[THEME MUSIC]
NARRATOR: In the State Capitol of Alabama,
did an awful specter terrify this man?
There was no expression on her face at all;
it was just a blank stare.
NARRATOR: In a photograph of an empty room,
what explains this ghostly figure?
And was the sale of this haunted house
obstructed by real spirits from the past?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of 2001 and inventor of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other the worlds.
[THEME MUSIC]
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: In the days of the British empire, here
in the highlands Sri Lanka, the members of the Hill Club
used to while away their evenings in this reading room.
Tonight, as I sit here in their place,
every nook and cranny speaks of the past.
Presences from the 19th century seem to lurk in the shadows
all around me.
Colonial adventurers, tea planters, map makers
and surveyors, hunters weary from the pursuit of elephants,
leopards, and deer.
In fact, I'm surprised no one has ever claimed that this room
is haunted, as far as I know.
It fits the traditional picture of an abode of ghosts
perfectly.
Yet, the more I investigate reports of hauntings,
the more I realize they come from the most unlikely places.
NARRATOR: The Alabama State Capitol
dates back to before the Civil War,
and needs skilled craftsmen to maintain
its traditional beauty.
James Gammage is a specialist in restoring old buildings.
One night he was working late, alone in the rotunda, when
he got the fright of his life.
JAMES GAMMAGE: I've been through quite a few things, close calls
in cars, I've been in a few war zones,
been on board a few airplanes that
have come close to going in.
But this, I put at the top of the list.
This is one of the most frightful
things I've ever had happen.
NARRATOR: The glossy sheen of the metal doors
acts like a mirror.
Intent on his work, James thought he saw the reflection
of a person behind him.
He turned to speak, but his uninvited visitor
was not of flesh and blood.
JAMES GAMMAGE: What I saw was a lady.
She was dressed in Civil War period dress.
The dress she was wearing was not a heavy duty
hoop type skirt, but it was out a ways and it went down a ways.
It was an opaque, white type image.
It definitely was the figure of a lady.
There was no expression on her face at all.
It was just a, kind of a blank stare.
And she moved across and went into the back direction,
back here behind me, and then when she came back,
she had the same expression.
Nothing changed, like I said, she took no notice of me
whatsoever.
But I did take notice of her.
And I thought that it was about time to leave.
NARRATOR: The next morning, James went to his boss.
He insisted he could no longer work
alone at night in the Capitol.
Bill Woodsmall was sympathetic.
WILLIAM WOODSMALL: He's somebody that I would depend on.
When he tells me something, I believe it.
He was very agitated, he was nervous.
He couldn't keep his hands still.
You could tell something had happened the night
before that affected him.
My own custodial staff has talked about seeing shadows
move through the building when they know no one's there
at night, hearing doors slam closed
when they know they're the only ones in building at night.
So we have heard stores like that.
NARRATOR: At the time of the Civil War,
many southern soldiers died on the battlefield.
It is said that the ghostly woman is
a distraught wife searching the Capitol
for news of her husband.
JAMES GAMMAGE: When I explained that to Mr. Woodsmall
the following morning, he kind of laughed about it
and told me, you're not the first one.
And you saw her, you saw her come through.
I said, yes I did and I said, I don't believe that I'll
be doing anymore work at night.
You will have to experience what I did.
You may make your own decision as far
as your disbelief or whatever, but I have experienced it
and I believe in it.
NARRATOR: From Blue Bell Hill in southern
England come reports of a bizarre modern ghost.
She appears at random on this road,
and leaves her victims shaking with terror.
Ian Sharpe was driving home one night when
a girl appeared from nowhere.
IAN SHARPE: The lady ran in front of the car.
I hit her on her left hand side.
As I hit her, she turned her head and she was looking at me.
She went down under the front of the car.
Now, she had shoulder length hair, rolled inwards.
Fair hair, a fringe with big eyes.
She had a round face, she had a high necked jumper thing on
or something, and a light colored coat.
I was terrified.
I didn't know what to do.
All I could think of, was this lady under the car.
I then had to look under the car.
I bent down, and looked under the car
and there was nothing there.
Now, my brain is going, I don't know what to do.
NARRATOR: Ian managed to call the police,
who raced to the scene.
IAN SHARPE: I was still shaking like a leaf.
Looking for the body or the person who I'd hit.
We couldn't find anybody, it was then that the policeman told
me, we've got to put this down to another sighting
of the ghost of Blue Bell Hill.
Which I had never heard of before.
NARRATOR: The hauntings are thought
to have begun after a fatal car crash on Blue Bell Hill.
Every year produces new witnesses.
One is Chris Dawkins.
CHRIS DAWKINS: A girl ran out, sort of semi-turned towards me
as I hit her.
