Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (26 page)

The more I thought about this view, the more it struck me as interesting and plausible.
There are, in fact, a large number of poltergeist cases in which the phenomena occur just once.
In fact, I am relatively certain that one such occurred in my own house.
It was in 1960, and my family—my father, mother and thirteen-year-old sister—had moved to Cornwall to live with us.
One bright, sunny morning, I was awakened by a loud, repeated banging sound.
It sounded just like someone hammering on something made of metal, with slow, steady blows.

It so happened that two friends were sleeping up in the attic.
My first thought was that one of their beds had collapsed, and someone was hammering at the bed-frame to try and get it apart, in order to reassemble it.
I got out of bed, went to the foot of the stairs and called: “What’s going on up there?” All was silence.
I went upstairs, and saw both friends were fast asleep.
I peeped into my sister’s bedroom; she was asleep.
But the sounds now seemed to be coming from outside the house—perhaps on the roof.

I went downstairs and outside.
It was a very still, sunny morning—about five a.m.—and the sounds were undoubtedly coming from our house (which stands alone in the middle of a field), and not from some neighboring house.
I walked all the way round the house, but could not locate the noise.
It seemed to be coming from overhead.
The obvious suspicion—that it was something to do with the hot water system (which sometimes “knocks” as it heats up)—was dismissed when I saw that the sounds were not coming from any of the hot water pipes.

During all this time, the sounds went on—loud, clear, metallic bangs, exactly like someone hammering on an iron bedstead with a hammer.
My father was awake by this time, and we both walked around the house again.
Then, as it was impossible to locate it, we went back to bed.
Ten minutes later, the noise stopped.
About an hour later, it started up again briefly, for perhaps a dozen bangs.
Then it stopped.
And we have not heard it since.
I assume that the sounds were somehow connected with my sister, who was not particularly happy at being dragged away from her home town (Leicester) to live in the country.

I went to see Tom Cunniff in Pontefract, and he told me about the Doncaster Research Group.
They had, apparently, fixed upon Phillip as the culprit.
They had analyzed the tape recording, and decided that it could have been faked.
And they had searched the house, and found in the attic a circle free of dust, which—they decided—might have been made by a loudspeaker, lying face downwards.
This, then, “explained” the banging noises.

As soon as I went into the Pritchards’ home, I became convinced that this theory was absurd.
They had brought in a number of neighbors—like Mrs.
Mountain—and Diane and Phillip were also present.
They played us the tape, and then answered questions.
What struck me most strongly was the spontaneity of the whole thing.
They might contradict one another “No, it wasn’t that day, it was the day when Alan Williams came because, you remember, he put his hat down on that chair and it disappeared .
.
.” but they were obviously discussing something they had all lived through.
And every one of them remembered some slightly different aspect of what had taken place.
No group of conspirators could have made up such a story, and then told it so convincingly.
These were simply a crowd of ordinary people who had been through a strange experience, and who would never forget it.

Diane intrigued me when she told me that she had “seen things” at other times.
When she was six years old, she came out of her bedroom one day, and saw an old lady dressed in grey outside her mother’s bedroom door.
Jean Pritchard assumed that she had been dreaming.
Diane also told me how, in her teens, she was walking past the grounds of a nearby hospital, which was being partly demolished for rebuilding, and was surprised to see two women in crinolines walking among the trees.
She said they seemed to be “floating” over the grass.
She stood watching them for about a quarter of an hour before they vanished into the trees.

What I find even more interesting is that the whole area is permeated with stories of hauntings.
At the present time, there is another house in the Chequerfields area where a “ghost” has appeared to a number of tenants.
Tom Cunniff has noted a number of other stories—for example, poltergeist occurrences at a pub called the Golden Lion, kept at the time by Mrs.
Pritchard’s sister-in-law, Christine.

When I left the Pritchards’ house that afternoon, I had become a convert to Guy Playfair’s theory of the poltergeist.
The first thing that struck me was Phillip’s description of the water appearing on the kitchen floor on that August day in 1966.
That certainly seemed to fit amazingly well with Guy’s statement that the “electrical energy” used by the poltergeist turns into water.
Admittedly, the “spontaneous psychokinesis” view might explain the water equally well—except that it hardly seems to make sense for the disturbed unconscious mind of a teenager to create large quantities of water on the kitchen floor.
Banging and rapping noises, yes.
Objects flying through the air, yes.
But why circular pools of water?

