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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Ben Machell
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Ben Machell
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Ben Machell
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- [01:29]
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- [01:47]
Ben Machell
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [01:49]
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- [02:04]
David Musgrove
It's something of a Christmas tradition to enjoy a spooky ghost story in the run up to the festive period, and the Victorians were instrumental in shaping such stories in their modern form. For today's episode of the History Extra Podcast, Ben Machell, author of new book Chasing the Dark, spoke to David Musgrove about the history of ghost hunting and supernatural investigations since the mid 19th century and how it shaped today's passion for the paranormal.
- [02:31]
Podcast Host
Do you believe in ghosts? I am fascinated by the idea, but I've never seen anything to make me a believer. I'm open minded to there being things that we can't understand, and I think a lot of people today are similarly interested in things that you that go bump in the night. Journalist and author Ben Machel has been investigating where our current passion for the paranormal derives from, and his book Chasing the Dark is a cracking read. Ben, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:00]
Ben Machell
Thanks so much for having me.
- [03:01]
Podcast Host
That's an absolute pleasure. I really enjoyed your book. Let's go back to America. Let's go back to Hydesville, New York State, 1847. In the book you say this is the origin of the modern world, Western relationship with the supernatural. And I wonder, maybe you can agree or disagree, whether it would be going too far to say it's the origin of the modern ghost story. So tell us what happened in Hydesville.
- [03:22]
Ben Machell
So, Hydesville, we're talking about a family of Canadian farmers called the Foxes who emigrate, as I say, in 1847 south to the US to New York State to a small rural town, I mean villages, but be more accurate, called Hydesville. And they move into a respectable, not huge, clapboard wooden house. And upon ARR. The family, which is a Father John, and three daughters who are adolescent to early 20s, are told, oh, this is the spook house. This is the local spook house. And for the first year they live in the house and nothing happens. And then I think it's the winter of 1848. There starts to be these knocking noises, tappings, rappings, shakings. The house moves or seems to move and night after night this happens. And it's frightening and disturbing. And at some point the daughters just can't cope with it anymore. And one of them, I think the youngest, says, look, do as I do. And she does one rap on the wall and in answer to the rap is a bang. And then she does it twice. Two bangs. And so what they establish, and again, this is a very, very, very well worn, well polished story. But what they establish is that this entity is communicative, that they can, you know, through a series of bangs, ask it questions and it can respond over these long dark nights. They establish that what they're speaking with is the essence of a person. They call it Mr. Split Foot. And they glean again through these knockings that it's the spirit of a peddler who had passed through Hydesville some years previously and been murdered. And wood gets around and eventually they excavate the dirt floor cellar and. And they find what appears to be a layer of quicklime and then human remains. And very quickly the story spreads.
- [05:18]
Podcast Host
Spooky, spooky stuff. But as you say, when they got there, people had said, this is the spook house. So there must have been some sense that this sort of phenomena could have existed before 1847.
- [05:28]
Ben Machell
Yeah, and it could have been local kids on a Wind up, we don't know. And as I say, this story has kind of calcified over the decades and centuries now, but there is a sense that, you know, if something like this is gonna happen, it may be in this house.
- [05:42]
Podcast Host
So what happened? How did it gain traction? How do people become interested in it?
- [05:46]
Ben Machell
So very quickly, the daughters are subjected to testing, you know, informal, by local people, and they're convinced. They begin to do something else, which is not just speak with Mr. Splitfoot, but to speak or commune with what appear to be the personalities of other deceased people. And I think this is really important to understanding why this is sort of such a foundational story. They become known as mediums. They are the vessel, right, through which the personalities of the dead can communicate with the living, and they get snapped up. But P.T. barnum, you know, the greatest showman, he says this is exactly the kind of stuff that people will love, and they become traveling performers and celebrities. But the point is that it's a ghost story, but the ghost is kind of the secondary character. What makes this sort of distinct from a lot of the historical ghost stories that people up to this point is that it's about the living people. It's about the gifts and talents of the Fox sisters.
