(ORDO NEWS) — Those who, as part of polar expeditions, found themselves in this land of white silence, in their memoirs describe not only the hardships and hardships that they experienced during these journeys, but also what they could not forget even years after meeting this Something.
I recently read some of these reports and it’s really very strange…
Let’s start with Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer, figure in the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Member of four Antarctic expeditions, three of which he commanded.
“Third wheel”
The phenomenon is named after the experience of Ernest Shackleton and two of his comrades while crossing the mountainous terrain of South Georgia Island in 1916 on the ice of the Weddell Sea, and their journey for help – to a whaling station through the mountain ranges – included a meager diet, lack of sleep, crevasses, giant ice hummocks, steep cliffs and an almost complete lack of equipment.
Shackleton’s account of this journey in his book The South ends with a mysterious observation: “When I look back on those days, I have no doubt that Providence led us… the mountains and glaciers of South Georgia … there it often seemed to me that there were four of us, and not three.”
This feeling was confirmed by his comrades when they reached safety: each independently said that he had experienced the same feeling that they were accompanied by an invisible companion.
And this satellite is not an enemy, but a friend. The benevolent third person, what John Geiger calls the presence of a “savior” seems to be something different from our traditional understanding of ghosts.
He appears in crisis situations and interacts with the observer, if only to provide a sense of comfort.
However, Antarctica also has stories of encounters with a less benevolent presence. This second type of encounter, again, does not fit into the “ghost” category, if by that we mean the spirit of the person who has died.
“Ghost of Rivingen”
The story of a similar “evil spirit” occurred during the expedition of Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wickem-Fiennes in 1980 at the foot of Mount Rivingen, where four participants set up a base camp to wait out the Antarctic winter.
The team’s radio operator was the formidable Virginia, Lady Fiennes (“Ginny”), who spent countless hours in a radio booth, more than fifty meters from the team’s main living quarters.
She told her husband, “There’s something there,” and spoke of a frightening creature or presence that sometimes haunted her when she left the hut.
This same sense of otherworldly presence was described by men wintering at Esperanza’s Antarctic base in Argentina, and in similar terms: always felt in the most isolated structures, usually at night, and expressed in “a strong feeling of being watched” (and one even saw a male figure).
Fiennes described how his wife hears something: someone is crying in the dark and someone is “whispering unintelligible words right next to her.”
“Baby Bait”
The Heart of the Antarctic (Shackleton’s book) begins by describing the desire to go out into the “empty spaces of the world” because of “the lure of a crying and calling child’s voice”
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was one of the youngest members of Scott’s tragic 1912 South Pole expedition, writes of these voices:
“The whole place is very creepy, it has such a feeling of life. Not only I feel it, but others too. Last night after I went to bed, I could have sworn that I heard people screaming at each other.
I thought that I was just having a nervous breakdown, but Campbell asked me if I heard any screams, because he definitely heard. It must have been the seals calling each other, but it definitely sounded very human”
Toward the end of their stay in Antarctica, he again experienced the same incident when they were awake, waiting for their comrades to return:
“Last night at two, five or six o’clock, the blows rumbled through a small window above our heads… Some one lit candle… and we all ran out. But there was no one there. It was the closest contact with ghosts that I have ever experienced.”
“Hostile Environment”
In 1908, as Shackleton advanced toward the Pole through the Great Ice Barrier, he seemed to have an almost spiritual sense of unease:
“It’s as if we really are at the end of the world and break into the birthplace of clouds – the house of the four winds, and there is a feeling that we, mortals, are jealously watching the forces of nature”
This feeling grew until (when they were forced to give up and turn back to save their lives) Shackleton felt himself repelled by the landscape itself on the way back. Falling at the last moment into a hidden crevice, he felt that “as if a glacier was saying to me: “Here is the last warning to you; don’t come here again.”
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.