Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

by Colin Wilson

  He died in 1945, in his eightieth year. The “communications” of his later years still await investigation; if they prove to be half as accurate as the earlier ones, the results should be very remarkable indeed. And to some extent, his faith in Glastonbury—and that of the Watchers—has been justified. Since Bond left the abbey, Glastonbury has become increasingly a center of artistic and spiritual activity. The composer Rutland Boughton tried to turn it into an English Bayreuth, and wrote a number of huge operas on King Arthur; but Boughton’s socialism incensed the conservative people of Glastonbury and his plans collapsed. John Cowper Powys’ novel, A Glastonbury Romance, is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and its nature mysticism catches something of the essence of that extraordinary area that was once King Arthur’s Avalon. Margaret Murray was living in Glastonbury when she stumbled upon the idea—which has since become a commonplace—that witchcraft (or “wicca”) was a pagan religion of nature worship, and that it has continued secretly down the centuries in this form. The occultist Dion Fortune—one of the early members of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn—moved to Glastonbury, and spent the second part of her life studying occultism in her house at the foot of Glastonbury Tor. Geoffrey Ashe, the author of King Arthur’s Avalon, now lives in the house; the chalet in which Dion Fortune practiced her magical rites is haunted by a ghost that opens and closes doors and is occasionally seen as a shape in the darkness. We have already noted that Eileen Caddy first heard her “voices” in Glastonbury. And when, in 1969, John Michell’s View Over Atlantis described Glastonbury as one of the major “nodal points” of ley lines, the result was the “hippy invasion” of Glastonbury that reached a climax in the mid-1970s.

  In The Undiscovered Country, Stephen Jenkins mentions that when he was studying Buddhism in Tibet, he asked his guru about Shambhala, the legendary sacred place of the ancient Hindus. He was told that it was located in England, at the place now called Glastonbury.

  [1] Francis Griffiths passed away in 1986 at the age of 78; Elsie Wright passed away in 1988 at the age of 87.

  [2]. See chapter 2.

  [3]. Printed in The Ley Hunter, no. 90, Spring 1981.

  [4]. The housing estate was eventually built, and the stone is now marked by a small sign, surrounded by a wooden fence within the Stadium Housing Estate.

  [5]. August 26, 1980.

  [6]. No. 84.

  six

  The Black Magic Connection

  Considering that poltergeists have been recorded for more than a thousand years, and that eminent scientists have been studying them for about a century, it seems a little surprising that they are still regarded as an insoluble mystery. In the past two decades, there have been three major scientific studies of the poltergeist: Dr. A. R. G. Owen’s Can We Explain the Poltergeist?, William Roll’s The Poltergeist, and Poltergeists by Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell. All three raise the question of whether poltergeists could be spirits of the dead or other types of disembodied entity; all three decide that this is unlikely, and that therefore poltergeists are probably some kind of manifestation of the unconscious mind: that is, of “spontaneous psychokinesis.” Owen points out that a large number of children in poltergeist cases have mental problems; Roll notes that most objects tends to move counterclockwise, and suggests that there is some kind of whirlpool or psychic vortex that drags them into motion. But no one explains why poltergeist effects are so much more powerful than the kind of psychokinesis that has been studied in the laboratory.

  There is, admittedly, one case that seems to be an exception to this rule. In the early 1970s, members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, under the direction of A. R. G. Owen, decided to try to manufacture a ghost. For this purpose, they invented the case history of a man called Philip, a contemporary of Oliver Cromwell, who had an affair with a beautiful gypsy girl. When Philip’s wife found out, she had the girl accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake; Philip committed suicide.

  Having elaborated this story and created a suitable background—an ancient manor house—they set about trying to conjure up the spirit of Philip. For several months, there were no results. Then one evening, as they were relaxing and singing songs, there was a rap on the table. They used the usual code (one rap for yes, two for no), to question the “spirit,” which claimed to be Philip, and repeated the story they had invented for him. At later séances, Philip made the table dance all around the room, and even made it levitate in front of TV cameras.

