Sue St.Clair and Matthew Didier's Paranormal Blog

UFO photo? I do not know about you, but to me it looks like a Panama Straw Hat, with some type of fabric band. You know the type I mean, you see them a lot on beaches. Who knows.......

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Photo Source: Believed to be in the Public Domain

Regular readers of this blog will know that each Wednesday for almost a full year now our dear friend, and colleague Chris Laursen has been writing the Weird Wednesday feature. This past week Chris has started back to school, and while he transitions back into academic life he will be taking a break from his column.

Chris has promised to come back in a few weeks with some new material, and until then please do read over the 40 plus Weird Wednesday articles in our blog archives.

Congratulations to Chris, and hope to see you back here soonly!

Sue & Matthew

On the first Weird Wednesday of each month, Chris Laursen reviews exceptional films, television series, visual arts and music that have imaginative paranormal themes. He introduces us this week to an all-girl new wave band who in 1982 did a very catchy tune about hysteria and demonic possession.

Haunting Visions | September 2007
“The Devil Lives In My Husband’s Body” by Pulsallama
by Chris Laursen

In the early 1980s, girl groups rocked New York’s East Village, giving a beat-happy new wave kick that was both artsy and gritty. The bands had names like Shazork, Das Fürlines, Frieda and French Twist – they were glam, they were sassy and, judging by their spectacular costumes, big hair (or wigs) and make-up, they probably inspired many future drag queens. One of these memorable though not well known all-girl bands was called Pulsallama, and they took a clever swing into paranormal satire in 1982 with a little college radio treasure called “The Devil Lives In My Husband’s Body.”

It documents a suburban housewife’s worst nightmare when her husband starts making barking noises. In a post-1950s throwback to seventeeth century New England Puritanism, there can only be one explanation for this behaviour – Beelzebub himself must possess the poor man! What’s a girl to do but call on the witch next door to cure him?

I’m not sure if any members of Pulsallama took courses about the witch hunts in early modern Europe, but their song has several historical truths in it. For one, especially before and during the Reformation, common folk still used cunning men and women who used magic to cure ills and resolve problems, even if the churches preached against such actions. In the song, the suburban housewife does just that, asking the witch next door to lend a helping hand. No doubt there are people who still use magic today in cases that seem to be reminiscent of possession.

The twist at the end of the song in which a medical doctor diagnoses that the husband has Tourette Syndrome also has historical basis. When people were afflicted by mental illness before such things could be diagnosed medically, problems ranging from epilepsy to dementia could be construed as demonic possession. At times, an unpopular neighbour might be accused of cursing the ill person, and a witch trial would be conducted. What could not be explained was determined to be of supernatural origin, and illnesses indicated some form of malicious conjuring was being used to harm the ailing individual.

So keep these facts in mind as you get a rare chance to enjoy this East Village underground classic!

Pulsallama were Jean Caffeine, Kimberly “Princess” Davis, Stace “Timbalina” Elkin, Dany Johnson, Diana Lillig, Ann Eleanor Magnuson, Lori “Bubbles” Montana, Miss April Palmieri, Charlotte Slivka, Min “Bonefinder” Thometz, Ande Whyland and Wendy Wild. “The Devil Lives In My Husband’s Body” was released as a 7” single released on Y Records in 1982. Press play below to listen to the song!

Last year, Chris Laursen worked with television producer Sarah Kapoor (who made the three-part CBC Television series Past Life Investigation in 2004) on a radio pilot called Welcome to the Unknown. They are providing Paranormal Blog with a documentary and interview they did about the idea that 2012 will mark a drastic change on our planet, allegedly due to an ancient Mayan calendar coming to its end.

The Mayan long count calendar and 2012
by Chris Laursen and Sarah Kapoor

December 21st, 2012 is just over five years away. Are you ready? Are you prepared for the end of the world as we know it? That might depend on if you believe in the prophecies that supposedly come with the end of the 5,200-year-old Mayan long count calendar. A new long count calendar begins the next day, but the time period before and after the day of turnover is said to come with powerful force. A force that could change the world as we know it.

