Cry me a river

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends, "Urban legends are kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors.  Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot.  And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true, events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen...  Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears...  They are weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual.  They maintain a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible, and they have a moral."

It's not that there's anything wrong with urban legends per se.  A lot of the time, we're well aware that they're just "campfire stories" that are meant to scare, amuse, or otherwise entertain, and (absent of any further evidence) are just as likely to be false as true.  After all, humans have been storytellers for a very long time, and -- as a fiction writer -- I'd be out of a job if we didn't have an appetite for tall tales.

When it becomes problematic is when someone has a financial interest in getting folks to believe that some odd claim or another is true.  Then you have unethical people making money off others' credulity -- and often along the way obscuring or covering up outright any evidence to the contrary.  And it's worse still when the guilty party is part of the news media.

Which brings us to The Sun and the legend of the "Crying Boy."

Back in 1985 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex had more than once found undamaged copies of a painting of a crying child in houses that had otherwise been reduced to rubble by fires.  Upon investigation, they said, they found that the painting was by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin.

If that wasn't weird enough, The Sun claimed they'd found out that Bragolin was an assumed name, and that the painter was a mysterious recluse named Franchot Seville.  Seville, they said, had found the little boy -- whose name was Don Bonillo -- after an unexplained fire had killed both of his parents.  The boy was adopted by a priest, but fires seemed to follow in his wake wherever he went, to the extent that he was nicknamed "El Diablo."  In 1970, the engine of a car the boy was riding in exploded, killing him along with the painter and the priest.

But, The Sun asked, did the curse follow even the paintings of the boy's tragic, weeping face?

It's not a headline, but we can invoke Betteridge's Law, wherein we learn that anything like that phrased as a question can be answered "No."  Further inquiries by less biased investigators found that the story had enough holes to put a Swiss cheese to shame.  There was no Don Bonillo; the model for the little boy was just some random kid.  Yes, Bragolin went by the pseudonym Franchot Seville, but Bragolin was itself an assumed name; the painter's real name was Bruno Amadio, and he was still alive and well and painting children with big sad eyes until his death from natural causes in 1981 at age seventy.

As far as the survival of the painting, that turned out not to be much of a mystery, either.  Bragolin/Seville/Amadio cranked out at least sixty different crying child paintings, from which literally tens of thousands of prints were made and then shipped out to department stores all across southern England.  They sold like hotcakes for some reason.  (I can't imagine why anyone would want a painting of a weepy toddler on their wall, but hey, you do you.)  The prints were made on a heavy compressed cardboard, and then coated with fire-retardant varnish.  Investigators Steven Punt and Martin Shipp actually purchased one of the prints and tried to set it alight deliberately, but the thing wouldn't burn.  The surmise was that when the rest of the house went up in flames, the string holding the frame to the wall burned through and the print fell face-down on the floor, protecting it from being damaged.

Of course, a prosaic explanation like that was not in the interest of The Sun, which survives by keeping sensationalized stories alive for as long as possible.  So no mention was made of Punt and Shipp and the probable explanation for the paintings' survival.  Instead, they repeated the claims of a "curse," and told readers that if they owned a copy of The Crying Boy and wanted to get rid of it, The Sun would organize a public bonfire to destroy the prints forever.

How they were going to accomplish this, given that the whole shtick had to do with the fact that the painting couldn't be burned, I have no idea.  But this evidently didn't occur to the readers, because within weeks The Sun had received hundreds of copies.  A fire was held along the banks of the Thames in which the mailed-in prints were supposedly destroyed, an event about which a firefighter who had supervised the burning said, "I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now."

This in spite of the fact that the whole thing had been manufactured by The Sun.  There would have been no widespread fear, no need for people to "breathe uneasily," if The Sun hadn't hyped the claim to begin with -- and, more importantly, ignored completely the entirely rational explanation for the few cases where the painting had survived a house fire.

It's probably unnecessary for me to say that this kind of thing really pisses me off.  Humans are credulous enough; natural conditions like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the argument from ignorance already make it hard enough for us to sort fact from fiction.  Okay, The Sun is a pretty unreliable source to start with, but the fact remains that thousands of people read it -- and, presumably, a decent fraction of those take its reporting seriously.

