Though I've a long-standing interest in matters esoteric and otherworldly (fairies, mysterious beasts, aliens and the like) I rarely buy or read books on the area. The simple reason being that (other than the fine work of folklorists such as Eddie Lenihan) the vast majority of material published on such subjects is excessively credulous, bargain-basement fare. That's not to say that what I'm looking for are scientific, materialist denunciations of weird and "unexplained" phenomena, however, for such works are often (at least to my mind) fairly uninspiring (empirical) analyses of things that are incompatible with such scrutiny.
Three cheers then for books like Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, which I’m currently about ½ way through. It's a rare pleasure to read something that both articulates & makes concrete one's own vague feelings & intuitions on a "subject", while simultaneously going beyond the trite, the obvious and the "common-sensical" (dreadful word that) in its analysis.
He covers so much ground it'd be hard to give even a representative flavour of the book here, but it beautifully (and wittily) sets out to demolish the idea that the world (as we apprehend it) can be reduced to 2 categories: "The literally real" and "The wholly imagined/imaginary". I've made brief attempts to articulate my own vague (agnostic) feelings about all this on the blog before [see here & here] but I've never seen such a sustained (and confident) attack on prosaic, literal-mindedness before. Great stuff.
In the introduction he has this to say:
I do not want to convince or convert, but merely to persuade people to recall odd experiences of their own which, lacking official sanction, have been forgotten, as dreams are. I would like to stick up for people who, having seen funny things, have set them apart from their otherwise ordinary lives because such things have been outlawed by the orthodox, respectable world of science or literature, of the Churches or even their own families. (Harpur, xvi)
I've decided, then, to take Mr. Harpur's advice and do a bit of (public) recalling of my own, right here on this blog. Settle yourselves down then, with a nice cup of tea or a soothing glass of wine, and I shall relate a tale both rum and uncanny. Every word of it is true (memory lapses aside) and it remains the oddest, most "otherworldly" experience I've had to date.
One Friday evening, many years ago (when I was but a youngish lad of 17), I was sitting in the bedroom I shared with my brother, listening to music with a friend and chatting about the impending trip to "Termight's" (Limerick's famous, and much-travelled, alternative nightclub).
The music in question was a cassette copy of Joy Division's Closer and it had reached perhaps the second last track when my pal announced that he was off home to get changed into his "going out clothes" (an important ritual back then). I walked him to top of the landing, told him I'd see him later, and returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind me. As I wandered round the room, busying myself with this and that, the final track "Decades" reached its climax and the end of tape 'hiss' kicked in.
Now I'd listened to this cassette on numerous occasions - usually allowing it to run its course before flipping it over to side 2 (rather incongruously, Paul Simon's first solo album) - so it was by no means the first time I'd heard these last 2 minutes or so of tape (and I'd certainly never noticed anything unusual before). As I settled down on the bed to read whatever book was at hand something very odd indeed began to happen.
With about 40 seconds left on the cassette the hiss was interrupted by a clear voice - a rural, middle-aged, female Irish voice.
"Seán", it said, "Are you there Seán?"
A brief pause followed as I sat up on the bed.
"Seán", it started again, "It’s me Seán. Can you hear me?" [In case you're wondering, my name is not "Seán", but I was called that in my all-Irish primary school]
By the end of the last sentence I had slowly climbed off the bed and was squatting on the floor beside the stereo. Pause.
"Seán, I just wanted to tell you not to worry about things and what people think. I’m looking out for you."
Another pause.
"I don’t have much time."
Click. The tape ended.
I sat there in silence, frozen, breathing heavily. In the next 20 (or so) seconds various thoughts zipped through my mind: I was somehow tuning in to one half of a telephone conversation; It was a recording of one of those "phone gag" things that were doing the rounds at the time etc., etc. Of course just below/behind such sense-making thoughts lurked the creeping feeling that something more otherworldly was playing itself out.
Snapping out of this reverie I quickly rewound the tape a bit and started to play it again. Cue hiss and the voice once more. This time, however, the "message" was different.
After a few other brief words of comfort and reassurance (words I can't precisely recall, as I was beginning to become freaked out) the voice announced that it "had to go now, Seán" and that it would try and contact me again soon. There then followed five or ten seconds of garbled, gibberish (what religious types might classify as "speaking in tongues") before the tape stopped again, leaving yours truly flabbergasted and slightly terrified.
