Ghosts and Poltergeists in the Newspapers - Volume One

The whole subject of things that go bump in the night hold a morbid fascination for most of us. So how do you cope with things you cannot see, or touch, or even begin to explain? How would you feel if the book you were reading was suddenly snatched from your hands by an unseen force? Suppose that armchair in your front room rose in the air right in front of your eyes and turned over by itself. Or small objects started flying around like bullets, or constant knocking and weird noises kept you awake at night. You search frantically for a rational explanation, but there isn’t one. Things start happening that defy the laws of reason. Fear of the unexplained or the unpredictable – paranormal activity – can break the everyday pattern of people’s lives, making them fearful of things outside their normal experience. What do you do when you’re confronted with the unexplained in this way? Something outside the bounds of normal experience. It takes courage even to mention it to a friend or neighbour. But this is what they have done, when they became frightened for themselves, or for their children’s safety. They turned first of all to a priest. Next in line of authority lies the housing officer, responsible for all the day to day hassle (who usually brush it aside). Some in desperation turn to local ghost clubs, mediums or psychics. What kind of explanations can we find for what is going on? Apparitions, constant poltergeist activity, that is to say, unexploded bursts of energy, moving things around—even people. There are, it seems, two main schools of thought on the basis of this activity, one it is generated by the people involved. But several distinguished paranormal investigators would argue that poltergeist activity is closely related to spirits, or entities, call them what you will, trying to make contact in some way, with the living world. It may well be that if your belief system encompasses something like this, if you believe there is a life after death, then events of this kind would strengthen that belief, because it would seem that it was the personality of someone who has died, which persists for some time after death, and which still wants to interact in some way with living people. Some of these cases are associated with particular houses and the people who have lived in the house years ago. One explanation put forward sometimes is that the person doesn’t realise they are dead, even in their hanging around the place where they used to live, they may be rather unhappy to find people living in their home, so they make all sorts of disturbances to drive them out. That is just one belief system.Volume One begins in the 1830s and finishes with reports from the 1960s. Read more