The September/October issue of Skeptical Inquirer contains a three-page special report (“Ghostly ‘Black Monk’ or Random Tourist?”) responding to newspaper accounts of the appearance, in a photograph of a castle in Kent, of a hooded figure that the photographer does not recall noticing when he took the picture and which he therefore believes to be supernatural. That article may be an over-reaction to a minor observation; British ecclesiastical ruins are prime sites for more direct spectral encounters.
Several decades ago my wife and I visited the massive ruin of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire with our two teenage daughters. The day was overcast and there had been occasional showers. As the closing hour approached, we and a busload of middle-aged German ladies were among the few visitors remaining.
Suddenly one of the bus ladies gasped and pointed out through a window opening. Some distance away two hooded figures, palms piously pressed together before reverently bowed heads, drifted across the field of view. From the excited comments of the tourists, it seems likely that many long Teutonic winter evenings for years to come would be enlivened by Grandma’s tales of that apparition of medieval nuns at a ruin in England.