HGB Ep. 538 - The Haunting of Carl Jung

Moment in Oddity - Hodges Meteorite

Star gazing is a pastime that many people enjoy, especially during meteor showers when the skies can put on quite the show! Back in November of 1954 there was a woman by the name of Ann Hodges who had decided to take a little nap in her (si luh kaa guh) Sylacauga, Alabama home. She was fast asleep when a nine pound meteorite came crashing through her ceiling, proceeded to bounce off a radio and then hit her body. A photograph of her painful looking injury was shared in Time magazine. The space rock was named 'Hodges meteorite' for her, and while the meteorite brought her fame, the event did not bring her good fortune. Ann ended up in a legal battle with her landlady due to the landlady believing the meteorite should belong to her, as the owner of the home. Sadly with all the stress entailed in the court process, Ann Hodges' mental and physical health began to decline. She and her husband separated, and she passed away from kidney failure in a nursing home at the young age of 52. Although there have been other meteorites that have made their way to earth, Ann's story of being physically hit by a space rock has become one of the most well documented tales. So the next time you're gazing towards the heavens being tantalized by the light show, you really don't need to be concerned about being hit by one of the meteorites. Because the likelihood of that happening, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - First Flush Toilet Patent

In the month of May, on the 19th, in 1775, the first flush toilet was patented. Alexander Cumming was a Scottish watchmaker, organ builder and inventor. Many would say that his greatest innovation was the S-shaped pipe, also known as a U-bowl trap, which was located below the toilet bowl. This created a seal to prevent sewer gas from seeping up and out of a toilet. Although Alexander did not invent the first flush toilet, his patented design was a significant improvement on the original model. At the time of Cumming's toilet patent, houses were not furnished with indoor plumbing or running water. In addition, there were no sewers for the flushed waste to flow into. Earth closets remained the most prevalent form of waste removal until the second half of the 19th century. Despite his ambitious invention, it took nearly one hundred years for the new style of toilet to catch on. Once established as a modern water closet, his style of toilet was still being used all the way into the early 20th century.  

The Haunting of Carl Jung (Yoong)

Carl Jung was a world renowned psychoanalyst and although he was a man of science, he embraced the unusual readily. Not only did Jung develop the theory of synchronicity, but he was a big fan of the occult and studied the ways that mythology affected people's psyches. On top of that, he wasn't shy about sharing experiences he had at a haunted cottage in England. On this episode, we will explore the life and haunting of Carl Jung.

This episode is going to be a little more cerebral. There can be no doubt that psychology and the paranormal go hand-in-hand. Obviously, some mental illnesses can manifest hallucinations like audible voices and visions of monsters. Science has actually studied the connection of trauma to paranormal happenings. H.J. Irwin published a paper in February 1994 entitled "Childhood trauma and the origins of paranormal belief: a constructive replication." Interestingly. he found that "compared to 89 control participants, a sample of 32 adults who were children of alcoholics had stronger beliefs in witchcraft, superstitions, and precognition." Carl Jung's work is fascinating for the paranormal enthusiast because he explored all the various parameters of supernatural occurrences like synchronicity and precognition and even coined terms for many of them. But first, let's work our way through the biographical part of Carl Jung, separate from his work. 

Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland. He grew up as the only child of a Protestant clergyman. It was a lonely life and he was without his mother from an early age due to her struggle with mental illness. She was checked into a psychiatric hospital when Jung was only three. His father would have a crisis of faith as he got older. Jung decided to go to the University of Basel, rather than follow his father into the clergy, and he studied a variety of sciences before he decided medicine would be his route. These other studies would most certainly influence his later work. After graduating, he went on to the University of Zurich for another two years to get his M.D. While he attended this University, he worked at Burgholzli Asylum and developed theories around certain words, emotions and sexual connections with patients. Not surprisingly, he gravitated towards Sigmund Freud and his work.

Jung would meet Freud and work with the man for five years, starting in 1907. There was a big conflict with Freud though. Freud wanted to make Jung his heir apparent, but the men had different ideas and Jung saw himself as a young colleague to Freud, not a student. And as Jung had these complex dreams that Freud couldn't understand, the two men would quarrel. Jung also drifted away from the idea that sexuality was the foundation of neurosis. The friendship would end and Freud would alienated Jung from his collegues and others in the community. This was all good as it drove Jung deeper into his own work and he developed analytical psychology. He traveled the world and studied various culture and held professorships at both the University of Basel and the Federal Polytechnical in Zurich.

