The sense of a presence
ALAN MURDIE explores varied accounts of phantom presences both friendly and malevolent
The feeling of being in the company of an invisible presence is one of the most commonly reported ghostly experiences. It also remains one of the least investigated by ghost hunters.
Many reports from occupiers of haunted houses mention a “sensation of a presence”, a strange “atmosphere” or “a feeling of being watched”. The sensed presence often features on lists of more tangible phenomena that contradict the findings of “normal science”, recorded together with claims of temperature variations, chilly breezes, the disturbance of bedclothes and objects, glowing lights, doors opening and shutting themselves, footsteps, apparitions and all the other effects which constitute the hallmarks of a haunted site.
To cite two recent examples from the UK: “Ghostly shadows” flitting through its hall, doors slamming, wardrobe doors flying open at night and the feeling of “a presence” all come from staff and guests at the Penrallt Hotel, Aberforth, near Cardigan Bay in Wales. Dating from the 17th century, this family-run hotel was visited in the summer of 2019 by members of Cymru Paranormal
Investigations and Research before reopening last August following refurbishment.
Cymru Paranormal claims success recording unexplained noises by the bar, a “movement” in the dining room and hearing the sound of running water with no obvious source. They state “experiences of the team, along with the one scientific piece of evidence which remains unexplainable” tend to suggest “some sort of paranormal activity going on at the location”. (‘Something really does go bump in the night at the Penrallt Hotel in Aberporth!’ Tivy Advertiser, 25 Oct 2019).
Just over six months later, and over 300 miles away in Scotland, the owner and staff of the George & Abbotsford Hotel in Melrose also requested a ghost investigation.
Staff complained of lights being switched on and off and physical assaults by an invisible presence. An investigation of sorts was duly supplied by UK Ghost Nights, an entertainment company that charges fees for services appearing to be a mixture of ghost hunt, séance and diverting night out. Joining them was Andrew McQuarrie an editor with the Border Telegraph.
Unfortunately, at least as Mr McQuarrie describes proceedings, the UK Ghost Nights involvement was heavy on showmanship, with much solemn brandishing of copper dowsing rods, but light on any scientific scrutiny or study of the patterns of experience within the building. While Andrew McQuarrie clearly remained unconvinced at the efforts of a UK Ghost Nights employee “trying to channel my inner Bill Murray” as he put it, he admits finding stories told by hotel owner Mrs Dawn Barrett and her head chef Kailee Reidie ‘compelling’.
Ms Reidie, 22, described an alarming incident, ascribed to the aggressive spirit of “John… supposedly a grouchy ex-chef”. One evening, as Ms Reidie was alone in the kitchen, turning on the fryer, her hair was pulled back so sharply that she was thrown
Her hair was pulled back so sharply that she was thrown against the table behind her
against the table behind her. She stated: “I was in shock because I knew he [John] was there, but I’m not a big believer in ghosts… I’ve never seen John – it’s just a feeling.”
Mr McQuarrie found “a sense of foreboding in some areas of the building – not least the cellar and the attic,” though such places can often seem gloomy and claustrophobic, regardless of any haunting.
Pick up almost any book on haunted places published in the last 60 years and you will find similar stories. Diverse places are described as ‘uncanny’, ‘weird’, ‘spooky’ and so on, descriptions often straying into the poetic. John Harries wrote of Glencoe, “whatever the time or season, if, in this valley of angry rock and torrential streams, the ghost hunter does not find himself in the presence of vengeful phantoms, he lacks the very rudiments of the sensitivity for the most persuasive of psychic experiences.” (The Ghost Hunter’s Roadbook (1968).
More commonly, the sensation of a presence may occur when a person is alone in a building, including their own home, as well as in the open air. Sometimes the impression may be identified as related to a living person not physically present or to someone actually deceased. Dr Dewey Rees studied hallucinations experienced by the bereaved. Experiences of presences often happened spontaneously to widows and widowers, following the death of a spouse (British Medical Journal, 3Oct 1971). Alternatively, the percipient senses an anonymous personality, or even a nonhuman entity.
