The persistence of memory 2

  

Time is on a continuum. 

I first read JW DUNNE,  when I was a child, 

Because my father had a copy. 

Why he did always puzzled me, because he was an atheist and 

Had no interest in the supernatural at all, 

And I think it more to do with his having read JB Priestley's plays.

Anyway, it made me think of time differently. I think of it as a continuum, which joins with other continuum,  but there  were peoples which believed

that time had all the past present and future rolled into one. 

It makes a lot of sense in some ways. You can't really 

 ever prove that the past happened, as you imagine it, and it isn't here now. 

The present is a fleeting moment, and you can never know it, as

 the moment you have it it's the past. 

Do we claim that the present goes on over a period of time?

That would only mean it was past present and future rolled into one anyway.

The future hasn't yet happened. When it does, it isn't there any longer,

 and you can't hold onto it. 

So you come back to the idea that it's all simultaneous, 

and that our experience is cyclic and continuous.

I wonder if there isn't something in the idea that the past is retained,

Not only as a photographic image,  but as a separate dimension of experience, 

and the future....fate or uncontrolled chance, you come back 

To questions of free will. Do we have any?

But what if will and being are actually that threefold dimension of 

Past present and future?

If it's that anyway, the question of free will surely becomes obsolete.?

Our will is was and will be informed by many things.

It's all of us all of the time, and can be informed by more than what 

We see through our eyes at any given moment.

Maybe we need to have the experience of what's going to happen

 to tell us what to remember?

the Persistence of Memory 1

      I have had other experiences, which make me believe that the past still exists somewhere. I don't only mean because we keep records to define ourselves and our antecedents. I don't believe that we can rely upon a memory of the past to define ourselves,  and that's why we do it.

I am very suspicious of memory. I mean that once an event has happened

All that we have left of that event is a subjective idea in our mind, and that could be spurious. So, you say, take a photograph, write down a factual account. 

Written or photographic evidence. 

Which is why that's evidence in a courtroom, whereas different witnesses might have different subjective experiences in their memories, and accounts do differ,

In a sense, having physical evidence is like holding out against entropy. 

When chaos sets in and bit by bit, that evidence is destroyed,

Or you have a book of family photos without enough evidence to piece together 

Which ancestor is which. In the end the evidence decays,  one way or another. 

But the ghosts of that evidence remain.

That is what we are talking about, I think, in a number of instances.

The persistence of the "presence" of the yeti, the lake monsters

 and ghosts.

It's why if you are sensitive, and stand below decks on a ship like the HMS. Victory, 

There you sense the activity, and the smells of shipboard life are present.

I thought of devoting a page for that,  

but I thought there isn't enough to that experience, except for my 

 impressions of the moment which I remember. 

But how much can I rely on my memory?

I do feel that I am prejudiced against memory, as there is simply

So much that I would rather not remember. 

...I'll say more about this. Were the Mayas right to think that time is circular?

The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

The idea of the missing or the vanishing features highly in stories.

There are a number of boundary crossing tales. 

Hope Hodgson's "House on the Borderland," the Narnia books of course, 

And there's the apocryphal story of Crossing the Field, 

Which was probably created by Ambrose Bierce,  and then repeated with different names and in different places, as actually having happened, 

Because it's a good story, by others including Charles Fort,

But it is probably Bierce's alone, and if you have a copy of Bierce's collected tales

you'll see that Bierce wrote a number of them, including 

'The difficulty of crossing a field'

And ' Charles Ashmore's trail', and often you see versions with 

elements of  both stories melded together.

I think that a fair sign that others are running with someone else's story.

However, I have had experiences of seeing ordinary people "disappear" 

which I couldn't follow up, 

And leave me puzzled.  

Like one morning at Chichester, seated under the wall, facing across a road,

and next to a path, which led to both left and right, along the foot of that wall

I was reading, and across the road were a row of houses,

 and another area of green, and two young  women were heading towards the road 

Crossing that "field" if you will,

I looked down at my book, and when I looked up again, both had disappeared. 

I can't give a clear idea of how long I was looking down, 

But it was odd that they had gone. I would have seen if  a car pulled up, 

And would have seen if they had passed me below the wall. 