After a brief interlude (during which my heart thudded rapidly in my throat) I got to my feet, ran to the bedroom next door, grabbed my older sister and told her, "You’ve got to listen to this".
Readers familiar with the conventions of supernatural tales will probably see where this is heading. I rewound the tape, pressed play, and (of course) there was nothing to be heard but the gentle hiss that should have been there all along. I repeated the exercise. Same result. Fortunately, she had heard - though the wall separating the two rooms - the murmur of what she took to be conversation, and had wondered who I might be talking to (as my friend had left some minutes before). This, at least, proved that the experience wasn't - as glib, pipe-chewing, pragmatist scientist-types might put it - "all in the mind".
Later that night, as I recounted the story to a group of friends who’d gathered to "bush drink" in a local alley (hey, we were 17 and broke), I suddenly, unexpectedly, burst into tears, feeling deeply shaken and disturbed.
Yet like most people who have "such experiences" (I'd imagine) I soon filed the whole thing away in the mind's storehouse and thought about it only infrequently - and then merely to use it as material for an interesting and creepy anecdote. In other words, it changed my life not a whit.
Coda:
One night, a year or so later, as I sat in my room in University College Galway's "Corrib Village", I came across the tape in a drawer while searching for something or other. I hadn't realised that I'd brought it with me to Galway and hadn't actually listened to it since a week or so after the incident. Though curious, I found myself reluctant to play it again…not because the initial experience had been a particularly unpleasant or sinister one, of course, but…well..when you're alone in your room on a dark (windy) night then why take any chances?
After sitting and staring at it for a few moments however, I took the plunge. I inserted it, pressed play and…[pauses for dramatic effect]…at that exact moment there was a power cut, plunging the entire student village into darkness.
As my heart exited my mouth and rebounded off the far wall, I leapt off the bed and ran into the corridor, there to find a house-mate emerging from his room with a torch. "Just a power cut", says he. "You don’t know the half of it" thinks I.
So there you have it. Make of it what you will. All I'll add is that after wading through a few Readers Digest: Mysteries of the Unknown-type volumes (this was in pre-internet days remember), and chatting to a friend's family, I first heard of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). For those unfamiliar with the term it refers to "speech or speech-like sounds of paranormal origin occurring on previously unused recording media". After rooting around in second-hand bookshops for a while I came across Peter Bander's Voices from the Tapes (1973), and a natty scan of that volume's natty cover sits at the head of this post. Alas it was pretty dull, earnest and uninspiring stuff - largely describing recordings of indistinct "voices" that required some imagination to decipher. "My voice", however, was as clear as day (apart from the garbled bit at the end) and for some reason never struck me as that of as deceased individual (as crazy as that sounds).
I don't really feel the need to understand the experience anymore (if, indeed, there is anything significant to understand) but it's something that has stayed with me as (by and large) a pleasant, stimulating memory. Perhaps there's a rational explanation for it all, perhaps not. All I can say for sure is that it happened…and it makes for a pretty cool story.
The End.
Tags: EVP, Termights, Voices on tape, Galway, Joy Division, Patrick Harpur
Thats fascinating. We had a haunting, but i don’t believe in ghosts. My gal got an exorcist in and everything. I think there’s more to our senses than we know, and that maybe those before us leave something behind that certain peeps can pick up.
February 7th, 2007 at 3:52 pmLike I said, I’m pretty agnostic about the whole thing but - if pushed - I (just about) lean towards feeling that aliens, fairies, mysterious creatures etc., are all connected and interrelated (part of what Patrick Harpur calls “daimonic reality�)…though, of course, I’ve no proof whatsoever to back that up.
What those connections, and that “reality�, actually is/are is a bit trickier to pin down or explain. It seems to be something that leaves the conscious mind reeling and bewildered while interacting seamlessly with the unconscious (in dreams etc). In other words, it speaks the same “language� as the unconscious.
I don’t think that this “reality” (and I hesitate to use that word to describe something so amorphous and elusive) can really be represented or described by science. It’s probably best articulated through art/literature/cinema etc. Take David Lynch’s work for example. I love it for just this reason. The “languageâ€? of his films is largely a subconscious and otherworldly one. They [the films] affect me deeply - inspiring awe and producing pronounced dread. They bypass the intellectual and the conscious and hint at deeper, weirder, older things…
So do otherworldly entities exist? I’d say yes…and no. It all depends on what your emphasis is. There’s a lovely (borrowed) sentence in Harpur’s book: “folklore is never literally true, but may always be fundamentally true�. Pretty much nails how I feel…I think…
ahem.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:53 pmA further note. I have not listened to the cassette since the blackout in Galway (14 years ago) and I no longer even know where it is. It may be in my parents’ attic. It may be down the back of a sofa in some old flat. I just don’t know.
