The Sweetshop Spook – Cardross, Dunbartonshire, Scotland

OK, I have been really busy lately so let us return to the 25th June and a story in the Daily Record —

A SWEET-TOOTHED ghost has whipped up a storm in a teacup at a village cafe. The friendly “Casper” likes to move sweet jars and other goodies around the tearoom in the night.

Many many years ago an old friend of mine was called in to investigate a poltergeist at a chocolate manufacturers, way back in the early 1980’s. Rats turned out to be the cause! (And oddly enough a couple of years ago a care home where staff were frightened and contacted me also turned out to have a problem with the “rats in the walls”.  But even the most enterprising rodent does not heft around large sweet jars, so let us read on…

But the playful poltergeist sometimes makes an appearance during the day.

That poltergeist activity occurs during the day is of course no surprise, but appears? Um, let’s establish the facts as far as we can…

Laura McKirdy and her mum Fiona believe they are being haunted by an old lady dubbed Nanny Goony by folk in Cardross, Dunbartonshire.

Laura said: “I had just locked the door one evening when a jar of lollipops went crashing to the floor.

“I thought I’d just pick them all up in the morning but, when I came back, they were back in the jar and stood upright.

Well the obvious solution is someone else picked them up and put them back. Yet obviously Laura would have considered this possibility, and would hardly be attributing it to a ghost if she felt it likely. A second option is that she picked them up and put them back, and simply forgot. I know that sounds bats but I have often done things like this, then been surprised to find I have done a task when I return to do it later. But then I’m often quite bewildered,and can’t generalize from my crapness to to others.

Laura's Cafe, Cardross, from their Facebook page (linked). The cafe has since had a makeover apparently, but looks good to m anyway!

What is interesting is not the fall, but the replacement on the wall. One assumes the jar could have fallen for all kinds of perfectly mundane reason, but the tidying up the spill is a bit strange! Then again, there is another really odd but entirely possible scenario – that the jar did not fall in the first place, and was hallucinated, or that the fall happened some days before, resulting in someone else sorting it out, and Laura was mistaken as to the date. All these explanations strain credibility however, but then so do poltergeists!

Other spooky happenings include sweets moving on their own, pictures falling off the wall and crumbs appearing on newly wiped tables.

All very poltergeist, but all to my mind within the possibilities of simple misperception and natural causes. Those who read my 1996 JSPR piece will remember that I suggest that “ghost” may sometimes be an explanation that develops over time to explain a lot of “symptoms” that appear puzzling and bizarre, but when each of the “evidences” for the spook is examined in isolation, the whole picture may change, and instead it may just represent a series of mundane but entirely explicable events. Anyone who has been besotted with a girl or chap knows you start to notice their name more, spot their birthday, and generally become hyper-aware of things that remind you of  the object of your affections – at least I hope so or I am just a freak, it certainly happens to me. Or if you read Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus Trilogy, it may well be that you suddenly spot the number 23 absolutely everywhere, because 23 now stands out to you.

In many cases I think this occurs with ghost and poltergeist cases (the relationship between which will be a future article written with Becky, but you can here more on my thought about this at ASSAP’s Seriously Strange conference this September); a series of minor events that may well happen to all of us all the time and which are intrinsically puzzling become attributed to an entity, as we seek a causal relationship between what are probably events unrelated except by the fact they live in the category “mysterious happenings in our home”.

Note I’m not saying this happens all the time, and it certainly does not explain a large number of poltergeist cases I have read about, investigated or studied, but it may well explain some. The place for any ghost investigation to start is with each single incident, meticulously examined and recreated with the original witnesses present — exactly the kind of thing I can not do on a press review site like Polterwotsit. This is why I always  stress that I want to go and talk to the witnesses myself, or speak to them via the phone or email. I very rarely get the chance 😦

Fiona said: “One time we heard the sound of legs moving under a table, but there was nobody there.”

This seems rather subjective, but I don’t work in a small cafe, so I may not instinctively recognize these things. Laura and Fiona probably have lots of experience of their cafe – they know what they are hearing, so I’ll take their word for it.

The cafe owners called in the Scottish Society for Psychical Research to investigate.

