Ghost Stories

Until we sell our house in Houston, our entertainment budget in Fort Worth is a bit scant.  Luckily, when we tire of board games and Netflix, we are easily entertained by free museums, theaters with great matinee prices, and drives down country roads.  As far as the drives go, Joy is enamored with bluebonnets, which are plentiful this time of year, and I am on the lookout for cemeteries and ghost towns.  It seems that every community has its own folklore about hauntings and spooky supernatural occurrences, and although I consider myself to be an open-minded skeptic, those ghost stories are still fascinating to me.  

Thus, when we made the move to Fort Worth, I was given a book all about the area's haunted locales, and when a friend came to visit on Friday, we decided to check out a couple of spots the author highlighted.  The first was Carter, Texas, a town that doesn't exist anymore except for some historical markers, an old church building, and an open-air, tin-roofed gathering area the author calls a "tabernacle".  According to the book, the ghosts of a couple of children supposedly still played in the area, but we discovered something that the author neglected to publicize.  At one end of the tabernacle stood an ancient piano, the victim of weather and neglect.

Ghost town piano detail

An old ghost town piano

Of course, I tried to play a few tunes on the decrepit instrument, and of course, they sounded creepily dissonant.  Although we didn't hear any ghostly children, we did hear sounds of living children and livestock from nearby farms.  It was easy to imagine how such noises, made ethereal by distance and intervening vegetation, could seem like spectral entities on a dark, quiet night in what remains of Carter.  But the fact that the author didn't mention the old piano surprised me.  It's not like anyone would travel miles out of the way to see a broken-down musical instrument, and given that the locals likely already knew about it, that old piano seems a strange thing to keep secret.  Given what I know about children and pianos, if there truly were any juvenile spirits hanging around, they would be hard pressed to resist the urge to play it (or bang on it, depending on your perspective).  Still, prowling around the ghost town and reading the historical markers was quite cool, and the discovery of the poor old piano was indeed a treat.

The author of my Fort Worth ghost book also mentioned a cemetery not far from Carter which boasts a glowing tombstone.  According to what he wrote, "the phenomenon is consistent, night after night, regardless of the weather or any other conditions that might affect it."  From his own personal account, this tombstone, supposedly 50 yards into the graveyard and clearly visible from the road, was "blazing away in ghostly iridescence."  We decided to check out this "consistent phenomenon" for ourselves, since we were already close by.  The experience was somewhat disappointing.  Although we waited outside the cemetery gates for awhile after the sun had completely disappeared, we never saw anything glowing with the intensity the author described.  We chalked up the alleged glow to some kind of optical illusion, but there was simply nothing there for us to see.

Which got me thinking about why a person would publish a story that was so easy to verify as false.  The Carter stories are par for the course: On certain nights, if you listen carefully, you may hear the ghostly voices of the children of Carter.  That kind of story might have people returning and hanging around time and again (although I can't say that such visits would benefit the local economy in any way).  To suggest that one visiting the cemetery would experience something specific with absolute certainty, no matter the time of year or weather conditions, is just a silly claim.  But we accept all kinds of silly claims all the time without verifying them, so stories about glowing tombstones seem like small potatoes.  

In fact, I think I have accepted a great many "ghost stories" as true, without bothering to verify them for myself, and I'm not talking about glowing tombstones and underage specters at this point.  From Hollywood movies to church pulpits to popular songs to adages that are somehow just floating through the collective unconscious of society, there are so many stories about how people should be.  I have fallen prey to other people's beliefs about what a husband should be, what an artist should be, what a responsible adult should be, what a friend should be, what kind of music I should be writing, what kind of connections I should be making, and on and on.  And as many times as I have accepted other people's beliefs, I have rebelled against them just to be defiant.  I know that most people mean well when they share their beliefs about such things, and I know that most people are convinced that what they share is steeped in truth.  Still, it takes a bit of work to peel back all of the layers of ghost stories that have covered my perspective of what my life is supposed to be like.  

