The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to investigate “psychical phenomena” scientifically. One of its most influential members, Frank Podmore, author of a valuable two-volume history of Spiritualism, was firmly convinced the poltergeists were usually fakes, caused by stone-throwing children, although he was willing to admit that a well-known case at Durweston, on Viscount Portman’s estate, was probably genuine. Podmore later had a lengthy correspondence with Andrew Lang, who found Podmore’s skepticism too wholesale; Lang is generally conceded to have won this controversy.

  In 1990 the famous criminologist Cesare Lombroso investigated a case of poltergeist haunting in a wine shop in Turin. As Lombroso stood in the wine cellar bottles gently rose from the shelves and exploded on the floor. At first Lombroso suspected that the proprietor’s wife was the cause of the disturbances, but they continued while she was away. Lombroso’s suspicions then focused on a thirteen-year-old waiter. When this boy was dismissed the haunting stopped.

  So it was fairly clear to the early investigators that poltergeist phenomena were connected, more often than not, with some particular person, usually an adolescent. (The word poltergeist was seldom used in the early days of psychical research, although it had been used to describe various cases by Mrs Catherine Crowe in her best-seller The Night Side of Nature in 1848.) But it was not until the late 1940s that the “unconscious mind” theory became popular. Nandor Fodor put forward his theory that poltergeists are “personality fragments” in The Journal of Clinical Psychopathology in 1945. Frank Harvey’s play The Poltergeist had a successful West End run in 1946; it was based on a case that had taken place at Pitmilly House, Boarshill, near Fife, in which £50 worth of fire damage had been caused – Harvey transferred it to a Dartmoor vicarage. His play popularized the “unconscious mind” theory, which had first been put forward about 1930 by Dr Alfred Winterstein, in discussing the case of the Austrian medium Frieda Weisl; the latter’s husband described how, when they were first married, ornaments would fly off the mantelpiece when she had an orgasm. The Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki had reached similar conclusions when she examined a young Rumanian girl named Eleanore Zugun, who was continually slapped and punched by a poltergeist – bite-marks that appeared on her were often damp with saliva. By the end of the 1940s the “unconscious mind” theory was generally accepted by those psychical investigators who were willing to believe that the poltergeist was not a fraud. This theory was summarized by BBC investigator Brian Branston in his book Beyond Belief (1976):

  I believe that, on the evidence, we may claim as a working hypothesis that poltergeist phenomena are produced unconsciously by an individual whose psyche is disturbed, that the disturbed psyche reacts on the oldest part of the brain, the brain stem, which by means unknown to science produced the commonly recognisable poltergeist phenomena. And these phenomena are the overt cry for help: as the poem says . . . “I was not . . . waving but drowning”.

  Yet Branston’s own theory has been contradicted by a case he has cited earlier in the chapter on poltergeists – one that took place at Northfleet in Kent. Branston records that “spooks so upset the various tenants that the house finally became empty. Previous tenants named Maxted had young children, and the usual poltergeist phenomena had taken place – mouse-like scratching noises, then the bedclothes pulled off the bed, ornaments disappearing and reappearing, and so on. When Mrs Maxted saw the ghost of a six-year-old girl they decided to move out. The next tenants had no children; they heard strange noises in the bedrooms, and smelt an unpleasant, rotting smell, but it was only after a year that they woke up to find one end of the bed rising up into the air, while beside the bed stood a pinkish-orange phantom, partly transparent, of a woman with no head. They also moved out. But even when the house was empty the next door tenants were able to hear thumping noises, and were alarmed when their own bed began to vibrate. So here, it seems, is a case where the “poltergeist” remained in the house throughout two tenancies, and stayed on when the house was empty.

  A similar case was investigated by the present writer.20 It took place in the Yorkshire town of Pontefract, in the home of the Pritchard family. Furniture moved, ornaments flew around, green foam gushed out of the taps, the house was shaken by thunderous crashes. A “ghost” – apparently a monk dressed in black – was also seen. But the “haunting” began when the eldest son, Phillip, reached the age of fifteen, and lasted a few days. When his younger sister Diane was fourteen the disturbances began again, and were this time more violent. (Diane had been away on holiday during the first outbreak.) Practically every breakable object in the house was smashed, Diane was thrown repeatedly out of bed and attacked by moving furniture, and a crucifix flew off the wall and stuck to her back, making a red mark. Then, as before, the manifestations faded. Diane herself was aware that the entity was somehow using her energy, and also felt intuitively that it meant her no real harm.

  Cases like these suggest that the poltergeist is not a manifestation of the unconscious mind of an unhappy teenager but – as Kardec stated – an actual entity or “spirit”, which remains associated with some place, but which can only manifest itself through the surplus energy of a human being – not necessarily a teenager.

