Ghostbusters
It turns out that around the world, more than 10,000 people are actively searching for ghosts and their habitats. For example, American researcher Sharon Hill has counted 2,000 amateur ghost hunting teams in the United States alone. There are those who do this professionally, exploring their phenomena from a completely scientific point of view. Among them are physicists Ian Scott and John Fowler from England, who seriously tackled this problem. Their research activities began under very unusual circumstances.
1995 - On a rainy summer evening, Ian Scott lingered in his laboratory, preparing a new experiment. And when he was about to launch an installation that creates superstrong magnetic fields, he saw in the corner a translucent silhouette that was glowing, and resembled a human figure. In the voice of his long-dead father, the ghost said, "You messed up the wires," and immediately disappeared. The startled physicist checked the equipment - and in fact, he made a mistake during the installation. If the experimenter turned on the system, then a short circuit could lead to a fire.
And from this memorable evening, Scott thoroughly engaged in the study of ghosts, involving his partner John Fowler in the work. Together, during off-hours, physicists designed special installations for "catching" phantoms that could cause the envy of even the ghost hunters from the movie of the same name.
In the course of their work, the researchers collected as much information as possible about the subject of the hunt. We discovered a lot of interesting things. For example, ghost stories often say, "A burial chill was blowing." Is this a metaphor or a real fact? To check, the partners set up an "ambush" on the ghost of London's White Tower, one of the victims of Henry VIII - Anne Boleyn. They installed dozens of temperature sensors and an automatic recorder throughout the tower. The wait dragged on - only three months later the recorders registered a wave of cold that swept along the main staircase, and the camera captured a white translucent figure - the unfortunate wife of the cruel king.
Scott and Fowler suggested that a restless soul needs a lot of energy to acquire at least some semblance of a visible shell. And she takes it … right out of the surrounding air. Therefore, in the vicinity of a ghost, people feel cold - the temperature actually decreases. And sometimes so abruptly that condensation of moisture in the atmosphere begins up to the formation of fog.
Further, the researchers asked the question: how is our time different from the Middle Ages? Of course, chaos on the air. The pile of radio waves, power lines, household electrical appliances, electric trains prevent potential ghosts, figuratively speaking, from realizing themselves. Scott and Fowler wanted to test the electromagnetic parameters of those locks that are famous for their own ghosts. And they found in the walls very weak "frozen-in" magnetic fields of complex configuration. Probably, they decided, at the moment of a violent death, people form a complex and powerful impulse, which, like on a hologram, is fixed in the surrounding objects. Then such a "picture" helps the ghost to "gather itself". At present, this is not so easy to do - the interference clogs up natural signals. That is why ghosts are almost never found in large cities,but in country castles you can hear a lot of stories about them.
After this discovery, they decided to design a kind of "weapon" against ghosts - a compact "electrobazuka", which produces a powerful magnetic burst. And comparatively recently, researchers managed to "catch" and even "talk" the afterlife entity. It was in Ireland, in the famous Rafpeak House - the house of the "mad Lynches", where, according to legends, ghosts have lived for a long time. And then one night the instruments showed the presence of the "object".
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The experimenters rushed into the corridor, where they saw the pale shadow of the girl. The partners tried to convince her not to disappear right away, after which the ghost told that during her lifetime she was the daughter of the former owner of the castle. She committed suicide by smashing her head against the wall. She decided on this after her brother immured her alive in one of the towers, wanting in this way to put an end to her meetings with a neighbor boy from a family with which Lynchies never wanted to become related. After a moment's hesitation, the girl's ghost conveyed the ghosts' collective appeal to all hunters and explorers. According to researchers, if we discard the medieval ornateness mixed with strong modern words, its meaning is simple: "Leave us alone, mind your own business!"
Of course, this warning, even if it came from a ghost, did not stop the enthusiasts. Many of them have been doing a real photo hunt for a long time in the hope of taking unique pictures. The same Fowler and Scott have collected many "portraits" of ghosts, captured by amateur photographers. At the same time, the authors assured that they did not see any outsiders in the viewfinder of the device, but simply took pictures of friends or relatives. It turned out that ghosts refract solar ultraviolet light. A person does not see it, but the sensitivity of ordinary photographic film extends beyond the visible spectrum - just into the ultraviolet region.
And now a little history. It should be noted that the respected, but still not recognized by the scientific world, the profession of ghost hunters has been around for several centuries. The first to do this business were the clergy, as well as the secret service in the bowels of the Holy Inquisition. Both of them had enough work: in the Middle Ages, not a single decent English or Scottish castle could do without its own ghost, or even several, which were the restless souls of the innocent murdered, including villainous ones. It is interesting that the owners of such castles patiently endured all the pranks and evil jokes of the ghosts-neighbors, although often the latter not only saw each other, but also heard, and turned out to be quite talkative, reporting on the terrible details of family secrets.
The priests, armed only with the Bible and holy water, did not make much of an impression on ghosts and poltergeists (aka “noisy spirit” or “drums”). And then the owners of the castles turned to the Inquisition for help, in the depths of which the first methods of hunting ghosts were developed. We must pay tribute - these persecutors were not afraid of either God or the devil, catching alone at night people from the other world. By the way, loneliness was a sine qua non for a successful hunt.
