Abandoned: Why We’re Haunted by Ruins
Around the Albaicyn in Granada, about 20% of the homes are abandoned. Some are waiting for restoration, for a future, while others are disintegrating beyond all repair. As I walk through these tiny, winding streets, I seek out the desolate places, the homes that have withered for decades under the harsh sun of the Andalusian summers, and the punishing cold that descends upon Granada every winter. These homes are lost to time, their windows like dead eyes staring into the nothingness.
There are property disputes that are never resolved here. The parents pass away, and the children cannot agree on the fate of the house. The homes are held hostage to angry siblings who, instead of working together to either save or sell the property, decide to let their childhood home succumb to the elements.
Some homes have caught fire or suffered some irreparable damage, and there is no assistance coming from the local government. There are cat colonies that wander through these places, staring out from the dark and dusty rooms, too wild to come close and too hungry to resist a plate of food. Other buildings are illegally occupied by “okupas”, who, while they have no legal right to live there, are almost impossible to dislodge due to local rules that grant them certain rights. Still others are a magnet for the homeless, the addicted, and the desperate. I stay away from places that have human occupants, but the vast majority do not. In those cases, the most I can do is take photographs, since there are too many neighbors close by who will ask you what your business is peeking into doorways and windows. Trespassing, even when a place has been abandoned since the 19th century, is very much frowned upon here. Ghost hunting in such a Catholic country as Spain not only is a bizarre activity, but directly contrary to the beliefs of the Church.
I am drawn to the beauty of these places, to the way they gracefully disintegrate and retain their former elegance if only in the memories they still embody. These homes are more than buildings; they are grave markers, reminders of a time long past, and the guardians of their former occupants’ lives.
Even buildings that are not abandoned in Granada feel haunted. There is something about the history of the entire area that repeats itself every time you walk through the streets. The Romans built a road through the Bajo Albaycin, and after that, the Arabs and Mozarabs added aljibes, or wells, storage areas for grain, more streets, places to barter, spice stores, baths, and tea shops. The Catholic Monarchs claimed it all in 1492, sending the Arabic princes, dignitaries, soldiers, and families into the surrounding hills and towns, where inevitably, they were slaughtered or forced to convert to Christianity.
Granada is a haunted city. There are so many layers of history, of lives lost in battle, of anarchists and communists and protesters shot up near my neighborhood at the end of the Spanish Civil War; the Inquisition marched heretics and enemies of the faith around the Albaycin in tunics and pointed hats before torturing them to death in the name of the sanctity of Catholic doctrine. And more recently, there are the ghosts of someone’s elderly parents who died in their homes or left to live in the “residencia” while their children fought among themselves regarding the fate of the family home, or simply, there were unresolved legal issues that left the apartamento or the carmen in a state of eternal, legal limbo. Or there was no money for needed repairs and upgrading, and the family simply had to leave.
And while the Ayuntamiento (City Hall) wrings its hands about the number of empty and decaying buildings in the city, the ghosts of the past settle in and peer out the dark windows. There is no rush to leave, no need to move on, and nobody to send them away. Granada holds them all, memories and emotions long lost, and all the ghosts of history–recent and ancient–continue their silent vigil.
What Scares You About Aging?
Time, Ghosts, and the Haunting of Corriganville
Corriganville Ranch/Park is hidden in the east hills around Simi Valley, in a gulley between mountain ranges. It was a movie ranch, a theme park, and finally a regional park. The opening of Disneyland in 1955 killed off the theme park, and fires, distance from Los Angeles, and complicated land negotiation deals prevented any further development or recreations of what it once was. See: https://obscurehollywood.net/corriganville.html for more information.
Corriganville currently adds something else to the history of the area, and that is a reputation for strange apparitions and a feeling that one is under observation from the boulders and outcroppings of enormous rock formations. The area was home to the Chumash tribes long before Hollywood involved itself with Western theme parks or movie sets.
There are so many layers to the history of Corriganville and the surrounding areas–known for cults, plane crashes, Western movie sets, the Manson family caves, the hanging tree, the oldest stagecoach road in California, and so much more–that time seems to warp and overlap when walking around the enormous sandstone boulders and meandering down the many trails, some hundreds of years old.
When I received the following email from Megan, I asked her if I could answer her on this blog, since what she asks about is something I believe we have all had experience with: time slips and alternate dimensions of realities invading this one:
Hi Kirsten,
I’m reaching out to you because I have a question for you about the paranormal events in this area. I’ve spent a LOT of time walking, hiking and running through the trails and hills of Corriganville and the Santa Susana mountains. I live about a minute walking distance to Smith Rd. along the Allied Studios.
