Herculaneum - A Tail

As many of you know, I volunteer at a local museum, and I’ve been working a Pompeii exhibit since it opened. It’s a great exhibit. I like to wander around, studying the artifacts and thinking about the people who made them and used them.

I’ve worked almost every job in the exhibit, but one of the most boring jobs is the VIP door: You’re there to help people who need to use the elevator to get to the second floor of the exhibit. Hours can pass where no one needs help. There’s a photo op nearby and I try and pass the time offering to take people’s pictures, but time still drags.

I pass the time reading up on Pompeii, the history, the last days, anything I can find that can be read on my phone. I’ve learned a lot about everything from volcanos, to water supplies in ancient times, to proper care of archeological sites once they’ve been uncovered. My excuse is that I want to be prepared when people ask me questions, which does happen from time to time. <Wink>

Herculaneum is/was a city, like Pompeii, that was also covered in the same eruption that buried Pompeii. It’s not so famous because it’s buried a lot deeper and there’s a modern city on top of it. Herculaneum is interesting for several reasons, perhaps more interesting than Pompeii. First, it apparently was a much wealthier city, with more elaborate art and treasure, and because it was buried deeper, many building are intact through the second story and above, unlike in Pompeii where only the first floors survived, for the most part.

One of the wealthy villas they have found is called the Villa of the Scrolls, because it contains a huge library of scrolls, many of which have been read, and many more are waiting for the technology that will allow us to read them. This villa was apparently owned by the uncle of the emperor Augustus. What’s exciting about these scrolls is that they are not records, but literary works of all kinds. What’s really cool is that some of the works are known to have existed, from references by other writers of the period, but no other copies had ever been found. For scholars, it’s really exciting to get your hands on an original version, not one handed down over the centuries, copied, re-copied, translated, and copied again.

My tail begins with a pain in my shoulder. It first showed up as not a big deal, but over time it got worse and worse and spread to include a stiff neck as well. At first I dismissed it, thinking that it was caused by holding and reading my phone for too long. But I do the same thing at at other positions in the exhibit without any problems. It wasn’t until last week that I connected all the dots and realized that I only got the pain when I was working in that precise place, the VIP door, and I when was reading about Herculaneum. Being who I am, I came to the conclusion that there was a connection. With enough digging, I came up with the following story.

I was a young boy in Herculaneum on that last day, August 24th, 79 CE. I had an older sister and parents. Our parents had not left with everyone else, I don’t know why, maybe they were worried about thieves. In any case, they had left earlier in the day, and had never come back. I was badly scared and wanted to leave, but my sister wouldn’t go and I couldn’t bring myself to leave on my own. I’ve sure we fought about it, but she was stubborn, a “Mom and Dad said wait here!” kind of thing. Later that night, well after dark, though with the clouds and ash, it was difficult to tell how late it was, things got seriously bad, and the part of the house I was in collapsed. A beam from the second floor hit me on the right shoulder, broke the bone and I was buried under the rubble of the second floor and roof. I have no idea where my sister was, somewhere else in our villa, I suppose. Fortunately I didn’t have to suffocate or suffer a lingering death from thirst, one of the pyroclastic flows of super heated air finished me off fairly quickly. I suppose that’s good, yes?

I can surmise that my family was pretty well off, from the fact that we had a large house, and my clothes seemed pretty nice, but a ten-year-old generally doesn’t pick up on these things. Especially when you’re a child in a society where you tend to stay with people of your own rank and station. You tend to take everything for granted without thinking about it too much. My feeling is that were servants, but they had fled early on, leaving the parents with no one to help them get their valuables out. So they went out looking or, perhaps, abandoned their children to their fate. I don’t know why they would do that, but families were probably just as “complicated” back then as they are now. I lean toward the abandon theory because, if they intended to return, the mother probably would have stayed with the kids. Just a guess. Anyway, since the vast majority of Herculaneum has not be excavated, it’s possible that my remains are still there. Interesting to speculate on, but I’m sure I’ll never know for sure.

That’s my story, accept it or not, as you like. This could explain why I’m so interested in the artifacts, the people who used them, and how they were made and used. I have no trouble imagining what it must have been like, living in those houses, and the hustle and bustle of the streets outside, and the smell! God the smell of the refuse in the streets on a hot, still summer’s day! They must have prayed for rain as much to wash the streets as for the water. There’s a reason why the wealthy people had their houses upwind of the heart of the city!

