Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘That chap Stoker had a lucky escape, then!’

  ‘Stoker? Oh, he went in with the rest. There was trouble before they took off — he couldn’t find his flying gloves and he could have frozen to death with the rear gun hatch open. He was moaning all the way out to the transport.’

  I said nothing, but this preyed on my mind, and two days later I reported sick, told the MO what had happened. He said he believed me, but he gave me some pills to make me sleep, and as time went on the shakes stopped and I forgot about it. Looking back, the most remarkable aspect was that the air gunner looked perfectly normal to me. His clothing creaked as usual when he moved, his face was worried but in no way remarkable, and it was only later that I realized that he had been groping round in his flying-clothing locker in pitch darkness.

  I took the advice of the Medical Officer on the Station and told the story to nobody else. He asked me to write an account of it in longhand, which I did on the back of a sheet of Station Routine Orders and gave it to him. Ever since I have wondered how many of these things we see in broad daylight, regarding them as normal living human beings. As I see it, there is no way to distinguish them from a living breathing person.

  A number of interesting points emerge in this narrative. The first is that Stoker was obviously able to open his locker door and was therefore, in some sense, solid. This disposes of the theory that perhaps he was a ‘telepathic projection’ of someone else on the station who happened to be thinking about Stoker at that moment. The second is that Stoker obviously believed that he was alive. The third is that he looked and acted exactly like a living person. The notion that ghosts are semi-transparent and look and behave in a ‘ghostly’ manner is an old wives’ tale. What would have happened if Wright had tried to shake hands with Stoker is difficult to say, but in all probability he would have felt perfectly normal and solid. In their book Apparitions Celia Green and Charles McCreery devote a whole chapter to touch and pressure in which there are several cases in which people have shaken hands with ghosts. ‘His hand was not icy cold like that of a corpse,’ says one man who shook hands with an apparition of his father, ‘it was only cool.’ And in another well-known case from the records of the SPR, Lieutenant J. J. Larkin was writing letters when the door opened and his friend Lieutenant David McConnel shouted, ‘Hello boy!’ Larkin heard a few hours later that McConnel had crashed at roughly the time he had seen him. His ghost seems to have had no problems opening a door and holding a brief conversation.

  Stories already cited about doppelgängers seem to suggest that one of our ‘hidden powers’ is an ability to project a more or less solid image of ourselves to other places. As often as not this seems to be done unconsciously: Celia Green cites a report of a woman who was knitting as she listened to a talk on the radio when her husband (who was in fact at work) entered the room and touched her under the chin. His hand was icy cold. Then he disappeared.* However the novelist Theodore Dreiser has described how, after eating dinner at Dreiser’s house, his fellow novelist John Cowper Powys told him that he would appear to him later that night. Two hours later, as he sat reading, he looked up and saw Powys standing by the door. The apparition vanished as Dreiser went towards it.† Powys later refused to explain how he did it but it seems certain that he had learned the same odd ‘trick’ as the student Beard.

  In the circumstances it seems highly likely that persons on the point of death are able to exercise this faculty of ‘projecting the double’ by means of thought: in other words that apparitions of the dying seen by their relatives are not ‘ghosts’ in the normal sense of the word — i.e. spirits of the dead — but something more like a mental television picture. In some cases this ‘picture’ is solid enough to open doors or shake hands, which seems to argue that scientists like David Bohm and John Wheeler may be correct to believe that reality is to some extent a mental construct (a theme to which we shall return in the final chapter). But what seems equally obvious is that if Leading Aircraftsman Stoker could still project his image two nights after his body had been blown to pieces, then the ‘image-projecting’ part of his mind must have been operating normally, which could hardly have been possible unless it had survived his death.

  In 1979 the mind’s survival of death was even recognized in an American courtroom. The occasion was the trial of a man named Allan Showery for the murder of a Filipino nurse, Teresita Basa. She was stabbed to death in her apartment in Evanston, Illinois, on 21 Feburary 1977. Medical evidence indicated that the forty-eight-year-old nurse had let a man into her apartment and that he had encircled her neck from behind in a Japanese half-Nelson and rendered her unconscious: then he had stripped her and stabbed her between the ribs with such force that the knife went right through her. He left her in a position that suggested rape to confuse the investigation (his real motive was robbery), then set the place on fire.

