The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

Today the mark is as clearly visible on the page as on the day it was made. I can form no conjecture as to who the entity was, but he certainly knew the contents of the book. No one watching the search could doubt that, or that he was desirous of impressing upon the readers of the book a certain fact stated therein, which must have previously attracted his attention.

  THOMAS CHARLES LETHBRIDGE developed his interest in the paranormal while he was a student at Cambridge University. Here he took part in several antiquarian expeditions and later became “Official Excavator” to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society from 1925 to 1956. His fascination with the relics that were unearthed drew him into tales of the restless dead and his later publications revealed an objective mind forever seeking explanations for old supernatural traditions. His enquiries led to several important books, notably Ghost and Ghoul (1961) and Ghost and Diving Rod (1963), which offered his theories about the nature of such phenomena. Lethbridge admitted that one cause of his obsession could be traced back to the day at University when he saw a ghost – which he describes here.

  THE GHOST IN THE TOP HAT

  Location and date: Cambridge, UK, 1922

  The incident happened in 1922, in New Court, Trinity, Cambridge. I had rooms in the block which faces the Backs and my stair was the first on the left of the gateway as you go out towards the river. On the next stair to mine, again on the left, a friend of mine, G. W., had his rooms, two floors up. They were a set of rooms which were said to have been occupied by generations of Buxtons, but, as there were no Buxtons in the college at the time, G. W. had them. The rooms were on the left of the stair. I am putting in these details in case any later occupant of the rooms has had the same experience.

  G. W. and I had not been model undergraduates. I regret to say that we thought far more about shooting, fishing, sailing and the like, than about cutting up dog-fish or wading through text-books. Later in the same year, G. W. was one of the party on the Shiant Islands. We were, I suppose, about the last batch of young men who went to a university simply to finish their education and make friends. I was actually diverted from the Army and sent up to Cambridge at the end of the Kaiser’s war, because everyone thought there would never be a war again and training for it was useless. I did not even know you were supposed to get a degree until I got up to the place. A good degree was no lure to us at all. In fact lectures were a bore after years of school.

  Diagram of occurrence in New Court, Trinity, Cambridge, in 1922. Not to scale.

  (A) Unknown man in top hat.

  (B) G. W., still seated by the fire.

  (C) Myself, going back to my own rooms.

  There were more chairs in the room and the bookcase may not be in the right place.

  I was sitting rather late one evening in G. W.’s rooms. We were discussing this and that in a desultory sort of way, one on each side of the fire. I was in the chair nearest the window, which looked over the court. Between me and the door in the opposite corner of the room was a square dining-table. Noticing that it was nearly midnight, I got up from my chair and was about to go back to bed. As I got up, and before I had said good night to G. W., the door opened and a man came into the room. G. W. remained sitting in his chair. The man, who had a top hat on, came only a few steps into the room and there stopped, resting both his hands on the table. I thought he was a college porter who wanted to say something to G. W. I said, “Well, good night, G. W.” and “Good evening” to the other man, who did not reply. Then I walked round behind the figure standing at the table, through the door, and down the stairs into the court. I went up the next stair to my own rooms and into bed without giving the incident another thought.

  Next morning, I met G. W. in Trinity Street. Remembering the visitor of the night before, I said, “Hello, G. W. Why did the porter come in last night? We weren’t making a row or anything.” “Nobody came in,” he replied. I found this statement quite impossible to believe and we argued a bit in the street. But G. W. had not seen the man and I had and that was all that could be said about it. When I had time to think it over, I found I could remember the man’s appearance in considerable detail. He was not very tall and he was slight. His face was rather pointed. He did not resemble any of our porters I could remember. Then I thought of something else: he had on a top hat. Our porters wore top hats, but they only wore them on Sundays. That evening had not been a Sunday. More than that, I found I could distinctly remember that he had something white at his throat and not a black tie. Then I got it. This was a man in hunting kit. G. W. had not seen him at all. He was a ghost.

  But that does not postulate that he was a visitor from another world. He could have been a thought projection from any unknown source. G. W. may have projected him. Someone may have projected himself while sitting sleepily in a chair in a London club. He may have been one of the countless Buxtons. Anything may have caused him to be there; but I happened to be on the right wave-length to receive the picture. It was just like a television picture without the sound. There was no colour and it was as utterly without feeling as a television shot. But it was full size. There was nothing, of course, about a man dressed in black and white to show as colour. Nevertheless, I do not think there was any colour in his face.

  HARRY PRICE is probably one of the best-known and certainly most controversial figures in the history of twentieth-century ghost hunting. Famous – or notorious – for his studies of Borley Rectory “The Most Haunted House in England,” his psychic research into a variety of spirit mediums including the German Willi Schneider and the jailed Mrs Helen Duncan, plus his investigations into supernatural phenomena such as the Indian Rope Trick and the “talking mongoose” of the Isle of Man, Price was often embroiled in controversy and attracted admirers and detractions in almost equal numbers. An excellent amateur magician, he was also an influential figure in the SPR, The Ghost Club and the formation of the first laboratory to scientifically test the paranormal in London. His most extraordinary investigation undoubtedly concerned a little Romanian girl who, in the 1920s, was the victim of what the popular newspapers of the day referred to as a “vampire-like poltergeist”.

