A ghostly figure is sometimes seen haunting High Down near the Tennyson monument. Not so long ago an attempted ambush revealed the ghost's identity.
Ghost Ambush
During the winter of 1893 an ambush was set to catch a ghostly figure seen wafting the down-land above Farringford House, poet laureate Alfred Tennyson’s Isle of Wight home.
Since he died in October the previous year, there were claims it was the ghost of Tennyson himself.
Others thought different and said it was someone playing a joke, dressing up in the poet’s big hat and green cape.
To resolve the mystery the villagers of Freshwater took turns to watch the paths, but after nights of nothing most were ready to drop the idea and concede the joker had the better of them.
Next cold night their mystery man appeared, as Donald Parr remembers in his excellent book: ‘Ghosts of Hampshire & the Isle of Wight’.
The ghost-hunters were ready when the figure approached through the January mists and came toward their trap. No one dared breathe to make a sound to alert the target. The only noise was their own thump, thump, thump of heartbeat.
Before anyone knew what was what, the figure in big hat and cape breezed directly through the group, oblivious to their calls to stop; and wafted on down the path. “Everywhere suddenly turned cold!” said one ambusher recalling the ghostly encounter.
“It was like a cold damp piece of blotting paper passing through,” shuddered another.
The third man gulped. “I am convinced that what I, and so many others saw and had reported, was the spirit of Lord Tennyson. You see, I knew him so well.”
What Time is Now?
The standard idea to which most of us adhere is time moves on. It flows from past into present, on into future. As you read this, the past just passed no longer exists.
Ghosts cannot be the past, it is gone. The figure who passed through the ambush could not have been anything other than hallucination.
The standard model of time leaves no room for ghosts as time phenomena.
They must be supernatural. In rhe standard model of time, that was either hallucination, or it was the ghost of Alfred Tennyson.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
In the science of physics, time is treated as a dimension, like space. From the Theory of Relativity comes a very different idea: the Block Universe. Past, present and future coexist simultaneously. We exist as a giant 4D block. Experience only one "slice" at a time.
Time is landscape not flow. Near to hand is you in 1924, and over there you can find yourself again in 3010.
The ghost of Tennyson Down was merely a moment from the past leaking into the present. An echo from another temporal layer. Those ambushers saw, momentarily, a slice of sometime else.
Do moments in time get stuck in a loop, a glitch in the matrix? That does explain invisible footsteps heard at the same time every night. Or a ghostly figure seen up on Tennyson Down some early mornings.
The problem with this interesting model is that such things are only possible in Black Hole mathematics.
Quantum Theory Weirdness
Quantum theory suggests reality isn't fully fixed yet. At quantum scales particles exist in multiple possible states at once. Events only become definite when measured. Cause and effect can appear blurred.
Some interpretations of quantum mechanics even allow for retro-causality, where the future influences the past. And multiple branching timelines.
Reality is dependent on the observer.
The Tennyson Monument is a region where events have not yet settled into a single timeline.
The Future is the Past
The future may already exist, we just haven't yet reached it.
According to relativity, observers moving differently experience time differently. There is no universal "now". Someone elsewhere in the universe could already be in your future.
Are We Sailing Through Time?
Do we the conscious us, you and me, move, not time?
Do we construct the "now". Is memory just stored past experience. Does this explain those deja vu memory moments?
Or are these anomalies overlaps that sometimes happen in the multiverse?
Time is Weird
Time slows down during the stress of fear, and speeds up to repetition. Brains can misorder events. Does our brain sometimes stitch together, jumble up, generate ghosts?
"Something was there, a second ago..." type experience.
Are anomalies time perception distortions caused by the brain?
Or memory, and the excitable effects of expectation?
And what about the Block Universe? It does support the Stone Tapes explanation.
Are ghosts not spirits of the dead, but the past, briefly visible?
Time based explanations do not prove ghosts exist. But they do shift the question from "Are ghosts real?" to "Are we always seeing the present clearly?"