The Mayan view of time is cyclical. Time ends and begins anew inside of several concurrent calendars all the same time. These endings and new beginnings are often described as periods of earth shattering events. For example, Guatemalan Mayan elder Chan K’in Viejo prophecized in 1978: “Our Lord Hachakyum will make everything die because of the cold. The grass wishes to die. The seed, the animals all wish to die. And the True People also – we all die. In thirty years Hachakyum will destroy the world.”

Words of this nature evoke powerful images, especially in our age when global warming and rapid environmental change dominates headlines. There is a growing movement of people, not unlike those who felt the new millennium would be “the end of the world as we know it,” who believe that the pre-Columbian Maya accurately prophesized massive change in 2012, change that comes with global destruction and the birth of a new era in humanity. You will find their books at mainstream bookstores and documentaries about 2012 on television.

Detail showing three columns of glyphs from the second century La Mojarra Stela 1 from an article on the Mayan calendar at Blessings Cornucopia

Marina Pinto, who holds a doctorate in Latin American and Spanish history and archaeology from Tulane University in New Orleans, told us, “I took a course on Mayan codices and we knew about 2012 simply because we had to study the Mayan calendar and the end of the long- count happens to occur on that date. And that is it. That is all we really heard about in connection to 2012. There was no meaning attached to that other than the calendar would presumably begin again.”

For most who study Mayan culture, the date means nothing more than that. Indeed, this date marks the end of the Mayan long count calendar – a two hundred year calendar. It could just be the turning over of the calendar, but speculation has risen that includes that this marks the end to civilization as we know it, with some saying a consciousness shift will bring a new era of peace. In the below audio documentary, we talk to scientists and survivalists and who speculate on what’s possible. We also interviewed Robert Sitler from Stetson University in Florida. He’s a professor who had an article published last year on the 2012 phenomenon in Novo Religio, the journal of new and alternative religious movements.

As Professor Sitler tells us, the 2012 prophecy movement is largely made up of people who are not even Mayan. Followers from all corners of the globe are gravitating to the end date as it seems to explain everything from climate change to war.

Prophecy or coincidence? You decide.

In the documentary piece, you will hear from Patrick Geryl, a Belgian man who runs a website dedicated to the 2012 prophecy. He tells us why he believes there will be a massive shift on our planet (specifically, a magnetic pole reversal) that coincides with the end of the Mayan long count calendar in 2012.

We also talk to academics such as Allen Christenson, a Mayanist anthropologist from Brigham University, Provo Utah; and Anthony Aveni, an astronomer and anthropologist from Colgate University in upstate New York. We also speak to Randy Enkin of the Geological Survey of Canada who gives a scientific point of view on magnetic pole reversals and other dramatic geological and environmental changes on the planet.

The documentary and interview with Professor Sitler run about 24 minutes. Just press play below to hear it!

Ponder this, gentle readers…

History is filled with prophecies about the end of days. Do you feel any past prophecies succeeded in heralding a major shift in humanity?

Further reading

Patrick Geryl’s website, How To Survive 2012

Robert Sitler’s website includes contemporary Mayan perspectives on 2012.

Dr. Anthony Aveni’s books Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures and Behind The Crystal Ball: Magic, Science, and the Occult from Antiquity Through the New Age (both published by University of Colorado Press).

This week, historian Chris Laursen offers some tips on how to find excellent books on the paranormal.

Finding the best information on paranormal research
by Chris Laursen

It is essential for anyone interested in paranormal research read as much as they can to build knowledge that will be practical in actual investigations. Personal experiences, field work, anecdotes and so forth will only offer you a very small piece of the full range of exploration that has been done on the paranormal. There is amazing, ongoing research on things paranormal, and the body of work published (especially since the creation of the Society for Psychical Research in London 125 years ago) is mind blowing.

