FT258

In recent years, even the most abandoned lover of ghost stories is likely to have looked askance at the way ghost research has been treated by television. Ghosts are no longer a topic generating hot embarrassment; rather it is the antics of many so-called ghost-hunters themselves when performing before the television camera that are so awful. Light on subtlety and sensitivity, brazenly eschewing rationality and logic, these programmes happily present hysteria, New Age nonsense and re-heated spiritualist dogma as valid psychical research. Investigations are depicted as a form of thrill-seeking entertainment, giving the impression that contacting the dead is some kind of game.

However, television is still capable of dealing with ghost experiences in a serious manner. One rare example was on Hallowe’en night, when BBC2 broadcast The Ghostman of Skye. The programme followed former missionary Donald Angus MacLean in collecting first-hand accounts of apparitions from natives of the Isle of Skye. At the outset, the programme indicated that the motivation for his work was reaction to the death of his beloved wife in 2000, with his grief sometimes painfully close to the surface. But what the programme also provided was the rare opportunity of allowing mostly elderly witnesses to speak on film about their personal experiences, in direct and raw interviews, unimpeded by sound effects or vacuous commentary.

Among the most remarkable accounts were sightings of a ghost car on the Portree to Sligachan road, which have caused something of a sensation on the island. One driver described how he had pulled in twice to avoid what he believed was a real vehicle approaching, only to see the headlights mysteriously vanish. On a third encounter, he instead drove boldly towards the headlights, much to the discomfort of passengers in the car, only to find the lights unaccountably vanishing once again. An elderly ex-policeman told of seeing a headless lady in green; where the head should have been it was “vacant, missing”. Other stories told of strange lights associated with road accidents and drownings, which were seen as omens.

A phantom child, five or six years old, was seen by two men out walking. The vision occurred about an hour and half before the discovery of a body of a child who had drowned in a loch, and for whom neighbours were searching that night. An account from a John McGillivray told of a light seen climbing up from the shore and moving up the hill. This was reportedly seen at a spot where a body was later discovered, with the light moving along the track where the body was later carried to the nearest graveyard.

In contrast with the insistent certainties proffered by so many TV psychics and investi­gators, Donald MacLean emphasised how little we actually know, referring to “an incalc­ulable number of things around us that we just haven’t got a clue what they are.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Ghostman of Skye received mostly lukewarm reviews from TV critics nourished on a diet of Most Haunted and dodgy medium shows (one revealing comment was that Donald MacLean would not have been suitable as a child­ren’s entertainer). Inevitably, there was no appreciation that the experiences recorded fitted into the oral tradition of the Highlands and Islands, the means by which ghost stories were conveyed in past generations. In particular, the stories of prophetic lights mirror accounts of prophetic phantom lights known as dreags which feature in Scottish second sight beliefs.

Studies of second sight have been conducted sporadically since the 1690s. After the Society for Psychical Research abandoned an attempt to conduct a questionnaire survey in 1893, this method of research was not used with such experiences for over a century until a detailed survey was undertaken by Dr Shari A Cohn of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. In her study, Dr Cohn found that ghost experiences with a predictive element were still current and that “For many the seeing of the dreag continues to hold a spiritual significance as an omen forewarning of death, even though they regard the physical characteristics of the dreag as indicating that it is a meteor. There are, however, several accounts of unusual lights which cannot be explained as meteors, such as objects being alight which are later associated with burial.” (“A Questionnaire Study on Second Sight” by Shari Cohn in Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 63 no. 55 129, April 1999.)

Even the relatively modern phenomenon of a ghostly car is known on other Scott­ish islands. For example, in the 1970s a phantom car was reported on Benbecula in the Hebrides, on a five-mile stretch of road between Balivanich and Creagorry. The vehicle was described as “a dark 1100” and was seen both approaching ahead and from behind by drivers on the island, before dis­appearing unaccountably (D.Mail, 8 April 1972).

For viewers, the only ‘twist’ at the end of The Ghostman of Skye came at the end when it was revealed that Donald MacLean himself had died, with the closing scenes showing his coffin conveyed for burial.