Late for Halloween

I'm a few days late for stories which make for some good Halloween reading, but here you go anyway:

*   George Orwell thought he had once seen a ghost in a graveyard.   (Or, at least, thought he had a hallucination which resembled a ghost sighting.)  It wasn't a particularly clear sort of encounter, by the sounds, but it does appear to have puzzled him.

All atheists should have a ghost sighting, I think.  It would be good for their soul.

*  Goblins were not necessarily bad.  A benedictine monk wrote about them in 1746:

Calmet stressed goblins’ helpfulness and lack of malevolence, which meant that they were not devils. They only became dangerous when angered, like Hecdekin. But neither were they angels, their “waggish tricks” lacking dignity. Goblins were somewhere in between.

Brand classified the goblins linguistically. They were the same as Brownies in Scotland, related to fairies, and “a Kind of Ghost”. Brand believed that ‘goblin’ came from ancient Greek, meaning ‘house spirit’, and that hobgoblins were a species known for hopping on one leg. The name ‘Brownies’ referred to their swarthy colour, which came from their hard labour. The origin of the belief itself, Brand suggested, was Persia or Arabia. However, since Samuel Johnson had noted that no one had spoken of Brownies “for many years”, Brand thought they were extinct.

Goblin beliefs were, indeed, changing. Calmet might have dismissed the existence of vampires, but he believed in goblins because of good eyewitness accounts. William Bourne in 1725—and Brand who agreed with him—would have seen this as Calmet’s popish credulity. Goblins only flourished “in the benighted Ages of Popery, when Hobgoblins and Sprights were in every City and Town and Village”. These were stories told around winter fires that added “to the natural Fearfulness of Men, and makes them many times imagine they see Things”. Goblin extinction, then, was a move from superstitious excess (as Bourne and Brand saw it) towards reason. The classification of goblins was a way of putting them in their place.

*  Smithsonian.com has a fascinating, lengthy article on the origins of the ouija board, as well as talking about some of the fascinating modern studies of it from a psychological point of view.  For example, I don't think I had heard of this before:

 Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. In actuality, the robot’s movements simply amplified the participants’ motions and the person in the other room was just a ruse, a way to get the participant to think they weren’t in control. Participants were asked a series of yes or no, fact-based questions (“Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil? Were the 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney?”) and expected to use the Ouija board to answer.

What the team found surprised them: When participants were asked, verbally, to guess the answers to the best of their ability, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they answered using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time. “It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” recalled Fels. “It was so dramatic we couldn’t believe it.” The implication was, Fels explained, that one’s non-conscious was a lot smarter than anyone knew.