Like the “One Ring” it’ll probably continue to turn up in unexpected places over the years, passing from person to person and leaving its mark on them all.
February 8th, 2007 at 2:00 pmThere was some interest in Ireland in EVP in the early 1970’s after an EVP expert was interviewed by Gay Byrne on the ‘Late Late Show’. I seem to remember the voices being called ‘raudiva voices’ or some such. If my memory serves me right the Vatican even took an interest because it was suggested that the voices were of the dead trying to contact the living. I seem to remember a book on the topic called ‘Carry on Talking’ or am I getting it mixed up with an old Pinewood Studios comedy and Kenneth Williams’s unmistakeable voice…
Your experience sounds intriguing. What did you do with the cassette following the power cut? Have you tried to play it since then?
The anti-spam word that I have to type in is ‘listen’. Is that just a coincidence I wonder…
February 8th, 2007 at 2:03 pmHere I was asking you what happened to the cassette and you provided the answer before I posted my message! Strange things going on here!
February 8th, 2007 at 2:07 pmFreaky stuff indeed, Ithaca.
I think the expert Gay Byrne interviewed was actually the author mentioned above: Peter Bander. I haven’t read his book in ages (and never finished it) but I’m fairly sure there was a story in it about Gay Byrne hearing his dead mother’s voice on a tape! Must check that out when I get home.
The voices were referred to as “Raudive Voices” in honour of Dr. Konstantin Raudive: A student of Jung’s and the man who helped make them (reasonably) famous. Before you ask, his book was not called Carry on Talking…but it should have been!
I think that most EVP enthusiasts (back in the 60s/70s) were implying that the voices might be those of the dead. The idea being that a blank cassette doesn’t have the sensory prejudices and “firewalls” that we possess. It simply picks up what’s there.
February 8th, 2007 at 2:22 pmThere’s a new “Raudive Voices” section on iTunes where you can download messages from the dead.
February 8th, 2007 at 4:49 pmfoolhardy,
What was the story about the “milk boy” again (told to us by someone or other)? It has loitered around the darkened halls of my mind ever since I first heard it back in the Cabbage Lane house.
February 8th, 2007 at 6:33 pmThere was a guest called Ted Bonner on the Late Late Show that night. This Ted Bonner does not appear to have been famous for anything other than that he was occasionally a guest on the Late Late Show. I seem to recall that he was a used car salesman - he must have been a mate of Gay Byrne’s. He used to cultivate a sort of David Niven image and he got very hot under the cravat about the Raudive voices quoting bits of the Bible to prove how wrong it was to investigate the phenomonen. Oh the innocence of those times when a middle-aged git in a cravat could spout Biblical shite on TV and be taken seriously!
February 8th, 2007 at 11:12 pmIthaca,
I’ve actually got Peter Bander’s book out in front of me and there’s a whole chapter on the Late Late Show (I should have read it to the end the first time!).
There were, apparently, two shows on the phenomenon, such was the impact of the first one (with phones ringing well into the night). The first was on the 8th of May 1971, with the second coming two Fridays later on the 22nd.
Before the second show (Late Late researcher) Pan Collins sent Bander a cassette on which she (and some friends) swore they could hear voices. After listening to the tape Bander concluded:
“Frances” was apparently Pan Collins’ real Christian name and Gay Byrne’s mother had died by that time.
When Bander arrived at the RTE studios he asked Gay Byrne, Collins, and all the RTE technicians to come into the monitor room and listen to the tape. After they had done so Gay was the only person in the room who claimed he couldn’t hear the voice, and Bander noted that “this was the first and only occasion when I noticed anger and coldness in Gay’s facial expression”.
Though Bander had told Gay that he didn’t think it would be fair to bring this all up during the show itself (as it seemed to be too upsetting), Gay actually mentioned it himself (live, on-air). After a brief discussion about who did and didn’t hear a woman’s voice Dennis - the sound-technician - called out (from above the audience) “I heard it too”. Here’s the exchange that followed as it appears in the book. Nothing remarkable about it but it really gives a flavour of the dynamic and spontaneous nature of the Late Late in its heyday:
Like I said, that all may seem like a very minor bit of chat but it’s impossible to imagine something so naked and unscripted happening on a similar chat show these days.
