Quite some time ago, possibly as a teenager, I was doing that very common teenager thing of being interested in hauntings and ghosts, but I felt very dubious about the idea that supernatural spirits of the dead were responsible for them. I came across the idea that ghosts appeared to walk through walls because the walls weren’t there while the person was alive, and this triggered a thought in me that I’d never come across before. What if ghosts are like the footprints of people recorded in their surroundings? This idea had the appeal that although it did seem to evoke an unknown mechanism, it didn’t require me to accept that the mind and body were co-existing entities with the same ontological status. That is, I didn’t have to believe that souls existed independently of the body in order to believe in ghosts.
This is, it seems, what’s popularly known as the “Stone Tape Theory”, a name popularised by its use as the title of a BBC TV play broadcast in about 1972. I haven’t seen it but I want to, and it’s here if you want to watch it. The general idea is that something in the environment of an occurrence retains a trace of certain events which can be recovered, and in particular “play back” into the minds of certain individuals when they’re in the same place. Most people who interpret anecdotes of haunting who accept this idea also believe that it’s only one of two main categories of haunting, the other of which does involve currently conscious entities.
I have a vague recollection that I’ve covered this here before, incidentally. If so, I apologise but I have a new angle on this so it’s still worth reading. I think it’s interesting that this thought occurred to me independently, although this in itself isn’t evidence for it being true. What is rather surprising is the reputation of other people who have thought of and worked on it, because one of them was the respected academic philosopher H H Price, and another was none other than Charles Babbage! Papers have been written on this hypothesis, notably a chapter in Babbage’s own work ‘The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise’ and a 2005 article in an Australian parapsychological journal. My immediate response to this is that in the case of H H Price, who was born in the late nineteenth century, and Babbage, who wrote on this early in the same century, this reflects a different approach to the corpus of scientific inquiry. The scientific shift away from the idea that there might be psionic phenomena is relatively recent: I can remember a teacher in the 1980s telling our class that the chances were that some of us were actually psychic, and although he may or may not have been out of line to say this, it does illustrate how mainstream the idea of psionics was only a few decades ago. However, another aspect of this is that it isn’t inevitably an idea that the supernatural exists, although it does tend to be taken that way by many.
Babbage’s thought was along the lines that although sound attenuates rapidly, it never attenuates to complete silence. Hence a sound, once produced, moves air molecules (for example) ever less but they never reach total rest. This concept makes a lot more sense in a pre-quantum physics and pre-chaos theory era, because there is then the thought that the physical world is infinitely divisible. Hence a sound is dwindling constantly, below even atomic scale, but its effects are never completely absent. Part of Babbage’s claim was that if all the causative factors for the motion and position, my words by the way, of air molecules could be determined sufficiently accurately, it would always be possible to “wind back the clock” to the point where details of the sound could be recovered. This reminds me of the “octogram”, which is apparently eluded to in ‘Black Mirror’ when a guinea pig who witnesses a murder has their brain scanned to recover memories of that event. This is very like the idea that the last image seen by a dying human remains on their retina. Sadly, an experiment was once done on a rabbit where a photograph was obtained of the last image they saw, although the circumstances were artificial and involved the rabbit’s eyes being placed in front of a well-lit image for a very long time or something – I may be misremembering but I’m not keen on being that accurate about findings obtained via vivisection so I’m not going to put much effort into it. Less unethical is the situation which arises sometimes with the eyes of trilobites, those amazingly successful marine arthropods who lived in the Paleozoic Era, the lenses of whose eyes sometimes still work when their fossils are recovered, meaning that they are now “seeing” the world of the 21st century CE, more than 200 million years after their deaths.
The problem with Babbage’s idea is that even in effectively silent conditions, thermal noise would overwhelm any recoverable data. An exceedingly loud noise could be preserved on this planet if it could encircle it, lasting perhaps around seventeen hours and actually being concentrated in the antipodes of the event, as happens on some bodies with major asteroid impacts. This feasibly happened with the Chicxulub Impact which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, and earthquakes sometimes cause the whole planet to resonate for a relatively long period of time. There are also Schumann Resonances, which I’ll come back to. Besides this, it’s very obvious that events occur within chains of cause and effect, and therefore it’s trivially true that how things are now is the result of events in the distant past, all the way back to the Big Bang. However, a resounding echo is not the same as a recording on a wax cylinder or cassette.
