Supernatural (80 page)

In the case of Mina’s urge to jump from the cliff, Lethbridge speculated that someone had intended to commit suicide by jumping from the same spot, and that she was somehow responding to the ‘recording’ of his depression.
At this stage, Lethbridge did not assume that the man
had
actually jumped; he might have gone home, had a large whisky, and felt better.
But he discovered later that a man had, in fact, committed suicide from the place where Mina was standing.

In his book
Ghost and Divining Rod,
Lethbridge speculates on how the classical belief in nymphs came about.
Suppose a youth sits down on the bank of a stream, and falls into a vivid sexual daydream in which he imagines a girl, unaware of his presence, taking off her clothes and bathing.
His excitement is so strong that his mental image of the naked girl is ‘recorded’ on the electrostatic field of the water.
Some time later, a casual passer-by, thinking of nothing in particular (and therefore in a receptive state), catches a glimpse of a naked girl in the stream, and a moment later, she vanishes.
He naturally supposes that she is a supernatural being who has made herself invisible when she sensed that she was being watched .
.
.
Lethbridge coined the name ‘naiad field’ for the ‘recording’ medium of the water.

The Great Wood near Wokingham was not particularly damp, and this led Lethbridge to suggest that woods possess their own kind of electrical field, for which he coined the term ‘dryad field’, after the Greek word for a wood nymph.
He went on the suggest that open places—like moors or deserts—and mountainous areas might have their own type of electrostatic field, and that this could account for similar tales of ‘spectral beings’ seen there.
Lethbridge coined the word ‘ghouls’ for the kind of unpleasant feeling he experienced in the Great Wood, and applied the word ‘ghost’ to actual appearances—like the man in hunting kit he had seen in his friend’s rooms in Cambridge.

But even Lethbridge had to admit that his neat scientific theory of ‘elemental fields’ failed to explain some of his own experiences.
In 1924 he had visited the island of Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry.
He had climbed a hill to look at the ruins of an 8th-century monastery when he noted a heap of rubbish halfway down the cliff face.
As he made his way down towards it, he was overtaken by an odd conviction that someone wanted to push him over the cliff, and the feeling was so strong that he changed his mind and went back.
According to his later theory, he had experienced a ‘ghoul’ like the one that made Mina feel she ought to jump from the cliff.
But shortly afterwards, as he walked down the hill in front of the monastery, he experienced a sensation that there was someone behind him, and he was suddenly flung flat on his face by a blow.
When he sat up, he was alone on the hillside.
Clearly, this was not a ‘ghoul’, a tape recording of negative emotions.
A telegraph operator on the mainland told him that the lighthouse on the island had been haunted since a shipwreck.
But Lethbridge thought that whatever had knocked him on his face was some kind of poltergeist.

In
Ghost and Ghoul
(where he tells the story), Lethbridge goes on to speculate about the nature of the poltergeist.
He discusses the notion that poltergeists take their energy from disturbed adolescents, and adds that ‘many still think that the mind of the individual concerned is linked with that of some sub-human personality’.
But he then goes on to talk about psychokinesis, and ends by suggesting that his experience on Skellig Michael could be explained in terms of some person who saw the shipwreck, and whose shock had created some kind of delayed psychokinetic effect.
He fails to explain where the ‘poltergeist’ had obtained the energy to knock him down.
Or rather, he throws off casually the suggestion that the energy was somehow connected with the ancient religious site.

We are in a position to recognise that Lethbridge was closer to the truth when he suggested that the poltergeist is ‘some sub-human personality’.
His ‘elemental field’ hypothesis is a bold and interesting attempt to create a scientific theory that can explain ‘ghosts and ghouls’.
But Lethbridge lacked the actual experience of poltergeists that led Guy Playfair to recognise that, in many cases at least, they are ‘spirits’.
If he had, he would have recognised that his ‘tape recording’ theory of ghosts simply fails to cover the facts.

Elsewhere in
Ghost and Ghoul,
Lethbridge goes on the discuss the most familiar type of elemental known to folklore, the ‘sith’ or fairy, and he records with amusement that a Scotsman of his acquaintance, an old boatman named John M.
Robertson, was a firm believer in the sith.
When Lethbridge and some Cambridge friends were on the Shiant Islands, in the Hebrides, one them placed his coat and his lunch beside a rock on a hilltop.
When he went back, they had vanished.
The rest of the party laughed and said that a gull had probably taken them.
But while a gull might well help itself to someone’s lunch, it would certainly ignore a coat.
His friend was so certain that no one could have taken them without being seen that he declared they had been removed by some supernatural agency.
John M.
Robertson agreed, declaring that the sith were the culprits.
Lethbridge’s later experience on Skellig Michael led him to wonder whether Robertson might not be closer to the truth than the sceptical young men from Cambridge, and that his friend’s coat might have been taken by some kind of poltergeist, like the one that knocked him down on Skellig Michael.
But he remained adamant that the fairies described to him by various Scottish and Irish countrymen were some form of ‘mental projection’—a euphemism for hallucination.

Three decades earlier, the poet W.B.Yeats had arrived at a different conclusion.
Yeats’s early poems are full of fairies, but at the time Yeats was convinced that this was wishful thinking.
What changed his mind was a collaboration with his friend—and patroness—Lady Augusta Gregory.
In the summer of 1897, Yeats had been staying with Lady Gregory at her home, Coole Park, and the two of them began collecting fairy stories from the local peasantry.
Yeats’s acquaintance with the extraordinary Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, had already convinced him of the existence of ‘spirits’.
Now the sheer factuality of so many descriptions of fairies—many of them eye-witness accounts—convinced him that they could not be dismissed as products of the ‘folk imagination’.

G.K.
Chesterton, who met Yeats a few years later, was impressed by his insistence on the factual reality of fairies.
‘He was the real original rationalist who said that the fairies stand to reason.
He staggered the materialists by attacking their abstract materialism with a completely concrete mysticism: ‘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;’ the Irish accent warming with scorn; ‘they had ‘um out and thumped ‘um; and that’s not the sort of thing that a man wants to imagine.”

Chesterton goes on to make a point of basic importance: ‘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 is the agricultural labourer who calls a spade a spade who also calls a spirit a spirit; it is the woodcutter with no axe to grind .
.
.
who will say he saw a man hang on the gallows, and afterwards hang round it as a ghost.’

A few years later, Yeats was to encourage the orientalist W.Y.Evans Wentz—best known for his translation of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
—to study the folklore of the fairies: the result was Wentz’s first book
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
(1911), a bulky and scholarly volume, based upon his own extensive fieldwork.
Yeats’s friend, the poet ‘AE’ (George Russell) contributed an anonymous piece to the book (under the title ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testimony’) in which he describes his own fairy sightings with the factuality and precision of an anthropologist describing primitive tribes: shining beings, opalescent beings, water beings, wood beings, lower elementals .
.
.
‘The first of [the fairies] I saw I remember very clearly .
.
.
there was first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre.
Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras.
From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary lightness, joyousness or ecstasy.’

Wentz concludes that the factual and scientific evidence for the existence of fairies is overwhelming.
‘There are hundreds of proven cases of phenomena .
.
.’

But AE’s fairies were essentially ‘visions’, and could therefore be classified with unicorns or centaurs.
Nine years after Wentz’s book appeared, the British public was intrigued to learn of new scientific evidence which seemed to place belief in ‘the little people’ on an altogether more solid foundation.

The story began on a Saturday afternoon in July 1917, when an engineer named Arthur Wright, went into the dark room to develop a photograph taken earlier in the day by his 16-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 11—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 centre 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.)