Читать книгу The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings - John Robert Colombo - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMiss Seward (with an incredulous smile): “What, Sir! about a ghost?”
Johnson (with solemn vehemence): “Yes, Madam: this is a question which, after five thousand years, is yet undecided; a question, whether in theology or philosophy, one of the most important that can come before the human understanding.”
— James Boswell, quoting Dr. Samuel Johnson on
April 15, 1778, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
Did you ever wonder whether the place where you are now dwelling is haunted?
Here is a big book about such matters, about ghosts and hauntings, a book that is calculated to make you pause and wonder about the world of spirits, about haunted sites and places, and about the interconnections that may exist between the world of the living and the world of the dead or unborn. The accounts in this tome raise questions about the extent and limit of human knowledge and the reliability of human experience. In many ways it is an entertaining book; in other ways, a sobering collection of riveting accounts of “what should not be.” In other words, here are one hundred or so of what I call “Canadian mysteries.”
For the last forty years, I have been an assiduous collector of “Canadian mysteries.” Perhaps I should explain this term because there are not too many collectors of mysteries, Canadian or otherwise, in this or any other country. What I mean by “Canadian mysteries” is accounts of events or experiences that are neither explicable nor inexplicable, but at present are unexplained. Hence I have in mind the operations of powers or abilities that are above and beyond the capacity of human beings to entertain or perform, as well as of events that seemingly defy rational explanation. Such occurrences have been reported in the past, continue to be reported by Canadians in the present, and, I have no doubt, will continue to be reported in the future.
I collect such accounts but I specialize in the ones that are expressed in the words and phrases of the witnesses themselves, rather than in the words and paraphrases of interviewers, reporters, or commentators. First-person statements convey a sense of immediacy that is lacking in second-hand or third-hand accounts. There is a fair amount of interest in these statements and I am pleased to devote time and energy to collecting them — which means I enjoy encountering people — and setting down their memories in readable form.
Many people enjoy reading about the unexplained, the mysterious, and the fantastic, and there are various reasons why this is so. Perhaps the main reason is simply the wonder of it all. Most of us at one time or another has pondered the mysteries of life and death — about such matters as extensions of the mind, body, or spirit in time and space and about access to minds other than our own. Indeed, we have often worried about the state after life as well as the state before life, and here is a place to shelve our apprehensions, at least for the time being. Are powers greater than human fictions? We may soberly ask ourselves, can such things be?
Accounts of psychical and other activities are “wonder tales” and come in one of two kinds — narrative accounts and personal accounts. The narrative accounts are basically objective reports of peculiar events, like acts of prophecy, reports of mysterious disappearances, instances of telepathy, et cetera. The personal accounts, on the other hand, are subjective reports that take the form of first-person descriptions of experiences that have occurred to that person. Both kinds of accounts are “told as true,” — that is, they record events and experiences that defy rational expectation, supposedly true reports that elicit disbelief. Such stories — the word story is something of a misnomer here because it involves fiction, but here it is being used in its non-fictional meaning — characteristically involve encounters with ghosts and spirits. Far from being rare, such stories are quite common! I like to say that extraordinary experiences are extraordinarily common. They are widely reported from coast to coast, even in Canada!
The subject of the paranormal is a vast one and it is surveyed in dozens of books that I have written or compiled, many of them of limited distribution, but most of them commercially available. For instance, I compiled The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories, which brought together almost two hundred such accounts. One reviewer compared the book’s jumbo form to that of the telephone directory of a middle-sized city! And it is large, for it contains some 175,000 words — the same number of words as the present volume, The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings, which is the size and format of another city’s telephone directory!
The majority of the accounts in these two volumes consist of reports of the first-person variety — that is, they are told by the witnesses themselves. These are not “told-to” stories, nor are they third-person stories — that is, experiences related to a third party, like a journalist, who records them, adding a few frills and possibly chills in the process. Nor are these accounts imaginative fiction like the ghost stories of M.R. James or Robertson Davies or Stephen King. Instead they are “stranger than fiction,” being “told as true,” with nothing irrelevant included and with nothing relevant excluded.
How truthful are these accounts? The reader will have to decide. Some of the prose from the nineteenth century is certainly overwritten, and the newspapermen who contributed these columns are given to embroidery and drollery in equal proportions. Conversely, some of the prose from the twentieth century is underwritten, in the sense that many of the witnesses, lacking some of the structures available to writers of earlier centuries, simply recount their experiences in the ways in which the incidents and the impressions occurred, perhaps with a nod to familiar formulas from horror programs on television or horror movies on the big screen. There is really no way to prove that any of the incidents recorded in these accounts actually occurred, or occurred in the ways that they are being described, so it is expedient to keep a critical eye open.
