ghosts were souls trapped in purgatory until they expiated their sins. The only apparitions that were holy and permitted by God were apparitions of religious figures, such as angels, saints and Jesus. All other apparitions, including spirits of the dead, were delusions created by Satan to confuse the living.
In seventeenth-century Europe apparitions of the dead played an important role as advisors to the living. Belief in ghosts fell out of favour in the eighteenth century, returning in the nineteenth with spiritualism, which espouses survival after death and mediumistic contact with the dead. Many motifs of apparitions appear in the folklore of different cultures, such as the Flying Dutchman or the ankou.
According to a study of apparitions by American psychical researcher Hornell Hart, published in 1956, there is no significant difference between apparitions of the living and of the dead. Apparitions can move through solid matter and appear and disappear abruptly. They can cast shadows. Some are corporeal and lifelike in their movement and speech while others are luminous or limited in movement and speech. Apparitions are typically dressed in clothing of their time. The majority of apparitions are thought to manifest for a reason, for instance, to communicate a crisis or death, give a warning, offer comfort or convey important information. Some haunting apparitions appear in places where emotional traumas have taken place, such as murders or battles, but other hauntings seem to be aimless.
Systematic studies of apparitions began with the Society for Psychical Research, London, in the late nineteenth century. By the 1980s polls in the United States conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Council showed a dramatic increase – around 78 per cent – in reported apparitions, perhaps due in part to changing public attitudes towards acknowledging paranormal experiences.
Although many ghost investigators have their own categories, the following are the most typical types:
Crisis apparitions: usually images that appear in moments of crisis to communicate death or danger. They typically appear to a person who has close emotional ties to the agent (the person who is the source of the apparition).
Apparitions of the dead: manifestations of someone who has died, usually within a short time after death, to comfort a loved one or communicate important information.
Collective apparitions: manifestations of the living or dead that occur to multiple witnesses. Approximately one-third of reported apparitions are witnessed collectively.
Reciprocal apparitions: apparitions of the living in which both agent and the percipient (the person who experiences the apparition), separated by a distance, experience apparitions of each other simultaneously.
Deathbed apparitions: visual images of divine beings, religious figures and dead loved ones that are reported by the dying in the last moments of life.
Apparitions in cases suggestive of reincarnation: cases when the deceased appears in a dream to a member of the family into which it will be reborn. Such dreams occur frequently among Native American tribes of the Northwest and in Turkey, Burma and Thailand.
A large number of theories have been put forward to explain apparitions, but none explain all the different types. Society for Psychical Research founders Edmund Gurney and Frederick Myers at first believed apparitions were mental hallucinations that had no physical reality, either produced by telepathy from the dead to the living or projected out of the percipient’s mind in the form of an image. Gurney also believed that collective apparitions were a product of telepathy among the living, projected by the primary percipient to others around him or her. However, telepathy among the living does not explain why witnesses in collective sightings notice different details.
Myers, who believed strongly in survival after death, began to doubt the telepathic theory as early as 1885. In his landmark book Human Personality and Its Survival after Death (1903), he suggested that the apparitions consisted of a ‘phantasmogenic centre’, a locus of energies that could be perceived by the most psychically sensitive people. He conceived of a ‘subliminal consciousness’ as the basis from which the consciousness springs and which survives the body after death. He theorized that the subliminal consciousness was receptive to extrasensory input and that apparitions appeared to psychically receptive people.
Other theories that have been advanced subsequently about apparitions suggest they are:
Idea patterns or etheric images produced by the subconscious mind of the living.
Astral or etheric bodies of the agents.
An amalgam of personality patterns, which in the case of hauntings are trapped on a psychic or psi field.
Projections of the human unconscious, a manifestation of an unacknowledged need or guilt.
Vehicles through which the ‘I’, the thinking consciousness, takes on a personality as well as a visible form.
Projections of will and concentration; see Thought form.
True spirits of the dead.
Localized physical phenomena directed by an intelligence or personality.
Recordings or imprints of vibrations impressed upon some sort of psychic ether. In Eastern mystical philosophy, the cosmos is permeated by a substance called the Akasha. Oxford philosopher H H Price called this substance ‘psychic ether’, a term adopted by some psychical researchers to suggest that if all events are recorded on some invisible substance, then perhaps psychically tuned people can get glimpses of these records and get a playback. See Akashic Records.
It is unlikely that any one theory can explain all apparitions, and it is conceivable that some apparitions are created by the living, that some have their own reality, that some are hallucinations and that some are psychic recordings.
Twentieth-century psychical researcher Andrew Mackenzie suggested that the ability to have hallucinations could be a function of personality. In his studies he found that one-third of cases occurred just before or after sleep, or when the percipient was woken in the night. Other experiences took place when the witness was in a state of relaxation or doing routine work such as housework, or concentrating on some activity such as reading a book. Only when the external world was shut out was the unconscious able to release impressions, which sometimes took the form of an apparition.
English psychical researcher G Tyrrell also made this link between dreamlike states and sightings of apparitions. Tyrrell theorized that there were two stages in an hallucinatory experience. In stage one the witness unconsciously experiences the apparition, and in stage two the information from stage one is processed from the unconscious in dreams or hallucinations with the required details added, such as clothing and objects.
APPLIED PSI
Also known as applied parapsychology and psionics, applied psi is a branch of parapsychology that assumes psychic ability exists and seeks ways to apply it in everyday life.
Applied psi is used today when anyone acts on his or her intuition to make a decision. Experimental studies of applied psi date back to the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the discipline was seriously explored. In 1963 the Newark College of Engineering in New Jersey became one of the first engineering centres in the US to explore psi ability in people. Researchers found that successful people use psi and precognition daily in their jobs in the form of intuition, hunches and gut feelings. In the early 1980s, American parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove urged parapsychologists to
