Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (30 page)

After a scramble of several hundred feet up a rocky glen we turned out to one side, on to the open fell where it faces a huge crag.
Immediately on reaching the open we became aware, with startling suddenness, of the presence of a great nature-deva, who appeared to be partly within the hillside.

My first impression was of a huge, brilliant crimson, bat-like thing, which fixed a pair of burning eyes upon me.
The form was not concentrated into a true human shape, but was somehow spread out like a bat with a human face and eyes, and with wings outstretched over the mountainside.
As soon as it felt itself to be observed, it flashed into its proper shape, as if to confront us, fixed its piercing eyes upon us, and then sank into the hillside and disappeared.

He describes “tree devas” among a group of old firs and comments: “The nature spirits do not appear to be individualized as yet, working under a group consciousness,” a point that may be worth bearing in mind when considering the more traditional poltergeist.
When human beings lack a sense of identity, they often do apparently pointless things, simply to give themselves a sense of existence-through-action; this could explain the apparently aimless mischief of the poltergeist.

It is to the “earth devas” that the community at Findhorn, in Scotland, attributes its astonishing success in horticulture.
In 1978, after a visit to the Edinburgh Festival, I spent a few days there to gain some first-hand impressions of this unusual community.
It is situated on a bare spit of land sticking out into the Moray Firth, close to the town of Forres, and at first sight looks like any holiday site, with chalets and caravans.
It had been founded in the early 1960s by Peter and Eileen Caddy, after Peter Caddy had lost his job as a hotel manager.
Ever since a day in Glastonbury many years earlier, Eileen Caddy had been receiving “guidance” through some kind of inner voice.
This voice now led them to live in a caravan on the bleak, sandy wastes of the Forres peninsula.
They had no money, and Peter Caddy decided that they ought to grow their own food.
But the sandy ground seemed completely unsuitable.
They used seaweed and manure from local horses as fertilizer, while Eileen’s voices assured them that all would be well.
And the vegetables, when they began to grow, were extraordinary—giant cabbages and marrows and lettuces.

When I was at Findhorn, there were no longer giant vegetables—they explained that the purpose of these vegetables had been to demonstrate conclusively what could be done with love and “guidance.” But the gardens were certainly an astonishing sight on that windy peninsula, with their magnificent beds of flowers.

I am not “community-minded.” On the few occasions in my life when I have spent some time in communities—whether monastic or just vaguely “spiritual”—I have usually felt awkward and out-of-place, totally unable to share the group-spirit.
Findhorn was an interesting exception.
There was a great deal of talk about love and cooperation and guidance, yet the atmosphere seemed so friendly and normal that I felt perfectly at home there.
It was strange to talk to people who claimed to have had contact with—and even seen—nature devas and fairies; yet at no point did I feel that I was among cranks, or even mystics.

A book,
The Magic of Findhorn
, by Paul Hawken, speaks at length about these nature spirits.
In 1966, a scholar named Robert Ogilvie Crombie—known as Roc—came to help at Findhorn.
Crombie describes to Hawken how, in March 1966, he was walking in the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens when he experienced a state of heightened perception, then became aware “out of the corner of his eye,” of a nature spirit in the form of the god Pan.
“I could see shaggy legs and cloven hooves, pointed chin and ears, and two little horns on his forehead .
.
.
He was naked, but his legs were covered with fine hair.” When Ogilvie said “Hello,” the creature looked startled and asked: “Can you see me?” “Yes.” “I don’t believe it.
Humans can’t see us.”

“He told me,” said Crombie, “that he lived in the Garden, and that his work was to help the growth of the trees.
He went on to say that the Nature Spirits had lost interest in humans, since they have been made to feel that they are neither believed in nor wanted.
He thought that men were foolish to think that they could do without the Nature spirits.”

Crombie’s account sounds like a piece of whimsy by Sir James Barrie; yet his descriptions of his encounters with nature spirits are precise and circumstantial.
He speaks of an encounter with a faun, and with some kind of nature deva.
“He stepped behind me and then walked into me so that we became one and I saw the surroundings through his eyes .
.
.
The moment he stepped into me, the woods became alive with myriads of beings—elementals, nymphs, dryads, fauns, elves, gnomes, fairies .
.
.
The Nature Spirits love and delight in the work they do and have to express this in movement.”

Crombie and Peter Caddy met in 1965, and, according to Hawken, Crombie became Caddy’s “ambassador” to the world of Nature Spirits.
They were together at the Faery Glen, at Rosemarkie, when Crombie claimed to have encountered elves—which were invisible to Caddy; they were highly hostile because of the damage that has been done by man to the Glen.
Crombie returned to Findhorn with Caddy, and “brought with him this intimate contact with the Nature Kingdom and Pan.
He sought their help and cooperation in making the gardens an example of what could be accomplished among Man, the Devas and the Nature Spirits.
He was told by Pan that a ‘wild area’ should be established in the garden to serve as a sanctuary for the Nature Spirits .
.
.” All this was to be done in close cooperation with nature.
When Peter Caddy cut down some gorse bushes in blossom, Crombie encountered some furious elves, and had to explain to them that man may be ignorant and tactless, but is not fundamentally wicked.

Hawken describes a conversation with two of the chief gardeners.

