Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (12 page)

When Stevens first saw Lurancy, the girl was in a bad mood—“possessed” by Katrina Hogan.
Then she said she was a young man named Willie Canning.
Stevens persuaded her to be hypnotized; whereupon Lurancy returned and explained that she had been possessed by evil spirits.
Stevens said she ought to try and find a better “control” (a name mediums apply to the spirit who acts as master of ceremonies).
Lurancy then mentioned that a girl named Mary Roff had offered to become her “control.” Mr.
and Mrs.
Roff, who were present, said that this was their daughter, who had died at the age of eighteen when Lurancy was a baby, twelve years earlier.

The next day, Lurancy’s personality had changed.
She now declared herself to be Mary Roff, and said she wanted to go home.
Lurancy’s father contacted the Roffs, and Mrs.
Roff and her daughter (Mary’s sister) went to call at the Vennums’ home.
As they approached, Lurancy, who was looking out of the window, said excitedly: “Here comes my ma and sister Nervie!” She flung her arms around their necks and cried.

In February 1878, “Mary” went back home with the Roffs, and told them that “the angels” would allow her to stay until May 21.
She knew everyone—neighbors as well as family—and showed an intimate acquaintance with the life of the dead Mary Roff, who had died of mysterious fits in July 1865.

The lengthy account of the case written by Dr.
Stevens (and later expanded by the researcher Richard Hodgson) is full of details which show that “Mary” knew things that could not possibly have been known to Lurancy Vennum.
Her parents tested her with a velvet headdress Mary used to wear; she recognized it immediately.
For three months “Mary” lived with her “parents,” and gave them instance after instance of her knowledge of Mary Roff’s life.
On one occasion she mentioned an incident when Mary had cut her arm during a fit, and she started to roll up her sleeve to show the cut; then she seemed to recollect herself and said: “Oh, this is not my arm—mine is under the ground.” She claimed to have encountered two of Dr.
Stevens’ deceased children in heaven, accurately described them, and also described Stevens’ own home in Janesville, Wisconsin.

The house where the Roffs lived in 1878 was not the one in which Mary had died in 1865.
They passed this other house on the way to the Roffs, and “Mary” struggled hard to get into it; she correctly named it as the place in which she had died.
(She also accurately described her own funeral and described where she was buried.)

On May 21, 1878, Mary went around taking her leave of relatives and friends, hugging and kissing them.
Then she left and returned to the Vennums’ house.
By the time she arrived there, she had become Lurancy again.
From then on, Lurancy remained more or less normal, marrying a farmer in 1882; but her mediumistic powers remained, and after her marriage, Mary Roff made periodic “visits.”

Richard Hodgson—who was associated with Morton Prince in the Christine Beauchamp case—agrees that the explanation could be that Mary Roff was simply a secondary personality of Lurancy Vennum’s; but in that case, the secondary personality would have had to possess paranormal powers—at the very least, of telepathy.
Hodgson seems to feel that the “spiritualistic hypothesis” is preferable.

But whether or not we can accept the notion of life after death, there can be no doubt that all these cases seem to point in the same direction: to the notion that the personality—or “spirit”—uses the body in much the same way that a driver makes use of a car.
This flatly contradicts one of the most widely accepted notions of psychology—and indeed, of philosophy—that “personality” is some kind of “emanation” of the brain, and therefore of the body.
Professor John Taylor writes in
The Shape of Minds to Come:
“We recognize personality as a summation of the different contributions to behavior from the various control units of the brain.” One of the most widely respected of modern philosophers, Gilbert Ryle, has devoted his most influential book,
The Concept of Mind,
to arguing that it is a mistake to think of “man” as a “ghost in a machine.” Man
is
his body and brain.
Yet the evidence we have examined so far in this chapter suggests unmistakably that personality and body are as distinct as tenants and the houses they live in.
This, admittedly, sounds regrettably old-fashioned—after all, the position “Man is a spirit” belongs to religion rather than science—yet it is hard to see how this conclusion can be side-stepped.
Whether or not we can accept Kardec’s
Spirits’ Book
as a contribution to our scientific knowledge, it is necessary to admit that its basic theories explain the mysteries of the human personality rather more convincingly than Professors Taylor and Ryle.

And what of Kardec’s other basic assertion: that spiritual evolution involves reincarnation?
Reincarnation—rebirth into another body—is, of course, closely related to the whole problem of “possession,” as we can see in the case of Mary Roff, who was (temporarily) reincarnated in Lurancy Vennum’s body.
The case of a Hindu boy Jasbir Lal Jat, recorded by Dr.
Ian Stevenson in
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
, is perhaps one of the most striking on record.
When the son of Sri Girdhari Lal Jat of Rasulpur, Uttar Pradesh, “died” of smallpox in the spring of 1954, his father decided to leave the body unburied until the next day.
But before morning the boy had recovered, although he was unable to speak.
When he began to speak, he asserted that he was the son of Shankar, of a village called Vehedi, twenty or so miles away.
He claimed that he was of Brahmin caste, and refused to eat food cooked by his “mother.” Only when a local Brahmin lady agreed to cook for him did he consent to eat.
Gradually, over two years, he abandoned this insistence and ate with the rest of the family.

According to Jasbir, he had attended a wedding and been given poisoned sweets; these led to a fall from a chariot, and a head injury from which he died.
One day Jasbir recognized a woman who was visiting the village as his “aunt”—she was in fact from Vehedi, and her nephew Sobha Ram had died just as Jasbir described.
But the strange thing was that Sobha Ram had died in 1954, shortly before the “death” of the three-year-old Jasbir from smallpox.
Jasbir later claimed that after his death, he had met a Sadhu (holy man) who had advised him to take over the body of Jasbir, which he did.

