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Ghosts: A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof

Roger Clarke

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Aug 26, 2014 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: occult-paranormal

Note, Oct. 1, 2016: I just edited this review again to correct a minor typo.

Note, Nov. 28, 2014: I just edited this review slightly to make a factual correction --I recognized two of the names in the bibliography, not just one.

Full disclosure at the outset: I won a free copy of this book in a recent Goodreads giveaway.

Because of my liking for supernatural fiction and my interest in folklore, it's perhaps not surprising that I'm intrigued by unexplained phenomena in the real world, and have been Note, Oct. 1, 2016: I just edited this review again to correct a minor typo.

Note, Nov. 28, 2014: I just edited this review slightly to make a factual correction --I recognized two of the names in the bibliography, not just one.

Full disclosure at the outset: I won a free copy of this book in a recent Goodreads giveaway.

Because of my liking for supernatural fiction and my interest in folklore, it's perhaps not surprising that I'm intrigued by unexplained phenomena in the real world, and have been since childhood. My own attitude is one of open-minded inquiry, tempered by caution and a critical faculty. While I don't "believe in ghosts" in the conventional sense, I also don't dogmatically assume that naive materialism explains all observed reality. I've never had any paranormal experiences of my own (I'm using "paranormal" as most people do, in the sense of uncanny or strange, with no connotations about the cause --not, as Clarke defines it at one point in this book, as a technical term that itself implies a non-supernatural explanation); but I have family members who have, and a neighbor whose veracity I have no reason to doubt, who fully believes that her house is harmlessly haunted by the ghost of a child. So my interest in Clarke's book was piqued when I saw the giveaway.

Roger Clarke grew up in the 1960s and 70s on England's Isle of Wight, an area with folk beliefs in ghosts, and lived in houses that had tales of hauntings connected to them. As a kid and teen, he developed an avid interest in ghost hunting, becoming the youngest member of the Society for Psychical Research at the age of 14. (The first chapter of the book provides this background, and discusses the several "haunted" sites he's visited personally.) While the bulk of the Goodreads description just reproduces the cover copy, which is a bit sensationalized, it does give a pretty accurate idea of the book's flavor. It's not really a systematic treatise on the subject, or a full history of ghost beliefs (it's organized topically, rather than chronologically), but it's a very wide-ranging discussion, with a lot of fascinating factual information. Clarke takes it as a given that some people do experience "ghost" phenomena; the question for him is not whether these exist or not, but rather how they should be explained, and what ghost beliefs tell us about ourselves. (And, at least in this book, he doesn't really attempt to suggest definitive answers.)

Though the book isn't really a "natural history" of ghosts, the second chapter does provide a "taxonomy" or classification (actually taken from ghost researcher Peter Underwood) of eight types of "ghostly" phenomena: "elementals," poltergeists, traditional or historical ghosts, mental imprint menifestations, crisis or death-survival apparitions, time slips, "ghosts" of the living, and haunted inanimate objects. Some of these categories, which are mostly distinguished by how they can possibly be explained, are concepts I was already aware of from other reading, but I still found the discussion informative. The succeeding chapters deal with a variety of subjects (which aren't always neatly organized), including 20th-century style ghost hunting, spiritualist seances, attempts to photograph ghosts, use of other kinds of technology for ghostly research, ghost phenomena associated with the military in wartime, and bogus ghost phenomena. Another interesting theme is the role of religion in European ghost belief. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church explained ghosts as souls from Purgatory; once souls were in heaven or hell, they stayed there. The Protestant rejection of Purgatory was associated with denial of the possibility of ghosts, and the explanation of all alleged ghostly phenomena as demonic in origin. (An exception was the early Methodist movement, which was open to the idea of ghosts due to the Wesley family's experience of poltergeist phenomena in Epworth in John Wesley's early years.) Much of this information was new to me or only vaguely grasped before. Several chapters concentrate on famous cases of "hauntings," including the 17th-century Tedworth Drummer, the phenomena at Hinton Ampner in the 18th century, the "Brown Lady of Raynham Hall," and the case of Borley Rectory in the 20th century.

For the most part, Clarke expresses no opinion, or ambiguous opinions, about the phenomena he describes, with the exception of some incidents, like the Cock Lane "ghost" in London in 1760-62, that were clearly faked. Based on the material here, I would say that there is a good deal of claimed "ghost" phenomena that can be discounted or that is susceptible of a natural explanation. There is, IMO, a core residue of data that is more resistant to that sort of explanation. This doesn't mean that we're obliged to explain it as the activity of revenant spirits of the dead, though I don't dogmatically deny that some of it could be. (I personally believe that the souls of the dead are normally unconscious and inactive until the time of the future resurrection; but that's a Biblical interpretation, not a proven fact, and what's normal may also not be invariable. I also don't rule out the reality of genuine demonic activity as an explanation for some phenomena; and I would recommend Kurt Koch's Between Christ and Satan as a worthwhile resource on that topic. But that's also not a handy-dandy explanation that all data can be forced to fit.)

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book to me was Clarke's highlighting of connections between supernatural fiction and real-life incidents. For instance, he makes a good case that the Hinton Ampner haunting suggested Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Daniel Defoe's "True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal" turns out to be an only lightly fictionalized account of an actual reported event; and famed ghost story writer M. R. James had a traumatizing paranormal experience as a boy.

Clarke isn't a scientist as such; he's an interested dabbler in the subject, writing for interested lay persons. His style is lively and chatty, but not ultra-scholarly, and his treatments of various facets of the subject are often not deep. He uses endnotes, but they're often just factual tidbits about a subject, not documentation of sources, and a lot of quoted and other material isn't documented. (The book is also indexed, but there are some omissions in the indexing.) Also, the editing was sometimes careless; information will occasionally be repeated because he apparently forgot he supplied it earlier. More than once, he left me wanting more information than I got. He did, however, clearly do his homework, and took it seriously. The bibliography for further reading fills about three-and-a-quarter pages, and consists of apparently solid sources, several of them from university presses. I haven't read any of these, and the only authors I recognized were folklorist Andrew Lang and Peter Haining (who edited The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings); but at least one is a book I'd like to read. Two valuable sources not included are William G. Roll's The Poltergeist, and True Irish Ghost Stories by St. John Seymour and Harry Neligan.

All in all, I enjoyed the book enough to feel it earned its fourth star. It's not the definitive exploration of its subject by any means. But if that exploration is ever written, this is one source its author will probably want to make use of! ...more

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