Ever since we have looked over the horizon and wondered what lies beyond, there have been those willing to trek off to find out. Exploration seems to be an innate feature of human nature, the need to shine a light on the dark corners of our understanding, a force that drives us to further penetrate realms we do not understand. Many of these travelers have, over the centuries, brought back amazing and mysterious tales from these faraway lands, and sometimes it is difficult to know what to make of them. Are they illuminating new places and things long immersed in shadow, or are they tall tales and flights of fancy? It can be sometimes hard to tell, but many tales have been brought back by explorers from the wilds of our world that involve all manner of mystery, bizarreness, and the supernatural.
One such individual who had plenty of such stories to tell was an Ottoman explorer who traveled the ends of the earth to bring back many odd tales, including those of the decidedly supernatural. The Ottoman explorer, traveler, and writer Evliya Çelebi was born in 1611 in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey, during the height of the Ottoman Empire, which was created by Turkish tribes in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and grew exponentially to be one of the most imposing and powerful states in the whole world during the 15th and 16th centuries. The son of the chief court jeweler, Celebi’s intelligence, wit, extensive knowledge of the Koran, and natural gift for music and languages, with him able to speak Arabic, Persian, Greek and Latin, captured the attention of the imam of Sultan Murad IV, and at just the tender age of twelve he was taken in as an apprentice to Sultan, excelling as a Koran reader and able to recite long passages perfectly from memory, by some accounts all of it.
He did not start out as the intrepid traveler he would become; instead, he was absorbed in his studies of Arabic, calligraphy, and music at the Ottoman palace school, but at some point, he discovered his deep wanderlust when he began embarking on official travels that took him from Belgrade to Baghdad and from Crimea to Cairo. Even at this point, his ultimate goal was to be a member of the Imperial court; it was something his family also desperately wanted for him despite his urges to travel over the horizon, but one night, he was to have an epiphany that would change his life forever.
Evliya Çelebi
On the very night of his twentieth birthday, Celebi allegedly had a vision of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as His Companions and the four first caliphs of Islam in a vivid dream. In this dream, he was told to give up his designs of joining the court and rather spend his life traveling to the far corners of the world so that he might “compose a marvelous work” based on his adventures to far-flung exotic lands. The Prophet would tell him:
“Thou shalt travel through the whole world and be a marvel among men. Of the countries through which you will pass, of their castles, strongholds, wonderful antiquities, eatables and drinkables … the extent of their provinces and the length of the days there, draw up a description which will be a monument worthy of thee.”
On the strength of this potent dream, Celebi decided to defy his parents’ wishes to be a member of the Imperial court and give up everything to follow what the Prophet had told him to do. And so he set off on a life of journeys that would span the next three decades, traveling with an entourage of mules, camels, travel companions, and up to a dozen slaves at any given time, on extensive travels that would take him from one end of the known world to the other, often returning to enthrall the court with tales of adventure and mystery. Along the way, Celebi would compile a vast, sprawling 10-volume tome of travel memoirs and notes called the Seyahatname, or the “Book of Travels,” also sometimes referred to as the Tarihi seyyah (“Chronicle of a Traveler”), which has been called “the longest and fullest travel account in Islamic literature, perhaps in world literature.” Within the many hundreds of pages of this vast masterpiece of travel literature are tales of strange customs and lands, exotic people and cultures, fantastical animals, and bloody battles and massacres, as well as the landmarks, ethnography, history, and geography of the lands he visited in Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond, and all manner of bizarre and amazing tales of the things he had seen and done. It is an impressive and unique manuscript to be sure, with pages upon pages of amazing and spectacular adventures, but within these volumes, among the various exotic people, customs, and tales of far-flung lands beyond the understanding of the time are some stories that stand out as weirder than others, and here we get into all of the damn witches, vampires and zombies Celebi claims to have come across.
Throughout the pages of the Seyahatname, Celebi makes frequent mention of magic, sorcery, the supernatural, and metaphysical beings, and one prime example of this is an incident he claimed happened to him on the night of April 26, 1666, in the tiny Pedsi village of the Caucasus. He claimed that one dark, moonless evening, there had been a sudden, very intense flash of lightning outside that had roused him from his writings. These flashes continued, and when Celebi asked some of the villagers what was going on, they told him that once a year, there was a night during which Circassian witches and Abkhaz witches flew to the sky and engaged in battle in a great war. Astonished by this, Celebi then went outside to see for himself, where he was met by quite the bizarre sight.
