The ghost of Greyfriars

I've been asked a number of times why I disbelieve in such phenomena as ghosts, and my answer is always the same: I don't.  I have no strong evidence that they exist, which is not the same thing.  Presented with scientifically admissible evidence, I'd have no choice but to admit that, in fact, I do believe in spooks.

So on this count -- like with most other fringe-y beliefs -- I'm able to have my mind changed.  But -- to borrow a phrase from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson -- "I need more than 'you saw it.'"

And that's the difficulty I have with just about every ghost story I've ever heard.  Take, for example, the spot that is often called "the most haunted place in Scotland" -- Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.

Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carlos Delgado, Greyfriars Kirkyard - 03, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's unsurprising that the place is claimed to have ghosts; it's been used as a cemetery since the time of Mary Queen of Scots.  But it didn't really get an evil reputation until the horrible "Killing Time," when beginning in 1679 and lasting nine years, the Scottish Covenanters got into a dispute with King Charles II over whether the Presbyterian Church would be the sole form of religion in Scotland.  (It's always been astonishing to me how often people were killed in Europe, and in the places the Europeans colonized, over disputes that boil down to "my Jesus is better than your Jesus.")  In the end, of course, Charles's side won, and hundreds of Covenanters were transported, imprisoned, or even executed as traitors to the crown.  And things only got worse when Charles's brother James II succeeded to the throne -- James was (to put not too fine a point on it) a narrow-minded, humorless religious fanatic, who (as a Roman Catholic) was even more against the Covenanters than his brother was.

However, the name most often associated with the Killing Time is one George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, nicknamed "Bluidy Mackenzie" by the Covenanters, who despised him because of his siding with the King and for his role in the persecutions that followed.  It's likely Mackenzie saw himself as having no choice, and that he was simply doing what the King ordered him to do -- but, from the Covenanters' perspective, that was a mighty fine excuse for the horrors that followed, which included people being crowded into unheated, stone-floored jails in midwinter with only four ounces of food a day to sustain them.  The worst spot was the official Covenanters' Prison, conveniently (considering how many of them died) located right next to Greyfriars Kirkyard.

In any case, the persecutions eventually ended with the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when James II was deposed and his daughter, Mary II, and her Dutch husband William of Orange, were put on the throne.  The Presbyterians were given their religious freedom, the surviving Covenanters (there weren't many) freed, and everything more or less went back to normal.  Mackenzie only lived three more years, dying in 1691 at the age of 55, and was buried with honors...

... in Greyfriars Kirkyard, within a stone's throw of the old Covenanters' Prison.

Which these days is called rubbing salt in a wound.

It wasn't long before the horrors that had happened gave rise to claims that Mackenzie's spirit was haunting the place.  By the nineteenth century, it was so established as a haunted spot that Robert Louis Stevenson commented upon it (and Mackenzie), "When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly, sometime or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave...  Foolhardy urchins [thought it] a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord Advocate’s Mausoleum and challenge him to appear. 'Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye dar!'"

This legend has persisted to today, where Greyfriars figures prominently on Edinburgh ghost tours.  But here's where the problem comes up.  It's haunted by an evil presence, they claim, which one site says "is attracted to and feeds on fear;" another says the vengeful spirit has "knocked more than fifty people [on ghost tours] unconscious" and has scratched or bruised others, including an eleven-year-old boy who was given a black eye.

And my question is: if there's such an embarrassment of riches in the way of evidence that the ghost of Greyfriars is real, how has this not been verified scientifically?

If people are being beaten up right and left by a ghost, it seems like it'd be simple to set things up so that there'd be some kind of evidence other than saying after the fact, "I'm sure I didn't have these scratches when I came in here."  Now, mind you, I'm not accusing anyone of lying.  But it certainly does seems suspicious that if so many people are having these experiences, no one has conducted a scientifically-admissible investigation of the place.

If they have, I haven't found anything about it.  Plenty of anecdotes, nothing in the way of proof of the claims.

So, to return to my original point -- I'm convincible.  But don't @ me with more "my grandma's Cousin Ethel went there and an invisible hand touched the back of her neck!"  I'm very sorry grandma's Cousin Ethel got scared, but that's hardly to the point as far as science goes.

In any case, you can bet that the next time I'm in Scotland, Greyfriars Kirkyard will be high on the list of must-sees.  And I hereby invite the ghost himself to change my mind.  I would consider a black eye from a poltergeist a badge of honor, and after all, as a skeptic it's no more than I deserve.

Bluidy Mackenzie, do your worst.

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The legend of the Bell Witch

Skeptics trying to tease apart fact from fiction in accounts of allegedly paranormal occurrences are fighting against a confluence of human tendencies, including:

• In general, our memories are way worse than we think they are.
• Some level of confirmation bias -- accepting weak or faulty evidence supporting something we already believed -- is nearly impossible to eradicate completely, even in the most rational of rationalists.
• Our sensory/perceptive apparatus is not very accurate.  We all have the unfortunate capacity for misperceiving, or failing to notice entirely, things that are going on around us.
• Recounting a tale and giving it a scary spin has way more of a cachet than telling a completely prosaic one.  If you say to your friends, "It was late at night... all was quiet... then suddenly there was a crash, and the dog started barking!  I was terrified!  I went outside..."  *dramatic pause*  "... and one of the garbage cans had fallen over," no one is going to be very impressed.  In fact, the next time you start telling a story, your friends might well suddenly realize they had pressing engagements elsewhere.
• People like making shit up.

