The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  We were required to join hands in a circle around a central table. The lights were put out at the wall switch, and also individually, to prevent any skeptical person in the circle suddenly arising and flashing them on. The grocer, however, at my advice, had brought a strong pocket flashlight, so we were prepared.

  The séance was opened by the company singing a hymn. Then there was silence for a space, and more singing, while the medium, tied up in a black bag, went into a trance. The proceedings were directed by a woman who, I think, was a sincere believer in spiritualism, and wanted to make all psychic conditions right for opening spirit communications.

  I noticed that the singing was loud enough to deaden any sounds a person might make by entering the room either by the door or through the window, and I knew that if the medium had unlocked the window while he was putting up the drapes, it could be opened very easily without being heard above the noise of the singing. I was uneasy, however, and feared that I was on the wrong track, because I saw no way by which an outsider could gain access to the window, which was too far above ground to be reached by ladder.

  Finally the spirit manifestations began. There were table rappings, twanging of mandolins, movements of the speaking trumpet, ghostly touches in the dark – all the old claptrap of spiritualistic séances. Then the messages began, the spirit control being ostensibly an Irishman named Mike, who talked in a thick brogue and cracked numerous jokes, even banging the grocer sharply over the head with the mandolin to cool his skepticism. The medium, during all this excitement, was supposed to be in a deep trance, with his hands made useless by being sealed into the black bag, which in its turn was covered with postage stamps on which everyone present had placed marks by which we should know that the medium had not emerged from the bag. This also is a time-worn device of spiritualistic charlatans. It does not hamper the medium’s movements as much as might be expected.

  Mike, the spirit control, then asked every person in the circle to think very hard of some departed friend or relative whom they wished to see, for the psychic conditions were right for a materialization. The room was very hot and close, but an almost imperceptible breath of air fanned my cheek, and I knew that the window had been opened. The medium, of course, had unlocked it when he was putting up the curtains.

  I moved my chair back, out of the circle, and the grocer, who was on my left, moved in a little to take up part of the space I had occupied. I freed my left hand carefully, and substituted the grocer’s hand in the hand of the woman on my left, who must have thought that I sat on her right, still holding her hand. My purpose in leaving the circle was to make an investigation. I wanted a look at that window.

  A phosphorescent glow emerging from the cabinet now showed vaguely a human face, whether of man or woman I could not say. But the grocer and lawyer were there to attend to the materialization. It was my purpose to learn how the materialization had gained access to the room. I wormed my way down into the cabinet, and through an opening in the back I reached the window very easily. The double curtain bulged out with a slight breeze, and I knew that the window was open.

  I poked my head out, and was amazed at what I found. To the left of the window a ladder was hanging from the roof above my head. It was a fireman’s extendible hooking ladder, about fifteen feet long, which had been thrust out of the window above, and attached to the top of the building so that the medium’s “materialization” could climb down from the window in the third story.

  Behind me a scream arose, which I did not take time to investigate. It was a girl’s scream, and the name “Marion” was repeated several times.

  I tried to push the hooking ladder off from the roof, but I could not dislodge it. The ladder was in two sections, and the lower section, being loose, merely slid upward in its grooves. The upper part of the hooking ladder was securely attached to the roof, and could not be lifted out unless I could raise the rigid upper part of the ladder. So I climbed out, and went up to the window in the story above. Behind me still arose the girl’s scream: “Marion! Marion! Oh, God, it’s Marion!”

  I found the window in the fourth story open. I sat on the sill, lifted the booking ladder from its position and shoved it in the room. The escape of the medium’s materialization was cut off, and my own return by the window was also blocked. I found the door locked from the inside. Evidently the “materialization” wished to make himself secure from intruders while he waited for the singing to tell him that the time had come for him to put out his ladder, attach it to the roof, and descend to take his part in the séance.

  I made my way quickly through the corridor and down the stairs to the room of the séance, and found everything in turmoil. I had missed the unmasking of the fraud, but I had prevented the escape of the “spirit.” What happened while I was going out of the window and removing the ladder, if told in fiction, would seem like stretching the long arm of coincidence so far that it would break under the strain. That is why I said, at the beginning of this article, that the story would be unconvincing if told by a novelist, because of its improbability.

  I had wormed my way into the cabinet and was approaching the window when the grocer flashed his pocket light upon the supposed materialization. A woman’s scream split the darkness, and the flashlight was violently knocked from the grocer’s hand, but the young woman had thrown her arms around the ghost and was covering his face with kisses, screaming “Marion, Marion! It’s you! For God’s sake, speak to me, Marion!”

  While some tried to find the switch, only to find the lights turned off at the chandelier too, someone probably the medium, was striking the girl’s hands with a blackjack, endeavoring to break her hold, and the ghost was muttering in great fright: “Frances, let go of me; you’re smothering me, Frances,” and fighting to free himself. The combined efforts of the medium and the ghost finally freed him from the girl’s hysterical embrace, but the means of escape was cut off by my removing of the ladder. The ghost was a real flesh and blood one, and could not dematerialize into the world of shadows.

