On a purely psychological level, what is an "objective" or "steady" (or whatever one may call it) mind? How do you define it, how do you measure it? And of course, what is the "objective reality"? How do you measure that? Are we really familiar with the rules it obeys? How can we know that even within the apparent frame of objective reality we really do have the same perception of the same phenomena?
Monday, 29 December 2008
Time flies... faster than you think
On a purely psychological level, what is an "objective" or "steady" (or whatever one may call it) mind? How do you define it, how do you measure it? And of course, what is the "objective reality"? How do you measure that? Are we really familiar with the rules it obeys? How can we know that even within the apparent frame of objective reality we really do have the same perception of the same phenomena?
Monday, 24 November 2008
Have you seen this house?
ALERT
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS HOUSE?
Age: uncertain, possibly Georgian (app. 160 - 280 years old)
General appearance: large; brickwork
Distinguishing marks: variable
Area of sighting: variable, general area of Rougham, Kingshall St, Bradfield St George (Suffolk), UK
Location of last sighting: Kingshall Street (unconfirmed)
Date of last sighting reported: October 2007 (unconfirmed)
The house is not known to be dangerous, but due to its highly unpredictable nature approach is discouraged.
It's fun. Not for very long, but it is fun.
Especially if somebody else is driving.
In England, however - as well as in some other places - there are a few homes that are mobile in a very special way. They take off on their own - brick, mortar and all. And nobody knows what, ahem, drives them to do so.
Furthermore, they appear in places far removed from their original location, wherever that is or was.
And most interesting of all: there seem to be places, i.e. geographical spaces, with special attraction to such wayward houses.
The most famous such place appears to be the area around Rougham, in Suffolk (England). According to Betty Puttick's book Ghosts of Suffolk , there have been sightings of a house - possibly just one, the same house in all cases (but there is no way to ascertain it without a doubt) - all over the place.
Its rise to fame started in 1934, when Edward Bennett was compiling his book Apparitions And Haunted Houses. At that time, he received a letter from a teacher, Miss Wynne, telling him of an extraordinary incident that happened in the autumn (possibly October) of 1926:
"I came to live at Rougham, four miles from Bury St. Edmunds, in 1926. The district was then entirely new to me, and I and my pupil, a girl of 10, spent our afternoon walks exploring it. One dull, damp afternoon, I think in October 1926, we walked off through the fields to look at the church of the neighbouring village, Bradfield St. George. In order to reach the church, which we could see plainly ahead of us to the right, we had to pass through a farmyard, whence we came out on to a road.
We had never previously taken this particular walk, nor did we know anything about the topography of the hamlet of Bradfield St. George. Exactly opposite us on the further side of the road and flanking it, we saw a high wall of greenish-yellow bricks. The road ran past us for a few yards, then curved away from us to the left. We walked along the road, following the brick wall round the bend, where we came upon tall, wrought-iron gates set in the wall. I think the gates were shut, or one side may have been open.
The wall continued on from the gates and disappeared round the curve. Behind the wall, and towering above it, was a cluster of tall trees. From the gates a drive led away among these trees to what was evidently a large house. We could just see a corner of the roof above a stucco front, in which I remember noticing some windows of Georgian design. The rest of the house was hidden by the branches of the trees. We stood by the gates for a moment, speculating as to who lived in this large house, and I was rather surprised that I had not already heard of the owner amongst the many people who had called on my mother since our arrival in the district....
My pupil and I did not take the same walk again until the following spring. It was, as far as I can remember, a dull afternoon, with good visibility, in February or March. We walked up through the farmyard as before, and out on to the road, where, suddenly, we both stopped dead of one accord and gasped. "Where's the wall" we queried simultaneously. It was not there. The road was flanked by nothing but a ditch, and beyond the ditch lay a wilderness of tumbled earth, weeds, mounds, all overgrown with the trees which we had seen on our first visit. We followed the road on round the bend, but there were no gates, no drive, no corner of a house to be seen. We were both very puzzled.