Yesterday, I went out at 5:30pm for a hike and run. As I was cutting through that corner dirt lot and at the edge of the dirt and where it spills off into the road, I saw a tall very slender man, very tan looking. White hair, longish, white shirt (like a men’s undershirt – crew neck) and short shorts colored red and some white and maybe green. it was a half circle red pattern (remember Dolphins shorts from the 80’s). I watch him cross over the road from the homes to the tree-lined fence. I am watching him the entire time for safety reasons and I was planning to stay on the opposing side of the road. as he goes in between the trees, I don’t hear crunch noises of the leaves and bark. Then he disappears. Completely dissipates into nothing. I inspected the fence and the trees and there was no way he could hide or get through anywhere else.
I was so shaken about it that I turned around and went back to my neighborhood on Katherine and finished my exercise there. I went back this morning before work to inspect again and I’m stumped.
I’m wondering, are you familiar with any ghostly figures that may resemble this man or thing I saw? I’m trying to find answers and I am completely shaken by it still. I’d like to hear your opinion on what this may have been. I know Corriganville is known for activity, but I’m curious who or why this spirit thing was there.
Thanks
Megan
What I have experienced personally at Corriganville is more along the lines of occult activity, evidence of rituals or ceremonies, and a strong sense of indigenous presences from the rock outcroppings. And, I suppose I should be rigorously honest here, I have felt “nature spirits”, along the lines of small creatures that seems to be connected to certain oak trees. It hurts me to admit that, since my academic background and skeptical nature make such statements anathema to serious investigation, but to hide the fact that I saw and felt presences around those trees seems dishonest. The sensation was one of constant surveillance and curiosity; and the certainty that I was being followed by someone, only to turn around quickly and see nothing.
I also feel the layers of history and time overlapping there. As I have written about extensively in this blog and on the sister site, soulbank.org, time as we experience it is a biological phenomenon and not an independent, existing, quality of reality. All events in what we call “past” and “future”, co-exist along with a possibly non-existent experience we call the present (see: https://iai.tv/articles/ethics-death-and-the-block-universe-nikk-effingham-auid-2461). What that means, simplified, is that everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen, is mapped out in space, but not time; it’s ALL occurring NOW. We don’t have access to the point in space where we had dinner with our grandparents that summer in 1977, nor can our conscious experience live the events of our 76th year where there was a surprise party on the Queen Mary, but all those events are “out there” in the Block Universe. They are real. We simply cannot perceive them, because our brains have been designed to interpret reality as successive events that “happen” and then fade away. We create chronology, as we could not function as biological beings if we could experience everything, everywhere, happening right now. Our brains organize, erase, remember, create, and narrate our lives in what appears to be a certain order.
However . . . there are moments when the brain goes offline, or there is a change in consciousness for whatever reason, and our finely-tuned, story-making machines relax just enough to allow one of those events from what we call the “past” to slip past our guard gates into our conscious reality. Hence, we see a jogger from the 1970s or 1980s who used to make that run on a regular basis, and he sees us, wondering where we came from. He won’t remember ever seeing us, and we don’t remember ever seeing him, as he belongs to one layer of reality and we belong to another. The brain mechanisms that prevent us from witnessing something that doesn’t belong in our point in space either fail or shut down momentarily, and we are allowed to see an event from another perspective in the Block Universe.
This, I believe, is a partial explanation for ghosts. “Ghosts” might simply be people inhabiting another dimension of spacetime that slip through the guard gates of consciousness. I think we see them all the time without realizing it, because these layers of reality are more porous than we think. How do we know that everyone we see belongs to our current reality?
That would be my explanation for the runner in the park who vanished. He slipped into our present moment from what we call the past, which is just as “present” as what we are experiencing right now. The person who saw him could have been a vision of the future for him; but both realities are equally valid–they are on the same ontological footing, so to speak, one not privileged over the other; we are simply used to thinking that what we perceive is the Ultimate Reality of Right Now, when in reality, it’s the partial point in space of one layer of the Block Universe that our brains have turned into the only possible reality. Sorry, brains. We are no more “real” to the jogger from 1980 than he is to us.
I also found this video on Corriganville and the paranormal happenings around the park:
There are many differing perspectives on the “paranormal”, but I think it’s a good idea to consider that what we call paranormal is simply the superposition of different points in space, creating a multilayered reality where then is now, now is then, and what will be has already happened. You died in the Block Universe already; you just haven’t experienced it yet. This view of reality allows for the weirdness of Corriganville, but perhaps does not explain nature spirits, aliens, and other entities that would not classify as human. For that, I need another blog post and more energy!
Thank you to Megan for allowing me to answer her questions, at least in part. Although, it occurs to me that I did NOT answer her original question, which was about the identity of this man and if anyone else has seen him. So, I open up this post for comments on his possible identity, if anyone else has run across him (pun intended).