I got up, but there was no sign of either up or down the road. 

I don't think there was time for them to enter one of the houses.

I could have had a time lapse of course, but I never understood 

exactly what happened.

That is not the only " disappearance" I've encountered. 

Needless to say there was no way I could find out what 

I may or may not have witnessed.

     Sorry everybody, if you wanted to comment on anything, and couldn't. Being new to blogging, I didn't realise that I had to actually tick a box to say

that people could. I find with computers that 

there's always something that you've missed.

I am able to think logically, but I sometimes seriously wonder if machines can.

I prefer to teach myself rather than be told or taught what to think. 

Maybe that's one of the problems with being a free thinker, that 

eventually you end up always having to think things out for yourself, 

So that you always hope to find another place where the struggle 

To cope with the ghost in the machine won't apply any more.

You're an escapologist without an escape route.

An angel seeking his wings.

I prefer the natural world and the world of the imagination to this one.

Now I need to take to the air myself, and find the eave of a quiet roof to nest away in.

The  doorways to other world's could be anywhere, as maybe the back of the wardrobe!

Very groggy this morning after trying to type out

 a book of short stories all day yesterday, on the computer.

It's a book of comic horror shorts that I'm working on with a 

Trend towards writing about childhood

NIGHT TERRORS.

I started thinking about the occult in my childhood period when I went to 

A public school. I read a lot of UFO and stone circle and monster 

Books then, which seem to have belonged to that age rather than to be 

generally starting serious investigation into such things.

I think a lot of it became like the weird tales pulp magazines of a couple of decades before

And there was some good material in those as well.

Some do have a value like Keyhoe and Frank Edwards " Strange but true? "

That was three little books, as I recall, 

and you never see copies of that about in second hand bookshops.

And now you have the Fortean Times instead, as a source of material,  and some TV shows,  some useful, a lot trivia. 

The bookshelves include all of this as New Age, which is cataloguing rather than opening up the issue to us, I think.

What I liked most about the 70s paperback books was their covers. 

They felt mystical half of the time. 

Which was the point. I want to see the mystical returned into our thought patterns more than the blood and guts and c*** of today's idioms.

I'm working on a twitter page. 

I have set up a Facebook page, as well, 

but how do you make social media have a mystical flavour?

* I am trying to root out old photos,  and I'll write

then about my experience on the HMS Victory in Portsmouth.

The Other Place

The Other Place

I wonder you see, in similar vein to Charles Fort, if there

is another world, which represents a depository of missing things, 

especially beings.

In particular, beings which now no longer exist. 

The reason why this idea rests strongly on my mind is that 

ideas themselves never seem to entirely die out. 

There is always a likelihood that a lost idea will be renewed, 

A lost invention reinvented, a philosophical thought resurface in another form. 

Do people also continue in such a place, if they cease to exist,  

and could they be alive over there?

Or do they persist as a cosmic memory?

If the coelacanth can return after being though extinct, 

What else could, or could these animal just be the memories of past lives?

Is that what ghosts are, the lake monsters,  yeti and big foot? 

Is there a storage area for the lost out there somewhere,

 which certain things go to and from, between?

Memory is a strange beast, and as a writer 

I know that if you tear up a story, then you can rewrite it, nothing is really dead. 

Something persists.

The real question is where does it persist, how alive is it there,

And how open are the doorways between that world and this?

Nepal

I thought that I'd go to Nepal this morning.

Does the Yeti exist?

Is he Big foot?

There were plenty of his footprints in this restaurant in Kathmandu.

Why is it that after making an interesting suggestion, that maybe the Yeti

was a polar bear hybrid or ancestor of the Himalayas bear, does the scientific establishment have to backtrack again?

Do we have really ancient relatives still alive today, or are we all really descended from polar bears? It could explain why we are so vicious to one another. 

I was fascinated with the idea from an early age, that maybe a memory of old beings persisted in the wilderness areas of the world, and that it was possible to link

in somehow with these latent ideas. 

Of course an undiscovered creature might still be the answer, 

even if Big Foot is usually nothing more than a man dressed up in a monkey suit or unrecognised bear sightings. 

