So, let's talk about poltergeists, because I've been reading books about them - non-fiction books, because that is the only decent kind, generally speaking.
All generalizations are false, but the odds are good that the only good fictional poltergeist stories I've ever read are ones you haven't heard of or, if you've heard of them, didn't know had any supernatural element. Like, The Almost Year, by Florence Engel Randall, which was published in 1971 and is about a poor black girl living for nine months with a wealthy white family, and that was where the focus was in its promotional material. This was a huge mistake - it was promoted as a problem novel and I didn't go for those in 1971. And as a problem novel about a black child written by a white woman it was and is problematical - but as a poltergeist novel, it is flawless, precisely because it is problematical.
The thing about poltergeists is, they happen - don't make any mistake about that! I don't know what they are, and neither does anybody else. They needn't, even, all be the same thing. The word applies to a configuration of disruptive events, involving physical effects with no obvious or even probable physical cause. Any given one might be hoax, fairy, repressed emotion breaking out as telekinesis, hysterical misperception, series of mindbogglingly improbabl accidents, or all of the above - or, none of the above, given the unliklihood of our finite minds framing the question correctly to recognize all the possibilities. So they are a frustrating, but flexible, set of phenomena, able to produce almost any effect your fiction might require.
And this is why the most famous depictions of them - Poltergeist the movie, most notably - are so unsatisfactory. They treat the phenomena as the important, interesting problem, and the solution as a dramatic fight against some external force. And that is just not so. A poltergeist is not, in itself, a problem. It is a symptom of a problem.
Because the other thing about poltergeists is, they don't happen in happy families. They don't happen in loudly, obviously, blatantly dysfunctional families. They happen in families where somebody (or multiple somebodies) is under a little too much stress and the problem is being skated around.
The parapsychological theory of RSPK - Recurrent Spontaneous PsychoKinesis - was dreamed up to account for this. The idea is that psychological tensions are released, by people who happen to have a lot more psychokinetic ability than most people, through unconscious psychic tantrums. Since most poltergeists have one "focus person" on whom most of the phenomena center, and who is often actively persecuted by them, the theory is that the focus person is unconsciously engaging in attention-seeking, acting out, or self-harm that she refuses to engage in consciously, for the very same reasons that attention seeking, acting out, and self-harm usually happen.
I'm not being blithely feminist in that choice of pronoun, by the way. According to the literature, the most common poltergeist focus is an adolescent girl. This meshes nicely with the RSPK theory, since girls are so much more likely to be encouraged to repress the kinds of "energy" (i.e. sexual feelings, anger, and resentment) that the theory assumes fuels the RSPK.
The problem with the RSPK theory, of course, is that the best evidence that psychokinesis even exists involves the subtle non-random behavior of random things like dice and subatomic particles. It's a huge leap from rolling a statistically unlikely number of sixes to starting fires, throwing rocks, levitating beds, or creating a vocal apparition of a talking mongoose. But it does focus attention where it belongs, in fiction - on the unhappiness and tension in the house, underneath the phenomenon. Resolve those issues, and the poltergeist resolves itself, whatever its mechanism; and this is why so many true poltergeist stories peter out with no climax. The people involved are willing to talk about the phenomena; they are not willing to talk about the personal situations that created the conditions that enabled the phenomena. Many family members may not even know them - with nineteen children and servants, the Reverend Samuel Wesley was unlikely to be aware of all the stresses at large in his home at Epworth Rectory, or the measures taken to relieve and master them, and even less likely to record them for posterity at the same time that he was recording the disruptions caused by "Old Jeffrey," the poltergeist that both tormented and amused his family for some months.
Another way that real-life poltergeist stories end is with a failure to resolve. The problems become more and more overt - exacerbated by the investigation of the phenomena, to the point that a focus may feel obliged to produce phenomena. That way lies the full range of coping syndromes; the abuse of recreational substances; the making of poor decisions; even, in the most spectacular poltergeist ever, The Bell Witch, in murder by poltergeist.
A good poltergeist book is not a special effects horrorfest. Movies can do that if it needs doing. A good poltergeist novel would illuminate the personal parts, the dynamics of the household, the stresses and coping mechanisms that investigators only guess at. We can invade the privacy of fictional characters as we would never dare invade that of real people. Are poltergeists and drug abuse the same behavior at their cores? To face up to your poltergeist, must you face up to yourself? What if the focus is a shared one (the Bell Witch murdered father John Bell, tormented daughter Betsy Bell, and was kindness personified to mother Lucy Bell) - does this indicate a codependency? And what happens, in any relationship born of stress, if one party is making a strong effort to resolve the problem everyone else ignores?
I can't think of a single problem novel that wouldn't be improved by plopping a poltergeist into it and seeing what happens.
