Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (4 page)

So his wife came back from her home town, and the disturbances continued as before.
A bottle of soda water rose up gently in the bar, floated across the room as if someone were carrying it, and smashed on the floor.

It seemed, then, that Signora Fumero was not to blame; at least, not entirely.
So who was?
There were only three other suspects.
Signor Fumero could be dismissed—he was a “brave old soldier,” and not at all the hysterical type.
There was a head waiter, who seemed to be an ordinary, typical Italian.
But there was also a young waiter—a lad of thirteen, who was unusually tall.
Lombroso may have recalled that the girl who could see through her ear was also unusually tall, and that she had grown about six inches in a year immediately before her problems began.
This boy had also reached puberty.

Accordingly, he was dismissed, and the “haunting” of number 6 Via Bava immediately ceased.

As a scientist, Lombroso’s problem was to find an explanation that would cover the facts.
At a fairly early stage, he was convinced that they were facts, and not delusions.
He wrote to a friend in 1891:

I am ashamed and sorrowful that with so much obstinacy I have contested the possibility of the so-called spiritualistic facts.
I say the facts, for I am inclined to reject the spiritualistic theory; but the facts exist, and as regards facts I glory in saying that I am their slave.

By “spiritualistic theory” he meant belief in life after death.
At this stage he was inclined to believe that he was dealing with some kind of purely mental force.

I see nothing inadmissible in the supposition that in hysterical and hypnotized persons the stimulation of certain centers, which become powerful owing to the paralyzing of all the others, and thus give rise to a transposition and transmission of psychical forces, may also result in a transformation into luminous or motor force.

He compared it to the action of a magnet in deflecting a compass needle.

But ten years later he had come to recognize that this theory failed to cover “the facts.” It might be stretched to cover the case of the wine shop poltergeist, if the young waiter was an “unconscious” medium, and was using his magnetic powers without realizing it.
But by that time, Lombroso had also studied many cases of haunted houses, and he concluded that there are basically two types: those like the Via Bava, in which there is a “medium” (and which usually last only a few weeks or months), and the more traditional haunting, which may last for centuries.
Lombroso apparently never had a chance to study this second type directly, but he went about collecting evidence from witnesses he judged reliable.
When he heard about Glenlee, a haunted house in Scotland, he asked a friend named Professor Scott Elliott to investigate.
Elliott went to see a girl who had lived in the house, and sent Lombroso the following story.
Glenlee was owned by a family called Maxwell, and was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a lady who had poisoned her husband.
A visitor named Mrs.
Stamford Raffles was lying in bed beside her husband when she saw in the firelight a cloud of mist, which gradually turned into the shape of an old woman.
The room became icy cold.
The old woman seemed to be looking at the clock on the mantelpiece.
Another visitor, Mrs.
Robert Gladstone, had the same experience—but during the day, with the sun shining; the same cloud of mist, the same old woman looking at the clock.

Since the stories cited by Lombroso are second-hand, and lacking in the kind of precise detail that is to be found in that of the wine shop, let me offer here a case of haunting that provides a better comparison.
It is to be found in
Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book
.

In the 1890s, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould published in the
Cornhill Magazine
a “true ghost story” about a house in Lille.
A Mrs.
Pennyman, who had been involved in the case, wrote a long letter in which she corrected the inaccuracies of Baring-Gould’s account.
Her own is as follows:

In 1865, when she was a girl, Mrs.
Pennyman’s family had gone to France so that the children could learn French; and they rented a house in Lille, where they had a number of introductions.
The rent of the house—in the Place du Lion d’Or—struck them as remarkably low.
When they went to the bank to cash a letter of credit, they found out why.
The place was reputed to have a
revenant
—a ghost.
In fact, the girl and her mother
had
been awakened by footsteps overhead, but had assumed it was a servant moving about.
After the visit to the bank, they enquired who was sleeping overhead, and were told that it was an empty garret.

Their maid soon heard the story of the
revenant
from the French servants.
A young man who was heir to the house had disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
The story had it that he had been confined in an iron cage in the attic by his uncle, who later killed him.
The uncle sold the house, but it had never been occupied for long because of the ghost.

The family went to look in the garret, and found that there
was
a cage.
It was eight feet high and four feet square, and was attached to the wall.
Inside there was an iron collar on a rusty chain.

Ten days later, the maidservant asked if she could change rooms.
She and another maid slept in a room between the main stairs and the back staircase, and which therefore had two doors.
They had seen a tall, thin man walking through the room, and had buried their faces under the bedclothes.
The mother told the maids to move into another bedroom.

Soon after this, the girl and her brother went upstairs to fetch something from their mother’s room, and saw “a thin figure in a powdering gown and wearing hair down the back” going up the stairs in front of them.
They thought it was a servant called Hannah, and called after her, “You can’t frighten us.” But when they got back to their mother, she told them that Hannah had gone to bed with a headache; they checked and found her fast asleep.
When they described the figure, the maids said that it was the one which they had seen.

Another brother came from the university to stay.
He was awakened by a noise, and looked out of the door to see a man on the stairs.
He assumed his mother had sent a servant to see if he had put out his candle, and was angry about it.
His mother told him she had not sent anyone.

