Another possibility which a sceptic might explore would be that of illusions of the sense of hearing. He might suggest, for instance, that the rappings were really quite random, and produced by subsidence of the house. We were in a state of nervous expectancy due to being in a reputedly haunted house, and interpreted these random noises as intelligent responses to questions. Or else he might suppose that a practical joker was outside the house tapping on the window sills with a stick – and certainly in the still hours of the night noises in the haunted room could be clearly heard from outside the house, and of course the flashing of torches could be seen through the uncurtained windows. None the less we do not think there is much to be said in favour of either of these possibilities. All four investigators heard the raps; and all agreed they were answers to the questions. In general they did not occur whilst we were asking questions. They came in an even tempo, at a rate of one a second or somewhat faster. Immediately a question had been put, answering raps began. They were appropriate in number to the questions asked, for example one for “Yes”, eleven for “November”; and once a question had received an appropriate answer there was nearly always silence until the next question had been posed. Nor does there seem the slightest reason for supposing that we mistook raps made by a mischief-maker on the walls, windows or window sills of the haunted room for raps made inside it. Auditory localization is an ordinary room (as distinct from localization out of doors or in an anechoic chamber) is more accurate than is commonly supposed; and we conducted extensive experiments in the haunted bedroom to ascertain whether or not we were liable to confuse rappings made from the outside of the house with rappings made inside the room itself. The answer was unequivocally that we were not.
The only remaining possibility for a sceptic to put forward is that of fraud by a member or members of the family or by the investigators themselves.
It is certainly possible that the toasting fork incident was fraudulently produced. We found that if we pushed the toasting fork behind the metal plate so that its prongs just shaved the staple when we closed the door, and then slammed the door, the fork would jump a little and “bolt” us into the room. Almost anyone in the house could have placed the fork in position while we were absent from the room between 2.45 a.m. and 3.34 a.m. – although we should add that the journalist and his friends were definitely absent from the house during this period, and that the members of the family, apart from the children, all signed statements that they were in no way concerned in the production of the phenomena. Incidentally we are convinced that the two children were too young to have been responsible for any of the phenomena; and in any case while phenomena were actually in progress we several times checked up that they were safely asleep.
There is, we fear, no escaping the conclusion that the only persons who could have faked the remaining phenomena were ourselves. In our statements we each considered the possibility that the other had produced the phenomena fraudulently, and, while there is no doubt that ADC could have tipped over the chair without AG seeing him, we neither of us thought that the other could have faked the various series of rappings. When the rappings began we each suspected the other, and in consequence we watched each other like hawks. There were no curtains on the windows of the haunted room and so we were each able to keep a fair check on the other’s position. We switched our torches on and off without warning, several times interrupting series of raps, and each of us is prepared to assert quite definitely that if the other had been making the noises with his hand or with a reaching rod he would have been detected. We are left only with the possibility that we conspired together to produce the phenomena fraudulently. To this we must confess that we cannot find a ready answer. No sceptic worth his salt would accept our avowals of honesty, even if supported by evidence as to our moral characters, as refuting the hypothesis of fraud, for he could always conceive of overriding motives which might have impelled us to throw our habitual scruples to the winds – the desire for publicity, for instance, or the sheer joy of deceiving other people. To such dedicated disbelief there is in the last resort no answer.
DORIS STOKES undoubtedly helped to raise the profile of spiritualism in the later part of the last century with her public performances, television appearances and memoirs. She claimed to have developed her psychic abilities as a child when she saw groups of spirit figures and began to hear disembodied voices. Although attacked by several church authorities, Doris Stokes became the resident medium of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain in 1975 and certainly promoted a new resurgence of interest in psychic phenomena. A story she liked to tell concerned an experience she had as a WRAF when – just for once – she actually ran away from some ghostly figures.
NO SUCH THING AS SPOOKS?
Location and date: Port Talbot, Wales, 1943
It was a stormy night. The rain had stopped, but a wind had sprung up and it was getting stronger every minute. Everything was in motion. Tattered clouds were flying across the moon, great black branches tossed against the sky, dead leaves whirled along the gutter and the six of we WRAFs, brave because we were in a group, decided to take the short cut home through the churchyard.
We joked nervously as we approached the path. Beneath wildly plunging trees the silent gravestones stood in rows, now in moonlight, now in shadow. Wet twigs slapped against our hair, strange dark shapes bobbed by the fence and our skirts tangled round our legs making it difficult to walk. The six of us huddled closer together, yet each voice grew a little louder, a little more daring.
“Bet you wouldn’t walk across one of those graves!”
“I would too.”
“The spooks’d get you.”
“Spooks!” Molly’s voice rose in derision. “Don’t tell me you believe in spooks.”
“Bet you wouldn’t stay here all night.”
“No. I’ve got more sense. I’d freeze to death.”
