Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Two days later, as Esther was getting into bed, she began to feel ill again. All the bedclothes flew off the bed, and landed in the far corner of the room. Jane fainted. Esther began to swell again. The men rushed in, and someone replaced the bedclothes; they promptly flew off again, and a pillow hit John Teed on the head; he left the house never to return. Again, there were some loud explosions. Esther stopped swelling, and fell asleep.

  The following day, a doctor came to see Esther. As she lay in bed, the pillow under her head inflated, as if filled up with air, then collapsed, then re-inflated itself. Raps sounded around the room. The bedclothes flew off. There was a scratching noise above Esther’s bed and, as they all watched, they saw writing appearing on the wall. It said: ‘Esther, you are mine to kill.’ A lump of plaster detached itself from elsewhere on the wall and flew across the room to the doctor’s feet. Then rappings and bangs continued for the next two hours, while Esther lay, terrified, on her bed.

  The following day, Esther complained of an ‘electric’ feeling running through her body. The doctor gave her morphine; instantly, there was a series of bangs and crashes that seemed to go up to the roof.

  These disturbances continued for another three weeks. Then, one night, Esther fell into a trance, became rigid, and told the story of what had happened with Bob MacNeal. When she recovered consciousness, she admitted it was true. When Jane said that Bob must be responsible for Esther’s problems, loud knocks suggested that the ‘spirit’ agreed completely. Jane remarked that it seemed to understand what she said, whereupon there were three distinct raps. The doctor tried asking the ‘spirit’ simple questions, with one rap for no, two for ‘no answer’, three for yes. But the doctor’s attempts to get it to explain itself were a total failure.

  Esther became a subject of controversy; the house was permanently full of people. When a minister called to see her, a bucket of cold water on the kitchen table began to bubble as if it was boiling.

  In December, Esther developed a severe sore throat which turned to diphtheria. While she was ill, the manifestations ceased. Then she went away to convalesce. When she returned, the manifestations started immediately. Esther said she heard a voice telling her that the house was going to be set on fire. As she told the others about this, a lighted match fell from the air on to the bed, and the sheets caught fire. Jane quickly put it out. More lighted matches fell around the room, most of them going out immediately. The rapping noises started later, and when the family asked the ‘spirit’ whether the house would be set alight, it replied that it would not be. At that moment there was smoke from under Esther’s bed; they found that a dress had somehow transferred itself from the bedroom door, and had been set on fire.

  Three days later, Mrs Teed smelled smoke coming from the cellar. They found a barrel of wood shavings burning vigorously and had some trouble putting it out.

  The villagers were alarmed about this; if the Teeds’ house caught fire, half the village would probably be burned down. They suggested that Esther ought to be sent away. A neighbour named John White offered to take her in if she would do some housework. For two weeks, all went well; then a scrubbing brush flew out of Esther’s hand, went up to the ceiling, and came down and hit her on the head.

  White owned a restaurant, and Esther went to work there. An oven door refused to stay closed, and jumped off its hinges. Metal objects began flying at Esther as if she were a magnet, and a boy’s clasp-knife made her back bleed. When iron spikes were laid in her lap, they quickly became too hot to touch.

  All this seemed to support the suspicion that Esther was somehow ‘electrified’. They tried making her wear a special pair of shoes with glass soles; but these gave her headaches and made her nose bleed.

  When furniture began to move around the restaurant, John White decided it was time for Esther to go home. Again, she left Amherst for a few months; first to stay with a man and his wife in New Brunswick, then to a farm three miles from Amherst. She told various visitors about the ‘voices’ that spoke to her—voices which claimed to be the spirits that were causing the mischief. One of these spirits, ‘Bob Nickle’, threatened her with fire and stabbing.