At first we thought that our house and wall had been pulled down since our last visit, but closer inspection showed a pond and other small pools amongst the mounds where the house had been visible. It was obvious that they had been there a long time."
One may be wrong regarding the age of a pond - nature can work very fast! - but this detail seems irrelevant anyway, because, apparently, nobody in the area had ever heard of a house like the one she described standing where she said she and her pupil had seen it.
Or did they?
Further investigation, undertaken in the 1970s by a Mr. Leonard Aves, a skeptic local researcher, uncovered reports - and even a witness - of earlier sightings in the area.
In an issue of the Amateur Gardening magazine (December 20th, 1975), a Mr. James Cobbold (writing under a pseudonym) told of a "phantom house" that he said he saw with his own eyes when he was very young, in June of 1911 or 1912.
Young Mr Cobbold might have been amazed; not so Mr Waylett. Apparently, he had seen the house a number of times before. And, as it turned out, there had been sightings of the house in Cobbold's own family.
Such erratic behaviour earned the house a name: "the Rougham mirage".
But is it a mirage?
Not in Mr. Aves's opinion:
"I considered that it might have been a mirage, but I have some experience of mirages and I believe this apparition to be too large to be encompassed in one. At least I have never heard of a mirage that large in this country. Furthermore, for it to have been a mirage would mean that there would have to have been such a house not too far away and we cannot find any traces of one within a reasonable radius".
And if it were a mirage, why does it appear - or so it seems - only in the relatively small area in and around Rougham?
(There are other such "mirages", not only in England but in other places, too - but more on that some other time.)
In later years, the house seemed to have more or less settled down somewhere, but recently it seems to have started reappering again - unless it's only due to the fact that people are simply more willing to talk about it now. A year ago, it even made the headlines:
And - this is news - according to a local historian, Mr. Sage, there is evidence that a house once stood in the area of Kingshall (it might explain the name), but nothing is known about its appearance.
That's not all.
"The contents of the video have never been explained."
Indeed... like, why exactly was the girl was videorecording her dog in the first place?
Of course it's a hoax - what did you think? ;)
But at least it may keep people on the lookout for the real thing... or whatever it is.
* The photo at the top of the page shows a road in the actual area of Rougham.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
The hills are alive!
There's nothing quite like a trip with a twist: an unexpected sight, an unplanned detour, maybe even getting lost... for a little while.
(I adore getting "lost" on a trip, although I rarely succeed, much to my chagrin; and unless you are in the Amazonian jungle, or the Sahara, or something like that, it's not really dangerous.)
Only, it's usually the sightseers who stray - not the sights themselves.
And yet, just that apparently happened to an English couple, Mr and Mrs Allan (the names are not real), in the 1950s.
This story - for some reason, one of my favourite time slip stories - is described in H. Brennan's book Time Travel: A New Perspective (p. 63), and he got it from Colin Wilson (Beyond the Occult, 1989).
Please note that, at this time, I do not have direct access to Wilson's work, so I will have to rely on Brennan's account. I am also drawing on a very lucid little article, written by Alan Murdie (scroll down to the section called "Time slips").
According to these sources, in 1954 - in the days of yore when not everyone had a car - Mr and Mrs Allan went on a day trip to the countryside.
I don't know where they were originally headed to, but apparently they missed their bus stop and found themselves in the village of Wotton instead. (N.B. Brennan calls the village "Wotton Hatch". But according to the holy internet - which is not always right, I know -, there is only a pub by that name in Britain; the village itself is called simply Wotton.)
As any true traveller, they decided to seize the day and make the most of this unexpected detour. So they headed for the family church of John Evelyn, to do some sightseeing.
When they came out of the church and crossed the churchyard, they saw an overgrown path leading onto a hill nearby. The Allans let themselves be lured by it and followed the path, which led them to a clearing, with a simple wooden bench on it. From there, Brennan reports, there was "an excellent view of the valley".
