One of the interesting things I’ve noticed when researching ghost-lore is the way in which ghost stories of the past differ to what we might call ‘the modern ghost experience’.

Once upon a time, particularly in the Celtic fringes of the islands of Britain, ghosts, goblins and monsters tended to be lumped together into one terrifying package. In Wales, my home country, a White Lady, a Black Dog, or a half-human-half-animal Thingummy would all have been called by the same name: a bwgan (or a spook, in English).

Ghosts didn’t follow the rules we expect them to follow today. Although there were many stories told of spirits (ie personalities surviving physical death) who came back from beyond to bother mortals, it didn’t follow in old ghost-lore that a ghost was necessarily a spirit. Take the following example from The Folk-Lore of West and Mid Wales, published in 1911 by J C Davies. At a lonely moor, Mr Davies informs us, ‘a poor old woman had been murdered, which was supposed to account for the spot being haunted’. But the moor wasn’t haunted by the spirit or apparition of the murdered woman, as one might expect. Instead it was haunted by ‘a ghost which appeared sometimes in the shape of a cat, at other times as a man on horseback’.

Now, how does that belief tally with the ghosts we are introduced to in TV programmes today, all of which seem to be ‘trapped’ or ‘grounded’ spirits?

Even before the boom in paranormal telly programmes, we had become used to thinking in terms of ‘the ghost of Lady So-and-so’, the ‘apparition of Bad Lord Wotsit’ and the like. But ghost-lore was not so clear-cut in centuries past.

This is why I consider entities like Black Dogs or the Owlman as ‘spooks’ rather than strictly ‘ghosts’ or even ‘zooforms’ (a handy term for anything animal-like but supernatural). Surely, once the cryptozoologist has determined that such an entity is unlikely to be a real, flesh-and-blood animal, he or she should move on. Owlman might just have been a big owl which frightened two young people not used to seeing an owl close to, and its appearance loomed larger and more alarming in their imaginations subsequently. But if we take Owlman descriptions literally, as a man-sized, red-eyed thing wearing little trousers and emanating evil, it cannot be perceived as a natural creature. It is a spook.

I like spooks. For me, spooks are at the very core of the paranormal: really, really weird, inexplicable, scary things. They might keep me up at night, but they keep me up at night reading books – and magazines. In the Moslem faith, such spooks might fall within the realm of the Jinn, a race of spirits touched on in a fascinating article which begins on page 12. The modern sorcerers whose beliefs are investigated by Jimmy Lee-Shreeve and Jason Karl on pp 16-27 also encounter spooks, but they might think of them as demons. Spooks have a heritage. And they are still with us.

So, let us not be too keen to categorise our paranormal visitors. Some may be spirits, if a spirit world exists. Some may be unexplained glitches in time, others misidentifications of exotic beasts. Many others, of course, may simply be mistakes or even hallucinations on the part of the witness. But beyond such limitations, there still survive the spooks.

Since Parapsychology and Cryptozoology are established terms and considered worthy pursuits to follow, why should we not also have Spookology?  Spookology seems no less worthy – and a lot of fun, too. Henceforth, I shall consider myself a Spookologist. I wonder if I can get a grant?

Richard Holland

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