Thank you for reading.
–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
Bullies, Attachments, Devils and Sociopaths: Is Protection Possible?
Let’s imagine a purely hypothetical situation: you have a bully at work. He’s been after you for years and years. When you threaten his power, he reminds you in many ways that he is a man capable of subduing you. He places his hand on your shoulder when he wants to get a point across or change your mind about something. He makes disparaging remarks regarding your professionalism, your competence, your sanity, and your work ethic. He always makes sure that you are alone with him and never answers your emails, because he knows better than to leave a digital paper trail or involve witnesses. When he makes comments about your appearance or stands too close to you, you don’t dare ask him to back off; the last time you did that, he retaliated by ignoring your requests, belittling you in front of coworkers, and increasing his attacks on your character.
Imagine that you dared run against him for an important position; you notice that you are losing friends, that people who used to chat with you avoid you. Eventually, a kindly colleague informs you that you have been painted as a lunatic (paranormal investigator becomes psychotic unhinged witch; an interest in the metaphysical means that you need to be institutionalized) and an incompetent fool. The road back from this ugly slander is a very long one, indeed; you must endure years of isolation as a result of these attacks, and eventually, other colleagues (all women) step forward into the privacy of your office with their own stories of harassment. Vulnerable people in the organization tell you about their own abuse, some of it criminal. Let’s say you make the mistake of reporting this to your superiors and it gets all the way to the Human Resources department.
Imagine that the result of you doing the “right thing” is that your bully gets a slap on the wrist and decides to REALLY bring you down. He takes over projects that belonged to you; he leaves you out of important meetings; he schedules you for conferences you cannot attend–he knows this, because you wrote to him about it multiple times, but he never answers your emails–and when you don’t show up for something you told him you could not attend, he makes notes that you “refused” to work on a required project, or seminar, or whatever that important thing might be. He piles up demerits against you, and you have no idea what is happening because he never tells you anything. He never responds to your entreaties for information. You don’t know what is happening, ever, because he has cut you out of his loop and is carefully overseeing your downfall via machinations that you couldn’t have imagined.
Imagine that karma catches up to your demon. He attacks the wrong person. He is discovered stealing a project from you. His evil plans crumble as one by one, people start to see through the superficial charm to the relentless narcissism that lies beneath. So, let’s say that your bully has to go away for awhile, and someone else steps up to run your department. Joy! Relief! Problem solved.
But not for long. Because like all attachments, all demonic entities. he returns. Not riding the coattails of victory, but because nobody wishes to run against him for a position with some power. And just like that, he is back. People scatter like rats on a sinking ship. Some head into Administration to escape his department; others quit outright; still others hunker down and get ready for the coming storm. And there are those who find alternate employment. Some decide that the only way to avoid another bruising and punishing round with this minor devil is to perform their work remotely.
Now, imagine that you have opted for that last option in order to save your soul from torment. You write the emails to the right people, you consult lawyers, you state your case, and you even beg for mercy. And the deafening silence engulfs you like a wave of futility and pointlessness. People just want you to go away; they don’t want to deal with this situation or even think about it. When you turn to the Department of Last Resort, you are told, finally, to ask for disability status and request an accommodation. For that, you need a medical professional to attest to the fact that you cannot currently perform your job due to a disability that could be either physical or mental.
In other words, in order to be protected from this demon, this pathological entity, you must say that you yourself are the sick one, not him; not it. You have cracked and broken and can no longer perform your job in person due to YOUR PERCEIVED INABILITY, your deficiency, and your “issue” that you simply cannot manage. It has nothing to do with the fact that you have been tormented for years by a bully; no, it’s turned into YOUR problem that you need assistance in managing. Just like the person who can’t lift more than ten pounds, or the person who can’t stand for too long, you are unable to perform your work duties because you are limited in some fundamental way that requires, for example, remote work.
Imagine that people have asked you to file a formal grievance and start a long process of dragging your bully into meetings where he will be confronted with his execrable behavior, his macho posturing, and his gender-specific power plays. Imagine that you spend the next several nights unable to sleep, drenched in panic, struggling with migraines, bleeding hands from self-inflicted wounds, stomach pain so intense that you can’t get off the floor, and a creeping depression that threatens to keep you trapped in bed. This demon didn’t keep a paper trail; he never responded to emails or requests for this very reason: there is no hard evidence against him when nobody else dares to come forward. His confrontations were in private; his accusations were never documented. His power plays and manipulations were just on the razor edge of permissible, barely allowed, not recommended, frowned upon, yet not strictly “grievable”. He knew the ins and outs of the company policies so well that he could quote chapter and verse of all the employee handbooks, so he also knew how to subvert all the weaknesses in our contracts. He learned how to retaliate without anyone being able to prove it.
