Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  ‘Do you want to see a trick?’

  I don’t move.

  ‘No, Kathy, Will does not want to see a trick.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re going to do some divination.’

  ‘Do you want to see a trick?’

  ‘Is that a chain you’ve got there, Kathy?’

  I try to look round with only my right eye. Kathy has the tips of two fingers in the coin pocket of her tight jeans. I can see that, inside it, she is fiddling with a fine gold necklace, the one I assume that she uses to contact the dead. There’s a long, heavily freighted silence. Then, she stands up and walks out.

  I watch her go, then breathe out, my shoulders collapsing. I look around, checking that the front door is still in the same place that it was, while Lou goes into the kitchen to retrieve his Dictaphone. He plays his recording back. Compared to last night, the barks and growls in this place are diabolical and furious.

  ‘It just goes right through you,’ Lou says, and I notice that the sound of my coughing is present and in the correct place on the recording. It’s 3.22 a.m.

  ‘The best chance of seeing a ghost is when you’re by yourself,’ Lou whispers. I look over to his face in the light of the glowing monitor. He looks like a domesticated and slightly evil Elvis.

  ‘Some people say that this stuff is just your innermost fears coming to a conscious reality. But there are tons of cases where many people have seen the exact same thing. I’ll stay here, you go into the kitchen for a while and tell me what happens.’

  Obediently and condemned, I walk around the corner. And I’m frightened. It’s as if the dark is thick and airless and I have to push my way through it. Eventually, I find a low chair in the corner and sit down, amongst discarded toys and books and ironing.

  For a while, everything is normal. The settling house pocks, ticks and knocks. The cars swoosh past and my breathing rises and falls like a breaking sea. And then I see a streak of light dart across round by my feet. Then, a rapid series of knocks bang the wall. I know I’ve never been this scared before, because I’ve never felt the sensation of thousands of needle pricks coursing up my legs and through my torso. Suddenly, I am furious that I’ve put myself in this situation. I am, literally, too frightened to move my eyeballs. I sit hard and still, chest up and jaw stopped. I’m about to break every single one of Lou’s rules except the one about laughing.

  Five minutes later, Lou switches on the lights. I look, searching, into the bright, open air, in the places that the ghost lights appeared on the screen. Nothing. I tell Lou about the knocking and the lights. He shrugs and says, simply, ‘OK.’

  SO WHAT HAPPENED in Pennsylvania that winter? Whatever it was, it prickled at me for a long time afterwards. I became obsessed with what I’d seen, as did other people. Friends of mine told friends of theirs about Lou Gentile and his dark vocation. One afternoon, I got a panicked phone call from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody I knew. She wanted to know exactly what Lou had told me about the number three. She said that she and her father used to wake up at the same time every night. It became a running joke in the family. Neither of them knew what it was that interrupted their sleep at 3.33 a.m. every morning, but now, after hearing my story, she was frightened.

  I know what I saw, and it wasn’t, as one parapsychologist has told me since, ‘insects’. And I’m convinced that I wasn’t taken in by some conspiracy or hoax. You could argue that Kathy was mentally ill, but that doesn’t explain the knocking or the ghost lights. If they were just specks of household dust (or, indeed, insects), how did the things appear and disappear in mid-air? And why did they behave so strangely? What about the streak of light? And the knocking? What about the EVP? My coughing proves it wasn’t pre-recorded and the sound was unlikely to have been some sort of static interference because it came in response to Lou’s questions. And interference doesn’t answer questions.

  I also wonder if the Carvens could have made their ghost stories up in order to sue the property developer who sold them tainted land. But would they really risk all that ridicule? Why would they perjure themselves in such a ludicrous fashion? And, anyway, what court would rule, legally, that ghosts exist? Aside from all of that, what about the evidence that Lou found? The EVP and the ghost light that appeared right on cue? How do you explain the fact that something touched me?

  This is my problem: if I accept that ghosts do exist, then the hard walls of my straightforward and rational world fall down like colossal reality dominos. Because if we don’t die when we die, then nothing is as it seems and everything is up for questioning. All logic is gone. The priests, with all their smoke, spells and bad news, could turn out to have been right after all. There could be an afterlife, and if there is, that means there could be angels and demons and heaven and hell and rules of right and wrong by which I should be living. But, there again, they could, quite simply, just be insects.

