Ghost Routines

The Residual Haunting Theory

Some shop news: I am selling 35 animation frames from this lil’ mouse notebook animation in my shop.

Signed and drawn on punched animation paper, each one is a unique drawing in the sequence. For example:

or alternatively:

But the real news is that it’s almost the end of ghost season.

Devastating.

I recommend watching this mainly for the good cartoon ghost aesthetics.

I love a spooky post, so if you’re also mourning the end of the season you can read some of my previous devotions to Halloween here:

This Halloween I have been spending my quieter moments reading not one but TWO books about ghosts that are seemingly the multiverse version of each other.

One is about American ghosts:

And one is about British ghosts:

So my entire identity is covered.

I bought Ghostland by Colin Dickey after I saw him speak at a conference about death hosted by the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

Here are some of my favourite facts from his book.

• Triskaidekaphilia is a love the number 13.

• The word cemetery comes from the Greek koimeterion and originally meant a dormitory or a place to sleep.

• Spiritualists did not believe in hell, but rather that the dead went to a place called Summerland.

• In the late 1950s Swedish painter and opera singer Friedrich Jurgenson decided to record birds singing in his garden and while playing back the recording, he heard the voice of his dead mother calling his name. He spent years making further recordings before publishing ‘Radio Contact with the Dead’ in 1967.

  

• His work was followed and greatly expanded on by Konstantin Raudive who published his extensive documentation of EVPs in his book “The Inaudible Made Audible” and transcribed some of the more disturbing communications he received:

  

  “Here is night brothers, here the birds burn.”

  “Secret reports…it is bad here.”

• There is a haunted Toys “R” Us in Sunnyvale, California.

• There is a 1983 dutch horror film called De Lift, about a haunted, murderous elevator, with the tagline: “Take the stairs, take the stairs. For God’s sake, take the stairs!!!”

  

• There is a meet up in LA called GHOULA which stands for: Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles. Should we go?

• Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston is so large that it is dubbed “The City of the Silent.”

And finally I stumbled up my favourite explanation of ghosts, which I once heard on a ghost tour at The Stanley Hotel (the hotel that inspired the Shining). On the tour the woman said that there was a theory that ghosts were not dead souls come back to haunt the living, but rather recordings of moments where someone did a particular routine every day, such as making coffee, or where people had felt a particularly strong emotion. If you cried a lot in one spot, chances are it would make an impression and your sobbing body would come back to haunt someone later.

This phenomenon, I learned from Colin, is known as “Residual Haunting Theory”:

• Also known as the Stone Tape Theory, the belief is that certain inanimate objects are primed to record imprints of certain actions that they then play back later. Stone and rocks in particular, the theory says, can absorb energy from the living, much as a tape recorder absorbs the voice of the living, especially during episodes of high tension, anxiety and fear. Once this energy is stored, it can also be released, resulting in the replay of the recorded events.

• This is why castles are so haunted.

Poltergeist

• Sir Oliver Lodge in his 1908 book Man and the Universe, speaks of how a haunted house “photographs” a past event. An ability to see ghosts is based then on a living persons ability to tune into the frequency of that memory.

I love the idea that ghosts are just imprints of intense memories. But my favourite part of this theory is that someone’s routine can also haunt people later.

Coffee ghost

Newspaper ghost

Television ghost

My ghost would be the ghost of talking about ghosts.

I haven’t gotten as far into the British ghost book but it has chapter headings such as: “Sheets and Clouds” so you better believe i’m excited.

See you on the other side (of October).