Post by Graveyardbride on Oct 10, 2014 14:23:00 GMT -5
Ghosts Have Always Been with Us
Dance of the Dead. Ghosts are eternal in at least one sense: They have always been with us, terrifying our ancient ancestors and persisting through the millennia to intrigue more enlightened minds. Before beginning your own search for revenants, it is useful to know how others have envisioned them.
To anyone who has ever experienced the chilling sensation that an unseen someone, or something, is hovering nearby, there is no question that ghosts are real. But even if this were not so – even if ghosts dis not exist – we would probably have invented them. They are, if nothing else, a basic human response to the mystery of death.
We can imagine our most ancient ancestors, faced for the first time with grief and loss, grappling with the unacceptable notion of extinction. Finding it too hard to bear, they must have formulated beliefs that allowed for the dead to linger in this world, still accessible to the living. Along with easing sorrow, such beliefs would have offered hope: If our dead loved ones survive in spirit form, then so might we; death – the manifestly terrible corruption of the body – need not extinguish the soul.
It must have occurred to those long-ago people soon enough, however, that postmortem existence was an idea that cut both ways. The spirits can comfort, but they can also threaten – lingering forever, fearsomely and maliciously immortal. One can imagine a Neanderthal man strutting triumphantly away from a fatally clubbed enemy, only to pause, wondering for the first time in history whether that crumpled form might yet have his revenge. And then, this prototype haunted humanoid might have tiptoed back and covered the body with stones, just to be on the safe side.
The same dichotomy that must have troubled our ancient forbears is still with us: We long for ghosts as a comfort and as proof of an afterlife, but we also dread them. The nature of our reaction lies in part in the nature of the particular ghost. Everyone knows stories of protective and helpful ghosts, the ones that offer sage advice to the living, or show up just in time to warn of impending disaster. There are even cuddly parodies of ghosts – the friendly cartoon Casper, for instance, or the sheet-draped youngsters who show up annually with the Halloween ultimatum, “Trick or Treat.”
Even frightening revenants can delight us, as long as we don’t have to confront them personally: they can make us safely afraid. Believers and nonbelievers alike are apt to recall fondly the delicious shiver of childhood fear that went with hearing a good ghost story, and the most skeptical adult may not be immune to the well-told ghost tales of M. R. James or Shirley Jackson or to the film versions of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” or Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. In these cases, the listeners or readers or viewers know, after all, that the ghosts are not real. Similarly, Elizabethan audiences – many of whom accepted the reality of ghosts without question – probably enjoyed watching Banquo’s blood-smeared ghost show up at dinner to rattle his old friend Macbeth, or the ghost of Hamlet’s father drift out of the mist to deliver his bad ness. Plausible or not, these ghosts were somebody else’s problem.
Why Ghosts are Frightening. But spectral pleasures notwithstanding, the idea of actually encountering a ghost – even the notion that spirits of the dead truly exist – is enough to make most of us shudder. Perhaps this is because ghosts remind us of our own mortality. Or maybe we fear their power., the force that comes from a knowledge no living mortal can match. They have penetrated the ultimate mystery, death itself, and they know what lies beyond. If they turn out to be our enemies, they are enemies with clout. Perhaps we fear them because these creatures of another realm are so alien to the living, so utterly different from us. On the other hand, perhaps we fear them because they are not.
One person who holds the latter view is a man who should know: Stephen King, the novelist who has made a multimillion-dollar industry out of pinpointing with uncanny accuracy what scares us. In his Danse Macabre, a book-length essay on the horror genre, King proposes that ghosts are Freudianly frightening because they are just like us – the dark, untrammeled, irrational side of us all. “We fear the Ghost for much the same reason we fear the Werewolf,” King writes. “It is the deep part of us that need not be bound by piffling Appolonian restrictions. It can walk through walls, disappear, speak in the voices of strangers. It is the Dionysian part of us ... but it is still us.” So terrifying are these postmortem alter-egos, in fact, that King classifies the Ghost as the most potent of the four supernatural archetypes (the others being the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name). The Ghost, says the master of horror, is “really more than symbol or archetype, it is a major part of that myth-pool in which we all must bathe.”
Ghostly History. As King’s mention of archetypes suggests, we modern humans are hardly the first to test the myth-pool’s waters. In primitive societies, signs of humanities early notions of ghostliness are still on the surface, showing where we all have been. the tribes of inland New Guinea still believe the last breath of the dying is a spirit that takes the form of a bird. The same belief is suggested in the 15,000-year-old cave paintings near the French town of Lascaux. In fact, the whole aboriginal world was populated with spirits – of humans, animals, the heavens, even rivers, stones and trees. When life fled, it fled into that teeming universe of spirits; it embarked on a journey that wasn’t headed for oblivion but for some domain beyond our own.
