i'm going to have a gripe day

It's s very busy week, as i shall be setting up two local exhibitions, 

Of my art and photography, at the outset of August. 

Lots of frustrating problems, 

Which you didn't know existed suddenly start beating at you. 

Like why have printers started printing smudgy inked photigraphs?

Why isn't your intellectual property respected

When it comes to insuring your art work for exhibition?

Why is masking tape only available ib art shops now.

What are these idiots doing to standards of supply and demand

And aavailability of quality goods?

This is today's society, where many of the things, 

which were of value have ceased to be so, 

in terms of increasing plasticity and cheapness

And the removal of anything of any value at all, to be replaced by tat.

This plasticity will destroy any sense of anything of quality,

Even our old beliefs and myths and the sense if magic in the world.

Where nature is given a montary value 

In order that it can be protected.

I'm sorry, but nature needs to be protected per se, 

without dragging it down to our debased level.

I also think that we are too dependant on change. There are

And always will be things, which we shouldn't change.

The old ways, the sense or intuition of the world we're in, 

our need not to find even existence totally frustrating,

Because some politician, doctor, scientist, 

Or other educator or businessman wants us to follow this or that 

Diminishing of standards and quality

For the sake of their earnings at our expense as a species.

Let's revert to the sense of the bizarre and wonder at the world,

I can't feel any wonder for this sick society at all!

evil 2

My mother claimed that when she went to Aston Manor 

In Birmingham, she had to leave there quickly, 

as she had an overwhelming sense of something evil there. 

It is hard to see what would be left as residue in a house,

 if there was something ugly, 

which had happened there, but the idea is that some sort of photographic imprint 

could be topped up with emotion.

I would expect to have some sense of Aston and Birmingham 

generally as being familiar, because of family history associated with both areas. 

If there is a huge genetic memory pool, then there's 

as likely to be negative as positive memories stored there. 

would each carry a weighting of its own, or would that depend upon 

each person, who became aware of any of those memories,

 and their predisposition, if any, towards what their senses might pick up?

We all have the nature of good and of evil within ourselves,

To a lesser or greater extent.

the evil in a place 1

Evil

I have had a difficult weekend trying to get a website to work 

in a way useful to me, rather than in a way useful to its owners.

That made me think about the nature of evil.

Supernatural evil.

Well, as a writer of ghost stories, it's a subject of interest to me, obviously.

There's a lot made of "evil" in modern fiction, film, etc,

basically in terms of cruelty and fatal violence.

That is only one kind of evil, and a very human one.

Usually supernatural forces are only tacked onto that to justify the story.

My view of evil is that it represents nothing more than a different agenda from your own.

Hence my thoughts based on my experiences over the weekend.

That does not necessarily mean that "evil" necessarily 

intends harm to you. 

It simply is, and works to its own rules,

 and causes problems only when you confront it.

 Hence the adage in Asian belief that you can't win against demons

Especially if they come from inside of yourself. 

You have to feed them somehow to reduce their effect, 

This is true of any type of evil, perhaps. 

The haunted house is often thought of as a place of evil intent.

How can a place have an intent?

The story of Hill House - Shirley Jackson - had an evil intent.

That ended in Eleanor's hurried departure, and tragic death, but

evil probably doesn't work like that.

Poltergeists are not evil in intent, 

Unlike the atrocious and unintelligent recent version of the Enfield haunting

which was recently made with Timothy Spall. I was appalled, and 

shouldn't wonder if Maurice Gross is turning in his grave.

I have a story of a plsce, which felt evil, which i'll tell tomorrow.

old straight track 3

 it does seem to me that the idea of parallel dimensions 

Depends on the idea that the results of different actions in one

 would have to match different actions in another,

At least in terms of outcome.

If the results of a  chain of events in one 

Were that different surely it would not take long before

The appearance of the different dimensions 

Were so unlike as to be unrecognisable.

If someone died in one, who didn't in the other,

Surely it wouldn't take many generations before their separate histories

 began to be incomparable?

If this difference was repeated for everybody, 

How long would it be before there was no cmparison at all?

On the other hand, if the outcomes had to be the same, 

to maintain the same population, so that they could remain parallel, 

How could you foster difference?

You would need to envisage the same people living and dying at exactly the same time, with the same relationships, but a distinct "culture"

In my view  parallel worlds are much more likely to be either wildly divergent 

Or basically the same.