The problem amplifies when stories are retold over and over, because all of these tendencies add up, causing the tale to grow by accretion in what amounts to a giant, free-floating game of Telephone.  By the time a few decades of this has passed, you have a legend that has taken on a life of its own, in which it is probably impossible to determine for sure which parts of it are true and which parts are not.

And there's no better example of this than the legend of the Bell Witch.

The story originates in Robertson County, Tennessee in the early nineteenth century, and centers around the Bell family, headed by John Bell, Sr.  Bell himself was real enough; he was born in 1750 in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, married a woman named Lucy Williams, and moved to Tennessee in 1804.  He and Lucy had six children -- Jesse, Betsy, Richard, John Jr., Drewry (known as Drew), and Benjamin.  John Bell, Sr. died on December 19, 1820 after suffering for four years from a neurological disorder that may have been some form of Bell's palsy (the fact that the disease carries John's name is a coincidence; it was named after the first physician to study it extensively, Charles Bell of Edinburgh, Scotland, who appears to be unrelated to John.)

Artist's sketch of Betsy Bell (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The problems started in 1816, when John Sr. was working in his field and saw a strange creature that looked like a dog with a rabbit's head.  Alarmed, he picked up his shotgun and fired at it, but it disappeared.  Shortly afterward John's son Drew saw a bird perched in a tree, but as he approached it, it spread its wings and "grew to enormous size" before flying away.  One of the Bell family's slaves said he'd been attacked by a dog-like animal on the way to his cabin in the evening.  Betsy Bell saw a young girl in a green dress swinging from the limb of an oak tree -- she didn't recognize the child, and like the rabbit/dog, the girl vanished when approached.

Events accelerated.  Now sounds were heard inside the house -- chains rattling, knocking inside the walls, animal growls, the grating of teeth gnawing on the furniture.  John Sr. started showing symptoms of the progressive paralysis that would ultimately claim his life.  Sheets were pulled from the children's beds at night, their hair pulled and faces scratched.  Betsy had the worst of it -- she was repeatedly slapped at night by an unseen entity.

Artist's sketch of the Bell home (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

A neighbor, James Johnston, came in to help, and tried to talk to whatever it was that was causing the uproar.  A feeble voice answered, "I am a spirit; I was once very happy but have been disturbed."  When asked how it had been disturbed, it gave vague answers about Native American burial grounds, which launched Drew Bell and his friend Bennett Porter on a search for a gravesite, but they found nothing.

The spirit allegedly could quote the Bible fluently, and was aware of what was going on outside the Bell property -- it recited word-for-word a sermon given in a nearby church (the contents later verified by someone who had attended), and began recounting gossip about what was going on in other households in the area.

The story spread.  Andrew Jackson visited the Bell homestead in 1819, and is said to have "experienced the haunting himself."  One person who came to speak to the spirit asked what his grandmother would have said if there was trouble, and the spirit immediately responded in the grandmother's thick Dutch accent, "Hut tut, what has happened now?"  Another asked about his parents in England -- and later reported that the entity had visited his parents and spoken with them.

The whole episode reached its climax when one day the spirit -- now nicknamed "the Bell Witch" -- told John Bell Sr. that he was going to die in seven days, because she was going to poison him.  His neurological condition worsened steadily over the following days, and he lapsed into a coma on December 17 from which he never recovered.

After that, things seemed to settle down, although the spirit allegedly told the widowed Lucy Williams Bell that it would return in seven years.  According to the Bells' third child Richard, it did, but "they chose to ignore it and it eventually left, discouraged."

So, that's the legend.  What parts of it are true?

What's interesting here is that all of the named players in the drama are well documented in contemporary records.  There's no doubt that the Bell family and their neighbors existed.  The rest of the legend is largely the responsibility of Martin Van Buren Ingram, who in 1890 published a book called An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, which recounts the story pretty much in the form I've described.  He claimed that he based the book on Richard Bell's diary -- which, interestingly, no one else has mentioned in any context, and doubters believe never existed at all.  The book begins with a brief description of the legend, followed by this passage:

Now, nearly seventy-five years having elapsed, the old members of the family who suffered the torments having all passed away, and the witch story still continues to be discussed as widely as the family name is known, under misconception of the facts, I have concluded that in justice to the memory of an honored ancestry, and to the public also whose minds have been abused in regard to the matter, it would be well to give the whole story to the World.

Skeptic Brian Dunning finds the delay between the events of the legend and the publication of the book a little suspicious.  "Conveniently, every person with firsthand knowledge of the Bell Witch hauntings was already dead when Ingram started his book," Dunning writes, in a wonderful piece over at Skeptoid about the alleged haunting.  "In fact, every person even with secondhand knowledge was dead."

