Alasdair Wickham - The Dead Roam the Earth: True Stories of the Paranormal from Around the World

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THE DEAD ROAM THE EARTH

Shortly after his parents died, Alasdair Wickham went to live in his grandparents house, which was haunted. He has taken the supernatural for granted ever since and has been researching the field for the last thirty-five years. The author of several novels, he lives in the United Kingdom.

True Stories of the Paranormal
from Around the World

Alasdair Wickham

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Great Britain as The Black Book of Modern Myths by Century 2011

Published in Penguin Books 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright James Buxton, 2011

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Wickham, Alasdair.

[Black book of modern myths]

The dead roam the earth : true stories of the paranormal

from around the world / Alasdair Wickham.

p. cm.

Originally published: The black book of modern myths. Great Britain : Century, 2011.

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60374-1

1. Supernatural. 2. Parapsychology. 3. Occultism. I. Title.

BF1040.W53 2012

130dc23 2012020983

Printed in the United States of America

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

I f magic is an attempt to influence events through non-physical and nonreligious means, then this is an age of magic. Whenever you hear a contestant on a TV quiz show say they totally believe they are going to win, they are saying that belief will help them achieve their goals. Whenever an athlete or sporting hero touches a talisman before a match, or says that they have 110 per cent faith in their ability, they are saying that a force that has nothing to do with the physical or the intellectual is behind them. Fifty years ago, the gap between desire and achievement would have been bridged by effort. Increasingly today we bridge that gap with belief, and although it is not called magic, in truth it is nothing else.

The Dead Roam the Earth does not set out to investigate whether or not supernatural forces exist. Instead, it looks at how we respond to them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. More specifically, it takes advantage of the Internet and shows how a web of discussion is throwing new light on the supernatural as people from all over the world pool experiences and post footage. We can read about incubi from Sumatra and watch exorcisms in Sudan. We can enter chatrooms where some people believe that yoga leads to demonic possession and damnation, while others argue that human/demon relationships are the last great taboo, comparable to the worst forms of racism.

All this shows one thing: there is no contradiction between the modern world and the supernatural world. In Japan, priests routinely exorcise office blocks while besuited office workers watch respectfully, then go back to their computers. Modernity, far from marginalizing supernatural phenomena, is providing increasing numbers of channels for it to move into the natural world thus film sets become the new haunted abbeys, shopping centres the new haunted inns, digital recorders the new mediums. And the more we know, the more we want to know. In the past, rumours that a house was haunted might put off buyers; today, estate agents use it as a selling point. A hundred years ago, decent folk might have scurried past a haunted graveyard when darkness fell. Today, they wait until midnight then descend by the coachload for guided tours.

This book takes a global view and this too is fascinating. It shows the richness and diversity of the supernatural and how different cultures accommodate it. Take demons. Belief in demons has been growing since the 1970s and with it has come a hardening of attitudes towards them. For some this might seem a no-brainer. Demons are bad and so, by definition, the risk of possession is so great that extremes of exorcism must be tolerated. However, by looking at demons from an international perspective, this book calls attitudes of this sort into question. If fundamentalists saw how possession is treated in other cultures and adapted their practices, lives could be saved. Innocent lives would be saved.

But The Dead Roam the Earth is not just a compendium of stories from around the world. It examines how electronic recording equipment has revolutionised spiritual communion as much as human communication, and reveals why films can and do become cursed. It looks at possession, both from the point of view of people trying to expel demons and those trying their hardest to become possessed. It looks at warfare where soldiers, inventors and strategists are always looking for the edge, and surprise, surprise finds the devil in the details. It looks at some famous murders, and, for the first time, exposes the supernatural workings behind them. It looks at liminal creatures owlmen, mothmen, and giant, muscle-bound women of the mountains and finds out where they come from and what they do. It listens to things going bump in the night in sleepy suburban backwaters and then chucking the bed across the room.

In short, it explores the richness and diversity of the supernatural ecosystem around the world and looks at the latest attempts of science to measure the power of the supernatural on a global scale.

All of this begs the question: Why do people believe in ghosts? My own experience is typical: an anomalous, intense experience thats impossible to deny and impossible to prove. My parents died when I was a child and my sisters and I went to live in a wing of my grandparents house a rambling old rectory in the heart of the Lincolnshire countryside. The wing had been converted for us: prior to that it had been a line of outhouses that ended in a stable and above the stable had been a room where my grandfathers reclusive sister had lived. I never saw my great aunt she died long before I and my sisters moved to the Old Rectory but the old stable was turned into the sitting room and the room she had lived in became the wings main bedroom, where I slept.