The fact that it would deliberately mislead is infuriating.

The result is that the legend still persists today.  There are online sites for discussing curses, and The Crying Boy comes up all too frequently, often with comments like "I would never have that in my house!"  (Well, to be fair, neither would I, but for entirely different reasons.)  As Brunvand points out in The Choking Doberman, one characteristic of urban legends is that they take on a life of their own.  Word of mouth is a potent force for spreading rumor, and once these sorts of tales get launched, they are as impossible to eradicate as crabgrass.

But what's certain is that we do not need irresponsible tabloids like The Sun making matters worse.

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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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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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Make a little noise

Sometimes, you can mislead people not only by what you say, but by what you leave out.

Take, for example, the "Moodus noises," that have been reported for centuries near the village of Moodus, Connecticut, in the town of East Haddam.  The sounds themselves are real enough; in fact, the village's name comes from the Algonquian matchitmoodus, which translates to "place of noises."  Rumblings and deep booms are frequent, especially in the vicinity of nearby Mount Tom, and were apparently part of the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying short story "The Dunwich Horror":

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below...  Noises in the hills continue to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and other physiographers.  Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard -- a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow.

Which is pretty damn atmospheric, you have to admit.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Reuben C. Dodd - DeviantArt - Facebook, The Dunwich Horror - "Wilbur Whateley's Twin" by Reuben C. Dodd, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Interestingly, not only was Lovecraft springboarding off a real phenomenon of subterranean noises; the Devil's Hop Yard is also a real place, but it's not as eerie as Lovecraft would have you believe.  In fact, it's pretty enough that it was set aside as a state park, and as far as its diabolical name, no one's quite sure where it came from.  One theory is that a brewer who lived there was named Dibble, and the locals thought using the name for his hop fields was an amusing pun.

Of course, Lovecraft was writing fiction, and actually, he himself was not at all superstitious.  When fans wrote him letters asking for the directions to Dunwich or Arkham or Innsmouth -- or, worse, said they'd been there and wanted to tell him all about it -- he'd respond with admirable patience, "None of those are real places.  I know that for certain, you see, because I made them up."  But the fact remains that the Moodus noises are quite real, even if he and others spun fictional tales around them.  So what are they?

There are dozens of websites and books and YouTube videos claiming that they're supernatural in origin -- citing Native or early colonial legends but not going any further.  They often quote the passage from Charles Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land:

It was finally understood that Haddam witches, who practiced black magic, met the Moodus witches, who used white magic, in a cave beneath Mount Tom, and fought them in the light of a giant carbuncle [ruby] that was fastened to the roof...

If the witch-fights were continued too long the king of Machimoddi, who sat on a throne of solid sapphire in the cave whence the noises came, raised his wand: then the light of the carbuncle went out, peals of thunder rolled through the rocky chambers, and the witches rushed into the sky.

Most of the paranormal-leaning sources claim the area is haunted -- either by demons, or nature-spirits, or the ghosts of dead humans (or some combination).  They claim that there's a grand mystery still surrounding the place; you'll frequently see phrases like "no good explanation" and "unexplained phenomenon" and "scientists are baffled" (given the frequency of this one, you'd think scientists do little more than shrug their shoulders in helpless puzzlement all day long).  What these books, articles, and websites conveniently leave out is that in fact, a cogent scientific explanation for the Moodus noises was published by a geologist named Elwyn Perry...

... all the way back in 1941.

Perry proposed -- and the explanation has borne up under scrutiny -- that the Moodus noises are caused by minor seismic activity.  The area around Moodus is prone to earthquake swarms, despite its being far from obvious active fault lines.  In the 1980s there were four separate clusters of small quakes, numbering more than one hundred temblors in all, accompanied by a corresponding upswing of reports of booming and rumbling noises, and another swarm occurred in 2011.  Later studies found that the culprit is the Lake Char Fault, the subterranean suture line of a terrane (a microcontinent that ends up welded to a larger land mass) that stuck to North America during the lockup of Pangaea 250 million years ago.  The boundary was a weak spot when the Atlantic Ocean opened, and the tensional stress of rifting is still being released as the land settles.