I always offer suggestions for further reading on my column, but how do you find these books? Many of them are not available at the majority of bookstores, and it may be challenging to find them at most public libraries. I have stepped into libraries that have only a handful of books on paranormal topics, and not very good ones at that, so libraries with an interlibrary loan system are your best bet to find good reading.

Although you will find some excellent new or popular mainstream books at a large bookstore or public library, such as Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, Will Storr vs. The Supernatural or Gary Schwartz’s books on survival after death research, you will be hard pressed to find books that are put out by independent publishers, were published years ago or, as commonly happens, have gone out of print.

Where are the best places to browse for a good selection of paranormal books? Your local independent used bookstore is likely a good source for older books. Not only are you likely to find some classic tomes of paranormal research, the prices are likely to be quite reasonable. It’s pure joy to search through the shelves of local used bookstores to see what treasures may have arrived in, especially if you live in a bigger city. In downtown Toronto, for example, you can find a good floor-to-ceiling shelf full of books on these topics at places like Eliot’s Bookstore (572 Yonge Street), Seekers (509 Bloor Street West), The Recycled Book Shop (162 McCaul Street), ABC Book Store (662 Yonge Street) and the large BMV stores which mostly have titles published in the past decade (on Bloor west of Spadina, or Yonge north of Eglinton). Just a few examples! I have really struck gold in smaller cities and towns as well, for example Fremont Books (240 St. Paul St.) in St. Catharines, Ontario, which has a surprisingly massive collection of vintage titles from the 60s and 70s. Most communities still have used book shops, and it is very much worth your time to go in, browse and support these businesses, many of which are sadly disappearing. Many of these shops will have a paranormal, new age or occult section, as they are often called. Even the smallest collection can yield some great books for you to enjoy!

So I’ve come across a book that looks interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s a good resource for research. Does it have a bibliography? A bibliography is a list of the sources (e.g. other books, journal articles, etc.) that usually appears in the back of the book, often before the index. On occasion, it is included after each chapter, or sources will be referenced in footnotes on individual pages. Any good book should list its sources, including the name of the author(s), book, publisher and year. It will likely also include articles that have been published in addition to books, for example in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (JSPR). These sources will lead you to other books you’ll be interested in reading, as well. I would say that many of the books in my collection have been discovered through bibliographies.

Although there are exceptions, books that lack a bibliography may not be best suited to finding reliable information on paranormal topics. Unless the book is a personal account, for example of a haunting or alien abduction, it should include a bibliography. Not citing the sources where the author(s) get information (because all authors do get their information from somewhere) is questionable. Personal accounts, however, can be treated as primary (first-hand) sources in your research. The question then is… is this person giving an honest account? That, in itself, is a whole other topic for discussion.

Some libraries and bookstores have a reputation for being haunted. The Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana, for example, has an online ghost cam that allows people to see if they can capture images of the apparitions that browse their books. (Image: about.com)

And what about when I’m looking for specific books? Although I find many random treasures in used book shops, books have mostly found their way into my personal collection by purchasing them online. It’s helpful when I am looking for specific titles.

Several websites provide an online network for independent booksellers around the world. I have found some really wonderful volumes from countries like England and Australia that I doubt I would ever find from North American booksellers simply because they were never distributed on this continent.
My personal favourite websites for finding books in and out of print include alibris.com, ebay.ca, amazon.ca (and its subsidiaries in other countries), and indigo.ca. (The .ca is the Canadian version of these sites, and they all have .com sites usually based out of the United States; many countries have their own national version of these websites. Sometimes it is worth seeing if rarer books are available on other country’s websites because the list of books for sale differs from country to country.) Alibris and eBay in particular have independent booksellers networked through their search engines. eBay predominantly lists individual people selling their own books.

Then it’s up to you to find the right version of the book for your own purposes, whether you just want to be able to read the text and don’t mind a copy with highlighting or notes scribbled in it, or if you seek high quality antiquarian or mint condition books.

