Does Haunting Inevitably Follow Tragedy?
by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine
Rescue workers search for bodies in the wake of the 1917 explosion of the Mont-Blanc
Cheryl and I were recently discussing the Halifax explosion in Novia Scotia. On December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship – the SS Mont-Blanc was making its way through the narrows section of the Halifax harbor when it collided with the Norwegian ship, the SS Imo. The Mont-Blanc quickly caught fire. It was 8:40 in the morning along a busy harbor, and the smoke and fire brought the citizens of Halifax to the harbor and their windows to watch what was happening. The Mount-Blanc burned for approximately 25 minutes before a growing crowd of onlookers – who were blissfully unaware of the deadly cargo that the ship was carrying. At 9:04, the war explosives on the Mont-Blanc gave way to the heat, and the ship exploded. Nearly two square kilometers of buildings along the harbor in Halifax, Richmond and Dartmouth were obliterated – along with those who stood within that range watching the fire.
The explosion had the force of nearly 3 kilotons of TNT and was the largest man-made explosion up to that point in history.
In the aftermath of the explosion came the percussion wave, which snapped trees in its path in half and blew in windows where people stood watching. Then came the tsunami and a rain of fiery metal, wood and chunks of debris that poured down on the harbor and the towns surrounding it. Not only that, but the percussion from the explosion caused lamps, stoves and furnaces that were being used on the dark wintry day in many buildings in the area to tip, causing wide-spread fires in buildings throughout the town.
It is unknown how many actually perished on this deadly day in Halifax history; however, there is speculation that the death toll from the explosion, tsunami, percussion wave and fires was right around 2000.
That’s a lot of dead in an unimaginable tragedy.
History is peppered with places where such tragedies have occurred. Sudden, mass deaths. Awful events that are barely imaginable from our comfortable perches in cozy rooms as we read from our computer screens on a warm summer day.
So what remains in the wake of tragedies such as Halifax, where the loss of human life is immense and sudden? Is there an energetic imprint that replays itself? Do the spirits of the dead head Home in the wake of their tragic deaths, or do they remain, confused by the suddenness of their demise?
Halifax Harbor has its share of reported hauntings – as do the sites of other tragedies that occur on a massive scale. But do those reports of hauntings arise as a result of actual activity, or do they arise from human attempts to process tragedy and the expectations and fears we have about dying in such a manner ourselves? Or is it a little bit of both – truth and rumor?
There is no way to know for certain. While we can base our answers on personal experiences that we may have in such places, that is proof only to the individual who had the experience. Or maybe it isn’t. Stories of tragedy provide fertile soil for our imaginations. If we expect to see and hear things, do those expectations manifest because we think they will?
Paranormal research and investigation provides hope that someday we may find the answers to such questions; however, we’re not there yet. Our current knowledge isn’t much more than it ever has been – although we have lots of theories. As long as questions like this remain unanswered, we will seek.
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Or when we visit these places with knowledge of the history running around in our head, do we leave ourselves open to these unexplained experiences? If a person visited a battlefield and didn’t know it was a battlefield, how would they react? Would they experience anything?
I still believe the power of suggestion creates a sense of bias in our minds when we visit places. I’m guilty of that when I traveled to the Myrtles Plantation. I researched the heck out of that place before I even crossed the state line. Now I wonder if some of the stuff we experienced was just regular normal every day things.
On the other hand, one place that I have had experiences personally and caught on DAR was a place that I did not have any beforehand knowledge of. Now granted it was a cemetery but I didn’t research any history of it till much later.
So I wonder about groups going in cold, do they have an advantage that is easy to lose and never overcomed.
Hey Ryan -
I actually wonder the same thing myself. How much do our expectations of a place influence what we experience there? I think it is a great question!
~Karen
I know it greatly influenced a team in an experiment I did to see how telling groups what to expect would influence their experiences.
Team A: no story. no experiences
Team B: story of a haunting. experiences matched much of the story.
Consider this: Hearing the stories before going to a location may only help raise the brain’s awareness level.
Stolling down 42nd Street, maybe our awareness is not at a point where we are apt to percieve spiritual vibrations. Or whatever they are.
Once we know there may be something at a specific location, our senses may click into a more receptive state. It may be something that our subconscious does automatically or upon stimilation. Stimulation is hearing a story.
A supposed automatic subconscious reaction is what I felt when, years ago, I was walking a across civil war battlefield, although it wasn’t a well known one, not a large one. I didn’t know there’d been combat there. But the place itself made me sense something. And the more time I spent there, in what I thought was just a pasture, the more psychic images came to me. The battlefield, defined itself to me. Just by its nature. The nature of it, quiet, still, breathless, otherworldly, raised my awareness level, as surely as if I’d been told it had once been a killing ground.
Let’s consider the concept of an awareness level.
