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

by Will Storr

‘Lots of people have got stories about her,’ Lynne says. ‘There’s Derek, who you’ve met, and a couple of weeks ago, we met another previous landlord and landlady. They run another pub now, not too far away from here. We went in and introduced ourselves and they said, “How you getting on with Annie?” It was one of the first things they said.’

  Half an hour ago, I did have a chat with Derek, downstairs in the bar. A soft, melancholic and slightly wary man, he told me that he’d seen Annie when he was living here, and that when there was ‘aggravation or upset’ in the pub, pictures would fly off the walls and bottles would be seen moving slowly across the bar and smashing onto the floor.

  ‘When I saw it for the first time, I couldn’t believe it, like,’ he told me. ‘It almost always happened when there was problems. She don’t like upset. She got pegged out on the beach, you know. They put her in an unmarked grave. That’s the reason. She hasn’t been left to rest properly.’

  As well as the moving objects, the apparition and the horrific night terrors, Lynne says some people have had their hair pulled in the flat. When I ask if they’ve had problems with power-drain she nods. They’ve a cat-shaped clock, she tells me, that didn’t need its batteries changed for years. Until they moved here. They’ve been replaced six or seven times now, in just a few months.

  It’s bedtime in the last village in England. I leave Lynne to join her husband and I walk back towards the room. I enter a small lobby area that’s decorated with photographs and cluttered with stray bits of pub. An old menu board leans against the wall. Green bottle crates are piled by the banisters and next to them there’s a tatty stack of wooden chairs. In the middle of all this, there are pets going crazy. One cat’s cowering under a chair. The dog is barking. Another cat bombs across the lobby, towards the safety of its owners, its tail low to the carpet. I’m troubled by all this, as I walk through the furry mêlée. I’d be troubled by it even if I hadn’t just been told that disturbing story. As I enter the corridor that leads to the bedroom, I grip my tape player and notepad tightly, deep in ponder. And then, I barely notice it, but something happens. The part of my brain that isn’t trying to find an explanation for the spinning animals hears movement in the bedroom. But because I’m completely preoccupied, that small mind-part just says ‘there’s someone in the bedroom’ and I carry on walking the next few steps, down the old corridor, go through the door and look up to see who it is. But there’s no one there. Just the bed and the walls and my stuff on the floor and the shadows that the dim lightbulb is conjuring. I was so sure there would be a person in the room – the sound was so mundane, so ordinary and clear – that in those brief seconds, it didn’t even occur to me that the room would be empty.

  I stall in the doorway, startled. I’m scared. Only my neck is working, and that only in small, jerky movements. I get the sensation that I mustn’t move, in case I draw the attention of something lurking. It’s as if a sudden action from me might provoke some unknowable retaliation. I sniff unnecessarily, then clear my throat as a warm-up to breaking the thick silence. I hum a couple of notes, pause for a second and enter the room.

  After I’ve lain, slowly, on the bed, I’m relieved to see a wet black nose peer around the door. The old dog has come to see me, followed by the ginger cat. I sit up and stroke them, as the relief works on me like warm oil and loosens up all the tense bits. There can’t be anything nasty in here, I think, if the animals have chosen to come in.

  As I play with the pets, I take the opportunity to look around me. The foot of my bed faces the small window and the old door is to my left. To my right is the stone wall from which Annie apparently steps out. Opposite that is the wardrobe, with two drawers under it, the one that the cats were found in. There’s not a lot else here, except a row of Lynne’s shoes, a picture of a fishing boat, a cheap plastic bedside light and a cat-shaped clock on the window sill, which has stopped.

  I try to distribute attention between the animals fairly. It’s not easy. Every time I do the dog, the cat starts miaowing. Then, when I stroke its bony back, the dog gives me the big dewy-eyed trick and I’m compelled to think again. I experiment, for a while, at doing them both simultaneously, but I can’t co-ordinate my hands properly. Then, as I’m trying to work out a new system, the dog turns towards Annie’s wall. It looks at something for a second, and runs out of the room. The cat sees it, too. And it’s gone so fast that it skids around the corner.

  I look after them. The door’s open a few inches and the light from the corridor, which Neil and Lynne insist on keeping on all the time, glows dully through the gap. I prepare myself for the shock I’ll get when it closes by itself. I wait and watch the door. It stays absolutely still.

  Half an hour later, I’ve finally willed up the courage to shut it myself. The door is closed and everything is quiet and waiting. It feels as if the walls are watching me, as if this room has all the power and I’ve placed myself, willingly, between its teeth. Lying there, under my thin sheet, with the wind big and hostile and banging outside, I feel tiny and lonely and scared.

  I take a breath, lean over and switch off the light. Then I lie back and wait.

  Nothing.

  I decide to speak. ‘If you are here, Annie,’ I say in a small voice, ‘will you let me know?’

  Silence.

  ‘Please,’ I whisper.

  I look in the direction of the window, back at the wall, and at the dead lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I look at the wardrobe. It seems to hang malevolently in the air, like a skinned cadaver on a butcher’s hook.

  Suddenly, a shrill scream shatters the dark air.

  It’s my phone. I scrabble out of the sheet for it, and retrieve it from the tangle of my trousers that are lying in a crump on the floor.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me,’ says Farrah.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I was on the sofa and something weird happened.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was this laughing all around, like mischievous children, and then it felt like I was coming out of my body, like an out-of-body thing, like I was floating. I was off the couch completely and it was like the wall with the picture on it was where the floor should be and the room was all in weird proportions. I’m scared. What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing, Far,’ I say. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m scared. Why do I always get stuff when you’re out bloody ghosthunting?’

  ‘Um,’ I say, ‘it must have been a dream.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘It didn’t feel like one.’

  ‘You should just go to bed, Far,’ I say. ‘I’m sure it was just a dream.’

  ‘But I didn’t wake up, or anything,’ she says. ‘It was just like everything became normal again, like I went back in my body.’

  ‘Are you OK now?’

  ‘I’m scared … I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ I say. ‘Call me if anything else happens. Love you.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she says. ‘Love you.’

  I get back, slowly, under the sheets, where I lie still and wait for Annie.

  16

  ‘And when they die, they’ll get a big surprise’

  ‘YOU CAN’T JUST expect things to happen to order,’ Maurice tells me, the next day.

  I lean back on the sofa for a moment, glance at the ceiling and then hunch forwards, towards him.

  ‘But every time Lynne went in the room, the door slammed behind her,’ I say, my arms gesticulating helplessly. ‘Every single time.’

  ‘Listen,’ says Maurice, pulling himself out of the throat of the plump, flowery armchair that’s trying to swallow him. ‘As I believe I have told you before, paranormal activity does not act to command. It never happens when you think it’s going to happen. I mean, to go to one of these situations and expect something to happen, well, it’s quite rare. It’s quite rare, I can assure you.’

  ‘But every night,’ I say, ‘every night they sl
ept in there, something happened. And Annie’s meant to act up when there’s change or strangers, so I thought I’d have a good chance.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine,’ he says. ‘That would be a fine situation. If anything had happened. But it didn’t, did it?’

  I’m not sure whether the world’s greatest ghosthunter is flabbergasted by my naivety, or amused by it or irritated. That doesn’t stop me, though. I’m over-tired and under-prepared and I’ve momentarily lost control of my talking.

  ‘But why?’ I say. ‘Why does nothing ever happen when you want it to?’

  ‘You want an answer?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  Maurice looks at me, his eyes watery, granite and pale. ‘Bloody-minded.’ He punctuates the words with a small nod for emphasis. ‘Bloody. Minded. It’s always like that. Always. It’s as though it’s saying, “Sod you.” Bloody-minded, that’s what I say.’

  I wonder if Annie’s non-appearance last night could have had anything to do with what they call the Experimenter Effect. This is the theory that the experimenter himself might affect what happens, just by being present. Nothing ever occurs, they say, in front of a sceptical experimenter. This may sound dubious, a suspiciously convenient excuse the ghost-convinced can give the protesting non-believer to shut him up, but something similar to this has been proved to happen in science – in quantum physics.

