Whisperers
Page 37
While Flournoy was investigating mediumship in Geneva, Sigmund Freud was beginning to develop his own concept of the unconscious mind in Vienna. Freud himself loathed anything that smacked of the occult, but Jung had no such misgivings and threw himself into the investigation of his cousin’s mediumship with enthusiasm. But it was an enthusiasm tempered by the doctrines of his mentor, Flournoy. Consequently, Jung classified Helene Preiswerk’s mediumistic abilities under four categories: somnambulism, semi-somnambulism, automatic writing, and hallucinations. He attempted to discover the sources of her fantasies and decided one must be Kerner’s work on the Seeress of Prevorst while another was overheard conversations about Kant’s cosmology. Like Flournoy, he attributed table tipping at the séances to the medium herself, thorough “involuntary muscle movements.” One of his more intriguing conclusions was that the Ivenes persona represented Helene as a grown-up and emerged due to an intuition that she would die young. She did, in fact, die prematurely in 1911, from tuberculosis.
Jung’s final conclusions closely mirrored those of Flournoy. His dissertation made frequent use of terms like hysteria and epileptoid. He often referred to the subjects of his study as “patients.” He cited alcohol as a possible factor in one example of the mediumistic phenomenon10 and summed up the entire mediumistic process in the following words: “The impressions received in somnambulism go on working in the subconscious to form independent growths and finally reach perception as hallucinations.”11
The findings of Flournoy and later Jung were accepted almost without question by the emerging discipline of analytical psychology, conventional psychology, and modern scientific thought. Although Jung changed his mind about spirits in later life, the consensus opinion to this day still considers spirits in the same light as Jung and Flournoy did more than a century ago. They are hallucinations of the deep mind. Variations on the theme abound. When the academic Elizabeth M. Butler came to analyze Cellini’s Coliseum conjuration, she reached the conclusion that everything took place exactly as Cellini had described it … but only with qualifications. Her published account of the conjuration begins with the observation that there was a strong visionary element in Cellini’s nature12—and one that did not necessarily represent a clairvoyant perception of spirits. For example, she came to the conclusion that the Ferryman Cellini saw during a life-threatening illness “certainly derived” from Dante’s description of Charon in the Inferno.13 Furthermore, she is happy to call into question the genuineness of the manifestations and the magician involved. In this latter respect she suggested nothing so crude as the magic lantern theory put forward by other commentators14 but rather pointed out that nowhere in the account did Cellini categorically state that he saw or heard the demons personally. If he did not, then, since his companions Romoli and Gaddi were silent on the matter, we rely only on the statements of the magician and, more particularly, the boy Cenci.
Although Butler is fair-minded enough to leave open any question of deliberate fraud, there is little doubt where her sympathies lie when it comes to an explanation:
What are we to think of the good faith of the magician? … He must … have believed in … magic and therefore presumably in his own performances and powers. It seems to me clear that he did; and like many another was hallucinated by his own invocations and the incense.15
It appears, though, that the term hallucinated is not to be taken in the sense it is used by Flournoy and Jung. Cenci’s account is dismissed on the grounds that he was “highly impressionable” and visual imagination is much more vivid in childhood than in later years. Butler suggests that this is the precise reason why children are so often associated with magical experiments of this type. “And it was from Cenci that the panic spread throughout the circle; the magician himself was obviously affected by the terror-stricken boyish voice.”16 So, spectacular though it might appear in Cellini’s account, the Coliseum conjuration really took place only in the imagination of the participants, perhaps with a little mass hysteria thrown in. Views of this type are so deeply embedded that few modern commentators stop to consider those instances of spirit “hallucinations” seen simultaneously by more than one person or recurringly associated with a particular place. An example would be the widely reported “Grey Lady” hauntings of ancient sites throughout the world.
26. PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS
THE MORNING OF MY THIRTY-SECOND BIRTHDAY WAS A CLOUDLESS JULY day, unusual for Ireland. I was living alone at the time in the rented gate lodge of the Hamwood Estate in Dunboyne, County Meath. A perk of the tenancy was the use of a delightful walled garden, first planted in the fifteenth century but renovated extensively in Victorian times. I decided to take time off work and do a little reading in the sunshine. At around 11:00 a.m., I equipped myself with a paperback, a flask of chilled fruit juice, and a rug, which I spread on the lawn. Twenty minutes later, I was reading my book when a young woman appeared from the direction of the main house. She looked to be in her thirties, dark-haired and pretty. She was also dressed quite formally, in a manner rather more suited to the evening than a sunny summer’s morning. I remember thinking there might be a party arranged at the main house and she was a houseguest trying out her outfit. She walked across the lawn and as she came closer, I called out a greeting but, to my surprise, she ignored me. I watched as she walked past and continued across the lawn until she reached a low box hedge some ten to twelve feet from where I was lying. Then, while I continued to watch her, she vanished. It was almost exactly like the transporter effect in Star Trek: she shimmered, then faded, and eventually disappeared completely, leaving a momentary sparkle in the air.
I was shocked—hairs literally stood up on the back of my neck. For a moment I simply stared, then scrambled to my feet and ran across the lawn with some mindless idea that she must have fallen down behind the little hedge. But there was no one there. After a moment, with thumping heart, I was prepared to accept that I had seen a ghost.
Almost forty years later, I had another paranormal experience. I awoke in the early hours of the morning to find a tall figure standing at the foot of my bed. For some reason, I felt no fear. I believed myself to be fully awake: I was in bed with my wife beside me and there was no question in my mind that I was dreaming. But at the same time, I was aware that I was not in my normal state of consciousness: the creature staring down at me was not physically present, at least not in the way I would usually define “physical.” A form of nonverbal communication began between us. I would be tempted to describe it as telepathic, except that it was not telepathy as I would normally imagine it. There was no voice in my head. I simply knew, all of a piece, what the entity wanted me to do and why. The bed in my room is aligned north-south. There are two windows in the eastern wall. To the northeast of my home, some fifteen miles away, is a megalithic site known as Castleruddery Stone Circle, an untidy layout of forty stones about a hundred yards in diameter with two enormous (fifteen-ton) quartz boulders acting as portal stones at the entrance. The circle is surrounded by a low earthwork and several thornbushes. Beyond is a ditch, no longer visible from the ground. Official estimates date the site to about 2500 BCE. To reach the circle in physical reality, it would be necessary to drive for approximately half an hour, then turn off the N81 some five miles northeast of Baltinglass and follow the signs. But now it seemed to me that the entire eastern wall of my bedroom had become transparent. I could see the intervening countryside stretched out like an open plain and the circle itself luminous in the moonlight. The entity carried me across the landscape until I found myself standing inside the circle. In this location, I had visionary encounters with tall, silver-skinned creatures and what appeared to be the “little people” of Irish mythology before the entity carried me back to my home.
Whatever the explanation for either of these experiences, it is clear they were essentially different. In my first sighting, the woman appeared solid, physical, and, apart from the anomaly of her dress, completely normal. But she failed to communicat
e, even when spoken to. It was as if she was completely unaware of my presence. In my second sighting, the entity, although objectively standing in my bedroom, appeared neither solid nor normal. It was not only aware of my presence, but skillfully communicated mind to mind in a manner that I was capable of understanding without difficulty. Both encounters could reasonably be thought of as involving spirits, but did they? Was it possible that certain “spirit sightings” do not involve spirits at all?
I subsequently asked the owners of the Hamwood estate if there had been any previous reports of ghostly sightings in the garden. There had not, but apart from this fact, my experience had hallmarks of what psychical researchers informally refer to as a “Grey Lady.”
