by J H Brennan
The author Colin Wilson describes7 an even more specific time-slip at Fotheringhay Church in Northamptonshire that involved a Cambridge schoolteacher named Mrs. Jane O’Neill, when she visited the church in the early winter of 1973. There she spent time admiring a picture of the Crucifixion behind the altar on the left side of the church. The work had an arched top featuring a dove with outstretched wings. Later in her hotel room she mentioned the picture to a friend named Shirley, who claimed she had never seen it, although she had visited the church often. Concerned by Shirley’s reaction, Mrs. O’Neill rang the local postmistress, who confirmed there was no picture of the Crucifixion, although there was a board behind the altar with a painting of a dove.
A year later, Jane O’Neill returned to Fotheringhay Church to find the outside as she remembered it, but the inside was a different building, much smaller than she recalled. There was, as the postmistress said, no painting of the Crucifixion, and the dove behind the altar was totally different from the one she had seen. Mrs. O’Neill then contacted a Northamptonshire historian, who told her that the original Fotheringhay Church had been torn down in 1553 and the present building erected on the site. Further research confirmed that the church Mrs. O’Neill entered in 1973 was the one that had been demolished more than four hundred years previously.
Other examples of the “time slip” phenomenon include the experiences of two late Victorian schoolteachers, who apparently walked into a different time-stream while visiting the former palace of Marie Antoinette in Versailles, near Paris, France, and of Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard who appears to have flown his biplane some four years into the future.8 But whether “time slip” or “natural recording,” the only concern of our present investigation is to show that a certain type of experience, often classified as an encounter with a spirit, may be nothing of the sort within our present definition of the term. Whatever else one might say about them, it is clear that the Grey Lady phenomenon has had little or no impact on the course of human history, if only for the fact that Grey Lady specters never communicate. But the situation is a little less clear-cut in another apparent spirit manifestation.
27. THE GEIST THAT POLTERS
WHEN I WORKED IN JOURNALISM AS A YOUNG MAN, I WAS DISpatched to investigate an attack on a remote farmhouse in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. As reported to my editor, someone had thrown a volley of stones onto the farm roof during the night and broken a window. The farmer suspected a neighboring family with whom he had a grudge. On the face of it, this sounded like one of those pointless feuds that sometimes break out among neighbors, but when I arrived on the scene, it turned out to be something very different. There had been, in the interim, a second attack of stones, but this time during daylight. The farmer and his son were in the building at the time and both rushed out to catch the perpetrator. But though they reached the farmyard while the attack was still going on, there was no one in sight, nor anywhere obvious where someone might hide. The stones that thundered down—it was a corrugated iron roof— appeared to fall from nowhere. During my interview with the farmer, he added a telling detail. When the stones stopped falling and they went back into the house, several cups fell off a dresser in the kitchen for no apparent reason. There was one further incident of the same type a week or so later, but with a much lighter fall of stones and no disturbances inside the house. After that, the phenomenon stopped completely. Brief though the whole thing had been, enough had happened to establish that the “attacker” was not a neighbor but a poltergeist.
Colin Wilson, who has devoted an entire book to the subject, estimates that there are more than a thousand recorded cases of poltergeist activity. Perhaps the earliest, which occurred toward the end of the ninth century CE, bore a passing resemblance to the case I investigated as a reporter. According to the account handed down in the Annales Fuldenses,1 the phenomenon began on a farm—this time near Bingen on the Rhine—and involved the throwing of stones by an invisible hand. But events did not end there. The stone throwing was followed by raps on the walls, so violent at times that the entire house shook, while shortly after harvest, the farmer’s crops mysteriously caught fire. Word of the outbreak reached the bishop of Mainz, who concluded that evil spirits were at work and dispatched a team of exorcist priests to get rid of them. When the ritual began, the priests were pelted with stones.
