The Stone Remembers

One of the most intriguing aspects of my A level Theology study- and the one that has stayed with me the longest- concerned the explanations for sightings of ghosts. This was deemed relevant because if ghosts do exist, they may constitute evidence for the existence of an afterlife, and hence, the existence of God- and so a lot of theologians and philosophers have spent a lot of time theorizing about them. No doubt their presence also served to ‘sex up’ the syllabus a little- anyway:

One account for ghost sightings speculated that it may be the case that when certain meteorological conditions combine with an extremely emotional occurrence, an episode may somehow be recorded on the stone of the buildings around it. When the same meteorological conditions recur, the scene replays itself, in ghostly form.

I love this idea, that history can have an actual presence: not physical, but no less ‘real’ than the sounds and images replayed on our television screens. The stone remembers.

It seems unbelievable, but since we know that energy is never destroyed, only transformed, what other explanations do we have for what happens to the huge emotional energy that goes into a fight with a loved one, or the grief over a death, or loving, or hating, from near or afar?

And if part of us does believe it, will we, therefore, be mindful of this in the buildings we inhabit? That they are themselves a record of what has preceded us in the space, and further, that we ourselves, with what we say and do, make our own imprint on the space: a legacy to future inhabitants.  

And will we hold séances, and channel these emotional histories, and make them manifest?