Hi there, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Scholar Minor.
It is now officially my very favorite time of year - Halloween season - and the increasingly gloomy weather and autumnal foliage has gotten me in the mood for spooky subjects. Back in March - if you can believe it - we talked about poltergeist phenomena, and how mischievous spirits have been confounding parapsychologists and paranormal investigators for a long, long time.
This week, we are returning for Part 2 of Scholar Minor’s ghost series for an introduction to one of the most interesting - in my opinion - theories of paranormal phenomena: residual hauntings.
I would describe myself as an optimistic skeptic when it comes to ghosts and hauntings. I would love for ghosts to be real, but I recognize that the human brain and the natural world are capable of truly strange things all on their own - that my own mind may very well be an unreliable narrator as it were.
I live in a tiny duplex built in the 1930s - quite old for the West Coast of the United States - and while we will occasionally hear a bump in the night or some creaky floorboards, I acknowledge that most often I’m probably hearing very normal, old house sounds.
A few times in my life, however, I have encountered a ghostly experience that I have not been able to write off so easily. My parents’ old farmhouse still boasts disembodied footsteps, electronics behaving strangely, and other weird happenings that I’ve had a little more difficulty explaining away over the years.
While the existence of paranormal activity is a conclusion everyone draws for themselves, based on their personal experiences and their cultural or religious background, the way that folks have approached inexplicable encounters with the unusual is fascinating. So this week, we’ll be talking a bit about residual hauntings and some of the theories and key players in trying to make sense of the unexplained.
Thanks for joining me once again and enjoy.
In our Poltergeists episode, we discussed how most modern paranormal investigators divide ghostly phenomena into two categories: residual hauntings and intelligent hauntings. This differentiation is based on whether or not a haunting seems to possess a consciousness that interacts with the world around it - a poltergeist throwing stones at an investigator, for example - or whether the spiritual presence appears to be acting out patterns from its lifetime and unaware of the living humans in its presence.
If you have indulged in any paranormal investigation shows, or if you are familiar with ghost stories in general, you may have heard of hauntings that seem disconnected from their modern location. The sound of someone descending a staircase, for example, in a place where there is no staircase - but there was at one time in the past. This is what would be referred to as a residual haunting.
A famous example of a residual haunting is the tale of the ghost of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of English King Henry VIII. When she was only 19 years old, Catherine was beheaded for treason and adultery, and accounts tell us that Catherine broke free from her guards at Hampton Court, running through the halls screaming for the mercy of the king. The guards caught up to her quickly, but a widely reported phenomena at Hampton Court Palace is that of disembodied screaming and running sounds in what is now called the "Haunted Gallery".
Ghosts like Catherine Howard's are believed to be attached to a place - it's almost as if the place itself has a memory of the events that occurred there and is replaying them. So where did this theory come from? Well, for insight, we can turn to what is arguably the spookiest of centuries - the 19th. And we can start with a gentleman who may seem an unlikely player at first glance: Charles Babbage, the "father of the computer".
In 1821, Babbage invented the Difference Engine - a machine that could complete mathematical tables, and by 1856, he had created the Analytical Engine. Babbage was responsible for the creation of the first machines that could make calculations. Until the end of his days, Babbage would work on calculating machinery, but this talented mathematician and inventor had significant interest in theology and philosophy as well.
In 1837, Charles Babbage published the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a work focused on natural theology. And in that work, Babbage suggested that human voices may remain imprinted into the material world that surrounds them.
"The pulsations of the air," writes Babbage, "Once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Strong and audible as they may be in the immediate neighbourhood of the speaker, and at the immediate moment of utterance, their quickly attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears.
The motions they have impressed upon the particle of one portion of our atmosphere, are communicated to constantly increasing numbers, but the quantity of motion measured in the same direction receives no addition. Each atom loses as much as it gives, and regains again from others, portions of those motions which they in turn give up."
Babbage explains his belief that speech, through its ability to displace the atoms of the atmosphere, leaves an imprint in the materials around it - like an atomic-level echo.
"There, in their mutable but unerring characters," he writes, "Mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will. But if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are in like manner the eternal witnesses of the acts we have done."
The concept of physical places somehow recording the voices and actions of human beings was a heated topic of debate and research among academics, philosophers, scientists, and parapsychologists by the turn of the century. Residual spiritual phenomena became a subject of great interest for the Society for Psychical Research, with further experimentation conducted by intellectual minds like physicist Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick and psychologist Edmund Gurney, the latter of which had dedicated much of his work to the continuation of human consciousness following the death of the physical body.
Many parapsychologists over time have theorized that some connection exists between the wiring of the human brain and paranormal activity. We see this in the ideas surrounding poltergeist phenomena - that somehow adolescents often become the focal point of spirit activity. Some parapsychologists even suggest that poltergeist activity may not be the result of a spirit at all - but a kind of psychokinesis acted out by a living human individual.
Similarly, paranormal researchers began to consider that perhaps residual hauntings were also connected to the mysterious powers of the human brain. A moment of extreme emotion - like Catherine calling out for King Henry’s mercy - would create more of an imprint on its surrounding environment.
In 1972, a teleplay titled The Stone Tape was broadcast on BBC Two as a spooky Christmas special. It was written by Nigel Kneale, and directed by Peter Sasdy. This play drew heavily from the research of the parapsychologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, so much so that this type of imprinted spiritual phenomena is known as the Stone Tape Theory.
In the play, a group of scientists who work with recordings and electronics are trying to discover a new recording medium. They move into a renovated Victorian mansion to conduct their experiments. The workmen in charge of the conversion refused to enter one of the rooms, saying that it is haunted - and the electrics company uncover a hidden staircase that has been boarded up behind a fake wall.
One of the employees, Jill, sees a woman screaming at the top of the mysterious staircase. After further investigation, multiple others in the group begin to encounter the spirit - some only hearing her scream, some sensing her presence, some seeing a visible apparition, and some experiencing nothing at all.
“It must act like a recording,” the lead character Peter Brock explains, “in the floor, and the walls. Right in the substance of them, a trace of what happened in there. And we pick it up. We act as detectors, decoders, amplifiers.”
As tempted as I am to give away the ending, The Stone Tape is available in full on YouTube. While I do recommend checking it out - it’s genuinely creepy, and well-acted, it is from the early 1970s. There is some racial content that is quite uncomfortable - so please be aware. Though it has some issues, the Stone Tape is an incredibly influential piece of media - with references popping up in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness and Tobe Hooper and Steven Speilberg’s Poltergeist.
Hauntings of any kind have a pretty negative reputation. And theories suggesting they are connected to incidents of overpowering human emotion definitely add to that reputation. But not all residual hauntings reflect a traumatic incident, like The Stone Tape’s maid falling down the staircase or the brief escape of Catherine.
Some parapsychologists have theorized that residual hauntings may be the result of repeated, habitual occurrences. To explain - think about Charles Babbages ideas of voices altering their environment and leaving an imprint behind them. If a sound or an event is repeated over and over again in the physical world, this could suggest that it makes a deeper imprint in its environment.
A helpful metaphor would be a hallway carpet. Even if no person is present in the hallway, a route that has been used for many years will be reflected in the wear and tear of the carpeting. You can see the route that inhabitants of the home use. And that’s similar to a residual haunting. And imprint left after years and years of the same thing.
My family and I recently visited the famous Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California and had a lovely time - though after some research, poor Sarah Winchester may be undeserving of her frightening reputation - a subject for another podcast. Either way, our wonderful tour guide described a haunting encountered in the house’s basement near the coal furnace used for heating.
Witnesses have seen a man who worked on the property moving coal to and from the furnace with his wheelbarrow. This is a behavior that he would have done countless times, along the same route, in the same place, for many years. The same apparition is also seen repairing a fireplace in the house, seemingly unaware of passersby. Again, these are actions that were repeated many, many times - perhaps so many that they are permanently imprinted in their environment.
So if you live in an old home and occasionally hear mysterious footsteps, it’s not necessarily a place where something terrible happened. It might just be somewhere that’s been lived in.
That’s all for us today, friends. I hope you learned something new about ghostly phenomena. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, paranormal theory is an extremely interesting rabbit hole to read and learn about.
My references, as usual, are listed in the show notes - and if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to Scholar Minor wherever you find your podcasts, including on YouTube.
Thanks for listening, be safe, and I’ll talk to you again soon.