I guess i've gone off the old straight track theme a little.

But what if it's time itself that shifts, and you find that the other

side is just like 'red shift' moved a little bit forward and backward,

And that events are basically the same?

old straight track 2

I prefer the oriental view as in Feng shui

That there are natural energies, life streams,  

Rather than being tied to recognisable landmarks.

Energies, which flow through the landscape, 

Perhaps in association with water.

I think it's typical of our materialistic viewpoint that we have to look for

A physical substance to a spiritual fact,

If you look at why roads are sited where they are or

Why buildings are placed in the landscape, its more for fastest access, or to keep 

Sightlines open.

A military road would want to be as direct as possible, with the clearest view around 

To protect from attack. A landowner would want clear vistas. 

A church would be built to be visible from a wide area, as a landmark.

It might be built on a pagan site, but it would have been selected 

For the same reason

Tieing lines of energy in with this is mixing two entirely different things.

If there are ways across, between dimensions, 

Would you really expect them to be normal ones?

I think that they may symbolically select doorways,

Which would be because doorways function in that way normally

Maybe individual roads could as they would symbolise a route between, 

But if they all did that, moving between dimensions would be commonplace

the old straight track 1

I was watching "weird or what" at the weekend,

Not a program i like very much, as it does this popular and revolting facie thing

Of shoving a picture of an "expert" right up in your face 

In full on the screen. I find it an enormous invasion of space,

And some of their "experts" leave a lot to be desired,

In terms of crankiness.

But they were talking about teleportation, 

By which i guess is meant crossing boundaries

Between dimensions.

Dragging in leylines and government experiments, and shadowmen

A hotchpotch. 

I don't credit ley lines much. 

I read Watkin's Old Straight Track, in a book from the library, when i was a teen.

I wasn't a believer then. i can't see why i should be expected

To believe that landmarks would all be aligned with others, by different builders at different times, although to some extent i agree that some might have a connection 

With natural local landmarks. 

 i couldn't envisage a huge spider's web of hypothetical links, 

When there were no roads or paths in between. 

I do accept that our ancestors thought like that.

E.g. the stonehenge landscape. 

Maybe the idea is with us because it is a throwback to how

 our distant ancestors perceived their world. 

That idea i like.

Shirley Jackson

 it's extremely hard to write a long ghost story,

Without it becoming simply a horror story.

To keep the attention of the reader for that long without

Cheap shocks. (I mean gory ones)

The only person that i know to have done this successfully

Was Shirley Jackson in her The Haunting,

The true and ONLY Hill House story.

And perhaps the greatest ghost story film ever.

Every other version is a poor joke

It holds off violence mostly, but the threat is retained

If there is a threat it should be off the set, not thrown in your face

That's what makes the ghost story's bastard younger brother, the horror story.

The frisson is the point.

The long drawn out fight against unknown elements.

That's what makes Shirley Jackson at her best. 

Look out for The Bird's Nest too...

An interesting novel, 

Although not a ghost story, and

Whst i suppose is on the fringe of horror...

Maybe...

 WE have always lived in the castle.

I'LL  like to praise the old masters, and the ugly

Modern horror writers can go to hell.

The spiritual world

 A BIT OF A HIATUS. I Need to do some serious cleaning. 

Then maybe i can focus in on my mystic and supernatural collections a little more.

The spiritual world suffers for an overburden of the material. 

We are so materialistic and commercial now, that we aren't real.

We lose touch with the spiritual around us. 

It's all so commercial. You can see everyone going glassy eyed 

If they can sell you something, 

Not because they care if you survive, let alone make contact with 

The Real World.

The Real World of course is NOT society, it isn't the financial 

Market place, it isn't career, it isn't work, it isn't money. Actually all of those things are

Artificial. What's real is being in touch with the world, the space,

Real things, things which DO exist.

Trees, animals, the rules of life, the universe, time,

And NOT BECAUSE SOME SCIENTIST TELLS YOU what is or isn't,

Or some doctor, or a politician, teacher, or a shopkeeper or a financier. 

The reality simply IS. 

Today everything i was taught in school is obsolete, 

so WHAT THE HELL WAS THE POINT? 

WE'VE GONE COMPUTER MAD.

This won't do us any good.

We will lose touch with reality even more than we already have.

Everything else is empty and make believe apart from the truth,

 and trying to describe anything else, which you sense.

orbs

I had awful trouble with tis website yesterday.
It would not stay stable and  kept dropping, and again can't see my posts

Anyway today seems ok. Are these orbs or lens flares?

Frankly i don't believe in orbs. 

I think the idea barmy that lights floating about, which could be a fly

With some sort of luminosity

I don't know what type  that would be,

Or maybe only dust, could be a beginning of a manifestation of a spirit. 

It's too minimal, and when people talk about seeing faces in it, when they enlarge it,  that is probably  only paraidolia

Our instinctive tendency to see faces in everything.
For reason of self preservation originally.

Okay, having said that, what are these, taken through a window of a tour bus, heading into Nepal, with a mobile camera.

The light accompanied the tourbus along the road towards Nepal, and might be a lensflare but i couldn't see where the light wss coming from.

Rugby ghost story 2

My friend continued with her story, that the shape was strangely elongated, 

... like a fairground distorting mirror perhaps?

And she couldn't really say if it was male or female,

But it was possible that it had its hair collected up

Into a bun-shape on the top of its head.

She said that it was shadowy, directly opposite the bedroom door against 

the light.  Shadow man perhaps? 

They weren't talked about much back then.....

The three girls moved away from the bedroom,

and when they did it made an awful sound which they all heard..

Like a groan of despair perhaps, but it was so hideous

That they all fled downstairs as rapidly as they could.

She didn't even remember the flight down. 

She says that she put this image out of her mind for years

But the memory began filtering back.

She did ask her mother, as she recalled hearing her mother 

discussing the ghost in that house with a friend, 

but her mother denied that there had been talk of any such thing. 

She said she also asked one of her two friends, 

but she also denied that it happened.

Is she remembering correctly, or do we all experience these events,

 yet blot them out of our conscious minds? 

She says that something about staircases frightens, her even now.

Rugby ghost story.

I'm going to add some other people's stories, If I may. 

This one interests me as it relates to my home town, 

Rugby

Called by Dickens Mugby in his Christmas tales series Mugby Junction.

This was related to me by a friend in a cafe.

It relates to a house at the back of a square of old three story houses,
 which had a ghost upstairs.

When she was a child, say nine or ten years old,
My friend, let's call her Jenny,
Went to visit schoolfriends, who were living there.
Apparently the family were aware that there was a ghost there and,
at least the children, didn't go upstairs individually, because they had a "visitor".
She went to visit once, and had to go upstairs to the loo,
And was duly accompanied by her friends.
Looking into the elder sister's room,
Saw a form by the window.
She said to her friends "who's that?
To find that they couldn't see it.
She described it as being very tall and thin, standing
Across the edge of the sash window, facing the wall,
Obscuring part of the window, dark against the light,

(to be continued)

Victorian ghost story writers

How often do ghost  storues, which circulate, owe their origin to a writer?

I was thinking about this after finding a writer's contribution involved in following up

 the Hinton Ampner story yesterday.

There's the story in Lord Halifax's ghost book, for instance, about 

The train passenger, who finds his fellow passenger to be a ghost, 

and solves a crime as a result. 

It's peculiar, as i know that story, which passes as true in Lord Halifax's collection, was written by a very excellent, now mostly forgotten contemporary of Dickens,

 Amelia B Edwards. 

Some of the lesser known contributers to Dickens Christmas tales were generally better at writing ghost stories than Dickens was, in my opinion, 

Although Christmas Carol is a classic. 

Anyway, that story came from her pen, Berkeley Square from Rhoda Broughton.

Who says that ghost stories are a lesser art form in writing?

What has happened for them to be dismissed?

They have had such a major impact on our culture.

I wish that culture's morbid fascination with gore and violence 

Could disappear, and we could go back to a time 

When bookshops were not full of horror and mayhem stories.

To a time of writers and imagination.

And reawaken that culture.

Hinton Ampner

The Ricketts case.

There's a letter in this month's Fortean Times

 about the  demolition of the Hinton Ampner house.

It says that there's a book called Allan Fea's "Secret Chambers  and Hiding Places"

 published in 1901, which says that when it was demolished passages were found, 

and the implication is that this solves the mystery.

I have questions about this. 

For one thing, the haunting went on for a couple of years

1769-71, and if it was a hoax, or to drive the family away, why?

Why so long?

There's also the story of a skull, possibly a child's or a monkey's being found under the floorboards, when the house was demolished, 

So where does this come from? The same source as the 1901 book?

