Chasing Ghosts, page 19
“They were talking to each other and all of a sudden my mom and sister hugged each other, said they were sorry, the whole entire area lit up, and the marks on the mirror went away,” Philip recounts. If the antique had quarreling spirits trapped within, the long-overdue apology seemingly brought closure and set them free.
Other ghosts know they’re dead and are ready to go, but just want to say their goodbyes. According to Auerbach, ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of people who appear to others as ghosts do so at the moment of death or within a few days. They usually appear only to family members and people they knew well, but not to everyone else who may be around. Such occurrences turned Lady Beresford into a legend and launched a young Andrew Jackson Davis into Spiritualism royalty. More recently, Auerbach experienced this phenomenon himself shortly after the death of his friend, Martin Caidin, in 1997. Caidin, a science fiction author and aviation expert, had fought a long battle with cancer. Among his books were the novel Cyborg, which was adapted into the 1973 TV movie The Six Million Dollar Man, and Ghosts of the Air, a nonfiction collection of paranormal experiences from pilots.
“He constantly kidded me about haunting me after he died,” Auerbach recalls. “I challenged him to do it.”
Nothing happened within the expected window of two days, but a week and a half later, as Auerbach was driving to the Oakland airport for a morning flight, something unusual happened. His three-month-old vehicle that still had its new car smell suddenly filled with the aroma of cigar smoke—despite the fact that Auerbach doesn’t smoke. It was Caidin’s brand of cigar smoke specifically.
“It felt to me like somebody was sitting in the passenger seat next to me, but there was nobody there,” Auerbach describes. “I just said my goodbyes and it went away.”
When he arrived at the airport he called a mutual friend of his and Caidin’s and, to his surprise, learned that the aviation expert’s spirit could zip across the country in minutes.
“I don’t know why you’re calling. The timing couldn’t be better,” the friend told Auerbach. “I just got back from flying my Cessna here in New Jersey, and at 10:10 a.m. my cockpit fills up with the smell of stinky cigar smoke. I swear to God Caidin was with me. It was there for a few minutes, and I was talking to nobody, then it went away.”
This had occurred ten minutes after Auerbach’s experience in his car. What’s more, the friend had just spoken with another pilot in Florida who was also close with Caidin. At 10:20 a.m., the same thing happened to him during a flight.
Auerbach believes ghosts project an image reflecting their appearance in the prime of their lives, since that’s how people usually think of themselves. Alternatively, paranormal investigator Greg Newkirk suggests apparitions might appear as the loved ones experiencing the phenomena remember them. “They don’t see them as they were when they died—frail and old—they see them as their best memory of the person,” he says. “So I think that there’s an intelligence out there, whether it’s our intelligence or something else, and occasionally it pokes us. I think it needs our minds in order to do that.”
Both theories would agree that apparitions occur within the mind, but might appear in different ways. In other words, what you experience is not physically in front of you or around you, it’s a mental phenomenon. In the case of Caidin’s cigar smoke, the spirit’s information was processed in an olfactory sensation. At other times, any given apparition could be experienced uniquely by different people in the same location. For example, if you and some friends were at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, one of you might see and hear an apparition speaking, another might only see it or hear it, and another might smell it—be it the patient’s perfume or another aroma associated with the person. One last person in such a group might experience nothing at all and suggest the rest of you get a room in one of the wards.
Capturing evidence of these perceptions isn’t easy. If it were, we’d have many more answers by now. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t trying. The Rhine Research Center in North Carolina and other institutions are engaging in scientific studies to better understand the paranormal. On a less scientific level, countless ghost hunters, from the Roto-Rooter guys on Ghost Hunters to Zak Bagans and his crew on Ghosts Adventures to Ozzy Osbourne’s son on Portals to Hell, are trying to record otherworldly chatter and spot spirits in every creepy corner. However, long before parapsychologists began their experiments and plumbers ventured into the dark, others were working hard in the light to develop technology that might connect us to the Other Side.
WHY DO GHOSTS WEAR CLOTHES?
People have been seeing ghosts since, well, since there’ve been people. In all the stories that have been passed down, the ones you’ve watched on reality TV and in the movies or heard about from friends, the ghosts have one thing in common: they’re dressed. You don’t hear about naked spirits. It’s not because the afterlife is fashion conscious or chilly in winter (it seems like a safe assumption). The theory on ghostwear is that apparitions appear to us as they see themselves.
Loyd Auerbach offers a simple test to illustrate this: close your eyes and picture yourself for ten seconds. Go ahead. Now think about how you visualized yourself. Were you naked? Probably not. Did you see your shoes? Most likely you didn’t. And when you picture a ghost in your head, it’s probably clothed and fading away just before the feet—as if floating in midair.