Grey Ladies do not have to be ladies at all but can take the form of male apparitions, phantom animals, and sometimes even inanimate objects like carriages or cars. They are far and away the most commonly reported form of ghostly encounter. More than two hundred of them are listed on a single Internet site devoted to haunted places in the United Kingdom alone,1 and this record is far from exhaustive. Such sightings vary enormously and are typically seen by more than one person at more than one time. The Grey Lady in the Willard Library of Evansville, Indiana, for example, was first reported by a custodian in the late 1930s but has continued to be seen at intervals by library staff and visitors up to modern times. (The last recorded instance was in August 2010.) A more typical instance involves the Grey Lady of Levens Hall, an English stately home south of Kendal in Westmoreland. Levens Hall is an Elizabethan mansion built ca. 1586, and reported sightings of its Grey Lady go back several centuries: in the days when a coach and four was the standard form of aristocratic transport, her sudden appearances often startled the horses. Today, she startles motorists who have reportedly braked sharply to avoid collision with a figure who simply fades away.
A prime characteristic of the Grey Lady phantoms is that, like my young woman in the garden, they never speak even when spoken to, never communicate in any way, and never show awareness of the carriages, cars, and human beings who frequently bear down on them. A member of the Bagot family who own Levens Hall once cycled through the phantom without disturbing her walk. Another common characteristic is that they tend to appear in exactly the same place, often at a given time of day or on a given date. At Levens Hall, the ghost always appears on the driveway. In the Church of Saint Michael and All Angels at Rycote in Oxfordshire, the apparition invariably glides from a pew to vanish into a stone wall.
A clue to what might be going on here lies in the experience of the psychical investigator and author Sheila St. Clair. Ms. St. Clair reported2 a Grey Lady sighting while staying in an Irish manor house. The phantom in this instance was actually male but behaved in characteristic Grey Lady fashion by ignoring Sheila as he strolled in his nightgown from one side of her bedroom to the other before making an exit through the wall. The case had some interesting, and possibly significant, details. One was that the ghost walked in midair an estimated two and a half feet above the floor level of the room. Another was that the owners of the manor later confirmed there had once been a doorway in the wall at the spot where the phantom disappeared, but it had been bricked up for more than fifty years. Yet another was that the original floor of the room had once been at a substantially higher level but had been lowered in Victorian times during renovations to get rid of dry rot. The impression left with Sheila was that the ghost was not haunting the bedroom in which she was trying to sleep but seems to have been walking across the chamber as it used to be in the Victorian era, with its feet firmly planted on the original floor and its exit made through a door that was then visible.
Cases of this type—and there are a great many of them—have led psychical researchers to develop a theory that Grey Lady ghosts are not ghosts at all (in the sense of being spirits of the dead) but rather some hitherto unsuspected form of natural data recording imprinted on some aspect of the haunt scene and capable of being “played back” when conditions are right. What the recording medium might be remains an open question. A particular type of rock has been put forward as a possibility, as have a range of natural and man-made materials such as brick, mortar, and wood. The British archaeologist and dowser Tom Lethbridge, who investigated the subject thoroughly, suggested that since many such sightings are reported near water—lakes, rivers, marshes, and the like—the carrier might be an electrical field generated by dampness.
The theory remains to be proven, although it has gained widespread acceptance among psychical researchers, but there is substantial suggestive evidence to support it. One historical example concerns the Battle of Edgehill, the first major clash between Cavaliers and Roundheads in the English Civil War. The battle, which involved some fourteen thousand3 men at arms, was fought on October 24, 1642. Fierce fighting went on for three hours and both the Royalist and Parliamentarian armies suffered heavy losses. Two months later, a group of travelers, guided by some local shepherds, were approaching the site of the battle shortly after midnight when they heard the sound of drums, followed by moans of pain. Phantom armies abruptly appeared,4 carrying the familiar standards of Royalist and Parliamentarian forces, and proceeded to duplicate the action of their earlier clash.
The witnesses hastened to the nearby town of Kineton where they woke a justice of the peace named William Wood, who in turn awakened his neighbor, the Reverend Samuel Marshal, and together both men took sworn statements. The following night (a Sunday) a large party from the town and neighboring parishes went to Edgehill to investigate. About half an hour after they arrived, the phantom armies reappeared to reenact the battle. The next night an even larger audience turned up, but nothing happened. The following weekend, however, the phantom battle was refought on both Saturday and Sunday nights. The phenomenon continued each weekend for several weeks.
