The Complete Book of Ghosts

THE MODERN PREOCCUPATION with the paranormal could be said to have begun in 1848 with the publication of The Night Side of Nature. The Victorians were avid readers of ghost stories, but they bought this collection in unprecedented quantities because its author, Scottish novelist Catherine Crowe, appealed both to their romanticism and their reason. Her obvious delight in describing Gothic horrors was balanced with rigorous research. Each episode was backed up by witness statements, documents and dates to reinforce the author’s belief that the supernatural was as worthy of serious investigation as the natural sciences. Her view was that the scientific establishment was arrogant and presumptuous in stating that all paranormal phenomena were the result of hysteria. It was her contention that the majority of scientists ‘arrange the facts to their theory, not their theory to the facts’.

Crowe’s timing was opportune. The belief in the infallibility of science was beginning to be questioned, yet the literate classes were also losing their faith in religion. Neither science nor religion appeared to have all the answers, but it seemed that a commonsense approach to the supernatural – and specifically to the question of life after death – might finally reconcile the two. By insisting that at least two independent witnesses corroborate each sighting, she laid down the ground rules for conducting paranormal research which was to change little over the next 100 years.

WILLINGTON MILL

Her most thorough and intriguing investigation concerned Willington Mill, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, which was a haunted mill house owned by an industrialist, Joshua Proctor, who provided a sworn statement which Mrs Crowe included as a preface to her account. The property was only 40 years old when Proctor moved in during the spring of 1840, so it did not conform to the traditional idea of a house haunted by the spirits of previous owners. Moreover, Proctor was a devout Quaker, a God-fearing Christian not given to belief in spooks. And neither was Dr Edward Drury, a hardened sceptic and amateur ghostbuster who was the first on the scene when rumours of the haunting circulated around the region. It was Dr Drury who was to bring the facts to the attention of Mrs Crowe.

In July, Drury and his trusted friend Mr Hudson inquired if they could spend the night in the mill house in order to ‘unravel the mystery’, implying that they expected to expose a hoax. On meeting Mr Proctor they were immediately struck by his honesty and candour and so decided that they would not need the brace of loaded pistols with which they had intended to frighten the trickster. Proctor clearly believed that something was amiss and had even sent his family away so that the investigators could have a clear field.

At 11pm on the night of 3 July 1840, Dr Drury and his companion made themselves comfortable on a third floor landing outside the haunted room and settled down for an all-night vigil. At midnight they heard the sound of bare feet running across the floor, then knocking sounds as if someone was rapping with their knuckles on the bare boards. Other noises followed in quick succession – a hollow cough and a rustling – suggesting that a presence was making itself known. By 12.45 am, Dr Drury assumed that the show was over and was planning to retire to bed leaving Mr Hudson on the landing, but before he could do so Dr Drury saw a sight that was to haunt him for the rest of his life. A closet door swung open and ‘the figure of a female, attired in greyish garments, with the head inclining downwards, and one hand pressed upon the chest as if in pain’, stored slowly towards him. The spectre advanced towards Mr Hudson at which point the doctor found the courage to charge at it but he passed right through the apparition, knocking over his companion. Drury confesses that he recollected nothing for three hours afterwards and was assured by Hudson and Proctor that he was ‘carried down stairs in n agony of fear and terror’. The good doctor was so traumatized by his experience that he required 10 days to calm his nerves before writing his account. He ended it by stating that he had gone there as a devout disbeliever but had emerged convinced of the reality of the supernatural.

Not content with relying on Dr Drury’s account and Proctor’s verification, Mrs Crowe dug deeper, unearthing accounts of earlier and subsequent sightings at Willington Mill given by four other people, plus a local newspaper proprietor and a historian who discovered that ghosts had been seen in a house that had occupied the same site 200 years earlier. Mrs Crowe wrote:

‘The following more recent case of an apparition seen in the window of the same house from the outside, by four credible witnesses, who had the opportunity of scrutinising it for more than ten minutes, is given on most unquestionable authority. One of these witnesses is a young lady, a near connection of the family, who for obvious reasons, did not sleep in the house; another, a respectable man ... his daughter ... and his wife who first saw the object and called out the others to view it. The appearance presented was that of a bare-headed man in a flowing robe like a surplice, who glided backward and forward about three feet from the floor, or level with the bottom of the second story window seeming to enter the wall on each side and thus present a side view in passing. It then stood still in the window and a part of the body came through both the blind which was close down and the window, as its luminous body intercepted the framework of the window. It was semi-transparent and as bright as a star, diffusing a radiance all around. As it grew more dim it assumed a blue tinge and gradually faded away from the head downward. Had any magic lantern been used it could not possibly have escaped detection ...’

Fox Cottage was the family home of the Fox sisters, who started the Spiritualist movement in the mid-1900s

Mrs Crowe then travelled to Willington Mill to question the witnesses herself and found them to be entirely credible.

‘They spoke of the facts above detailed with the simple earnestness of people who had no doubts whatever on the subject.’

But although The Night Side of Nature can be credited with raising public awareness of paranormal phenomena and making a case for having the subject taken seriously, it was an event on the other side of the Atlantic which raised belief in the afterlife to such an extent that it became the foundation for a new religion – spiritualism.

THE FOX SISTERS

The event that led to the birth of the Spiritualist movement occurred in Hydesville, near Rochester, New York in the spring of 1848.