Even the visit by Andrew Jackson is never mentioned anywhere else, and Dunning strongly suspects it never happened.

As far as the other details of the story, he thinks there's nothing to them either, other than a tale that grew by accretion -- much as I described at the beginning of this post.  "Vague stories indicate that there was a witch in the area," Dunning writes.  "All the significant facts of the story have been falsified, and the others come from a source of dubious credibility.  Since no reliable documentation of any actual events exists, there is nothing worth looking into.  I chalk up the Bell Witch as nothing more than one of many unsubstantiated folk legends, vastly embellished and popularized by an opportunistic author of historical fiction."

Ingram's retelling, though, continues to be compelling, and supposedly was one of the inspirations for the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project.  You have to admit passages like this do provide a certain frisson:

Whether it was witchery, such as afflicted people in past centuries and the darker ages, whether some gifted fiend of hellish nature, practicing sorcery for selfish enjoyment, or some more modern science akin to that of mesmerism, or some hobgoblin native to the wilds of the country, or a disembodied soul shut out from heaven, or an evil spirit like those Paul [sic] drove out of the man into the swine, setting them mad; or a demon let loose from hell, I am unable to decide; nor has anyone yet divined its nature or cause for appearing, and I trust this description of the monster in all forms and shapes, and of many tongues, will lead experts who may come with a wiser generation, to a correct conclusion and satisfactory explanation.

Not to mention the fact that it could also be a strong contender for winning the Run-On Sentence Of The Year award.

In any case, I'm inclined to agree with Dunning.  Although the people in the story were real enough, that's more than you can say for the events that allegedly happened to them.  As creepy as the story of the Bell Witch is, there's not much more here than a tall tale that probably started from a family patriarch's mysterious illness -- and after that, the add-ons came from some combination of confirmation bias, misremembering, and the pure fun of telling a story that makes the listeners shiver.

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Letting sleeping dogs lie

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post about dogs' uncanny ability to tune into their owners' cues, today we have:

Dogs that continue wanting to interact after they're dead.

No, I'm not making this up, but the people making the claim probably are.  According to a couple in Southport, Merseyside, England, their flat is occupied by a ghost dog that likes to sleep in their bed with them.

Mike Lee was asleep with his husband Blake early one morning, when something very odd happened.  "About five in the morning, I thought the cat had come on the bed to wake us up for food, but the cat was nowhere to be seen," Lee said.  "It was like footprints that were coming slowly on the bed, then lay on my foot.  It lays crossways.  You can see [in the photo] where I have a fluffy blanket on the bed; it is completely flat then when this dog comes across you can see the dip in the bed where it is lying.  It is quite heavy, too heavy to be a cat."

So rather than doing what I'd have done, which is wet the bed and then have a stroke, Lee decided to use his phone to see if he could communicate with the spectral pupper.  His phone has an "infrared camera and a two-way microphone," so he said into it, "Is anybody there?" and was met with "a high-pitched howl."

Given that the dog was right there, why he had to use the phone rather than just saying it is anyone's guess.  Maybe ghost dogs only use Verizon, or something.

"It doesn't scare me, you know what it might be and what it couldn't be," Lee said.  "It's not going to harm you.  It is a poltergeist but ghosts don't seem to do any harm anyway.  All it does is just lie on my feet, that's all it does.  I have my partner as a witness who has seen the dip in the bed.  When I asked if the ghost was there the other day, he heard the noise it made.  There's no way a cat would make that noise, it must be a dog."

I'm assuming the noise he's talking about is the disgusting slurping sound dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, but he didn't specify.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Virginia State Parks staff, Ghost Dog (6312596718), CC BY 2.0]

In any case, Lee and his partner seem awfully sanguine about the whole thing.  Our dog already takes up more than his fair share of the bed (when we allow him up there, which is seldom), so I don't think I'd be all that happy about a spirit dog joining us.  After all, what are you going to do if you don't want Ghost Pooch up there?  Grab him by his invisible collar and drag him off?  Offer him a treat to lure him away?  I don't know what kind of treat you could tempt a dead dog with, anyhow.

I have to admit, though, that as canine hauntings go, it could be worse.  A few years ago I did a piece on Ballechin House, in Perthshire, Scotland, that was haunted by an insane ex-military guy and his various dogs.  People visiting there allegedly had experiences like an "overpowering doggy smell" and being nudged by a wet nose, and one person supposedly saw a pair of disembodied dog paws on her nightstand.  Then there's the East Anglian legend of Black Shuck, a giant demonic dog who is capable of "sucking the life out of its hapless victims... leaving them shriveled."

So an invisible dog snoozing on your bed is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty tame.  I still don't need any additional pets, but I guess a ghost dog isn't so bad as long as it behaves itself and doesn't suck out my soul or carelessly leave its paws hanging around on the furniture.  It'd save in pet food costs, for sure.  Oh, and vet visits would be unnecessary, given that the dog has already Joined the Choir Eternal.  Any pet hair it sheds would be invisible anyhow, so cleanup would be less of an issue.

But me, I think I'll stick with live dogs.  At least you always know where they are.  I'm a bit twitchy at the best of times, and having an invisible canine oozing about the place would be kind of unnerving.

