10 Most Compelling Pieces Of Evidence That Prove Ghosts Are Real
6. The Stone Tape Theory
Speaking of wild scientific theories, we come to one that originated in a BBC TV show and has since been taken up as a legit explanation of haunted houses. Writer Nigel Kneale has covered paranormal activity from a rationalist angle in many of his works, most notably the Quatermass serials and films about the titular scientist coming into contact with aliens, cults, and ancient evils.
With The Stone Tape, Kneale turned his attention to ghosts, with the story of a group of researchers setting up shop in a renovated Victorian mansion they've adopted as their new based of operations. A renovated Victorian mansion with a history of hauntings, natch.
As the story progresses, the scientists begin to formulate their "Stone Tape theory", which suggests the ghosts they're seeing are "residual hauntings"; not the traditional lost souls roaming the Earth, but "recordings" of traumatic events that have imprinted themselves onto the environment where they happened, playing on an infinite loop. These ghosts aren't dangerous necessarily, or even self-aware. But they are super spooky.
Widely celebrated at the time of transmission in 1972, the residual hauntings hypothesis has been taken up by paranormal investigators as an actual thing. The real Stone Tape theory, named for the TV show, has it that moments of high tension or stress in a person's life (or even death) can cause a great amount of energy to be released. That energy is then absorbed by the inanimate objects in the surrounding area, ready to be released and replayed.
Some of the earliest research relating to this theory was...iffy, to say the least. But once people stopped believing in the hippy-dippy ideas of "psychic energy" getting stored in chairs and such, they made some decent headway, no least in discovering that minerals which exist in VHS videotapes and allow them to record stuff exist pretty much everywhere in the natural world, too. It's an untestable theory, but a fun one!