I think that the Migou is alive and well myself, and he probably serves in the House of Commons in Westminster, but who knows?

Could we have them in England too? In the remoter places?

demons in dreams

   I was asked by a friend if I was ever given to having demonic dreams?

I said" no."

I write about supernatural beings or events, so it's a fair question. 

"No," ? That isn't quite true.

I had a dream the other night, but before I get there, I'll tell you 

One experience I had at a previous address. 

There was a staircase outside of my bedroom window,which led up 

to the flat above, a fire access, which I didn't have access on to. 

I recall waking, or at least being in bed, and seeing the door light of the flat above

Coming on. It was over to the far right side of the window, but a human silhouette was outlined against the curtains. It was square on to me, and I could see its arms and head,

but no features, of course. It was full on across the window, and 

Like a shadow man. 

The staircase was up the top half of the window, and the door light at the top right. Even if someone had gone up the stairwell to operate the automatic light, 

I was fairly sure, and still am, that to see a full figure silhouetted against my curtains was impossible. 

I am still not sure, as I write this now, whether this image was in a dream or not.

The one the other night was different. 

This was female in form. I was definitely in a dream, trying to get access to a building, and I think I was arguing with someone in a doorway, when a white figure was standing beside me. She had a pasty white face, and long white hair over her shoulders, and a large cloth hat, which was off-white or grey. The really alarming feature were ivory black eyes, like the shells of beetles. Shiny and convex. 

Actually the overwhelming impression was her strangeness. I could feel the presence, in terms of the proximity of a body. I could feel her body warmth. It did not feel as though it meant me any harm.

I woke up, without feeling that I had been in a nightmare. 

I wonder if this was my muse, as a writer of the supernatural?

Berkeley Square

   The origins of accounts connected to alleged haunting,

especially in terms of English literary sources, 

 is of special interest to me.

I read the review of the Berkeley Square story in Fortean Times at Christmas, 

and thought I would add a few things to the detail there.

In it Elliot O'Donnell's often dubious contribution to the literature

Was mentioned. Alas it does seem that a lot of the early "investigators" 

Didn't refrain from embellishment. 

Elliot seems to have given different stories and asked his audience 

to choose which they preferred, but some of these other variations and embellishments were false, and one of the most famous,

which keeps being regurgitated is the business of the two sailors, who broke 

into the premises,  as they were homeless and seeking shelter for the night.

Underwood, who really ought to have known better, quoted this tale in Haunted London, saying that they were terrified when something "shapeless and horrible" oozed into the room. One allegedly escaped to find a policeman, but the other was found dead in the garden, by the policeman, when he arrived, with his neck broken. 

This story originates with O'Donnell, in  his Ghosts Helpful and Harmful"(1923)

 and is also in his "Screaming Skulls" (paperback version 1964) pages151-4

I took copies of all the Notes and Queries letters from 1872 to 1881

And other material. The tale of someone staying in the haunted room, and a maid who goes mad, was apparently mentioned in a letter from Jan 22 1871, 

by Bishop Thirlwall, which "originated"the story, 

seemed to have been a case of Chinese whispers, perhaps only  the re-narration

of the story by Rhodes Broughton, which she created for her "Twilight  Stories"

 published in "Temple Bar"in 1868. 

It's hard to say, as that letter, or its alleged date, appears to be absent

 from the on-line collection of the Bishop's letters, which I've also seen.

The specific story IS told in a series of letters  and is called :

"The Truth, The Whole Truth and nothing but the Truth"

I found the book on-line eventually, so hunt around, you may find it, too.

I would estimate that Bulmer  Lytton's famous "Hunter and the Haunted" probably owes a lot to Rhodes Broughton's story too.

It's worth looking at all of these stories before believing this ghost story

As repeated, and the review in FT  does an excellent job.

The Barby Ghost part 2

I  found the source of this account in a letter from Sir Charles Edmund Isham, 10th baronet of Lamport in Northamptonshire (1819-1903), vice president of  the London Homeopathic Hospital

A man who apparently has the creation of the tradition of the garden gnome to his credit!

