Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  Anne-Marie had no suspicion that she was the cause of the disturbances in the lawyer’s office: indeed when I met him during the course of the programme Professor Bender told me that one of the first rules of poltergeist investigation is not to tell the ‘disturbed adolescent’ that he — or she — is the real cause of the disturbances, for it usually terrifies them.

  In 1980 I heard of a poltergeist haunting that was even more astonishing than the Rosenheim case. It had taken place in Pontefract in Yorkshire and I heard about it from a friend of the family concerned, who seemed to think that it might make a book rather like the best-selling Amityville Horror. The poltergeist had, it seemed, wrecked practically every breakable item in the house and made such loud drumming noises at night that neighbours gathered in crowds to listen. But in this case a number of people concerned had apparently also seen the poltergeist, which took the form of a monk dressed in black. The friend of the family who contacted me was also interested in local history and told me that his researches had revealed that there had once been a gallows on the site of the house, and that a Cluniac monk had been hanged there for rape in the time of Henry VIII.

  The story sounded almost too good to be true. But before deciding to write about it I asked a friend who lived in the area, Brian Marriner, to go and investigate. He wrote me a long letter in which he outlined the story of the haunting, and I was left in no doubt that this was a genuine case, not a hoax. The daughter of the family, Diane Pritchard, had been dragged upstairs by the throat by the ‘Black Monk’ and thrown out of bed repeatedly. But the ghost also seemed to have a sense of humour. When Aunt Maude, a determined sceptic, came to see for herself, a jug of milk floated out of the refrigerator and poured itself over her head. Later what looked like two enormous hands appeared around the door: they proved to be Aunt Maude’s fur gloves. As the gloves floated into the bedroom Mrs Pritchard asked indignantly, ‘Do you still think it’s the kids doing it?’ Aunt Maude burst into ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and the gloves proceeded to conduct her singing, beating in time.

  Having studied Brian Marriner’s report on the case I concluded that there was not enough material there for a full-length book, but it would make an admirable centrepiece for a book on the poltergeist, on which there is an immense amount of well-authenticated material. Poltergeist cases seem to be among the most frequent of paranormal events — at any given moment there are probably thousands of them going on all over the world and there is likely to be one going on within a dozen miles of where you are now reading this book. This, I concluded, is because the world is so full of sexually disturbed adolescents. I sketched out an outline of a history of poltergeist phenomena and submitted it to my publisher, who wrote back to say he liked the idea. Then, accompanied by my wife, I set out for Yorkshire to investigate for myself.

  On our way to Pontefract we stopped for a night at the Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick, Derbyshire, where I was to lecture at a conference on the paranormal. The following afternoon, just as we were about to leave, someone mentioned that Guy Playfair was due to arrive in half an hour. He and I had corresponded but had never met. So although I was anxious to get on to Yorkshire I decided to stay around for another half hour to introduce myself. It proved to be one of those fateful decisions that exercise an immeasurable influence on the future.

  Guy, I knew, had spent some time in Rio de Janeiro, where he had joined the Brazilian equivalent of the Society for Psychical Research and studied the local version of black magic, umbanda. I knew his book The Indefinite Boundary, a scientific study of the paranormal, and was impressed by its logic and detachment. I was just as impressed by Playfair himself, a quietly-spoken man whose modest utterances nevertheless carried total conviction. For half an hour or so we talked about ley lines, animal homing and telepathy. Then, just as it was about time to leave, I told him I was writing a book on the poltergeist and asked his opinion. He frowned, hesitated, then said, ‘I think it’s a kind of football.’ ‘Football!’ I wondered if I’d misheard him: ‘A football of energy. When people get into conditions of tension, they exude a kind of energy — the kind of thing that happens to teenagers at puberty. Along come a couple of spirits, and they do what any group of schoolboys would so — they begin to kick it around, smashing windows and generally creating havoc. Then they get tired and leave it. In fact the football often explodes, and turns into a puddle of water.’