Showing posts with label poltergeists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poltergeists. Show all posts
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Essence of Summer
Once I faced up to the fact that vertigo was kicking my butt and I was neither smart nor steady enough to do anything useful, I made the most of it and spent some long June afternoons indulging in the prime luxury of summer: Reading true ghost stories on the balcony, with a cold drink.
Once upon a time a bag of chips would have been included in that luxury, and I would have had the option of caffeine in the drink; but the hot sun and the cold drink and the true stories of weirdness are good enough. Plus, of course, cats, one in the lap and one following the shade across the porch.
I have always craved the weird and been more or less afraid of the dark. If I confine my reading of ghost stories and so on to the sunny hours, I spend fewer of the dark ones lying awake dreading the presences I cannot see. I derive considerable pleasure from bungee jumping (mentally) through a universe vast enough that my finite human mind is under no obligation to understand all of it, contemplating mysterious appearances and disappearances, apparitions, poltergeists, sourceless voices, animals displaced in time or space, all the apparently impossible experiences of ordinary people. I hate being scared.
Most literary supernatural tales focus too much on instilling fear and use too many of the old gothic trappings to satisfy me. It always seemed to me grossly unfair that the really pretty houses, with the towers and bay windows and gingerbread and so on (I love a frilly building) in fiction were so often unliveable due to ghosts; and also that, unlike in real life, the residents of ordinary ranch houses never had anything interesting happen to them. This was a large part of the motivation behind The Ghost Sitter - to put a fictional ghost into a house that the individuals making up my audience were likely to live in.
In fact, I wanted to write a ghost story that took the assumptions of modern ghost theory and put them to good use; one that read like fiction, but satisfied the same itch as true ones. Closure, but not too many answers.
True weird stories seldom have neat resolutions, but they often open up vistas of possibility. And they are just as likely to happen in full summer sunlight as in the wet, cold, windy, dreary wuthering heights of tradition. When those mainstay authors of my childhood, Susy Smith and Hans Holzer, tracked down ghosts, they were as likely to manifest on sunny porches, in busy warehouses, in new houses with Florida rooms as in atmospheric theaters or spooky old houses. Fairies dance and girls perform divinations on Midsummer Night. Brownies did housework. Poltergeists throw stones and break dishes in broad daylight. People see water monsters and Bigfoot on their summer vacations. The most long-lasting, bizarre, and witnessed haunting in American history, the Bell Witch, took place in the sunny hills of Tennessee. And I eat it all up with a spoon.
Even when we approach the literary tradition, the cold misty Halloweeny setting isn't as prevalent as the stereotypes would have us think. Every ghost story J. Frank Dobie ever told is saturated with the dry, hot air of Texas and northern Mexico. One of the spookiest, most atmospheric fictions ever penned is called "August Heat." (It is also a model of concision. Poe would weep to find himself surpassed like this.) "The Willows", by Algernon Blackwood, and "They," by Rudyard Kipling, are both summer stories, and though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's much-anthologized "A Pair of Hands" is told in front of a fireplace, it happens amid the blossoms of banksia, clematis, and honeysuckle.
But nothing scratches that particular summer-time, porch-reading, cat-basking, salt-craving, cold-drinking itch like a good compilation of unexplained happenings in real life. Charles Fort, Rupert Gould, Martin Gardner, Frank Edwards, John Keel, I don't care who wrote it or what his take is on it. If it's about ghosts, fairies, monsters, poltergeists, or just the flat-out bizarre, and it's about real events, I'm there. It is thanks to this indiscriminate reading habit that I have any critical sense at all, for these people seldom agreed with each other, are not always reliable, and do not always tell you when they're joking or have a vested interest. (For the perfect Fortean read, I give you The Mothman Prophecies , by John Keel. Not the movie, though.) The same data can be interpreted as proof of any number of things depending on your starting premises. Believers in a phenomenon might be too quick to accept a hoax, but a skeptic of the same phenomenon can tie the evidence into knots in order to find one.
And where do I stand? Why, I believe - in ghosts and fairies and poltergeists and any number of things; but I don't know what any of them are. I don't care, either. All I want is the story.
If someone tells me he's seen the apparition of a girl in a full skirt and a sunbonnet on the patio at the Old Alsatian, it is not for me to argue with him, though I don't believe any girl is buried there. (That slab was in all probability removed from the cookhouse, built in 1856, when Mr. Belcher repaired the back wall and dumped stones and stucco along the fence line.) It might be one of the Karle girls, or one of their friends, returning to a happy place; it might be something masquerading as one; it might be something the human eye can't interpret that the brain turned into a pioneer girl in order to interpret it into something.
I don't mind not knowing. I like it. As long as it's honest not-knowing, not laziness and failing to do the research. Not knowing is where curiosity, research, and storymaking start.
Speaking of laziness - I need a new cold drink.