 This letter is quoted in Henry Spicer's "Facts and Fantasies" of 1853.

In this document the date of Mrs Hart's death is again given as March 3rd. 

However there is a factual inaccuracy here. It's a little surprising, given as being only two years after the  event is reported to have happened, and in a quote by a prominent figure, with an estate in the same county.

I searched the 1851 census, and this census was supposed to have been taken on March 31st. It gives the following for Barby.

Susannah Webb head 67 annuitant

Then her granddaughters Charlecote,  Esther and Elizabeth, and grandson Davis.

She clearly did exist, but the dates are wrong. 

There are numerous farmers and other residents by the name of Hart also.

The Accletons (spelled Ackleton) are also present  in the village, in another cottage:

Henry, a sawyer, and his wife, and a nine year old niece, named Elizabeth Archer.

It's interesting that the main players are there, but already there are inconsistencies.

I like to see the actual context for some of these stories.

I suppose if Sir Charles first received this tale by letter, it would be easy enough to have misread the March 31 for March 3 depending upon how it was written down for him.

Interestingly, if anyone would like to follow it up, letters of the peer do exist on-line, but not a copy of that specific one, apart from its quote in the book. 

If anyone likes, I can transcribe the story, as it is quite short.

the Barby Ghost part 1

Have you heard this story?

I lived in Rugby In Warwickshire a lot of my life, and had an extensive family with connections all around the area of Hillmorton.  They were pot carriers and hawkers, and had a vague traveller based ancestry. maybe gypsy, maybe not, it is hard to be sure.

Anyway, I recall cycling all over the area as a boy, and a very close village was Barby. 

It has a ghost story.

The source is Frederick Lee, 1875, "Glimpses of the Supernatural"

The story goes that an elderly woman named Webb, died on March 3rd 1851, at 2am, and she was 67. 

She had married well, and is what was called an annuitant.  She was said to be miserly, and hid money about her house. it was told that after she died heavy thumps and other strange noises against a partition wall, and a cupboard door were heard, and the dragging of furniture, at 2 in the morning. 

Then in April a family named Accleston moved in.

The husband and wife occupied the room where the old woman had died, with their ten year old girl in a bed in the corner.

They too heard thumps, tramps and banging,  and we're wakened at 2 am by their daughter screaming "Mother, mother, there's a tall woman standing by my bed, A-shaking her head at me!"

At a similar hour a strange light appeared in the room. sometimes with a low moaning noise, and the lights seemed to rise through a trap door in the ceiling.

Mr Hart, the old woman's nephew made a search of the attic, and found title deeds, and a large bag of gold and bank notes.

After this find, and the paying off of debts which were revealed by the documents, the haunting subsided. 

Further research into Lee's sources was interesting. 

I'll tell you what I found out in the next blog, tomorrow...

  MY BIRTHDAY, today. 

  maybe I should have two birthdays, one for myself, and an official one. 

This one seems to be jinxed so far. 

Had trouble getting the WiFi to work. 

I was going to write about haunted Sussex. 

I watched a film called Number of Death yesterday. 

It was saying how 9 was a sinister number, which was fatal, 

that all its multiples add up to nine, e.g. 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, etc. 

I thought interesting, but of course they will do in a decimal system. In a system based on the number eight,  if you can imagine a world like that,

Seven would be the number to do it.

They went on to suggest that Sussex was the only county of England, whose digits by numerology add up to nine. 

However it doesn't work. 

I make the numbers by numerical charts  1 3 1 1 5 and 6. 

That makes 17, which makes 8. 

So the scripting wasn't researched and double checked properly.

So, so much for that, although it was a good idea.

Still Sussex does still have the hill forts and the Long Man of Wilmington.

Devil's Dyke,  and a long history of magic and dark pagan beliefs. 

I always felt drawn to Sussex by the  dark strands of some enormous Web

Spun by the Great Spider Goddess. 

So inaccuracies in the movie or not, I wonder....

 

   I wanted to describe my underlying theme, the one which informs my writing. 

Basically it's my life long sadness that everything that seems to me to be good and worthwhile is eroded. I think society continually picks the lesser solution, perhaps -no, for certain, -because it's the cheaper option.  

