by Colin Wilson
For a while, the poltergeist seemed to be in an amiable mood; Maria could ask for a flower or piece of candy, and it would instantly drop at her feet. Then, quite suddenly, the poltergeist began to attack her, biting her and slapping her on the face or bottom. It tried to suffocate her while she was asleep by placing cups or glasses over her mouth and nostrils. Then it began to set her clothes on fire.
When Maria was taken to a Spiritist center, the hope of “curing” her disappeared. A spirit came and spoke through the medium, saying: “She was a witch. A lot of people suffered, and I died because of her. Now we are making her suffer too . . .” Spirits, of course, are not invariably truthful, and this one may have been inventing the tale that Maria had been a witch in a previous existence. (Kardec, it must be remembered, taught reincarnation as an integral part of Spiritism.) Special prayers and appeals to the spirits failed to stop the attacks on the girl. And, when she was thirteen, she took a dose of ant killer in a soft drink and was dead when they found her. It would be interesting to know whether Maria took the poison deliberately, or whether the poltergeist placed it there, as the “Bell Witch” dosed John Bell’s medicine.
All this makes it rather difficult to follow William Roll’s reasoning in this central paragraph from his book on poltergeists:
I do not know of any evidence for the existence of the poltergeist as an incorporeal entity other than the disturbances themselves, and these can be explained more simply as PK effects from a flesh-and-blood entity who is at their center. This is not to say that we should close our minds to the possibility that some cases of RSPK might be due to incorporeal entities. But there is no reason to postulate such an entity when the incidents occur around a living person. It is easier to suppose that the central person is himself the source of the PK energy.
The source, possibly. But the whole cause of the phenomena? It is true that in some cases—perhaps the majority—we can interpret the disturbances as an unconscious attempt by the “focus” to draw attention to his or her problems, as an unsuccessful suicide attempt does. Esther Cox’s manifestations ceased after she was put in prison. But if Maria’s unconscious aggressions were causing her clothes to catch on fire and bite marks to appear all over her body, surely the despair that finally drove her to suicide would have reached through to the rebellious part of her mind and persuaded it to stop? It simply fails to make sense to believe that Maria’s own unconscious aggressions drove her to kill herself.
The point is underlined by one of the most remarkable cases described by Guy Playfair, that of a girl who inadvertently incurred a “black magic curse.” He calls her Marcia F. and mentions that she had a master’s degree in psychology. In May 1973, when Marcia was twenty-eight, she went for a family outing to the Atlantic coast near São Paulo. As they walked along the beach, Marcia noticed something lying in the sand—a plaster statue of a woman about six inches high, with much of the paint worn off by the sea. She took it back home to her apartment, which she shared with another girl—in spite of her aunt’s warning that it might bring bad luck to take a statue of the sea goddess Yemanjá, which had obviously been placed there as an offering in return for some favor. But Marcia was a good Catholic as well as a psychology graduate, and thought that the talk of bad luck was nonsense. She placed it on her mantelpiece.
Some days later she was violently ill with food poisoning after eating chocolate. Then she began to lose weight and feel rundown. Her vitality was draining away. She began to spit blood, and X-rays showed a patch on her lung. Yet a few weeks later the patch had disappeared—it would normally have taken at least a year. After a holiday at home with her parents, Marcia returned to her flat. The pressure cooker blew up and she suffered second-degree burns on her arms and face. Then the oven exploded, shooting out a sheet of flame toward Marcia; an engineer found the incident unexplainable. A few days later, a friend told her that at the moment when her pressure cooker had exploded, Marcia’s photograph had jumped from the wall in her parents’ home.
When a friend warned her again about the statue of Yemanjá, Marcia again dismissed the idea as preposterous.
Now she began to experience suicidal impulses. Crossing the road at a traffic light, she suddenly felt a powerful desire to fling herself under the oncoming cars. Opening the window of her apartment (which was on the fifteenth floor) she seemed to hear a voice inside her urging her to throw herself out.
