On July 6, 1925, an attorney named Thomas Blackwelder was awakened by a knock at the
door.
When he opened it, his neighbor, James “Pink” Chaffin, was looking somewhat flustered.
Chaffin asked him if he could go with him to his brother’s house.
He needed to find something at that house, and he required the attorney to be a witness.
The attorney, somewhat taken aback, said you have to tell me what this is all about before
I go anywhere with you.
Chaffin looked him in the eyes and said, “There is a will, a will my father wrote, and it’s
hidden in an old bible.”
“How do you know that,” The attorney asked, “Your pop has been dead for almost four
years.”
“I know,” said Chaffin, “because he told me last night.”
And guess what folks, the will was there.
We guess we should finish the story.
It is, after all, one of the most well-known ghost stories in the US.
Some people have heard it and have decided ghosts are indeed a real thing.
The father who died was James L. Chaffin of Monksville, a North Carolina farmer who’d
worked hard for many years and accrued land and property.
In 1921, he had an accident and died.
Surprisingly for some, everything in his will went to just one of his four sons, Marshall.
That will was dated 1905.
Marshall was said to have been the dead man’s favorite son, so while the other sons, Abner,
John, and James Jr. were understandably a bit upset, they didn’t contest the will.
Marshall and his wife got everything.
Then in 1925, James said he started having crazy dreams that seemed just a little bit
too real.
In those dreams, his father came to him and said that he had written a second will and
hidden it, and in that will he left everything to all the sons.
James later said, “I was fully convinced that my father’s spirit had visited me for
the purpose of explaining some mistake.”
His father’s ghost told him to look in his old coat, the one he was wearing when he came
to him in ghost form.
James and the attorney went to Marshall’s house where the coat was stored in an attic.
Sewn into one of the pockets was a note.
It read, “Read the 27th Chapter of Genesis in my daddie’s old Bible.”
When they discovered the bible, in that chapter two pages had been folded together.
Within those pages was the will.
It was dated January 16, 1919.
Part of it read: “I want, after giving my body a decent burial,
my little property to be equally divided between my four children, if they are living at my
death, both personal and real estate divided equal if not living, give share to their children.”
The case went to court because it had to be decided if the will was indeed real.
During the proceedings, people were shocked to hear James’ story of the ghost.
A judge later ruled that the second will was valid.
But you have to ask this question, why would the father have created a kind of puzzle to
solve?
Why not just tell James where the will was?
That’s what some of the skeptical public asked, and it’s what the Society for Psychical
Research asked when they got on the case.
Any of you down to Earth folks are likely assuming that James and his brothers concocted
an elaborate plan, and at least one of them tried in earnest to copy his father’s signature.
They then waited for the right time to hide the note in the pocket and stuff the will
between the tattered Bible pages.
But at least a few of you will have felt a chill run down your back when hearing the
story.
You people might give credence to the possibility of the existence of ghosts.
You wouldn’t be alone.
Polls differ from year to year, but most of the time when people answer polls, the results
show that between 40 and 50 percent of people in the USA believe in ghosts.
A 2019 YouGovAmerica poll said 45 percent, with slightly more people believing in demons
and only 13 percent of participants believing in vampires.
A YouGov poll in the UK said 34 percent of people there believe in ghosts.
9 percent of people that answered said they’d actually seen or communicated with one.
These are pretty high numbers, but head over to, say, East Asia, and the very mention of
ghosts can make people’s knees tremble.
The skeptics watching this are now thinking, why!?
Why do these people believe in things that science cannot prove are there?
Do they also believe in tooth fairies and goblins?!
Well, for a start, humans have done a lot of believing in unscientific things throughout
the ages.
Maybe if a guy like James turned up in an American court these days and claimed to have
talked to the apparition of his dead dad, the whole place would erupt in laughter.
But wait a minute, don’t people say this in court, “I swear by Almighty God that
the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Nobody would laugh at that.
Science cannot prove God exists, either.
That’s why religious people talk about faith.
Faith can be powerful.
It can pretty much define a person’s life, or has happened, even define how they die.