- [06:48]
Podcast Host
So was I right to ponder whether it was sort of the origin, modern ghost story then?
- [06:52]
Ben Machell
Yeah, I think we can say that because it's the touchstone for so much of what happens in terms of people's attitude towards spiritualism in the 19th century and into the 20th century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who we may get onto, he cites it as, in 1840, many of your listeners will know. Huge convulsions in Europe, year of revolution. He says the most important thing that happened in 1848 was what happened in that small house in Hydesville, you know, because it opened people's minds to the possibility of spiritualism and this other world, this place in which the dead have survived and can communicate with us. So I think you're absolutely right. It's not just about an apparition or something floating by that you can't speak with. It's about living people who have this ability to bridge those two worlds.
- [07:42]
Podcast Host
Okay, so on the History Extra podcast, we've had quite a few interviews in the years with ghost stories talked about. So we had Irving Finkel talking about ancient Mesopotamian ghost stories. I chatted to Dan Jones a couple of years ago about medieval ghost stories. Very strange sort of stories. Quite different to what we're thinking about here. It seems like we're now moving Into a different space, a different relationship with the paranormal. And that is all kind of tied up with this thing called spiritualism. So what's that? What's that all about?
- [08:10]
Ben Machell
So spiritualism is fascinating. And before I found myself writing Trace in the Dark, it was one of these subjects that I kind of had a very mushy conception of. I understood that during the 19th century there was this huge upsurge in interest. I didn't really understand why or what it was. I think the difficulty with spiritualism is that it's not a particular creed. Okay. So it's not something that you sign up to and that you learn the secret handshakes for. And that there are ten commandments of spiritualism. It is really an openness to the possibility that there is an afterlife which is in some ways permeable with our reality that death, physical death, bodily death, is not the end for our essence. And that there are certain people who have the ability to, as I say, bridge those two worlds to communicate with the dead. And there are certain times when the personalities or the essences of the physically deceased are still able to impose themselves in our sort of physical reality. So this is something which a lot of people are interested in. It doesn't mean that they all believe in it. Because there's not one set of beliefs that you have to subscribe to. Part of the reason I think it becomes so popular is because it's always this possibility that people can kind of nibble at. People can sort of pick and choose the aspects of it that they're attracted to. But very quickly, what. I suppose the implication is that if consciousness, if sense of personality is not confined just to our physical bodies and, you know, to our skulls and brains and that we're able to project somehow ourselves, then all these ideas around things like mesmerism, which becomes known as telepathy. Or even things like maybe a bit later, psychokinesis. There being aspects of reality which we can project around us and which are still us but discrete from our physical bodies. People are really, really drawn to this for reasons which we might get into.
- [10:08]
Podcast Host
And psychokinesis, you just mentioned, that's like bodily moving things with your mental power.
- [10:12]
Ben Machell
Yeah. It's being able to have a physical impact on the physical world through some mental faculty without touching things.
- [10:18]
Podcast Host
So before we move on. And there's lots of things I want to pick up on there. But you mentioned it's not a creed, but it was like a Pan Atlantic thing. It went from America to Britain at night, probably across to Europe. I'M not sure actually how far it spread across to Europe, but that's obviously, it's within the Western Christian tradition. How far is it tied up with Christianity and our understanding of religion?
