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

by Will Storr

  ‘Still, though,’ I say, ‘to threaten her with legal action – that’s quite an aggressive act.’

  ‘Well, no. I wasn’t too worried about it,’ he says. ‘But Guy got very upset. Well, Guy’s an author, you see, and it was questioning his book and his honesty. I was naive enough to think that it didn’t matter a tuppenny damn.’

  ‘So, I take it that she wrote that the Enfield case was faked?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Her thesis was very bad indeed. John Beloff told me afterwards, he said, “That influenced me at the time, but now I believe everything you said.”’

  I shift in my seat. ‘That’s funny,’ I say. ‘John Beloff wrote to me and said it was the kids acting up.’

  There’s a small silence. I wait. Maurice smiles. He rubs his chin.

  ‘Is that what he said, now?’ he says. ‘Well, he must be getting old. Because it’s not very long ago he said to me, he said, to my face, he said, “What I’ve said before about the Enfield case – I retract it all.”’

  ‘But,’ I begin again, ‘I wrote to him asking his opinion on the Enfield case and he said that he was of the opinion that it was the kids.’

  ‘I bet if I confronted him face to face he wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘But –’ I say.

  Then Maurice’s tone changes. ‘Listen, I’ve had to put up with all this nonsense … ’ He pauses. ‘Look, I don’t care if … let me put it like this. I don’t care a tuppenny damn about the sceptics. I’ve spent my whole time, my career in parapsychology, trying to produce evidence. Now, can you point to anyone who has produced better evidence than I have?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Then, that’s the answer to your story. All right?’

  But it’s not all right. Not yet. I read Anita’s claim that the neighbour, Peggy Nottingham, said that what was going on at the end was a ‘load of nonsense’.

  ‘Well, she told me she said no such thing,’ he says.

  ‘But what about the WPC who witnessed the moving chair? Anita said she thought that was a trick.’

  ‘Well, ask her how the trick was done,’ he says. ‘I’ve got her statement upstairs.’

  In fact, there’s no need for Maurice to fetch me the statement. I’ve already seen the transcript of an interview that WPC Heeps gave a director from BBC Scotland at the time of the haunting. I found it in the SPR journals. Her exact words were: ‘The chair was by the sofa, and I looked at the chair and I noticed it shook slightly. I can’t explain it any better. It came off the floor, oh, nearly a half-inch, I should say, and I saw it slide off to the right about three and a half to four feet before it came to rest. I’m absolutely convinced that no one in that room touched that chair or went anywhere near it when it moved. Absolutely convinced.’

  ‘So, was Anita lying about that?’ I ask.

  ‘You want my honest opinion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.’

  ‘I know she’s dead,’ I say, ‘but … ’

  There’s a long, driving silence. I look at Maurice. Maurice looks at me.

  ‘She was a liar,’ he says. ‘No question about it.’

  With that, I decide to put the dossier away. Even if you do accept some of Anita’s concerns, I still think it’s unreasonable to believe the whole eighteen-month episode was a hoax. I’m convinced that an eleven-year-old couldn’t fool a mother of four, her neighbours and all those journalists and miscellaneous strangers that a ghost was causing chaos, when it was actually her. Nobody could. If you, as a child, threw a Lego brick at a houseguest’s head and blamed it on a poltergeist, there wouldn’t be a mother on earth that would fall for it. Not even once. And besides, why would she want to make it up? The haunting was an exhausting and miserable trial for the whole family and it led to Mrs Hodgson having a nervous breakdown, to her brother suffering years of bullying and to Janet herself moving away from the area. She’d have to have been crazy to willingly inflict that on everyone – and we know she wasn’t crazy, the team at the Maudsley confirmed that much.

