hit on the head by a meteorite a lunatic.
I have a confession to make. I started research on this book as a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic. I did not believe in the paranormal. I finished writing the book from a different personal perspective. I still maintain a very healthy scepticism about a great deal of so-called ‘evidence’, but I am now convinced that there are many unexplained and fascinating happenings that do not fit into the regular framework of human life, events that can only be encompassed within the definition of paranormal.
I have been greatly helped in researching this book by many experts, whose brains I have picked unashamedly, and to whom the finished product will no doubt appear superficial. To them I quote Oscar Wilde: ‘To be intelligible is to be found out.’ I didn’t set out to further their expertise; I set out to explain to beginners, like myself, just what a vast and fascinating subject this is. I am more concerned with being intelligible than with being found out.
To give you a taste of what the paranormal is all about, let me quote just one of the stories I was told by an acquaintance when she discovered I was writing a book on the subject.
* * *
Dr Betty Cay is an intelligent, well-educated and eminently sensible grandmother, the widow of a GP, and a retired historical geographer in her seventies. As well as spending her days looking after her two grandchildren while her daughter works, she researches and writes local history books, concentrating on areas of her home town, Edinburgh.
Early in 1991 she was trying to put together a book on Saughton, in south-west Edinburgh, and she was running up against a big brick wall. She could not find any information on one crucial small area. She knew that a certain house, known as Sauchton Cottage, was the key to this area. The house, not an impressive manse but an artisan’s dwelling, had been the first to be built in the area, at some time during the eighteenth century. The history of the house and the land that originally surrounded it was fundamental to the history of the development of the area.
‘Because I was looking after the children and running a home for the family, I measured the amount of time I had for research in the odd couple of hours I could squeeze in each day. I was very keen to get on with the book, but I was completely held up by the lack of information I had about this house.
‘I could trace its history back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, but I knew that it went back another hundred years or more and I had no clue as to who had owned it or what land was entailed to it then. If it had been a big, important house, no doubt records would have been kept. But I could find nothing on it.
‘The present occupant of the house was as helpful as possible, and arranged for me to visit his solicitor to see the deeds of the property. But I was told by both him and the solicitor that the paperwork only went back to the start of the twentieth century and I had already got most of that information from other sources.
‘Nevertheless, I went along. The lawyer gave me an empty room to work in and presented me with a typical bundle of legal documents, tied around with red ribbon. On the top was an inventory of all the documents in the pile. I started to work my way through them, taking notes as I went. The papers were in chronological order.
‘Astonishingly, as I progressed, I turned over a document and found underneath it one that dated back to the very beginning of the house in the eighteenth century. It gave the name of the owner of the house and details of his two wives. (He had apparently remarried after his first wife died.) It also gave the name of another woman, who I took to be his third wife.’
The document Dr Cay saw, and from which she made notes, was a ‘memorandum on a feu charter’: a feu charter being an old Scottish term for a conveyancing deed. Dr Cay was able to get all the details she needed about the early days of the house from the document. With it was another eighteenth-century document that was not relevant and did not help her at all.
She continued with her note-taking, moving on to the much more recent documents which covered the early years of this century. Eventually, constrained by lack of time, she re-bundled the documents in the order in which she had found them, noting from the inventory on the front that her eighteenth-century documents were listed, out of chronology, at the end of all the others. She told the solicitor that she would like to return again the following day to do some more research, and the bundle of papers was left out on the desk for her to resume her research.
The next day she was shocked to find that the eighteenth-century documents were no longer in the pile. What’s more, they were not included on the inventory. Upset, Dr Cay called the lawyer, who was in another office. The lawyer insisted that there had never been any eighteenth-century paperwork in the bundle, that there were no papers missing, and that, as Dr Cay had originally been told, it was only possible to trace back ownership of the house through the deeds to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Perplexed, Dr Cay was inclined to wonder whether she had hallucinated the existence of the documents. But she knew she had handled them and read them and she had the evidence of her own notebook in which she had copied out details from them.
Taking the names of the owner and his wives that she had copied from the document, she was able to trace them at Edinburgh’s Register House in the official births, marriages and deaths registers. (Scotland was more efficient than England at starting and keeping good records.) Without the initial input of the names from the ‘non-existent’ document, she would have had no way of knowing where to start. She was able ultimately to find out that the woman she thought was the original owner’s third wife was, in fact, the woman to whom he sold the house.
‘Eventually, everything slotted into place and I was able to trace the early years of the property. Yet the document I used did not exist! Without having seen it, I could have spent years floundering through records and still never have come up with the information I needed.’
Dr Cay has no explanation to offer for her experience. She believes she may have hallucinated when she saw the documents listed on the inventory, but she is certain that the documents themselves were real enough.
Were they hallucinations? Did she already have the information buried somewhere in her subconscious mind (this is highly unlikely, considering the particular and precise nature of the information involved)? Was her mind in some way tuning in to another source of the material? Was her need (she was desperately short of time for her research) a factor in helping her ‘find’ the information? If so, why was there also another, irrelevant, document among the bundle?
There are no easy answers to these question or to most of those posed by the paranormal. But there is no shortage of questions. While this book cannot attempt to ask them all, it looks at some of the main ones, and the work that is going on to try to come up with some of the answers.
What have Prime Minister Gladstone, Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley got in common? The answer is that they were all members of the Society for Psychical Research, a pioneering and highly-respected body set up in London in 1882 with the aim of investigating paranormal phenomena ‘without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated’.
The Society was born out of the general disquiet at the end of the nineteenth century about the nature of the universe. This was before science had taken its quantum leap into the twentieth century, and the prevailing wisdom was that we lived in a mechanical world in which everything – every action and reaction – could be scientifically explained. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had only added to the feeling of being very tiny cogs in a huge well-oiled machine. But the idea that human beings were not the specially-designed central focus of all creation and were simply highly-evolved monkeys, the ‘animals with the big brain’, took a lot of getting used to. There was an undercurrent of belief that this could not be all.
Religion