February 9th, 2007 at 12:15 amOh and Bander describes Ted Bonner as:
And while he did, apparently, use Biblical quotations he also seemed to believe that the whole thing was genuine, and didn’t appear to have shown too much animosity towards the experiments, saying that “it looks like a door has been slightly opened” (105).
February 9th, 2007 at 12:26 am“milk boy”?
apologies Fústar, but I don’t recall that at all.
Will mull over it but perhaps Copernicus would be more reliable.
I do know a guy who looks like the Milky Bar Kid but I doubt that’s what you’re after.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:12 amfoolhardy,
It was some story about a kid who used to get visited at night in his bedroom by this featureless humanoid entity that looked like it was made out of milk! That’s how I remember it anyway.
Great image…but details are sketchy.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:43 pmHoly shit!
I don’t remember that at all. Some prompting usually helps but I’m drawing a blank. Perhaps I was out.
The only spooky tale I recall is the one about the baby/baby murderers in the corner of the attic - I think you mentioned this in a previous post. There was also our landlady at the time who’d was fairly terrifying. Irrationality fused with a short temper always is.
I can’t say I regret not being able to remember - sleep can be hard enough to come by without visions of milky headed humanoids arriving in my room after traversing the galaxy in search of refrigeration.
Maybe it was Michael Jackson?
February 9th, 2007 at 3:18 pmThank you for the information Fustar. As it happened over thirty-five years ago it is only recently retrieved snippets of memory that I have to go on and I had forgotten about the Raudive voices until I read your posting. So Bonner was an electronics expert - for some reason I thought he sold cars. I saw that Late Late Show but I do not remember very much about it other than what I have already recounted and that is not very accurate…
February 9th, 2007 at 3:25 pmYesterday, I tried to post a comment on milk boy, the details of which I remember rather thoroughly. But spamguard liked me not.
February 9th, 2007 at 4:40 pmSweet, Im back - Milk boy was the spectral child who used to visit Brendan from Listowel’s (or his friend’s, I’m a bit hazy) little brother after midnight, when they’d sit together on the edge of the bed in the darkness and chat and play.
February 9th, 2007 at 4:44 pmWas this the same brother who used to beat him at chess by making up rules whenever he started losing? Years later, Brendan was shocked to discover that putting your knight on the back rank DIDN’T turn it in to a queen. Scurrilous behaviour of that sort makes me somewhat dubious about the existence of milk boy.
Otherwise, I might buy it though.
I still maintain it was Michael Jackson.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:10 pmWhile it was Brendan from Listowel who told the story (thanks for jogging the memory, copernicus), I’m fairly sure it was his friend’s brother who received the visits.
I do remember that “milk boy” had been visiting the chid for a long time and that the child never remembered these encounters in the morning. As far as I recall the friend invited Brendan to sit in the kid’s room one night to observe. Cue sleeping child, enter Milk Boy. Kid sits up and plays (happily) with Milk Boy. Milk Boy disappears back where “he” came from. Kid returns to sleep none the worse for wear.
According to the story the family weren’t concerned about it as they felt that Milk Boy was a wholly benevolent entity and that (if anything) “his” visits were making the young fella in question happier and more content.
Great story. I wish I could hear it told, properly, again.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:47 pmThat’s pretty much how I remember the story too.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:50 pmI remember the night the voice came through on the tape. At the time it left me feeling slightly terrified and probably (in retrospect) a little envious. Now, I think I’m happy enough to live in a world that doesn’t have explanations for everything. If they’re there, I’m more than happy to know them; if there is no explanation of a scientific nature, I’m equally happy to live with the mystery. It looks like you may well have been there Seán!
February 10th, 2007 at 12:49 amcnuimh,
Didn’t you have a strange experience of your own that night? I was pretty drunk, but I remember a similarly freaky tale.
February 10th, 2007 at 1:14 amOnce again fústar, a great post.
I do now recall a strange experience from the same night.
That night I was saved from a thorough pummelling by an elderly lady just as one of Limerick’s finest decided I was fair game for a thrashing on account of my having made eye contact with him while making my way into town for the ‘Termights night out’ - the one we had both planned just before I left you in the company of your fateful Joy Division cassette.