In Dr. Michael Shermer’s book, “The Believing Brain,” he asserts that humans are hardwired
to believe in a kind of top-down system.
That’s the same as having faith in an omniscient being or beings.
We can’t seem to live without that.
He talks about something called “patternicity,” which is when we find meanings in patterns
that might be meaningless.
He also talks about something called, “agenticity”, when we give patterns meaning and agency.
According to him, this is how that pans out: “Once beliefs are formed the brain begins
to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an
emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process
of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of
belief confirmation.”
It's why we have faith in things that aren’t there, or at least what we can’t see, whether
we are talking about Zeus, God Almighty, Satan, Thor, or a ghost known as Pret or Preta, which
has scared the hell out of billions of Asian kids for many years.
It still does now.
If people believe in ghosts, studies have shown that they are more likely to say they
have seen a ghost.
For instance, a study in the UK involved one of the country’s so-called haunted places.
The study found that people who believed in ghosts reported hearing and seeing what could
have been a ghost more than people that didn’t believe in ghosts.
The force is strong in those that believe in it.
Another study showed that the people who believed in ghosts tended to have first embraced that
belief not because they saw one, but because they’d been told ghosts exist by a source,
or person, they believed in.
Once something is implanted in childhood, it is not easy to remove later.
To sum this up, humans are hardwired to believe in something outside of their earthly existence.
They pass stories on to their impressionable kids.
The more impressionable they are, the more they believe it.
Those kinds of people are more likely to see what they believe.
That’s some fundamental reasoning for you.
Now on to something less obvious.
Scientists argue that we have evolved as a species to hallucinate just a little bit to
be ready for outside threats.
When you are walking through a dark forest, you might just be able to deceive yourself
into thinking you see or hear something unusual.
One scientist put it like this.
When you’re in such a situation, you have a couple of choices.
Do you think, ah, it’s nothing, and head towards the noise?
Or, do you take the possible threat on board and walk slowly away from the noise?
He said humans have evolved to convince ourselves the threat is real, that the noise or movement
was real.
That way, we stay safe.
The professor called it the better safe than sorry kind of thinking, which might mean we
deceive ourselves a lot, but we might avoid getting stabbed in the woods because of it.
The downside is we tell our friends dubious wild stories about stuff we experienced when
we were alone.
It goes deeper than this, though.
There was a study published in 1993 titled, “Bereavement among elderly people: grief
reactions, post-bereavement hallucinations and quality of life.”
It studied 14 men and 36 women, all in their 70s, who had just lost their partner.
The researchers wrote, “Half of the subjects felt the presence of the deceased (illusions);
about one-third reported seeing, hearing and talking to the deceased (hallucinations).”
The scientists didn’t even discuss the possibility that these people had seen a ghost, saying
what they saw was a manifestation of “instantaneous relief from painful grief symptoms.”
Nonetheless, if grandma Gladys starts telling everyone she was visited by grandpa Bob last
night and they talked about how much they both missed Monday night bingo, someone in
that family might believe she had seen a ghost.
A lot of families might not be too familiar with grief-related hallucinations.
Even if they are, they might not believe in them if they’ve been conditioned enough
as children to be superstitious.
According to Christopher French, a professor of psychology and head of the Anomalistic
Psychology Research Unit, humans hallucinate a lot.
He’s talked about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which is when humans become conscious
while they are still partly in the REM dream state.
30 to 40 percent of people worldwide have reportedly experienced this, but around 5
percent of people have experienced something much worse.
That is feeling like they are paralyzed and seeing something terrible next to or over
them.
It might sometimes feel like this being is sitting on top of them, maybe even choking
them.
This presence has been called the “night hag” or “old hag” in some cultures”.
In some Asian countries, it is often referred to as a ghost pressing down on someone’s
chest.
The Vietnamese word for it literally means, “held down by a ghost” and the Chinese
word means, “ghost pressing on body”.
Sometimes the presence is felt with sounds, such as ghostly whispering, while others have
even reported a feeling of being pulled from their beds.
Scientists say that what happens during one of these episodes likely has its foundation
in culture, meaning the sufferers see or hear what they are culturally accustomed to.
