Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

by Colin Wilson

  It so happened that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had agreed to write an article on fairies for the Christmas number of the Strand Magazine (in which Holmes first appeared). When he heard about the photographs, he contacted Gardner and asked if he could see them. The two men met, and agreed that the pictures were too good to be true—the waterfall in the background (which looked like a painted backcloth), the highly appropriate toadstools . . . Gardner agreed to go to Cottingley to see the girls, and to find out whether they were hoaxers. Mr. and Mrs. Wright were startled to hear that the experts thought the photographs genuine. And Gardner was startled when he walked up the glen with Elsie, and saw the scene exactly as she had photographed it, complete with waterfall and toadstools—although without fairies.

  Gardner decided to test the girls. Two cameras were bought, and the film-plates were sealed so they could not be tampered with. In due course, the negatives were returned to Gardner, and the factory that had produced them verified that they were still sealed. One showed Frances with a fairy leaping close to her face, another showed a fairy offering a flower to Elsie, while the third showed two fairies in the middle of a bush. In the center of the picture there is an object that looks rather like a bathing costume hung on a line. Elsie apparently had no idea what this was; but Gardner, with his wider knowledge of fairy lore, identified it as a “magnetic bath” which fairies weave in dull weather. (It had rained continually that August.)

  Once more, the experts got to work to try to discover if the photographs had been faked; again, they concluded that they were genuine. That Christmas, Doyle’s article on the fairies appeared in the Strand Magazine and caused a sensation. Inevitably, the majority of people thought it was a hoax; yet no expert on photography was able to say anything conclusive about how it might have been done. A reporter on the Westminster Gazette learned the true identities of the girls (Conan Doyle had used pseudonyms to protect them from publicity) and went to see them. He concluded that everyone seemed honest and genuine, and there was no evidence of trickery. Arthur Wright was baffled by it all, and deeply disappointed that Conan Doyle was naive enough to be taken in, “bamboozled by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of her class.” Conan Doyle was himself puzzled and critical; yet he could not discount the possibility that these were real fairies, nature spirits of some kind. He contacted a well-known clairvoyant named Geoffrey Hodson, and Hodson went to Cottingley, talked to the girls, and went to the dell with them. He also saw fairy forms. (We shall have more to say about Hodson in a moment.)

  By the end of 1921, most people had lost interest in the fairies. Conan Doyle was to write a book about the case, called The Coming of the Fairies, which came out in 1922; but there was no re-investigation.

  In 1965, a Daily Express reporter named Peter Chambers discovered that Elsie was still alive, having spent most of her life in India, and now back in the north of England. He went to see her, and asked her straight out whether the pictures were faked. Elsie neither denied nor confirmed this; she said she would prefer to leave it “open.” She made the curious statement that the fairies were “figments of her imagination.” This certainly sounds like a confession; but if it is, why did she not say openly that the photographs were faked? Six years later, in 1971, the BBC’s Nationwide program discovered that both Elsie and Frances were still alive, and interviewed both. Again, both declined to deny or confirm the genuineness of the photographs. Elsie says: “I’d rather leave that open, if you don’t mind. But my father had nothing to do with it, I promise you that.” Again, this sounds like a veiled admission of faking; but four years later, in 1975, Elsie gave an interview to Walter Clapham, of Woman, in which she stated again what both girls had maintained at the time—that they had seen fairies repeatedly in the dell, and had photographed them. Elsie mentioned that she was “psychic,” and described a number of occasions on which she had seen ghosts. (Gardner had been convinced that both Elsie and Frances were mediums.) As to the fairy photographs, she admitted that they had been intended as a hoax, but not quite of the kind suspected by the non-believers. It seems that on the day they took the first photograph Frances had fallen into the stream, and had tried to get out of trouble by lying about in it. She had been soundly admonished for stretching the truth. Elsie borrowed her father’s camera to comfort Frances, and when they began to discuss the lying issue, Elsie pointed out that grown-ups lie—for example, about Father Christmas. So they would get their revenge in a rather convoluted manner. They would take photographs of fairies, and show them to the grown-ups. And if the grown-ups took them seriously, they’d reply: “But you know fairies don’t exist.”