Sobha Ram’s father heard of the case, and went to Rasulpur to see Jasbir; Jasbir instantly recognized him and other members of the family.
A few weeks later, Jasbir was taken to Vehedi and asked to lead the way from the railway station to the main square; he did this without difficulty, and then led the way to Sobha Ram’s home.
He stayed there for several days, demonstrating a detailed knowledge of the family and its affairs.
Dr.
Stevenson investigated the case thoroughly, interviewing many witnesses in both families, as well as the boy himself.
The case of the poisoned sweets has never been satisfactorily cleared up.

The case of Jasbir is one of the most remarkable in Stevenson’s records; yet most of them contain the same feature of recognition of the family and home of the alleged previous existence.
(Stevenson’s twenty cases cover Brazil, India, Alaska and Lebanon.) In fact, the earliest such case to excite widespread interest was that of Shanti Devi, a girl born in Delhi in 1926.
At the age of seven she told her mother she had been alive before, in a town called Muttra.
She talked about her previous home, her husband and her three children.
When she was nine, she recognized a stranger who came to their house as her husband’s cousin.
The man was from Muttra, and confirmed that his cousin’s wife, a girl called Ludgi, had died ten years earlier.
When the husband came to the house, Shanti Devi flung herself into his arms.
Taken to Muttra, she recognized friends and relatives, and showed detailed knowledge of Ludgi’s life.
But she failed to recognize Ludgi’s youngest child, whose birth had cost Ludgi her life.

I have had the opportunity to investigate personally only two cases of alleged reincarnation.
One of these I have described in some detail elsewhere;
[3]
the other is sufficiently typical to be worth describing here.

In 1978, a Liverpool hypnotist named Joe Keeton was studying “hypnotic regression”—the tendency of some people under hypnosis to recall “previous existences.” Under hypnosis, a young nurse named Pauline McKay asserted that she was a girl called Kitty Jay, who had committed suicide near Chagford, in Devon.
Joe Keeton made enquiries through librarians in the west country, and was startled to discover that Kitty Jay was a real person.
“Jay’s grave” lies on the edge of Dartmoor, not far from the village of Manaton.
(Conan Doyle set his
Hound of the Baskervilles
in this area.) In the late eighteenth century—the exact date has not been preserved—an orphan named Kitty Jay went to work at Ford Farm, Manaton, as a milkmaid.
She became pregnant, and committed suicide by hanging in the barn of the nearby farm of Canna.
As a suicide, she was buried at a crossroad not far away—suicides were buried at crossroads to confuse the spirit with a choice of ways and prevent it from haunting the site of its death.

The case came to the attention of Westward Television, and I was asked if I would be present on a program with Joe Keeton and Pauline McKay.

Pauline proved to be a pretty, dark-haired girl in her early twenties; Joe Keeton is a big, bespectacled north countryman in his fifties.
In the studio, we were shown his letter to a local librarian and the librarian’s reply about Kitty Jay.
Then Pauline was settled in a reclining chair in front of the cameras, and Joe talked to her softly until her eyes closed.
First of all, Joe regressed Pauline to her own childhood, asking her about her third birthday and what she had done; it was astonishing to see the nurse suddenly “become” a little girl.
If she was faking, she must have been a first-class actress.

Joe then took her further back into the past, until she said her name was Kitty Jay.
Questioned by the interviewer, Kay Avila, Kitty said she was ten years old and lived in a big house near “Chagiford” (the old local pronunciation of
Chagford
)—apparently the orphanage or local poor-house.
Taken forward to her fifteenth birthday, she said she was now working on a farm near Manaton, for a master named Thomas.
She mentioned a cook called Maudie and a man named Rob who worked at nearby Canna Farm.
She told how she and Rob sometimes went for walks “to the stones” (the area has many standing stones), and to a bridge; pressed for the name of this bridge, she said Fingle, and named the river as the Teign—both identifications being correct.

Taken forward again, she said she had now run away from the farm—apparently at Rob’s instigation—and was living in a remote cottage that seemed to have no furniture.
She was very hungry—Rob had promised to stay with her, and to keep her supplied with food, but had not kept either promise.
She said her stomach hurt, but it was not clear whether this was hunger, or pains connected with pregnancy.
Asked to describe Rob’s last visit to her, she made it clear that he had insisted on making her lie on the floor to have sex, and that she objected.
Finally, Keeton took her forward to her suicide on Canna Farm—she had obviously gone there hoping to see Rob; it was late afternoon.
Her misery and despair were painful to watch, as she described her decision to kill herself.
As she began to choke and gasp, Joe soothed her, then woke her up.

The whole thing was astonishingly convincing—doubly so, since Pauline had never visited the west country before, and had only traveled down that morning.
Admittedly, there were a few features that were unsatisfactory.
She had no idea of the year—except that it was “seventeen something”—or whether there was a king or queen on the throne.
But for an illiterate orphan, perhaps this is not surprising.
She did not know the surname of her master, and she refused to name Ford Farm (although it seemed that her reason was fear in case the questioner wanted to go and talk to her master).
When, later in the day, we took Pauline to Ford Farm and Canna Farm, she did not seem to recognize either.
On the other hand, Pauline was quite definite about never having heard of Chagford or Kitty Jay.
And since the legend is not widely known outside the area, this seems plausible enough.

Joe Keeton, who has regressed many people into “previous lives” (some of which are described in his book
Encounters with the Past
), says that he is not necessarily convinced that this is reincarnation—that it could be some kind of persistent memory from a forebear, freakishly carried in the genes.
But since Kitty died with her unborn child inside her, this theory hardly seems applicable to the present case.