The hot, still night was illuminated by a full moon. The two shadowy figures moving along the empty road wondered if this would interfere with their mission.

“Are you sure you took everything?” asked the slender one.

“Of course!” said the shorter one, who was carrying a backpack. “I checked the inventory. I even took the infrared goggles and a telescopic steel rod.”

“Really?”

“Well . . . as a form of self-defense. You never know.”

The two reached a tall, black gate.

“It’s locked.”

“Hold this,” said the shorter one, handing the backpack to his colleague. After searching it, he took out a large ring with a dozen keys attached.

“Here they are! They assured me that with these there would be no problems.”

“We’ll see. . . .”

One at a time, the short fellow inserted the keys in the keyhole. But not one worked.

“Damn! I knew it. We should have checked first that it worked.”

The road was empty. Only one car had passed since Slender and Shorty stopped by the gate, but it did not slow down. The dark shadows hid them from the light.

“All right, if that’s the way it has to be. . . .”

Slender shined a pocket light into the keyhole. “It’s an old Wally model, there should be no problem.”

Shorty took a leather case out of his pocket and opened it. There were a dozen different lockpicks. One was chosen, and the operation started. “It should be no problem,” puffed Shorty, who was crouched on his legs while trying to pick the lock, sweat dripping from his face. “Yeah, it’s easy when you just hold the light and someone else has to do the dirty job.”

“Cut the chatter. Let’s move along.”

After a few more attempts there was a reassuring “click.” The door was open.

“Quick!” snapped Slender. “Stand up.”

“What . . . ?”

“I said quick, get inside!” Slender pushed his mate in the dark hallway and closed the gate. “Don’t say a word.”

They both hid behind a wall, holding their breath. A police car passed by without stopping.

“That was close!” sighed Slender.

Shorty protested. “Close for what? You make it seem like we are two burglars here!”

Slender smiled. “Yeah, and it’s more fun, isn’t it?”

“We are here on a scientific mission,” continued Shorty. “We are not on a secret hunt to rob lost treasures or something like that.”

Slender turned on his pocket light and did not reply. They were in a dark corridor, but down the hall a door that led to the field outside could clearly be seen. It was open when they reached it.

When they stepped outside, the pocket light was no longer needed. The moon was quite bright, but the field, full of a thousand flickering flames, was more luminous. Quite an unexpected view—surreal but almost romantic. Slender regretted he was there with Shorty and not with his girlfriend.

However, it was indisputable: a cemetery at midnight was a sight not to be missed.

Luminous Fungis and
Earth Lights

The two mysterious figures in the story above are my friend and colleague Luigi Garlaschelli and myself. Actually, Luigi is not that short, but I needed an easy descriptor for him. And since he is just a little shorter than I am . . . my apologies, Gigi!

The night visits at the Major Cemetery in Pavia, Italy, took place some time ago when we decided it was time to investigate the “will o’ the wisp” phenomenon. Of course, we obtained official permission from the county administration—“scientific purposes” was the reason we gave for our requested visit. We were quite fascinated by this rare luminous phenomenon, a source of all kinds of supernatural tales.

Also known as ignis fatuus, Latin for temporary fire, will o’ the wisps are in fact said to be ghostly lights, usually seen around graveyards and marshes at night. They look like faint flames or a flickering, glowing fog, usually green, that sometimes appears to recede if approached. Folklorists have collected all kinds of legends related to these mysterious lights, including the fact that they could be some form of spirit lights or have a paranormal origin. Science, however, has precious few facts to offer.

Some have proposed that Armillaria, a parasitic kind of fungi known also as “honey fungus,” could be responsible for some of the apparitions. Some species of Armillaria are bioluminescent and may have been mistaken for will o’ the wisps.

According to another theory, the wisps are nothing more than barn owls with luminescent plumage. Hence, the possibility of them floating around reacting to other lights could explain their strange behavior.

In the 1970s, John Derr and Michael Persinger of the Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, put forth a theory that these lights may be generated piezoelectrically under a tectonic strain.

The theory suggests that the strains that move faults also cause heat in the rocks, vaporizing the water in them. Rocks and soils containing piezoelectric elements such as quartz (or silicon) may also produce electricity, which is channeled up through soils via a column of vaporized water until it reaches the surface, somehow displaying itself in the form of earth lights. If correct, this could explain why such lights can behave in an electrical and erratic—or even apparently intelligent—manner.

Persinger thinks that his theory can be used to predict the manifestation of earthquakes and, along the way, explain many UFO sightings. “When the specific equations between UFO reports (the contemporary label for luminous events) and earthquakes in the central U.S.A. between 1950 and 1980 were applied to the 19th century (earthquakes were recorded then), there were predictable peaks in the numbers of luminous events for specific years,” says Persinger.

“Although there were no reports of ‘UFOs’ in the historical newspapers, there were reports of ‘odd air ships’ and ‘phantom balloons.’ The massive ‘flap’ of 1897, through several tens of states in the southeastern U.S.A., was followed by one of the largest earthquakes in the region.”

As interesting as this theory sounds, and as interesting as it would be to discover whether UFO “flaps” of the past century have been followed by major earthquakes or not, we wanted to test a different kind of will o’ the wisp. The kind that is said to appear in the presence of freshly buried bodies.

Decaying Bodies

One of the most popular scientific explanations for ghost lights is that the oxidation of hydrogen phosphide and methane gas produced by the decay of organic material may cause glowing lights to appear in the air. And this phenomenon is said to occur more easily in the proximity of “fresh” burials.

Thus, we positioned ourselves, with video cameras rolling, in an area of the cemetery where burials had taken place that same day and a few days before. The idea was to document on film the formation of a will o’ the wisp.

Luigi had even built an aspiring pump that would allow him to “suck” the wisp inside a hermetically sealed container in order to later test its chemical composition in the lab. In fact, Luigi has now been able to replicate the lights in his laboratory at the Department of Chemistry in Pavia with the help of his colleague Paolo Boschetti.

At first, the idea was to test the “cool fire” effect. Luigi explains it this way: “According to one hypothesis, the will o’ the wisp is a sort of cold flame, inconsistent with a normal combustion of methane, as reliable eyewitnesses have reported. ‘Cool flames’ can indeed be generated if vapors of suitable organic compounds (such as ethyl ether) come in contact with a hot surface kept at temperatures around 200–300°C [392–572ºF]. These luminescent pre-combustion haloes are sufficiently cool that a hand or a piece of paper can be put in them without being burned.”

The main objection to this interesting hypothesis is that the necessary vapors are not known components of marsh gases, and the presence of surfaces at such high temperatures is difficult to find in nature.

“It is often stated that the phenomenon originates from the spontaneous combustion of gases generated underground by anaerobic fermentation processes,” continues Luigi. “These gases consist mainly of methane and carbon dioxide. Small amounts of phosphine (PH3) and diphosphine (P2H4) [self-igniting on contact with the air] would act as a ‘chemical match’ for the combustible methane.

“Although this hypothesis is one century old, the presence of PH3 in marsh gases has only recently been demonstrated. If the will o’ the wisp indeed is a hot flame, this conjecture might be correct.” If, on the contrary, a will o’ the wisp is a cool “flame,” then the cold chemiluminescence of some compound naturally occurring in marsh gases appears to be a more appealing explanation.

Luigi reconsidered a century-old experiment conducted by German chemists in which phosphine, oxygen, and an inert gas were fed through three small nozzles at the base of a vertical glass tube. By carefully adjusting the flow of the inlets, a faint flickering luminescence could be seen in the dark near the top of the tube due to the chemiluminescence of phosphine.

Luigi built the necessary equipment with a 500 mL flat-bottomed flask, in which he put some solid phosphorous acid. The flask was stoppered by a silicone septum through which a mixture of air and nitrogen was stored on water within a gas tank and fed by a needle. A second needle in the septum provided for the necessary outlet. The flask was flushed with nitrogen and put on a hot plate that was heated to 200°C (392ºF).