In subsequent years, many came to share the bishop’s conclusion about poltergeist phenomena. The very term poltergeist derives from the German and translates as “noisy ghost or spirit,” and while it has not always been seen as outright evil, it is frequently described as “troublesome” or “mischievous.” Typical of poltergeist activities are rains of stones, mud, dirt, and various small objects; raps and other noises; the movement of furniture; the displacement and in some instances levitation of ornaments, cutlery, kitchen china, and the like; and the setting of small fires. In the late 1970s, the British parapsychologists Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell conducted a computer analysis of cases from 1800 to the present day. Some sixty-three typical poltergeist characteristics were identified, including the movement of small objects (64 percent), nocturnal activity (58 percent), raps (48 percent), the movement of large objects (36 percent), and the opening and shutting of doors and windows (12 percent). In only a quarter of all cases did activity last for more than a year.2
The dry statistics give little impression of the violence and variety of many poltergeist outbreaks. In a relatively modern case, a poltergeist announced its presence to the McGrath farming family of County Westmeath in Ireland during August 1981 by making noises on the roof. This was followed by electric lights switching on and off and small household objects mysteriously moving from their normal places. The phenomena died down at Christmas but started up again in the New Year. Like the County Armagh case I investigated, stones cascaded onto the roof. Buckets and churn lids were thrown around the farmyard by invisible hands. The McGraths called in a priest who blessed the house, but while activity ceased for a time, it started up again after two weeks. A brother of the owner was “chased” by a plastic bucket and saw a cable swinging violently while there was no wind to move it. Doors opened of their own accord, shoes were taken from the house and left outside, a window was smashed in, logs for the fire were moved about, and a kitchen brush somehow found its way onto the roof—as a daughter of the house discovered when it fell on her head.
An even more extreme example—and a case that has become a classic of poltergeist literature—was recorded by the Reverend Joseph Glanvil in 1666. Glanvil described how he went to a house in Wiltshire3 and there found “two modest little girls in bed between seven and eleven years old.” There was a mysterious scratching sound coming from behind the bolster. Glanvil was certain the noise could not have been made by the girls—their hands were in view. He searched the room without finding the cause, but later discovered a linen bag with something moving about inside it, like a rat or a mouse. He drew the bag inside out, but it was empty.
Glanvil investigated the background to the mysterious sounds he had heard. Five years previously, in March 1661, a magistrate named John Mompesson was trying cases in the village of Ludgershall, East Wiltshire, when court proceedings were disturbed by the sound of drumming. He sent the local constable to investigate and quickly discovered that the noise was caused by a tinker named William Drury, who had arrived in the village a few days earlier. Drury had requested public assistance on the strength of papers signed by eminent magistrates, but so far the request had been refused. Mompesson ordered the tinker be brought before him, examined the papers, and pronounced them forgeries. Consequently he committed Drury to jail until the next sitting of the Assizes and confiscated his drum.
Within a few days, the tinker escaped. For want of anything better to do with the drum, the court bailiff sent it off to Magistrate Mompesson. It arrived at Mompesson’s home in Tidworth while he was away in London. When he came home, terrified servants told him there had been knocks and raps in the house for
three nights running. The magistrate suspected intruders and went to bed with a loaded pistol. When the sounds started up, Mompesson leaped out of bed brandishing his pistol. He rushed into the room where the noises came from, only to find they had moved to another room. The magistrate followed. The noises moved again. Soon he was chasing them all over the house. Eventually they moved outside. Mompesson gave up and went back to bed and lay listening as the noises continued. Among them he could clearly hear the sound of drumming.
The noises returned night after night, often continuing for hours on end; then suddenly they stopped. For three weeks there was silence; then the noises started up again, worse than ever, often seeming to follow Mompesson’s children around. At this point, other poltergeist phenomena began to manifest. Small articles moved of their own accord. Invisible hands tugged a breadboard away from a manservant. When a minister arrived to pray, the noises increased in volume and were accompanied by the smell of burning sulfur. Soon the Mompesson house was filled with knocks, raps, bangs, slamming doors, and mysterious lights. One morning the magistrate’s horse was found on its back with a hind hoof jammed in its mouth. A visitor had his sword snatched away. Another found that the coins in his pocket had turned black. The local blacksmith was attacked with pincers. The spirit developed a voice. Witnesses claimed it shouted, “A witch! A witch!” at least a hundred times. The contents of ash cans and chamber pots were emptied into the children’s beds. The phenomena, somewhat abated, were still manifesting five years later when the Reverend Glanvil paid his call.
