Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

by Colin Wilson

  It was these experiments in will-power and hypnosis that convinced Barrett that an unknown human faculty was waiting to be investigated; and, together with a spiritualist called Edmund Dawson Rogers, he decided to found a Society for Psychical Research. It came into being in 1882, and one of its chief tasks was to study examples of “paranormal occurrences,” and take evidence from as many witnesses as possible. They soon began to accumulate a considerable body of evidence on one particular subject: the so-called “phantasms of the living”—when the “ghost” of a living person is seen at some distance from his physical body. A typical example concerns the poet Goethe who was walking home one day after a heavy shower when he saw a friend named Friedrich walking in front of him; what surprised him was that Friedrich was wearing his—Goethe’s—dressing-gown. When he got home, he found Friedrich in front of the fire, wearing the dressing-gown—he had been caught in the shower, taken off his wet coat, and borrowed Goethe’s dressing-gown. The SPR collected hundreds of similar cases. Many of these were concerned with “crisis apparitions”—people seeing a relative who was seriously ill or on the point of death. The immense work Phantasms of the Living (1886) by Gurney, Myers and Podmore contains hundreds of such cases. And what it seems to demonstrate beyond all doubt is that human beings have the ability to project an image of themselves—a quite solid-looking image—to distant places.

  What is odder still is that, in most cases, the “projector” has no idea that he is being seen elsewhere, and no particular reason for wanting to be seen elsewhere. There is, for example, the curious case of Canon Bourne, cited by G. N. M. Tyrrell in Apparitions. Canon Bourne was out hunting with his two daughters when the girls decided to return home. On their way home, the girls saw their father, looking dirty and dishevelled, waving to them from the other side of the valley. When they reached the place, there was no sign of him. They searched the area, then went home. Their father arrived home soon afterwards—quite unhurt. He could not explain why he had “appeared” to his daughters, and neither could they. One odd point is that one of the girls noticed the maker’s name inside their father’s hat as he waved it to them—which would obviously have been impossible at such a distance. This seems to suggest that it was their minds rather than their eyes that were seeing him. Yet both girls and the coachman saw the figure clearly.

  Now cases like these may be quite bewildering, but they seem to make one thing perfectly clear: that there is far more to human beings than meets the eye. In fact, they seem to suggest that we are making a false distinction when we talk about “ghosts” as if they were quite distinct from living people. It would probably be more accurate to say that human beings are ghosts—ghosts with bodies.

  Faced with such a mass of evidence, this conclusion—or something very like it—slowly forced itself upon even the most skeptical members of the SPR. So by the beginning of the twentieth century, a new theory of Spiritualism had developed, according to which there is no need to suppose that the world is full of invisible “spirits.” Man himself could be the invisible spirit who causes tables to rise into the air and trumpets to play themselves. And if poltergeists seem to require a disturbed child or teenager at the center of the disturbances, then perhaps the child is the poltergeist? This, as we have seen, is the view that still prevails today. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate that it is unsatisfactory.

  By the time Lombroso died, in 1909, psychical research was marking time. Spiritualism continued to flourish; but as scientific investigation, it had come to a halt. The reason can be seen by anyone who reads Owen’s Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World and then turns to Lombroso’s After Death—What? The books were published fifty years apart; yet they might both have been written at exactly the same time. Lombroso offers some “scientific evidence,” by way of a few experiments in telepathy; otherwise, he presents just the same kind of evidence that Robert Dale Owen had presented. There was plenty of evidence for ghosts, for poltergeists, for telepathy, for precognition, for “out of the body experiences,” and a dozen other varieties of “paranormal” experience. But the evidence seemed to lead nowhere. One remarkable case had even proved life after death, to the satisfaction of most open-minded inquirers. This was the celebrated “cross-correspondences.” By 1904 three of the chief founders of the SPR—Henry Sidgwick. Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney—were dead, and it seemed logical to hope that if they were still alive in another world, they would try to communicate through mediums. In the previous year, a psychic named Mrs. Holland, the sister of Rudyard Kipling, began receiving written messages—through automatic writing—that seemed far more intelligent and thoughtful than the majority of such scripts. And in 1904, another psychic; Mrs. Verrall, the wife of a Cambridge don, also received some messages, one of which included the words “Record the bits, and when fitted they will make the whole.”