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I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

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

The firestarter

It is the nature of the world that sometimes we have to look at all of the available evidence, and not come to a conclusion.

It's tempting to think that science, and the skeptical approach, will always result in answers, but the sad fact is that sometimes we have to admit that (barring the uncovering of further data) we will never have an explanation.  This is something that often doesn't sit well with people, however.  We like understanding, we like everything to be tidy and clear, without loose ends, and the result is that we will sometimes settle for a bogus explanation simply because it feels better than saying, "We don't know."

Such, I believe, is the strange case of Carole Compton, the Scottish nanny who almost ended up spending decades in jail because of an accusation of attempted murder by pyrokinesis (starting fires with your mind) and witchcraft -- surprisingly, only forty years ago.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Compton is from Ayr, Scotland, but had fallen in love with an Italian man she'd met there and followed him back home.  While waiting for him to complete his military service, she took on a job as a nanny for a wealthy family near Rome.  The Riccis welcomed Carole into their home to look after their children, and all went well until a small religious picture fell off the wall as Carole walked by, prompting a maid to make the sign of the cross and raise her eyebrows about what it could mean.

That event was recalled several weeks later when Carole accompanied the Riccis on their annual vacation in the Alps, and a fire broke out in their vacation home, destroying the second floor completely.  Firemen said that the house had a history of electrical problems, and that was undoubtedly the cause.  But the Riccis began to question that explanation when two subsequent fires began in Carole's presence -- one in a trash can and the other in the bedroom of the Ricci's two-year-old son.

Shortly afterwards, the Riccis fired Carole.

Carole was rehired by another family, the Tontis, once again as a nanny.  The grandmother of the family, however, took an instant dislike to Carole, which was intensified to hatred and fear when once again Carole seemed to be the epicenter of bizarre occurrences -- a fire in a mattress, a vase falling from a table and breaking while no one was near it, and objects (including a religious figurine) flying off shelves and walls.  At this point, the word strega (witch) was used, and the talk started in earnest.

But it was all talk until a fire started in another mattress, this time in the room of three-year-old Agnese, the child Carole had been hired to care for.  The grandmother demanded that it be stopped, and the authorities intervened, and arrested Carole for attempted murder.

The media went wild about "the nanny they call a witch."  Some people claimed she was psychotic, and had engineered the incidents; others that there was a poltergeist following her around.  The consensus, though, was that she was possessed, and the demon was visiting its evil on the people she lived with.  It took over a year for her to come to trial (in December 1983), and she was found innocent of the attempted murder charge, but guilty on two counts of arson.  She was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but was released on time served and immediately left Italy to return to her native Scotland.

What really happened in the Compton case?  It hardly bears mention that I'm doubtful about the "poltergeist" and "demonic possession" explanations, not to mention the phenomena of telekinesis and pyrokinesis in general.  According to an article about Compton and other similar cases in The Scotsman, Compton now is living quietly with her husband, Zaroof Fazal, in a town in Yorkshire, and they have three school-age children.  Nothing further in the way of quasi-supernatural events has happened to her.  "What happened to me is something that never goes away," she told reporters.  "It was a dreadful ordeal...  I have a happy life now.  I try not to think about the past."

Not the sort of thing you'd expect if she suffered from Münchausen's-by-proxy, which is another explanation that has been put forward -- that she deliberately attempted to injure her young charges in order to garner attention and/or care.  Compton seemed horrified at the attention she was getting right from the beginning, and even she denied that anything supernatural was going on, although she didn't have an alternate explanation.  During her trial, noted supernatural investigator Guy Lyon Playfair (the man who did the study of the Enfield poltergeist) offered to look into the case, but Compton didn't want him to get involved, claiming that there must be a rational explanation and surely the Italian legal system would realize that.

No such rational explanation has ever been found.

Of the non-paranormal solutions to the case that have been proposed -- Compton being psychotic or suffering from Münchausen's-by-proxy, the fires having a natural cause (nearby electrical shorts, for example), and the falling objects being due to the fact that objects fall down sometimes -- none of them explain the entire story, nor why those events seemed to follow Compton around.  Even the people who accused Compton -- the Tonti grandmother, for example -- steadfastly claimed that the fires erupted and objects fell and broke without Compton touching them.  No one in the Tonti household said that Compton had gone around breaking things and setting fires deliberately; it was only after it got into the courts that this explanation was settled on, because no 20th century European judge would be willing to risk his or her reputation by seriously considering a charge of witchcraft.

So we're left where we started; some weird things happened in Carole Compton's presence in Italy in the 1980s, and no one knows why.

Not a satisfying explanation, by a longshot.  But as skeptics, we have to go as far as the evidence pushes us, and no further.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

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

Duppy freestyle

Life isn't always smooth sailing, for me or for anyone else, but I'm thankful that I've never had to deal with a "duppy."

