The slideshow for a talk given for the Rhine Research Center, March 8th, 2013

1. Ghosts, Poltergeists
and Hauntings:
A Romp through the History of
Psychical Research
Nancy L. Zingrone, PhD
Presentation for the Rhine Research Center
March 8th, 2013

2. The talk:
O Selected Ghosts, Poltergeists and
Hauntings Across Cultures and Time
O The Well-Heeled 19th Century Ghost
Enthusiast & The Beginnings of Psychical
Research
O 20th Century Methods
O Ghost Whispering, Ghost Hunters and
Psychical Research

3. Some definitions:
O Ghost: an apparition of a deceased
person
O Haunting: a recurrent set of phenomena
that may or may not include an apparition
O Poltergeist: an unnerving, sometimes
dangerous, sometimes destructive, set of
phenomena, that may or may not include
an apparition
O Apparition: a visual representation of a
person or persons, who may or may not
be deceased at the time they appear

4. Ghosts, Hauntings & Poltergeists
O Is a deceased individual at the center of the
experiences?
O Is the phenomena place-centered or
person- centered?
O Are the perceptions single or multi-
sensory?
O Is the phenomena recurrent?
O Is it responsive or nonresponsive?
O Is there a “communicating” intelligence?

5. 1998, University of
Texas Press
1992, Prism Press
1984, Prometheus Press
Covers retrieved from amazon.com
1848, T.C. Newby

6. 1979, Routledge,
Kegan, Paul
1982, Heinemann
1963, University Books
Covers retrieved from amazon.com 2002, John Murray

7. 2002, Parapsychology
Foundation
2004, Paraview
Cornell & Roll Covers retrieved Special Education,
from amazon.com; Auerbach original 1972,
cover retrieved from tower.com Doubleday
2005, Atriad

8. The divisions within the
presentation:
O Ghostly Reenactments on a Grand
Scale
O Ghosts with a Purpose
O Ghost without a Purpose (or with a
Purpose We Don‟t Quite Understand)
O Poltergeists
O Some comments on the impact of
worldviews

9. Ghostly reenactments on a grand scale
O Begin soon after the event they depict is over
O Reoccur sometimes over centuries
O Might be only sounds, distant and faint but
identifiable
O Might be complete visual suggestions of the
original event with sounds, smells and
identifiable individuals
O Seem to fade away as the memory of the event
fades away
O Arising from profoundly emotional moments or
something quiet, pastoral but elaborate

10. Pausanias
2nd Century AD
Retrieved from wikipedia.com,
“Pausanias, the Geographer”
Battle of Marathon, 490 BCE
Retrieved from ancientgreekbattle.net

11. The Battle of Edgehill, 1642
Retrieved from heritage-history.com

12. Annie Moberly
Eleanor Jourdain
Retrieved from itdidntcostmeadime.com
The Petit Trianon
Retrieved from my.opera.com
Adventure retrieved from bookshop.unimelb.edu.au
Ghosts of the Trianon retrieved from rennes-le-chateau-rhedae.com

13. British soldiers in a
Revolutionary War Re-enactment
Retrieved from notmytribe.com
Field Museum of Natural History
Chicago, Illinois
Retrieved from chicago.about.com

14. Ghosts with a Purpose
O Seem to want to communicate
O Seem to be drawing attention to a need of
their own or of the living around them
O Seem to show emotion
O May be dangerous or destructive
O May seem helpful or supportive
O Seem to be place-centered because they
want to be or because they must be until
they fulfill some purpose

15. Athenodorus
Stoic Philosopher
(74-7 BCE)
Original source:
Letters of Pliny the Younger
Traveled in the Greco-Roman world
Tutor of Octavian
(later Caesar Augustus)
The haunted house was in Athens
By Henry Ford, “Athenodorus the Philosopher
Rents a Haunted House”
Retrieved from wikipedia, “Athenodorus Cananites”

16. The story of Alis de Telieux
and Sister Antoinette
Titled “Benedictine Nuns
of Denmark were not poor”
Retrieved from thyra2005.blogspot.com
The Abbey of St Pierre at Cluny
Retrieved from NickKahler.tumblr.com

