Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Lodge’s book gives many more examples of evidence of Raymond’s ‘survival’; but, as he points out, this one is particularly convincing because it involves two mediums, both of whom spoke of the photograph before Lodge knew of its existence—thus ruling out any possibility of telepathy.

  To conclude this chapter, here is a final example of a type of phenomenon so beloved of Mrs Crowe and other early writers on the ‘supernatural’: the full-scale haunting.

  In February 1932, the grandchildren of a chimney-sweep named Samuel Bull refused to go to sleep, insisting that there was someone outside the door of the cottage. (They were sleeping in a downstairs room, recovering from influenza.) Their mother, Mary Edwards, looked outside the door, but there was no one there. Soon afterwards, she and the children saw the figure of Samuel Bull—who had been dead since the previous June—walk across the room, up the stairs, and through the door of the room in which he had died. (This was closed). They all screamed. This was the first of many appearances of the dead man at his cottage in Oxford Street, Ramsbury, Wiltshire. The ‘ghost’ was apparently aware of the presence of his family, for he twice placed his hand on the brow of his invalid wife Jane, and once spoke her name. Samuel Bull—who had died of cancer—looked quite solid, and could be seen so clearly that the children noticed the whiteness of his knuckles, which seemed to be protruding through the skin. They also noticed that the expression on his face was sad. After the first appearance, the family no longer felt alarmed—the children seemed ‘awed’ rather than frightened. They assumed that the ghost was looking sad because of the miserable conditions they were living in—the cottage was damp and some rooms were unfit for habitation. On the last two occasions on which he appeared, Samuel Bull no longer looked sad, and Mrs Edwards assumed that this was because the family was to be re-housed in a council-house.

  The family was already on the move when the two investigators from the SPR arrived, but the local vicar had already interviewed the family and recorded their accounts of what took place. The investigators were understandably upset that they had not been told about the case earlier, but their conversations with witnesses, and the evidence of the vicar, left them in no doubt that the haunting was genuine.

  This rag-bag of assorted visions and apparitions underlines the enormous variety of cases investigated by the SPR in the first century of its existence. None of them are, in themselves, more impressive than cases cited by Jung-Stilling or Catherine Crowe or Robert Dale Owen. But they are more convincing because honest investigators have obviously done their best to confirm that they are genuine. And anyone who is willing to spend a few hours browsing through volumes of the Proceedings of the SPR (or its American counterpart) is bound to end with a feeling that further scepticism is a waste of time. Even if half the cases proved to be fraudulent or misreported, the other half would still be overwhelming by reason of sheer volume. It is easy to understand the irritation of Professor James Hyslop when he wrote in Life After Death:

  ‘I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose to argue with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.’

  Where sceptics are concerned, he certainly has a point. Sir John Bland Sutton, a well-known surgeon, remarked: ‘Death is the end of all. My experience is that all of those who have studied the subject scientifically and deeply have come to the same conclusion.’ Such a statement simply lacks the ring of truth. There have been many basically sceptical investigators—Hyslop himself was notoriously ‘tough-minded’, and much disliked by fellow members of the SPR because he seemed an incorrigible ‘doubting Thomas’—but in every single case where a sceptic has persisted in studying the facts, he has ended up more-or-less convinced of the reality of life after death. I say ‘more or less’ because a few investigators, such as Dr Gardner Murphy and Mrs Louisa Rhine, feel that most of the ‘facts’ can also be explained by what might be called ‘super ESP’—mind-reading clairvoyance, and so on. Hyslop himself finally abandoned the ‘super ESP’ hypothesis through an experience that has become known as the ‘red pyjamas case’, He received a communication from a medium in Ireland to the effect that a ‘spirit’ calling itself William James had asked him to pass on a message asking him if he remembered some red pyjamas. Now William James, who had died in 1910, had agreed with Hyslop that whichever of them died first should try to communicate with the other. But the message about red pyjamas meant nothing to Hyslop. Then suddenly he remembered. When he and James were young men, they went to Paris together, and discovered that their luggage had not yet arrived. Hyslop went out to buy some pyjamas, but could only find a bright red pair. For days James teased Hyslop about his poor taste in pyjamas. But Hyslop had long forgotten the incident. As far as he could see, there was no way of explaining the red pyjamas message except on the hypothesis that it was really William James who had passed it on.