If you don't know what a duppy is, well, neither did I before yesterday.  Turns out it's a malevolent spirit of Jamaican origin.  After doing a bit of research, I found that the name comes from the Ga language of Ghana, where adope means "a spirit that appears in the shape of a dwarf."  In the tradition of Obeah -- a West Indian folk religion, originally of West African origin -- humans are born with two souls, a good one and a bad one.  When you die, your good soul goes to heaven to be judged, and the bad one stays in your coffin for three days, at which point it dies.  But if in those three days proper precautions aren't taken, the bad soul will escape and become a duppy, and go around causing problems.

The problem is, I couldn't find anywhere that told me what the proper precautions were.  So that's unfortunate.  I mean, they shouldn't be coy about this stuff, or we'll have the bad souls of Grandma Bertha and Great-Uncle Edmund and everyone else wandering about making people's lives miserable.

And heaven knows we wouldn't want that.

Woodcut of an "Obeah Man" from the journal Folk-Lore: A Quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition, Institution & Custom, volume 4. 1893.  Published in London by the Folk-lore Society.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

There are other kinds of duppies, though, as if one kind weren't enough.  There's one called the "Rolling Calf," which is a calf that rolls (thus the name) because its body is completely wrapped up with chains.  How that helps it roll I'm not sure, but you can see how that would make other sorts of movement pretty much out of the question.  There's also the "Three-Footed Horse" (once again, self-explanatory), and "Old Higue," a vampiric spirit that looks like a sweet little old lady by day, and a loathsome bloodsucking hag at night.

I think this might well explain the personality of my seventh-grade English teacher.  There always did seem to be something kind of cunning behind her smile.

The reason all this comes up is an article that appeared in The Jamaica Star a couple of weeks ago about an elderly husband and wife in St. Andrew, Jamaica, who say they're being tormented by a duppy.  The author of the article, Simone Morgan Lindo, seems to take the whole thing seriously, and quotes the old lady, Eulalee Mills, extensively.  Here's what Mills had to say.  (Note: the newspaper quoted her in Jamaican patois; I'm merely copying it here.  I say that so I don't have to write [sic] every other word.)

I was in my room and I had some things on my microwave and I just see the dem fly off.  I took them up back and pack them up but as me turn and a go in the next room, me hear the same tings dem drop off again...  The next day everything start fling from my chest of drawers and tings just start throw from all over the room.  Everything up in the air, all me medication and me blood pressure machine deh all over the place and tings just start 'lick' me inna me back and all over mi body.  Me and me husband stand up in our room and all things from the kitchen a sail come in come lick we.

So that's pretty scary.  Her husband Milford, though, was not about to let some disembodied spirit throw around their belongings.

As soon as me rebuke the 'spirit' and stepped out the room, it start act up back again and start sail tings...  I know dem spirits deh can't trouble me, enuh, because me is one of God's bad man, so me a go continue rebuke them.  The rest a people dem in the house no have the spiritual power to fight dem, but me nah stop until me house get calm back.

Which is pretty damn brave.  I know I'm a skeptic and all, but I have to say, if I was sitting in my house minding my own business and my blood pressure medication suddenly started flying through the air, rebuking would kind of be the last thing I would think of.  I think my more likely response would be to piss my pants and then have a stroke.  Because I may be a rationalist, but I'm also a big fat coward.

Interestingly, the Mills' neighbors aren't quite so certain Milford Mills is on the right side of things.  One neighbor, who didn't want to be named, said that Mills was a practitioner of Obeah who was just getting what he deserved.  Another said that (s)he had seen a female spirit walking in the Mills' yard at night, and it was the ghost of a woman with whom Milford Mills had an illicit relationship.

I hope the whole thing settles down soon, not only so Eulalee and Milford get the calm they want, but because bad stuff happens when superstitious people are feeling threatened.  If the neighbors start thinking Milford and his wife are a danger to the safety of the community, they might take matters into their own hands.  Just last year, it was reported that a bunch of homeless children in Uige, Angola were tortured -- and some were killed -- because the locals had become convinced they were witches.  That sort of thing appears to be fairly common in the world, which I find appalling.

But so far, no one's bothered the Mills, and there were no more recent reports of their belongings being thrown about.  So that's all good.  As for me, if there are duppies around here, I'd be much obliged if they'd stay out of my house.  My housekeeping skills are already such that they could be summed up by the statement, "There appears to have been a struggle."  The last thing I need is a ghost adding to the chaos.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from one of my favorite thinkers -- Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke has made several documentaries, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and After the Warming -- the last-mentioned an absolutely prescient investigation into climate change that came out in 1991 and predicted damn near everything that would happen, climate-wise, in the twenty-seven years since then.

I'm going to go back to Burke's first really popular book, the one that was the genesis of the TV series of the same name -- Connections.  In this book, he looks at how one invention, one happenstance occurrence, one accidental discovery, leads to another, and finally results in something earthshattering.  (One of my favorites is how the technology of hand-weaving led to the invention of the computer.)  It's simply great fun to watch how Burke's mind works -- each of his little filigrees is only a few pages long, but you'll learn some fascinating ins and outs of history as he takes you on these journeys.  It's an absolutely delightful read.

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

Legally haunted

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

I hadn't, until yesterday.

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

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

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

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The possessed microwave

Spurred by my post a couple of weeks ago debunking claims that microwave ovens are unsafe, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email saying, "Ha.  A lot you know.  Your microwave has just lulled you into a false sense of security.  Because, you know... demons."