  And then there are the parallels with other cases I’ve come across. Deborah Carven also complained of terrifying reflections in the window. Tim Laverty experienced hot stones falling from the air during his school trip to Michelham Priory. And, just like Kathy, Debbie and Rain-On-Face, Janet would ‘go under’ and have no memory of what happened when she came back up again. And then there are the indismissable similarities with other poltergeist cases from around the world and centuries. Almost every item in Canon Michael Perry’s checklist has been checked. So really, if we’re going to conclude that Janet – possibly with the help of Rose – was responsible for an almighty hoax, as well as being extremely well educated (they weren’t), they’d have to have been expert magicians, ventriloquists and liars. And unless during my evening with Janet I witnessed yet another astonishing performance, I just cannot believe that sad, faltering person was the evil architect behind the Enfield haunting.

  In the end, reading through Anita’s letters, I get the sense that she actually had more of an issue with Maurice and Guy’s scientific techniques than she did with the authenticity of much of the phenomena. It seems to me that Maurice and Guy weren’t logging and recording things in the way that she thought a professional should, and they might have felt irritated when this was pointed out in the SPR journal, which was why they were over-ravenous in their anti-Anita actions. In fact, in an article called ‘Investigating Macro-Physical Phenomena’, that Anita wrote for the Parapsychology Review in 1982, she repeats her doubts, but this time concedes that ‘there is nevertheless some good evidence and testimony’.

  But the one aspect of the Enfield haunting that Anita did absolutely refuse to accept, though, was the voice. Anita had a monstrous issue with the voice. So, was Janet putting it on? I think it’s possible. But, to be honest, I don’t think it matters. I think the voice is a red herring. The tapping, the furniture moving, the doors slamming, the hot stones – all these things were witnessed by many people. Even Janet’s levitating was witnessed by two locals. These things, taken in the context of their consistency with historical hauntings, well, that’s good enough for me. You’d have thought that would be good enough for anyone. But it probably won’t even be approaching the outskirts of good enough for the sceptics.

  The problem, I found, with turning fully sceptical is that to really pull it off you’ve got to stitch your eyes shut, pump rubber glue down your ears and say, ‘I don’t care what anybody else says. They can throw whatever they like at me but it won’t make any difference because I already know the truth.’

  The other morning, as I was getting ready for work, I heard a scientist on Radio 4 telling the country with a satisfied chuckle that there is no afterlife. I paused in mid-air with my sock pulled half on. How does he know? Logically, that statement could not be based on science. It’s pure belief. Even if someone had managed to properly discount all the paranormal evidence there is, well, that still wouldn’t prove death is the absolute end. All this made me realise that to be a hard sceptic you have to start with the belief and then look at the evidence. Which, often, you have to twist and squash and smear to make it fit your point. And it’s this partisan, almost political approach to the subject which leads to the ridiculousness of sceptics trying to prove their point by replicating paranormal phenomena with magic tricks. To me, that makes no sense. You don’t try to explain snow by faking a blizzard. Just because you can forge a £50 note, it doesn’t mean that all the red bills are snide. Another one of their tricks is to say, ‘Well, it’s just not very likely, is it?’ Well, really, that depends on who you ask. And how confident you are that twenty-first-century humans already know everything there is to know about all of existence.

  To take the sceptical stance, you need to just know somewhere deep in your soul that you’re right. In other words, to be a true, fundamentalist hardcore disbeliever, you have to have faith. And I find faith difficult. Because it’s tha
t closed attitude to life’s mysteries that made me want to walk out of my R.E. A-level lessons. The hard sceptics, you see, are just the same as the priests. Because they offer absolutes, they give answers – and Maurice is absolutely right about that: you only get answers from charlatans.

  That morning, as I stood in my bedroom with half a sock on, I wondered why the sceptical faithful just cannot accept that there might be more after life than the void. It’s as if they’ve got a blockage.

  ‘A blockage!’ says Maurice. ‘Yes. They’ve got a blockage.’

  ‘Is it because they’re scared?’ I ask.

