Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (11 page)

We know that sudden shock can destroy the reason, perhaps turning the person into a “vegetable.” It is, in effect, as if a ship had been torpedoed.
Other kinds of stress and misery can cause something more like a “slow leak”; a draining of vital energy.
This is what happened to the unfortunate Father Tranquille, who virtually died of “shock” after being “possessed” by the “spirits.” He went into “exhaust status.” Prince’s theory is that dual (or multiple) personality occurs when severe shock threatens a person’s mental stability.
The “other personality” could be considered as the mind’s own defense against destruction.
And, in fact, the majority of cases of multiple personality begin with a bad shock that threatens to overwhelm the person with “discouragement.” We can see how such a shock might turn Doris—at the age of three—into Margaret, who treated life as a joke.
But it is almost impossible to understand how it could create “Sleeping Margaret,” the “guardian angel.”

In
The Devils of Loudun,
Aldous Huxley tries to explain the behavior of Sister Jeanne des Anges by appealing to the concept of multiple personality.
He prefers to speak of the case of “Christine Beauchamp,” recorded by another famous American professor of psychology, Morton Prince, around the turn of the century.
(Her real name was Clara N.
Fowler.) Huxley summarizes the case:

Here is Miss Beauchamp, a blameless but rather sickly young woman, full of high principles, inhibitions and anxiety.
From time to time she plays truant from herself and behaves like a very naughty and exuberantly healthy child of ten.
Questioned under hypnosis, this
enfant terrible
insists that she is not Miss Beauchamp but someone else called Sally.
After some hours or days Sally disappears and Miss Beauchamp returns to consciousness—but returns only to her own consciousness, not to Sally’s; for she remembers nothing of what was done, in her name and through the agency of her body, while the latter was in control.
Sally, on the contrary, knows all that goes on in Miss Beauchamp’s mind and makes use of that knowledge to embarrass and torment the other tenant of their shared body.
Because he could think of these odd facts in terms of a well-substantiated theory of subconscious mental activity, and because he was well acquainted with the techniques of hypnosis, Dr.
Morton Prince, the psychiatrist in charge of this case, was able to solve Miss Beauchamp’s problems and to bring her for the first time in many years, to a state of physical and mental health.

All that need be added is that the case of Christine Beauchamp—who lived in Boston—bears many resemblances to that of Doris Fischer.
Her father was also a drunkard, and Christine became “neurasthenic” (inclined to suffer from nerves) when her mother died in unpleasant circumstances (which Prince does not detail).
She greatly admired a close friend of her father’s named William Jones, who seemed to her to possess all the qualities her father lacked; when Jones got drunk one night, and made some kind of sexual advance to her, she became even more depressed and neurasthenic.
Prince began to treat her for general depression and fatigue, and tried hypnotizing her.
This proved to be a mistake, in that it released the secondary personality—who called herself Sally—like a genie out of a bottle.
From then on, Sally behaved toward Christine rather as Margaret did toward Doris, but with more malice.
Sally, who was as strong as a horse, would take a long walk into the countryside, then abandon the body to the feeble Christine, who had to walk home.
(One of the strangest features of cases of multiple personality is that the body seems to be as weak—or as strong—as the personality occupying it; in the case of “Eve”—Christine Sizemore—the secondary personality even emerged when the primary one was unconscious under anaesthetic.) When Christine went to New York to get an office job, Sally got off the train at New Haven and took a job as a waitress.

The main point to note about the cases of Doris Fischer and Sally Beauchamp is that the primary personality could be “dispossessed” of the body by the secondary one—exactly as in the case of the devils of Loudun.
And this is by no means a common feature of all such cases.
Rather more typical is the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne who, in January 1887, drew five hundred dollars from his bank and vanished.
He then went to Norristown, Pennsylvania, rented a shop, and carried on a trade as a shopkeeper under the name of A.
J.
Brown.
Then one day “Bourne” reappeared, completely oblivious of what he had been doing since he withdrew the money from the bank.
Hypnotized by the psychologist William James, “Brown” came back—a completely different personality from Bourne.
Brown knew nothing of Bourne, and vice versa, so there was no question of one displacing the other at will.
The same seems to be true of the Mary Reynolds case.

Stranger still is the case of Mrs.
Remibias Chua, a Philippino woman of Evanston, Illinois.
On February 21, 1977, a forty-eight-year-old Filipino nurse named Teresita Basa was stabbed to death in her apartment in Chicago.
An attempt had been made to burn the body, which was naked; the medical examination revealed that there had been no rape.
The motive was robbery—Miss Basa apparently had a quantity of valuable jewelry.

Teresita had worked at the Edgewater Hospital, where one of her colleagues was another Filipino, a respiratory therapist named Remy Chua, who was married to a doctor.
Two weeks after the murder, Jennie Prince, the technical director of the department, had said, “Teresita must be turning in her grave.
Too bad she can’t tell the police who did it.” And Remy Chua replied seriously: “She can come to me in a dream.
I’m not afraid.” Later the same day, when she was dozing in a locker room, she had a feeling that someone was trying to communicate with her.
She opened her eyes, and saw Teresita Basa standing in front of her.
In a panic, Remy Chua ran out of the room, and told her fellow workers about the apparition.