There are certainly instances of phenomena which were not accepted by scientists because the conditions in which they operated could not be easily reproduced or observed. Will o’ the wisp is one of these which is particularly reminiscent of Stone Tape Theory. This is the appearance of lights above decomposition, sometimes of buried bodies, which was for a long time considered to be mere superstition but is now accepted as phosphorescence caused by bacteria acting on the body. Ball lightning is another one. I do have a bit of an issue with this, as I can think of at least three instances in Leicester of what seemed to be reliable reports of what seemed to be hauntings in old buildings or their grounds. With one of these, the witness described a woman in a pub cellar and they were completely unaware of the reputation of the building as haunted by this person but were told later of the details of what they were expected to have seen, so here I have to choose between not taking their testimony seriously and actually believing they observed something hard to explain naturalistically. I have chosen to trust them. It also seems that it’s better to opt for an explanation which doesn’t require evoking the spirits of the departed, and therefore I feel a lot of sympathy for this hypothesis.
Very similar, perhaps even the same, to this is the notion of “place memory”, which the Society for Psychical Research has used to explain ghosts. Here, quartz or limestone is hypothesised to form a suitable medium to be impressed by events in its vicinity. The paranormal enthusiast Thomas Charles Lethbridge, an archaeologist and graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, believed ghosts were impressions of living humans made on invisible fields. Clearly the point at which one utters the words “invisible fields” may be the stage after which one will not be taken seriously, but nobody would deny that invisible fields exist, such as magnetic or gravitational ones. The problem is that the assertion seems to involve the existence of an unproven form of energy. Lethbridge may have believed there was indeed such a fifth force of nature, although since he also rejected evolution I have to admit that I want to go ad hominem on him. He referred, however, to H H Price, whose talk, also published, ‘Haunting And The “Psychic Ether” Hypothesis’ is quite a methodical breakdown of the idea. Price was a respected philosopher who did a lot of work on perception and dreaming. He believed there were two types of haunting, one with physical effects and one without. It’s a little confusing that he describes them in this way because seeing something is a physical effect if that’s considered to be caused by light hitting the retina as opposed to an hallucination, and even if it is such a thing, the physical effects are presumably happening in the brain, but are still physical. Nonetheless there is a less precise sense in which his division is satisfactory to a casual reader. The second type is poltergeist activity and less relevant to the hypothesis. The first is where people experience odours, physical contact or noises, and presumably apparitions and chills. This is not a revenant, i.e. someone returning from the dead after a long absence, but rather a trace which is “developed” in a manner analogous to a photograph when a suitable person enters the room (for example). This is called the “Psychometrical Theory of Haunting”, since the idea is similar to psychometry in the parapsychological use of the word.
Just to explain this, I currently have my mother’s wedding ring on my finger. I transferred it from her ring finger to mine soon after her death. Clearly this ring has emotional significance to myself and her, although it’s worth mentioning that it wasn’t her actual wedding ring but one she wore in order to put men off harassing her after her divorce and it serves a similar purpose on my finger. Anyway, for whatever reason it seems to make sense to the sentimental mind that something so close and personal would be charged with some kind of energy, something which has been called “cathexis”. Psychometry is the idea that objects personal to someone carry such an energy which can be used by a psychic, for example to trace a dead body. This certainly makes sense psychologically. When I was training as a herbalist, I visited a herb garret where a saw which had been used to amputate legs was displayed. Irrational though it may be, I struggle to conceive of this piece of steel not being imbued with some kind of cathexis, either of hope or suffering. Sexual and spiritual fetishism may sometimes have the same elements, different in detail.
One version of place memory is the idea of a large object such as a room or building being charged with cathexis in the same way as my mother’s wedding ring might be. The sensations played back to someone while they’re there are similar to a person presumed to be sensitive to this kind of thing being able to glean information from such an object, although I imagine most people would say there’s a difference because I get the impression that haunted places are usually haunted for lots of people rather than a small set of talented individuals, as it were. Price’s view seems to be that there is a psychic “ether” on which impressions have been made. The use of the word “ether” refers back to the idea of a now-disproven medium pervading all space in which light, radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation is propagated like atomic and molecular matter is for sound. Price’s view is that there is a similar such medium which records events and can later be played back. He also believed that memories could become detached from individuals and inhere in the environment, so this may be part of the same belief system.