What better place to eat the sandwiches they had brought with them?
So they sat, ate and watched, ate some more, watched some more.
At some point during this improvised lunch al fresco, something extraordinarily odd is said to have happened to them.
A sudden silence descended upon the place, and, according to Brennan, Mrs Allan "became utterly convinced that three men had entered the clearing behind them. She could see them so clearly in her mind's eye that she was able to note one was wearing clerical garb. But when she tried to turn around, she found she was paralyzed." (N.B. A later mention in Brennan's book also tells of a reported "drop in temperature" they both felt.)
After a few moments "the feeling passed and the Allans left the clearing in a thoroughly disoriented state". (For more details, be sure to consult Murdie's article.)
The account of the first visit ends here.
But two years later, in 1956, Mrs Allan returned to Wotton. She revisited the church, but she couldn't find the path that had led them up the hill during their first visit.
Even more extraordinarily, the hill itself was not there anymore.
I can easily imagine the animated conversation that ensued when Mrs Allan returned home and told her husband about it... Unsurprisingly, Mr Allan decided to revisit the area himself - only to find that his wife had been telling the truth. The path, the hill, the bench were nowhere to be seen; furthermore, he was told that there was no "wooden seat" anywhere on church grounds.
Twenty years later the Allans, or somebody on their behalf, must have reported this oddity to the Society for Psychical Research, because it apparently investigated the case (in 1974).
It turned out - so the book reports - there never had been a hill there.
But, eerily, the Society did find a 17th century record - an entry (March 15th, 1696) in John Evelyn's diary - of three convicts having been executed on the approximate spot where the "hill" had stood - and one of them had been a clergyman.
Brennan concludes, quite endearingly, that "no spirits of the departed, no natural tape recordings can produce a hill for you to climb and a seat for you to sit on. Only a time slip can account for that".
Indeed... provided there was a hill there at any point in time.
But according to the reports, nobody knew of a hill having been there at any time.
(It is possible, of course, to remove hills. However, it seems highly unlikely that such a huge undertaking would not have been recorded.)
But was the area really as "flat" as that?
Here's how Brennan describes the findings regarding the area: "Nowhere in the area bore any resemblance to the hill, clearing and bench the Allans described."
And now consider this passage from a description of Wotton, including the church of St. John the Evangelist (Evelyn's church), and its surroundings (published in 1911):
The church of ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST /.../ is most beautifully situated on the summit of a steep ridge, its east and south sides overlooking a beautiful green valley and the hillside opposite/.../. In the hollow behind this hill, to the south east, lies Wotton House. The churchyard is surrounded by noble trees—here, again, in some cases, of Evelyn's planting. /.../
The traveller, on foot or horseback (the road is not one for wheels), passing from the chalk country sees in front of him an ascending mass of broken sand hills /.../. Leaving Wotton House on the right a bridle road /.../ leads up the valley where John Evelyn first began the ornamental planting of his brother's grounds. /.../. Passing on by another hamlet, King George's Hill, so named from a now extinct public-house, the path leads out on to the heather-covered common of Leith Hill. A view opens gradually to the west, as the ground ascends, but it is not till the traveller reaches the southern brow of the hill that the panorama bursts suddenly upon him. The summit of Leith Hill is the highest spot in the south-east of England, 967 ft. above the sea.
Being far too far from Wotton - Hatch and all - to inspect the area in person, I decided to "investigate" the surroundings of Saint John's church in Wotton by means of old photographs, drawing and prints available on the internet.
Here is a series of old prints depicting the church and the surroundings. There is no hill in sight - although rarely is the angle wide enough to really provide a good idea of the surroundings. (In other words, there might have been a hill at the time of the artist's work, but it isn't visible on any of the prints.)
However, this photo (1919) seems to have been taken from a (low) hill. (It could have been taken from a building, but I don't think there are any on this particular spot.) The church is nearby, so this could have been the hill the Allans visited, or thought they did, although it doesn't seem to offer a particularly "excellent view of the valley".