A case in modern-day Pontefract, an historic West Yorkshire market town in England, produced some unusual features. When Colin Wilson investigated in 1980, he discovered that the disturbances, some fourteen years earlier, had begun with a drop in temperature, a rattling window, and an extraordinary drizzle of fine white dust inside the house at 30 East Drive. The dust did not fall from the ceiling but appeared to manifest out of nowhere some distance below it, so that when residents stood up their heads protruded beyond the top of the dust cloud. At much the same time, pools of water began to form on the floor, re-forming each time they were wiped up. Investigation showed the floor beneath the linoleum was dry and the pools continued to appear even after the main water was cut off. Before that happened, another water effect occurred when green foam rushed from taps and flushing toilets. A button-operated tea dispenser near the sink began to operate of its own accord. As the button went in and out as if pressed by an invisible finger, tea leaves cascaded onto the draining board until the container was empty. Sugar was also strewn across kitchen work surfaces. Alongside these oddities came more typical examples of poltergeist activity: a loud crash in a hallway, a light switching on of its own accord, a plant separated from its pot and moved halfway up a flight of stairs while the pot was flung onto the landing above. There were also banging noises, a vibrating kitchen cupboard, and a wardrobe that swayed and tottered for no apparent reason.
After this brief, violent burst over a matter of days, the manifestations stopped for a period of two years, then started up again with the movement of a bedspread from a bedroom to the bottom of the stairs. This was followed by plant pots upending themselves in the hallway with a loud crash. A paintbrush and bucket of paste were flung across a room, a roll of wallpaper reared up like a cobra, a carpet sweeper flew up into the air, a wooden pelmet was ripped from the wall and tossed out of the window. After these and even more violent phenomena, the Pritchard family who lived in the house understandably concluded, like many other victims of the noisy ghost, that they were dealing with a spirit—they called it Mr. Nobody. But was a spirit really involved?
Another well-attested poltergeist “haunting” challenges any facile conclusion. Rosenheim is a small town southwest of Munich. In November 1967, the lighting system in the local office of a German lawyer named Sigmund Adam began to show serious faults. Strip lights failed explosively and with such consistency that he installed a special meter. It showed sudden, inexplicable surges of current. The local electrical company, the Stadtwerke, were called to investigate and came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the power lines. They installed a direct cable, but still the lights exploded. Sigmund Adam then had his own generator installed and changed the strip lights for ordinary bulbs, but the problem remained. The mystery deepened when he tested his meter on a 1.5 volt battery. It showed an impossible output of 3 volts. He was still wondering what to do when his phone bill arrived, showing a massive increase over his usual level of calls. Phone company technicians installed a monitor that showed someone was dialing the speaking clock for hours on end, four, five, and even six times a minute—faster than it was physically possible to make the connection.
A local reporter arrived to investigate. When a lightbulb fell out of its socket as he was leaving, he decided a spirit was involved and wrote up a report on the Rosenheim ghost. When the story was taken up by the national press, it attracted the attention of one of Europe’s leading parapsychologists, Professor Hans Bender of the Institute of Paranormal Research in Freiburg. Bender mounted an investigation during which lights swung for no apparent reason, pictures turned on the wall, and a heavy filing cabinet was moved by unseen hands. But the spirit proved not to be a spirit. Bender noticed that all the phenomena seemed to be associated with a teenage girl, Anne-Marie Schaberl, who had joined the company direct from school two years previously. The connection was not subtle. The surges of current occurred only when she was in the building. When she walked along a corridor, the overhead lights would begin to swing back and forth. Adam responded to the discovery by firing the girl. There seems no doubt that Schaberl, a tense, unhappy, suspicious, and aggressive teenager, was the ultimate cause of all the problems. The phenomena stopped at once when she left but broke out in another office once she found employment there. When she went ten-pin bowling with her fiancé, the electronic equipment ceased to function properly. She took a mill job but left when a machinery malfunction led to the death of a coworker.
