Bear with me as I get a little science-y on you.
Charles Robert Richet was born in 1850 and was a renowned medical doctor most famous for winning the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1913 for his work on anaphylaxis, a term he coined for severe and sometimes deadly allergic reactions that lead to insights into allergies, asthma and other medical mysteries. His broad range of interests also had him investigating neurochemistry and physiology, but what he is best remembered for outside the world of medicine is his investigations into spiritualism and ghosts. At one point in his career he teamed up with Marie Curie to investigate a medium. A coiner of words, it was Richet who first brought us the concept of ectoplasm, and first gave us a theory as to what it was.
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| A Medium vomits forth Ectoplasm |
Unlike the movie Ghostbusters, in which ectoplasm is a viscous, gross slime, real ectoplasm is something excreted from the mouths and pores of mediums, those who can contact the spirits of the dead, and used by these spirits (or ghosts) as a means by which to interact with the real world. This excretion is described as being a cross between a solid and a liquid (I believe it to be no accident that Richet chose “plasm” as a root for his word, because he was looking for a word that could be seen as between two of the common three states of matter.)
Richet, and others who have who worked extensively with ectoplasm, determined that it was made from human skin and white blood cells. (Which would give it a white to yellow-green, pus-like coloring.) There are three stages of ectoplasm. In the first stage the ectoplasm is is invisible to the naked eye and intangible, but still able to be photographed with infrared photography and weighed via advanced scientific equipment. Note that the physicality of ectoplasm is not disputed, this is seen as an actual, physical substance, like helium. The second stage it is either vaporous, liquid or solid (or some combination of all three), with a smell like ozone, or of an open wound. In it’s final stage the can be seen with the naked eye, and resembles a cloth like muslin or a tangle of spider-webs. It can flake and become brittle after this.
Ectoplasm is excreted by mediums as a means by which spirits can interact with the real world. In order to understand why this is so, we have to look at the mind-body problem. Classically, a human is thought to be made of two things, our physical body, and our immortal soul. Many philosophers and theologians have tried to understand how a non-physical, immortal soul can be said to interact with or temporal, physical bodies. One way to understand this was to imagine the existence of a third class of things: a substance that can bridge the gap between ineffable and effable, and allow mind and body to interact. That substance was ectoplasm, and the medium had found a way to excrete some of this substance from his body so that returning souls could borrow the substance to interact as a ghost with those of us on earth.
There is nothing in the concept of ectoplasm that would deny a dead soul from dragging ectoplasm out of its original host body and becoming a ghost without the efforts of a medium. The only difficulty for a ghost would be for it to keep its ectoplasm fresh and not crusty.
From the concept of ectoplasm we now have our vision of the modern cloth draped ghost, which we no know to be in fact ectoplasm.
For a long time contact with ectoplasm was rumored to be dangerous, though Richet, despite his intimate interactions with the substance, lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five. Breathing in ectoplasm was thought to bring illness or death. However, here is at least one source that I have found that suggests that ingestion of ectoplasmic residue can enhance health and even improve one’s extra sensory perception. The Journal of Roger Pelton, a reprint of a homeless man’s screed first made available in the late 80’s by a homeless man in Allston Massachusetts tells of a man who achieved virtual immortality through the ingestion and consumption of the ectoplasm like substance left behind when souls eventually die.
Because souls can be encased in ectoplasm it follows that they can be trapped by it as well. Unlike the complex ghost traps of Ghostbusters, however, there are simple, what I would call folksy, ways to trap them. The Journal of Roger Pelton describes how to trap ghosts in simple glass jars, and indeed there is some evidence to suggest that this is at least possible.
