by Colin Wilson
Lombroso struggled manfully to stay within the bounds of science; he devised all kinds of ingenious instruments for testing mediums during seances. But, little by little, he found himself sucked into that ambiguous, twilit world of the ‘paranormal’. Having studied mediums in civilised society, he turned his attention to tribal witch-doctors and shamans, and found that they could produce the same phenomena. But they always insisted that they did this with the help of the ‘spirit world’—the world of the dead. And the more he looked into this, the more convincing it began to appear. And so, finally, he turned his attention to the topic that every good scientist dismisses as an old wives’ tale: haunted houses. Here again, personal experience soon convinced him of their reality.
His most celebrated case concerned a wine shop in the Via Bava in Turin. In November 1900, he heard interesting rumours about how a destructive ghost was making life very difficult for the family of the proprietor, a Signor Fumero. Bottles smashed, tables and chairs danced about, kitchen utensils flew across the room. So Lombroso went along to the wine shop, and asked the proprietor if there was any truth in the stories. Indeed there was, said Fumero, but the disturbances had now stopped. Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had now gone away. ‘You interest me extremely,’ replied Lombroso. ‘Allow me to introduce myself.’ And he presented his card. Fumero looked deeply embarrassed, and admitted that the story about Lombroso was an invention, intended to discourage the curious. For it seemed that the Italian police had been called in, and that they had witnessed the strange disturbances and told Signor Fumero that, unless this stopped at once, he would find himself in serious trouble. So Fumero had invented this story of how the famous Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had taken his departure.
In fact, the proprietor admitted, the ghost was as active as ever; and if the professor would care to see with his own eyes, he only had to step down to the cellar.
Down below the house was a deep wine-cellar, approached by a flight of stairs and a long passageway. The proprietor led the way. The cellar was in complete darkness; but as they entered there was a noise of smashing glass, and some bottles struck Lombroso’s foot. A lighted candle revealed rows of shelves with bottles of wine. And as Lombroso stood there, three empty bottles began to spin across the floor, and shattered against the leg of a table that stood in the middle of the cellar. On the floor, below the shelves, were the remains of broken bottles and wine. Lombroso took the candle over to the shelves, and examined them closely to see if there could be invisible wires to cause the movement. There were none; but as he looked, half a dozen bottles gently rose from the shelves, as if someone had lifted them, and exploded on the floor. Finally, as they left the cellar and closed the door behind them, they heard the smashing of another bottle.
The cellar was not the only place in the house where these things occurred. Chairs and plates flew around the kitchen. In the servants’ room, a brass grinding machine flew across the room so violently that it was flattened out of shape; Lombroso examined it with amazement. The force to flatten it must have been considerable; if it had struck someone’s head, it would surely have killed him. The odd thing was that the ghost seemed to do no one any harm. On one occasion, as the proprietor was bending down in the cellar, a large bottle of wine had burst beside his head; if it had struck him it would have done him a severe injury. Moreover, the ‘entity’ seemed to have the power to make bottles ‘explode’ without dropping them. They would hear a distinct cracking sound; then a bottle would fly into splinters.
Now Lombroso knew enough about hauntings to know that this was not an ordinary ghost. The ordinary ghost stays around in a house for many years, perhaps for centuries, and manifests itself to many people. But this bottle-smashing ghost was of the kind that the Germans call a poltergeist—or noisy spirit. Such ‘hauntings’ usually last only a short period—seldom more than six months—and they often seem to be associated with a ‘medium’—that is, with some particular person who ‘causes’ them, in exactly the same way that Eusapia Palladino caused a table to rise into the air.
In this case, Lombroso suspected the wife of Signor Fumero, a skinny little woman of 50, who seemed to him to be distinctly neurotic. She admitted that ever since infancy she had been subject to neuralgia, nervous tremors and hallucinations; she had also had an operation to remove her ovaries. Ever since the case of the girl who could see with her ear, Lombroso had noticed that these people with peculiar ‘powers’ seemed to be nervously unstable. He therefore advised Signor Fumero to try sending his wife for a holiday. She went back to her native town for three days, and during that period, the wine shop was blessedly quiet—although Signora Fumero suffered from hallucinations while she was away, believing she could see people who were invisible to everyone else.
It looked as if Lombroso had stumbled on the correct solution. But it was not so simple. On Signora Fumero’s return, all the disturbances began again; so, to make doubly sure, Lombroso again suggested that she should go home for a few days. The poor woman was understandably irritated at being banished from her home on account of the spirits; and before she left, she cursed them vigorously. That apparently annoyed them, for this time the disturbances went on while she was away. On the day she left, a pair of her shoes came floating out of her bedroom and down the stairs, and landed at the feet of some customers who were drinking in the bar. The following day the shoes vanished completely, to reappear under the bed a week later. Worse still, plates and bottles in the kitchen exploded or fell on the floor. But Signor Fumero noticed an interesting fact. It was only the plates and bottles that had been touched by his wife that smashed. If another woman set the table—preferably in another place—nothing happened. It was almost as if the objects she had touched had picked up some form of energy from her . . .