On 31 March, a Methodist farmer James Fox, his wife Margaret and their two daughters, Margaretta aged 14 and Kate aged 12, retired early in the hope of catching up on their sleep. They had suffered several disturbed nights due to noises which they assumed were caused by the wind rattling the shutters of their wooden frame house. But the wind was not to blame. Before coming to bed Mrs Fox tried the sashes to see if they were loose and was answered by bangs for which there was no obvious explanation. Puzzled, she put the children to bed then prepared to retire herself. The family all slept in the same room and so Mrs Fox was a witness to what happened next. The rapping noises began again. Kate reminded them all that the next day was April Fool’s Day and assumed that someone was playing a practical joke. She thought it might be fun to test them and challenged whoever was making the noises to copy her. She snapped her fingers and was immediately answered by the same number of raps. Then Margaret clapped and was answered in the same way. By now Mrs Fox was concerned as she knew that no one else but her husband could be in the house and he would not indulge in such frivolous games. She was also aware that a previous tenant had moved out after complaining of inexplicable noises. She later wrote:

‘I then thought I could put a test that no one in the place could answer. I asked the noise to rap my different children’s ages, successively. Instantly, each one of my children’s ages was given correctly, pausing between them sufficiently long to individualise them until the seventh [child], at which a longer pause was made, and then three more emphatic little raps were given corresponding to the age of the little one that died ...’

Mrs Fox kept her composure, but she was increasingly anxious. She asked out loud if it was a human being making the noises. There was no reply. ‘Is it a spirit?’ she asked. ‘If it is make two raps.’ She was answered emphatically with two bangs that shook the house. In later weeks, disbelievers accused the children of making the noises by cracking their joints but it is reported that anyone who had heard the loud reports which shook the walls that first night would have dismissed such explanations out of hand.

Emboldened by her ability to converse with the other side, she then asked if it was an ‘injured spirit’ to which she received two loud raps in reply. Using an impromptu code, Mrs Fox elicited the following information from the intruder. It was the spirit of a 31-year-old man who had been murdered in the house and had left behind a widow and five children. Mrs Fox obtained permission from the spirit to invite the neighbours in to witness their exchange, but many were too frightened to enter the bedroom. They waited outside while a hard-headed pragmatist by the name of William Duesler sat on the end of the bed and quizzed the spirit with more personal questions. Duesler’s cynicism melted the moment the bed vibrated in response to the strength of the rapping sounds.

Duesler managed to draw out more information including the fact that the murdered man was a peddler by the name of Charles Rome and that he had been killed five years earlier by a previous tenant of the house, a Mr Bell, for the $500 that he had saved and carried with him. Subsequent inquiries confirmed that a maid had been sent away on the evening a peddler had been invited to spend the night, and that when she returned the next morning the peddler had gone.

By Sunday, 2 April, rumours of what was taking place in the Fox family home were the topic of conversation around every breakfast and dinner table in the town. Hundreds of people converged on the house hoping to hear the raps and learn the latest news from the spirit world. Interest intensified when it was learnt that the murdered man had informed the family that his body had been buried in their cellar. Without delay James Fox and a number of men picked up picks and shovels and started digging up the dirt floor. The excavation had to be interrupted when they struck an underground stream, but a couple of months later the water had drained away and digging was resumed. Five feet down they struck a plank. Underneath they discovered human bone fragments and tufts of hair in a bed of quicklime.

Meanwhile, the previous owner, Mr Bell, had been traced to nearby Lyon, New York, but in anticipation of being accused of murder he had petitioned his neighbours to provide written testimony as to his good character. There was little that the law could do at this stage other than wait for more damning evidence to be unearthed – or for Mr Bell to be forced into making a confession by his conscience or by the persistent phantom. Curiously, the murdered man had predicted that his killer would never be brought to trial and it proved to be so.

But then, in November 1904, the cellar wall collapsed revealing the original wall behind it and between the two, a skeleton. Someone had evidently exhumed the body from its initial grave beneath the cellar floor and re-interred it behind a hastily built partition. The scene was reminiscent of a scene from Edgar Allan Poe. But who was the victim? Those who looked upon it were in no doubt, for next to the grisly find lay a peddler’s tin box.

THE BIRTH OF SPIRITUALISM

The Fox family were the first people to become national celebrities in the field of spiritualism, simply by being in the right place at the right time. Not surprisingly, there were those who resented the attention they had attracted, specifically the Church authorities who were suspicious of anyone claiming direct communication with the dead. Under pressure from the Church and puritan elements within the Rochester community, three separate committees were set up in the following months to investigate the phenomena. They subjected the children to strip searches and tests in which they tied their ankles together and made them stand on pillows to isolate them from the floor, but still the rappings continued. All three committees concluded that the children attracted the anomalous activity even if they were not the cause of it. When the children were absent from the house, nothing happened. To save them from becoming a freak show attraction they were separated by their parents and sent away to stay with relatives. Kate went to live with her older sister Leah in Rochester and Margaretta lived with her brother in Auburn. Yet still the noises continued.

However, before anyone could claim that this proved that the children had somehow manufactured the sounds, the spirits raised the stakes. Leah’s sceptical lodger, Calvin Brown, was pelted with objects by an invisible assailant while invisible hands prodded and pulled at guests in brother David’s boarding house. More incredibly, a 16-year-old girl, Harriet Bebee, who visited the boarding house was disturbed to discover that the spirits followed her home to plague her and her family in a similar fashion. The Fox family were finally forced to abandon their besieged home and move to Rochester, but to their dismay the spirits pursued them to their new house where the rappings persisted. Some were so loud that they could be heard at the other end of town.

Such an epidemic of poltergeist (‘noisy ghosts’) activity suggests that at least some of the phenomena might have been produced by the children themselves – teenage girls have subsequently been found to be the origin of much psychokinetic activity (physical phenomena caused by involuntary discharges of psychic energy) due to physiological changes at puberty – rather than by the sudden incursion of angry spirits into one region of the country. However, it seems some of the mischievous antics can only be explained in terms of spirits. One such identified himself through decoded communications with Kate as a dead relative by the name of Jacob Smith. The deceased were evidently keen to communicate, but were limited to creating loud reports and throwing objects across a room. Attempts were made to create a more sophisticated alphabetical code using different knocks to identify specific letters but any form of communication which relied on a crude form of Morse code was laborious and unreliable. A new and more direct way had to be found. The answer lay in allowing the spirits to take over the body of a willing individual so that the spirit could speak through their voice boxes or guide their hand to write a message from the world beyond. This development was foreseen by an anonymous spirit in a message dictated to Isaac Post, a visitor to the Fox home in 1849.

