The Stone Tape Theory
A Gallup poll conducted back in 2005, found that roughly 37% of American households believed in ghosts and haunted houses. In 2024, that percentage had risen to 40% or roughly 1 in 5. It stands to reason that small increase can also be attributed to the rise in popularity of paranormal reality-based TV shows (Ghost Adventures, Most Haunted, Ghost Hunters, etc.).
Regarding your typical “haunted house,” hauntings can be divided into two categories, intelligent hauntings and residual. Each category can be sub-divided into components. But it’s the latter which we’ll be looking at today.
Most researchers accept that the lion’s share of hauntings are what’s called residual, that is, something (a traumatic event) that occurred in the past, and is now replayed ad nauseam. This can occur in a specific room, over an entire structure or even a plot of land. These types of hauntings occur regardless of whether there’s anyone there to witness it. Another distinguishing factor between residual hauntings and intelligent is that, residual hauntings will NOT interact with you. Residual hauntings are like watching a movie on repeat. In fact, one may witness a residual haunting go through a wall where a door may have once been or a hallway that’s been truncated due to remodeling.
So, how does this “Stone Tape” theory attempt to explain scientifically, unexplainable events? By using something called ‘place memory’ and the thought that certain materials can absorb energy and release it under specific conditions and circumstances.
Possibly the earliest known reference to this train of thought dates to 1838 when Charles Babbage (father of the computer, mathematician) in chapter nine of his book, The Ninth Bridgwater Treatise, speculated that human speech can stay in the ether pretty much forever but quickly becomes inaudible. And that only a few select individuals can listen and interpret to this past diction. These people, of course, are what we would now-a-days call sensitives. Babbage further explained that this lost diction is usually attributed to places of past trauma, something he called, place memory.
This is slightly different from Stone Tape. Place memory still attempts to explain residual hauntings, but it looks at objects, physical things and people with extrasensory perception. Stone Tape likewise, has its’ roots in past events, but its foundations lie in materials and places. Materials like granite, limestone, magnetite and quartz are thought to absorb energy.
Over the course of the next couple decades, this idea that places can ‘absorb memory’ gained traction as particulars were slowly sussed out. The rise in Spiritualism in the latter half of the 19th century and a relatively new theory called, psychometry (reading past events from handling haunted or cursed objects) gave ‘place memory’ an almost clean slate to develop without critique.
Borley Rectory
In 1882, The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London and is still going strong today. Aiming at proving places can be haunted, they employ reasonings based in science (though unproven) while keeping skepticism as a tool.
Eleanor Sedgwick (a member and eventual president of SPR) in 1885, was a proponent of Charles Babbage. She suggested that instead of actual objects holding the key to hauntings, that it was perhaps, “something in the building itself” that is giving rise to hauntings. But admittingly, she was not a huge believer in this theory herself. She merely proposed it to further the conversation.
A few years later in 1888, Edmund Gurney, a contemporary of Sedgwick, furthered her idea by suggesting that there was a process in which traumatic events were “impressed upon” their surroundings but couldn’t come up with a logical explanation as to how such events were recorded.
Then in 1961, T.C. Lethbridge, an archeologist turned parapsychologist, wrote a book called, Ghost & Ghoul. He postulated that ghosts were not actually people. But instead, were non-interactive recordings of past events (like watching a movie) that were closely tied to places like rivers, forests, streams and stones.
Spring boarding off this theory, the British author, Nigel Kneale wrote a teleplay called, The Stone Tape. When it debuted on Christmas Day on the BBC in 1972, it gained almost instant popularity. The plot follows a small group of researchers investigating a hidden, but newly discovered basement of a Victorian mansion & trying to figure out the paranormal events and what happened there 80 years prior. The entire basement by the way, was constructed entirely of granite stone. The group uses light & sound to try and coax the ‘memories’ from the stone. And just like that, the Stone Tape Theory was born.
Keep in mind a few things. Firstly, Lethbridge was retroactively and incorrectly credited with this theory. Two, it is still unproven and more or less, pseudoscience. And three, we’re still no closer to an explanation for residual hauntings in 2024 then we were in 1961.
But regardless, even if witnessing an apparition in the corner of a room, hearing phantom footsteps echo down a hallway or experiencing the ‘cobweb’ sensation across your skin, such encounters are still downright creepy and unsettling. And yes, 90% of these experiences can be explained away by more logical means like temperature fluctuations, settling wood, clogged pipes and shadow play. But the real question is, what about the 10% that defies logical explanation? Time to strap on your proton pack & do some ghost busting!
Still from the movie, The Stone Tape
Loftus Hall- Ireland
1.) The Quietus
https://thequietus.com/culture/film/film-the-stone-tape-50-anniversary/
2.) En.m.wikipedia.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape_theory
3.) Hauntedwalk.com
https://hauntedwalk.com/news/the-stone-tape-theory/
4.) The Ghost in my Machine
influence-of-memory-and-emotion/
5.) Using GIS to analyze relationships and explore paranormal occurrences in the Continental US