Ghosts in the machine: Stone Tape theory

In the recent BBC radio and television series Uncanny, presenter Danny Robins often returned to what he termed ‘Stone Tape theory’ to explain the tendency of certain places - and particularly houses of one kind of another - to become haunted by ghosts or other unexplained entities. According to Robins, this is the idea that paranormal phenomena can be ‘explained by the fact that the very fabric of buildings can somehow record shocking or tragic events and then play them back’.

What Harry Martindale might have seen in the cellar of the Treasurer's House, York

In support of this, Robins referred to the famous case of a haunting witnessed in York in 1953. In the dark cellar of the Treasurer’s House, built in 1419, heating engineer Harry Martindale witnessed an apparition: a Roman solider emerged from the cellar wall followed by a carthorse and more soldiers. Martindale also noticed that he could only see the soldiers from the knees up. As Robins explained, it was later discovered that a Roman road had run through the site of the cellar but 15 inches lower than the medieval cellar floor, hence the apparition hiding the soldiers’ lower legs. This seemed like a moment of ancient history literally being replayed: it had somehow been recorded and preserved within the stone walls of the cellar itself.

Despite the fact that some have tried to prove the scientific validity of Stone Tape theory, it is not, as Robins discovered, a plausible explanation of ghosts - the molecules of stone, or indeed any building material, cannot, in and of themselves, store any visual or sonic information. In fact, it is fiction that provided the foundation for Robins’ exploration, namely the 1972 BBC television drama The Stone Tape, written by Nigel Kneale.

Kentish ragstone in the Roman-era London Wall

In this play, a research and development team from Ryan Electrics - a British tech firm vying with the Japanese for preeminence - move into a Victorian country mansion to develop a new recording medium that would outflank their competitors. The titular stone in Kneale’s drama is described by one of the researchers as rag-stone, a type of hard limestone laid down in the Cretaceous period and found in the southeast of England, including the area in which The Stone Tape was filmed, namely East Horsley in north Surrey. Rag-stone not only contributed much of the fabric of medieval London, but also its Roman walls further back in history.

The moment in The Stone Tape when the ghost of a Victorian maid falls to her death

Thus, the titular stone of Kneale's drama is already cast as a time-travelling substance, even before it’s found to be haunted. The team of researchers discover a decaying room within the mansion that is haunted by the ghost of a Victorian maid who runs and then screams, falling to her death from an exposed set of stone steps. The head of the research team - bellicose Peter Brock - believes this room might hold the secret to his long sought after technological breakthrough. With their early-1970s recording equipment and, what was then, an advanced computer, they attempt, without success, to record the recording, realising that the most important sensing device in the process of transference is the human body itself. Eventually, their increasingly desperate attempts result in the disappearance of the Victorian ghost - the stone tape seemingly wiped. However, something much older, and more malevolent, emerges from the stone - a thousands-year-old entity that kills the lone female researcher, her moment of death also inscribed in the stone and seeming to offer the same kind of protection as the ghost of the Victorian maid, so long as the room remains undisturbed.

Jane Asher falls victim to a malevolent entity at the end of The Stone Tape

Kneale’s unsettling drama popularised Stone Tape theory, but it was an idea that Kneale probably sourced from Thomas Charles Lethbridge’s popular book Ghost and Ghoul (1961), which proposed that stone architecture and crystalline materials like quartz have the ability to record traumatic events of the past and transmit them to human subjects.

According to self-penned ‘spooky geologist’ Sharon A. Hill, Stone Tape theory has even older origins in psychometry - literally ‘measuring the soul’ - an idea developed in the mid-nineteenth century by Joseph Roses Buchanan and William Denton as a form of geological knowledge. In his 1863 book The Soul of Things, Denton explained the many experiments he carried out on rocks and fossils to ascertain their histories through intuitive readings (often assisted by his wife Elizabeth and sister Ann). Thus, a piece of coal would emanate images of a Carboniferous swamp; a lump of solidified lava the fires of the inner earth. Naturally, these impressions were highly subjective, but they were based on what was becoming a more widely-accepted scientific belief, namely that rocks do indeed hold within themselves ‘an essence or trace of influence or memory of [their] history’. In the mid-Victorian period, when geological knowledge was still in its infancy, the dawning realisation of the unparalleled length of Earth’s history - hundreds of millions of years - challenged the widely-held belief that scientific enquiry could exhaustively describe the material world. Denton’s turn to subjective insight might seem to us characteristic of pseudoscience, but it flagged up what were then the perceived limitations in comprehending deep time, especially when the scientific tools to do this were not yet fully developed.

The first ever photograph of a living person (bottom left): a man stops to have his shoes shined on the Boulevard du Temple, Paris in 1838. This image was made by Louis Daguerre.    

Another important context for the emergence of psychometry was the invention and subsequent popularisation of photography. When Louis Daguerre created the first known photograph of a person in 1838, he transformed the relationship between humans and the world they sought to represent by fixing the fleeting movement of light. It is no accident that the early years of photography were accompanied by an increasing interest in spiritualism and related paranormal phenomena. Indeed, in The Soul of Things, Denton made an explicit comparison between psychometry and photography, when he argued that ‘the radiant forces … passing from all objects to all objects in their vicinity, and during every moment of the day and night are daguerreotyping the appearances of each upon the other’. The trade-off for this seemingly miraculous transfer of information from the immaterial world to the material one was a pervasive sense of ghostliness.

The first selfie: a self-portrait of Philadelphia store-owner Robert Corneilus, taken in 1839

Who indeed has not felt, whilst looking at an old photograph, that one is being haunted by a ghost? We see imprinted on the photographic paper a scene that has been forever frozen in the past but which we also know is irrevocably lost. This accounts for the ambivalent feelings generated by photographs, namely those of comfort and loss. We are reassured by the permanence of a photograph - its unqualified assertion that we and the world have a history that can be preserved - but we’re also disquieted by it’s insistence that everything passes, that all things must decay and die.

Some of technological devices that featured in The Stone Tape

Ambivalence in the face of new technologies of reproduction is also key to the unease generated by The Stone Tape. When it was first aired in 1972, compact cassette tapes were still a relatively new technology, and home video recording, whether VHS or Betamax - only became widely available from the late 1970s onwards. The various recording devices featured in The Stone Tape are thus analogous to the daguerreotype in The Soul of Things - they represent the cutting edge of technologies of reproduction in the early 1970s - a mixture of infrared cameras, sound-emitting speakers, scanning devices and a computer that itself seems to become haunted.

When film director Peter Strickland updated The Stone Tape into a Halloween radio play in 2015, he made a conscious choice not to set it in the present day, but rather in 1979, when home video recording first began. As Strickland explained in an interview, although the entire play was recorded digitally, there was a concerted attempt to produce the feel of analogue tape for listeners. This in order to question the tendency of digital recording technologies to flatten the nuances of sound. Like Strickland’s filmic work - particularly the 1970s-set Berberian Sound Studio (2012) - an obsession with sound grounds The Stone Tape in conveying the chilling effects of particular recording media on human experience. Strickland himself grew up in the 1970s, a period in which he described television possessing an ‘uncanny’ quality. It’s clearly an effect that he regards as particular to the analogue era, and one that has perhaps been lost with the onset of the digital revolution. It’s almost as if Strickland believes that digital sound has somehow stolen a part of ourselves - a corollary to the belief amongst some indigenous peoples that photographs steal your soul.

A television set as a portal for a ghost in Poltergeist (1981)

The Stone Tape remains an influential precedent for contemporary notions of residual haunting, as seen in many of the stories featured in Uncanny. In a few films, this influence is quite explicit: for example in Poltergeist (1981) when a ghost begins to communicate with a young girl through a television set; and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), in which a team of scientists investigate a mysterious cylinder hidden in the basement of a church which spawns the devil himself. In others, the relationship with The Stone Tape is centred on the ghostly effects of new technologies. The Japanese films Ring (1998) and Pulse (2001) are both important examples of what’s been termed ‘J-horror’, and both posit human-created recording equipment being responsible for opening up material pathways for ghosts to return from the immaterial spirit world.

An avenging ghost emerges into the real world through a television screen in Ring (1998)

In Ring the murderous progeny of a psychic woman is thrown down a well by her father. She returns for vengeance through a videotape recording, memorably entering the material world by crawling through a television set. In Pulse the conduit is cyberspace, the world of the dead leaking into that of the living through what were, in 2001, still relatively new technologies of computer terminals and monitors. The result is the disappearance of the living; they are drawn into limbo by the ghosts, leaving dark smudges on walls as their only material remains. In Ring and Pulse, the principal source of fear is the perceived porosity of the ‘real’ world when mediated by technology, whether videotape, television or computers. Here, ghosts make themselves present through materials - whether stone, metal, glass, magnetic tape, liquid crystals or copper wiring. It’s precisely the human manipulation of materials that creates the possibility of movement between the immaterial realm of spirits and that of the living.

All that's left of a person stolen by ghosts lurking in cyberspace in Pulse (2001)

Media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux has argued that ‘when we record sound, we store time, archiving our own impermanence’. The same might be said for images too. When social media platforms remind us that we have a memory or present a ‘personalised’ timeline of images and videos, we are quite literally haunted by our own histories. There is always something uncanny about seeing one’s own life played back, no matter how ubiquitous this now is.

Zoom connects both people and the undead in Host (2020)

In December 2022, on the 50th anniversary of the first airing of The Stone Tape, Sean McGeady considered its enduring influence, referring to the sentient stones of recent films such as In the Earth and Enys Men. But he might have also included the 2020 film Host, made and released during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this film, a group of six friends, confined to their homes, hire a medium to conduct an online seance via Zoom. This releases a demon that proceeds to terrorise the group - the entire film mediated by computers and their built-in cameras. Whilst the principal source of terror in this film is the threat posed by the coronavirus, there’s also a strong sense of fear of the consequences of our collective reliance on mostly untested technological platforms like Zoom. During that period, many of us experienced a pervasive sense of online communication as both connective and also alienating, precisely the same feelings that accompanied the invention of photography nearly two centuries ago. For any recording device produces a ghost in the machine - it creates a playback loop that confirms there’s no such thing as a dead mechanism. Fixing images, whether in stone, on paper or screens, reminds us that there’s always something unknowable about the past, despite or even because of its ubiquitous presence in the sounds and images that our machines now incessantly create for us. And, as Sigmund Freud aptly argued: ‘A thing which cannot be understood inevitably re-appears like an unlaid ghost’