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

by Will Storr

  The psychiatrist puts the dossier down on his desk and shifts on his seat. He clears his throat and crosses his hands on his lap.

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Supposing I’ve come up with this theory that all swans are white. I’ve written books, toured the world, built my whole career and reputation on my white-swans theory. And then somebody sends me a picture of a black swan. I’m not going to be too happy about that picture, am I? If it gets out, that’s my mortgage and my status gone. I’m certainly not going to mention that black swan to anyone, am I? In fact, I might do everything in my power to keep news of that black swan out of circulation.’

  The black swan. This reminds me. Since my meeting with Maurice Grosse I’ve been trying to find a sceptical view on the Enfield poltergeist case. It’s been extremely difficult. And then someone warned me that Maurice had successfully sued a journalist for claiming that the case was untrue. This worried me. It seemed to be extreme behaviour from Grosse. So, I re-read My House is Haunted, Playfair’s book on the case. It noted an SPR member called Anita Gregory who studied the case for her Ph.D. thesis. She visited the house and left sceptical. So I called the SPR and asked if I could be put in touch with her. The man who answered the phone was the same man who put me in touch with Maurice in the first place.

  ‘Not unless you know a good medium,’ he said. ‘Mind you,’ he laughed, ‘you probably do by now, don’t you?’

  ‘She’s dead?’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Well, can I get hold of her thesis?’ I asked.

  ‘Ha! No chance,’ said the man. ‘And I should warn you, if Maurice Grosse hears you mentioning her name, he’ll take your head off.’

  So I tracked down John Beloff, the professor who visited the house with Gregory. I wrote to him and requested his opinion. He said: ‘I am now eighty-three and my memory is not as good as it was. I do recall, however, that I did make one trip to Enfield and that I failed to witness any notable phenomena. Like Anita Gregory, I suspected that the two little girls involved were up to mischief.’ Then, Beloff complains that Maurice ‘put Anita Gregory’s Ph.D. thesis out of bounds’. I was stunned. Not only had Maurice sued a journalist, he’d also taken action against one of his own fellow researchers.

  ‘Methinks he doth protest too much,’ says Dr Mark, when I tell him about my worry. ‘It’s taking it to extremes, really, isn’t it? How did he use a court to prove that it was true?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to find out what really happened.’

  Before I leave, I want to know what Dr Mark thinks about the vast number of everyday people who have ‘seen’ ghosts. Not the moustachioed investigators, the paranormal cult leaders, the diamond-studded mediums. I want to know why the ordinary working man or woman might be convinced they’ve seen a spectral something.

  ‘Because the brain is an explanation-generating machine,’ he says. ‘Imagine you’re driving late at night down the M25. It’s approaching dusk and you see something in the distance. You think, bloody hell, there’s a cow on the road. You get a bit closer and, after having just seen a documentary on the wildlife of the southern African Congo, you think, oh, it’s not a cow, it’s an aardvark. Then, as you get closer, you think, oh, no, it’s just a piece of blown-out tyre. As further information becomes available to your brain, as you get closer, it keeps generating new explanations. Your brain constantly jumps to all manner of incorrect conclusions. And your state of mind plays a crucial part in determining the meaning you give the incoming data at the time. And by state of mind, I don’t just mean feeling cheerful. It’s much more complicated than that. It’s state of mind, body, anticipation, memory.’

  ‘So, you see something strange.’ I say, ‘and if you’re already inclined to believe in ghosts and if your brain is in a certain mental state, you will think what you’ve seen is a ghost?’

  ‘At that moment, yes. At that moment, you’re drawing on influences from your own past, you’re drawing on inferences from what you think is gong to happen in the immediate future, you’re drawing inferences coming out from your own internal signals – in other words, stomach tightness, muscle tension, sweatiness, temperature, wind, humidity – all these things that your body is doing. You’re also making comparisons between how things are now and how things were five seconds ago. You’re constantly updating. You should also consider the microenvironment of a ghostly experience. It’s always in that corner, and surprise, surprise, if you check the window ledge, the draughts, the underground passage of water currents, vibrations, strange sounds, the feng shui aspects – by which I mean the way the environment happens to be arranged – all those things will be far worse in those particular areas.’

