Symbolic Forest

The other day, Tim Boucher linked to Colleague M’s ghost story, in which M’s sister Lydia had a bit of trouble with a pair of argumentative ghosts apparently haunting her house. When I first heard about the ghosts, I was hoping I’d be able to post regular updates on the story; but there don’t seem to have been any updates recently. I asked M if anything had happened, and was told that everything has settled down quietly again. No more ghostly voices on the phone, no more things going missing, no more possibly-possessed cats. So, Lydia is able to sleep at night again.

It did get me thinking, though. There’s something I’m tempted to try, but it would be rather evil. I want to try to be a psychic myself.

Not a real one, you understand. However, it should be very easy to pretend to be one, if I want. I’ve still not met Lydia herself, but I do know rather a lot about her, and her family, from M. Secondly, Lydia’s job includes shifts on an enquiry-desk type of place. In other words, it’s easy to get to talk to her – all you have to do is think of a question. All I would then have to do is start telling her the things my intuition was telling me. “You seem to be a mother – I can see a lot of love in your household – but there’s a lot of strain too. Are you a single mother?” And all that sort of thing. The question is: how far would I be able to push this before she starts smelling something fishy? How much would I have to prove I know about her? Or would she just assume I could genuinely sense things about her?

Should I try this? Or would it just be too evil of me?

Keyword noise: Colleague M, fraud, ghosts, ghost stories, gullible, misleading, psychic.

The cruel hoax TV series Space Cadets, which I wrote about recently is due to finish tonight. The contestants have successfully been made to look like idiots; and sadly, no aliens have been caught on camera.

As nobody went into space, you might not expect aliens to be caught on camera. However, as it happens, a huge number of UFO enthusiasts do believe that aliens have visited the site of the *Space Cadets* set. Twenty-five years ago this month, in fact. The incident – which has become known as the Rendlesham Forest incident – is often described as a classic UFO sighting, by impeccable witnesses,^* even though it’s more likely to have been a sighting of a lighthouse, rather than a UFO. I’m slightly disappointed that, as far as I noticed, a mention of it wasn’t slipped into the programme.^** If nothing else, the Rendlesham Forest incident is a wonderful example of how eye-witness reports can change over time, and how rumours can be spread. And, of course, how some people will believe almost anything.

It’s a shame that no aliens – if there were aliens, which is rather unlikely – decided to come back for a 25th-anniversary visit just whilst a film crew was in the area. It’s also a shame that the Space Cadets contestants weren’t a bit more alert – and/or paranoid, of course. Personally, I’m hoping that at least one of them will go a bit mad when everything is revealed at the Live Finale. It really would be can’t-stop-watching TV.

Update: sadly, they didn’t. They all seemed, as you might expect, rather baffled and overcome.

* a group of USAF airmen on two successive nights.

** although, in last night’s show, I was quite pleased to notice a joke about Johnny Vaughan’s time in prison.

Keyword noise: alien, Bentwaters, game shows, gullible, hoax, Johnny Vaughan, lighthouse, RAF Bentwaters, reality tv, Rendlesham Forest, Space Cadets, Suffolk, television, UFO, Woodbridge.

Colleague M has passed on the latest news on her sister Lydia’s ghosts. The start of the story is here.

Lydia was still worried about the argumentative ghosts that are haunting her house, according to the psychic she brought in last week. She was settling down, though, and her sleep was getting easier again. Until the other night, that is.

Her daughter – who hasn’t been told about the possible ghosts – had gone away for a couple of days to visit her grandparents, and was phoning home before bedtime. They were chatting away as normal, when the daughter said:

“Who’s that talking with you?”

Lydia had the telly on; she turned the sound off. “There’s noone here,” she said, “it must have been the TV. Can you still hear them?”

“I can still hear them, Mummy,” she said.

Lydia looked around: she definitely couldn’t hear anything herself. “What do they sound like?”

“It sounds like a man and a woman, arguing.”