But what really changed my mind about the psychokinesis theory was Diane’s description of being dragged up the stairs by the entity.
Nobody in the house on that evening had any doubt about her terror and confusion.
It is just conceivable that Diane’s unconscious mind might throw her out of bed—by way of demanding attention.
But by no stretch of the imagination can I imagine it grabbing her by the throat and dragging her up the stairs.

The subsequent research for this book—the study of hundreds of accounts of poltergeist hauntings—has only strengthened my view that the RSKP theory leaves half the phenomena unexplained.

Monasteries and churches are often built on older religious sites, as we have already noted.
The reason seems to be that the ground has some kind of “power,” perhaps a purely magnetic force.
My wife, who is an excellent dowser, said that she felt almost dizzy when she first tried dowsing on Glastonbury Tor, one of England’s oldest “sacred sites.” And she also obtained a powerful response when dowsing the area of Pontefract’s ruined priory, and of the nearby castle.
On the site of an old chapel in the castle grounds there is a stone sarcophagus that seems to date to the Roman period.
When it was found in the eighteenth century, it contained the bones of a man who had been beheaded—the skull had been placed between his legs.
It is believed that this is the skeleton of Thomas of Lancaster, the man who headed the opposition against Edward II, a homosexual who poured favors on his friend Piers Gaveston.
In 1312, Gaveston was seized and executed in the presence of Thomas of Lancaster.
The king had Thomas ambushed and beheaded.
As I watched my wife walking around the stone sarcophagus, I saw the dowsing rod twisting violently in her hands—once at the foot and once at the head of the coffin.
It had been placed where the altar would stand if the chapel still existed.
Why should the sarcophagus be placed precisely upon this spot?
Could it be to counteract some unpleasant influence associated with the sarcophagus?

I am suggesting, then, that the solution to the mystery of the Black Monk of Pontefract may lie in the ground itself.
It is “haunted ground,” land that retains impressions for a long time.
Only a few days before I arrived in Pontefract, a nursing sister in the Pontefract Royal Infirmary—where Phillip was then working—came into the television room.
There were two other members of staff there, and she noticed, as she sat down, that there was also a man in a dressing gown.
Patients were not allowed in that room, and after a moment she turned her head to look at the man.
He was no longer there—yet he could not have left the room without walking past her; he had been sitting in the corner.

This, then, is my own theory about the Black Monk case.
The ground itself contains some peculiar force that favors “manifestations.” The early haunting was triggered by Phillip and by his psychological tension.
The “entity” remained in the area until Diane—who herself seems to possess undeveloped mediumistic powers—could provide the energy it needed to manifest itself.
When that energy ceased to be available, it again became inactive; perhaps waiting for another provider-of-energy to offer it the chance to erupt into the space-and-time world of humanity .
.
.

five

Fairies, Elementals,
and Dead Monks

Some thirty miles to the northwest of the Pritchards’ home, there is another piece of “haunted ground” known as Fairy Dell.
The events that took place there in July 1917 are still the subject of controversy.

On a Saturday afternoon in that month, Arthur Wright, an engineer, went into his darkroom to develop a photograph taken earlier in the day by his sixteen-year-old daughter Elsie.
As the plate began to develop, Wright saw vague white shapes appearing—-he took them for birds.
But when the picture became clear, he was startled to see that they were fairies.
The picture showed a serious-faced little girl—Elsie’s cousin Frances Griffiths, aged eleven, standing behind a bush, her chin propped on her hand.
And in front of her, dancing on top of the bush, were four neat little female figures with wings and diaphanous garments, one of them playing a pan-pipe.
“What on earth are they?” said Arthur Wright to his daughter, who was standing behind him.
“Fairies,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Now, working-class Yorkshiremen tend to be phlegmatic and down-to-earth.
Arthur Wright did not press his daughter for explanations; he merely grunted, and awaited further developments.
They came a month later, when the girls again borrowed his camera.
Elsie and Frances scrambled across the deep stream—or “beck”—that ran at the bottom of the garden, and went to the old oaks in the dell beyond.
And when Arthur Wright later developed the plate, it showed Elsie sitting on the grass, holding her hand out to a gnome who was apparently about to step up on to her dress.

This time, Arthur and his wife Polly looked through the bedroom of the girls, hoping to find cut-out pictures that would explain the photographs.
They found nothing.
Arthur Wright became mildly exasperated when both girls insisted there had been no trickery—that there really
were
fairies at the bottom of their garden.
He told Elsie she couldn’t use the camera again until she told him the truth.