  In June, 1879, a stage magician named Walter Hubbell moved into the Teeds’ cottage as a paying guest; he had heard about the ‘haunting’ and thought it might make the subject of a book. Within a few minutes of arriving, he had no doubt that this was no fraud. His umbrella sailed through the air, then a carving knife landed at his feet, then his bag was ‘thrown’, then a chair shot across the room and hit his own so hard that he nearly fell on the floor. From then on, the chairs in every room he entered performed a dance. Esther told him he was unpopular with the spirits. Undeterred, Hubbell tried asking them questions by means of raps, and the spirits were able to tell him the number engraved on his watch, and the dates of coins in his pockets. Later, Hubbell lay down on the settee and closed his eyes; Esther came into the room, and Hubbell cautiously peeped at her, perhaps hoping that she would give herself away as a cheat. Instead, he saw a large glass paperweight float up across the room and rebound off the arm of the settee.

  During the next few days the poltergeist put on a special show for Hubbell. Objects floated around, strange noises were heard—like sawing wood and drumming on a washboard—and Esther was attacked by ‘six spirits’ who stuck no fewer than thirty pins in her. Small fires broke out—on one day there were forty-five of them—and the sound of a trumpet echoed through the house; they later found a small silver trumpet which no one had ever seen before. When Esther went to the local minister to pray, ‘Bob Nickle’ attacked her viciously on her return, cutting her head open with a bone and stabbing her in the face with a fork.

  Hubbell thought he saw a way of making money. He hired a hall and persuaded Esther to put on a ‘show’ for the people of Amherst. Inevitably, the spirits declined to operate, and the audience demanded their money back.

  Tired of the non-stop disturbances, Daniel Teed sent Esther off to stay with some obliging friends; Hubbell, who now had enough material for his book, went to St John to write it. It appeared in due course and went through several editions.

  During Esther’s stay with her friends, the spirits let her alone. She then took a job on a farm owned by people called Davidson. Her friends found that various articles were missing, and these were located in the Davidsons’ barn. Esther was suspected of theft, but before the case could be investigated the barn caught fire and burned to the ground. Esther was accused of arson, and was sentenced to four months in jail. After this, the manifestations came suddenly to an end.

  This abrupt termination of the ‘haunting’ seems to favour the view that Esther’s own unconscious mind was responsible. This is, in fact, the view I favoured when I described the case briefly in a book called Mysteries. Esther was sexually frustrated, and if Bob MacNeal had adopted a more gentlemanly way of seducing her, there would have been no ‘Great Amherst Mystery’ (the title of Hubbell’s book). Esther was a classic case of ‘the divided self: a part of her longing to give herself to her lover, while the inhibitions induced by her background and training made this impossible. So when she rejected his advances, and he vanished into the night, her unconscious mind said, in effect: ‘Now see what you’ve done, stupid!’, and set out to punish her. As to the effects themselves, many of them fit the hypothesis I have suggested: that the ‘energy’ comes from the earth. When Esther wore shoes with glass soles, the manifestations stopped but she developed headaches and nosebleeds. Her sensation of electric currents is also highly suggestive. There have been dozens of well-authenticated cases of ‘human electric batteries’. Again, nearly all concern girls or boys at the age of puberty. Caroline Clare of Bondon, Ontario, began to lose weight at the age of seventeen (in 1877), then developed such powerful electric currents that people who touched her received severe shocks; pieces of metal stuck to her as if she were a magnet. Jennie Morgan of Sedalia, Missouri, became an electric battery at fourteen; when she touched metal object
s, sparks flew. Frank McKinistry, also of Missouri, would develop an electric charge during the night and slowly lose it during the day. When highly charged, his feet would stiek to the ground so that he had difficulty in walking—which sounds again as if the electricity comes from the earth. (Good dowsers receive a ‘tingling’ sensation when they touch standing stones.) The Amherst minister, the Reverend Edwin Clay, was convinced that the secret of Esther’s manifestations was electricity, and even delivered a lecture to that effect.

  But how did Esther’s unconscious mind know the number of Hubbell’s watch and the dates of coins in his pocket—which no doubt he did not know himself? How did her mind scratch ‘Esther, you are mine to kill’ on the wall above her head? How did it blow a trumpet all over the house? The truth is that the unconscious mind theory needs to be stretched so much that it loses the chief virtue of a good theory—simplicity.