Harry Price, in his Poltergeist over England says that the house

Still stood in 1793, as it was in the directories then.

But it could therefore have been demolished 1797.

His mention of the skull in his 1945 book

Originates from the tale as told by Sachaverill Sitwell

Poltergeists Fact or Fancy (1940.)

Sacheverill's earlier source for the skull story appears to be 

From the journal of society for Psychical Research April 1893

I have edited this, looking at the journal of SPR  for that date.
Sitwell copied the item in that journal which adds nothing further to
Osborne Markham and his wife Martha Jervis's material.

  There are two different stories emerging from the demolition to sort out.
But the Ricketts account itself does remain the same
in its reproduction from the 1818 entry.

vanishings

  vanishing

I told you one of  my stories about people disappearing.

It happens from time to time in circumstances that 

Might be explainable, although I can't see how. 

I was walking along a pavement before the opening to an estate. 

A man walked out turning a corner ahead of me. Where he was walking, there was a paling fence about six foot high. Opposite a long hedge bordering a cricket club, and that stretch, about a hundred yards ended in a roundabout. 

I crossed behind him, and when I entered that area, and couldn't have been a minute behind him, there was no sign of him. 

I reached the roundabout, but could not see him anywhere. 

I had an experience at art college, photographing my paintings. 

A fellow students was holding the bigger ones. 

This was back in the days of Polaroids.  

I developed them all one by one on the spot, but 

My fellow students was not on any one of the photographs.

Bizarre. 

I never knew what happened to him.....

Could that have been trying to tell me something about his future?

Or are there people here with us who don't photograph?

why do ghosts wear clothes?

    There's a big question about whether ghosts are real or not,

That's that good old one of how can ghosts wear clothes.?

Well how can they have skins or facial features either? How can they carry any form at all, if they don't have a body any more?

The obvious answer is that their appearance is all in our minds

There believers switch off and say that sceptics have nothing to say. 

Of course that is only the tip of the iceberg. 

Ghosts are not merely imaginary, and the mind is a complex machine, and people,

Indeed, any living being, is a sensitive awareness.

So when we talk about the mind, we don't only mean the brain, 

and the range of what the mind is sensitive to, has to be extended to take on board 

everything that a living essence might be sensitive to, 

And what a living being might creatively be able to produce.

I'm a writer and artist so that's a wide range of things, in my opinion.

If I say what's in my mind, that could be an enormous amount.

A person can picture in any language available to them, spoken or visual, and

receive inputted material of a wide range as well.

In my view the big question is not HOW they appear to us, 

but WHERE they come from, in order to appear.

Are they really there? 

Do they come out of our  environment as wavelengths, or energies, 

streams of particles or different frequencies?

Are they the product of the  receiving apparatus of the mind, and it's 

outward sending apparatus?

Are they in the stones, and solid matter as photographic memories.?

Or are they like us -  essences really?

If so, then the same could extend to the Fey, to demons, 

Angels, naiads and other elementals, or other gods?

 

 

 

famous Coventry monk

     here is another famous ghost photograph. 

Infamous, I should say. 

It's utter nonsense.

This photograph keeps cropping up in books on haunted Coventry.

I lived there myself.

This allegedly happened in the banqueting hall.

Banqueting hall ghost.

This is claimed to show a monk. It doesn't. It's a grainy picture, which shows a dark haired woman in a long dress, with her head bowed,  and her hands folded together saying grace, like those beside and opposite her.

Presumably the white shape  behind her, little more than an outline, 

Is an usher, standing quietly, or another guest. 

There's no ghost in this one.

The aura of the railway platform

There's nothing more eerie than the story of a ghost train, 

Something which runs on the day, which is an anniversary of  a rail disaster, maybe. 

 the haunted railway station (copyright terryawhite@1.7.16)

I think nothing is more atmospheric as a deserted railway station

 whilst you are waiting for the last train, 

And your only companions are the rats. 

I love the atmosphere of damp expectation. 

The 3.00 am up express to Hell via the World's End.

Any darkness is crisp enough to find the bleary eyed driver

Slowing to a dead screech of brakes

In front of an unfortunate passenger, 

Who waits in vain

For a sensible train

Which will take him to a destination

From which he will ever be able to return.

Remember classic ghost stories like The Twilight Zone "Stop-over at Willoughby" 

And Jenny Agutter in the TV show 'Shadows' (1975) " The Waiting Room".