by Colin Wilson
While Friederike was in Kerner’s house, there were constant poltergeist phenomena: knocks and raps, noises like the rattling of chains, gravel thrown through the window, and a knitting needle that flew through the air and landed in a glass of water. When Friederike was visited by a spirit one night her sister heard her say: “Open it yourself,” then saw a book on the table open itself. A poltergeist tugged her boots off her feet as she lay on the bed, and threw a lampshade across the room. In the Kerners’ bedroom, a table was thrown across the room. The poltergeist threw a stool at a maidservant who went into Friederike’s room while she lay asleep. It extinguished a night light and made a candle glow.
Friederike also produced what would later be called “spirit teachings,” an amazingly complex system of philosophy in which man is described as consisting of body, soul and spirit, and of being surrounded by a nerve aura which carries on the vital processes. She spoke about various cycles in human existence—life cycles (or circles) and sun circles, corresponding to various spiritual conditions. She also described a remarkable universal language from ancient times, said to be “the language of the inner life.” (A mystical sect was founded to expound those doctrines after her death.)
All these mediumistic activities made Friederike more and more feeble, and she died in 1829 at the age of twenty-eight. Kerner’s book The Seeress of Prevorst (the name of the Swabian village where she was born) created a sensation, and was equally successful when it was translated into English in 1845 by Catherine Crowe, whose own book, The Night Side of Nature, created an equal sensation four years later. It is arguable that The Seeress of Prevorst and The Night Side of Nature were two of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the scientific reaction against Spiritualism increased, The Seeress of Prevorst ceased to be taken seriously by those engaged in psychical research, and by the twentieth century it had been virtually forgotten. Writing about it in his Modern Spiritualism (1902), the skeptical Frank Podmore—who believed that all poltergeists are due to naughty children—dismisses most of the evidence as second-hand, while another eminent researcher, E. J. Dingwall (writing in Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena) seems to feel that Kerner was stupid to take her claims seriously, and that if he had remained skeptical and treated her simply as a case of hysteria, she would have lived longer. But reading Kerner’s own account, it is difficult to see how he would have remained skeptical without being downright dishonest or blind; on one occasion, he saw a cloudy figure hovering in front of her, and although it had vanished when he came back with a lamp, Friederike continued to stare at the spot as though listening to it.
In fact, we can see that the case of the seeress of Prevorst is a thoroughly typical case of poltergeist phenomena caused by a medium. In detail after detail, it sounds like any number of other cases of “haunting.” If anyone killed Friederike Hauffe, it was the spirits themselves, who must have been using her energy to manifest themselves. No doubt the poltergeist phenomena were unspectacular because Friederike was weak from the moment Kerner set eyes on her. (In a case cited by the novelist William de Morgan, a maidservant who was able to cause rapping noises gradually lost her powers as she became weaker from tuberculosis.)
In another of his books, Kerner describes another remarkable case with some of the characteristics of poltergeist haunting. He was asked to treat a “possessed” peasant girl in Orlach, near Stuttgart. For some reason which is not clear, she was persecuted by “spirits” from the age of twenty, and there were the usual bangs and crashes, movements of furniture, and even outbreaks of fire. Then, after five months of this, she saw two ghosts, one of a nun dressed in white, the other of a monk dressed in black. The nun asserted that she had been smuggled into the monastery disguised as a cook, and had had two children by the black monk, both of whom he had killed at birth. He also murdered three monks during the four-year period she was with him; and, when he suspected she was about to betray him, he killed her too. The black monk also spoke to the possessed girl, saying that he was the son of a nobleman from nearby Geislingen, and that as the Superior at the monastery of Orlach, he had seduced a number of nuns and killed the children they bore. He also confessed to killing monks. The bodies, he said, he threw into a hole in a wall.
