Ghosts

This paper analyses two short stories by Nisi Shawl, "The Raineses'" (1995) and "Cruel Sistah" (2005), to examine the persistent link between ghosts and children in horror fiction. Drawing on recent work in queer theory, I argue that both children and ghosts are queered by the illegibility of their motives and desires and by their temporal dislocation. That is, both the child and the dead person who lingers as a ghost are inscrutable to present observers, available as objects of knowledge only through retrospection. Shawl’s narrative style in these short stories both demonstrates and complicates these two modes of queerness.

Hearing and seeing ghosts in Babylonia was harmful and brought about physical and mental illnesses, which could sometimes have a fatal outcome. The rich corpus of mainly first millennium BC Mesopotamian texts differentiated between various ghosts, who could be the spirits of the dead relatives or unspecific, strange ghosts, which emerged from the other world, due to specific reasons, to attack and torture the living. In Babylonia such phenomenon was
11 generally known as the "Hand of Ghost •
The paper will scrutinize encounters with ghosts, the disorders they caused and the way the Babylonians cured and/or protected themselves. The Mind-Spirit aspects of Babylonian medicine in this particular case will be exemplified by the means with which the Babylonians dealt with harms wrought by ghosts: the use of magical utterances repeatedly recited by the patient and/or by the exorcist, in combination with offerings, substitutes, stone amulets, bandages, potions, salves or fumigations, all derived from tested substances selected by a herbalist. Thus, the magico-medical means influenced the patient's body and mind achieving, when possible, his return to normality and health.

The paper considers some of the ways in which the female protagonists in a considerable number of works of fiction by 20th-century Canadian and American women writers are haunted, or “possessed,” by the deaths of their mothers. In the texts, these deaths – or maternal losses – are transfigured into things, into items that have substance, but that, peculiarly, are also found wanting.

The existence of ghosts and apparitions is theoretically possible in a scientific sense, a fact which should come as a surprise to both the scientifically trained and those who are not. In other words, all those people who have seen or experienced ghosts and apparitions could have come into contact with something that is physically real. It is possible and perhaps even probable that they are neither fictional experiences created in the mind of the experiencer nor are they made of matter, although they can be sensed as 'things' in our extended external physical (nonmaterial) universe by the mind through either our normal senses or directly through consciousness, if not both together. We have - and the term 'we' is meant to include both non-scientists and scientists alike - unfortunately succumbed to the simple belief that ‘things’ are either mind or matter (purely mental as opposed to material) or they belong to a classification that only allows Cartesian Mind or Matter (religious as opposed to scientific, respectively). Yet there exists a good many real ‘things’ that exist somewhere between mind and matter as well as Mind and Matter. Considering these differences opens up a vast region of physical reality that is never considered by anyone, including scientists, under any circumstances in any meaningful way. In other words, the simple words of mind and matter have far too many meanings, connotations and interpretations to be of use in something as exact as science where all quantities must be well defined. When mind and matter are more carefully and scientifically defined, the survival of mind and consciousness as physical but non-material entities that can be ‘observed’ under special physical conditions becomes possible. Ghosts fall into this category of physical ‘things’.

Photographing ‘orbs’ in cemeteries and haunted houses has become extremely popular in the past few years, but no one, to my knowledge, has ever conducted a scientific study of these ‘orbs’. Many people, including both professional ghost hunters and skeptics alike, automatically chalk the ‘orbs’ up to reflected light from various types of material particles (either animate or inanimate) using ‘cheap’ low resolution digital cameras. Yet I myself have photographed ‘orbs’ that defy simple explanation as light reflected from dust, insects, water droplets and so on in a variety of physical situations. So my students and I conducted an experiment to determine the nature of the ‘orbs’ in an upper level philosophy of physics course that I taught. We concluded that nearly all ‘orbs’ are more than likely just photographs of common particulate matter that is out of focus, but science should be
interested in the very few examples of ‘orbs’ that do not fall into this catchall explanatory category.

It is fairly common to refer to our use of the paranormal aspects of consciousness as a sixth sense, but the idea of a sixth sense comes much closer to the truth of our physical situation in the universe-at-large than we might imagine. The universe in which we exist is commonly thought to be a four-dimensional space-time continuum. All five of our normal senses evolved within this common four-dimensional environment. Each individual consciousness interacts with the four-dimensional world via our five normal senses. However, our universe is actually five-dimensional so it would be safe to assume that human evolution has also taken the fifth dimension of the space-time continuum into account and given humans a sixth sense. According to all indications in modern science, this assumption would prove true. Our sixth sense actually represents the manner by which we gather information about the universe in which we exist via the fifth dimension, just as our normal five senses allow us to gather information about our physical environment within the four normal dimensions of space-time. Even when our four-dimensional material bodies die, we still continue to exist, communicate and gather information via this five-dimensional connection with the rest of the universe, and sometimes show ourselves and communicate with the living.