She was wearing a white or cream top, like jumper,
pullover type thing.
I just stopped and got out and ran around the back
in a state of panic.
I mean, I thought I'd actually killed someone.
And when you actually get out and find
that there's no one there, you start
getting very worried about it.
STEVE NELKIN: We actually found Chris was sitting in his car
at the telephone kiosk.
Sitting in the passenger seat, very shaken, very scared.
And he was absolutely adamant that he'd
knocked somebody over.
And so we checked all over his car,
we checked around it, underneath it.
There was no sign of any damage to the car;
nothing that would suggest that he hit anything.
We then carried a thorough search
out of the village itself, where exactly it happened,
the gardens, the road.
And we found absolutely nothing whatsoever.
I can't begin to explain what happened to Chris that night.
He dealt with something or hit something
that night which, I'm no expert, I just can't explain.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Even in the early days of psychic research
at the end of the 19th century, investigators called
in physicians and psychologists to help
explain the phenomena being reported
from apparently haunted places.
Today, experts agree that hallucinations and delusions
often occur in the weird transition period
between sleep and wakefulness.
They can be caused by images from dreams lingering on,
or thoughts assuming a solid form as sleep approaches.
These may account for the spooky experiences sometimes described
by people lying in bed.
NARRATOR: Captain Barney Concannon is
an experienced airline pilot.
One of his regular overnight stops
has been an airport serving the northeast of England,
at Teesside.
The crews were always booked into Saint George's
Hotel, right by the airport.
When the building belonged to the Royal Air Force,
the hotel was the officer's mess.
In 1951, a small plane crashed on landing,
careened across the car-park, and smashed
into the wall of the mess.
The pilot was killed by falling masonry.
The mess was rebuilt, and is now part of the hotel.
There are stories of a ghostly airman seen in its corridors.
Captain Concannon was skeptical, until the night he
was booked into room 62.
BARENY CONCANNON: I came into the room,
got undressed as normal, put my raincoat on the bed
because it was so cold.
There were four or five blankets on the bed already,
and lay down on my stomach, wrapping
the blankets around me; just leaving my nose
so that I could breathe.
And I must have been lying there for five minutes when I felt
a sudden pressure on my legs, on the back of my legs,
as if somebody had walked into the room
and sat on my lower legs.
It only affected me from the knees down.
I thought to myself, the story of the ghost
came back to me at that time, and I wondered
whether I should put the light on or what I should do,
and I decided not to.
Decided to brave it out, in fact.
And I turned around and I said, go away.
But in much stronger language.
And it went immediately, as soon as I said, go away,
it disappeared.
I didn't even put the light on afterwards.
The room became warmer, I was quite comfortable,
and I went to sleep.
NARRATOR: Unaware of the stories on her first night
in the hotel, stewardess Lisa Cox
settled down for a good night's sleep
LISA COX: I awoke less than an hour later
and there was the weight of a heavy person
lying on me from the top of my head all the way down my body.
And it took me just a couple of seconds
to realize that I wasn't at home and I was in the hotel.
And of course then I was petrified.
I couldn't move and I realized that it just must be a ghost,
there was no other explanation, and I was wide awake.
I couldn't move an arm or a leg, I was pinned down
and the only thing I could hear was my heart beating.
And whilst I was pinned down, I could see movement.
And when I moved my eyes to look towards my left, the curtains
which are very heavy and I'd drawn open,
were moving upwards from the ground, not blowing outwards
as though in a breeze, but as though somebody
had put two hands underneath them and was lifting them up.
They were crumpling and they were
about a meter off the floor.
NARRATOR: After a couple of minutes the weight left Lisa.
She fled the room, too terrified to return.
Real as such experiences seem to those who suffer them,
some scientists suggest they are caused by a condition
known as sleep paralysis.
BARENY CONCANNON: Some people think that this sort of thing
happens with particularly airline people who are flying
all over the world, different time zones
and so on getting very tired.
And they-- when they go to sleep they
enter a state of semi-consciousness,
neither sleeping nor waking, in which things like this
can occur.
But my answer to that would be, I've flown all over the world,
I've stayed in hotels all over the world.
I've never had any problem of this sort before.
LISA COX: I know the Saint George's Hotel is haunted;
I'm 100% sure, because it happened to me.
It wasn't a dream.
I know that I was wide awake, and that's
why I was so frightened.
I was petrified.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Sometimes, stories
of hauntings clash with the hard commercial realities
of the modern world.
Can the alleged presence of ghosts affect house prices?
Well, it's a question lawyers have had to take seriously.
In Italy in 1960, this paranormal problem
was the subject of a learned treatise.