So there's a completely natural explanation for the Moodus noises, however reluctant some people are to say so.  In a way, I get it; there's a certain frisson you get from accounts of orgiastic rites and conjuring evil spirits from underground caverns, that "it's a geologic fault zone and what you're hearing are small, shallow earthquakes" simply doesn't provide.

But predictably, I'd much rather know the real answer, and if I want to scare myself, I'll just read "The Dunwich Horror."  As far as the supernatural explanations, I tend to agree with journalist/skeptic Carrie Poppy: "We use these as stopgaps for things we can't explain.  We don't believe them because of evidence, we believe them because of a lack of evidence."

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Primed and ready

One of the beefs a lot of aficionados of the paranormal have with us skeptics has to do with a disagreement over the quality of evidence.

Take, for example, Hans Holzer, who was one of the first serious ghost hunters.  His work in the field started in the mid-twentieth century and continued right up to his death in 2009 at the venerable age of 89, during which time he not only visited hundreds of allegedly haunted sites but authored 120 books documenting his experiences.

No one doubts Holzer's sincerity; he clearly believed what he wrote, and was not a hoaxer or a charlatan.  But if you read his books, what will strike anyone of a skeptical bent is that virtually all of it is comprised of anecdote.  Stories from homeowners, accounts of "psychic mediums," recounting of old tales and legends.  None of it is demonstrated scientifically, in the sense of encounters that occur in controlled circumstances where credulity or outright fakery by others can be rigorously ruled out.

After all, Holzer may well have been scrupulously honest, but that doesn't mean that the people he worked with were.

I'll just interject my usual disclaimer; none of this constitutes disproof, either.  But in the absence of evidence that meets the minimum standard acceptable in science, the most parsimonious explanation is that Holzer's many stories are accounted for by human psychology, flaws in perception, and the plasticity of memory, and the possibility that at least some of his informants were exaggerating or lying about their own experiences.

As an illustration of just one of the difficulties with accepting anecdote, consider the phenomenon of priming.  What we experience is strongly affected by what we expect to experience; even a minor interjection ahead of time of a mental image (for example) can alter how we see, interpret, and remember something else that occurred afterward.  A simple example -- if someone is shown a yellow object and afterward asked to name a fruit, they come up with "banana" or "lemon" far more frequently than someone who was shown a different color (or who wasn't primed at all).  It all occurs without our conscious awareness; often the person who was primed didn't even know it was happening.

This becomes more insidious when it starts affecting how people understand the world around them.  To take another lightweight example, but which gets at how claims of the supernatural start, take the currently popular "paranormal game" called "Red Door, Yellow Door."  "Red Door, Yellow Door" is a little like the game that all of us Of A Certain Age will remember, the one called "Bloody Mary."  The way "Bloody Mary" works is that you stand in front of a mirror, stare into it, and chant "Bloody Mary" over and over, and after a moment, nothing happens.

What's supposed to happen is that your face turns into the blood-dripping visage of a woman, or else you see her over your shoulder.  Most of us who tried it, of course, got what the paranormal investigators call "disappointing results."  But "Red Door, Yellow Door" moves even one step further from verifiable reality,  because the whole thing takes place in your mind.  You're supposed to lie down and close your eyes, while a friend (the "guide") massages your temples and says, "Red door, yellow door, any other color door" over and over.  You're supposed to picture a hallway in your mind, and as soon as you've got a clear image, you give a hand signal to the guide to stop chanting.  Then you describe it, entering doors as you see fit and describing to the guide what you're seeing.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons dying_grotesque from Richards Bay, South Africa, Red Door (3275822777), CC BY 2.0]

Thus far, it's just an exercise in imagination, and innocent enough; but the claim is, what you're seeing is real -- and can harm you.  Because of the alleged danger, there are a variety of rules you are supposed to remember.  If a room you enter has clocks in it, get out fast -- you can get trapped permanently.  If there are staircases, never take one leading downward.  If you meet a man with a suit, open your eyes and end the game immediately, because he's evil and can latch on to you and start following you around in real life if you don't act quickly enough.

Oh, and to add the obligatory frisson to the whole thing: if you die in the game, you actually die.