Though often omitted from surveys of ghostly encounters, it is a common and cross-cultural experience. Dr Erlendur Haraldsson found a sensed presence ranks highly among ghostly manifestations in Iceland, often only exceeded by visual experiences (see The Departed Among the Living: An Investigative Study of Afterlife Encounters (2012) and also Apparitions (1975) by Celia Green and Charles McCreery). As often as not, the percipient encounters a more nebulous feeling, perceived as an impression of a malaise or oppression, leading to a conviction that an unspecified ‘something’ is wrong with a house or location.
A prime difficulty with analysing reports is that the sense of a presence crosses the boundary into what, in other contexts, is interpreted as a spiritual, mystical and religious experience, saturated with a host of cultural and personal meanings.
William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, confessed in his Principles of Psychology (1890) that he hardly knew where to begin with it, announcing: “No definite conclusion can be come to until more definite data are obtained”. The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre has collected thousands of cases over many years, but a paradigm for understanding remains elusive.
A sign of just how little progress has been made in more than a century is shown by its specific omission from a leading 21st century study, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (2016) by Stanley Krippner and Ertzel Cardena, who consider “that there is not a substantial enough research literature relating to it”. Consequently, we are left principally with only the descriptions supplied in personal testimonies.
In 1897 an intriguing description was provided by Harold Sanders, a butler at the notoriously haunted Ballechin House in Perthshire (see FT345:18-20). A few minutes prior to hearing strange noises Sanders felt a “peculiar sensation” that he compared to “suddenly entering an ice house, and a feeling that someone was present and about to speak to me” (In The Alleged Haunting of B––––– House (1900) by Ada Goodrich-Freer and John, Marquess of Bute).
In the 1950s a professor of zoology purchased a mews flat which had formerly been a studio, at Wonersh, Surrey, to carry out his studies. After a few months he was forced to vacate the property because of its atmosphere. He told Andrew Green: “The feeling was really diabolical, it was getting so bad that I was developing suicidal tendencies. I had to get out.” (Our Haunted Kingdom, 1973).
Writer Joan Forman made no claim to possessing psychic abilities, but found herself sensitive to atmospheres when exploring a number of haunted locations in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. Her first encounter with a malevolent presence took place when visiting an (unidentified) church in a north Norfolk hamlet “beyond Colney” in the autumn of 1971. Both she and a friend found the ambience so intensely oppressive and “evil”, they left the building. Returning to their car, they found a green, glutinous substance spattered over the vehicle for which they had no explanation.
Going up to a haunted room on the first floor of an Oxfam shop in Magdalen Street, Norwich, in early 1973, Joan Forman experienced “a feeling of physical disturbance”. She described it in Haunted East Anglia (1974): “At first mild, it intensified as we climbed the stairs and entered the corridor leading to the front office”. By the time she reached the door, “the sensation was precise, intense and concentrated”, proving “overpoweringly strong” inside the room itself. Describing the effect upon herself, she stated how the feeling, “seems first to affect the middle of one’s body, the stomach tightens or feels queasy, as in a fear reaction. There is a feeling… of oppression on the body’s surface, as though the atmosphere had gained additional weight.”
She describes encountering something similar at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in 1986, finding “Rizzio’s Room” (where David Rizzio, lover of Mary Queen of Scots, was murdered on 9 March 1566) quite impossible to stay in. She identified a sense of horror permeating the room, concentrated on the left-hand side near the entrance door. “The sensation is so intense that it almost seems to have weight –as though the air was thicker at that spot.” (Haunted Royal Homes, 1987).
I find this description interesting. It matches how I would best describe a sensation I have felt myself at several
haunted sites visited over the years. The air seems to be too thick or condensed at certain points. The problem is that one cannot be sure with such impressions, owing to their typically unique and essentially private nature.