“It works!” shouted Luigi, probably feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein.

The decomposition of phosphorous acid generated phosphine, and a fog formed in the flask. When the air and nitrogen stream was fed into the phosphine vapors, a faint, pale-greenish light was clearly visible in the darkness.

The success in the lab, however, was not matched by success in the field. We spent the entire night at the cemetery, but nothing happened except buzzing and biting mosquitoes. After that there have been repeated visits to cemeteries, graveyards, marshes, and the like, and Luigi has started to carry with him a very sensitive phosphine detector—a portable Draeger Xam-7000—but so far with no luck.

Being able to reproduce spooklights in a lab is one thing. But to see it up close with your own eyes in a cemetery at night is quite another. Hopes are still high, however. There never is a shortage of fresh burials, and hunting season for will o’ the wisps is always open.

A conference on “anomalous cognition” features unusual claims and raises issues on the role of scientific evidence, replicability, and philosophy of science, plus another: when should one stop looking for evidence in support of an elusive effect?

AMIR RAZ

Amir Raz holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at McGill University and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital, where he heads the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory and the Clinical Neuroscience and Applied Cognition Laboratory, respectively.

“What exactly is anomalous cognition?” As a cognitive scientist, I wondered about this question as I was peering over an intriguing invitation to attend an exclusive Meeting of Minds (MoM) conference on this very topic.¹ I had been counting the days before the MoM, until finally in July 2007 about sixty researchers got together at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. To avoid media coverage, the organizers targeted a select group of speakers, and attendance was by invitation only. I was surprised when the conference turned out to be a series of presentations, including reports of what are arguably the best accounts in favor of the possibility of things such as parapsychology and psychic influence, also known as psi. The meeting brought together behavioral scientists and experimental psychologists—most of the audience for the talks—a few skeptics, and a group of self-labeled psi researchers, most of the presenters. As a special treat, a handful of renowned panelists—two Nobel laureates and two distinguished professors of psychology—offered pithy summaries of their impressions following the presentations. It did not take long to realize that anomalous cognition is a new euphemism for the time-honored claims of psi, including extrasensory perception (ESP) and telekinesis.

Initially, I was not sure whether I was invited as a scientist, a skeptic, a magician, or as a friend of one of the organizers. Although I am not a parapsychologist, I am genuinely interested in what I refer to as atypical cognition and rarely shy away from investigating areas within my purview, even those considered as fringe by most of my colleagues. For example, I have been studying the brain computations that occur during planes of altered consciousness, including the cognitive neuroscience of phenomena such as sleep-deprivation, hypnosis, and meditation. At the same time, I consider myself a skeptic—of the deferentially inquisitive rather than gravely unyielding variety—who thrives on converging independent replications of rigorous empirical evidence, not on doctrinaire viewpoints. Finally, it was nice to see among the MoM guests a few fellow conjurors who are, foremost, scientists. Their presence was reassuring, if only to avoid thinking about my answer to the phrase “Are you the best magician among scientists or the best scientist among magicians?” which I have heard one too many times. In that crowd, I was neither.

Having spoken to one of the organizers a few weeks before the meeting, it was my understanding that the conference’s leadership envisaged it as an opportunity to present some of the most compelling data sets in support of anomalous cognition and to urge “mainstream” scientists to foster sufficient open-mindedness to consider a more programmatic investigation into these fields based on these findings. That approach seemed fair and appropriate. Although it was unclear to me at that time what exactly anomalous cognition is, I thought then—as I do now—that it is certainly legitimate to advocate for the possibility of anomalous cognition, including psi. The agenda at the meeting, however, went beyond asking that “mainstream” scientists consider the possibility of psi: it intimated that scientific evidence for psi was solid and replicable. Furthermore, it went on to propose that a major goal of the MoM was to consider why scientific and lay communities do not appreciate the existence of psi.

Interestingly, a number of presenters who argued for the possibility of psi were mainstream researchers, at least in the sense that they had trained and worked in some of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. While several speakers judiciously implied the possibility of psi, a few explicitly claimed that, based on rigorous data, several anomalous phenomena were veridical. It is perilous, however, to overlook the tenuous boundary between suggesting the possibility of certain phenomena and insinuating—not to mention explicitly submitting—that such anomalies actually exist. During the MoM several speakers blurred this boundary, some in letter and some in spirit, and a few unflinchingly crossed it.

As the conference unfolded, serious issues began to surface concerning the role of scientific evidence, replicability of findings, and philosophy of science. In addition, another question gradually emerged, one that scientists seldom ponder: when is it rational to end the pursuit of a hard-to-pin-down goal? In other words, when should one stop looking for evidence in support of an elusive effect?

As a matter of good practice, members of the scientific community tend to be skeptical. Science thrives on a skeptical approach, and scientists are typically conservative in what they consider a “generally accepted view.” Two types of errors, however, stand in the way of any gatekeeper of science. One pertains to how nonexistent phenomena may pass as real or generally accepted; the other pertains to how real phenomena, which should be generally accepted, may pass as nonexistent. Scientists typically pay more attention to the former trap, and some consequently tend to be overzealous or dogmatically skeptical; members of this staunch group can be skeptical of their own belly buttons. The second trap, however, is usually less explored. If psi effects are real, then the scientific establishment needs to be careful not to deny a phenomenon that may later become a generally accepted view.

Carl Sagan popularized Marcelo Truzzi’s dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Although Truzzi used the word “evidence” rather than Sagan’s “proof,” the former, too, had paraphrased earlier statements by great skeptics such as David Hume and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Most scientists still uphold the “extraordinary” motto; however, many of them might not realize that later in his life Truzzi recanted his own maxim. While we can speculate why he did, it remains unclear what constitutes an extraordinary claim. Does claiming to possess X-ray vision or that the sun will not shine tomorrow count as extraordinary? Deciding on what constitutes an extraordinary claim is probably related to our working knowledge—the proverbial a priori Bayesian probabilities with which we navigate the world. We typically use the inductive process to decide whether claims are extraordinary. It would be easier to accept X-ray vision, for example, if we suddenly discovered special receptors for that wavelength in the human body. The presence of such receptors is unlikely—if only because they have eluded us heretofore—but not impossible. That the sun will not shine tomorrow is perhaps a more extraordinary claim because our inductive experience, not to mention our knowledge of physics, suggests otherwise. In addition, while it may be difficult to agree on what would lend extraordinary support to a claim, scientists usually agree on what constitutes unimpressive evidence. Thus, for example, experimental results that do not replicate, effects that are very small and tenuous, flaws of design and methodology, insufficient sample size, inadequate statistical analyses, and lack of a theoretical basis may all contribute to weak evidence.

Conducting parapsychology experiments is an unprotected legal act: anyone can do it without a special license. At the conference, a few talks featured nonpsychologists, including physicists, engineers, and other professionals with little or no training in behavioral science, who nonetheless reported data from studies they conducted in experimental psychology. While at least some of these studies were markedly inadequate and contained glaring shortcomings, others consisted of more careful efforts, sometimes with intriguing results. Physicists with little training in behavioral science, however, are probably not the best professionals to conduct complex psychological experiments in the same way that experimental psychologists with little background in theoretical physics are likely suboptimal candidates to carry out empirical research in quantum mechanics. Of course, individuals who combine psychology with relevant interdisciplinary knowledge, including that from the exact, life, social, and engineering sciences, may have relative merits. In this regard, magicians—those performers who are well-versed in the art of human deception and trickery—may have especially good insights to offer. Whereas I have been an active magician and spent considerable time following claims of the paranormal, I am now a professional academic scientist, at least in the sense that a reputable university supports my research and salary. These credentials make me neither omniscient nor an authority on truth. But they do suggest at least some experience with and perhaps proficiency in assessing psi claims.

