| November
1998
Ball lightning, ghosts and other outlaws
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Like many people in increasingly internet-crazy Singapore, I was awake and at my keyboard at 12.55 a.m. on Thursday, 26 November, when an enormous explosion blasted the stillness of the night. My flat shook at least three times. I glanced at the clock beside me as I got up from my seat. Looking out the window, I could not see anything unusual. The road was empty, but it was close to 1 a.m. after all, and my neighbours weren't spilling out of their homes. I looked at the sky, but it was a clear night. No thunderclouds in sight.
So I behaved like a well-practised urbanite, shrugged it off and went back to my computer. The disturbance was not reported in the morning papers; it had probably gone to press by then. The afternoon tabloid didn't have much to report either: just that about 500 metres away from where I lived, a man was found dead at a bus stop. The first few persons who rushed down to where a column of smoke rose found his body all blackened. There was a hole in his chest, and smoke was coming out of it. However, the bus shelter itself and the overhead concrete beams for the urban metro ("MRT" in Singapore-speak) were unscathed. Just the dead man and some charred things a metre or so around him. The police suspected a bomb and requested the assistance of explosives experts from the army to help them in their investigations.
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Ball lightning However, while reading the short report, another thought briefly crossed my mind. The man was killed by ball lightning. Frankly, I don't know anything about ball lightning. It's just one of those things from my younger sci-fi days that will forever inhabit the recesses of my mind, making unexpected (and unfounded) associations every now and then. In the footnotes, you'll find some links to websites about ball lightning, but basically, they are bundles of very high voltage about the size of a grapefruit or basketball. Unlike the usual forked lightning, they are not much brighter than a lightbulb, and they travel relatively slowly, no more than 3 metres a second, or 10 kilometres per hour. They don't just drop to earth, but often appear to float about and not even in a straight line. There have been reports of them coming into homes through glass windows, leaving the window panes unaffected. Sometimes they disappear quietly, especially when found in aircraft; other times, there are violent explosions. They are rare phenomena, and you'd be very unlucky to be standing in their way. Because they are so rare, not much hard data have been collected about them. Up until the 1970s or 80s, mainstream science did not take ball lightning seriously, dismissing reports that had been accumulating for decades, as optical illusion or wild imagination. I first came across ball lightning in science fiction, along with spontaneous combustion, and even now, this phenomenon is mostly mixed up with listings of paranormal sightings rather than meteorology. In the yellow box on the right is an
excerpt that tells how even when people see ball lightning, it can be
under-reported, simply because the information doesn't fit any
pre-existing theory of science. Ghosts The bus stop where the man died will probably be visited by his family and friends, and being Chinese, they will most likely burn incense and make offerings at the very location. They believe the spirit, so rudely torn from its body, needs to be appeased, or else it shall wander the earth, unsettled and perhaps in search of revenge. In other words, a ghost. Now, this is the paranormal issue par excellence. The biggest contradiction to the system. It keeps mocking our beliefs regarding our place on earth, and our conceptions of life, death, salvation, reincarnation and all that sort of thing. Most of us don't know what to think. When we get rational about it, we behave exactly as described in the quotation above -- since it can't be explained, it probably doesn't exist! Yet, yet, yet … there are just too many reports, stretching back to time immemorial, to dismiss completely out of hand. Just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine had this personal story to tell: Years ago, he was a student in Australia. With two other friends, they set out on a driving tour. One evening, they drove into a small town and decided it was nice place to spend the night. They found a bed & breakfast -- a charming house -- and was met by an old lady at the door. They were given a lovely room upstairs, with three comfortable beds, paintings on the walls and various homely touches. They slept well, being tired from a long day. The next morning, they came downstairs and had breakfast. Then they prepared to set off again. They asked the landlady how much they owed her. She said payment was not necessary. She insisted she didn't want anything at all. So the guys left, but felt bad about it. They decided, at the very least, they should buy her a gift. They did, and drove back to the house. When they got there, it looked strangely deserted, like it had not been lived in in years. They asked each other, was this the house? They looked around the neighbourhood, and they all agreed, yes, this was the same house. Well, maybe in the brighter daylight, its age showed more clearly than in the night or in the early light of morning. They knocked but no one was in. The door was unlocked so they stepped in to look for the old lady. No one was there. They went upstairs and they found the same room they had slept in, except that it was pretty bare. The three beds were there but little else. They asked each again, was this the room? Yes, definitely, this was the room. But … no, there was no need to discuss what they all were thinking at that very moment. They were out of there in a flash. As they drove off they convinced themselves they had made a wrong turn somewhere and had come upon a different house. But had they? Would a bed & breakfast landlady waive payment? This friend of mine is a regular churchgoer. I doubt if he can ever reconcile this experience with the "model" as taught by his religion.
Then last night, another story was told to me by an ex-colleague. A few years ago, he taught martial arts to a group of boys at a Chinese temple. For warming up, he asked them to run a circuit around the compound. When the boys came back, they said they were never going there again, pointing to the stretch looping around the back of the temple. There was a monster there. The next session he held with the boys, he ran with them. And once again, when they ran through the rear section of the temple complex, which housed the urns and ashes of the dead, the boys were frightened when they saw the 'monster'. My friend couldn't see anything, but almost all the boys did. To try to get to the bottom of all this, my friend spoke with the monk, and the monk said, yes indeed, there was a ghost loitering at the back. He was described as a big headless torso. Children can see these things more readily than adults, he believed. We probably have closed minds. For example, he said, children are afraid to go into elevators in hospitals. They see things inside.
Singapore has all kinds of legacies from the Second World War. For years, I've heard various stories about Selarang Barracks. The most common, which was told to me again in another version last night, was about the sound of boots stomping and marching in the parade square and along the roads in the middle of the night. But if you looked, there'd be nothing there, if you're lucky. If you're not, you might see something you wouldn't want to see ever again. Selarang Barracks was a major internment centre for prisoners of war when the Japanese occupied Singapore. What brutalities were committed there, we may never fully know. * * * * *
It's not just the hard sciences that have elaborate constructs in an attempt to explain reality. In the realm of the societal, we have have elaborate constructs that we hew to, in an effort to understand the social arrangements among us. In many societies, homosexual orientation is outside the model, without any place in a scheme of man, wife, children, grandfathers and grandmothers. Similar denial mechanisms are brought in when faced with the occasional reporting of a homosexual relationship: objectively, it does not exist, it is an error of perception, like ghosts and ball lightning. Homosexuality is dismissed as a psychiatric condition -- in other words, it's all in the mind. It's a phase, they may say, a fad. You only think you're homosexual; in actual fact, nobody is. Denial can only get you so far. When your son
or daughter is gay, it's a reality whether or not the social construct
accommodates it. When ball lightning hits you, whatever the scientists may
believe, you're pretty objectively dead. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
None
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