  So, I need to find some answers. Because, right now, I’m haunted by questions.

  To: Lou Gentile

  From: Will Storr

  Subject: Ghosts

  Hi Lou

  Following my trip to Philadelphia, I have decided to spend some time looking into the subject further. I’d really appreciate it if you could keep in touch over the next few months and let me know what’s going on with you. Give me a shout if anything really mental happens.

  Thanks.

  Will

  1

  ‘Are you Sir Thomas Sackville?’

  HE’S A MAN’S man, is Christopher Tuckett. Rosy-cheeked and countryside-fit, rugged-faced and handsome. The 34-year-old assistant property manager (events) of Michelham Priory is all thick-cord trousers, rolled-up shirt-sleeves and shooting the shit out of pheasants. That’s what the (events) part of his job title means, by the way – countryside pursuits. He adores them. And they’re his job. So, you believe him when he says, ‘I’m not the type who’s easily fobbed when it comes to spooks and whatnot.’ (I believe him, anyway: I’ve seen a framed photograph in the lobby of him with a peregrine falcon perched on his arm. He’s giving it a steely look.)

  ‘I was a right cynic,’ Christopher continues, leaning back on a thick stone ledge. ‘I didn’t believe in ghosts. Still don’t. I’ll argue the toss about anything.’

  ‘What,’ I say, ‘even when you’ve got a tornado in your bedroom?’

  But the rest of the Ghost Club don’t laugh. They just stand there and blink back at him.

  It would, perhaps, have been better for me if the Ghost Club had turned out to be a support group, the sort that sits in circles in meeting halls, a cuddly community of crumpled victims who wear name badges, have tearful, confessional moments and a twelve-step rationality-recovery programme. Unfortunately, however, they’re not. They’re unashamed and unreconstructed Ghostaholics. And I am their newest member.

  A couple of weeks ago, I decided that my only option is to confront my fears, to charge bravely, head first, onwards towards the answers. So, I tracked down the Ghost Club’s website, printed off an application form, filled it in and popped it in the post.

  Barely two weeks later, I am here in Michelham, East Sussex on my first investigation. The thirteenth-century priory looms in misty, silent grounds, surrounded by a still-treacherous moat. Its high sloping roof, tough Tudor chimneys and thin, suspicious windows give the building the air of a defensive, growling animal. It doesn’t want you anywhere near it.

  We’re standing in the undercroft, the priory’s large, square, stone-walled entrance room. It has a low roof of curved arches that honeycomb across the ceiling and gather together into a large column that comes down into the middle of the room. It’s 5:17 a.m.

  ‘Well,’ says Christopher, rubbing his chin, as if he’s being made to consider the tornado incident properly for the first time. ‘Actually, I would say it was more like a mini-tornado. Me and my wife used to hear it in the kitchen. Then it would come down the corridor and into the bedroom. It would be there for a
good … two or three minutes?’

  ‘And it would … what?’ I ask. ‘Blow stuff around?’

  ‘Mmm, yeah,’ he says, nodding with his hand still cradling his jaw. ‘The curtains would be flat on the ceiling. Then you’d hear it go back up the corridor and into the kitchen.’ He ponders the mini-tornado for a few more moments before muttering, ‘That would wake you up.’

  In the corner of the undercroft, a life-size waxwork model of an Augustinian canon gazes at us piously from beneath a dark cloth hood.

  Christopher has permitted the Ghost Club to investigate the property that he’s allowed to live in as an employee of Sussex Past, the site’s owner. He’s come down to lock up behind us.

  ‘My wife left about a year ago,’ he says, folding his beefy, bramble-grazed forearms. ‘She couldn’t handle it here. I had to make a choice between my marriage and my job. And the job’s quite good.’

  The worst time for Christopher, he confides, was when he first moved in. He wasn’t allowed to live with Sue until they were married, so he had to spend two weeks living here alone.