Just as I was bracing myself for the ‘batin of a lifetime’ (I was never a fighter) I heard the voice of an old lady which suggested that my attacker and I not ‘be fightin all the time’ (some fight, I was cowering!). I looked over my attacker’s shoulder and saw a headscarved rosary-beed type making very slow progress along the deserted street (I was pinned to the wall). My assailant looked at her, then at me and walked away. I immediately went to thank the old dear for her intervention only to find the street deserted apart from my nemesis bounding away from me. Hard to know who she was, there were no side streets for her to hide in, she would not have had time to advance more than a few metres.
All this took place before the night out, so we can’t blame it on intoxication. A strange night indeed! Christ fústar, I had forgotten about that segment of the eventful evening! Again, sometimes it’s nice to have the odd mystery.
February 10th, 2007 at 1:38 amremember that haunting i mentioned. I didn’t believe shit right? but once or twice i woke up in a cold sweat and couldn’t move…..felt a malicious presence in the room, even woke the girlfriend once - ‘you alright?’, ‘yeah are you?’ ‘course i am think i believe in ghosts or something?’ type of thing. I read up on it afterwards, put it down to temporal lobe epilepsy. That TLE?, thats a prime example of the crossover between paranormal and scientific. But either way - i nearly weed myself, and as far as i’m concerned, theres no conclusions. TLE is a global phenomenon, sure wasn’t i just watchin a movie tonight Harsh Times with Christian Bale, and he wakes up with the shakes (he’s a seriously traumatised american soldier returned from afghanistan). His country bumpkin mexican wife says, ‘ the devil was sitting on you’ - and thats exactly how temporal lobe epilepsy feels!!!
February 10th, 2007 at 1:41 amTracker,
What you’re describing sounds more like “Sleep Paralysis” to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis
The classic “devil sitting on you” image, of course, is Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” which actually illustrates the above Wikipedia entry.
I’ve experienced said paralysis on a few occasions and it’s terrifying. The most vivid time was many years ago when I “woke upâ€? (or so I thought) to find myself unable to move. I felt the bed sheets being pulled back and then started to fall very slowly (face first) toward the floor. As I hit the carpet I felt something grab me by the back of the neck and drag me along the carpet toward the corner of the room. I even remember my brother sitting up in the opposite bed looking terrified as he saw me being pulled away! As suddenly as it started, however, it ended - with me jolting up in the bed, fully awake, but very badly shaken.
The other times it happened (and it hasn’t happened me for years) I kept reminding myself to try and move a single digit - a toe or a finger. As soon as I managed that the spell of paralysis was broken and I was fully awake and fully functional. Once or twice I remember deciding to “go with it� - letting myself slip deeper and deeper into that curious paralysed state, just to see where it led.
I don’t really think I was awake on such occasions, but I didn’t feel fully asleep either. It seems to be some kind of in-between state where the brain thinks it’s awake but the subconscious (REM, dreamy) mind is still to the fore. Just as it can be mega-scary, it can also be a bit of a rush: allowing a weird sort of “conscious� access to the “unconscious� mind. I don’t know any other situation in which that possibility can be so potently explored.
Of course, that’s not to say that some objective malevolence might not have been present in your case. Obviously I just don’t know.
February 10th, 2007 at 2:58 amI have experienced sleep paralysis and night terrors on numerous occasions, but never in such a dramatic way as you. I think that your experience sounds more like night terrors. My memory of sleep paralysis is of lying in bed with my eyes open but being unable to move. Pretty unnerving, but night terrors are more scary and I have often woken up screaming and feeling terrified, but without any clear memory of what it was I was afraid of. Both sleep paralys and night terrors occur during non-REM sleep usually with one or two hours of going to sleep. I believe the conditions in my case to be caused by apnoeia the most recognizable symptoms of which are excessive snoring and a tendency to stop breathing while asleep. I think that the night terrors start when I stop breathing. One simple way of controlling it is to sleep on one’s side. I feel more comfortable lying on my back, but have recently been trying to train myself to sleep in my side and there has been a noticeable improvement… There is a very informative website on the subject: http://www.nightterrors.org
I remember when I lived in the Middle East being told that sleep paralysis was caused by a djinn sitting on one’s chest.
February 10th, 2007 at 10:16 pm