The white nun told the girl that her sufferings would cease only if her parents agreed to allow their cottage to be demolished. By this time they were so desperate that they agreed. On March 5, 1833, the house was finally demolished. Most of the walls were made of mud, but one corner was constructed of limestone, obviously part of a far older building. When this was pulled down, they found underneath it an empty well containing a number of human bones, including those of children. The girl’s possession ceased from the moment the wall collapsed.
The story sounds like a typical invention of a German romantic novelist; but Kerner devotes a whole book to it, describing it in the same detail as his investigation of Friederike Hauffe. In spite of this, modern investigators are inclined not to take it seriously. Yet readers who are impressed by the clarity and detail of Kerner’s reporting may feel that this case of the possessed girl of Orlach is one of the most convincing arguments for the close connection between poltergeists and spirits of the dead.
Ten years after publication of The Seeress of Prevorst, another doctor—this time of philosophy—produced an equally remarkable account of a case of possession, this time benevolent. In Die Schutzgeister (The Guardian Spirit, 1839), Heinrich Werner identifies his eighteen-year-old subject only as “R.O.” Like Friederike, she had been subject to all kinds of illnesses; then, at a certain point, found herself haunted by spirits. One day the girl fell into a trance; and from then on she was able to do so at will, and to supply Werner with all kinds of information obtained “clairvoyantly.” She had a guardian spirit called Albert, who seems to have acted rather like the “spirit guide”’ of later mediums. And the spirit who caused her so much trouble was—again—a wicked monk. One day when the girl claimed that the wicked monk was present in the room, Werner was puzzled to hear an odd sound coming from a small table—like a cup rattling on a saucer. This occurred a number of times, becoming steadily louder (a typical characteristic of poltergeist noises); R.O. said that the monk was producing the noise, and was delighted at Werner’s astonishment—which also sounds typical of a poltergeist.
One day, Werner was startled to hear a loud crash from an empty room; he rushed in to find that two large flowerpots, which had stood on the window sill, had been hurled to the floor so violently that there was earth all over the room. The blind was closed and there was no breeze. One of the curtains had also been twisted around a birdcage. Later that day, Werner went to call on R.O., who went into a trance, and then told Werner that the black monk had been responsible for smashing the flowerpots (Werner had not mentioned this to her). Albert apparently had ejected him from the house.
Werner was greatly impressed by his patient’s clairvoyant powers. She demonstrated these one day when she woke up from a trance and told him that she had seen herself driving in a green-lacquered chaise. Now Werner had, at the time, made some enquiries about a chaise that was for sale in a town some fifteen hours away, and he expected to get an answer in about a week. R.O. told him he would hear much sooner than that—in fact, the following afternoon; she also went on to describe the chaise, in some detail. The following afternoon, Werner received a message about the chaise, and discovered that the girl was right in every detail.
Her most dramatic piece of clairvoyance concerned her younger sister. One day, in a trance, she cried out “Albert, help me! Emilie is falling down into the street.” Then, after a short period, she said: “Thank God, help has already come!”
Asked what had happened, she explained that her little sister had been leaning out of a top-story window, trying to grab a rope suspended from a winch above the window; she had been on the point of falling when her father had entered the room and pulled her back.
Werner contacted the father to ask if anything remarkable had happened on that particular day, and received a reply which Werner printed in his book; it said that the father had been sitting in his office when he had felt uneasy. He went home, and went upstairs, in time to find his daughter had leaned too far out of the window to catch the rope, and could not get back into the room; he grabbed her dress and hauled her back in. R.O. said that it was Albert, the guardian spirit, who had made her father feel uneasy.