17. Giles Bolacre, suing to break a lease …
Actually a painting of
Charles d‟Ambroise
in 1507
Painted by The Medieval City in Tours, France
Retrieved from bugbog.com
Andrea Solario,
hangs in the Louvre
Retrieved from all-art.com

18. Ghosts without a purpose
O Appear in a place they frequented in life
and seem to see you
O React negatively or positively
O React passively but seem aware
O Appear and go about their business
O Seem to show an awareness of the current
surroundings
O Seem to be totally unaware of the current
surroundings

19. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall
Sightings from
1835 to 1936,
at least …
Published in 1936
in Country Life Magazine
and in 1937 in Life Magazine
Taken by
Captain Hubert C. Provand
& Indre Shira
Retrieved from castleofspirits.com

20. Lady Dorothy Walpole
Captain Frederick Marryat
1686-1726
Portrait by Charles Jervas 1792-1848
Retrieved by en.wikipedia.com, Portrait by John Simpson, 1826
“Brown Lady of Raynham Hall” Retrieved from en.wikipedia.com

21. And now the well-heeled Victorian
Ghost Enthusiast …
The Cheltenham Ghost SPR Researcher
Retrieved from art.com Andrew MacKenzie
Retrieved from ufopsi.com

22. SPR Leaders
Henry Sidgwick Eleanor Sidgwick F. W. H. Myers Edmund Gurney
(1838-1900) (1845-1936) (1843-1901) (1847-1888)

23. From the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
Experiments
Richet, C. (1889). Further experiments in hypnotic lucidity or clairvoyance.
Theory/Concepts
Sidgwick, H. (1889). The canons of evidence in psychical research.
Reports, Analysis, and Discussions of Many Cases
Sidgwick, Mrs. H. (1885). Notes on the evidence, collected by the Society, for
phantasms of the dead.
Report of a Single Case
Marillier, L. (1891) Apparitions of the Virgin in Dordogne.
Morton, R.C. (1892) Report of a haunted house.
Reports of Séances
Hodgson, R. (1892). A record of observations of certain phenomena of trance.
Methodological Discussions
Edgeworth, F.Y. (1885) The calculus of probability applied to psychical research.

24. Morton, R.C. (1892)
Report of a haunted house.
O Rosina Clara Despard (1863-1930)
O Moved into St. Anne‟s, then Garden
Reach, in 1882 with her family, she was 19
O From 1882 to 1884, she encountered the
ghost
O In 1886 while taking her preliminary
scientific examination for medical school,
she met Frederic Myers, was encouraged
to write up her investigation

25. St. Anne‟s — “Garden Reach” — Cheltenham
Retrieved from ghostsofbritain.com

32. One of Rosina‟s
three maps

35. History of the house from 1882:
O 1882-1893, Despards in possession of the house
O House empty from 1893-1898
O 1898-1907, a boys school
O Empty until 1910
O 1910-1970, housed a convent, a training school for nannies,
and a diocesan house
O Empty 1970 to 1973
O 1973 reopened as an apartment house
O No hauntings reported within the house from 1907 to the
present but ….

36. Modern history:
O Persistent reports of the ghost in the neighborhood around
the house from the first sightings in the 1870s to today
O Between 1958 and 1961, on the grounds of a hotel across
the street, same description from waist up but bottom half
“fading”
O In 1933 and during WWII she was reported in Weston House
about a half mile away from Garden Reach
O In the 1960s Weston House housed doctors offices, no
visual sightings, but unexplained noises, sense of being
watched
O In 1979, a report of footsteps that drove a staff member from
the house in a panic

37. The SPR Method as apparent in
Rosina Despard’s report
O Detailed observations including feelings of witnesses
(predominantly a sense of loss of power to the ghost)
O Attempts to determine the “reality” of the experiences
O Attempts to intervene
O Gathering of observations from others, including letters of
corroboration in the report
O Drawing conservative conclusions on the meaning of the
sightings
O Set up an experiment to see if they could identify photos
from life of the ghost, the photo of Imogen‟s sister was
chosen