However, the Inquisition had another, quite practical interest in ghosts. In addition to the fact that talkative ghosts often betrayed the secrets of the Vatican itself, they talked about buried treasures and secret documents. For example, in the history of Britain, there is a case when, in the 17th century, the famous lawyer of King Charles II, George Mackenzie, a ghost pointed out the location of the document, with which he won a large inheritance case.
Walking in the city park of Edinburgh, Sir George met a venerable-looking old man who began to persuade him to go to London and take part in the inheritance case. At the same time, he told where the winning document was located. Having reported this information, the old man suddenly disappeared. Sir George shrugged his shoulders and continued his walk. But the persistent ghost caught him in the same place for two more days in a row. The lawyer gave up and went to the indicated address in London.
In the castle where the plaintiff lived, Sir George saw an old portrait depicting the same stubborn old man - as it turned out, this was the great-great-grandfather of the owner of the castle. The lawyer told him this story, and together they went up to the attic of the castle, where, according to the old man, in an old oak cabinet there should have been a parchment with the text of the document. They found him there! And this is far from the only story of this kind, when people from the other world passed on very useful information to the world they had left.
The first official club of ghost seekers was organized in England in the same century - in 1665. Several leading intellectuals of the time, including the famous physicist Sir Robert Boyle, founded this society to jointly study reports of phantom phenomena.
Notable was the outfit of the ghostbusters of the time. Sacks of talcum powder or finely ground flour were intended to reveal traces of "otherworldly guests" invisible to the eye on the floor. Skeins of the finest silk threads to stretch them in the path of perfume; a bright lantern lit but covered with black matter, sometimes even with a reflector, a spare torch soaked in a flammable composition, and flint (it was believed that most ghosts were afraid of bright light); a bottle of ammonia; a rope impregnated with the same composition to form a fiery circle around itself if the ghost turns out to be aggressive; crayon for inscribing on the floor of Kabbalistic signs, which are not officially recognized by the church and prohibited as a way of communicating with the devil.
The 19th century made its contribution to this unusual hunt, although only electric traps with micro contacts and calls and cameras were added to the equipment of enthusiasts. However, until the end of the century, the latter were of little use due to the low degree of sensitivity of the then photographic materials and the duration of the process. By the end of the century, the first successful photo hunters appeared, but most of the testers considered the photographs of spirits to be either a marriage, when there was something obscure on the film, or falsification, if the image was of better quality.
A few words should be said about such a concept as ectoplasm. Such a term was coined in 1904 by the future Nobel laureate, French physiologist Charles Richet, designating by this a certain substance that the medium secretes (from the eyes, ears, navel, etc.) and from which a ghost is formed, moreover, as an "etheric double "The medium himself, and the phantom of a personality who has long left this world.
Since no one knows what kind of substance it is, a device for fixing it has not yet been invented. But ghost hunters in the first half of the 20th century found out that when guests from the other world appeared near them, the temperature dropped (according to various estimates - up to 5-6 ° C and below), radio interference, acoustic noise appeared, including in the ranges inaudible to humans, the electrophysical parameters of space change.
Beginning in the 1950s, the ghost hunters' weapons were supplemented by a thermal network, which is a rare (with cells measuring 20-30 cm) metal network, in the nodes of which there are fast-response microthermistors. In recent years, a computer has been connected to such a network, which makes it possible to get the configuration of a thermal object on the screen and determine the speed of its movement.
At the end of the 20th century, hunters received thermal radars at their disposal, which made it possible to record the exact configuration of an object and its movement, even with a difference between the temperature of the environment and the object in tenths of a degree (even a weak draft is recorded). Thermal radars are complemented by ultra-sensitive directional microphones and indicators of weak electric and electromagnetic fields.
Of course, the use of all this equipment does not yet make it possible to answer the main question of what a ghost is and what it is formed from. At the same time, the technique allows us to fix completely material traces inherent in it and thereby confirm that we are not dealing with hallucinations, but with an independently existing object of unknown nature.
Nowadays, ghost hunting is the sphere of activity of either individual daredevils or scientific teams armed with modern equipment. These are digital video cameras, cameras, and sensors of electromagnetic, acoustic and thermal fields. Such equipment can work autonomously and throughout the night to record what is happening in the room. Equipped with a Geiger counter and infrared film, scientists penetrate all the nooks and crannies of apartments, where, according to rumors, phantom entities are found. And there are already some results.
1993, December - at the Christmas party, a photographer filmed playing children. After the films were developed, the face of an unfamiliar woman appeared on the TV screen, caught in the frame. But the TV was turned off during filming and in front of the screen, according to the assurances of all adult family members, no one was at that moment. Later, some identified in the photograph of the medium Doris Stokes, who died several years ago.
Mysterious phenomena took place in Manchester and Dublin. In the first case, a chilling inhuman voice was recorded on the answering machine. And in the second, instead of the crying of the baby, adult voices were transmitted from the room, in which, except for the child, there was no one else, to the device "children's watchman". According to scientists, such studies must certainly technically confirm the existence of ghosts.
Y. Pernatiev