by Will Storr
‘This makes me believe that if you can see a historic ghost,’ Philip says, ‘then they will be able to see you, too.’
I find the time-slip theory difficult to grasp because, surely, when something has happened, it doesn’t exist any more. Time isn’t like tape from a video recorder that you can rewind and fast-forward, it’s like steam from a kettle – once it’s gone, it’s gone. Mind you, if Einstein reckons this is how it is, I’m not about to argue. But then there is another immediately obvious problem with this theory.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I say. ‘So if ghosts are just people in the past looking back at us through some sort of translucent time-wall, how come we don’t see ghosts of the future?’
Phil cocks his eyebrow. ‘How do we know that we don’t?’ he says, smiling in an ‘a-ha!’ sort of way.
‘Because they’d all be wearing space suits,’ I say.
‘Hmm, well, OK,’ says Phil, placing his chin in his hooked forefinger. ‘Maybe if the future hasn’t yet occurred, we can only see into the past. The past has happened, that’s an undisputed fact. So maybe we can only be retrospective.’
He looks at me and thinks a bit more with his lips all bunched up into the middle.
‘I’ve just contradicted myself, haven’t I?’ he says. ‘I need to give this some more thought.’
‘I think we both do,’ I say, as a long trail of Ghost Club investigators emerges from the depths out of an iron door beneath us.
‘Hello, is that Will?’
‘Yes, hello. Is that Janet?’
‘Yes. I was just ringing to say that I won’t be able to speak to you tonight.’
‘Oh, right. That’s a shame. Can we arrange a new date?’
‘No, um … I’ll call you about that.’
‘Oh. OK. Well, I hope everything’s all right?’
‘Thanks, bye.’
11
‘I promise you, you’ll scare yourself’
TODAY, THE CORRIDORS that I’m walking down have seen more agony than Coalhouse Fort has in all of its lifetimes. And yet there’s no darkness here. The air is big and dry, footsteps echo purposefully around wide, polished corners and there’s light here, constantly. It watches, humming in high, fluorescent tubes and glowing in sad, bedside bulbs as the poor souls that it keeps from the darkness come and go. It’s there during the good times, when they leave upright and out of the door and it’s there, also, at the bad times when they just flicker off, and their life slips away into the gap between the seconds. But you don’t need EMF meters, infra-red cameras or a celebrity medium to find haunted here. And you don’t have to fall into a noisy trance to find rage in this place, either. Or turn the lights off to find fear. Just step into the car park and listen to the woman I’ve just passed who’s barking her tears down her mobile phone. There’s fear and rage. There’s haunted.
I walk quickly, with my head down. I don’t like hospitals. They’re the waiting rooms for the graveyards – and this is where the grim stuff happens, the terror before the silence. I hurry to a lift with my hands in my pockets, travel two floors up, and am relieved to find myself in a safe, administration part of the building. I relax and enjoy breathing air that smells of carpet panels and photocopying, after the disinfectant tang of the wards downstairs. I find my door, the one with ‘Dr Mark Salter’ written on it. I knock, and a clean-cut, kind-looking, thirty-something man holds out his hand to greet me. Then, before I’ve even had the chance to take my cycle helmet off, he says, ‘You know, there’s no such thing as the supernatural.’
I freeze. After the events of the last few months, this sounds like heresy. Revolution. I take a steadying breath.
Then, Dr Mark says brightly, as if he’s just said nothing at all, ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’
I’ve come to see a shrink. Dr Mark Salter is a psychiatrist who works at the Homerton Hospital in east London and is an expert in delusions of the paranormal. If Dr Mark could meet Lou Gentile, David Vee, Debbie and Trevor and all the rest of them, he wouldn’t treat them as professional researchers working on the frontiers of human knowledge. He would treat them as patients. Mental patients. So, I’m here to hear his point of view. I want Dr Mark to speak for the rational part of me that reared up in the black and madness of the Coalhouse Fort tunnels, the voice that protested, a decade ago, against the R.E. teacher who told me that God once pushed her on a swing.