This is excellent news. I only really know Trish Robertson and Archie Roy, and I think Soapy Sam off the JREF attends meetings sometimes, but they strike me a level headed and intelligent organization.  The context makes it sound like this chap however is the SSPR reponse, which I don’t believe to be the case…

Paranormal expert Ron Halliday described the goings-on as typical poltergeist activity.

He said: “It could be that it is a trapped soul who is trying to send a message to the owners themselves.”

It could be. Or it could be all kinds of other things, and trapped souls are currently low on my lists of suspects. Still I will wait and see what transpires. The SSPR will do a good investigation.

Laura added:”She doesn’t seem to mean any harm. She’s a very friendly ghost – I wouldn’t stay here if she wasn’t.”

Well that is nice, and I think Laura has a very healthy attitude. I’ll do a follow up if anything emerges! I’d love ot hear more from anyone with actual first hand knowledge of the case.

References

Romer, The Poverty of Theory: Notes on the Investigation of Spontaneous Cases, JSPR, July 1996

A Poltergeist in Cork: Part Two

OK I was interrupted yesterday and was unable to finish my comment, so I will continue it now. Part one of this article can be found here – read that first! Continuing to look at the Irish Independent piece…

“It’s an evil spirit — I don’t believe it means us well,” said Laura.

Well I can see why she would come to that conclusion! The great debate over whether ‘poltergeists’ are living or dead continues but seems largely unknown outside of parapsychology: though again I think there is a third possibility, often overlooked, but traditional to religions – it does not have to have a ‘dead guy’ or a living human agent behind these things, it could be that a discarnate intelligence shares the planet with us – Angel, Demon, Leprechaun, call it what you will. I will discuss this idea in future posts i’m sure — I’m not saying it is my preferred hypothesis, but it certainly appears to be an option.

“We tried saying prayers in the house and the next thing all you hear is banging furniture upstairs or clothes being fired out of wardrobes.”

Interesting, and classic poltergeist behaviour in terms of the furniture banging around and clothes moving – “being fired” suggests quite violent dramatic movement too.

However, I can’t help a brief theological digression here. The ‘polt’ starts with disrupting ‘holy pictures’, and now it responds what I presume can be interpreted as  negatively to prayers (I’m resisting a joke about the shade of Richard Dawkins here…) Now I have seen comments like this about prayers making poltergeists worse before: I have of course seen the converse, with aperiod of calm following a blessing or prayer. If the prayers had been silent and the beastie had reacted, well that would have been more interesting, but I suspect the prayers were spoken out loud. A fraudster – and yes I know I have not even mentioned that possibility up till now – could react just as much as a ‘polt’ to such.

Still, why does the polt not like prayer? A running joke between me and my housemate Lisa about the American series A Haunting is that it should come with a Papal Imprimatur (loosely, ‘authority to publish’) as the Catholic priests so often end up solving the alleged disturbances by prayer or blessings. Actually this is a non-denominational tendency: other Christian denominations likewise seem to be able to help in some cases. So in fact can the intervention of research scientists, people chanting made up shopping lists in Welsh backwards, and all kinds of other interventions. I suspect the key word here is ‘intervention’: someone with authority and apparent expertise (yes, even me in a couple if cases) comes in and it all quietens down.

The question remains though – why does the poltergeist not like prayer? In the medieval era ghost wanted prayer — in fact I think that was the case right the way through till the Reformation, and probably long after. Ghosts were percieved as here to address needs: unfinished business like getting their bones buried, bringing someone to justice, sorting out an injustice like a Will that had been lost or similar, or simply asking for prayers to help them find rest, move out of Purgatory, or similar.

Yet this entity, whatever it is, does not like prayers. Um… That could tell us something: the obvious conclusion is that it is just what Laura believes “an evil spirit”.  Alternatively, and this is just as much a possibility to my mind, it shows us the polt is acting in the way the cultural expectations of the witnesses would expect it to.  I don’t know why modern ‘ghosts’ are so purposeless; what I do know is that these phenomena often appear to have a reflexive relationship to the expectations of the living human witnesses. If that is true then poltergeist phenomena will be culturally conditioned: and it might suggest that somehow human agenst are involved in creating or at least shaping the phenomena. While the poltergeist phenomena  has been manifesting for a couple of thousand years, and seems to have a set of “core” phenomena, it could be that we need to study more the differences rather than concentrating on these similarities. This reminds me of something I heard at SPR Study Day No.58: Poltergeists: Then and Now, but I will leave that for now…