Then, let me put forth the concept that surviving spirits may not be the movie version we’ve been programmed to expect. Maybe its more something that is perceived within out senses, known or unknown though those senses may be. We don’t know what we’re capable of “picking up”. Maybe “ghosts” exist beyond our visual senses. Maybe we percieve them inwardly. Like an organic EVP. I’ve picked things up on film that I absolutely did not see when I took the picture. That’s common, isn’t it? Maybe the image of a ghost is recorded somewhere in our conscious or subconscious mind. Unseen by our eyes. Ergo, when we are made aware to be on the lookout, we may tend to pick up something had we not been alerted before hand.
I could site a sideways example of the awareness factor from when I was a young fella, raised in the south. We were hunters. I could stroll out through the woods without my shotgun or hunting license and see nary a squirrel. But come hunting season, I’d go back into those same woods with my awareness level raised and see game everywhere.
And as Forrest Gump said, “An’ tha’s awl ah got t’say abowdt th’yat.”
Budd
And much of what is mentioned here is a problem that plagues investigation. How much is heightened awareness and how much is created in our own minds based upon input.
I know in the case of the experiment I ran the location had never had any reports of a haunting. The place was one where no one died and had been in the family since it was built. The stories were total figments of my warped imagination, yet the team that was told those stories still perceived at that location by people who do their best to not let their imaginations get the better of them. Yet it still happened.
So the ‘sticky wicket’ is how to separate things perceived from things created by the mind. Considering how flawed human perception is we must turn to an alternate method. But therein lies another problem: what method? An impartial one is needed, which is what we can get from technology, but what technology to use? What is it that needs to be measured? How do we use our objective technology, which can also be fooled if we are careful to setup controls.
Seems pretty hopeless, doesn’t it?
Dream, you’d know; have there ever been any functional equipment designed and produced for field testing that actually had any merit or were bug-free, suspicion-free, dumbass-free?
All the equipment we first saw, well most of us first saw, on GH being used were things that had been produced for other things. The EMF was used by electricians, wasn’t it? When you look at the equipment that was used when this paranormal investigation thing first burst upon on us via Televisionland it was basically like the equipment used by Our Gang/The Little Rascals on their adventures. Just stuff laying around in the garage.
I know people are always trying to come up with something that’ll be a sure-fire Ghost Detector, but how many of them have really passed the taste test? Its seems as soon as someone comes up with a new piece of ghost hunting equipment, it gets tossed right on the pile marked Snake Oil.
Have you heard of anything of late that has any promise for field work?
Otherwise, it seems we’re still unarmed in this Great Quest. Personally, I haven’t seen anything that trumps good ol’ fashioned goosebumps when whisting past a graveyard. A K-2 Meter doesn’t seem to have anything on the hairs being raised on the back of my neck.
Maybe that’s what we’re too quick to leave behind, the Human Equation. Not so much mediums and sensitives and the like, but maybe there’s something else we’re not considering. Like the organic link between human and robot that the Sci-Fi genre calls “Cyborg”. Maybe there’s an organic link between the unseen and the percieved in the human brain organ. And somewhere in between, we might be missing something, like an implant that records cerebral cortex images. I’m just vamping, but an idea like that could possibly get someone with the technical brainpower motivated to start dreaming up systems.
Jules Verne, in his horse-drawn carriage, wrote about travelers from Earth to the Moon. NASA actually visited the STAR TREK set and made measurements of the scanner bed prop. Then went back to Houston and built the damned thing. I’m just sayin’.
Budd
No piece of equipment is free from defects or misuse. Since the paranormal is yet to be defined there is no way to build a detector for it.
The biggest problem with use of equipment in paranormal investigation is that it is either a poor piece of equipment (K-II, etc) or it isn’t being employed in such a way that it yields any valuable data. Take EMF for instance. Nobody seems to have done the proper testing to see if it’s relevant or not. Most investigators I’ve seen wander around with one, maybe two EMF detectors (usually single pole) and look for anomalous readings. With so few data points there is no real way to see what is going on with EMF. Personally I’d look at both static and dynamic magnetic fields, plus I’d use an array of tri-field sensors. but the main point here is without proper data collection questions cannot be answered.
Most of the equipment that I’ve seen; Frank’s box, Ovilus, EM microphones, and a few that slip my mind at the moment, are nothing but variations on a theme, or simply take advantage of a quirk in the brain. Frank’s box is an example of that. Every clip I’ve seen or hear produced using said device could easily be a product of suggestibility and coincidence. Ovilus produces just as much nonsense as it does “valid” hits. The biggest problem I see with equipment use is investigators ability to follow the rules of data collection as well as the rules of establishing controls to produce sound conclusions.
Let’s look at Frank’s box again. In the last clip I watched on YouTube, the person asked a question and then listened. I counted 19 responses before it hit on one that the investigator accepted as “it fits”. That’s know as data mining, and if you look at the hit percentage (5%) it’s not very impressive. But, because most investigators and your average Joe don’t see it that way, they are impressed because they only see the hits and don’t look at the misses. If they were to witness the same clip I saw they’d see communication because 90% of the questions asked appeared to have responses. When looking at the actual numbers they’d find what I found and see that the actual response rate is less than 3%. The biggest problem with this type of equipment is there is no real testing done; there are no controls and no standards, which leaves interpretation wide open for manipulation and self deception.
