Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

by Colin Wilson

  It would also be interesting to have a “ley map” of Robertson Country, Tennessee, showing the Indian sacred sites, and to know whether the Bell farmstead was situated over a blind spring or underground stream. A combination of a house with nine children and powerful “telluric currents” would provide an ideal situation for a bored and mischievous “elemental.”

  It is important to realize that poltergeists are one of the most common of all “psychic” manifestations: as common, say, as plane crashes, or accidents in which people are struck by lightning. At any given moment, there are probably dozens of cases going on in different parts of the world. Nandor Fodor begins his study with brief summaries of about five hundred cases, starting in 355 a.d. and extending to the Douglass Deen case in 1949. Other books by researchers of other nationalities—Richet, Lombroso, Aksakov, Bender, Roll—make it clear that there are hundreds more that could be added to the list.

  This wealth of material is actually something of an embarrassment, for most cases are so similar that they can teach us nothing new about the poltergeist. How does it help us to know that in 1170 a.d., the hermitage of St. Godric was bombarded with showers of stones, and that the poltergeist threw at him the box in which he kept his altar beads and poured the communion wine over his head? It merely suggests what we already suspect, that poltergeists are mischievous spirits who behave very much like “demons.” More than seven hundred years later, in 1906, the poltergeist is still indulging in the same rather boring escapades on the other side of the world, in Sumatra, when a Mr. Grottendieck was awakened in the bedroom of a makeshift house by falling stones, which appeared to be penetrating the roof (made of dry leaves). When he fired his rifle into the jungle, the barrage of stones only increased (another example of a poltergeist resenting aggression). His “boy” (who was presumably the “focus”) told him that the stones were being thrown by Satan. But in the Sumatra case, we at least have one interesting detail. Mr. Grottendieck tried catching the stones as they fell, but they seemed to avoid his hand. He says: “It seemed to me that they changed their direction in the air as soon as I tried to get hold of them.” And from this we can make one solid inference. The stones were not “thrown.” Whatever agency caused them to fly through the air was still holding them when Grottendieck tried to grab them. And this observation is confirmed by case after case in which “thrown” objects manage to perform right-angle turns in mid-air (which, interestingly enough, seems also to be a characteristic of “flying saucers”).

  So let us, in the remainder of this chapter, glance at a number of famous cases that offer some new feature or provide a clue, and ignore all the hundreds of others that provide no new information. All they can tell us is that the poltergeist is undoubtedly a reality, and that anyone who thinks otherwise—like the eminent investigator Frank Podmore, who concluded that naughty children are responsible—is being willfully blind or stupid.

  The poltergeist that appeared in the home of a Huguenot minister, M. Francois Perrault, in September, 1612, is remarkable solely for being one of those rare cases in which the “spirit” developed a voice and became extremely talkative. When the minister came back to Mâcon after a five-day absence on September 1, 1612, he found his wife and her maid in a state of terror. The disturbances had started when something drew the curtains in the middle of the night. The following night, the poltergeist pulled the blankets off the bed. When the maid tried to go into a room, something pushed on the door from the other side; and when she finally got in, she found that everything had been thrown about. Every night after that, the poltergeist made loud bangs and crashes. On the night M. Perrault returned, the poltergeist hurled pots and pans around the kitchen, convincing him that he was dealing with an evil spirit. A week later, on September 20, it spoke for the first time, starting with a whistling noise—as did the Bell Witch—then repeating the words “Minister, minister” in a shrill voice. Finally it began to sing a simple tune of five notes. Soon the spirit was holding lengthy conversations with various regular visitors to the house, singing French popular songs, saying prayers (to prove it was not a demon) and offering to transform itself into an angel—a promise it never carried out. It also declared that

  M. Perrault’s father had been murdered, and named the man who did it. M. Perrault was inclined to disbelieve this tale, and his skepticism proved justified as the entity invented various other malicious stories about the townspeople of Mâcon. These strange conversations continued for two months—the spirit obviously enjoyed having an audience—and objects continued to be hurled about. Toward the end, huge stones weighing two or three pounds were thrown about the house—although, as usual, they caused no harm. M. Perrault states his opinion that this was because his household was protected by God; but it seems more likely that the spirit simply lacked destructive tendencies.

