Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (51 page)

Such notions as these are thoroughly foreign to our Western modes of thought; yet they can be found in many other cultures.
For example, the notion of man’s “seven bodies” is to be found in Hindu and Egyptian occultism, and is discussed in the books of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as in works like A.
E.
Powell’s
The Astral Body
and
The Etheric Double
.
And the concept of multiple personality has been used by Max Freedom Long to buttress a system of ideas originating in Africa and now represented mainly in the Kahuna culture of Polynesia.
Long’s book
The Secret Science Behind Miracles
contains a great deal that is relevant to this investigation of the poltergeist.

Long arrived in Hawaii in 1917 and became intrigued by references to native magicians, kahunas or “keepers of the secret.” All his attempts to find out more about them encountered a brick wall.
The kahunas, apparently, had been outlawed by the Christians, but their practices continued to survive.
Long heard about a local minister who had challenged a kahuna to a contest of prayers; the kahuna declared that he would pray the minister’s congregation to death.
Long actually saw the diary of this minister, reporting death after death in his congregation.
Finally, the minister persuaded someone to teach him the magic involved in the death prayer, and tried a counter attack.
The kahuna magician died within three days.
The missionary seceded from the church, and built his own small chapel, over which he continued to preside.

At this point, Long met a doctor, William Tufts Brigham, who had been studying the kahunas for years.
He was able to give Long certain vital clues.
And later, in America, Long studied the Hawaiian language, and gradually began to crack the “code.” One of his first discoveries was that the kahunas seem to accept that man has at least two “selves.” (He later discovered that there is a third.)

The Kahuna idea of the conscious and subconscious seems to be, judging from the root meaning of the names given to them, a pair of spirits closely joined in a body which is controlled by the subconscious and used to cover and hide them both.
The conscious spirit is more human and possesses the ability to talk.
The grieving subconscious weeps tears, dribbles water and otherwise handles the vital force of the body.
It does its work with secrecy and silent care, but it is stubborn and disposed to refuse to obey.
It refuses to do things when it fears the gods (holds a complex or fixation of ideas), and it intermingles or tinctures the conscious spirit to give the impression of being one with it.

A number of important points are stated here.
The “subconscious” spirit intermingles so closely with its partner that we do not realize that it has a separate identity.
But this spirit is rebellious and highly emotional.
It refuses to obey.
Long is here speaking of what Poe meant by the “imp of the perverse,” which has been mentioned elsewhere in this book: that curious tendency of the human mind to turn against itself.
There is part of us that seems to be little better than an immature child, howling with misery and defeat when confronted by problems it regards as “unfair.” This part of us is dangerous because we fail to recognize it is a separate entity, and may be unaware of its existence until it has betrayed us into some act of stupidity.
We have all met people who seem to be balanced, strong, self-possessed, and who, when confronted by some sudden frustration or injury to their self-esteem, become mean, petty and often violent; we stand aghast at this sudden revelation of their immaturity.
Until we can recognize this element in ourselves, we are unable to take the measures that might bring it under control.

In addition to these two “souls,” we also “possess” (or “are”?) a higher self, a superconscious being who might be regarded as the guardian angel, and—this is perhaps the most interesting suggestion—controls our future.
It does so according to the desires and suggestions of the “middle self—the conscious ego—and most of us have such messy lives because our suggestions are so muddled and contradictory.

These three souls use three kinds of vital force, or
mana,
each with a different “voltage,” so to speak.
The form used by the higher self is symbolized in religions by the sun.
Long adds the interesting comment that
mana
can be stored up in wood and in water—a remark that would have excited Tom Lethbridge.

By way of illustrating this vital force on its lowest level, Long cites Nandor Fodor’s
Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science
, and Lombroso’s case of the poltergeist in the tavern.
For the poltergeist, according to Long,
is
a spirit—“lower soul” which has somehow, in death, become separated from the middle and higher selves.
According to Long, the lower self possesses memory, and the middle self does not.
So a disembodied lower self is an earthbound spirit of the type that causes poltergeist disturbances.
The disembodied middle self, separated from the other selves, is a wandering wraith without memory—in fact, what we would generally regard as a ghost.
According to Long, then, the old man who haunted Ash Manor would be a disembodied “middle self.”

The death prayer, and other forms of black magic, are, according to Long, performed by means of low spirits, who obey the magician.
On this point he is totally in agreement with the view put forward by Andrade and Playfair.
These low spirits lack intelligence, and (like the low self) are highly suggestive to hypnotic suggestion.
Long tells a typical story of his master, Dr.
Brigham.
Brigham had hired a party of Hawaiian natives to climb a mountain, and one of them (a fifteen-year-old boy) became ill.
His feet had become numb, and the numbness was slowly rising up his body—a sign that someone had practiced the death prayer on him.
Brigham questioned the boy, who then remembered that before he left his native village, the local kahuna—witch doctor (who hated the influence of white men)—had declared that any villager who worked for the whites would become a victim of the death prayer.
The boy had, in fact, worked with Hawaiians until Long offered him a job in his party, and the boy had accepted it without thinking of the consequences.