  As Dr Mark speaks, I start to think about the moment I was touched by the ghost in the Carvens’ house. I was sitting in a darkened room that I had been told was haunted. I had just seen a ghost light float around Mrs Carven’s head. I was watching a demonologist speak into a Dictaphone that was visibly, via its flashing light, picking up voices of undead spirits. I was in a state of suffocating terror. And, at that precise point, I was touched.

  ‘Dr Salter,’ I say, ‘is it possible to be so frightened that you think something’s touched you?’

  ‘Oh definitely,’ he says. ‘Definitely. That fella on the TV does it all the time. Derren Brown. He’s brilliant at it. He talks people up until they’re grossly over-aroused, then creates this heightened state of expectation and then he suggests. And they fall for it, every Saturday night.’

  ‘So, is that what happened to me when I was touched on the back?’

  The psychiatrist smiles. ‘It was a puff of air! And you were so over-aroused that a simple puff of air wasn’t enough of an explanation for you. Because you’d been pre-conditioned into expecting ghostly phenomena, the first explanation your brain gave to what happened was: I’ve been touched by a ghost.’

  ‘You know,’ says the doctor, as I bend to get my coat, ‘human beings have always been desperate to believe in all kinds of supernatural mumbo-jumbo because they are ways of explaining away the most terrifying fact of all. That we are zombies leading meaningless lives.’

  ‘Zombies?’

  ‘Yes. Emotions and free will are just an illusion that we have to stop us blowing our brains out.’

  I stop and freeze and listen. Dr James the philosopher said that some people have used the fact that we’re not zombies to try and prove that we have souls. But is Dr Mark right? Are we just very sophisticated zombies? If so, it’s not just religion, ghosts and the afterlife that we use as a comfort blanket when faced with the brutal concept of total death. It’s free will and our entire emotional landscape. Could every decision we make, every feeling we feel, every moral conviction we have, our very sense of self, our personality, our ‘soul’, our ‘consciousness’, be just a chimera whipped up by our minds to keep us keeping on?

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says, fiddling with a Biro idly. ‘You and I are actually zombies living an automatic life. And we are here for no reason at all.’

  To: Milton

  From: Will Storr

  Subject: Your story

  Hi Milton

  Thanks for the lift back from the investigation the other night. Much appreciated.

  I need to ask a huge favour. You know that off-the-record thing that you told me? Could I possibly ask you to reconsider? Your and your brother’s experience is particularly fascinating, for reasons I’ll go into if you can spare the time to meet me.

  I know your brother doesn’t want this coming out. I’m happy not to reveal his name or any clues as to his identity if he wants. If you could have a think about it, I’d be extremely grateful.

  Thanks.

  Will

  12

  ‘They’ll build it up and bugger off home’

  WHEN HE TELLS the story these days, Charles insists that he wasn’t nervous on his way to meet the Satanist. I’m not sure I believe him. He says he didn’t have time to worry, that th
e man who’d called had told him to be there in half an hour, at a crossroads deep in a silent part of the lower woods. This was over thirty years ago now, on a high summer night just like this one. And it would have been dark, during his meeting with the strange caller. It would have been still and eerie and lonely. Charles’s thin frame would have moved down the track lightly, his keen eyes darting around the black shapes in the undergrowth that he passed.

  Only a handful of people had answered the appeal he’d posted in his local newspaper, for information about the ‘mysterious events’ in Clapham Woods. And he’d dismissed them all, except this one. This one, he thought, was different. He was well spoken and calm and serious. When Charles reached the crossroads, the place where the caller had told him to go, he found it empty. He looked around. He listened. In that warm, static air, even the trees had barely a murmur. And there was no birdsong at all – but, then, that was normal for this part of the woods. The animals, he already knew, kept themselves well away from this uneasy place. He strode up and down for a time, smoked a cigarette, chewed on his thumbnail. And then, just as he was about to give up and go back to his bike, he heard a voice, somewhere to the left of him.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ it said.

  Charles froze. The voice, he realised, was coming from the inside of a large bush. He began to turn around.

  ‘Don’t turn around,’ said the bush. ‘Just listen.’

  This evening, as he tells me his story, Charles Walker’s eyes flit worriedly here and there. And whether he was nervous before the rendezvous or not, he will admit that, when he heard the stern voice coming from the inside of the bush, he was scared.

  ‘I would say I was shaking,’ he says to me, his gaze distant with recollection. ‘Definitely shaking.’

  That moment, all those decades ago, Charles was about to be told something that would set him on a mission that he is still trying to accomplish to this day.

  We’re at the crossroads now. The tracks are narrow, well walked-in by ramblers, and are surrounded on either side by the brambles and ferns of secondary forest. I’m with Charles, who has been described as ‘one of Britain’s leading occult researchers and authorities on Satanism’. The fifty-one-year-old is the author of The Demonic Connection and an associate of Children of the City – the man Stacey told me about during our evening in Durrington Cemetery. His partner Dave is also here, and it’s become clear, from being with them, that they know these paths as well as the local badgers. But, regardless, there’s still a tense spring of jumpiness behind their every step. It’s the very fact that they know about Clapham Woods, and the macabre things that go on within them, that means they are ever-ready to duck for cover in one of the many hides that they’ve set up in ditches and hedges about the place.

  Clapham Woods came to the attention of the nation’s supernaturalists in the late sixties, when a fleet of UFO sightings made the national papers. At the same time, locals started to report strange behaviour from their dogs when they walked through the area where the objects had been seen. Then, a couple of dogs went missing. Straight away, local paranormal groups linked the canine disappearances to the space-ship sightings. People began to chatter excitedly about an other-worldly race of super-beings that had traversed vast universes in order to study life on earth. But it struck Charles – then a keen ‘unexplained’ hobbyist and member of Sussex Skywatchers – that if an other-worldly race of super-beings had traversed vast universes to study life on earth, it was unlikely that they’d come all this way just to steal two dogs. So, on reflection, he decided to dismiss the UFO sightings altogether. He was convinced that there must be a human explanation for the dog trouble, and set out to find out what it was. He started knocking on doors in the area and, to his rising suspicion, nobody would even discuss it, let alone help. So, at a loss, Charles decided to place his advert in the local paper.

  That night, the man in the bush told Charles about a powerful local satanic cult. It was made up of important people – magistrates, doctors, lawyers – who regularly met up in Clapham Woods to perform evil rituals. He said they had powerful political connections, that huge sums of money were involved, and that they were using the forces of darkness to control others. Their idol was a triple-headed goddess called Hecate (pronounced Hek-arteigh). As well as being Queen of the Witches, Hecate was a notorious dog-enthusiast. One of her heads was a dog, and when she appeared to her disciples during their black masses, it was said that she was followed by a yapping pack of demonic hounds. The neighbourhood pets that were going missing, Charles was told, were being sacrificed by the ‘Friends of Hecate’, who also had sidelines in blackmail, drugs and sex.

  ‘He told me not to investigate any further,’ says Charles as the three of us start walking back up the path to where his car is parked, ‘and then he just disappeared.’ Charles pauses and gives me a look. ‘It was as if he’d never been there.’

  But he didn’t stop his investigations. It was true, he discovered, that Hecate was a genuine dog goddess. And an associate in Brighton – a doctor – who was an expert in paganism and witchcraft, knew all about her sinister cabal of ‘Friends’.

  ‘He said, “For God’s sake, don’t get involved,”’ Charles says. ‘He said, “You’re dealing with a serious organisation who will not allow themselves to be exposed.”’

  As we carry on up the path, Charles tells me that shortly after his conversation with the expert doctor he decided to team up with his friend Dave to start patrolling the woods. To this day, the two anti-Satan vigilantes regularly stay up all night to keep watch on the place. And they often find candles, pentagrams, remains of fires, runes, bones and ‘tree hexing’ – twigs and branches bound together in special ritual arrangements.

  Of the two of them, it’s shop-worker Dave who appears to be the most prepared. A short, grey, balding man, he’s kitted out in combat trousers with a thick brown leather belt, a fawn fleece and a camouflaged hat. Charles, by day a full-time carer, is more casual, in granite-coloured jeans and an old shirt that holds a ten-pack of Superkings and a disposable lighter precariously in its baggy, open pocket. He has long, tangled hair that hangs off his skull in several different directions, leaving his scalp covered in a system of partings that looks like the delta of a desert river. His skin is withered, ashen and loose, and it makes his blue eyes appear so vivid that they look as if they’ve been popped in by a taxidermist. Both men carry seven-foot wooden staffs that have been lovingly smoothed and would be perfect for caving in the skulls of any devil-worshippers that may decide to launch out of a shrub and attack at any moment. Charles has a crystal embedded in the top of his. ‘Yeah,’ he tells me when I ask him about it. ‘It’s been sorted by a wiccan.’

  Tonight, they’ve promised to take me to the most dangerous part of the forest – up the hill to the ‘altar tree’, which is a hot centre of occult practice. In the past, they’ve found much satanic paraphernalia there as well as a pool of spilled blood and, once, the decapitated head of a cat. Later on, we’re planning to do a Ouija board on a plague pit.

  Before all that, however, the anti-Satan vigilantes have to nip to the car to fetch their tea and biscuits. As we come to the end of the rutted and pebble-strewn path, and emerge onto the road, the remarkable tinyness of Clapham village, which bisects the woods halfway up the hill, becomes apparent. The entire place comprises just one street, and the name of that street is The Street. And its residents, according to Charles, are all deeply involved in the bad magic.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he tells me, his boots crunching on the gravel as we go. ‘And they get hostile, too. Sometimes they actually confront you; other times it’s just a general sort of keep-an-eye-on-you type of thing. We’ve had one incident recently, with a local saying, “Make sure you stick to the footpath, there’s going to be shooting up there tonight.”’ He pauses. ‘There wasn’t. But it was a warning, a scare tactic, to try and get us to give it up and go home. Well, sorry,’ Charles says, jutting his chin in the air, defiantly, �
�they’ve got the wrong people.’

  ‘Are there actual individual villagers that you suspect?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘A definite yes. None that I could name to you, though. Proving it, that’s part of our job now.’

  Just as I’m about to ask my next question, Charles motions me to silence. I glance around for an explanation. Dave’s walking stiffly, his small head fixed straight down at his boots. Charles starts whistling, thinly, through his teeth.

  ‘What … ?’ I say.

  ‘Keep … shush, ssshh,’ says Charles.

  We’re about to walk past a man who’s still out working in the warm, failing twilight. He pauses as we pass and leans on the handle of his hoe and his ruddy, earth-bruised face smiles a grotesque run of farmyard teeth in our direction.

  ‘Y’all right?’ he says.

  ‘Hello, Bill,’ Charles says.

  The man nods. ‘Going ghosthunting, then?’ he says, smiling stilly and staring.

  ‘Oh, no,’ says Charles. ‘No ghosts round here.’

  ‘Good luck,’ says Bill, still smiling.

  We continue up the path in silence, until we’re out of his eyeshot.

  ‘Phew,’ exhales Dave. ‘That was close.’

  ‘Was he a Satanist?’ I ask.

  ‘We have our suspicions. The trouble is, we’re both well known in the village,’ Charles explains as we approach his small grey car. ‘And every time, every single time, you get: “You going ghosthunting, then?” And it doesn’t matter how many times you say no, they still ask you the same bloody question.’

  There’s a good reason for Charles and Dave’s fear of the locals. They believe that people who get too close to the truth about the Satanists are dealt with mercilessly. On Halloween 1978, the local vicar, Reverend Harry Snelling, went missing on his way back from the dentist. A full police search, with sniffer dogs and light aircraft, turned up nothing. His body was eventually found on the Downs in 1981. His death remains unexplained.