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

by Will Storr

  When we arrive at Mrs Clarke’s for our vigil, Lou gives Bob and me the same talk that I heard in the diner on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He runs through his rules and leads us, above the sound of the chanting crickets, in a rousing ‘Our Father’, which is supposed to help protect us from the oncoming demonic onslaught. On the long drive from Philadelphia to Kentucky, Lou told me that there was a battle going on, between good and evil. But we’ve found no evidence of the devil in Denzel. In fact, I think that if I have witnessed any evil today, it’s in the very people who are convinced of their goodness.

  But is there really such a thing as an independent force of evil? One that disappears up the ears of sleepers and causes them to wake up a thief or a wife-beater or a paedophile? Could it be true that we’re not actually responsible for the dreadful things we do? I don’t think so. Our behaviour is defined by our history, our psychology and our genes – and the way those things pan out is down to the chaos theory of birth and life.

  I think if there is a battle between good and evil, it’s a psychological one that takes place in the tiniest decisions. Good’s done when we fight against our negative behavioural predispositions and win. Bad’s done when we’re lazy; when we act to type. It’s when we muster the strength to not behave like our fathers that we become better people, not when we beg a superhero in the sky to protect us from some diabolical vice-monster. And as for religion’s ideas of an afterlife of punishment or reward for our behaviour; we get our heaven and hell in this life, not the next. We reincarnate ourselves – we change the content of our futures – every time we make a decision.

  So after a year of searching, I’ve decided to try to pay more attention to each one of those daily decisions. Because I’m now convinced that there is evidence of something following death. Because ghosts exist. There really are such things as apparitions and EVP and poltergeists and heavy breathing in old rooms in the night. And humans, being human, feel compelled to explain that. But they can’t. It’s only the faithful who think they can. In this regard, Christians are just the same as witches and druids and anti-Satan vigilantes and sceptical monsterologists and hard rational scientists. They all think they’ve got answers, but really, they’re all wildly theorising. The simple truth is – nobody knows. Nobody, not Dr Salter, Dr Garvey, Father Bill or the Founder, knows what happens when our brains finally flicker off. We’re in the dark about death and the purpose of existence. And an awful lot of people, it seems, are scared of the dark. This is the thing that I’ve learned over the last twelve months about blind belief in the supernatural: faith is for the frightened. These are the things that scare humans more than anything else – death, loneliness and guilt. That’s the ominous three, the holy trinity of dread. If you sign up for a supernatural belief like Christianity, these timeless problems disappear in a puff of incensed smoke. Death? No worries. Paradise awaits you. Lonely? Don’t be daft – God loves you and is with you always. Guilt? Just say the word, and you will be forgiven.

  And it’s not just the Christians. There’s a certain type of ghost-believer that’s victim to this same syndrome. They use ghosts, just as Dr Salter said, to make themselves feel more important or to convince themselves their dead friends, family and lovers aren’t just Spam for maggots. They use their cod logic to bring order and meaning to their chaotic and seemingly meaningless lives. And some of them use it to dress themselves up as instant experts. You can say anything you like about ghosts and, providing you do it with enough authority, you’ll get your own slot on satellite TV.

  But not all of the ghost-convinced are like this. Because if you strip away all the nonsense, you’re left with something that most Christians will never have. You’re left with evidence. Genuine, unexplained, skull-bucklingly fantastic evidence. For me, the extraordinary truth about ghosts doesn’t lie in the individual experiences of one witness or another. It lies in the patterns. That, perhaps, four or five other people heard breathing in that bedroom before me doesn’t make it four or five times more interesting, it makes it one of the most incredible mysteries in the world. Just like the previous occupants of Annie’s room, the many victims of poltergeists, the worldwide thousands who’ve recorded EVP, the routinely spooked visitors to Michelham Priory, the young brothers who talked to the women in their bathroom, it’s the chorus of humans who are experiencing the same things, evidence of intelligent ghosts, that make this subject so profound and wondrous and universal. I am convinced that one of the frontier sciences will eventually solve ghosts. And most likely it will be quantum theorists. With their atoms that don’t like to be observed, their free-floating souls, their mysterious extra dimensions and their fundamental cosmic interconnectedness of all things, they certainly seem to be closing in on the subject. And, as for God, perhaps Lou’s not so far from the truth when he describes him as a ‘powerful energy source’. Perhaps this fundamental level that near-death survivors describe feeling so blissfully a part of is God – a Quantum God. Maybe it’s this very essence of existence, this network of life, that we all have a pinch of fizzing away inside our microtubules, that’s the sacred source that everybody’s searching for. Or, then again, maybe not.

  As for the hard sceptics, I think that to believe so passionately in the existence of nothing that isn’t immediately obvious is to suffer the most gigantic failure of intelligence and imagination. The universe – the reality in which we exist – is such an immeasurable, unbelievable and, ultimately, unknowable thing. And the only thing I know for sure is that it’s a stranger place than any human has the capacity to imagine.

  For Denzel’s mother, though, the universe is small and filled with Jesus. Here she is, one of the faithful frightened. Is she terrified that she might, in some way, be responsible for her son’s disability? Or petrified that God won’t judge her good enough to provide a cure? Our prayers and pep-talk over, Lou, Bob and I enter her house and find her nervous. There’s a jittery hyperactivity crackling her blood and she clucks and laughs and works hard to fill the silences. In the night, her front room has taken on a sinister aspect. As Lou makes a quick tour of the house, ensuring that anything that’s making a sound is identified and switched off at the mains, I look around. There’s a Bible on the table, open at Ecclesiastes. I notice that all of the indoor shrubbery is made from plastic and there are little pottery praying angels, many of which have had their heads broken off. There’s a torn scrap of paper pinned to the wall above the door. It says, in inky hand-writing, ‘Whoever enters this house is covered by the blood of Jesus.’