‘Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era; you must not try to conceal it any longer. God will protect you and good spirits will watch over you.’

A SURPLUS OF SPIRITS

Mediums were nothing new. Since prehistoric times shamans, witch doctors, holy men and priests had claimed to be able to commune with their ancestors and the gods. In some cases it is clear from the nature of their messages that they were expressing ideas from their own subconscious and that the gods from whom they channelled their laws and edicts could be seen to have been universal archetypes personifying aspects of their own psyche. Many however, appeared to be genuine channels for discarnate entities whose predictions and insights were later verified by subsequent events. But psychic sensitivity and its various manifestations – clairvoyance (‘clear seeing’), clairaudience (‘clear hearing’) and clairsentience (‘sensing an unseen presence’) – are not the exclusive preserve of ‘gifted’ mystics. Everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, has the ability to attune to the presence of spirits.

In the wake of the Fox sisters’ experience, hundreds of ordinary people across the United States and Europe began holding séances and many were shocked to discover that they too could produce loud reports and automatic writing, and move objects. More than 100 ‘mediums’ appeared in Rochester alone in a single year. Newspaper reporters across the country were run off their feet chasing stories of spectral manifestations and levitating tables. One journalist scooped his rivals when he learnt that the Fox sisters were not the first to have experienced such phenomena.

Two brothers and a sister named Davenport who lived in Buffalo, New York, had been disturbed by loud reports and vibrations in 1846, but they did not understand their significance until they attended a séance held by the Fox family four years later. During one of their own séances, Ira Davenport was told by a spirit to fire a pistol. In the flare of the discharge, witnesses swore they saw the ghostly figure of a man with his finger wrapped around the trigger. After the shot, the pistol was snatched out of Ira’s hand and it fell to the floor. The spectre, who identified himself as ‘John King’, subsequently entered the bodies of each of the brother and spoke through them for all in the room to hear.

Soon spirits across the country were performing all manner of ‘tricks’ for the amusement of spellbound onlookers: playing musical instruments, moving furniture, producing ectoplasm (a gelatinous substance drawn from the living essence of matter), manifesting objects in midair (apports) and even superimposing their faces on thatof the medium – a phenomenon known as transfiguration. If the disembodied had suddenlydiscovered a way to tear the veil between their world and this and were as excited and uninhibited as children who had just learned to ride a bike.

Spiritualism swiftly became a recognized religion. In spiritualist meetings a medium would deliver a sermon dictated from the spirit world and then pass on messages from the departed to the eager congregation. However, the more serious-minded members voiced concerns that nothing of a profound nature was ever communicated. The mysteries of life and death and the nature of the world beyond were rarely alluded to in anything other than the vaguest of terms. The spirits seemed preoccupied with mundane matters and ‘unfinished business’ on earth. It was if they were trapped in a limbo between the worlds, unable to move on so long as their loved ones refused to let them go. For the bereaved it was undoubtedly comforting to be given indisputable evidence of survival in the form of personal information that no one else but the deceased could have known, but for those seeking answers to life’s mysteries it was ultimately unsatisfying. Perhaps spiritualism wasn’t the breakthrough it had promised to be.

Needless to say, the Church was outraged and condemned all communication with the beyond as dabbling with the devil. As their pews emptied they took courage from the numerous accounts of fake mediums who had been exposed by the press and they vented their righteous indignation on those fraudsters who had preyed on the bereaved and the gullible. But despite the damage done to its reputation, the new movement continued to spread at a phenomenal rate. Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert declared themselves convinced after enjoying a table-turning (the manipulation of a table during a séance, attributed to spirits) session at one of their country retreats. While some treated a séance as nothing more than a fashionable new party game to amuse their dinner guests, and the scientific establishment dismissed the whole business on principle, there was also a sense that something significant had come to light. Perhaps science and religion no longer had all the answers.

THE HAUNTING OF CHARLES DICKENS

The Victorians were very fond of ghost stories and the most popular authors of the period relished competing with one another to see who could make their readers’ flesh creep the most. One of the era’s best-loved storytellers was Charles Dickens, though surprisingly the author of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and many supernatural short stories on ghosts was not a believer in the paranormal. In fact, Dickens was a hardened sceptic until he had a disquieting paranormal experience of his own.

In 1861, Dickens contributed a ghost story to the popular magazine All The Year Round which centred on an encounter between a portrait painter and a young lady in a railway carriage. During the journey, the story goes, the pale looking lady inquired as to whether the artist could paint a portrait from memory to which he replied that he probably could. When asked the reason for her question she responded, ‘Look at me again. You may have to take a likeness of me.’ Shortly afterwards they parted and the painter travelled on to his destination. Two years later, an elderly gentleman by the name of Wylde called on the artist and asked if he would accept a commission to paint a portrait of his daughter from a description as she was not available to sit for the portrait in person for she had died some time earlier. Puzzled but intrigued the artist agreed and began to sketch a young lady in accordance with Mr Wylde’s description. After several failed attempts to capture her likeness he was on the verge of giving up when in desperation he recalled the young woman whom he had met on the train and used her as his inspiration. ‘Instantly, a bright look of recognition and pleasure lighted up the father’s face,’ Dickens wrote, ‘and he exclaimed, “That is she!”’ In the course of conversation, the artist asked when the young lady had died and was told it was two years previously on September 13 – the very date the painter had met the pale young woman on the train.

Such twists were almost cliches even in Victorian fiction, but what makes this particular story significant is that it was to have a resonance in real life. Shortly after publication, Dickens received an irate letter from a painter who claimed that the story was not fiction, but fact. It had been his own personal experience which he had written down with the intention of submitting it for publication, but had delayed and he was now convinced that Dickens had heard his story somehow and copied it – even down to the date chosen for the girl’s death. The painter had told the story to his friends but had never mentioned the date until the time he wrote it all down. This is what particularly unnerved Dickens. He later wrote, ‘Now my [original] story had no date; but seeing when I looked over the proofs the great importance of having a date, I wrote in, unconsciously, the exact date on the margin of the proof!’

