Too busy for ghosts

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Sorry, no time.

Hallowe’en’s but a few short weeks away, and it’s supposed to be the time of the dead, when “the veils are thinnest ‘tween worlds”. Yet, outside obvious fiction, when was the last time you heard of a young ghost?

Recently I reviewed Claude Lecouteux’s The Return of the Dead for SpiralNature.com.¹ In it, the author  delves into Germanic and Scandinavian folklore to discover their pre-Christian beliefs about death and the afterlife, focusing on ghosts and revenants in particular.

He was writing of a time when they were taken to be a very real phenomena, yet for the mainstream, this no longer holds. He writes:

In terms of evolution, having suffered the outrages of time and history, revenants have lost almost everything that distinguished them: their physicality and their powers. They no longer kill or threaten, nor do they perform domestic tasks. They are no longer the tutelary or wicked spirits of an earlier age. Ordinarily, they appear mute, using their eyes or gestures to express what they wish to say, but they no longer have the power to express themselves with words because they are no longer of this world.²

Lecouteux attributes their decline to “specialists” and the anonymity of death: “people no longer die at home, surrounded by family, but in hospitals or hospices, from where they are taken to stone gardens on the periphery of the community of the living…”³ Our changing attitudes towards death have lead to an end: “the door to the otherworld has closed, and the beyond keeps our elders for eternity.”⁴ Whether one takes a spiritual or psychological view on this, I’m inclined to agree.

Sean Thomas wrote a piece for the Guardian back in 2004 that spoke of “the mysterious death of the paranormal”, noting the decline in incidents of reporting of hauntings, Nessie sightings, abductions and other weird stuff.

Tony Cornell, vice-president of the UK’s Society for Psychical Research, put it this way:

I personally believe the decline in hauntings may simply be because people haven’t got time to see ghosts any more. These days people are always rushing around, playing computer games, surfing the net, and such activities aren’t great for experiencing apparitions.⁵

And yet, earlier today BoingBoing linked to the website scienceofscams.org, which purports to explain the “secret science” (secret? seriously? no.) behind various “paranormal” claims. I’m having difficulty determining whether it’s aimed at children or just the hyper social media-aware. Perhaps both.

The videos are hosted by “mentalist/magician” Derren Brown and Kat Akingbade who fills the role of The Scientist. (Kind of like a British Bill Nye tag team.) But I suppose the larger question is, do things like the “psi wheel” really need debunking anymore?

On the hand we have an obvious decline in everyday belief in the “paranormal”, on the other we continue to see shows like this one mocking a credulous public. But where is this credulous public?

Footnotes:

1. Read the review of The Return of the Dead on SpiralNature.com. [back]
2. Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead, p. 228 [back]
3. ibid., p. 229 [back]
4. ibid., p. 229 [back]
5. Guardian.co.uk, “What’s happened to the weird?“ [back]

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