  Owen’s group rightly regarded this “creation” of a ghost as something of a triumph, making the natural assumption that Philip was a product of their unconscious minds. But this assumption is questionable. What they did, in effect, was to hold a series of séances until they got results. Philip may have been a manifestation of their collective unconscious minds. Or he may have been another of those bored and untruthful “spirits” we have already encountered, joining in the game for want of anything better to do. The Philip case cannot be regarded as a proof or disproof of the psychokinesis theory.

  The trouble is that when scientists start looking for patterns, they are inclined to see what they are expecting to see. If they are good scientists, they finally notice the facts that contradict their theories, and modify the theories. But this sometimes takes a very long time; sometimes, it never happens at all.

  On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle. This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.

  In 1961, Guy Playfair had been down from Cambridge for two years—he had graduated in modern languages—and was finding life in England difficult and rather boring. And when he saw an advertisement in the personal column of The Times saying that teachers were wanted for Rio de Janeiro at a thousand pounds a year, he applied immediately. He signed a two-year contract, and at the end of the two years, decided to stay on in Rio as a free-lance journalist. He was reasonably successful, working as a correspondent for Time and The Economist, then as a writer in the information section of the U.S. Agency for International Development. When President Nixon cut the foreign budget in 1971, Guy Playfair was offered a golden handshake, and took it; as a result he was able to move into a comfortable house with a good view of the harbor.

  One of his neighbors was an American film actor called Larry Carr, and it was through him that Playfair became involved in the world of Brazilian Spiritism. One day, Carr asked him casually if he would like to go and watch a healer. Just as casually—having nothing better to do—Playfair accepted. They drove out to a Spiritist center in an area full of warehouses and run-down bars—“the kind of street you end up in if you get lost on the way to an airport.” The healer, a man named Edivaldo, was late, having had to drive five hundred miles from his home town; he was a school-teacher who, with his spectacles and neat mustache, looked more like a bank clerk, or possibly a bank manager. When Playfair’s group entered the consulting room, Edivaldo would prod the area that was giving the trouble, write something on a prescription pad, and pass on to the next. When Playfair’s turn came, Edivaldo’s hand went straight to the spot on his stomach which had been giving him trouble; pills were prescribed, and Playfair was told to come back later for “a little operation.” A few months later, he went back for his operation. When he went into the room, an old man was lying on the bed, and Edivaldo was bending over him. The old man’s stomach had been ripped open, exposing the entrails. Playfair admits that he did not observe as well as he might because he found it all too bewildering. “He was sloshing around in blood—it was a pretty gruesome sight.” He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back again, the man’s stomach was “all neat and tidy,” and was being covered with bandage. The man got up, and was helped out by his wife. One of the helpers told Playfair to lie down on t
he bed. He unbuttoned his shirt. Edivaldo came over and ran his hand over his stomach, then his hands seemed to find what they were looking for and he pressed. Playfair felt a distinct plop and the hands entered his skin and went into his stomach. “My stomach immediately felt wet all over, as if I were bleeding to death. I could feel a sort of tickling inside, but no pain at all.” He seemed to smell ether. Then it was all over and he was told he could get up and go home. He felt curiously stiff as if his middle had been anaesthetized, unable to bend. (This so intrigued him that he later tried to reproduce the same effect—with the aid of a friendly doctor who gave him twenty jabs of local anaesthetic; “It wasn’t the same thing at all.”) When he got home, he had to take off his shoes by kicking each one off with the other foot. On his stomach there was a jagged red line where Edivaldo had pressed his thumbs, and two bright red dots nearby.

  Later, after a second operation, two more red dots appeared. And Playfair’s stomach complaint, though not permanently cured, was considerably eased.