  One day in November, the racket suddenly stopped. Twenty-four hours of blessed silence made it clear that the “demon” had departed. On a nail above the fireplace hung some bells that he had often thrown about the place. The day after his departure, a large viper—a rare snake in that part of France—was seen leaving M. Perrault’s house, and was caught; but it proved to be a perfectly normal snake, and presumably had nothing to do with the haunting.

  Perhaps the most interesting point about the Perrault case is that the maid was generally believed to be a witch—perhaps because her parents had been accused of witchcraft. We have seen that she seemed singularly unafraid of the poltergeist—few people would try to force their way through a door when some invisible presence was trying to hold it closed. The spirit obviously liked her, and enjoyed imitating her broad patois. One day, when she complained that it had failed to bring her any wood, it threw down a faggot at her feet. When another maid came to the house and shared her bed, the poltergeist tormented the newcomer so relentlessly that she finally had to leave.

  Modern writers on witchcraft take the view that it was a delusion due to peasant superstition. No doubt the majority of women who were burned as witches were innocent; but no one who has studied some of the best-known witch trials, like the Isobel Gowdie case in Scotland, or the notorious Chambre Ardente affair in Paris, can believe that all witchcraft is smoke without fire. In fact, this whole subject of witchcraft and magic deserves a chapter to itself.

  Perhaps the best-known of all poltergeist hauntings is the case that has become known as the phantom drummer of Tedworth. It took place just half a century after the Mâcon case, and begins on a day in mid-March 1661, when a magistrate named John Mompesson was visiting the small town of Ludgershall in east Wiltshire, and became irritated by loud drumming noises that came from the street. He inquired what these were, and was told that they were made by a vagrant named William Drury, who had been in the town for a few days. He had tried to persuade the constable to give him public assistance, on the strength of his papers, signed by various eminent magistrates; but the constable suspected they were forged.

  Mompesson ordered the drummer to be brought before him, and examined his papers; just as the bailiff had suspected, they were forged. Mompesson seems to have been an officious sort of man who enjoyed

  exercising his authority; he ordered the drummer—a middle-aged man—to be held until the next sitting of the local Bench, and meanwhile confiscated his drum. The man seems to have tried hard to persuade Mompesson to return the drum, but without success. As soon as Mompesson’s back was turned, the constable seems to have allowed Drury to escape. But the drum stayed behind.

  A few weeks later, the bailiff of Ludgershall sent the drum to Mompesson’s house in Tedworth. Mompesson was just on his way to London. When he came back he found the house in uproar. For three nights there had been violent knockings and raps all over the house—both inside and out. That night, when the banging started, Mompesson leapt out of bed with a pistol and rushed to the room from which the sound was coming. It moved to another room. He tried to locate it, but it now seemed to be coming from outside. When he got back into bed,
he was able to distinguish drumbeats among the rapping noises.

  For the next two months, it was impossible to get to sleep until the middle of the night; the racket went on for at least two hours every night. It stopped briefly when Mrs. Mompesson was in labor, and was silent for three weeks—an indication that the spirit was mischievous rather than malicious. Then the disturbances started up again, this time centering around Mompesson’s children. The drumbeats would sound from around their beds, and the beds were often lifted up into the air. When the children were moved up into a loft, the drummer followed them. The servants even began to get used to it; one manservant saw a board move, and asked it to hand it to him; the board floated up to his hand, and a joking tug of war ensued for twenty minutes or so, until the master ordered them to stop. When the minister came to pray by the children, the spirit showed its disrespect by being noisier than usual, and leaving behind a disgusting sulphurous smell—presumably to imply it came from Hell. Scratching noises sounded like huge rats.