So his wife came back from her home town, and the disturbances continued as before. A bottle of soda water rose up gently in the bar, floated across the room as if someone were carrying it, and smashed on the floor.
It seemed, then, that Signora Fumero was not to blame; at least, not entirely. So who was? There were only three other suspects. Signor Fumero could be dismissed—he was a ‘brave old soldier’, and not at all the hysterical type. There was a head waiter, who seemed to be an ordinary, typical Italian. But there was also a young waiter—a lad of thirteen, unusually tall . . . Lombroso may have recalled that the girl who could see through her ear was also unusually tall, and that she had grown about six inches in a year immediately before her problems began. This boy had also reached puberty.
Accordingly, he was dismissed. And the ‘haunting’ of number 6 Via Bava immediately ceased.
As a scientist, Lombroso’s problem was to find an explanation that would cover the facts. At a fairly early stage, he was convinced that they were facts, and not delusions. He wrote to a friend in 1891:
‘I am ashamed and sorrowful that with so much obstinacy I have contested the possibility of the so-called spiritualistic facts. I say the facts, for I am inclined to reject the spiritualistic theory; but the facts exist, and as regards facts I glory in saying that I am their slave.’
By ‘spiritualistic theory’ he meant belief in life after death. At this stage he was inclined to believe that he was dealing with some kind of purely mental force.
Lombroso’s study of hypnotism had convinced him of the reality of thought transference (or telepathy), and he went on to make the startling suggestion that thought itself could make objects fly through the air.
‘I see nothing inadmissible in the supposition that in hysterical and hypnotised persons the stimulation of certain centres, which become powerful owing to the paralysing of all the others, and thus give rise to a transposition and transmission of psychical forces, may also result in a transformation into luminous or motor force.’
He compared it to the action of a magnet in deflecting a compass needle. But ten years later he had come to recognise that this theory failed to cov
er ‘the facts’. It might be stretched to cover the case of the wine-shop poltergeist, if the young waiter was an ‘unconscious’ medium, and was using his ‘magnetic powers’ without realising it. But by that time, Lombroso had also studied many cases of haunted houses. And he concluded that there are basically two types: those like the Via Bava, in which there is a ‘medium’ (and which usually last only a few weeks or months), and the more traditional haunting, which may last for centuries. Lombroso apparently never had a chance to study this second type directly, but he went about collecting evidence from witnesses he judged reliable. When he heard about Glenlee, a haunted house in Scotland, he asked a friend named Professor Scott Elliott to investigate. Elliott went to see a girl who had lived in the house, and sent Lombroso the following story: Glenlee was owned by a family called Maxwell, and was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a lady who had poisoned her husband. A visitor named Mrs Stamford Raffles was lying in bed beside her husband when she saw—in the firelight—a cloud of mist, which gradually turned into the shape of an old woman. The room became icy-cold. The old woman seemed to be looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. Another visitor, Mrs Robert Gladstone, had the same experience—but during the day, with the sun shining: the same cloud of mist, the same old woman looking at the clock.
Since the stories cited by Lombroso are second-hand, and lacking in the kind of precise detail that is to be found in that of the wine shop, let me offer here a case of haunting that provides a better comparison. It is to be found in Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book.
In the 1890s, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould published in the Cornhill Magazine a ‘true ghost story’ about a house in Lille. A Mrs Pennyman, who had been involved in the case, wrote a long letter in which she corrected the inaccuracies of Baring-Gould’s account. Her own is as follows:
In 1865, when she was a girl, Mrs Pennyman’s family had gone to France so that the children could learn French; and they rented a house in Lille, where they had a number of introductions. The rent of the house—in the Place du Lion d’Or—struck them as remarkably low. When they went to the bank to cash a letter of credit, they found out why. The place was reputed to have a revenant—a ghost. In fact, the girl and her mother had been awakened by footsteps overhead, but had assumed it was a servant moving about. After the visit to the bank, they enquired who was sleeping overhead, and were told that it was an empty garret.
Their maid soon heard the story of the revenant from the French servants. A young man who was heir to the house had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The story had it that he had been confined in an iron cage in the attic by his uncle, who later killed him. The uncle sold the house, but it had never been occupied for long because of the ghost.
The family went to look in the garret, and found that there was a cage. It was eight feet high and four feet square, and was attached to the wall. Inside there was an iron collar on a rusty chain.
Ten days later, the maidservant asked if she could change rooms. She and another maid slept in a room between the main stairs and the back staircase, and which therefore had two doors. They had seen a tall, thin man walking through the room, and had buried their faces under the bedclothes. The mother told the maids to move into another bedroom.
Soon after this, the girl and her brother went upstairs to fetch something from their mother’s room, and saw ‘a thin figure in a powdering gown and wearing hair down the back’ going up the stairs in front of them. They thought it was a servant called Hannah, and called after her, ‘You can’t frighten us.’ But when they got back to their mother, she told them that Hannah had gone to bed with a headache; they checked and found her fast asleep. When they described the figure, the maids said that it was the one which they had seen.
Another brother came from university to stay. He was awakened by a noise, and looked out of the door to see a man on the stairs. He assumed his mother had sent a servant to see if he had put out his candle, and was angry about it. His mother told him she had not sent anyone.
