Writing Ghosts, by Elizabeth Kay

A good example of cloud iridescence from the web,
July 2023. Don't know where.

 How do you write about ghosts when you don’t believe in them? I don’t believe in them because I’ve not had a single supernatural experience. I stopped believing in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy when I was very young, I’m one of those people who require the evidence of my own senses, and none has been forthcoming. I haven’t even had a spooky feeling, and I’ve never felt inexplicably cold or scared or seen objects moving of their own volition.

I have a problem when people I respect tell me quite seriously that they have seen/heard/felt or even smelt something. But no one has told me that sort of thing since I was a teenager, probably because they think I’ll laugh at them. I do remember my mother telling me what happened the night her grandmother died though. She was sharing a room with her, and Gra (as she was known) was very elderly. Suddenly she said to my mum, “Ella, Ella, open the door.” My mother must have looked confused because Gra then said, “Sid’s outside. He’s come to fetch me.” So my mother went and opened the door. There was no one there, but when my mother turned back to her grandmother she had died. Sid was one of Gra’s sons, who had died fairly recently. Of course, this can easily be explained by someone who’s mind isn’t functioning properly any more as they approach death, but my mother was really unnerved by the experience.

I’m reminded of a line by Stephen King, about the way writers think. He could be sitting be a beautiful lake with his wife and children, and rather than appreciating the view would start to wonder what might crawl out of the lake  when he wasn’t watching.

For some people, their imaginings can be so powerful that they translate to reality after a jar or three. He mentioned the time he saw some signs hanging from the ceiling of a supermarket. A swift glance made them look like a row of pterodactyls flying down one of the aisles, although this was instantly replaced by the realisation of what they actually were. But it’s these swift glances out of the corner of the eye that lead a writer to think ­– what if they really were pterodactyls? What then? Where did they come from? Am I going mad? Has someone spiked my drink? Was Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World real after all? Or has someone done a Jurassic Park number on an amber-preserved mosquito? And was that pale human shape I saw in a shop window last night a ghost? The following day it turned out to be a stand-alone rack of greetings cards.

There are many optical illusions and atmospheric effects that initially defy explanation. Infra-sound is an interesting example of something that can engender fear without there apparently being any rational explanation. You can’t hear infra-sound, it’s below the range of human hearing, but it has an effect of your body and can produce feelings of fear, awe, horror, even nausea. In 2003, a group of UK researchers held a mass experiment, where they exposed some 700 people to music laced with soft sounds described as “near the edge of hearing”. The two experimental concerts (entitled Infrasonic) took place in the Purcell Room. Two of the pieces in each concert had infrasound played underneath. In the second concert, the pieces that carried the undertone were swapped so that test results would not focus on any specific musical piece. The participants were not told which pieces were which. The presence of the tone resulted in a significant number of respondents reporting feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear. Go figure, as they say across the Pond. Infrasound can be produced naturally by  volcanoes, avalanches, wind, thunder, waterfalls, earthquakes, meteors, and ocean waves. Different sorts of machinery can do it too.

 

Some animals can produce it – whales, giraffes, and alligators. The most interesting is the roar of the tiger, which has an infrasound component which can make a prey animal freeze in its tracks and may scare the living daylights out of human beings close by. Even when behind toughened glass or a twelve foot Tornado mesh fence.

This was taken by someone in
another boat. 

When I was whitewater rafting in Costa Rica some years ago – which was why I didn’t have a camera on me – the six of us in the boat became aware of a very strange apparition in the sky. It undulated like a living rainbow, a colourful serpent stretching itself out and then contracting again, the hues reminiscent of refracted light. It was incredibly beautiful, and nobody knew what it was. The display went on for about twenty minutes, arced over a white cloud shaped like a giant cauliflower against a darker sky. When I got home I researched it and discovered it was a very rare phenomenon called cloud iridescence, and much harder to see than the Northern Lights as it is even more unpredictable. When it had appeared many years earlier people had thought it foreshadowed the end of days. Not a ghost, but what seemed to be a supernatural event that had a logical explanation.

The one thing that always amazes me about ghost stories or films is the way people never ask the apparition what things are like in the afterlife. And how come there’s room for the millions and millions of souls who have gone before, so wouldn’t everyone be queueing up to speak to Mohammed or Buddha or Shakespeare? I would. I most definitely would.

And then there’s poltergeists, supernatural entities or disembodied spirits that are said to cause physical and psychological disturbances. From the German: polter, meaning "noise" or "racket", and geist, meaning "spirit". If I believed in them I would have been utterly convinced when I went into my office recently, and found it in disarray. The only access is the door from the garden, then through the conservatory and in through another door. I assumed I had been clumsy and knocked everything off the window ledge myself, although as the morning went on I found things in different places. The third or fourth time I went in there was a sudden scuffling from the top of the bookshelves, and the squirrel I call Einstein made a flying leap onto my computer keyboard, after which he his under a small table and wouldn’t come out. He’s called Einstein because he has wrecked bird feeder after bird feeder in ingenious ways to get at the goodies inside. My initial worries about how distressed he must be were confounded when he took time out to wash his face whilst at the top of the curtain rail.

If we only wrote about what we know, there would be no Lord of the Rings or Dune or Harry Potter. It doesn’t mater that you’ve never had a supernatural experience. An imagination is even better. Shakespeare wrote good ghosts, although I don’t think he believed in them either…