Science provides an evanescent form of truth. We never get there, but we can judge how close we are. One test that we can perform requires the convergence of evidence over multiple researchers, methods, labs, and periods. We should probably apply the same time-honored, scientific principle to the study of psi. The psi phenomena reported in the conference, however, tended to comprise very small, elusive effects that were difficult to replicate. In the few cases seemingly supported by replication or meta-analysis (a statistical method that can provide a more complete picture than individual small studies can), multiple caveats cast long shadows over the raw data and the inclusion/exclusion criteria of specific studies. Statistical analysis, however rigorous, is independent of the quality of the unprocessed information: it crunches both meaningful and less meaningful data indiscriminately. Thus, independent of the statistical methods, interpretation of the results is inconclusive at best.

It became clear that proponents of the existence of psi, who typically claim that evidence for psi is bona fide and replicable, largely base their claims on the results of several meta-analyses. It is precarious, however, to rely almost exclusively on the outcomes of meta-analyses for support. Meta-analytical studies are retrospective, not prospective, and confound exploratory with confirmatory investigation. In addition, in the known cases where more than one team of investigators have conducted a meta-analysis of the same research domain within psi, the conclusions have been strikingly different (e.g., a psi proponent reported a meta-analysis of Ganzfeld studies with an average effect size that significantly differed from zero with odds of more than a trillion to one while another meta-analysis of the Ganzfeld data concluded that the average effect size was consistent with zero). This lack of robustness is difficult to reconcile.

Scientists, including the better and smarter of them, are fallible beings prone to the entire spectrum of human behaviors and blunders. People, including scientists, often ask unscientific questions: do you believe that hypnosis can reduce pain? Do you suppose that Prozac can help depression? Pristine scientists, however, do not believe or suppose. Instead, they look at the data and ask whether the evidence supports the hypothesis. At least in theory, researchers’ beliefs should be immaterial to the results of their experiments, because science is about empirical evidence. In reality, however, the experimenter’s beliefs may introduce a substantive bias to the interpretation of data and sometimes even to more nuanced aspects. For example, beliefs and attitudes may bias participant recruitment and influence their expectations, affect feedback, and may even subtly permeate data collection and analysis. At the MoM, it quickly became evident that people had strong beliefs. “What kind of data would make you change your mind?” I asked many a colleague. While several associates danced around the answer with grace and elegance, most coy responses amounted to one troublesome sentiment: “none.”

In a short, informal gathering following the main MoM event, a few participants suggested that perhaps psi effects are not amenable to standard scientific scrutiny because the alleged effects, when they do occur, typically disappear soon after the initial experiment, thereby preventing replication. This “decline effect”—the tendency of psi phenomena to wane over time, sometimes reaching chance levels—is most peculiar. Another commonly reported outcome is the “experimenter effect”: a difference in participants’ performance as a function of the individual who is administering the experiment. It may be interesting to further pursue the latter, as it may also elucidate the therapeutic alliance we so desperately seek with our health practitioners. Nonetheless, we should heed Karl Popper, an influential twentieth-century philosopher of science, who taught us that a proposition or theory is scientific if it permits the possibility of being shown false—the falsifiability criterion. The history of science shows that many theories were not initially falsifiable not because they were not sufficiently well-operationalized in terms of measurable variables—as was the case in Freudian theories, for example—but because they were not fully developed. Such theories, however, have often served a valuable purpose. Proponents of psi may feel that they operate in a similar climate: they might not yet be ready for “prime time” but may want to use the controversy surrounding psi to generate interest and perhaps even a large body of research from which new theories and empirical findings can evolve.

Theory is important, and the life of the scientific theoretician is anything but easy because experiments are inexorable evaluators of one’s work. These unfriendly judges—the experiments—never say yes to a theory and in the great majority of cases assert a flat-out no. Even in the most favorable of situations, they suggest only a “perhaps.” Historically, rather than anchor their observations in a theoretical framework, most proponents of psi have focused on a technicality: their pivotal criterion for the presence of psi hinged on obtaining a statistically significant departure from chance. It became gradually evident, however, that in this way it was difficult to specify what properties typified psi and what criteria determined its absence. Nowadays, theories of psi abound, with most loosely brushing against quantum theory and generating no specific, testable, and falsifiable predictions. Such theories, some rather grandiose, appear especially disjointed, as they are not grounded in supporting experimental data.

“A wise man…proportions his belief to the evidence,” wrote Hume in his 1748 essay Of Miracles. Having attended all the talks at the meeting, the collective evidence that I have examined does not support the hypothesis that psi phenomena exist. Neither I nor anyone else, however, can reject this hypothesis and conclude that such phenomena do not exist. For example, based on insufficient evidence we cannot decisively conclude that the Tooth Fairy does not exist. But the burden of “proof” rests with those who make the extraordinary claim. On the one hand, when intriguing nascent evidence presents itself, further investigation should ensue. On the other hand, skeptics will probably continue to maintain that psi is unlikely, and proponents will almost certainly continue to look for new ways to demonstrate their claims.

The air was effervescent as each panelist offered an extemporaneous eight-minute summary. Peppering their comments with humor and panache, the psychologists were largely unimpressed by the evidence and pointed to a number of the abovementioned weaknesses. The Nobel laureates, however—one in physics and one in chemistry—echoed a favorable and more accepting tenor. One mentioned atmospheric science as a metaphor for the science of psi, suggesting that psi phenomena may be difficult to predict and replicate consistently in the same way that weather forecasts are nebulous. The other described his experiences with personal acquaintances whom he considered to be genuine psychics.

These last statements left me rubbing my ears in disbelief. On the one hand, albeit far from perfect, weather forecasts have gotten better over the past few decades and are certainly more reliable than outcome predictions from psi research. On the other hand, befriending individuals who claim psychic abilities is hardly firm grounds for scientific exchange.

Individuals, including intelligent persons, are infamously irrational, and one personal “psi experience” is often more compelling than multiple converging scientific accounts. Social psychologists have coined this phenomenon the “vividness” effect. Being a scientist, a prestidigitator, and a skeptic who is keenly aware of his bellybutton, I’d be curious to see compelling scientific demonstrations of psi (i.e., a string of multiple successful experiments by several independent investigators producing lawful and replicable outcomes). Alas, I have found none to date. But when do you conclude that the effect you are seeking is unlikely? When do you stop looking?

Data in support of psi have so far failed to meet the acceptable scientific standards of lawfulness, replicability, objectivity, falsifiability, and theoretical coherence. A group of dogmatically skeptical individuals seems to consistently reject psi research because of granitic prejudices, but navel-denying skepticism is incongruent with good science. While some scientists may indeed reject psi out of prejudice, they typically do not “discriminate” against psi; they show a similar “prejudice” against any claim that seemingly violates fundamental principles of current scientific theory. A healthy first reaction to any departure from existing frameworks is to look for defects in the supporting evidence. If such defects are not apparent, it is time to insist on obtaining independent replications. Until such evidence is forthcoming, it would be difficult for the scientific community to accept a claim for an anomaly.

Highly biased perceptions of reality may be at odds with the findings of science, and establishing the existence of paranormal phenomena might well comprise an intractable task. If compelling evidence were to materialize, however, scientists should be willing to change their minds. Members of the scientific community should be amenable, at least in some measure, to the possibility of novel phenomena. At the same time, proponents of new claims should provide compelling “proof,” and everyone should be sufficiently critical to dismiss claims that already have been found specious. While some of us may have concluded that the Tooth Fairy seems unlikely, others may keep on looking for her…. Still others may be undecided.

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in).

The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.