Because of his study of the Huna religion, Brigham was regarded by the natives as a powerful kahuna—an idea he encouraged—so they now asked him if he would direct the death prayer back at the magician who had sent it.
With some trepidation, Brigham decided to try.
Standing above the boy, he spoke aloud to the spirits, praising and flattering them, then argued warmly that the boy was an innocent victim, and that it was the kahuna who sent them who ought to be destroyed.
He then directed them to return and leave the boy alone.
For another hour, he kept his mind concentrated on this idea until quite suddenly, he said, the tension seemed to vanish, and the boy declared that he could feel his legs again.
Soon after, the boy was quite well.
In order to verify if the “magic” had worked, Brigham got the boy to take him to his own village, where the villagers fled at the sight of the white magician.
It seemed that, on the night Brigham had redirected the prayer, the magician had come suddenly out of his hut where he had been sleeping, told the people that the white magician had redirected his prayer, and that he had omitted to take any ritual precautions against such redirection because he believed he was in no danger.
By morning, the kahuna was dead.

How did the kahuna know that the boy was working for a white man?
The “spirits” told him.
The same clairvoyance should have protected him from Brigham’s attack; Brigham thinks that this attack was successful because the kahuna had gone to sleep early, and woke up to find himself already under attack.

The death prayer, Long says, depends on these “subconscious spirits,” which a kahuna might inherit from another kahuna, or find for himself if he happens to be sufficiently psychic.
Long adds the disturbing comment that in the early days in Hawaii, prisoners of war were sometimes given potent hypnotic suggestion to cause the subconscious spirit to separate from the “middle self” after death.
We must return to this matter of hypnosis in a moment.

When the low spirits reach the victim, they have to await the chance to enter his body, and they can do this because they have been given a surcharge of
mana,
or vital force, by their master.
Normally, says Long, the unconscious mind can protect itself against invading spirits, because its vitality is greater than theirs.
The spirits of the death prayer have to enter by brute force, as it were.
They then proceed to drain the victim of vital force, which would cause the feet to grow numb, then the rest of the body.
Having killed the victim, the spirits are now supercharged with energy.

“In the event of a successful mission,” says Long, “the kahuna ordered his spirit slaves to play until they used up the vital force they had taken .
.
.Their play usually took the form of what we would call ‘poltergeist activities.’ They would throw objects, make loud noises, and create a bedlam of some proportions.
Dr.
Brigham once heard a great commotion in the hut of a kahuna at night, and was later told that spirits were at play in this manner.”

According to Long, this same
mana
can be transferred to a stick, which is then used in war; when it strikes the victim, he receives a kind of paralyzing shock.
He speaks of a Reo Indian medicine man who could knock a brave unconscious by merely placing his finger against his chest.

In order to offer further demonstration of his theory of the three spirits, Long turns to cases of multiple personality, citing Mary Reynolds and Christine Beauchamp—already discussed in chapter 2.
He then mentions an unusual case that he heard from a Dr.
Leapsley in Honolulu.
The daughter of a prominent California attorney had been a dual personality since she was a child, and the two alternated every four years.
At the age of four, the girl had gone into a deep sleep, and had apparently reverted to babyhood when she woke up.
This baby learned very quickly—as Mary Reynolds did—and quickly developed into a person completely unlike the original girl.
“Miss First” was studious, shy and retiring, “Miss Second” was a noisy tomboy.
At the age of eight, Miss First came back, unaware that she had been absent.
At twelve, Miss Second returned one afternoon.
At sixteen, Miss Second fell asleep and woke up as Miss First, asking her mother to go on reading a book she had been reading when Miss Second took over four years earlier.

When the girl reached the age of twenty-eight, the parents consulted medical men, who decided to try to make the secondary personality go away through hypnosis, or to cause the two to amalgamate.
Under hypnosis, each personality appeared, and the doctors learned that each was aware of the actions of the other by “reading” the other’s memory.
Then the order to “blend” was given.
It had no effect.
More hypnosis was tried, and the two personalities were asked why they had not blended; Miss First said she had been unable to carry out the instructions.

More hypnosis led to the “hypnotic syncope”—the body seemed to become dead.
Then, suddenly, the lips moved, and a completely new personality spoke through them.
This spoke in a firm voice, and seemed to be older and wiser than the other two.
It was the voice of an old man.
It explained that it had the two girls under its guardianship, and that what the doctors were trying to do was wrong: the girls had to go on sharing the same body.
When one of the doctors threatened to keep the girl hypnotized indefinitely the “guardian” replied firmly that in that case it would withdraw, and leave them with a corpse.
It spoke with such quiet conviction that the doctors decided not to put this to the test.

This, says Long, is an example of the “higher self.” But what about the two girls?
According to Long, multiple personality is simply a case of a body being invaded by a spirit—sometimes a low self, sometimes a middle self, sometimes a combination of the two.
Long accepts without question the idea of “possession,” declaring that some “low selves” may prey on the living, draining their vital energy, or taking up residence in their bodies and rendering them insane.
Like Arthur Guirdham, Long is convinced that much mental illness is a kind of “haunting” by spirits.
But he points out that most people have very powerful resistance to invading entities—even those sent by kahunas.
Only people suffering from deep-seated guilt feelings are fairly easy prey.