  And it slowly became clear that the “senders” claimed to be the spirits of Sidgwick, Myers and Gurney, and that what they were attempting was a “proof” of such complexity that there could be no possibility of fraud. In effect, they seemed to be using a large number of mediums—others included Mrs. Flemming, Mrs. Forbes, and the famous American medium Mrs. Piper—to produce a complex jigsaw puzzle or conundrum, giving each woman only part of the puzzle, so that there could be no possible doubt that there was no collusion between them. Unfortunately, the conundrums were so complex that it would take a short book even to give a simple outline. A typical one is as follows:

  In 1906, Mrs. Flemming produced a script containing the words Dawn, Evening, and Morning, a reference to bay leaves, and the name Laurence. Six weeks later, Mrs. Verrall wrote out a message mentioning “laurel” and a library. Mrs. Piper came out of a trance speaking of laurel, “nigger,” and a phrase that sounded like “more head.” Mrs. Flemming produced more scripts referring to Night and Day, Evening and Morning, and also a reference to Alexander’s tomb with laurel leaves. And eventually, all these clues pointed to the tomb of the Medicis in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence. It had been designed by Michelangelo, and contained his sculpture of Night and Day, Evening and Morning. Lorenzo de Medici’s emblem was the laurel, and near the tombs is the Laurentian Library. Alexander (or Alessandro) de Medici was half negro; after his murder, his body was hidden in the tomb of Giuliano. “More head” was actually “Moor head”—the head of a negro. This conundrum was solved only four years after the first “clue,” and there could be no question of telepathy between the mediums, since they did not understand what it was all about. Altogether, the case of the cross-correspondences is one of the most impressive—perhaps the most impressive—in the history of psychical research. It is true that the various “clues” are so complicated that few people have ever taken the trouble to study the case. Yet the sheer complexity of the code at least indicates that it originated on a far higher level of intelligence than most spirit messages. In addition to which, it effectively disposes of the objection that spirits never have anything interesting to say.

  If the “spirits” of Myers, Gurney and Sidgwick failed to convince the world of the reality of the afterlife, a far more skillful and flamboyant publicist was now preparing to launch himself into the project.

  Harry Price, ghost-hunter extraordinary, claimed that he was born in Shrewsbury, son of a wealthy paper manufacturer. A brilliant critical biography by Trevor Hall, The Search for Harry Price, reveals that he was, in fact, the son of an unsuccessful grocer, and that he was born in London in 1881. From then until he was about forty, he seems to have supported himself by a variety of jobs, including commercial traveling, manufacturing patent medicines, journalism and giving gramophone concerts. What is certain is that his lifelong interest in stage magic began at the age of eight, when he saw an itinerant magician and patent medicine salesman, the Great Sequah, giving a public performance. Price began collecting books on magic, and became an expert magician. It may have been the interest in magic that led him to join the Society for Psychical Researc
h in 1920—the SPR was then, as now, much concerned with trying to detect fraud in mediums. E. J. Dingwall, who was then Research Officer for the Society, asked Price if he would care to come with him to Munich, to attend some séances of a remarkable German medium, Willi Schneider—one of two brothers. The man who arranged the séances was the German investigator, Baron von Schrenk-Notzing, a friend of Lombroso’s, and the author of a sensationally successful book called Materialization Phenomena, which had aroused widespread skepticism in Germany when it appeared in 1914. Schrenk-Notzing himself was something of a flamboyant publicist, and Trevor Hall suggests that Harry Price took his example to heart, and decided that this was the way to achieve the fame he craved. (He admitted frankly that he had always wanted to get his name in Who’s Who.)

  The Schneider brothers, Willi and Rudi, the most psychic members of a psychic family, were born at Braunau am Inn and, according to one friend of the family, the phenomena began after they had spent an evening playing with a Ouija board. Willi had then reached the age of puberty—in 1916—and the family was disturbed by loud knocking noises. Then objects began moving around, and Willi saw a ghost in the sitting room. Neighbors became so alarmed about the racket that the family were on the point of vacating the flat. By means of the ouija board, they tried questioning the “spirit,” which identified itself as a girl named Olga Lindtner, who claimed to be a reincarnation of the notorious Lola Montez. In due course, Willi went into a trance, and Olga spoke through him. In spite of doubts later raised by Harry Price—after he had quarreled with the brothers—there can be no doubt that the phenomena were genuine. The novelist Thomas Mann attended one séance, and has recorded how, as he pressed Willi’s knees tightly between his own, and two other people held his hands, a handkerchief floated into the air, a bell began to ring and then floated into the air, a music box played, and the keys of a typewriter were struck. Mann was convinced that deception was impossible.

  Harry Price and E. J. Dingwall witnessed similar occurrences, and also saw a white hand which materialized in front of them; they had no doubt whatever of the genuineness of the phenomena, and said as much at a lecture to the SPR. But by way of keeping his options open, Price helped to edit and publish a book called Revelations of a Spirit Medium, in which a fake medium described the tricks of the trade.

  In 1923, Price got into conversation with a young nurse on a train; her name was Stella Cranshawe. He was fascinated to hear that mild poltergeist phenomena occurred around her—a feeling like a breeze, movement of small objects, rapping noises, and flashes of light. By this time, Price knew enough about psychical research to realize that the girl was probably, without knowing it, a medium. He persuaded her to allow herself to be investigated. And at the first séance, a heavy table levitated and moved across the room on two legs, raps sounded, lights flashed, and the temperature in the room dropped considerably. (At later sittings it became very low indeed.) At another séance, the table hit Harry Price under the chin, then three of its legs snapped off, the top broke into two pieces, then the whole table crumbled into matchwood. Stella herself found all these phenomena rather boring and, after she married in 1928, refused to take any part in further experiments. It is possible, in any case, that her powers would have vanished with marriage; many investigators have noted that there is a connection between sexual frustration and “poltergeist effects,” and that such effects cease when the “focus” leads a normal sex life. (She may also have felt that séances were bad for her health—they often leave the medium exhausted.)