  Twenty-six years after Hyslop’s death, he was quoted by the psychologist Carl Jung in a letter. Jung was discussing the question of the identity of ‘spirits’ who communicate through mediums:

  ‘I once discussed the proof of identity for a long time with a friend of William James, Professor Hyslop, in New York. He admitted that, all things considered, all these metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious. And here, on the basis of my own experience, I am bound to concede he is right. In each individual case I must of necessity be sceptical, but in the long run I have to admit that the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other.’1

  Yet it is significant that Jung never made this admission in any of his published work, where he continued to insist that the facts about the paranormal could be explained in terms of the powers of the unconscious mind.1

  As far as the present investigation is concerned, we shall proceed on Jung’s assumption that the ‘spirit hypothesis’ fits the facts better than any other. The question of whether it is ultimately true must, for the time being, be left open.

  1. Trevor H. Hall, The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, 1964.

  1. John L. Campbell and Trevor Hall, Strange Things, 1968, p. 211.

  1. Collected Letters, Vol. 1, p. 431.

  1. This is discussed at length in my book on Jung, The Lord of the Underworld (1984).

  6

  On the Trail of the Poltergeist

  ONE DAY IN March 1661, a magistrate named John Mompesson, who lived in Tedworth in Wiltshire, was visiting the small town of Ludgershall when he was startled by loud drumming noises that came from the street. He was told that the racket was being made by a vagrant named William Drury, who had been in town for a few days. Drury had been trying to persuade the local constables to give him public assistance, on the strength of a ‘pass’ signed by two eminent magistrates. The constable suspected that the pass was forged.

  Mompesson ordered the drummer to be brought before him, and examined his papers; just as the bailiff had suspected, they were forged. Mompesson seems to have been an officious sort of man who enjoyed exercising his authority; he ordered the drummer—a middle-aged man—to be held until the next sitting of the local Bench, and meanwhile confiscated his drum. The man seems to have tried hard to persuade Mompesson to return the drum, but without success. As soon as Mompesson’s back was turned, the constable seems to have allowed Drury to escape. But the drum stayed behind.

  A few weeks later, the bailiff of Ludgershall sent the drum to Mompesson’s house in Tedworth. Mompesson was just on his way to London. When he came back he found the house in uproar. For three nights, there had been violent knockings and raps all over the house—both inside and out. That night, when the banging started, Mompesson leapt out of bed with a pistol and rushed to the room from whi
ch the sound was coming. It moved to another room. He tried to locate it, but it now seemed to be coming from outside. When he got back into bed, he was able to distinguish drumbeats among the rapping noises.

  For the next two months, it was impossible to get to sleep until the middle of the night; the racket went on for at least two hours every night. It stopped briefly when Mrs Mompesson was in labour, and was silent for three weeks—an indication that the spirit was mischievous rather than malicious. Then the disturbances started up again, this time centring around Mompesson’s children. The drumbeats would sound from around their beds, and the beds were often lifted up into the air. When the children were moved up into a loft, the drummer followed them. The servants even began to get used to it; one manservant saw a board move, and asked it to hand it to him; the board floated up to his hand, and a joking tug-of-war ensued for twenty minutes or so, until the master ordered them to stop. When the minister came to pray by the children, the spirit showed its disrespect by being noisier than usual, and leaving behind a disgusting sulphurous smell—presumably to imply it came from Hell. Scratching noises sounded like huge rats.