A more naturalistic version of this is also proposed. Place memory is further subdivided into active and passive forms. Active place memory is the result of psychokinesis, and I presume here once again the writers have poltergeist activity in mind. Its passive correspondent results from proximity, recency and repetition. In other words, it’s similar to magnetisation and this may not be coincidental. It does occur to me that some very prosaic activities could be preserved in this way, such as someone going to the toilet or making a cuppa, although it often seems that strong emotions should be involved. This is where Schumann resonances come in. This is the way lightning sends out extremely low frequency radio waves which reflect off the ionosphere, becoming a radio wave trapped inside the atmosphere with a frequency equivalent to the circumference of the planet, which would be around 1.4 decahertz. Hence it really is the case that for a while, the ionosphere causes a record of thunderstorms on Earth’s surface. The non-psionic version of the psi field theory is that geomagnetic storms record events like a hologram. Holograms are interference patterns between a reference laser beam and an identical copy of that laser beam which has illuminated an object, Earth’s crust being a recording medium in this similar process. This, however, completely bypasses the idea of emotional significance or psychometry.
It’s been noted that this idea has similarities to homoeopathy and the so-called memory of water, and this leads me in a direction I try to avoid because as a herbalist this subject is rather sensitive. That said, I will make a couple of comments about K-skepticism in this area. In order to test a homoeopath’s claims, it would probably be necessary for them to sit down with skeptics and negotiate a means of designing a test with good ecological validity, as the usual activities in this area lack that. Nonetheless I will “go there” without committing myself to belief or disbelief in the claims. There is an idea often connected to homoeopathy that the way it works is that the water receives an impression of the marc which can be replicated. I will just say two things here: there are moths who use pheromones over kilometres to locate their mates, whom they can then find by going in the right direction, and there are sharks who can find their prey with such little amounts of blood in the water that their chances of picking up a single molecule are very small. This I find interestingly similar to homoeopathy, but won’t be committing myself to an opinion on it.
Water is a very unusual substance which can maintain a structure even when liquid. It also forms cages of molecules around the likes of enzymes. This gives weight to the idea that placing a substance in water and then removing it does not return the water to the same state as it was in before the substance was introduce. Sometimes this is just crassly obvious. For instance, dropping an alkali metal into water and then taking it out will leave the water at a higher temperature. At other times it’s more contentious. I have an image in my mind which I will now describe without pledging allegiance to its veracity or otherwise. A marc is placed in water, say a particular protein molecule such as haemoglobin. This causes water molecules in the menstruum to bond weakly with each other, forming a particular motif which can replicate itself independently. After the haemoglobin is removed, this replication continues until it reaches the olfactory receptors of a shark’s nose, and the shark can then smell the haemoglobin in spite of the fact that it hasn’t encountered an actual molecule.
The situation with the moth, however, is somewhat different because the animal is smelling air rather than water, unless the “memory” is carried in water vapour. This particular trace would seem to have to work in a different way. The medium carrying the message is different, the message is different, and yet the message still gets through without the physical presence of the stimulus. In a way, this shouldn’t be very surprising because light and sound also work in this way. The controversy emerges from the problem of there being no known medium for the recording.
If “stone tape” really happens, it could have an interesting side effect. The objects we see during a haunting are three-dimensional: “in the round”. The only way this kind of illusion has been achieved in the real world is via Pepper’s Ghost, where a large sheet of reflective transparent material, usually glass, reflects an actor or other objects. This has been made rather closer to a three-dimensional solid in the geometrical sense by using several panes at angles to each other, but this prevents entry to the virtual space where the object is located. If Pepper’s Ghost were to be replaced, as it were, by a real ghost, a science fictional three dimensional display may be feasible, though by currently unknown methods. It would mean that something is making three-dimensional kinetic recordings of events which include various sensory modalities, in particular odours, which have always escaped the grasp of media in anything like a realistic way. Even now, almost two centuries after photography was invented, we still have to have actors commenting on smells in movies and TV programmes because they’re irreproducible, in the same way as radio scripts have to take the visual into account via acting and description. Just maybe, there is something out there which can do all this. And it seems to be an analogue medium.