  ‘So you mean a poltergeist is actually a spirit?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m not saying there’s not such a thing as spontaneous psychokinesis. But most poltergeists are spirits.’ And he advised me to read the French spiritualist Allan Kardec.

  I must admit that I found this notion hard to swallow. Ever since making the programme on the Rosenheim case I had taken it for granted that poltergeists are some kind of strange manifestation of the unconscious mind. I was not sure where the energy came from, but suspected that it was from the earth itself. I had seen a dowser standing above an underground spring, his fingers locked together and his hands pumping up and down so violently that the sweat poured down his face: he was obviously unable to stop himself while his hands were together. And at a dowsing conference I had been introduced to an old lady who sometimes picked up a large fallen branch and used it as a dowsing rod. Suspended in one hand, it would swing from side to side like a huge voltmeter needle. It seemed to me highly likely that the energy used by the poltergeist flows from the earth via the right brain of the disturbed adolescent. And now Guy Playfair was advising me to abandon these carefully constructed theories and return to a view that sounded like crude mediaeval superstition.

  The following afternoon we arrived at the home of Joe and Jean Pritchard in Pontefract. It was the typically neat home of an upper-working-class family. Their nineteen-year-old son Phillip was at home, and during the course of the afternoon their daughter Diane came over with her husband to join us. These two had been the unconscious cause of the events that had caused a local sensation in 1966. I asked how the disturbances had begun. ‘With these pools of water on the kitchen floor.’ Joy and I looked at one another. ‘Can you describe their shape?’ Mrs Pritchard shook her head. ‘They were just neat little pools — like overturning an ink bottle.’ This, according to Playfair, was a description of the pools of water created by the explosion of the ‘energy football’. He said it was almost impossible to make them by pouring water on the floor — from a jug for example — because it splashes. These pools look as if a small cat has placed its behind close to the floor and urinated. I began to feel that there might be something in his spirit theory after all.

  Mrs Pritchard said that as fast as they mopped up the pools they reappeared elsewhere. But waterboard officials could find no leak. And when the tap was turned on green foam rushed out. Then the button of the tea dispenser began to move in and out, covering the draining board with dry tea leaves; lights switched on and off and a plant-pot somehow found its way from the bottom to the top of the stairs.

  This first set of manifestations occurred in 1966 and Phillip was obviously the focus since Diane was away on holiday at the time. Two days later, they ceased. But when they began again in 1968 Diane — now fourteen — had become the focus. The ghost seldom paid a visit during the day, when she was at school. But in the evening the racket would start — usually a noise like a child beating a big drum — and ornaments would levitate across the room while the lights turned erratically on and off. Yet the poltergeist did not seem malicious — rather an infuriating practical joker. After a tremendous crash all the contents of the china cabinet were found scattered around the sitting room, yet not one was even cracked. When the vicar came to try to exorcise the poltergeist and told the family that he thought their trouble was subsidence, a candlestick rose from the shelf and floated under his nose. The exorcism was unsuccessful.

  Diane found it frightening, yet less so than might be expected. She always had a kind of inward notification when the pranks were about to start. Hurled vi
olently out of bed with the mattress on top of her, she was unhurt. When the hall stand — made of heavy oak — floated through the air and pinned her down on the stairs (with a sewing machine on top of it for good measure) she was unable to move and the family were unable to budge it, yet she was not even bruised. When the ghost — whom they called Mr Nobody — hurled the grandfather clock downstairs so that it burst like a bomb, no one was anywhere near.

  At a fairly late stage in the haunting the ghost began to show itself. Jean and Joe Pritchard awakened one night to see a dim figure standing in the open doorway. Their next-door neighbour was standing at the sink when she felt someone standing behind her: it proved to be a tall figure in a monk’s habit with a cowl over the head. It looked so solid and normal that she felt no alarm: then it vanished. Another neighbour, Rene Holden (who was a bit psychic), was in the Pritchards’ sitting room when the lights went out. In the faint glow of the streetlamp that came through the curtains she saw the lower half of a figure dressed in a long black garment.