  The girl, Frances, whose surname I will not mention here, as she is still living, had attended the séance in good faith, and when the spirit control asked everyone present to hold in mind the image of a dear departed one, so that the spirit might be aided in showing itself, she concentrated her thoughts on her fiancé, who had died a little less than a year before.

  Out of the cabinet, dimly seen by a phosphorescent glow from the features of the ghost, stepped the materialization. The girl stared, hoping that this was indeed her fiancé, trying to believe, her heart beating between skepticism and faith, when the grocer’s flashlight lit up the features distinctly. It was only for an instant, for the flashlight was knocked from the grocer’s hand almost immediately, but that instant was enough.

  The ghost that had emerged from the cabinet was the man she had been engaged to marry, the man whom she had seen laid away in his coffin and buried in the earth:

  Is it any wonder that the poor girl became hysterical? Is it any wonder that she threw her arms about her beloved dead, and sought to hold him in the land of the living? Possessed for the moment of an unnatural strength, she held him tight, screaming her love at him, until the struggles of the ghost and the cruel blackjack of the medium had broken her hold.

  The materialization, of course, was a paid employee of the medium. And he really was the girl’s fiancé!

  It transpired that the man, who lived in Chicago, had a twin brother in Wyoming, who was slowly dying of consumption and had gone west to work on a ranch in hope that the high altitude would help him. Frances knew of the existence of this twin brother, but she had never seen him. Marion, realizing that the end was near for his brother, had himself heavily insured in his brother’s name. He sent for the brother, who came to Chicago while Frances was in Montana with relatives. In Chicago Marion changed lodgings to break contact with those who knew him, and he took his brother’s name, and gave his own name to his brother. The brother died in a Chicago hospital
under the name of Marion, but Marion was speeding west to Wyoming when the end came. Letters from Frances in Montana were found in the pockets of the dead man, and a telegram brought the heart-broken girl back to Chicago to attend the funeral of her fiancé, as she supposed. Marion, by this fraud, was able to collect the insurance on his own death.

  The money did him very little good, however, for he squandered it in mining stocks and gambling and other means, and was soon penniless. He then obtained employment as assistant to the charlatan medium, and did materializations for him, with his face smeared with phosphorescent paint that gave a pale, unearthly radiance to his features in the dark, and yet did not light them up enough so that anyone could certainly recognize his face. It was the flashlight of the grocer that accomplished that.

  The strangest part of the whole occurrence is that the girl and the man should meet in this strange way. He had not the slightest notion in the world that his fiancée was in that room, while she, of course, believed him dead.

  The insurance company prosecuted the man for fraud, but the medium who employed him departed suddenly, and may still be preying, under another name, upon the credulities of those who want to communicate with their beloved dead. He was a clever magician, and under whatever name he perpetrates his fraudulent tricks, he should be very successful. It is much more lucrative to be a charlatan medium than an honest magician, for rich dupes pay well, whereas the amount of money that can be made by parlor magic is relatively small.

  The girl, Frances, refused to have anything to do with her fiancé thereafter, for the fraud he practised both on her and on the insurance company killed her love. She went to the hospital, suffering from a nervous collapse, after her hysteria at the séance, but she recovered, and afterward returned to Chicago.

  SHANE LESLIE (John Randolph Shane Leslie, Third Baronet Leslie) devoted much of his life to investigating unexplained phenomena, particularly in his native Ireland where he played a key role in a number of SPR cases. A larger-than-life character who travelled a great deal – especially in Russia where he became a friend of Tolstoy – Leslie wrote one of the most authentic studies, Ghost Book in 1955, and drew on his own experiences as a ghost hunter for various collections of short stories, in particular the curious tale of A Ghost in the Isle of Wight (1929). Leslie had a particular fascination with poltergeists: probably because of his own experience as a young man as he relates here.

  THE IRISH POLTERGEIST

  Location and date: Donegal, Ireland, 1910

  In June 1910 I performed the Pilgrimage to Lough Derg with two young Catholic students, Mr Smyth and Mr Moynagh. We did the pilgrimage with fervour and returned walking from the lake to the village of Pettigo in Donegal. As the village was on family property, I suggested we should sleep the first night (after two without much sleep on the Island of St Patrick’s Purgatory) in the Agency. Here I slept as I had often slept in the past the sleep of the just. But my companions, who had deserved every consideration from Morpheus, were troubled and tossed and torn by a ghost who stripped the bedclothes from them.

