One evening in the early 1950s, a young drama student named Bill Slater, later to become head of BBC Television drama, attended a party that turned into an impromptu séance. Most of the guests sat around a circular table, with an inverted glass in the middle and the letters of the alphabet arranged around it. A few people laid their index fingers gently on the glass, and it proceeded to move quickly from letter to letter, spelling out the answers to questions. Bill Slater found it fascinating but was unwilling to accept it as anything more than a party game. He made some facetious remarks which the glass seemed to resent. When it was asked if there was anyone present it would prefer to have leave, it shot unambiguously towards Slater. He had no objection—he was getting bored anyway—and went off to flirt with a pretty girl.
In the early hours of the morning, he returned to the room where he was staying with a fellow drama student; they talked for a while, then retired to bed. Slater explained to me in a letter describing the incident that two hours later:
I found myself half-awake, knowing there was some kind of presence massing itself on my chest; it was, to my certain knowledge, making every effort to take over my mind and body. It cost me considerable will-power to concentrate all my faculties to push the thing away, and for what seemed like twenty minutes this spiritual tussle went on between this awful presence and myself. Needless to say, although before going to bed I had felt perfectly happy and at ease with a very good friend, in a flat I knew well, I was now absolutely terrified—I have never known such fear since. I was finally able to call my friend’s name; he woke up, put on the light, and was astonished to find me well-nigh a gibbering idiot.
I have never since had any psychic experience.
I cite this incident, not because it happens to be one of the more startling tales of possession (or attempted possession), but simply because I know Slater well and regard him as totally honest. Oddly enough, he seems to regard his friend Bob—a mystical Celt who later became abbot of a monastery—as somehow responsible for causing the alarming visitation. ‘I am sure, to this day, that Bob had somehow brought that force into the room.’ One would have thought that a more obvious assumption was that the offended spirit from the party had come to teach him a lesson.
We have seen how cunningly the subconscious mind can simulate possession by an ‘evil spirit’. But Bill Slater strikes me as sturdily normal. It is possible, of course, that he dreamed the whole thing; but he is certain that he lay there, trying to prevent the spirit from taking him over, for a good twenty minutes.
There is another possibility: that some person at the party was infuriated by his flippancy and directed a beam of ill-will at him. No one with any acquaintance with witchcraft would deny that this could happen. I quote from a letter from a correspondent at St Leonards on Sea:
Some years ago my husband was treated very badly by the man he worked for. We had been to his house, and I knew the room where he slept. This night I was feeling a lot of anger and hate, and felt myself concentrating very hard on the side of the bed which I thought he would be sleeping on; I was sticking pins into his stomach slowly, one by one. I heard the next morning that his wife had been taken to hospital during the early hours of that morning in terrible pain. They thought it was gall-stones, but the tests showed nothing wrong. Did I do that, do you think? I know I felt drained the next morning because I had concentrated so much …
The Reverend Donald Omand, author of Experiences of a Present Day Exorcist, has no doubt that concentrated ill-will can have a maleficent effect and also states his belief that when a worker is ‘sent to Coventry’1 by his colleagues, the concentrated dislike of so many minds can actually cause psychological damage. But it is hard to square this with Bill Slater’s experience, which involved a sense of an active entity, not some vaguely defined feeling of ill-will.
Mankind has always been inclined to believe in the existence of objective forces of evil. This may indeed be the main reason for our modern scepticism about the occult. Almost every important work on magic contains endless lists of demons, with details of how each might be invoked or dismissed. Even a work as late as Barrett’s The Magus (1801) explains that there are nine different varieties of demons, ranging from Vessels of Iniquity, who invented cards and dice, to the Ensnarers who dwell in every man. Nowadays we know that ‘devils’ tend to be the gods of overthrown religions. Baal, the god of the Canaanites, became the Christian demon Beelzebub. Even the word devil is derived from the Hindu deva, a shining one or angel. We also recognise that the ‘devils’ that possessed the nuns of Loudun and Aix-en-Provence were merely the expression of the violent desires aroused by their unfortunate Father Confessors, Urbain Grandier and Louis Gaufridi, who paid for their sexual magnetism at the stake.2 Understandably, therefore, we are sceptical about the objective existence of powers of evil.
But the determination to reduce all problems to their psychological components may have caused us to swing too far in the opposite direction. The easiest way of illustrating this may be to cite a personal experience. In 1966, I picked up a copy of the selected works of the Marquis de Sade at the airport of a small American town where I was due to lecture; I read a few pages in my hotel room that night before falling asleep. I was already familiar with de Sade’s work and inclined to regard him as a boring fool who made a mess of his life. He seems to have been a nasty, spoilt little man, but as far as we know, his worst cruelties were confined to his imagination. In the early hours of the morning, I woke up from an appalling nightmare about de Sade; he had committed some horrible atrocity in the hotel, then come into my room holding a bloodstained knife. As I woke up, I had a strong sense that this was not entirely a dream. The feeling of menace in the room was so powerful that I got out of bed and looked in the bathroom, then out into the corridor, which was empty. When I got back into bed, the feeling of evil had disappeared. My subconscious mind obviously took a more serious view of de Sade than my waking intellect.
The point is an important one. De Sade’s works are cruel to the point of insanity, but the intellect can place them in perspective, regarding him as sick rather than wicked. We achieve this detachment by seeing them, as it were, through de Sade’s eyes. But cruelty takes place in the real world and involves terrified victims. And even imaginary cruelty has an unpleasant power to propagate itself. Two centuries after de Sade, the so-called ‘Moors murderers’, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, were inspired by his works to torture and murder children. There are few viruses that are infectious at the end of two hundred years.
Rationalists are inclined to argue that it is the crime itself that is evil—or socially undesirable—not the person who commits it. If a tree falls down in a storm and kills a passing pedestrian, nobody ‘blames’ the tree. In the same way, many murderers seem only partially responsible for their crimes. In a recent case in Germany, the killer not only murdered and raped more than a dozen children, but also carried away parts of their bodies, presumably to eat. In the public imagination, he became a figure of pure evil. When finally arrested, Joachim Kroll—a public toilet attendant—proved to be something of an anticlimax; he was a mild, absent-minded little man who was unable to recall most of his victims. He was convinced that, after medical treatment, he would be allowed to return home. When the police burst into his room, a hand of his latest victim, a five-year-old girl, was being boiled in a stew with carrots; Kroll regarded his taste for eating small girls as unusual but not reprehensible.
The Middle Ages also recognised this frequent disparity between the crime and the criminal, but they regarded it as a proof of the objective existence of evil. If the crime is more evil than the individual who committed it, then it seems to follow that evil has an independent existence. In the mid 1920s, the ‘Reverend’ Montague Summers acquired a certain notoriety by setting himself up as an advocate of the same view and using it as the basis for his books on witches, vampires and werewolves. But he based his argument on an observation that was later confirmed by Lethbridge: tragic events seem to be able to ‘imprint’ themselves on physical objects.
He cites the case3 of a Devon craftsman, who married at the age of twenty-five and moved into a coastal cottage. Two weeks after the honeymoon, the husband returned home completely drunk; his wife was horrified, since he had a reputation as a sober and reliable workman. The next day he was miserable and penitent, swearing never to drink another drop. A month later it happened again. When he came home drunk a third time, the wife consulted a ‘wise woman’, who came to the house, pointed to a wooden armchair, and advised the girl to burn it. It had been given to them as a wedding present. When the chair was burned, the trouble stopped immediately. Investigation of the chair’s history revealed that it belonged to a drunken butcher who had committed suicide while sitting in it.
Another case is reported by Dr Robert Morris, a psychologist affiliated with the Psychical Research Foundation of Durham, North Carolina. A rat, a cat, a dog and a rattlesnake were taken to a haunted house in Kentucky; the two reputedly haunted rooms were ones in which violent deaths had occurred. The dog was taken into one of the rooms, snarled, and backed out; no cajoling could persuade it to re-enter. The cat was carried in its owner’s arms; it leapt onto his shoulders, digging in its claws, and spat at the empty chair in the corner. The rat showed no reaction at all, sniffing around the room. But the rattlesnake instantly assumed an attack posture in the direction of the empty chair. None of the creatures showed any reaction when taken into rooms where no tragedy had occurred.4
In his book Design for Destiny, Edward Russell calls these imprints or recordings ‘T-fields’ (or thought-fields). He writes: ‘One of the commonest forms of the [phenomenon] are the thoughts of horror or despair imprinted on the structure of a building in which some murder or tragedy has taken place. These powerful thoughts seem to saturate the building materials and to last indefinitely.’ He mentions an observation made by the psychic Geraldine Cummins: if two letters are kept together for a time, the psychic field from the letter from the stronger personality will tend to imprint itself on the other in the same way that a magnetic tape can ‘print through’ and cause pre-echo effects. Russell also adds the interesting observation that this is the basis of the ancient custom of blessing material objects or putting curses on them.
There is a great deal of documentation on ‘curses’, and on objects that carry bad luck. One of the most striking cases is the subject of a chapter in Together We Wandered, by C. J. Lambert, who, with his wife Marie, was actually involved. In 1928, the Lamberts saw the statuette of Ho-tei, the Japanese god of Good Luck, in a junk shop in Kobe, Japan. It was made of ivory, yet the owner of the shop charged them less than five shillings for it. En route to Manilla the next day, Mrs Lambert began to suffer agonies of toothache which lasted until they arrived two weeks later. On the next lap of the sea voyage to Australia, Ho-tei was somehow transferred to Mr Lambert’s luggage; he now suffered the toothache all the way to Brisbane. In Sydney, when the luggage was in bond, the toothache stopped; back in their cabin, it started again. When the luggage was transferred to the hold, it stopped. In America, they gave the statuette to Lambert’s mother; when her teeth began to ache a few hours later, she gave it back. And now, for the first time, the Lamberts thought about their months of intermittent agony, and realised that the statuette might be to blame. It was made of the base of an elephant’s tusk, and there was a tiny hole in the bottom where its nerve had ended. So in London, the Lamberts took Ho-tei to a Japanese art shop and described their problems. An art expert explained that it had probably come from a temple, and that such gods are sometimes given ‘souls’, in the form of small medallions hidden inside them. An ivory plug in the base of the figure suggested that this was so in this case. Ho-tei was placed in a tiny shrine in the shop, and the Lamberts saw the last of it.
If we can accept this story—and it is difficult to see why a middle-aged couple would invent it, and insert it in the middle of a book about their travels around the world—it raises some interesting questions. The most obvious is that the explanation about the ‘soul’ inside the statuette seems superfluous. If it was originally an elephant’s tusk and still had the nerve-hole in the base, is it not conceivable that the Lamberts were experiencing some kind of reflection of the elephant’s death agony? Perhaps the tusk was removed while it was still alive? Perhaps the ‘T-field’ of its pain and terror clung around the tusk, and the suggestions of pain conveyed itself via the subconscious mind of its owners, manifesting itself as toothache.
