HOW TO EXPLAIN HAUNTINGS

I wrote this last month for my series of essays on the paranormal, but seeing the Sunday Scribblings prompt this week, I thought it would be perfect.

I’ve written on many aspects of ghosts and related phenomena, but if the subject is to make any sense, we also need to address the ‘system’ by which a haunting could occur. In other words, place all the suggested elements into a graded theory.
Such a system addresses many skeptical objections to hauntings – namely, by providing an overall theory, the repeatability of experiences can be shown. I also hope to show how an initial skeptical process can build to something greater.

Vital to a haunting is culture.

Whether this is historic culture such as an old building, or family culture – i.e. expression of a problem – all ghosts express themselves within a cultural form understandable to the experiencer.
Ghosts can often express information not known to the experiencer. However, this is not necessarily correct. Cryptomnesia – the ability to recall ‘forgotten’ information – can often be applied in such cases. The person reads, views or hears vast quantities of information unbeknown to the conscious mind. Memory recall during hypnosis has shown that this unconscious repository is vast.

Ghosts tend to be hallucinated.

This is not meant to imply mental illness involved in the viewing of a ghost. Rather, the mind always analyses information. When this is cut off or reduced by tiredness or other altered state, the mind naturally interprets from the information available.
Hallucination is therefore inevitable, and it is usually during ideal times for such ‘sensory decalibration’ that a ghost is experienced.

Possession can often be involved.

By this, I mean the taking over of the mind by an ‘entity’. However, do such entities come from ‘outside’ the mind? Split-brain research tells us that we can function both rationally and emotionally at the same time, the emotional element often seeming dislocated from the mind.
This allows inner information to be expressed as ‘separate’. Jung also gave us understanding of ‘archetypes’, which can be seen as ‘personality’ fragments at a species level, but shared by all. The terms ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are not as definite as thought.

Some hauntings are shared by a group.

Usually a family, this is known as the poltergeist. However, it is known that hysteria can work on the communal level, prompting spontaneous similar action beyond the apparent control of the individuals involved. In particular, each person’s ‘suggestability’ is enhanced.
I view such phenomena as ‘psychodrama’. Usually beginning with a pubescent child, a problem is expressed, leading to abnormal behaviour. Possession can result, and the child becomes a ‘focus’.
Repeatability of behaviour leads to hysteria, rising to the point of mass hallucinations. In effect, an altered reality has formed around the group, with behaviour and experience expressed in terms of communality.
Ecology is about more than any single element of an ecosystem. Rather, it suggests an influence above any one part, providing ‘communal’ behaviour which expresses more than the sum of the individual parts.
Placing this idea upon a haunting psychodrama, I suggest a point comes when the various elements become more than the sum of their parts. Rather, shared cryptomnesia inputs information that manifests with the past, providing phenomena that would agree with classically understood interpretations of ‘ghost’ and ‘possession’.
The paranormal suffers from a lack of theories that show the repeatability of experience. The above is an attempt to address this problem.

© Anthony North, June 2008