And at this point, the first unmistakable suggestion of witchcraft entered the case. Her bedroom seemed to be full of presences. Then they entered her bed, and she felt herself being touched all over. And one night, she felt the presence of a male body, which moved on top of her; she felt a penis entering her, and lay there while the entity had sexual intercourse. This went on happening for several nights, until Marcia, wondering if she was going insane, went again to stay with her parents. There, by chance, they were visited by a Spiritist, to whom Marcia told her story. He advised her to go to the local umbanda center—umbanda is the most popular Afro-Brazilian cult. She also took along the statue, at the insistence of her flat mate. The director of the center listened to her story, and told her that her problem was undoubtedly a case of a black magic trabalho (work or job) being directed at her because of her removal of the statue. It was only then that Marcia looked more closely at the statue which had only patches of paint left on it—and realized suddenly that each remaining patch corresponded to a part of her own body that had been damaged: the burn marks on her arms, neck and face matched exactly the paint on the statue, and the patch on the back was just above the “patch” that had been found in her lung. The statue still had paint on its blue eyes, which was ominous. She took the advice of the director, and returned the statue to the spot on the beach where she had found it. Immediately, the run of bad luck ceased.
This story bears too many resemblances to Van der Post’s account of the spirits of the Slippery Hills for us not to feel that the same kind of “earth forces” may have been involved. Van der Post’s guide Samutchoso lamented that the spirits were losing their power—that ten years earlier they would have killed him for approaching without proper respect. The implication seems to be that the spirits in Brazil are still in possession of their full powers.
Playfair personally investigated the case of Marcia, and was not surprised when she told him that, as a result of her experience, her skepticism about “bad luck” and trabalho had given way to a more pragmatic attitude.
Playfair’s observations received strong support from those of another investigator, his friend David St. Clair, who has described his experiences of Brazil in a book called Drum and Candle. He speaks of walking down Copacabana Avenue with some friends on his first night in Rio, and noticing on the pavement a circle of burning candles around a clay statue of the devil. When he reached out to touch it, one of his friends pulled him back, saying: “It’s despacho—an offering to a spirit.”
“But you surely don’t believe that stuff?” said St. Clair. “You’re all college graduates.” His friends admitted that they did not believe in it—but nevertheless would not allow him to touch the statue.
After that, St. Clair saw many such offerings. He saw offerings of cooked chicken, and the starving beggars who stared at them, then quietly went away. He even saw a dog sniff at such an offering, then back away.
St. Clair has many stories about candomblé and Spiritism. But the final chapter of the book describes his own experience of a trabalho. He had been living in Rio de Janeiro for eight years, and had a comfortable apartment with a fine view. He also had an attractive maid named Edna, a pretty, brown-colored girl. She was, he assures the reader, a maid and nothing more. Her life had been hard; deserted by the father, her family had been brought up in a shack in a slum. She was obviously delighted with the comfort and security of her job with St. Clair. She joined a folk-dance group and, after a television appearance, became something of a local celebrity. And one day, St. Clair told her that he had decided it was time for him to leav
e Brazil. Edna was now doing so well that he had no doubt she would easily find another job; he told her he would give her six months’ wages.
Then things began to go wrong. A book he had written failed to make any headway; his typist made a mess of it, then fell ill so that it sat in her desk for weeks. A New York publisher rejected it. An inheritance he was expecting failed to materialize. His plans for moving to Greece had to be shelved. A love affair went disastrously wrong, and a friend he asked for a loan refused it. He even fell ill with malaria.
One day, he met a psychic friend in the Avenida Copacabana; she took one look at him and said: “Someone has put the evil eye on you. All your paths have been closed.”’ A few days later, another friend wrote to say he had been to an umbanda session, and a spirit had warned him that one of his friends was in grave danger due to a curse; all his paths had been closed.