But this fails to explain the oddest part of the story: the pain affected only the ‘owner’. When it was in Mrs Lambert’s luggage, she had the pain; when transferred to her husband’s bags, he felt it; when given to his mother, she suffered. And when its owner was not in the immediate vicinity, the toothache ceased, as though there were some limitation on distance. It is almost impossible to account for this apparent ability to ‘choose’ its victim except by assuming some kind of intelligent entity. We can try other ways around the difficulty—for example, supposing that the negative T-field ‘tuned in’ through the possession it was in contact with, so that when it was in Mrs Lambert’s baggage it ‘fixed’ on her. But how did it know when its ownership was transferred to his mother, unless she put it in a drawer full of her clothes. (But surely the logical place would be the mantelpiece—a fairly neutral situation.) And why did the mother’s toothache cease as soon as she gave it back?
The ‘soul’ hypothesis at least offers a semblance of explanation. Tibetans believe that an object can be ‘animated’ by the thoughts of living people. If the figure was originally worshipped in a shrine, it might well acquire something like a living aura. But even this hypothesis involves some highly ‘unscientific’ assumptions: either that life can be transferred to material objects, or that disembodied ‘spirits’ can enter them.
How do we explain the notion that certain ships are unlucky, which every experienced sailor takes for granted? Conrad’s story The Brute dramatises the belief, but there have been innumerable real-life examples. A whole book has been devoted to the astonishing story of the Great Eastern, the most ambitious project of the great nineteenth-century engineer Brunel.5 At 19,000 tons, it was the world’s largest ship. Misfortunes began when a riveter and his boy apprentice disappeared during its construction. In June 1859, as it was about to be launched, Brunel realised that the splash might drown spectators and ordered a halt; the ship became stuck in the runway and took three months to free. When it was finally launched, Brunel collapsed on the deck with a stroke and died a week later.
From then on, the career of the Great Eastern was one long disaster. A funnel expoded when someone accidentally closed a safety valve; five firemen died; another was crushed in the paddle wheel. In port for repairs, the ship was damaged in a storm. The captain was drowned in a boat with a young boy. In America, another sailor was crushed in the wheel, and a man fell overboard and drowned. A two-day excursion was a non-stop catastrophe, climaxed when the ship drifted a hundred miles out to sea; many passengers got off at the first opportunity and went home by train. Now the ship had acquired such a bad reputation that she seldom carried enough passengers to pay the wages of the crew (over 400). And the disasters continued: wrecked paddle wheels, wrecked funnels, storm damage. When the ship was hired to lay the trans-Atlantic cable, she lost it halfway across and had to return empty-handed. A mere fifteen years after its launching it was left to rust in Milford Haven. And when it was finally broken up for scrap in 1889, the skeletons of the missing riveter and his boy apprentice were found trapped in the double hull.
Lethbridge would have said the ship was haunted by a ghoul. But ghouls are supposed to be mere tape recordings. It might depress the crew and cause a certain amount of carelessness; but how could it cause storms and similar disasters?
The Hinemoa, launched three years after the Great Eastern was destroyed, had a similar history of disasters, which the crew attributed to the fact that its first ballast had been gravel from a London graveyard. There was a different captain for each of its first five voyages; one went insane, another ended in prison, another drank himself into DTs, another died in his cabin, and the fifth committed suicide. On its sixth voyage the ship overturned; on the seventh two sailors were washed overboard. In 1908 she became a write-off after drifting in a storm.
The troubles of the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst began when she rolled over while only half-completed, crushing sixty men to death. If jinxes are caused by ghouls, this must be when it acquired its aura of nastiness. When Hitler and Goering arrived for the launching in October 1936, the ship had already launched itself in the night, destroying several barges. Three years later, in the ship’s first major engagement—the bombardment of Danzig—a gun exploded, killing nine men, and the air-supply system broke down and suffocated twelve more. A year later, bombarding Oslo, it was struck by so many shells that it had to be towed away. Entering the River Elbe by night, it collided with the passenger liner SS Bremen, which sank into the mud and was destroyed by British bombers. Returning to sea again after repairs, the Scharnhorst passed a disabled British patrol boat in the dark; the boat radioed the alarm, and British warships closed in. It looked as if the Scharnhorst might be saved by falling darkness, but one of the warships fired a chance broadside at 16,000 yards; inevitably, the Scharnhorst was directly in the line of fire and burst into flame. Hours later, she sank. Even now the bad luck was not over. Two crew members reached shore on a raft, but died when their oil heater exploded.
There are just as many stories of jinxed houses, jinxed planes and jinxed cars. And again, many of them seem to start from a tragedy. Misfortune began for the Lockheed Constellation aircraft AHEM-4 from the moment a mechanic walked into a propeller in July 1945 and was cut to pieces; from then on there were endless disasters until it crashed near Chicago in July 1949, killing everyone on board. The car in which Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated at Sarajevo—thus precipitating the First World War—went on to bring disaster or death to its owners. General Potiorek of the Austrian army died insane after a catastrophic defeat at Valjevo; an Austrian captain who took over the car broke his neck after owning it for only nine days; the Governor of Jugoslavia lost his arm in it; a doctor who bought it was crushed to death when it overturned; a Swiss racing driver was killed when thrown over a wall; a Serbian farmer was killed while starting it; a garage owner died in a crash when overtaking dangerously as he returned from a wedding; so did four passengers. The car was placed in a Vienna museum, where it has been ever since.
The Porsche racing car in which the film star James Dean was killed in 1955 seemed to have the power to cause accidents even when dismantled. Bought by a garage owner, George Barris, it slipped as it was being unloaded from the breakdown truck and broke both a mechanic’s legs. The engine was sold to a doctor, who was killed when the car in which it was placed went out of control during a race. Oddly enough, another car in the race contained the drive shaft from the Porsche; its driver was injured when the car turned over. The battered shell of Dean’s car was used in a display on Highway Safety; in Sacramento it fell off its mounting and broke a teenager’s hip. Weeks later, en route to another display, the truck carrying it was involved in an accident; the driver was thrown out and killed by Dean’s car as it rolled off the back. A racing driver who bought the heavy-duty tyres from the car was almost killed when both tyres exploded simultaneously, causing the car to swerve off the road; George Barris was unable to find anything wrong with either tyre. In Oregon, the truck carrying the car slipped its handbrake and crashed into a store. In New Orleans in 1959, it broke into eleven pieces while on stationary supports. Finally, in 1960, it vanished when being sent by train back to Los Angeles. In their book Cars of the Stars, which contains many similar tales of jinxes, George Barris and Jack Scagnetti mention that Dean’s mechanic Rolf Weutherich, who suffered a broken arm and leg in the original crash, was convicted of murdering his wife in 1968; but it seems to be stretching a point to lay the blame for this on the car.
Where houses are concerned, it is perhaps easier to understand how a ghoul can cause mental depression and therefore bring tragedy to a succession of owners. Dr Arthur Guirdham has described a house in Bath where a whole series of tenants have committed suicide or become mentally ill. In this case, the first suicide could have caused the ghoul, which then continued to cause mental illness.
The notion of some actively malevolent spirit seems unacceptable, from the commonsense point of view, until we remember Bill Slater’s battle. Alan Vaughan’s story of the wife of the Nantucket sea captain who ‘got inside his head’ seems to point in the same direction. The ghost encountered in Torquay by Beverley Nichols and Lord St Audries6 sounds like an active force rather than a tape recording of some tragedy. The same applies to a ghost encountered by Jung in England in 1920.7 He spent several weekends in a rented country house, and there were knockings, sounds of rustling and dripping and unpleasant smells. One night he opened his eyes and found himself looking at half a woman’s head facing him on the pillow, its single eye wide open and staring at him. He lit a candle and it vanished; Jung spent the rest of the night in an armchair. He learned later that the house was haunted and that all other tenants had been driven away. The house was demolished soon after.
In cases like this, the tape recording theory begins to wear thin, or at least, to show its limitations. Why do we try so hard to find a theory that rules out living forces? It is as if a doctor tried to find a theory of disease that made no use of the concept of germs. Why do we experience a certain unwillingness to entertain this hypothesis of ‘discarnate entities’? It is not simply a matter of ‘evidence’—most people have read about dozens of ghosts and met people who have seen them, so we at least have plenty of second-hand evidence. But there is an unwillingness to introduce a frightening unknown factor into our picture of the universe. We can remember unpleasant experiences of childhood: the terror of empty houses and dark rooms, made all the more disturbing by the vulnerability of the unformed personality. As we grow up, the personality solidifies, and the night terrors are left behind. We want to believe in the secure universe we have created. Why should we introduce a new fear of the unknown?
And, of course, there is the common-sense objection to the idea of ‘evil spirits’. As embodied in human beings, evil is usually a mixture of spoiltness and stupidity. Evil men are usually ‘Right Men’ who are trying to convince themselves that they are natural rulers and leaders; it is the Haroun Al-Raschid syndrome. To assume that ‘spirits’ can be evil seems rather like assuming that they have a taste for beer and cigarettes.
Yet the study of multiple personality shows that we are mistaken in thinking of ourselves as unified personalities. We are bundles of psychic and biological impulses loosely held together by habit. These disconnected parts of the personality can sometimes behave like independent entities. Moreover, under certain circumstances, they seem able to make use of unknown forms of energy to manifest their dissatisfaction: in which case they are known as poltergeists. And poltergeists behave remarkably like evil—or at least, mischievous—spirits. The study of the poltergeist throws an interesting light on the problem of ‘discarnate entities’.
Until the mid-nineteenth century it was generally assumed that poltergeist disturbances were the result of witchcraft, or evil spirits, or both. One of the best documented of the early cases occurred in the house of the Reverend Samuel Wesley; in December 1716, his family were puzzled but not unduly alarmed by a ‘banging ghost’ that usually announced its presence after dark in the rectory at Epworth, Lincolnshire. There were loud crashing noises, as if a ‘vast stone’ had been hurled among several bottles, and thumps, raps and dismal groans. At first the family were afraid that these disturbances portended the death of their son Samuel, also a clergyman and living in London. (He was the father of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who was born in the rectory ten years before the disturbances began.) The phenomena continued for two months, then stopped. The modern view is that a nineteen-year-old girl, Hetty Wesley, was the ‘focus’—she would often tremble violently in her sleep before the knockings began. The scientist Joseph Priestley, who took an interest in the case, was convinced that it was basically a hoax.