I like to say that there are three areas of deception — foolishness, fraud, and fantasy — and that each of these is worth a pause. Many people are foolish and find it difficult to distinguish between what they feel and what they think, between what they sense and what they know. Rigorous thinking is difficult for foolish people, who listen to what other people say all the time and hence are deceived — unlike the fraudster, who knows exactly what he is doing. Fraud is outright deception, generally for commercial gain or social power over other people, and there are certainly many celebrated deceptions in the field of psychical research and parapsychology, ranging from peasant mediums who engaged in outright deception to distinguished statisticians, psychical researchers, and parapsychologists who were uncovered fiddling with the records to make a point or two. Finally there is fantasy, basically wishful thinking, and psychologists have suggested that there is a part of the population that is what they call “fantasy prone” — that is, given to mixing imagination with reality. Foolishness and fantasy have characteristics in common, but the main difference between the foolish person and the fantasy-prone person is that the former has no idea what she is doing or saying, whereas the latter knows quite well that her ideas and deeds are not quite right. Foolishness, fraud, and fantasy are areas of deception. But over and above these pitfalls there are areas of knowledge — fields of experience or realms of insight, intuition, and imagination — that exist on their own and that are part of the life of man and woman. These are our mysteries and they inspire our sense of wonder.
The title of the present volume is The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings, but I am of the opinion that its title could be reduced from six words to one word. That one word is fear. This is a book that is all about fear — fear of the unknown, fear of what is outside ourselves, fear of what is inside ourselves, fear of what is above us, what is below us, what is far beyond life itself ... fear of what is beyond death. Indeed, we feel those very fears (the limbs quivering, the skin crawling, the hair standing on end, the body shivering, the pulse quickening, the attention wavering, the perspiration forming, the cheeks flushing, the eyes watering, the stomach trembling, the bowels loosening) in the face of the unknown! We feel ourselves to be threatened, and often the appearance of a ghost or a spirit will initially amplify and then eventually allay that fear. We may then feel a sense of relief, a feeling of completion, or a realization that “we have come full circle.” This is currently called “a sense of closure.” So the present volume is a collection of human stories about fear, about inhuman threats to human beings which may, paradoxically, leave us feeling more human than ever.
As Marshall McLuhan once observed, “The most human thing about man is his technology.” Instead of the word technology, he might have substituted the word ghosts. “The most human thing about man is his ghosts.” Only human beings know anything at all about ghosts and spirits, though it is true that in folklore and literature there are many descriptions of animals responding to appearances and disappearances of spiritual entities. (But this folklore and these works of fiction were written by human beings.) There are many people who are critical of ghost stories and accounts of the unknown, and these people may be sceptics (who doubt rather than believe in the existence or operation of mysterious powers or abilities) or they may be believers (who want to limit such powers or abilities to their own conception of a Holy Spirit, a Holy Ghost, a Saviour, a Devil, a Satan, an angel, et cetera). The truth is nobody knows anything at all for sure about such matters, though sacred scriptures and scientific works of psychology and books of imaginative literature help us along the way. They at least raise great questions. So it is best to maintain an open mind and to accept whatever evidence is at hand.
This book deals with our principal primordial fear, and that is the fear of the dark. This is the sense of fear and the sense of foreboding that we face when we are lost in the dark, beginning when the sun begins to set at dusk, continuing through the darkness of midnight and the wee hours of the morning (sometimes called the “hours of the wolf”) until the sun begins to rise at dawn, when once again we know what is happening to us. Here night is a metaphor for the “inner night” that alternates with the “inner day” that dawns upon all of us. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Spanish painter Francisco Goya titled one of his demonic etchings. The critical faculties do fall asleep and the associative and imaginative faculties sometimes wake up and “come into their own,” most directly in dreams and the dreams we call nightmares because they are so shocking or so discomforting. The present book is a collection of accounts of how we face the world of darkness and its shadows, how we confront our own fears and experiences (what is “in there”) with what we find in the world (what is “out there”). Many of the experiences reported in the pages of this book will remind its readers of half-formed dreams and half-recalled episodes of real life. Who is to say, along with the ancients, that dreams do not convey knowledge and information? The great psychologists of the twentieth century, notably Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, held strong views on man’s half-remembered, semi-dream life. Freud felt the world of dreams to be “the royal road to the unconscious.” Jung conducted dream analyses in which dreams were treated like mandalas, images to be pondered.