  The haunting was nearing its climax. One evening when the lights went out Diane was heard to scream: the family rushed into the hall and found her being dragged up the stairs. The ghost seemed to have one hand on her cardigan, which was stretched out in front of her, and the other on her throat. As Phillip and Jean Pritchard grabbed her the ghost let go, and they all tumbled down the stairs. Diane’s throat was covered with red fingermarks yet Mr Nobody had not exerted enough pressure to hurt her. Soon after this Jean Pritchard came downstairs to find the hall carpet soaked in water; on the wet surface there were huge footprints.

  One day Phillip and Diane were watching television when they both saw the Black Monk — or at least his shape — silhouetted on the other side of the frosted glass door that led to the dining room. As Phillip opened the door they saw his tall, black shape in the process of vanishing. It seemed to disappear into the kitchen floor. And that was the end of the Pontefract haunting. Mr Nobody disappeared and has not been heard from since.

  I spent the whole of that Sunday afternoon listening to recordings of the poltergeist making violent banging noises, and questioning the family and neighbours. I also read the accounts contained in the local newspapers at the time. There could not be the slightest reasonable doubt that the haunting was genuine: there were too many witnesses.

  Even if I had not met Guy Playfair some of the features of the case would have puzzled me. This poltergeist behaved more like a ghost, and its connection with the former Cluniac monastery and the local gallows was fairly well established. In that case the theory that it was a really a kind of astral juvenile delinquent from Diane’s unconscious mind seemed absurd. Besides, as Diane described her feelings as she was pulled upstairs by Mr Nobody I experienced a sudden total conviction that this was an independent entity, not a split-off fragment of her own psyche. When I left the Pritchards’ house that afternoon I had no doubt whatever that Guy Playfair was right: poltergeists are spirits.

  It was an embarrassing admission to have to make. With the exception of Guy Playfair there is probably not a single respectable parapsychologist in the world who will publicly admit the existence of spirits. Many will concede in private that they are inclined to accept the evidence for life after death, but in print even that admission would be regarded as a sign of weakness. Before that trip to Pontefract I had been in basic agreement with them: it seemed totally unnecessary to assume the existence of spirits. Tom Lethbridge’s ‘tape-recording’ theory explained hauntings; the unconscious mind theory explained poltergeists; and the notions of ‘double consciousness’ and the ‘information universe’ combined to explain mysteries like telepathy, psychometry, even precognition. Spirits were totally irrelevant. Yet the Pontefract case left me in no possible doubt that the entity known as Mr Nobody was a spirit — in all probability of some local monk who died a sudden and violent death, perhaps on the gallows, and who might or might not be aware that he was dead. And I must admit that it still causes me a kind of flash of protest to write such a sentence: the rationalist in me wants to say, ‘Oh come off it… .’ Yet the evidence points clearly in that direction and it would be simple dishonesty not to admit it.

  When I returned from Yorkshire I took a deep breath and plunged into the annals of poltergeist activity with the aid of the library at the Society for Psychical Research and the College of Psychic Studies. The picture that now began to emerge made me aware of how far my preconceptions had caused me to impose an unnatural logic on the whole subject of the paranormal. It was not so much that the conceptions underlying The Occult and Mysteries were wrong as that they were incomplete. And much of the evidence required to complete them had been staring me in the face from the beginning.

  I began, on Guy Playfair’s advice, by reading Allan Kardec.

  *Nicholas Clark-Lowes, the librarian of the Society for Psychical Research, informs me that Dr Leapsley appears in their records as Dr James H. M. Le-Apsley MD, who in 1922 lived in Pasadena, California and who moved to Honolulu in 1928. His last appearance in the SPR records is in 1949.

  *Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1916.

  *The case is described at length in Lombroso’s After Death — What? and in my book Poltergeist, A Study in Destructive Haunting (1981).