He claimed that when he looked up he saw “witches on large trees, cubes, boats, carriage wheels and many other similar objects fighting witches on horses, cattle, carrion and dead camels, with snakes, horses and camel heads in their hands,” all behind the backdrop of intermittent flashes and swaths of bright light across the sky, now obviously not from lightning, but rather through the magical might of their sorcery. At one point, there was an enormous, thunderous explosion, after which “felt, poles, cubes, doors and carriage wheels, and parts of humans and animals such as horses” fell from the sky, followed by seven Abkhazian witches and seven Circassian witches hurtling to the ground, where they continued to fight. According to the account, the Circassian witches killed the Abkhazian witches by sucking their blood, after which they hurled the lifeless bodies onto a bonfire. After this, there was the crowing of roosters, and the remaining witches took flight to disappear into the night. Celebi makes it a point to mention that he would have never believed such a thing possible if he had not seen it himself, and we are left to wonder what was going on here.
Celebi would write of other encounters with witches as well. In one incident, he was staying in the Çalıkkavak village of Bulgaria when he claimed to have come across an “old miserable woman with messy hair and an ugly face and seven children.” This woman and her children entered the non-Muslim house where he was staying and gathered around the fire, where the women gathered up some ashes and performed some kind of arcane spell. After this, the old hag and the children allegedly transformed into chickens right before the eyes of Celebi and other members of his expedition. Celebi would write of what transpired next:
“The next thing we knew, a heathen was peeing on chickens. At that moment, they all turned into human beings. Some other people grabbed the woman and the children by the arms and beat them. We went and saw that the church was where they arrived later. They handed the woman over to the priest, and the priest excommunicated her. My men swore an oath after this incident. They all saw this incident and witnessed that the chickens turned into humans. That night, my nosebleed did not stop out of fear. The bleeding stopped in the morning.”
His other stories of witches seem to imply something we would be more familiar with as vampires. Celebi claimed that the Caucasus region was particularly infested with such creatures. He told of bloodsucking witches prowling remote villages and drinking the blood of the terrified populace, after which any villager who was fed on in such a way would become sick, die, and then rise from the dead to do the same thing as some sort of undead abomination. These terrifying entities were said to return to sleep in the ground during the day, and according to Celebi, the villagers would sometimes unearth one to find it flushed and the eyes bloodshot from having fed. This “witch” would then be dispatched with a long stake of blackberries that was “nailed to her belly,” and her body then burned to ashes in a fire. If this were done, then any of the other blood-drinking revenants that the witch had spawned would supposedly revert to normal human form. On other occasions, a blood-drinking witch would be captured, put in chains, and forced to confess her black magic, after which she would be killed with a stake and immolated, but not before some of her blood was taken to rub it on her victims to cure them of their affliction. If some of the details here sound familiar, it is because such tales are considered to be some of the earliest vampire stories, and are even thought to have influenced Bram Stoker for his book Dracula.
Is any of this true? That is a tough question to answer. The veracity of anything written in the Seyahatname has long been debated, as while Celebi claims that his work is the will of Allah and an honest chronicle, it is peppered with numerous stories and claims that seem like they can’t possibly be true. Interspersed throughout the vast tome are countless embellishments, flourishes, and just stuff he made up, such as inaccurate geography or descriptions of places he had obviously never been to, battles that could not have possibly happened as described, and numerous fantastical animals, people, and plants, including giant avian monsters, humans with animal heads, chimeras, dragon-like beasts, giant waxen plants like nothing known, a strange yellow tree whose leaves miraculously cured syphilis, and many other strange anomalies.
What makes it harder to weed out the fantasy, fairy tale elements is that there are also long passages that are actually incredibly accurate, matching up perfectly with what we now know about the places and people he encountered, as well as accurate and meticulous transcriptions of languages that were unknown at the time, while other stories are almost certainly tall tales and then there are those that incorporate elements of both. There could be an otherwise honest and sober, accurate depiction of history that will feature a jarring inclusion such as a cat freezing in midair as it jumps from roof to roof, a virgin woman giving birth to an elephant, or some other obvious flight of fancy.
