First Time For Everybody

The world is a pretty straight forward place and material reality is all there is to it. Or so I tried to remind myself the first time I encountered a ghost. Unfortunately, the thought was neither convincing nor reassuring.

Instead, I knew that I was witnessing something that was not scientifically suppose to exist but which was there no matter what and it didn't appear at all interested in what science had to say one way or the other. It also didn't seem very interested in the profoundly stupid wide-eyed look on my face. I have since learned that this is a common facial expression when people are having their first "experience."

A long time ago (longer than I care to admit), I was a film student at Ohio University. Yes, the infamous Athens, the town with almost as many folk tales as bars. If half of the ghostly stories about Athens were true, you would expect to meet headless ghouls at every street corner.

In truth, many of the tales have to do with youthful imaginations and a common love for telling creepy tales. One year, I lived in a house rumored to be haunted. The proof, it was said, was the way doors mysteriously swung open by themselves. It was true that various doors did just that. However, this had more to do with the fact that there wasn't a right angle anywhere in the house and the only mystery was figuring out how to keep any of the doors shut due to the way they were all hung.

Many tales about Athens has less to do with spirits and more to do with a unique combination of high ground water, shoddy construction, bad wiring and a complete lack of housing inspectors.

Which may be why I had ignored the rumors about the haunting in the hallways of the film department. Live and learn is all I can say.

Some people claimed to have heard the sounds of footsteps and weeping in the hallway outside of the editing room. A few reported odd noises late at night on the office side of the building. A couple of braver souls had actually attempted to trace the sounds only to find nothing. Several debunkers insisted that it was simply the sound of the stream pipes in the building. I had sided with the stream pipe theory. I should state right now that I have been known to be wrong.

How wrong became apparent when I was staying late one night watching a film in the screening room. It was after midnight and no one else was on the floor except me. I had finished the movie, placed the 16mm reels back into the container and had stepped across the hall to put the print away in an office when it happened.

At the end of the hallway was a fire escape door. Like most fire escape doors, it was locked and could only be opened by pushing the crash bar. Further, it was connected to a heavy spring that actually made the door difficult to open. Once, when we had to open it, it had taken several of us to do so. This is why I was slightly surprised when the door opened and closed all by itself.

I could have sworn that I heard the sound of someone moving a few feet down the hall and then stopping. Since I knew what I had just seen couldn't have happened, I told myself that there was no need to panic. So I calmly opened the office door, calmly threw the film box onto the nearest chair in the room, then very calmly closed the door and with extreme calmness fumbled with the keys until I locked it. I was so calm that you could barely see the flop sweat rolling down my brow.

Since I was determined not to show fear, I left the building in a steady and orderly manner and immediately made my way to the nearest bar for a couple of stiff ones. However, as I went to leave, I did turn around and uttered a respectable good night. For some odd reason, that only seemed like the decent thing to do.

Over the next several months, I discovered that the other rumors were, by in large, pretty accurate. The "racket", as we came to call it, would usually start up round midnight and continue until 3 am. Footsteps and soft weeping noises would move up and down the hallway for several hours. At first, the sounds would be disturbing. But you had to choice to either get your work done in the editing room or else, and many of us developed various techniques for dealing with the situation. One student would play heavy metal music and sip from a bottle of even stronger spirits through the night to steady his nerves. Or at least that was his excuse. Most of us simply learned to ignore it. Fortunately, it never crossed the doors into the editing room.

I had already learned to ignore it when a colleague of mine had decided to put in a long night on a project that was on a tight deadline. He had never stayed this late in the editing room and since his original background was psychology, he had largely dismissed the rumors as misperceptions. We were working at editing tables positioned side by side and he had already made it clear that he was planning to be wrapped with his project by 1am.

So we were quietly working away when the magic hour came and the "racket" kicked in. By this time, I am playing no particular attention until it was nearly 1am and I just realized that my partner at the next table hadn't moved for the last 45 minutes. I turned and noticed that he had a profoundly stupid wide eyed look on his face.

In a quiet voice, he asked "Is that what I think it is?"

I nodded yes. "By the way, I thought you were planning on leaving about now?"

"That's OK," he replied. "I don't have to rush."