GHOST LIGHTS

Not all spirits appear in human form. Often entities will register on video film and photographs as moving lights. The following true story recorded by the Reverend Charles Jupp, warden of a Scottish orphanage, in 1878 is of great interest because it was seen by two witnesses both of whom found its presence reassuring.

‘As near as I can tell I fell asleep about 11 o’clock, and slept soundly for some time. I suddenly awoke without any apparent reason, and felt an impulse to turn round, my face being turned towards the wall, from the children. Before turning, I looked up and saw a soft light in the room. The gas was burning low in the hall, and the dormitory door being open, I thought it was probable that the light came from the source. It was soon evident, however, that such was not the case. I turned round, and then a wonderful vision met my gaze. Over the second bed from mine, and on the same side of the room, there was floating a small cloud of light, forming a halo the brightness of the moon on an ordinary moonlit night.

I sat upright in bed looking at this strange appearance, took up my watch and found the hands pointing at five minutes to one. Everything was quiet, and all the children sleeping soundly. In the bed, over which the light seemed to float, slept the youngest of the ... children mentioned above.

I asked myself, “Am I dreaming?” No! I was wide awake. I was seized with a strong impulse to rise and touch the substance, or whatever it might be (for it was about five feet high), and was getting up when something seemed to hold me back. I am certain I heard nothing, yet I felt and perfectly understood the words – “No, lie down, it won’t hurt you.” I at once did what I felt I was told to do. I fell asleep shortly afterwards and rose at half-past five, that being my usual time.

The Reverend Charles Jupp, outside the orphanage of which he was warden

At 6 ... I began dressing the children beginning at the bed farthest from the one in which I slept. Presently I came to the bed over which I had seen the light hovering. I took the little boy out, placed him on my knee, and put on some of his clothes. The child had been talking with the others; suddenly he was silent. And then, looking me hard in the face with an extraordinary expression, he said, “Oh Mr Jupp, my mother came to me last night. Did you see her?” For a moment I could not answer the child. I then thought it better to pass it off, and said, “Come, we must make haste, or we shall be late for breakfast.”’

The incident prayed on Jupp’s mind and perhaps it was guilt at not having reassured the child that later compelled him to write an account of that night for the orphanage magazine. When the child read it his expression changed and looking up at the Reverend he said, ‘Mr Jupp, that is me.’ Jupp answered, ‘Yes, that is what we saw.’ Satisfied that he had not dreamt it the child fell into deep thought, ‘evidently with pleasant remembrances, for he smiled so sweetly to himself,’ recalled Jupp, ‘and seemed to forget I was present.’

THE GHOST CLUB

It has been said that if two Englishmen found themselves marooned on a desert island, the first thing that they would do would be to form a club. In 1873, two eminent English academics did just that after finding themselves isolated on an island of doubt surrounded by a sea of certainty.

Professor Henry Sedgwick of Trinity College, Cambridge, had earlier resigned his fellowship because he no longer felt he could subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith central to the Church of England. He was later reinstated when the religious qualifications for the fellowship were rescinded, but his disillusionment was deep rooted and he no longer felt able to accept what the rest of Christian society accepted in blind faith. Inevitably, his adoring students began to side with their mentor, among them Frederick Myers, the son of a clergyman.

One crisp winter’s evening in 1869, Myers called on the professor and persuaded him to take a walk to discuss their reservations regarding religion. As they looked up at the stars Myers voiced his frustration with philosophy and idly asked if his companion had given any thought to the rise of spiritualism and if it might signify a breakthrough in man’s understanding of the universe. Sedgwick was doubtful but a seed had been planted that was later to grow into the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), an informal collective of intellectuals and the restlessly inquisitive formed by Myers and his former mentor. Its stated aim was to investigate all forms of paranormal phenomena in a strictly scientific manner and settle the matter once and for all. Its strength was that its members included sceptics as well as believers, among them two future prime ministers – Arthur Balfour and William Gladstone – the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, novelist Mark Twain, intellectual and critic John Ruskin and academic Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll). The SPR investigated more than 700 paranormal incidents from telepathy to out-of-body experiences which they compiled in an exhaustive 2,000 page study published in several volumes as Phantasms of the Living in 1886.

During the four years of intense research prior to publication, Myers, who is credited with coining the term telepathy, attended several séances without success until, one evening, as he sat in a circle with the medium Charles Williams, a disembodied hand materialized in midair. Such phenomena had been faked by other psychics who had resorted to paying an assistant to appear in a darkened room dressed in black with only their hand exposed. Fearing another fake, Myers had grasped the phantom hand and felt it grow steadily smaller until it disappeared altogether like a deflating balloon, only there was nothing in his fist when he unclenched it. Myers concluded, ‘Whatever else a “ghost” may be, it is probably the most complex phenomenon in nature ... Instead of describing a “ghost” as a dead person permitted to communicating with the living let us define it as a manifestation of persistent personal energy.’ It was Myers’ belief that phantoms were not physical in the sense that they were solid, but occupied a physical space in a fourth dimension.

A GHOSTLY INTRUDER

The following is typical of the type of ghost stories the society investigated. It is significant because it was one of the rare occasions when a ghost was heard to speak, and also was so solid as to cast a shadow. Its appearance was witnessed by two people and supported by their signed statements along with those of another couple to whom they had told their story shortly after it had happened.

A married couple, who chose to be identified in the report as Mr and Mrs P (but whose real identity and address are on file in the SPR archives), were in bed when Mrs P was startled to see a stranger standing at the foot of the bed. He was dressed in a naval officer’s uniform. She woke her husband who demanded to know what the man was doing in their bedroom at night. The officer simply spoke the husband’s name as if reproving him for being so readily offended and then turned about and walked through the facing wall.

Mrs P had assumed that it prefigured some disaster for her brother who was in the navy, but her husband recognized the intruder as his father who had died several years earlier. Shortly afterwards, Mr P fell ill and remained in a serious condition for several weeks. When he recovered he confessed to his wife that he had accumulated a considerable debt and was so desperate that he had been considering going into business with a disreputable character whom he now realized might have ruined him for certain. He had taken his father’s appearance and remonstration as a warning and was now determined to resolve his financial difficulties by himself.

