A Pilgrim’s Digression

One of the benefits of waking up for work before five AM is that I catch the final minutes of Coast to Coast AM, the early morning (or late night, depending on your point of view) talk show in which host, guests, and callers discuss paranormal and other pseudo-scientific phenomena.

I consider this a benefit because if I formed my impression of Americans and how they think solely from mainstream sources such as daytime talk radio and cable news, I’d probably believe that we are all exceptionally rational human beings. Instead, by listening to Coast to Coast, I’ve been given a glimpse into the erratic minds of people who listen to radio at four AM and then decide to call in to report their experience with “visitors” from a parallel universe. Somehow I think these late-night denizens of the airways are far more typical of Americans than otherwise, especially when you consider that according to a recent study, educated people are more likely to believe in the paranormal than the uneducated or religious.

[The study] “of 391 U.S. college students done in 2000, found that participants who did not believe in Protestant doctrine were most likely to believe in reincarnation, contact with the dead, UFOs, telepathy, prophecy, psychokinesis, or healing. Believers were the least likely to buy into the paranormal.” Monsters, Ghost and Gods: Why We Believe

The reason I bring this subject up is not that I am a coldly rational skeptic, but because indeed I am fascinated by stories of ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and the like. However, I like to think I do approach the subject with a skeptical, questioning mind. What amazes me about Coast to Coast is that people call in with the most outlandish stories, and their wild tales are accepted as true by the host and his guest.

Sometimes I feel the host and his guests aren’t skeptical enough of their own beliefs and stories, as well.

For example, this morning when I turned on the radio, George Noory was talking to someone named Joshua P. Warren, a paranormal researcher who, judging by his photo, looks a bit too much like the kid in high school drawing Metallica logos on his notebook in the back of the classroom while his science teacher drones on.

The subject under discussion was this photo of construction at the White House, taken during the 1950’s and first appearing in David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman. If you scroll down to the magnified view of the image, you will see what appears to be a transparent image of a man standing amidst the construction.

Now, if I saw this photo in the McCullough biography, and if I noticed the “ghostly” man at all, my first thought would not be “Oh my god it’s a ghost!” My first thought would be “double exposure.” Because that’s what it looks like, and that is the simplest and most likely explanation. Or perhaps the picture was taken with a camera with a long exposure time, and someone moved, causing their image to be blurred. Who knows…but my first thought is not “Ghost!”

My wife and I enjoy watching the show Ghosthunters on the SciFi network, and I find myself both believing and disbelieving at the same time. However I rarely end an episode of this program convinced of anything, because so much “proof” of paranormal activity is based on unverifiable human sensory perception–a person senses that something is watching them–or else on fallible technological evidence, such as recordings, photographs, or (most laughable of all) fluctuations in temperature within a room. So often I think that, as in religion, we believe in the paranormal because we want to believe, not because there is any evidence worthy of our belief.

Furthermore, sometimes we can be influenced to believe by accepted “wisdom” concerning the paranormal. For instance, the idea that photographic equipment can capture paranormal manifestations invisible to the naked eye is a staple belief of paranormal “researchers,” and most ordinary people interested in the subject believe it. Similarly, a prevalent idea is that when a ghost or presence is in a room, the temperature will lower dramatically as the being sucks energy from the room. Thus when a person sees a blurred human image in a photograph of construction at the White House, they have been trained to think “Ghost” when in fact the image may be perfectly explicable by reason.

To give another example, I live in an eighty year old house here in Washington. My landlady is 94, and her husband died a painful, prolonged death in the house a few years ago, finally going out of his mind in his final days. There may have been other deaths in the house. Thus, given accepted wisdom about the kinds of houses that are haunted, this house seems like a likely place for the paranormal to manifest itself.

My diet of literature and TV shows about ghosts and the paranormal also influences what I expect or believe possible. I hate to be alone in the house. I don’t like looking in mirrors, for fear of what I might see behind me. I hear a lot of noises at night, including creaking doors and the crack of wood as the house cools. I’ve been awakened in the night with the oppressive fear that something is in the room with me, literally hovering near the bed.

The latter in particular disturbed me, for awhile. I don’t sleep well, anyway, and I used to attribute it to the “presence” in the house.

Then at some point, it occurred to me that if I wake up in the night with this feeling of oppressiveness about me, why do I immediately attribute it to the paranormal? Could it be I’ve been conditioned to think “ghost” because of all the crap about ghosts I’ve loaded into my brain over the years? Could a more likely explanation be that I just woke up out of a pleasant sleep, and so naturally my brain is not going to be functioning at its highest, most rational level?

We’ve all had the experience of being in that twilight state between sleep and waking, and thinking something that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. But in the light of day, we look at it and think, “How ridiculous!”

It is probably no coincidence that people tend to see ghosts mostly at night. There is probably a psychological link between how our brain works during sleep and in those periods just before or after sleep, and our mis-perception of reality at that time.

In short, I think more often than not ghosts and the like can be explained by reference to our brains and our environmental conditioning, rather than to any measurable manifestation.

And yet, I still am attracted to the kinds of “evidence” people such as Joshua Warren propose as proof of the existence of ghosts. Why do I want to believe? I don’t know. In the end, I think like a lot of people, I just like a good scare and the feeling of creepiness when I hear the sound of a voice on a recording of an empty room.

At some point, there has to be room for faith in life–belief divorced from evidence. But for the most part, I hold these two parts of my being separate, the part that believes on faith, and the part that demands evidence. There is no need to reconcile them. Humanity itself is unreconciled to its own humanity, thus our belief that we become like gods upon death, transcendent and immortal.