Stories about glowing tombstones are easy to verify.  You drive up to the cemetery and you look out across the gravestones and visually determine if one of them has an eerie green ghostly blaze.  It takes an inner eye to verify all of the folktales about more mundane subjects, how men or women are supposed to act, how success should be defined, what one must do in order to be a valued member of society, and why that is of paramount importance.  Maybe some people find it easy to disregard such stories, but I know some people that take such beliefs very seriously.  Some of them might be true for me, but I will only know that for sure if I take those ideas from external sources and verify them against what makes sense to me personally.  If I don't see the glow, then I know that's one more ghost story someone just made up.  Otherwise, I am essentially always measuring my life by someone else's ruler, and sometimes it seems that no two rulers agree.

I will most likely keep enjoying ghost stories and my own amateur investigations of supernatural folklore, but I haven't come across one yet that has turned out to be verifiably accurate.  Likewise, I'll keep testing other people's beliefs that have made their way into my psyche.  Hopefully, I can peel away the ones that don't make sense to me and hang on to the ones that ring true.

Redefining the Unknown

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

I was reminded this week of Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws, which have been oft quoted in science fiction films and literature.  In case you aren't familiar with these tidbits of wisdom, they are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.


Although the Third Law is probably the most familiar, it was the first two that got me thinking this week, especially about the unknowable.

For a couple of years, I was quite intentional about making decisions based on verifiable data, and not making decisions based on things that I didn't actually know (like how someone would react, or what would happen in the future).  Sometimes these predictions seem like absolute fact because they are so believable, especially if one is aware of certain patterns.  If Bob has gotten angry every time I have mentioned his ex-wife in the past, I have every reason to suspect that he will get angry if I mention her again, even though I don't actually know what Bob will do.  Criminals sometimes convince themselves that they will get away with a crime based entirely upon false assumptions about what other people will or will not do.  Making decisions based on information that is created entirely in one's own mind can be dangerous, or at least frustrating.  Most people can't predict the future nearly as well as they think they can.

That being said, there are some things that are probable even if they are technically in the realm of the unknown.  Once I realize that Bob is likely to get angry if I mention his ex-wife, but admit that I don't know for sure what Bob is going to do, I can decide how much value there is in testing my hypothesis.  Dismissing a pattern of behavior entirely, simply because Bob's future behavior is technically unknown, is honestly a rather stupid approach.  Scientists operate all the time in the realm of the unknown, testing hypotheses to see how accurate their predictions are, and correcting things along the way to learn as much as possible and get to a desired result.  Strategists in many fields operate in the realms of the unknown, predicting (with varying degrees of accuracy) what outcomes will result in the future from actions taken right now.  They can't possibly know the future, but they can make predictions.

During the time that I was attempting to base all of my decisions exclusively on verifiable data, I lost a job, threw money away, and spent a lot of time on fruitless efforts, all because I could not claim absolute certainty about future events.  In so doing, I discounted a huge portion of my personal strength.  I am a person who resonates with Clarke's Second Law, willing to push past the knowable into the unknown.  But such endeavors are not usually done haphazardly.  Usually, a scientist conducting an experiment has some data upon which a hypothesis is based, and that hypothesis is fine tuned by a number of intelligent predictions.  It isn't just a matter of throwing a dart without regard to the dartboard.

In all honesty, I think that people who are observant can make a great many reliable predictions.  Sometimes our minds trick us into seeing "patterns" where none actually exist, but the answer is not to discount the unknown and operate completely blind to such predictions.  Instead, it is better to venture into unknown territory with both eyes open, aware that our forecasts may be inaccurate, but willing to test them and see what happens.  Playing it safe and hedging bets are the kinds of things that lead distinguished but elderly experts to claim that something is impossible.  It would perhaps be more accurate to use "unknown" in the place of "impossible".  Personally, attempting the impossible seems foolhardy and unsatisfying, but attempting the unknown can be pretty inspiring.

So while I acknowledge that I cannot accurately predict the future, I can also acknowledge that my strategic and forward-thinking mind is a powerful tool that can guide me in a keenly directed exploration of the unknown.  If all of my decisions are based entirely on what I can know with utmost certainty, they are based on inaccuracy and half-truths.  It is actually much easier to be manipulated when one discounts personal discernment as essentially unknown and unverifiable.  Rather than discount it outright, I now believe that it is better to trust myself and work toward verifying the intelligent hypotheses of my insightful mind, reaching perhaps a bit past what I know to be possible.  I'm not sure how a person can grow otherwise.