  ‘I think that some people don’t like the idea of an afterlife because of the life they’re leading now,’ says Maurice. ‘This question of heaven and hell is much more deeply ingrained in people’s psyche than they think. Especially if they’ve got a Catholic background. Another one is if they’ve been brought up with no spiritual background whatsoever. You have to understand that when you’re talking about sceptics, you’re talking about a very special breed of people. It’s … it’s … ’

  ‘It’s Luddite,’ I say.

  ‘That’s it!’ Maurice roars. ‘That’s the word! Absolutely! Here, do you want to hear a tape of Janet speaking in the voice?’

  ‘Have you got one?’

  ‘Does that thing play back?’ he says, looking at my Dictaphone.

  Maurice goes upstairs, and returns with an old cassette tape. I slip it into the player and press play. It hisses. And then a noticeably younger-sounding Maurice says: ‘You understand that you shouldn’t really be in this house?’

  A faint knocking responds. Then, the voices of the Hodgson family can be heard. More knocking.

  ‘Shh!’ he says. ‘It’s now doing the rat-tat-a-tat-tat. Now, I’m going to ask you a question. Are you having a game with me?’

  There’s a noise of something. And then …

  ‘Aaarghh!’ says a young girl. ‘Oh!’ says an older woman. ‘Oh! Crikey!’ says Maurice, all at the same time.

  Then Maurice speaks. He’s out of breath, excited.

  ‘As I asked the question, “Are you having a game with me?” it threw the cardboard box and the pillow right at my face. Thank you very much, that was a very good answer.’

  We forward the tape.

  ‘Say, “Doctor Beloff”,’ Maurice says. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Doctor! Beloff!’ it shouts.

  The voice. My first instinct is to try not to smile. It just sounds stupid. This is a tape of an eleven-year-old putting on an old man’s voice. But then, I think, let’s just say that a ghost was using the physical equipment it found inside an eleven-year-old’s gizzard to speak. What would it sound like? Well, probably, just like an eleven-year-old girl putting on an old man’s voice.

  But I still don’t think that belief in these voices is essential so my ‘wows’ are mostly manners-based. Until Janet’s tone suddenly barks. I bend down towards the tape slightly.

  ‘ … so you can’t shoot me,’ it says.

  ‘How can we shoot you if we can’t see you, Bill?’ says Guy Playfair.

  ‘BY PRAYING! To God.’

  The voice growls along, like an oil drum being dragged over gravel, and then, without warning, it leaps into a quick, sudden yelp and then goes back down again. Without hesitation I know where I’ve heard this before. It’s precisely the same pattern of sound as the EVP Lou recorded in Kathy’s house and at the Carvens’. Really, precisely, completely, exactly. The timbre of the growl is identical, as is the timing and suddenness of the yelps. And it’s the same in such an unusual, unexpected way. I stand there, open-faced, as a chill wave breaks over me. I tell Maurice.

  ‘How strange,’ he says. ‘That’s very interesting, what you told me. Very interesting. I’ve never heard that before.’

  Then I talk about the cavernous glare, like a traction beam into purgatory, that came out of Janet’s eyes, and how it was exactly the same cavernous glare that came out of Kathy’s.

  ‘And I wasn’t looking out for it,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t expecting it. And I’ve never felt that from anyone else.’

  ‘Well, there you are, you see!’ he says, and laughs at the expression of gentle horror that this connection has left on my face.

  I’m stunned because the fact that this voice – which was recorded in a London suburb in 1978 – sounds the same as one recorded over twenty years later, on a different continent, makes complete sense. It adds up. Because if both these recordings actually are the sound of disembodied souls, they would sound the same – whether they were free-floating in the invisible world or whether they’d managed to disappear up the nostril and down the throat of a human with usable voice-amplifying equipment. They would sound the same. And they do sound the same. It all makes heavy, terrifying sense. And it is terrifying because it means …

  ‘When people say they believe in ghosts,’ I say, when we’ve sat back down on the comfy chairs, ‘I’m not really sure that they know what they’re saying. I mean, the ramifications … ’

  Maurice leans forwards and offers me a plate of biscuits as a soothing gesture.