And more recently in the United States,
the courts have tried to untangle the answer.
NARRATOR: Nyack is a comfortable suburb of New York,
on the shores of the Hudson River.
One property has more to offer than most.
The house's owner for 23 years, Mrs. Helen Ackley
now lives in Florida.
She and her husband brought up their three
children in the house, with ghosts for company.
HELEN ACKLEY: My house was haunted
by three different ghosts that we could say for sure.
One was an older gentleman, one was a young girl,
and one was a young Navy lieutenant.
Oh I love the ghosts, all of them.
They were there, I could feel them,
but however they did not intrude upon me,
but they were there if I needed them.
And there were times I called on them.
And is seemed as though they understood
and would try to help.
NARRATOR: Helen's friendly feelings towards the ghosts
are confirmed by her neighbors across the road.
The Oursler family were close friends of the Ackleys.
James Oursler grew up alongside Helen's son William.
He remembers spooky incidents.
JAMES OURSLER: William had a habit of every night going down
into the basement and locking up and making
sure everything was secure.
And this time he saw something white outside glowing,
and he had no idea what it was and his eyes shot up
and he saw this Revolutionary War ghost.
And he was panic stricken, and he
turned around and ran right into one of the walls
in the basement.
And he came upstairs and his mother saw him, Helen,
and she just started laughing because she knew he had seen
a ghost for the first time.
NOEL OURSLER: The Ackleys really felt that the ghosts
were part of their family.
I'm sure because they never had any fear,
there was never anything negative.
In fact, it was as though they were sort of guardian angels
or something in the family.
NARRATOR: The time came when widowed Mrs. Ackley had to move
from the 18 roomed house.
She wanted to join her son, who had
set up a business in Florida.
With regret, she put the house up for sale.
The estate agent was Richard Ellis.
He was worried about mentioning the house's extra features.
RICHARD ELLIS: We kind of took a deep breath
and we approached the buyer on it, and he laughed about it,
he just joked about it.
And then a couple of weeks later,
he called us and was very serious about the whole thing.
And at that point, we set up a meeting for him
to meet with Mrs. Ackley, and she spoke with great enthusiasm
about the ghosts.
And at that point I think he became very concerned,
and shortly after that meeting he decided he
did not want to buy the house.
NARRATOR: The buyers had put down a substantial deposit,
but they now wanted to cancel the deal.
A dispute arose over who would keep the money.
The case ended up in court.
The judge threw out the buyers' claim, saying it was too late
for them to change their minds.
The buyers took the case to the appeal division of the Supreme
Court of New York.
The presiding judge was Israel Rubin.
The basis of the appeal was that Mrs. Ackley
was not fulfilling her obligation
to leave the house unoccupied.
It was still inhabited by the ghosts.
ISRAEL RUBIN: We had to balance off whether a ghost should have
been disclosed as against a theory or principle of law that
is almost universal in the United States, that is caveat
emptor, let the buyer beware, that the buyer has
to beware of what they're buying,
and has to do an adequate search.
And once they do that search, they're actually stuck
with what they are purchasing.
NARRATOR: Judge Rubin's ruling was that the deposit should be
equally divided, and that the unhappy buyers would
not be held to their purchase.
He took practicalities into consideration
when making his decision.
ISRAEL RUBIN: When you purchase a house,
you usually have certain inspections made of a house.
If you want to check on the construction of a house,
you call someone that's an engineer or someone that's
an expert in construction.
If you want to check for termites,
you call someone that's a termite inspector.
There's someone to call.
So we said in this kind of a case,
and we quoted Ghostbusters, we said who are you going to call?
NARRATOR: The immediate result of the case
was that the presence of ghosts had
to be revealed before a sale.
But since then in New York, the view has softened.
Estate agents are not obliged by law.
I think I would probably bring it up
to a potential buyer as a matter of conversation,
but we do not have to disclose it.
On the other hand, we cannot lie about it either.
I mean, if we're asked directly, do you know of a ghost
that's in this house?
Or have you heard of anything?
We have to disclose that to a buyer.
NARRATOR: The Ourslers worried that the ghosts
had not been consulted.
James thinks they weren't best pleased.
JAMES OURSLER: The first Christmas
that the Ackleys weren't here, we had a lot of bells hanging
around the house, and for some strange reason
they just started ringing.
And we thought they were because of the wind in house
and we moved them, and they'd still ring.
And I just it was so creepy that that would happen.
I really think the ghosts were trying to express themselves
and say, we've had something happen here
and we really don't like it, our friends have gone
and we're really upset about it.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Hauntings are never
easy to investigate, by their very nature;
they are fleeting and elusive.
And the people who believe they've seen weird phenomena
are often too frightened to provide rational testimony.