I experience this as a loss, all of the time, of things, which feel strong and culturally worthwhile, with their inferior cousins. 

In my writing I translate this into a world view, where innocence is threatened, or life as a whole endangered, by spiritual evil.

To me society behaves like a spiritual evil. certainly capitalism and commercialism do.

If I write about a cannibalistic, malignant supernatural force, that's what I'm really writing about.... society.

It doesn't seem to matter what you want, if you like it, it's no longer on the shelves, because  it doesn't sell enough. 

The same goes for ethical standards,  I believe. 

I call this in my work, the Law of Nectholm.

Simply put, it's "abomination exists".

In fact it only exists to feed some greater abomination somewhere. That's the basic principle informing black magic, the dark side of the "as above, so below" principle.

It's a spiritual escalator to chaos. 

It may start with not being able to get bread, which doesn't use rapeseed oil, in its production,

 and it can end with a totally self-serving social organism, which doesn't accept the principle that human beings should survive.

I don't mean so much that the matrix exists, as that we aren't allowed to.

The dark elements of my writing, the horror, if you like, is finding the terror underlying existence in this society almost every single day, not so much supporting you as threatening you. How do you fight back against unbelievable odds?

Covent Garden copyright@terrywhite 11.6.16

There's a ghost in the machine today. As usual the computer is haunted by the spirits of the dead. It's a device which is born out of the activity of the dead,  I think.Do you think the Devil himself might have invented it? I wonder sometimes......

Anyway this is Covent Garden. The former haunt of theatre goers, fruit sellers and prostitutes. It's one of the places Boswell went for meeting the "drabs" and where Professor Henry Higgins met Eliza Doolittle for the first time, was it? but things may have changed... still on a misty morning.....
You can still get the feel that there may be someone there watching to see if you might be a punter.

Balcony copyright@terrywhite 11.6.16

Streets of London copyright@terrywhite11.6.16

IN  London today,

Aka the Smoke, the Great Wen, the centre of the known universe... ehhmmm.

Well, London has to be at least one of the most haunted cities in the world. 

It certainly is today, with the Queen's celebrations. 

I always liked London. Lived here for many years, although not in the heart of things,
It's another strong aspect of the Spirit of Place for me that places to which I have a strong attraction are always, I find, places to which my family is connected.
My father's ancestral family were tin plate merchants and dentists in the Southwest
and my mother's watchmakers in Hoxton and the North. 
A residual race memory of these and lesser family connections to London bind my spirit to this place. I walk where they walk and their footstep traces linger in my soul.
Or something poetic of that kind.
I'll take a few photos around the metropolis today and if I can find a few haunted corners.....

   i can't find my Whitby drawings, as maybe they're too old to have survived. Most of my college wotk has. There is another portfolio somewhere to root out.

Meanwhile, 

I was thinking of telling you where my interest in alternative worlds began. 

These are all subjective experiences. I haven't found a real doorway 

across a threshold yet, myself, but I had a feeling as a child that they existed.

This probably owes a lot to my child's imagination, 

but the idea has always fascinated me.

It began, i think, with my grandparent's back door. 

I know that sounds weird, maybe i was being overimaginative,  but

These were the days of Star Trek, Dr Who (the real versions)  and Land of the Giants on TV.

They had a double doorway, an inner and an outer door into the garden, with a utility in between. My granddad kept pigeons out back and, to get there, you had to go through this air lock. it just made me think that there could be anything on the other side,

 not only the garden. That was not the only time that I have felt you could cross into

Another dimension.

I wish it were true. I don't much like the one that we're in.

I never did find the other garden, only the ones with the pigeonhouse.

What  I always enjoyed was to walk down a country lane and, at the end, you'd find a different world waiting for you. There was a passage down a tree-lined lane, which ran from the back of the hospital, out into a hidden estate, which I found for the first time, 

And couldn't believe that it really existed. 

It did, of course, but one day maybe I'll find one that doesn't.

There are places, which you find, that are exactly like that, aren't there?

The familiar.. Grimshanks copyright@terrywhite 8.6.16

I haven't been able to find the Whitby Abbey sketch, but rummaging through my old sketch books, I found this drawing I made of a cat. 

