by Colin Wilson
The most obvious thing about the case is that the second Mary—the cheerful one—contained elements that were not present in the first Mary: high spirits, love of nature, courage and daring. It is as if Mary’s unconscious mind got tired of her dullness and lack of enterprise, and decided to take over. But the “new Mary” was not, in all respects, an improvement; her insistence that bears were hogs makes it sound as if she was slightly deranged. Eventually, the second Mary became strong enough to control the personality, and keep her “alter ego” out.
Walter Prince suggested that Esther Cox was a kind of variant of Mary Reynolds—and it is certainly true that Esther was, like “Mary One,” a dull and irritable girl, trapped in a rigid personality structure. The obvious objection is that Prince’s hypothesis about “dual personality” still fails to explain all the poltergeist occurrences.
Yet Prince’s argument begins to look rather more plausible in the light of a case of which he had direct personal experience. In 1910, Prince’s wife got to know a girl called Doris (in his account, Prince gives her the pseudonym Doris Fischer). She was an easygoing, sweet-natured girl who lived with her drunken father, and who suffered periodic fits of amnesia, during which she was “taken over” by no fewer than three other personalities. Prince was so fascinated by the case that he invited Doris to come and live in his home, and ended by completely curing her.
Doris’ problems had started when she was three years old; her father came in drunk one night, snatched her from her mother’s arms, and hurled her on the floor. This had the effect of causing instant amnesia. Doris remembered nothing more until the following morning, when she suddenly found herself at the foot of the stairs. There had been a slight snap of the neck, as if an electric current had been switched on. Yet her mother had seen her walk upstairs in the normal way.
What Doris did not realize was that while she was in a state of amnesia, another personality had taken over her body, a mischievous little girl called Margaret. Like Mary Reynolds’ “second personality,” Margaret was a good-natured madcap, a bright, vivacious child who was generally liked. While Doris was serious and studious, Margaret was empty-headed and a born truant. Doris would promise her parents not to go swimming in the river; Margaret would go swimming, then slip out of the body and leave Doris to take the punishment. On one occasion, when Doris reached for a piece of cake, she “blanked out,” and Margaret snatched the cake and ate it.
Oddly enough, Margaret knew all about Doris, but Doris knew nothing about Margaret until, one day, Margaret decided to tell her. So, leaving Doris’ consciousness fully awake, she told Doris the whole story, using Doris’ mouth to speak the words. This sounds very much like the “demoniacal possession” of Father Surin, watching his body convulse while unable to do anything about it.
When Doris was in her mid-teens, she graduated at the top of her class and decided to go on to high school. Margaret, who hated studying, refused; and, since she was the stronger personality, Doris left school and went to work as a seamstress.
At seventeen, another personality “appeared.” One day at work, Doris had a visual hallucination of her mother; she rushed home and found her mother dying of sudden acute pneumonia. In the early hours of the morning, her mother died. Then her father staggered in, dead drunk, and, without noticing that his wife was dead, fell into bed and began to snore. Doris experienced a pain in her head, and again lost her memory. This new “Doris” was—like the second Mary Reynolds—virtually a new-born baby, entirely without memory. It was Margaret who had to teach her to speak. This new personality was nervous and rather stupid, a thoroughly dull, conventional girl with a monotonous voice.
When Doris was eighteen, she slipped and fell on the back of her head; as a result, yet another personality began to take over the body. This one was even less complex than the previous invader; she seemed to be little more than a memory, and could repeat word for word long conversations that Doris had had in childhood.
When Prince began to study Doris, in 1911, he realized that she seemed to be an incredibly complex series of persons, like Chinese boxes. First, there was Doris herself, a good-natured sensible girl, who unfortunately never seemed to be able to spend more than a few hours at a time in charge of her own body. She was likely to be taken over by Margaret, who was a delightful and mischievous ten-year-old—she had stopped developing at that age—who loved playing with dolls, and kept everybody in fits of laughter. Then there was the dull girl who had taken over when Doris’ mother died, and whom Prince called Sick Doris—she was also rather childlike. The “tape recorder” personality also made brief appearances—Prince called her “Sleeping Real Doris.” He also discovered that there was yet another personality, more mature and complex than any of the others, whom he called “Sleeping Margaret” because she put in an appearance when Margaret fell asleep. This personality seemed to be able to see into the minds of all the others. She also claimed to be a spirit or guardian angel who had come in reply to the prayers of Doris’ mother for someone to protect her daughter.
So the personalities in Doris’ body seemed to form a kind of hierarchy or “ladder.” At the top was “Sleeping Margaret,” the “guardian angel.” Next came the mischievous and childish Margaret. Then Doris, then “Sick Doris,” then the “tape recorder,” Sleeping Real Doris.
Margaret could “eject” Doris at a moment’s notice. Sometimes, Doris would be half-way through a sentence when suddenly her expression would alter, and Margaret would take over, with her typical mischievous grin. But Margaret was unaware of the “guardian angel” and on one occasion when she had unceremoniously forced Doris out of the body, the guardian angel got angry and forced Margaret out. Later that day, Margaret reappeared and confided to Prince that there must be someone else in this body because someone had thrown her out.