In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach and they would have five children. Emma passed away in 1955. Carl Jung started to have serious health issues in March of 1961. In May he had a slight stroke that affected his ability to speak and while he had no other impairments, he began to tell people that he was dying. He had another slight stroke about two weeks later and this would leave him in bed until his death on June 6, 1961 at the age of 85. He had received several awards and honors in his lifetime. Jung wrote a lot and 18 volumes make up his Collected Works. Throughout these works, Jung put forward the idea that a person needed to find their true self and that this could be accomplished through studying there own dreams and imaginations. Jung called this individuation. 

Long after his death, in 2009, The Red Book was published. The Red Book, or Liber Novus as it is officially known, was Jung's Magnum Opus and he described it as a "record of his confrontations with the unconscious." This was written from 1914 to 1930 and contains Jung's own color illustrations, and accounts of his fantasies, dreams and induced hallucinations. Jung was a strong believer in duality. He once said, "Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness." Jung's analyst is much of where the Myers-Briggs Personality Test gets its foundation. Jung was the one who realized that people could be either extroverts or introverts or some variation of those. 

We are huge fans of synchronicity and so we appreciate Carl Jung for bringing this hypothesis to the masses. Jung defined synchronicity as "an acausal connecting principle, whereby internal, psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains." One well known example he used to explain the theory featured a patient who told him that they had dreamed that someone gave them a piece of gold jewelry that looked like a scarab beetle. At the same time that the patient was relating this dream, Jung saw a rose-chafer beetle outside the window and he let it in and handed it to the patient with them both mesmerized by what just happened. Jung first put the term synchronicity out to the world in 1930 and he formed much of his hypothesis from philosophical points of Chinese Taoism. At this same time, Jung was working on his Dream Analysis Seminars, which would continue through the 1930s.

Jung was fascinated with dreams and spent years presenting his theories on dream interpretation. What some people may not know is that he had a very personal reason for becoming enamored with dreams. He himself seemed to have prophetic visions and dreams starting back in 1896. When Jung started having his visions, he thought he was becoming schizophrenic. That wasn't a term yet, but that best describes what Jung thought and these were really the core people he worked with, those with deep psyche issues. His mother had asked him to go visit a friend of hers named Frau Rauschenbach and it was during this  visit that he caught a glimpse of a young woman named Emma Rauschenbach. Although the interaction was very brief, Jung knew that she was going to be his wife even though she was only 14 at the time and the daughter of a rich man, while Jung was a poor medical student. Seven years later, Jung was doing much better financially and he sought out Emma and courted her, marrying her in 1903. Jung wrote of his mother's death in his autobiography Memories, Dream, Reflections, "I was in a dense, gloomy forest; fantastic, gigantic boulders lay about among huge jungle-like trees. It was a heroic, primeval landscape. Suddenly I heard a piercing whistle that seemed to resound through the whole universe. My knees shook. Then there were crashings in the underbrush, and a gigantic wolfhound with a fearful, gaping maw burst forth. At the sight of it, the blood froze in my veins. It tore past me, and I suddenly knew: the Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul. I awoke in deadly terror." The next morning, he learned of her death.

Another example of his intuition came right before World War I broke out. He had one vision and three dreams that convinced him that Europe's future would be filled with blood. His vision occurred in 1913 and he wrote, "I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about an hour…. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. 'Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.'" The three dreams followed in 1914 and he saw Europe covered in ice with all the vegetation dead. Visions continued for him throughout his life, all the way up to his deathbed when he gave a final vision.

As we said earlier, Jung's father was a pastor and Jung referred to himself as Christian. Jung met two what we'll call characters in his deep unconscious called Elijah and Salome. Elijah was the Old Testament prophet, so a precursor to the Messiah and Salome was thought to be the one who murdered the Messiah before Christ came. Think of this way. Elijah was like John the Baptist and Salome was the one who asked for his head. In the Red Book, this symbolizes Jung moving from intellectual that he is comfortable with (Elijah) to the esoteric that scares him (Salome) and him realizing that they are both a part of him. Jung wrote on pg. 264 in The Red Book of Salome, "Salome loves me, do I love her? I hear wild music, tambourine, a sultry moonlit night, the bloody-staring head of the holy one - fear seizes me." Jung delved into these characters in his Black Books as well.

