Eddie

“That comment really annoyed me because I’d been getting the better of her — it felt like an unfair intervention from the other side!”

In life, things that are considered signs or signifiers are open to interpretation. Some can be more obvious than others and their importance is not always immediately evident. It also depends on your outlook on the chosen situation — complete denial is often just as misjudged as unquestioning belief.

When it comes to the experiences we feature on Errant Thought, the word ‘signs’ can have all sorts of connotations. Ghosts can be interpreted as harbingers of doom, messengers with inferred information, or even a full stop to a life sentence. Significance depends on context, and context depends on a vast array of factors that differ from individual to individual.

For Eddie (not his real name but an affectionate nickname between us), belief is not a black and white thing and, perhaps, that’s where the healthiest attitude lies. As friends, we have often chatted about the nature of belief in relation to support for a football team you might follow. In that particular field, it often comes down to this: you can deeply love something and passionately strive for success, yet still question whether the methods involved align with the joy it brings you. In sport, the lines are increasingly blurred between what is considered ‘real’ or fair success, and that which is delivered by having more money than your opponents.

This conversation with Eddie is always revealing. Today, we are going to chat about something he has never mentioned to me before, but will bring questions about belief and signs into focus. The one thing we both agree on is that two things can be true at once. Modern online discourse often breaks down when black and white answers apparently have to be stated in what are quite clearly grey areas. My own belief in ghosts remains complex: I don’t think they have to exist for someone or somewhere to be haunted. It seems we both believe contradiction can be healthy.

That is a good thing because I am going to be living my own here. I’ve stated before on Errant Thought how I don’t really enjoy horror movies or the classical spooky tropes. What Eddie is about to tell me both starts with one of the great ghost stories and ends with what could be a sign in the most dramatic fashion. As we’ll get to, his story needs both the stereotype at the start and then a jump scare to work, both of which I am on record as not liking. Yet, when combined, they transform into a story that lingered with me long after it was told.

It begins not with Eddie, but with his mother.

“My mum and I both share a lot of attributes, and I love that. We are both very empathetic people and yet I think we are both stubborn to the point of boneheadedness. Where we are polar opposites is in matters of physics or metaphysics — the paranormal. I am quite sceptical, to say the least. I have become a bit more open-minded as I’ve experienced more of what the world has to offer, but I always approach everything with the scientific method in mind. As Carl Sagan once said, ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ I do have an interest in the paranormal, ufology, and high strangeness, but there is almost always a mundane explanation. While it may not definitively claim to be the truth, it is typically the most plausible one.

“Mum is the opposite. She’s a full-blown spiritualist with a pick-and-mix approach to faith. She’ll have this bit of Christianity, this part of paganism, this slice of eastern spirituality. I mean, she’s got crystals everywhere. And my mum has never met a coincidence. She’s only ever seen synchronicity. Coincidence doesn’t exist to her, so if something happens, there is always a reason. If there’s no immediate explanation, then it must be otherworldly.”

Families are complicated organisms and having such differing viewpoints is not always easy to manage. Still, as he talks, Eddie says everything with a tone of affection and love. It can be easy to dismiss or mock those who hold extreme beliefs on either side of the spectrum. Here the difference of opinion is perhaps a good part of their relationship.

“So, this one night — I must have been maybe 19 or 20 — I came home from work. It was that period of life when you’re still living at home and you’re doing your best to avoid spending time with your parents. It’s a Friday night, and she’s staying in and having a beer, watching TV. I found myself at a loose end, so we got chatting and then somehow we got onto ghosts and ghost stories. My mum has loads of them, but one always stood out to me because it involved my grandad. She told me the whole thing again.

“Back in the 1970s — she was a teenager when this happened — her older brother was passing out of the Army down South. That was a big thing in those days, so the family got in my grandad’s old van on a Friday evening — all the siblings, my grandad driving, my grandma in the back seat keeping everyone in line. A few hours in, my grandad needed a break and pulled over on some moor. They didn’t need to be there until the morning and they’d have to find the place. It was late, so he said, ‘Look, we’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s too late to find a hotel — we’re going to get some sleep here’.”

That idea of setting off without having a hotel booked is such a wonderfully seventies thing. In the age of mobile phones it is virtually impossible to get lost, never mind not really knowing where your actual destination is.

