Ghosts & Gallows (30 page)

It is with the last of these great religions that we are briefly concerned with here. The psychic world of Islam represents a fascinating and compelling area of study as yet little explored by Western psychical researchers. As with the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, many aspects of the life of Muhammad, who founded the religion of Islam in the seventh century
AD
, can be considered in the language of modern parapsychology,
i.e.
prophethood as mediumship, channelling, automatic writing, out-of-body experiences and altered states of consciousness, while a study of the lives of the Sufi shaykhs and mystics reveals a wealth of paranormal phenomena that encompasses remote viewing, bilocation (the ability to be in two places at once), mind over matter and psychic healing. The revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad can be looked upon as spirit communication through automatic writing (the favoured interpretation of commentators such as Arthur Findlay and Dr Jones-Hunt) and other noted Muslims have demonstrated unique and seemingly inexplicable paranormal abilities. Hazrat Ibn al-‘Arabi (d.1240), the noted Sufi theologian and metaphysician (often called the ‘Shaykh Al-Akbar’ or ‘greatest teacher’) of some eight centuries ago, claimed to have visited the moon and compiled written accounts of his experiences, while as a six-year-old child another Islamic saint, the Persian mystic Hazrat Mawlana Rumi (d.1273), is said to have jumped into the air and dematerialised, his spectacular vanishing, apparently in front of his playmates, lasting a whole afternoon. Nearer to our own times, the American Shaykh Moinuddin Chishti, a former Fulbright scholar, writing in his
The Book of Sufi Healing
(1991) describes an incident that took place in his presence while visiting a Sufi order in northern Afghanistan. During a ceremony of dhikr (described as ‘the touchstone of all mystical practices’ in Islam), which had been carried out every Thursday evening on the same site for an unbroken period of 1,200 years, Chishti heard ‘a loud grinding and whooshing sound’ that filled the entire room and saw a cleft appear in the far wall which almost instantly sealed itself, a collective hallucination witnessed by over forty people and which, according to the shaykh who was leading the meeting, had allowed ‘pious souls’ to enter the building to take part in the dhikr. In the West, other phenomena with its origins in devout religious belief and practice include the levitations of the seventeenth-century Franciscan monk St Joseph of Copertino and the twentieth-century stigmata of Teresa Neumann.

One aspect of Muslim belief for which the Qur’an gives examples and explanations is the existence of
jinn
, described as invisible beings created from ‘smokeless flame’ which, together with angels, inhabit the earth with mankind; what appears at first glance to be an interpretation in religious language of forces, both for good and evil, in the universe. Western Sufi teacher Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri has commented (in his
The Elements of Islam
(1993)) that, ‘Made of light, angels have no choice but to follow their prescribed patterning, whereas
jinn
, who are made of fire and air, reflect their elemental volatility in virtuous or evil behaviour’. For those Muslim persons brought up on a literal or simplistic interpretation of the Qur’an and Islamic traditions (known as hadiths), with its concept of a final Day of Judgement and a Balance of souls for the dead, the
jinn
have become a blanket explanation for most types of reported paranormal phenomena, including ghosts and apparitions, poltergeists, hauntings and, most importantly, for the subject which concerns us here: diabolical human possession. This view is supported by the fact that practically the only book to appear in the English language in recent years that addresses the subject, Hasan Moiz Ansari’s
Islam and the Paranormal
(2006), despite the author’s admission of a lifelong interest in the occult and psychical subjects, applies a literal Qur’anic approach, and as such does not look beyond assigning the origins of all reported supernormal phenomena to the workings of the
jinn
.

As noted by Haeri and most other Islamic commentators,
jinn
are regarded in most cases to be mischievous, evil and threatening entities against which the Qur’an provides remedies and suitable protection. However, a closer examination of reports from haunted houses and experiences of apparitions shows that one single explanation does not fit all of the facts and provide, for want of a better description, a general theory of the paranormal. We have already briefly discussed the ‘atmospheric photograph’ or ‘stone tape’ theory as applied to reported encounters with apparitions and phantom figures. To this can be added other forms or ‘types’ of ghost, each of which appear to suggest different explanations for their origins: apparitions of the living (hallucinations of persons known to be alive and well at the time of the experience), death bed visions, crisis ghosts (visions of persons either at the point or moment of death or involved in some tremendous emotional or physical upheaval), cyclical hauntings (a recurring form of the mental imprint ghost), as well as apparitions that impart information in such a way that is highly suggestive of some form of survival after death,
i.e.
an after-life apparition. In this respect, with such a clear diversity of reported phenomena, the Islamic or Qur’anic
jinn
appears to be more closely related to the concept of an elemental spirit or discarnate non-human intelligence as concluded by researchers such as Guy Playfair and Colin Wilson to be behind such modern poltergeist hauntings as Enfield, Pontefract and Cardiff. The evil side noted by Shaykh Haeri is amply demonstrated in all three of these well attested cases.

Writing about the use of exorcism on victims of poltergeist activity in
The Unexplained
magazine in the early 1980s, Andrew Green, who we have already briefly encountered in connection with the Ealing murder house haunting, commented that only around two per cent of poltergeist cases involved genuine inexplicable phenomena, and he questioned the need for any kind of organised exorcism ceremony to take place ‘even in cases where the effects themselves [i.e. poltergeist phenomena] may be explicable in emotional terms, and even regardless of the individual’s religious commitment’. ‘For some atheists,’ Green notes, ‘the rite may be comforting and effective; for some believers, who have unwittingly engaged fanatics or incompetents to perform the rite, the results can be as terrifying as the work of the “demon” itself’. Few cases of Islamic exorcism involving the alleged ‘possession’ of men and women by
jinn
and evil spirits in Muslim countries such as Malaysia, Egypt and rural Pakistan are reported in the Western media, although they undoubtedly take place on a regular basis and have done so for countless years, in the same way that ‘casting out the devils’ has been a cornerstone since the earliest days of Christianity. However, a case from the north of England in the early 1990s that made newspaper headlines goes a long way to proving that Green’s viewpoint is correct.

During the spring of 1991, Muhammad Bashir, a machine operator in his mid-thirties from Coppice in Oldham, Lancashire, together with his wife, both originally from Pakistan, became increasingly concerned about the well-being of their daughter, twenty-year-old Kousar Bashir. An attractive young woman, over a period of months she had become increasingly withdrawn and depressive, a condition for which initially her parents, both devout Muslims, were unable to offer any explanation. When Kousar failed a driving test for which she had been working for some length of time, her depression grew to the point that her parents considered her behaviour as totally unnatural and turned to their local religious community for help. The cleric or imam from the Bashir’s nearby mosque, sixty-three-year-old Muhammad Nurani Sayeed, quickly diagnosed that Kousar Bashir had become possessed by a
jinn
which was revealing its presence through the twenty-year-old’s strange and unnatural behaviour. The Bashirs took recourse initially to the Qur’an but when the regular recitation of prescribed passages had little or no effect, they again consulted Imam Sayeed, who felt that there was little choice but to perform an exorcism ceremony to rid Kousar of the unwanted presence. Unable to carry out the ritual himself, Nurani Sayeed advised Mr and Mrs Bashir that an experienced exorcist was needed and recommended them to hire Muhammad Bashir (no family relation), an experienced Islamic teacher in his early sixties. Warned that the exorcism could be a long, drawn-out process, the Bashirs paid a fee of £200 and in June 1991, Imam Muhammad Bashir, together with Nurani Sayeed acting as his assistant, arrived at the family home in Oldham to drive out the possessing
jinn
. It was to prove the beginning of what was later described as a week-long ‘orgy of violence’ with ultimately tragic consequences.

