Monday, 3rd July, 2006

Things do not bear much looking into - an attitude attributed by Conrad to Mrs Verloc, wife of a terrorist.

Ghosts are not what they were. I've seen mobile phones blamed. Do their waves poison the spooks or are we just never remote enough from civilization any more?

UFOs are not what they were, if they ever were. The Internet is blamed for their demise. It has taken away the enthusiasm of local groups who were wont to gather in the upstairs rooms of pubs and unload the data from under the hoods of their anoraks.

Five years is a long time on the Web and it's nearly that long since the Fortean Times put up a Message Board. Within about three years there were voices urging that we should erase the gathered wisdom we had accumulated and start all over again.

I was strongly against that but I could understand the feeling. We had started from a position of glorious mystery and ended up with quite a detailed mental map of the various kinds of phenomena, the classic cases and a polyp of links to the increasing numbers of weird web sites. It might still be that the detailed stuff lay in books but there was a good chance that someone on the site had the book at his or her elbow.

Still, there were voices, partly-serious I think who wanted to erase the map and start again with the tabula rasa. In place of the elaborate taxonomies, the classic cases, the known hoaxes and the dubious sources, we should forget what we think we know and start again from Here be Dragons.

Phenomena seem to go through a process of accelerated ageing. It may start for an individual with an anomaly - say an unexplained pool of water in their house. Appealing for someone to explain it, you discover that you are not alone. Far from being an unique event, it is one of the commonest weird happenings. The interpretations will be found to cover a tremendously wide spectrum - from the tears of the Virgin Mary to a hidden plumbing fault. Exposure to years of these stories seems to cause investigators to go all wet or dry up completely. Either the Saints are weeping buckets for our sins or people are born attention-seekers who will ruin their floorboards with six kettles of water to get their picture in the paper. Standing somewhat aside from interpretation, the anomalist will note the weight of the various interpretations, chalk up another statistic and go on waiting till the larger picture clarifies. If he is sensible, he will try to avoid any over-excitement or expectation of impending revelation: he knows it's been going on for years, hasn't a clue what causes it and does his best to assure others they are not losing their minds, while watching to see that he doesn't lose his own.

Some posters are short-lived. There is some curious tale or weird picture or classic case which has captured their imagination. Such was the Australian case of a photograph in which some blokes were having a few beers at the back of a house. Only around the waist of one of them, a small pair of arms was reaching! This one was widely circulated - it was picked up by the Brooke Bond Company and appeared on a series of tea cards given over to strange phenomena. People had seen it over the breakfast things as children, passed it around and been thoroughly creeped out by it! I dare say there are people now who will read this and recall it with a shudder.

It has gone the rounds of ghost-books along with the hand on the bannister and the drippy-faced thing on the altar of a church. Usually there are assurances from photographic experts who profess themselves baffled. The Web does not like to leave things like that. Cases are open until closed. What closes them is newer better information rather than analysis of the existing material. For example, the Australian arms photograph seems stubbornly impossible when viewed as a scan from a tea-card. Already degraded by printing then scanning, it is further subjected to JPEG compression which makes the hunt for retouching futile. In the digital domain, manipulation can be so carefuly done that even where it is suspected, it may be difficult to demonstrate to anyone predisposed to prefer mysteries.

Faced however with a copy from a better source, the space in the photograph resolves itself more clearly so we see that the bench was not right back against the wall. There was room for a kiddie to be hiding. Not, I think deliberately. It was always part of the appeal, conscious or subliminal, that this picture was not set up to be spooky. The very relaxed air of blue-collar outdoor sunlit socialising could hardly have been more at odds with the traditional haunting. Most people would view the picture, pick up its strangeness and then move on. Yet it would stick in their minds for the reason that it wasn't the expected thing at all.

On the Message Board, the story was pieced together as better sources were tracked down and memories wracked internationally. Newer information emerged about the identities of the people. Not surprisingly, they did not want to be fielding any more enquiries about the story via the Internet or post or telephone. Still, there was some extra information which had emerged before they had got bored with the subject. They had submitted the original negatives for examination at some point and it emerged that a small boy was on several other shots. He was notably absent from the ghost shot. The photo had been entered in a local newspaper competition and won a prize. Later the story was picked up by some larger Australian papers and presumably syndicated overseas.

Yet I think it was never set up as a hoax. The child just managed to hide himself entirely behind the seated drinker. Maybe the promise of a prize prompted some mystification and evasion - or maybe it just snowballed with some creative journalism. The point is that the less you know the more mysterious it seems.

In other cases, all we can do is go back to the earliest sources. This is not always easy, given the proliferation of weird tales material and a general disinclination for literature of this kind to provide references to sources.

The works of Charles Fort himself have provided many years of hard work for the Canadian investigator Mr. X. His annotated editions of the works are online in their entirity. Still, for every classic case from Charles Fort, I'd guess there are probably a dozen from two other major sources. The Reader's Digest has been filling our heads and our shelves with piffle for generations now. Strange That, Mysterious Thing, Wonders of The Other, you could fill a bookcase with them, even if the same stuff tends to get recycled ad nauseam. Aimed at the popular market, they are light on attributions and go on making people wonder, even when better information has come to light.

The other major publication which seemed to affect a generation of the curious was The Unexplained part-work. Thirteen bound volumes of marvels from Orbis in the early eighties. The content has been recycled - mainly without credits to the original authors, so I'd guess without repeat fees - in numerous hardcover volumes ever since. It is nearly a relief to open any large-format supernatural volume and find it is not from the Unexplained plates. Yet it was nicely done, before the age when desk top publishing made page-designers hyper-active. The Unexplained developed a way of treating each topic as a series of instalments. Usually the first ones would spell out the mystery in all its glory. The later instalments would quietly point to some of the more earthly explanations or the flaws in the legend. Each issue would cover a variety of topics and needless to say, it is the opening chapters of each which tended to stick in the mind. Anyway, not everyone got to see every issue. The Unexplained was a classic of its kind. The quality varied from author to author and subject to subject but it seldom insulted the reader's intelligence the way that the plethora of New Age magazines do.

Television production companies go further still and see weird stuff as essentially down-market fodder to be tricked out with camp mediums and screaming presenters. Yet, even in our increasingly unmysterious world, I have known whole hard-bitten and rowdy classes go unnaturally quiet when somebody relates a simple uncanny thing that has happened to them.

Websites have a short life-span, it seems. Message Boards in particular can become suddenly a social meeting-point and before you know it there is a tendency for the socialising to drown out the original purpose. Then there is the need for moderation - anyone who has tried to read an unmoderated Board will see that moderation is a necessary evil. There are the commercial interests of the board's sponsor, host and advertisers. There are the legal requirement to ensure that robust comment does not become libellous. Then there is the self-limiting aspect to the group dynamics when schism becomes inevitable. Sooner or later, there is the complaint that things are not what they were. Which is how we got to the point of the erasing it all suggestion.

I suspect that like any study, the real rewards do not come in the first glad raptures when everything seems bright and fresh. Exploring Forteana soon brings you up against the fact for some it is a roller-coaster ride and for others a painstaking feat of construction. A pity the subjects of our enquiry never seem to stand still long enough to actually become data. All I can do is declare a prejudice and an interest. Though I am highly sceptical by nature and think we can hardly overestimate the degree to which people fib, I did - just once - see a ghost. I think of it as an annoyance mainly, though I suppose a Catholic upbringing does ensure that you retain a mental category for the miraculous, even when you think to have cleaned it out. Even without much hope or fear or interest, like a slapped wife who doggedly seeks out the sort to do the same again, the prospecting for piffle must continue.