Look After Your Mind – Atmosphere
In my experience some people seem to be sensitive to the atmosphere of a place.
I’m not, and I don’t know quite how to explain it. But my wife is.
When we’ve looked to buy a house, she’s always been guided by the ‘feel’ of a place, while I think about the price and how much work on it needs to be done.
A startling example occurred some years ago when I was invited to run a weekend creative writing residency at Ford Castle in Northumberland.
We drove up and arrived several hours before the children. The warden showed us around. At one point he stopped by a dark oak door and said that some children prefer to write lying on the floor rather than sitting at a table and chair.
He pushed open the door to reveal a bare room with a deep red carpet, saying ‘This might be just the place’. He stepped in, I stepped in but my wife would not, saying that this was a dark place where something bad had happened.
The warden asked if we had read the guide book or looked on the internet, but we’d never heard of the place until the invitation.
He said that my wife was right and that people had been murdered in that room. An explanation?
There is the idea of the ‘stone tape theory‘; that the environment can absorb the emotional energy of violent events, but who knows.
Doubtless sceptics will explain away our experience, backed by robust reasoning of course. Otherwise, it remains one of the tantalising mysteries of the human mind.
Steve Bowkett
Nature Notes Mid-spring Review