So now, of course, Lydia is terrified again.

Keyword noise: Colleague M, ghosts, haunted house, poltergeist, psychic.

Colleague M’s sister Lydia is having trouble with ghosts.

No, really. I’m not making it up, and I don’t think M is either. I don’t know her sister, and I think that a lot of this story sounds a little unlikely. But Lydia’s scared, because she’s having trouble with ghosts.

The first M or I heard about it was a couple of weeks ago, when we were visiting M’s mum, and Lydia phoned up in a great panic. She’d gone to bed early, and had been drifting off to sleep, when a man whispered something in her ear. She awoke, startled and panicking; you can’t blame her, because her small daughter was the only other person in the house. Lydia was convinced – for no apparent reason – that this meant her father was dangerously ill and didn’t have long to live.

Anyway, leading up to this, Lydia and her daughter had been having a lot of trouble with things going missing. The sort of problems, in fact, that might be blamed on poltergeists. Little things would disappear, be unfindable, then mysteriously pop up in somewhere they’d only just looked in. Things would vanish from Lydia’s makeup bag, for example – and then would reappear impossibly, on top of it, even though it definitely hadn’t been there just before.^* Secondly, just recently, Lydia got a kitten. Most of the time the kitten was happy, sleepy, purry, the way kittens usually are. Surprisingly often, though, it would start hissing and yowling, the way cats do at things they don’t like – but when there was nothing at all there. After thinking about the mysterious voice for a few days, Lydia started to wonder if all these things were connected; so, she went out and found a psychic.

The psychic she brought in was, I’m told, a very experienced psychic who is an expert at sorting out This Sort Of Thing. I’m not sure how you tell, or how you find psychics – is there a psychics category in the Yellow Pages? – but anyway, the Expert Psychic came in, sniffed around the house, and told Lydia that the house was very much haunted; which was why things kept going missing, and why the cat kept hissing at empty spaces. In fact, there were two ghosts living in Lydia’s house; they had quarrelled when they were alive, and they were quarrelling now. One of them – a man – was a nice friendly ghost; the other – a woman – was not. The friendly ghost was trying to protect Lydia from the other one, which was why she’d suddenly heard a man whispering in her ear: he was trying to warn her. The non-friendly ghost, on the other hand, kept stealing things and trying to possess the cat.^** The psychic said: “I’m going to take them both away with me now – but be careful, because after a while they’ll probably come back.”

Lydia, then, is terrified. Her house has apparently been occupied by two warring ghosts who could return at any moment. At any moment, one of them might try to possess her cat, or even her daughter. Even worse, her mascara keeps going missing. As fas as she can tell, anything might happen. If anything does, I’ll try to let you know.

* I was sceptical about the significance of disappearing makeup in a house where a young girl lived; but M assures me that it wasn’t her niece doing the disappearing.

** Seriously, I’m not making any of this up. The psychic might have been, but I’m not.

Keyword noise: Colleague M, ghosts, ghost hunter, haunted house, poltergeist, psychic.

Feeling dark and downtrodden still, and nothing creative has been coming to mind. When I’m home from work, all I want to do is stretch out on the sofa and let my mind idle. When I’m at work, I’m too busy, well, working, rebuilding and reindexing database after database in desperate attempts to shave percentage points off their performance.

When I sit back and let my mind idle, there are usually a few images that float into my head by themselves. Lately, when I relax, I start thinking about yggdrasil, the tree that binds the worlds together. I’m not sure why, but it helps to remind me that everything we do is interconnected.

Keyword noise: archetype, darkness, databases, interconnection, mythology, subconsious, yggdrasil.

Following on from Thursday’s post, here’s the first Book I Haven’t Managed To Finish Reading Yet.

I’ve always been interested – in an academic kind of way – in trying to understand what other people believe;^* partly because I can rarely understand why they believe it. That’s why I wanted to read *A History of God* by Karen Armstrong. I’ve started it three times now, but it’s still a book I haven’t managed to finish reading yet.