Here is a book of impressions and experiences — the physiological responses of the body, the emotions of the heart, and the thoughts of the mind. They beg the question: what is it that sends us into a state of apprehension, even of shock? It may be many things, but since childhood we are conditioned to worry about imaginary beings. Many children begin to play with their own imaginary companions. Other children fear the “monster under the bed.” Indeed, youngsters are introduced to imaginary beings — good fairies, bad fairies, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, et cetera — which then take the form of inscrutable figures, some of them companions or guardians, others of them scarecrow-like figures, stern and even destructive. Witness these horrible synonyms for ghosts and spirits, which I corralled from a thesaurus:
aliens, apparitions, banshees, beasts, beings, bogeymen, brownies, chimeras, demons, devils, doppelgangers, doubles, elves, entities, fairies, forerunners, ghosts ghouls, goblins, gremlins, haunts, imps, incubi, kelpies, leprechauns, manes, monsters, phantasms, phantoms, pixies, poltergeists, revenants, shades, shadows, souls, spectres, spirits, spooks, sprites, succubi, sylphs, trolls, vampires, visions, visitants, visitors, wraiths, zombies
There are many more of these where these were found, but I think forty-six synonyms are enough for now!
While checking the thesaurus, I came up with an even greater number of synonyms for fear and dread. Here are sensations, affections, and notions that overcome people from time to time in real-life situations and are recalled when they read accounts like the ones in this book:
agitation, alarm, amazing, anguish, anxiety, apprehension, astonishing, astounding, awesome, baffling, bewildering, bizarre, concern, confounding, confusing, cryptic, curious, disquieting, distress, dread, dumbfounding, elusive, enigmatic, extraordinary, fabulous, fanciful, fantastic, fear, foreboding, fright, ghastly, grotesque, hallucinatory, horror, illusory, imaginary, incomprehensible, incredible, inexplicable, marvelous, mysterious, mystifying, outlandish, panic, paradoxical, perplexing, puzzling, quaking, quivering, scare, shakes, shivers, shocked, shudder, startled, strain, strange, stress, suspense, sweats, tension, terrifying, terror, tremble, trepidation, troubled, unfathomable, unusual, upset, weird, wondrous, worry
That list consists of seventy-two descriptors, but I am sure there are many more such words.
Here in these pages there are more than one hundred “told-as-true” accounts of eerie events and weird experiences. In the main these episodes are anomalous occurrences — that is, any attempt to explain them or at least to account for the fact that they have happened in the past and will happen again in the future makes for “heavy lifting.” An experience that is anomalous may be simply unconventional, or it may be really strange, odd, peculiar, or eccentric. It may also be abnormal in the sense that such events and experiences are not easily explained, difficult to account for, and hence lead to unease and sometimes worse. I would call them supernatural states except for the fact that there is a better way to describe them, and that is to refer to them as preternatural states. They are not “super” anything, but they are beyond normal states. The Canadian psychologist Graham Reed labelled them anomalous experiences, thereby liberating them from the last pages of textbooks on psychology and psychiatry where they used to be herded together and regarded as abnormal experiences.
I cannot account for the persistence, the variety, or the intensity of these experiences. What I can attest to is that my informants — the men and women who sought me out to recall their experiences for me and for my readers — believe that these psychological and sometimes physical events occurred as they are described, factually and fully, and that they are as puzzled by these experiences as I am. There is no doubting the immense power of such encounters and the dramatic need to recall them and then relate them to sympathetic souls. A psychological event that took place thirty years ago, which lasted for thirty seconds at the most, leaves an indelible impression on the tablets of memory, on the chalkboard of the heart, and in the pit of the stomach. I wish I could account for such experiences, though I believe, by now, most of the informants have given up expecting an explanation for them. Some correspondents wish confirmation that they are not alone in experiencing such episodes; others wish to add their descriptions to the ever-widening pool of anomalous experience, what psychical researchers in the late nineteenth century called their 8220;census of hallucinations,” using the latter word in the sense of disorientation rather than illusion.
I am an author and anthologist by profession, and an editor and writer by training, who, ever since he can remember, has been fascinated by — and bewildered with — accounts of anomalous events and experiences: reports of ghosts and spirits, apparitions and spectres, the poltergeist and the entity experience, prophecies and predictions, legends and myths, strange gifts and wild talents, visions and revelations, clairvoyance and precognition, psychokinesis and extrasensory perception, psychical research and parapsychology, psychometry and precognition, alternate states of consciousness, reincarnation and past-life regression, cryptozoology, miraculous cures, occult organizations, near-death and out-of-body experiences, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, alien beings and hybrid creatures ... you name it!
Once I began in earnest to collect and publish accounts of such episodes and occurrences in this country, I was dubbed “Canada’s Mr. Mystery.” I have now published some three dozen collections of such encounters with the irrational and each one includes introductory and often explanatory notes. Since I am interested in the past as much as I am in the present, with each book I try to offer readers some historical material, largely in the form of columns reprinted from nineteenth-century newspapers and books. But in the main readers are offered new, never-before-published accounts that I have gleaned from my own explorations and investigations, inquiries and interrogations, and correspondence on paper and via email. I encourage readers of my books to communicate with me directly and to share with me, and then with future readers, accounts of their own experiences, no matter how bizarre.