If you have time, you might want to check out the exhibit, or delve more into the history of both Pompeii and Herculaneum. There’s a cautionary tail there, as Vesuvius is still a active volcano, and millions of people now live in it’s shadow.

Common Knowlege Aint So Common?

A person contacted me recently, saying that they were pretty sure that was more to reality than we'd been taught. He went on a bit, but the upshot was that wanted to buy a K2 meter and go to a graveyard on afternoon and answer the question once and for all. These sort of things come up a lot in my conversations, and I'd thought I'd publish my response as a point of general information. I tend to forget that I have been involved in this for a long time, and what I take for common knowledge really isn't that common at all. If you are going to get into the paranormal and do psychic research, you have to understand that psychic abilities don't follow the rules that we take for granted. That doesn't mean it doesn't follow rules, we just don't fully understand them yet. Just like in the early days of electricity, nobody knows what it is or how it works, so there's plenty left to be discovered, for those who have a mind to do so! Here is the letter in full, I hope you find it informative.

Hello,

Well, I have some good news and some bad news. But first, a little story.

My daughter called my this past weekend. She lives in another state. She wanted my help with something that had happened: A couple of days before, she was lying in bed at around 8 in the mornings, and she heard some noise outside her door. When she looked, she thought she saw the door begin to open a crack, then she blinked and it was closed again, without a sound. Then she had a feeling that there was something in the room with her. This feeling was so strong that she was afraid to move or open her eyes. She stayed like the for about a hour, then got up and left the room. She didn't know what to make of it, and she hadn't slept in that room since because she was afraid of it coming back. The irony of this is that she has complained to me, several times, that she was mad that she had never seen a ghost or had any kind of related experience! The thing is, she has been exposed to quite a bit of paranormal stuff, even had a spirit attach to her at one point, but, as far as she was concerned, it wasn't "real," so it didn't count. I have to say that I went on a similar journey, and it's taken me over a decade to get that the "unexplained" is all around us, all the time. The catch 22 is, if you can't believe it, you can't see it.

Ask any die-hard skeptic and you'll see that, not matter how much evidence you present, no matter how good the quality, they know that "it's fake or there's a reasonable explanation." In my daughter's case, she probably would have dismissed it as a bad dream, not too long ago. When you accept that reality is bigger than the material world, you will start to realize that it permeates our lives in ways small and large. The biggest problem turns out to be sorting the wheat from the chaff: There is so much bunk out there from people that literally seem to believe everything they read, and people that appear to deliberately spread false and misleading information for profit, that you have to develop your own inner sense of what is true for you. The good news is that you will find what you are looking for, if you can believe what you find. The bad news is that no amount of proof will be good enough, if you don't.

I, personally, don't watch "ghost" shows, though I have been on a number of investigations. I have seen some interesting stuff, nothing dramatic, and nothing that would have convinced myself a few decades back, but a lot of it raises intriguing questions in my mind. I also find it interesting to watch how the other people on the investigations, feel, think, and react.

If you do some more research, you will find that instruments appear to react to the person holding them. In the same situation, it will be dead as a door-nail in one person's hands, and light up like a Christmas tree in another's. In a way, this makes sense, because our instruments are designed to be as insensitive to paranormal influences as possible, otherwise they would appear to be unreliable for the purpose for which they are designed. They are not completely immune, as some people can significantly affect electronic and physical devices: You know, the people who can't wear a watch, for they simply won't work around them, or they crash computers, if they get too close. As a computer scientist, I had the opposite effect, people give me stuff that's flaky or doesn't work, then I fiddle with it for a while and it then works just fine. I've gotten a lot of free appliances and electronics that way.

Here's the really bad news: I you want to prove it to yourself, you are going to have to put in a lot of time, one afternoon won't do it, no matter how spectacular the results. They could have been just a fluke. Any serious investigator will tell you that the "good stuff" is rare and you have to put in a lot of hours to get it. The only exception to this are the "gifted" psychics. I put gifted in quotes because it rarely seems a gift to those people. Believe me, having spirits bug you 24/7 is more of a pain-in-the-ass than anything else.

All that said, if you want to hang out for an afternoon, I could do that. We can swap stories and try a few things to open you up, if you're interested. Do you have a place in mind? Let me know.

Rodney Whitehouse