FAMOUS HAUNTED HOUSES AND PLACES

In a Gallup Poll conducted in May 2001, 42 percent of the respondents said that they believed that houses could be haunted by ghosts or spirits of the dead. Psychoanalyst Dr. Nandor Fodor theorized that genuinely haunted houses were those that had soaked up emotional unpleasantness from former occupants. Years, or even centuries, later, the emotional energy may become reactivated when later occupants of the house undergo a similar emotional disturbance. The "haunting"—mysterious knocks and rappings, opening and slamming doors, cold drafts, appearance of ghostly figures—is produced, in Fodor's hypothesis, by the merging of the two energies, one from the past, the other from the present. In Fodor's theory, the reservoir of absorbed emotions, which lie dormant in a haunted house, can only be activated when emotional instability is present. Those homes which have a history of happy occupants, the psychoanalyst believed, are in little danger of becoming haunted.

Psychic investigator Edmund Gurney put forth the hypothesis that the collective sighting of a ghost is due to a sort of telepathic "infection." One percipient sees the ghost and, in turn, telepathically influences another person, and so on.

In his presidential address to the Society for Psychic Research in 1939, H. H. Price, a distinguished professor of logic at Oxford University, put forth his "psychic ether" theory of hauntings. Price hypothesized that a certain level of mind may be capable of creating a mental image that has a degree of persistence in the psychic ether. This mental image may also contain a degree of telepathic ability by which it can affect others. Price's theory holds that the collective emotions or thought images of a person who has lived in a house some time in the past may have intensely "charged" the psychic ether of the place— especially if there had been such powerful emotions as fear, hatred, or sorrow, supercharged by an act of violence. The original agent, Price theorized, has no direct part in the haunting. It is the charged psychic ether which, when presented with a percipient of suitable telepathic affinity, collaborates in the production of the idea-pattern of a ghost.

Ghosts, according to Price, may be manifestations of past events that have been brought to the minds of persons sensitive enough to receive a kind of "echo" from the past. These sensitive individuals receive impressions from those emotion-charged events that have left some trace of some energy in the inanimate objects at the place where they occurred. This information, or memory, may be transmitted as telepathic messages that can be received at some deep level of the human subconscious. These impressions then express themselves in the conscious mind in such a form as an uneasy feeling or a ghost.

Perhaps every old house, courtroom, hospital ward, apartment, or railroad depot is "haunted." Any edifice that has been much used as a setting for human activity almost certainly has been saturated with memory traces of the entire gamut of emotions. But it may be this multiplicity of mental images that works against the chances of a ghost popping up in every hotel room and depot lobby. An over-saturation of idea-patterns in the majority of homes and public places may have left only a kaleidoscopic mass of impressions that combine to produce the peculiar atmosphere one senses in so many places. It is only when an idea-pattern that has been supercharged with enormous psychic intensity finds the mental level of a percipient with the necessary degree of telepathic affinity that a real ghost can appear.

A ghost, then, in Price's theory, has nothing to do with the "supernatural." The appearance of a specter is an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, a paranormal happening, but there is a "natural" cause for the manifestation of the ghost. Once science determines just how the energy released by intense emotions is able to permeate the matter of wood, stone, metal, and gems and just how the furnishings of a room are able to absorb these vibrations, it will be as easy to "dehaunt" a house as it is to rid it of pests. Medical doctors have learned to deal with the unseen world of viruses; physicists have learned to work with such unseen lines of force as electricity; so may it be one day with the "psychic germs" that infect haunted houses and the invisible field of force that dictates the mechanism of ghosts.

In the hauntings described in this chapter, however, there were no psychical researchers available who had the ability to negate the effect of the powerful psychic energies that had been released by entities from other dimensions, spirits of the dead, or unconscious psychokinetic projections of the living.

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