Ghost stories of British Museum

The stories on ghosts will never cease to fascinate us. It may be that these are essential archetypes, teleologically embedded in the civilisation whatever be the spirit of the age and time.

If the rationalist mainstream refuses to entertain these paranormal events; they persevere and keep cropping up in the movies and fantasy novels and the modern folklore ‘twilight zone’.

Ghost stories and the ghost sitings are reported from the burial grounds and the desolate, uninhabited houses and strange spaces.

What is a ghost phenomenon? There are hypotheses as many as ghost stories. Whatever they are, they still enchant people. They always fascinate people. If we say it differently, people want it to be true.

Incidentally, I was reading the book “The ghost stories of  Charles Dickens”. The first story is an excellent curtain-raiser.

The story opens with the scene of a  red painted horse-drawn coach winding along the hilly road at the twilight time in the evening on a heavily raining squally day. The horse was exhausted, clawing up the road, pulling the carriage with squealing sounds and stooped head.

The emotionally drained coachman drags himself to the other side of the town. He was at the lowest ebb of his spirits as his wife asks him to leave following her affair with another man. The story eerily inches further, and the man hires a room in the inn on the hilltop. He was half-drunk during the night and re-running his tragedy in his mind. The antique chair in front of him, to his surprise,  slowly comes alive and starts to converse with him. It shares his anguish and directs him to the wardrobe in the room and asks him to fish out a paper from the trouser pocket forgotten by the previous inmate who stayed there. The man does so and finds that it is a letter of his wife’s’ lover written to another woman. The chair bids him use that paper and salvage his life. Humans like to have some superhuman benediction or grace to settle their issues.

 I would like to compile and tie some stray, but some thought through ideas from philosophy, psychology and the rest of it. Humans consider themselves small and puny and are overwhelmed by the unknowable nature. And it is true that his or her inadequate apprehending apparatus fails to comprehend what exists outside him and may be seeking some sort of union with the wholeness of human existence and existence of cosmic reality.

Adler, the Neo- Freudian psychologist, says that The primordial anxiety of human existence is the finiteness of human existence wherein the individual life ends at one point of time. It always tries to be one with the all-powerful wholeness. Nondualists say that the separate-self always works to be part of non-describable universal consciousness. Hence it embarks on more significant causes and issues.

On a more tangible note, when we go to the historical monuments, there is a feeling that many people high and low over a long period have passed from that place, touched the stones feelingly with all their personal stories of highs and lows. Somehow it appears that those objects record them and their emotions in a very human way. Visiting those places is a kind of communion with the past and the human collective in the time domain.

Someone told me that when there is intense anguish in any individual at the time of death in torture chambers, confinements like prisons in the castles or the battlegrounds, massive energy emanates and embeds itself in the surroundings. Whoever has the appropriate wavelength of the sort with those surroundings could appreciate the past and can rerun the story.

The quantum mechanical world, and it’s difficult to understand theories, leave scope for these possibilities. We are trained by the rationalist mainstream relentlessly and inexorably where everything is seen through the prism of the three-dimensional world. We don’t have the apprehending and receptive apparatus to appreciate the reality which is said to be ten-dimensional which many cosmologists swear by , hence truth is relative, incomplete and unknowable.

The Newtonian three-dimensional world considers time as an independent and absolute entity. Einstein’s Time-space continuum has wholly shattered it.  Time-space is an expanding and contracting entity. It is hypothesised that there are time storms, time-lapses and times vents and slips. Who knows these phenomena are ‘the past’ peeping through dynamics of time as Lian Gilchrist says in his book the Emissary and the Master. The holistic right brain the Master is underutilised and atrophied in modern times.

Coming to the subject matter of the title, I went on a guided tour on the ‘Ghost stories in the British Museum’. Noah is making an oral history project on the ghost stories heard from the staff working in the British Museum which they have experienced during the nights. The staff of cleaners and the guards and the CCTV handlers. The stories are fascinating. There is a question, why the stories of the nights only. The footfall of the visitors is as dense as the nearest and busiest tube station Holborn. A total electromagnetic disturbance to make out anything.

There is a small art piece with an intricate design of a ship of the 15th century from Germany. They made it from a glittering gold sheet — the ship of a third of a meter in length. Once a lady has photographed the ship in the glass case. The image on the photograph has shown a dwarf and with the hair falling on one side of the face with an amused smile on the face looking at the golden ship. The dwarf alludes to the fools (people with developmental delay) who were reared in the royal households in that era as the voices of the divine.

There is a face mask of an Anglo Saxon royalty, Sutton soo, from the burial pit of East Anglia. It is made in gold. There is a massive door right in front of this artefact. The closing the doors shut in alignment is some times experienced as a difficult one as if somebody was pushing it from the other side. That gallery was very powerful with a lot of paranormal phenomena. Noah said ( the tour guide) it is compounded by the presence of death masks of Napoleon and Henry the 8th kept in the room in the floor below.

Noah considers that the objects hold specific energy when so much intense labour, visualisation and longing goes into it.

Even in the day time if you see your self alone in the gallery with no one around in the day as a visitor, you can tell that these places are unique and uncommon.

