If These Walls Could Talk: The Stone Tape Theory Of Ghosts

Guest post by Robert Buchanan

To clarify a few things. I do not believe in an afterlife. I do however believe that images, sounds and sensations from the past can be recorded in matter as energy and played back. One of the reasons I believe this is every day I see images and hear sounds from the dead in the form of television and radio. Actors and singers who have long since bit the dust are resurrected in photons and electrons for our pleasure on television and the radio. Yes these are not interactive, they are just unintelligent echos, recorded electronically. But a surprising amount of reported ghosts in so called “residual haunting” share many of the qualities of our artificially recorded snapshots of the past.

In a world permeated by invisible signals like WiFi and EMF leakage its more credible than ever that another invisible dimension of reality might be overlaying normal life. In this article I’m going to discuss the “Stone Tape Theory” of residual hauntings. The theory has yet to be proven so for the most part this is speculation yes,but exploring the possibilities of a scientific explanation for ghost sightings should not be taboo. Any extraordinary alleged phenomena requires extraordinary proof, but that potential proof will never be found if science merely dismisses the possibility of the existence of the phenomena we now call ghosts.

The idea that environmental factors might trap and replay phantom images is around longer than the advent of video and audio recordings. As early as the 19th Century Sir William Barrett, who was a scientist and founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, speculated about the possibility. The expression ‘Stone Tape ’ was first coined in a BBC play of the same name from 1972. The Stone Tape theory speculates that materials in the environment can trap representations of events in time the same way that a video camera can. For example Iron oxide particles, essentially rust, which are used in old video and audio taping equipment, might work in concert with the crystalline structure of some types of stone. Another theorized method for storage and playback of information echoes of past experiences is water. It’s not as far fetched as it might initially sound. Ambient water in the materials could act as a substrate capable working in tandem with the mineral and metal content of the location. Water is pervasive in practically all building materials not to mention in human bodies and in the ground.Water is often ionized and when agitated it can produce, amplify and transmit an electric charge at varying levels.

This might even account for how disturbing an old building during renovation work might release trapped moisture bearing charges. The slowly evaporating water corresponds also with the reported fading of apparitions over time. Interestingly materials used in the storage of electromagnetic data are found in abundance in some of the stereotypically “haunted” locations such as old stone castles, state institutions and historic houses. It does seem as if residual hauntings have a limited lifespan, and even the ghosts themselves seem to chromatically fade over time, changing colour. Could the numerous accounts of “headless” or “floating” ghosts be less to do with some spooky mutilation and more to do with the extremities of the image wearing and fading with time like an old photograph?  The cliché of “grey ladies” which are in abundance in ghost stories of the UK might have less to do with grey being a fashionable colour in the afterlife and more to do with the fact that there was a large amount of ghosts generated during a particular point in history whose time in the past corresponded to their images fading to grey by the start of the twenty first century.

To speculate how this might occur, we can conjecture that it requires a concert of specific conditions, otherwise we would find ourselves on a planet crowded with more ghosts than the living. Perhaps we are, but its only the visible ones which Stone Tape theory is concerned with. Three main elements are at play. Firstly the location. This creates the right ecology to enable playback. Certain building and environmental materials and conditions. Secondly the catalyst for making the human brain imbed some type of image on the surroundings.This opens the fascinating area of “crisis apparitions” where people see the images of loved ones at a moment of extreme distress or near death. The person could be on the other side of the world. Obviously if there witness is aware that their loved one was near death due to sickness or is very elderly than perhaps stress or bereavement could create a hallucination anticipating their demise. Likewise a lot of the crisis apparitions reported during wartime might be just caused my worry about the very likely danger the other is in. However there sheer volume of reports and the often bizarre and surprising features make it interesting. One could imagine some kind of biological process where by a persons brain unconsciously transmits some kind of electromagnetic signal at a moment of mortal danger which is picked up like some kind of spiritual Skype by the person they are most intimate with. The stone tape theory requires neither the existence of the afterlife no any supernatural forces. It simply involves an extension of natural phenomena and an interaction of matter and radiation, an as yet unexplained interplay between the human brain and the environment.

So we have the environmental conditions sympathetic to receiving and storing these experiences and we have the traumatic event which is recorded, now the third element, playback. Perhaps it’s great trauma or an individual whose life experiences make them particularly empathic to the person. Perhaps it a natural but so far undetected sense the brain has. Disruption and construction work at haunted locations are frequently cited as a stimulus for haunting.These might agitate or release something trapped in the materials of the building analogous to how asbestos can be or even electrical leakage by faulty wiring can be released during renovations. Whatever the trigger the unwitting witness suddenly finds themselves confronted by a playback of audio or visual from a long dead source, a ghost.

In a universe governed by quantum physics and warped space time we’re not even sure there really is any difference between the past and the future. Again, the Stone Tape Theory requires neither an afterlife nor an intelligence behind the existence of ghosts. Residual haunting may be just recordings, as demonstrated by the often seemingly illogical behaviour of the spectres walking through walls where perhaps a door had previously been etc.This indicates again an affinity for a particular location as opposed to having any real knowledge that it is being observed.

Millions of people are seeing this phenomena. They can not all be hallucinating or lying. If it is mundane to us that visual and audio representations of the living and the dead can already be recorded by transferring electromagnetic radiation (images in to video) and sound (voices on to magnetic magnetic tape) then it is neither an impossible leap or even a very unlikely one to forward the hypothesis that images of long past events and people might somehow be recorded in the environment.

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