The Flying Dutchman
The Flying Dutchman, the world's best-known non-human ghost, is a seventeenth-century merchant ship said to haunt the high seas. According to sea lore, the ship, which often appears as a hazy image or a strange light, is said to be a portent of bad luck and doom. The ship and its crew became eternally cursed when its Dutch captain refused to take safe harbor during a storm despite pleas from the crew and passengers. Instead the impudent Dutchman challenged God to take them down. The "ghost ship" has been reported on the ocean from time to time, including appearing off the coast of South Africa in 1923. Though never seen on land, The Flying Dutchman most recently appeared in movie theaters across the country in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films.
Bloody Mary
"Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary..." With those words, many schoolchildren had their first experience with a ghost. According to folklore, Bloody Mary is a ghost of a woman who murdered her children long ago. If you want to see her, go into a bathroom (usually at school), turn the lights off, stand in front of a mirror, and repeat her name three times. While countless children (and surely more than a few adults) have tried to summon Bloody Mary using the prescribed method, to date few if any have actually succeeded. Most either stare at their scared reflection in the dark mirror or lose their nerve after saying the second "Bloody Mary" and run screaming from the bathroom in girlish giggles. An updated version of the Bloody Mary legend was made into a horror film series "Candyman."
The Ghost of Christmas Past
In Charles Dickens's famous novel "A Christmas Carol," cold-hearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge has a change of heart after being visited by several ghosts representing different eras of his life's Christmases (Past, Present, and Yet to Come). Ghosts are often associated with life lessons and morality tales, and these spooks are no exception. The ghosts aren't wasting time rattling chains or scaring kids; instead the Ghost of Christmas Past rehabilitates Scrooge by showing him visions of his past Christmases. Scrooge comes to appreciate the true meaning of Christmas-no, not holiday commercialism but friendship and goodwill.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
"This didn't happen to me, but my friend, she heard it from her hairdresser, it happened to her parents. It seems that they were driving along a lonely country road one night' it was really cold, maybe up in Minnesota, or Montana. Anyway, it was snowing and as they turned a corner they saw a barefoot young girl wearing a dress and a green shawl. Of course they stopped to help her, and she got in the back seat. She didn't say much, and when they asked her where she lived, she pointed to a farmhouse in the distance. A few minutes later, when they pulled into the driveway, she was gone! The couple were puzzled but got out of the car and knocked on the farmhouse door. A somber, grey-haired woman answered, and the couple explained that their mysterious passenger had said this was her house. 'That's impossible,' the woman replied. 'My daughter died near here twenty years ago, on this very night.' Just inside the door, on an old wooden peg, hung her daughter's green shawl!"
Slimer
Slimer is the grotesque green ghost featured in the "Ghostbuster" films and cartoons. He's green, he's obnoxious, and he can spew slime... what's not to love? In fact, Slimer proved to be so popular with kids that he got a starring role in the spin-off series "The Real Ghostbusters." A reformed evil ghost that joined the Ghostbusters team, Slimer's voracious appetite and guttural burps make him among the most memorable cartoon ghosts.
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Shirley MacLaine reveals details of her much-anticipated appearance on season 3 of "Downton Abbey" and says the set "seemed haunted and full of otherworldly spirits."
MacLaine will appear in the first two episodes of the PBS hit as Martha Levinson, mother of Elizabeth McGovern's character, Lady Cora. "I sort of had to make her personality up," the Academy Award-winning actress tells TV Guide's Will Keck. "She is from Long Island and finally lands at Downton Abbey and sees what's happening to the place when everyone's coming back from the war." MacLaine says what made the character interesting to her is "her reactions to tradition and the class system. I do my best to be kind to tradition, but frankly think it should shift."
Further whetting fans' appetite for the season 3 premiere is confirmation that MacLaine will have scenes with Dame Maggie Smith, whose indelible portrayal of the acid-tongued Dowager Countess is a standout. "Our characters' relationship is probably not what you'd think," MacLaine says. "Maggie and I are both so old, we have a lot of time on us to discuss."
MacLaine, who has written numerous books about her belief in reincarnation, describes the set as "stepping back in time. The whole place seemed haunted and full of otherworldly spirits."
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No, I haven't forgotten or abandoned the theme of my blog. I took a break admittedly after all the research for the haunted formula and the books I'm working on, but I've been in the mood lately to discuss some alternate explanations for hauntings. This will be a series on the blog, called appropriately "Ghost Hunting Theories." Expect to hear such things discussed as; interdimensional beings, shadow people, aliens, neurologic disorders, residual, alternate universes, time splits, earth effects and completely explainable.
In this first in the series, I want to discuss the concept of interdimensional beings. Let's go to Wikipedia to get an overview: There is a hypothesis called "Interdimensional hypothesis," relating that UFOs, aliens, shadow people, crop circles, Bigfoot, and ghostly activity are all explained by the passage of beings from another dimension occasionally crossing into our dimension and being glimpsed.
I'll be honest. When I first heard about this theory, I laughed. It's a normal reaction when hearing such a "universal" view of ghostly activity. Then, I started reading more about it and considering it. Honestly, the concept of souls of the departed lingering as if their lives on Earth weren't enough seemed equally as ludicrous.
Some things explained by this theory include the lack of evidence of visitations, the difficulty capturing them, their ability to show up and then disappear suddenly. The characteristic often associated with shadow people is that once they realize they've been seen, they dart off into oblivion as if they didn't expect to be seen by people normally. There are also some areas like Bennington Triangle that have a wide variety of events occurring on one place that make them seem likely portals.
Let's go back in time when a person would get a cut that became infected. They had no concept that tiny little microscopic bacteria were the reason they were getting sick and dying. The very mention of microbes would have made people giggle nervously. "There's nothing there we don't see with our eyes. That is ridiculous! Surely it is a matter of the person's character or perhaps their very soul." Things that occurred were often explained by the supernatural or spiritual because if science didn't cover it, that's the category it was relegated to. Luckily, advancements made it possible to see things at a molecular level and realize that these very exceptionally tiny bacteria could create a chain reaction that would down a human. It was not the human's lack of moral fiber that created the illness but something spread easily by our environment.
The ghost world will some day face the same issue; is it supernatural or is it scientific?
We are in much the same situation now. We have all these different forms of phenomena, no way to truly capture them. I know this as an investigator that it's an extremely frustrating thing when really the majority of the evidence if subjective personal experiences. Perhaps we aren't able to visualize the means by which these phenomenon occur. And, perhaps they are not all separate issues, but held together by one commonality; interdimensional travel.
So, the next obvious question is; if they can travel into our dimension, why the hell don't we drop into theirs? There are many explanations, some including technology and others assuming that perhaps their dimensions have exits and ours does not.
Here is another consideration; what if when we are sitting at home watching TV, we are being seen briefly by another dimension, but we do not see their dimension? Perhaps when we glimpse a ghost, we are briefly seeing something in another dimension which might also explain why it often times does not seem to see us or passes through walls as if they are not there.
Any way you look at the concept of interdimensional beings, I actually have it as one of the top of my list of explanations for phenomenon. I am more likely to believe that concept than souls being stuck here because they don't know they're dead or they unfinished business which I put further down my list. At the end of this series, I will give you my order of beliefs at this very moment because, one thing I know about me, tomorrow something new will give me a new belief in the field.
It is my very ability to admit I have no final answers that keeps me seeking out ghost hunting theories.
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