This was also the conclusion arrived at by Dr Samuel Johnson when he investigated the famous Cock Lane ghost. The knocking noises began in the house of Richard Parsons, clerk of St Sepulchre’s church in Smithfield, London, in November 1759; a certain Mr William Kent was lodging there at the time with his common-law wife, Fanny Lynes. The unfortunate Fanny died shortly thereafter of smallpox, and Kent moved out. The knockings continued in the following year, and seem to have been connected with Parsons’ eleven-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who was subject to convulsive fits. The ‘ghost’ became increasingly famous, and witnesses tried putting questions to it, using the usual code—one knock for yes, two for no. In this way, the ‘ghost’ identified itself as Fanny Lyrics, who asserted that she had been poisoned by William Kent. Poor Kent was understandably frantic. A committee of eminent gentlemen, including Dr Johnson, was asked to investigate; but, like most poltergeists, it declined to perform on request. Johnson concluded that ‘the child has some art of making or counterfeiting particular noises’. Now Elizabeth’s father was in a serious position. If his daughter had deliberately manufactured ‘evidence’ of Kent’s guilt, it must have been because Richard Parsons would gain by it. There had been some unpleasantness with Kent over a debt; the general opinion was that Parsons was trying to blackmail his former lodger. Elizabeth was taken to a house in Covent Garden to be examined. The knocks went with her; her examiners had to agree that they continued even when Elizabeth lay motionless in the middle of the room. Nevertheless they told her that unless the ghost proved its existence the following night, she and her family would be sent to Newgate prison. She was carefully watched by servants; understandably, she climbed out of bed when she thought no one was looking and knocked on a piece of board. When this became known, there was universal ridicule. William Kent brought a case against Parsons and various other supporters of the Cock Lane ghost. Two of the five accused were dismissed when they paid nearly £600 to Kent. Parsons was sentenced to two years in prison and to stand in the pillory three times; his wife was sentenced to a year, and a woman named Mary Frazer, who had taken part in the séances, to six months. Parsons protested vigorously that many other people beside himself had heard the rappings, and that he had no reason for malice against Kent. The poor of London evidently believed him, for he was treated with sympathy when he stood in the pillory.
The case bears some startling resemblances to that of the Fox sisters ninety years later. The Hydesville rappings which inaugurated the history of modern spiritualism were almost certainly poltergeist phenomena; the Hydesville ‘ghost’ also claimed to be the victim of an undetected murder.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Cock Lane case, from our point of view, is that so many ‘unprejudiced witnesses’ chose to ignore the evidence that Elizabeth could not have counterfeited all the rappings. The public swung from extreme credulity to total scepticism, and seemed relieved to be able to dismiss the ghost as a fraud. The only full-length book to be published about the case8—as late as 1965—still takes it for granted that Parsons and his wife were guilty.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, it began to dawn on trained investigators that a frustrated adolescent was often the focus of poltergeist phenomena. Moreover, such children were unaware of causing it. Understandably, this view was too subtle for the public at large, who preferred to think in terms of frauds or malevolent spirits. And the pendulum often swung from one assumption to the other. This is again what happened in the remarkable case that became known as the Amherst Mystery, one of the most important of all poltergeist cases.
The shoemaker Daniel Teed lived in a small house in Amherst, Nova Scotia, with his family, which included his wife and two sons and his wife’s two unmarried sisters, Jennie and Esther Cox. Jennie was pretty and popular; Esther was plain and inclined to sullenness. There were also two other adult males in the house, brothers respectively of Mr and Mrs Teed.
In the year 1878, Esther was eighteen, and had acquired a boyfriend, a good looking young man named Bob McNeal, who had a reputation for instability. The trouble appears to have begun with what seems to have been the attempted rape of Esther by Bob. On August 28, he took her for a buggy ride and asked her to go for a walk in the woods. She refused. He lost his temper and pointed a gun at her, ordering her to get out. At that moment the sound of another vehicle was heard; Bob climbed back into the buggy and drove her home. Although it rained heavily, he refused to raise the hood. That night, he left town. Esther kept her secret for a month but went around red-eyed and obviously upset.
On September 4, lying in the bed she shared with Jennie, Esther started crying and admitted that she was thinking about Bob. Soon after they blew out the light, she screamed and declared that there was a mouse in the bed. A search revealed nothing. The same thing happened the next night. The rustling noise seemed to come from a box that stood under the bed. They placed it in the centre of the room and prepared to surprise the mouse, when the box rose a foot in the air. Their screams brought Daniel Teed, who told them they were dreaming and went back to bed.
The next night, Esther leapt out of bed shouting: ‘Janie, I’m dying.’ Her face was bright red. The other adults came into the room and Esther was helped back to bed. She began screaming and grinding her teeth. Her whole body seemed to be swelling. There was a loud bang, like a thunderclap, and Esther ceased to swell. There were two more loud bangs that seemed to come from under the bed. By this time, Esther was peacefully asleep.
Three days later, Esther again felt herself swelling. The bedclothes flew off the bed of their own accord and floated across the room. Again there were loud bangs, and Esther deflated and fell asleep.
The next night, the local doctor was called in. He felt Esther’s pulse and declared she was suffering from shock. At that moment, the pillow inflated like a balloon, there were rapping noises, and the bedclothes flew off. They all heard a scratching noise on the wall above the bed. An invisible hand or claw traced the letters: ‘Esther Cox, you are mine to kill.’ The letters were scratched deep into the wall. A large piece of plaster fell off the wall, and the room resounded with raps. Esther lay there, wide awake, as terrified as everyone else.
Soon after, Esther began to complain of electrical sensations in her body. When she was given morphia, loud bangs began. When the doctor left, they sounded as if someone was pounding on the roof with a sledgehammer.
Three weeks later, Esther suddenly went rigid and fell into a trance. In this state, she told the story of the ‘attempted rape’ for the first time. On recovering consciousness, she admitted it was true.
In December, the manifestations ceased when Esther became ill. But in January 1879, she told Jennie that a voice had warned her that the house would be set on fire by a ghost. The next morning, as the members of the family laughed about the idea, a lighted match fell out of the air and onto the bed. More lighted matches rained out of the air for the next ten minutes, but were all extinguished. That evening, a dress belonging to Esther was found burning under the bed. Three days later, a barrel of wood shavings in the cellar burst into flame and was extinguished with difficulty.
Daniel Teed was deeply worried. When a neighbour offered to take Esther in, he agreed. For two weeks nothing happened; then a scrubbing brush flew through the air. It signalled another outbreak of poltergeist activity. At work in the neighbour’s restaurant, Esther was attacked by a flying jacknife that stabbed her in the back and drew blood. Some iron spokes placed in her lap became too hot to touch. A heavy box was moved across the floor. Rappings resounded along the main street of Amherst. The neighbour sent her back home. For the next three months, she lived out of Amherst as the guest of two sets of kind-hearted neighbours. During this time, no manifestations occurred, although Esther claimed that she saw ghosts who threatened her. One was called ‘Bob Nickle’.
When she returned to the Teed cottage, a professional magician named Walter Hubbell had moved in to observe her. In 1888, he published a book called The Great Amherst Mystery, in which he described all the poltergeist phenomena he witnessed: flying knives and umbrella moving furniture, loud bangs and raps. Questioned by means of the raps, the ‘spirits’ correctly named the serial number of his watch and the dates of coins in his pockets. Hubbell was so impressed that he persuaded Esther to make a public appearance in a rented hall; every seat was taken, but nothing happened.
Esther spent another peaceful holiday with the kindly neighbours, then went to work on a nearby farm. There she was accused of theft when some missing clothes turned up in a barn. Before further action could be taken, the barn burned down. Suspected of arson, Esther was put in the town jail for four months. And the manifestations ceased as abruptly as they began.
The ending of the story certainly suggests that Esther was somehow responsible for the phenomena, and that when the penalties became too serious, her subconscious mind was cowed into good behaviour. It is interesting that the manifestations ceased when she stayed with people she liked. The ‘spirit’ hypothesis is, however, just as plausible as the ‘over-active subconscious’ theory. We can believe that Esther was a bored and frustrated young woman who longed for attention. But she was as worried and frightened by the phenomena as everyone else. It is hard to believe that she would—even subconsciously—cause so much damage to her sister’s home, which was virtually a wreck when she left. Furthermore, Hubbell describes Esther as a pleasant, honest-looking girl with well-shaped features and pretty teeth, who loved housework, and was in constant demand with the neighbourhood children ‘who were always ready to have a romp and a game of tag’, which does not sound like a house-wrecker.
Esther herself asserted repeatedly that she heard and saw ghosts. When she called on the minister to ask him to pray for her, one of the spirits attacked her with a bone, which cut her head open, and jabbed a fork in her face. When she and the doctor went down to the cellar to investigate, they were met by a hail of potatoes. There seems to be no doubt that whatever was causing the disturbances enjoyed attacking Esther. We also have to explain how the spirit knew the dates of the coins in Hubbell’s pocket, which presumably he himself did not know. It is, admittedly, an easy to endow Esther with second sight as with powers of psychokinesis. But it is just as easy to see that whatever wrote ‘Esther Cox, you are mine to kill’ could have been a real spirit.
The Rosenheim case has some curious similarities to the Amherst mystery. Here again, the focus of the outbreaks, Anne-Marie Schaberl, was a bored and dissatisfied girl in her late teens. She started to work for the lawyer, Sigmund Adam, as soon as she left school in October 1965. His office was in the Königstrasse, in the small town of Rosenhcim, south-west of Munich. Two years later, in November 1967, Adam’s lighting system began to go wrong. Strip lights kept failing, and a specially installed meter revealed that there were sudden inexplicable surges of current. The Stadtwerke—the local lighting company—investigated and decided that there must be something wrong with the power lines. But when they tried running a cable direct from the office to the generator, the lights continued to explode. Adam decided to install his own generator out in the yard and changed all the strip lights to ordinary bulbs; it made no difference. Moreover, when an ordinary voltmeter was tested by connecting it to a 1.5 volt battery, it registered three volts. That was a physical—or electrical—impossibility. When Adam received his telephone bill, it was many times bigger than usual. The telephone company installed a device to register every number that was dialled, and in this way they discovered that someone was dialling the speaking clock for hours on end. This also failed to make sense; it took at least seventeen seconds to get through to the speaking clock, and the monitoring device revealed that it was being dialled four, five, even six times a minute. Someone—or something—must be getting straight through to the relays.
The affair was talked about all over the town, and a reporter came to investigate. As he was leaving the office, a bulb fell out of its socket and almost hit him on the head. His story about ‘the Rosenheim spook’ was taken up by the national press. It came to the ears of Professor Hans Bender, in his Institute of Paranormal Research at Freiburg.
It was Bender’s young assistant who realised that Anne-Marie was probably behind the disturbances. He noticed that as she walked along the corridor, the overhead lights began to swing back and forth. Further investigation soon showed that the surges of current occurred only when she was in the office.
Now, the poltergeist began to manifest itself in a more normal manner. Pictures turned on the wall, lights swung—sometimes changing direction in mid-course—and a heavy filing cabinet was moved away from a wall.
Anne-Marie was given leave of absence to go to Bender’s Institute. Bender found her in many ways typical of the personality that causes poltergeist phenomena. She was tense, mistrustful, aggressive and unhappy. She had been brought up in the country, and she hated the town. Her family background had been difficult; her parents were Catholics and her father was a rigid disciplinarian. And now, although she was engaged, her emotional life was thoroughly unsatisfactory.
Yet at first, the tests revealed no kind of psychic ability. It was not until Bender began to question her about a painful illness—a year spent in plaster with a tubercular hip—that she became deeply disturbed. Bender switched to ESP tests and was amazed by her scores. She showed remarkable telepathic abilities.