What's striking about "Red Door, Yellow Door" is that despite the fact that its claims are patently absurd, there are huge numbers of apparently completely serious people who have had terrifying experiences while playing it -- not only manifestations during the game, but afterward.  (If you search for the game, you'll find hundreds of accounts, many of them warning people from ever playing it because they were so traumatized by it.)  The thing is, what did they expect would happen?  They'd been primed by all of the setup; it's unsurprising they saw clocks and eerie staircases descending into darkness and evil guys in suits, and that those same images haunted their memories for some time after the game ended.

And if a silly game for gullible teenagers can do that, how much more do our perception and memory get tainted by how we're primed, especially by our prior notions of what might be going on?  Hang out in graveyards and spooky attics, and you're likely to see ghosts whether or not they're there.

As I recounted in Monday's post, I've been fascinated by tales of the supernatural since I was a kid, and on some level, I'm like Fox Mulder -- "I Want To Believe."  But the fact is, the evidence we have thus far just isn't enough.  Humans are way too suggestible to rely entirely on anecdote.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it most succinctly: "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'  When you have something tangible we can bring back to the lab and analyze, then we can talk."

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Rules for miracles

In today's News of the Surreal, we have: the Vatican is tightening the rules on what it's willing to call divine supernatural phenomena.

It's tricky business, isn't it?  In science, there's a well-established protocol for evaluating the strength of a claim, involving stuff like evidence and logic (and, if possible, a statistical analysis of the data).  But how do you do that in religion, where the only real rule is God does whatever the hell he wants?  Most of the claims of miracles are, by definition, one-offs; after all, if the same sort of thing kept happening over and over, it wouldn't be a miracle.  It's not like when Moses saw the Burning Bush, he was able to say, "Okay, let's compare this to other times we've had booming voices speak out of a flaming shrubbery, and see if this is a real phenomenon or if maybe I shouldn't have eaten those suspicious-looking mushrooms at dinner." 

So now, according to the new rules, bishops are being given the unenviable task of deciding whether a given apparition or miraculous healing or whatnot is real.  The first hurdle, apparently, is to determine if it is an outright lie to make money -- and the problem is these sorts of claims are ridiculously lucrative, so such scams abound.  The apparition of the Virgin Mary in the little village of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, wherein six adults were supposedly blessed for their faith and told such surprising revelations as "don't have an abortion" and "same-sex marriage is naughty in God's sight," led to it becoming the third most popular pilgrimage site in Europe (after Fátima in Portugal and Lourdes in France).  Over a million people visit the shrine every year, bringing in huge amounts of revenue; in 2019, sixty thousand young Catholics from all over the world descended on the village, accompanied by fourteen archbishops and bishops and over seven hundred priests -- despite the Vatican making the rather equivocal statement that such pilgrimages were okay "as long as there is no assumption the [apparitions of Mary] are confirmed to have a supernatural origin."

One of the many gift shops in Medjugorje [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sean MacEntee, Virgin Mary Statues (5778409684), CC BY 2.0]

Don't try to tell me that religion isn't big business.

Once the bishops determine that any given claim isn't simply fraudulent, they issue a nihil obstat ("there is no obstacle") decree, which is the religious version of "Whatever floats your boat, dude."  Nihil obstat effectively says, "Okay, fine, we can't stop you from worshiping this thing, but we're not saying it's real, either."  In the new guidelines, bishops are warned against going from there to stating outright that the phenomenon is divine in origin; issued prematurely, the Vatican says, jumping from nihil obstat to "this is a message from God" can lead to "damage to the unity of the Church" and could "cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church."

Well, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?  There is no good evidence-based litmus test for differentiating between a "real" supernatural event (whatever that means) and a mere delusion; if there was, the event wouldn't be supernatural, it would simply be natural.  So we're still down to the sketchy grounds of having a bishop say, "I prayed to God and God said it was so," which then hinges on whether the bishop himself is telling the truth.

Because I can't think of any times bishops have been involved in hinky stuff, can you?