We spent the rest of the night getting a lot of work done. Strangely enough, neither one of us had to go to the bathroom anytime during the night. I am sure that the fact that the bathroom was out in the hallway had nothing to do with this.

"Phony perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not."

-Bela Lugosi (from the movie The Black Cat)

Leave it to ol' Bela is perfectly sum up my own attitude toward the paranormal. Sometimes I really don't know which way I feel or think about the subject. There are many claims made which sound silly and, upon closer examination, turn out to be extremely silly. Then there are the reports that are quite preposterous and, the more one looks into it, very hard to either explain or forget.

I once had some neighbors who were convinced that they had a ghost stalking their attic. They described every spooky sounding stomp, scratch and squeal of some strange entity that routinely scrambled across the attic floor. In fact, they described these ghostly hauntings so well, that I realized that they had squirrels in their attic.

Many hauntings do have such equally banal explanations. Some do not.

I once talked to a woman who had been stationed by the U.S. Army in England. She lived off base in a quaint little house that had been recently built on what had use to be a parkway in the village. The parkway had been very popular with people walking their dogs. So popular that an elderly gentleman who had been deceased for a few years still took his dog for a daily walk and routinely came in through one kitchen wall and out the other. The first couple of visitations she found disturbing, but after awhile got use to it.

Some tales are just out right ridiculous. Some are not. And quite a few are in between. It is my fondest hope that over the years I have at least learned how to tell some of the differences.

There are certainly some basic rules that I have learned and that I strongly adhere to. These are my general guidelines for studying any claim of the paranormal.

A. Most eyewitnesses are seriously trying to tell you what they believe to have seen, heard and felt. Often, the core description is reasonably reliable. It is their interruption of what they witnessed that becomes tricky. They can report the basic perceived "facts." It is mostly their attempt to explain what they have observed that gets all balled up into their own predetermined notions. This is sometimes called analytic overlay.

B. The vast majority of people involved in paranormal events are extremely sane, quite normal and rarely have been indulging in any legal or illegal substances. The kook, crackpot and weirdo theory just doesn't hold.

C. Extraordinary claims DO NOT require extraordinary proof. This favorite chant of the debunkers (which was not coined by Carl Sagan) is simply anti-scientific rubbish. The whole point of science is that it is a great leveling force. All claims, no matter what they may be, must pass the same standards of proof. There are no exceptions to this anywhere in the history of scientific theory and methodology.

D. You can indeed fool some of the people some of the time. Charlatans, con artists and those who tell tale tales depend upon this and have an amazing ability to wheedle their way with bogus claims and stories. We call them bullshit artists and you always have to be on the watch for them.

E. Likewise, you can fool all of the people some of the time. These people are called "debunkers." Many debunkers have a scientific attitude but a complete lack of scientific training. A good example was the late Philip J. Klass. He had a perfectly respectable career as a technical writer and editor, but he routinely made a pretense to levels of scientific knowledge that he simply did not possess and often invented bogus scientific claims that were even more bizrre than the UFO sightings he kept trying to disprove. Klass had a near religious belief in ball plasma and its capabilities for chasing farmers across fields in the middle of the night.

Debunkers often exhibit a blind faith in 19th century Newtonian physics and seem to be waging a long lost crusade against the post-Einstein age. In some ways, I have a slight sense of sympathy with them. I have only recently allowed myself to accept that we live in a so-called "multiverse." Personally, I don't like the idea. It strikes me as kind of messy and complicated and the whole idea gives me a headache. Unfortunately, the multiverse doesn't care if it gives me a headache.

F. Never try to explain a mystery by invoking an enigma. This is a bad habit of folks from the "New Age" persuasion. I once was part of a panel on crop circles that was largely dominated by someone explaining how the circles were formed by aliens using their superior vibrational planes to open new channels of consciousness yada yada yada. The guy didn't have a clue what he was talking about and none of it made any sense and it was all based upon papering over one unexplained event by referring to a boatload of inexplicable notions versed in the language of pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo. Much like the multiverse, this too gives me a headache.

Finally, there is the one rule that is the most important. Don't worry about finding the right answer. Sometimes, it just isn't about finding the answer. Often, it is really about discovering the right questions. I seem to recall that the ancient Greek philosophers said the same thing, only in a much fancier form.