The ghosts of Bedrock

I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but I love a good ghost story. On a website I frequent someone asked, "What's the life expectancy of a ghost? How come a majority of ghost are from the 19th Century with only a handful dating back to the 18th Century? Where are all the Caveman ghosts or even a few from 300 A.D. would be nice?"

That's a pretty good question, where are the ghosts of Bedrock?

On the question of pre-18th century ghosts, that's just a misconception. There's actually quite a few Revolutionary War related ghost stories, especially around New England, and tons of Native American ghost stories, especially out West. There's a local, or somewhat local, Native American ghost story centering around Serpent Mound up in Peebles, Ohio. That's about forty-five minutes from here. That one even made it into the Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown Series volume on Mystic Places. Across the pond you have much older ghost stories. Sightings of Roman soldiers, for example, are pretty common.

Not sure if anyone's ever seen a "caveman ghost". Maybe that's where "wild man" sightings come from, or even Bigfoot?

There's some logic to the idea that ghosts "expire" over time, though, especially if you buy into the Stone Tape Theory.

The Stone Tape Theory suggests that ghosts aren't really souls of the departed, but rather "psychic echoes" recorded in the environment (not necessarily in stone itself) sort of like a 3D movie. Most ghost stories envision a ghost as the soul of a departed person. This doesn't really make sense though when you think of what people say they actually saw. For example, "I was walking along a back alley in London one night when from around the corner came an 18th century carriage drawn by a team of horses. The passengers on the carriage were dressed in 18th century apparrel, and they each had blank expressions on their face. They seemed not to notice my presence as they continued down the alley and disappeared. I later heard that people have been seeing the ghostly carriage as far back as the early 1900s, and the stories are typically the same."

The problem with viewing ghosts as the soul of a departed human is that one would have to assume in the above example (a typical ghost story) that not only does the passenger have a soul, but so would the horses, the carriage, and even their clothes, not to mention all of those lost souls that became ghosts decided to all hang out together in the afterlife doing the same thing over and over again.

The idea that what's being viewed in the ghost story isn't "ghosts" but rather an echo of some past event, sort of like a 3-D movie being played, evolved from that need to explain not ghosts as souls, but rather ghost stories as scenes taking into account all the elements involved in a typical ghost story. If one took the idea seriously, that it's a recording being played back, it makes sense that the recording would degrade over time – and that ghosts would have a "life expectancy". Whatever psychic echoes there were in caveman days may have dissipated over time.

Snakes on a plain

So it's springtime, and I'll probably head up to Serpent Mound soon. I like to go up there when I get a chance. The Serpent Mound is the 1,330 foot long, three foot high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau in Adams County, Ohio, about 45 minutes or so from where I live. It's America's boondocks version of Stonehenge. That is, it has all the trappings of Stonehenge — a prehistoric effigy shrouded in mystery and mysticism — but it is Ohio. I mean, the place just happens to be down the road from a literal junkyard. It attracts people from around the world, as far off as Japan, and I can only imagine them flying into Columbus or Cincinnati and driving two hours out to find rows and rows of junked up cars. "Welcome to America! Ya'll want a carburetor with that there prehistoric mystery?" Um, yeah. So anyway, I like to go up there when I get a chance.

The term "cryptoexplosive" structure is used to describe impact craters caused by a variety of reasons. Mostly it's an anomalous circular structure, or circular deformation of rock, assumed to be caused by explosive volcanism or the impact of a meteor. The famed Serpent Mound just happens to sit on the top of one of these mysterious structures. Conforming to the curve of the hill on which it rests with its head near the point, the serpent winds back and forth for seven hundred feet and ends with a triple coiled tail. The neck is stretched out in a gentle curve, ending with open jaws around the end of a one hundred sixty foot oval, thought variously to be either an egg, the sun or the body of a frog. It is the largest effigy earthwork in the world.

It's believed to have been constructed somewhere around 800 BC - AD 100 by Hopewell Indians. That's what the textbooks say, though archaeologists readily admit that they aren't completely sure who built it, when, and why. There's some strange things mixed up in the structure from a symbolic sense. For one thing, it's best viewed from the sky. There's no surrounding hills to get that vantage point. I mean really, it seems to be a lot about the sky. The head of the serpent, for example, is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the snake’s coils align with the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise. Carbon dating of the mound coincides with two major astronomical events: the appearance of Halley's Comet and the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula. The light was visible day and night for two weeks. Some believe that the snake was created to emulate a comet, slithering across the night sky like a snake. Quite a bit of sky stuff there for an earthwork. That's part of the mystery.

Practitioners of Kundalini Yoga have an entirely different view. They see the coiled part of the snake as kundalini (spiritual energy) rising through six chakras (the curved part of the snake) and ultimately reaching the crown chakra (the head of the effigy, often described as a snake eating an egg). That's a little more mysterious because chakra systems and spiritual energy being visualized as a coiled snake unfolding originated in India, all the way on the other side of the world. It's just one interpretation, of course, but it's a pretty slick one.

UFO sightings, ghosts, and other weird, paranormal phenomena have been seen around Serpent Mound as well, including this crop circle which appeared in the soybean field across from the park in 2003:



I actually got to check that one out since I was living here at the time. It was night when we got there and we had to go looking for it in the dark, but we got a few pictures and an adventure out of it.

I'm not one who subscribes to the whole crop circle/aliens theory. I mean, you know, who really knows. Instead, I appreciate crop circle art for what it is, regardless of who or what made it. These really complicated and intricate designs are somehow constructed, at night, in one night, and often much larger and more complex than the one pictured above. That's art. Who wouldn't look at that as amazing? Well, maybe not the farmer, but you get the idea.

In any case, the place is completely boring unless you take the above insight along with you. There's a small skipable museum with some artifacts, a tower you can climb to view the effigy, but better is the hike through the woods that leads down the hill and past a small river.

Still, when you take all of the above into account, it's worth the trip. I don't want to overhype it, but you can sense that the place has importance when you're out there. Think of it this way: The place has got to be important if it attracts Halley's Comet, aliens, ancient hindus, crop circle artists, the Japanese, and your's truly. I mean, this is Ohio after all.