I listened to them and laughed. You wouldn’t have got me staying there all night either and not because of the cold. I wasn’t going to let on but the place gave me the creeps. All those gloomy tombstones. They made me shudder. I glanced across at the church, a pretty stone building in daylight, but now just a black hulk against the sky, and as the moon came out again I stopped in surprise. There were people standing outside the church door. A whole family by the look of it; a man, a woman and two children, just standing there, patiently waiting. What in the world could they be doing? Surely the vicar hadn’t arranged to meet them at this time of night.
“I wonder what those people are doing on a night like this,” I said to the other girls.
“What people?” asked Molly.
“Those people over there.”
They looked vaguely up and down the path.“Where?”
“Over there,” I said pointing impatiently. “Look, standing by the church door. A whole family.”
They peered in the direction I indicated, and then looked back at me. There was an odd pause and then suddenly, without a word being spoken, they all turned round and ran. Bewildered, I stared after them. What had I said? I glanced back at the family, still waiting, their clothes strangely unruffled in the gale. And then my heart lurched violently. Before my eyes they disappeared. They didn’t walk away, they just went out like flames in the wind. For perhaps two seconds I just stood there, my mouth open, staring at the empty space and then I hitched up my skirt and ran as fast as my sensible shoes would allow me.
ARTHUR KOESTLER, whose unorthodox books on political, scientific and literary subjects made him one of the towering intellects of the twentieth century, was also deeply interested in psychic powers and helped to promote their study by leaving a bequest to establish, as the Sunday Mirror put it: “the first professional ghostbuster”. His 1983 will left £500,000 to endow a professorship of psychic research at Edinburgh University – a post subsequently filled by the American parapsychologist, Robert L Morris. Koestler, who worked as a foreign correspondent, served in the Spanish Civil War and came
to England in 1940, where his lifetime interest in the supernatural was evident in many of his books right up until the time of his sudden and unexpected decision to die by suicide. What follows is one of Koestler’s most striking accounts of the paranormal at work.
THE HOUSE ON THE LAKE
Location and date: Caslano, Switzerland, 1935
The house stood in the village of Caslano, on a wooded slope, overlooking the Lake. It belonged to a rich, middle-aged woman, the widow of the famous German film-actor, Eugen Kloepfer. Maria Kloepfer was a benefactress of impecunious Communist writers whom she invited to her house, one at a time, for a month or two. Among those who had enjoyed her hospitality were Johannes R Becher, Ludwig Renn, and my brother-in-law, Peter. She also contributed generously to the various committees and front organisations of the Party.
On our first evening in her house, she explained to me that she was attracted by Communism as a new way of social life, but equally by Buddhism and Theosophy as ways of spiritual life, and that she regarded psychoanalysis as a bridge between the two. This might have sounded like the gushings of a frustrated society woman who feels the change of life approaching, but Maria was not that type. She was just the opposite.
I remember her best in her white bathing suit. She was tall, with a lean, sinewy body, with small breasts and long limbs, her skin the colour of baked clay from constant swimming and sunbathing. Stretched out in the grass, she looked like a stranded, ageing mermaid, waiting for the flood to call her back. The only discordant feature was her teeth, held together by conspicuous metal braces.
During the second week of my stay with Maria, we went for a walk in the woods. Ricky, the old mongrel, was ambling a few yards ahead of us. Suddenly Ricky stopped, rooted to the mossy ground, and gave out a growl which then changed into a plaintive, long-drawn howl. Maria also stopped and grabbed my arm – that alone gave me a start, for she normally avoided, and shrank away from, any physical touch or contact. Her face had changed colour in the undefinably painful manner of a person growing pale under a sunburnt skin, and the braces on her beeth became very visible. The wailing dog’s hair was actually bristling, and the whole scene was so eerie that I felt suspended between horror and the giggles. Maria turned on her heel and hurried back along the narrow forest path towards the house, striding so fast on her long legs that I could hardly keep up behind her; yet I could see that she needed all her grim determination not to break into a run. The dog now kept running at her side, now and then licking her hand as if to comfort her. When we got home, Maria said curtly: “Don’t leave me alone, please.” I followed her to a balcony which she rarely used, and which opened on the back of the house, overlooking the woods from which we had come. Mary, the maid, brought up a carafe with grappa, giving her mistress a suspicious look, but left us again without saying a word. Maria drank a couple of small glasses, and I asked stupidly: “What happened?” She was not yet quite herself and said unguardedly with a shrug: “Ricky saw the uncle approaching us. He sometimes sees him first, and warns me.” On that afternoon, I learnt part of Maria’s story.