In the security of Prince’s household, Doris improved steadily. The personality called Sick Doris began to fade out; she became virtually an idiot, and she and Prince took a final walk together and had a touching leavetaking. Then she reverted to babyhood, and “died.” As an experiment, Prince tried encouraging the “tape recorder,” seeing if he could turn her into something more like a human being; she responded so well that Prince decided it would be unwise to carry on. She also faded away.
Margaret also began to “grow backwards” as Doris’ confidence increased, becoming more and more child-like and using the German pronunciations of Doris’ childhood. Her senses seemed to fade, and her visual field narrowed until she could only see directly in front of her—like a baby. Then she too faded away.
The “guardian angel” never faded away; she remained around, and sometimes emerged after Doris had fallen asleep, and had long and interesting talks with Prince. In 1916, when someone suggested that Doris should go to New York to sit with a medium, Prince was dubious until “Sleeping Margaret” assured him that Doris would be perfectly safe in her hands. She was as good as her word, and the result was a remarkable series of séances in which the spirit of Doris’ mother—or someone who claimed to be—wrote out long messages that showed an intimate knowledge of Doris’ background. Doris’ “mother” also insisted that all that had happened to her daughter was simply a case of “benevolent possession.” And it has to be admitted that this explanation fits the facts amazingly well. For, on the whole, Doris’ experience of multiple personality was not unpleasant. Margaret, although mischievous, was a good-natured and happy child, and the other personalities seem to have been basically harmless. Prince was disposed to believe the assertion of “Sleeping Margaret” that she was a guardian spirit who had come in answer to the prayers of the mother.
It can now be seen why Prince thought it possible that the Amherst case involved dual personality. He was more than half convinced that the Doris case of multiple personality was actually one of benevolent possession, so in suggesting that Esther was a dual personality, he was, in effect, hinting that this could be a case of non-benevolent possession. At the same time, his
position as a well-known psychiatrist meant that, for public consumption, he was bound to lay most of the emphasis on the purely psychological explanation—of both the Amherst and the Doris cases.
And what is the psychological explanation? It depends, basically, upon the recognition that we are all, to some extent, multiple personalities, divided selves. Part of Esther Cox wanted to be seduced by Bob MacNeal, but the personality structure induced by her upbringing made her resist his overtures. If he had been more subtle, and succeeded in persuading her to become his mistress, then the “old” Esther would have slipped into the background, and the new, sexually experienced Esther would have taken her place.
We all spend our lives trying to get rid of our “old” selves and develop new—and less constricting—personality structures. This is why we all crave experience, why every boy wants to run away to sea and every girl wants to marry a millionaire with a yacht. But then, we also spend most of our lives reacting “automatically” to familiar circumstances, hardly aware of anything that is further than the end of our noses. So it is difficult to escape the “old self,” which consists largely of a set of habits. It is easy to see how rather dull people—like Mary Reynolds and Esther Cox—become trapped to the point of suffocation in this mechanical, habit-bound personality structure, and how the unconscious life urges—perhaps working through the right brain—can plan to overthrow the dreary tyrant.
But before we allow ourselves to be persuaded by this explanation, there are still a few curious points about the Doris case to consider. One of these is how several personalities could apparently reside together in the same body. While Doris was “in” the body—i.e., in charge of its movements—Margaret might be also “in,” aware of everything that Doris was watching and thinking, and having her own ideas and opinions. Doris could be fast asleep, while Margaret was awake, observing her dreams. Moreover, the “guardian angel,” who explained all this to Walter Prince, was also able to be “in,” observing both Doris and Margaret, unobserved by both.
It is difficult to see how this could take place inside the head of a normal person, even if she happened to be torn by self-division. What the “guardian angel” is explaining sounds like a number of independent spirits, or entities, making use of Doris’ body. (Significantly, Doris herself was unable to be aware of any of her other “selves” and their activities.)
Again, there exist a number of photographs of Doris’ different personalities. One photograph shows Doris herself, and the caption explains that “Sick Doris” had sat down for the picture, but Doris had “taken over” for a few moments as the camera clicked. Another photograph of “Sick Doris” reveals that she is, indeed, a quite different person from Doris—she looks wooden and stolid, quite unlike the gentle, sensitive Doris. Margaret looks so completely unlike both Dorises that it is hard to realize that she is using the same body. In the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Prince also describes another case of amnesia, a man he calls Heinrich Myer. Again, the photographs of the primary and secondary personalities are incredibly different. Physically, they are very similar, yet a different person looks out through the eyes of each. It is tempting for the non-professional observer to say simply that the same body has been taken over by different spirits.
Let us consider again the assertion of the “guardian angel” (and of Doris’ mother) that the Doris case is basically one of “benevolent possession.” Prince tries to explain the coming and going of the personalities in terms of weariness and exhaustion. Doris was easily tired out, and when she grew tired, Margaret would take over. While Margaret was “in” the body, she would say that Doris was “resting.” Prince’s theory is that Doris became a dual personality as a three-year-old child—to save herself from total breakdown. The shock of being snatched from her mother’s arms and hurled on the floor might have seriously damaged her, perhaps turned her into a timid, listless, miserable child. Instead, the “guardian angel” took over the body (she insisted to Prince that she came first, before Margaret), and was later assisted by Margaret.