We are still unarmed in this quest, but it’s not the equipment it’s the methods. I have yet to see one group that knows enough about science to answer any questions. They can’t even give an answer on EMF, or cold spots. Most succomb to the pseudoscience that permeates the field, and fall pray to it’s abysmal logic; building theory on top of theory with no facts to lay a foundation.
When throwing in the human factor this becomes even more obscure, especially when there are unseen forces that can cause a sensation. Not to make light of your experiences in any way, but let’s use the hair standing on end as an example. There are several things that can cause such a sensation: infra-sound, electrostatic charges, and strong magnetic fields. Those are things that can be tested for with everyday equipment that is designed to test and measure for those things. But without testing for those things then how do we know they are not the cause? Could such an experience (and I’ve had them as well) be something paranormal in nature? I’d say yes, but I’d also have to say they could be one of the reasons I mention above.
With the human mind also comes another big issue, and that is that we know so little about how the mind works that there is no way (at least in the foreseeable future) to record what the brain sees. We do know that perception is fallible. Very fallible. We know that our brain can make us see faces and hear sounds that are simply bits of input that are suggestive enough for our brains to qualify them such. We also know that suggestion can greatly influence our perception, especially if emotions begin to run high. Currently where we are in our understanding of the brain, as well as our ability to verify what the brain has experienced, we are no better off relying upon it as a means to investigate with than we are with a K-II meter. The human equation is what’s given us the question, but it’s not what’s going to solve the equation. Not at this time.
So in a sense it does seem hopeless, and at the moment I’d say it is hopeless if we continue down the same path that we’ve followed for more than a century. Until investigators take the time bring actual science into their methods and learn about data points and performing sound experiments that yield true answers the field will never grow beyond campfire stories. I’m hoping that I’ll get groundwork for investigating, and actually get to do some more investigating before I pass on. But I am a Muppet with many projects and goals, and unfortunately this project is but a hobby, which puts it down further on list of life’s priorities.
One thing I do know is that I’ve had experiences that I cannot explain, which does make me wonder what is truly there. I know that there would be many who would be convinced by these experiences, and some would be sure to wonder how I could have experienced such things without believing they were paranormal in nature. About all I can say to that is I wish to find the truth regardless of where it leads, and by imposing my beliefs into the equation I have already biased the outcome.
I’d say PUG should roll out the red carpet for you, Dream. Sure, you lean to the Amazing Randi side of the conversation, but we need your kind of leveling to offset the fat kid on the long end of the see-saw. I think many of us could appreciate the did-did not give and take about the object of our interest. After all, like I was hoping to point out on the forum that-shall-not-be-named (ah-syfy-choo), the universal reason we are all attracted to the topic of ghost hunting is our innate human fear of death. As I mentioned, Man is the only animal that realizes it is alive and is, therefore, the only animal that fears death. Those of us who find little comfort in faith-base religions just want to find anything, a button, a thread of proof that when the light goes off in this world, another one comes on in the next world. If we glom onto this intriguing ghost hunting thing and just sit, fat and happy, feeling that “whew! Everthing is okay now,” we’re as guilty of being faith-based as any good Christian believer. The evidence is not in. There are intriguing clues here and there. For instance, the evidence of anomoly that Karen is personally bringing in from her discoveries at the Wellington site is something that can’t be dismissed. She’s just not a ghost groupie. Neither is Jim, her husband, Mr. Skeptic personified. But, again, what is it she’s found? Something, I feel certain, its something. But how to prove it? I think we’d be lucky to have the Dreamster making cases both for and against. What’s so interesting about you, Dream is you seem to be driven purely by need of scientific proof while being a non-skeptic about the possible existence of the paranormal. As George Gobel used to say, “You just can’t hardly get that no more.”
I hope Karen, Chad and Cheryl read your posts, which I’m sure they do. But I’d like to read a monthly article from your keyboard in the magazine. Unlike non-believers, you seem to truly want to find proof that even you can’t unravel. Well, until that time, I bid you happy hunting, Dreamsinger. And I hope you find what you’re looking for. For all our sakes.
Yes, I do read Dreamsinger’s posts. I also am a follower of his two websites, http://www.paranormal-tips.com and http://www.darkrealmlabs.com.
I was just looking for pictures of the explosion, and I stumbled across your site. After reading some of the replies here, I was compelled to tell you this :
I personnally live in Halifax. I’m in the Navy, and I often work in buildings that either survived or were built on the ashes of those who did not. One of them is known as the Stadacona A-Block, the Atlantic Block for single members, basically, barracks. It was built straight on top of where they used to put the dead bodies after the explosion. More precisely, the South End of the building, at the basement deck, houses a post office, facing a storage room for bicycles. During nightly rounds we have to conduct everyday, we pass by this post office. There was not a single time where I didn’t hear heavy noise in that storage room. However, when opening the doors, nothing had moved.
I don’t need any electronic instrument, even though I myself am an electronics technician, to prove to me that the dead are not always resting in peace.
Cheers to you all.
Jeff.
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