The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  The coat was then handed to the third medium. He held it for a few moments and then began to describe a dramatic vision. There was a young girl, he said, about eighteen to twenty years of age. She had a sense of guilt about something. In some way she had provoked anger akin to madness in a man who, nevertheless, was not essentially evil. The medium said he could see a pair of hands, the rough hands of a workman, tearing at the girl’s clothing. The two struggled violently until suddenly the girl fell backwards and there was a splashing as she was forced into a butt of water.

  The assailant then dragged her body from the water and carried it up a flight of stairs into a room, squalid and bare save for two pieces of furniture. There he wrapped the body in a blanket, then carried it downstairs again, still wet and dripping. At that point the visions faded.

  There was an immediate, still more dramatic, sequel. From the auditorium, where she had been listening breathlessly, Marjorie Page rushed onto the stage. She said, in great excitement, that the medium’s account of events tallied exactly with a vision that had come to her when she wore the jacket. It had seemed so fantastic at the time that she had not spoken about it to anyone.

  The members of the company had by now become so excited that it was difficult to continue. It seemed unlikely that the mediums would get much farther in such an atmosphere, so we brought the séance to a close. Most of the people left the theatre, but a few of us went backstage to Thora Hird’s dressing room to carry on the experiment in quieter conditions.

  After some discussion, Mrs Piffard put on the jacket. She immediately began to breathe heavily and to wrench at the coat, complaining of its growing tightness. So distressed did she become that when her husband entered the dressing room she did not recognize him. But no clearly defined marks, such as were said to have appeared when she wore the jacket a few days previously, could be seen on her throat.

  A man who had come along as a friend of Miss Hird and her husband then asked if he might try the jacket. He was well built, which made the coat naturally tight to his physique. Less naturally, he fainted into complete unconsciousness as soon as he had put it on.

  Ivan Staff, an actor in the play, was next to try the experiment. He wore the jacket without in any way being affected.

  By this time such excitement had been engendered that one had to consider how big a part suggestion was beginning to play. The original experiences that had started the investigation – those of Miss Hird and Miss Foyle – had been individual and independent, according to their testimony. Thora Hird is a down-to-earth north-country woman, and Erica Foyle seemed a sensible and reliable witness.

  The story of the girl being murdered as described by the medium and confirmed by Miss Page as matching her own vision fitted in with the fingerlike weals stated to have appeared on Mrs Piffard’s throat. But events had now reached the stage where everyone present knew of what had gone before. However honest they might be, if they were at all susceptible to suggestion – and mediums and theatrical folk react more sensitively than most – any additional phenomena were likely to be self-induced rather than revelatory.

  Fresh minds, not emotionally involved and having no inkling of what had already happened, were needed if the experiment was to continue. Where to find them at that hour of the morning was the difficulty, for it was now well past midnight and even the West End of London can be almost deserted at that time.

  Another newspaperman and myself decided to take a long chance. We would go out and invite the first passers-by we happened to meet. They would be just ordinary members of the public who could have no connection with any of the people already involved – actors, mediums, and press. We walked down St Martin’s Lane without meeting anyone. We reached Trafalgar Square, empty save for Nelson and the sleeping pigeons brooding high on his column.

  Then across the square, coming towards us, we saw two people. The couple were in their twenties, we guessed as they neared us, a boy and girl apparently on their way home after an evening in town. We explained to them that we were newspapermen working on a story. We needed the help of two members of the public. Would they assist us by coming along to the Duke of York’s Theatre, where some other people were already assembled? That was all they were told. It says something for public confidence in the press, or perhaps for our honest faces, that they agreed to follow us down the dark alleyway – an ideal place for a holdup – that leads to the stage door of the theatre.

  Nor was any further explanation given after we had taken them into Thora Hird’s dressing room. We simply stated that the people present were conducting an experiment and invited the young lady to put on the monkey jacket. They looked mystified but anxious to please. The girl donned the jacket, and everybody watched her carefully while trying to avoid giving the impression of undue interest.

  Smiling round on us, obviously wondering what the fuss was about, the girl showed no signs of discomfort. After a while, feeling that the experiment was a flop, we asked her if she felt any particular sensation that she could describe. Her answer was that she felt perfectly normal.

  The young man was then asked to just touch the sleeve of the jacket. He put his right hand on the girl’s arm. As he did so a queer expression crossed his face. Asked what was wrong, he said he had the feeling of wanting to grip the arm tightly. He placed his left hand on the other sleeve of the jacket, then moved both hands higher. The nearer they came to the girl’s throat, he said, the more the impulse grew upon him. Suddenly he wrenched himself away, dropping his arms to his sides.

  It appeared that the boy rather than the girl might possess some kind of sensitive powers. When she took off the jacket we asked him if he would wear it. Amid mounting tension he put it on.

  Straightaway he appeared to be having difficulty with his breathing. After a few moments he gasped out: “There is something sinister – like death. It feels as if someone were trying to kill me. But in a just way.”