Again, the benefit of ordering online (as with used bookstores) is that you can often find bargains and the shipping rates are generally reasonable. Some even offer free domestic shipping depending on how much you spend in an order. For the budget conscious, many of these websites offer significant discounts from the price you would pay at a new bookstore. Always be sure to spend a bit of time browsing these different sites and sellers for the price and quality of book you are happiest with.

But I’d like to encourage those of you who wish to keep your local independent book dealers alive to order the books directly through them. They often can order in the books for you just as quickly as if you order them online, you pay the cover price (you really shouldn’t be paying more unless you live in a remote community, in which case shipping is taken into consideration) and you keep a wonderful tradition of bookselling going in the process. There is, after all, nothing quite like wandering the aisles of any bookstore, new or used, and finding the wonderful treasures that add great value to understanding the paranormal experience.

Ponder this, gentle readers…

What are your favourite all-time books about the paranormal?

Further reading

In future columns, I will continue to write about more great books, but in the meantime, check out Toronto Ghosts’ Recommended Books list.

A carefully considered list of book retailers around the world focusing on speculative fiction, which can often lead you to paranormal non-fiction.

Harry Price Library of Magical Literature

Historian Chris Laursen reviews a documentary aired on British television last Hallowe’en about the ghosts that haunt the London Underground, including an inexplicable photo that may be connected to the man accused of murdering Charles Lindbergh’s young son in 1932.

The Haunted Tube
by Chris Laursen

Why is it that people get creeped out by tunnels? Is it the darkness, a sense of claustrophobia, fear of what might be lurking in its passages – or can we sense something ghostly? Last Hallowe’en, British TV network Five aired Ghosts on the Underground, which delved into what could be the most haunted tunnels of all – the tube, a massive subway network that extends to all ends of metropolitan London, carrying with it one billion passengers in the past year, according to Transport For London.

The 47-minute documentary is not only an excellent series of anecdotes by the staff and passengers of the London Underground on their inexplicable experiences over the past several decades, it also give a stunning tour of the stations, pedestrian passageways, foyers and trains of the commuter train system. Many of the visuals are outright futuristic: brightly-lit, colourful, curving spaces void of humans during the wee hours when the tube is closed, bringing a haunting sense of wonder to places usually tightly packed with commuters.

This is in many ways a documentary that, aside from its high-tech cinematography, has the feel of many classic collections of real-life ghostly anecdotes and gives the viewer the sense of what it is actually like to encounter a ghost without the over-the-top drama usually found in films on this topic. So it is not surprising that the documentary sticks to traditional anecdotal conventions by considering the accidental deaths and suicides that have befallen the London Underground in context of the ghost stories – this may or may not be connected to the strange experiences people have had, but it is always interesting to consider the possibilities.

Images from the Five documentary, Ghosts on the Underground, aired last Hallowe’en in the U.K.

There are a few accounts of Underground security seeing lone people on the closed circuit television system (CCTV) that monitors everything. In one case, a staff member went to investigate a person standing on the platform after the Underground had shut for the night. But he found no one in the station. However, his colleague, watching him via the CCTV, said he was standing right beside the person, still standing on the platform in the closed station. The reverse occurred in another story relayed by a staff member who saw an elderly lady standing in a pedestrian tunnel after the tube had closed. He tried to approach her, but she turned a corner and then disappeared. CCTV footage shows no indication of anyone in the tunnel with the staff member.

Many of the best stories are those where staff reported seeing an apparition, and then found out from other staff that they had seen the same thing some time before. Such cases where multiple people have had a similar experience in the same location at separate times pose strong evidence validating that a ghost indeed lurks there on a repeated basis.

One of the stranger cases occurred on a subway carriage on the Bakerloo Line. Karen Collett had taken a family photo on the line two decades ago, and was very surprised to see what appeared to be the image of a man seated in an electric chair behind the glass of the carriage. The late Maurice Grosse of the Society for Psychical Research investigated it and was astonished by the image. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. Here we have a man sitting in an electric chair of all things, squared up in the Underground. Nobody obviously saw it, and yet the camera did,” he said.

A photographic expert, Robert Cox from the National Museum of Photography, said upon inspecting the negative, “The point with this is that it’s an amateur [point and shoot] camera, so to do manipulation of photographs particularly in the ‘80s, you would have needed quite sophisticated cameras,” he said.

The twist happens when the image is compared to a wax figure in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London of Bruno Hauptmann, the accused kidnapper and murderer of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son in 1932. In 1936, Hauptmann was electrocuted upon conviction in a New Jersey prison despite his continue claims of innocence.

Newspaper clippings on Bruno Hauptmann and a poster seeking the missing Charles Lindbergh, Jr. tell the sad story of the boy’s murder in 1932. In Ghosts on the Underground, Karen Collett’s photo with her family shows a ghostly figure behind the glass that the documentary producers overlaid with the image of the wax figure in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London. The similarity is exact, minus the blue lightning coming out of the man’s hands in the subway photo.

A photograph of the wax figure, a representation of Hauptmann in the electric chair, overlaid with the photograph taken by Collett shows an identical match between the two images, including the pair of suspenders worn, the buttons and position of the hands of the wax figure. “The only difference with mine is that there are blue sparks to indicate he was being electrocuted coming out of both fingers,” said Collett. This has led sceptics, including photographer Robert Cox, to argue that there was a poster in a station advertising the wax museum, however Madame Tussauds Wax Museum confirmed that they have no record of such an image of Hauptmann has ever being used in advertising.

The intriguing denouement of the tale is Karen Collett recalling taking a friend to get a reading from a medium. Collett sat outside while her friend spoke to the medium. Afterwards, the medium approached Collett and told her he had a message for her. “I looked at him and said, ‘But I’m not here for a reading.’ And he said, ‘It’s about your photo. I just want you to know that the man said, I’m accused of something I didn’t do, but I did something else.’ And that was the end of the message.” Bruno Hauptmann had claimed innocence for the crime of killing Lindbergh’s son until the day he died, even after being encouraged that a confession would save him from the electric chair.

This documentary vividly entices viewers to consider the strangeness that lurks in the shadows of London’s Underground. It might make you think again if you see something strange in any subway system.

Ponder this, gentle readers…

Have you ever had a ghostly encounter on public transit?

Further reading

You can watch Ghosts on the Underground on Google Video

A BBC website with more ghosts stories from the London underground

Spirits of the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission)

The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby

Image Credit: Copyright Karen Collett (used with permission)

This week, historian Chris Laursen reviews the Fortean Times’ retrospective on 60 years of UFOs in popular culture.

UFO:60
by Chris Laursen

I remember a dream I had once when I was a teenager. In it, I drew apart my curtains and looked out of my window to see hundreds of flying saucers slowly hovering by at low altitude. There was nothing that would stop them. I had such a feeling of dread in the dream. Earth was being invaded.
I blame it on a TV show I saw when I was a wee one. It was called Project UFO (1978-79, NBC). I was at my parent’s friends’ house, sitting on their lush beige livingroom shag with their son. From what I recall, the episode commenced with a woman in a high-rise apartment, and a flying saucer was going around the tower. She opened her curtains – and voila – a window opens in the saucer hovering right outside of her apartment. And what has she come face to face with? Two horses! Egad! A quick Google reveals that I’m not the only one who was fascinated by the horse-headed aliens.

The horse-like aliens in an episode of Project UFO. (From The Project UFO Page)

That silly introduction over with… what a great time to celebrate 60 years of ufology! The X-Files is gathering dust in the annals of TV cultism. Mediums, ghosts and superheroes have captured the television crowd now. One can actually take a pretty sober look at what has happened over the past 60 years, remembering of course that aerial phenomena has been reported long before 1947.

Fortean Times (FT225, Special 2007) does an excellent 33-page retrospective on the topic, asking several knowledgeable people what they think the best evidence is for (or against) this phenomena, talking about terrestrial versus extraterrestrial origins, recalling some strange sightings and asking what their overall opinion is of the past 60 years of ufology.

The issue includes an excellent article by Alan Murdie, best known for his articles on ghosts, on pre-1947 aerial phenomenon in New Mexico, going back to early Native lore and experiences where it seems that strange lights were very much a part of the natural world. There are interviews with controversial abduction researcher Dr. David M. Jacobs (who isn’t afraid to denounce the cruelty of the abduction accounts he has collected), some photos from the McMinnville UFO Festival, looking at the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case of 1961, and an indepth profile of the late Desmond Leslie, “the founding father of the modern fascination with alien contact.” Also interesting are the stories behind stamps that depict UFOs from countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Tanzania, Grenada and Guyana – not exactly places that come to mind in the popular context of aliens. But UFOs, it is clear, have touched every corner of our humble blue planet.

Each of the researchers who speak on the past 60 years of ufology tend to put their own local geographical spin on what they think the most important evidence is. For example, Australian researcher Bill Chalker unabashedly refers to a multiple-witness, radar-visual case involved the Australian Navy in 1954. Many of the experts concur with Chalker, choosing evidence where military, meteorologists or air traffic control all had technical evidence, often from radar, to match eyewitness reports from the ground or the air. Interesting cases for certain! But…

“All ufologists learn something unique about the UFO phenomenon and like everyone else, our interpretation of the data is subject to our own interests and prejudices,” wrote David Clarke and Andy Roberts, regular contributors to Fortean Times. “As a result, there is very little consensus, which means ufology remains disorganized, chaotic and belief-driven.”

Some of the experts who offer their point of view in the Fortean Times. (From the Fortean Times)

French sociologist Pierre Lagrange talks about how important it is to seek connections between unidentified flying objects and natural phenomenon. He offered further explanation as to why ufology, as a field, is chaotic. “Most of the debate is focused on how to obtain ‘objective’ data from witnesses,” he wrote. “But the fundamental problem is that the alleged divide between subjectivity and objectivity doesn’t exist – it is a pseudo-argument invited by sceptics to maintain an endless controversy.” Lagrange calls on researchers to abandon seeking this objective data from the witnesses themselves, for objectivity is not a mental quality, but rather one developed through observation with specific goals. He suggests, for example, that an organized network of amateur astronomers would be excellent to collect data around the world on aerial phenomenon.

Here lies another key to resolve this chaos, Lagrange suggests, in “that ‘sceptics’ and debunkers are not interested in the solution to the mystery, and that UFO researchers confuse debunkers with scientists because some scientists are debunkers. But science is something completely different.” He’s got a good point there! The question from all of this input is could ufologists put their personal interests and prejudices aside to actually organize? Could they seek objective evidence through a network of sky gazing observers and take witness reports for the subjective data they present? Some good points to ponder among many in this issue of Fortean Times.

The problems faced by ufologists over the past 60 years has made many of them cynical, and many comment in Fortean Times that they feel little to nothing has been learned since 1947. Others concede such a viewpoint is quite extreme. For example, common characteristics can be derived from sightings. Police detective and ufologist Gary Heseltine, editor of UFOMonthly.com, wrote, “These objects have the ability to stop and hover in complete silence, to make instant bursts of acceleration and deceleration, to reverse direction, make right-angle turns and rise and fall vertically. And there are five basic shapes – disc, cigar, sphere, triangle and bright white lights.”
Yes, these are all common traits in many sightings. But what a variety of sightings there are. We’re not just talking about flying saucers or grey hairless aliens with large black eyes. There seems to be every kind of shape and size of object, in every type of situation, from a far-off sighting of a strange object high in the sky, to very close encounters, to even being taken into the craft by a variety non-human beings. And what of the parallels found in popular culture, including science-fiction movies from The Day The Earth Stood Still to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Contact? How do these all filter into the public imagination and influence the recollections people give of what they saw? Close Encounters, after all, coincided with a massive wave of reports in 1977.

It all is a good reminder that people can only describe things they cannot explain within their own perceptual contexts. People can only go so far in describing something which is often fleeting, moreso when it looks unlike anything they have ever seen before.