During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints’ Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints’, All Saints’, and All Souls’, were called Hallowmas.

WATCH BELOW THE HISTORY CHANNEL’S - A HAUNTED HISTORY OF HALLOWEEN

by LISA LEE HARP WAUGH

Necromancy has come to be associated more broadly with black magic and demon-summoning in general, sometimes losing its earlier, more specialized meaning. By popular etymology, nekromantia became nigromancy “black arts”, and Johannes Hartlieb (1456) lists demonology in general under the heading. Eliphas Levi, in his book Dogma et Ritual, states that necromancy is the evoking of aerial bodies (aeromancy).

Evocation is the magic of dark spirit summoning from the planes beyond human existence. You can summon spirits into the physical plane, order them to do your bidding. Sorcery is one of the greatest powers so well left to us from the Age of Alchemy.

Early necromancy is likely related to the roots of shamanism, which calls upon spirits such as the ghosts of ancestors. Classical necromancers addressed the dead in “a mixture of high-pitch squeaking and low droning”, comparable to the trance-state mutterings of shamans. This I have practiced at times but calling up ghost to appear as a full body apparition is something that I am honing in on in every ritual I now perform. Many people believe when they or I ‘raise’ the dead, that they can tell one’s future because spirits are not bounded by the same laws of time and space as we are.

The historian Strabo refers to necromancy as the principal form of divination amongst the people of Persia (Strabo, xvi. 2, 39,), and it is believed to also have been widespread amongst the peoples of Chaldea (particularly amongst the Sabians or star-worshipers), Etruria, and Babylonia. The Babylonian necromancers were called Manzazuu or Sha’etemmu, and the spirits they raised were called Etemmu.

Necromancy was widespread in ancient Greece from prehistoric times. In the Odyssey (XI, Nekyia), Odysseus makes a voyage to Hades, the Underworld, and raises the spirits of the dead using spells which he had learnt from Circe (Ruickbie, 2004:24). His intention is to invoke and ask questions of the shade of Tiresias, but he is unable to summon it without the assistance of others.

Necromantic practice is neither the ‘right’ nor the ‘left’ path. It is simply an acute attunement to what many refer to as “death energy”, an affiliation and natural affinity some people have for the current of transition. It is a fact that some people beside myself tha feel more at ease or comfortable among the dead rather than being with the living. Although some cultures may have considered the knowledge of the dead to be unlimited, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, there is an indication that individual shades knew only certain things. The apparent value of their counsel may have been a result of things they had known in life, or of knowledge they acquired after death: Ovid writes of a marketplace in the underworld, where the dead could exchange news and gossip (Metamorphoses 4.444; Tristia 4.10.87–88)

There are also many references to necromancers, called “bone-conjurers”, in the Bible. The Book of Deuteronomy (XVIII 9–12) explicitly warns the Israelites against the Canaanite practice of divination from the dead. This warning was not always heeded: King Saul has the Witch of Endor invoke the shade of Samuel using a magical amulet, for example. Later Christian writers rejected the idea that humans could bring back the spirits of the dead, and interpreted such shades as disguised demons, thus conflating necromancy with demon-summoning.

Proof for the common knowledge of necromancy and belief in its power is also evident in the New Testament. Others in the court believed Jesus to be Elijah, another deceased prophet. This account is written in Christian Canonical Scriptures, mainly the book of Mark, chapter 6:14-16. “King Herod heard about this, for Jesus’ name had become well known. Some were saying, ‘John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him.’ Others said, ‘He is Elijah.’ And still others claimed, ‘He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of long ago.’ But when Herod heard this, he said, ‘John, the man I beheaded, has been raised from the dead!”

Lisa Lee Harp Waugh: Photographed with what many say is real ghost energy collecting around her right before a ritual to contact a spirit for a local Lone Star Texas ghost hunter to investigate and document. Lisa says, ” I think in my own life time so far, I have communicted with more ghosts and Spirits then I have living human beings.”

I have had many actual real “Phone Calls From the Dead”. From close to long lost friends and relatives to people I never ever knew. Some people have to me been reporting experiencing paranormal phenomena over the telephone over the years. And it makes me wonder… how long will it be before the first spooky encounters via internet or text messaging or emailing from beyond the grave?

Also I have had this happen within moments of a persons death, or within 24 hours from time of death. Some real ghosts that have talked and carried on long indepth conversations with me, only to find out later that the person had passed away. I have even used a dead battery - less cell phone in a ritual on several occasions iin recent months and had it ring . In answering it, the spirit on the other end oftens is long winded. Glad I’m not paying that Cell Phone bill. And calls sometimes very short, and the low voice of the caller or just sounding to losy or distant, often it rings then the line wil just l cut off. I think some spirits come and observe for weeks to learn to be able to communicate so they are always around me.

Caesarius of Arles (Kors and Peters, 48) entreats his audience to put no stock in any demons, or “Gods” other than the Christian God, even if the working of spells appears to provide benefit. He states that demons only act with divine permission, and permitted by God to test Christian people. Caesarius does not condemn man here; he only states that the art of necromancy exists, although it is prohibited by the bible.

In modern time necromancy is used as a more general term to describe the art (or manipulation) of death, and generally implies a magical connotation. Modern séances, channeling and Spiritualism verge on necromancy when the invoked spirits are asked to reveal future events. Necromancy may also be dressed up as sciomancy, a branch of theurgic magic.

Necromancy is extensively practiced in Quimbanda and is sometimes seen in other African traditions such as voodoo and in santeria, though once a person is possessed by a spirit in the yoruba tradition he cannot rise to a higher spiritual position such as that of a babalawo, but this should not be regarded as a modern tradition, in fact it predates most necromantic practices.

The Enochian script was said to have been revealed to John Dee by the angels who were conjured by Kelley. John Dee became obsessed with the occult and spent most of his later life in search of its secrets. Dee, who numbers Astrology among his many talents, does some work for Princess Elizabeth by casting her horoscope and those of the Queen and her husband. Dee’s enemies use this as an excuse to lay false charges of Treason and conjuring evil spirits. Dee successfully defends himself before the Star Chamber and subsequent interrogation by the Bishop of London. Dee is eventually released 3 months after being arrested, but the slur of being a conjurer of spirits will haunt him for the rest of his life .

According to Charlotte Fell Smith, this actual portrait was painted when Dee was 67. It belonged to his grandson Rowland Dee and later to Elias Ashmole, who left it to Oxford University.

John Aubrey gives the following description of Dee: “He was tall and slender. He wore a gown like an artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves, and a slit…. A very fair, clear sanguine complexion… a long beard as white as milk. A very handsome man.”

Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were becoming distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his time, he had lectured at the University of Paris when still in his early twenties. John was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading expert in navigation, having trained many of those who would conduct England’s voyages of discovery (he coined the term “British Empire”).

At the same time, he immersed himself in magic and Hermetic philosophy, devoting the last third of his life almost exclusively to these pursuits.

In 1564, Dee wrote the Hermetic work Monas Hieroglyphica (”The Hieroglyphic Monad”), an exhaustive Cabalistic interpretation of a glyph of his own design, meant to express the mystical unity of all creation. This work was highly valued by many of Dee’s contemporaries, but the loss of the secret oral tradition of Dee’s milieu makes the work difficult to interpret today.

By the early 1580s, Dee was growing dissatisfied with his progress in learning the secrets of nature and with his own lack of influence and recognition. He began to turn towards the supernatural as a means to acquire knowledge. Specifically, he sought to contact angels through the use of a “scryer” or crystal-gazer, who would act as an intermediary between Dee and the angels.