CONCERN FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

After the Great War, paranormal research was almost exclusively pursued by elderly academics and matronly mediums, but in February 1932 two investigators from the SPR arrived in the English village of Ramsbury, Wiltshire, to investigate a local haunting only to discover that the local vicar had beaten them to the story.

The grandchildren of chimney sweep Samuel Bull had complained that they could not sleep because they were aware of a presence outside their damp and dilapidated cottage. The case is noteworthy because the whole family witnessed the apparition on several occasions and instinctively reacted to it without prompting from the others.

Bull had died the previous summer but on several occasions his ghost appeared in full view of the children, their mother, Mary Edwards and Samuel’s invalid wife, Jane, who lived with them. They saw him walking across the living room, up the stairs and through the closed door of the bedroom where he had died. At first they were all terrified, but they gradually became used to seeing the old man and were curiously reassured by his presence. He didn’t look like a ghost and it was clear that he was aware of their presence. On two occasions he put his hand on Jane’s head and spoke her name, but there was a sadness in his expression which the family assumed was his reaction to seeing them living in such squalid conditions. Shortly before the hauntings ceased Mrs Edwards received news that they were to be re-housed and thereafter the spectre of Samuel Bull appeared with a less troubled look on his face. When they moved he did not appear to them again.

SUICIDE SIGHTING

The SPR were scrupulous in their methods and, in an effort to satisfy their most hostile critics who were within their own ranks, subjected every case to the degree of scrutiny usually reserved for the natural sciences. Several of their members were distinguished physicists and guarded their reputations as staunchly as the clergy protected the sanctity of the Church. They were not interested simply in collecting ghost stories in the manner that amateur historians collected folklore. They were in search of incontrovertible evidence and that meant securing the written testimony of as many witnesses as possible. The following case is a prime example of the kind of incident they were keen to include.

One pleasant summer evening, a mother and her son were sitting in the back garden of their suburban house in Clapham, South London, when the young man exclaimed with surprise, ‘Look mother, there’s Ellen!’ Ellen was the elder of his two sisters and had been sent to Brighton on the south coast by her parents to cool her heels after she had been forbidden to see an unsuitable suitor. The young lady was at the far end of the lawn walking toward the garden gate which led to the fields beyond. Fearing that her father might see her before she had a chance to explain her daughter’s unexpected return, the mother asked her son to go after Ellen and bring her back to the house. ‘I can’t run after her,’ he reminded her. He had sprained his ankle earlier that day. ‘You’ll have to send Mary.’ So the mother called her younger daughter from the house and told her to run after Ellen and bring her back before her father saw her. They would send her back to Brighton in the morning without him knowing anything about it and so they would avoid an unpleasant scene.

Mary ran across the lawn and through the gate calling her sister’s name, but Ellen did not respond. She continued to walk down a path across the fields leading away from the house, her black cloak billowing in the breeze. ‘Ellen, where are you going?’ asked Mary as she finally caught up with her sister. Then, as she grasped her sister’s arm, she found her hand passing right through the apparently solid figure as through a mist. When she had collected herself, she walked back in a daze to where her mother and brother were waiting and told them what she had seen and that she feared the worse. The next day the family learnt that Ellen had thrown herself into the sea and drowned at the very hour that she had appeared to them in the garden.

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

One of the most famous and convincing accounts of survival after death preserved in the SPR archives described an occurrence on the other side of the Atlantic in 1885. An American farmer, Michael Conley of Chicasaw County, died of natural causes at an old people’s home and was stripped of his filthy work clothes at the Dubuque County morgue. When his daughter was informed of his death she fainted, but when she recovered consciousness she claimed that her father had appeared to her and told her to recover a roll of dollar bills he had sewn into the lining of his grey shirt. Remarkably, she was able to describe the clothes he had been wearing at the time of his death, even down to the fact that he had wrapped the money in a square of red cloth torn from one of her old dresses. No one believed her, attributing her ‘delusion’ to grief, but to calm her down they decided to humour her by fetching the clothes from Dubuque and allowing her to examine them. In the lining of the grey shirt, wrapped in a patch of red cloth, they found the money just as the daughter had said they would.

A similar incident was recorded 40 years later by the American branch of the SPR. In Davie County, North Carolina, James Chaffin, a farmer’s son, dreamt that his dead father appeared at his bedside and urged the boy to look for his missing will in the pocket of the overcoat that he was wearing in the dream. When James awoke he was puzzled as the farm had been left to the elder of his three brothers, Marshall Chaffin, according to the terms of the one and only will that the family had been aware of. Besides, the old man had been dead for four years. Why had he appeared now when the matter had long been settled? His curiosity aroused, James visited his mother and asked about the coat. She told him that it had been given to his brother John. John dutifully handed it over and was witness to what happened next. James tore open the lining of the inside pocket and inside found a message in his father’s handwriting. It said, ‘Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddy’s old Bible.’

Returning to his mother’s house James found the family Bible and exactly at the place indicated they found the missing will. It had been written after the one that had left the farm to Marshall and expressed the father’s wish that the land be divided equally between his widow and the four boys. Initially, Marshall was inclined to contest it, but backed down when 10 witnesses testified that it was in the old man’s own handwriting.

When the case came to the attention of the SPR, they hired a lawyer to investigate it and he concluded that all the facts were correct. Old man Chaffin had chosen the 27th chapter of Genesis to make a point. It described how Jacob deceived his blind father Isaac into giving him what rightly belonged to his brother Esau. Unfortunately, the family were not habitual Bible readers and so the father was forced to make a belated appearance in order to ensure his last wish was respected.

A DISPIRITING RESPONSE

Phantasms of the Living presented a formidable accumulation of similar cases to convince many hardened sceptics. Although the general public was deterred from reading it by the mass of witness testimony and dry scholarly discussions regarding the validity of the evidence, several devout sceptics were converted. Professor James Hyslop, who was disliked by his fellow SPR members for his entrenched cynicism, felt compelled to urge other sceptics to admit defeat.