  ‘The flat upstairs is quite huge,’ he says, ‘big rooms. And there was no furniture up there except one circular table and a bureau in the kitchen, which we decided to move into the sitting room. I remember waking up at three in the morning and you could hear this thing moving across the floor, as clear as you like. And you knew what it was straight away. It was the bureau, on these small brass caster wheels. I remember thinking, oh dear. Well, this noise seemed like it went on for ever. But it stopped and, well, eventually curiosity gets the better of you. I went into the sitting room and turned the light on. The bureau had been pushed up against the corner and it looked like it had only come out that far,’ he says, measuring about a yard with his hands, ‘but when you looked at the floor, there was this huge figure of eight scratch. It had scored all the polish from the floor, where one of the wheels had seized up.’

  ‘Christ,’ I say, involuntarily.

  ‘Now, I have to admit I do sometimes find it a little difficult to relax. Some nights it’s busier than others. You always know when it’s going to kick off. You know when you go into a pub and everyone stops and looks at you? That’s the feeling. Sometimes I’ll walk in, get a chill down my spine and I’ll go flat out up the stairs. But I just think, psychologically, that’s me snowballing in my mind.’

  I know what he means. I’ve done a bit of psychological snowballing in my own mind over the last few hours.

  It started in the gatehouse, a centuries-old castle-like tower that guards the entrance to the priory over the moat. I was with a senior member of the Ghost Club called Lance, and a couple in their early twenties called Natalie and Dane. I’d gravitated towards Lance early on because he looked like a man who knew what he was talking about. Male-pattern-bald and dressed down in a black T-shirt with studious wire-rimmed glasses and a cautious and precise way with words, Lance brings to mind a very kind, curious and learned old mole. I followed him about earlier as he set up various ghost traps. He sprinkled talc on a bookcase to capture phantom handprints; he put a teddy on top of the stairs and marked its exact location in case a recently reported apparition of a little girl is coaxed out of the shadows to play with it; and he talked about EMF and gaussmeters, which measure disturbances in the magnetic field that have been shown to take place where there’s ghostly activity.

  ‘The Ghost Club’s stated aim is to observe, record and monitor possible phenomena,’ he says. ‘We’re not ghosthunters in the sense of stamp collectors. We’re investigators. It’s a very imprecise science and our purpose is to gather evidence and to try and improve the methods by which we do so.’

  When we reach the gatehouse I notice, through the half-light, that Lance is carrying two thin metal L-shaped poles.

  ‘Dowsing rods,’ he says, noting my noticing. ‘You put them in your hands like this.’ He curls his fingers and rests one rod in each hand, so the longer part sticks out from the top at right angles. ‘Ask a question, and if the rods cross, that means yes.’

  ‘What, they just cross?’ I ask. ‘Just like that, of their own accord?’

  ‘It works with about 80 per cent of people,’ he says, ‘but nobody quite knows how. A simple test is to approach somebody with a pair of rods and, in almost all cases, they will part as you get near them. There is no physical contact, but you’re producing physical results.’

  ‘Can I hold them?’ I ask.

  I take the rods in my palm and weigh them. They’re strong, but incredibly light. I’m astonished. If what Lance is telling me is true, I am holding two bona fide mysteries of the paranormal in my left hand. Could these rods really cross of their own accord? And on cue, when you asked them a question? Even if they move aside when you approach someone – that’s scientifically absurd, isn’t it? Physical results without physical contact? That breaks the laws of physics.

  I carefully pass them back to Lance. I don’t want to break them. They must be valuable. Where do you get hold of something like that? I wonder.

  ‘They’re Sketchley’s coat-hangers,’ Lance says, ‘bent into shape.’

  Behind Lance, a man in a leather coat bends down and unclicks a large metal briefcase. He’s got a milky complexion, close-cropped hair and wide, pale eyes that look as if they’re in a permanent state of examining things. He opens the lid of his case and pulls out two enormous dowsing rods, like pistols. They’re bent into perfect right angles and, even in this dull light, they manage to flicker and glint. I walk up to him and introduce myself. He shakes my hand and gives me a business card – ‘Paolo Summat, Paranormal Investigator’.