  What I’m about to tell you is, quite possibly, at least four times more astounding than anything I’ve come across in my search so far. And it is real. Demonstrably, scientifically, unarguably real.

  They have found – and nobody can explain this – that atoms will behave in one way if a human is watching them and in a completely different way if not. It’s called the ‘Two Slit Trick’. For one reason or another, some advanced science types with a spare morning to fill decided to fire some atoms through a sheet that had two slits in it. They were expecting the particles to act like sand and pile up in two equal-sized atom-stacks behind each slit, on the other side. But they didn’t. Each atom actually behaved in a way that suggested it had gone through both slits at the same time. Which is, of course, impossible. Or paranormal. Or supernatural.

  Wanting to reveal the process behind this unexpected atomic weirdness, they installed a tiny camera in their set-up and filmed the atoms in flight. But when they watched the tapes, the atoms actually did start to behave like grains of sand, and piled up neatly at the other side of the slits. Then, when the scientists switched the camera off and repeated the test, they started behaving mysteriously again. It was as if the atoms didn’t want to be seen acting in a magical way, as if they wanted to keep their secrets.

  And I thought that was just like ghosts.

  So I decided to read more, and I found out about String Theory, the cutting-edge quantum-related idea that everything is made out of tiny, vibrating strings. If this theory is correct (and, so far, many of the world’s leading brains think that it is) it means that there aren’t four dimensions, as we have been led to believe. No. There are, in fact, eleven.

  On one level, String Theory explains how quantum physics works in the same universe as Newtonian physics. Which is excellent. But it also creates a big new problem, because the way it pans out means there are whole slices of existence that we weren’t previously aware of. Humans only have the equipment to detect four dimensions, so that’s all we can ever possibly know. According to String Theory, the others are all around us, but because we only have a nose, eyes, ears, tongue and skin to receive information about the world, we have no way of experiencing them.

  So, I was thinking: could ghosts or the afterlife exist in one of these other seven dimensions? Could quantum scientists have found theoretical evidence of the same invisible world that I’ve found physical and anecdotal evidence of? Have they found out where ghosts come from? Could these spirits be cross-dimensional leakage? And could the ‘Two Slit Trick’ explain their science-proof behaviour?

  Maurice rubs his chin and looks away for a second to compose himself. ‘Right, let me tell you again. There are no definite answers to why these things happen. If you’re looking for answers, you aren’t going to get any. You’ll only get answers from charlatans. A lot of my colleagues believe there is a connection between quantum physics and paranormal activity. It is quite possible that paranormal activity, or the afterlife, might exist in the quantum sphere. But we don’t know. Everybody’s fishing and nobody’s come up with anything yet. I mean, who knows? Quantum physics, the Experimenter Effect – they may have a great deal to do with what happens.’

  He pauses again and frowns. ‘I can tell you what does have an effect, though: the stress situation. There’s absolutely no doubt about that at all.’

  By now I’ve almost completely lost control over which thoughts are staying in my mind and which ones are coming out of my mouth. Part of the reason for this is that I’m exhausted after last night and the pre-dawn rise that I had to endure in order to make it to Muswell Hill on time for our meeting. But most of all, it’s because I’m stalling. You see, I’ve actually come to see Maurice to confront him about my Enfield research. But I’m worried that when I remove the Anita Gregory Dossier of Doubt from my bag, the ghosthunter might get up and throw me right through his pretty bay windows. I can’t get the words of the SPR man out of my head: ‘If Maurice Grosse hears you mention her name, he’ll take your head off.’

  ‘I’ve investigated hundreds of poltergeist cases,’ Maurice is telling me. ‘Literally hundreds. And I’ve never been to one where there hasn’t been a very strong element of stress. They’ve either got money problems or sexual problems or family problems or some bad problem that is causing a lot of trouble. It’s quite remarkable.’

