Page 11 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October 2015
P. 11
Ghosts: In Time of Stress 11
GHOSTS: In Time of
Stress
A sailor overboard, alone in the
ocean… climbers on Everest,
gasping for oxygen… a family
racked by collective guilt… Were
the apparitions they saw
inexplicably real or simply
hallucinations, conjured up by
people at the farthest extreme of
stress?
On Christmas Eve 1955, in the Gulf of Mexico, years of South Georgia Island in 1915, wrote, in HALLOWEEN TRIVIA
Arne Nicolaysen, a Norwegian sailor, fell his account South (1919): “it off and seemed to
overboard from the deck of his ship, Hoegh me that we were four, not three.” And Franco Originally, you had to dance for
Silver Spray. No one saw him fall, and his ship Worsley, one of his companions on the your "treat."
steamed away in the dark without him. For expedition, recalling that journey in his
many hours he managed to keep afloat, but was memoirs, Shackleton’s Boat Journey (1940), Most experts trace trick-or-treating to
unable to attract attention from any of the ships reflected: “Even now again find myself the European practice of "mumming," or
he saw. Then, the following night, he reported counting our party - Shackelton, Crean and I - "guysing," in which costume-wearing
afterwards, he saw what appeared to be to ship who was the other?” participants would go door-to-door
mates walking across the water towards him. performing choreographed dances, songs and
They told him, he said, that if he swam toward In 1969 American pilot Edith Foltz- plays in exchange for treats. According to
the Moon he would reach safety. He did as they Stearns stated in an interview in the magazine: Elizabeth Pleck's "Celebrating The Family,"
directed, and a few hours later he was picked up “I never fly alone. Some ‘presence’ sits beside the tradition cropped up in America, where it
by the British tanker British Surveyor. me, my ‘co-pilot’… In times of great danger would often take place on Thanksgiving.
some unseen hand actually takes the controls
Mountain ghosts and guides me to safety. In some early versions of trick-or-
treating, men paraded door-to-door, and boys
Mountain climbers seem especially prone to Helpful companion often followed, begging for coins. Most of
seeing apparitions. Dr. Griffith Pugh, a British Foltz-Stearns’s “companion” however, was not these early trick-or-treaters were poor and
climber, noted more than 30 sightings of ghosts always the same person. In 1932, the aviator actually needed the money, but wealthy
by fellow mountaineers. If one American claimed, the voice that warned her not to make children also joined in the fun. Door-to-door
climber in the Himalayas claimed to have seen a dangers landing was that of an old schoolmate "begging" was mostly stopped in the 1930s,
a, only a few yards away, a familiar figure: the who had died when she was still a girl. But, but re-emerged later in the century to distract
bartender of the fashionable 21 Club in New when she was tearing a plane during the Second kids from pulling Halloween pranks.
York City, a man who had died five years World War, the warning that saved her from
earlier. A British climber in the same mountains flying into the side of the mountain came, she If you'd been around for the
reported seeing the figures of two of his dead at said, from her dead father. British publisher earliest Halloween celebrations,
schoolmates. Both men were climbing without Peter Dawney reported a presence similar to you might have worn animal
oxygen at a high altitude. that notice by Foltz-Stearns. In 1967 Dawnay skins and heads.
had to drive across Spain, then take a ferry to
In these instances, the apparitions were Tunis, where he had an important appointment. According to ancient Roman records,
clearly recognizable people no one to the His only hope of catching the ferry was to drive tribes located in today's Germany and France
witnesses. But there are other cases in which all night nonstop. During the taxing journey he traditionally wore costumes of animal heads
climbers have reported being accompanied by sensed a presence in the seat beside him. His and skins to connect to spirits of the dead.
mysterious, unknown “companions,” which companion was invisible, but Dawnay This tradition continued into modern day
appear to have no individual identity. remembers the feeling of reassurance it gave celebrations of Samhain, the Celtic holiday
him. that inspired Halloween in America. On this
Comforting presences day, merry-makers often dressed as evil
Extreme stress can sometimes distort spirits simply by blackening their faces. The
During the unsuccessful British attempt of 1933 perceptions, and the apparitions of seen in some leader of the Samhain parades wore a white
to reach the summit of Everest, Frank Smythe, of the cases just described may have been sheet and carried a wooden horse head or a
climbing alone and without oxygen, felt that he hallucinations. And in the cases of helpful or decorated horse skull (a modern Welsh
was “accompanied by another,” as he put it in comforting presence is it is clear why such version of this costume is shown above).
his account of the expedition, Camp Six (1937). hallucinations would take that form. Young people also celebrated by cross-
“This presence was strong and friendly. In its dressing.
company I could not feel lonely, neither could I Longing for help
come to any harm.” This sensation was so vivid When, for example, the sailor Arne Nicolaysen
that, when Smythe paused for a moment to saw two crewmen approaching him across the
boost his strength of with some mint cake, water, he had been alone in the ocean for 24
“instinctively I divided the mint into two halves hours with little prospect of rescue and was in
and turned round with half in my hand to offer the state of not only physical exhaustion but
in it too my companion.” extreme nastier and despair. He would have
wished desperately that his shipmates could
Others undergoing extreme physical somehow rescue him, impossible though that
stress, fatigue, and isolation, such as explorers might seem. In these circumstances, might not
and solo aviators, have provided similar the apparitions he saw simply have been images
accounts of being accompanied by various conjured up by his subconscious mind to aid
comforting presences. The British Antarctic him and his hour of need? []
explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, describing a
three men trek across the mountains and police