Americans don’t generally have nightmares about Madam Koi Koi, a ghost that Nigerian
and other African kids might dream up.
When people find themselves conscious but unable to move and still in a dream state,
their brains become hyper-vigilant.
The person is shocked, scared, anxious, and so their dream, or nightmare, conjures up
the most frightening things.
It’s the scientific belief that this is one of the primary reasons we have ghosts
in our cultures.
We literally dreamed them into reality.
Ok, on to something else.
Ghosts have been exploited in many cultures to keep kids in order or keep them safe from
danger.
The boogeyman in western cultures can be very helpful to parents.
Tell your kids a boogeyman could be lurking around in the streets at night, or in the
nearby woods, and that might make children not wander off too far.
On the other hand, just tell a kid not to do something, and their curiosity or rebelliousness
might get the better of them.
While not a ghost, Santa rewards nice children with gifts and the tooth fairy leaves cash
under your pillow if you don’t make too much noise about losing a tooth.
Add this to the devil and the boogeyman and it’s no wonder paranoid maniacs walk the
streets.
Anyway, remember we talked about the Asian ghost, Pret, or sometimes called Preta.
You’ll hear stories about this unfriendly ghost in most Asian nations.
In Thailand, Pret is very tall and skinny, ugly, and is always very, very hungry; hence
it’s sometimes called the “Hungry Ghost.”
It also has a tiny mouth, like the eye of a needle, but a large stomach that can’t
ever be filled.
It roams around feeling starved to death, sometimes with only dead bodies and trash
to see.
It’s a miserable world that Pret lives in.
One Thai person talking about the ghost said she was told by her parents when she was a
kid that if she was rude to them or basically did anything they didn’t like, she would
be born again as a Pret.
She said this scared her to death when she was growing up in the 1990s.
She’s still scared of Pret now, even though she’s university-educated, well-traveled,
and works for an international company.
Pret is ingrained in her brain, and she said she knows that seems silly to some people.
She can’t forget what her parents used to say to her when she was a kid, something along
the lines, “Rawang na, tam rai paw, mare, die bye, ja ben Pret.”
That means, “Be careful, if you’re bad to your mom or pop, you’ll become a Pret
after you die.”
The problem is, if parents tell such scary stories, they might create a kind of neurosis
in the kids that carries through to an older age.
There are plenty of Thais that in adulthood don’t feel comfortable being alone, but
that is a curse for many people all over Asia.
Such is the power of ghost stories.
It’s also worth noting here that some western studies have shown that fewer students who
study subjects that involve a lot of critical thinking believe in ghosts.
With that in mind, Thailand’s education system has been criticized for decades for
not embracing critical thinking.
That’s another reason then why ghosts are still here, there, and everywhere.
It’s also why people can be too fast to believe they saw a face or body in something
when there’s nothing to see.
Pareidolia is the phenomenon of humans seeing an object in something when it isn’t there.
Sometimes we make something seem human when it’s not human at all, which is a type of
anthropomorphization.
We are sure you’ve all seen those ghost photos that appear online that seem to titillate
the tabloid media, but more often than not, we are trying too hard to see something or
someone has just doctored the photos.
People have seen Jesus in a piece of toast, and it’s why we might sometimes see ghosts
when we are just looking at random messiness.
Scientists say the human brain can see faces in things incredibly quickly.
Yet again, we impose patterns on things and give them agency, just as Dr. Shermer said.
All the time we are awake, we are taking in an incredible amount of information, and the
brain can’t pay attention to everything, otherwise there would be a data overload.
One expert told Scientific American, “The vast majority of perception is the brain filling
in the gaps.”
The brain can create a picture that isn’t there, which is why you might think you saw
a ghostly face when in fact if you’d have had time to look harder what you saw was a
plastic bag blown past a moonlit branch.
It’s the same with words.
You’ve all heard those songs that tell you to listen for the wrong lyrics.
Once you try to hear the wrong words, you actually do hear them.
That can happen when you are trying to hear language in ghostly, incoherent audio.
Scientists call this “electronic voice phenomenon.”
