Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (40 page)

What Hayward says about his craving for ice cream brings to mind Guy Playfair’s comment that earth-bound spirits long for the things they enjoyed while alive.
And the experience of the invalid lady—the sudden desire for ice cream, and the choking sensation when she tried to eat it—would be explained by Kardec as an example of the type of minor “possession” that occurs all the time.
Kardec, it will be recalled, said that our thoughts and actions are constantly influenced by spirits.
People who can be fully “possessed” are called mediums; most of us, fortunately, have only feeble mediumistic powers.
But spirits can still wander in and out of our bodies at will.
So the Spiritist explanation of what happened to the invalid is that she was a natural medium—the text makes it clear that she was aware of this—and Hayward managed to “possess” her to the extent of making her long for ice cream.
But in order to enjoy the ice cream vicariously, he had to “take over” her body.
As he tried to do this, the lady began to choke—presumably because Hayward had been hanged—and she realized what was happening and threw him out.

Anita Gregory, an eminent psychical investigator, discusses Wickland’s
Thirty Years Among the Dead
in her introduction to Oesterreich’s book on possession, and dismisses it as an example of self-deception.
The cases cited above suggest that it is not as simple as this.
Mrs.
Wickland was a genuine medium, and no doubt most of the phenomena were genuine.
But Wickland is simply
imposing his own preconceptions
on every thing he witnesses.
And séances are fairly easy to influence in this way.
In
The Occult
, I have quoted the case of Louis Singer, who deliberately experimented with suggestion and telepathy at a séance.

One of the sitters announced she could see lights, I too giving my consent as I was too polite to disagree.
Another said she could feel a wind.
Again agreement, to which I assented.
Then for a while, nothing.
At last I felt it was my turn, so I remarked it was getting lighter.
This met with concurrence.
Indeed, one went so far as to remark upon the beautiful lights that played around me.
I then suggested I felt a wind.
So did everybody present.
Later the trumpet miraculously floated into the air, the voice recognized by one sitter as a relative spoke.
They were all certain it was not the medium’s voice, and not too cleverly disguised.

So Singer decided to try to influence the séance by telepathy.
A dog basket made him think of a coracle, and he visualized one.
By accident, one chair too many had been put in the circle, and the medium suggested that they leave it for a spirit to occupy.

Sure enough, a spirit invisible to us occupied it.
It was, the medium said, a drowned sailor.
After this, I tried on more than one occasion to dictate what spirit should come through, using the method of visual projection.
I was largely successful .
.
.

All this seems to suggest that séances are entirely a matter of self-deception: that is, of some unexplored power of the human mind, directed by our own preconceptions.
But in that case, how did the trumpet float into the air?
How did Daniel Dunglas Home make tables float up to the ceiling?
We have to fall back on the idea of “spontaneous psychokinesis,” and we have already seen that this is simply inadequate to cover the facts of poltergeist hauntings.
So the sensible position would seem to be somewhere midway between the two: that is, that spirits do exist, but that the phenomena they cause is very easily influenced by the human mind.
We have seen that poltergeists are frequently influenced by what people say; in the Enfield case, one investigator visiting the house mentioned that he had just come from a case where the poltergeist caused fires; the Enfield poltergeist immediately acted upon the suggestion.
The Dagg poltergeist did not seem to be sure whether it was supposed to be a devil or an angel; it seemed quite prepared to be whatever people wanted it to be.
And this is the basic cause of the failure of psychical research.
If we know as little about “the spirit world” now as we did a century ago, it is because we keep on imposing our own preconceptions and prejudices, and the “facts” become hopelessly muddled with our interpretation of them.
The early investigators insisted on mixing religion with psychical research; the result, predictably, was that Spiritualism seemed to confirm the Christian faith.

But within twenty years of the founding of Spiritualism (around 1850) there was already a strong reaction against this tendency.
In Ireland, a professor of physics called William Barrett used to stay with a friend in the country, and became interested in his friends experiments in mesmerism with the village children.
One little girl became strongly telepathic as soon as she was placed in a trance.
If the experimenter held his hand over a lighted lamp, the girl—who was facing the other way—instantly snatched her own hand away as if it was burnt.
If he tasted sugar, she looked pleased, while salt made her grimace.
In France, the psychologist Pierre Janet investigated a case in which a peasant woman could be put into a hypnotic trance when the hypnotist simply
thought
about it—even at a distance.
Another investigator, Dr.
Julian Ochorowicz, studied a “somnambule” called Madame Lucille, who, when in a trance, was able to tell him what he was doing behind her back.
A boy investigated by Ochorowicz could even repeat aloud the words that Ochorowicz was reading in a book.
All this seemed to prove beyond all doubt that the human mind has some curious unknown power to influence other minds.
Janet pointed out that if his hypnotist tried to hypnotize the peasant woman without concentrating on what he was doing, she remained unhypnotized.
Yet when he concentrated hard, he could even hypnotize her at a distance.
Obviously, the mind itself has some peculiar power, a kind of radar beam of will.
(In
Mysteries,
I have described a simple experiment by which any group of people can verify this; it was first shown to me by the theater historian John Kennedy Melling.
Two or three people stand around the person who has been selected as the subject, and the subject closes his eyes.
The others then press their fingertips lightly against the subject’s body, at shoulder level, then withdraw them so they are a few inches away.
The whole group now concentrates on forcing the subject to sway in a definite direction, chosen at random by one of the group.
When I first tried the experiment, acting as subject, I was astonished to feel a curious force pushing me in a certain direction—the direction chosen by those standing around me.
If the subject tries to resist, the result is usually a feeling of dizziness.
An interesting extension of this experiment is to try to move a paper roundabout, balanced on a needle, by will-power.
The roundabout is made by taking a small square of paper, about an inch square, folding it four times—like the crosses on a Union Jack—and then pinching the four folds to make a paper dart, which is then balanced on a needle stuck in a cork.
The hands should then be gently cupped around the “roundabout.” Most people will try making tremendous efforts of will and produce no effect—as I did myself the first time I tried it.
The trick seems to be visualizing the roundabout turning one way or the other as you exert the will.
With a little practice, most people can make the roundabout turn clockwise, then stop, then turn counter-clockwise.)

It was these experiments in will-power and hypnosis that convinced Barrett that an unknown human faculty was waiting to be investigated; and, together with a spiritualist called Edmund Dawson Rogers, he decided to found a Society for Psychical Research.
It came into being in 1882, and one of its chief tasks was to study examples of “paranormal occurrences,” and take evidence from as many witnesses as possible.
They soon began to accumulate a considerable body of evidence on one particular subject: the so-called “phantasms of the living”—when the “ghost” of a living person is seen at some distance from his physical body.
A typical example concerns the poet Goethe who was walking home one day after a heavy shower when he saw a friend named Friedrich walking in front of him; what surprised him was that Friedrich was wearing his—Goethe’s—dressing-gown.
When he got home, he found Friedrich in front of the fire, wearing the dressing-gown—he had been caught in the shower, taken off his wet coat, and borrowed Goethe’s dressing-gown.
The SPR collected hundreds of similar cases.
Many of these were concerned with “crisis apparitions”—people seeing a relative who was seriously ill or on the point of death.
The immense work
Phantasms of the Living
(1886) by Gurney, Myers and Podmore contains hundreds of such cases.
And what it seems to demonstrate beyond all doubt is that human beings have the ability to project an image of themselves—a quite solid-looking image—to distant places.

What is odder still is that, in most cases, the “projector” has no idea that he is being seen elsewhere, and no particular reason for wanting to be seen elsewhere.
There is, for example, the curious case of Canon Bourne, cited by G.
N.
M.
Tyrrell in
Apparitions
.
Canon Bourne was out hunting with his two daughters when the girls decided to return home.
On their way home, the girls saw their father, looking dirty and dishevelled, waving to them from the other side of the valley.
When they reached the place, there was no sign of him.
They searched the area, then went home.
Their father arrived home soon afterwards—quite unhurt.
He could not explain why he had “appeared” to his daughters, and neither could they.
One odd point is that one of the girls noticed the maker’s name inside their father’s hat as he waved it to them—which would obviously have been impossible at such a distance.
This seems to suggest that it was their minds rather than their eyes that were seeing him.
Yet both girls
and
the coachman saw the figure clearly.

Now cases like these may be quite bewildering, but they seem to make one thing perfectly clear: that there is far more to human beings than meets the eye.
In fact, they seem to suggest that we are making a false distinction when we talk about “ghosts” as if they were quite distinct from living people.
It would probably be more accurate to say that human beings
are
ghosts—ghosts with bodies.

Faced with such a mass of evidence, this conclusion—or something very like it—slowly forced itself upon even the most skeptical members of the SPR.
So by the beginning of the twentieth century, a new theory of Spiritualism had developed, according to which there is no need to suppose that the world is full of invisible “spirits.” Man himself could be the invisible spirit who causes tables to rise into the air and trumpets to play themselves.
And if poltergeists seem to require a disturbed child or teenager at the center of the disturbances, then perhaps the child is the poltergeist?
This, as we have seen, is the view that still prevails today.
One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate that it is unsatisfactory.

By the time Lombroso died, in 1909, psychical research was marking time.
Spiritualism continued to flourish; but as scientific investigation, it had come to a halt.
The reason can be seen by anyone who reads Owen’s
Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World
and then turns to Lombroso’s
After Death—What?
The books were published fifty years apart; yet they might both have been written at exactly the same time.
Lombroso offers some “scientific evidence,” by way of a few experiments in telepathy; otherwise, he presents just the same kind of evidence that Robert Dale Owen had presented.
There was plenty of evidence for ghosts, for poltergeists, for telepathy, for precognition, for “out of the body experiences,” and a dozen other varieties of “paranormal” experience.
But the evidence seemed to lead nowhere.
One remarkable case had even proved life after death, to the satisfaction of most open-minded inquirers.
This was the celebrated “cross-correspondences.” By 1904 three of the chief founders of the SPR—Henry Sidgwick.
Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney—were dead, and it seemed logical to hope that if they were still alive in another world, they would try to communicate through mediums.
In the previous year, a psychic named Mrs.
Holland, the sister of Rudyard Kipling, began receiving written messages—through automatic writing—that seemed far more intelligent and thoughtful than the majority of such scripts.
And in 1904, another psychic; Mrs.
Verrall, the wife of a Cambridge don, also received some messages, one of which included the words “Record the bits, and when fitted they will make the whole.”