This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 2, from 2012.
Anecdotes, while not considered compelling evidence by sceptics, nevertheless hold a lot of power over those not used to thinking in a sceptical or scientific way. We have all, at some time or another, come across someone who claims to have seen something that they couldn’t explain and use that to try and browbeat one into accepting their personal testimony as fact. Without the proper analytical tools or experience, it can be hard to tell fact from fiction, especially given the fallibility of human memory; these personal testimonies that “can’t be explained” should not be given the weight of authority that the person demands of them.
By way of example, let me share with you the time I saw a ghost.
I was walking home one dark and dreary night; not my normal route home, but a more scenic route, as I’d been out for a meal with friends and the shortest route home was across the local heath. It was around 10 pm, dark, cold and a fine drizzle was falling. I walked fairly quickly across the heath to get home, not wanting to get wetter than I needed to. As I neared the edge of the heath, suddenly, right across my field of view, I saw a translucent dog, glowing bright, running in front of me, right to left. It was a large golden retriever – silently running across my path before it vanished at the edge of my vision and was gone.
I had heard the stories about ghostly dogs before, but never in this part of London; these phantom pooches were supposed to be harbingers of death, doom and all sorts of disastrous maladies. I confess that it genuinely spooked me, my heart raced, a twinge of panic shot through me. Had I really seen a ghost? I had to believe what I saw with my own eyes – what I had just seen was clear as day; the thing was glowing, I could have hardly missed it. I decided there and then that the rest of my journey home would be at a brisker clip, thence to the internet, so I could do a little more research into these apparitions, in case there was a rational explanation.
In my mind at the time, it could not have been a real dog – it was too large, it glowed in a bright golden colour, it was partially transparent and it ran far too fast across my field of view for it to be real.
As I neared home and safety, my mind was racing. Was it real? Did I really see it? Were there any others who had ever reported seeing something similar on the heath? As the familiar orange glow of the street lights brightened, indicating that I was close to home, I felt relieved. I was safe. Then it hit me out of nowhere, the answer to my ‘ghost’ was staring me in the face. I felt both incredibly silly and incredibly smart to have figured out what my spectre had actually been. I laughed the rest of the way home.
So what was it? What was the ghost dog?
The clues to the solution are in the story – you just have to pick them out. It was dark, there was drizzle and there were street lights. I had been walking in the fine rain, which had settled on my hair, face, and clothes. As I had approached the edge of the heath and the street lights, the orange glow of a nearby light had refracted through a droplet of water on my eyelashes, right into my eye. As I walked, the light had moved across my field of view. My brain, seeing a sudden, unexpected moving golden light, filled in the blanks, making the shape out to be a dog. We know that the brain, in the absence of other stimuli, can fit an image into its preconceptions; we call this pareidolia; the seeing of a significant image where there is nothing but noise. Faces in clouds, hearing words in static, these are all examples of the pattern recognition parts of the brain finding things that really aren’t there.
The ghost dog was nothing more than a chance flash of light from a sodium street light through a droplet of water onto my retina. My brain filled in the blanks, et voilà! A ghostly golden retriever running across my path. So remember, next time someone tells you of an apparition that they could not explain that maybe, just maybe, there was no supernatural occurrence, just your brain filling in the gaps from a bizarre optical illusion. Feel free to counter their anecdote with this one, although after a few tellings, see how it differs to what’s written here, as a guide to how stories change. You might be surprised.