This has all posed a bit of a conundrum for historians, as it is sometimes nearly impossible to parse fact from fiction in this hodgepodge of the real and imagined, and reading it is akin to trying to solve a puzzle. Indeed, some experts have claimed that only about 50 percent of the entire text is factual, while the other is heavy exaggeration or pure bunk. Some passages are obvious truths, while others are obvious lies, but there are also large swaths in which the lies are not particularly obvious, a sort of blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, making it even harder to tell if what you are reading is true or not and hiding possible tantalizing insights into history behind a murky lense. Edward White, author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America, has said of it:
“In the Seyahatname, pages can whistle by without an honest word in sight, though Evliya emphasizes that he is upholding the will of Allah. Typically, “Evliya the unhypocritical” reminds us of his pious commitment to scrupulousness just before he launches into an obvious lie about, say, an encounter with a woman from the Black Sea who gave birth to an elephant, the rhinoceros-riding tribes of the Sudan, or the man-eating Buddhists of Kalmyia. “God is my witness that this took place,” he says before one such tale—cast-iron evidence that it didn’t. Historians debate whether these fairy-tale inventions are intended as satirical barbs at the hyperbolic travel writers or an homage to the fantastical stories of Arabian Nights on which Evliya had grown up. Likely, it was both. But it’s also pretty clear that every now and then he simply got bored with faithfully recording reality and decided to amuse himself by splicing the mundane with the phantasmagorical. The fun for the reader comes in trying to spot the moment when empirical truth ends and one of Evliya’s campfire yarns begins.”
If he is lying, then it seems strange, considering he was such a devout Muslim, to the point that he routinely referred to non-Muslims as “infidels” and “heathens,” swearing to Allah that it was all true, that he would defy that faith to tell tall tales. Celebi would settle in Cairo near the end of his life, dying in 1684 to leave behind this fascinating and frustrating historical travel account, with no notes or indications from the author himself as to where reality ends and the tall tales begin. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, it was all a completely true and honest account of his travels; he insists so on many occasions, even swearing to Allah that it is so, and so we are left with this lengthy text that harbors tantalizing historical facts mixed in with a lot of question marks. Unfortunately for many who would study it, while the Seyahatname is very well-known in its native Turkey, it is more obscure in the West. Indeed, there currently is no complete English translation of the entire work, just certain parts, and the only other language it has been translated into to an appreciable degree is German, leaving much of it in the dark to those not up to speed on their Turkish.
We are left with an epic piece of travel literature that has fascinated and puzzled historians right up to the present, perpetually stuck in a limbo of interpretation and debate. How much of these accounts is true and what is false? Did this explorer ever really come across the supernatural creatures he claims he did? What are we to make of all this? It seems that in the end, Evliya Çelebi and his strange texts on his mysterious travels and encounters will likely forever remain in the shadows, cryptic and misunderstood.
Moving along, in the 19th century, the wealthy and eccentric English naturalist and explorer Charles Waterton traveled the world collecting an eclectic mix of specimens that he then used his formidable skills in taxidermy to create exhibitions for his estate, a sort of museum of the strange and macabre. He was, by all accounts, a rather odd individual, known for his remarkably eccentric behavior and myriad odd claims. For instance, he was known to prowl about his estate acting like a dog and biting strangers on their legs, dressing like a scarecrow and sitting in trees, pretending to be his own butler, and making a myriad of bizarre claims such as that he could “navigate the atmosphere,” but he was still nevertheless respected for his writings on natural history and conservation, which were groundbreaking at the time.
In 1804, Waterton made his way to the South American country of Guyana to take control of some of his uncle’s estates there, and he would branch out to explore and collect various specimens of the wildlife there as well, as he was wont to do. Between 1812 and 1824, he would make various journeys and expeditions out into the unexplored areas of the country, all the while collecting numerous specimens of wildlife, which he would put on display in his home, amassing an enormous menagerie of stuffed birds and animals in the process. He was known for his unique method of taxidermy, in which he would use a mercury-based chemical to harden the skins and make them hollow, yet very lifelike simulacrums of the animals they had been. One of the most famous of all of these was a curious little exhibition that concerned an anomalous head of a monkey-like creature that Waterton simply referred to as “The Nondescript.”