While alchemy mainly dealt with transforming ore into gold, Jung saw something else in alchemy and he combined this with occult mysticism. He felt it could pertain to personal rebirth, especially after trauma. And he embraced the symbolism of alchemy and thought that those same symbols appeared in the psyche of his patients. This helped Jung to embrace the purpose of spirituality in psychic health as well. He put his thoughts and theories into volume 12 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung in 1944. The main premise to this functioning is that Jung believed in a Collective Unconscious. He not only coined the term, but defined it. This collective incorporated archetypes and ancient primal symbols, which he defined as things like the Tree of Life, The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man and the Shadow. This was in stark contrast to Freud's personal unconscious. Jung believed his theory was proven in the fact that cultures from around the world that had no contact with each other would come up with similar themes in their myths. Now, of course, we could argue that these cultures have different names for the exact same experiences. For example, the world-wide flood. We've heard many different cultural stories with different names for characters, but the exact same premise. While Jung would say they have similar themes because the unconscious would all understand one man building a big boat, some of us might say there really was just one man who built a boat, he just was called by a different name in different cultures. What say you? Interpreting these alchemical symbols also helped Jung in his dream analysis.

Jung wrote a letter to one of his students who was dying named Kristine Mann in 1945. In this letter, he revealed a near death experience he had that convinced him that life goes on after death. Jung fell on some ice and broke his foot and had a heart attack in the hospital in 1944. He wrote, "...I was free, completely free and whole, as I never felt before. I found myself 15,000 km from the earth and I saw it as an immense globe resplendent in an inexpressibly beautiful blue light. I was on a point exactly above the southern end of India, which shone in a bluish silvery light with Ceylon like a shimmering opal in the deep blue sea. I was in the universe, where there was a big solitary rock containing a temple. I saw its entrance illuminated by a thousand small flames of coconut oil. I knew I was to enter the temple and I would reach full knowledge. But at this moment a messenger from the world (which by then was a very insignificant corner of the universe) arrived and said that I was not allowed to depart and at this moment the whole vision collapsed completely. But from then on for three weeks I slept, and was wakeful each night in the universe and experienced the complete vision. Not I was united with somebody or something – it was united, it was the hierosgamos, the mystic Agnus. It was a silent invisible festival permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss, such as I never could have imagined as being within reach of human experience. Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return. As a matter of fact, during the first month after my first vision I suffered from black depressions because I felt that I was recovering. It was like dying. I did not want to live and to return to this fragmentary, restricted, narrow, almost mechanical life, where you were subject to the laws of gravity and cohesion, imprisoned in a system of three dimensions and whirled along with other bodies in the turbulent stream of time. There was fullness, meaning fulfillment, eternal movement (not movement in time)."

Jung was interested in Parapsychology and corresponded with J.B. Rhine from 1934 to 1954. He also studied I Ching for a summer in the 1920s and Jung wrote of astrology to Freud, "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find clues to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up...I dare say that one day we shall find in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words, libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment." Jung used birthcharts to augment his psychiatric therapy. 