This was not the only case of its type. At much the same time as the Rosenheim poltergeist in Germany, there was an outbreak in a wholesale novelty store in Miami, Florida. Some two hundred separate incidents were reported, involving the movement of items from shelves and multiple breakages. When parapsychologists J. G. Pratt and W. G. Roff investigated, they quickly narrowed down the focus of the disturbances to a nineteen-year-old shipping clerk named Julio. Like Schaberl, he was a frustrated individual with strong feelings of hostility for which he had limited outlet. Another American case a few years later showed the same essential pattern. An elderly couple living in Olive Hill, Kentucky, had so many of their possessions smashed by a poltergeist that they were forced to move. The geist moved with them and under professional investigation was found to be associated with the couple’s twelve-year-old grandson, Roger. The boy generated some 179 incidents, including the levitation of a heavy kitchen table, which not only jumped into the air but rotated some forty-five degrees before settling down on the backs of nearby chairs. Investigators noted that the number of incidents decreased in inverse proportion to their distance from the boy.
Cases like these led to the theory that poltergeist outbreaks had little to do with spirits. The historian and academic Richard Cavendish sums up the position:
Because poltergeist incidents usually occur in close proximity to a living person, parapsychologists tend to regard them as instances of psychokinesis or PK. Since poltergeist incidents are recurrent and arise unexpectedly and spontaneously, they are commonly referred to as instances of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” or RSPK. They appear to be unconscious cases of PK since the person who seems to bring them about is usually unaware of his involvement. Some persons remain convinced that RSPK phenomena are due to the agency of an incorporeal entity such as the spirit of a deceased entity or a “demon” which has attached itself to some living person and which causes the incidents by PK. However, since there is no evidence for such spiri
ts apart from the phenomena themselves, most parapsychologists are of the opinion that poltergeist phenomena are examples of unconscious PK exercised by the person around whom they occur.4
While Cavendish is correct in his assertion that a majority of psychical investigators subscribe to the “unconscious PK” theory, there is evidence that the theory itself may not hold for every case. PK is defined as “movement of physical objects by the mind without use of physical means.” The fact that the talent is recurrent, spontaneous, or unconscious does not change this. So how does “the movement of physical objects by the mind” account for these reports:
• In 1877, disturbances at a farm in Derrygonnelly, Ireland, were investigated by the physicist and Society for Psychical Research founder Sir William Barrett, who reported: “I mentally asked it, no word being spoken, to knock a certain number of times and it did so. To avoid any error or delusion on my part, I put my hands in the side pockets of my overcoat and asked it to knock the number of fingers I had open. It correctly did so.” Barrett repeated the experiment four times without error. The focus of the poltergeist activity in this case was the twenty-year-old daughter of the house, Maggie, but if she was using unconscious PK to produce the raps, she must also have been using something else—presumably telepathy—to answer Barrett’s silent questions.
• In 1952, Hans Bender, the parapsychologist who handled the Rosenheim case, was called in to investigate a poltergeist outbreak in the home of the mayor of Neudorf, in Baden, Germany. In this instance, three witnesses watched as a collection of nails appeared eight inches below a bedroom ceiling before falling to the floor. The origin of the nails was a locked cupboard in the kitchen. The problem was obvious: how did the nails move out of the cupboard without damage to its structure or themselves? How did they pass through intervening walls and ceiling without leaving holes? Bender became particularly interested in this phenomenon—which is quite frequent in poltergeist cases—and eventually postulated the existence of a “higher space,” or fourth dimension of matter, which would allow “freedom of movement” and account for the apparent penetration of matter by matter. Whatever the validity of this postulate, one can say with confidence something more than PK was involved.