Skip Notes
7History later revealed that there was no monastery on the site of the rectory, though monks may have been in the area. When they were, however, it was at a time before the era of coaches.
8What’s in Harry Price’s ghost-hunting kit, you ask? He didn’t have fancy gizmos with blinking lights and buzzers, but he did have a ball of string, a stick of chalk, a pair of soft felt overshoes, a steel measuring tape, white tape, dry batteries and switches (for secret electrical contacts), a camera, film and flashbulbs, infrared filters, a notebook, red, blue and black pencils, bandages, iodine and surgical adhesive tape, matches, a flashlight and candle, a bowl of mercury to detect tremors in room or passage, and, in case things got really out of hand, a flask of brandy.
9If this sounds familiar, you can thank The Conjuring 2. The 2016 horror flick wasn’t exactly accurate, but it was indeed based on real people and some really strange happenings.
10Apologies for the spoiler, but if you haven’t seen The Sixth Sense by now, that’s on you.
“Is it a coincidence that this century—known as the age of anxiety, a time rife with various hysterias, the era that gave birth to existentialism—is also when we stepped inside an electromagnetic bubble and decided to live there?…We have never quite comprehended that we walk about in a sea of mild electromagnetism just as we do air. It is part of our atmosphere, part of the containing bath our consciousness swims in.”
—Jack Hitt, writing for Wired in 1999, on electromagnetism as a possible explanation for paranormal phenomena
I magine what it must have been like to be alive in the early twentieth century when something called “radio” first yanked distant voices right out of the air and played them in your living room. Or, even more amazing, seeing moving pictures from faraway places suddenly appear on another newfangled device called “television.” We take it all for granted today, but back when these technologies exposed an invisible world bristling with data all around, people surely found them to be as magical as they were scientific. So is it any wonder that technology would offer the hope of uncovering another aspect of our world that remains unseen? If there were one person who might unlock a scientific door to the realm of spirits, it was the man known as the Wizard of Menlo Park: Thomas Edison.
Thomas Edison’s “Spirit Phone”
Edison had proven his genius with the ability to capture the human voice in 1877, starting with the words, “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb . . .” The famous nursery rhyme was transferred to a tinfoil-coated cylinder and became the first recording of a person. Forty-three years and countless inventions later, Edison set out to create a device that would once again capture a human voice and change everything. Only this time, that voice would come from the dead. The wizard was going to build a telephone to the afterlife.
The inventor had heard enough about séance tables, rappings, spewing ectoplasm, Ouija boards, and other effects that mediums offered as means of communication with the afterlife. If Edison was going to talk to the dead, it was going to be done through science. As he told B. C. Forbes of American magazine in 1920, “The methods and apparatus commonly used and discussed are just a lot of unscientific nonsense.”
Why, he wondered, would any personality in the afterlife bother communicating in such prankish and primitive ways?
Edison didn’t offer Forbes specific details of how his device would work, but he explained, “I am proceeding on the theory that, in the very nature of things, the degrees of material or physical power possessed by those in the next life must be extremely slight; and that, therefore, any instrument designed to communicate with us must be super-delicate—as finely responsive as human ingenuity can make it.
Among Thomas Edison’s lesser-known inventions was a prototype for a telephone to the afterlife—one of many attempts by scientists to prove the existence of ghosts.
“For my part, I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved or manipulated—whichever term you want to use—by our personality, as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.”
He added that, should he succeed, the first spirits to take advantage of the device would likely be telegraphers or scientists or anyone else with experience in the use of delicate instruments and electric currents.
Was Edison making a joke? Was he merely looking to grab headlines during the Spiritualism craze? Many believed this was the case, but a 1933 article in Modern Mechanix magazine reported on a secret demonstration the inventor held one winter night in 1920 in his darkened laboratory with several scientists present. According to the article, “Edison set up a photo-electric cell. A tiny pencil of light, coming from a powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the active surface of this cell, where it was transformed instantly into a feeble electric current. Any object, no matter how thin, transparent, or small, would cause a registration on the cell if it cut through the beam.”
The team of scientists spent hours closely watching Edison’s prototype for any sign of movement from beyond. But none came. Still, Edison maintained his belief that some form of afterlife might exist. Months after his announcement, the modern-day wizard added to his theories on what constitutes life in an interview with the New York Times. He explained that he believed the human body to be composed of 100,000,000,000,000 (that’s 100 trillion) infinitely small life units, beyond microscopic, and beyond what the human mind can conceive.
True to his nature, Edison took a very pragmatic approach to how the life units might operate. They, much like him, maintain a strong work ethic by constantly rebuilding our tissues to replace any that might be wearing out. They also monitor the functions of our organs, “just as the engineers in a power house see that the machinery is kept in perfect order.” When all of our internal machinery finally breaks down beyond repair, the life units move on and leave our broken bodies behind.