  Their revenge fell flat, since Elsie’s parents declined to believe in the fairies.

  In 1976, a Yorkshire folklorist and psychical investigator, Joe Cooper, persuaded Elsie and Frances to appear on a television program. His account of what happened is contained in a book called The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. I met Joe Cooper on my visit to Yorkshire in August 1980, and he told me then that his final conclusion was that Elsie and Frances are genuine; they really did see fairies. In his book, he records conversations with Elsie in which she makes statements such as: “Fairies and elves are tremendously interested in the doings of human beings.” In the dell, she told Cooper: “Round about here the gnomes used to come,” and in reply to his question about what they wore: “Russet colors—they were a bit shy.” She describes the photographing of the fairies quite circumstantially, with no attempt to imply that they were pure imagination: “When it [the elf] became clear Frances pressed the trigger on the box camera.” Asked why she never made a grab for the fairies, she replied: “You couldn’t. It’s like grabbing for a ghost or something.” And to the question: “Did you in any way fabricate these photographs?” Frances replied flatly: “Of course not.”

  The most interesting point established by Joe Cooper is that Elsie is undoubtedly psychic—either that, or a liar. She told him of a lady with a dog who used to come to her bedside when she was a child of four. Elsie talked to her, but the lady never replied. On one occasion, Elsie claims, the lady brought a fox terrier, which somehow located a penny she had under her pillow, and swallowed it. When Elsie shouted, her mother rushed upstairs. The lady and the dog had vanished, but they never found the penny.

  Elsie also tells of an occasion when she came downstairs one evening for a drink of water, and found a strange man in his shirtsleeves in front of the fire, reading a newspaper, and a woman with a white apron came from the kitchen with a dish of rice pudding and put it in the oven. When Elsie asked where her parents were, the man told her they were playing cards at their neighbors, the Moffs. Elsie said she wanted to see them, and the man opened the door for her—the latch was too high for her to reach. When she knocked on the door of the Moffs, her parents were highly alarmed to hear about the strangers in their house, and rushed back immediately. The house was in darkness. The only sign that anything strange had occurred was that the door was still open. And Arthur Wright had locked it when they went out.

  The case of the Cottingley fairies remains unproven. For the skeptics, the strongest evidence against it is the photographs themselves. The fairies look a little too conventional. The BBC demonstrated that it is not too difficult to fake fairies; they showed their reporter surrounded by them in the studio; these fairies were cardboard cut-outs that moved on wire (to make them stand up). It is therefore entirely conceivable that Elsie and Frances used cutouts supported by wire. In that case, it would be perfectly understandable that they are disinclined to confess. All their defenders, from Conan Doyle to De Vere Stacpoole, would be made to look idiots, and an intriguing mystery would finally be dismissed and forgotten. Yet there is surely no reason why, in that case, they should continue to insist that they saw fairies frequently as children. Frances told Joe Cooper that she still “almost” sees them, from the corners of her eyes, but declines to have her attention drawn to them.[1] (Cooper quotes another man who claims to have seen
fairies, but only out of the corner of his eye.)

  The view that was held by Gardner, Doyle and Hodson is that what the children saw were “elementals.” Elementals are nature spirits, particularly of woods and streams. There are four basic elementals: gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and nereids, being respectively the spirits of earth, air, fire and water. It would be a fair assumption that in the twentieth century, only members of the lunatic fringe believe in such creatures. This is not so. Writing in his classic work The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, W. Y. Evans-Wentz writes:

  We seem . . . to have arrived at a point in our long investigations where we can postulate scientifically . . . the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons, all kind of true fairies, and disembodied man . . . The general statement may be made that there are hundreds of carefully proven cases of phenomena or apparitions precisely like many of those which the Celtic people attribute to fairies.