The Egyptians ramified that simple journey into a excursion not by a single entity, but by a tripartite one: the bird-like ba, or heart-soul, fluttering away from the body at death, but never far away; the mysterious ka, which could survive the death of the physical body by taking up residence in a statue or some other effigy; and the akh, the part of the human soul that could take any form and revisit the living as a ghost.
In ancient Greece, the soul became less elaborate – more spartan, you could say. There was, as Homer reported, a body-soul that animated the corporeal self, and a free soul, a kind of objective life force. At death, the free soul departed, leaving the body a dune of “senseless earth.” But there remained the eidolon, or image of the self, which roamed the earth aimlessly until the body was cremated. Only then could this essential substanceless self – this ghost – turn toward the underworld abode of the dead. Given the stakes, the Greeks were quick to cremate.
The idea of the ethereal drifter is still with us, despite the fact that human understanding has become so broad and complicated that most mysteries have evaporated in its glare. We know that birds are not the revived spirits of the dead; we know that life is not entirely breath or blood, that rocks reveal their souls only to geologists, stars only to astronomers. In our culture, the body has become somewhat renewable; organs can be replaced, and we can ameliorate or cure more maladies than ever. Even so, there remains that persistent tug of doubt, that suspicion that no matter how much we know, some mysteries my go forever unplumbed. And in this dwindling no-man’s-land of the mind, there is still room for ghosts.
The Ghosts We Love. In truth, our favorite ghosts are the ones most at home in the mind, those who have kept themselves as multiform and evanescent as thought itself. The others – the ones that rattle chains or jiggle tables or fluoresce in the darkness with moans and groans – are not the stuff of true terror and can easily be faked. To be properly haunted, we need something that no one can explain: a woman in white, the human form in flight, apparitions in the shape of their real-world counterparts, or long-dead celebrities coaxed to speech by the sensitivities of living ones. They ghosts we love are the ghosts we create with our imagination.
Like the grief and fear and love and loathing that produce them, ghosts are stamped with such properties as we suppose them to have. Fiction gives us what we would like to be the real thing and it tells us what to expect in the way of hauntings. Where we expect retribution, we see fearsome ghosts, like the vengeful shades that haunt Shakespeare’s Richard III. Amateur murderers, fictional or real, are visited by the spirits of their victims, or thing they are. Only the killer in Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” can hear the throbbing of his victim’s heart, but to him the sound is thunderous.
Ghosts are nowhere more satisfactory than in motion pictures, where specters find stone walls transparent and work all sorts of wonders. Who wouldn’t want to have someone around as amusing as Charles Laughton’s chubby, chicken-hearted Canterville Ghost? What lonely young woman wouldn’t want to buy a seaside cottage, like Mrs. Muir’s, and find it haunted by the irascible sea captain created by Rex Harrison? What woman would shun the tender protection of her lover’s spirit, refusing to play – à la Ghost – Demi Moore to his Patrick Swayze? And the ghosts manufactured by creative minds need not be appealing to be compelling. Think of the awesome evil that pervades the Overlook Hotel in King’s The Shining or that animates a home in an elite urban enclave in the Anne Rivers Siddons novel The House Next Door.
The Ghosts We Create. Those of us who feel truly haunted have no need of these fictional beings; there is already some presence that behaves and feels like a proper ghost, something that overtakes us, fills our lives, our minds, with apprehension or replenished grief.
Ancestors may come back, like Hamlet’s father, urging the living to avenge some secret wrong. Victims may materialize to finger their murderers and the scent of lovers persists long after they’re gone. The battle-weary men of every war have seen their fallen comrades’ ghosts, who march with them and protect them; and they have anxiously sensed the presence of the spirits of fallen enemies, their shattered selves returned to haunt the victors. The only sure thing about ghosts is their reliability: They guarantee that the living reap what the sow.
Sometimes it is impossible to say where the line of demarcation falls between the real and the imaginary, between the living and the restless dead. Our ghosts are sometimes spun from the subconscious stuff that dreams are made on, as Shakespeare said, and it is when we dream, awake or sleeping, that those specters come to us. What can be the difference between a recurring dream of a lost loved one and a haunting?
Whatever they are, real or fancied, ghosts do not call us; we summon them, drawn by some age-old impulse that no infusion of rationality can entirely dispel. Ghosts may be the spirits of the dead, or only the spirits of the human mind, the animated entities born of the terror and mystery and inevitability of dying. Either way, it is as if death were a still pond whose profound, dark depths cannot be seen, but whose untroubled surface is a mirror. When we look into the mirror of death, ghosts are what we see.
Source: Carl A. Posey, Discovery Travel.
Photo: This picture was taken in the library of Combermere Abbey near Burleydam, Cheshire, England, by Sybell Corbet in 1891. The figure of a man can be seen sitting in the chair on the left. His head, collar and right arm on the armrest are clearly visible. The figure is believed to be the spirit of Lord Combermere, who died a few days before and whose funeral was taking place four miles away when Mrs. Corbet took the photograph. The chair was the one in which Lord Combermere always sat.