  Some time later, Playfair interviewed Edivaldo, and heard the remarkable story of how he had become a healer. One evening in 1962 he had been called in to sit with a neighbor who had gone temporarily insane. He became unconscious, and during this period he smashed up the room. But when he recovered consciousness the woman was cured. Soon after that, he visited a woman who had become rigid after childbirth. He suddenly became rigid himself, and the woman’s rigidity disappeared. It was clear that he was somehow “taking on” the illness of other people. A psychiatrist told him he was probably a medium, and advised that he should go to a Spiritist center. The first evening he did this, he again went into a trance. When he came to, he was being driven home, and was told that he had performed several operations. Apparently he was “taken over” by various spirits who had been surgeons while alive—a Dr. Calazans, a Frenchman called Pierre, a Londoner called Johnson, and a German called Dr. Fritz, who also worked through the famous psychic surgeon Arigó.

  For another year, Playfair continued to spend a great deal of time at Edivaldo’s surgeries, and watched innumerable operations—on one occasion, Edivaldo (or rather, the “spirit” who was controlling him) took Playfair’s hand and thrust it into the open stomach. By this time, he was convinced he had discovered the subject he wanted to write about. He began to attend Spiritist sessions (Spiritism is Brazil’s version of Spiritualism, and is based on the teachings of Kardec). When he encountered Hernani Andrade, founder of the IBPP—Brazilian Institute for Psycho Biophysical Research—he decided to move from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, a move that struck his friends as eccentric, since it is the equivalent of moving from, let us say, the Cornish Riviera to the industrial Midlands, or from Florida to Detroit. But Andrade offered Guy Playfair full and unrestricted access to his files, as well as the insights of forty years of Spiritism. As a consequence, Playfair’s interest came to extend from psychic healing to poltergeists, reincarnation, black magic and life-after-death.

  In São Paulo, he began by investigating more psychic surgeons. Then he heard of a case of poltergeist haunting, and offered to help the IBPP look into it.

  At the time he heard about it, in 1973, the case had been going on for about six years. The family consisted of a Portuguese mother, who had been married to a Lithuanian immigrant, and was now divorced. She had a son and daughter, both adults. There had been the usual bangs and crashes, clothing and bedding had caught fire, or had been soaked with water; and as a result of these disturbances, the family had already moved house three times. There also seemed to be some evidence of black magic involved; photographs of a girl with thread stitched through it had been found in the house. The troubles had begun after the son of the family had married a girl called Nora.

  It was to their house that Guy Playfair went in October 1973, taking his tape recorder with him. He sat up into the early hours of the morning, reading Frank Podmore—one of the early psychic investigators—on the subject of poltergeists. Podmore came to the conclusion that they are invariably fakes—an example of the kind of stupidity to which members of the SPR occasionally seem to be subject—and at this stage, Playfair thought he might well be correct. Finally, just as he was on the point of dozing off to sleep, he was awakened by a series of bangs that shook the house. The poltergeist had arrived. Playfair was struck by the timing—that it began as he was drifting off to sleep; the same thing had happened to Suzuko Hashizume, the investigator who had spent the previous night in the house. Playfair subsequently came to suspect that poltergeists have an uncanny sense of timing which suggest that they are able to foretell the exact moment when the investigator will be looking the other way.

  There was something odd about the bangs. They caused nothing to vibrate, as such bangs normally do, and they seemed to echo longer than they should. Kardec has noted in The Medium’s Book:

  Spirit sounds are usually of a peculiar character; they have an intensity and a character of their own, and, notwithstanding their great variety, can hardly be mistaken, so that they are not easily confused with common noises, such as the creaking of wood, the crackling of a fire, or the ticking of a clock; spirit raps are clear and sharp, sometimes soft and light . . .