As soon as Anne-Marie walked back into Adam’s office, the equipment began to go wrong. Understandably, he decided to dispense with her services. She got another office job and the same thing happened there. At about this time, her engagement was broken off. Her fiancé was fond of bowling and used to take her to a Catholic youth club where the scoring, pin-setting and return of the balls were all controlled electronically. As soon as Anne-Marie walked in, the board began to register random scores and the pin-setting equipment went mad. Her fiancé was not amused and ended the engagement. She took a job in a mill; but when a man was killed in an accident with the machinery, people began to avoid her. She decided to leave. Eventually she married someone else, moved to a house on the outskirts of Rosenheim, and had three children. The poltergeist activity ceased.
Hans Bender has no doubt that this was a case of spontaneous psychokinesis. But that explains very little. What is so baffling is the disparity between Anne-Marie’s own personality—and education—and the behaviour of her poltergeist. For months, the disturbances seemed fairly natural; it was not until Bender’s assistant noticed the swinging lights that the spook decided to show its hand and behave like a conventional poltergeist. Again, it seems to have known a certain amount about electricity—enough to interfere directly with the relays. Anne-Marie didn’t even know what a relay was.
But perhaps the most interesting thing is that the battery registered 3 volts instead of 1.5. This strongly suggests that the poltergeist was able to generate an electric current. It caused the lights to fuse by the same means. In the Amherst case, a Baptist clergyman, the Reverend Edwin Clay, studied Esther Cox and became convinced that the answer to the riddle lay in electricity. Esther frequently complained that she felt as if an electric current was running through her body. Clay came to believe that Esther was a kind of human battery. He observed that she seemed to have a particular attraction for metals, like the knife that jumped from a small boy’s hand and stabbed her in the back. He thought that she emitted some form of lightning, and that the loud noises were claps of thunder.
At the New York seminar on Kirlian photography, Max Toth described a number of well-attested cases of ‘human batteries’.9 In 1877, Caroline Clare, of Bondon, Ontario, began to waste away, although there was nothing obviously wrong with her; from 130 pounds she dwindled to less than ninety. Then she began to have seizures when her body became rigid. As she slowly recovered, she turned into a human battery, capable of giving shocks to anyone who touched her. Pieces of iron stuck to her and had to be pulled off by force. She was seventeen when she became ill; the electric charge vanished when she grew out of her teens.
In 1895, fourteen-year-old Jennie Morgan of Sedalia, Missouri, generated enough electricity to knock a grown man flat on his back. When she reached out to touch a pump handle, sparks flew from her fingertips. Her charge also faded as she reached maturity.
Another Missouri teenager, Frank McKinistry, developed an electric charge during the night and lost it slowly as the day wore on. Perhaps the most interesting thing about McKinistry is that when highly charged, his feet stuck to the ground, so that walking became immensely difficult.
Most doctors who have worked in mental homes will testify to the prevalence of ‘electrical cases’, patients who suspect that someone is trying to electrocute them by unknown means. The Swedish playwright Strindberg became convinced, during a period of mental illness, that someone in the next room was trying to suffocate him with a current of electricity. ‘Then I feel, at first only faintly, something like an inrush of electric fluid … the tension increases; my heart beats violently; I offer resistance, but as if by a flash of lightning is charged with a fluid which chokes me and depletes my blood … A new discharge of electricity strikes me like a cyclone and forces me to rise from my bed.’10
Now if the Reverend Edwin Clay was right and Esther’s poltergeist made use of some kind of electrical energy, it would explain a great deal more than the thunderclaps that took place in her vicinity. It could also explain how Anne-Marie could fuse electric lights and cause electronic equipment to go haywire, and how an electric light can change direction in mid-swing. When a light is switched on, its wire is surrounded by an electrical field, which could, in turn, be attracted or repelled by another field.
Many of these cases seem to begin with a severe shock, either an electric shock, as in the case of Uri Geller, or a psychological shock of the kind Esther received when Bob McNeal pointed a gun in her face. Anne-Marie was having severe emotional trouble when the disturbances in Adam’s office began. Caroline Clare became an electric battery after an unexplained severe illness—probably psychosomatic—had reduced her from an overweight teenager to a walking skeleton. Elizabeth Parsons, the focus of the Cock Lane disturbances, suffered from violent convulsions before the 1762 phenomena.
We may recall that a large number of cases of multiple personality have also begun with a shock. Doris Fischer became Margaret after her father hurled her on the ground. Christine Beauchamp’s illness began when William Jones tried to climb in the window from a ladder. Sybil Dorsett became Peggy Lou to escape her mother’s sexual assaults. Shock can cause the fragmentation of the personality into several selves, and the evidence strongly suggests that poltergeist phenomena are a special form of split personality. It is worth recalling that Christine Beauchamp’s alter-ego Sally emerged only under hypnosis. Before this, Christine had suffered from tiredness and depression but not from multiple personality. Apparently the shock of William Jones’s wild behaviour caused a fragmentation of her personality, but the ‘new’ Christine remained concealed, in the unconscious. It seems likely that something of the sort happened to Esther Cox when Bob McNeal tried to rape her; the ‘new’ Esther was invisible. Yet two weeks later she began to manifest herself as a mischievous spirit.
This raises the obvious possibility that all ‘spirits’ are manifestations of the unconscious mind. But the Doris Fischer case makes us aware of an alternative hypothesis. One of Doris’s alter-egos, Ariel, claimed to be a spirit who had appeared in response to the prayers of Doris’s mother; Dr Walter Prince was actually inclined to believe her. If we can admit the possibility of disembodied spirits, then it is difficult to rule them out as an explanation of some of the cases we have been considering.
And what of the energies used by the poltergeist? The Anne-Marie case suggests that they could be electrical. But when Strindberg held a compass close to his body as he was convulsed with shocks, the needle showed no response. Besides which, Anne-Marie’s poltergeist later began moving heavy objects and making pictures turn on the wall, which suggests that it could exert ordinary physical force. The likeliest explanation seems to be that the poltergeist can convert energy into any form it prefers.
Then there is the closely related question of why all kinds of psychic phenomena—from banshees to phantom black dogs—are associated with ley lines? This question has been examined at length by a dedicated ley hunter named Stephen Jenkins in his book The Undiscovered Country. Jenkins is a schoolmaster who enjoys wandering around the English countryside with an ordnance survey map and a camera. He has observed repeatedly that various kinds of psychic phenomena seem to be associated with the ‘nodes’—or crossing points—of leys. His first experience occurred at the age of sixteen, on a track near Mounts Bay in Cornwall.
The clumps and bushes were very still in the windless evening light when suddenly I experienced what I took to be a startlingly vivid optical illusion. Scattered among them, motionless but frighteningly distinct, was a crowd, a host of armed men. For a moment I stood stock still, unable to believe my eyes, then I began to run towards them. At once something like a curtain of heated air wavered in front of them briefly—and there were only bushes and stones.
Years later, when he became aware of the existence of leys, Jenkins examined an ordnance survey map and realised he had been walking along a ley and approaching a nodal point. In 1974, he returned to the spot with his wife. ‘And again, as in the deepening light of that August afternoon thirty-eight years before, the illusion of armed men! And again the vanishing as one took a few paces forward.’
This tale is one of many stories of similar hauntings. Near Wroxham, in the Norfolk Broads, a phantom Roman army has been reported by many witnesses, and placed on record. In Archives of the Northfolk for 1603 a Mr Benjamin Curtiss describes swimming across the lake known as the Great Broad of Wroxham, and suddenly glimpsing around him a Roman amphitheatre; a companion who was swimming beside him saw it too. It vanished as they swam on a few yards. In 1709, the Reverend Thomas Josiah Penston recorded seeing a procession of Roman soldiers there. In 1829, Lord Percival Durand described in a private letter how he suddenly found himself in a Roman amphitheatre and watched a Roman procession.11 At Edgehill, in Warwickshire, where one of the great battles of the Civil War was fought, the battle was ‘repeated’, complete with noises of cannons, within a year. A pamphlet about it included accounts by a justice of the peace and several army officers, who had recognised old companions among the ghostly combatants. King Charles I was so intrigued by the story that he sent a group of officers to investigate; these officers, led by Colonel Lewis Krike, witnessed the phantom battle themselves and testified to it on oath before the king. A twentieth-century clergyman, the Reverend John Dening, collected accounts of many witnesses who had heard the sounds of the battle.
Stephen Jenkins has experienced many supernatural occurrences on ley lines, although perhaps none as remarkable as his vision of the phantom army in Cornwall. But his most significant story concerns a spot near Acrise in Kent. Following a ley line running past Eastry church, he paused to consult his map and to take his bearings. To his surprise, he was unable to measure the necessary angle. There was a feeling of light-headedness and a sense of disorientation. It vanished when he walked on a few yards, and he had no difficulty taking the bearing. Whenever he went back to the spot, the dizziness returned. Two years later, he took three of his students to the same spot without telling them anything about his sensations, and asked them to take their bearings on the map. All three experienced the same disorientation and were unable to do it; when they moved on, the problem vanished. The point at which the dizziness occurred was a nodal point—a crossing of two ley lines.
Near a stone which he calls the Merlin Stone, on Dartmoor—again, a crossing point of leys—he set out to take a photograph of the stone from the north and discovered that he had moved south-east. He tried a second time and this time went to the west. Even when the mist cleared enough to show a camp to the north, he found it impossible to orientate himself.
I can testify to this curious experience of totally losing one’s bearings in a place where there should be no difficulty. In 1975, I took some friends to look at the ancient stone circle at Boscawen-un, in Cornwall, one of the oldest in the British Isles. About a quarter of a mile away, on a hilltop, there is a landmark known as the Giant’s Footprint, a rock with a hollow in the centre; my wife had been there, and told me that the view was spectacular. I had half an hour before we had to leave to get my friends to a train and I decided this was plenty of time to go there and back. So I left my friends and cut across the heather towards the hilltop. The bracken proved to be more of an obstacle than I had expected; finally, I looked at my watch and decided that I had better go back. The stone circle was no longer visible, but the countryside is open, and I could see the direction I had come from. I plodded on downhill. Soon, to my astonishment, I realised I was lost. I decided that I had been bearing too far to the right, so I went left, which should have brought me to the path at the bottom of the hill. I climbed over a wall and found myself in a strange field. It took me half an hour to find my way back to the circle, and when I arrived there, I found it completely impossible to work out how I had succeeded in losing myself. To end up at the main road, as I had done, I must have gone in the opposite direction to the one intended. Since then, I have walked from the standing stones to the Giant’s Footprint many times, and never succeeded in finding out how I managed to become so totally confused in such a short distance.
Stephen Jenkins has no simple explanation as to why so many strange things should happen on ley lines, or why nodal points should produce disorientation. He seems to agree with Lethbridge that some kind of powerful field can operate in certain spots, and that in such places, the interaction between the human mind and the forces of the earth is particularly powerful. And he cites a statement made by Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, when discussing UFOs at a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society in May 1969; Goddard commented that there was no need to assume that UFOs were visitors from other planetary systems; they might come from an invisible world that coincides with the space of our own. (This was also Lethbridge’s suggestion.) Jenkins, who spent some time in Tibet, goes on to cite the teaching of his Tibetan masters to the effect that there are six ‘realms of being’, of which only two are perceptible to our physical senses. They also taught that the ‘heavens’ listed in the teaching of Mahayana Buddhism are planets, three-quarters of which are metaphysical or paraphysical in nature.