  And by way of example, he goes on to cite poltergeists, which, he points out, sound very much like what have been called demons, fairies and elementals. He goes on to quote the famous French investigator (and astronomer) Camille Flammarion, who points out that the pranks of poltergeists are thoroughly puerile and resemble the mischief of badly behaved children. Flammarion goes on to make the important statement:

  These spirits are not necessarily the souls of the dead; for other kinds of spiritual beings may exist, and space may be full of them without our ever knowing anything about it, except under unusual circumstance. Do we not find in different ancient literatures demons, angels, gnomes, goblins, sprites, spectres, elementals, etc? Perhaps these legends are not without some foundation in fact.

  The scientist and psychic investigator Sir William Crookes came to the same conclusion, summarizing his theory in the words:

  The actions of a separate order of beings, living on this earth, but invisible and immaterial to us. Able, however, occasionally to manifest their presence. Known in almost all countries and ages as demons (not necessarily bad), gnomes, fairies, kobolds, elves, goblins, Puck etc.

  Moreover, as Evans-Wentz remarks, the kind of people who claim to have seen fairies are not usually excitable, hysterical or neurotic; they tend to be very ordinary. Andrew Lang made the same observation about people who have seen ghosts—that they are usually “steady, unimaginative, unexcitable people with just one odd experience.” Joe Cooper’s observations bear this out: for example, a National Serviceman out having a picnic with his girlfriend in Gibraltar when the sandwich was snatched from his hand by a little man about eighteen inches high, who then ran away. The account is completely matter-of-fact: “his features were just human, they weren’t distorted, a big bulbous nose or chin . . . and I noticed he had a hammer in his hand . . .”

  When I was lecturing at the Edinburgh Festival in 1978, I was interviewed in the local Scottish TV studio by an interviewer named Bobbie (whose second name, regrettably, I failed to note in my journal). He was apparently a well-known interviewer on Scottish news programs, and he commuted between the Edinburgh and Glasgow studios. When, afterwards, we sat in the pub next door, he told me casually that he had seen a gnome and that it had “scared the hell out of him.” He was picking up a friend outside a convent, and had seen the gnome—a very thin man—standing on the pavement outside the gate. Something about the figure had terrified him and he drove off at top speed. Most stories of “fairy” sightings are like this, oddly circumstantial and oddly pointless.

  Marc Alexander tells such a story in his book Enchanted Britain. He has been discussing the case of Elsie and Frances, and speculates that these strange beings are not necessarily of a definite shape and size, that would be seen by anyone who happened to be on the spot. “Mankind down the ages has interpreted visions according to his experience and metaphysical outlook—the old Christians saw angels, we see UFOs.” He goes on to tell a story of a friend named Pat Andrew, whom he knew in New Zealand, and who claimed to have seen a pixie sitting on a gate when he was six. When a stage hypnotist came to town, Marc Alexander and his friend both began to experiment with hypnosis, and soon became proficient at it. One day, Marc Alexander tried regressing Pat Andrew to the age of six, to find out whether the story about the pixie was invention.

  When he reached this point he exclaimed in a wondering, high-pitched voice: “Look, a pixie.” He then continued, to whatever it was that he was seeing once again on the gate, “Hello, little fellow.” There was a pause, while presumably the pixie returned his greeting, then Pat said: “You’re a pixie, aren’t you?” Again there was a silence from the young man with closed eyes as in his memory the pixie answered his questions.

  It was strange to listen to this one-sided conversation, to the questions that a child would ask a pixie such as where did it live, what did it eat, what was its name, and so on. All I could hear were the words Pat had actually used sixteen years earlier, but they left me in no doubt that as a child my friend had spoken to something sitting on top of a gate which had replied to him as a pixie.