How can we make sense of popular struggles in this period of late capitalist modernity? What do the experiences, voices, and visions of groups involved in such struggles tell us about the actual functioning of our world — a world mined with growing inequalities, ever more intrusive levels of governance and managerial techniques, all of this held together by the increasing ubiquity of law? What does the silencing of such groups — and their refusal to be silenced — teach us about political action in our supposedly disenchanted times? And, more specifically, what can we learn from the arrival of otherworldly forces — a ghost, for example — in their midst?

ABSTRACT: The topic statement for the panel highlights the ambiguity of ghosts. Ghosts blur the mind-matter binary opposition, but also others, such as: living-dead, internal-external, this world – other world. Ghosts do not fit into usual “rational” categories. Classification problems are pervasive in paranormal fields, and ghosts exemplify them. The concepts of liminality and binary opposition from anthropology are useful in addressing the topic of classification. Anthropologists have addressed magical practices and mana (an impersonal supernatural power) in relation to classification. Problematical aspects of the paranormal can be conceptualized in terms of classification issues.

This article examines economic risk in a selection of mid-career ghost stories by Charlotte Riddell. Drawing on recent scholarship on the Victorian financial market and the author’s own pecuniary struggles, I argue that Riddell’s tales utilise the figure of the spectre in order to express anxieties about the perilous nature of nineteenth-century economics, particularly for women. This financial background influences my reading of a number of ghost stories by Riddell – “The Open Door” (1882), The Uninhabited House (1875), “Nut Bush Farm” (1882) and “Old Mrs Jones” (1882) – which feature a plethora of financial shocks, ruined subjects, and economically-driven spirits. What hovers ominously on Riddell’s narrative peripheries is not the vengeful ghost, but the altogether more terrifying menace of Victorian economics. Although Riddell’s spectres provide the mystery around which her narratives revolve, these figures appear to pose far less risk than the cruelty of a volatile economic structure which could (and often did) crush subjects in an instant, engendering poverty, trauma, and even death. The ontological questions raised by the ghost are thus complicated – and largely overshadowed – by the potential horror and violence encoded into the Victorian financial system.

This essay examines how two much-anthologised ghost stories from the long nineteenth century – Charlotte Riddell's ‘The Open Door’ and Rudyard Kipling's ‘They’ – challenge the perceived idea that the experience of witnessing a spectre has a shattering or feminising effect on men. Instead, ghostly encounters enable the male protagonists to develop a form of spiritual awareness which bolsters rather than undermines their embodiment of traditionally masculine traits. The concept of manliness was continually being contested and redefined during the period in which these tales were published. Its perceived links with rationalist materialism were also being eroded as various male-orientated groups sought to synthesise the ghost within scientific discourse. ‘The Open Door’ intriguingly promotes a supernaturalised form of masculine identity through an interrogation of class: the spectral encounter is crucial in the development of the middle-class protagonist into a model of hardworking Victorian masculinity. ‘They’ reworks the motif of the manly but spiritually sensitive central character via a focus on paternity, suggesting that trauma and loss can be adequately incorporated into this rehabilitated form of British masculinity. Both tales thus utilise the experience of ghost-seeing to highlight the importance of emotion and sensitivity to masculine identity at the end of the long nineteenth century.

Ghosts and apparitions come in many different forms and their existence has been reported for as long as humans have been around. While a great deal of ‘superstition’ and outright silly beliefs have surrounded the phenomena for much of human history, some people, including a few scientists, have taken them seriously. During the past few decades, the question of the reality of apparitions has become even more urgent as science has matured and more scientists are considering the possibility that something or some part (at least) of human consciousness and/or personality survives bodily death. Science now needs to determine whether apparitions represent real physical ‘things’ or projections of a person’s subconscious on their perceived physical reality before it can move forward and explain them. Yet this question is almost impossible to answer with any certainty given the present paradigms of science. Science simply doesn’t know how to detect the physical presence of apparitions necessary to verify their reality. So the real question that scientists should ask is ‘how do we detect apparitions if they exist as real independent ‘things’ or entities, independent of any particular observer’s possibly biased sightings of them?’ Without anything else to go on, science needs some form of theoretical basis for the existence of apparitions to use as a guide to how to detect their ‘reported’ existence.

When I first began hearing ghost stories at ETSU, I realized something: the undead are bridges. The undead – those ephemeral beings in their multiple variations – are bridges between the seen and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the understood and the unexplained, mystery and science. A ghost tale can hold us together in the communal bliss of fear around a campfire. They can also pit us against one another. The undead are simultaneously the persons they used to be, as well as the apparitions they are now. They connect the past with the present. They – like the past – are dead, but very much alive in the present as they haunt places and people. They are somewhere “in-between,” having never completely crossed the threshold into whatever lies beyond. I realized my autoethnographic work is similarly haunted. Ghosts haunt the narrative and autoethnographic work of others too. Haunting, however, is not one-sided. Autoethnographers are not only haunted; they haunt as well.