In November 1917, Frances wrote a letter to a friend in South Africa enclosing one of the photographs, and remarking casually that it “is me with some fairies up the beck .
.
.”

These events took place in the village of Cottingley, in Yorkshire, on the road from Bradford to Bingley.
It has long since ceased to be a separate village, and has become a part of the urban sprawl; but the Fairy Dell still exists.

In the summer of 1919, Polly Wright, Elsie’s mother, went to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford.
She was interested in “the occult,” having had experiences of astral projection and memories of past lives.
The lecture that evening was on fairies—for it is the position of the Theosophical Society that fairies are simply a type of “elemental spirit”—nature spirits—that can manifest themselves to people with second sight or “clairvoyance.” Naturally, Mrs.
Wright could not resist mentioning her daughter’s “fairy photographs” to the person sitting next to her.
As a result, Arthur Wright made prints of the two photographs, and they were passed from hand to hand at the Theosophists’ conference at Harrogate a few weeks later, and finally made their way to London, and into the hands of Edward Gardner, who was the president of the London branch of the Theosophical Society.
Gardner was familiar with faked photographs of ghosts and spirits, and decided that these looked doubtful.
He asked his correspondent if he could let him see the negatives.
When these arrived a few days later, Gardner was surprised to find no evidence of double exposure or other cheating.
He took the negatives to a photography expert named Snelling, who examined them carefully under a powerful lens, and announced that it was undoubtedly
not
a double exposure.
Nor were the dancing fairies made of paper, or painted on to a sheet of glass.
They had
moved
during the exposure.
A week later, after enlarging the photographs, Snelling announced that, in his opinion, they were not faked.
They were ordinary open-air shots.

It so happened that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had agreed to write an article on fairies for the Christmas number of the
Strand Magazine
(in which Holmes first appeared).
When he heard about the photographs, he contacted Gardner and asked if he could see them.
The two men met, and agreed that the pictures were too good to be true—the waterfall in the background (which looked like a painted backcloth), the highly appropriate toadstools .
.
.
Gardner agreed to go to Cottingley to see the girls, and to find out whether they were hoaxers.
Mr.
and Mrs.
Wright were startled to hear that the experts thought the photographs genuine.
And Gardner was startled when he walked up the glen with Elsie, and saw the scene exactly as she had photographed it, complete with waterfall and toadstools—although without fairies.

Gardner decided to test the girls.
Two cameras were bought, and the film-plates were sealed so they could not be tampered with.
In due course, the negatives were returned to Gardner, and the factory that had produced them verified that they were still sealed.
One showed Frances with a fairy leaping close to her face, another showed a fairy offering a flower to Elsie, while the third showed two fairies in the middle of a bush.
In the center of the picture there is an object that looks rather like a bathing costume hung on a line.
Elsie apparently had no idea what this was; but Gardner, with his wider knowledge of fairy lore, identified it as a “magnetic bath” which fairies weave in dull weather.
(It had rained continually that August.)

Once more, the experts got to work to try to discover if the photographs had been faked; again, they concluded that they were genuine.
That Christmas, Doyle’s article on the fairies appeared in the
Strand Magazine
and caused a sensation.
Inevitably, the majority of people thought it was a hoax; yet no expert on photography was able to say anything conclusive about how it might have been done.
A reporter on the
Westminster Gazette
learned the true identities of the girls (Conan Doyle had used pseudonyms to protect them from publicity) and went to see them.
He concluded that everyone seemed honest and genuine, and there was no evidence of trickery.
Arthur Wright was baffled by it all, and deeply disappointed that Conan Doyle was naive enough to be taken in, “bamboozled by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of her class.” Conan Doyle was himself puzzled and critical; yet he could not discount the possibility that these were real fairies, nature spirits of some kind.
He contacted a well-known clairvoyant named Geoffrey Hodson, and Hodson went to Cottingley, talked to the girls, and went to the dell with them.
He also saw fairy forms.
(We shall have more to say about Hodson in a moment.)

By the end of 1921, most people had lost interest in the fairies.
Conan Doyle was to write a book about the case, called
The Coming of the Fairies
, which came out in 1922; but there was no re-investigation.