From time to time, Maria had a hallucination. She saw an uncle, who had died of dementia praecox when she was three, advancing on her simultaneously from three directions, from the right, left and front. The frontal image was slightly over life-size, the two lateral images were smaller. Before he could reach her, she was usually seized by a fit. “Don’t get frightened,” she said, “if you see me rolling on the floor and grinding my teeth – just leave me and call Mary. I don’t like people to see it.” When the hallucination started, Ricky always behaved as he had today. But sometimes the dog sensed the approach of the uncle before she saw him, and warned her. He had not turned up for the last few weeks, and she had already hoped that she had got rid of him for good. Now she was no longer sure. Anyway, something was bound to happen during the next few days – a sign. – What sort of sign? – Oh, nothing frightening. Just a sign. I would see.
After dinner I learnt more of the story. Maria had suffered one or two nervous breakdowns earlier in her life. She had been for a long period under psychoanalytical treatment. The analyst was a well-known orthodox Freudian whose name was at the time familiar to me, but I have mercifully forgotten it since. He had brought back to her the memory of a previously repressed and forgotten, early traumatic shock. As an infant between the age of two and three, she had been left alone for a few minutes with the deranged uncle, who had committed a sexual assault on her. But the revival of this memory did not cure Maria. On the contrary: it was after the conjuring up of the uncle’s ghost that the hallucinations started. Before that she had not even known that the uncle had ever existed, for he had never been mentioned by her parents. She had then broken off the treatment, against the analyst’s warning, for fear that if she continued with it she would go insane. About the same time she divorced her husband, who seems to have treated her abominably. The analyst was the last link with her former world. When that link snapped she had retired to the house on the lake. She wanted no more grave-diggers to work in her brain. She knew everything that lay interred there, even the symbolic meaning of the trinity in her hallucination: the two pocket-editions of the uncle on either side, the large erect one in the centre, advancing upon her. But the knowledge did not help, and she wanted to know no more. She wanted to swim in the lake and get cleaned and tanned by the sun through skin and flesh down to the bones – an ageing, psychic mermaid, stranded upon “the tedious shore of Lethe”.
While Maria was talking, first on the balcony overlooking the woods, and then on the terrace facing the sea, I had a strong feeling of listening to the langage du destin, as Malraux calls it. That demented uncle seemed to have stepped straight out of the book on Perversions that I had just finished. At moments, an absent look of Maria’s reminded me of Attila watching a match burn down between his fingers. There was also that third parallel: the fatal breaking-off of a treatment, which Attila had also done – escaping from the operating table with only a hand pressed against the open gash. I had a feeling of being under a spell, experienced by the spiritual viscerae, as it were. Serial coincidences of this kind had often pursued me when I was passing through a crisis; gradually I have come to regard them as a warning in the symbolic code of the “language of destiny” – see the closing pages of Arrow in the Blue.
At some point during that evening, I said to Maria, attempting to joke, that in the matter of being “sore and kicked about” she certainly took precedence over me. She repeated, unsmiling, what she had said before, that the worst kick was still in store for me, and that it would be coming soon.
After that evening, the “uncle” was never again mentioned between us. But the next day, or the day after that, another incident occurred. While we were sitting at lunch, there was a sudden loud crash. A large, heavily-framed picture which, an instant before, had been peacefully hanging on the wall that I was facing, had crashed down on to the sideboard that stood beneath it. It made me jump, whereas Maria, who sat with her back to the picture, did not move a muscle. On the sideboard had stood a row of tumblers filled with milk in various stages of curdling into yoghourt. Maria had a hobby of making her own yoghourt; every morning two glasses of fresh milk were added to the left end of the row, and two glasses of finished yoghourt were taken off the right end. Now most of the glasses were broken; the row looked like a line of soldiers in whose middle a grenade had exploded, and half-curdled milk was splashed all over the sideboard and the floor.
“How on earth did that happen?” I asked, walking over to the battlefield. Maria shrugged, and said nothing. I looked at the back of the picture: the wire was not broken, and the two picture-hooks were still in the wall, solid and undamaged. In fact, I was able to hang the picture back in its former place, where it came again to rest as firmly and innocently as if it had always stayed there. Maria rang the bell, and Mary the maid came shuffling in to clear up the mess. “What happened?” she asked. Maria said quietly:
“Es sp
uckt.”
“Schon wieder?” said Mary. “Now Ma’am will have to go without yoghourt for a whole week.”
When we had settled down again, Maria said gently, as if talking to a child: “Was the wire broken?”
“No,” I said, “but please don’t ask me to believe in miracles.”
“There is no reason to get irritated,” said Maria, “but I told you something of the kind would happen.”
“What does it mean?” I asked, even more irritated.
“It is a sign,” she said, again shrugging.
“A sign of what?”
“I don’t know. Please let us drop the subject.”
Maria rarely used the rhetorical “please”. When she did, it had a strangely helpless, pathetic ring – it carried an echo of a frightened child saying “please” to a maniac with whom she had been left alone in a room.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 31