When he finally got caught, he learned how to up his protection game, how to never allow it to happen again.
When you report someone like him, he learns from the experience. He learns more about your weaknesses, your fears, your deepest anxieties, and he takes note. He figures out how to become even more difficult to pin down, he ups his defenses, and he makes sure that no matter what, it will boil down to “he said, she said”, and he will win. In the end, that’s all he cares about. The devil, the bully, the attachment, the lower-level demon, the narcissist, the sociopath, they want to hurt you because hurting you is fuel for their psyche; it feeds them to see you in pain, to witness your desperation, your fear, your puny desires that justice be served.
Maybe in the end, in some cosmic sense, justice will be served. And how I wish that I could be the superhero of this story, the one who revealed the banal evil that exists in all institutions, in all places humans gather for whatever purpose. But sometimes, when you tangle with a devil, a bully, a very bad man, you lose.
And then you file for disability and admit that, in the end, you were bested, beaten down, and defeated. And all you can do is wake up screaming and and carry your diagnosis into that dark night, knowing that your accommodation is a far cry from justice, but it was the best you could do to save your soul.
Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
La Casa de las Caras: Believe it or Not, Something Weird is Happening Here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9lmez_Faces
In 1971, María Gómez Cámara saw a clear face form in her cement floor, seemingly overnight. The Pereira family home at Calle Real 5, Bélmez de la Moraleda, Jaén, Spain, became famous shortly thereafter, with Spanish newspapers coming down on one side or the other regarding the authenticity of the faces. What followed were decades of faces appearing, transforming, and disappearing. The house has been investigated extensively over the years by scientists and paranormal teams within Spain, and unsurprisingly, what determines the true nature of the faces has more to do with one’s openness to paranormal explanations than with any objective truth; when it comes to the paranormal, truth is a mixture of fraud and illumination.
When we arrived, it was a blustery March day. Snow was whipping through the mountain town, and there was no sign that a famous house with hotly debated paranormal activity was just in front of us. It seemed so ordinary, unassuming, and easy to miss. After calling the number on the door, Miguel informed us that the family had just sat down to lunch, and requested we return at 3:30. If you know anything about Spanish lunches, they can last awhile. So my husband, brother-in-law and myself trudged off to find food and landed at Bar San Antonio, where everyone swiveled their heads at the strangers walking in the door. Indeed, this is a small town.
We found the one, open table and ate plates of habas con jamón y huevo and flamenquín with a carne en salsa tapa–lots of ham, egg, fried meats and cheese. I loved it, but if you’re not used to Spanish lunch food in a small town, it’s quite heavy. While there, we discussed our hopes for the house and our expectations. My sense is that my cuñado was hoping for something haunted but not expecting it, my husband was already skeptical, and I wanted to believe that something truly weird was happening. Our expectations often color our experience.
Once Miguel arrived and opened up the door to the infamous Casa de las Caras, my first impression is that the house was not haunted, in the classic sense. There was no electric energy, no sense of being watched, no strong emotions connected to the space; it was quiet, like a memorial to a past that had left only traces behind. At first, none of us could see the faces. Miguel, after the obligatory introduction and history lesson, used a pointer to show us where eyes, noses, chins, and hairlines were etched into the cement. For all three of us, there was this moment when the faces started to emerge from the cement like fast-blooming flowers. Where there had been almost nothing before, faces popped out everywhere. I was taking photos all over the two rooms, seeing new faces even as I returned to the same spot I had been moments before.
This was beyond anything I have experienced before. Faces were appearing before my eyes. Not only was I not straining to see anything, I could not keep up with the sheer number of odd forms. Here are some of the photos I took:
We made a generous donation to Miguel and proceeded to argue about the faces and figures for the next hour as we headed to Jaén. My brother in law swears that his cement floor has faces, too, and that this is all a hyped-up case of “pareidolia” or the human propensity to see faces everywhere (we are hard wired for facial recognition even when there are no faces to be seen). Plus, he said, it’s not haunted. I agree with him on the last opinion, but pareidolia has its limits, too–sometimes, there is a face in the damn floor. My husband remained agnostic on this issue, thinking that fraud was involved, and indeed, there have been accusations of tampering with the cement floor with paints and other chemicals to “enhance” a subtle pattern that might have been there. There was little doubt that some of the historic photos of the faces had been traced with pencil or paint so that they would stand out, but . . .
Some of those faces were neither pareidolia nor produced via fraud. Something strange was happening at that house.
As Ty and I were scrolling through our photos, something odd had happened: the faces that were so clear at the house had vanished in the photos, even though we reviewed our photos at the house and saw the faces more clearly in the photos than on the floor. Where had they gone upon review at our hotel? At least 50% of the photos no longer showed any evidence of the original faces. And weirder yet, as I reviewed the photos today that had “lost” the original faces and figures, I found new faces; faces that I had never seen before. I can see them in the photos above.
Miguel said that the “caras” would transform over time. He swears that one set of figures not only changed over time, but the children grew up between the first photos and the last, taken years later. That strains credulity, I know; however, what does seem to be true is that the faces morph and evolve, appear and disappear, with no known cause.
As is typically the case, you can choose your explanation and be right. Or be wrong. You could call all of this a case of “pareidolia” and be justified in your position. You could say that something authentically paranormal is happening, and you would also be right. You can accuse the family of fraud and profit taking (although the condition of the house and the pueblo in general strongly argues against that), and maybe you would be onto something. Or not. My husband suggests that there is a spirit or paranormal energy in the house that affects what you see and manipulates your senses. I tend to agree with that, because something is altering your perception after a few minutes in that house. Try as I might, I do not see a proliferation of faces in my kitchen floor, or anywhere else. But there, it was a phenomenon impossible to deny. It happened to all of us.
I am actually desperate for comments on this post, as I am still attempting to make sense of what we all saw. I don’t mind skeptical comments, or wild theories, because I have no explanation for La Casa de las Caras.
–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
The Perils of Paranormal Programming
There is one reason that those who are publicly involved in the paranormal must be honest: people take them seriously and often look to them for real answers regarding the afterlife and the reality of the spirit world. It’s a large burden to bear, and if you have a “show” or a “documentary” (the lines are blurred between these two genres, to the detriment of the viewing public), then you must be ethical and responsible in what you do, as the emotional well being of your clients frequently depend upon your good will and transparency.
Paranormal fakers and opportunists can ruin lives by manipulating the emotions and the beliefs of their victims. I have the same message for all the mediums out there, both famous and anonymous: lie to your clients, manipulate their faith and their trust in you, and you will pay the price through eventual online disclosure and the loss of something you cannot regain: your integrity.
It is not an excuse to say that the shows are intended as entertainment. These programs rely on the public taking their work seriously. For every faked piece of “evidence”, for every dishonest emotion, for every capitulation to a director or a producer who asks for “more drama”, I say: you are committing a crime against the people who look up to you, who believe in you, and who come to you for answers. You should never agree to fabricate anything when it comes to something as deeply personal and meaningful as afterlife communication.
I work as a medium in private sessions. I have also been under contract with a studio intending to produce a documentary or a “show” on my life and those of my teammates. We have all agreed to one, basic rule: no faking of evidence. Ever. Once you lose the trust of your audience, it’s nearly impossible to get it back. When I am reading for clients, some of what I do is based on observation: I tell them that. I explain that a successful reading involves observation, reading of emotional energies, deduction, inference, and then the facts and images that I cannot explain. When something I say is not based on paranormal information that I am picking up via processes that are not known to me, I say the following: “What I am about to tell you is based partly on observation and inference. It may or may not have any paranormal source. Sometimes, the source of the information is not even clear to me. I can promise you that I have no intention of deceiving you or pretending that I pick up is the absolute truth that you must follow regardless of how you feel about it”.
Honesty. It’s difficult to maintain when someone is directing you to be more “energetic” or “emotional”; especially difficult when someone above you–a camera operator or one of many people involved in a shoot–might be knocking on the floor or making your EMF meter go wild by pushing the button on the walkie. It takes a tremendous amount of integrity to resist the call to “dramatize” an otherwise mundane investigation, but I can promise you, resist you must. I lost opportunities to be on television (more than once) because I refused to “follow direction”, which amounted to lying. I won’t pretend that a spirit possessed me if it did not happen; someone watching, or perhaps many people watching, would have believed me and possibly prayed for me under false pretenses. Pretending to have experienced something that didn’t happen is a form of mass gaslighting and narcissistic abuse. I refuse to inflict emotional violence on anyone, as I know how it feels to be on the other side of that equation.
I am not accusing anyone pictured above or any particular paranormal program of lying or faking evidence. I am warning them against it. For they are playing not only with the souls of others, but with the ultimate fate of their own. As fun as it might be to watch, this is not a game.
–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
We Know We Have Died . . . And Then What?
Sam Parnia via the AWARE study determined that there is electrical activity in the brain that suggests (how, I am not sure) that we are aware of our physical death for at least 20 seconds and possibly much longer after our hearts have stopped beating and our lungs have given up the ghost, so to speak.
Sam Parnia, M.D.
Of course, nobody is touting this as proof that our consciousness survives death, as the definition of “death” has become rather . . . fuzzy. If you have electrical activity in your brain, then you are not, technically, dead; and, of course, the assumption here is that the activity that is recorded in your brain is CAUSING your awareness, not simply possibly CORRELATED with it. And as we all know, correlation is not causation. What that brain activity means, and whether or not it is measuring your awareness or creating it, well, who knows. All we do know is what patients who “come back” tell us.
As I have written about before, I was one of those patients who found herself on the ceiling during an operation. This is how I found out that the doctor who had promised not to put me to sleep with a mask had indeed done just that, because I saw it over my face, a fact which upset me no end, even though I was floating above my body. I had no problem with the idea that I was “up here” and “down there” at the same time. I was able, even at five years old, to memorize details of that scene and relay them back to the very befuddled and confused doctor after I woke up from surgery. Yes, I confronted him about the broken promise, and he had nothing to say, of course.
No, I wasn’t ‘dead’. My heart had not stopped, nor had my lungs stopped breathing. But I was still able to experience consciousness without a body, and it seemed the most normal thing in the world to me. I had no idea that my experience was not “supposed” to happen; it did, and it seemed quite ordinary to me. Doctors, scientists, and researchers become quite outraged at the idea that consciousness is not created or caused by brain activity. I am not sure why, except for the purposes of defending a materialist world view. The problem is that we consider ourselves to be “one thing”, one body, one consciousness, some kind of unique awareness that only exists in a particular vessel.
For a while now, I have believed that what is missing is a view of ourselves that embraces the multiplicity and diversity of being, of existing. The Christian concept of the trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is, as I see it, a metaphor for the different aspects of our consciousness: we are soul, spirit, and body. The soul is our essential self, the eternal expression of who we are; it exists outside of space and time as the energetic pattern of our identity. It is not bound by circumstances or events and functions as our ‘blueprint’ for all the incarnations governed by spirit. Our spirit animates the multiple versions of us that come into being via reincarnation or repetition of some slightly different version of us that the “many worlds” interpretation of reality supports (I am me in infinite ways, as every new decision creates another universe where I live out the consequences of countless paths not taken). The body is the vessel, housing and expressing the particular circumstances of one life, the one we are currently aware of, the only one that most of us care about and believe in.
One identity can be expressed in many ways, which explains why I do not believe that the child ghost that cries in a corner of a haunted house is doomed to eternity to relive a traumatic experience. That is one aspect only of that child, that person, and in the Block Universe, that child is in all states of life and death at once, and only this one, particular instantiation of that personality is playing out. Remember, there is no time when we talk about ultimate reality, so that person is also enjoying a college physics class, waking up next to her cat as an old lady, and everything else that the impossibly rich block universe allows her to experience. That “dead” child is also alive in another part of the Block.
However you choose to look at this issue, whether through the lens of physics or Christianity, or any other religion for that matter, the self is not one, not solitary, not a one-time manifestation of a singular personality, but the result of an enormously complex play of consciousness on the backdrop of an infinitely complex universe. I knew that as a child and have forgotten it as an adult. No, not intellectually; I can write to you all day about the multiplicity and the eternity of our selves, our conscious awareness, but I become trapped by a culture that doesn’t “believe” such things and will not, therefore, even consider these points. The idea that we are meat robots, simple bodies animated by random and incomprehensible brain activity, is the most reductionist, sad, cruel, and ignorant of theories that has led to despair and depravity; it’s the philosophy of a reality drained of human experience over millennia.
We contain multitudes. All the major religions know this, but cloak the information behind power plays and fear tactics. Physics knows this, but is terrified of the implications, and often refuses to discuss the existential and ontological implications of their own Block Universe and Multiverse theories. Consciousness is fundamental to the structure of reality, and death does not apply or even have meaning in such a space.
Dr. Parnia is one of many scientists and medical professionals who are daring to step cautiously outside of the materialist paradigm. But he treads with great caution, lest he end up an object of ridicule, as has happened to Eben Alexander and Robert Lanza, both of whom make a strong case for the eternal nature of consciousness, Alexander through a stunning near-death experience and Lanza through a consideration of biocentrism (we create the Universe, not the other way around). I hope that those courageous voices will continue to speak up, for the opposition is fierce.
The truth shall set us all free, and yes, we can handle the truth.
–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
Jack Osbourne’s “Night of Terror”, The Block Universe, and Quantum Weirdness in the Ghost Shows
Well, it has happened: physics (or intimations of it) now needs to be introduced into the paranormal shows in order to sort through the mishmash of theories that are popping up to explain hauntings. Recently, it’s not just about the spirits of dead people engaging in the classic haunt, but “crossing timelines”, “overlapping dimensions,” and quantum queerness. Jack’s show is the first, I believe, to introduce these concepts and expand upon them by inviting a “time jumper” specialist (still not sure what that is or what she does), but he most certainly will not be the last host of a ghost show to start exploring Theories of Reality. He is right to do so, for the traditional concept of the spirit wandering about and creating havoc or messing with our devices to indicate their presence, well . . . perhaps that is finally fading out as the preferred explanation for bizarre phenomena.