‘I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward.’

Nevertheless, the scientific establishment was unimpressed. It was not that they did not accept the evidence, but rather that they lost interest in phenomena since apparitions and apports did not add to their understanding of the inner workings of nature. As the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne observed after having compiled convincing evidence purporting to prove the existence of the paranormal:

‘These soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them ... they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities: and yet I cannot force my mind to interest itself in them.’

And this attitude has been the bane of believers ever since. Phenomena in themselves tell us nothing about the nature of the universe or human potential. No amount of table-turning, inexplicable rapping sounds or phantom materializations add to our understanding, only to the catalogue of anomalies. In the end a person either believes in ghosts or they do not. Those who were inclined to disbelieve may have been converted by the wealth of experiential evidence, but unless they had been disillusioned with their religion and felt fired up by spiritualism they might be inclined to say, ‘All right, ghosts exist, but so what? What does it all mean?’

TIME-DELAYED PROOF

The fact that Phantasms of the Living was not a bestseller did not dampen SPR members’ enthusiasm, nor lessen their conviction that they were on the threshold of a new world and they were braced for a radical new understanding of the universe. The first study was only ‘the foundation stone’, as Myers liked to call it. A second study was hastily commissioned under the title Census of Hallucinations and attracted an astonishing 17,000 replies from individuals as far apart as Russia and Brazil. It appeared that the SPR had breached a dam. Paranormal experiences were more common than even the SPR had imagined, but many people had felt unable to admit to having had such experiences. Now the SPR and the spiritualists made it socially acceptable to talk about such things. Again, the most persuasive evidence was the cases confirmed by several witnesses. The following incident must rank as one of the most convincing cases ever recorded.

On the night of 3 January 1856, a New Jersey housewife, Mrs Anne Collye, awoke to see her son Joseph standing in the doorway of her bedroom in a dreadful state. He had severe head injuries which had been hastily wrapped in bandages and he was wearing a soiled white nightshirt. A moment later he vanished. Her family comforted Mrs Collye as best they could, reminding her that Joseph was 1,000 miles away in command of a Mississippi steamboat and that it must have been a nightmare brought on by worry. However, Mrs Collye protested that she had been wide awake. It wasn’t until two weeks later that the family learned that Joseph had been killed in a collision with another boat. The mast on his vessel had fallen, splitting his skull on the very night she had seen her son standing in the doorway. When Joseph’s brother viewed the body, he found it still wrapped in the soiled white nightshirt Joseph had been wearing when called from his cabin in the middle of the night to attend to the disaster. Fortunately for the SPR, Mrs Collye had described her experience to her husband and four daughters the next morning, a full two weeks before news reached them of the tragedy.

FRAUDS AND FAKES

Sadly, the society’s efforts to bring such evidence to the attention of the scientific establishment were fatally undermined by several well-publicized scandals involving fake mediums. These occurred just prior to, and in the years immediately after, publication of Census of Hallucinations and consequently public ardour towards spiritualism was dampened and the sceptics had further cause to doubt. Several SPR members were duped by hoaxers who exploited their eagerness to believe, leaving the reputation of the society irreparably damaged by the turn of the century. The episode gave rise to the saying, ‘for those who believe, no proof is necessary; for those who doubt, no proof is enough.’

Though their pride had been punctured SPR members continued to pursue their investigations independently, producing some of the most significant and influential studies of the period. Sir Oliver Lodge, twice president of the SPR, recorded his communications with his dead son Raymond in a bestselling book of the same name. Raymond had been killed at Ypres in August 1915 and Sir Oliver required incontestable evidence that his son’s spirit survived his physical death. He received it in a remarkable way.

Sir Oliver’s wife, Lady Lodge, was eventually persuaded to attend a séance presided over by a medium who did not know her by name and who was unaware of her situation. During the evening the medium, Mrs Leonard, declared that she had a message from a young man named Raymond who had recently passed over and that he had met several of his father’s friends including a man named Myers. Frederick Myers had died in 1901 and Phantasms of the Living had been published posthumously.

‘Raymond’ reappeared at a second séance held by a male medium, Vout Peters, during which he referred to a recent photograph in which Raymond was shown with a group of friends holding a walking stick. Raymond’s parents did not possess such a photograph so Sir Oliver took the opportunity to raise the subject with Mrs Leonard on a subsequent visit. He was told that it had been taken outdoors and showed a comrade leaning on Raymond for support. A few days later a photograph arrived in the post from the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers. She had known nothing of the séances, but had sent the photo to Lady Lodge because she had just learnt of Raymond’s death. She realized that it must have been the last photo taken of her son. It showed Raymond sitting in the front row with a walking stick by his side and another officer standing behind, leaning on his shoulders.

SPECTRAL SOLDIERS

During the First World War, both the Germans and the Allies reported several sightings of spectral soldiers who intervened to save the lives of their comrades. The most famous was the legendary ‘Angels of Mons’, which may have been the creation of the English novelist Arthur Maachen. However, the following story is generally considered to be authentic. It appeared in the August 1919 issue of the popular Pearson’s Magazine and was credited to Captain W.E. Newcome.

‘It was in September, 1916, that the 2nd Suffolks left Loos to go up into the northern sector of Albert. I accompanied them, and whilst in the front line trenches of that sector I, with others, witnessed one of the most remarkable occurrences of the war.

About the end of October, up to November 5th, we were actually holding that part of the line with very few troops. On November 1st the Germans made a very determined attack, doing their utmost to break through. I had occasion to go down to the reserve line, and during my absence the German attack began.

I hurried back to my company with all speed, and arrived in time to give a helping hand in throwing the enemy back to his own line. He never gained a footing in our trenches. The assault was sharp and short, and we had settled down to watch and wait again for his next attack.