The question must be asked: as a reader, should I trust that these accounts are truthful? Let me attempt to answer that question. In the past I would request each person contributing an account to one of my collections to sign a statement that affirms that the account to be published is truthful, accurate, and complete — the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No one ever refused to sign this statement, though the occasional contributor requested anonymity or subsequently developed cold feet and asked that nothing at all be published. All such requests have been honoured. Subsequently I dispensed with that statement. But I do, in my own way, keep my eyes open for what I call the “three Fs.” These are fraud, foolishness, and fantasy. But we discussed those earlier.
Over the four decades that I have been collecting these accounts, I have come to a number of conclusions about “told-as-true” stories in general, and about the ones that appear in these pages in particular. I call these accounts memorates, employing the term used in folklore studies to refer to first-person accounts of experiences that are confided to friends and family members. These are originally oral in nature and are not meant for broader distribution, as they are shared to bear witness, not argue or convince anyone of anything. When I use the folklorist’s term, I do not argue that the accounts themselves are folklore, or that they are “fakelore,” only that they bear some of the characteristics of folklore, the two principle ones being repetition and variation. The accounts are quite often quite similar with incidental differences.
Typically the memorate will begin, “You won’t believe me when I tell you what happened to me the other day.” Typically it will end, “And that’s what happened. I don’t know what to make of it.” In between, a standard account will be a straight-forward description of an odd happening that is objectively described and subjectively validated. So the memorate comes in three parts, with the beginning and the ending stressing a modicum of belief, a quantum of disbelief, and a fair amount of not knowing what to think.
The key factor of the memorate is that the witness himself is at a loss to explain what has happened, what is going on, and what it could possibly mean. When I have asked witnesses about their belief systems, I am quite often surprised to learn that they have none, at least none that will make sense of the experience that they have had and have described. Some people subsequently become knowledgeable about New Age matters, and UFO sighters typically know all about “mother ships” and “aliens,” “contact,” and “hybrids.” Indeed, they seem well informed. I myself am at a loss to explain what has been occurring, and all I can do is suggest the dynamic or organic mechanisms involved. So what I do fall back on is my own familiarity with descriptions of such experiences, so I assure witnesses that far from being extraordinary, such experiences are surprisingly commonplace!
I am regularly asked about my own beliefs. People directly ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?” Over the years I have perfected a reply that runs like this: “I do not believe in ghosts. I do not disbelieve in ghosts. I am interested in ghosts.” I will often add the following admission: “What I do believe in is ghost stories.” I find these narratives to be convincing in and of themselves. Depending on the interest of the questioner, I might reply, “Ghosts and spirits do not belong to the category of belief. They belong to the category of experience.” Yet the question that I keep asking myself is, “Why are these accounts so riveting? Why do people recall in such detail the sight of a spectral figure that appeared for ten seconds before vanishing so many years ago, even decades ago? Why are they compelled to tell and retell their experiences to people like myself who ask them about their encounters and are prepared to listen to them?” In some ways the witnesses are like the Ancient Mariner or the Flying Dutchman, burdened with fabulous memories.
Those are questions to ask, but not of everyone. Some people have no time at all for ghosts and spirits; other people are held spellbound by these subjects. At receptions I enjoy asking people, “Have you ever seen a ghost?” The usual answer is no. I then ask a supplementary question: “If you have never seen a ghost, do you know someone whose judgment you respect who has told you that he or she has seen a ghost?” There is usually a pause here, followed by the hesitant answer, “Well, yes. My brother / sister / uncle / cousin / best friend told me he saw a ghost.”
It is frequently said that ghosts and spirits are illusions and delusions and that we would be better off if we simply forgot about them. Then it is sometimes added, rather mysteriously, “This way leads to madness” or “These are works of the Devil.” That does not make much sense. There are no good reasons to ignore this dimension of the human personality. Ignoring such experiences guarantees continued ignorance. In fact, I am prepared to argue, and have done so on many an occasion, that ghosts and spirits are good for us. They are good for us because they require us to open our minds to the possibility that such things exist. They require us to think about the ultimate mysteries, about life and death, about destiny and fate, about grace and disgrace, about mystery and goodness, about evil and goodness, about madness and sanity, about the nature of life and reality. Responding to such possibilities prompts us to be more thoughtful, more impassioned, and more accommodating to the prospects and expectations that exist in our society, the world, and the universe in which we live.
This is not my opinion alone, but the considered opinion of William James, the great psychologist (who developed the theory of Pragmatism) who was known in his day as a psychical researcher. He devoted twenty-five years of his life to psychical research in the United States and Great Britain. In a letter to a fellow researcher, dated January 1, 1886, he ventured the following conviction about this field of interest and inquiry to which I subscribe:
It is a field in which the sources of deception are extremely numerous. But I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are impossible.