  In 1926, Price came upon one of the most remarkable poltergeist cases of all time. In February 1925, a thirteen-year-old Rumanian peasant girl called Eleonora Zugun went to visit her grandmother at the village of Buhai, and on the way found some money by the roadside, which she spent on sweets. Her grandmother, who was 105 years old, and had a reputation as a witch, told Eleonora that the money had been left by the devil, and that she would now be possessed by the devil. The next day, stones rained down on the house, smashing windows and small objects near Eleonora rose up in the air. Eleonora was quickly sent home to Talpa, and the phenomena continued there. A jug full of water rose slowly in the air and floated several feet. A trunk rocked up and down. A porridge bowl hit a visitor on the head and made a nasty wound. Eleonora was sent to a nearby monastery, then shut in a lunatic asylum. A psychical researcher managed to get her removed and taken back to the monastery. There he witnessed all kinds of things flying through the air. The “spirit” also began slapping the girl. Then a countess with an interest in psychical research—Zöe Wassilko-Serecki—heard about Eleonora, went to see her, and brought her back with her to Vienna. Eleonora was delighted with her new life in the countess’ flat, and began training as a hairdresser. And the poltergeist phenomena continued—indicating perhaps that a poltergeist does not need a psychologically “disturbed” teenager for its manifestations. The countess observed what most other researchers into poltergeist activity have noted: that the poltergeist seems to dislike anyone actually seeing it move objects; the countess noted that various small items would fall from the air without being seen to move from their original place. The poltergeist—or dracu (demon) as Eleonora called it—communicated by automatic writing, even spoke a few sentences in a “breathy and toneless voice.” But what it had to say indicated that its level of intelligence was extremely low.

  The dracu also punched and slapped Eleonora, threw her out of bed, pulled her hair, filled her shoes with water (the poltergeist seems to be able to create water, as we have seen), and stole her favorite possessions. In March 1926, it began scratching and biting her, as well as sticking needles into her. The bite marks were often damp with saliva.

  Price came to Vienna at the end of April 1926, and was soon convinced that this was a genuine poltergeist. He took her back to London, where she was subjected to laboratory tests. The movement of objects was less violent than in Vienna, but the bites and scratches continued to appear. One day, when she was tying up a parcel in front of several witnesses, she gave a gasp, and teeth marks appeared on her wrist, then scratches appeared on her forearm, cheeks and forehead.

  Back in Vienna, the movement of objects ceased, but the scratches and bites continued, now often accompanied by quantities of an unpleasant spittle. Subjected to chemical analysis, this was found to be swarming with micro-organisms (whereas Eleonora’s own saliva was relatively free from them). When she went to Berlin to be studied by Schrenk-Notzing, a researcher named Hans Rosenbusch accused her of cheating—with the co-operation of the countess; but this seems to be typical of the extreme skepticism of certain investigators. Finally, in 1927, the “spirit” got tired of tormenting her, and went away. She moved to Czernowitz, in Rumania, and ran a successful hairdressing business.

  The countess was convinced that Eleonora herself—or rather, her unconscious mind—was responsible for the attacks: she believed that Eleonora had powerfully developed sexual urges, and that these were fixated on her father (it sounds as if she had been impressed by Freud); so the “attacks” were a form of self-punishment. Harry Price was inclined to agree, likening the bites to the “stigmata” that appear on the hands of saints and religious fanatics. Yet as we read the account of Eleanor’s sufferings at the hands of the dracu (there is an excellent account in Alan Gauld’s Poltergeists), these explanations seem more and more preposterous. A girl does not go on scratching and biting herself for two years because she feels guilty about her sexual desires, particularly if she finds herself transformed, like Cinderella, into the protégée of a wealthy countess. Then what exactly happened?

  Clearly, the grandmother was in some way responsible for “triggering” the attacks. Eleonora had reached the age—thirteen—at which such things happen; she was not particularly happy in her present surroundings in Talpa, so there was an underlying sense of frustration. Peasants are superstitious, and when her grandmother told her that from now on she would belong to the devil and never get rid of him, the effect must hav
e been traumatic. Eleonora’s energies began to “leak.” And some delinquent entity saw its chance, and made use of them. It may or may not be relevant that her grandmother had a reputation as a witch. If magic—and presumably witchcraft—makes use of “spirits,” as Playfair suggests, then her grandmother’s house may have been the worst possible place for a frustrated adolescent like Eleonora. (This matter of witchcraft is a subject to which we shall return in the final chapter.)