Haunted Land: Investigations into Ancient Mysteries and Modern Day Phenomena

A highly readable investigation of haunted landscapes across time and in different parts of the world. It centres on the shamanic tradition, beginning with journeys to the New World before returning to the Old World to see if similar insights might be capable of explaining similar phenomena. However, in Europe his discoveries are dominated by associations with the dead the straight 'spirit roads'. He then finds out that both sets of features point to a central Asian shamanic tradition with different phenomenology in different geographical areas. He looks at historical and contemporary accounts of ghostly encounters and then revisits rock art sites of the Americas. The clue to understanding the material he covers seems to lie in recent scientific research about the nature of the mind and its relation to physical reality. This brings in Jung's archetypes as the 'inside' of the quantum sea in a merging of the structure of mind with physical reality (ghost, place and mind) – inside and outside are less distinct than we think: 'the spirit in the landscape is consciousness itself'. This is a fruitful novel hypothesis applied to a fascinating range of data.