  THE TELEKINETIC GIRL

  Location and date: Vienna, Austria, 1926

  It is a maxim that in Poltergeist cases, one practically never witnesses the displaced objects in flight, or the beginning of the telekinetic movements which are a feature of these cases. A classic exception to the above rule was Eleonore Zugun, a little Roumanian girl, accounts of whose telekinetic or Poltergeist phenomena filled the psychic and lay Press during the years 1926–7.

  Eleonore was born in Talpa, Roumania, on May 13, 1913, and was first studied by Fritz Grunewald. His friend the Countess Wassilko-Serecki then removed the child from her rather unsuitable home surroundings and adopted her. She resided with the Countess at her flat in the Josefstadterstrasse, Vienna. Soon after her arrival in Vienna, Professor Hans Thirring, of Vienna University, wrote and informed me of the alleged amazing phenomena which the girl was producing, and invited me to investigate.

  My first séance with Eleonore was at 5.15 p.m. on May 1, 1926, in the Countess’s study-bedroom, fifteen feet square. The sun was shining, and the large French windows flooded the room with light. Both windows and door were fastened. Only the Countess, Eleonore and myself were present. The apartment was simply furnished with a couch, chairs, table, etc., on one side of the room, which was divided longitudinally by means of a matchboard partition, six feet high, with an opening in it at one end. On the far side of the partition were the usual bed, toilet table, chairs, etc.

  I had brought Eleonore a toy spring-gun, firing a celluloid ball which was caught in a wire basket attached to the gun. The Countess and I sat on the couch watching the child play with her toy. In a few minutes, the ball had divided into its component halves and the child ran to us with a request that we should mend it. The Countess and I rose and while she was holding one half of the ball, and Eleonore the other, a long steel stiletto paper-knife shot across the room from
behind me, just missing my head, and fell against the door. I was intently watching the Countess and her protégée attending to the toy and can swear that neither touched the stiletto, whose normal resting-place was on a writing-table near the French windows, which were closed and fastened. I was between the table and my hostess, and whatever projected the stiletto must have been behind me. But there was no tangible being behind me, and the paper-knife could not have been thrown normally. A further and minute search of the apartment threw no light on the phenomenon, which occurred at 5.43.

  The flight of the stiletto was the first of many telekinetic phenomena. At 5.58 a small hand mirror was thrown over the partition from the bed side of the room, while the Countess, Eleonore and I were by the couch in the study portion. At 6.15 a metal cap was thrown from the bedroom side of the partition and fell at our feet. At 6.32 a large stuffed cloth dog was thrown from our side of the partition and fell on the coal-scuttle near the bed. I had just previously noticed the toy dog on a chair to the right of me; the Countess and Eleonore were on my left: neither could have touched it. It is interesting to note that after each phenomenon, the child’s pulse-rate increased. Her normal rate was 75; after a minor telekinetic displacement it rose to 95; after the “flight” of the dog it had increased to 126 with some palpitation of the heart.

  Soon after the toy dog incident I was watching Eleonore scribbling on a piece of paper. Between the child and me was a chair on which rested a large square cushion. Both girl and cushion were in my line of vision, and the child was five and a half feet away from the chair. The Countess was on the other side of me. At 6.33, as I gazed at it, the cushion slowly slid off the chair. There was no vibration in the room. After each phenomenon I searched the double apartment, and found nothing that could account for these most convincing manifestations, a detailed account of which should be read.

  I was so impressed with Eleonore that I persuaded the Countess to bring her to London. They arrived on September 30, 1926, and left on the following October 24. Under much better conditions, and in my own laboratory, numerous telekinetic movements of objects were recorded. Especially striking were the experiments arranged by the late Dr R. J. Tillyard, F.R.S., and myself in which coins placed on the lintel of our séance-room door, six feet, ten and three-quarter inches from the ground, were supra-normally displaced under perfect control conditions. An attempt to induce phenomena while the girl was being hypnotized by Professor McDougall produced no results.

  A curious feature of Eleonore’s telekinetic phenomena was the accompanying stigmata. Just before, during, or immediately after a phenomenon, red weals would spontaneously appear on various parts of the girl’s body. They would gradually turn white, and slowly disappear. A prolonged study of the stigmata suggested that they were really due to physiological causes induced by the mental excitement of the telekinetic phenomena. It is interesting to note that the phenomena, both telekinetic and stigmatic, ceased abruptly after the first appearance of the menses. Eleonore, now aged 26, manages her own hairdressing business in Czernowitz, Roumania.