While Dr Mark is out of his office making tea, I check the shelves for supernatural nick-nackery. There’s nothing. No candles, crystals, crucifixes, mini-menorahs or pictures of white wolves howling at the moon. There’s just a pen-holder, a picture of a family and a big red book called The Broken Brain.
Dr Mark returns, sets the cups down carefully and asks, ‘Who’s she?’
He’s looking at the screen of my laptop, which I’ve set up on the desk. It’s frozen at the beginning of the mini-movie that Trevor, the sceptical monsterologist from Avalon Skies, sent me of his girlfriend Debbie under possession.
‘That’s Debbie,’ I say. ‘She’s a witch.’
The psychiatrist smiles. ‘Oh, yeah?’ he says.
I press play.
The footage is shot in the blank, reptilian green of an infrared camera. We’re inside a traditional old pub. There are wooden slab tables, grubby glass ashtrays and dusty knuckles of hops hanging down from the ceiling. Debbie is sitting next to Trevor. A shawl is draped over her shoulders and the pits of her eyes glow white in the grainy, inverse light.
‘I am George Turnbull,’ she hollers into the air. She sounds bloated with rage and as masculine as a fat butcher. Her whole frame is consumed with it. Her neck hurls forwards as she cries out, her lips arch forcefully as they over-enunciate. It’s as if someone else has taken over the workings of her mouth and hasn’t quite got used to the controls.
‘Why are you angry, George Turnbull?’ says Trevor. You can see him in the flat greenness, his wide, succulent eyes glistening with worry for his partner. But he presses on dutifully, professionally.
‘I got accused and it was not me! I got accused of hiding all the stuff! And it was not me! I will not be accused any more!’ she shouts, her eyelids stretched.
Trevor has had enough. He puts his hand on the back of her neck in a cautious, comforting gesture, and says in a firmer voice, ‘All right, Debbie. Come forward, Debbie.’
‘No!’ she shouts, the fury rippling like a layer of boiling blood just under her skin.
‘Debbie?’ says Trevor.
Everything dives out of view for a few seconds as the camera operator panics.
‘Debbie?’ says Trevor again. ‘Debbie?’
She appears again as the cameraman steadies himself.
‘No!’ she shouts. Her ligaments are straining, her tendons popping. ‘I will not be! I will not be accused!’
Even on this bright and birdsongy afternoon, I can’t help but find the footage a little disturbing. I turn to Dr Mark for his reaction.
‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Ha, ha! Great stuff.’
‘What do you think?’ I say.
‘I see this routinely,’ he says. ‘People get into intense, super-aroused states for whatever reason. This is how someone might look if they’d just found out that their husband has been buggering their six-year-old daughter, or whatever. It’s very common. Who’s he?’ he says, pointing to the now-still image of Trevor, whose arms are clamped in a tight, protective hold over Debbie’s shoulders.
‘That’s Trevor,’ I say. ‘He’s a monsterologist.’
Dr Salter gives me a look and crosses his legs.
‘Are you telling me that Debbie’s just worked herself up into this state?’ I ask him.
‘Yes, and she’s very adept at it, isn’t she?’ he says, reaching for his tea.
I go for my cup as well and take a moment to consider the shrink. He’s wearing comfortable black shoes, discreet wire-rimmed glasses and light-brown semi-casual trousers. Here, I think, is a functional man. A man who’s comfortable being one in
a crowd. A man whose skull works. But that’s not to say he’s boring. I don’t know it yet, but the two hours I’m about to spend with Dr Mark Salter will prove to be illuminating, compelling and horrifying on the profoundest level imaginable.
‘Look at him,’ says the doctor, motioning at Trevor. ‘The solid, loving, enduring boyfriend whose partner has got this special talent. And it’s very important for him, I suspect, to have a girlfriend like this. “I’m not going out with any ordinary woman,”’ he says. ‘“She’s a witch.”’
‘Is she mental, then?’