  But perhaps the strongest argument against the unconscious mind theory is simply that Esther’s torment went on for so long. To actually read the case in detail is to feel that no one could get so angry with herself that she would continue relentlessly for more than a year. We may say, ‘Oh, I could kick myself,’ when we do something stupid; but no one has ever done it.

  The fraud hypothesis also fails to stand up to close examination. If Hubbell’s book was the main piece of evidence, then we might well feel suspicious, since he went to Amherst with the hope of writing it, and eventually made a great deal of money from no fewer than ten editions. But there are accounts in the Amherst Gazette that confirm everything Hubbell says. Moreover, in 1907, more than a quarter of a century after the events, the researcher Hereward Carrington went to Amherst and took various depositions from people who had witnessed the manifestations. By this time, Esther was unhappily married, and had turned into a sullen middle-aged woman, who agreed to talk to Carrington only on the payment of $100; Carrington felt that such testimony would be valueless. But there could be no doubt that most of the people involved believed that the manifestations were genuine, including the farmer, Davidson, whose barn had been destroyed—he said that he had often watched Esther as she came downstairs and had noticed that she seemed to fly or float. (In the Middle Ages, levitation used to be one of the criteria for demoniacal possession.)

  But this question of demoniacal possession must be left until a later chapter.

  * * *

  1. Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J. Ghosts and Poltergeists, 1953.

  7

  The Scientist Investigates

  THE NEXT MAJOR STEP forward in the history of poltergeist investigation was taken by an unlikely figure, Professor Cesare Lombroso. He was an unlikely investigator because he was known throughout Europe as a hard-line sceptic and materialist. And this, in turn, was due to the fact that he had been born—in 1835—in Verona, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was Roman Catholic. And since Lombroso was a Jewish Italian, he naturally hated the Austrians and their religion. His distaste was increased by several years under Jesuit schoolmasters—he felt they were trying to thrust him back into the Middle Ages. When he discovered science, he took to it like a duck to water—the simile is painfully hackneyed, but in this case gives an accurate sense of his enthusiasm. By the time Lombroso was 30, Garibaldi had freed Italy from the stranglehold of Austria—and Roman Catholicism—and Lombroso could proclaim his materialism without danger of finding himself in jail. Lombroso himself had played a small part in freeing Italy by serving in the army as a surgeon.

  When he became a Professor of Psychiatry at Pavia, and the director of a lunatic asylum in Pesaro, he set out to try and prove that insanity is a purely physical illness—he had to believe this, of course, since (as a good materialist) he did not believe that the mind exists. He spent years studying the brains of madmen and carefully staining their nerve fibres, in an attempt to track down the ‘germ’ of insanity—without success. Then he learned that the German physiologist Verchow had discovered certain ‘atavistic’ features about the skulls of criminals—that is, that they have a touch of the cave-man about them. This was the clue he had been looking for. He proceeded to make a careful study of the inmates in the local prison, and at the age of 41, announced to the world his discovery that the criminal is a throwback to our cave-man ancestors, a kind of human ape. In other words, a man born with these tendencies can no more help committing crimes than a born cripple can help limping. The book Criminal Man (L’Uomo Delinquente) made him famous throughout Europe. Naturally, it gave violent offence to the Catholic Church, which has always felt that wickedness is a matter of choice; but it also upset psychologists, who liked to feel that man possesses at least an atom of freewill.

  Yet in spite of his reputation for aggressive materialism, Lombroso was too good a scientist not to be willing to study new facts. And in 1882, he encountered a case that baffled him. A teenage girl had apparently developed some rather peculiar powers—although it sounded too silly to be taken seriously. According to her parents, she could see through her ear and smell through her chin. When Lombroso went to see her, he expected to find some absurd deception.

