Oct

24

I Want To Believe.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 24, 2007 |

I generally assume that being a skeptic is a good thing. The scientific method is, after all, based on being skeptical, and even when dealing with the supernatural I think it’s important to apply the scientific method in gaining an understanding of things. Since the things may not even be real, it may be even more important to be skeptical. Perhaps that’s why, as much as I enjoyed it, the book Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern disappointed me. Redfern seemed a little too inclined to believe. We’re promised that he and his friends Jonathon Downes and Richard Freeman went looking for monsters and found them. They certainly found some monstrous individuals, including a supposed witch who threatened them with horrible things if she ever saw them again, and a man who was convinced Marilyn Monroe was just one of many celebrities who was (and possibly is) an alien, working as part of a nefarious plot against the human race. And yet they seemed to find very little, aside from regular opportunities to run around the woods or spooky buildings, and Redfern’s credibility isn’t helped by the fact that he admits that and his friends consumed massive amounts of alcohol on the trip. In fact almost every meeting with an interesting individual seemed to be accompanied by, at the very least, a glass or two of sherry, and most included several pints of ale or bottles of red wine. At the end Redfern said he had been profoundly changed; seeing humor as the only way to combat evil spirits he’d become convinced were all around us he made the book lighter than, so he claimed, it could have been. Yet it seems hard to imagine how the story of three eccentric guys (two of them devotees of punk music–in fact Redfern begins each chapter with a quote from The Ramones) drinking heavily and driving around Britain in a camper could be dark.

Interestingly according to Cryptomundo the film rights to the book have been acquired by Universal, with the possibility of Jon “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder playing Nick Redfern. (Nick Redfern, by the way, has a shaved head, so just imagine Napoleon Dynamite without hair.)

If there’s such a thing as been too much of a believer, there is also a danger in being too much of a skeptic. That’s what makes Will Storr Versus The Supernatural so interesting and, in many ways, more enjoyable than Redfer’s book. In spite of the confrontational-sounding title, Will Storr, a journalist (check out his web site if you want to commission him to write about something, but, unfortunately, he seems to have removed the articles that were there previously, including Will Storr Versus The World’s Biggest Penis), is, in fact, quite open-minded. Throughout the book he seems to do his best to not pass judgment either way; he is there to observe and record. Unlike Redfern (who presumably constructed long conversations from memory) Storr recorded conversations so he could transcribe them verbatim, giving the book a very journalistic feel. He travelled the United States and Britain, interviewing ghosthunters, exorcists, and haunted house owners. He watched a filming of Most Haunted, and tagged along with a couple of witch hunters. He even spent a week in what is supposedly the most haunted house in Britain…and lived to tell the tale. He may have started the book as a single article intending to poke fun at belief in the supernatural, but it became something much more significant. Storr doesn’t end up entirely convinced, but he’s not entirely skeptical either. He goes back and forth throughout the book–something I think most of us can relate to.

Do I believe in ghosts, demons, angels, the Loch Ness Monster, chupacabras, Sasquatch, werewolves, vampires, discount gasoline, or aliens? I say I’m a skeptic, but, sometimes I’m not so sure of that. When I was in college and read more philosophy than was healthy, especially Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, I came up with the phrase, “I can’t believe in anything but I have to believe in something” as a way of describing how I felt. Although my journeys were almost entirely mental they were, by the way, very much like Nick Redfern’s in that I was accompanied by friends and, frequently, large amounts of alcohol. There was a comfort to having friends because philosophy is a matter of perception. If I assume my perception is the only one I end up occupying a very lonely, and very small, universe.

I have to believe in something, but what? Since leaving college I’ve narrowed my ambitions a little, and now tend to take specifics. I’m fascinated by the paranormal but don’t believe most of what I read. At the same time, if I were to meet a ghost or Bigfoot, and if I had some pretty incontrovertible proof that they were real, I hope I’d have the good sense and integrity to admit it. What form would that proof take, though? How would I know I wasn’t losing my mind? Among other things I’d have to rely on other witnesses, people who were, preferably, with me at the time. In other words, I’d have to put my faith in other people. We all share the same world. I can’t believe in anything, but I think believing in other people is better than nothing. Something that struck me from Nick Redfern’s book was one of his friends describing a ritual that had a figure of order and a figure of chaos because, as he explained, without chaos order is meaningless. The same is true of skepticism. Without belief in something skepticism is simply a barrier, a way of separating myself from a much larger and more interesting world that could be out there. It may be small, and I may keep it locked more than I should, but in the wall of my skepticism I have a door that I occasionally open to other possibilities.


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