Chasing Ghosts



A Tour of our Fascination with Spirits and The Supernatural

Marc Hartzman

If you follow this column, you’ll have picked up on a few themes. I love Sci-Fi, the book needn’t be recent to be worthy of reading, and I adore ghost stories. I’m not sure if it was what I read as a kid, or the fact that my sister and I were quite sure we lived in a haunted house in Buffalo during our early years, but stories of ghosts and the supernatural have always fascinated.

And that is the… spirit (sorry!) with with writer Marc Hartzman entered his investigation. His curiosity, investigational skill, and sheer story-telling power are evident on every page – many of them beautifully illustrated with original art and period pieces as he traces our interest in the ghostly from earliest history to modern times.

The book is broken into chapters that cover an aspect of that which haunts.

What is a ghost? Let’s go deep into history, and explore ancient and medieval beliefs about what happens after death, why spirits might linger, how they can be detected, or laid to rest. Shamans, acting as psychopomps, in many cultures led the souls of the dead into the afterlife. Customs, such as laying coins on the closed eyes of the dead, came from the belief of the ancient Greeks that Charon was the ferryman who carried the souls across the River Styx, and the ferryman needed to be paid. Originally the coin was placed in the mouth of the newly dead. Hungry ghosts in the far east might feed upon corpses, and even the Bible serves up a ghost to King Saul when he consults the Witch of Endor.

The middle ages was a particularly ghostly period, with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, John Dee and his quest to turn ordinary metal into gold (along with scrying, casting horoscopes, and convincing angels to appear). Emanuel Swedenborg was convinced we could project our spirits to the “astral plane,” – and this is just Chapter One!

The next chapters take us on journeys into the turn of the 20th century’s fascination with communicating with the dead; the Fox Sisters, Lilydale, spiritualism, curious cabinets and levitation. It was in the 1890’s that the Ouija Board took on the job of “spirit writing,” a specialty of many a medium in this period, and not only have mediums attempted to contact famous writers (and add new books to their oeuvre), but even artists have been targets for either clever or credulous seekers, who wanted to create new works from beyond the grave.

Ectoplasm, trumpets, table tipping, and of course the famous falling-out between Harry Houdini (who was eager to “out” fakers) and Arthur Conon Doyle (a believer whose wife claimed mediumistic powers) are all covered in delightful detail. Though I was familiar with many of the stories, it is to Hartzman’s credit that not only are they told with energy and style, but there were details I have never uncovered, so I found myself eagerly turning pages, and rewarded with nuggets or whole new troves.

He devotes another section of the book to sightings and phenomena, beginning with the Winchester Mystery House. I have had the exciting experience of having seen the place, and it feels as odd as its story. The house, reportedly, was dictated to the widow of the manufacturer of the Winchester Rifle by the ghosts of those who lost their lives to the guns. Borley Rectory, Amityville, poltergeists, a haunted asylum, and much more is waiting to be discovered here.

Finally, the writer devotes a section of the book to the possibility of technology building a bridge to the otherworld, or simply as a means of communicating with the dead. Photos and recordings have long been manipulated either in hopes of “seeing” or “hearing” the other side.  Have you ever taken a photo filled with orbs? Do you, like me, have an “EVP” app on your phone? Perhaps you’ve heard about photographing the “aura” or the experiments conducted to see if the soul weighed anything – serious experiments done at the point of death, weighing the deceased precisely before and after the event?

All of this and more is waiting in this delightful book – and what a perfect time of year, as the days grow shorter and the nights longer, to take a peek under the bed, behind the door, into the crystal, down the well,  or simply by turning the next page, to see what might be lurking there.


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