So the new rules don't really solve anything, just kick the can down the road to give the impression that there are now hard-and-fast rules for determining the veracity of something that by definition doesn't obey the laws of nature.  The BBC article where I learned about this story (linked above) ends with what has to be my favorite line I've read in a news source in months, to wit: "And so the Vatican, an institution peppered with mysticism, and which still communicates via smoke signals when electing a new pope, will be hoping its new rules can regulate claims of the supernatural."

Heh.  Yeah.  The Catholic Church, of course, is kind of in an awkward position, because they do more or less accept science most of the time, as long as the science doesn't fly in the face of the status quo.  The Big Bang Model was actually the brainchild of an astronomer who was also an ordained priest (Monseigneur Georges Lemaître) and the Vatican stated outright that the Big Bang was completely compatible with Catholic theology in 1951.  They officially pardoned Galileo in 1992 (better late than never), and have at least refused to condemn biological evolution.  But the fact remains that -- as the writer for the BBC News stated -- the entire institution is rooted in mysticism, which is a deeply unscientific approach to understanding the world.  I suppose I'd prefer this sort of waffling to (say) the views of the fundamentalists, who pretty well reject science in toto, but it still strikes me that trying to play it both ways is not gonna turn out to be a winning strategy.  Once you accept any kind of evidence-based criteria for establishing the truth, you're solidly in science's wheelhouse, and -- despite the "non-overlapping magisteria" stance of people like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould -- the result for religious claims has almost always been a solid thumbs-down.

In any case, there you have it.  New rules for miracles.  I guess it's a step up from the bumper sticker I saw a while back that said, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it," but given the other options, I'm still going with the laws of scientific induction any day of the week.

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The origins of the story

I'm always interested in looking into where tales of the paranormal get started.  We've seen a number of examples here at Skeptophilia, each with its own peculiar provenance.  There are ones that have the feel of Scary Tales Told Around A Campfire, and which probably have little connection to reality other than the setting, like the legend of 50 Berkeley Square and the famous tumbling coffins of Barbados.  Others come from works of fiction that were misinterpreted (or misrepresented) as fact, and afterward took on a life of their own, such as the tragic tale of Christopher Round.  There are stories for which the basic facts are clearly true, but which picked up paranormal overtones by virtue of being unexplained, such as the odd phenomenon of the Devonshire footprints.  Last, and most common, there are ones for which the main players are definitely real people with a decent amount of credibility, and who seem to have had no particular reason to lie other than perhaps relishing getting a chuckle from scaring the absolute shit out of their friends, such as the weirdly open-ended tale of Nurse Black (still my all-time favorite "true ghost story"), the story of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, Lord Dufferin's terrifying premonition, and the much-retold legend of the screaming skulls of Calgarth.

More interesting to me, though, are ones where the story itself has no obvious point of origin.  One of these for which I've spent an inordinate amount of time digging, and come up absolutely empty-handed, I know about because of the book Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, which I've owned (courtesy of the beloved Scholastic Book Club) since shortly after it was published in 1972.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Harald Hoyer from Schwerin, Germany, The Haunted House Das Geisterhaus (5360049608), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Hurwood gave the story the rather lurid name "The Mystery House of Horror," and it was one of a handful in the collection that completely freaked me out when I read it as a highly imaginative, impressionable twelve-year-old who was absolutely convinced that if I left even the slightest gap in the curtains of my bedroom at night, someone or *gulp* something would watch me through the window while I slept.  You'd think monsters would have better stuff to do at night than to squint at a sleeping kid, but you never know, with monsters.

Right?

Of course right.

In any case, "The Mystery House of Horror" is about a manor house in Kensington, England that had a sinister reputation.  No one, we're told, has any information about when it was built or by whom, which right away seems a little strange for a culture so absolutely obsessed with keeping track of the minute doings of the landed gentry.  All Hurwood tells us is that the unnamed original owner was a "man of ill repute" who hanged himself in the house rather than waiting for the law do it first, and after that, the house and the gardens that surrounded it were definitely a Very Bad Place.

It was rented for a time by a family with the last name of Trent, but that tenancy came to an abrupt end when something tried to smother Mrs. Trent in her sleep with a pillow.  Her husband leapt to her aid, and found himself in a wrestling match with something strong, slimy, invisible, and giving off a horrible stench.  For some reason, even after this incident they stayed on a few more weeks.  This is more than I'd have done -- if that happened to me, all you'd see is a comical, Looney Tunes-style blur as I ran away screaming, my feet not even touching the ground.  But during those weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Trent were plagued by something slamming doors, and occasionally violently shaking their beds at night.