And so the explanation that begins to emerge is very clear. There are other realms of being that run parallel with our own, and the nodal points of ley lines can create some kind of bridge between the realms. Jenkins’ teacher added the astonishing piece of information that Shambhala, the legendary island of bliss of Eastern mythology, is not—as is generally believed—situated in the Gobi Desert, but in the Island of Britain, at Glastonbury. Glastonbury is, of course, the nodal point of a record number of leys.
Stephen Jenkins was also able to throw interesting light on a case of haunting I presented on BBC television. This took place at Ardachie Lodge, near Loch Ness. In 1952, Mr and Mrs Peter McEwan moved into the Lodge, which had been built in the nineteenth century, with the intention of turning it into a pig farm. They advertised for a housekeeper, and engaged a Mr and Mrs McDonald; McDonald had been a London postman who gave up his job and his pension for the chance of moving back to Scotland. On the night of their arrival, the McDonalds had been in bed only half an hour when they were awakened by footsteps that came up the stairs and into the room opposite. When the footsteps were repeated a few minutes later, they were curious enough to go and peep into the room; it was empty. They went downstairs to the McEwans, who were still awake, and asked if the house was haunted; the McEwans said that, as far as they knew, it wasn’t. They in turn asked if Mrs McDonald was psychic; she said she wasn’t. But back in her bedroom, Mrs McDonald was petrified to see an old woman beckoning to her; neither her husband nor the McEwans saw it. They moved to another room, and this time were kept awake by loud rapping noises on the wall. They wakened the McEwans; then, in the corridor outside their bedroom, Mrs McDonald saw an old woman, crawling on all fours, with a lighted candle in one hand.
This convinced the McEwans that their housekeeper was not simply a hysteric. For Mrs Brewin, the wife of the previous owner of the house, had suffered from severe arthritis in her last years and had crawled around on all fours. She had also been convinced that the servants stole various items and hid them, so she used to crawl around at night with a candle in one hand. But the McDonalds had never been in Fort Augustus before, and had not spoken to anyone about Mrs Brewin; there was no way in which Mrs McDonald could have known about her habits.
The Society for Psychical Research sent two investigators, who were impressed. Mrs McDonald ‘knew’ that the arthritic old lady had spent hours in the rose garden, tending a particular tree; the ‘spirit’ was apparently upset that her tree had been allowed to die. The gardener confirmed that he had dug up the tree and moved it to the greenhouse, where it died.
Mrs McEwan found the whole situation so nerve-racking that she left the house with the children. The McDonalds returned to London. And the house remained empty until, in 1968, it was blasted and bulldozed to the ground by the army.
The curious feature of the case is that the housekeeper had had no previous ‘psychic’ experience. She was a rather tense, highly-strung woman, but otherwise apparently normal. Why was she the only one to see the Ardachie ghost?
Stephen Jenkins saw my presentation of the case on television and took the trouble to get an Ordnance Survey map of the area. Just as he had suspected, Ardachie Lodge had stood on the crossing point of four major leys.12
This could explain another curious episode. When the two investigators were present, Mrs McDonald rose to her feet and stared, white-faced, at the door; she was obviously seeing something. But what she saw, she claimed, was Mrs McEwan, her employer, who was in bed at the time. If the house was haunted by the unquiet shade of Mrs Brewin, this seems all wrong. But if some quality in the house itself—or the land it stood on—was capable of ‘boosting’ psychical phenomena, then anything is possible; Mrs McDonald simply saw her employer’s doppelgänger.
Yet clearly, Mrs McDonald herself was a ‘trigger’ for the whole situation. No one had even suspected the house was haunted before she arrived. But her first comment when she stepped into the house was that there was ‘something wrong with the place’. Presumably Mrs McDonald was psychic, but so minimally that her powers had to be boosted by some force in the house. Possibly because of her nervous constitution, she was open to the force.
This again raises the tantalising question we have touched on so often in the course of this book. Was the ghost a mere tape recording? Mrs McDonald certainly thought not. On that first night, she was convinced that it beckoned to her, and that the crawling old lady actually saw her. (It is not quite clear whether both apparitions were of the same person.) Moreover, if the ghost was a tape recording, how did it know that its favourite rose tree had been destroyed?
It is by no means rare for people who have seen a ghost to be convinced that it has also seen them. In 1975, I interviewed a couple in Mevagissey who had lived for a time in a haunted cottage; the ghost had apparently been the previous tenant, an old man who had died there. The husband saw the old man several times on the upstairs landing; he said nothing about it to his wife, for fear of alarming her. But his wife herself encountered the old man in the bedroom. When I questioned her about it, she insisted that he had actually looked at her. Both of them said they felt no fear, because he was obviously a gentle and friendly character. Nevertheless, they moved when the opportunity arose.
All this is not to suggest that Lethbridge was mistaken about his tape-recording theory. What he recognised instinctively was that there is some intimate, and at present unexplained, connection between the forces of the earth and the forces of man’s mind. He realised that this strange interaction could produce all kinds of so-called psychic phenomena. His central recognition was that, through this interaction, man can know all kinds of things that arc normally inaccessible to consciousness. Richet spoke of the sixth sense, as if it were a one-sided affair; as a dowser, Lethbridge knew that it is a two-way involvement. It was natural that he should apply this important new insight to one of the oldest mysteries known to man: ghosts. Yet, although he was inclined to believe that ghosts are tape recordings, he also believed that there is a realm beyond death that is, to some extent, accessible to living creatures. Which suggests that our world should also, under certain conditions, be accessible to the dead. Lethbridge was an empiricist; he had never encountered a ghost that behaved like a conscious individual. If he had done so, he would have made room for it in his theory.
Let us now look at some of the evidence that Lethbridge might have considered valid.
Robert Monroe’s description of the astral realm is, as we have noted, remarkably close to Lethbridge’s own deductions from the pendulum. A whole chapter of his Journeys Out of the Body is devoted to his experiences with various alarming non-physical entities. He begins: ‘Throughout man’s history, the reports have been consistent. There are demons, spirits, goblins, gremlins and assorted sub-human entities always hanging around humanity to make life miserable. Are these myths? Hallucinations?’ His first experience was not particularly frightening: a ten-year-old boy came and clambered on to his back as he lay on a couch, inducing an out-of-the-body experience. Monroe felt that this creature was more animal than human. ‘He seemed confident that he would not be detected, perhaps through long association with humans to whom he was invisible.’ Monroe avoided an encounter by re-entering his body. Ten days later, two curious rubbery entities made of flesh kept trying to climb on to him when he was out of the body. He became panic-stricken and fought frantically. They turned momentarily into his two daughters—some attempt to deceive him, he thought—then resumed their former shape when they saw he was still hostile. Eventually, a man in a monk’s robe came and pulled the two creatures off.
The ‘rubbery entities’ became a constant hazard of his astral journeys; in May 1960, he succeeded in driving one away by imagining that he had stuck two electric wires into it. ‘Immediately the mass deflated, went limp, and seemed to die. As it did, a bat-like thing squeaked past my head and went out of the window.’ In July 1960, Monroe was suddenly attacked as he was about to fall asleep. He was unable to see what he was fighting, but it bit and scratched. Eventually, he threw it out of the window—and then realised, for the first time, that his body lay asleep in bed, and that he was on the astral plane. Three days later, he again had a long and exhausting battle with some unseen entity that seemed to go on for hours. ‘This struggle was not like fending off an animal. It was a no-holds-barred affair, silent, terrifyingly fast, and with the other seeking out any weakness on my part.’ Feeling that he would finally lose the battle, Monroe succeeded in dropping back into his physical body. His struggle sounds remarkably like Bill Slater’s.
In Beyond the Body, Benjamin Walker suggests that some of the entities described by astral travellers are nature spirits or elementals, ‘who depend for their existence on the substance provided by the exhalations of the material elements, hence their name’. And he makes the startling suggestion that the fairies and elves of mythology are basically such nature spirits.
Oliver Fox also has an account of an alarming encounter with some kind of elemental.
As I opened my astral eyes, I turned right round within my physical body so that I faced the other direction. Great forces seemed to be straining the atmosphere, and bluish-green flashes of light came from all parts of the room. I then caught sight of a hideous monster—a vague, white, filmy, formless thing, spreading out in queer patches and snake-like protuberances. It had two enormous round eyes, like globes filled with pale blue fire, each about six or seven inches in diameter.
When he looked again, the monster had vanished. He comments: ‘The “monster” may have been some form of elemental or non-human entity.’
It is interesting to compare this passage with a description by Henry James senior—father of William James—of how he came to the verge of a mental breakdown:
One day … towards the close of May [1884], having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash as it were—‘fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake’. To all appearances it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damnéd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself reduced to a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy. The only self-control I was capable of exerting was to keep my seat. I felt the greatest desire to run incontinently to the foot of the stairs and shout for help to my wife—to run to the roadside even and appeal to the public to protect me; but by an immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses, and determined not to budge from my chair till I had recovered my lost self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good long half hour, as I reckoned time, beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair, with absolutely no relief from any truth I had ever encountered.13
After two years in a condition of despair, it was recommended to James that he read the works of Swedenborg, whereupon he decided that he had undergone the spiritual experience Swedenborg called ‘devastation’ or simply ‘vastation’. Doctors assured him that he had simply ‘overworked his brain’, and it would certainly be convenient to accept some similar explanation. But James makes it quite clear that he was not overworked or tense at the time. It is easy to understand how this kind of experience can happen in a state of fatigue and worry; in fact, William James experienced precisely such a breakdown when he was depressed about his future prospects. It is important to understand that such attacks come from a collapse of vital energies, like the ice on a pond suddenly giving way; then the situation is made worse by fear, a generalised distrust of life. On the other hand, James says nothing about exhaustion and worry; in fact, he states that he was relaxed and cheerful, thinking about nothing in particular.
It was this last comment that led me to undertake an interesting piece of research. James’s description of the evil presence makes it sound not unlike the ‘blanket of depression and fear’ that almost suffocated Lethbridge on Ladram beach. Which suggests that James may have encountered a ghoul or elemental.
When this suspicion occurred to me, it struck me as a pity that we know nothing about the house, presumably in America, where James’s experience occurred; whether, for example, it was situated on a ley line, or had been the scene of some violence or tragedy. At this point, I re-read the passage as it occurs in James’s Society, the Redeemed Form of Man, and was startled to realise that James was in England at the time, near Windsor. The whole Windsor area is famous for its hauntings—particularly the castle—while the park has the interesting legend of Herne the Hunter, who is clearly a Celtic fertility god. It struck me that it might be worthwhile to try to discover precisely where James had been living.