I couldn't give you a name to the creature, so I made one up. Or tell you when or where I drew it.

The witch's familiar is a shape shifter, which I think this drawing captures. 

He can change himself into a man, or another animal. 

This cat may or may not be friendly to anyone who tries to handle him. 

Is there something dark inside you? Maybe then he'll let you touch him.

diferent senses

I always believed myself to be sensitive, in terms of vision, sight and smell. It puts me in mind of the film "A matter of life and death", where when time stops, and David Niven talks to the ghost, he reports a smell accompanying the experience, 

And the doctor makes something of that.

If i remember the scene correctly.

I was put in mind of this because a friend of mine is off to Whitby, 

And that is one of the places where I had this experience of an other sense being activated

This was perhaps clairaudience, and I never found an explanation forwhat I heard.

 And it was a long while ago.

In the ruins of the abbey, as i was sketching it, I heard the sound of Gregorian chant. 

There were buildings behind it, and I can't discount that I was hearing music and song on a radio, or even singing by real people. This was years ago, in the days before computerised methods of playing music?. The 1970s?

It perhaps goes with being an artist that your other senses are heightened as well as your eyes. it is the spirit of place,  connecting with you. Some places do that very strongly. 

The most dramatic of those is Pevensey in Sussex. But that's another entry, for the future.

I'll see if i can root out the sketch i made then. And tell you the story of my experiences on HMS Victory.

who is the best all time writer. of the supernatural.

I wondered which writer of the supernatural people like most?

In my way of thinking a lot of horror writing doesn't count, as it only uses the supernatural as an excuse for having one person kill another in the most gruesome way possible. 

There's nothing basically wrong with a character dying as an outcome of a supernatural plot, but if it IS a supernatural plot. 

This is after all writing about other worlds and other entities. 

Mine are M R James  and Lovecraft, and E F Benson and Algernon Blackwood, 

A lot if modern writing is more about the ugliness of modern society, rather than dealing with a different supernatural world, i think.

I do like a number of more modern authors, who deal with the supernatural. I like the Sergey Lukyanenko Night Watch stories, 

I also like Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan stories. 

I kind of like the zany and outre  in the supernatural story. 

It's about escape from this awful tedious world with rational obsessions that really squash the mind down into boxes.

Who tops the poll for you?

who is this, who is coming?

"Who is this, who is coming?"  copyright@terrywhite 4.6.16

Littlehampton beach , a sketch after M.R.James, "whistle and i'll come to you , my lad."

"Nuff said"

Night Terrors 2

Here is my rendering of my mother's night terror.

To be frank i think that this could so easily be a metaphor for our society.

That's a greater night terror, if not also a day terror.

A complete and utter terror.

The Alma street eye.( copyright@terrywhite 2 .6. 16)

Who is watching us, or you now?

Do we actually live within the Matrix? computers are taking over the world.

I should have expected that as a child, after reading the  Magnus the Robot Fighter stories.

But back to Alma Street Coventry. 

I think it was no 23, but not sure. 

I looked in the archives and through old newspapers, but couldn't find any evidence of the murder that mum said happened there. She was born in 1920s, and moved to the country in her teens. So I assume the "event" to have been late Victorian or Edwardian.

Night Terrors

Night Terrors.

This is a theme that i like.

I remember having them as a child.

My worst experience was of the sound of a peg-legged man walking down the corridor towards my bathroom. I expect that my mother started it. 

She lived in her youth, she told me, in a street in Coventry, in Southfields, called Alma Street, in an old house, where she said a murder had been committed.

 She says that she remembered seeing a great disembodied eye over her bed one night.

I could never find any proof of the story being founded in an actual event.

I'll have to draw that, but for now, here's one of mine

 Nassian from "The Nest"(copyright@terrywhite 1.6.16)

Sometimes Night Terrors and nightmares are indistinguishable.

The worst I ever had was dreaming that I came home from a shopping trip to town, on the bus, and woke up screaming. I believed that my mother had left a cabbage on the bus, and I suppose that I thought that the bus passengers would think that it was a human head in the bag rather than a vegetable!