The origins of this peculiar specimen were written of in Waterton’s 1825 travel memoir Wanderings in South America, a fairly influential work which is said to have even captured the imagination of a young Charles Darwin, and turned out to date back to an expedition to the jungles of Guyana during which he came across a rather odd beast indeed. During the journey, the expedition allegedly came across a rather peculiar humanoid creature that was covered with thick hair and possessed a tail and a face with strikingly human features. The group did the human thing and promptly shot and killed it, after which Waterton claimed he had been forced to preserve merely the head and neck of the beast. Waterton would say of this:
“I also procured an animal which has caused not a little speculation and astonishment. In my opinion, his thick coat of hair and great length of tail, put his species out of all question; but then, his face and head cause the inspector to pause for a moment before he ventures to pronounce his opinion of the classification. He was a large animal, and as I was pressed for daylight, and moreover, felt no inclination to have the whole weight of his body upon my back, I contented myself with his head and shoulders, which I cut off, and have brought them with me to Europe.”
Since the weird specimen looked so incredibly human, albeit with a hairy body, there were all kinds of theories orbiting the find. One was that Waterton had actually shot, killed, and stuffed the corpse of a native tribesman, which he had then snuck into the country through bribing customs officials, which Waterton himself vehemently denied, claiming that it had been some sort of unidentified ape-like creature. Another theory was that the creature on display was exactly what Waterton claimed it to be: some sort of new type of primate.
The specimen itself was just the head and shoulders, with a strikingly human countenance with a hairless face and large eyes surrounded by a thick, red mane, sort of reminiscent of an orangutan. The specimen drew flocks of gasping, puzzled onlookers, but some were aware of Waterton’s skill with taxidermy and began to suspect that this was some sort of cleverly crafted fake. It was suggested that he had merely taken the corpse of a howler monkey, in particular its hindquarters, and modified it to make it more human in appearance. Indeed, he had already shown a propensity for using taxidermy for satire and to make a political point, such as using lizards to craft into likenesses of various famous Protestant figures (Waterton was a devout Roman Catholic), and he had indulged in creative taxidermy on many occasions before.
It was even pointed out that the “Nondescript” bore an uncanny resemblance to a customs official who had given Waterton some trouble on his return to England from Guyana. Apparently, when he had docked, there had been a customs inspector named Mr. Lushington, who had seen the mass of animal specimens and demanded that Waterton pay a premium tax on the haul. Waterton had fought the import tax, but had invariably been forced to pay it, which had apparently irritated him to no end.
The thing is, while with all of his other, more creative designs, he had readily admitted to the whole thing, with the Nondescript, he not only firmly denied any tampering with the specimen, but actually provided a full back story to capturing it. He always maintained that the specimen was real, and there were plenty of people who believed him. Why would he do such a thing? It has been suggested that he was trying to test his skill by presenting a hoax as real and seeing how well it stood up to scrutiny, or that it was even meant to be a beacon to try and draw more exploration to Guyana, or even a satirical jab at other naturalists of the time. Others think that this was just a long-running practical joke that he had thought up for the fun of it all, or merely a stubborn dis of the customs official who had irked him. To this day, the specimen is exhibited at the Wakefield Museum in England, and still generates controversy as to its origins and reality. In the end, it is unknown.
Finally, we get to the adventures of anthropologists. Like in any science, the anthropologist looks for studies of human activity through investigation of physical evidence, through stringent protocols, and fact-based research. Yet also, as in many sciences, the researcher sometimes hits a wall of bafflement in which they are no longer penetrating into the unknown, but groping along the edges of it, trying to make sense of it and find a way in. There have been a handful of these explorers and researchers who have come up against something they truly do not understand and which their training has not prepared them for, brushes with forces beyond their comprehension. So next up we will look at a selection of instances in which respected, highly seasoned scientific anthropologists in Africa had supernatural experiences that would challenge their beliefs and the very fundamentals of what reality is.
First off is American cultural anthropologist and professor of anthropology at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Paul Stoller, who is one of the most respected in his field, over his more than 30 years of field work earning many accolades, numerous academic awards, and grants from Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as receiving a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. The American Anthropological Association named him the recipient of the Robert B Textor Award for Excellence in Anthropology, and he has also won the coveted Anders Retzius Medal in Gold, given once every three years by the King of Sweden, for his scientific contributions to anthropology. He has written numerous ethnographies, biographies, memoirs, and novels, as well as countless articles, many of which have been nominated for various awards. He is highly respected in his field, and is also interesting in the fact that much of his fieldwork and studies relate to magic, sorcery and spirit possession.