Leon Edel’s four-volume biography of Henry James offered slightly more information: the cottage was ‘near Windsor Great Park’, and the ‘vastation’ took place in 1844. I turned to Ralph Barton Perry’s two-volume biography of William James and opened it casually. The first thing I saw was a date: ‘H.J. to his mother, May 1, 1844.’ And, in fact, the letter it refers to is dated from Frogmore Cottage, Windsor. James describes the cottage that he has just rented at the exorbitant price of £4.10s a week. ‘It is a little cottage standing between the Great and the Little Parks, next to the residence of the Duchess of Kent, and fronting the entrance to the Little Park.’ He speaks of the ‘beautiful avenues of the Little Park [now known as the Home Park] sweeping over hill and dale until they reach the Thames’. If he was opposite the entrance to the park and could see an avenue stretching into the distance, he must have been in the direct line of an avenue; and such avenues, as we know, often follow the routes of old roads, which in turn follow ley lines.
I turned to Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British Ghosts. This has two entries for Windsor, one for the Great Park, the other for the castle. The latter has many ghosts, apparently, including those of Charles I and George III. There is also a story of a young Grenadier guardsman who committed suicide in the Long Walk, and whose ghost was seen subsequently by two sentries at the same spot. In his chapter on Windsor,14 Elliott O’Donnell—writing long before anyone associated ley lines with ghosts—makes the perceptive comment: ‘Of all the famous historic buildings of the Thames Valley none are reputed to harbour more ghosts than Windsor Castle, an argument in favour of the theory that hauntings do not necessarily originate in tragedies, for, as far as is known, few if any tragedies have occurred in the Castle itself, and none in connection with the best known of its ghosts.’
Underwood states that the original Herne the Hunter was probably a huntsman of Richard II who hanged himself on an oak tree. When it was blown down in 1863, Queen Victoria had it replanted. The ghost of Herne, complete with stag’s antlers, is supposed to appear in times of national crisis: it was reported in 1931, before the Depression, and again before the Second World War. In 1926, Mrs Walter Legge, a JP, heard the baying of hounds coming from Smith’s Lawn and retreating towards the Castle. She and her daughter heard the sounds again two weeks later.
Folklore, Myths and Legends of Great Britain declares that Herne’s last appearance was in 1962 when some youths found a horn and blew it in the forest; Herne appeared, riding on a black horse, followed by hounds. It adds that the horns ‘almost certainly identify him with Cernunnos, Celtic god of the Underworld’. In The Undiscovered Country, Stephen Jenkins refers to the Celtic god of the Underworld as Arawn, which is even closer to Herne, and is obviously a Welsh version of Cernunnos. Margaret Murray identifies Herne the Hunter with the Celtic god of the witches, and mentions that he was ‘seen in Windsor Forest by the Earl of Surrey in the reign of Henry VIII’—complete with horns.
But where was Frogmore Cottage? My rather inadequate three-inch-to-the-mile road atlas showed it on the main avenue from Old Windsor to the castle. A biography of Queen Victoria revealed that this was, in fact, the residence of her mother, the Duchess of Kent. The avenue certainly looks as if it could be a ley line. But as I looked more closely at the map, I saw an altogether more likely candidate: an avenue called the Long Walk, which runs due south from Windsor Castle and continues in a ruler-straight line for about three miles into the middle of the Great Park. The Long Walk was the place where the sentries saw the ghost of their colleague who had committed suicide.
I tried ringing the Windsor Tourist Board; there a helpful lady named Mrs Yeomans was able to give me some interesting information. She knew very little of Herne the Hunter, but there were several other ghosts associated with the area: a headless poacher who haunts the Great Park and a grey lady who is seen at the Royal Adelaide Hotel. She also mentioned a recent incident that I had not heard of, but which had been reported in the local paper: a young soldier had seen something when he was on guard duty, and had received such a shock that he had collapsed and had to be taken to hospital. It had occurred—as I might have guessed—on the Long Walk.
When I mentioned Smith’s Lawn, Mrs Yeomans told me that this was also near the Long Walk. Smith’s Lawn was the place from which Mrs Legge had heard the baying of hounds, retreating towards the castle. They could, then, have been retreating along the Long Walk. But Mrs Yeomans was unable to tell me where Herne’s Oak was situated. She thought it was between Frogmore and the Long Walk. Man, Myth and Magic added the interesting information that Herne’s Oak stood on the edge of a hollow called Fairy Dell. ‘Fairy’ occurs in many place names on ley lines.
Now convinced that I had found one major ley, I wrote to Stephen Jenkins to ask him if he knew anything about ley lines in Windsor Great Park. His reply showed that my guess about the Long Walk had been correct: ‘The ley line starts at the Round Tower [of the Castle] and coincides with the north end of the Long Walk’—that is to say, with the part close to Smith’s Lawn. ‘The ley line runs almost due south, touching the west edge of the circular earthwork at Albury Bottom, through the church at Chobham, across the west face of Loseley House, through Farncombe church, the spot height 586 at Hydon’s Ball, to the site of the Roman building north east of Chiddingfold.’
And what of my other guess—that the other ley ran from the castle down the main avenue, out to Runnymede? This proved to be very nearly correct. In fact, the ley runs parallel with this, about a hundred feet to the north. It runs ‘south-east from the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, parallel with but about a hundred feet from Frogmore House, across the west end of the old mansion Great Fosters, through the earthwork on St Ann’s Hill, east of Virginia Water, along the west edge of a tumulus on Ockham Common, through the church of Westcott, and south-west of Dorking to the church at Rusper’.
This still left unsolved the mystery of Herne’s Oak and its location. I decided to try ringing the Royal Library at Windsor. The librarian—Sir Robin Mackworth-Young—was courteous and helpful. No, he said, Herne’s Oak was not situated on the Long Walk. It was not situated anywhere any more, since it had blown down in a storm. Its traditional site was in the Home Park.
I asked if he could describe exactly where it had been—for example, in relation to the main avenue running diagonally across the park. ‘Yes, there’s a road running off the avenue to the north, and it’s about fifty feet along it.’ He verified that there is a hollow called Fairy Dell next to the site.
His description of the site places it, of course, right on the ley line described by Stephen Jenkins, give or take a few feet—the ley that runs parallel to Frogmore.
And what of the experience of Henry James senior? Frogmore Cottage is not on a ley, but it is only a hundred feet away. There seems to be no common agreement among ley hunters about how far the influence of a ley can extend—or rather, the general view is that it depends on the force of the telluric current and on the time of year. Stephen Jenkins describes a vigil at the nodal point of two leys near Saltwood in Kent, when the whole group saw a ghostly figure about sixty yards away, which moved over a considerable distance before it turned grey and vanished. Lethbridge’s description of his experience on Skellig Michael makes it clear that the ‘sinister influence’ extended not only over the whole area of the ruined monastery, but also down the cliff to the sea. It was halfway down the cliff that he felt that something wanted to push him over, and the unpleasant sensation increased for another fifteen feet, before he decided to turn and go back. The poltergeist knocked him on his face in the middle of the chapel area.
Lethbridge’s experience is relevant to James’s vastation at Frogmore because it seems highly likely that the whole Windsor Park area is a site of the ancient religion associated with the horned god of the witches and with Diana. Since the area is associated with the kings of England, it is even conceivable that the park was the centre of the old religion. Lethbridge felt that there was a hostile force on Skellig Michael that resented his presence. Henry James senior was a healthy Victorian rationalist when he moved into Frogmore; before the end of that month, some hostile presence had reduced him to a nervous wreck, a man who believed in the reality of forces of evil. It may or may not be significant that the letter to his mother, written immediately after moving into the cottage—perhaps on the same day—is dated the first of May, the festival of Bel, when the forces of the earth are traditionally at their most powerful.
The picture that begins to emerge is foreign to our Western modes of thought; yet it can be found everywhere among primitive people who live close to the earth. It is the notion that nature is alive, that certain places are holy, and that the spirits that inhabit such sites need to be treated with respect if their displeasure is to be avoided.
A relevant example can be found in Laurens Van Der Post’s book The Lost World of the Kalahari. Van Der Post was seeking the vanished bushmen of South Africa, and his guide Samutchoso offered to take him to a place where they might be found—the Slippery Hills. His one condition was that there must be no killing as they approached the hills, otherwise the gods would be angry. Van Der Post forgot to tell the advance party, who shot a warthog. From then on, they were a prey to endless misfortunes. They were attacked by bees; the new camera jammed continually; when Samutchoso tried to pray in a sacred place, something pulled him over backwards. He asked: ‘Did you see, master, I was not even allowed to pray.’ The camera and tape recorder continued to jam and there was another invasion of bees. The steel swivel on the camera failed, a part so reliable that no spare was ever carried.
At this point, Samutchoso offered to consult the spirits. He threaded a needle and placed it along the lifeline of his left hand, then stared into it. After ten minutes, he began to speak to invisible presences—there seemed to be a crowd—and then listened intently. Finally he told Van Der Post that the spirits were angry because they had approached with blood on their hands and failed to observe the proper ceremonies. ‘If they had not known your intention in coming here was pure they would long since have killed you.’ The spirits told Samutchoso that they would have killed him if he had tried to pray again.
Van Der Post had an idea. Suppose he wrote a message of apology and everybody signed it, then they buried it in a bottle at the foot of a sacred rock painting? Samutchoso thought it was worth trying. The next morning, they buried a lime-juice bottle with their message. Again, Samutchoso consulted the spirits. This time they told him that all was well. But they warned Van Der Post that when he reached the next place he was going to, he would find bad news.
From that moment, the jinx went away. They left the hills, and he said goodbye to Samutchoso, who remarked regretfully: ‘The spirits of the hills arc not what they were … Ten years ago they would have killed you all for coming to them in such a manner.’ When they arrived at the next stopping place, Van Der Post’s assistant found a letter saying that his father had died and asking him to return home immediately.
Van Der Post’s comment on all this is interesting. ‘From the moment of burying the letter at the foot of the painting, I had a feeling of having broken through one dimension of life that was full of accident and frustration, into a more positive one.’ And he says of the Slippery Hills, with their natural temples: ‘We seemed to be in the presence of a single system of spirit dedicated to the translation of flesh and blood into a greater idiom of the world beyond.’
Let us pause to review the argument so far.
The occult, like any other subject, deserves to be approached in a rational and logical frame of mind. Certain phenomena, like curses and poltergeists, give the impression that disembodied spirits exist. On the other hand, the tape-recording theories of Buchanan and Denton—that objects somehow store up everything that has ever happened to them—makes it possible to explain curses as negative vibrations without recourse to the spirit theory. As to poltergeists, we are now fairly certain that they are connected with the frustrations of adolescents and the phenomenon of multiple personality. Yet this leaves just as many unanswered problems. Where does the ‘disconnected’ part of the personality get its energy? And how does it succeed in using it at a distance? The ‘earth’ theory provides, on the whole, a more convincing explanation than Professor John Taylor’s notion that some form of muscular electromagnetism is involved (if only because he has so far found no evidence to support his theory). It offers us a convincingly simple explanation of all kinds of psychical phenomena in terms of the interaction of two factors: the human mind and the forces of the earth. Yet even this is not as convincing as it might be. For it seems that all kinds of strange psychical phenomena tend to occur on Icy lines, and that not all these can be explained in terms of the mischievous forces of the subconscious mind. The Ardachie ghost does not seem to have been either a tape recording or a projection of living human beings.