  Things got worse. During the next two years lights were seen, doors slammed, unseen skirts rustled, and a Bible was burnt. The creature purred like a cat, panted like a dog, and made the coins in a man’s pocket turn black. One day, Mompesson went into the stable and found his horse lying on its back with its hind hoof jammed into its mouth; it had to be pried out with a lever. The ‘spirit’ attacked the local blacksmith with a pair of pincers, snatched a sword from a guest, and grabbed a stick from a servant woman who was trying to bar its path. The Reverend Joseph Glanvil—who wrote about the case—came to investigate, and heard the strange noises from around the childrens’ beds. When he went down to his horse, he found it sweating with terror, and the horse died soon afterwards.

  The phantom drummer seems to have developed a voice; one morning, there was a bright light in the children’s room and a voice kept shouting: ‘A witch, a witch!’—at least a hundred times, according to Glanvil. Mompesson woke up one night to find himself looking at a vague shape with two great staring eyes, which slowly vanished. It also developed such unpleasant habits as emptying ashes and chamberpots into the childrens’ beds.

  In 1663, William Drury was arrested at Gloucester for stealing a pig. While he was in Gloucester jail, a Wiltshire man came to see him, and Drury asked what was happening in Wiltshire. When the man said ‘Nothing,’ Drury said: ‘What, haven’t you heard about the drumming in the house at Tedworth?’ The man admitted that he had, whereupon Drury declared: ‘I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet until he has made me satisfaction for taking away my drum.’ This, according to Glanvil, led to his being tried for a witch at Salisbury and sentenced to transportation. As soon as Drury was out of the country, peace descended on the Mompesson household. But the drummer somehow managed to escape and return to England—whereupon the disturbances began all over again. Mr Mompesson seems to have asked it—by means of raps—whether Drury was responsible, and it replied in the affirmative.

  How the disturbances ended is not clear—presumably they faded away, like most poltergeists. Certainly they had ceased by the time Glanvil published his account twenty years later.

  The ‘ghost’ that caused these disturbances in the Mompesson household belongs to the class of phenomena known as the ‘poltergeist’. The word is German, and means ‘noisy ghost’. It is the commonest type of spirit on record, and unless you are in the middle of an ocean or a desert, there is probably a poltergeist haunting going on within ten miles of the place where you are now reading this book . . .

  What is a poltergeist? It is a ‘spirit’ that seems to specialise in mischievous tricks, such as making scratching or banging noises, and causing objects to fly through the air. It would not be quite accurate to say that they ‘throw’ things, for the objects often have a strange habit of changing direction abruptly in mid-air, as if they are being carried rather than thrown. Moreover, these objects have been known to go through walls, and to come out on the other side. It is as if the poltergeist can de-materialise things and then materialise them again—either that, or the world of the poltergeist possesses an extra dimension to our three normal dimensions of length, breadth and height, so it can somehow ‘step over’ obstacles like walls.

  Glanvil wrote his book on strange occurrences—Saducismus Triumphatus—just before the dawning of the 18th century, the age of reason. Even in the 1660s, the magistrate Mompesson was widely suspected of somehow fabricating the story of the phantom drummer, and ‘he suffered by it in his name, in his estate, in all his affairs . . .’ A quarter of a century after its publication, Glanvil’s book was regarded as an absurd relic of an age of credulity. The main reason was that the civilised world was finally—after four centuries—shaking off the belief in witchcraft. In England, there had been no mass trials of witches since the death of Matthew Hopkins, the ‘witchfinder general’, in 1646; in America, the witch hysteria came to an end after the Salem trials in 1692. The age of science had dawned; there was no room for books like Saducismus Triumphatus in the age of Newton and Leibniz.

  One of the most remarkable cases of the early 18th century was investigated by the eminent scientist Joseph Priestley who, predictably, decided that the phenomena were caused by a hoaxer. It began at the rectory of Epworth, in Lincolnshire, inhabited by the family of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, grandfather of the founder of Methodism. On December 1, 1716, the Wesleys’ maidservant was in the dining-room when she heard appalling groans, like someone dying. The family made a joke of it. But a few nights later, they were awakened by loud knocking sounds, which usually seemed to come from the garret or nursery. The only person who failed to hear them was the Reverend Wesley himself, and the family decided not to tell him in case he thought it was an omen of his death. When they finally told him, he refused to believe them; that night, as if to convince him, there were nine loud knocks by his bedside.