  Just as I’m reading this, Lou comes into the room. He’s gone red.

  ‘Guys,’ he says, urgently. ‘I need a word. Outside.’

  Bob and I follow him out into the driveway. His face is glowing in the tungsten orange dark and the crickets are going crazy.

  ‘Before,’ he says, breathless from something, ‘I told you that I took a pinch of blessed salt and I sprinkled it in front of the closet doorway, right? The one that the black shadow comes out of.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Well, I just walked in there and the room is in a fucking shambles. She’s ripped the carpet up and bleached the fucking thing! You can smell the bleach!’

  ‘She’s bleached the area where you put the salt?’ I say. This can’t be right. The holy salt cannot have worked. ‘Fuck! That’s … ’

  That’s just like Father Amorth said. Bob looks aghast.

  ‘That’s like, if you don’t like oregano,’ says Bob, ‘and you get the taste of oregano, you go ape.’

  Ten minutes later, I’m sitting in Denzel’s room, preparing for lights out. There are two EMF readers in front of the closet door. The kid’s bed, chest of drawers and toy trunk have been pulled from the walls and left clumsily and uncomfortably out of place. The room is, indeed, a shambles. The carpet by the closet, where the blessed salt was sprinkled, has been pulled up and the air is bruised with the piercing, sweet smell of bleach. And there’s the bottle, sitting nearby. Next to that, there�
��s a wet and dirty cloth lying discarded on the floor, like a dead mouse. Pinned to the door of the wardrobe there’s a scrap of paper that’s been written on in green wax crayon. It says: ‘The blood of Jesus covers this room.’

  I sit still and wonder, quietly, until Lou’s head comes round the door.

  ‘You OK, Will?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Remember,’ he says. ‘Rule number one. Don’t freak out.’

  ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I remember.’

  Lou switches the light off and closes the door. All I can see are the EMF meter’s green LEDs glowing and a hazy halo of light pushing up through the gap above the blind. And then, surrounded by the thick and acrid darkness, I fall fast asleep.

  Epilogue

  LOU GENTILE IS working towards a pilot’s licence, so that he can buy a light aircraft and help the demonically infested all over America.

  Kathy Ganiel is still using divination.

  Trevor and Debbie from Avalon Skies got married, in secret, in Gretna Green.

  The ever-sceptical Trevor requested a tape of Rain-On-Face’s ‘Mary’ possession in Tow Law, as he was having doubts about it. Rain-On-Face resigned from the organisation soon after to ‘pursue his Native American spirituality’. They apparently remain on speaking terms.

  The October 2006 issue of the SPR’s Paranormal Review included testimony from an apparently reliable source which included claims that the dogs that came to harm in Clapham Woods in the 1970s were attacked by a local gamekeeper who ‘had spent the war as a Japanese POW and was scarred by the experience’.

  Following the publication of the first edition of this book, Charles Walker contacted the author to point out that his fingertip was white during the Ouija board session because he is a diabetic with circulation problems and the blood didn’t reach.

  Philip Hutchinson has a photograph of himself taken outside Michelham Priory, in which an unexplained mist is present.

  A senior Ghost Club investigation squad, led by Lance, have been investigating Ham House in Richmond, Surrey. They have come up with some ‘very interesting’ results which will be published soon.

  Stacey still lives with her hermit ghost under the stairs.

  ‘Big’ George eventually resigned from Ghosts-UK and joined an organisation called Club Zero. He soon became fed up with them too. He is currently a senior member of Jacquie’s group Shanry.

  Steve, the Trance Medium, claims to have been recently possessed by the ghost of King Henry VIII.

  The Founder was dropped from ITV1’s series Haunted Homes before the filming of the first series. He is currently attempting to launch a rival show called Haunted Houses.

  Janet still lives quietly with her family in Clacton-on-Sea. Her youngest child still knows nothing of the events of 1977/78.

  Maurice Grosse passed away on 15 October 2006.

  Father Amorth continues his gruelling schedule of exorcisms.

  Lynne and Neil eventually left the First and Last Inn. Then, on 14 September 2006, their local newspaper, The Cornishman, reported: ‘After just one night, the new landlords of the haunted First and Last Inn at Sennen have packed up and left – apparently scared off by the pub’s ghosts. Following a sleepless evening of things going bump in the night, locals say the Scottish couple fled early on Saturday morning, still wearing their pyjamas, and apparently terrified by the 17th-century inn’s many phantoms.’

  Acknowledgements

  FIRST AND FOREMOST I’d like to thank everybody who appears in this book, especially Maurice Grosse, Dr Mark Salter, Dr James Garvey, Lance Railton, Trevor and Debbie, Philip Hutchinson, David Vee, Charles Walker, Jacqueline Adair, Father Gabriele Amorth and, of course, the brilliant, brilliant Lou Gentile.

  I’d also like to give a full royal bow to my editor Andrew Goodfellow and Paul Moreton for always knowing what’s best for me, even when I don’t, and for putting up with my constant obsessive worrying.

  Thanks also to Alex Hazle, Sarah Bennie and everyone at Ebury, Jon Ronson, Chloe Makin, Paul Merrill, Duncan Hayes, Francis Storr, Richard Purvis, Guy Lyon Playfair, Peter Johnson at the SPR, Andrew Sumner and Simon Hills.

  I’d also like to thank Jill Schwartzman and all at Harper Perennial in New York, Antony Medley, Simon Trewin and Danny Wallace.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  This edition published in 2007

  First published in 2006 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

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  Copyright © 2006, 2007 Will Storr

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  ISBN 9780091910136