  Things got worse. During the next two years lights were seen, doors slammed, unseen skirts rustled, and a Bible was burnt. The creature purred like a cat, panted like a dog, and made the coins in a man’s pocket turn black. One day, Mompesson went into the stable and found his horse lying on its back with its hind hoof jammed into its mouth; it had to be pried out with a lever. The “spirit” attacked the local blacksmith with a pair of pincers, snatched a sword from a guest, and grabbed a stick from a servant woman who was trying to bar its path. The Reverend Joseph Glanvil—who wrote about the case—came to investigate, and heard the strange noises from around the children’s beds. When he went down to his horse, he found it sweating with terror, and the horse died soon afterwards.

  The phantom drummer seems to have developed a voice; one morning, there was a bright light in the children’s room and a voice kept shouting: “A witch, a witch!”—at least a hundred times, according to Glanvil. Mompesson woke up one night to find himself looking at a vague shape with two great staring eyes, which slowly vanished. It also developed such unpleasant habits as emptying ashes and chamber pots into the children’s beds.

  In 1663, William Drury was arrested at Gloucester for stealing a pig. While he was in Gloucester jail, a Wiltshire man came to see him, and Drury asked what was happening in Wiltshire. When the man said “Nothing” Drury said: “What, haven’t you heard about the drumming in the house at Tedworth?” The man admitted that he had, whereupon Drury declared: “I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet until he has made me satisfaction for taking away my drum.” This, according to Glanvil, led to his being tried for a witch at Salisbury and sentenced to transportation. As soon as Drury was out of the country, peace descended on the Mompesson household. But the drummer somehow managed to escape and return to England—whereupon the disturbances began all over again. Mrs. Mompesson seems to have asked it—by means of raps—whether Drury was responsible, and it replied in the affirmative.

  How the disturbances ended is not clear—presumably they faded away, like most poltergeists. Certainly they had ceased by the time Glanvil published his account twenty years later.

  The most interesting point about the case is Drury’s admission that he caused the disturbances. This seems to fly in the face of the most popular theory of poltergeists—that they are the result of the unconscious disturbances of a child at puberty. If we regard Drury merely as the focus or medium, then we have to explain how he succeeded in causing the phenomena when he was many miles away. Few writers on the case have even bothered to quote Glanvil’s remark that Drury had been a soldier under Cromwell, and learned magic from some “Gallant Books he had had of a wizard.” Together with Drury’s trial for witchcraft, they seem to add a disreputable air of superstition to a case that otherwise looks like a classic poltergeist haunting. To make sense of Drury’s admissions, we have to suppose that (a) he knew how to practice some form of magic, and (b) that the spirit or spirits that caused the disturbances could be persuaded to help him obtain his revenge. These propositions strike a modern investigator as preposterous. Yet, as we shall see, they fit the facts rather better than modern theories about “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” or Fodor’s sexual theory of the origin of poltergeist activity. In her book The Night Side of Nature—a Victorian bestseller—Catherine Crowe describes a case that occurred in Rambouillet in November, 1846, at a farm house belonging to a M. Bottel. Some peddlers came to the door and asked for bread, which they were given. Later, one of them came back and asked for more; the servant refused him, and the man went off uttering vague threats. That night, at supper, plates began to roll off the table. When the servant girl happened to stand on the spot where the peddler had stood, she was “seized with convulsions and an extraordinary rotatory motion.” A carter standing beside her placed himself on the same spot, felt “suffocated” and dizzy, and fell into a pool of water outside the house. The curé was asked for help, but he was “attacked in the same manner,” and his furniture began to dance about. The phenomena continued for some weeks before they stopped.

  Here we can note a number of points of interest. Mrs. Crowe does not say so, but if the peddlers formed a group, then it seems probable they were gypsies, and gypsies have a strong magic tradition—in the nineteenth century it was studied by a remarkable investigator, Charles Godfrey Leland. It seems curious that the servant girl was seized with convulsions on the exact spot where the peddler had stood, and that the carter also felt dizzy and suffocated. This immediately calls to mind some of Lethbridge’s comments about “ghouls;” He experienced a sense of dizziness and suffocation on Ladram Beach, and his wife Mina felt the same as she stood on the clifftop at the spot where the man had committed suicide. The French dowser Barthelemy Bléton discovered his powers when he felt suffocated and dizzy over a powerful underground stream. It seems conceivable that the forces involved in this type of “magic” may involve the earth. Yet since the poltergeist also attacked the curé in his own home, we have to assume that it was an active force—in fact, one of Kardec’s spirits.

  Glanvil wrote his book on strange occurrences—Saducismus Triumphatus—just before the dawning of the eighteenth century, the age of reason. Even in the 1660s, the magistrate Mompesson was widely suspected of somehow fabricating the story of the phantom drummer, and “he suffered by it in his name, in his estate, in all his affairs . . .” A quarter of a century after its publication, Glanvil’s book was regarded as an absurd relic of an age of credulity. The main reason was that the civilized world was finally—after four centuries—shaking off the belief in witchcraft. In England, there had been no mass trials of witches since the death of Matthew Hopkins, the “witchfinder general,” in 1646; in America, the witch hysteria came to an end after the Salem trials in 1692. The age of science had dawned; there was no room for books like Saducismus Triumphatus in the age of Newton and Leibniz.

  One of the most remarkable cases of the early eighteenth century was investigated by the eminent scientist Joseph Priestley who, predictably, decided that the phenomena were caused by a hoaxer. It began at the rectory of Epworth, in Lincolnshire, inhabited by the family of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, grandfather of the founder of Methodism. On December 1, 1716, the Wesleys’ maidservant was in the dining-room when she heard appalling groans, like someone dying. The family made a joke of it. But a few nights later, they were awakened by loud knocking sounds, which usually seemed to come from the garret or nursery. The only person who failed to hear them was the Reverend Wesley himself, and the family decided not to tell him in case he thought it was an omen of his death. When they finally told him, he refused to believe them; that night, as if to convince him, there were nine loud knocks by his bedside.

  From then on, the house was in a constant state of disturbance, with footsteps in empty rooms and up and down the stairs—often more than one set of footsteps at a time—noises like smashing bottles, and a curious sound which was compared to the “winding up of a jack” or someone planin
g wood. When Mrs. Wesley heard knocking noises from the nursery, she tried repeating them, and the poltergeist then made the same knocks resound from the floorboards under her feet. When she looked under the bed, an animal like a badger ran out. A manservant who saw the animal sitting by the dining-room fire said it looked like a white rabbit.

  The family were at first afraid that it portended someone’s death, either that of the Reverend Samuel Wesley or of his elder son (of the same name). When nothing of the sort occurred, they decided that they were dealing with witchcraft—against which the Reverend Samuel had preached. Yet they also noticed that the disturbances seemed connected with the nineteen-year-old Hetty Wesley; she often trembled in her sleep before the sounds began.

  After two months, the poltergeist went away, although it is said to have made occasional brief reappearances in later years. The family came to refer to it as “Old Jeffrey.” And Mrs. Wesley remained convinced that Old Jeffrey was the spirit of her brother, who worked for the East India Company, and who vanished without a trace. She could well have been right. In some respects, the poltergeist behaved like a ghost. Its activities always seemed to begin at a quarter to ten every night (few poltergeists keep to an exact timetable)—and the very first sounds heard were groans and heavy breathing, not the usual raps. Poltergeist disturbances usually—almost invariably—occur in a certain sequence. The earliest stage is usually some kind of scratching noise like rats; then raps and bangs, then flying stones or other small objects, then larger objects, then other forms of physical mischief—moving furniture, blankets pulled off beds. If voices occur, they usually occur after this stage—as, for example, in the case of the Bell Witch. It is almost unknown for phenomena to occur in a different order. So in that respect, the Wesley case is unusual, starting with what is usually one of the later developments. The chief objection to Mrs. Wesley’s theory is that if the spirit of her dead brother was behind the disturbances, then why did he not try to communicate—for example, when the Reverend Samuel tried to get him to answer questions by means of raps?