We had not long to wait, for we soon saw Germans again coming over No Man’s Land in massed waves; but before they reached our wire a white, spiritual figure of a soldier rose from a shell-hole, or out of the ground about one hundred yards on our left, just in front of our wire and between the first line of Germans and ourselves. The spectral figure then slowly walked along our front for a distance of about one thousand yards. Its outline suggested to my mind that of an old pre-war officer, for it appeared to be in a shell coat, with field-service cap on its head. It looked, first, across at the oncoming Germans, then turned its head away and commence d to walk slowly outside our wire along the sector that we were holding.

Our SOS signal had been answered by our artillery. Shells and bullets were whistling across No Man’s Land ... but none in anyway impeded the spectre’s progress. It steadily marched from the left of us till it got to the extreme right of the sector, then it turned its face right full on to us. It seemed to look up and down our trench, and as each Véry light [flare] rose it stood out more prominently. After a brief survey of us it turned sharply to the right and made a bee-line for the German trenches. The Germans scattered back ... and no more was seen of them that night.

The Angels of Mons seemed to be the first thought of the men; then some said it looked like Lord Kitchener, and others said its face, when turned full on to us, was not unlike Lord Roberts. I know that it gave me personally a great shock, and for some time it was the talk of the company. Its appearance can be vouched for by sergeants and men of my section.’

Later in the same article, another officer, William M. Speight, describes seeing the phantom figure in his dug-out that night. The next evening Speight invited another officer to serve as a witness in the hope that the vision might make another appearance. The dead officer duly appeared, pointed to a spot on the floor of the dug-out, then vanished. Intrigued and somewhat superstitious, Speight ordered a hole to be dug at the spot. To the amazement of Speight and the whole company, the sappers unearthed a narrow tunnel that had been excavated by the Germans, primed with mines timed to explode 13 hours later. The timers and explosives were excavated safely and destroyed.

From the numerous accounts of spectral soldiers on file it would seem that fighting men take such sightings in their stride. No doubt frayed nerves, fatigue and the proximity of death play their part in lowering the threshold of awareness which protects ordinary people from glimpsing the world beyond. In his memoirs of the First World War, the English poet Robert Graves recalled a sighting which produced only mild curiosity, rather than fear, at the time.

‘I saw a ghost at Bethune. He was a man called Private Challoner who had been at Lancaster with me and again in F Company at Wrexham. When he went out with a draft to join the First Battalion, he shook my hand and said: “I’ll meet you again in France, sir.” He was killed at Festubert in May and in June he passed by our C Company billet where we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from Cuinchy ... Challoner looked in at the window, saluted and passed on. There was no mistaking him or the cap badge he was wearing. There was no Royal Welch battalion billeted within miles of Bethune at the time. I jumped up and looked out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag end smoking on the pavement. Ghosts were numerous in France at the time.’

Years later Graves was asked what he thought ghosts might be and he elaborated in the same dispassionate manner.

‘I think that one should accept ghosts very much as one accepts fire – a common but equally mysterious phenomenon. What is fire? It is not really an element, not a principle of motion, not a living creature – not even a disease, though a house can catch it from its neighbours. It is an event rather than a thing or a creature. Ghosts, similarly, seem to be events rather than things or creatures.’

A ‘STRANGE MEETING’

One of the finest poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen – who is perhaps best remembered for his atmospheric verse ‘Strange Meeting’ in which a German and a British soldier encounter each other in the underworld – was killed just one week before the Armistice was declared. On the day the guns finally fell silent, his brother Harold, a naval officer, was overwhelmed by a feeling of apprehension and was later ‘visited’ in his cabin by Wilfred’s spirit. Harold’s reaction to the presence of his brother contrasts with the fears of fictional characters who are confronted by unquiet spirits and for that reason his experience is strangely comforting. Harold was unaware of his brother’s death at the time of their strange meeting.

‘I had gone down to my cabin thinking to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside and to my amazement I saw Wilfred sitting in my chair. I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from my face. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin – all my limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: “Wilfred how did you get here?” He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and endearing dark smile. I felt no fear – I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. I spoke again, “Wilfred dear, how can you be here, it is just not possible ...” But still he did not speak but only smiled his most gentle smile. This not speaking did not now as it had done at first seem strange or even unnatural; it was not only in some inexplicable way perfectly natural but radiated a quality which made his presence with me undeniably right and in no way out of the ordinary. I loved having him there: I could not and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was sufficient. I could not question anything, the meeting in itself was complete and strangely perfect. He was in uniform and I remember thinking how out of place the khaki looked among the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty ...

The war poet Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), who was killed just a few days before Armistice Day

I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these an overpowering sense of emptiness and absolute loss ... I wondered if I had been dreaming but looking down I saw that I was still standing. Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep and oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.’

THE CONVERSION OF CONAN DOYLE

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, became an enthusiastic advocate of spiritualism in the early days of the First World War. This was much to the dismay of his closest friends and most ardent admirers, among them King George V, Prime Minister Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. They were appalled that the man who had created the very embodiment of deductive reasoning should dabble with the specious world of spirits. They suspected it was due to his inability to cope with the death of his son Kingsley who had been killed in France, and his father, but Doyle’s enthusiasm for the new fad had been awakened by a remarkable personal experience.

The author and his wife had been nursing a young lady, Lily Loder-Symonds, who was in poor health and spent much of her time practising automatic writing. Doyle was fascinated but had attributed the messages to the action of Lily’s subconscious mind until one morning, in May 1915, she declared in some agitation that she had received a warning of impending disaster. ‘It is terrible. Terrible. And will have a great influence on the war.’ Later that day there came news that the transatlantic liner the Lusitania had been sunk by a German submarine with the loss of more than a 1,000 lives, 128 of them American. It was the turning point of the war. Americans were outraged and shortly after entered the war on the side of the Allies. Germany’s fate was sealed.

Doyle began to take an active interest in ‘spirit messages’ after this and received what he considered to be incontrovertible proof of the soul’s survival after death. It came in the form of a ‘conversation’ with his dead brother-in-law, Malcolm Leckie, who had been killed at Mons in April 1915. Doyle was stunned to witness Lily writing in Malcolm’s unmistakable hand and struck up a dialogue during which he asked probing personal questions which only his brother-in-law could have known, relating to details of a private conversation which they had just before Malcolm returned to the front. Doyle had not even confided the gist of the conversation to his wife so Lily could not have learned about it from her hostess.