38. Poltergeists …
O Reports from antiquity / from every culture
O Frequent focus on adolescent in home as
“focus person” or “agent”
O Important to rule out fraud
O Important to make careful observations of
events, position of all individuals when
events occur

39. Poltergeists …
O Noisy spirits, O Psychokinetic
targeting an outburst of the
individual „focus person‟
O Short duration O Short duration
O Frequently O Frequently
dangerous dangerous
O Cease naturally, O Ceases naturally or
through moving, when “stressors” on
changes in family the focus person
situation are lessened or
removed

40. Tony Cornell
(1924-2010)
Retrieved from mobygames.com

41. Carrying on the SPR tradition with a twist …
O Healthy skepticism but openness to experience
O Detailed observations
O Development of technology
O Corroboration:
O Witness testimony
O Independent evidence
O Consciousness of alternative explanations
O Willingness to help experiencers
O Detailed reports

43. The Antique Shop
Spuk
O 30+ events
O No “focus person”
identified
conclusively
O All breakage
confined to goods
purchased from a
specific estate sale

44. Bill Roll
(1926-2012)
Retrieved from pflyceum.org
Retrieved from goodreads.com

45. The Miami Poltergeist
O More than 200
incidents of
movement/breakag
e of objects
O Measurement of
trajectory/condition
O Julio Vasquez
identified as focal
person

46. An aside …
Take home:
Haunting cases with apparitions have more features than those without
Alvarado, C. & Zingrone, N. (1995). Characteristics of haunting with and without
apparitions: An analysis of published cases. Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research, 60,385-397.

47. Why?
o Are hauntings with apparitions more likely to be what they
seem: noisy spirits attempting to interfere or communicate
with the living?
o Or are experiencers who report hauntings with
apparitions more likely to project/produce experiences
that are more complex?

48. Depends on your worldview:
o Are you a ghost whisperer?
o Are you a ghost hunter?
o Are you a psychical researcher, academic
or scientific parapsychologist?
o Are you a psychologist with a skeptical
but otherwise open interest in what seem
to be paranormal experiences?

49. Ghost whisperers, ghost hunters and psychical
researchers …
O Differences
O In purpose: What questions are we asking and what
do we do with the answers?
O In method: Are we getting the details to verify a
theory? Are we constructing a story to fit our
worldview? Are we seeing if there is someone there
who needs our help whether the someone is the
experiencer, or a “person” who seems to inhabit the
apparition?
O In ultimate goal: Are we working to add to
knowledge, to rack up another case history for the
website, or are we trying to the light?

50. The bad news for psychical researchers:
O While the Cheltenham Ghost is seen as the best
researched single case in the history of the SPR:
O What about Imogen Swinhoe? Can we worry
about her and still be seen as scientific?
O What do we do with Edgehill, Athenodorus and all
the old unverifiable cases can be convincing but:
O Is it safe to draw conclusions from them?
O Is it enough to just say, this is “inexplicable” or
this is “culturally interesting”?

51. The consequences for all of us:
O If we are theory-driven, we may miss some
meaning because we just don‟t see it.
O If we fail to verify, we may be building a false
picture of what is actually going on.
O If we define own point of view as the only path
to understanding, we will miss the insights of
those who hold a different point of view.

52. And finally, the good news:
O 21st century researchers who operate in
academic/scientific parapsychology have a wider view
than their predecessors:
O We are open to other ways of knowing.
O We are also worried about the essential questions about
what it means to be human.
O There are forums where ghost whisperers, ghost
hunters and psychical researchers and even skeptics
are in the same room:
O So there is a chance for mutual influence on our methods
as well as a chance to share our assumptions and our
stories.

53. Thank you …
Email me: nancy@theazire.org
Follow: The AZIRE on Facebook
Visit: The AZIRE Learning Center in Second
Life
Website: www.theazire.org
Powerpoint is available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/NanZingrone/rrc-
talk-ghosts-poltergeists-hauntings-2013