  By the morning they had not slept a wink. They were considerate enough to avoid telling their host, but they confided the night’s work to Mr Flood, a reputable publican, who was certain that they had encountered the Protestant spirit of Mr James McCullagh, who had long been Agent but had died two years previously. Poor James’s feelings can be understood at finding Catholic pilgrims in his beds. But the Parish Priest at home told me that, before they parted for ever in this world, the old Agent (who had a compassionate record in the 1879 Famine) had asked him to do his best for him in the next world. Smyth felt the bedclothes stretched over him and then a foot which descended between him and the bed. Moynagh said the clothes had been rolled up over him like the drop-curtain in a theatre.

  VIOLET TWEEDALE was a woman cast in the same mould as Eleanor Sidgwick – resourceful, self-sufficient and fascinated by the supernatural. An energetic traveller, she was forever on the search for material to use in her novels and to bolster her conviction about the paranormal. A convinced spiritualist, she attended séances with Lord Haldane and WE Gladstone and was a powerful witness when the trance speaker, Meurig Morris, sued the Daily Mail for libel in 1932. Her friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a foreword to her book Phantoms of the Dawn (1938). This next strange account is from the most interesting of Tweedale’s reminiscences, Ghosts I Have Seen & Other Psychic Experiences published in 1920.

  THE INVISIBLE HANDS

  Location and date: London, UK, 1908

  I was sitting near the library window, reading, in the fading light of a quiet November afternoon. It was one of those utterly still, mournful days, with a grey, brooding sky, save where, in the west, a pale primrose sunset was bathing the horizon in light. I was reading “Man and the Universe,” by Sir Oliver Lodge, and had arrived at page 137, which ends Chapter VI.

  In those days (the year was 1908) I always tried to arrange at least one week of perfect quiet for the study of a new book which I had just ordered. I would calculate on which day the post would bring it to my country home, and I would arrange my life accordingly. This may sound rather ridiculous, but the truth is that a book such as “Man and the Universe” is such a pure intellectual treat to me, that I like to gloat over it, to taste it slowly, and imbibe it gradually. I try to spin out the joy of it as long as possible by reading slowly, and thinking over the problems presented.

  At last I put the book down on a table by my side. I was in no hurry. It lay on its back, open, the pages uppermost; just where I had stopped reading. I fell to wondering on the words I had just read:

  “A reformer must not be in haste. The kingdom cometh not by observation, but by secret working as of leaven. Nor must he advocate any compromise repugnant to an enlightened conscience. Bigotry must die, but it must die a natural, not a violent death. Would that the leaders in Church and State had always been able to receive an impatient enthusiast in the spirit of the lines—

  ‘Dreamer of dreams! no taunt is in our sadness,

  Whate’er our fears our hearts are with your cause.

  God’s mills grind slow; and thoughtless haste were madness,

  To gain Heaven’s ends we dare not break Heaven’s laws.’ ”

  I must have sat thinking for quite ten minutes when my attention was suddenly attracted by a sound – the sound of paper leaves being rustled. The room was so dead still that the faintest sound would have called my attention, but this sound was by no means faint. I turned my head and looked at the book I had been reading, because, from it, unmistakably the noise proceeded.

  I beheld a most enthralling phenomenon. Unseen hands were turning over the pages.

  A thrill of intense excitement ran through me, and I stared at the book in breathless interest. The hands seemed to be searching for some particular passage. The number of the page upon which the passage was printed was not, apparently, known to the searcher. I will try to describe what actually happened.

  Several leaves of the book were turned over rather rapidly, each leaf making the usual sound which accompanies such an ordinary physical action. Then, as if fearing that the passage required had been overlooked or passed by, several leaves were turned back again.

  This manifestation continued for at least ten minutes, and I could see nothing but the pages of the book being turned quite methodically, as by a human hand.

  At moments there was rather a long pause in the search, and at the first pause I thought the demonstration might be over, but once again the invisible entity resumed the search, and I found myself saying, “He found something there that interested him. That is why he stopped.” For no reason I can give I felt certain my visitor was a male spirit.

  On the second pause in the search occurring I had no doubt that again he had found something that interested him. The whole manifestation was very leisurely and wonderfully human. As I sat watching the book being manipulated by unseen fingers, every smallest action suggested design. One could not do
ubt as to what was taking place. At length there came a pause longer than usual. The book lay flat on its back wide open. There was now no quiver of the leaves. The invisible entity had found what he wanted and gone.

  I curbed my curiosity for five minutes more, then feeling convinced that I was again alone I stretched out my hand, took the book and, rising, carried it close to the window.

  There was still enough light to read by, and the leaves were open at pages 172–173.

  I had only read as far as page 137.

  I scanned them eagerly, and at once discovered that a mark had been made on the margin of page 172. A long cross had been placed against a paragraph. The mark was such as might have been made by a sharp finger-nail. The words marked were—

  “I want to make the distinct assertion that a really existing thing never perishes, but only changes its form.”