  This was the conclusion reached by Guy Lyon Playfair, a paranormal-investigator who went to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1960s. Brazil, unlike England and France, remained faithful to Allan Kardec’s version of spiritualism, and his two works, The Spirits’ Book and The Medium’s Book, became the basic scriptures of Brazil’s most influential religion, “spiritism”. He investigated a poltergeist for the Brazilian Institute for Psycho-biophysical Research, and began to accept the Brazilian belief that poltergeists are spirits, and that they can be controlled by witch doctors, who may send them to haunt someone they dislike. One young girl named Maria was continually attacked by a poltergeist which tried to suffocate her and set her clothes on fire. A medium relayed a message saying that Maria had been a witch in a previous existence, through whom many people had suffered, and now she was paying for it. Maria committed suicide with poison at thirteen. Playfair’s books. The Flying Cow and The Indefinite Boundary present highly convincing evidence that most poltergeist disturbances are due to “spirits”.

  In 1977 Playfair and his fellow SPR member Maurice Grosse went to investigate a poltergeist at Enfield in north London. The case is described in detail in a classic book This House is Haunted. There were four children in the Harper family, aged respectively thirteen, eleven, ten and seven; it was a one-parent family, and there was considerable psychological tension. The disturbances began with vibrating beds and moving furniture. Playfair tried holding a chair in position with wire; the wire was snapped. A medium who came to the house said that there were several entities, and that eleven-year-old Janet was the “focus”. Playfair and Grosse finally established communication with the entity by means of a code of raps; it stated that it had been a previous tenant of the house thirty years ago and was now dead. It began to write messages in pencil. Eventually it developed a strange, harsh voice, identifying itself as Joe Watson. On another occasion the entity called itself Bill Haylock, and claimed that it had come from a nearby graveyard in Durant’s Park. One of its standard replies to questions (such as “Do you know you are dead”?) was “Fuck off”. Bill Haylock was later identified as a local resident, now deceased. Finally, in 1978, a Dutch clairvoyant, Dono Gmelig-Meyling, spent some time in the house, and somehow put an end to the “haunting”. He reported going on an “astral trip”, and meeting a 24-year-old girl who was somehow involved in the case. Maurice Grosse’s daughter Janet, who was the right age, had been killed in a motor-cycle crash in 1976. Playfair speculates that it was Janet who drew her father’s attention to the case, putting it into the head of a neighbour to ring the Daily Mirror, and into the head of a Daily Mirror journalist to contact the Society for Psychical Research. (Kardec insisted that our minds are far more influenced by “spirits” than we realize.) But the energ
y required by the poltergeist or poltergeists was undoubtedly supplied by the children, primarily by Janet Harper. (Playfair commented at one stage that half the contents of the local graveyard seemed to be haunting the house.)

  The view that poltergeists are “spirits” who make use of some form of human energy remains highly unfashionable among psychical investigators, who prefer the more “scientific” theory of Fodor. Yet the case of the phantom drummer of Tedworth seems to support Playfair’s view that poltergeist phenomena can be caused by “witchcraft”; and witches have traditionally claimed to perform their “magic” through the use of spirits. One thing is certain: that Podmore’s view that poltergeists are usually due to deliberate fraud is untenable in the face of the evidence. Skeptics point out that most “psychical phenomena” are intermittent, and that they are so much the exception that they may safely be ignored. But there have been literally thousands of cases of poltergeist phenomena, and they continue to occur with a regularity that makes them easy to record and investigate. No one who considers the phenomenon open-mindedly can fail to be convinced that the poltergeist is a reality that defies “purely scientific” explanation.

  42

  Possession by the Dead

  Myth or Reality?

  In 1924 the National Psychological Institute in Los Angeles published a book with the arresting title Thirty Years Among the Dead, by Carl A. Wickland. It was not, as one might have supposed, the memoirs of a mortuary attendant but an account by a respectable doctor of medicine of his psychological research into Spiritualism. Inevitably, it aroused a great deal of scorn among the medical fraternity, one fortunate result being that first editions are still fairly easy to find in the “occult” sections of secondhand bookshops. Yet this is hardly fair to a work that proves, on closer examination, to be a sober and factual account of Dr Wickland’s theory that a great deal of mental illness is caused by “spirit possession”.

  Wickland, born in Leiden (Sweden) in 1861, had emigrated to Chicago, where he earned his medical degree; he became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Science and a medical adviser to the Los Angeles branch of the National Psychological Institute. It seems likely that he decided to burn his boats and publish his book because at age sixty-three he was on the verge of retirement anyway, and ridicule would make no difference.

  Ridicule was inevitable. Twelve years before Wickland had been born, in 1849, the movement called Spiritualism had been launched in the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, and within a few years, the new “religion” had swept across the Christian world.

  It had all started two years earlier in the small town of Hydesville, where strange banging and rapping noises had kept the Fox family awake all night. Mrs Fox asked the unseen knocker whether it was a spirit, and if so, to make two raps; she was answered by two thunderous bangs. Later “communications” in a code of raps seemed to establish that the knocker was the ghost of a peddler who had been murdered by a previous tenant and buried in the basement. (The previous tenant denied it indignantly, but more than half a century later, human bones were unearthed in the basement, behind a makeshift wall.) The raps and bangs turned into typical poltergeist phenomena, which followed the two teenage sisters, Kate and Margaretta, even when they were separated. In the Fox home, bloodcurdling groaning noises and sounds like a body being dragged across the floor made James Fox’s hair turn white. Eventually, a “spirit” spelled out a message to the effect that “this truth” must be proclaimed to the world, which led to the launch of the Spiritualist movement in November 1849.