“My grandad was in the front, along with my mum’s now deceased younger brother, who died in a car crash when he was seventeen. Everyone else was in the back. They were sitting there on this beautiful night where they could see for miles. When you think of southern English moorland, you conjure up images of Hound of the Baskervilles fog — two orange eyes emerging from the ether! This was the complete opposite. The sky was clear, and everything was calm. Funnily enough, that’s the thing everyone who was there remembers — you could see for miles. Anyway, everyone in the van gradually dropped off to sleep, but my grandad up front was still awake.

“All of a sudden, this figure appeared at the window, out of thin air, like it apparated. I don’t know what the correct term is, but it was an old hag archetype — like a traditional witch. It was the sort of thing people describe seeing in the corner of the room or pressing on their chest when they experience sleep-paralysis-induced hallucinations.”

We have come to our stereotype. Admittedly, not on a dark and stormy night, or even leering through the fog, but that image of the old woman ghost on the moor is one that has been used countless times. Moorland itself has a haunting quality, an otherworldliness. During the day the ability to see clearly for miles is a beautiful thing, but at night there is a fear in the expanse existing beyond your sight.

If you care to Google moorland ghosts you will find everything from lonely children trying to find their way home to garrisons of soldiers still defending places that no longer exist. The one we are allegedly dealing with here, the old woman, appears in various forms such as ‘Owd Aggie’ in Darwen or Jay’s Grave on Dartmoor. It is a classical image that has become a modern-day Halloween costume.

“It loomed at the window and shocked him into a panic. He was shaking and shouting, which woke my uncle up in the passenger seat. He saw her and started screaming, too. Everyone in the van was shocked awake. The woman then disappeared from sight — into the void, according to the tale my mum was telling.

“Now, my grandad had served in the Second World War and various operations around the world afterwards. He was known as a hard man, a quiet man admittedly, but a real old-school type of stoic, no-nonsense man. He wasn’t easily disturbed or scared, so he got himself together and flung the door open. He started looking for this woman and almost immediately saw her trundling off at a speed you wouldn’t associate with an old dear. He started to run after her, but she just got further and further away. He couldn’t catch up and then about 30 seconds, maybe even a minute into the chase, she just disappeared in front of him. She dissolved into the air again. Gone.

“He came back to the van, and everybody who has told this story says he was white as a sheet. He was still shaking, so the rest of the party talked to him. He said a woman just appeared out of nowhere and that she had this strange aura about her… and then she vanished. He was adamant about what had happened. My uncle saw her too, and he was asking questions like, ‘Why was this woman on the moors at this time looking like that?’ Where did she go?’ ‘How did she just… fade into nothing?’”

At some point, having animatedly told me this story, I know the rational side of Eddie’s brain is fighting to take charge. I don’t have to wait long.

“I think one of two things happened. Either people were drifting off to sleep and there was a merging of the dream world and the waking world, which does happen — we’ve all had those dreams or moments in dreams we can’t shake. Or it might have been an old woman out on the moors thinking, Who are these people out here at this time? and looking in to find out whether they were up to no good. She then just fell out of view — behind a verge or a wall or a bush.

“Then, obviously, this tale takes on a life of its own as something we all witnessed and it becomes the family ghost story, each retelling changing things slightly or altering the detail. I’ve probably done the same thing!”

I know the people that come to Errant Thought are here for the irrational. The unexplainable. Eddie’s explanations are sound; they work on every level. There may well have been that sleep-related event taking place and the immediate power of suggestion meant his uncle became an ‘eyewitness’ too. It is also entirely possible there was an old lady up on the moor, perhaps on some sort of nightly ritual, wondering what a van was doing on the road in the middle of the night. At that point, the culture was already stuffed with enough references for things such as a lonely woman on a desolate moor to take hold in the imagination. This is a story of two parts though, and as we move on, those answers may actually not matter. In fact, we may be looking at the wrong ghost.

“So, my mum tells the story and I present these explanations to her. The believer versus the sceptic. Mum was having absolutely none of it and she says, ‘Your grandad had never experienced anything like this before, never saw anything like it after’. But I immediately question that — people can be naturally inclined to see or believe certain things. The 1970s was the height of the twentieth-century paranormal and UFO craze. You had The Exorcist and Close Encounters of the Third Kind playing on repeat in cinemas and The Hynek UFO Report and Chariots of the Gods in every bookshop. It was a genuine part of the mainstream conversation at that point.”

Here you perhaps see something I know Eddie has read a lot about and researched himself. His rational approach may have seen him lean away from anything ghostly, but UFO phenomena interest him even if they are subject to the same exacting thought process. Chariots of the Gods was a controversial book by the equally controversial Erich von Daniken. It was the origin point for a theory we now know as alien origins for partial or all life on earth. It has been widely discredited but the theory has become so popular the book has remained in print since its release in 1968, and the television series Ancient Aliens is now into a twentieth series with over 260 episodes aired.

The Hynek UFO Report was published by Josef Allen Hynek, who was originally hired to be sceptical and debunk sightings of flying saucers, but who became convinced of alien visitations to earth. Both men took science fiction into the realms of their own version of scientific fact — though in very different ways.

“I think he was predisposed to pick certain explanations off the shelf,” Eddie says bringing us back to his grandad’s encounter. “My grandma and grandad’s bookshelf was full of ‘Mysteries of the Universe’ type books. Arthur C. Clarke books. John Keel books. My mum was like, ‘No ,he was a strait-laced military man!’ But I said, ‘I don’t think he was.’ Yes, he was a practical man, always building things or taking them apart, looking for explanations, but there was another side to him.

“I honestly think if he was still here today — he’s been dead for years now — he would be able to sit here and reflect, and think, Actually, I had this experience, but memory isn’t reliable, especially when it comes to stressful situations. Memory isn’t a record of what actually happened. It’s inherently subjective, for a start, because it only recalls your perspective of an event. Event then, it fills things in, makes things up, and it’s influenced by your current mood or location, and so on.

“I say this to my mum, but as I finish speaking, I notice a glass on the side table next to me. It wasn’t an ordinary drinking glass. It was a sort of heirloom that had been passed around over the years — always kept on a table or in a cupboard. It had originally been at my grandad’s house before being passed between relatives for reasons that were never entirely clear.”

“The moment I stopped talking — finished presenting my case, if you will — this glass, with nothing near it, just explodes. There’s no other way to describe it; it shatters into a million pieces. Even weeks later, we’d still be finding shards scattered across the room, in every corner. I was nowhere near it, and there was nothing around that could have caused it—no objects flying or hitting it. It just went bang!”

“We looked at each other, utterly shocked. Then my mum broke the silence. She looked at me dead in the eyes, and said, ‘Well, explain that one then.’”

We both laugh, a moment of nervous energy. The rational man cannot explain it. Several walls now have a crack in them.

“That comment really annoyed me because I’d been getting the better of her — it felt like an unfair intervention from the other side!”

We laugh again but Eddie’s voice changes for a moment. I can sense his annoyance at having a black hole where he wants an answer to live.

“I’ve tried to rationalise it. I do believe there are things that can explain it — could it have been anti-shatter glass with a hairline crack that went at that moment for some reason? Was there a slight drop in the air pressure that caused it to go? The problem is, if it had exploded two hours before or two hours after, it wouldn’t have even needed an explanation. A glass exploded. Okay. But it happened at the exact moment we were talking, the moment I had finished talking, actually. It was like someone wanted to have their say, but couldn’t do so the normal way. It just felt very odd.

“I’ve said to this you before, but it bears repeating. At that point in my life, I was a card-carrying atheist, and I don’t mean just that in relation to religion or spiritualism. My approach to everything paranormal — you call it something else don’t you — was that there is only the normal. Anything we can’t explain now will be explicable in the future. Even so, that exploding glass… I can’t explain it. I couldn’t explain it then and I can’t explain it now.”

We chat for a bit and it is clear that little chink in the rationalist’s armour changed him.

“Gradually, as I got older, I became more agnostic on these things. I’m a bit more open to odd goings-on. When I look back, that moment in my mum’s old living room was the point when something in my brain said, I don’t know, man; maybe there are more things in heaven and earth…”

As we talk further it’s clear Eddie still wants to try. He talks about anti-shatter glass and whether the technology existed at the time the glass was made. But nothing satisfactory works as a reason for the glass exploding. It becomes clear, though, that he has eventually come to see the blank space as a positive thing.

“I’m now a man with one percent doubt. It does play on my mind — makes me think — and challenges my preconceptions. My mum is one hundred percent belief. The glass just confirmed it for her. For me, that sliver of uncertainty is the root of a more rounded, useful scepticism. It improves my perspective on these things and makes me work harder to explain them — not explain them away.”

We chat for a few minutes more. The conversation inevitably turns to football as most of ours usually do. It’s a story that has stayed with me more than others, perhaps in part due to Eddie’s attitude towards it. Two incidents, one he chooses to doubt but another he can’t deny. We’re back to those grey areas, the space where just maybe the truth might lie.

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