PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: ‘’IT’S A MORE POWERFUL THING THAN HOLLYWOOD.’’
By Jana Wargentin
People rarely speak so passionately and inspired about ghost or paranormal happenings. There’s one person in particularly that does the opposite. It is paranormal expert Archibald A. Lawrie. He is the head of the Psychical Research Unit at the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre in Edinburgh. And through the years he has seen so many spirits and mystifying cases that nothing scares him anymore.
The passionate ghost-lover lives in a little village about one hour outside Edinburgh called Kingskattle. His house is a hundred and sixty old Victorian building with a nice piece of land attached to it. ”When I first moved into this house thirty four years ago, it was a complete ruin. There were no floors and the ceiling came down,” tells Lawrie smiling. But he managed to turn it into a comfortable place to live and he’s not alone in it. It is haunted, according to Lawrie: ‘’I do not live alone in this house. Upstairs, there is a woman ghost which grieves about something that must have happened here. We think that she lost her child up there.”
Such a fascinating story but how did Archibald get into this spooky business? Well, it all started with the young Lawrie at the age of nineteen. He was like many other pals in the British Army and didn’t ever think about spiritual or paranormal things. Until that one special day when he and another military met a blind man in the train. This blind man knew a few personal things about them. Like the fact that the father of the other military died. But another more remarkable thing was what the blind man has said to Lawrie. He told him Lawrie would injure his arm very badly that he might lose it. Lawrie didn’t believe the old blind man. The next day he’d have a vehicle course but found out that someone else had taken his place on this course and had an accident. This man injured his arm so badly that he’d ben disdained from the Armed Forces eventually. Lawrie then realized that what the blind man said was true. It could have been him. From this day on, he knew that there must be a spiritual world: ‘’there’s more than just the physical things that we feel and see.’’
The theory about the psychic world goes that there are no such ghost as we see them in horror movies. It are no creatures dressed in white cloaks who scare people to death. It is much more than just ghosts: ‘’It is a big memory system. Every memory of every person is collected in this big memory system. It’s so marvelous. It is much more powerful than Hollywood. Ghosts are memories, they are all pieces of memories and energies. ‘’ So that would mean that every memory is a ghost and that every household is haunted? ‘’No, but the most paranormal activity does happen in normal households. Because every house and every place has it’s memory. Let me explain, say a few hundred years ago a woman was brutally killed at the place you live right now. That is a highly emotional event. This emotion will stay there forever,’’ tells Lawrie full of conviction, ‘’Even if the house has been demolished and rebuild, the memory of that event will remain. You cannot take away a memory.’’
That does sound very logical but the modern science will not accept this. They need evidence and some kind of proof to this all. Lawrie is sure that science has got it wrong: ‘’Everything we know about time and retentivity is wrong. Time in the psychic world is different from ours. They don’t really have the sense of time as us. Their time is spread. It is not exact as it is here.’’ There might me truth in this story because there is no true solid evidence about how time really works. We just made the clock up to make it easier to live on this planet, not because it is so.
But what is wrong with memories, they are all in your head right? ‘’Same thing really. It has been taught us that memories are in your head. But in reality, your memories are around you. They are everywhere. In other words your head is like a modem which receives information. If you’d be able to keep all of the information and all of the memories in your head, your head would have the seize of a castle.’’
That certainly would not be very comfortable. This theory had a very good argumentative question about psychics. If the science got it right and you keep all memories in your head. How is it possible that a medium can get your memories back when you already buried or cremated? The only answer at the moment would be indeed what Lawrie reckons.
There are different types of spirits. The psychic world can contact you in many ways. By sounds and smells. Like, scratching, knocking, whispers and noises. The ghosts are energies but they can do whatever a human can do too. However, the most known is the poltergeist. These are ghosts that can carry and bring objects in a way that we don’t understand. Lawrie: ‘’Solidity to us, is not solidity to them.’’
It should be clear that spirits are mostly emotions that drift around the place that they are attached to. And so they are not the stereotype what many people believe: ‘’The stereotype is that ghosts are lost souls that haunt graveyards and castles. In fact, there are no haunted graveyards, really. The people that are buried there, have died somewhere else so it are just bodies. It is of course different if the person’s been killed on the graveyard. Then the emotion is still there.’’ And what about castles then? ‘’Castles were homes too, you know. Hundred of people lived there over centuries. There ought to be emotions and memories left.’’
It seems like the people in the United Kingdom are much more used to these paranormal activities. I would conclude that Dutch people are down to earth and try to avoid this or if it can’t be explained, well then it didn’t happen. Lawrie: ‘’In some way the Scottish and English people are more believing. But it’s important to know that there aren’t more or less ghosts in the Netherlands than there are in the United Kingdom. Spirits are everywhere, not everyone can sense them, but that doesn’t mean they are not around.’’
Thanks to Professor Archibald A. Lawrie
If you want to read about the many cases of Archibald Lawrie then read his books: ‘’The Psychic Investigators Casebook.’’
More information on this subject: www.psychic-info.com