Stoller was long interested in various ritual practices, specifically in Africa, and far from just sitting in his study reading about such things, he really went the whole hog. In the 1970s, he travelled to the Republic of Niger and Mali in order to live among the Songhay people and study their culture and linguistics. It was here that he would cultivate an interest in actual magic and sorcery, and he has said of the evolution of this interest in magic in the workshop, Weaving the World: Writing Evocative Ethnographies:
“I think that the topic chooses the anthropologist rather than the other way around. In Songhay they say that if you want to seek out sorcery or magic, you will never discover it. You might approach it, you might talk about it, you might meet some people, but it will never grab you. So, what happens according to them is, if you eat magic, which is, you eat the substances to transform yourself, then magic eats you. If you consume history, you are consumed by it. It is the larger force of things that focuses on you. In my case, my initial fieldwork was in linguistic anthropology and I was interested in Friday mosque sermons. I never sought out to learn about sorcery. But then – I described this in my book In Sorcery’s Shadow (1987) – there were these two birds living in a rafter of the house where I was living. They were pooping on my floor and I got all irritated with these birds so I would knock their nest down. They would fly away, but then build another nest and get closer and closer to where my desk was. So after a while I just stopped paying attention to them. One day one of the birds pooped on my head in the presence of a guy that I thought was a rice farmer. But he turned out to be a Songhay healer. He said, “I’ve seen a sign, you’ve been pointed out to me. Come to my house and begin to learn.” That is how I got into the topic of sorcery. For me at least, things have sought me out. I have stumbled into sorcery.”
Stoller would jump fully into the world of Songhay sorcery and magical practices, living in a hut and studying under a man named Adamu Jenitongo, considered to be one of the most knowledgeable and powerful Songhay sorcerers of his era, as well as under the apprenticeship of another sorcerer called Hamidou Salou. This took him into a murky world of strange powers, dark forces, and mysterious spirits that most outsiders have never even heard of, much less become a part of. Among his studies of various spells and rituals, he had some particularly odd experiences. One of these was a time he tried to help a friend bless his house, as it was apparently being terrorized by a powerful evil spirit called Dongo, which was greatly feared by the local people to the point that they did not dare even so much as invoke its name. The ritual involved the sacrifice of a black rooster, but Stoller apparently botched the spell and angered the spirit and causing it to plague him with misfortune. He would say of this:
“Things began to unravel a few days later. After a short trip to Tillaberi, Adamu Jenitongo’s village 75 miles north of Niamey, I returned to the capital city and was in a car accident, bruising my forehead when it slammed against the sun visor. The evening after the accident, I attended a wedding ceremony and developed a pounding headache, blurry vision, and a high fever – telltale signs of the onset of malaria. Complaining about my symptoms, his in-law, a physician, gave me sulfa drugs to teach the ‘malaria’. The drugs quickly produced an allergic reaction – a severe rash that spread over my torso and down my legs. I became more feverish and was soon too weak to walk. At night I had disturbing ‘malarial’ dreams, all of which were about my difficult death. After several days of suffering, I somehow gathered the strength to get out of bed, dress myself and hail a taxi, which I took to Hamidou’s hut. I told Hamidou my tale of transgression.”
His mentor chastised him, calling him a “foolish boy,” telling him that his attempt to banish Dongo had greatly angered the spirit, especially since he had tried it as just a lowly and unworthy apprentice. Stoller was sent on his way back to the United States to recuperate from his illness, along with a satchel of magical herbs, medicine, and resin to help him. Oddly, although he was very sick, doctors could find nothing physically wrong with him and no reason why he was ill. It wasn’t malaria or any other known disease; doctors were stumped. However, after burning the resin every day and taking the herbs and medicine he had been given by the sorcerer, he made a full recovery within a few days. Stoller would write several books on his experiences with the Songhay, including In Sorcery’s Shadow, The Burden of Writing the Sorcerer’s Burden: Ethnography, Fiction and the Future of Anthropological Expression, and Fusion of the Worlds: Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger, the latter of which would be nominated for the prestigious J.I. Staley Prize. He continues to do anthropology work and fill halls for his numerous lectures, as well as blogging regularly on culture, politics, and higher education for The Huffington Post.