- [10:37]
Ben Machell
So it's absolutely tied up with those themes. You know, one of the big, big, big sort of dynamics that you almost don't see because you don't see the wood for the trees, in a sense is just a huge existential tension that so many ordinary people in the Western world found themselves living under during the 19th century. Because you've just got this, you know, it bears stressing this huge technological change happening. You know, we are able during the 19th century to understand reality in a way which we'd just not come remotely close to before. You know, from the microscopic to the cosmic. Obvious things like railroads and the telegraph. But, you know, advances in medicine, advances in engineering, you know, skyscrapers, photography, all these things, you know, we're able to understand and work out the chemical composition of the sun. But despite all these things, we still don't have really anything to say about what happens to us about consciousness, about what people might call the soul. This is kind of a gaping hole in all these advances and it stresses people out, like, understandably, because, you know, science, big capital S. Science is just doing so much for the world. You cannot argue against it. It is almost kind of bombastic, right in its triumph, kind of over religion. And yet the one thing that everybody, all of us really care about, what happens when we die, just absolute crickets. It's got nothing to say about that. And there becomes this anxiety amongst lots of people about what some people call the horror of this mechanical universe. We understand everything. Everything runs like clockwork. That's not satisfying, that's not enough. There are deeper questions that people answers to. And it's no coincidence that this is when spiritualism and people's interest in this, you know, that there's a corresponding uptick in it.
- [12:24]
Podcast Host
We're going to chat a bit later on, I hope, about sort of the ups and downs of interest in the paranormal. But what you've just described perhaps might explain a bit about why we're so interested in it today. Because yet again, we're faced with technological challenge and existential threats to our beings.
- [12:37]
Ben Machell
Yeah, yeah. We love a historical parallel, like. And I think there's a really strong one there.
- [12:41]
Podcast Host
Yeah, well, let's come back to that in a bit. But just one thing I wanted to sort of pick up on is how these ideas spread. And you said that, you know, the Hydesfield story was picked up by media. This is also the time when we start to see the growth of papers, the mass media, and those go across the Atlantic. There's, you know, people are talking about you. Stories are written on one side of the Atlantic and they appear on the other side as well. So how does mass media help to sort of spread interest in this topic.
- [13:05]
Ben Machell
Precisely as you describe? It's the age of press barons and growing literacy rates amongst, you know, all sections of society, and particularly things like the transatlantic telegrams. It's just adding fuel to what's already a really vibrant intellectual exchange. You've got to think of all the scientific ideas. There are channels for exchange not just between the States and Britain, but, you know, France and other parts of Europe. This is just, you know, I don't want to say piggybacking onto that because there'll be plenty of readers who aren't so interested in the scientific advances. But these stories, you know, these are the Fox sisters as an example. It's such an obvious thing to say, but people love stories and people love human stories. And so much of the story around spiritualism is. It's, you know, not just a story, but it's also an individual, a living person that you can hang narratives around. And people love that then. People love that now.
- [14:01]
Podcast Host
And you would know this better than most, given you were a journalist for the Times. Ghost stories, spooky stories. They're good copy. They sell papers.
- [14:08]
Ben Machell
Yeah. Maybe less so for the Times, but absolutely. I mean, and again, this is having gone through a lot of newspaper cuts over the 20th century, it's really interesting the attitudes that you can start to glean once you've read a sufficient volume of them.
- [14:21]
Podcast Host
Let's think a bit about when people start. Started to try and study this phenomenon from a scientific basis. Can you tell me about this society that was founded and what it was about and what was what its aims were?
- [14:34]
Ben Machell
Sure. So in 1882, you have the foundation of what was known and is still known because it still exists today, the Society for Psychical Research. And this was, I suppose it was a response to the past 40 years, really, to the. You hesitate to call it a culture war, but really the sort of sniping between big S scientific establishment and spiritualism, or the ideas, the possibilities offered by spiritualism. And these group of people who founded the SPR were not the first group of people to try and understand what was happening, you know, using sort of scientific methods, but they were the first group of people to sort of say, look, science has done so much over our lifetimes. Surely we can just. Rather than creating a sort of antagonistic dynamic whereby it's science versus the supernatural, let's just apply, let's use everything that science has taught us, all the methodology, all this sort of the systematic approach that has helped us in so many ways. Let's apply that rigorously to the supernatural. This is stuff that people, by this point, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people have had experiences of or feel they've had experiences of. So it's wrong to just dismiss it out of hand, which was in some ways the attitude that a lot of scientists at the time had. Just, this is delusion, this is superstition. I'm not even going to go there. The people who set up the SPR said this area is full of unanswered questions. So let's use the scientific method to try and answer them neutrally and objectively. That was the mission statement. Obviously you then have to ask the people who choose to join a society like this, often to some degree, subconsciously, they may have their thumb on the scale slightly, but again, that might be something we get into.
- [16:26]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Did this sort of introduction of scientific method lead to lots of people's activities being debunked, lots of fraud being identified?
- [16:35]
Ben Machell
Yeah, absolutely. And this was one of the big problems for the SPR even before its foundation, was that the world of 19th century spiritualism was just rife with fraud. You know, there were just so many people, as soon as you can monetize something, there were so many people who were caught in the act of cheating, of lying, of using various subterfuge or chicanery to persuade ordinary people that, for example, the most common thing was that they were in touch with the spirits of the dead, when in fact they may have just been steaming open people's post and finding personal information out about them and then feeding it back to them, or using just sleight of hand, conjuring tricks. There have always been people who were really good getting people to look at one thing and doing something else and then saying this is what really happened. And because of human psychology, we're prone to this, particularly if, as of the 19th century, there are a lot of people who, to use a cliche, want to believe. So there've been debunkings before and from the outset. But I suppose what's different about the SPR is that their job isn't to debunk anything. That's not the attitude. The attitude is to just work out what's going on in the course of doing that, they debunked an awful lot of people. But what was so interesting was that that was fine with them. It's the people who, try as they may, they still couldn't show how they were doing it. They couldn't uncover fraud. It was that kind of residuum of examples that they're like, okay, well, this is the stuff we need to zero in on and focus on.
- [18:06]
Podcast Host
So beyond table magic, there was stuff that they just couldn't understand what was going on. So were there any really sort of virulent cases in the late 19th, early 20th centuries that had these sort of unexplained elements?
- [18:17]
Ben Machell
Yeah. So a really classic example might be the case of a medium in Boston called Leonora Piper. And this was in the late 19th century, and she was a housewife in a suburb of Boston who, for whatever reason, just seemed to be able to enter a trance state and through what's called a secondary personality, which is she is. Seems to be taken over by someone who's not herself, who has a name and can speak, tell strangers a huge amount of information about their lives and about people that they've known who have died. And she was investigated by an SBI investigator called Richard Hodgson. He kind of had a track record of debunking really well known mediums. You know, he'd gone to India and had managed to debunk a woman called Madame Blavatsky, who was very well known at the time. And he was like, you know, this will be. And he visited her and visited her and he tested her when she was in trances. I mean, this is stuff you couldn't do today. But he would put needles into her leg. She wouldn't wait from the trance. She'd put ammonia under her nose. She was in a trance. And he would interview people that she had spoken to and they would just say she just knew all this stuff. She had no way of knowing. Hodgson got private detectives to follow her and husband. What was she doing? There must be a reason. She'd go into the library to read up on people. She was just living a normal life. And it was when a friend of Hodgson's died suddenly. And then this friend of his began speaking through Piper again, telling him really specific stuff that she couldn't possibly know. In the end, Hodgson dies. Suddenly, he starts speaking through Piper. And this was not a woman who was seeking fame and fortune. Frankly, it's kind of mad to me that she allowed herself to be made to jump through so many hoops. But I think she was also interested because she didn't know herself. And this is, I think, one of these examples of, yeah, there's fraud, there's fraud, there's fraud. But until you find that person who you really want to expose, you really want to find out how they do it and you can't because they don't know themselves. I think that's one of these people that people still talk about today, you know, because it's such a clear example of what the SBR set out to do.
- [20:25]
Podcast Host
Pretty weird case. So, Leonara Piper, that's. That's a name to conjure with.
- [20:30]
Ben Machell
So.
- [20:30]
Podcast Host
So I have this view of late 19th century society. Basically everyone's sitting around in their drawing rooms with seance tables and table shaking and stuff like that. And it feels like it's the sort of thing that people did rather than watching TV or going on mobile phones. That's probably not a fair characterisation, but.
- [20:44]
Ben Machell
I think you're absolutely right. I think the thing to understand when we kind of back project is not everybody's doing this with earnest sincerity. You know, it's often a thing to do. It's a game. There was a craze for something called the Willing Game. You'd have friends around, someone would leave the room and then everyone else would say, right, we've got to get them to do a specific action, to touch a particular picture or to pick something up in this room. And we're not gonna tell them what it is, but we're all gonna kind of will together that they do it. And if you get enough people playing this game enough times, then you will, oh, my God, have so many examples of people playing this game and seeing it work and then saying, huh, okay, what else is there? And then, as you say, you know, Ouija boards or planchettes or all these table tilting parties, all these things, which it doesn't mean that people are buying in lock stock to a belief that there is this other world which is a veil, but yet which our dead loved ones still live, but it might make them kind of a little bit agnostic. So I think it's absolutely right. People did do this for a laugh. People did do it for something to do.
- [21:45]
Podcast Host
Yeah, a bit of fun. But one thing that clearly wasn't fun was the First World War, which must have changed attitudes massively and made people a lot more aware of death and brought people into proximity with death and loved ones. So what did that do to spiritualism? Did it increase interest in it or did it make people think this is nonsense?
- [22:05]
Ben Machell
No, it absolutely increased interest. You get what becomes known as the spirit during and after the First World War. And again, it's one of these things which is hiding in plain sight to us, but just unfathomable death toll. And not only that, but I think more specifically it's people not having the standard grieving structure whereby there is a body that you can bury and have a service you can have. You know, hundreds of thousands of people just vanished and were never seen again, which creates all kinds of ambiguities and psychological tensions because there isn't the same kind of closure, I suppose. So during and after the First World War, again, huge upsurge in interest in this area. And all the more so because, you know, we talked about Conan Doyle, one of the most famous writers in Britain. He loses a son on the Western Front. This only kind of makes him double down on his belief. He goes on tours speaking about spiritualism, about this new world. And I think also the other thing which maybe we sometimes lose looking back, is that at the time there was a utopian aspect to it. It wasn't fusty and kind of twee and old fashioned. To a lot of these people it was the future. This was like a brave new world. You know, if only everybody could get on board with what spiritualism offered, what the implications were, then we would be on the verge of this new society. Much less materialistic, you read the terms in which people spoke and this is something that's distinct from playing parlor games. A new world is at hand.
- [23:38]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, that's eminently understandable, isn't it? Having been through the horrors of that terrible conflict, you can see why people would want to be able to cling to something.
- [23:51]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
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- [24:25]
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- [25:00]
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- [25:31]
Podcast Host
Tell me about Tony Cornell. Who's he? Because he's a kind of key figure in your book. What's his role in this?
- [25:36]
Ben Machell
So Tony Cornell is really the reason I wrote the book that I did. Tony Cornell was a member of the spr. He was somebody who investigated what still is known are spontaneous cases. So rather than doing research in laboratories into telepathy or other, you know, supernatural psychic phenomena, Cornell would travel the country when people had an outbreak of something that they couldn't explain, whether it was poltergeist phenomenon or whether it was a haunting or whether it was things which are often less easy to characterize but which were disturbing and which you get the sense of people's understanding of reality beginning to sort of fray around them. Tony Cornell was often the person who would arrive with his notepad and tape recorder and various instruments and try and get to the bottom of what was happening to these people. He was born just outside of Cambridge. He was in the Navy during the Second World War. And really from early 1950s until his death in 2010, he became, I think, one of the most prolific investigators of cases for the spr.
- [26:44]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And I don't know whether it would be fair to call him a ghost hunter, whether he would have liked it or whether you would have liked it. But it sounds like he was from reading your book. It's like he's constantly getting these messages from people who want something resolved, who've got some supernatural problem that is troubling them. And kind of he's the man they call. So in that case, he is a ghost or he's a ghostbuster.
- [27:01]
Ben Machell
I think ghost hunter, he might have objected because it implies that he was hoping to find a ghost. And there are lots of people who are ghost hunters who want to find ghosts, and they often do end up finding ghosts I think with Cornell the differ is that he was more broad minded in the sense that he wanted to know what was going on, but not necessarily to find that ghost. You know, spoiler. Tony Cornell never sees a ghost in his life and yet he keeps returning to this. Well, he keeps going back into this sort of liminal place where, you know, reality stops working in the way that people hope it does. He was really quite skeptical, which again I think is one of the things I hope comes across in the book and certainly one of the things that attracted me to him. He was not somebody who was keen to find supernatural for he was keen to work out what was happening and every so often he couldn't work it out.
- [27:53]
Podcast Host
You've got a good story in the book about one of his early investigation. I think he goes to someone's house, it's an old chap whose daughter in law has just moved out because she's been scared by a poltergeist. And he goes and sits down in the lounge with the chap and basically discovers that the father in law has created a poltergeist sensation by ringing a bell that sort of smashes some pots and pans and stuff. So he very interestingly sort of works that one out. And the book tells lots of stories like. But what sort of struck him, going back to things that were unexplained, what were the stories that he couldn't work out?
- [28:25]
Ben Machell
So there's a. I say famous one. To me it's famous. It's an investigation he and some colleagues from the SBR conduct at a place called Hannorth hall, which is an old Jacobean manor house up in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire. And the family had just moved in and very quickly things had started to happen. KNOCKING sounds, footsteps where there was nobody there, people's beds at night being lifted up and then dropped on the floor and then increasingly apparitions, you know, a young boy peering around the door or scampering across a hall. And the family became increasingly concerned. None of them had any particular spiritualist beliefs or believed in ghosts and stuff. But one of the things that I found is that everybody is skeptical and believes in science until things start to happen like this. And Cornell and his great friend and they become really in some way investigating partners. A psychologist called Professor Alan Gaold, they get everyone in the house together, they get them to do a Ouija board, not because they particularly believe it, but it's a great way of getting everyone in the house into one place, seeing their hands and they explore the house. They find this particular room where the story, the local story, is that the wife of the local lord had died. She'd been laid out there for six weeks because he was beside himself with grief. And very quickly, it's really Hydesville again. There's this knocking sound that both he and Alan can hear in this small, dark room. And it's communicative when they're talking. It doesn't knock. They're absolutely persuaded that there are no other people around, everyone's been accounted for, and they begin to ask it questions in exactly the same way that the Fox sisters did. And again, it talks back to them. It tells them that it's the spirit of a woman who had been killed. Both Tony and Ellen, this perhaps illustrates how rigorous they were. They both know that it's quite possible that the other man is just doing this. So they end up in this situation whereby they're sat on the floor holding hands with their feet against each other's feet. So they can both categorically say it was not the other guy. And this knocking continues, and they're able to speak with it and communicate. And then a little bit later, as they're trying to leave the room, there's a sudden scrape, and the door has been bolted shut by a long brass toasting fork, which has suddenly wedged itself in the lock mechanism, sort of preventing them from leaving. Now, it's a really good ghost story, but they can't explain it. They are there to explain this stuff. They really want to be able to say, okay, it is just the movement of an old house. It is just windows being brushed by branches in the wind. But they can't say that because the knocking would stop when they spoke, would start when they didn't speak. It was sentient. So that's, for me, one of these examples of a case where you have to interpret it as best you can. Cornell and Alan Cowell don't say, well, so clearly it was a ghost. But they say, this is what happened. I don't know what else to say. And I think that was one of those experiences that I think really helped both of them as investigators, because once you've been there, you understand how difficult it is for people who have experienced these things. You know, you have an empathy for people who were living normal lives and then suddenly found that they weren't, because that can be quite a lonely place.