We know that sudden shock can destroy the reason, perhaps turning the person into a “vegetable.” It is, in effect, as if a ship had been torpedoed. Other kinds of stress and misery can cause something more like a “slow leak”; a draining of vital energy. This is what happened to the unfortunate Father Tranquille, who virtually died of “shock” after being “possessed” by the “spirits.” He went into “exhaust status.” Prince’s theory is that dual (or multiple) personality occurs when severe shock threatens a person’s mental stability. The “other personality” could be considered as the mind’s own defense against destruction. And, in fact, the majority of cases of multiple personality begin with a bad shock that threatens to overwhelm the person with “discouragement.” We can see how such a shock might turn Doris—at the age of three—into Margaret, who treated life as a joke. But it is almost impossible to understand how it could create “Sleeping Margaret,” the “guardian angel.”
In The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley tries to explain the behavior of Sister Jeanne des Anges by appealing to the concept of multiple personality. He prefers to speak of the case of “Christine Beauchamp,” recorded by another famous American professor of psychology, Morton Prince, around the turn of the century. (Her real name was Clara N. Fowler.) Huxley summarizes the case:
Here is Miss Beauchamp, a blameless but rather sickly young woman, full of high principles, inhibitions and anxiety. From time to time she plays truant from herself and behaves like a very naughty and exuberantly healthy child of ten. Questioned under hypnosis, this enfant terrible insists that she is not Miss Beauchamp but someone else called Sally. After some hours or days Sally disappears and Miss Beauchamp returns to consciousness—but returns only to her own consciousness, not to Sally’s; for she remembers nothing of what was done, in her name and through the agency of her body, while the latter was in control. Sally, on the contrary, knows all that goes on in Miss Beauchamp’s mind and makes use of that knowledge to embarrass and torment the other tenant of their shared body. Because he could think of these odd facts in terms of a well-substantiated theory of subconscious mental activity, and because he was well acquainted with the techniques of hypnosis, Dr. Morton Prince, the psychiatrist in charge of this case, was able to solve Miss Beauchamp’s problems and to bring her for the first time in many years, to a state of physical and mental health.
All that need be added is that the case of Christine Beauchamp—who lived in Boston—bears many resemblances to that of Doris Fischer. Her father was also a drunkard, and Christine became “neurasthenic” (inclined to suffer from nerves) when her mother died in unpleasant circumstances (which Prince does not detail). She greatly admired a close friend of her father’s named William Jones, who seemed to her to possess all the qualities her father lacked; when Jones got drunk one night, and made some kind of sexual advance to her, she became even more depressed and neurasthenic. Prince began to treat her for general depression and fatigue, and tried hypnotizing her. This proved to be a mistake, in that it released the secondary personality—who called herself Sally—like a genie out of a bottle. From then on, Sally behaved toward Christine rather as Margaret did toward Doris, but with more malice. Sally, who was as strong as a horse, would take a long walk into the countryside, then abandon the body to the feeble Christine, who had to walk home. (One of the strangest features of cases of multiple personality is that the body seems to be as weak—or as strong—as the personality occupying it; in the case of “Eve”—Christine Sizemore—the secondary personality even emerged when the primary one was unconscious under anaesthetic.) When Christine went to New York to get an office job, Sally got off the train at New Haven and took a job as a waitress.
The main point to note about the cases of Doris Fischer and Sally Beauchamp is that the primary personality could be “dispossessed” of the body by the secondary one—exactly as in the case of the devils of Loudun. And this is by no means a commo
n feature of all such cases. Rather more typical is the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne who, in January 1887, drew five hundred dollars from his bank and vanished. He then went to Norristown, Pennsylvania, rented a shop, and carried on a trade as a shopkeeper under the name of A. J. Brown. Then one day “Bourne” reappeared, completely oblivious of what he had been doing since he withdrew the money from the bank. Hypnotized by the psychologist William James, “Brown” came back—a completely different personality from Bourne. Brown knew nothing of Bourne, and vice versa, so there was no question of one displacing the other at will. The same seems to be true of the Mary Reynolds case.
Stranger still is the case of Mrs. Remibias Chua, a Philippino woman of Evanston, Illinois. On February 21, 1977, a forty-eight-year-old Filipino nurse named Teresita Basa was stabbed to death in her apartment in Chicago. An attempt had been made to burn the body, which was naked; the medical examination revealed that there had been no rape. The motive was robbery—Miss Basa apparently had a quantity of valuable jewelry.
Teresita had worked at the Edgewater Hospital, where one of her colleagues was another Filipino, a respiratory therapist named Remy Chua, who was married to a doctor. Two weeks after the murder, Jennie Prince, the technical director of the department, had said, “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 the same day, when she was dozing in a locker room, she had a feeling that someone was trying to communicate with her. She opened her eyes, and saw Teresita Basa standing in front of her. In a panic, Remy Chua ran out of the room, and told her fellow workers about the apparition.