So we find ourselves giving serious consideration to the notion that our material world may be only one realm of being, and that others might exist parallel to our own. This could include the realm of the dead or of disembodied spirits. It could even involve a realm of evil—or, at least, badly-disposed—spirits.
The trouble with the parallel universe theory is that it leaves us out on a limb. Our remote ancestors believed in ghosts and evil spirits, which led them to burn witches and cross themselves when there was a clap of thunder. When science began to reveal that thunder and eclipses are natural phenomena, Western man went to the other extreme and declared that belief in the supernatural is pure superstition and ignorance. We have attempted to show that this view was too simplistic; there are all kinds of phenomena, from telepathy to poltergeists, that seem to lie outside the paradigms of modern science. But if we are going to accept parallel universes, and the possibility of evil spirits—or any kind of spirit for that matter—then we are coming alarmingly close to the world-view of our ancestors, a completely irrational world in which anything can happen.
But is this entirely true? In fact, the analytical approach has enabled us to make some useful distinctions. We have seen, how, in the case of Janet’s patient Achille, split personality can look incredibly like ‘possession’; yet it seems it was not possession. On the other hand, Alan Vaughan’s story of his ‘possession’ by the wife of the Nantucket sea captain sounds like the real thing. So does Bill Slater’s story of his battle with the ‘spirit’. The ancients believed that there is a universal interaction of the dead with the living, and you were likely to meet your grandfather’s ghost any time you went out to the coal hole. Our researches suggest that this is highly unlikely. On the whole, our world obeys ordinary material laws, and can be expected to go on doing so. These laws may be broken at certain places, under certain conditions, but not otherwise.
This means that we must preserve an open mind. In 1975, a married man named Michael Taylor joined a revivalist religious group in Barnsley, Yorkshire, and became convinced that a girl in the group had gained some psychic influence over him. He asked his local vicar, the Reverend Peter Vincent, to help him, and the vicar decided that exorcism was called for; Taylor, he declared, was possessed of forty devils. The exorcism ceremony lasted all night and left Taylor violently disturbed; he rushed home and murdered his wife in a particularly gruesome manner, tearing her to pieces with his bare hands. He was found lying naked and unconscious in the street a few hours later. But the ‘spirit’ that possessed him had apparently left him; during his trial—which ended in a sentence of detention in a mental home—he seemed balanced and normal. The judge declared that the vicar should have sent for a psychiatrist instead of attempting exorcism, and it is difficult not to agree with him. But the facts make it impossible to state dogmatically that Taylor was suffering only from mental illness. When people begin to dabble in witchcraft and the ‘psychic’—as Taylor apparently had before the exorcism—anything must be regarded as possible.
There is an even more fundamental difference between the ancient world-view and the view based on modern paranormal research. Ancient man believed in all kinds of spirits and demons; but he was, for the most part, unaware of his own psychic potentialities. Other people’s psychic powers frightened him; those who had them he regarded as witches or magicians. But ever since Dr Rhodes Buchanan began testing the students of the Cincinnati medical school for psychometric powers in the 1840s, modern researchers have realised that such powers are far commoner than we think. Nine out of ten people can dowse, and probably the tenth could develop the ability if he made the effort. Poltergeist disturbances occur every day of the week; investigators like Hans Bender and William Roll have examined hundreds. And even the least psychic people can tell remarkable stories of coincidence or synchronicity. We are surrounded by the psychic all the time, but we seldom notice it unless we look for it.
When speaking of psychic forces, like the entity that caused Bill Slater so much alarm, it is also important to realise that most human beings possess greater powers than they are aware of. My correspondent from St Leonards on Sea, who caused the boss’s wife severe stomach pains, was not a witch; she was simply very angry. The novelist John Cowper Powys records that people he hated met with unpleasant accidents with such frequency that he was finally reduced to a state of ‘neurotic benevolence’, terrified of unleashing his irritation.
A French criminal case of the nineteenth century provides a well-documented illustration of the use of such powers.15 On March 31, 1865, a club-footed beggar knocked on the door of a farm labourer, M. H., in the village of Sollies-Farliede (Var) and asked for food and shelter; the kindly labourer gave him supper and allowed him to sleep in the haystack. The beggar was a hairy, repulsive-looking man of about twenty-five, who seemed to be a deaf-mute (although later evidence suggests he was shamming). By means of a pencil and paper he explained that his name was Thimotheus Castellan, an out-of-work cork cutter who had become an itinerant healer and dowser. The daughter of the house, twenty-six-year-old Josephine H., found him terrifying. The next morning, the father and his fifteen-year-old son went to work; Castellan soon joined Josephine in the cottage. During the morning, crowds of curious neighbours wandered in and out; one of them claimed that he saw Castellan making strange signs in the air behind Josephine’s back. Later, as they were eating the midday meal, Castellan suddenly reached out and made a movement with his fingers, as if dropping something into her food; she felt her senses leaving her. Castellan carried her into the next room and raped her. The girl remained conscious, but unable to resist. She was also unable to move when a neighbour came and knocked on the door.
Later that day, Josephine was seen to leave the house with Castellan; she seemed upset and made incoherent noises. For the next three days she remained with Castellan. At a farmhouse at La Cappelude, she seemed to experience extremes of tenderness and violent revulsion towards her companion. She asked a girl to allow her to go home with her for the night, but Castellan ordered her to stay. He made signs with his hands, and she seemed to become paralysed. He asked if they would like to see her laugh, and she immediately burst into peals of hysterical laughter. When he slapped her face, she suddenly recovered and seemed perfectly normal. She accompanied Castellan to bed without protest. The next morning, Castellan again demonstrated his power over her by making her crawl around like an animal. The farmer was so outraged that he threw Castellan out. The girl now seemed to become partly paralysed, so Castellan had to be called back; he slapped her face, and she recovered.
The following day, the girl managed to run away while Castellan was engaged in conversation with some hunters. She remained violently disturbed for the next six weeks, but slowly recovered. Castellan was sentenced to twelve years in prison for rape.
What precisely happened? We get the impression that, as soon as Castellan saw her, he recognised her as a potential victim, while the girl herself felt that she had been somehow marked down. She described at the trial how she lay awake, fully dressed, on her bed throughout most of the night when Castellan arrived. And if the neighbour was not mistaken about the strange gestures he made behind her back, it sounds as if he was able to exert some kind of pressure on her even when her back was turned. When they were finally alone—over the midday meal—he was able to paralyse her will merely by making a movement with two fingers. It sounds as if he was exercising some direct form of thought pressure on her.
A notorious case that took place in Heidelberg in 1934 suggests the same curious powers. A woman travelling on a train, on her way to consult a doctor about stomach pains, fell into conversation with a man who introduced himself as a healer and homoeopath. She felt nervous and insecure with him, but accepted when he invited her to join him for coffee. The man—whose name was Franz Walter—suddenly took hold of her hand, and she felt weak and dizzy, with no will of her own. Later, he took her to a room in Heidelberg, placed her in a trance by touching her forehead, and had intercourse with her. His power over her was absolute. He made her prostitute herself and give him the money. She also gave him 3,000 marks of her savings. Finally, he ordered her to murder her husband, either by poison or by shooting him; he added a hypnotic suggestion that she should not, under any circumstances, reveal his own part in the affair, or even his identity. But the husband became suspicious after her sixth attempt at murder (she had cut the brake cable of his motor bike, causing a serious crash), and he reported his increasing misgivings to the police. The police psychiatrist, Dr Ludwig Mayer, who described the case in Crime Under Hypnosis, had the interesting task of somehow by-passing Walter’s complex system of commands and inhibitions. He succeeded so well that Walter was sentenced to ten years in gaol.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the woman’s evidence was her insistence that she fought hard against Walter’s powers but found them too much for her. As she felt him raping her, she tried to push him away but was unable to move. She experienced the same reluctance to give herself to the various clients he selected for her but was unable to help herself when they uttered a certain word of hypnotic command.
What was the nature of this peculiar power exercised by Walter and Castellan? The common-sense view is that it was simply the ordinary power of suggestion exercised by a dominant man over a neurotic, weak-willed woman. But this view ignores too many problems. Even ordinary hypnosis takes a certain amount of time and requires the co-operation of the subject; Castellan and Walter apparently exercised their power in a more direct manner, somehow dominating the will.
It is worth bearing in mind that this same power was attributed to Rasputin, Gurdjieff and Crowley. Prince Yussupov tells how ‘the holy devil’ hypnotised him into a state of total paralysis at their first meeting: ‘His hypnotic power was immense. I felt it subduing me and diffusing warmth throughout the whole of my being… I lay motionless, unable to call out or stir.’16 In God is My Adventure, Rom Landau has a similar account of the peculiar power exercised by Gurdjieff at their first meeting: ‘the feeling of physical weakness pervaded me more and more… I was sure that if I tried to get up my legs would sag under me and I would fall to the floor.’ Landau makes the interesting suggestion that ‘it may have been a form of electric emanation such as Rasputin is said to have possessed in a high degree’. Landau has an even more significant story of a lady novelist who sat in a restaurant near Gurdjieff.
Gurdjieff caught her eye, and we saw distinctly that he suddenly began to inhale and exhale in a particular way. I [realised] Gurdjieff was employing one of the methods he must have learned in the East. A few moments later I noticed that my friend was turning pale; she seemed on the verge of fainting … ‘That man is uncanny,’ she whispered. ‘Something awful happened … He looked at me in such a peculiar way that within a second or two I suddenly felt as though I had been struck right through my sexual centre. It was beastly …’
Crowley’s hypnotic powers have been described many times; but most writers assume that they emanated from his peculiar, basilisk-like stare. An account given by Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, son of Crowley’s literary executor Louis Wilkinson, makes it fairly apparent, however, that Crowley’s powers had much in common with those of Rasputin and Gurdjieff.17 Wilkinson was speaking to a scene-designer in a Gloucestershire mansion where Crowley had spent a great deal of time.
When I, in discussing Crowley, doubted his magical powers, the scene-designer said: ‘You would not have thought that if you had been with us when Crowley was here. After dinner, we came down to a room on the first floor … Crowley sat on his haunches, there by the fire … Two others beside myself were in the room. As Crowley talked, the man on the other side of the fireplace from Crowley fell sideways, his head a few inches from the flames, and stayed there. Another got up, dropped on all fours, sniffed round the chairs, begged, barked and whined, scratched at the door …’ At this point I remembered Frances [his mother] describing how a man who had called at the same time as Crowley … had begun to act like a dog, and how Crowley had continued to talk, watching with mild interest, till the man recovered, passing the obscene exhibition off as a joke … ‘Like a dog,’ the man continued, ‘and the man over there got up, without a word, rushed through the window, and didn’t come back till noon next day, his clothes torn and his face bleeding. I couldn’t move for a while, and when I did, Crowley had gone to bed.’ ‘Crowley might have used drugs,’ I suggested. ‘And hypnotism … But he used something else too …’ ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Magic,’ said the young man.
