‘But?’ Ethan coaxed her with a smile.
‘But,’ she replied, ‘as with so many supposedly paranormal events, a small percentage defies rational explanation. They stand up to scrutiny, are witnessed by people who make no attempt to gain financially or otherwise from their stories, and often have footage or audio recordings to support their claims. They’re rare, but there, as I like to say.’
‘Could they crush an elevator car or tear a man in half?’ Ethan challenged her.
Professor Bowen sighed.
‘I’ve never heard of anything like that,’ she admitted, ‘but, in 1967, in Rosenheim, Germany, scientists from the Max Planck Institute were called to a lawyer’s office to investigate an immense surge of poltergeist activity. Drawers would open and close, lights would swing, printers would spill their ink, telephone calls would be made when there was nobody actually using a phone. One set of records shows the talking clock being dialed three times per minute, too fast for the mechanical dialing system of the phones of the time to handle. On one occasion, every light bulb in the building blew at once. Such events require huge amounts of energy and yet nobody was doing anything untoward. The scientists set up cameras and voice recorders to monitor events and recorded some of the only existing footage of things like pictures rotating on their hooks, far beyond the reach of the witnesses. They also noted that electrical equipment would falter and lights would flicker when a nineteen-year-old employee was in the building. They eventually traced the events to her and, when she was sent on vacation, the poltergeist activity ceased.’
‘That’s hardly the same, even if it is true,’ Ethan said.
‘On one occasion,’ Professor Bowen added, ‘an extremely heavy filing cabinet was witnessed to have been shifted across the office floor. It would seem that, as remarkable as it may appear, it is possible that this kind of energy can indeed be directed by poltergeist activity and to an extent that exceeds our own physical capabilities.’
‘And you say that a wraith is worse?’ Lopez asked.
‘Much worse,’ Professor Bowen confirmed. ‘There is no precedent in modern times. The name derives from archaic Scottish dialect, meaning a ghost. However, most descriptions of a wraith suggest it’s something like a poltergeist on steroids, extremely violent and utterly unstoppable. There are numerous references to witches in ancient literature that might in fact refer to wraiths, but nobody’s really sure.’
Ethan glanced thoughtfully out of the window of the office.
‘So you’re saying that poltergeist activity is often attached to somebody who is alive, but a wraith is the spirit of somebody who is dead?’
Professor Bowen nodded. ‘That is almost certainly the case. Poltergeists tend to be caused by the living, through means that we just don’t understand that may involve an individual actually causing the entire disturbance themselves or being used as a channel for the events. It is often centered on troubled teenage girls, as in the Rosenheim case, or girls at about the age of puberty. Wraiths, on the other hand, are the spirits of the dead.’
Lopez looked at Ethan. ‘That kind of rules out Karina,’ she said.
Ethan shrugged. ‘All of this is just based on hearsay. Like you said, professor, there’s absolutely no evidence that there is an afterlife, anyway. So why should we even consider that this is the work of some kind of rampaging spirit?’
‘That’s not quite what I said,’ Professor Bowen corrected him. ‘Whatever you may or may not think about the afterlife, the notion that we can exist independently of our bodies is a fact.’
30
‘How can you say that?’ Lopez asked. ‘There’s no evidence to support it.’
‘Actually,’ Professor Bowen replied, ‘there is a wealth of evidence. There have been countless cases of victims of massive trauma finding themselves floating above their bodies as paramedical teams strive to save their lives. The experiences of people floating up through tunnels of light, meeting deceased family members and so on are common in the public knowledge.’
‘No.’ Lopez shook her head. ‘I heard it was suggested that all such experiences were the result of lucid dreaming.’
‘What’s that?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s when you wake up within a dream,’ Lopez said. ‘The brain builds our world around us using what we see through our eyes. When we’re asleep, it does so without information coming in, and we dream. That’s why dreams can be so weird — the dream world is just the brain working alone. But some people train themselves to become aware when they’re dreaming, and the result is the best virtual-reality in the world, completely indistinguishable from the here and now, except that there are no rules: if this was a dream, I could walk through that wall right now.’
‘She’s right,’ Bowen said. ‘Lucid dreams are remarkable, and the majority of all supposed alien abductions can be put down to people having lucid dreams without realizing what they are. If you don’t understand them, they can be terrifying, as it appears to be absolute reality. Near-death experiences could plausibly fall into the same category.’
‘It’s still personal experience, though,’ Ethan said. ‘So it can’t be proved. I thought that such experiences were thought to be the product of chemicals in the brain, or similar?’
‘A chemical known as dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, exists in trace amounts in mammals, including humans,’ Professor Bowen agreed. ‘It acts as a psychedelic drug, if ingested, and has been repeatedly cited as the cause of both out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, which in many cases are closely related to each other.’
‘So can’t DMT explain the experiences entirely then?’ Lopez asked.
Professor Bowen inclined her head in acquiescence. ‘That’s not impossible, but the victims I’m referring to were clinically dead. They did not have any activity in their brains. Not only that, but the events they witnessed when floating above their bodies actually occurred and were not the imagined products of the release of chemicals such as DMT. There are multiple accounts of people recounting the actions of surgeons and nurses working to save their lives while they were clinically dead. How could they even see and hear, Mr. Warner, if their eyes were closed and their brains inactive?’
‘More to the point,’ Lopez challenged, ‘how could they remember their experiences if their brains were inactive? I thought that if a person’s cortex was completely shut down, it could not be reactivated, that they really would be dead?’
‘Because you assume that the brain is the sole repository of memory,’ Bowen replied to her. ‘But what if the brain is in fact an antenna of sorts, a point of access rather than the home of memory? There are individuals who have fallen into icy water and been trapped for up to two hours, their bodies as cold as a corpse and their brains entirely inactive. Yet these people have been revived and made full recoveries. If their brain was dead and with it their memory lost, how could they have recovered in full?’
Professor Bowen gestured to newspaper cuttings tacked to the walls of her office.
‘In 2006, a Japanese man named Mitsutaka Uchikoshi was stranded on a mountain in the depths of winter for twenty-four days. His core temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees Celsius and he ate nothing. It is believed he went into some kind of hibernation, because, after being found, he was revived in hospital and made a full recovery.’
She gestured to another cutting.
‘Erika Nordby, a one-year old who in 2001 got out of her Canadian home on a bitter winter’s night and was found hours later lying in the snow wearing only a diaper in temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. Her heart had not beaten for two hours and she was clinically dead, so cold that her mouth was frozen shut and her toes frozen together. Yet when she was warmed by a hospital team, her heart spontaneously began to beat again on its own and, upon recovery, she showed no sign of brain damage.’