  I’d forgotten how much Maurice has shrunk. I was properly taken aback when he opened the door. Since we last met, I’ve looked many times at his photograph in my copy of This House is Haunted. In times of weary fatigue, I have studied it for strength. It is an excellent portrait of a man who means business. A strapping, besuited professional, caught seemingly unawares, removing the keys from the ignition of his shiny red Jaguar. But he looks tiny now. Pale and slight and careful. Until, that is, he starts to speak. If age has taken something of Maurice’s physical presence it hasn’t stolen any of his spirit. He’s still fierce and sharp and quick as a switchblade.

  ‘This one you went to last night,’ he says, ‘was there any stress?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  He glowers at me over the top of his moustache. ‘Then you didn’t ask the right questions, did you?’

  This ‘stress effect’ brings me back to the idea that ghosts need to gather some sort of energy in a haunted situation. From the flickering lights to the draining batteries to the Ouija boards that, supposedly, work by letting a spirit use human energy, it does all seem to point to the suggestion that ghosts need to feed in order to be. And perhaps they can feed on emotional energy, like fear or stress, as well as other types.

  ‘You’re talking about energy,’ says Maurice, ‘but you don’t even know what that energy is. Nobody does. Guy Playfair has told me about a poltergeist case in Brazil where a car was literally lifted up and thrown a hundred yards. If that’s true, what sort of energy was being used there? And, in any case, we’re not just talking about an unknown energy that’s moving things; it’s affecting people as well. Like in cases of possession. If it can do those things, you might say that it’s capable of anything.’

  Maurice has his theories about telepathy and psychokinesis. He thinks these are real human attributes that could explain away much apparent poltergeist behaviour. And he’s right, of course. Just as hypnogogic states might explain some night-terrors, the Stone Tape theory some apparitions, advanced body-language skills some mediums, coincidence some crisis apparitions, rogue radio waves some EVP, and hoaxers, mental illness and wishful thinking the rest. Nothing, however, explains it all. Except, that is, the afterlife theory.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he says,
nodding sagely, ‘there’s an enormous amount of evidence for the afterlife. But how much poltergeist activity has to do with it, I’m not quite sure. The only thing in the Enfield case was that he identified himself in the voice and said who he was.’

  ‘This is Bill,’ I say, ‘the guy who died in the house?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Maurice says. ‘Everything pointed to the fact that it was that man.’

  Whilst the Enfield investigation was ongoing, Maurice was interviewed on the radio. During the broadcast, he played a tape of the voice. Soon afterwards, a man who’d heard the show contacted Grosse and told him that he’d lived at the house and that the sound on his tape was the voice of his father, Bill.

  ‘And he did tell me some facts that we didn’t, at that point, know,’ says Maurice. ‘He also told us how he died, and he was exactly right.’

  So was it the spirit of Bill that was haunting the house? Was Bill the entity and the voice? Or did Janet speak in that gruff growl because she was on some sort of extreme attention trip? Anita Gregory thought so, I mention, very quietly.

  There’s a small, dense silence. I sit and wait in slow motion.

  ‘Anita Gregory,’ Maurice says. He lets out a small sigh and glances out of his window. A car passes by. ‘What a problem she was.’

  ‘I was trying to get hold of her thesis,’ I say, ‘but it was placed out of bounds.’

  ‘That’s because we threatened her with legal action,’ says Maurice.

  ‘I understand you took legal action against a journalist, too?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the apology upstairs.’

  ‘So, did you prove the Enfield case was true in a court of law?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘all I did was get my solicitors to write to them and got an about-turn. I’d just like to tell you – I’ve never been called a liar. Ever.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘but why did you force the SPR to place Anita’s thesis out of bounds?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ says Maurice. ‘She came to the house maybe three, four times. One day, she was writing up her notes in a book, similar to the one you’ve got there. I was also writing up my notes in a book. Now, she went home one evening, and when I opened my book, I realised that she’d got my book and I’d got hers. Now, when I read those notes, I thought, this is a very disturbed person. She’s writing, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here” and “It doesn’t make any sense” and so on and so forth. And yet, when she did that thesis, she said, “Oh, this definitely didn’t happen and this definitely didn’t happen.” If I’d have been clever, I’d have kept that book. But I didn’t. I gave it back the next morning.’