by Editor
on November 30, 2014
Old Man And A Ghost. Drawing By Polish Artist Teodor Axentowicz (1859-1938).
What Color Is A Ghost?
No, ghosts are not always white, or black, or translucent—and they’re certainly not always invisible.
And how do we know, one way or the other? Because, regardless of whether ghosts are “real,” thousands of people have seen them, and some of those people have shared the details of their experiences with scientific researchers. Between 1968 and 1974, the Institute of Psychophysical Research in Britain interviewed 1,800 people who said they had seen one or more ghosts. The fascinating results were published in the 1975 book, Apparitions, by Celia Green and Charles McCreery. [continue reading…]
by Editor
on November 29, 2014
The Amityville Horror (1979)
One of the main interests in the original version of The Amityville Horror is that it is a fictionalization of supposedly actual paranormal events experienced in 1974 and 1975 by two separate families who lived in the same Long Island home.
At 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, on November 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr., shot to death his entire family while they slept—his parents, two brothers, and two sisters. He at first attempted an insanity defense, claiming that voices in the house had told him to commit the murders—but later he admitted drugs and alcohol were probably responsible. [continue reading…]
by Editor
on November 29, 2014
The Novel Jap Herron Was Allegedly Dictated By The Ghost Of Mark Twain. Its Publication Inspired A Lawsuit.
Ouija Board Dictation: Another Kind Of Ghost Writing
After the Ouija board became popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was only a matter of time before enterprising people got the idea to ask spirits to help them write books. Some of the spirits obliged, and the result was a small but interesting selection of literature—all fiction of course.
The most notorious case of literal ghost writing occurred with the 1917 publication of Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board, which Emily Grant Hutchings alleged had been dictated to her by the ghost of Mark Twain. (The Huckleberry Finn author died in 1910.) Not only did critics trash the book’s literary quality, but Twain’s estate and his publisher both objected to the claim that he had written it from beyond the grave. Jap Herron was eventually withdrawn from publication, and most copies were destroyed. [continue reading…]
by Editor
on November 28, 2014
The Father Of Psychology Attributed A Surprising Importance To Ghosts
Did Ghosts Form The Basis Of All Human Thought?
In several of his books, the so-called father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, speculated about the role that ghosts played in the human psyche, as well as in our development as a species. And while we now know that much of what Freud said about human sexuality was probably wrong, many of the things he wrote about the ghostly still seem accurate.
In The Uncanny, for instance, he remarked on the powerful grip in which the ghostly continues to hold us in spite of all our technological advancements: “To many people, the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything having to do with death, bodies, spirits, revenants, and ghosts. . . . in hardly any other sphere has our thinking and feeling changed so little since primitive times or the old been so well preserved, under a thin veneer, as in our relation to death.” [continue reading…]