Along with the message, he sent me a link to an article from Empire News called "Paranormal Investigators Confirm Poltergeist Possession of Microwave."  And as soon as I saw the title, I knew this was gonna be good.

[image courtesy of photographer Christian Rasmussen at apoltix.dk, and the Wikimedia Commons]

Turns out that Bill Michaud, of Louisville, Kentucky, has been having trouble with his microwave oven.  "We found [the microwave] in the attic when we moved in a few months back," Michaud said.  "Didn’t have one, so figured, ‘what the hell,’ might as well try it.  I tell you, the thing heats up the food real nice.  Sometimes it beeped or turned itself off in the middle of cooking, though.  Then really weird things started happening.  It zapped at food as if we were putting shards of metal in it.  I couldn’t figure it out."

Michaud's wife, Betty, concurs.  "It turns on by itself.  It turns off by itself, too," she said.  "It’s like it’s messing with me.  No matter how many times I popped the door shut, the minute I leave the room it pops open again.  One night, really late, I walk into the kitchen and I’m about to open the fridge, and the microwave door flies open, lighting the whole kitchen up in a horrible, scary lightning-blue color.  It’s like it wanted to electrocute me."

Well, I know what it's like to own a mechanical device that appears to be not only sentient, but evil.  I feel that way about my lawn mower, which seems to have a sensor that detects how long the grass is, so it knows when to break down.  One time this summer, when the grass had gotten so long that my only other choice would have been to rent a flock of sheep, the Possessed Lawn Mower decided that this would be a fine time to stop working.  So it let me back it out of the garage, and get all the way down the hill into the back yard, and then in rapid succession (1) the blade suddenly stopped turning, (2) the engine stalled, and afterwards would only make obscene farting noises when I turned the key in the ignition, and finally (3) it simply decided to stop responding entirely and became the world's largest paperweight.  Because (4) the wheel release is broken, and the brakes engage whenever the motor isn't running, the Possessed Lawn Mower was left out in the back yard in the rain, with the grass slowly engulfing it, until the mower repair guy had time to come fix it three weeks later.

But I digress.

Bill and Betty Michaud certainly had reason to stop using the microwave, not to mention a good explanation as to why the previous owners had tossed it up in the attic.  But that didn't stop them from continuing to use it, until one day when Bill was heating up some leftovers.  "[I]t went off like the food was done," Michaud said, "and when I looked over, the damn thing was still going and said 6:66."

Well, that was enough for him.  Instead of doing what I would have done, which is throw it out and buy a new microwave, he called in some paranormal investigators.  They got Kevin Young, a professional ghost hunter, who got permission from the Michauds to spend the night in the house.

"The Michauds didn’t want to go without a microwave, or risk upsetting the spirit by taking it out of the house," Young said.  "My wife, who is also on my squad, is highly empathic.  As we warmed up TV dinners in the microwave, she sensed a presence.  As soon as she mentioned it, the microwave started beeping repeatedly.  The door flung open, and my 'Hungry Man' dinner went flying across the room.  We pressed the off button.  We unplugged it.  It beeped several times after we cut off the power.  Of course our digital recording became corrupted, which often happens when there is such strong energy."

Of course.  And you have to admit that the spirit crossed a line when it threw Young's 'Hungry Man' TV dinner across the room.  In the words of the inimitable Bugs Bunny, "Of course you know: this means war."

So Young called in the big guns, namely an "authority on mechanical possession," one Carl Richards.  Richards confirmed the presence of a poltergeist in the microwave, but cautioned the Michauds against simply throwing the oven out and getting a new one.

"It is important to remember, the malevolent presence does not strictly ‘live in’ the microwave," Richards said.  "Getting rid of the machine will not solve the problem.  It has the ability to travel throughout the electrical wiring in the house."

Which is pretty scary.  God forbid a poltergeist should get into the coffee maker or something.

In the end, Young and Richards advised the Michauds to stop paying attention to it.  "It is best not to engage the being," Young told them.  "Try not to be fearful.  Always remain calm.  If you’re facing a poltergeist in your kitchen devices, just ignore its outbursts, and it will not be able to feed off your energies."

Myself, I'd have been more worried about the damn thing malfunctioning and burning down the house.  But that's just me.

The Michauds still use the microwave, which "heats up leftovers like a champ," and they ignore its periodic demonic outbursts the same way you'd "ignore a child's temper tantrum."  So it all ended happily enough, which I suppose is good.

So Young and Richards have wrapped up their work in Louisville, and presumably are looking for other possessed devices to investigate.  I'd like to invite them to come look at my lawn mower.  My lawn is needing to be mowed, in what is likely to be the last mowing of the season, and this would be an inopportune time for it to malfunction.  Meaning that the demon that lives in the engine is going to be primed and ready.  I'd like to have a strategy in place by then.  Be prepared, that's my motto.

The haunted PC

There's a lot of misunderstanding out there about the definition of the word "skeptic."