I asked Mathew and Leonard about Nature Spirits, and whether in “working” with them they actually perceived them.
Both said that they did not perceive them directly, but both felt that they were intuitively guided by the Nature Spirits.
Leonard told the story of how he went to several deeply-rooted bushes a few days before they had to be removed and quietly told them why they had to be moved.
When the day came to remove them they could easily be pulled out of the ground with one hand as if they had completely released their “hold” on life.
For comparison, Leonard went to one of the bushes that was not to be taken out and pulled on it.
It wouldn’t budge.

While at Findhorn, I mentioned that I have endless trouble with moles in my garden, and was told that they had also had the same problem, briefly; all that had been necessary was to explain to the moles that this was now a garden, and to ask them politely if they would mind moving elsewhere.
The next day, the moles had moved out to more distant fields.

All this sounds preposterous only if we happen to be unaware that reports of these elementals and nature spirits have come from all parts of the earth and all ages.
It is, of course, quite possible that it is all imagination and wishful thinking.
But this is largely a matter of our “common sense” prejudices.
The annals of the Society for Psychical Research are full of so many thousands of well-authenticated stories of poltergeists, apparitions and “specters of the living” that we can accept that they may have some basis in fact.
It seems quite conceivable that “mediums” may be able to see things that are not visible to non-mediums.
But when mediums claim to have seen fairies or elves, we become skeptical.
The two-volume
Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology
contains an interesting entry under “Fairy Investigation Society.”

Formed in Britain to collate information on fairy sightings in modern times, with membership from various countries.
The Society used to publish an occasional Newsletter, but this has been suspended in recent years.
It was found that although reports of Unidentified Flying Objects received tolerant public notice, reports of fairy sightings encouraged press ridicule.
The Society is at present quiescent, but is planning to reorganize on a basis which will protect members from undesirable notice.

In fact, fairy sightings are just as commonplace as UFO sightings, and just as circumstantial.
Joe Cooper devotes a chapter of his book to sightings that he has personally noted down—for example, the group of Bradford students who saw fairies “who were circling and dancing” and were invisible to a direct gaze but discernible “at the corners of the eye.” (This is a phrase that occurs repeatedly in fairy sightings.) Cooper goes on to mention the investigations carried out in Ireland by W.
B.
Yeats and Lady Gregory, which they recorded in a book,
Visions and Beliefs
, in 1920.
A typical example is of a Mr.
and Mrs.
Kelleher of Wicklow, who told Yeats: “We had one of them in the house for a while .
.
.
It was in winter and there was snow on the ground, and I saw one of them outside, and I brought him in and put him on the dresser and he stopped in the house for a while, for about a week.” His wife interrupted him to say: “It was more than that, it was two or three weeks.” Mr.
Kelleher goes on: “He was about fifteen inches high.
He was very friendly .
.
.
When the boys at the public house were full of porter, they used to come into the house to look at him, and they would laugh to see him but I never let them hurt him.”

When Chesterton met Yeats, he was struck by his down-to-earth attitude to fairies.

“Imagination!” he would say with withering contempt; “There wasn’t much imagination when Farmer Hogan was dragged out of bed and thrashed like a sack of potatoes—that they did, they had ’um out and thumped ’um, and that’s not the sort of thing a man wants to imagine.” But the concrete examples were not only a comedy; he used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it.
It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists but normal men like peasants, who have borne witness a thousand times to such things; “it is the farmers who see the fairies.”

It was a meeting with Yeats, and with his friend George Russell—the mystic “AE”—that led Evans-Wentz to begin the studies that led to his book The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.
In this book he explains what he calls the “psychological theory” of fairy sightings—which is not, as might be supposed, an attempt to dismiss them as figments of the imagination.
His theory is that it is the experience of nature in such countries as Ireland and Scotland that “impress man and awaken in him some unfamiliar part of himself—call it the Subconscious Self, the Subliminal Self, the Ego, or what you will—which gives him the unusual power to know and to feel invisible or psychical influences.
What is there, for example, in London, or Paris, or Berlin, or New York to awaken the intuitive power of man, that subconsciousness deep-hidden in him?”

One of the most fascinating parts of his book is an interview with “AE,” under the title “An Irish Mystic’s Testimony.” George Russell began to have “visions” at the time of puberty, when he was torn by sexual conflicts.
He had his first mystical vision lying on the hill of Kilmasheogue, when “the heart of the hills opened to me, and I knew there was no hill for those who were there, and they were unconscious of the ponderous mountains piled above the palaces of light.”

Evans-Wentz asked him about the sidhe or fairies (the same word as Lethbridge’s “sith”), and Russell replied that he divided them into two classes: those which are shining, and those which are opalescent and seem to shine by a light within themselves.
“The shining beings appear to be lower in the hierarchies; the opalescent beings are more rarely seen and appear to hold the position of great chief .
.
.” Asked under what conditions he saw fairies, Russell replied:

I have seen them most frequently after being away from a city or town for a few days.
The whole west coast of Ireland, from Donegal to Kerry, seems charged with a magical power, and I find it easiest to see when I am there.
I have found it comparatively easy to see visions while at ancient monuments [i.e., stone circles and monoliths] like New Grange and Dowth because I think such places are naturally charged with psychical forces, and were for that reason made use of long ago as
sacred places.

Asked about the shining beings, Russell replies:

It is very difficult to give an intelligible description of them.
The first time I saw them with great vividness I was lying on a hill-side alone in the west of Ireland, in County Sligo: I had been listening to music in the air, and to what seemed to be the sound of bells, and was trying to understand these aerial clashings in which wind seemed to break upon wind in an ever-changing musical silvery sound.
Then the space before me grew luminous, and I began to see one beautiful being after another.