Seances

[Anna B]

1 hour ago, Bellatrix said:

It's very convincing, especially when you catch that first glimpse of it before you have time to focus and put your brain in gear.  Proper hairs standing up on the back of your neck stuff.

 

It's fascinating how folklore builds up around these things.  I was just having a read about them.  There are a few associated, long-standing tales: Am Fear Liath Mòr (the Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui) that supposedly haunts the highest peak in the Cairngorms, and the Dark Watchers of Santa Lucia Mountains in California.

 

Apparently infrasound can be generated by the wind in mountainous places, which provokes anxiety, a feeling of being watched, and that creepy sensation you get in certain places with spooky reputations.  There's a similar phenomenon in the underground Mary King's Close in Edinburgh.

So what do you think it is?

[Draggletail]

17 hours ago, lavery549@yahoo said:

I am an Empath Witch 

I like this 💜👍

[Bellatrix]

4 minutes ago, Anna B said:

So what do you think it is?

It's a weather phenomenon/illusion:

 

The "spectre" appears when the sun shines from behind the observer, who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist or fog. The light projects the observer's shadow through the mist, often in a triangular shape due to perspective. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges their shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points by which to judge its size. The shadow also falls on water droplets of varying distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. The ghost can appear to move (sometimes suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer and variations in density within the cloud.

 

From here.

[Draggletail]

19 hours ago, lavery549@yahoo said:

There was someone on here that I felt pain from recently 

Out of interest, was that me? Obviously, you don't have to reply. If you did decide to reply, a Yes or No would be fine, and the conversation would never go any further...

[Anna B]

9 hours ago, Bellatrix said:

It's a weather phenomenon/illusion:

 

The "spectre" appears when the sun shines from behind the observer, who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist or fog. The light projects the observer's shadow through the mist, often in a triangular shape due to perspective. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges their shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points by which to judge its size. The shadow also falls on water droplets of varying distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. The ghost can appear to move (sometimes suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer and variations in density within the cloud.

 

From here.

Thankyou. A very good answer.

[Bellatrix]

4 hours ago, Anna B said:

Thankyou. A very good answer.

 

This bit:

 

13 hours ago, Bellatrix said:

The ghost can appear to move (sometimes suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer and variations in density within the cloud.

Especially the bit in bold, is . We've all seen the horror film tropes of the fast moving ghost, the thing that looks like a person in the shadows that suddenly flickers, rushes, or moves in a way that tells you it really isn't corporeal after all.  Catch that movement out of the corner of your eye, in the isolating fog, and you're going to be off and running like the Hound of the Baskervilles is after of you, before you get a chance to start assessing it rationally.

[Slighty batty]

There was a rather strange woman who lived on the next street to me. She had a habit of pouncing on people in the street and starting long, intense conversations with them. You could be stuck there for ages with her, she’d drone on and on for hours. Anyway one day I was walking up the road and she suddenly appeared, said she’d been taking photos of the snow and here take a look at them… So I looked at all her photos of pine trees in the snow, and then she said she had a very special photo of her bathroom, take a look at this..  And it was a picture of her shower but it looked like the camera lens had been smeared with lard. She pointed at the smear and said guess what that is? I said maybe condensation on the lens, and she replied no, then she whispered in my ear “ectoplasm.” 

[Bellatrix]

When I was ten or eleven I used to buy The Unexplained magazine, one of those weekly part-works.  If you know it, you'll likely know it well, and you'll remember the article on spontaneous combustion (with that photo), the article on the devil's hoof prints, and the floppy 45 single that was allegedly EVP recordings .  Set me up for a lifetime of interest in lore and all things spooky.

 

I remember an article on the spiritualist mediums of the early 20th century, with photos of them manifesting ectoplasm out of various orifices, which turned out to be cheesecloth.  Just the practical ramifications of cheesecloth ectoplasm boggled the mind (if your mind wasn't boggled already), especially by how they'd manage to conceal the fact that it was cheesecloth and not some sort of spirit gloop.

 

Simpler times.  Like Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley fairies: Cottingley Fairies: How Sherlock Holmes's creator was fooled by hoax

 

[horribleblob]

48 minutes ago, Bellatrix said:

When I was ten or eleven I used to buy The Unexplained magazine, one of those weekly part-works.  If you know it, you'll likely know it well, and you'll remember the article on spontaneous combustion (with that photo), the article on the devil's hoof prints, and the floppy 45 single that was allegedly EVP recordings .  Set me up for a lifetime of interest in lore and all things spooky.

 

I remember an article on the spiritualist mediums of the early 20th century, with photos of them manifesting ectoplasm out of various orifices, which turned out to be cheesecloth.  Just the practical ramifications of cheesecloth ectoplasm boggled the mind (if your mind wasn't boggled already), especially by how they'd manage to conceal the fact that it was cheesecloth and not some sort of spirit gloop.

 

Simpler times.  Like Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley fairies: Cottingley Fairies: How Sherlock Holmes's creator was fooled by hoax

 

A decade before The Unexplained, I was lucky in that my parents paid for my subscription to Man, Myth & Magic, so I didn't have to use my paper round money.

[Gormenghast]

3 hours ago, Slighty batty said:

She pointed at the smear and said guess what that is? I said maybe condensation on the lens, and she replied no, then she whispered in my ear “ectoplasm.” 

 

Sometimes there's a lot of ectoplasm on here.