OK, so what else? Clairvoyant John O’Reilly said felt “a presence”, adding: “There is someone here — someone who is very angry.”  I don’t think one has to be clairvoyant to guess that though!  He added “I get (a feeling) of a younger man who would have hung himself.”  Now this is actually quite useful: assuming the fellow in question was supposed to have hanged himself in this house, or on the property, we have an identity for the spook and a purpose of some sort – an angry, ‘earthbound’ entity… I wonder if there is anything else he said though, not reported in the press? I am still unsure if John and the shaman are one and the same person:  but whatever my doubts about mediumship I am glad fi he helps the family move on in some way I guess. Unfortunately as the headline says the family are planning to flee the property it seems more may be required, hence presumably the “exorcism”?

Again more questions than answers. Imagine for  a moment that the entity behind events really was the ghost of a young chap who tragically took his own life. Why would his spirit act in this way? He may well have a grudge against holy stuff I guess, that might explain some of it, but tipping the son out of bed? Banging around? Appearing as glowing balls of light? Shooting clothes out of a wardrobe?   It seems peculiar behaviour: the only possible purpose I can see is to draw attention to his plight, using whatever means are at his disposal. Yet that leads to even more questions – why pick out ‘holy pictures’? Are there no other pictures? Do holy items show up better wherever he is?  If so why the clothes in the wardrobe and the furniture banging? The clothes were almost certainly not there in his own time, so how and why does he interact with them?

I’m trying to imagine another set of dimensions. This chap is in “Flatland“; not occupying our three dimensional space. OK, maybe some of his actions would appear very odd to us? Yet he clearly has some perception of three dimensional space to fire the clothes out of the wardrobe: or in fact does he just somehow imbue them with some kind of kinetic energy? How??? Whose clothes moved, and what clothes were they? How far did they move? Maybe that would tell us something?  A ghost who hurls the father’s wellington boots would have a different character to one who hurled the lady’s lacy underwear. The Irish Independent notes —

However, locals remain dubious about the haunting claims and said nobody recalls previous incidents at the house or any tragedy fitting the descriptions being cited.

Two separate claims really: one wonders what local information they have about the witnesses that makes them sceptical of their claims, or is this just stolid Irish common sense? As to the no one remembering a tragedy fitting this description, well if there was such a tragedy then I would have thought some one would have dug it out by now. I await developments with interest.

However, the furniture moving is very interesting. In the past I have noted that in these cases gravity or the acoustics seems strangely effected: small objects or tiny movements of furniture result in thunderous crashes, large items move with almost no force, and heavy items crash to the floor silently. That was probably the realisation that kept me interested in all this, and seeking solutions… The physics of the poltergeist remains the most interesting aspect of these cases to my mind. The boy being tipped out of bed is certainly commensurate with the other reported motion of objects in the upstairs – rather than being hurled out by an invisible beastie, we can imagine the bed rising at one side, and him sliding to the floor.

The balls of light reported fascinate me as well. Were they three dimensional? I’d live to imagine them as ‘holes’ to somewhere else, but they are described as orbs, so I’m guessing they were 3D, though as I noted before that could just be the adoption of modern ghosthunting jargon. Plasma? Some plasma phenomenon could theoretically cause a ball shape I’m guessing – ball lightning springs to mind.  My own father reported seeing this odd phenomena in 1930’s Denmark, when what he assumes was ball lightning came in through a window, travelled round a room where the family were seated at dinner, and left buy the kitchen door. I’ll get a full account this weekend when i see him for his birthday.

OK, but why would a plasma be associated with the other phenomena? Another possibility would be a very small object radiating an intense light, but what it might be I know not. The statements given in the paper are simply not detailed enough to speculate.  Equally frustratingly we don’t even know the ages of the witnesses, or anything about them.

So where now? I’d love to hear from anyone with information, but particularly the family, Ralph Riegel who wrote the sensible and interesting piece, the shaman or John O’Reilly. I’ll try making enquiries, and see what we can find out!

cj x