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Occult and Psychical Sciences:"Some Hauntings" [1]

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Date: 2024-06-14  

"Academic Dr Kate Cherrell lectures on Victorian Britain and the paranormal. She believes the current enthusiasm for ghost hunting shares features with that earlier era. “The love of the paranormal seen in the 19th century sprang from a fear of death in a time when people were turning away from the established church,” she explains. During Covid, she notes, it was our generation’s turn to confront the prospect of death. “It made many of us consider the afterlife at the same time as we were at home, noticing the bumps and squeaks in our own houses.”

Cherrell has a lot of time for new community ghostbusting teams such as Paraletic Activities, including those who dress up in 1980s Ghostbusters-style boiler suits and backpacks. “It’s easy to laugh at the aesthetics: the cheesy team logo fleeces and the beeping and flashing boxes,” she says, “but these groups are rich and vibrant communities and a social lifeline for many people, including the recently bereaved.” The Church of England is not so keen, complaining of amateur ghost hunters who trespass in “haunted” church graveyards at night.

Dr Malcolm Schofield studies the psychological basis of paranormal belief at the University of Derby. He is also on the Spontaneous Cases committee at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882 to “understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal”. SPR and fellow paranormal association The Ghost Club, which includes Charles Dickens, WB Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon among its illustrious former members, are seeing rising membership and increased reports of ghostly and unexplained phenomena. “We are getting a lot of reports of precognitive dreams and after-death communications,” Schofield says, “though reports of poltergeists are way down."

While believers in broad-brush “spirituality” tend to be hard to categorise, according to Schofield, believers in the paranormal have certain traits. “They tend to have more open and intuitive thinking styles than people who believe in institutional religions, who tend to be more dogmatic.”

"According to Dr Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of a new book called The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal, ghost believers, however sceptical they claim to be, do not in fact want their experiences to be explained away by scientific, or non-paranormal explanations. “None of us like the prospect of simply ceasing to be when our physical body dies, or, even more so, the thought that when our loved ones die, we will never have contact with them again. So any kind of evidence that seems to support the possibility that part of us lives on beyond physical death is welcome, no matter how flimsy that evidence may be.”

Both paid-for and free nightfall investigations with Wednesbury Paranormal at allegedly haunted locations, including The Rising Sun pub in Tipton (said to be haunted by the spirit of drowned publican Eliza Whitehouse) and the ruins of Dudley Castle. Bevin favours Georgian devices over the jazzy modern ghost-sensing technology many groups go in for. “We use scrying, which is an old method of channelling spirits with mirrors and pentagrams and sometimes incantations, though not everyone goes in for that gloomy occult stuff.”

read more www.theguardian.com/...

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