Again, writers like Podmore and Dingwall express strong skepticism about Werner’s book—Dingwall says that when the flowerpots were smashed, Werner should have checked on the key (or keys) to the room and whether anyone could have got in past the Venetian blind. In a case like this, such pedantic hair-splitting is irrelevant. After all, Werner might have invented the whole case. In a book like this: the basic question is of Werner’s honesty, and whether he reported the case to the best of his ability. If he did, then the real question is not whether he could have spent more time double-checking on everything that happened, but whether we can accept his own interpretation of the things he witnessed. As “tough-minded” psychical researchers, Podmore and Dingwall naturally reject the whole notion of a guardian spirit, as well as of malevolent dead monks; therefore, they are inclined to question the whole story. In fact, there is nothing in Werner’s account that is inconsistent with the behavior of poltergeists as explored and described in this book, and a great deal that fits very convincingly And whether we interpret Albert as a spirit guide, or simply as a higher level of R.O.’s personality, he also seems to deserve rather more serious treatment than Podmore seems willing to grant.
The cases described by Justinus Kerner and Heinrich Werner excited widespread interest in Europe, and led to much serious discussion. A similar case that occurred in America in 1844 received almost no publicity, and led to a persecution of the two principals that seemed to prove that the spirit of the Salem witchcraft trials was still alive. The case is documented in Emma Hardinge’s Modern American Spiritualism (1870).
Dr. Lyman B. Larkin was a physician of Wrentham, Mass., whose servant girl, Mary Jane, suffered from fits. Larkin was another practitioner of “magnetism,” and he began trying to cure Mary Jane by this method—probably stroking her with large bar magnets. Mary Jane was soon falling into hypnotic sleep, during which she became clairvoyant. (The same thing was to happen to another American in the 1890s; Edgar Cayce was put to sleep by a hypnotist in an attempt to cure the loss of his voice; he was not only able to prescribe for his own ailment, but for other people’s. Cayce went on to become one of the most famous “psychics” of his time.) Mary Jane could instantly diagnose the illnesses of any of the doctor’s patients, and often suggest the correct prescription.
Mary Jane told Larkin that when she went into her trance states, she saw a beautiful “fairy” called Katy, and it was she who performed the diagnoses. There were also other “fairies,” who all came from Germany.
At this point, Mary Jane began to attract less benevolent entities. There were loud rapping noises from various articles of furniture as soon as she fell into trance. Mary Jane began to speak in a strange voice, uttering awful obscenities. Then the furniture began to move about. One day, as the whole family sat in the room, with Mary Jane asleep on the couch, a flat iron suddenly appeared in the room—it had last been seen in the kitchen. When Mrs. Larkin requested the spirit to take it away, the iron vanished, and was later found in the kitchen. (It is a pity that Larkin failed to record whether anyone was looking at it at the time; as we have seen, poltergeists seem to prefer to perform their tricks when no one is watching.) The mischievous spirit, according to Mary Jane, was the ghost of a sailor boy.
It seems probable that Larkin was himself an unconscious medium, for some of the manifestations followed him on his rounds; in one house, loud knockings terrified the family, who were convinced they were a premonitory warning of disaster.
Like Werner’s patient R.O., Mary Jane was able to describe to the doctor exactly what he had been doing during the day—an ability known to researchers as travelling clairvoyance. On one occasion, she even told him about some irritations he had suffered at supper on the previous evening, due to the salmon being underdone, and the roast pig eaten up before the doctor had helped himself.
The sailor boy now became more violent, and began to cause powerful convulsions of Mary Jane’s body, in the course of which her joints were dislocated. Although these dislocations were painless they caused a great deal of inconvenience. The poltergeist claimed it could not set them right, and other doctors and helpers had to be called in. On one occasion, a doctor who had just attended to a dislocation was in a hurry to get away, and said he hoped he wouldn’t be needed again; the sailor boy then cursed him with foul language, and dislocated another joint on the spot.