Dee’s first attempts were not satisfactory, but, in 1582, he met Edward Kelley (then going under the name of Edward Talbot), who impressed him greatly with his abilities. Dee took Kelley into his service and began to devote all his energies to his supernatural pursuits. These “spiritual conferences” or “actions” were conducted with an air of intense Christian piety, always after periods of purification, prayer and fasting. Dee was convinced of the benefits they could bring to mankind. (The character of Kelley is harder to assess: some have concluded that he acted with complete cynicism, but delusion or self-deception are not out of the question. Kelley’s “output” is remarkable for its sheer mass, its intricacy and its vividness.) Dee maintained that the angels laboriously dictated several books to him this way, some in a special angelic or Enochian language.

In 1583, Dee met the visiting Polish nobleman Albert Laski, who invited Dee to accompany him on his return to Poland. With some prompting by the angels, Dee was persuaded to go. Dee, Kelley, and their families left for the Continent in September 1583, but Laski proved to be bankrupt and out of favour in his own country Dee and Kelley began a nomadic life in Central Europe, but they continued their spiritual conferences, which Dee recorded meticulously. He had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II and King Stephen of Poland in which he chided them for their ungodliness and attempted to convince them of the importance of his angelic communications. He was not taken up by either monarch.

During a spiritual conference in Bohemia, in 1587, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered that the two men should share their wives. Kelley, who by that time was becoming a prominent alchemist and was much more sought-after than Dee, may have wished to use this as a way to end the spiritual conferences. The order caused Dee great anguish, but he did not doubt its genuineness and apparently allowed it to go forward, but broke off the conferences immediately afterwards and did not see Kelley again. Dee returned to England in 1589.

The British Museum holds several items once owned by Dee and associated with the spiritual conferences:

Dee’s Speculum or Mirror (an obsidian Aztec cult object in the shape of a hand-mirror, brought to Europe in the late 1520s), which was once owned by Horace Walpole.

The small wax seals used to support the legs of Dee’s “table of practice” (the table at which the scrying was performed). The large, elaborately-decorated wax “Seal of God”, used to support the “shew-stone”, the crystal ball used for scrying.

A gold amulet engraved with a representation of one of Kelley’s visions.
A crystal globe, six centimeters in diameter. This item remained unnoticed for many years in the mineral collection; possibly the one owned by Dee, but the provenance of this object is less certain than that of the others.
In December 2004, both a shew stone (a stone used for scrying) formerly belonging to Dee and a mid-1600s explanation of its use written by Nicholas Culpeper were stolen from the Science Museum in London; they were recovered shortly afterwards.

Necromancy - Rituals to contact the Spirits

Often I personally enjoy a simple method conjuring the Spirit of somone dead to question into a Crystal Ball or a cellphone with no battery in it, that is placed in the middle of the magical Triangle or using a Black Mirror in the middle of the conjuoring Triangle. With this method you do Conjures the Spirits, but one must be able to Skry or see onto the Astral Plane where then Spirit is. The Mirror or Crystal Ball only acts as a focal point. And sometimes during the ritual to call the dead the cellphone will ring.

I set up the Triangle circle on a small round table that was given to me by the high witch queen Onieda Toups from New Orleans before she died. Then I place a Crystal Ball a very old one from victorian times, or my hand held 200 year old mirror that was said to have belonged to Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Once in the middle of the magic Triangle, or circle. I Gaze into the Black mirror or ball reflection. Or focus on the cellphone ringing.

I often would during my time in Galveston, Texas be standing outdoors from my shop as the Ghostman Dash Beardsley would past with his haunted Galveston Ghost Tour. Often many would photograph me and the building and always their was some type of spirit phenomena going on in the photo. I know the building where my Candle shop was was very haunted for the full story you’d have to question Dash. THE OFFICIAL GHOST TOURS OF GALVESTON ISLAND HOME PAGE

Now a days I do much of my Spirit invoking for Ghost hunters also. I do use magical circles and triangles for protection, candles, swords, chalices, magic staff, wand, pentacle and atheme and fumigations and wear my long white robes. All this is part of the invoking process. I do enjoy being the part of someone investigations into the otherworldly aspects. It pushes me to go further and to be more objective to what happens during these many documented rituals. Solely I am a Necromancer not a witch.

When I lived in Galveston Ghosts followed me everywhere I was never sure unless I turned around if it was a living or dead person speaking to me. I don’t consider my self to be a real clairaudient just a fortunate person who can sometimes hear the dead speak to me.

Spirits and ghost have related to me describes being able to see thier temporary earthbound condition then help other lost sould in transition to the etheric sphere. They also tell me of some answers to practical questions such as the spiritual body and clothes. And the need of the world to understand the reality ofa souls survival. Or even asking me questions like how find a medium to communicate through. Or nobody notices us even though I bang on the walls or hit and bite or scratch them.

Paul Devereux

Following Alfred Watkins’s famous vision of straight paths crossing the landscape, the concept of “leys” has evolved over several decades (see panel, pp31–32), but it has become increasingly obvious to research-minded ley students that there never were such features as “leys”, let alone “leylines”. At best, these were convenient labels to cover a multitude of both actual and imaginary alignments from many different eras and cultures. This was because most enthusiasts were projecting their own ideas onto the past in various ways. But the handful of research-minded ley hunters cared about actual archæology, and they followed where the mythical leys led – a journey in which they have made some unexpected findings, proving William Blake’s dictum that if the fool persists in his folly he will eventually become wise. These vary from discovering that culturally contrived altered mind-states in past societies caused markings to be left on the land to unravelling the meaning of a passage in a Shakespeare play that has revealed the vestiges of a spiritual geography in Old Europe.

Because the realisation that New World features like the Nazca lines of Peru and other pre-Columbian land markings throughout the Americas seem to be associated with entranced mind states (typically triggered by the ritual use of plant or fungal hallucinogens) has been sufficiently aired previously, we need spend little space on them here – save to note that in the late 1980s, when the present writer introduced the term “shamanic landscapes” to describe such ground markings, few people were aware of the scale of mind-altering drug usage in ancient America and so tended to dismiss the idea at the time as being over-fanciful. Subsequently, though, the role of altered mind-states in explaining certain imagery in prehistoric rock art has become more widely accepted. The land markings share a similar source to these rock art images, so features like the Nazca lines are not to be misunderstood as landing strips for extraterrestrial spacecraft but as the markings of a culture encountering inner space. The human spirit has left its signature on the planet in some surprising ways.

Less well known by academics and folklorists, let alone anyone else, is the fact that the leys led researchers to revelations regarding largely ignored features in the Old World.

A Secret History

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Bard has Puck say:

Now it is that time of night,

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite,

In the church-way paths to glide.

How many actors who have uttered these words, and how many modern audiences of the play, understand what the hell Puck, the archetypal nature spirit, is on about? Some generalised notion of haunting? And what are “church-way paths” anyway?

Only slowly did the ley researchers themselves come to understand that Puck’s words were a reference to the tail-end of a deep-rooted spirit lore that stretched across the Eurasian landmass from China to Ireland, so archaic and widespread that it may even have accompanied modern humans out of Africa, dispersing in all directions from central Asia. It also became apparent that Alfred Watkins had picked up on sections of church-way paths in some of his church leys without realising it.

There are slight variations in different cultures and ages, but the core of the deep-rooted spirit lore is that supposed spirits of one kind or another – spirits of the dead, phantasms of the living, or nature entities like fairies – move through the physical landscape along special routes. In their ideal, pristine form, at least, such routes are conceived of as being straight. By the same token, convoluted linear features hinder spirit movement.

Shakespeare’s “church-way paths” refer to a special class of old pathway or road in Europe known as “corpse roads”. In Britain, they can also be known by a number of other names – bier road, burial road, coffin line, lyke or lych way (from Old English liches, corpse), or funeral road, to mention just some. The feature was called deada waeg in Saxon times, which may be the etymological roots of the Dutch term for corpse roads, Doodwegen (“deathroads”). Corpse roads are primarily mediæval or early modern features. Many have disappeared, while the original purposes of those that still survive as footpaths have been largely forgotten.