  Suddenly, hundreds of “mediums” discovered that they could communicate with spirits; some “physical mediums” could even cause them to “materialize”. Scientists were furious and denounced the movement as a revival of medieval superstition; even the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882 – by serious-minded scientists, philosophers, and statesmen – failed to provide Spiritualism with an air of respectability.

  So even as late as 1924 Wickland was inviting ridicule with a title like Thirty Years Among the Dead. Yet the book’s opening chapters soon make it clear that his interest sprang from medical curiosity and was that of a medical man rather than a “believer”.

  It all began, he explained, with a patient whom he calls Mrs Bl –, who began to practice automatic writing and who soon began to have fits of derangement in which she used vile language and claimed she was an actress; she had to be committed to an asylum. Another woman, “an artist and lady of refinement”, became convinced that she was a damned soul and knelt in the mud to pray at the top of her voice. Yet another woman, who owned a millinery shop, posed in her window in her nightclothes, declaring that she was Napoleon, and had to be removed by the police.

  At this time (in the mid-1890s) it was generally believed that mental illness could be explained in purely physical terms; many a head physician in a mental home was appointed because he had a working knowledge of brain anatomy. Freud himself was an early convert to this theory (known as organicism), his professor, Dr Theodore Meynert, being one of its chief advocates. (Meynert later turned his back on Freud when the latter returned from Paris espousing a new “psychological” explanation of neurosis based on the idea of the unconscious mind.) In America, the favourite theory of mental illness was that it was due to poisons in the system resulting from such causes as infected tonsils or decayed teeth. But Wickland was intrigued by the case of a youth named Frank James who, after a fall from a motorcycle at the age of ten, changed from an affectionate, obedient boy to a juvenile delinquent who spent many terms in reformatories and jails. Declared hopelessly insane, James succeeded in escaping from the criminal asylum and during his recapture was hit on the head with a club. On awakening, he had once again reverted to his earlier personality – gentle and good-natured.

  This convinced Wickland of the inadequacy of the “toxemia” theory. And while he was still a medical student, his marriage to a woman who proved to be an excellent “medium” soon provided him with evidence of an alternative theory. One day Wickland was dissecting a leg in medical school, and on his return home, was alarmed when his wife, Anna, seemed to be about to faint. He placed his hand on her shoulder and was startled when she drew herself up and said threateningly, “What do you mean by cutting me”? After a few questions it became clear that he was speaking to the spirit of the owner of the leg he had been dissecting. Wickland guided Anna to a chair, and the spirit objected that he had no right to touch “him”. When Wickland replied that he was touching his wife, it retorted, “What are you talking about? I am no woman – I’m a man”. Eventually, Wickland reasoned the spirit into recognizing that it was dead and that dissecting its old body would do it no harm. When it asked for a chew of tobacco or a pipe, Wickland had to explain that his wife was a nonsmoker. (The next day he observed that the teeth of the corpse were heavily stained with tobacco.) More detailed explanation finally convinced the man that he was dead, and he left.

  This showed Wickland that a “ghost” may believe that it is still alive, particularly if death came unexpectedly. He also encountered a case that seemed to demonstrate that spirits did not need to manifest themselves through a “medium”. When he was alone one day, dissecting a female corpse, he thought he heard a distant voice shout, “Don’t murder me”! A newspaper on the floor made a rustling noise, as if it was being crushed. Some days later, at a séance, a spirit who gave her name as Minnie Morgan claimed that it was she who had shouted “Don’t murder me”! and crushed the newspaper. Minnie also had to be convinced that she was no longer alive.

  At séances, entities who spoke through his wife later explained to Wickland that such “homeless spirits” – those who are unaware that they are dead – are attracted by the warmth of the “human aura” – a kind of energy sphere that is supposed to surround the human body – and, under certain circumstances, may attach themselves to the owner of the sphere as a kind of mental parasite. In effect, such spirits ar
e in a state of sleep, in which dreams and reality are confused, and, as in sleep, the dreamer is unaware that he is dreaming.

  In one case – of a female musician who had suffered a nervous breakdown – the woman spoke in a “wild gibberish” of English and Spanish (a language of which she was ignorant). Eventually, Wickland succeeded in learning that she was possessed by three spirits: a girl named Mary, and two rival lovers. One had murdered Mary, then the two men had killed each other in a fight; the three spirits were unaware that they were dead and had found themselves able to “possess” the musician, who was psychically weakened. (Wickland’s experience was that people who are insane or on the verge of a nervous breakdown are vulnerable to these psychic parasites.) Before the woman was finally cured, another spirit – that of a little girl who had been killed in the San Francisco earthquake – was “removed” from her (by a mild shock treatment involving static electricity generated by a Wimshurst machine, which Wickland found highly effective in “dislodging” these uninvited visitors).