"Skeptic" is not synonymous with "disbeliever."  "Climate-change skeptics," for example, aren't skeptics, since skeptics are swayed by evidence, and the vast preponderance of evidence is in favor of anthropogenic climate change.  Those "skeptics" are better termed "deniers."

So if that's what a skeptic isn't, how can we define what a skeptic is?  The bottom line is that to a skeptic, natural explanations always trump supernatural ones.  You follow the evidence where it leads, and then either settle on the conclusion that best fits all of the evidence -- or else hold conclusion in abeyance, indefinitely if need be, until more evidence arises.

The dictum of always looking for a natural solution is a sticking point, for some folks.  The end result  of accepting a supernatural explanation, though, is often the lazy way out -- you arrive at "it's magic" or "it's god" and then stop.  No further comprehension of the world is necessary at that point, or perhaps even possible.

I find that an unsatisfactory protocol for understanding how the universe works.  I want to know what's really going on -- what the actual mechanism is.  And once we decide that magic works, that anything is possible even if it contravenes the known, tested laws of science, then the door shuts.

Take, for example, the case of Ken Webster, Thomas Harden, and the haunted computer.

The bare bones of the story can be found at the site Instrumental TransCommunication, but there is a much more exhaustive telling in the book The Dead Roam the Earth: True Stories of the Paranormal From Around the World by Alasdair Wickham.  Here is the basic idea of the claim:

In 1984, a young man named Ken Webster moved with his girlfriend to an unnamed village in north Wales.  They report that poltergeist activity was already happening in the house even before what was to become the main event started -- canned food being moved around and rearranged in cabinets, newspapers levitating from the table, and six-toed footprints appearing from nowhere in cement dust during a renovation.  But the real trouble started when Ken brought home what was, at the time, cutting-edge technology -- a BBC personal computer with a disc drive and 32 KB of RAM.

One evening, Ken was idling on the computer when he found a file on a disc named "KDN."  He didn't recognize it as anything that belonged to him or his girlfriend, so he opened it, and found the following message:

Ken Deb ni c
True A re The NIGHTmares
Of a pErson t hat FEARs
Safe A re The BODIES Of tHe
Silent WORLD
Turn Pr etty FlowER tuRn
TOWARDS The SUN
For Y o u S HalL GroW
AND SOW
But T he FLOWer Reaches
TOo high and witHERS in
The B urning Light
G E T OU T YOU
R BR ICKs
PuSsy Ca t PUSSy Cat
Went TO LonDOn TO
Seek
FamE aND FORTUNE
Faith Must NOT Be
LOst
For ThiS Shall
Be YouR REDEEMER.

Understandably creeped out by this, he and his girlfriend decided to approach the whole thing scientifically.  If there was a spirit who liked to communicate via PC, they'd give him/her/it the opportunity.  So they left the computer on, all the time, to see if any further communiqués from the Other World appeared.

And appear they did.

The first morning after the computer had been left on all night, the following file was found on the disc drive:

I WRYTE ON BEHALTHE OF MANYE -- WOT STRANGE WORDES THOU SPEKE

THOU ART GOODLY MAN WHO HATH FANCIFUL WOMAN WHO DWEL IN MYNE HOME... WITH LYTES WHICHE DEVYLL MAKETH... 'TWAS A GREATE CRYME TO HATH BRIBED MYNE HOUSE -- L.W. 

Besides the fact that you'd think the Spirit World would have figured out about caps locks by now, the voice in the new message seemed light years from the random weirdness in the first.  The spirit had even signed its initials.  So Ken asked the spirit who it was, and to give more information about its history.

And the spirit obliged.  Over the next few weeks, Ken found out that the spirit was one Lukas Wainman, who had lived in the first half of the sixteenth century and had been a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford University.  He had lived in the very cottage that Ken and his girlfriend now occupied, he said.  And Lukas -- the live Lukas, back in the 1500s -- was aware that he was communicating with them, five-hundred-odd years later.  Because of his communications, he said, he was in danger of being arrested for witchcraft.  Ken cites one message, a little on the cryptic side, that said:

WHEN THY BOYSTE DIDST COME THER WERT A VERS ON'T THAT SAID ME WERE NOT TO AXE OF YOUR UNKYND KNOWINGS FOR THY LEEMS BOYSTE WILT BE NAMORE.

Which isn't particularly helpful.  But things took a turn for the (even more) surreal a few months later, when a second (or perhaps third) personality started talking through the computer, one who just called himself "2109:"

WE SHALL ANSEWER AS YOU WISH IT IN TERMS OF PHYSICS THEN IT SHALL BE SO BUT REMMEMBER THAT OUR LIMITS ARE SET BY YOUR ABILITIES.

"2109" said he belonged to an incorporeal race that was watching humanity, and was responsible for a lot of the supernatural silliness that abounds around the world.  But "2109's" appearance didn't stop Lukas, who still came through now and again.  He finally owned up that his name wasn't actually Lukas Wainman, but Thomas Harden or Hawarden, and that he wasn't going to be tried for witchcraft but was still under suspicion.

So Ken decided to do a little digging in the local library, and found that there had been a fellow of Brasenose College in the 1500s named Thomas Harden, who had been expelled for failing to remove the pope's name from religious documents after Henry VIII did his power grab and founded the Anglican Church.