The basic, material facts concerning corpse roads are straightforward enough: they provided a functional means of allowing walking funerals to transport corpses to cemeteries that had burial rights. In the 10th century, there was a great expansion of church building in England, which inevitably encroached on the territories of existing mother churches or minsters. There was a demand for autonomy from outlying settlements that minster officials felt could erode their authority, not to mention their revenue, so they decided to institute corpse roads that led from outlying locations to the mother church at the heart of the parish, the one that alone held the burial rights. For some parishioners, this meant corpses had to be transported long distances, sometimes over difficult terrain. Fields crossed by churchway paths often had names like “Churchway Field”, and today it is sometimes possible to plot the course of a lost churchway simply by the sequence of old field names.

But Puck alludes to a secret history of these routes. They attracted already long extant spirit lore, for they ran not only through the physical countryside but also through the invisible geography, the mental terrain, of pre-industrial countryfolk. Vestiges of this archaic spirit lore are revealed by a variety of ‘virtual’ and physical features across Old Europe.

The virtual features were folk beliefs that, while having no physical manifestation, nevertheless had a geographical reality. An example existed in Nemen, Russia, where there was the tradition of a Leichenflugbahn, literally “corpse flightpath”. There were two cemeteries in the town, one Lithuanian, the other German, and the spirits of those interred in them were believed to be able to travel between the two places. These ghosts were said to fly along on a direct course close to the ground, so a straight line connecting the two places was kept clear of fences, walls, and buildings to avoid obstructing the flitting spectres.

The Germans had similar virtual paths they called Geisterwege. Although invisible, these spirit paths had a definite geography in local folklore, and people would be sure to avoid them at night. A German folklore reference work (Handwortbuch de deutschen Aberglaubens) describes them thus:

The paths, with no exception, always run in a straight line over mountains and valleys and through marshes… In towns they pass the houses closely or go right through them. The paths end or originate at a cemetery… therefore this way or road was believed to have the same characteristics as a cemetery… where spirits of the deceased thrive.

In Ireland and other Celtic lands, there were fairy paths that, again, while being invisible nevertheless had such perceived geographical reality in the minds of the country people that building practices were adopted to ensure they were not obstructed. There are startling similarities to the beliefs underpinning Chinese feng-shui landscape divination, in which homes and ancestral tombs had to be protected from straight roads or other linear landscape features (“arrows”) because troublesome spirits travelled along them and would bring bad luck. In Ireland, people who had illnesses or other misfortune, or who suffered poltergeist activity, were said to live in houses that were “in the way” or in a “contrary place”. In other words, they obstructed a fairy path.

Fairy paths typically linked fairy forts (a class of circular earthwork dating from the Iron Age), “airy” (eerie) mountains and hills, thorn bushes, springs, lakes, rock outcrops, and Stone Age monuments. Although the form of specific fairy paths tended to be mentioned only in passing in the earliest written sources, it is possible to gradually assemble a general picture of their characteristics. Most sources implied that fairy paths were straight. Writing in 1870 (in The Fireside Stories), Patrick Kennedy stated it clearly: fairies “go in a straight line, gliding as it were within a short distance of the ground”. Other accounts record that if fairies marching out at night encountered an obstacle such as a bush “in the way”, they would simply go round it and re-join the course of the fairy route beyond.

An example of this fairy straightness is provided by an account concerning a croft (now a cattle shed) at Knockeencreen, Brosna, County Kerry. In an interview in the 1980s, the last human occupant told of the troubles his grandfather had experienced there, with his cattle periodically and inexplicably dying. The front door is exactly opposite the back door. The grandfather was informed by a passing gypsy that the dwelling stands on a fairy path running between two hills. The gypsy advised the grandfather to keep the doors slightly ajar at night to allow the fairies free passage. The advice was heeded and the problem ceased. It so happens that the building is indeed on a straight line drawn between two local hilltops, and is, moreover, at one end of a long, straight track. If the croft were in China, it would be said to have bad feng-shui.

Fairies and the spirits of the dead enjoyed a curiously ambiguous relationship in the peasant mind: for instance, American folklorist Evans Wentz was told about paths of the dead in Brittany that he could not distinguish from the beliefs about fairy paths. Similar could be said of invisible ghost routes in Albania and elsewhere.

These virtual spirit roads were always conceived of as being straight, but the physical corpse roads of Europe vary between being straight and not particularly so – virtual routes are less affected by contingencies than are physical tracks. Examples of straight physical spirit/corpse paths include a Viking funeral path at Rösaring, Sweden, which runs to a Viking and Bronze Age cemetery, a stone road in the Hartz Mountains in Germany, and the Dutch Doodwegen, which were officially checked on an annual basis to ensure their straightness and regularity of width.

In Old Europe, then, there seems to have been a ‘virtual blueprint’ concerning spirit ways relating to physical cemeteries and material, pragmatic paths actually used for conveying corpses to burial. The precise relationship between these virtual and physical features has not been fully explored, but as Shakespeare revealed, there is no doubt that the physical corpse roads came to be perceived as being spirit routes, taking on qualities of the archaic ‘blueprint’. For a start, there is an abundance of generalised lore about how corpses were to be conveyed along corpse roads to avoid their spirits returning along them to haunt the living. It was a widespread custom, for example, that the feet of the corpse be kept pointing away from the family home on its journey to the cemetery. Other minor ritualistic means of preventing the return of the dead person’s shade included ensuring that the route the corpse took to burial would take it over bridges or stepping stones across streams (for spirits could not cross open, running water), stiles, and various other liminal (“betwixt and between”) locations, all of which had reputations for preventing or hindering the free passage of spirits. In Old Europe, crossroads fell into a similar category – the corpses of suicides were buried at crossroads, for example, so that their spirits would be “bound” there, and for similar reasons gallows were often erected at them. The living took pains to prevent the dead from wandering the land as lost souls – or even as animated corpses, for the belief in revenants was widespread in mediæval Europe.

All these customary precautions obviously suggest that people using the corpse roads assumed that they could be passages for ghosts, but there is more specific evidence too. For example, a documented contemporary tradition relating to a corpse road at Aalst, Belgium, informs us that mourners had to intone: “Spirit, proceed ahead, I’ll follow you”. This indicates that the spirit connection existed when the roads were being used and is not some falsified folk memory added later. This is reinforced by the fact that one Dutch term for a corpse road was Spokenweg – spook or ghost road. German lore maintained that corpse roads took on the “magical characteristics of the dead” and should not be obstructed. “Church-way paths” were definitely associated with spirits, so Puck knew what he was talking about.

The archaic spirit lore that attached itself to the mediæval and later corpse roads also may have informed certain prehistoric features. In Britain, for instance, Neolithic earthen avenues called “cursuses” link burial mounds: these features can run for considerable distances, even miles, and are largely straight, or straight in segments, always connecting funerary sites. The purpose of these avenues is unknown, but some kind of spirit-way function must be at least one possible explanation. Similarly, some Neolithic and Bronze Age graves, especially in France and Britain, are associated with stone rows – sometimes with blocking stones at their ends. What was being blocked?

Spirit Road Necromancy

In the course of their corpse way revelations, research-minded ley hunters uncovered a forgotten form of necromantic divination. In Britain, we pick it up as the “church porch watch” or “sitting-up”. In this, a village seer would hold a vigil between 11 pm and 1 am at the church door, in the graveyard, at the lych-gate (where the cortège entered the churchyard), or on a nearby lane (presumably a corpse road), in order to look for the wraiths of those who would die in the following 12-month period.