Eventually, though, they had enough, and left.

The next tenant was a Mrs. Cattling, who moved in with eight small dogs, four dachshunds and four Pomeranians.  The dogs obviously hated the place right from the get-go (a common trope in paranormal stories is dogs being more sensitive to hauntings than humans are), and one night their fear was realized as something attacked them, killing one of the Pomeranians.  What happened next is, to me, the scariest part of the entire story:

She was about to pick up the limp little form when something made her whirl around.  To her horror she saw one of the pillows on the bed lift itself up and stand on end.  Frozen to the spot, she watched as it compressed itself into the shape of some hideously unfamiliar beast with a long muzzle, sharp teeth, and monstrously evil gleaming eyes.  For a moment she stared at it in morbidly rapt fascination, like a bird at a snake about to devour it.  Then, summoning all her strength, she rushed to the bed, seized the pillow and flung it to the floor, jumping on it with both feet and screaming, "You killed my dog!  You killed my dog!"

Quite the badass, that Mrs. Cattling.  The tale is reminiscent of the absolutely terrifying short story "O, Whistle and I'll Come for You, My Lad," by M. R. James, in which a malevolent and invisible spirit creates a body for itself out of whatever happens to be around -- a bedspread, curtains, clothing hanging on a line.  *shudder*

After Mrs. Cattling (and her surviving dogs) left, the house went through various other tenants, none of whom stayed long.  One saw a "gaunt, cadaverous figure" standing by the end of the bed.  Another saw a man in "peculiar old-fashioned dress" tinkering with the gas mantle.  She assumed her husband had called a repairman, but the husband hadn't done any such thing, and when the woman returned to the kitchen she found it filling up with a dangerous level of natural gas -- the result, we're led to believe, of one of the house's resident ghosts trying to do away with its living tenants.

Even when it was unoccupied, strange things happened.  A pair of young lovers looking for a quiet place to have a nice snog found their way into the house's garden one evening, but before they could get down to the business at hand the young man noticed that despite the house being empty, there was an eerie golden light in one of the upstairs windows.  As they watched, it changed to a "ghastly bluish-green," and a "tomblike chill" descended over them.  But finally we have people showing some degree of common sense -- the couple hauled ass out of the place and vowed never to come near it again.

Understandably, the house got such a bad reputation that no one would rent it. "Some time between World War I and World War II," we're told, it was torn down, and "when the last scraps of debris were hauled away, the residents of the neighborhood breathed a collective sigh of relief."

So it's a very creepy story, and going back through it to write this post I had a couple of moments where I had an honest shiver.  (Fortunately, as I write this, it's a bright sunny morning, my dogs are all safely asleep on their own personal sofa, and there are no peculiar-looking repairmen working on the gas line.  The latter is largely because we don't have a gas line, but still.)

But where did the story come from?

I've done a significant amount of research trying to find anything but Hurwood's account, and had zero success.  You'd think that a house with this kind of story behind it would merit mention somewhere, but if there is, I haven't been able to find it.  All of the references I've come across ultimately lead back to Hurwood himself.

So as compelling as the story is, I think the answer is that it came from Hurwood's own imagination.

I kind of get the draw, you know?  As a novelist, I want my own imaginary creations to get as much notice as they can, and if I were writing a True Tales of the Supernatural sort of collection, it'd be mighty tempting to throw one of my own stories in there just for fun.  And I suspect that's what Hurwood did.  The Mystery House of Horror, I'm afraid, never existed.

I might be wrong, of course.  If one of my readers knows the provenance of this story (other than Hurwood's anthology), please let me know in the comments.  Maybe there was a haunted house in Kensington, and that'd be worth knowing about.

Although I'd be just as happy if invisible, slimy, smelly creatures didn't exist.  Even if all they did was watch me through gaps in the curtains at night.

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The haunted sentry box

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

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

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

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

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

The sentry box was, understandably, never used again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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