So it's not surprising that explanations
may take a long time to emerge.
In fact, more than a century later, we're
only just beginning to understand some famously spooky
cases from Victorian England.
NARRATOR: This fine mansion Cheshire was
the seat of Lord Combermere.
It boasts a splendid library.
In 1891, a Miss Sybell Corbet took a remarkable picture.
Her technique intrigues photographic expert Adam
Hart-Davis.
ADAM HART-DAVIS: She exposed it for an hour,
long long exposure, between two and three in the afternoon.
And you can see the sun is streaming into the room here,
it's lovely.
And when she came to develop the photograph,
she was amazed to find that in this chair on the left,
there is a sort of shadowy figure sitting.
And she was rather surprised by this
and she consulted her sister, and one of her sisters said,
that's Lord Combermere.
Absolutely positive, she was absolutely certain.
There is a slight difficulty though, because Lord Combermere
was dead.
He'd been run over by a cab in London a few days earlier,
and he died from his injuries.
And he was, while this picture was being taken,
he was actually being buried in the graveyard a few miles away.
And so that of course made everyone
think it's got to be his ghost, it must be his ghost.
NARRATOR: Sir William Barrett, a pioneer of psychical research,
was not convinced.
He wrote an article suggesting that a footman had strayed
into Miss Corbet's photograph, taking an illicit rest
in his master's chair.
ADAM HART-DAVIS: There are various things
that support this.
One is that the figure is quite well lit on the side
where the light is coming from, so you can see one hand,
but he's very poorly lit on the other side.
You can't see the figure's legs at all,
and there's a very neat point here.
All across the picture, all the bright lines are doubled.
There's a bright one, and then a very slightly less bright one
beside it, which suggests that the camera
was moved during exposure.
Now Miss Corbet herself says that she was out of the room.
So somebody jogged the camera during exposure.
Could it be this person came in, sat down, moved a little bit,
suddenly realized he was on camera,
rushed out, kicking the tripod as he went out the door?
It's possible, anyway.
NARRATOR: To test the theory, Adam has set his modern camera
for an exposure of two minutes.
His wooden study seat stands in for his Lordship's armchair.
And as an extra gesture towards authenticity,
a footman's coat seems appropriate garb.
ADAM HART-DAVIS: I'm going to have to sit here for a minute,
but I don't want to be completely still.
The right hand is still, the left hand
must move about a bit.
I have to move my legs so that they don't register
on the picture, and I need to move my head from side to side,
and up and down so that it will register as a blur,
but still a head-shaped blur.
NARRATOR: The experiment's result is gradually revealed
in the glow of the dark room.
ADAM HART-DAVIS: It's beginning to appear.
It's the blacks that come up first.
And the ghost is shadow, so it will come
up last if it's there at all.
I can see the books.
I can see the chair.
Yeah, there's definitely something there.
There's a right hand.
Yes, there's a ghost there. Look!
I'm in it.
Terrific, it's worked, so maybe, maybe we've solved the mystery.
Here's the Combermere photograph,
and here's my photograph.
And mine's like a sort of section
out of this, a small section blown up, if you like.
And if you look over here on the left, there's a chair,
and over here on the left of the frame there's a chair.
And here there's a shadowy figure,
you can see a sort of blurred head,
and here there's definitely a shadowy figure
and you can see a blurred head, which does look rather like me,
I have to admit.
And over in the Combermere photograph,
there's a rather sharp right hand and arm.
And that's exactly the same here,
a sharp right hand and arm.
But there is no left arm or hand,
although this is slightly blurred a bit, on the hand rest
there.
And here, there is no left hand, although there's
a slightly blurred patch just on the hand rest.
So, so far we're doing quite well.
And here we've got no legs at all,
the sharp edge of the chair and no sign of legs.
And here, sharp edge of the chair, no sign of any legs.
This could still be a ghost.
I can't disapprove that it's a ghost,
but it seems to me that I've made
a pretty fair representation of it myself,
just messing around in my own sitting room.
I reckon that there's something like an 80 or 90%
chance that this was just somebody
who wandered into the picture, and wandered out again.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Most of us know a place
that seems to be haunted.
I certainly do.
When I was a child living on an old farm in the west
of England, the bells, once used to summon servants,
would ring from rooms that we knew for certain were empty.
In the end, we put it down to rats in the wiring.
That experience taught me the power of suggestion.
An ancient building, empty rooms,
the dark shadows of night, conspired
to create a ghostly scenario.
But all too often, a rational explanation comes only
with the cold light of dawn.
So I am very skeptical about haunted places.
But I must confess that I have a sneaking sympathy when
the manager said, I don't believe in ghosts,
but I'm scared of them.