We have, in fact, already touched on this question in discussing the basis of magic: the power of the will. J. B. Priestley was able to induce a woman to wink at him by sending a ‘mental order’ across a dining room. Joire could make hypnotised and blindfolded subjects perform certain actions purely by telepathy. But sexual magic seems to involve even stronger forces. I have elsewhere quoted Robert Graves’s remark that many young men use a form of unconscious sorcery to seduce women. Not, one should note, the other way round. The ‘unconscious sorcery’ of woman tends to be passive, a kind of invitation. (We can see this in sex goddesses like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, who possess a quality of innocence and vulnerability. Actresses whose seductiveness is more self-conscious never achieve this almost mythological status.) Masculine seduction, by contrast, is basically an attempt at domination. This can be clearly seen in the writings of professional seducers like Casanova or ‘Walter’ (the anonymous author of My Secret Life); they mark down the woman as prey; their aim is to convince her that she is destined to submit, that she has no choice. In order to do this, they induce in themselves an attitude of dominance, in which the result is a foregone conclusion, then attempt to transmit this to the woman. It seems to require a total commitment of the will and absolute single-minded determination to achieve possession. And this in turn seems to involve an unconscious belief in the power of the will to achieve its object by sheer intensity of desire, not unlike the belief of a devout Christian in the power of prayer. All this certainly adds up to magic, either in Sartre’s negative definition (‘wishful thinking’) or Crowley’s (‘magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will’).
However, the most important common denominator in the cases cited above, is that Castellan, the German Franz Walter, Rasputin and Gurdjieff were all healers. And healing often seems to involve an actual transfer of some form of energy from one person to another. Rasputin saved Anna Vyrubova’s life by taking her hands and staring into her eyes—draining himself of energy in the process. The same is true of Gurdjieff, after he had revitalised Fritz Peters simply by staring at him. Peters said that it was ‘as if a violent electric blue light emanated from him and entered into me’. Castellan influenced Josephine by making movements with his hands behind her back. And Franz Walter’s victim described how, at their first meeting: ‘Suddenly he took hold of my hand, and it seemed I no longer had a will of my own. I felt strange and giddy …’
Let us, at this point, try to summarise some of the findings of the present chapter, and of the second part of this book.
While it would be a pity to return to the old, simplistic belief in evil spirits, it would be short-sighted not to admit the likelihood of the existence of intelligent non-human powers and entities. Such entities are not necessarily more intelligent than human beings; many of them seem to be a great deal less so. Whether they could be considered ‘evil’ is another matter. It should be borne in mind that, from the point of view of cows and sheep, human beings are evil. We slaughter and eat them; we even tear their unborn children from their wombs as a special delicacy. But this does not mean that human beings are ‘evil’ per se. The phrase is probably meaningless; evil per se does not exist.
No honest evaluation of the known universe can exclude this possibility of other intelligences and of disembodied spirits. But this second part of the book has been concerned mainly with a more interesting and immediate problem: the hidden potentialities of the human spirit. And this phrase in itself makes us aware of the inadequacy of our paradigms. We naturally see ourselves as a certain type of body and a certain type of consciousness that we call ‘human’. Freud and Jung showed us that this level may be only a single floor of the building; below there can be endless basements and catacombs. On the other hand, we have seen that various strange phenomena—from multiple personality to second sight and precognition—seem to be most easily explainable by assuming that there are also a great many levels above this everyday consciousness. The picture that emerges is of a kind of skyscraper which continues below the ground. Should we think of the whole skyscraper as the human being? This seems to involve a kind of conceit, as if a tobacconist’s kiosk on the ground floor of a skyscraper regarded the rest of the building as an extension of itself.
Besides, the study of multiple personality suggests a more startling possibility. It seems that this body of mine is not really ‘mine’ at all; it can be taken over by squatters. This is a flat contradiction of the materialist view—expounded in our own time by Wittgenstein and Ryle—that ‘I’ am the sum of my bodily and mental states. Doris Fischer’s body and brain remained the same, yet her personality varied according to whether she was ‘occupied’ by herself, Margaret or Ariel. This in turn suggests another possibility: that ‘I’ am not a genuinely self-complete being, in spite of my sense of selfhood, but am merely the tobacconist on the ground floor of the Empire State Building.
It is worth adding, in passing, that this image enables me to explain the development of my own field of interest from ‘outsiderism’ to the paranormal. The ‘outsider’ is aware of being trapped in his own narrow personality, and he suffers from a sense of suffocation. ‘We each think of the key, each in his prison.’ But the outsider suffers so much because he has had moments in which he experienced an intoxicating sense of freedom, in which his consciousness seemed somehow enlarged. He has, in effect, managed to escape from the kiosk and explore some of the rest of the ground floor. The great romantics, from Rousseau to T. E. Lawrence, were all driven by this desire to escape from ‘themselves’ and explore the realms of freedom.
But there are also other floors, both above and below. And although it seems to involve considerable effort, there seems to be no ‘law’ forbidding the owner of the kiosk from exploring the rest of the building. The problems are purely practical. It is not easy to go downstairs, because we tend to fall asleep when we try to descend into ourselves. As to exploring the higher floors, it is a problem that has preoccupied philosophers and mystics ever since Plato. Direct attempts to climb the stairs are usually defeated by the sheer effort involved; it is as if the force of gravity increased with every step.
But at least there seem to be telephone lines to other floors, and these lines are habitually used by dowsers, clairvoyants and psychics. Mystics and philosophers agree that this is a far less satisfactory method than direct exploration. Psychics usually seem to pay for their unusual abilities with a kind of lop-sidedness, as if clairvoyance were due to some kind of deficiency. And much of their evidence is confused and ambiguous—as if they were not certain whether the telephone line led to the upper floors or the sub-basement. All the same, many of them have presented convincing evidence of the existence of the other floors.
One of the most interesting clues to the mystery is the existence of the poltergeist. Although no one realised it at the time, the recognition that poltergeists are of human origin was one of the greatest intellectual landmarks in human history. It was the first convincing proof that we possess other floors. The materialist philosophers of the nineteenth century could dismiss psychics like Frederika Hauffe, the Seeress of Prevorst, as puzzling exceptions to the laws of nature. But if dozens—or hundreds—of disturbed teenagers can produce the same curious manifestations, then it seems unlikely that Frederika was merely an exception to the general rule. It is altogether more logical to suppose that we are all like that. We are all multi-storied.
As we have already noted, the most baffling thing about the poltergeist is the source of its energy. It could be, as John Taylor suspects, electromagnetic; it could be electrical; it could be from the earth itself; it could come from other people. But if we think of the poltergeist in the light of our observations on multiple personality, an even more interesting problem emerges. It is easy enough to understand—in theory, at least,—how our higher levels can make use of these unknown energies. But as far as we can see, the poltergeist is not a higher level. It usually seems to be a kind of mischievous child. Why should it have powers that are not accessible to our conscious, everyday self?
The study of multiple personality suggests an answer. Janet noted that when people become neurotic and obsessed by anxiety, their energies diminish; they find everything an immense effort. By contrast, the best way for a human being to increase his energy is to widen his personality, to expand his sympathies, to throw himself open to new and interesting experiences. This is the most reliable way to contact our ‘vital reserves’—or perhaps that great lake of energy that Gurdjieff spoke to Bennett about in the forest at Fontainebleau. The whole mind is like a full moon; everyday consciousness is like a mere shaving of it. We find it easy enough to imagine that if a human being could expand his consciousness to the full moon, he would become godlike and his energy would be boundless. Somehow, the hidden part of the moon is connected with the lake of energy.
Independent ‘personalities’ like Sally Beauchamp and Margaret Fischer have something in common with poltergeists: they are mischievous sprites, often destructive but seldom malicious. And if they exist anywhere, then it is in that hidden part of the mind. Some confine themselves to playing tricks on the current occupant of the body. Some, like Anne-Marie Schaberl’s alter-ego, play tricks on other people with the use of an unknown form of energy.
The evidence seems to suggest that these energies are available in another part of our consciousness. Why should that be? Here again, Janet’s observations suggest an answer. Why do people suffering from acute anxiety also suffer from exhaustion? Because the more anxious and tense we become, the more we fall into the hands of the robot, our mechanical part. People who plod through habit-ridden, automatic lives seldom call upon their vital reserves, so their energies become constricted by habit. But everyday life is bound to be governed largely by the robot, merely because it involves so much repetition. So my conscious being, no matter how busy and creative, is also largely in the hands of the robot. And its energies are therefore seriously restricted. This is not true of the unconscious (or superconscious) part of my mind. Like the open countryside, these areas of my being are largely unmechanised, and their forces are immense.
But are there any limits to what can be achieved? If so, no one has discovered them. Bennett experienced a far wider area of his being at Fontainebleau; but he never suggested that was all there was to be explored.
The full significance of this insight takes a great deal of grasping. But an anecdote about Colonel Olcott, Madame Blavatsky’s friend and disciple, may point the way. In Ceylon, a local Buddhist priest told Olcott that the Roman Catholics were hoping to turn a nearby village into another Lourdes, complete with miracles. Olcott replied that the priest had better learn to perform miracles; the priest replied sadly that he had no powers. Olcott decided to apply his knowledge of hypnotic suggestion; when he met a partially paralysed man, he made a few mysterious passes in the air and told him that he should improve. Later the same day the man came back saying he was already feeling better and asking for more treatment. Olcott made more mysterious movements. The man continued to improve. Suddenly, Olcott found that he had a reputation as a miracle worker; sick people appeared in hordes. And, to his own astonishment, he found that he was gradually learning to cure them; something flowed from him into his patients, and he felt drained, while the patient went away much improved. Olcott had developed healing powers simply by trying.
In the same way, when Abraham Maslow began to talk to his students about ‘peak experiences’—experiences of sudden over-whelming happiness—many of them recalled peak experiences they had half-forgotten, or hardly noticed at the time. And the more they discussed peak experiences, the more they began to have. Merely thinking about them, talking about them, was enough to make them happen.
In both these cases, the crucial element was an attitude of optimism. The Buddhist priest told Olcott that he had no miraculous powers. That was why he was unable to perform miracles. Olcott began by thinking he had no miraculous powers, but he made the effort, and discovered he was mistaken. The conscious knowledge that such powers exist is the most important step towards developing them.
All human beings share a desire to expand their powers, to experience greater freedom and vitality, to ‘have life more abundantly’. What deters them from making an effort is a lack of any idea of where to begin. If our reasoning has been correct, we have solved that problem. All that is necessary is to know that these powers are associated with the hidden part of the mind, and that they can be called upon by conscious effort. We simply need to be convinced that they exist. And this conviction can be gained by studying the evidence until dawning understanding turns into insight. No ‘belief’ is required, and no mystical disciplines are necessary: only the kind of straightforward effort that is needed to verify that the angles of a triangle really add up to a hundred and eighty degrees, or that the square on the hypotenuse is really equal to the square on the other two sides. Study the problem of multiple personality with an open mind, the phenomena of poltergeist activity, the curious powers of men like Rasputin and Gurdjieff, the observations of Lethbridge and Underwood on dowsing, and it is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that the human mind is a vaster and stranger realm than we ever supposed. Moreover, the greatest step towards exploring its latent powers is simply to recognise clearly that they exist.
The Tree of Life
