Horizon, SEPTEMBER 1940
To judge from the newspapers, poltergeists appear fairly frequently but seldom get a thorough investigation, because they will not, as a rule, ‘perform’ in the presence of strangers. But there are quite enough authenticated cases—Mr. Sitwell gives detailed accounts of four of the bestknown, but there is a number of others—to suggest that the poltergeist is not imaginary in the ordinary sense of the word.
These cases are almost always very much alike. They consist of a series of evil-minded and frightening practical jokes, often with an undercurrent of obscenity. Crockery is smashed, objects fly through the air in an inexplicable manner, there are rapping noises and sometimes tremendous explosions and the violent ringing of bells. Sometimes, also, there are mysterious voices and apparitions of animals. In nearly, though not quite all, cases, there is in the house some young person, usually a girl about the age of puberty, who can be identified as the medium. As a rule she is ultimately caught and admits that she has been playing tricks, after which the phenomena cease. But the thing is not so simple as this makes it appear. To begin with, there are cases in which no conscious fraud appears to exist, and others in which the medium only seems to have resorted to deliberate trickery after his or her ‘genuine’ powers had begun to wane. But the most striking fact of all is that even when the mediums are consciously cheating they seem to acquire powers that they would not normally have. At the least they become accomplished conjurors. The mysterious voices, for instance, are obviously due to ventriloquism, which is not much easier to learn than walking the tightrope. In a few cases the disturbances have continued for years on end without any human agent being caught in the act.
As with spiritualistic phenomena, three explanations are possible. One is ‘spirits’, one is hypnotism and hallucination, and another is vulgar fraud. Few sensible people would accept the first, and there is a good deal of evidence for the third. Houdini, for instance, was fond of demonstrating that all spiritualist ‘manifestations’ can be faked; some of the details are given in his biography. Mr. Sitwell takes it for granted that all poltergeist phenomena are due to human trickery, conscious and unconscious, but, as he points out, it is just there that the interest begins. Ghosts are completely uninteresting, but the aberrations of the human mind are not. In the case of the poltergeist you have an aberration by which one member of a family is impelled to play terrifying tricks on the others, and to show diabolical secretiveness and cunning in doing so. Why they do it, what pleasure they get out of it, is completely unknown. There is possibly a clue in the fact that the same phenomena recur in cases that are centuries apart. If one takes the view that the poltergeist disturbances never actually happen, that the whole thing is simply a pack of lies, then one is faced by an even stranger psychological puzzle—that of whole households suffering collective hallucination or conspiring together to tell stories that are bound to get them laughed at.
Mr. Sitwell links the subject up with sexual hysteria on the one hand, and on the other with witchcraft, in which hallucination was mixed up with the remains of a pre-Christian fertility-worship. The famous Sabbaths at which the witches had sexual intercourse with the Devil were presumably dreams induced by auto-suggestion and drugs. According to Mr. Sitwell, the ointment with which they rubbed themselves before mounting their broomsticks is now known to have contained drugs which would give a sleeping person the sensation of flying. It was only recently that witchcraft could be seriously studied, because it was only recently that the ‘supernatural’ explanation of it could be finally rejected. So also with the poltergeist, so long accepted as a real ghost or laughed at as an old wives’ story. It is probably neither, but a rare and interesting form of insanity. When it has been further studied it will probably, like spiritualism, teach us a little more about hallucination and group-psychology.1