225. NIGHT TERRORS - On the Possibility of Impossible Hauntings
I love the Halloween season, and this year, having a short horror story of mine published in the exciting new anthology book, Hardcore Horror, which came out October 31st, I was especially feeling the pull of all that goes bump in the night. Since mid-September I’ve almost exclusively been reading horror novels and short stories. I consumed all of the Conjuring universe series of movies, and watched several other horror movies when free time allowed. But as I have said on here before, and say to my students often, I am not quite sure why ghosts and the supernatural scare me so much? After all — I have absolutely no room in my rational understanding of the universe for the existence of spirits, malevolent or otherwise. If something does go bump in the night for me, the one thing I know it absolutely cannot be is a ghost. And yet…
Obviously I guess part of the appeal is epistemic humility. My bold proclamation that there is not any room at all for the supernatural in my worldview is not entirely right. My understanding of the world sees no good evidence yet for the existence of a non-physical soul or anything which can survive physical death except for our energy (which cannot be destroyed). And it appears, from what we know, that the energy my dead body possesses cannot manifest as an apparition which throws objects and walks through walls: that’s not how decomposition of physical matter works.
But seeing no good evidence is not a total dismissal of the possibility. Perhaps “paranormal” occurrences have a natural explanation, but that explanation still goes beyond our current understanding of the nature of reality? A creaking floorboard caused by footsteps from a person who isn’t there may not be being stepped on by a ghost, if by “ghost” we mean the spirit of a dead person, but maybe there is some way, hitherto not understood, that those footsteps can be caused by some real presence we do not yet fully understand? Even if that presence might be my own self? A trick of the mind? A skill of the body? A perfectly normal phenomenon we are just not yet aware of?
My point is that while I do not believe we have sufficient proof to accept the existence of the supernatural world as part of a coherent idea of what reality consists of, I suppose I do remain open to the possibility that there might yet be more to reality than we currently comprehend. And once that crack in the intellect is there, suddenly the footstep in the night always could be something untoward, even if you don’t really believe that it is. And that possibility can bloom and grow into an entirely sleepless night. Just ask anyone who suffers from anxiety — the things which keep us up don’t have to be real, they don’t even have to be possible, they just have to be believed that they could be possible, and the mind will happily spiral.
When I was younger I grew up in a “haunted” house. Only, at the time, I didn’t think of it as haunted. I just knew that the house felt sinister at times. That there were days when my sister and I didn’t like to go upstairs by ourselves, the dark gloom at the top of the staircase feeling creepy and foreboding rather than the welcoming doorway to our bedrooms and the family bathroom. Once, I found myself crying every time I set foot in my bedroom. The tears forming immediately as I crossed the threshold and then stopping the minute I crossed back out into the landing. I remember telling my sister that I couldn’t go back in there that night because “the room is sad tonight”. She let me sleep on her floor. For her part, she spent a whole year unable to sleep in her own bedroom years later for fear of various night terrors that stemmed from the night a bat flew in her window and landed on her bed as she was sleeping. She would hear sounds in the night. Scuttling. Voices. Rats in the walls and in her mattress. Footsteps on the gravel drive. And the nights I wouldn’t let her sleep in my room she would sleep in the landing instead, on guard against the nightmares in her mind. The same landing where, reflected in the television screen at the corner of my own room, I sometimes saw strange shadows moving in the empty night.
When our cat died, we could all still hear her meowing sometimes around the house. One foggy morning we awoke to cat footprints left walking up and down our bathroom window even though the window was closed and had been all night. My mother seemed shaken and couldn’t stop quoting the old Carl Sandburg poem: “the fog falls on little cat feet”.
My sister often heard coughing when she was alone in the house. That’s not uncommon in an attached house, or terrace, but this was a detached building. She would play piano in our father’s study and notice things moving in the pictures on his wall, just beyond the corner of her eye. When our parents separated, and my mom had left the house for good, she confided in me just how glad she was not to be living there anymore. “It had always creeped me out”, she told me, “knowing that one of the former owners died of influenza in your dad’s study.” She’d never told either me or my sister about this before, but suddenly the coughing made some sort of sense.