The exorcist expertly drew a chalk circle on the floor of the Bashir’s house in which, for the next eight days, Kousar Bashir was imprisoned, deprived of both food and sleep. Bashir’s initial approach was to literally smoke out the
jinn
using burning mustard oil, the fumes from which the young woman was made to inhale, as well as being regularly force fed with a cocktail of chilli powder. When it became plain to the two men that the invading entity was not giving up its hold, the screaming and crying woman was systematically beaten with a walking stick, a glass ashtray and Bashir’s fists. All the time her distraught parents were assured that it was the
jinn
which was protesting and crying, not their daughter, and that in order to defeat the supernatural creature, extreme measures were necessary. When police and an ambulance team were eventually called to the house they found Kousar Bashir’s bruised and bloody body lying within the same chalk circle – she had been beaten to death. A post-mortem revealed a horrific catalogue of violent physical abuse including cuts and extensive bruising to the young woman’s head, arms and legs, slashes between her breasts, a fractured sternum and sixteen broken ribs, one of which had penetrated through into a lung and resulted in fatal internal haemorrhaging. Nurani Sayeed and Muhammad Bashir were quickly arrested and charged with murder. At Manchester Crown Court in April 1992, Imam Bashir was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment; Sayeed was given five years for plotting to cause grievous bodily harm. The Manchester jury were unimpressed with the defence case citing the two cleric’s genuine belief in the existence of supernatural forces inhabiting the body of the young and troubled twenty-year-old Asian woman, against which the two ‘holy men’ had resorted to such outrageous violence. That the two priests had continually addressed the
jinn
as ‘John Wayne’ during the course of the week-long ritual and under this name had repeatedly demanded the ‘entity’ to leave the body of Kousar Bashir, no doubt exemplified and reinforced a grotesque and medieval thinking that belonged to the pages of history rather than the modern world of fax machines, computing and international communication.

The grim events of 1991 were to cast long shadows over the Bashir family and provide a tragic postscript to an already unhappy story. In the years following his daughter’s death, Muhammad Bashir lived what would seem a haunted life plagued with depression, heavy drinking and mobility problems. In March 2005, his wife was admitted to the Royal Oldham Hospital suffering from leukaemia, where she died the following month. A few days later, Bashir invited some female relatives, including his younger sister, to his St Thomas Street North home, where they read traditional prayers for the dead woman and recited passages from the Qur’an. Unbeknown to the family, earlier in the morning Bashir had asked some children to fill up a nine-litre jerry can of petrol. Around half past three in the afternoon of 28 April, emergency services attending a call to the house found Muhammad Bashir with almost 100 per cent burns to his body in the back garden, as well as the half-empty petrol can and a cigarette lighter. He was taken to Oldham hospital and died later the same day, admitting to dousing himself with the fuel and lighting it. At an inquest the following year it was ruled that Bashir had taken his own life while in a state of depression, a tragedy that had its routes in the events that had taken place fourteen years before.

In modern times the Bashir case is not without precedent where other religious faiths are concerned. In 1966, a young Swiss girl who claimed to be possessed by a devil was beaten to death during an exorcism ceremony, while ten years later, in July 1976, the parents of Annaliese Michel, together with two local priests, were all found guilty of causing ‘death by negligence’ after the German girl’s emaciated body was discovered dead from a circulatory disease after she had been entrusted into the priests’ care to rid her of an evil spirit. In 1991, the same year that Kousar Bashir was confined within the chalk circle in Oldham, the American ABC television network broadcast a live exorcism of a young Catholic girl who had been receiving medical treatment for a psychiatric condition. An audience expecting to see
Exorcist
-style effects were disappointed and, after the ceremony had been concluded, the girl continued to receive medical counselling, the exorcism having proved ineffective. It would seem that in this respect she was one of the lucky ones. The case of Kousar Bashir perhaps defines more aptly than anything that we have looked at during the course of this book the reality of true crime and the paranormal.

A glance through the published literature of hauntings and haunted places, such as London newspaperman Jack Hallam’s 1977 paranormal dictionary
The Ghosts’ Who’s Who
, quickly shows that where crime-related legends and stories – as well as well-documented cases involving eyewitness accounts and reliable testimony – that feature some form of supernormal phenomena or haunting are concerned, it is most often the ghost of the unfortunate victim rather than the perpetrator that predominates. As the ghostly or psychic phenomena described in the featured cases in this book follow this trend and have mostly concerned the victims of murder, I felt our survey might end with a brief discussion of some reported ghosts and hauntings associated specifically with the murderers themselves. For this I have limited the selection to four noted, and for the criminologist as well as the psychical researcher, interesting cases from the twentieth century.