Your Own Personal Residual Haunting

I finally got my hands on Paranormal Activity 2 and watched it the night before last. Fear not, no spoilers, but for those on the fence, it is a prequel, not a sequel. That means it happens before the first movie. One last thing about the movie itself. I like the way that it works to lead into the events in the first movie. That's part of a topic for another day. The following has nothing to do with the movie in particular.

Last time the discussion involved in part two different types of haunting, one of which was unintelligent and repetitious. Apparitions that are an echo of the past or simply repeating events in their life after their death are generally limited to a single location. It is an interesting question to ask, what if they could be attached to an object, or in a real twist, a person. I'm sure there is likely real life lore somewhere about haunted objects with only a residual haunting rather than an intelligent force. As to the other...

One of the theories of repeat hauntings or echoes is that the nature and or structure of a location allows it to retain events and play them back when certain conditions are met. If a residual haunting was due to an anomalous energy source instead that energy might be attracted, like magnetism of a sort, to a living being of a compatible "polarity" such as any human. Such a person would then be haunted. This might not necessarily be enough for a haunting disturbance, whether poltergeist-like or with a looping apparition. It might be that only someone sensitive to the world beyond might witness the ghost or be plagued by moving objects. In a sense psychic energy from the human might be needed to fuel the haunting. It could make the difference between wispy half seen figures and ones indistinguishable from the living, or objects moved slowly in time versus hurtling through the air.

Whether the residual haunting "works" when no one is around is another matter regardless off its attachment to a place or object. The old question of "if a tree falls in a wood, does it make a sound" comes to mind. As far as physics go, the answer is yes that the tree makes a sound. These witness only hauntings may be different at your discretion, especially when speaking of visual apparitions. A ghost might not appear without someone to witness it. It might be something that happens entirely in the mind of the viewer, in which case the ghost will not appear in pictures or on video. Likewise with no human presence objects will not move around. This would separate poltergeist phenomena into being the product of an intelligent haunting or as the RSPK/psychic phenomena. Of course there is always leeway on these ideas and multiple mix and match options are open to the writer.

Mood: amused.
Music: The Game Never Ends by Stratovarius and by Let Me Hear You Scream by Ozzy Osbourne.

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Haunting Master Class

Last time, we discussed imaginary friends that turn out to be not so imaginary. Yesterday at WraithStop™ while discussing an article titled "Cold Spots: Fort Delaware" I mentioned the "schism in ghost lore where there are photos of half seen figures not seen by the eye, but at the same time accounts of ghostly figures indistinguishable from the living until they disappear or do the impossible like passing into a wall." What I did not mention, because this is the more appropriate venue, is that there is a rules framework that brings together both of these elements and many others that don't necessarily seem to fit together. This does beg the question if it can just be that there are disparate haunting phenomena going on that do not interrelate. The answer is of course, yes, if you want it to be that way.

First let's look at the theories that make for a cohesive set of rules for ghostly manifestations. It starts with the idea that much of it comes down to energy, and some of it to the will of the spirits in question. It starts with a ghost hanging around unseen, watching things happen. At this base state it may or may not show up in a photograph, depending on how much energy it has. When it has enough energy it becomes visible to the naked eye with the translucency depending on how much energy. Other acts such as telekinesis require energy and may or may not impact on visibility. A ghost with enough energy can chose to remain unseen or reveal itself to someone even if it has no control over its current photogenic quality. Overarching, this all may be dependent upon whether it is an active, intelligent, spectre or a residual haunting played on a loop, or not dependent on that criteria at all.

It is certainly an option to have different kinds of ghosts and hauntings that each work off of their own rule sets with as much distance or overlap as desired. Poltergeists can be noisy mischievous spirits or they can be purely psychic effects of the living. Unintelligent hauntings can be echoes of the past or entities caught up in the energy of previous events. Intelligent ghosts can be earthbound spirits or conversely non-human spirits such as devils and non-corporeal species beyond our current understanding. There are other events that can be described as a haunting such as Shadow figures and people, doppelgangers, humans travelling astrally, black eyed kids and people, and watchers and thought forms, which are ghosts created by human belief. As with everything else your setting can incorporate whatever manners and meanings work for you.

Mood: educational.
Music: Thrills In The Night by Kiss and Wake The Dead by Alice Cooper.

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Feeding Off Of and Sustaining Each Other

For a number of years I have been thinking about doing a haunted house novel. I have done a couple stories with ghosts in them, a couple of haunted items, and in a similar but disconnected vein, a possessed house. What I find to be a real challenge is on deciding what kind of ghosts to use, what traditional haunting phenomena, and other related things. There is more than one approach to writing ghosts. There are different kinds of ghosts around the world, each with their own particular beliefs and superstitions floating around them. Then there are other divergent explanations to work with as well.

One can certainly delineate the meaning of hauntings into two categories, the supernatural, and the scientific. The supernatural explanations run from noisy, mostly mindless spirits, to apparitions seeking to complete some earth task or unmask their killers, to ghost who don’t know they actually died. The scientific explanations run from the overspill of mental energies to cause physical phenomena, to echoes of the past somehow imprinted on locations, to factors impacting on the human brain to cause false impressions and hallucinations.

Even without looking at the why’s and how’s science can still help out tremendously in explaining the phenomena involved in a haunting. There is the ever-popular cold spot theory that associates ghosts, even ones unseen, with a sudden drop in temperature in the area they “physically” occupy. There are the Electro-Magnetic readings which can either be evidence of the ghost, or evidence that it is the mind of the witness being effected, depending on what kind of readings are gathered and where. There is also audio-visual evidence, though much of it remains controversial, and the most compelling of this sort of evidence is elusive and hard to collect.

This is a mere brushing of the topic, but it gives a good impression of the breadth of factors to consider in just a couple of lines of thought on the matter. This is without taking a look at the story factors that will determine what phenomena, explanations and other details of the haunting will best fit the given story being worked on. Looking at things from the writing perspective, the rest of the story outside of the haunting itself should affect the haunting details the writer will use, and the details used in turn will affect the rest of the story, making for a relationship best described as symbiotic.

Mood: level.
Music: Good Mourning/Black Friday by Megadeth and These Colours Don't Run by Iron Maiden.

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