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hand, and describe the character and the emotions of the person who wrote it. Presumably, then, the character of the writer had somehow been “recorded” on the letter, and could be “picked up” by a sensitive person.
    William Denton, a professor of geology at Boston, was interested by Buchanan’s account of his experiments, and tried repeating them. He used geological samples wrapped in paper. Once again, the success rate was remarkable. A good “psychometer” sensed a volcanic explosion when handed a piece of Hawaiian lava, vast depths of empty space with stars when handed a meteor fragment, and immense depths of ice when handed a pebble from a glacier.
    Now obviously, there is no “powerful emotion” involved when a meteor flies through space or a pebble is frozen in ice. So Denton concluded that all events in nature are somehow “recorded,” and that the human mind possesses a faculty for playing-back the recording—an extra sense that enables us to see into the remote past.
    Unfortunately for Buchanan and Denton, the birth of “Spiritualism” in the late 1840s—when strange rapping noises were heard in the home of the Fox Sisters of Hydesville, New York—made scientists deeply suspicious of anything that seemed connected with this new craze. So instead of being taken seriously, psychometry and its theories were dismissed as a delusion. But Lodge and other psychical researchers revived the idea to explain haunted houses.
    Half a century after Lodge, T. C. Lethbridge—who was Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at Cambridge—stumbled on the “psychometric” theory as a result of his own observations. When he saw the “ghost” of the man in a hunting kit, he was at first inclined to wonder whether it had been purely a mental picture, perhaps “picked up” from somebody else’s mind. Perhaps the huntsman had been a former occupant of the rooms, and was sitting in his armchair at home sipping a whisky as he thought about the good old days at Cambridge; and perhaps somehow the image had got itself transferred into Lethbridge’s mind . . .
    But other experiences led him to revise this notion. One day, after he had retired to Devon, Lethbridge and his wife Mina went to collect seaweed from Ladram beach. It was a dull, damp day, and as they walked on to the beach near a stream that ran down the cliff, both suddenly experienced a profound depression. Lethbridge noticed that this vanished as soon as he stepped a few feet away from the stream. His wife, Mina, went to the cliff top to make a sketch, and suddenly had the odd feeling that someone was urging her to jump. (Again, Lethbridge was inclined to think that she could have been picking up someone’s thoughts—
perhaps someone had stood on that spot, contemplating suicide, then had a change of mind and gone home—but later investigation revealed that a man had committed suicide from exactly that spot.)
    Thinking about it all later, Lethbridge reflected that dampness can cause radio transmitters to short-circuit. Could it have been the dampness on the beach that was somehow responsible for the feeling of depression? He had also been struck by the fact that it seemed to end so abruptly, as if it formed a kind of invisible wall. He had noticed the same kind of thing around the cottage of an old woman reputed to be a witch—who had died under circumstances suggesting murder. There was the same “nasty feeling” around the place just after her death, and he had noticed that he could step in and out of it, as if it ended quite sharply. Could it, Lethbridge wondered, be some kind of “field,” like the field that surrounds a magnet?
    Lethbridge was also an excellent dowser, and it struck him that the “nasty feeling” on the beach (he used the term “ghoul” to describe it) had been around the stream. This led him to the theory that the “field” of water can “tape record” strong emotions, and that people who can dowse are probably able to