‘Well,’ he says, folding his arms, ‘she’s mentally disturbed. She’s aroused, she’s hyper-ventilating, she’s hurting her vocal chords. I would say that she has the capacity to go into a mildly histrionically sensitive state. And she can turn it on and off at will. Actors can do it. If you talk to an actor just after he’s come off stage, he will take four or five seconds before he comes back to who he is.’
That may be so, but I’m convinced that Debbie isn’t pretending. Even when you’re channel-surfing the TV, the difference between real documentary footage and an actor is instantly obvious. Have you ever seen a Crimewatch reconstruction actor do a fear face? Exactly. And there’s nothing about Debbie or the majority of the others that made me think, instinctually, that they were acting.
‘Oh, she does believe that it’s real,’ says Dr Mark, ‘yes. And it’s the same with all these cases.’ He turns and lifts the corner of the dossier that I sent him a couple of weeks ago. These are the full, unedited interview transcripts from my meetings with Christopher Tuckett, Dave Vee and Lou Gentile. The cases for the defence. I wanted his psychiatric opinion on whether any of them were lying. Because I remain solidly, up to my hips in concrete, rooted in the opinion that they were all sincere.
‘You’re right,’ he says, ‘they were sincere. There’s an old phrase – if a patient complains of pain, they’re in pain. If a patient tells you they’ve seen a ghost, they’ve seen a ghost.’
I lean forwards, towards the psychiatrist. ‘So they have seen a ghost?’
The psychiatrist sits back on his seat. ‘You need to accept that what they’re saying, they think is true. So your question is, why do they think they’ve seen a ghost? Well, hallucinations, incorrect memories, confusion of past and present. I mean, these guys who saw the demons, they could be remembering something they saw when they were scared shitless by a science-fiction film their brother was watching when they were five and they shouldn’t have stayed up that late.’
But Debbie was not having an incorrect memory. She was demonstrating a different phenomenon and showing different symptoms. Like Stacey, Rain-On-Face and Derek Acorah, Debbie is a medium, and mediums – let’s be blunt about this – hear voices in their heads.
‘You could call it multiple personality if you want,’ says Dr Mark. ‘We’ve all got the capacity to have them.’
There’s a silence. I put my tea down on the floor between my feet. ‘I don’t have multiple personalities,’ I say.
‘Try a little trick for me,’ he says. ‘How are you going to get home from here?’
‘I’m going to cycle,’ I say.
‘Well, as you’re cycling home, imagine a version A and a version B of yourself and have a conversation in your head between them. You know, like: What are you doing tonight? Well, I thought I might write up this interview. Well, you could, but there’s some great telly on. I know, but I have got a lot to get through. Carry on like that for an hour and see where you end up. I promise you you’ll scare yourself.’
Dr Mark tells me that, before long, the first voice will become more extrovert, more outgoing and prefer art and German techno. The second voice will be quieter, more nervous and like science and South American heavy metal. In other words, they will develop distinct and consistent personalities of their own. Just like a medium and their ‘spirit guides’.
‘Now, you tell me where that comes from,’ he says.
I nod and pick up my tea and I smile silently because the answer is – the answer must be – that both these characters would be a creation of my own mind.
‘These people,’ he says, motioning with a nod and an eyebrow towards my laptop, ‘are erecting other versions of themselves as a way of bolstering up some sort of personal currency with others. You very often find, when you interview a lot of these people, like I do, that the people who have experiences like this need meaning in their lives. They’re using it as a way of shoring up some other huge hole.’
So Dr Mark thinks that clairvoyants’ magic powers, their walkie-talkies to the dead zone, are just an illusion they’ve unwittingly created to help shore themselves up in some way. But how does it actually work? Dr Mark’s trick shows how you can willingly create another personality in your head. But how do you get to a point where there are two different operators working the controls in the cockpit behind your eyes, without you even trying?
‘Why aren’t you thinking about the planet Jupiter right now?’ asks Dr Mark.
‘What?’
‘Do you know what the planet Jupiter is?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Then why wasn’t it in your head just now?’
