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Author: Robert McLuhan
When Randi's Prize was published two years ago the press lady recommended it be timed to coincide with Halloween. To me, having pretensions to seriousness, that seemed a bit cheesy. However on reflection it made sense. It didn't help much in the end, but the principle was sound. Halloween is the one time of year when the chatterati allow themselves to talk about the paranormal without feeling guilty or embarrassed - an excuse for intellectual slumming.
So it's no surprise to see Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts getting a the sort of coverage I'd love to have had - a big spread on the news pages of the Sunday Times, in addition to a review in the supplement, and a long BBC radio discussion yesterday, among others. But of course to achieve that, Clarke had to make the kind of concession that I would not have been capable of, writing about ghosts in a detached way, as a slight and amusing curiosity. Like other books I've seen - Peter Lamont's on Daniel Home, for instance - it's artfully constructed to entertain readers but without frightening them into thinking that ghosts might be more than some curious hallucinatory episode or cultural belief.
It looked to me, from the reviews and the brief glimpse I got of it in a bookshop, as the familiar ghost story romp - classic cases like Epworth, Borley, etc - described with a light touch, and sometimes with interesting background details that I hadn't seen before. The approach in these sorts of books is the anthropologist's as well as the historian's: respecting anomalous experiences and beliefs, but not seriously engaging with them or with investigators' findings.
The urge to explain takes second place. There are references to JB Rhine, the Star Gate remote viewing, etc - when 'the race to understand ghosts became briefly part of the cold war', as one reviewer nonsensically put it - also to scientific findings, for instance that stimulating the temporal lobe can induce a sense of presence. The Society for Psychical Research gets several mentions, but - as so often - its conclusions are barely discussed, or are thrown out as asides for readers to make what they like of. So for instance, when Phantasms of the Living comes up it's with the interesting observation that ghost sightings might be as much of the living as of the dead. That would have been an opportunity for some reflections about the shared mental space of the two different states, with reference perhaps to the equally significant reports of experimental apparitional projections. The principal author, Edmund Gurney, and other SPR commentators, recognised the true implications of this. But here all the reader is left with is the impression that the finding counts against these episodes being paranormal - which is not what they thought at all.
An alert reader will spot details that could be enlarged upon but aren't; doors that could be opened but instead are left resolutely shut; abundant opportunities to embark on an interesting and open-ended journey passed up.......
Copyright©Robert McLuhan
Reproduced courtesy of Robert McLuhan
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