All of these questions and many more are addressed in this issue of Fortean Times. Worth picking up for avid ufologists and those interested in strange phenomena alike!

Ponder this, gentle readers…

What UFO story, fact or fiction, first grabbed your imagination?

Further Reading:

Fortean Times
http://www.forteantimes.com/

Karl Pflock and Peter Brookesmith, editors. Encounters at Indian Head: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Abduction Revisited. Anomalist Books, 2007.

Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden. Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience – The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Adbuction. New Page Books, 2007.

Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. Flying Saucers Have Landed. Werner Laurie, 1953.

Jerome Clark. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomena From The Beginning. Omnigraphics, 1998.

On the first Weird Wednesday of each month, Chris Laursen reviews exceptional films, television series, visual arts and music that have imaginative paranormal themes. In this instalment, he looks at a classy old-fashioned ghost story brought to the silver screen in 2001, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others.

Haunting Visions | August 2007
Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others
by Chris Laursen

How rare it is for a ghost story to be brought to the big screen in classic form. In 2001, Chilean-born director Alejandro Amenábar made The Others, an eerie story of a haunting reminiscent of film noir and golden age horror from the 1930s and 40s. His first English-language movie, The Others stars Nicole Kidman as a God-fearing strict mother, Grace, who is on the edge as she protects her two young children, Anne and Nicholas, from the sunlight. The children suffer from xeroderma pigmentosum, a real-life rare ailment which results in extreme burns for those who have it when they are exposed to direct sun or bright artificial light. Constantly, Grace is locking all of the doors of the large manor her family occupies to ensure that the children don’t accidentally step into a lit room. When the children move to other rooms in the house, she makes certain the curtains are drawn shut before they enter. It makes the entire house gloomy and dark. An unrelenting thick fog outside already makes for a murky environ.

A tale that takes place during wartime, Grace’s husband Charles has been fighting at the front and she has been anxious for his return. The servants she had suddenly disappeared one day without notice of leave, forcing Grace to take care of the house and her children on her own. That is until a trio of new servants arrive in response to a newspaper ad she posted.

Fionnula Flanagan (right) and Elaine Cassidy as two servants who are withholding information from Grace.

Bertha Mills (played wonderfully by Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan) leads the trio, also made up of gardener and handyman Edmond Tuttle and a young mute servant girl named Lydia. The new servants quickly are informed of the extraordinary conditions of their posting, and Grace cautiously offers Mrs. Mills a set of keys to access the various rooms with the stark warning that if she were to ever leave one unlocked, it would endanger the health of her children.

But there is even more going on in the large country home. There seems to be someone else there. Someone unseen. Grace hears things in the house, and the children seem to know about who is responsible. Anne has seen a boy named Victor who claims it is his house. But how could someone else be in the house without being seen? Grace, already near panic over all of her anxieties, is not sure whether or not to believe Anne. At first, she accuses Anne of fibbing and punishes her. But as time progresses, more strange things happen around the house. Invisible intruders threaten the sanctity of Grace’s fragile manor.

Grace (played by Nicole Kidman) knows there are troubling things happening in her family’s home, and is determined to make it stop.

This is a truly wonderful movie. It has the same pacing and suspense as classic horror films from the golden age of cinema, and Nicole Kidman plays Grace quite well for the cinematic era depicted. The last thing this woman needs is for ghosts to add a further threat to her fragile children, and it spins her life out of control.

Alejandro Amenábar is famous for making psychological thrillers. His international success was Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes, 1997), a film with many twists and turns, not far from the works of Pedro Almodovar (most recently known for the movie Volver). Tesis (Thesis, 1996) was a shocking movie about a serial killer. Most recently, he made Mar adentro (The Sea Inside, 2004), a true story of Ramon Sampedro’s 30-year campaign in support of the right to die for those with terminal illness. In The Others, he adds to the incredible Spanish and Latin American presence in fantasy cinema which also features the wonderful Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone) and Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men).

Ponder this, gentle readers…

What is your favourite classic ghost story?