My own most striking experience with a presence occurred on the night of 6-7 December 1997, at an isolated printing shop in a converted farm building near an ancient site in Kent. Employees were troubled by noises, an unpleasant atmosphere and shadowy figures glimpsed passing outside in the yard of the building during daylight hours. They became increasingly uneasy about working at the rather remote location, and one threatened to resign. I was requested to attend after the owner, a lady in her early 40s, had called in two experienced ghost investigators well known to me. One was a tough former soldier and devout Catholic, the other a successful lady journalist possessing pronounced psychic sensitivity. In turn, they asked me along, viewing me as something of a sceptic towards their impressions obtained at a previous visit that this haunting might involve “something nasty”.
Our visit took place on a Saturday evening, accompanied by the owner who admitted having become nervous herself about staying inside the building alone. The unit lay along a deserted minor road, running through thick woods. Being used to the East Anglian countryside at night, I did not find this troubling. It was a crisp and dry evening, and not cold for the season. I experienced no conscious sense of unease. If anything, my mood was buoyant and engaged, even one of pleasant expectation. This changed upon arriving at the premises and setting foot inside. Immediately upon entering, I was struck by an intensely unpleasant and unsettling atmosphere. It felt like stepping inside a block of intense hostility that filled the room.
My sensations were at odds with the actual scene presenting itself, starkly illuminated by bright electric lights. Looking over the idle machinery with stacks of halfcompleted printing jobs piled around them, it all looked a little chaotic and untidy, dingy in places, but hardly menacing. Yet the feeling of hostility in the air was acute. I can only compare it to the sensations that you may experience when trying to concentrate on some task at the same time as being exposed to a loud, piercing, high-pitched noise like a car alarm. Except here, both premises and surrounding grounds and woodland were silent.
Perhaps significantly, I also encountered this feeling immediately outside the building. Going out alone into the well-lit front yard, where storage sheds and the toilet and washing facilities were situated, proved markedly unpleasant. Here it seemed more dynamic; I had the eerie and unsettling feeling of being watched and then trailed, as if followed by someone intent on creeping up on me from behind. I was glad to return inside, where the unpleasant atmosphere slowly dispersed.
Over the next four hours, we explored the site, inside and out, while the owner remained in one small office doing paperwork. We conducted several static periods of silent observation with the lights kept on (nobody was keen to sit in complete darkness). We witnessed nothing unusual.
The one objective and unexplained event of the night occurred there at 12.30am. A large can of aerosol spray containing glue used for photographs suddenly fell off a work bench and struck the floor loudly – rather purposefully it seemed. We identified no obvious explanation for this (I actually found it interesting and not alarming). However, the lady sensitive reported hearing a strange groan and found the atmosphere increasingly uncomfortable. She was convinced that ‘it’ was back, whatever
‘it’ was, and that it was best to leave. Respecting her feelings, and not with much regret, we departed. I have not encountered a site with such a distinctly unpleasant atmosphere before or since.
There is no agreed consensus or hypothesis amongst psychical researchers as to the cause of such experiences, reflected in our division of opinion on the night. My companions thought of discarnate activity, while I was inclined at the time to think in terms of auto-suggestion or electromagnetic pollution. I was aware of research by Dr Michael Persinger in Canada and Albert Budden in the UK,
both promoting theories that electrical or electromagnetic stimulation of the brain produced haunting sensations. (CM Cook and MA Persinger: ‘Experimental induction of the “sensed presence” in normal subjects and an Exceptional Subject’ in Perceptual and Motor Skills 77 (1997), pp.1299-1308; Allergies and Aliens (1995) by Albert Budden).
Not until the summer of the following year, 1998, did the late Vic Tandy propose his hypothesis that low levels of infrasound trigger uncomfortable sensations in confined spaces, duly interpreted as ghostly presences (see FT301:52-53).