By now, the family had found themselves another house. Some English friends named Atkyns called a few days before they left, and were interested to hear about the ghost. Mrs Atkyns volunteered to sleep in the room with her dog. The next morning, Mrs Atkyns looked tired and distraught. She had also seen the man wandering through the bedroom. The dog seems to have refused to attack it.
Just before they left the house, the girl herself saw the ghost. By this time they were so accustomed to the footsteps that they ignored them; but they kept a candle burning in their room. She woke up to see a tall, thin figure in a long gown, its arm resting on a chest of drawers. She could clearly see the face, which was that of a young man with a melancholy expression. When she looked again, he had disappeared. The bedroom door was locked.
This was the story as told by Mrs Pennyman. Lord Halifax sent it to the Reverend Baring-Gould, who later sent him a letter he received from a reader of his account in the Cornhill Magazine. From this letter, it appeared that the haunted house had been transformed into a hotel in the 1880s. The reader—a lady—described how she and two friends had stayed at the Hotel du Lion d’Or in May 1887, and it is clear that one of the bedrooms they were given was the room in which the two servant girls had seen the ghost. The lady herself slept in the next room, and settled down after dinner to write letters. The hotel was very quiet—they were apparently the only guests—but towards midnight she heard footsteps on the landing outside the door. Then one of the ladies in the next bedroom—which was connected to her own—tapped on the door and asked if she was all right; she had been awakened by footsteps walking up and down. The two ladies unlocked the door and peered out on to the landing; but there was no one there, and no sound either. So they went back to bed. As she fell asleep, the lady continued to hear the slow, dragging steps which seemed to come from outside her door. They left Lille the next morning, and she thought no more about the experience until she read Baring-Gould’s account in the Cornhill and realised that she had probably heard the ghost of the Place du Lion d’Or.
Stories of this type inevitably raise suspicions in the mind of the scientific investigator; they sound just a little too dramatic to be true—the young man confined in an iron cage, and so on. Yet since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, thousands of well-authenticated cases have been recorded. Sir Ernest Bennett’s Apparitions and Haunted Houses, for example, contains more than a hundred carefully documented cases, and many of these have the same suspiciously dramatic air that suggests an active imagination. Case five will serve as an illustration: a General Barter of County Cork describes seeing the ghost of a certain Lieutenant B in India—riding on a pony in the moonlight, complete with two Hindu servants. When the general said: ‘Hello, what the devil do you want?’ the ghost came to a halt and looked down at him; and the general noticed that he now had a beard, and that his face was fatter than when he knew him some years before. Another officer who had known Lieutenant B immediately before his death, later verified that he had grown a beard and become stout, and that the pony he was riding had been purchased at Peshawur (where he died of some sickness) and killed through reckless riding.
It certainly sounds a highly unlikely story. Yet it is confirmed (in writing) by an officer to whom the general told it immediately afterwards, by the general’s wife, and by a major. The wife also states that they heard a horse galloping at breakneck speed around their house at night on several occasions, and adds that the house was built by Lieutenant B. Finally, Bennett himself confirmed with the war office that Lieutenant B had died at Peshawur in January 1854. So although only General Barter saw the ghost, the evidence for the truth of his story seems strong. Other ghosts cited by Bennett were witnessed by many people—for example, the ghost of a chimney sweep who died of cancer, and who returned to his cottage every night for two months, until the whole family (including five children) began to take it for granted.
It is worth noting that nearly all ghosts mentione
d in the records of the Society for Psychical Research look like ordinary, solid human beings; so it seems probable that most people have at some time seen a ghost without realising it. The late T.C. Lethbridge has described in his book Ghost and Ghoul how, when he was about to leave a friend’s room at Cambridge in 1922, he saw a man in a top-hat come into the room—he presumed it was a college porter who had to give a message. The next day he asked his friend what the porter wanted, and the friend flatly denied that anyone had come into the room as Lethbridge went out. It then struck Lethbridge that the man had been wearing hunting kit. If he had not happened to mention it to his friend, he would never have known that he had seen a ghost.
Now Lombroso, who died in 1909, gradually abandoned his scepticism, and came to accept the ‘spiritualistic hypothesis’—that ghosts are, quite simply, spirits of the dead, and that the same probably applies to poltergeists, even though these can only manifest themselves when there is a ‘medium’ present. The title of his book about his researches—which was published posthumously—was After Death—What?—a question that would have struck him as regrettably sensational twenty years earlier. In other words, Lombroso made no clear distinction between poltergeists and ‘apparitions’. But even in 1909, this assumption would have been widely questioned. One of the most obvious things that emerged from the thousands of cases recorded by the SPR was that the majority of ghosts do not seem to notice the onlookers. (In this respect, General Barter’s case was an exception.) In fact, they behave exactly as if they are a kind of film projection. They wander across a room looking anxious—like the ghost of the Lion d’Or—as if re-enacting some event from the past. This led a number of eminent investigators—among them Sir Oliver Lodge—to suggest that some ghosts, at any rate, may be no more than a kind of ‘recording’. In Man and the Universe, Lodge writes:
