Let’s not chase the ghosts away
“Just because you can’t prove something is true doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” - An Englishman speaking beside an overgrown French rum plantation ruin in the mountains not far from Havana. The Cuban guide had just looked off, inwardly, and said he felt an aura about the place.
Some people believe in ghosts. How else to explain that occasional low-voltage feel of electricity in the air that raises the hair on the back of your neck? You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t touch it, you can’t taste it or hear it, but you can feel its presence. Maybe it’s just felt by those endowed with extrasensory perception.
Then there are others who say it’s all a bunch of hokum. They have to see it to believe it.
Elements of both sides surfaced in the recent seven-hour Board of Adjustment hearing in Lewes. Those on the hokum side would certainly excuse Craig Karsnitz, attorney for the property owners of an historic structure in downtown Lewes. He sounded incredulous about a certain psychic quality imbued by history to the structure, as noted by the town’s Historic Preservation Commission. That was an argument for lifting the centuries-old structure and keeping it intact while building a new foundation, rather than allowing it to be disassembled and rebuilt with whatever was salvageable from the original building?
The attorney’s hope that the more logical argument might win out over the psychic argument surely faded when adjustment board Chairwoman Brook Hedge, in deliberations, alluded to a certain aura in historic homes. “There is a reason for the [historic preservation] process,” said Hedge. “It’s because there is soul to a historic house.”
Someday we will be able to measure soul and aura - perhaps in detecting tiny bits of electrical life left behind in nails, floorboards, walls and doors by builders or previous inhabitants. Until then, the Lewes Historic Preservation Commission, with backup from the board of adjustment, has signaled clearly that aura, soul and psychic forces are fair considerations that put real life into what might otherwise be considered dead history.