Typically, this “watch” took place on St Mark’s Eve (24 April), Hallowe’en, or the eves of New Year, Midsummer, or Christmas. The wraiths of the doomed, but still living, members of the community would usually appear to the inner eye of the seer as a procession coming in from beyond the churchyard and passing into the church, and then returning back out into the night. However, in some cases, especially in Wales, watchers were more likely to hear a disembodied voice tell the names of those who were soon to die. One apocryphal story tells of a church-watcher who saw a spectral form that was so hazy he had to lean forward to try to identify it. As he did so he heard a disembodied whisper: “’tis yourself!”

It is a reasonable guess that the spectral processions would have come into the churchyard via the corpse roads, the church-way paths. This is supported by the fact that an old woman at Fryup, Yorkshire, who was well known locally for keeping the “Mark’s e’en watch”, lived alongside a corpse road known as the “Old Hell Road”.

The church-watcher custom in Britain seems to have been a variant of a Dutch tradition concerning a class of diviners called voorlopers or veurkieken, “precursors”, who were specifically associated with the Dutch death roads, the Doodwegen. They were seers able to tell who was going to die soon in the community because they had the ability to see spectral funeral processions pass along the death road they visited or lived alongside. Folklorist WY Evans Wentz recorded a similar tradition near Carnac in Brittany.

The Dutch precursors, the Breton funeral seers, and the British churchyard watchers would seem to fall into the same general class of divination as did those who perceived the spirits of the dead in trance by “sitting out” (utiseta) in cemeteries or on burial mounds in old Norse tradition, or by sitting entranced at certain times between St Lucy’s Day (13 December) and Christmas – a seers’ custom known in Hungary as “St Lucy’s Stool”.

Another manifestation of spirit road necromancy in Britain was “stile divination”. An illustration of this is provided by a Cornish folktale in which the ghost of a woman’s dead husband carries her over the treetops and deposits her on a stile on a church-way path leading to Ludgvan church where she is able to interrogate passing ghosts. Stiles were considered “favourite perches for ghosts”. Until now, stile divination has been mentioned in the folk record without its context being understood.

Spirit Control

A further facet of this same overall class of seership is described in Icelandic folklore, in which a seer would visit a crossroads “where four roads run, each in a straight unbroken line, to four churches”, or from where four churches were visible on New Year’s Eve or St John’s Day, cover himself with the hide of a bull or a walrus, and fix his attention on the shiny blade of an axe while lying as still as a corpse throughout the night. He would recite various spells to summon the spirits of the dead from the church cemeteries and they would glide up the roads to the crossroads where the seer could divine information from them. Crossroads divination was also conducted in former times in Britain and other parts of Europe, and is associated with traditions that the Devil could be made to manifest at such intersections. This complex of crossroads lore is also related to the idea that spirits of the dead could be “bound” at crossroads, specifically suicides and hanged criminals, for along with the idea that straight routes could facilitate the movement of spirits, so contrary features like crossroads and stone and turf labyrinths were thought to be able to hinder it.

This was part of a broader fear of spirits that might flit into dwellings. In Bavaria to this day, one can find convoluted patterns of pebbles at doorsteps to confound dangerous entities, or just inside the front door there can be spirit traps looking like little antennæ stuck into ceiling beams. Witch bottles were common throughout Europe – bottles or glass spheres containing a mass of threads, often with charms entangled in them, to forestall the passage of witches flying about at night. ‘Cats’ cradles’ of threads would be laid on the chests of corpses to stop them wandering prior to burial, and nets of threads mounted on poles would be placed along church-way paths that were believed to be haunted. Beyond Europe, too, similar devices were employed – in Tibet, for instance, thread crosses, mdos, would be placed on the roof ridges of houses as “devil catchers”, and much larger ones deployed around monasteries.

These European and Asian devices look very similar to American Indian dreamcatchers, revealing curiously similar notions about the passage of spirits. Curious that is, unless one accepts the premise that it all derived from a common and extremely archaic source in central Asia. The alternative explanation is that the common “wiring” of the human brain produces similar concepts in the minds of people in technologically similar societies. A final option, of course, is that pre-modern peoples around the world were responding to the actual perception of spirits moving through the land. But however far we follow them, the “leylines” cannot lead us to an answer about that.

I was sitting today being reasonably unproductive and thought, looks like it’s time for another blog instalment.

So far the Australian Paranormal Society has been doing great, with interest abounding both near and far and many new friendships forming everyday which is so nice to see given that this field can be so competitive and nasty. That being said I am about to embark on another venture ( yes I like to keep busy and create more work for myself LOL ) This venture without saying to much will be about bringing the paranormal community in Australia together a little more where we can all share together. Actually to be honest I am just getting sick of forums everybody has one so its time for something a little more original and fun !!! I hope you will all get on board when its all completed.

The team here have been working hard and I don’t know what I would do without Bill and Amanda who have been up for any challenge I have thrown at them and have come out on top every time, its fantastic to have members who truly do have an open mind and a willing to go out on limb and explore new avenues no matter how unconventional they may seem, and DO THE WORK that is involved …. hallelujah.

As far as the blog is concerned I have had nothing but a great response for it, which makes me happy as I was a little worried some of you may not understand WHY I would possibly put the paranormal & occult into the same website. Basically its this, I have been interested and studying both since I was in my early teens so naturally it was something that I felt strongly compelled to do, some of you may not agree with this depending on your own personal and religious beliefs but the content posted on the A.P.S forum does NOT necessarily depict the personal beliefs of the A.P.S members but more that I look for interesting pieces of information and study covering all aspects of the paranormal and occult and if I think it fits I post it.

Personally I think that on the odd occasion the practise of occult study gets a bad wrap much like the Ouija board and the practise of witchcraft, its not the words and the tools that hold any power it is the person behind the words and tools that depending on their mental state and frame of mind can be a dangerous tool without experience, and instead of hiding the occult away from the public as something EVIL I would rather give you the information and if you so choose to use it in an inappropriate way YOU and YOU alone must suffer the consequence of your actions, but this is why I believe so many have problems, inexperience teamed with curiosity is a lethal weapon in itself and the reason too many people end up with those negative energies that are just waiting to feed on people who have no idea what they are playing with.

Experience and Knowledge is everything … use it wisely and should be safe ( most of the time ), and I don’t mean by telling people the Malleus Maleficarum is a great book to read on the birth of witchcraft !!! Which I recently read on a forum coming from someone who claims they know a lot about witchcraft….this is what I mean about inexperience or should I just say plain stupidity, anyway I had quite a good giggle LOL.

I hope you all have noticed that on a recent trip to the U.S Alison Oborn of PFI in South Australia  was lucky enough to be a guest along side Keith and Sandra from Near Paranormal on their show, If you missed it, not to worry I have posted it up for all to see as I am always proud to see the Aussies getting the word out there, especially when its somebody who is as modest and intelligent as Alison !!

Please keep sending along your emails, questions and requests as I am always happy to hear from everyone and am always here to help anybody who needs it.

For now I bid you all farewell until next time ..

Supernaturally yours

Allison

( ok I stole that line from Jeff Belanger but I have always wanted to use it, Sorry Jeff LOL )

While on the net tonight I made a great discovery, friend and fellow investigator from Adelaide, SA, Alison Oborn had made a guest appearance on her recent trip to the U.S with Keith and Sandra Johnson of NEAR paranormal.

Its is so good to see the Aussies out and networking and getting the Australian way of Investigating out there !!

Daniel Pinchbeck

This summer, I visited Glastonbury, the New Age epicenter of England, to speak at a “Great Mysteries” conference about orbs. Orbs are best known as those mysterious balls of light that have appeared on digital photographs for the last fifteen years, though some claim they can see them with the naked eye as well. Orbs have spawned an enthusiastic subculture of people who believe the blobby wisps are not dust particles or lens anomalies, but angels, spirits, other-dimensional beings and so on. Although I am now an accredited orbs expert, I remain agnostic on the subject. In this area, one encounters the same difficulties in establishing a methodology as one does with other phenomena that float on the outer edge of cultural possibility, such as UFOs, crop circles, occult conspiracies, miraculous appearances of the Virgin and so on.

