To this point, I have waxed poetic about several issues that are at the heart of the paranormal investigator and I have chipped away at the roots of the phenomenon we try to study. This missive will be a bit different, delving into the reality of conscious and subconscious thought as a trigger for ghostly activities.

This is a topic shielded in doubts and fears, the critic will say everything we study is rooted in the subconscious, while the wild-eyed proponents will swear all paranormal occurrences are totally unrelated to the mental constraints of the witness. Honestly, like so many other debates, the truth is probably somewhere in between.

I do not believe that we create what we see, there are too many contradictions in our own case studies to surrender to that simple an explanation, but in order to truly understand the realities of our work, we have to give serious thought to what I refer to as “the little engines that could” and do drive the phenomenon.

Let’s start at the beginning. Everything requires energy to exist and no matter how good the natural battery of a phenomenon may be, it will die eventually, if not properly charged. In past discussions we talked about what I call the “half-life” of an apparition or other paranormal occurrence. Now, detractors will say that all paranormal activity is driven by the human consciousness, which is a bit short sighted in that there are many paranormal events that exist without human interaction.

My favorite, of course is the reoccurring visitation of ghostly Roman troops that have been reported on lonely roads late at night in Great Britain. Surely, the witnesses had no preexisting motivation to create these apparitions, yet they are very old, thus the obvious question, what fuels them?

Even the great J.B. Rhine had a hard time wrapping his academic mind around the existence of apparitions. Throughout his long career as the Director of the Psychical Research Foundation at Duke, he refused to call apparitions or ghosts by their common name, choosing instead to refer to them as “Hallucinations,” a practice that I personally found offensive. When it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then call it a duck!

Apparitions are manifested in certain ways, and are totally unlike hallucinations in their basic character, but of course Dr. Rhine was dedicated to laboratory studies and not field work, so I can only question if he had ever really witnessed the manifestation of a ghostly phenomenon.

As a short side trip here, I should mention that if you know about the 60’s at Duke, you will understand a good deal more about J.B. Rhine. He was always open to new concepts, but he was at the core a true academic. When Tim Leary came to Duke, mind altering drugs in hand, Dr. Rhine was more than willing to hand them out to the staff, even taking a hit of the “sacred mushroom” himself.

Unfortunately, when others on his staff came back with wild tales of aura manifestations and the like, the good Dr. Rhine only reported a mild feeling of momentary disorientation. He was just wrapped too tight to experience what Dr. Leary was espousing. There they all were depravation tanks and mind altering drugs in the same place and Dr. Rhine could not conceive of any possible use for the experience. Leary left disillusioned and Rhine chalked it up to a “rather interesting experience” in the lab.

From that we can draw some basic inferences. It was well known that Dr. Rhine was looking for experiments to prove extra sensory perceptions (ESP) and possible clairvoyance. But he rejected the core question that first prompted these studies, namely the survival of human consciousness after death. Rhine spent more than 30 years saying that his studies would eventually lead to an answer of that core question, while all the time personally rejecting the hypothesis of life after death. It was not until the emergence of Dr. William Roll at Duke that we see any real field studies or the consideration of something beyond conscious manipulation of Dr. Rhine’s “hallucinations.”

If I sound a little bitter here toward Dr. Rhine, it is only because I perceive a conscious effort to misdirect funding earmarked for the resolution of the “Survival Question,” as it was referred to at Duke from actual case studies into the world of ESP. You have to ask just how useful 30 years of Zener card tests can be; was this just Rhine’s attempt to persuade mainstream science that parapsychology warranted a seat at the table of knowledge? In the end, Dr. Rhine lost most of his funding simply because the people writing the checks wanted answers to their questions, not just indulge an academic pursuit that did not seem to have any connection with the challenge on the table.

That being said, let’s get back to the reality of the question at hand. If Duke proved one thing it was that the mind, conscious or otherwise, is capable of many fascinating things. Not only can the mind receive a telepathic message from someone in the next room, they can do the same with a person half a world away, and there is no “lag time” involved in such communication, it is instantaneous! That might not seem to be earthshaking in concept, but it does address the question of time and space constraints, which suggests the later theories of multiple universes, crossing time is on the right track. That of course is not the question at hand for us, but it certainly is gratifying.

Rhine’s hallucination theory is, as I have said previously, flawed because he lacked the field experience or even curiosity to consider other options. He assumed that when a person claims to have seen a ghost, in fact it is a mental construct the viewer’s mind creates to understand some other kind of situation. As I asked before, how would that explanation fit the marching Romans along a roadway in modern England? If all apparitions are mental constructs, where is the energy coming from in cases where the viewer is seeing something completely unexpected.

The original theory behind the hallucination concept is simple. The person finds himself in a place that appears “Spooky,” be it an old house, castle, foggy moor or some other equally “haunting” environment. The viewer is primed to see something because of that environment and the mind then creates the illusion or hallucination to fulfill the expectation. This of course will work, but only in a suggestive environment, that is to say, the environment triggers the subconscious energy necessary to feed the illusion. But that theory has some very big holes! Our own files are filled with cases of apparitions in the most unlikely places; a mainframe computer room, a bathroom, or a beautiful meadow, none of them suggestive of a haunting and of course we have to go back to our marching Romans. Where is the much eluded to trigger there?

The answer, I personally think is that we are not dealing with hallucinations at all. Instead, one could argue that the “entity” is present; triggering a subconscious feeding off the witness or witnesses and as a result you have an apparition. The trigger is not the witnesses’ mind, but the presence of the “spirit” present. They trigger the subconscious response to release energy so that they can then manifest themselves visibly. Likewise, the feelings we encounter in a place with a spirit is nothing less than the triggering mechanism displacing our own energy or energy from some other convenient source and explains the higher EMF detected in such cases.