  The young man was now in a state of distress. As he was a volunteer who had been told nothing of what he was being asked to do, we felt that we could demand no more of him.

  In a just way. It was a curious phrase to use. As he was being helped out of the jacket I asked him why he had chosen those words. He said he had no idea and could not understand what they meant. I recalled the description given by the medium much earlier that evening: “a girl who had a sense of guilt . . . who had provoked a man who was not essentially evil.” Killed in a just way. The two accounts fitted together. A coherent picture had been built up though it was far from complete.

  And there we had to leave it. The jacket, whatever the full story of its associations, must have exerted an unusually powerful psychic influence to so strangely affect so many people. Yet to my mind the most remarkable factor of all was that the person who had been most visibly affected, whose reactions probed most deeply into the mystery, was the young man selected by chance from all the millions who might have been abroad in London that night.

  And when I questioned him later – his name was Edward Fosbrook and he lived in north-west London – to find out how he reacted to his unsought and, most people would consider, bizarre experience, he added a final coincidental touch to the story.

  He and his girl friend had for some time been interested in Spiritualism. There again the odds must have been pretty high against finding two young people who had the experience to be neither shocked nor afraid by the events of that evening.

  HEREWARD CARRINGTON was one of the United States’ leading psychical researchers for many years as well as the founder of the American Psychical Institute. He was a highly trained amateur conjuror and shrewd observer which enabled him to expose a number of fake hauntings and several fraudulent mediums in his numerous books such as The Story of Psychic Research (1930), Psychical Phenomena and the War (1945) and The Invisible World (1947). Carrington travelled extensively in America and Europe for his research, though some of his best and most authentic cases appeared close to home – like this account of a ha
unted house in New York State to which he took his wife and two “men-about-town” who, he explains, seem more interested in the spirits to be found in bottles than a rather violent ghost troubling a holiday house.

  UNDER THE INFLUENCE

  Location and date: New York State, USA, 1937

  On the night of August 13, 1937, a party of seven of us spent the night in a reputed “haunted house,” situated some fifty miles from New York City. I had heard of the house from a friend of mine who knew the summer tenant. He had merely told me that the latter had been compelled to move back to the city in the middle of July because neither he nor his wife could secure uninterrupted nights of sleep, and that their servants had all left in consequence of the haunting. (He had rented the house until the first of October. He thus abandoned it some two and a half months before he had been obliged to.) We knew nothing more about the house than this, except that “noises” had been repeatedly heard.

  Our party of seven visited the house on the night in question. The group consisted of the former occupant, two of his friends, two friends of our own, my wife and myself. We also brought with us a dog which had lived in the house while it was occupied, and which, according to reports, had behaved in an extraordinary manner on several occasions.

  Arriving at the house, we found it dark and locked-up. The tenant had some difficulty in entering and turning on the lights. This he finally succeeded in doing, however, and we could then see that the house was spacious and well-appointed, and that everything had been left intact.

  I suggested to the owner that, before hearing anything about the house and its history, it would be a good idea to explore it first of all from cellar to attic, to see that no practical jokers were hidden anywhere, and that no cats, bats, rats, mice, or what-not were present to account for the disturbances. To this he readily consented, and lighted the house from top to bottom.

  Examination of the cellar and the ground floor revealed nothing unusual. On the second floor, however, two or three of us sensed something strange in one of the middle bedrooms. This feeling was quite intangible, but was definitely present, and seemed to be associated with an old bureau standing against one wall. (The noises had been heard by Mr X and his wife from the large bedroom on the side of the house.)

  Walking along the hall, we came to a door which had escaped our attention the first time we had passed it.

  “Where does this lead?” I asked.

  “To the servants’ quarters,” Mr X replied. “Would you like to go up there?”

  “By all means,” I said, opening the door.

  Glancing up, I could see that the top floor was brilliantly lighted, and that a steep flight of stairs lay just ahead of me. Leading the way, with the others close behind me, I ascended the stairs, and made a sharp turn to the right, finding myself confronted by a series of small rooms.

  The instant I did so, I felt as though a vital blow had been delivered to my solar plexus. My forehead broke out into profuse perspiration, my head swam, and I had difficulty in swallowing. It was a most extraordinary sensation, definitely physiological, and unlike anything I had ever experienced before. A feeling of terror and panic seized me, and for the moment I had the utmost difficulty in preventing myself from turning and fleeing down the stairs! Vaguely I remember saying aloud:

  “Very powerful! Very powerful!”

  My wife, who was just behind me, had taken a step or two forward. She was just exclaiming, “Oh, what cute little rooms!” when the next moment she was crying, “No! No!” and raced down the steep flight of stairs like a scared rabbit! (She had not run up or down stairs for more than two years because of an injury to her back, but she flew down the stairs and past those coming up after her without even seeing or touching them!)