‘Well, because –’
‘Because there must be some mechanism that’s keeping Jupiter and the other 150,000 words of the English language suppressed, and out of your pre-conscious. And there’s a similar mechanism keeping your internal monologue – the voice in your head – simple. Now, supposing those mechanisms go wrong. Did you know that if you go up to the population at random and say, “Do you hear voices?” about eight and a half to ten per cent will say yes?’
So if the bit of your brain that keeps your monologue a monologue develops a problem, your monologue becomes a dialogue. You hear the sound of two of you. But some mediums say they hear other people’s voices in their heads. Some even claim to have animal spirit guides.
Dr Mark shrugs and glances over my shoulder, out of the window. Somewhere out there, a wailing ambulance is pulling in.
‘It can be their own voice,’ he says, ‘it can be a totally different voice. Often, it’s the sound of someone who has emotional significance for them, like their torturer or their abusive uncle. It doesn’t go away and it’s completely beyond their control. I’ll put you in touch with one of my patients, if you like. You’ll see how common it is.’
So, what about Vee, Tuckett and Gentile? They aren’t hearing sprouted voices. And they’re not just seeing flickering lights or fleeting shapes in the darkness, either. Those boys are seeing demons and whirlwinds and looming black shadows. How’s that possible? If, like Lou, you think you’ve seen a ten-foot black shadow with a bowling-ball head in your bedroom, surely you’ve not mistaken that for a poster that’s flapping off the wall or a car going past or, indeed, some insects.
‘Well, for a start, how old was he when he saw this?’ asks Dr Mark.
‘Ten.’
‘And how old is he now?’
‘Mid-thirties,’ I say.
‘Well, already you’re talking about something which has been processed by twenty years of retrospective memory. I mean, I had paranormal experiences when I was eight or nine. I remember waking up and seeing a figure at the foot of my bed.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, you name me a kid who hasn’t.’
‘Me,’ I say. And suddenly, and involuntarily, I hear the voice of a raging Maurice in my head. These people wouldn’t believe it if it happened in front of them.
Lou’s black shadow, as we know, was just the start of it. I pick up the dossier and show the doctor the part where Lou was lying in front of the fire, smelled a foul stench and saw a four-foot demon with ‘reddish piercing eyes’.
‘Are you going to tell me that he’s mistaking the fire for that?’ I say.
‘No,’ says Dr Mark. ‘You’re right. He’s having hallucinatory abnormalities rather than perceptual abnormalities. He’s seeing things.’
‘But,�
� I ask, ‘what is it that he’s seeing?’
‘I would think he is reliving a memory. An assembled memory that’s taken from various fragments in the past and has something to do with the emotional state that he was in at the time, around the age of ten.’
‘But he’s not ten now,’ I say. ‘He’s married now. He’s an adult.’
Dr Mark sighs, picks up the document and scans through it again.
‘Something must have been going on in his life,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘which, on that particular occasion, for a complexity of reasons that we’ll never fully understand, caused something to colour his mind in such a way that in retrospect he’s interpreted it as an evil red-eyed lizard.’
But what about Christopher Tuckett? Is he also having a string of false memories? Dr Mark runs his finger down the interview and reaches a section where I’ve asked Tuckett how he got used to living in such a terrifying and active place.
‘By the end of the first two weeks,’ Chris says, ‘I was desperate. I wanted this job more than probably anything else I’ve ever wanted in my entire life, and it became a huge personal battle – do I do the job or do I get scared and go? At the end of the two weeks I got absolutely ruined one evening on wine and it drove me to the point where I was sat on the bottom of the stairs and I was talking to the house. It sounds pretty stupid, I know, but desperation makes you do funny things sometimes.’
Dr Mark points out that, later on, Christopher says that his wife ended up walking out because she couldn’t cope with the ghosts any more.
‘One thing,’ says the psychiatrist, ‘that is very, very common in people that seek to convince you of extraordinary phenomena or delusions is that they will often go and select only information that is consistent with their theory. “My wife walked out because she couldn’t stand the ghosts.” Could it be more likely that his wife walked out because she was married to a man who when he drinks too much, sees ghosts and sits on the stairs talking to the house? It’s arbitrary selection. You’re putting forward only the facts that suit you.’