Another anthropologist who experienced some odd things during fieldwork in Africa was English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who was a pioneer in the development of social anthropology, President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland from 1949–51, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1946 to 1970, and also the recipient of numerous honors, including the Rivers Memorial Medal and of the Huxley Memorial Medal, and he was even knighted in 1971. In short, he was no quack. He is best known for his work on various religious practices among African tribes, particularly in Sudan and among the Azande people of the upper Nile in the 1920s. While studying their ways, he did much research on their magic and witchcraft, and although he mostly did this through a scientific lens, he reportedly had some strange experiences that he would not be able to easily explain. In his book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, he writes of one particularly odd incident:
“I have only once seen witchcraft on its path. I had been sitting late in my hut writing notes. About midnight, before retiring, I took a spear and went for my usual nocturnal stroll. I was walking in the garden at the back of my hut, amongst banana trees, when I noticed a bright light passing at the back of my servants’ huts towards the homestead of a man called Tupoi. As this seemed worth investigation I followed its passage until a grass screen obscured the view. I ran quickly through my hut to the other side in order to see where the light was going to, but did not regain sight of it. I knew that one man, a member of my household, had a lamp that might have given off so bright a light, but next morning he told me that he had neither been out late at night nor had he used his lamp. There did not lack ready informants to tell me that what I had seen was witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, on the same morning, an old relative of Tupoi and an inmate of his homestead died. This event fully explained the light I had seen. I never discovered [the light’s] real origin, which was possibly a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate, but the coincidence of the direction along which the light moved and the subsequent death accorded well with Zande ideas.”
What was going on here? Finally, we have the English-American anthropologist Edith Turner, who, among the various far-flung people she studied, covering such places as Mexico, Israel, Japan, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Korea, also spent much time doing fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia and the Bagisu of Uganda. She was known for her interest in the various rituals, shamanism, and especially the magical healing practices of these places, and it was during her time in Africa that she would allegedly witness this type of magic firsthand. In 1985, as she was living among the Ndembu people, she was invited to attend a spiritual healing ceremony for a woman named Meru. Leading the ritual was a witch doctor by the name of Singleton, who had deemed the woman’s sickness to be caused by possession by a malicious spirit called an ihamba. After covering the victim and others present with red clay to protect themselves from the ihamba jumping into their bodies and taking some herbal concoction, the bizarre ritual began with trying to guide the spirit out of the body, which would supposedly take the form of a tooth, and Turner would describe what unfolded next in her book Experiencing Ritual:
“Clap, clap, clap – Mulandu was leaning forward, and all the others were on their feet – this was it. Quite an interval of struggle elapsed while I clapped like one possessed, crouching beside Bill amid a lot of urgent talk, while Singleton pressed Meru’s back, guiding and leading out the tooth. Meru’s face in a grin of tranced passion, her back quivering rapidly. Suddenly Meru raised her arm, stretched it in liberation, and I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. An opaque ‘plasma’ might describe it. This thing was a large gray blob about six inches across, a deep gray opaque thing emerging as a sphere. I was amazed-delighted. I still laugh with glee at the realization of having seen it, the ihamba, and so big! We were all just one in triumph. The gray thing was actually out there, visible, and you could see Singleton’s hands working and scrabbling on the back, and then the thing was there no more. Singleton had it in his pouch, pressing it in with his other hand as well. The receiving can was ready; he transferred whatever it was into the can and capped the castor oil leaf and bark lid over it. It was done. I did not merely intuit the spirit form emerging from Meru’s back but saw it, saw it with my own eyes. This is different from intuition or imagination; it is nearer to seeing a ghost.”
Rather oddly, Turner would claim to have psychic experiences and occasionally go into strange trances for the rest of her life. Such cases are curious because they come from trained scientific professionals and blur the line between the reality we know and the world beyond our normal senses.
What is going on in these cases? These are people who have gone out to faraway places that most of us could never imagine going to, getting peeks into cultures far removed from our everyday lives, and although expecting to see the strange, coming across things that they were perhaps not ready for and which challenged their beliefs. Whatever they experienced out there on their travels, it just goes to show that in some ways, no matter how much our knowledge of the world has increased, there are still dark pockets of the unknown lying out in the shadows.