  What intrigued Marc Alexander was that Andrew’s description of the little man made it clear that he was a traditionally English pixie with a pointed hat, not the Maori equivalent of pixies, the turehu—and until the hypnotic experiment he had been inclined to assume that the pixie had been a figment of his friend’s imagination—not a deliberate lie, but a fantasy that had taken on reality for a small boy.

  The dowser Tom Lethbridge, whom we have met in chapter 1, was convinced that there are various types of “earth field” connected with different elements: water fields (which he called naiad fields), oread fields, associated with open spaces and mountains, and dryad fields, associated with woodland. Each field has its own kind of entity—or spirit—associated with it. But Lethbridge believes these are simply a property of the field—recordings—not real spirits. He says:

  Little people are seen now and then by many races of men. They are seen in Africa, for instance, where they are just like tiny Africans. I do not for a moment doubt that they are seen, but I do doubt the interpretation placed on the seeing. We can take it as an observed fact that ordinary men and women all over the world have seen little people; but I do not believe that they really exist as such. Throughout this investigation we are assuming that people do not go out of their way to tell lies. When they say that they have seen a little man, they are not just making up a story based on tradition. They have seen something which appeared to their mind as a little man.

  But Lethbridge goes on to tell two stories that contradict this hypothesis. (Lethbridge evolved from book to book, so this often happens.) In July 1922, Lethbridge and a party of friends were visiting the Shiant Islands off the northwestern coast of Scotland. One of them climbed a hill, and left his waterproof coat and lunch basket there by a marked rock. When he returned, they had vanished. Yet the island was deserted (apart from the rest of the party who were elsewhere); there were only seabirds, who could hardly lift a heavy lunch basket. He was convinced that they had been stolen by the “Sith”—or fairies—and Lethbridge acknowledged later that he felt they were wrong to laugh at this belief.

  Lethbridge himself had a supernatural experience on the island of Skellig Michael. He was with the friend who had lost his lunch. Lethbridge went off alone to examine the site of a Celtic monastery, then looked over the cliff and decided to climb down and look at the monastery’s rubbish dump. Halfway there, he had an unpleasant sensation—what he would later call a “ghoul”—the feeling that someone wanted to push him down the cliff. The feeling became so strong as he went on that he felt giddy. He decided to go back to the cliff top. Back at the site of the Celtic church, something suddenly flung him flat on his face. There was no wind, no animal, no other person. He later came to accept that what had flung him down was some form of poltergeist and, in Ghost and Ghoul, speculates that it may have been associated with a shipwreck of the previous year.

  But then, Lethbridge also knew that the sites of churches are ofte
n chosen because of some “earth force,” some innate “holiness” in the ground itself, and even pointed out that such churches are often named after St. Michael, because the saint became the Christian counterpart of the pagan god of light, Lugh (or Lucifer). This was the way the early Christians tried to “decontaminate” a place from its pagan origins. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about Guy Underwood’s discovery of ‘holy lines’ around sites like Stonehenge,[2] and knew nothing about ley lines, which were only just being rediscovered by John Michell and others during the last years of Lethbridge’s life; he might otherwise have taken the step—to which he comes so close in Ghost and Ghoul—of connecting some of these mysterious earth forces with the entity that stole his friend’s lunch basket and knocked him flat on his face on an island named after St. Michael.

  But Joe Cooper takes this step, in discussing the Cottingley fairies. He discusses a book with the off-putting title Secrets of the Gods by E. T. Stringer, and published in 1974. It is subtitled “An Outline of Tellurianism,” and the author—who is a climatologist who teaches at Birmingham University—defines this as a philosophy based on the notion of a Telluric force (earth force, Tellus being the Roman earth goddess). This, he says, is the force made use of by dowsers and psychic investigators

  —that is, Lethbridge’s “fields.” But he adds: “The Telluric force is not a physical force, as is magnetism or gravity. It cannot be measured by any scientific instrument . . .”