Maybe my open mind needs to be closed for repairs, but there is yet another aspect of this which would be interesting if true but probably isn’t. There have been rumours that the Vatican has a machine for viewing the past. The genuine sceptical position would be to hold no position on the truth or falsity of this, although of course it does really strain credibility that such a device exists. This is a particularly outlandish claim. In more detail, the Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed that he worked with a number of scientists including Wernher von Braun and Enrico Fermi, to develop a time viewer consisting of a cathode ray tube, various antennae and metals to produce images from the past, including the Crucifixion, Cicero giving an oration and a performance of the lost Euripides play ‘Thyestes’. The Vatican’s interest in such a method was to verify Biblical events, presumably particularly those from the life of Jesus. There’s even a rather sketchy diagram of the device:
It seems a little far-fetched that any of this happened, by which I mean the Chronovisor. There is an alleged photograph of Jesus which is in fact just a photo of a painting known to exist before Ernetti made his claims public. The Vatican decreed in 1988 that someone using a chronovisor would be excommunicated, which is a little odd for a machine which doesn’t exist, but is probably along the same lines as the Chinese government making time travel illegal.
The thing that really got me about the Chronovisor is that it used a CRT. This is strange because it suggests there was an analogue video camera at the other end, or if not that, that a formatted signal of some kind could be received from the past. This assumes, of course, that the CRT is a scanning one as found in old television sets or computer monitors. There are other kinds of CRT, such as oscilloscopes and the Crookes Tube, which simply shows a shadow of the object permanently fixed inside it, but the picture of Jesus shown above is not just a shadow. If you take away the time travel element, how would this device work exactly? It has a television screen but no corresponding camera. Why would it pick up more than just static? That said, it clearly is possible to project images onto a screen, as with a camera obscura, camera lucida, or just a film viewer. The difficulty is that this seems to have an intervening mechanism.
Place memory seems to need a person in the present to produce images of the past. Entertaining the idea that it happens, would it be confined to specific events or need a specific psychological type to view it? Would it be possible to work out what it is about the people that see ghosts, simplify that and reproduce it in a machine or by other methods? Does it require a conscious mind, or perhaps a soul, to do it? As far as events are concerned, it seems that strong emotions embed the scenes or perhaps repetition, but what if everything leaves a trace and they could be tuned into by physical means, like focussing a lens or adjusting a tuning control? Ernetti did claim that this was possible, and he also said the machine worked like a television, capturing echoes that were floating in space. This sounds very much like the Psychic Ether hypothesis, which is not to claim that he was telling the truth so much as a way of tracing the ideas he based his chronovisor tale on.
To close, this raises another rather interesting possibility. Price claimed that memories sometimes become detached from individual minds and attached to objects. This is somewhat similar to two other thoughts. One is that of Gottlob Frege, who claimed that the concept was not present in the mind but existed in relation to it, so the idea was out there waiting to be thought. It’s also a little like Charles Fort’s “steam engine time”, where an idea’s time comes and is brought into consciousness because the time is ripe, not in a mystical way but because it’s the shape of the missing jigsaw piece. An example I’ve mentioned before is the plot of the novels ‘The Hermes Fall’ and ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’, which are very similar but apparently thought of entirely innocently without any plagiarism. What if the idea of Stone Tape Theory is itself one of these archetypal things? It might have an independent existence from the human mind and simply have waited for someone to think of it.
I don’t have a particular urge to believe this hypothesis as fact. I like that there is a non-supernatural explanation for ghosts which is, however, tinged with magical thinking and evokes unknown physical processes, and I must remain agnostic on this for the sake of sanity, but I also think it works well as an SF idea and has possibilities. Also, this is SF and not fantasy, because the technobabble around it is not actually that far from established science and is definitely closer than a lot of what, for instance, ‘Star Trek’ comes up with.
A Box Of Chocolates 