Did the Allans confuse the place with some other?
Anything is possible, of course, but it seems extremely unlikely, considering that, between the two of them, they visited Wotton and the church on at least three occasions.
Were they lying?
Again, anything is possible - but it doesn't sound like it.
(Who, pray, would invent a story like that?)
Besides, I doubt that the Society for Psychical Research, as kooky as it may appear to so called "skeptics", would neglect that possibility and fail to first investigate the credibility of the story (and of the Allans themselves, I hope).
Unless, of course, the Allans did visit Wotton Hatch, after all.
We all know what mighty spirits abide in bottles... :)
(Yes, of course I am kidding.)
For the record, I tend to believe this story really happened as the Allans told it.
I just don't know - I suspect nobody does - what exactly happened.
For a tentative explanation I will refer you once again to Murdie's article.
What do you think happened?
Friday, 21 November 2008
A room with a view
"The ghost of Miss Urania Clara Mills haunted the C.C. White Memorial Building on this campus. The huge brick building, erected between 1903 and 1907, housed the Music Department, where Miss Mills taught from 1912 to 1936. On October 3, 1963, Mrs. Coleen Buterbaugh, a secretary to Dean Sam Dahl, was in the music building on an errand.
When she entered the rooms of Dr. Tom McCourt she was overcome by a strong, musty odor. Then she saw the apparition of a tall, thin woman reaching for some papers on the top shelf of an old music cabinet in a corner. Looking out the window, Coleen realized it was summertime and the sun shining and flowers blooming. Suddenly the ghostly scene disappeared and the outdoor scenery returned to a gray October day.
When she told Dean Dahl about her experience, she launched an investigation and discovered that those rooms belonged to Clara Urania Mills. She had died on October 3, 1936, in the room across from where her ghost was seen. The case has become a classic in the literature of the paranormal.
The CC White Building was torn down in 1973."
Here is another one, an excerpt from an interesting article:
"Now that is a very good question," said Roger Cognard when asked if he believes in the ghost that haunts the university.
Cognard, a professor of English at Wesleyan, was reluctant to talk about his personal beliefs about Lincoln's most notorious ghost but was willing to tell the story.
On Oct. 3, 1963, the dean of the university sent his secretary, Coleen Buterbaugh, on an errand to the C.C. White Building on campus. She entered a room in the building and saw a woman dressed in early 20th century clothing. Buterbaugh looked out the room's windows and saw that the tall trees she had walked past before entering the building had transformed into small, recently planted ones.
The area surrounding the building appeared to be underdeveloped and resembled what it would have looked like 50 years in the past. Buterbaugh turned and ran.
Upon hearing his secretary's account of the story, the dean sent Buterbaugh to a faculty member who had worked at the university the longest.
He showed her a yearbook, and she proceeded to flip through it, eventually identifying the woman she saw as Urania Clara Mills, a former music teacher at the school.
Buterbaugh was unaware that 23 years prior, Mills walked into the room Buterbaugh entered, sat in a chair and died of a heart attack.
"I came here one year after the incident and got to know the dean real well," Cognard said, "He is a credible man and he accepted his secretary's story as gospel."
But there is another version, much more extensive, where the apparent time slip, amazingly, plays only a minor role:
(The C.C White Memorial building as it was cca 1906 - 1920.
Photo taken from here.)
The vision of her reaching for a book would speak against that possibility. People do not usually "remember" themselves as they are seen from outside, by another pair of eyes.
Was it somebody else's memory, then?
Who knows.
For somebody who failed to appear in any photo of the staff, she certainly has a strong presence...
EDIT (23. XI. 08): Actually I am not sure that the photo and the catalogue (see note **) were even published by the Wesleyan university - both refer to the University of Nebraska, which was in Lincoln at the time (or so it seems).
The fact remains that her name is not mentioned on that site.
(Nor is Miss Buterbaugh's, for that matter.)