- [31:42]
Podcast Host
Yeah, definitely. And I guess the fact that they've gone through this sort of forensic approach to studying cases, they've been very thorough about it. That lends that case a bit more power now, look. Cornell dies, 2010.
- [31:53]
Ben Machell
I think that's right. Yeah.
- [31:54]
Podcast Host
But one of his sort of observations in his later years was that there seems to be a decline in interest in the supernatural in ghosts towards his later years. And yet now it feels to me like we're very interested again. And I'm a great fan of Danny Robbins Uncanny podcast on BBC. And incidentally, listeners, if you want to read accounts of Danny's adventures, they're on the history actual website. So go and check them out. I mean, that's great. He tells great stories and he does it really well, but it feels like we're back in the paranormal room again. So what's going on? Explain the ebbs and flows of it.
- [32:23]
Ben Machell
So it's interesting to try and track it. During his later years, Tony Cornell found that his phone stopped ringing and that there were fewer and fewer reports of supernatural events happening in the world. And. And he was really curious to know why, like, what's going on? Why aren't people getting in touch to say, these things are happening to me. Can you come and help? And I think what transpires really is that he misinterprets what's going on. He supposes that maybe people are more distracted, that because of mobile phones, because of online tv, we are less tuned in to the world around us. And there may well be some truth in that. It may well be that if the supernatural requires us to kind of consciously or otherwise tune into aspects of reality that we can't do, if we're just staring at the football results or whatever, then that stands up. But I think what we really see is that people's interest in the supernatural never really goes away, but it just goes online. People begin to share their experiences not with members of the SBR or investigators, they share it with each other. Facebook groups, you know, ghost hunting groups online. People have told me, investigators today, often when these things happen, people just want to know that that's not the weirdest thing to happen. They don't necessarily need someone to come and sort it out. They want to know that it'll probably pass. And going online to these groups, they can do that. I think you talked about Danny Robbins, brilliant work. Again, communities online allows people to just get these stories, stories, stories, stories. Again, it's story. People love them and people increasingly relate to them. And then if someone says, this happened to me, then in the comments pages, in the group chat, you can see that. And I think people find it really nourishing. I don't know that we can say, oh, people were less interested, now they're more interested. Although I do think again we talked about that parallel things like AI, existential threats, a rapidly changing world, maybe there is that human instinct to reach for stories that talk about really basic things about us and about what happens next.
- [34:25]
Podcast Host
Yeah, and one of the things about the availability of technology and dissemination online is that you can record stuff and sort of towards the end of the book you do talk about a case where there is some interesting recording and I think we can listen to it. It's from Steve Parsons and Parascience, I.
- [34:41]
Ben Machell
Think is where he is.
- [34:42]
Podcast Host
And basically he recorded a very interesting clip. Let's listen to. So that is singing children.
- [35:02]
Ben Machell
Yeah, what's that about? So Steve still is an investigator. Spontaneous case is very much in Tony Cornell's mold. They're a dying breed, but he's still out there doing it. And a number of years ago he and his team were approached by people who worked in an office building that was an old school, so now it was kind of commercial units. It had been, I think, an Edwardian school building. And the people working there said, look, when we're working there late, we hear things, we hear footsteps down the hall, we hear children playing, we hear children singing. People have felt the sensation of small kids brushing past them, you know, a clean had seen a figure of a child, you know, and this place has got cctv, it's got security passes. They'd established it wasn't local kids mucking about, it wasn't trespassers. And so night after night after night, Steve and his team would go there and they'd try and capture. They'd all hear it. By the time they'd set their equipment up, it gone. Which incidentally is a very, very common theme investigating the supernatural. But there was one instance where Steve was able to just run in with a tape player going and he was able to capture what I think to most people who've ever heard primary school children having to sing with their teacher sounds like that. And again, what do you do with that? What does it prove? What can we say definitively? Like not a huge amount, but is it the strangest thing that is happening, that you can hear it in an old school where hundreds, maybe thousands of children had been and played, you know, increasingly. I don't think it is the weirdest thing.