This theory accumulated a substantial following for a time, attracting efforts at experimental testing with the creation of the ‘Haunt Project’ by researchers at Goldsmith College, London. It involved creating an artificial ‘haunted’ room in which volunteers were exposed to infrasound, complex electromagnetic fields, singly or in combination (see ‘The “Haunt” Project: An attempt to build a “haunted” room by manipulating complex electromagnetic fields and infrasound’ by Christopher C French, Usman Haque, Rosie BuntonStasyshyn & Rob Davis (2009) Cortex 45, pp.619-29). Positive results were reported, although the methodology, measurements and the infrasound hypothesis itself have been disputed. Moreover, infrasound was postulated as operating in enclosed spaces, failing to account for experiences in the open air (see: ‘Infrasound and the Paranormal’ (2012) by Steve Parsons in Journal of the SPR v.76, pp.155-175).
Alternative explanations, favoured by an earlier generation of anomalous psychologists, looked to medicine and psychiatry, drawing parallels with symptoms of schizophrenia and epilepsy, in which sufferers feel an alien presence nearby. Such medicalisation of experience, and fears of being diagnosed as delusional (or simply labelled lonely and socially isolated), may have discouraged people from reporting their experiences.
However, a rebuttal to accusations of mental affliction comes from widespread accounts offered by individuals in top physical and mental condition, for example, explorers, soldiers, athletes and mountaineers (See The Psychology of Anomalous Experience, 1972, by Graham Reed). Mountaineer Ralph Izzard in The Innocents on Everest (1954) wrote: “Many of us, and not only the hypersensitive, have felt the sense of a ‘presence’ at high and desolate altitudes… Nine times out of ten this ‘presence’ is felt to be malevolent rather than benevolent”.
In other cases, the presence proves helpful and sustaining. After narrowly missing reaching the summit of Mount Everest in 1933, Frank Smythe felt himself accompanied by a friendly presence that seemed so real to him he offered it a share of Kendal mint cake. The sense of presence felt by some mountaineers may result from moving automatically in extreme fatigue; the sense of being guided may arise from perceiving oneself moving without being conscious of controlling one’s own movements, or from heightened reactions in external natural stimuli like draughts, cloud shadows and echoes, themselves startling in otherwise relatively silent and monotonous environments.
Notably, these experiences occur with sufficient frequency that US author John Geiger has gathered an extensive collection. Dubbing such phantoms the ‘Third Man’ experience, he has written a fascinating book, The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible (2013), devoted to the phenomenon.
Yachtsman Joshua Slocum (1844c.1909), who made the first solo voyage around the globe, claimed once being aided by a ghostly helmsman (see FT354:49). Following a perilous 16-day crossing of the Antarctic seas in an open boat to South Georgia, Ernest Shackleton wrote that during a long march over the mountainous and glacial island, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three... Afterwards Worsley and Crean [his living human companions] each confessed to ‘a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us’” (in South, 1919). Aviator Charles Lindbergh claimed ghostly presences advised him while making the first transatlantic flight in 1927. Geiger looks to evolutionary theory as a possible solution, advocating a hereditary survival mechanism hard-wired into human neurophysiology.
This is all deeply interesting, but in my view a theory inadequate to encompass the range of experiences occurring at haunted sites and their accompanying phenomena. Could it be that undergoing extreme physical hardship and privations, effectively bringing the body closer to physical death, results in a liminal condition where the boundary between this life and another dimension becomes permeable, as is presumed to occur at haunted sites? Effectively, does the body itself become haunted? Parallels may be drawn with near-death experiences.
As Renee Heynes stated in The Hidden Springs (1961): “The thesis that such intuitions of presence must always be illusory because they sometimes arise from physical stimuli originating either outside or inside the body is surely no more reasonable than the argument that the normal working of the senses cannot be trusted because drunkenness, or a high temperature, can produce hallucinations.”
If so, possible answers may better be sought in transpersonal psychology and parapsychology rather than anomalous psychology. As will be obvious, encountering a presence after walking up one flight of stairs in an Oxfam shop in Norwich is hardly comparable to climbing Everest.
The friendly presence seemed so real to him he offered it a share of Kendal mint cake