  In fact, a researcher, Dr. J. L. Whitton, subjected a tape-recording of “spirit raps” to laboratory analysis, and found that they are quite different in character from normal raps. Shown on a graph, an ordinary sound has a distinctive curve, rising and falling like the slopes of a mountain; spirit raps begin and end abruptly, like cliffs. In fact, they seem to be “manufactured” noises, as if the poltergeist had a BBC sound laboratory at its disposal and had to concoct the noises electronically.

  The other odd thing about these loud bangs was that they did not disturb the four dogs, which had barked themselves frantic when Guy Playfair arrived; either they failed to hear them or accepted them as perfectly normal.

  These bangs were followed by more, at intervals. Later, Playfair tried to make similar bangs by thumping the end of a broom handle on the floor; it was impossible to make them as loud.

  The following night, when Playfair was asleep in the downstairs room, a footstool bounced down the stairs, then a bedroom drawer full of clothes was hurled out of a window into the yard. A pillow shot out from under Nora’s head and flew across the room. Again and again, Playfair noted the poltergeist’s sense of timing—how things seemed to happen precisely as people were falling asleep or waking up. Bumps happened mainly at night. Outbreaks of fire could happen at any time—on one occasion, a wardrobe full of clothes caught fire, and would have burned the house down if it had not been caught in time.

  At this point, the IBPP called in their poltergeist-clearance team of mediums, who went into the house, sat in the kitchen, and asked their spirit guides to persuade the poltergeist to move. After this, there was silence for two weeks; then minor disturbances began again. This time, the family decided to call in a candomblé specialist—candomblé being one of the largest of Brazil’s many African-influenced cults. This man brought with him a team of helpers. He told the family that this struck him as a particularly nasty case of black magic. Rites were performed and incense burned. And at the end of it all, the poltergeist finally left the family in peace. (At least, it had not reappeared by the time Playfair wrote his book about two years later.)

  Now the notion of a poltergeist being associated with black magic is one that European investigators will find bizarre and outlandish. But in Brazil, it is taken for granted. Hernani Andrade is quoted as saying:

  In every case of person-directed poltergeist activity where I have been able to study the family background, there has been evidence that somebody in the house could be the target of revenge from a spirit. It may be a former lover who committed suicide, a jealous relation, a spiteful neighbor, or even a member of the same family bearing some trivial grudge. Any Brazilian is well aware that this country is full of backyard terreiros of quimbanda (black magic centers) where people use spirit forces for evil purposes
.

  You can use a knife to cut bread or to cut a man’s throat, and so it is with the hidden powers of man; they can be turned to good or bad ends, though they remain the same powers. To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits prepared to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist. Black magic is a really serious social problem in Brazil, and we must find reliable ways of getting rid of it.

  Playfair goes on to cite another case in a town near São Paulo, in which the poltergeist made a number of attempts to burn the baby. One day, the baby disappeared, and the mother heard stifled cries coming from a laundry basket. She rushed to it and found the baby buried inside dirty clothes, in the process of stifling to death. The poltergeist also smashed furniture and wrecked the roof by pounding on it; when the family finally left the house, it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. All this is, of course, no proof that poltergeists can be called up by magic, but it indicates that they can, on occasion, behave with something like demonic malevolence.

  In his book The Indefinite Boundary, Playfair devotes a chapter called “The Psi Underworld” to this problem of magic and malevolence. He cites the disturbing case of eleven-year-old Maria Jose Ferreira, who, in December 1965, became the center of violent poltergeist activity. Pieces of brick began to fall inside the house, in Jabuticabal, near São Paulo, and an attempt at exorcism made things much worse. (Poltergeists, as we have seen, seem contemptuous of attempts to exorcise them.) A neighbor who knew about Kardec took the child into his house; things got worse, with bombardments of stones and eggs. One large stone descended from the ceiling and split into two; when someone picked up the two pieces, they snapped together as if they were magnetically attracted to each other. (We have already seen that poltergeists seem to have an affinity with electricity; it is interesting to speculate whether the force that caused the stones to snap together was an example of “ley power” or what Stringer calls “Telluric force.”)