“Being indefatigable workers, they naturally seek something else to do,” Edison said. “They either enter into the body of another man or even start work on some other form of life. At any rate, there is a fixed number of these, and it is the same entities that have served over and over again.”
In the final chapter of the posthumously published Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, the great scientist expanded on his thoughts and even postulated that human life is alien in its origin. “I cannot believe for a moment that life in the first instance originated on this insignificant little ball which we call the Earth—little, that is, in contrast with other bodies which inhabit space,” Edison wrote. “The particles which combined to evolve living creatures on this planet of ours probably came from some other body elsewhere in the universe.”
Edison died in October 1931, having never completed his spirit phone. Sadly, this meant he couldn’t call the living from the Other Side to share new inventions, which he surely would be working on if possible. He said it himself four years earlier after a reporter asked how he’d spend his afterlife, answering with a smile, “Experimenting.”
Though Edison’s spirit phone never materialized, many Spiritualists believed technology had already started building a bridge between the living and the dead more than half a century earlier. Like the phonograph capturing sound, the introduction of the camera sparked wonder with its ability to preserve images on paper. Could the lens see what the eye couldn’t? In 1861, it appeared the answer was a resounding yes.
William Mumler and the Rise of Spirit Photography
William Mumler, a jeweler and photographer working in Boston, had just finished developing a self-portrait when he noticed an image of someone behind him. At first he assumed he just hadn’t cleaned the plate properly, so he cleaned it again, took another photo, and still saw a faint figure. He recognized it as a deceased cousin and decided to show it to a Spiritualist acquaintance.
“Not at that time being inclined much to the spiritual belief myself, and being of a jovial disposition, always ready for a joke, I concluded to have a little fun, as I thought, at his expense,” Mumler wrote years afterward in 1875.
The joke went well beyond their visit and quickly reached the Spiritualist newspapers, like Boston’s Banner of Light. Enthusiastic believers proclaimed that Mumler had opened a new door to the afterlife—and taken the world’s first spirit photo. Mumler rolled with the wave of excitement and decided that perhaps the “wonderful phenomenon” was worthy of investigation. That would be up to others, though. His role involved taking more photos of people eager to fork over ten bucks. Mumler never promised a spirit would appear, but one often did.
William Mumler defied skeptics with his spirit photographs. In portrait settings, ghosts can be seen over the shoulders of their living loved ones.
Naturally, there were skeptics. People assumed trickery was involved and various photographers wished to investigate his process. Mumler didn’t shy away. He allowed the respected Boston portrait photographer William Black to examine his methods. Black was so confident he’d uncover shenanigans that he offered fifty dollars if Mumler could produce a spirit photo in his presence. So Mumler let Black inspect his camera, plate, dipper, and chemical bath and observe every step of the process, from preparation to development. Sure enough, Mumler’s photo produced a hint of a man leaning against Black’s shoulder.
The seemingly legit photographer of the spirits gained further credibility after a peer, William Guay, conducted his own investigation. The Banner of Light printed this letter on November 18, 1862:
Mr. Editor—Having been informed by Mr. William H. Mumler that you desire to publish the results of my investigation into the possibility and genuineness of Mr. M.’s photographic impressions of spirit forms, it gives me much pleasure to detail to you what I have seen. As I have been commissioned by Messrs. J. Davis and Co., you can rest assured that I was resolved, if permitted, to allow nothing to slip my utmost scrutiny. Having had ten years’ continual practice in this particular branch—that is, negative on glass, and positive on paper from negative—I felt competent to detect any form of deception. Having been permitted by Mr. Mumler every facility to investigate, I went through the whole of the operation of selecting, cleaning, preparing, coating, silvering, and putting into the shield, the glass upon which Mr. M. proposed that a spirit form and mine should be imparted, never taking off my eyes, and not allowing Mr. M. to touch the glass until it had gone through the whole of the operation. The result was, that there came upon the glass a picture of myself, and, to my utter astonishment—having previously examined and scrutinised every crack and corner, plate-holder, camera, box, tube, the inside of the bath, &c.—another portrait. Having since continued, on several occasions, my investigations, as described above, and received even more perfect results than on the first trial, I have been obliged to endorse its legitimacy.
Respectfully yours, Wm. Guay.
The newspaper was quite pleased with Guay’s report. Mumler surely was, too, given that the dead were helping him make a good living. As with the Spiritualist mediums we met in part two of this book, the great loss of life during the Civil War translated to more business from grieving family members. Over the years, Mumler developed thousands of photographs. One of the most famous was taken of Mary Todd Lincoln and showed the assassinated president and her recently deceased son, Thomas, behind her. As the story has been told, however, Mrs. Lincoln entered the studio wearing a black dress and a veil and gave a false name. Perhaps she just wasn’t sneaky enough to fool the clever photographer.