And while we wouldn't declare that Jung believed unequivocally in ghosts, he knew that science couldn't explain all phenomenon. Particularly after his own experiences. In the summer of 1920, Carl Jung was in England to give a series of lectures and his host arranged for him to spend his weekends at a cottage in the country. It was here that Jung experienced ghost activity and he shared this in a book edited by paranormal researcher Fanny Moser in 1950 titled "Hauntings. False Belief or True?" Jung wrote, "The first night, tired from the strenuous work of the week, I slept well. We spent the next day walking and talking. That evening, feeling rather tired, I went to bed at 11 o’clock, but did not get beyond the point of drowsing. I only fell into a kind of torpor, which was unpleasant because I felt I was unable to move. Also it seemed to me that the air had become stuffy, and that there was an indefinable, nasty smell in the room. I thought I had forgotten to open the windows. Finally, in spite of my torpor, I was driven to light a candle: both windows were open, and a night wind blew softly through the room, filling it with the flowery scents of high summer. There was no trace of the bad smell. I remained half awake in my peculiar condition, until I glimpsed the first pale light of dawn through the east window. At this moment the torpor dropped away from me like magic, and I fell into a deep sleep from which I awoke only towards nine o’clock. On Sunday evening I mentioned in passing to Dr. X that I had slept remarkably badly the night before. He recommended me to drink a bottle of beer, which I did. But when I went to bed the same thing happened: I could not get beyond the point of drowsing. Both windows were open. The air was fresh to begin with, but after about half an hour it seemed to turn bad; it became stale and fuggy, and finally somehow repulsive. It was hard to identify the smell, despite my efforts to establish its nature. The only thing that came into my head was that there was something sickly about it. I pursued this clue through all the memories of smells that a man can collect in eight years of work at a psychiatric clinic. Suddenly I hit on the memory of an old woman who was suffering from an open carcinoma. This was quite unmistakably the same sickly smell I had so often noticed in her room. As a psychologist, I wondered what might be the cause of this peculiar olfactory hallucination. But I was unable to discover any convincing connection between it and my present state of consciousness. I only felt very uncomfortable because my torpor seemed to paralyze me. In the end I could not think any more, and fell into a torpid doze. Suddenly I heard the noise of water dripping. “Didn’t I turn off the tap properly?” I thought. “But of course, there’s no running water in the room—so it’s obviously raining—yet today was so fine.” Meanwhile the dripping went on regularly, one drop every two seconds. I imagined a little pool of water to the left of my bed, near the chest of drawers. “Then the roof must leak,” I thought. Finally, with a heroic effort, so it seemed to me, I lit the candle and went over to the chest of drawers. There was no water on the floor, and no damp spot on the plaster ceiling. Only then did I look out of the window: it was a clear, starry night. The dripping still continued. I could make out a place on the floor, about eighteen inches from the chest of drawers, where the sound came from. I could have touched it with my hand. All at once the dripping stopped and did not come back. Towards three o’clock, at the first light of dawn, I fell into a deep sleep. No—I have heard death-watch beetles. The ticking noise they make is sharper. This was a duller sound, exactly what would be made by drops of water falling from the ceiling. I was annoyed with myself, and not exactly refreshed by this weekend. But I said nothing to Dr. X. The next weekend, after a busy and eventful week, I did not think at all about my previous experience. Yet hardly had I been in bed for half an hour than everything was there as before: the torpor, the repulsive smell, the dripping. And this time there was something else: something brushed along the walls, the furniture creaked now here and now there, there were rustlings in the corners. A strange restlessness was in the air. I thought it was the wind, lit the candle and went to shut the windows. But the night was still, there was no breath of wind. So long as the light was on, the air was fresh and no noise could be heard. But the moment I blew out the candle, the torpor slowly returned, the air became fuggy, and the creakings and rustlings began again. I thought I must have noises in my ear, but at three o’clock in the morning they stopped as promptly as before. The next evening I tried my luck again with a bottle of beer. I had always slept well in London and could not imagine what could give me insomnia in this quiet and peaceful spot. During the night the same phenomena were repeated, but in intensified form. The thought now occurred to me that they must be parapsychological. I knew that problems of which people are unconscious can give rise to exteriorization phenomena, because constellated unconscious contents often have a tendency to manifest themselves outwardly somehow or other. But I knew the problems of the present occupants of the house very well, and could discover nothing that would account for the exteriorizations. The next day I asked the others how they had slept. They all said they had slept wonderfully. The third night it was even worse. There were loud knocking noises, and I had the impression that an animal, about the size of a dog, was rushing round the room in a panic. As usual, the hubbub stopped abruptly with the first streak of light in the east. The phenomena grew still more intense during the following weekend. The rustling became a fearful racket, like the roaring of a storm. Sounds of knocking came also from outside in the form of dull blows, as though somebody were banging on the brick walls with a muffled hammer. Several times I had to assure myself that there was no storm, and that nobody was banging on the walls from outside. The next weekend, the fourth, I cautiously suggested to my host that the house might be haunted, and that this would explain the surprisingly low rent. Naturally he laughed at me, although he was as much at a loss as I about my insomnia. It had also struck me how quickly the two girls [whom ‘Dr. X’ had engaged as housekeepers] cleared away after dinner every evening, and always left the house long before sundown. By eight o’clock there was no girl to be seen. I jokingly remarked to the girl who did the cooking that she must be afraid of us if she had herself fetched every evening by her friend and was then in such a hurry to get home. She laughed and said that she wasn’t at all afraid of the gentlemen, but that nothing would induce her to stay a moment in this house alone, and certainly not after sunset. “What’s the matter with it?” I asked. “Why, it’s haunted, didn’t you know? That’s the reason why it was going so cheap. Nobody’s ever stuck it here.” It had been like that as long as she could remember. But I could get nothing out of her about the origin of the rumor. Her friend emphatically confirmed everything she had said. As I was a guest, I naturally couldn’t make further inquiries in the village. My host was skeptical, but he was willing to give the house a thorough looking over. We found nothing remarkable until we came to the attic. There, between the two wings of the house, we discovered a dividing wall, and in it a comparatively new door, about half an inch thick, with a heavy lock and two huge bolts, that shut off our wing from the unoccupied part. The girls did not know of the existence of this door. It presented something of a puzzle because the two wings communicated with one another both on the ground floor and on the first floor. There were no rooms in the attic to be shut off, and no signs of use. The purpose of the door seemed inexplicable. The fifth weekend was so unbearable that I asked my host to give me another room. This is what had happened: it was a beautiful moonlight night, with no wind; in the room there were rustlings, creakings, and hangings; from outside, blows rained on the walls. I had the feeling there was something near me, and opened my eyes. There, beside me on the pillow, I saw the head of an old woman, and the right eye, wide open, glared at me. The left half of the face was missing below the eye. The sight of it was so sudden and unexpected that I leapt out of bed with one bound, lit the candle, and spent the rest of the night in an armchair. The next day I moved into the adjoining room, where I slept splendidly and was no longer disturbed during this or the following weekend. I told my host that I was convinced the house was haunted, but he dismissed this explanation with smiling skepticism. His attitude, understandable though it was, annoyed me somewhat, for I had to admit that my health had suffered under these experiences. I felt unnaturally fatigued, as I had never felt before. I therefore challenged Dr. X to try sleeping in the haunted room himself. He agreed to this, and gave me his word that he would send me an honest report of his observations. He would go to the house alone and spend the weekend there so as to give me a “fair chance.” Next morning I left. Ten days later I had a letter from Dr. X. He had spent the weekend alone in the cottage. In the evening it was very quiet, and he thought it was not absolutely necessary to go up to the first floor. The ghost, after all, could manifest itself anywhere in the house, if there was one. So he set up his camp bed in the conservatory, and as the cottage really was rather lonely, he took a loaded shotgun to bed with him. Everything was deathly still. He did not feel altogether at ease, but nevertheless almost succeeded in falling asleep after a time. Suddenly it seemed to him that he heard footsteps in the corridor. He immediately struck a light and flung open the door, but there was nothing to be seen. He went back grumpily to bed, thinking I had been a fool. But it was not long before he again heard footsteps, and to his discomfiture he discovered that the door lacked a key. He rammed a chair against the door, with its back under the lock, and returned to bed. Soon afterwards he again heard footsteps, which stopped just in front of the door; the chair creaked, as though somebody was pushing against the door from the other side. He then set up his bed in the garden, and there he slept very well. The next night he again put his bed in the garden, but at one o’clock it started to rain, so he shoved the head of the bed under the eaves of the conservatory and covered the foot with a waterproof blanket. In this way he slept peacefully. But nothing in the world would induce him to sleep again in the conservatory. He had now given up the cottage. A little later I heard from Dr. X that the owner had had the cottage pulled down, since it was unsaleable and scared away all tenants. Unfortunately I no longer have the original report, but its contents are stamped indelibly on my mind. It gave me considerable satisfaction after my colleague had laughed so loudly at my fear of ghosts."

