A ‘Stone Tape’ incident?
An extract from Awakenings - Why Neopaganism and the Folk Renaissance Matter.
I have a friend called Ashley Darkwood and, with a name like that, you won’t be surprised to hear that he organises paranormal conventions and ghost walks. Ashley is also part of a Spiritualist church and he tells me that spirits do speak to him. We met for a coffee recently and I reiterated the fact that in order for me to believe that such a thing is possible, I’d need to see some evidence.
‘I know, it’s tricky,’ he explained. ‘It’s something that happens inside my head and there’s no way for you to experience what I’m experiencing.’
The excellently named Ashley Darkwood
I suggested that maybe he is describing something I simply don’t have the equipment to detect – like trying to describe colours to someone blind from birth.
‘That’s a fair analogy,’ he said. ‘But maybe one day it might be possible. Or maybe it’ll turn out that I’m not talking to the spirits of the dead, but to people in other times. I’ve read that some scientists think that time isn’t linear and every moment exists in parallel with every other. Perhaps I occasionally catch a glimpse of one of these coexisting moments in history.’
‘I’ve heard that theory put forward for things like time slips,’ I said. ‘You know, when people claim that, for a brief period of time, they’ve been able to see into the past. It might have even have happened to me.’
I then told him about an anomalous experience I once had that, to this day, I can’t explain. I was about 14 or 15 years old and had a summer job on a farm out on the Lizard peninsula. I was having my lunch break with a friend called Martin, the son of the farm’s manager. We were sitting in the welcoming shade of an old open-sided granite-built hay shed when I heard what sounded like young women’s voices coming from around the side of the building.
50 years on and the haistyle has got no better
Being the hormonal teenager that I was, I went to investigate but there was no one there. I returned to my friend and the voices started up again so I asked Martin if he could hear them too. He said that he could. He also remarked that they sounded like they were speaking in Cornish, a language that stopped being commonly spoken by most people in the early 19th century. This time we both went and looked for the women but there was no sign of anyone. We could still hear the voices but they were always coming from somewhere out of sight. We walked all around the building and searched among the piled hay bales, all to no avail. As far as we could see, there were no living things anywhere near the shed except dairy cows.
Were we experiencing a time slip?
Were we somehow hearing little snippets of conversation from past times as Stone Tape Theory suggests?
Did we both, somehow, suffer the same hallucination?
I don’t suppose I will ever know. Meanwhile, it was interesting to hear that Ashley – like many people I spoke to for this book – is open to either a spiritual or a scientific explanation for what he experiences. I found that very refreshing.
Science and spirituality do have a number of genuine overlaps. They don’t have to be polar opposites.
___________________________________________________
Note: In 1972, the BBC aired a ghost story for Christmas called The Stone Tape. Written by Nigel Kneale, creator of the iconic Quatermass serials and films, it explored the idea that, just as the iron oxide or chromium dioxide in magnetic tape can store sound and video, so the minerals in stone could record and play back content. The idea that ghosts may be recordings of past events embedded in stone was first suggested in 1961 by author T C Lethbridge but, thanks to the impact of Kneale’s play, it is now universally known as Stone Tape Theory. Parapsychology researchers now spend a lot of time trying to coax sound and images from ancient buildings and stone monuments as the result.