The vast majority of the paranormal shows, the books written about hauntings and “ghosts”, and the entire tradition of studying communication with the “dead” assume three truths:
#1: People have bodies when they are alive, but they also have a soul and a spirit. The soul and the spirit persist in an undefined state after the death of the body.
#2: The soul moves on to the Afterlife, and the spirit can haunt homes and buildings, and be either “intelligent” (capable of interacting with humans attempting to contact it) or “residual”, playing out scenes from its life in endless loops (not capable of interaction).
#3: The spirit can be contacted via various devices designed to prove that it is there interacting with us. A medium can “tap into” the energy of the spirit and give us messages from the Beyond that will be consistent with who they were in life.
However: once you understand some very basic points from modern physics, the picture becomes far more complicated. The classic assumptions about what a “ghost” is, should be questioned now, in light of what we know regarding the Block Universe, Eternalism, and General Relativity: namely, that time is either relative to the observer (Einstein), or that it does not exist at all outside of the human brain (Lanza, Barbour, Rovelli) and shared experience. All one needs to do is to remove time from the equation, and you must interpret paranormal phenomena in a completely different light.
First of all, everyone in a timeless universe contains all aspects of their experience, or lives all their possibilities at once. You are only aware of the events and experiences that you can force into a timeline, so that you can preserve such concepts as cause and effect, action and reaction. Without such mental gymnastics, you could not survive in a world where you experience everything at once–your brain must filter, choose, reduce, and organize information AND PERCEPTION in such a way that time appears to pass smoothly from past to present, from present to future. You need to believe that the future is open and can be created, and that the past is over, complete, and unchangeable, even though none of that is true according to our best theories of how reality works.
You are both alive and dead in the Block Universe (see my previous posts). If, as a “dead” person, your consciousness can roam around timelines and spatial dimensions with a special ability to occupy any zone of the Block Universe that it desires to, then you are, for all intents and purposes, a “ghost” to the you that cannot do such a thing given your current constraints of occupying a body and a narrative that “leads” to your death. This explains the apparitions of the living and déjà vu, that sense that you have experienced your current reality before. Every person, then, contains within them their own “ghost”, even if we are not aware of it.
A haunting, then, is not about a separate thing: the ghost or the spirit. It’s all you or all them in all their ontological states at once. It’s an aspect of you or of someone else that we can engage with in the proper circumstances and in an altered state of consciousness, which the effective paranormal investigations induce. But: it’s all NOW–1860, 2025, 2099, 14 BC–these are points in space, not realities that once existed and now do not. The question is how to ACCESS these points in the Block Universe, how to reach them or interact with them, which is what we are actually doing in the investigation, NOT contacting spirits from the past.
We privilege our point of view, our perception, because we are designed to do that as human animals. However, that perception can and does break down all of the time, and then we realize that the “me” that is on my deathbed is right next to the “me” that is playing checkers in the high school gym. The person that is haunting an old building is only aware of themselves in a present moment, and you are the weird intruder, the person out of place, asking truly bizarre and irrelevant questions. The part of you that is already dead co-exists with what you perceive as happening right now, so your consciousness is always truly free to roam around the Block Universe and have infinite shared experiences with all those other points in space that are someone else. And, whether death returns you to the same old timeline or you get a new body, set of experiences, and even a new planet, it won’t matter, because it’s all real right now, anyway. There is no “will happen”, only “is happening”. So reincarnation makes no sense if it depends on a classical timeline. You are currently living multiple versions of yourself, and who knows? Maybe everybody else, too, if consciousness is unitary and we are simply branches of the tree.
These are the concepts, rooted in real science, that the paranormal shows, books, and media need to start exploring with some rigor and curiosity, because the lost spirit stuck in the past looks more and more like a figment of our collective imagination. Kudos to Jack Osbourne’s show for taking some steps in that direction (see the Virginia City episode).
–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
Ghost Shows and the Terrifying Truths of the Paranormal
Winter 2024–the new year has started with a wicked case of Seasonal Affective Disorder and a sense of dread. This is not how I had hoped to begin a new year and certainly not how I wish to start off a blog post; however, sometimes one’s mood is relevant to the subject at hand–the unexplained, the paranormal, and the haunted.
When I am depressed, I tend to binge watch Ghost Adventures and Destination Fear, among others; for awhile, it was Kindred Spirits and then The Dead Files and pretty much any other show that would take me out of this life and into another one. I suppose that is the link to depression: a desire to transcend this reality, to leave the confines of my mind and the dark sense of entrapment that one’s emotional state can create. The problem is always the same, unfortunately: there are precious few real moments of transcendence in the made for television shows that rarely showcase something truly compelling and inexplicable. But, like any other good addiction, you keep pulling the lever and hoping that you’ll hit the jackpot: real emotion, authentic mystery, and genuine evidence for something beyond this world. It does happen, just not often.