  PROFESSOR CYRIL EDWIN MITCHINSON JOAD was a friend of Harry Price and participated with him in a number of investigations into the paranormal. An outgoing and charismatic head of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London he was for years a member of the panel of the BBC Radio weekly radio programme, The Brains Trust, answering pressing questions of the day from members of the public. His opening reply to virtually every question of, “Well, it all depends what you mean by . . .” became something of a catch phrase. Joad was Chairman of the University of London Council for Psychical Research and among his enquiries with Price were testing a haunted bed in Chiswick, an attempt to raise the devil on the Brocken Mountains in Germany and discovering a submerged lake in Hyde Park, London using a dowser’s wooden bobbin. He also shared Price’s fascination with the hauntings at Borley Rectory and wrote the following report for Harper’s Monthly Magazine in June 1938. The Professor’s reputation suffered from attacks by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill and was ruined when he was successfully prosecuted for failing to buy a ticket for a train journey.

  THE PUZZLE OF BORLEY RECTORY

  Location and date:

  Borley, Suffolk, England, 1938

  Recently a curious outbreak of poltergeist phenomena has come to my notice at a rectory in Suffolk. The rectory is a typical haunted house. Surrounded with evergreens, it stands sombre and gloomy in a large neglected garden. Like many English rectories, it was far too large for the stipend of the rector or the needs of the parish, which contains, if I remember correctly, only one hundred and twenty souls. The cost of the upkeep of the place must have been considerable – there were, I think, seven or eight bedrooms; there was a large stable and a huddle of outhouses – and the parson’s stipend was as small as the place was large. The house had a long troubled history, which went back to some conventional story of a nun found guilty of unchastity, and being walled up somewhere in the basement to die of starvation. Whatever may be the truth of this story, accounts of poltergeist phenomena at the rectory had been reaching us at the Laboratory for a number of years. Bells were pulled, pieces of crockery flew unexpectedly through the air, dogs whined, servants refused to stay, and so on. A number of visits had intrigued without satisfying the curiosity of investigators. On one occasion the visitors had been fairly convinced that a genuine phenomenon had occurred; on another, their view was that the young wife of an elderly rector, bored with life in so dull and remote a place, had decided to exploit the house’s ghostly history by staging a few phenomena on her own account, thus providing amusement for herself, discomfort for her husband, and bewilderment for investigators. Within the space of a few years three rectors came and went, alleging, in each case, as their reason for departure the disconcerting happenings in the house. Finally the bishop decided to leave the rectory empty and to amalgamate the parish with the next one, letting the incumbent of the neighbouring parish attend to the needs of both. The house, being empty, was leased for a number of months to the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation; observers were asked for, and a number of people volunteered.

  The only phenomenon of note that had been observed was the appearance of miscellaneous pencil marks upon the inside walls of the house. A few of these were in the form of messages, but the majority were meaningless squiggles. The walls were whitewashed, so that it was comparatively easy to distinguish the marks, and in order that there might be no doubt which and where they were, each mark had been ringed by a circle drawn in thick blue pencil.

  On the evening on which I visited the house one observer had been staying there for some little time, sleeping on a camp bed, and cooking his meals on an oil stove in one of the empty rooms. We were alone in the house, and after carefully examining the garden, we had assured ourselves that there was nobody there. We came in, made a tour of all the pencil marks visible on the whitewashed walls, and carefully noted their date and position. It was my first visit and I was considerably intrigued by the mysterious marks. At seven o’clock we retired to the room with the camp bed and the oil stove, securely locking all the doors and windows before we did so, cooked some sausages and made some tea. We were together in this room for the whole of the ensuing hour, and I am positive that neither of us left it. I am also positive that if anybody had entered the house we should have heard him or her moving about; for the house, being empty, acted as a kind of sounding board, and every noise echoed and reechoed all over it. About eight o’clock we went out again, and on the wall in the passage immediately outside the room in which we had been eating there was another pencil squiggle. I feel reasonably certain that that squiggle had not been there before; it was, indeed, inconceivable that we should have missed it. I am also reasonably certain that it was not made by the other observer, who was in my company during the whole of the period within which the mark must have been made. I am sure that I did not make it myself and, as I have already said, I do not see how
anybody could have entered the house without being heard.

  On the other hand, the hypothesis that poltergeists materialize lead pencils and fingers to use them seems to me to be totally incredible; and the question of “why” seems to be hardly less difficult to answer than the question of “how.” As so frequently occurs when one is investigating so-called abnormal phenomena, one finds it equally impossible to withhold credence from the facts or to credit any possible explanation of the facts. Either the facts did not occur or, if they did, the universe must in some important respects be totally other than what one is accustomed to suppose. In this particular case my inclination is to doubt the facts; and yet, having reflected long and carefully upon that squiggle, I did not and do not see how it could have been made by normal means.

  JAMES REYNOLDS was born in County Tipperary, but made his reputation as a writer and ghost hunter in the United States. He was just twelve years old when he saw his first ghost – “a tall, hollow-eyed, cadaverous creature in a tattered black military cloak who more closely resembled a huge bat than any man out of Gaelic history”, he later wrote. Thereafter Reynolds began to collect stories of the supernatural whenever and wherever he came across them and, later publishing a series of very popular collections of true hauntings, notably Ghosts in Irish Houses (1947) of which the New York Times reviewer wrote, “Should sceptics come across this book, it will either convert them or turn them to stone”; and the equally well-reviewed, Ghosts in American Houses (1956). In this story, Reynolds describes a chilling encounter with a ghostly barge off the coast of Galway.