But evidently, Ken's inquiries alarmed the Spirit World, and his finding out about Thomas Harden effectively shut down the communication lines.  Neither Thomas/Lukas nor "2109" ever contacted him again.

So, let's see about explaining all of this.  There are two explanations I can see:

1. Ken Webster actually was communicating with spirits of various sorts -- a poltergeist, a living man from the past, and a member of an "incorporeal race" -- all of whom decided to speak through a PC.  People who favor this explanation usually claim Ken's discovery of the real Thomas Harden, and the fact of Lukas/Thomas's use of archaic English, as points in favor.
2. Either Ken, or his girlfriend, or both, made the whole thing up.  They wrote the files, and looked up the name of a disgraced Oxford don when they realized that sooner or later, people were going to figure out that there was no one named "Lukas Wainman" at Brasenose in the sixteenth century.

It's a general rule that the explanation that requires you to make the fewest ad hoc assumptions is the most likely to be true.  So which is it?  Especially given that anyone who is educated in the British public school system has read Shakespeare, and therefore could probably do a decent job at mimicking archaic English if they were going to pull a prank?

Even given that this story has all the hallmarks of a hoax, it's still cited as one of the best pieces of evidence out there for trans-temporal communication -- communication between two people from different time periods.

So, in conclusion: it's not that I think that what is conventionally called "paranormal" is impossible; it's more that I haven't run into any examples of alleged paranormal activity that weren't explainable far more easily from completely natural occurrences.  And human nature being what it is, the likelihood of being fooled by our own superstitiousness, fallibility, and gullibility, not to mention our capacity for lies, frauds, and hoaxes, makes me gravitate toward those explanations.

As usual, Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.  And in the case of Ken Webster and the haunted computer, I'm just not buying what's being offered as proof.

Caveat rentor

Yesterday we considered the question of whether stating your disbelief in a religious "miracle" (despite evidence that it is a purely natural phenomenon) is blasphemy; today we consider the question of whether a supernatural belief (with no hard evidence at all) engenders any sort of financial responsibility on the part of others.

The whole thing comes up because of a story out of New Jersey (source) in which a couple, Michele Callan and the rather unfortunately named Josue Chinchilla, are claiming that they are entitled to break their lease and receive a refund of their security deposit because their rental home is haunted.

According to Callan and Chinchilla, they knew something was wrong almost from the first day they moved into the house they'd rented in Tom's River, on March 1.  The couple, and also Callan's children, began to experience taps on the shoulder, which (this is a direct quote from the article), "they chalked up to the adjustment period of moving into a new home."

You have to wonder about this a little.  I mean, I've moved a bunch of times, and had to adjust to a variety of things, from leaky plumbing to noisy neighbors to (I'm not making this up) an apartment that had an oven with a door that expanded and stuck shut when it heated up.  In all of those moves, one thing I have never had the need to adjust to was spectral taps on the shoulder.  This is fortunate, because if I got tapped on the shoulder when no one was around, I would scream like a little girl and then run out of the house.  I'm just that brave.

In any case, Callan and Chinchilla (will you please stop snickering every time I write the guy's name?) were in for worse.  Doors opened and closed on their own, clothes flew out of closets, and there were menacing voices including one that said, "Let it burn."  After 13 days they could take no more and moved into a hotel room, where they have been ever since.  They demanded to be released from the lease and filed suit to have their $2,250 security deposit back.  Understandably, their landlord, Richard Lopez, said no, and has filed a countersuit, alleging that the couple changed their mind about the lease for financial reasons, and is trying to concoct a story so that they can be released from the agreement they signed.

The problem is, of course, no one except the couple (and possibly their children) has heard the voices, seen the flying clothes and self-opening doors and all.  They apparently have zero hard evidence that their story is true.  I suppose it could be; as befits a skeptic, I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand, being that I also have no evidence that they're lying.  My inclination is that it is more likely that they're trying to weasel their way out of the lease, being that despite all of the thousands of claims for hauntings I've read about or heard described, I've never seen a single one that generated evidence that met my minimum standard for scientific validity.

But who knows?  Maybe this is the real deal.  I certainly wouldn't want to be the judge in this case.  How do you evaluate a case that hinges on a claim of the supernatural without your own beliefs being the determining factor?  I suspect that the case will ultimately be decided on the written terms of the lease -- most leases have a list of conditions under which the contract can be considered null and void, and the majority of them end with something like, "And no other reason will be considered valid."  As far as I've ever seen, none of them include, "This contract is considered invalid in cases of haunting that result in creepy voices and clothes being flung about."  So that will be that, and Callan and Chinchilla will be out on their ears without their $2,250.  Caveat rentor.

Of course, I've been wrong before.  With a sympathetic judge, it might go the other way -- which would certainly set an interesting precedent, and one that would be distinctly unfavorable for landlords.  In the end, it could become far easier for renters who discovered things they didn't like to get out of leases.  I might have even had a case regarding the oven door, which resulted in a perfectly nice batch of biscuits being turned into little disc-shaped charcoal briquets.