  Two weeks later, in the Edgewater Hospital where Teresita Basa had worked, one of her colleagues remarked to another Filipino, a respiratory therapist named Remy Chua, ‘Teresita must be turning in her grave. Too bad she can’t tell the police who did it.’ And Remy Chua replied seriously, ‘She can come to me in a dream. I’m not afraid.’ Later that day, as she was dozing in the locker room, Remy Chua opened her eyes to see Teresita Basa standing in front of her. She ran out of the room in a panic.

  Remy Chua began to dream of the murder and of the killer, whom she then recognized as a black hospital orderly named Allan Showery. And one day, as she lay on her bed, a voice spoke through her mouth saying, ‘I am Teresita Basa. I want you to tell the police… .’ The voice spoke in Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines. Her husband heard the words although Remy Chua remembered nothing when she recovered from her trance. They decided to do nothing about it. Two weeks later ‘Teresita’ came back and spoke through Remy Chua’s mouth again, this time naming her killer as ‘Allan’. A few days later she named him as Allan Showery, and said he had stolen her jewellery and given it to his girlfriend — she even gave the telephone number of someone who could identify the jewellery. She claimed that ‘Al’ had come to fix her television and killed her.

  Finally the Chuas called the police. They were unconvinced and it was several days before they questioned Showery, who admitted promising to repair Teresita’s television but claimed he had simply forgotten. However when the police questioned Showery’s live-in girlfriend Yanka and asked her if he had ever given her jewellery, she showed them an antique ring that he had given her as a ‘belated Christmas present’. The police called the number that Mrs Chua had spoken in her trance and two of the victim’s cousins came to the station and identified the ring as Teresita’s. They also identified some other jewellery that had belonged to her. Faced with this evidence Showery broke down and confessed.

  At the trial in January 1979 the defence argued that the case should be dismissed on the grounds that the evidence had been — apparently — provided by a ghost, and implied that ghosts were untrustworthy. Judge Frank W. Barbero overruled the objection. But the jury obviously had its doubts and confessed to being hopelessly deadlocked. At a second trial a month later, however, Showery changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

  Stan Gooch might well argue that this case also has loopholes. The Chuas worked in the same hospital as Teresita Basa. Remy Chua may have suspected Showery — or even obtained paranormal knowledge of the murder — and found this way of conveying her suspicions. She might have obtained all her information — about the jewellery, the television repair motive, the girlfriend — from Showery’s mind. But how could she have obtained the telephone number of the cousins who could identify the jewellery from Showery’s mind? Although she often spoke to Teresita when their shifts overlapped they were not close friends, and she had no reason to know the telephone number. Only Teresita could have provided it.

  England has never had its own equivalent of the Basa affair but the case of Eric Tombe — which took place in
1922 — has some curious parallels. Tombe, an ex-army officer, was shot in the back of the head by his crooked business partner, Ernest Dyer, at the racing stable they ran together at Kenley, Surrey. Dyer concealed the body in a cesspit and ‘disappeared’. Soon after the murder Tombe’s mother — the wife of the Rev. Gordon Tombe — began to dream he was dead, and that his body was down a well with a stone slab over its mouth. She had never been to the racing stable at Kenley and did not even know of its existence: her husband finally tracked it down when trying to find his son. But as the dreams about the corpse in the well continued, the police decided to humour her and search the stud farm at Kenley. There was no well but there were four cesspits, each covered with a heavy slab. Eric Tombe’s body was found in one of these, hidden in a recess. The murderer — of whose existence the Tombes had also been unaware — had meanwhile moved to Scarborough, where he lived precariously by passing dud cheques. When the police came to question him about one of these he pulled out a revolver and killed himself — probably believing they had come to question him about the murder.