We might also sometimes get poisoned and actually “trip balls” as the saying goes.
This happened in 1951 in France in a small village called Pont Saint-Esprit.
Around 230 people became very sick after eating the same bread, aka, “the cursed bread.”
Some vomited and were bedbound, some died, and some experienced extraordinary hallucinations.
This is what the local mayor said at the time, “I have seen healthy men and women suddenly
become terrorized, ripping their bedsheets, hiding themselves beneath their blankets to
escape hallucinations.”
He recounted how people thought tigers were eating them, or as one guy said, “I am dead
and my head is made of copper and I have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me.”
In this case, seeing a ghost drift past a tree was not much of a big deal.
Five people died, while others came close to death trying to escape their hallucinations
by jumping out of windows or into the river.
The blame was put on the naturally occurring fungus, ergot, which in 1938 the Swiss chemist,
Albert Hoffman, used to make LSD.
Still, even a massive dose of LSD wouldn’t bring on that kind of madness, not in so many
people at the same time.
Something messed up happened, but what, we don’t exactly know.
Whether it was ergot, or even if the CIA had a hand in the mass poisoning, is still up
for debate, but what’s certain is humans throughout history have certainly had some
mind-bending trips when they didn’t sign up for it.
Some scholars think such hallucinations were behind great art, poetry, or even religious
experiences.
It’s possible some people have seen ghosts when under the influence of something they
mistakenly ate, and those experiences were passed down in stories through the ages.
But what about people who say they feel ghosts are around them all the time, you know, those
folks that say to you, “I see dead people?”
They exist, although they are more likely to tell you that they can’t see anything
but just know a ghostly presence is next to them.
Dr. Giulio Rognini, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, was very interested
in meeting some of those people.
In 2014, he invited them to his lab to do some tests.
He didn’t really believe they were experiencing something supernatural, but he wanted to find
out what was happening to them.
He told the BBC, “What is astonishing is that they frequently report that the movements
they are doing or the posture they are assuming at that specific moment is replicated by the
presence.
So, if the patient is sitting, they feel the presence is sitting.
If they are standing, the presence is standing, and so on.”
Let that sink in...
Imagine for a second how people might have reacted to these folks a couple of centuries
ago, or even now in places where logical positivism at times has less sway than superstition.
Rognini took 12 of those people and used MRI technology to scan their brains.
He found that they all had damage to parts of the brain responsible for dealing with
space, movement, and self-awareness.
He then took 48 healthy people who’d never had a supernatural experience in their life
and he freaked the hell out of them.
First, he blindfolded them and connected their finger to a machine.
Behind them was a robot that had a metal finger on the person’s back.
The doctor told each participant to move their finger, and when they did, the robot finger
made exactly the same movement on the person’s back.
They were aware that what they did with their finger would result in the same shape being
drawn behind them.
That all went fine.
It wasn’t fine, though, when the doctor started messing with the timing of the robot
finger.
He delayed the action a tiny bit, so it drew after the person had moved their hand.
The time difference was imperceptible to the participant.
This, he said, would replicate the brain damage the other people had.
What is remarkable is that when this happened, the people started saying something was in
the room with them.
They were sure there was something, with some participants saying they felt four people
around them.
Two of them demanded the doctor take off their blindfold.
Now frightened, they refused to do another experiment.
The changing of the time messed with their brain.
The robot finger didn’t correspond to what their brain was telling them was real.
Everything was out of whack, and that made them think something else was in the room
with them.
That is just how the people with the damaged brains felt most of the time.
When they feel another person next to them, it’s just themselves, but they perceive
it to be another person since part of their brain is out of whack.
You know where you are sitting now and where your arms and legs are, but imagine if your
brain told you everything was a millisecond behind.
There would be another person next to you.
Humans with damaged brains have likely been experiencing this kind of thing and talking
about it since they learned to string sentences together.
This and much more we’ve talked about today has given rise to the existence of ghosts...or
maybe we haven’t managed to convince you of that.
Now you need to watch, “The True Story Of The Enfield Poltergeist.”
Or, have a look at...