In my theory, Dr. Rhine was on the right track, but due to constraints he placed on himself as a lettered scientist, he lost sight of the age old question, “Which came first; The Chicken or the Egg?” He assumed following the scientific method, that the effect was projected by the witness, not allowing for the effect to be in fact a consciousness of its own. In the later theory, a “ghost” will manifest anywhere, at any time, with or without the cooperation of the witness.

So, how then do I explain the marching Romans? Well, energy is the key to this theory and most reported manifestations are tied to eye witness accounts, which also provides us with a logical source of energy. The Roman soldiers are a totally different thread. First, they are two thousand years old and they are a projection, not an interactive haunt. That being the case, one would question how they can manifest in the first place. The answer in this case is not human at all; in fact I would suggest that our ghostly Romans show up whether there is an audience present to see them in the first place. This is a case of an energy source completely removed from human consciousness. This source is commonly referred to as “Lay Lines.”

The Lay Lines have been alluded to for centuries, in theory they are lines that have been recognized to run from historic and often times psychically charged places and along those lines it is believed there is a massive amount of psy-energy. Of course skeptics call all of this “pseudo-science” but in fact it has been proven that there are significant differences between the ambient EMF adjacent to a Lay Line and upon it. The corresponding terminus points are considered by some to be so psi-charged as to be called a vortex of this energy where apparitions are very common. In England the lay lines are well defined by ancient markers, like Stonehenge and the lines have been mapped. Not surprisingly, the often referred to Marching Romans appear right along one of these lines.

Obviously, this proves one thing. In order to have an apparition, you must have energy. The “feeling” associated with high EMF is a manifestation of that movement of energy. But there is a word of warning here as well. While all apparitions will be accompanied by higher than normal EMF, not all high EMF situations are psychically related. A poorly grounded electronics system, a high powered transformer, etc. can produce high EMF and can also trigger human reactions sometimes associated with a haunting. In such conditions a subject might “hear” muffled voices, “feel” nauseated or experience visual effects that could be identified by the casual observe as paranormal, while in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

It is up to the trained investigator to discern the difference between the natural and the paranormal in such cases, utilizing the best tools at his disposal, but reminded that it is his or her intellect that will eventually decide the truth.

In recent years, there has been an effort to gather basic information about the location of paranormal events in the United States. One hope is that we might be able as time progresses to find a connection between active sightings and known lay lines, thus furthering the argument for energy as a contributing factor in many cases.

But energy alone is not the deciding factor, as any good field investigator can attest. While extremely high EMF will trigger a physical response sometimes akin to the haunting experience, it is not the same. This brings us back to the beginning of this lesson, the hypothesis of mind as the sole contributor to “hallucinations” in haunting as the good Dr. Rhine suggested.
The early experiments at Duke were extensive and have opened the eyes of serious research for the generation following the Rhine years. Yes, mind has a key place in the equation, as does energy, whether you wish to call it psychic or not. But it all seems to come back to the same question, the same one that James Kidd asked when he left his considerable fortune to anyone who would study the question of the survival of human consciousness after death.

After serious consideration, I think that the only working hypothesis begins with the spirit of the deceased. Time after time, in field investigation after field investigation we come upon situations that hinge on the existence of the human spirit after death and its interaction with the living. The science to date has discussed the methodology of such occurrences, but not the meat of the question.

As discussed in earlier lessons, Kidd never said he wanted someone to prove the survival of the human spirit; his interest was more basic and probably rooted in his experiences as a lone prospector in the Superstition Mountains of the Southwest. He simply wished to fund someone to explain the nature of ghosts as he knew them… unfortunately, no one ever took Kidd literally and so his fortune was spent on the study of ESP and telekinesis. Nevertheless, the field work that followed those years in the lab have led to a much more clear understanding of the nature of the ghost. Thanks to people like Dr. Roll, D. Scott Rogo and a host of others, the questions eventually were asked and in many cases answered.

It is reasonable to say that the human spirit does survive death, leaving the door open to other illusive questions, including how long the spirit may linger in our dimension, why and where he may go from here. Some things seem clear. If a spirit wishes to remain, he or she will; if they wish to stay in their home or with family or friends, they will do that also. But there are other cases that seem to muddy the water a bit. Is it reasonable to assume that a spirit bent on vengeance will be able to go to that person or persons to exact his toll freely; it seems to. In fact, I think that whatever the reasoning, the human spirit can and does linger.

Why do some departed not show themselves after death? Probably because they are not there to begin with, they have passed over to another place -- parallel universe some may suggest, a heaven others might say. All of this is for the consideration of the philosopher, not the paranormal researcher. Our job is to track the movement of the human spirit, to suggest the pathways that could be open to the departed, without the interjection of religion or personal beliefs.

As I have suggested all too often, we know that paranormal events take place all over the world and probably more often than some might thing; it is the nature of those events that we are here to study. Communication with the departed seems to be a reality; those truths were set in stone a hundred years ago by people like James, Alsop, et al . . . .

The nature of those communications has now flowered to include EVP research and the like and we now can learn who is communicating to a large extent; but how and why seems to be the lingering questions.

In the end we are still working to solve Kidd’s riddle. No these are not hallucinations, nor mistaken artifacts. They are what they seem to be and it our job to make the message clear.

© 2009 by Rick Moran & the ASUP, Inc.     All rights reserved    Reprint with permission.