Diane found this interesting interview with Professor Richard Noll who wrote The Jung Cult. A man named Ivan Tyrrell is interviewing him and Noll says, "So these folks were following a charismatic leader who claimed some sort of contact with transcendent reality, which is really what the collective unconscious is. He came up with that term in 1916, but was playing around with it before then. He sometimes called it “the spirit world” or “the land of the dead”, and, when he talks about “the collective unconscious” he is really getting back to his spiritualist roots. Jungians still keep saying to me: “You're wrong, you don't understand psychological reality”. But if you read Jung, it's pretty clear what his beliefs were. He was saying that gods ruled the collective unconscious. I'm simply saying that Jung was using, or rather hiding behind, psychological jargon to reintroduce the Hellenistic cosmos. 

Tyrrell: What do Jungians themselves say about this? Presumably their argument might be along the lines that these gods and spiritual forces are symbolic of psychological states. Is that the kind of argument you hear from them? Noll: Well, yes, that's always it. They say that I don't understand what Jung was talking about - that his cosmology was just a metaphor for psychological reality and not that he's actually talking about gods. But if you really read Jung, he is. He certainly did believe in gods communicating with humans, spirits and the spirit world, reincarnation and all of that stuff. Of course, it is primarily those Jungian analysts who are trying to present the ideas as respectable and scientific who get upset when you point this out. Everyday Jungians – they know what he is talking about – and it's the cultish beliefs that they are attracted to. For them he was talking about some other reality."

What do we make of Jung's visions and dreams. Was something psychic going on here? Was he possibly crossing into other dimensions, kind of like on an Ayahuasca trip? Was Carl Jung haunted? That is for you to decide!

Show Notes:

Irwin HJ. Childhood trauma and the origins of paranormal belief: a constructive replication. Psychol Rep. 1994 Feb;74(1):107-11. doi: 10.2466/pr0.1994.74.1.107. PMID: 8153198.