primitive humans.”

Okay.  Right.  A "phantimal."  So, what we've succeeded in accomplishing here is to take something that is potentially open to investigation (I hesitate to call what the Finding Bigfoot people did "investigation"), and place it entirely outside of the realm of what is even theoretically verifiable.

Redfern and Warren seem to think that this is a good thing.  If all of those people who claim to have seen Bigfoot are actually seeing a spectral proto-hominid, then the lack of evidence somehow becomes a point in favor of the claim, right?

Ghostly Sasquatches, after all, leave behind no hair samples.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pike's Peak highway bigfoot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This seems mighty convenient to me.  It takes all of the objections that skeptics have to the cryptozoology thing, and dismisses them at one fell swoop: "Of course there's no tangible proof.  If we're right, there' wouldn't be."  It also explains all of the cryptid sightings with equal facility.  Nessie and Cadborosaurus are spirit pleisiosaurs. Mokèlé-Mbèmbé is the ghost of a brachiosaurus.  Black Shuck and El Chupacabra are the ghosts of deceased canines.  Sheepsquatch is the ghost of... well, I still don't know what the fuck Sheepsquatch is.  But the ghost of some prehistoric mammal or another.

All of this, of course, just goes to show something that I've commented upon before; there's no crazy idea out there that's so outlandish that someone can't elaborate upon it so as to make it even crazier.  We take something for which there is no evidence, but which at least isn't biologically impossible (the existence of cryptids), and put it in a blender with another thing for which there is no evidence (the existence of ghosts), and pour out a wonderful new Woo-Woo Smoothie -- Cryptids are the Ghosts of Prehistoric Animals.

Maybe we can elaborate it further, you think?  Maybe the spirit animals are actually in contact with... aliens!  That's it, the spirit animals are spies and are relaying information on us to their alien overlords!  I'm sure that somehow it's all tied up with the Roswell Incident, HAARP, and the Illuminati.

Or maybe I should just shut the hell up, because every time I say, "Ha-ha, surely nobody believes this," I turn out to be disproven within twenty-four hours.

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