  Tombe had been killed from behind, the back of his head blasted off by a shotgun, so he could not have conveyed knowledge of the murder by telepathy as he was dying. Ergo: it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Eric Tombe survived his death and caused his mother to dream of where he was buried.

  Both these cases are fundamentally about mediumship. Mrs Chua first became aware of Teresita Basa when she was dozing and felt that someone was trying to communicate with her. She had already expressed her willingness to be ‘taken over’ by her fellow Filippino. Once Teresita Basa had succeeded in ‘getting inside her’, so to speak, she was able to take over when Remy Chua was dozing or asleep in bed. Eric Tombe’s mother also learned of the murder when she was asleep: in a sense she had also become a medium.

  It reminds us that mediumship could be regarded as a form of ‘possession’. The medium goes into a trance, not unlike a hypnotic trance, and is ‘taken over’ by a ‘spirit guide’ who acts as master of ceremonies, or by ‘spirits’. But this in turn may remind us that cases of multiple personality also look like a form of ‘possession’. Mary Reynolds fell into a twenty-hour sleep and woke up ‘possessed’ by another personality. Clara Fowler was hypnotized when Sally took over. Doris Fischer was momentarily unconscious, having been thrown to the floor by her father, when the first of her multiple personalities took over. Pierre Janet was hypnotizing a girl called Lucie when she plunged into such a profound sleep that it was impossible to wake her: when she finally awoke she was another personality. In 1877 a French youth named Louis Vivé began having epileptic attacks after being bitten by a viper: after an attack lasting fifteen hours he became another personality — a rebellious criminal who was completely unlike the timid and quietly-spoken Louis of earlier days. Vivé became one of the most famous cases of dual personality in the late nineteenth century. (Max Freedom Long makes the astonishing statement that ‘epilepsy is the result of habitual attack by disembodied low spirits who are able to overcome the resident low self of the afflicted individual and absorb the vital force from his body in a matter of a few minutes.’)

  It is also worth mentioning that when Kardec questioned the ‘spirits’ about ‘possession’ he was told that human beings can be influenced by spirits to a far greater degree than we suppose: they often influence both our thoughts and actions. Low spirits cannot actually take over a body since it is the property of its original occupant. Yet they can, either through the co-operation or weakness of that occupant, exercise total domination: this, said Kardec’s informant, is the real meaning of ‘possession’.

  The classic modern study of a case of possession is Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, which describes how a convent of Ursuline nuns in Loudun began to writhe, twist and blaspheme and generally behave as if ‘possessed by demons’. The local parish priest, Father Urbain Grandier — also known as something of a Don Juan — was called in to exorcize them: soon they were accusing him of being responsible for their possession. Grandier was tortured, condemned to death and burnt alive. Huxley has no doubt whatever that the nuns were in the grip of sexual hysteria and that the case can be understood in entirely Freudian terms. Discussing it in The Occult I was in total agreement with this judgement, writing, ‘… one can be quite certain that the “demons” were non-existent in the ordinary sense, but the possessed nuns believed in them… . The antics of the nuns went no further than blaspheming, making lewd suggestions and rolling on the ground in a way that displayed the part of the body that was the root of the trouble.’

  Yet the truth is slightly more complicated than that. It was not only the nuns who were possessed, but also the priests who tried to exorcize them. And it seems highly unlikely that this was merely a case of contagious hysteria. Father Lactance, a sadistic fanatic who deliberately broke his promise that Grandier should be strangled before being burnt, began seeing and hearing things within weeks of Grandier’s horrible death then began frothing at the mouth and screaming blasphemies; he died a month after the execution. Then Dr Mannoury, the surgeon who had pricked Grandier all over and claimed to find ‘Devil’s marks’ (spots that were numb because they had been touched by the Devil), began seeing Grandier’s ghost, and died insane. Father Tranquille, a Capuchin inquisitor who had gone to Loudun convinced that the Church would protect him, became possessed at intervals after Grandier’s death but finally succumbed four years later, when he would writhe on the ground, cursing, hissing, barking and neighing. As he lay dying the devils left his body and entered that of a friar kneeling in prayer and he began to writhe and blaspheme.

