id="ub8eba962-0256-5b70-8db0-b3fa9e2a4787">
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
A Fontana Original 1992
Copyright © Jean Ritchie 1992
Jean Ritchie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Pictures by Emma Cattell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780006378099
Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008192082
Version: 2016-05-12
Contents
2 Things That Go Bump in the Night
Tell anyone that you are researching a book about the paranormal and they will tell you an anecdote from their own life or one from the experiences of their family and friends. It may be something fairly insignificant: a dream that came true; a strange feeling of a ghostly presence; a clock that, in the words of the song ‘stopped, dead, never to go again, when the old man died’. Or it may be a full-scale haunting with clanking chains, footsteps and headless nuns; a disruptive poltergeist that hurled objects around; a vision of a dying relative many miles away.
The majority of people believe in the supernatural. Sixty per cent believe it is possible to communicate telepathically; fifty-nine per cent believe that some houses are haunted; fifty-nine per cent believe it is possible to dream the future; forty-five per cent believe in reincarnation and thirty per cent believe that we can receive messages from the dead (statistics from a poll carried out for Channel Four in 1987). The word ‘believe’ implies that they have faith in the fact that these things are possible. What this book attempts to do is find out what factual basis there is for their belief.
An anecdotal story, the sort everyone seems to be able to tell about things that go bump in the night, has no scientific worth. It cannot be investigated, bottled, analysed or dissected. It’s like Samuel Goldwyn’s verbal contract: not worth the paper it’s written on. Yet over the many months I was researching this book I came to realize that the sum of all this experience has to be worth something. If every family has within its culture a story of this kind, the sheer volume and universality of the material must amount to a matter of substance. Sure, the sceptics will say that man has demonstrated his need for mystery and that supernatural stories cater for this need. But there are easier ways to inject mystery into life: religion, for a start. The paranormal is a subject that invites scorn: many of the people who have confided their personal experiences to me have done so diffidently, and in confidence: ‘I’ve never told anyone this before in case they thought I was mad,’ is a fairly common fear.
This is not a book about the assorted unconfirmed experiences of all these people. But it is a book for them because it is a book which attempts to explain, in lay person’s language, just what is happening in the serious pursuit of the paranormal.
Are we any nearer today to understanding what ghosts are? What causes poltergeists? Why some people come back from mediums feeling that they have been in close commune with their dead loved ones – and others feel that they have been ripped off? Is there such a thing as telepathy – and, if so, why can’t we harness it and use it?
Research into the paranormal is regarded with some suspicion by the scientific establishment. One eminent American parapsychologist recently estimated that there are no more than fifty scientists worldwide involved in investigating the supernatural on a full-time basis. Fortunately, to counterbalance this, there are some brilliant part-time investigators (several of them, coincidentally, highly-regarded scientists in their own fields) who give their free time and energy to the subject.
Serious psychical research began here in Britain more than a hundred years ago. Although America hhas thrown more money at the subject over the past fifty years, international researchers still look to Britain for good examples of ghost stories: this is the most haunted country in the world.
It is shortsighted of the scientific community to turn its back on psychical research. In terms of world history,