An actor friend who was also a Spiritist immediately divined that it was Edna who had put the curse on him. St. Clair thought this absurd. To begin with, Edna was a Catholic, and had often expressed her disapproval of Spiritism and umbanda. But his actor friend told him he had attended a spiritist session where he had been assured that David St. Clair’s apartment was cursed. But how could Edna do that, St. Clair wanted to know. All she had to do, his friend replied, was to go to a quimbanda—black magic—session and take some item of his clothing, which could be used in a ritual to put a curse on him. And now his friend mentioned it, St. Clair recalled that his socks had been disappearing recently. Edna had claimed the wind was blowing them off the line.
St. Clair told Edna he believed himself to be cursed; she pooh-poohed the idea. But he told her he wanted her to take him to an umbanda session. After much protest, she allowed herself to be forced into it.
That Saturday evening, Edna took him to a long, white house in a remote area outside Rio. On the walls were paintings of the devil, Exú. Toward midnight, drums started up, and the negroes sitting on the floor began to chant. A ritual dance began. Then the umbanda priestess came in like a whirlwind—a huge negress dressed in layers of lace and a white silk turban. She danced, and the other women began to jerk as if possessed. The priestess went out, and when she came in again, was dressed in red, the color of Exú/Satan. She took a swig of alcohol, then lit a cigar. After more dancing, she noticed St. Clair, and offered him a drink from a bottle whose neck was covered with her saliva. Then she spat a mouthful of the alcohol into his face. After more chanting, a medium was asked who had put the curse on him. She replied: “The person who brought him here tonight! She wants you to marry her. Either that, or to buy her a house and a piece of land . . .” The priestess ordered Edna to leave. Then she said: “Now we will get rid of the curse.” There was more ritual drumming and dancing, then the priestess said: “Now you are free. The curse has been lifted, and it will now come down doubly hard upon the person who placed it on you.” When he protested, he was told it was too late—it had already been done.
Three days later, St. Clair received a telegram from a magazine, asking for a story; he had suggested it to them months before but they had turned it down. Now, unexpectedly, they changed their minds, and sent him money. A week later, the inheritance came through. The book was accepted. And ten days later he received a letter asking if his broken love affair could be restarted where it had left off. Then Edna became ill. A stomach-growth was diagnosed, and she had to have an operation for which St. Clair paid. But her health continued to decline. She went to see an umbanda priest, who told her that the curse she had put on
St. Clair had rebounded on her, and that she would suffer as long as she stayed near him. She admitted trying to get him to marry her by black magic. She declined his offer to buy her a house or an apartment, and walked out of his life.
In The Indefinite Boundary, Playfair goes on to discuss black magic. It seems, he says, to be based on an exchange of favors between incarnate and discarnate-man and spirit.
Incarnate man wants a favor done; he wants a better job, to marry a certain girl, to win the state lottery, to stop somebody from running after his daughter . . . Discarnate spirits, for their part, want to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh once more; a good square meal, a drink of the best cachaça rum, a fine cigar, and perhaps even sexual relations with an incarnate being.
The spirit has the upper hand in all this. He calls the shots. He wants his meal left in a certain place at a certain time, and the rum and the cigar had better be of good quality. Incarnate man is ready to oblige, and it is remarkable how many members of Brazil’s poorest classes, who are about as poor as anyone can be, will somehow manage to lay out a magnificent banquet for a spirit who has agreed to work some magic for them . . .
Who are these spirits? Orthodox Kardecists and Umbandistas see them as inferior discarnates living in a low astral plane, who are close to the physical world, not having evolved since physical death . . . In Umbanda they are known as exús, spirits who seem to have no morals at all, and are equally prepared to work for or against people. Like Mafia gunmen, they do what the boss says without asking questions.
He adds the interesting comment:
The exú reminds us of the traditional spirits of the four elements; the gnomes of earth, the mermaids of water, the sylphs of air, and the salamanders of fire. These creatures are traditionally thought of as part human and part “elemental,” integral forces of nature that can act upon human beings subject to certain conditions. There is an enormous number of exús, each with his own specialty. To catch one and persuade him to work for you, it is necessary to bribe him outright with food, drink and general flattery. An exú is a vain and temperamental entity, and despite his total lack of morals he is very fussy about observing the rituals properly.