In 1965, a
Daily Express
reporter named Peter Chambers discovered that Elsie was still alive, having spent most of her life in India, and now back in the north of England.
He went to see her, and asked her straight out whether the pictures were faked.
Elsie neither denied nor confirmed this; she said she would prefer to leave it “open.” She made the curious statement that the fairies were “figments of her imagination.” This certainly sounds like a confession; but if it is, why did she not say openly that the photographs were faked?
Six years later, in 1971, the BBC’s
Nationwide
program discovered that both Elsie and Frances were still alive, and interviewed both.
Again, both declined to deny or confirm the genuineness of the photographs.
Elsie says: “I’d rather leave that open, if you don’t mind.
But my father had nothing to do with it, I promise you that.” Again, this sounds like a veiled admission of faking; but four years later, in 1975, Elsie gave an interview to Walter Clapham, of
Woman,
in which she stated again what both girls had maintained at the time—that they
had
seen fairies repeatedly in the dell, and had photographed them.
Elsie mentioned that she was “psychic,” and described a number of occasions on which she had seen ghosts.
(Gardner had been convinced that both Elsie and Frances were mediums.) As to the fairy photographs, she admitted that they
had
been intended as a hoax, but not quite of the kind suspected by the non-believers.
It seems that on the day they took the first photograph Frances had fallen into the stream, and had tried to get out of trouble by lying about in it.
She had been soundly admonished for stretching the truth.
Elsie borrowed her father’s camera to comfort Frances, and when they began to discuss the lying issue, Elsie pointed out that grown-ups lie—for example, about Father Christmas.
So they would get their revenge in a rather convoluted manner.
They would take photographs of fairies, and show them to the grown-ups.
And if the grown-ups took them seriously, they’d reply: “But you know fairies don’t exist.”

Their revenge fell flat, since Elsie’s parents declined to believe in the fairies.

In 1976, a Yorkshire folklorist and psychical investigator, Joe Cooper, persuaded Elsie and Frances to appear on a television program.
His account of what happened is contained in a book called
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies
.
I met Joe Cooper on my visit to Yorkshire in August 1980, and he told me then that his final conclusion was that Elsie and Frances are genuine; they really
did
see fairies.
In his book, he records conversations with Elsie in which she makes statements such as: “Fairies and elves are tremendously interested in the doings of human beings.” In the dell, she told Cooper: “Round about here the gnomes used to come,” and in reply to his question about what they wore: “Russet colors—they were a bit shy.” She describes the photographing of the fairies quite circumstantially, with no attempt to imply that they were pure imagination: “When it [the elf] became clear Frances pressed the trigger on the box camera.” Asked why she never made a grab for the fairies, she replied: “You couldn’t.
It’s like grabbing for a ghost or something.” And to the question: “Did you in any way fabricate these photographs?” Frances replied flatly: “Of course not.”

The most interesting point established by Joe Cooper is that Elsie
is
undoubtedly psychic—either that, or a liar.
She told him of a lady with a dog who used to come to her bedside when she was a child of four.
Elsie talked to her, but the lady never replied.
On one occasion, Elsie claims, the lady brought a fox terrier, which somehow located a penny she had under her pillow, and swallowed it.
When Elsie shouted, her mother rushed upstairs.
The lady and the dog had vanished, but they never found the penny.

Elsie also tells of an occasion when she came downstairs one evening for a drink of water, and found a strange man in his shirtsleeves in front of the fire, reading a newspaper, and a woman with a white apron came from the kitchen with a dish of rice pudding and put it in the oven.
When Elsie asked where her parents were, the man told her they were playing cards at their neighbors, the Moffs.
Elsie said she wanted to see them, and the man opened the door for her—the latch was too high for her to reach.
When she knocked on the door of the Moffs, her parents were highly alarmed to hear about the strangers in their house, and rushed back immediately.
The house was in darkness.
The only sign that anything strange had occurred was that the door was still open.
And Arthur Wright had locked it when they went out.

The case of the Cottingley fairies remains unproven.
For the skeptics, the strongest evidence against it is the photographs themselves.
The fairies look a little too conventional.
The BBC demonstrated that it is not too difficult to fake fairies; they showed their reporter surrounded by them in the studio; these fairies
were
cardboard cut-outs that moved on wire (to make them stand up).
It is therefore entirely conceivable that Elsie and Frances used cutouts supported by wire.
In that case, it would be perfectly understandable that they are disinclined to confess.
All their defenders, from Conan Doyle to De Vere Stacpoole, would be made to look idiots, and an intriguing mystery would finally be dismissed and forgotten.
Yet there is surely no reason why, in that case, they should continue to insist that they saw fairies frequently as children.
Frances told Joe Cooper that she still “almost” sees them, from the corners of her eyes, but declines to have her attention drawn to them.
[1]
(Cooper quotes another man who claims to have seen fairies, but only out of the corner of his eye.)