Once upon a time a bag of chips would have been included in that luxury, and I would have had the option of caffeine in the drink; but the hot sun and the cold drink and the true stories of weirdness are good enough. Plus, of course, cats, one in the lap and one following the shade across the porch.
I have always craved the weird and been more or less afraid of the dark. If I confine my reading of ghost stories and so on to the sunny hours, I spend fewer of the dark ones lying awake dreading the presences I cannot see. I derive considerable pleasure from bungee jumping (mentally) through a universe vast enough that my finite human mind is under no obligation to understand all of it, contemplating mysterious appearances and disappearances, apparitions, poltergeists, sourceless voices, animals displaced in time or space, all the apparently impossible experiences of ordinary people. I hate being scared.
Most literary supernatural tales focus too much on instilling fear and use too many of the old gothic trappings to satisfy me. It always seemed to me grossly unfair that the really pretty houses, with the towers and bay windows and gingerbread and so on (I love a frilly building) in fiction were so often unliveable due to ghosts; and also that, unlike in real life, the residents of ordinary ranch houses never had anything interesting happen to them. This was a large part of the motivation behind The Ghost Sitter - to put a fictional ghost into a house that the individuals making up my audience were likely to live in.
In fact, I wanted to write a ghost story that took the assumptions of modern ghost theory and put them to good use; one that read like fiction, but satisfied the same itch as true ones. Closure, but not too many answers.
True weird stories seldom have neat resolutions, but they often open up vistas of possibility. And they are just as likely to happen in full summer sunlight as in the wet, cold, windy, dreary wuthering heights of tradition. When those mainstay authors of my childhood, Susy Smith and Hans Holzer, tracked down ghosts, they were as likely to manifest on sunny porches, in busy warehouses, in new houses with Florida rooms as in atmospheric theaters or spooky old houses. Fairies dance and girls perform divinations on Midsummer Night. Brownies did housework. Poltergeists throw stones and break dishes in broad daylight. People see water monsters and Bigfoot on their summer vacations. The most long-lasting, bizarre, and witnessed haunting in American history, the Bell Witch, took place in the sunny hills of Tennessee. And I eat it all up with a spoon.
Even when we approach the literary tradition, the cold misty Halloweeny setting isn't as prevalent as the stereotypes would have us think. Every ghost story J. Frank Dobie ever told is saturated with the dry, hot air of Texas and northern Mexico. One of the spookiest, most atmospheric fictions ever penned is called "August Heat." (It is also a model of concision. Poe would weep to find himself surpassed like this.) "The Willows", by Algernon Blackwood, and "They," by Rudyard Kipling, are both summer stories, and though Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's much-anthologized "A Pair of Hands" is told in front of a fireplace, it happens amid the blossoms of banksia, clematis, and honeysuckle.
But nothing scratches that particular summer-time, porch-reading, cat-basking, salt-craving, cold-drinking itch like a good compilation of unexplained happenings in real life. Charles Fort, Rupert Gould, Martin Gardner, Frank Edwards, John Keel, I don't care who wrote it or what his take is on it. If it's about ghosts, fairies, monsters, poltergeists, or just the flat-out bizarre, and it's about real events, I'm there. It is thanks to this indiscriminate reading habit that I have any critical sense at all, for these people seldom agreed with each other, are not always reliable, and do not always tell you when they're joking or have a vested interest. (For the perfect Fortean read, I give you The Mothman Prophecies , by John Keel. Not the movie, though.) The same data can be interpreted as proof of any number of things depending on your starting premises. Believers in a phenomenon might be too quick to accept a hoax, but a skeptic of the same phenomenon can tie the evidence into knots in order to find one.
And where do I stand? Why, I believe - in ghosts and fairies and poltergeists and any number of things; but I don't know what any of them are. I don't care, either. All I want is the story.
If someone tells me he's seen the apparition of a girl in a full skirt and a sunbonnet on the patio at the Old Alsatian, it is not for me to argue with him, though I don't believe any girl is buried there. (That slab was in all probability removed from the cookhouse, built in 1856, when Mr. Belcher repaired the back wall and dumped stones and stucco along the fence line.) It might be one of the Karle girls, or one of their friends, returning to a happy place; it might be something masquerading as one; it might be something the human eye can't interpret that the brain turned into a pioneer girl in order to interpret it into something.
I don't mind not knowing. I like it. As long as it's honest not-knowing, not laziness and failing to do the research. Not knowing is where curiosity, research, and storymaking start.
Speaking of laziness - I need a new cold drink.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Miscellaneous News
The Clovis Comet theory has been disproved - no it hasn't - is reasonable - no it isn't - explains a lot - doesn't make any sense. There's only one thing to do with a theory like that: get more data in order to revise it some more! An astronomer suggests that, while a single cometary impact is unlikely, the one that broke up to create the Taurid system could have showered us with lots of little bits of comet, which answers some objections, but not others. Such is science.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
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