Mrs.
Chua began to dream about the murder.
Again and again, she saw Teresita Basa’s face, with the face of a man close behind it.
One day, looking at the face of a hospital orderly named Allan Showery, a black man, she realized that he was the man of her dream.
Showery was a boastful sort of person, claiming that he owned a town house, and kept an airplane at a nearby airfield so that he could fly to New York for weekends to lecture.
Now that she had come to believe he was Teresita Basa’s killer, Remy Chua became increasingly afraid of him.

In early July, Mrs.
Chua was dozing one evening while her husband talked on the phone to his attorney, a man named Al.
As José Chua spoke the name “Al,” Remy Chua began to scream.
Then, in a kind of trance, she got up from the bed and walked across the room, speaking in Tagalog, the language of the Philippines.
When she lay down on the bed, a voice began to speak through her mouth: “I am Teresita Basa.
I would like to ask for help from you.” Dr.
Chua asked her what she wanted.
“A man came into my apartment and killed me.
I want you to tell the police.” Mrs.
Chua woke up a few minutes later, and remembered nothing of what had happened.

The Chuas did nothing about it—although Remy Chua left the Edgewater Hospital.
A few weeks later, as she was making a phone call, Mrs.
Chua again went into a trance.
Once again, Teresita Basa’s voice spoke through her mouth: “Dr.
Chua, did you talk to the police?” Dr.
Chua said that he had no evidence to offer them.
This time, she named her killer as a man called Allan.

A few days later, it happened again.
Mrs.
Chua went into a trance, and began to scream out in agony, “I’m burning!” Then the voice of Teresita Basa named Allan Showery as the man who had murdered her.
She went on to say that he had stolen her jewelry, and given it to his girlfriend.
She mentioned a number of people who could identify her jewelry, even giving the telephone number of one of them.
She added, “Tell them that Al came to fix my television, and he killed me and burned me.”

This time, José Chua decided to call the police.
Understandably, they were unconvinced, and for several days made no attempt to question Showery.
When they did, Showery admitted that he had promised to call and repair the television, but insisted that he had simply forgotten.
When they questioned his common-law wife, she showed them a cocktail ring that Showery had given her.
The police called the telephone number that Mrs.
Chua had spoken in her trance.
As a result, Teresita Basa’s cousin was able to identify the ring as an item of Teresita’s jewelry.
Faced with this evidence, Showery broke down and admitted that he had murdered Teresita Basa.

In court, the defense attempted to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the evidence had been provided in such an unorthodox manner; they were unsuccessful.
Showery was sentenced to fourteen years for murder and four years each for two counts of armed robbery and arson.

It is, of course, possible that Mrs.
Chua suspected Showery, and that her unconscious mind chose this way of bringing her suspicions to the attention of the police—certainly, the case for “possession” would be far more convincing if Mrs.
Chua had never heard of Teresita Basa or Allan Showery.
Yet this still fails to explain how Mrs.
Chua knew about the cocktail ring, and the people who would be able to identify it.

The Chua case is fundamentally one of “mediumship”—she went into a trance, like a medium at a séance, and was “used” by another personality.
But this draws attention to a similar feature in many cases of multiple personality.
Mary Reynolds went into a long and very deep sleep before she was “taken over” by the other personality; Christine Beauchamp was hypnotized; Doris Fischer was probably stunned by her fall on the floor.
The psychologist Pierre Janet was hypnotizing a neurasthenic girl when he plunged her into a sleep so profound that she appeared to have stopped breathing; when she woke up, a secondary personality had taken over.

In 1877, a fourteen-year-old French boy named Louis Vivé was attacked by a viper and severely traumatized.
He began having fits and was sent to an asylum at Benneval.
One day, he had an exceptionally severe attack which lasted fifteen hours.
When he recovered, he had become a totally different personality.
The primary personality had been a gentle, well-behaved youth who was paralyzed down his right side and spoke with a bad stammer.
The “new” Louis Vivé spoke normally, was unparalyzed, and was violent, dishonest and generally badly behaved.
After a conviction for theft, Vivé was sent to an asylum where the doctors were fascinated by his case.
They tried a technique for transferring his “sensibility” from one side to the other by means of powerful magnets, and this was astonishingly successful; the primary personality again
became established.

Here it seems clear that the viper attack caused some basic personality upset—like Doris’ violent fall.
The long fit, accompanied by a period of deep unconsciousness, allowed the secondary personality to “take over.” This secondary personality may have been connected with Vivé’s right cerebral hemisphere, since the “primary” Louis was paralyzed down the right side and had a stutter suggesting that it was the left hemisphere that was affected.

In all these cases—with the obvious exception of Remy Chua—the secondary personality has been strikingly different from the primary one; almost as if the personalities had been created out of the same construction kit, and the secondary one could only be created out of the pieces left over from the first.
Christine Beauchamp, Doris Fischer, and Louis Vivé, were gentle and docile—perhaps too docile; their secondary personalities were aggressive and uninhibited.

But there are also cases that look far more like gentle “possession,” where the secondary personality is anything but a mirror image of the primary one.
One of the most striking cases on record is that of Lurancy Vennum, the “Watseka Wonder.” On July 11, 1877, a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Lurancy Vennum, of Watseka, Illinois, had a fit and became unconscious.
The unconsciousness seemed to pass into a kind of trance in which she was able to speak; she claimed she was in heaven, and talking to a little brother and sister who had died.
From then on, Lurancy continued to have these trances, in some of which she was apparently “taken over” by various disagreeable entities, including a sullen old woman who called herself Katrina Hogan.
The Vennum family was tempted to have her committed to an asylum, but some friends called Roff persuaded them to call in a doctor, E.
W.
Stevens.