There are some assumptions that all ghost trackers/seekers/hunters make regarding the subject of their inquiry. I am going to list these problems, these issues, that strike at the heart of all ghost shows, and indeed, all paranormal teams that I am familiar with.
#1: Just what IS the subject of our inquiry? Souls? Spirits? Demons? Entities? Fairies? Poltergeists? Can we define what we are looking for? Do we know? A bang down a dark hallway has either no explanation or hundreds. What does it mean? Perhaps nothing. There is a blank space at the center of all of our efforts to contact what we call the “other side”, because we cannot define what we seek, cannot name it, cannot understand it, and indeed, cannot relate it to anything human. We simply do not know what we are contacting or if we are contacting anything; the weird noise, the thrown rock, the closing door, could all be random manifestations of energy that mean nothing at all, except to reflect back to us our own desires and fears. In that case, we are hunting ourselves and creating our own paranormal phenomena.
#2: A location with a violent and tragic history does not guarantee paranormal phenomena will occur. Sweet Springs Sanitarium was the most active of the episodes that I have seen on “Destination Fear”, yet was not the site with the most murders, deaths, and human suffering. Waverly Hills is supposed to be the Holy Grail, as is the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, and yet, those sites do not consistently provide the most terrifying experiences. I have had worse experiences in an unassuming, Southern California tract house that was infested with a demon. And this raises another question: why are we so collectively fascinated with suffering and death? Why, as investigators, is it some kind of badge of honor to dig up the most miserable place that we can find? Are we truly looking for evidence of life after death, or are we psychic and emotional vampires, looking to leech off the drama of others’ suffering? Do we want to “investigate” the paranormal, or profit off pain? My advice to paranormal enthusiasts: don’t forget that the most haunted and active sites can be homes, toy stores, or any little, easy-to-miss building with a past. Whatever reaches out to you does not need to come from an asylum, a prison, or a poorhouse. Sometimes, the most terrifying presence hides in plain sight at the house down the block. When someone/something NEEDS to be heard, WANTS to be heard, or seen, they/it will find a way. And my theory is that fewer EVP at prisons is about the people there feeling resentful and uninterested in the trespassers on their pain. They don’t need investigators asking them questions; if they need anything, it’s help. Which leads me to my next issue:
#3: What is our purpose? Are we investigating for our own entertainment, to profit from the fear response in an audience, to rack up viewers, to mess with our fellow investigators, or to actually learn something? Are we investigating because we are bored, need a shot of adrenaline, are looking to impress each other, outdo each other, or maybe to make a professional or romantic connection? Or, as we would like to think, are we truly interested in contacting whatever remains of the human soul or spirit after death? We need to question our motives regularly and be strictly honest with ourselves regarding the “why” of a paranormal investigation. Is it “fun”? Do we love feeling scared? It is better to know that you are asking questions to the dead in the hopes of running screaming down the hallway because it’s cheaper than a ticket to Disneyland than to pretend you are a serious researcher in search of answers when you are not.
#4: Watch out when you feel oppressed and terrified, yet your gadgets are collecting zero ‘evidence’. In almost every case, when the demonic is present at a location, your para toys and most cherished methods of recording communication will stop working. This happens on the ghost shows and has happened to me, personally. When my camera glitches, the recorder stops, the devices won’t spit out words, and you get the sense that you are being watched or observed, I recommend leaving the area. The demonic doesn’t wish to communicate; it wishes to destroy, to demean, to confuse, and to sow doubt and despair. Don’t mess with it. If you feel a sense of overpowering doom or dread, yet can’t find “evidence” to back it up, consider that you are about to be taken over. Your mood will shift, you will feel anger and/or irritation, your personality will shift and alter in ways that negatively affect others, and there will be a sense of illness and weakness that you can’t pinpoint a cause for. RUN. Don’t let that influence take you over, for that is the goal and the primary intent.
Finally, I want to mention that I have nothing against the ghost shows nor the teams that use classic investigative methods to find “something” or “someone” that has crossed over into unexplored territory and has no body or material form as we know it. I simply want to point out that it is a good idea to know what you are looking for, why you are looking for it, and to protect yourself against evil, which exists most emphatically. It’s a good idea to find God before you risk finding Satan, and if that sounds too Christian, then it’s a good idea to have a spiritual practice that grounds and connects you to the Light before you head into the darkness, not knowing what is waiting for you there.
May you enjoy your adventures. Just please, be careful.
International Society for Paranormal Research 