This had been going on for almost three years when a delegation from the local church—of which Larkin was a faithful and enthusiastic member—called on him to ask about the strange rumors. Larkin explained quite openly, and was upset when the committee seemed to feel he had been guilty of “scandalous behavior,” possibly suspecting his motives in plunging Mary Jane into hypnotic sleep. Larkin defended himself, and offered to allow members of the committee to live in the house and observe the phenomena. They turned down this offer, but began to behave like inquisitors, calling at all hours of the day and night and interrogating Mary Jane, obviously hoping to find something incriminating. Finally, Larkin lost his temper and told them that they must conduct an orderly investigation, or let him alone. So a Reverend Mr. Thatcher and his wife moved into the Larkin household for a week. He saw Mary Jane go into trances, and on one occasion was much impressed by the prayers she offered up in this state. Mr. Thatcher wrote a report that was circulated to all the ministers concerned, asserting his “entire conviction of the supra-mundane character of the events he had witnessed.” No one, he said, was attempting any kind of fraud or deception.
But the ministers were far from satisfied. Larkin’s chief enemy, the Reverend Horace James, won over three magistrates to his side, and they ordered Larkin to appear in front of them. Mary Jane was seized and accused of “necromancy.” She was put on trial and sentenced to sixty days in solitary confinement in the Dedham jail. Not long after being released, she died.
Larkin himself was found not guilty, but the ministers told him he was excommunicated from the church until he “made full confession of his crimes.” Larkin protested that he believed “in the communion of spirits; did realize that they could and had through the organism of Mary Jane again and again communicated with him.” The Reverend James found this thoroughly unsatisfying, and demanded a full recantation; because he wanted to return to the church, Larkin signed a paper agreeing that his statements about communication “were the biggest lie ever written.” Larkin, who later told the whole story to Emma Hardinge, said that he was ashamed of himself for denying the phenomena, but it was the only way he could again be accepted into the church. Two years after these events, the whole country was talking about the strange goings-on in the home of the Fox sisters and, within another two years, Spiritualism had swept across America. If the Larkin case had occurred in the mid-1850s instead of the mid-1840s, there seems no doubt that it would have aroused widespread interest and sympathetic study; as it was, Larkin and Mary Jane were the victims of the witch-hunting mentality.
In retrospect, one of the oddest things about this whole period is that there were so many “spirit manifestations” appearing simultaneously, with no possibility of influencing one another. It looks almost as if the “spirits” had decided to make a concerted effort to make human beings aware of their existence. An alternative possibility is that the discovery of mesmerism and hypnotism meant that far more doctors were placing their patients in a trance. And there seems good reason to believe that “spirits” can make use of the bodies of certain people when they are in trance.
At the same time that Lar
kin was “magnetizing” Mary Jane, a twenty-one-year-old shoemaker named Andrew Jackson Davis was conducting experiments in hypnotism. He had been fascinated by a lecture on animal magnetism, and persuaded a local tailor to try and hypnotize him. It worked, and Davis, like Mary Jane, began to diagnose illnesses with the aid of the “spirits.” In 1844, on a country walk, he encountered two men who said they were the physician Galen and the mystic Swedenborg, and who told him that he was destined to become an important teacher. In the following year, Davis encountered two men who decided to work with him in carrying out his mission: a Dr. Lyon, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Reverend William Fishbough. Dr. Lyon would hypnotize him, and then the Reverend Fishbough would write down the revelations that came from him in a trance state. These amounted to a remarkable and sizable volume which appeared in 1847 under the title of The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelation, and a Voice to Mankind. Podmore quotes long extracts from this work in his Modern Spiritualism, and it seems to be rather more interesting than he gives it credit for. He describes the beginning of the universe as being an “unimaginable ocean of liquid fire,” and adds that “particles did not exist, but the whole was as one Particle”—a view that most astrophysicists would now endorse. When he speaks about the origin of life, Davis makes the odd assertion that water is condensed light, but goes on to make some interesting observations about the influence of light on water which sound like an anticipation of photosynthesis; it sounds even more like the heterodox views of Wilhelm Reich on the creation of life through “orgone energy.” Davis also predicts the existence of an eighth planet in the solar system—this was written about six months before the discovery of the planet Neptune. A third part of Davis’ book deals with his own plan (or that of the spirits) for the reorganization of society—a kind of Christian socialism.