 Imagine these places during the night. They are desolate with powerful objects used by powerful people. You are alone going about your guard duties. Previously they used to go alone and guard, and now they go in twos as some refused to go alone.

There is a sitting statue of Egyptian goddess Sekmath. She is a female deity — Executioner of the will of Egyptian god RA.
Humans tend to touch everything they come across with their hands whether it is an artefact, a monument,  animal or humans for that matter. It is an innate urge to communion with. To merge with the whole. Every visitor touches the diety, and some leave some objects of veneration at their feet like flowers and some times chocolates. Many have reported that they have seen blue and violet rays from the statue and pools of golden lights from the open palms in the photographs taken. Why the colours and only in photographs. Every subtle play of electromagnetic colours are the different wavelengths of light and photographs are the receptors.

There is a Greek temple from Turkey which was brought in its entirety by the British collectors. Some night staff have reported Egyptian music coming from it. Noah said that among the Elgin marbles there is a statue of a lady used as a column supporting the roof of the Athenian temple,   it was transported in a box on a ship. While it was on the sea journey, the sailors reported that they could hear a quiet wailing sound from the box.

There is a two-headed dog in the African section which is said to be the most powerful object in the gallery according to some of the staff. No one dares to go into the gallery alone but only as a pair of guards. It is the object used in ancient African world as a contract between two tradesmen like a mason and a carpenter before embarking on the work indicating that they will do the work together  They keep the dog with two heads with nails stuck on the body. They consider that it is the most powerful object in the gallery. Whenever they stand at it, the alarms go off and this freaked the guards. They connect the alarms with that leather dog.

On one of the top galleries, there is something called an enlightenment gallery which was the former British library.  It housed Ex-servicemen as guards. There is a shooting gallery for them for recreation, right below is an Egyptian gallery with mummies. The behaviour of the ex-servicemen guards was not deferential when guarding them. Once a guard shot himself. Some say it is by PTSD ( post-traumatic stress disorder). Others say it is the Egyptian mummies.

Stories abound around Egyptian mummies. The newly brought Mummies from Egypt were unwrapped and set up for display. Lots of excesses committed at that time holding vulgar parties around them. They say that mummies reacted to that. Some cleaning staff refuse to go there. Once a Hindu woman sat on a coffin and made some jokes about the hair of the mummy. On the following night, she woke up by someone tugging at her duvet on the bed. She thought her son might have come during the night and was trying to wake her up. Next day she saw a poster of Krishna in her son’s bedroom. She asked why so. He said the night before somebody was tugging and pulling his duvet and he is scared, and the poster was for his protection. Once when the glass case was being cleaned the bandages on the mummies started moving to make the cleaners shudder. The authorities contend that it is the static electricity, but the guide says that it is not possible. The distance between the mummy and the glass is too far. On top of it, the authorities could not replicate it to the satisfaction of others by briskly cleaning or rubbing the glass of the case.

Once the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Prince Charles visited the Egyptian gallery and Mubarak felt very great uneasiness when he entered the gallery, Mubarak felt he was exposed to a lot of power and force. Cairo’s museum workers are aware of this folklore.

A lot of people leave the Egyptian artefacts in the museum disowning them; they have become a part of the museum collections.  The fly-tippers are not happy with them; they are amulets, the horn of Tutunkaman, etcetera. Once a Japanese man left a hand of a mummy. He felt that his house was quaking because of it. One should remember that Japan is the land of earthquakes and tremors. But it is very cultural that societies respect the burial places and treat them with reverence and refuse to disturb them. To do so will incur costs.

The combined will and intentionality of individuals, whether in mass meditations or among the so-called  ‘intenders’  which inflect the course of reality in the desired direction is a universal belief. Mass prayers in the churches, mosques and temples are the manifest forms of the cultural expectations.

 All in all, It was a  fascinating trip to the British Museum to hear the Ghost stories collected and narrated by NOAH; it is an Oral history project funded by the Norwegian cultural ministry.

In conclusion, how do I feel and how should I feel about this alleged supernatural phenomenon, is the most gruelling and challenging part of it. Someone said that genius lies in being comfortable with flux, uncertainty and non-conformity.

Here, what I mean, is the reductionistic approaches, eliminating the inconvenient experiences and mistaking ‘’lack of evidence as the absence of evidence’’  with a constant urge to conclude. It has always happened in the history of the sciences. There is a touch of silence and covered up hypocrisy in it.

At least now, when qubits and quantum chips are on the production line, one has to acknowledge its software based on non-signal communication with no time-lapse for the signal to go from point to point. One has to relook at the Acuasality, non-signal communication, possibility of the time-reversal phenomenon to reinterpret what is said so far.

Still, the materialist sciences ignore the observer effect on subatomic particles, Synchronicity, Psi phenomenon and the rest of it as pseudo-science.

Matcha-21/4/2019

The author is neither a believer in magic nor a non-believer of magic. He intends and attempts to be above them to study them and be a keen and objective student of nature, society and human condition. He believes that whatever we arrive at remains tentative and conditional and open to revision by better minds, technology, insights and the times which we are going to live in.