Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (21 page)

Additional work has shown that two curious things happen to your body when you dream. First, your genitals become active, with men getting an erection and women exhibiting increased vaginal lubrication. Although hailed as a breakthrough in the 1960s, some researchers have argued that the effect may have been discovered long before, pointing out, for example, that one of the 17,000-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux depicts a dreaming Cro-Magnon hunter with an erect penis (then again, he might just have really enjoyed hunting). Second, although your brain and genitalia are very active during dreaming, the rest of your body is not. In fact, your brainstem completely blocks any movement of your limbs and torso in order to prevent you acting out your dreams and possibly hurting yourself.
 

Just as your brain can fool you into seeing an afterimage of a ghost, it can also trick you into thinking that you have encountered an evil entity. As you move between ‘Stage 1’ and the REM state your brain sometimes becomes confused, causing you to experience the hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery associated with ‘Stage 1’, but the sexual arousal and paralysis associated with the REM state. This terrifying combination causes you to feel as if a heavy weight is sitting on your chest and pinning you to the bed, sense (and sometimes see) an evil entity or two, and believe that you are having a rather odd form of intercourse.
 

For centuries a significant percentage of the public have convinced themselves that they have been attacked by demons, ghosts and aliens. Not only have sleep researchers revealed the true nature of such experiences, but also uncovered the best way of banishing these entities from your bedroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, this does not involve extensive chanting, the sprinkling of holy water or an elaborate exorcism. In fact, it turns out that all you have to do is try your best to wiggle a finger or blink. Even the smallest of movements will help your brain shift from the REM state to ‘Stage 1’ of sleep, and before you know it you will be wide awake and safely back in the land of the living.

Those who believe in ghosts have now been forced to accept that the incubus experience is not evidence of hell, but rather a clever trick of the mind. However, rather than jettison their belief in hauntings, they have focused their attention on an altogether trickier problem – the many ghost sightings that happen when people are far from sleep.

BOX

HOW TO SUMMON THE SPIRITS

Would you like to see a ghost right now? If so, stare at the small white dot in the left-hand box below for about thirty seconds, and then look at the small black dot in the empty right-hand box. After a few moments you should see a mysterious woman in white emerge in front of your eyes. If you repeat the exercise, but look at a white wall rather than the tiny box, you will see a giant ghost projected onto the wall.
 

Psychologists refer to the ghostly figure that you just saw (and that many of you will continue to see for the next few minutes – sorry about that) as an ‘afterimage’. Your perception of colour is based on three systems. Each of these systems is based around two colours, with one dealing with the red-green continuum, another with blue-yellow and the third with black-white. In each of these systems the two colours oppose one another and can’t be see together. For example, when the eye and brain encounter the colour red, the ‘red’ half of the red-green system is activated, disabling your ability to see anything green at the same time
 
(this explains why you never see colours that appear yellowish-blue or reddish-green).
 

When you stared at the solid black image a few moments ago you unwittingly forced the ‘black-white’ neurons to quiet down for a very long period of time. Then, when you shifted your attention to the empty box, the neurons became activated. However, because they were already in a quiet state, the activation made them become over-excited, creating a rebound effect that resulted in a white afterimage.
 

END BOX

The Rose Without a Thorn
 

Hampton Court Palace has a long and controversial history. In the early 1500s the Archbishop of York, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, invested seven years of his life and over 200,000 gold crowns building a palace fit for a king. A few years after completing the project Wolsey fell out of favour with the reigning monarch, Henry VIII, and felt it would be politically expedient to gift his beloved palace to the Royal family. Henry graciously accepted Wolsey’s kind offer, expanded the estate to ensure that it could hold his thousand-strong court, and promptly moved in. The palace went on to become home to some of Britain's most famous kings and queens before being opened to the public in the mid-nineteenth century. Nowadays Hampton Court Palace is one of Britain's most popular historical attractions, playing host to more than half a million visitors each year.

The palace is famous for many things. It houses invaluable works of art from the Royal Collection, contains the best preserved medieval hall in Britain, and boasts giant Tudor kitchens designed to feed 600 twice a day. Oh, and one other thing. It is also one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Various spirits allegedly haunt the palace. There is, for example, a 'lady in grey' who walks through the cobbled courtyards regular as clockwork, a ‘woman in blue’ who continuously searches for her lost child, and a phantom dog that lives in Wolsey’s closet. However, despite stiff competition, Hampton Court’s most famous spirit is that of Catherine Howard.
 

Henry VIII did not have a great track record when it came to relationships, of course. He cheated on his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third while she was giving birth to his only son, and divorced his fourth. In a move that would make even the most experienced marriage counsellor raise an eyebrow, the 49-year-old Henry then became infatuated with a 19-year-old courtier named Catherine Howard. After a brief period of wooing Henry married Howard, publicly declaring that she was his ‘rose without a thorn’.
 