  She was a tall, thin girl of 14, and the trouble had begun when she started to menstruate. She began sleep-walking, and developed hysterical blindness. Yet she was still able to see through the tip of her nose, and through her left ear. Lombroso tried binding her eyes with a bandage, then took a letter out of his pocket and held it a few inches away from her nose; she read it as if her eyes were uncovered. To make sure she was not peeping under the bandages, Lombroso held another page near her left ear; again, she read it aloud without difficulty. And even without the bandage, she would not have been able to read a letter held at the side of her head.

  Next he tried holding a bottle of strong smelling salts under her nose; it did not make the slightest impression. But when it was held under her chin, she winced and gasped. He tried substances with only the slightest trace of odour—substances he could not smell if he held them two inches away from his own nose. When they were under her chin, she could identify every one of them.

  If he still had any doubts, they vanished during the next few weeks when her sense of smell suddenly transferred itself to the back of her foot. If disagreeable smells were brought close to her heel, she writhed in agony; pleasant ones made her sigh with delight.

  This was not all. The girl also developed the power of prediction. She was able to predict weeks ahead precisely when she would have fits, and exactly how they could be cured. Lombroso, naturally, did not accept this as genuine prediction, since she might have been inducing the fits—consciously or otherwise—to make her predictions come true. But she then began to predict things that would happen to other members of the family; and these came about just as she had foretold.

  In medical journals, Lombroso found many similar cases. One girl who developed hysterical symptoms at puberty could accurately distinguish colours with her hands. An 11-year-old girl who suffered a back wound was able to hear through her elbow. Another pubescent girl could read a book with her stomach when her eyes were bandaged. Another hysterical woman developed X-ray eyes, and said she could see worms in her intestines—she actually counted them and said there were thirty-three; in due course she excreted precisely this number of worms. A young man suffering from hysteria could read people’s minds, and reproduce drawings and words written on a sheet of paper when his eyes were tightly bandaged.

  Lombroso may have been a determined materialist; but he was willing to study the facts. And the facts led him into stranger and stranger regions of speculation. To begin with, he developed a simple and ingenious theory of the human faculties, pointing out that seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling all take place through the nerves, and that if one of these faculties becomes paralysed, there is no scientific reason why another should not take over. When he attended a seance with the famous ‘medium’ Eusapia Palladino, and saw a table floating up into the air, he simply extended his theory, and argued that there is n
o reason why ‘psychological force’ should not change into ‘motor force’. But when he began to study other cases of prediction and ‘second sight’, he had to admit that it became increasingly difficult to keep the explanations within the bounds of materialistic science. There was the case of a woman who refused to stay in a theatre because she suddenly had a conviction that her father was dying; she got home and found a telegram to that effect. A doctor who suffered from hysterical symptoms foresaw the great fire of 1894 at the Como Exposition, and persuaded his family to sell their shares in a fire insurance company which had to meet the claims; when the fire occurred, his family were glad they took his advice. A woman whose daughter was playing near a railway line heard a voice telling her the child was in danger; she fetched her indoors half an hour before a train jumped the rails and ploughed through the spot where her daughter had been playing.

  Slowly, and with painful reluctance, the sceptical scientist was converted to the view that the world was a far more complex place than his theories allowed. His colleagues were outraged. His biographer and translator, Hans Kurella, came to the conclusion that this was all a painful aberration due to the decay of his faculties—an argument difficult to sustain, since Lombroso was only 47 when he became interested in these matters, and he lived for more than a quarter of a century longer. Kurella can only bring himself to mention ‘Lombroso’s Spiritualistic Researches’ in a short afterword to his biography, and his comments are scathing. Talking about Eusapia Palladino, whose seances he had attended, he agreed that she was indeed a ‘miracle’—’a miracle of adroitness, false bonhomie, well-simulated candour, naivety and artistic command of all the symptoms of hysterico-epilepsy’. Which may well be true, but still does not explain how she was able to make a table rise up into the air when Lombroso and other scientists were holding her hands and feet.