  May I say, just here, that both my wife and myself are old-time investigators, quite unemotional and thoroughly accustomed to psychic manifestations of all kinds? My wife is a keen, cautious observer, who has sat with many mediums and exposed many frauds. I myself have done the same, and also participated in the Palladino séances, where I believed genuine phenomena were occurring, remaining quite unperturbed when “materialized” hands were pulling me about, passing their fingers through my hair, and so forth. All that time I was dictating to the stenographer precisely how I was controlling the medium – how her hands, feet and legs were being held – as our report on these sittings will show. I remained throughout quite calm and cool, as I have at innumerable séances and investigations since. But in the present instance the reaction was most intense, and almost more physiological than psychological. It was distinctly a bodily and emotional reaction – accompanied, I must confess, by a momentary mental panic and sensation of terror such as I have never known before.

  Two or three of those following me had by this time reached the upper floor, and I called out a few times to my wife. Hearing no response I descended the stairs to the lower floor, to see if she had fainted or was ill. I found her sitting on the porch, breathing deeply and slowly collecting her scattered faculties. She assured me that she was all right, and would come up again in a few moments. Her first reaction had been to get into the fresh air.

  Leaving her, I ascended the stairs and found the others filing down from the upper floor. Every one of them had experienced the same sensation to a greater or lesser degree. My friend G. B. had likewise experienced the utmost difficulty in swallowing, and tears were running down his face as though he were weeping copiously. All the others were similarly affected.

  Having no professional medium with us, we decided to sit for a time in the front bedroom on the second floor, to see if any sounds could be heard, or phenomena of any kind noted. We accordingly arranged ourselves in a sort of circle, prepared the camera and flashlight bulbs, and turned out the lights.

  We sat thus for perhaps an hour, during which time nothing visible manifested itself, and (apart from some dubious thumps on the ground floor) nothing unusual was heard. The distinct feeling of a presence was, however, sensed by two or three of the party. (Personally I did not feel this.)

  I should say here that the two friends of the late tenant – men-about-town – had looked upon the whole expedition as a sort of lark, and had brought with them a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of gin, intending to have an amusing evening. Every half-hour or so they would go down to the kitchen and mix themselves a stiff drink. It is interesting to note that these cynics experienced the same sensations as the others, and that they also reported difficulty in swallowing, tears running from their eyes, cold perspiration on the forehead, and other physical symptoms as did the rest of the circle.

  After sitting for an hour or so with no concrete results, we decided to sit in the upper room, where the original powerful “influence” had been felt. Accordingly, we ascended the stairs – but this time not a sensation of any kind was to be felt! The room seemed absolutely clear of all influences, clean, pure and normal. It felt just like any of the other rooms. What I had previously described as a heavy, malign gas instead of a normal atmosphere was no longer there. Nothing unusual was to be sensed by any of us, and a brief sitting in the room produced no results or untoward sensations whatever.

  After our original inspection of the house, and our first violent reactions, the former tenant had told us its history, disclosing for the first time the fact that a suicide had actually been committed on the upper floor, and that these rooms were thought to be the “seat” of the haunting. We had known nothing of this on our first trip, purposely asking for no information concerning the history of the house until we had explored it.

  The dog, which on the first occasion had positively refused to go with us into the upper storey, ran up the stairs quite naturally the second time, wagging his tail, prying into all the corners and behaving as any normal dog would. When we had tried to coax him upstairs the first time, he had growled, planted his feet before him, and refused to go forward a step. The hair on his back had stood up like that on a cat; and he behaved, in short, very m
uch as dogs are supposed to behave in the presence of ghostly phenomena. In the present instance, however, it was factual, and I saw it with my own eyes.

  It was by this time past five o’clock and getting light, so we decided to call a halt and return on another occasion, bringing with us a medium, as well as apparatus for recording possible sounds, for testing the air in the upper rooms, and so forth. Unfortunately, “the best-laid plans. . . .” One of the friends of the tenant “talked,” and a brief note appeared in the papers a day or so later, which the owner of the house saw and read. As a result, he positively refused to allow us to visit the house again, and our most persuasive powers proved of no avail.

  One of the most curious cases of a haunted house I have come across was one which I investigated some years ago, in Astoria, Long Island. It is a long story, which I must summarize briefly.

  One morning a young man called upon me in a very excited state of mind. He told me that he was living in a house in Astoria, and that he had not only heard footsteps stamping up and down the stairs at night, but that he had, on several occasions, seen a white figure, which had even lain down on the bed beside him, so that he could feel its weight, and also the springs of the bed tremble. When he had turned up the light, however, there was nothing there.

  In addition to this, he had received a series of alleged “communications” from the spirit of an old man, who had lived in that house about half a century before, as well as from other visitants. These communications stated that there was gold (valued at several million dollars) buried under the house!

  Greatly excited by this, my young friend had begun to dig, and, when my wife and I went over to visit him, we found the cellar filled with earth and rocks, which he had dug up, and a hole more than thirty feet deep which he had excavated. So far no treasure had been discovered, but he was anxious to know if I could help him in any way – particularly in solving the mystery of the ghost.