A few months after getting married, Howard found herself very much in love. Unfortunately, the apple of her eye was not her husband Henry, but rather a young courtier named Thomas Culpepper (who, according to several accounts more than lived up to his reputation as a ‘gentleman of the bedchamber’). News of their affair eventually reached Henry, who promptly decided to fetch the garden shears and remove the head of his beloved rose. Upon hearing the bad news, Catherine was understandably upset, and ran to Henry to plead for her life, but was stopped by Royal guards and dragged back through the corridors of the palace to her apartments. A few months later both Thomas Culpepper and Catherine Howard were beheaded at the Tower of London.
 

The ghost of Catherine Howard is said to haunt the corridor that she was dragged down against her will. By the turn of the last century this area of the palace had become associated with a whole host of ghostly experiences, including sightings of a ‘woman in white’ and reports of inexplicable screams.
 

In January 2001 a palace official telephoned me, explained that there had been a recent surge in Howard-related phenomena, and wondered whether I might be interested in investigating
⁸³
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Eager to use the opportunity to discover more about hauntings I quickly put together an experiment, assembled a research team, photocopied hundreds of blank questionnaires, loaded up my car and headed off to the palace for a five day investigation.

The palace had called a press conference to announce the start of my study, and had attracted the attention of journalists from all around the world. We decided to make the press conference a two-part affair, with a palace official talking about the history of the haunting in the first half, a brief break, and then my good self describing the forthcoming investigation. A palace historian kicked off the proceedings by telling a packed room of reporters what happened when Henry met Cathy. During the brief break I stepped outside to get some fresh air and the strangest thing happened. A car containing two tipsy teenagers drove slowly past me. One of the teenagers wound down the window and threw an egg at me. The egg smashed on my shirt. Unable to change, I tried to remove the worst of the stains and then returned to the press conference. A few minutes into my talk one of the journalists noticed the marks on my shirt and, assuming that it was ectoplasm, asked whether Catherine Howard had already slimed me. I replied ‘Yes. This is going to be a tougher investigation than I first thought.’ Although said in jest, my comment was to prove prophetic.

Prior to the experiment, I had asked the palace to supply me with a floor plan of the corridor that would have held such unpleasant memories for Catherine Howard. I then met with Ian Franklin, a palace warder who had carefully catalogued a century of reports of unusual phenomena experienced by staff and visitors, and asked him to secretly place crosses on the floor plan to indicate where people had consistently reported their experiences. To avoid any possible bias during the investigation, neither I, nor any other member of the research team knew which areas had been marked by Ian.
 

During the day groups of visitors were transformed into ghost hunters. After hearing a brief talk about the project, each participant was handed a blank floor plan, asked to wander along the corridor and place an ‘X’ on the floor plan to indicate the location of any unusual experiences that they might have (essentially playing a game of ‘spot the ghoul’). Each night we would place a variety of sensors and a £60,000 heat imager in the corridor in the hope of catching Catherine mid-‘boo’.
 

Day one of the investigation went badly, with several participants wandering into the wrong corridor and then wondering why the floor plan was so wildly inaccurate. On day two we were joined by a woman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Catherine Howard, and said that she could provide a unique first person perspective on the proceedings (‘Actually, I was dragged up the corridor, not down it’, ‘Not sure that the new paint job in the kitchens works for me’, etc). On day three a Brazilian film crew attempted to film in the haunted corridor but the presenter suddenly had an anxiety attack and left the palace without completing the piece. Day four turned out to be especially interesting. The team (which now included the reincarnated Catherine Howard) assembled in the morning as usual and reviewed the heat sensor data from the previous night. It was immediately obvious that something very strange had taken place, with the graphs showing a massive spike in temperature around six am. We eagerly rewound the recording from the thermal imager to discover if we had caught Catherine on tape. Dead on six am the doors at one end of the corridor burst open and in walked a figure. The reincarnated Catherine Howard instantly recognized the figure as a member of Henry VIII’s court. However, a few seconds later the proceedings took a decidedly more sceptical turn when we saw the figure walk over to a cupboard, remove a vacuum cleaner and start to clean the carpets. Thankfully, the data from the rest of the investigation proved more revealing.
 

Field footage of thermal ‘ghost’

http://www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/ThermalGhost.html

First of all, people who believed in ghosts experienced significantly more strange sensations that the sceptics. Interestingly, these odd experiences were not randomly spread throughout the corridor but rather stacked up in certain areas. Even more interestingly, these areas corresponded to the ones that Ian Franklin had identified from analysis of previous reports. Given that neither the team nor volunteers knew the location of these areas during the study, it was strong evidence that something strange was happening.
 

We have obtained the same pattern of findings in several investigations at other haunted locations. Time and again those who believe in the paranormal experience more ghosts than those who don’t, and these sensations frequently occur in places that have a reputation for being haunted. As I loaded my equipment back into my car and said goodbye to our well-meaning but intensely annoying Catherine Howard
wannabe
,
one question nagged away in my mind. Why?