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Unexplained uneasy feeling
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ToneStone
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From : Colin Wilson - Strange Talents
Jul 04, 2011, 19:11
An account from : T.C.Lethbridge

Passing the witch's cottage, he experienced a 'nasty feeling', a suffocating sense of dep-ression. With a scientist's curiousity, he walked around the cottage, and noticed an interest-ing thing. He could step into the depression and then out of it again, just as if it was some kind of an invisible wall.
The depression reminded Lethbridge of something that had happened when he was a teenager. He and his mother had gone for a walk in the Great Wood near Wokingham. It was a lovely morning; yet quite suddenly both of them experienced 'a horrible feeling of gloom and depression, which crept upon us like a blanket of fog over the surface of the sea'. They hurried away, agreeing that it was something terrible and inexplicable. Afew days later, the corpse of a suicide was found a few yards from the spot where they had been standing, hidden by some bushes.
About a year after the death of the witch, another strange experience gave Tom the clue he was looking for. On a damp January afternoon, he and Mina drove down to Ladram Bay to collect seaweed for her gar-den. As Lethbridge stepped on to the beach, he once again experienced the feeling of gloom and fear, like a blanket of fog descend-ing upon him. Mina wandered off along the beach while Tom filled the sacks with sea-weed. Suddenly she came hurrying back, saying: 'Let's go. I can't stand this place a minute longer. There's something frightful here.'
The next day, they mentioned what had happened to Mina's brother he said he also had experienced the same kind of thing in a field near Avebury, in Wiltshire. The word 'field' made something connect in Tom's brain- he remembered that field telephones often short-circuit in warm, muggy weather. 'What was the weather like?' he asked. 'Warm and damp, said the brother.
An idea was taking shape. Water. . . .could that be the key? It had been warm and damp on Ladram beach. The following weekend, they set out for Ladram Bay a second time. Again, as they stepped on to the beach, both walked into the same bank of depression - or 'ghoul' as Lethbridge called it. Mina led Tom to the far end of the beach, to the place she had been sitting when she had been overwhelmed by the strange feel-ing. Here it was so strong that it made them feel giddy - Lethbridge described it as the feeling you get when you had a high tem-perature and are full of drugs. On either side of them were two small streams.
Mina wandered off to look at the scenery from the top of the cliff. Suddenly, she walked into the depression again. Moreover, she had an odd feeling, as if someone - or something - was urging her to jump over. She went and fetched Tom, who agreed that the spot was just as sinister as the place down on the seashore below.
Now he needed only one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and he found it - but only years later. Nine years after the first known experiences of depression were felt on those cliffs a man did commit suicide there. Lethbridge wondered whether the 'ghoul' was a feeling so intense that it had become timeless and imprinted itself on the area, casting its baleful shadow on those who stood there.
Whether from the past or from the future the feelings of despair were 'recorded' on the surroundings - but how?
The key, Lethbridge believed, was water. As an archaeologist, he had always been mildly interested in dowsing and water - divining. The dowser walks along with a forked hazel twig held in his hands, and when he stands above running water, the muscles in his hands and arms convulse and the twig bends either up or down. How does it work? Professor Y Rocard of the Sorbonne dis-covered that underground water produces changes in the earth's magnetic field and that is what the dowser's muscles respond to. The water does this because it has a field of its own, which interacts with the earth's field.
Significantly, magnetic fields are the means by which sound is recorded on tape covered with iron oxide. Suppose the magnetic field of running water can also record strong emotions - which after all, are basi-cally electrical activities in the human brain and body? such fields could well be strongest in damp and muggy weather.
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