It’s a very good book, but the problem I have is that it’s very information-dense. As I was brought up as a good little Anglican, I still know a lot about basic Christian theology and a fair amount about the Bible itself. Because of that, I already had a fairly good grounding in the Christian side of the history of God, and the early Jewish part too. The problem comes with the development of Islam, which I know relatively little about, and the later developments in Deist philosophy. It just goes right over my head, and I get stuck in a thicket of theologians’ names and hair-splitting beliefs. Every time I try to read the book, I slow down but plod on when I get to Islam, then get stuck somewhere in the medieval philosophers. I’m hoping that if I make it past that section we’ll eventually get to the growth of fundamentalism. I know a bit about that, mostly from an apocalyptic viewpoint,^** and it should hopefully start to be an easier read again after that point.

* although I have to admit to a certain amount of point-and-laugh too.

** but then, the apocalypse is the most important aspect of most Christian Fundamentalist theology, not to mention all the other 19th-century and later Christian sects, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on. The next time a Jehovah’s Witness comes to your door, remind them that for many years they taught that Armageddon would occur during the lifetime of members who were alive in 1914.

Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, A History Of God, books, eschatology, god, Karen Armstrong, history, monotheism, reading, religion.

The other day, Peter of the Naked Blog said he thought the BBC should not have given as much attention to the video of the suicidal murderer Mohammed Sidique Khan:

MSK didn’t justify anything. What he did was demonstrate his religion-related fanaticism. By airing and promoting his views like this, you are guilty of leading thousands of ignorant assholes to follow in his vile ways.

Now, his first two sentences I agree with. I don’t think, though, that the BBC should just have ignored him. Mohammed Sidique Khan was, we can clearly see, a twisted, insane, brainwashed murderer who had fallen under the influence of evil, cold, vicious men claiming to be “religious leaders”.^* You can’t explain to people how sick and twisted his views were without telling people what they were.

It’s impossible to negotiate with people as mad as MSK was. You can’t pull out of Iraq, because Iraq isn’t really the issue here; and if Iraq wasn’t an issue at the moment then MSK would have been told he was killing himself in the name of Palestine, or Kashmir, or Afghanistan, or any country in the world which doesn’t have a Talibanesque government. One of the main problems politicians have is that by and large, they are intelligent people; but they have to deal with people who aren’t intelligent, people who are stupid, people who don’t think, and people who are downright insane. There is nothing we could have done to save Mohammed Sidique Khan from becoming the deluded murderer he was, other than making him less stupid and gullible to start with.

* I admit to being slightly biased on this.

Keyword noise: fanaticism, Mohammed Sidique Khan, religion, terrorism.

This morning I awoke like any other morning: with The Cat sitting on top of me and doing cupboard-love purring as loud as he possibly could. “Aren’t you a nice cat!” I said, sleepily, tickling him under the chin. “Ooh, you are furry!”* Eventually, I dragged myself out of bed to go downstairs and give him some breakfast. It was only then that I realised that today is September 1st, and my month is therefore doomed.

You see, I keep believing that it’s vital that the first thing you say every month is “White rabbits!” and if you don’t, you’ll have a month of bad luck. Or maybe you’ll just miss out on a month of good luck; I’m not entirely sure. It’s hardly something you can do meaningful experiments on, given that most months – like today – I forget about it anyway.

Last month, I did remember about it. I cheated slightly: I pegged a reminder note to my dressing gown, and managed not to mumble anything to the cat. Last month, I guess, I did have a rather nice month, so maybe it does work after all. Luck is where you find it, though. I have no idea what will happen to me a month from now; maybe, though, when October 1st comes around I’ll remember to look back and see if this month was lucky or not.

* Yes, I regress to twee baby-talk when I’m near cats. Shoot me now, please.

Keyword noise: The Cat, superstition, white rabbits.