  2

  The Truth About Magic

  Allan Kardec was one of the first and most influential converts to spiritualism. Born in Lyons in 1804 Kardec’s real name was Denizard-Hyppolyte-Léon Rivail, and he was descended from generations of lawyers and magistrates. He attended the school of the great educationalist Pestalozzi and soon revealed a brilliant and far-ranging intelligence. Like Ruskin or Carlyle in England, he was a born educator. By the time he was thirty he was the author of a French grammar, a work on arithmetic and a treatise on education. He gave immensely successful lectures on astronomy, chemistry, physics and anatomy and became a member of many learned societies. He was also fascinated by the great Mesmer, who had died lonely and discredited in 1815, at the age of eighty-one. In the 1850s most French doctors would have been afraid to confess an interest in mesmerism; it would have been tantamount to professional ruin. But Rivail had no need for caution; he was a famous savant with independent means and had no need to fear the malice of the coteries. So it came about that in May 1855, when he was fifty years old, he attended a hypnotic session with a certain Mme Roger who, in a trance, was able to perform apparently paranormal feats such as mind-reading. At that session Rivail met a Mme Plainemaison, who persuaded him to attend a seance at her house. There this disciple of the French encyclopaedists was astonished to see tables dancing and moving around the room. (It had been seven years since the manifestations in the home of the Fox family in New York and spiritualism had already become the latest craze all over Europe.)

  It was in the home of Mme Plainemaison that Rivail met a M. Baudin, who told him that his two daughters practised automatic writing. They were apparently rather frivolous young ladies, fond of dancing and parties. But when Rivail asked them questions, their hands raced across the paper and produced answers that were far beyond the intelligence of the attractive amanuenses. Asked, ‘Is density an essential attribute of matter?’ the disembodied intelligence replied, ‘Yes, of matter as understood by you, but not of matter considered as the universal fluid. The ethereal and subtle matter which forms this fluid is imponderable for you, and yet it is none the less the principle of your ponderable matter.’ When the communicator was asked why its replies were so much more profound than anything so far transmitted to the young ladies, it explained that spirits of a much higher order had come expressly for him, to enable him to fulfill a religious mission.

  When Rivail had accumulated a vast amount of information, he was told that he should publish it using the pseudonym Allan Kardec — both names that he had borne in previous incarnations. The Spirits’Book was a widespread and immediate success, one of the first — and perhaps one of the most important — of the classics of spiritualism.

 
The philosophy of The Spirits’ Book is certainly remarkably profound and consistent. The universe is permeated by a vital principle, but ‘life’ means the union of spirit and matter. This vital principle, or fluid, sounds like Mesmer’s ‘magnetic fluid’. When it is blocked, the result is ill health. The universe is also permeated with disembodied intelligences, and human beings are such intelligences confined within a body. But the purpose of their existence as human beings is a certain evolution. When the body dies, the spirit is eventually reincarnated in another body. In the meantime, depending upon its state of evolution, it may wander around, unaware of its condition. Such immature spirits may be responsible for various forms of mischief such as poltergeist effects, or they may turn up at seances and talk nonsense. Such a spirit, Kardec learned, had been the cause of violent poltergeist disturbances in the Rue des Noyers, when objects had been hurled around and every window had been smashed. The culprit in this case was a drunken rag-and-bone man who had been dead for fifty years and who was getting his own back on people for treating him without respect during his lifetime. He obtained the necessary ‘magnetic energy’ from a servant girl in the house: the poor girl was quite unaware that her energies were being drained and was more terrified than anyone of the ‘ghost’. The rag-and-bone man qualified as a low spirit, one of those who are trapped in the material world and addicted to mischief. More evolved second degree spirits experience only a desire for good, while perfect spirits have reached the peak of their evolution. To some extent the spirit can choose the trials it will undergo in its next life: these are chosen for the purpose of evolution. (Rudolf Steiner had once remarked, ‘Never complain about your lot, for you chose it before you were born.’) Kardec’s informants also stated that man is a fourfold being, consisting of body, vital principle (‘aura’), intelligent soul and spiritual soul — the same divisions that can be found in Steiner and Friederike Hauffe, the ‘Seeress of Prevorst’.