The Orbs Conference offered an eccentric collection of testimonies, channeling, scientific research and slide shows. My favorite take on the orbs came from William Bloom, a local mystic, who claims he has telepathic chats with the spheres. The orbs told him they work like “a cloud or a flock,” and visit us to “support group consciousness.” According to the orbs, “As we touch your individual psyches you begin consciously to experience yourselves as intimately connected with all other life forms on this planet and throughout the cosmos.” A physicist who connected two cameras to take simultaneous photographs found that orbs would only appear on one or the other camera. While he took this as evidence of their quantum subtlety, it could suggest spoof rather than proof.

In my talk on the orbs, I downplayed the question of the orbs’ authenticity to take a sociological approach. A postmodern phenomenon, the orbs only appeared in our world due to new technology, digital media, and social networks like Flickr, or blogs where people share orb images. As our evolving social technologies keep bringing us together in unexpected ways, Bloom’s transmission about “group consciousness” is thought provoking. As media theorist Clay Shirky explores in Here Comes Everybody, new social tools are making it possible for previously unconnected groups of people to suddenly behave like a “cloud or a flock,” when their interests coincide.

The orbs express a cute, trickster element by redirecting our attention. Most people first discover orbs when they are trying to photograph something else — friends at a party, a politician, their cat. Once captivated by the odd spheres floating through their images, their perspective changes: what seemed most important becomes marginal, and vice versa. A friend of mine once suggested that the year 2012 — end-date of the Mayan “long count” — might be when the center and the periphery of our attention switches places. The areas that our culture now finds important — such as possessions and wealth — might become marginal, while other areas, such as the development of soul and the ability to perceive subtle energies, will take on greater significance.

Although I do not pretend to have certainty in this area, I find the theories of the Dr. Alexey Dmitriev, a Russian scientist, to be highly intriguing. Dr. Dmitriev believes that our entire solar system is undergoing a phase transition, entering a region of the galaxy saturated with more intense cosmic energies. He has documented changes on other planets and moons around our solar system, some of which are developing atmospheres or experiencing polar reversals. One way this phase-transition is manifesting on earth is in increasing “vacuum domains” such as tornadoes, which are occurring with greater frequency. The orbs might be linked to this transition to a higher-energy state, as plasma-based vacuum domains that appear for an instant before spinning away. Plasma is the most unstable form of matter, and could be responsive to psychic energy — the orbs seem drawn, if not produced, by conscious intent. In photographs, they appear with greater frequency and in greater numbers at celebrations, group meditations, weddings and so on.

It can seem a bit reductive to seek to explain phenomena — such as the gregarious orbs — that resides at the periphery of our awareness. What is an explanation, in any case? Generally, it is a like cheap magician’s trick that pretends to make the Mystery disappear by covering it with language. As a phenomenon, the mass interest in the orbs suggests we are going through another wave of “Spiritualism,” a movement that swept the U.S. and Europe in the 1890s, bringing with it a wave of aura photography, levitating mediums and other anomalous events. Only the future will reveal whether the orbs reflect a deeper development of psychic awareness, or whether they are a fad that will soon trail off into the ether, from whence they perhaps came.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002) and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006). His features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wired and many other publications.

The two men who claimed to have found the carcass of Bigfoot have surfaced to say: Hey, it was just a joke.

Not everyone is laughing.

In an exclusive interview with CNN affiliate WSB, the two hoaxers — car salesman Rick Dyer and now-fired police officer Matt Whitton — said the whole situation began as a joke and then got out of hand.

“It’s just a big hoax, a big joke,” Dyer said.

“It’s Bigfoot,” Dyer explained. “Bigfoot doesn’t exist.”

Whitton chimed in: “All this was a big joke. It got into something way bigger than it was supposed to be.”

At a news conference in California last week, the two men had stood by their claims that they had discovered Bigfoot’s corpse and had it on ice. Scientific analysis would prove it, they said.

Not quite.

Now the two Georgia men admit that the hairy, icy blob was an Internet-purchased Sasquatch costume stuffed with possum roadkill and slaughterhouse leftovers.

Whitton and Dyer say that when they came up with the hoax, they had no idea it would become a media circus.

“It got legs and ran. It’s crazy now,” Dyer told WSB.

Co-hoaxer Whitton agrees: “It started off as some YouTube videos and a Web site. We’re all about having fun.”

“Fun” isn’t exactly how Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner sees it. He has kicked Whitton off the police force.

“He lied on national TV,” Turner says of Whitton, “so a defense attorney now could say, ‘How do we know you’re not lying now?’ “

Whitton and Dyer had announced that they had found the body of a 7-foot-7-inch, 500-pound half-ape, half-human creature while hiking in the north Georgia mountains in June. They also said they had spotted about three similar living creatures.

Still unclear is how much money Whitton and Dyer got out of the hoax.

Steve Kulls, who maintains the SquatchDetective Web site and hosts a similarly named Internet radio program, first interviewed Dyer on July 28 for the radio program. On August 12, Kulls said, Dyer and Whitton “requested an undisclosed sum of money as an advance, expected from the marketing and promotion.”

Two days later, after signing a receipt and counting the money, Dyer and Whitton showed the Searching for Bigfoot team the freezer containing what they claimed was the carcass: “Something appearing large, hairy and frozen in ice,” Kulls wrote on the Web site.

It was, as many had suspected, an ape-like costume stuffed with entrails.

After the news conference last week, Dyer and Whitton disappeared from view. The truth came out over the weekend.

In a Web posting this week, Kulls wrote that “action is being instigated against the perpetrators.”

The two hoaxers have hired attorney Steve Lister to represent them.

“There have been some threats made to them for both civil and criminal prosecution,” Lister said.

The attorney says the Bigfoot incident “got out of hand.”

Dyer, asked whether he ever thought that the hoopla had become more than just a joke, implied that everyone should have known it was a hoax.

“Well, we told 10 different stories,” he said. “Everyone knew we were lying.”

The Pyderrairme people were the traditional owners of the area that is now known as Port Arthur. Middens and other cultural sites remain from many thousands of years of occupation. Port Arthur penal station was established in 1830 as a timber-getting camp, produciing sawn logs for government projects. After 1833 it became a punishment station for repeat offenders from all the Australian colonies. It also managed a number of outstations that produced raw material like timber and food.

By 1840 over 2000 convicts, soldiers and civil staff lived here. It had become a major industrial settlement, producing ships and shoes, clothing and bells, furniture and worked stone, brooms and bricks. When the probation system was introduced in 1841, many convicts were sent to outstations around the Peninsula to work in timber-getting and agriculture. Port Arthur became a punishment station for serious repeat offenders.

Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ended in 1853 and Port Arthur began to enter its welfare phase. Increasingly it housed the wreckage of the convict system, men too physically or mentally disabled to look after themselves. Again Port Arthur became the administrative centre of a system of outstations that now housed invalids who worked at agriculture if they could, or who simply served out their time.

The penal settlement finally closed in 1877. Many of the settlement’s buildings were pulled down or gutted by fire. Others were sold to private settlers and gradually a small town, named Carnarvon, was established. Tourists began to pour in immediately the settlement closed. Some of the buildings became hotels, guest houses and museums. Almost 100 years ago, the government began to acquire and manage town lots for their historic value. The Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority is now responsible for the site’s management and conservation as a place of international significance. Port Arthur is Tasmania’s premier tourist attraction and stories continue to abound of the restless spirits who still inhabit this historic site.

Watch the documentary below ” The ghosts of Port Arthur”