In early 1643, a printer named Thomas Jackson published the story, which then came to the attention of the king at Oxford, who was sufficiently intrigued to dispatch six trusted investigators under the command of Colonel Lewis Kirke. After interviewing a broad cross section of eyewitnesses, the king’s men set out to see for themselves. They not only reported back that the stories had been true, but actually recognized the faces of individuals, like Sir Edmund Varney, who had been killed in the original battle. But clearly we are not dealing with spirits of the dead in this instance, if only for the fact that while many men were killed at Edgehill, many more survived and were alive and well elsewhere in England while their phantoms fought on the old battle site.
The theory of “natural recording” would appear to receive support from the curious fact that there seems to be a limit on the age of ghosts sighted in the British Isles. In 1709, the Reverend Thomas Josiah Penston was walking on the Norfolk Broads when a spectral Roman army marched past him and disappeared. In 1988, a workman carrying out repairs on a subterranean chamber in the English city of Bath saw a Roman cross the room and disappear through a wall. But the Roman era appears to mark a demarcation point for British ghosts. The Roman invasion began in 43 CE, with the legions entering a country already heavily populated since prehistoric times. Yet reports of ghostly Picts, Angles, Saxons, and the rest are virtually nonexistent, while Paleolithic hunting bands are never reported at all. One is tempted to think less in terms of spirits and more of a recording wearing out. The psychical researchers Eric Maple and Lynn Myring record—unfortunately without specific location or reference details—a case that reinforces this perception. The first reported sighting, in the eighteenth century, was of a woman wearing a red dress and shoes. The next, which occurred some seventy years later, found her wearing pink. By the nineteenth century she had become a typical Grey Lady, dressed in white. In 1939 there was a report of phantom footsteps and the rustle of a dress, but no visual sighting. When the house was demolished in 1971, all that remained was a faint sense of her presence.5
An alternative theory to the postulate of natural recording was put forward by the American author Wh
itley Strieber while discussing my sighting of the phantom in the walled garden. During his radio program Dreamland, he suggested that the young woman was neither a natural recording nor a spirit, but an example of a “time slip.” He envisioned a Victorian lady walking in her garden when a glitch in the fabric of time permitted me a brief glimpse of her before the “rift” closed again. Curiously, there are well-documented, if little known, examples of this sort of thing happening. In January 1912, for example, while still a young man, the distinguished historian Arnold Toynbee climbed one of the twin summits of Pharsalus, in Greece. There he “slipped into a time pocket” (his words) and found himself back in the days when the forces of Philip of Macedon faced the Roman legions at this spot in 197 BCE. The weather had changed: in place of the bright sunshine, there was now a heavy mist that parted to allow him a view of the downhill Macedonian charge. As he watched, the Romans spotted a weakness in the Macedonian flank, wheeled their men, and attacked with such ferocity that Toynbee had to turn his face away from the slaughter. Almost at once the scene disappeared and he was back in a peaceful, sunlit present. Toynbee had several similar experiences in the coming months—on Crete, in Ephesus, in Laconia, at the ruins of Mistrà in Sparta. The experience was so profound that it inspired him to write his monumental twelve-volume Study of History.6
Despite Toynbee’s subjective reaction, it might be possible to classify at least some of these experiences in the same category as the Edgehill battle, but other reports seem to point much more conclusively toward Strieber’s suggestion about time slips. One concerned an Englishman named P. J. Chase of Wallington in Surrey who was strolling down a road in 1968 when he came across two picturesque thatched cottages with hollyhocks in their gardens. One of them bore the date 1837. The next day Chase mentioned the cottages to a friend, who insisted they did not exist. When Chase returned to the spot where he had seen the cottages, he found his friend was right: the only buildings there were two brick houses. An elderly resident of the locality confirmed, however, that the cottages had existed but had been torn down to make room for the houses some years previously.