  I feel disappointed when I’m told that Paolo is not in my group. He’s been assigned to work with a woman called Anne. Anne makes me nervous. She walks around the place silently and on her own. She has no understandable expression and always keeps her arms hidden under her long coat. She doesn’t spook Paolo, though. I watch them walk off, down a gloomy corridor, while Lance, Natalie, Dane and I leave the undercroft and the main building to walk, by torchlight, across the lawns towards the gatehouse.

  The inside of this large, dusty, 800-year-old room, which sits directly over the priory’s entrance, is so black that you can feel it pushing against your eyeballs. Sitting here, against the cold stone, the only thing I can make out are two thin arrow slits in the wall. The night sky outside them is tinted and glowing with cloudy moonlight. Suddenly, there’s a flash. It’s Dane’s digital camera. I can see his face as he studies the screen on the back of it. He’s looking for orbs – or ‘ghost lights’, as Lou Gentile would have it. He flashes and checks, flashes and checks. The thought that orbs could be invisibly zipping about the place makes me uneasy and I shift about, nervously.

  ‘I’ve got one over by the fireplace,’ Dane says. In the torchlight that his girlfriend is shining on him, I watch Dane go and kneel down on the dusty floorboards where he saw the orb. He has a set of rods in his hands.

  ‘Is there a spirit present with us now?’ begins Lance.

  The rods don’t move.

  ‘If there is a spirit present, will you please cross the rods?’ he says.

  One of the rods starts to shake, tentatively. I squint and try to focus to see if Dane is moving it.

  ‘It’s struggling a bit,’ Dane says. ‘Do you want a go, Will?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lance, ‘why don’t you give it a try?’

  After Lou’s warnings about divination, I was hoping this wasn’t going to happen. Nervously, in the feeble torchlight, I walk over and sit down in the jaws of the echoey medieval fireplace.

  ‘Is there a spirit present?’ Lance says.

  I stare at the rods. I decide to will them, to plead with them, to beg them. Inside my head, I shout no.

  ‘If there is a spirit present,’ says Lance, ‘will you please cross the rods?’

  No, don’t, please, I think as loudly as I can.

  ‘If there is a spirit present,’ repeats Lance, ‘will you please cr
oss the rods?’

  At first I feel a bit guilty. Then I feel a bit bored.

  All right, I say silently, cross.

  I shift the weight between my legs again and look up and around me, for some sort of visual reassurance that the world is still as I know it. All I can see are the thin, glowing arrow slits. They look as though they’re floating in space.

  ‘If there’s a spirit present,’ says Lance, ‘will you please cross the rods?’

  And then, to my rising horror, the left rod starts to tremble.

  ‘Please cross the rods,’ says Lance.

  Slowly, shakily, as if it’s being tugged by an invisible moth, the left rod crosses over the right one, which stays entirely static. My hands, I could swear, do not move.

  A flash.

  ‘Got an orb, right under your chin, Will,’ says Natalie, her nose buried in the back of her digital camera.

  ‘Does anybody else want to try?’ I say, getting up and swatting the empty air under my chin with my hand.

  Feeling the need to gather myself back together somewhere I’m allowed to put the lights on, I walk back to the undercroft for a think.

  As I enter the room I notice a hard plastic briefcase with its lid open. Inside is another pair of dowsing rods. I decide to take them out and test them. Up in the gatehouse, they crossed only when I instructed them to. So maybe, I think, my hands are moving subconsciously. There could be tiny muscle twitches attached to my thoughts, which are making the thin metal poles move in minute, juddering fractions.

  I hook the rods into my curled fingers, stare at them for a time and, when I’m ready, unleash a torrent of silent will. Cross! I demand with my mind’s most mountainous voice. Cross! And, just like in the gatehouse, they twitch into life.

  I put the rods down. Mystery solved. Unless I’m to believe that an invisible spirit heard my wish for the rods to cross and decided to give them a little nudge in the right direction, it would seem that this divination thing is all a big misunderstanding. I think about Kathy and the gold necklace that she’d hang from between her fingertips. Was she just talking to herself all that time?