Doyle’s interest in the paranormal intensified as he investigated the phenomenon and brought his conversion from agnostic to ardent believer to public attention. He became an active member of the Society for Psychical Research and attended many seances including one at which he heard the voice of his son and saw the revenants of his mother and nephew – an event witnessed by two independent observers. Galvanized by the experience, he embarked on a worldwide lecture tour to promote the cause to which he was now wholeheartedly committed. This was against the advice of his more sceptical friends and much to the derision of his less sympathetic readers. His own spirit photographs were pored over by fellow enthusiasts but were dismissed out of hand by critics who saw him as a credulous old fool taken in by fraudulent mediums.

Doyle shared the belief at the core of the spiritualist creed that the soul is an etheric blueprint of the body and that this explained why discarnate spirits assumed human form. In The Vital Message, he wrote:

‘The physical basis of all psychic belief, is that the soul is a complete duplicate of the body, resembling it in the smallest particular, although constructed of some far more tenuous material. In ordinary conditions these two bodies are intermingled so that the identity of the finer one is entirely obscured. At death, however, and under certain conditions in the course of life, the two can divide and be seen separately.’

In 1926, he published The History of Spiritualism, the result of more than 10 years’ research into the subject. The book made a convincing case for the existence of psychic phenomena while acknowledging that there were many fake mediums who had no scruples about fleecing the unwary. During the latter years of his life, Doyle befriended the illusionist Harry Houdini who was incensed by the crude parlour tricks employed by fake mediums and he was intent on exposing them. He and Doyle made an odd but amiable partnership -each with his own agenda – as they attended séances around the country. Ironically, they eventually fell out over Doyle’s insistence on crediting Houdini’s miraculous escapes to the illusionist’s unconscious paranormal abilities, a theory he expounded in The Edge of the Unknown.

Ultimately, Doyle’s credibility took a fatal blow after it was revealed that the Cottingley fairy photographs which he had publicly and enthusiastically declared to be genuine were in fact fakes, but his faith in the afterlife remained unshakable until his death in 1930.

THE PHANTOM FAYRE

In October 1916, Edith Olivier turned off the main road to Swindon in Wiltshire, in search of a public house in which she could spend the night. It was beginning to rain and she was in no hurry to reach her destination. As she peered through the darkness she saw ahead of her the imposing black monoliths which lined the road to the megalithic stone circle at Avebury. Despite the drizzle she was keen to see the site which at the time was rumoured to have been the scene of bacchanalian rituals in pagan times.

She stopped the car at the end of a long dirt road and climbed a small mound to get a better view. From here she could see a cluster of cottages in the middle of the circle and what appeared to be a village fayre in progress. From the sound of the laughter and the applause which greeted the fire eaters, acrobats and jugglers, the villagers were clearly enjoying themselves, undaunted by the weather. But then she noticed something peculiar. The fiery torches they carried were undimmed by the rain and not a single man, woman or child wore a raincoat nor carried an umbrella. It was as if they walked between the raindrops, indifferent to the drizzle which by now was becoming a steady downpour.

It was nine years before Edith visited the site again. On this occasion she was part of a guided tour and she took the first opportunity to ask the guide about the fayre. He confirmed that the villagers had held an annual fayre on the site, but the custom had stopped in 1850. It was then that Edith realized that the road approaching the mound she had stood upon was no longer there. No trace of it remained. The guide agreed that there had been a long dirt road leading to the site in former times, but it had vanished from all maps made after 1800.

MASS MATERIALIZATIONS

While some apparitions appear to be those of earth-bound spirits, this explanation cannot account for the many sightings of phantom armies or groups such as the revellers seen by Edith Oliver at Avebury. The conventional theory is that such souls are unaware that they are dead and so continue to relive the drama of their last hours as if trapped in a recurring dream. While this may be true of certain stubbornly persistent personalities, it seems unlikely that hundreds of individual souls would reconvene on the anniversary of their death to relive such an event. What would have compelled the country folk of Avebury, for example, to relive their night at the fayre if there was no tragedy that had entrapped them? It seems more likely that sightings involving a group are an echo across time which can be picked up by anyone possessing heightened perception. In short, the phantoms are not fighting their battles again, the witness is simply tuning into it in their mind and the stronger the emotional residue, the easier it is for one or more people to tune into it. If all phantom battles were genuine collective hauntings, most of Europe would echo to ghostly gunfire from dusk to dawn. Why, then, is one battlefield or village the setting for a spectral restaging and not another? Is it because the phantoms are mere ripples in the ether?

The best known example of a mass re-imagining is the phantom battle of Edgehill which was originally fought on 23 October 1642 between the Royalist Army of King Charles I and the Parliamentary Army commanded by Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. So violent was the clash that the ripples were seen and heard by the locals on consecutive weekends two months later.

Naturally, the king was perturbed when he heard rumours that his defeat was being replayed with the same ignominious result so he despatched three of his most loyal officers to see if there was any truth in the tales. They returned ashen faced to report that not only had they witnessed the re-enactment but that they had recognized several of their friends who had been killed on that day, as well as the king’s nephew Prince Rupert who had survived.

It is tempting to dismiss such tales as the stuff of a more superstitious age, but such phenomena continue to be reported in more modern times. Two English women, holidaying in Dieppe, swore that they heard the sounds of a modern battle just before dawn on the morning of 4 August 1951. The sound of Stuka dive bombers, artillery shells and even the distinctive sound of landing craft hitting the beach was so loud they thought the French army were carrying out a training exercise or perhaps someone was making a war movie. But when they threw open the shutters of their hotel room they saw only empty streets. It was then that they remembered the significance of the date. On the same day nine years previously, a disastrous commando raid cost the lives of almost 1,000 Canadian soldiers.

CHAPTER 2

The night side of nature