  ‘Of course,’ he says, nodding.

  Maurice understands.

  ‘It’s the most important subject there is.’

  ‘Do you believe in heaven and hell?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t believe in hell,’ he says, ‘and I don’t believe in heaven. I just believe there’s something else, and that when they die, people will get a big surprise.’

  ‘But all this research that you’ve done,’ I say. ‘Hasn’t it changed the way you view reality?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he says.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I can answer that simply,’ he says.

  For the first time, I detect a marvellous hint of wonder and vulnerability soften the steel in his eyes.

  ‘I’m not sure what reality is any more.’

  17

  ‘Some really weird things’

  TO MY RIGHT, a vacant seat. To my front, a small table that holds my mess of notes, pens, research papers, tapes, a tape recorder, a laptop and no cup of tea. To my left, the black miles of night-drenched Britain, streaming past outside the window. I’m rarely happier than at the outset of a long, quiet train journey, when I’ve found a forward-facing place to sit where nobody else can see me.

  It’s been several weeks now since my meeting with Maurice. Much has happened. I’ve made an inglorious return to Michelham Priory with the Ghost Club. All was entirely normal – nothing, as far as I was concerned, remotely para occurred. Paolo was there, doing his thing. And Philip Hutchinson was there, too. We shared a disenchanted grumble as the dawn leaked out over the wet, mist-freezing lawns. I’ve also been back to Newcastle to see Debbie and Trevor. I hired out Newcastle Keep myself so I could test out a couple of theories. Firstly, I decided that the yabbering assemblies that normally attend vigils are probably not that conducive to the coaxing or sensing of fleeting ghostly happenings. So I thought I’d arrange for as small a group as possible to sit in the still and quiet. And this time, Farrah came with me. As she’d kept experiencing freakish events while I was out searching, I thought she might have been more psychically inclined to encounter something than me. She wasn’t. At just gone 3 a.m., she crept into an anteroom with a small gas fire and curled up on a wooden bench to fall asleep. None of the rest of us experienced anything remarkable either, unless you counted the bit when Debbie suddenly announced that she’d been shot in the face with a musket. I can taste the blood in my mouth, she said.

  And something else has happened, too. Christmas has been and gone. Mother Nature has given the world a totally bastard present – a tsunami, in the Indian Ocean. A mere muscular twitch in the earth’s physiology that has killed thousands. I pull myself up in my seat and let my fingers scramble through my notes for the newspaper cutting. Here it is: ‘Domestic and foreign media have reported dozens of ghost sightings in tsunami-affected areas. The encounters have ranged from back-packers hea
rd laughing and shouting on deserted beaches to holidaymakers hailing a cab to the airport, only to disappear along the way.’

  I put the cutting down and look to my left. Rain has started to hit the window. Fine little drops are shivering, merging and streaming in thin streaks. I find a tape, in amongst my rubble, upon which I’ve written ‘Michele Watkins’, and slot it into my Dictaphone. We run into a tunnel and the hailstorm sound of the speeding inter-city is pushed back into the carriage. The train rocks and roars with an intimidating fury. I put my earphones in, push the play button and the sound of the bright, 44-year-old civil servant’s voice begins:

  ‘I’d always had some really weird things happen to me. The first big one was, oh God, this was twenty-odd years ago. I’d started a relationship and I just thought he was a really nice bloke, and I had a vivid dream about him one night. Even though I’d done nursing, I’d never seen somebody have an epileptic fit. But in the dream, he had his head in my lap and he had an epileptic fit. And I mean really bad. And it was a beautiful sunny day, and I was freaking out, because I had never seen it. And then, the same night, I dreamed that he already had a girlfriend and that she was dressed in red and she was a hairdresser. Quite strange. So the next time I saw him, we went for a walk in the park, sat down and chatted. And I said to him, “I had a funny dream about you the other night. One thing disturbed me – I might tell you later – but the other thing that disturbed me was that you have another girlfriend.” Well, he just went white.’