  From then on, the house was in a constant state of disturbance, with footsteps in empty rooms and up and down the stairs—often more than one set of footsteps at a time—noises like smashing bottles, and a curious sound which was compared to the ‘winding up of a jack’ or someone planing wood. When Mrs Wesley heard knocking noises from the nursery, she tried repeating them, and the poltergeist then made the same knocks resound from the floorboards under her feet. When she looked under the bed, an animal like a badger ran out. A manservant who saw the animal sitting by the dining-room fire said it looked like a white rabbit.

  The family were at first afraid that it portended someone’s death, either that of the Reverend Samuel Wesley or of his elder son (of the same name). When nothing of the sort occurred, they decided that they were dealing with witchcraft—against which the Reverend Samuel had preached. Yet they also noticed that the disturbances seemed connected with the 19-year-old Hetty Wesley: she often trembled in her sleep before the sounds began.

  After two months, the poltergeist went away, although it is said to have made occasional brief reappearances in later years. The family came to refer to it as ‘Old Jeffrey’. And Mrs Wesley remained convinced that Old Jeffrey was the spirit of her brother, who worked for the East India Company, and who vanished without a trace. She could well have been right. In some respects, the poltergeist behaved like a ghost. Its activities always seemed to begin at a quarter to ten every night (few poltergeists keep to an exact timetable)—and the very first sounds heard were groans and heavy breathing, not the usual raps. Poltergeist disturbances usually—almost invariably—occur in a certain sequence. The earliest stage is usually some kind of scratching noise like rats; then raps and bangs, then flying stones or other small objects, then larger objects, then other forms of physical mischief—moving furniture, blankets pulled off beds. If voices occur, they usually occur after this stage—as we shall see in the case of the Bell Witch. It is almost unknown for phenomena to occur in a different order. So i
n that respect, the Wesley case is unusual, starting with what is usually one of the later developments. The chief objection to Mrs Wesley’s theory is that if the spirit of her dead brother was behind the disturbances, then why did he not try to communicate—for example, when the Reverend Samuel tried to get him to answer questions by means of raps?

  One of the more obvious features of the Epworth case is that there were none of the usual physical phenomena—falling stones, dancing furniture. The explanation, presumably, is that there was not enough energy available for the poltergeist to do anything more spectacular than make noises. This is also true of the most notorious poltergeist of the 18th century, the ‘Cock Lane ghost’. This began with knocking noises in the house of Richard Parsons, clerk of St Sepulchre’s church in Smithfield, London, in November 1759. One night, a woman named Fanny Lynes, who was lodging in the house, asked 10-year-old Elizabeth Parsons, the eldest daughter, to sleep with her while her common-law husband was away on business. All went well for a few nights; then the two were kept awake one night by scratching and rapping noises from behind the wainscot. When they told Richard Parsons about it, he said it was probably the cobbler next door.

  Soon afterwards, Fanny became ill with smallpox; she was six months pregnant, and her ‘husband’ was understandably anxious. He and Fanny were unmarried only because she was his deceased wife’s sister. William Kent had married Elizabeth Lynes two years earlier, but she had died in childbirth; now it looked rather as if the story was repeating itself. He moved Fanny into a house nearby, where, on February 2, 1760, she died of smallpox.

  Meanwhile, the rappings in Richard Parsons’ house were continuing; Parsons actually called in a carpenter to take down the wainscotting, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, the knockings got louder, and the story of the ‘haunted house’ spread throughout the neighbourhood. They seemed to be associated with Elizabeth; they came from behind her bed, and when they were about to begin, she would begin to tremble and shiver—like Hetty Wesley in the Epworth case. Later that year, Elizabeth began to suffer from convulsions.