- [36:38]
Podcast Host
So where does that leave you then? Having looked at all this and sort of researched it, studied it, I mean, I don't know whether you came to this open minded. I imagine you did, but where does it leave you? Thinking about the supernatural?
- [36:48]
Ben Machell
No, I didn't come to this open minded at all. Like I actively avoided the supernatural because I think I knew instinctively it was so annoying and so ambiguous and like many people, I like clear answers. I'm a journalist, I like to know basically what's really going on. And I think I always had this squeamishness about it. But I found Tony and I suppose as a result of spending a good deal of time in this world, I'm much more relaxed about ambiguity. Like I'm far more comfortable saying, well, we can't know and we probably never will know. However, wasn't interesting the things we learned along the way, you know, about possibilities, the many things, I'm not a physicist, is probably like number one. But even learning about gaps yet to be filled with knowledge, you know, about consciousness and really how little we know about what makes us us and our awareness. And if somebody were to say, perhaps there's a communal aspect of consciousness, perhaps there are levels of reality that people can unknowingly. You know, perhaps when people see what they think is a ghost or hear things that they perhaps shouldn't hear, they're just stumbling across an old memory that somebody else has had and for whatever reason it's still lingering. I think based on people I've spoken to and the stories I've read, I don't think I wouldn't be so quick to say nah, nah, nah, because ultimately, you know, who am I to say that I don't know enough to sort of dismiss out of hand and people like Tony and hundreds, thousands of other people in the have dedicated so much of their life to this stuff. I think you just have to take it as you find it.
- [38:24]
Podcast Host
That's really interesting insight from someone, as you said, came from maybe not as open minded as I suspected. Okay, finish up. One of the things that we often say today, certainly in Britain, is that we are very much still the sons and daughters of the Victorians. Like, you know, our drains are Victorian, our politics is Victorian. You know, we're very much still in the fabric of the 19th century and those Victorian people. Sounds like there's a lot we still take in terms of our understanding of the supernatural from the Victorians as well. Is that a reasonable thing to say?
- [38:51]
Ben Machell
Yeah, absolutely. I think the sort of psychological, cultural half life of that Victorian era as it relates to our attitudes towards the supernatural is huge. You know, Ouija boards, poltergeists, seances, obviously these things may have existed before, but what really kind of put them front and center was this period. And I think also just the idea of the ghost hunter, of using science to try and get to the bottom of stuff. That's such a Victorian attitude. You know, he a huge, huge problem. Let's try and tackle it. That feels quite a Victorian way of doing things. And the SBR is still going, arguably, it's still going strong. It has a thriving membership. People still want to get to the bottom of this, and I think that wouldn't be the case if British culture and society had been a little bit different 150 years ago.
- [39:43]
Podcast Host
That's been a brilliant conversation for listeners. If you want to listen to some of the other podcasts we've done, there's one on Irving Finkel, we're on Ancient Mesopotam ghost, Dan Jones on Medieval ghosts, and then all the Danny Robbins columns. You'll find them all on History Extra. So check it out. But also please do check out Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell, which is a brilliant read, really good, goes into a lot more detail than the stuff we've talked about. There's some other fascinating cases that will have you scratching your head. And of course that stuff about the Cold War and sparring, which we didn't get into, but which is a very interesting conversation. So Ben, thank you very much for your time.
- [40:17]
David Musgrove
That was Ben Machell in conversation with David Musgrove. Ben's book Chasing the Encounters with the Supernatural is out now, published by Abacus. And as David mentioned, there's plenty more on the History Extra podcast on the history of the supernatural and of the history of ghost hunting. Simply search your feed for more of that or head to historyextra.com or check out our app.
- [40:47]
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