One halloween, a friend of mine started acting strange. It was a few weeks in the making: odd things he’d say, a weird way of looking that was gone just as quickly as it appeared. On the phone, organising our halloween plans he had told me, in a voice that wasn’t his normal one, that it would be “just you, me, and…”, and then he said his own name, as if there would be three of us there instead of just the two, and the third, himself, was not who I was talking to! He thought he’d been possessed. A few weeks previously, we’d messed around with a ouija board at a friend’s birthday party and he was worried “something got in”. Either then, or at the end of the summer, when we had been experimenting with hypnotism after finding out how to do it from an old Dean Koontz book. His voice transformed, his physicality was different; he was himself but not himself. I thought, at the time, that he was just messing about, even as he made a friend of ours burst into tears just by looking at him during a maths lesson at school. But it creeped me out. I assumed he was just feeling the strain of his own parents’ divorce, and halloween made for the perfect backdrop to a dissociative episode he didn’t want to deal with. He told me there was a demon inside him who wanted to kill me and I just laughed it off (though I didn’t sleep well that night) and hoped the delusion would run its course. However, when we got some photos developed from that night, he’s there, sitting in my kitchen, and next to him, on the cupboard to his side, is some sort of shadowy face beside him. Possibly it was just a problem with the exposure in the room. But a group of us performed a ham-fisted atheist’s “exorcism” on him a few weeks later anyway (with his consent) and we were never bothered by the “demon” again. I’m still friends with him to this day.
My wife once stayed at our old family home with me, years later, when we were adults. She woke me up in the middle of the night, panicked. Something had been choking her in her sleep. Invisible hands around her throat and a weight on her chest from something she couldn’t see. We were alone in the house. When she woke me up, the sensation went away, but we decided never to stay there again. However, in our own rented house, a few miles down the road, we both knew there was something a little bit off about our own spare room. Neither of us liked going in there alone, especially in the evening. It gave me the same grim feeling I used to feel at the foot of the stairs in my childhood home. However I had to use the “haunted” room. I kept some clothes in the wardrobe in there. Although, too frequently, I imagined the door closing on me as I walked to the far side of the room to get a new shirt, the short distance from wardrobe to exit suddenly stretching out a million miles. We both used to joke about “the lady” in that room until we realised, with a chill, how strange it was that we both believed whoever was in there was a “lady”.
When we moved house a few years later, every friend of ours who had ever stayed in that room told us the same thing: “thank God — I always hated that spare room of yours. I don’t know why, but I often imagined there was some sort of old lady sitting in the corner all the time, watching me.”
Before renting it out to people like us, the house had belonged to our landlord’s mother. He began renting it after his mother had died.
Why share all of this?
Because what I find interesting about all these fragments of eerie feelings and sensed supernatural presences I have experienced over the years, is that in my current home, where I have lived now for a very long time, I have never felt anything at all like the things I felt in those places. Nor did I feel that way in the flat I lived in happily during my many years at university. My current home has no rooms we all avoid, or shadowy corners we feel uneasy passing. The stairs up feel welcoming and warm, even in the pitch black dark. I watch just as many horror movies and read just as many scary stories here as I did in those other places, yet the terror doesn’t seem to intrude into real life in this space the way it once did in those others. If the “paranormal” experiences were really all in my mind, why can’t my mind produce them at will, and impose the same sinister darkness onto any place in which I am living? Does the evidence suggest that there might be something tangible about those places and those experiences that is being perceived beyond mere imagination? Something that is actually there?
My worldview has no room for spirits and hauntings, and yet there seems to be something empirically different about these four properties: two of them contained something which stimulated a sense of dread and fear, which the other two did not.
The mind is a powerful thing. It can create experiences, worries, terrors, and even physical manifestations against its bearer’s will and it remains a component of the human experience we still know so little about, despite our greatest efforts. Likewise, philosophy is a powerful tool for seeking out the truth. But even philosophy has its limits. My worldview has no room for spirits and hauntings, and that worldview has been established by my practice of philosophy. But it is philosophy which also reminds me to never be so arrogant as to assume the infallibility of any current worldview we might hold.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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