All this sounds so much like the poltergeist that it is tempting to feel that we have finally pinned down his true nature and character.
Studying the background of the Ipiranga case—already described—Playfair found strong evidence that the poltergeist had been unleashed on the family by black magic. In 1968 an “offering” of bottles, candles, and cigars had appeared in their garden, indicating that someone was working a trabalho against the family. Playfair lists the suspects. A former boyfriend of Iracy, the daughter, had committed suicide; then there was an elderly aunt who had died abandoned by the rest of the family, and may have borne a grudge. Then Iracy had had a love affair with a man who was (unknown to her) already married; the man’s wife could have organized the trabalho. Or it could possibly have been some former disgruntled lover of Nora, the girl who married the son of the family; photographs of Nora’s husband were frequently disfigured, and they found many notes claiming that she was having an affair with another man.
Playfair mentions that at the time he was investigating the Ipiranga case, Andrade was studying one in the town of Osasco where there was definite evidence that a poltergeist was caused by black magic. Two neighboring families were having a lengthy dispute about boundaries, and one of the families ordered a curse against the other. The result was that the other family was haunted by a poltergeist that caused stones to fall on the roof, loud rapping noises, and spontaneous fires. One original feature of this case was that when the family went to ladle a meal out of a saucepan—which had been covered with a lid—they found that the food had been spoiled by a large cigar.
Candomblé—one of the bigger Afro-Brazilian cults—seems to have originated among freed negro slaves in the 1830s, and it has the same origin as voodoo, which began in Haiti when the first slaves arrived early in the seventeenth century. This, in turn, originated in Africa as ju-ju. Europeans are naturally inclined to dismiss this as the outcome of ignorance and stupidity; but few who have had direct experience of it maintain that skeptical attitude. James H. Neal—whose anecdote about the immovable tree has already been cited—describes his own experience in Ju-Ju in My Life. When, as chief investigations officer for the Government of Ghana, Neal caused the arrest of a man who had been extorting bribes, he found t
hat he was the target for a ju-ju attack. It began with the disappearance of small personal items of clothing as in the case of David St. Clair. One day he found the seat of his car scattered with a black powder; his chauffeur carefully brushed it off, and urinated in it to destroy its power. Then, one night, Neal became feverish, and experienced pains from head to foot. He felt he was going to die. Suddenly, he found himself outside his body, looking down at himself on the bed. He passed through the bedroom wall, and seemed to be traveling at great speed, when suddenly he seemed to receive a message that it was not yet his time to die; he passed back into his room, and into his body. After this he spent three weeks in a hospital suffering from an illness that the doctors were unable to diagnose. An African police inspector told him he was being subjected to a ju-ju attack. More black powder was scattered in his car. One night, lying in bed, he felt invisible creatures with long snouts attacking his solar plexus and draining his vitality. A witch-doctor who was called in described in detail two men who were responsible for the attacks—giving an accurate description of two men involved in the bribery case. Finally, after a ceremony performed by a Muslim holy man—who surrounded the house with a wall of protection—Neal slowly recovered. The white doctor who tended him agreed that he had been the victim of a ju-ju attack.
He also describes how, not long after the “exorcism” ritual, his servant killed a cobra outside his bungalow. As they were exulting about the death of the snake, Neal noticed another snake—this time a small grey one—slithering toward them. When he drew the servant’s attention to it, the man went pale. This, the man said, was a “bad snake”—meaning a snake created artificially by witch-doctors; a man bitten by such a snake has no chance of recovery. Neal was understandably skeptical. Then he saw the snake—which was still slithering at a great speed toward them—come to a halt as if against an invisible wall. It had encountered the “wall of protection” put there by the holy man. With a single stroke, the servant chopped off its head with a cutlass. No blood came out. Soon after this, Neal began to itch all over. Two perfectly healthy trees just beyond the “wall of protection” split down the middle with a loud crash. Consultation with another skilled sorcerer elicited the information that both Neal and his servant were victims of a new ju-ju attack, but that because of the protection, Neal could not be seriously harmed; the itch was the worst the magician could do.