  The final victim of the devils was the Jesuit mystic Father Jean-Joseph Surin, who came to Loudun four months after Grandier’s death, in December 1634, to exorcize the nuns who were still possessed. A man who was inclined to obsessional neurosis, he was the ideal victim for the possessing spirits, who soon entered his body. In a letter to a friend he described how ‘the alien spirit is united to mine, without depriving me of consciousness or of inner freedom, and yet constituting a second “me”, as though I had two souls, of which one is dispossessed of my body … and keeps its quarters, watching the other, the intruder, doing whatever it likes.’ When he tried to make the sign of the cross the ‘other soul’ would twist his hand aside or push the fingers between his teeth and bite them savagely. Meanwhile the nuns would continue to give astonishing public performances: a young nun named Sister Claire would roll on her back masturbating and shouting, ‘Come on, fuck me.’ All Surin’s exorcisms proved useless. And Surin himself suffered periodic attacks of insanity and ‘possession’ for the next twenty-five years: only in the last five years of his life was he free. Reading his own account of his illness it is hard not to feel that Kardec’s Spirits’ Book explains it rather better than Huxley’s Devils of Loudun.

  Walter Franklin Prince himself encountered a curious case of ‘possession’ in 1922. A wealthy and cultured woman whom he calls Mrs Phyllis Latimer (a pseudonym) told him that she was ‘obsessed’. The ‘spirit’ in question was her cousin Marvin, who had died two years earlier. A few days after his death she began to hear his voice telling her that he was going to make her suffer and that he had a reason for this. Soon the voice began speaking inside her head, telling her that she had made him suffer. She was unable to recall any injury that she had ever done him and begged him to tell her what he meant. Finally he told her how one day, shortly before his death, she had left the room while in the middle of writing a letter: he had read the letter and found a remark about himself that offended and upset him deeply. Now reminded of it, Mrs Latimer recalled the letter and the remark that had caused so much trouble.

  Cousin Marvin seemed to have remarkable knowledge of the future: he would tell her with glee of things that people would do to make her miserable, and they always happened as predicted. During a domestic crisis the voice told her that a certain person would offer to help her but that the promise would not be kept. Again h
e proved to be accurate. The voice also reproached her for not even sending flowers to his funeral. She protested that she had sent roses, but on enquiring she found that they had not been put on display.

  Prince’s first assumption was that Phyllis Latimer was suffering from paranoia — delusions of persecution — and his own acquaintance with such cases, where the delusions of persecution were accompanied by auditory hallucinations, convinced him that there would be no hope of a cure. But his friend James Hyslop of the American SPR had believed that there is such a thing as possession by an ill-disposed spirit, and Prince decided to act upon this theory. (He was almost certainly being disingenuous. His paper on the case* makes it sound as if he is an orthodox psychotherapist with no belief in ‘spirits’, yet we know from his account of the Doris Fischer case that he accepted Ariel as a spirit.) So, like Max Freedom Long’s Dr Brigham, Prince decided to talk to the ‘spirit’ and see if it could be persuaded to leave Mrs Latimer alone. Assuming that cousin Marvin could hear him, Prince explained that he wished to talk as one gentleman to another, then went on to point out that as well as possessing his cousin, Marvin was also being possessed by her — that is, by his obsession for revenge. And after a great deal more persuasive talk in this vein Prince went on to suggest that purely as an experiment, Marvin should try thinking charitably about his cousin Phyllis and see whether this would not free him from the hatred that now tormented him.

  Two nights after this Mrs Latimer dreamed that her dead mother came to her and told her, ‘We heard what the man said. I will take care of Marvin.’ She continued to hear the voice after this but it no longer expressed hatred. Following Prince’s instructions, Mrs Latimer declined to answer. Finally one day she allowed the voice to speak to her. It told her that because Marvin had died with resentful thoughts about her he had been unable to escape from them. When he started persecuting her, he said, ‘others had joined in’ and urged him on. Now he had taken wiser advice and was going to leave her. Not long after this all her inner tensions vanished and she felt free again.