By now, the family had found themselves another house.
Some English friends named Atkyns called a few days before they left, and were interested to hear about the ghost.
Mrs.
Atkyns volunteered to sleep in the room with her dog.
The next morning, Mrs.
Atkyns looked tired and distraught.
She had also seen the man wandering through the bedroom.
The dog seems to have refused to attack it.

Just before they left the house, the girl herself saw the ghost.
By this time they were so accustomed to the footsteps that they ignored them; but they kept a candle burning in their room.
She woke up to see a tall, thin figure in a long gown, its arm resting on a chest of drawers.
She could clearly see the face, which was that of a young man with a melancholy expression.
When she looked again, he had disappeared.
The bedroom door was locked.

This was the story as told by Mrs.
Pennyman.
Lord Halifax sent it to the Reverend Baring-Gould, who later sent him a letter he received from a reader of his account in the
Cornhill Magazine
.
From this letter, it appeared that the haunted house had been transformed into a hotel in the 1880s.
The reader—a lady—described how she and two friends had stayed at the Hotel du Lion d’Or in May 1887, and it is clear that one of the bedrooms they were given was the room in which the two servant girls had seen the ghost.
The lady herself slept in the next room, and settled down after dinner to write letters.
The hotel was very quiet—they were apparently the only guests—but toward midnight she heard footsteps on the landing outside the door.
Then one of the ladies in the next bedroom—which was connected to her own—tapped on the door and asked if she was all right; she had been awakened by footsteps walking up and down.
The two ladies unlocked the door and peered out on to the landing; but there was no one there, and no sound either.
So they went back to bed.
As she fell asleep, the lady continued to hear the slow, dragging steps which seemed to come from outside her door.
They left Lille the next morning, and she thought no more about the experience until she read Baring-Gould’s account in the
Cornhill
and realized that she had probably heard the ghost of the Place du Lion d’Or.

Stories of this type inevitably raise suspicions in the mind of the scientific investigator; they sound just a little too dramatic to be true—the young man confined in an iron cage, and so on.
Yet since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, thousands of well-authenticated cases have been recorded.
Sir Ernest Bennett’s
Apparitions and Haunted Houses
, for example, contains more than a hundred carefully documented cases, and many of these have the same suspiciously dramatic air that suggests an active imagination.
Case five will serve as an illustration: a General Barter of County Cork describes seeing the ghost of a certain Lieutenant B.
in India—riding on a pony in the moonlight, complete with two Hindu servants.
The general said: “Hello, what the devil do you want?” The ghost came to a halt and looked down at him; and the general noticed that he now had a beard, and that his face was fatter than when he knew him some years before.
Another officer who had known Lieutenant B.
immediately before his death later verified that he had grown a beard and become stout, and that the pony he was riding had been purchased at Peshawur (where he died of some sickness) and killed through reckless riding.

It certainly sounds a highly unlikely story.
Yet it is confirmed (in writing) by an officer to whom the general told it immediately afterwards, by the general’s wife, and by a major.
The wife also states that they heard a horse galloping at breakneck speed around their house at night on several occasions, and adds that the house was built by Lieutenant B.
Finally, Bennett himself confirmed with the war office that Lieutenant B.
had died at Peshawur in January 1854.
So although only General Barter saw the ghost, the evidence for the truth of his story seems strong.
Other ghosts cited by Bennett were witnessed by many people—for example, the ghost of a chimney sweep who died of cancer, and who returned to his cottage every night for two months, until the whole family (including five children) began to take it for granted.

It is worth noting that nearly all ghosts mentioned in the records of the Society for Psychical Research look like ordinary solid human beings; so it seems probable that most people have at some time seen a ghost without realizing it.
The late T.
C.
Lethbridge has described in his book
Ghost and Ghoul
how, when he was about to leave a friend’s room at Cambridge in 1922, he saw a man in a top hat come into the room—he presumed it was a college porter who had to give a message.
The next day he asked his friend what the porter wanted, and the friend flatly denied that anyone had come into the room as Lethbridge went out.
It then struck Lethbridge that the man had been wearing hunting kit.
If he had not happened to mention it to his friend, he would never have known that he had seen a ghost.

Now Lombroso, who died in 1909, gradually abandoned his skepticism, and came to accept the spiritualistic hypothesis that ghosts are, quite simply, spirits of the dead, and that the same probably applies to poltergeists, even though these can only manifest themselves when there is a “medium” present.
The title of his book about his researches, which was published posthumously, was
After Death—What?
(This question would have struck him as regrettably sensational twenty years earlier.) In other words, Lombroso made no clear distinction between poltergeists and “apparitions.” But even in 1909, this assumption would have been widely questioned.
One of the most obvious things that emerged from the thousands of cases recorded by the SPR was that the majority of ghosts do not seem to notice the onlookers.
(In this respect, General Barter’s case was an exception.
In fact, they behave exactly as if they are a kind of film projection.
They wander across a room looking anxious—like the ghost of the Lion d’Or—as if re-enacting some event from the past.
This led a number of eminent investigators—among them Sir Oliver Lodge—to suggest that
some
ghosts, at any rate, may be no more than a kind of “recording.” In
Man and the Universe
, Lodge writes: