Ghost and Ghoul
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, 1961
In 1957, Lethbridge moved to Hole House near Branscombe in Devon, a place which was to be the setting for the most eventful phase of his career. Here he would write another eight remarkable books (nine if you include the un-published autobiography The Ivory Tower), the first of this sequence was Ghost and Ghoul.
Published in 1961, Ghost and Ghoul followed Lethbridge’s 1957 publication Gogmagog - The Buried Gods. It is however, not a follow-up but a by-product of his line of research work concerning the old pagan gods of Britain. The understanding that mankind was compelled to believe in the existence of greater beings than himself and had therefore resulted in the belief of gods, was a theory that he questioned. The idea that the natural had somehow provoked a supposed supernatural did not sit easy with an enquiring mind.
In the course of his fieldwork, Lethbridge had become aware that he was prone to experiencing unusual happenings and that an enquiry into the occurrences was worthy of serious study. He believed that a ‘scientific’ explanation lay behind what can be termed the ‘odd’. History had proved to him that the supernatural of one generation often become the natural of the next and it was this notion that fired his investigations.
In Ghost and Ghoul, Lethbridge first aired his belief that ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ were two separate entities. He believed that mind was distinct from brain which, like the body, only existed as a convenience during our time on earth. He believed that earth level existence had a relatively low frequency and that the brain acted as a resistance which was able to filter out information that was required from a much greater volume of happenings.
His ‘Jack of all trades and master of none’ approach to his vocation had provided him with a great store of experiences that he believed put him in a unique position to be able to use himself as a guinea-pig for the study of these occurrences. Lethbridge was eager to state that his ideas were tentative and considered it his prerogative to change his theories should evidence prove contrary. In all of his works he was astutely aware of not wanting to inflict dogma upon his readers and throughout Ghost and Ghoul, he continually criticises dogmatic pedants and their inability to investigate and undertake primary research for themselves.
Lethbridge begins the book by recounting his own experiences of ghosts. The first, that of a porter at New Court, Trinity, Cambridge in 1922 and another, an old lady near to his neighbour’s house at Hole Mill near Branscombe in Devon. He believed that these ‘visitations’ were in fact not visitors from another world, but projections like a television picture or photograph. Was his own presence responsible for the perception of these ghosts? Was he acting as a receiver to some unknown, possibly unconscious, projector?
In Ghost and Ghoul, Lethbridge discusses psychokinesis and the precognition experiments of Professor Rhine and compounds these findings by quoting from Dunne’s Experiments with Time. Throughout the work he makes reference to George de la Warr’s work on resonance, a force akin to electro-magnetics. Many of these works were not considered by academics as serious studies and De la Warr’s 1956 publication New Worlds Beyond the Atom written in conjunction with Langston Day, was condemned as being wholly unscientific in its approach.
Although Lethbridge cared little of what others thought of him, he would certainly not want to have been tarred with the same brush as researchers who were unscientific in their study. It is apparent from his future work, that there are fewer references to other researchers exploring in similar fields. At some point, Lethbridge obviously made a mental note to rely solely upon his own primary research and observations. This is a point that he emphasises in his summary at the end of this book.
A great example of his observational skills is illustrated in his tale of the Westmen’s Islands in chapter six. Here an account of an event that is said to have occurred in 874 AD and documented in 1908, is proved to be unsound by observations he had personally made in the field. This type of discovery should always prompt us not to rely on second-hand knowledge and that our own undertakings can provide us, with not only accurate information, but new and startling revelations.
After the publication of Ghost and Ghoul, the ball was set rolling and Lethbridge’s journey into the unknown had begun!
Text © 2003 Welbourn Tekh
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