Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

by Colin Wilson

  In his account of the case in The Haunted Mind, Fodor makes the statement: “This discovery eliminated any remaining suspicion that a spirit or psychic force was still at work.” But the “still” implies that he felt there had been genuine psychic forces at work at an earlier stage. Reading his full account of the case, this seems self-evident. It would have been impossible for Mrs. Fielding to have faked the poltergeist occurrences in her home, and later in the Institute.

  Fodor’s own analysis is as follows:

  As a child, Mrs. Fielding was both accident- and illness-prone. At the age of six, recovering from tonsillitis, she thought that a muscular black arm tried to strangle her in bed; it vanished when her mother ran in. She was bitten by a mad dog, and attacked (and scarred) by a parrot. She lived in a house with a reputation for being haunted, and Fodor states as a fact that neither the windows nor mirrors ever needed cleaning—they were cleaned by invisible hands during the night.

  At sixteen, she had “visions” of a ghost; a cupboard in her room opened and a man stepped out, then vanished. Subsequently she saw him several times. On one occasion he left a piece of paper with sooty scrawls on it beside her, but her mother burned it. A bicycle accident at this time led to a kidney abscess, which later necessitated many operations. At seventeen she made a runaway marriage, had her first baby at eighteen, her second at twenty-one. (This died of meningitis.) At twenty she contracted anthrax poisoning, and tried to stab her husband with a carving knife. She ran into the street in her nightdress screaming “Murder, fire,” and recovered after having twenty-eight teeth extracted.

  At twenty-four she had a vision of her father, trying to pull her away from her husband. He made the sign of the cross over her left breast. When she woke from her trance, this was bleeding. At the hospital they discovered she had a breast cancer, and the breast was amputated. At twenty-six she had an attack of hysterical blindness which lasted for six weeks and, at twenty-seven, was in an accident on a steamer which was smashed against Margate pier. At twenty-eight she aborted twins after being terrified when she found a dead rat in among her washing. At thirty she had a kidney operation, and at thirty-two, pleurisy. Altogether, it can be seen, Mrs. Fielding was a thoroughly unlucky woman.

  Fodor then proceeds to interpret the evidence from the Freudian point of view. He is convinced that the basic truth is that Mrs. Fielding was attacked and raped, probably in a churchyard, by a man in round glasses, before she was five years old. Everything else, he thinks springs from this trauma. On two occasions, when lying awake at night, she felt a shape like a man—but as cold as a corpse—get into bed with her; then it “behaved like a man” (i.e., had sexual intercourse). One day, on her way to the Institute, Mrs. Fielding was attacked by a man on the train. Fodor does not doubt that she was attacked—she arrived in an upset condition—but thinks that the man’s round glasses may have aroused in her a mixture of loathing and desire which was wrongly interpreted by the man as an invitation. Fodor goes on to suggest that her husband became somehow identified in her mind with her attacker, so that the poltergeist attacks were due to her unconscious aggressions against him.

  There are times when Fodor’s Freudian interpretations verge on the comic. For example, he is convinced that her apports are a cipher “in which her tragic life story is hidden.” On one evening, the apports were: elephant’s tooth, tiger claw, Carthage pottery, a tropical nutshell and a piece of coral. These, says Fodor, symbolize the hugeness of the man who assaulted her (an elephant), his savagery and beastliness, his scaliness (the nutshell), while the pottery symbolizes the breaking of her hymen. The coral stands for music from the church nearby. (Organ music always made Mrs. Fielding cry, and Fodor surmises that the coral was organ-pipe coral.)

  There is, of course, one basic objection to the whole theory. Mrs. Fielding did not tell Fodor she had been raped, and apparently had no such memory. Fodor naturally thinks it was suppressed. But do memories of that type become so suppressed that they vanish completely? It seems highly unlikely.

  Fodor was never able to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion. When he began explaining his rape theories to the Institute for Psychical Research, they objected so strongly that he felt obliged to drop the case. At least it enabled him to believe that Mrs. Fielding was getting closer and closer to remembering her rape experience, and would one day have confirmed all his theories. It will be recalled that, in the case of the Bell Witch, Fodor believed that Betsy had been sexually attacked by her father, and that this produced the poltergeist, “tearing loose part of the mental system and letting it float free like a disembodied entity.” As a good Freudian, he felt bound to seek a sexual explanation in the Thornton Heath case. Yet, like so many of the “primal scenes” that Freud believed caused lifelong illness, the one posited by Fodor is completely inverifiable.

  It would be a pity to leave this case without at least an attempt at an alternative explanation. And the simplest and most obvious is that Mrs. Fielding was a born medium. Her many illnesses turned her into what nineteenth-century investigators liked to call a “sick sensitive.” Her vision of the black arm that tried to strangle her in bed may not have been a dream or hallucination, as Fodor thinks. If she lived in a haunted house, then it seems likely that spirit entities drew energy from her, increasing her tendency to illness. And later in life, she actually developed into a medium. During the investigation, she often went into trances, and a “control” called Bremba spoke through her. Sitting near a pub—and a church—in Coulsdon, she had a vision of an evil, leering face, which she continued to see for ten minutes. “Bremba” later stated at a séance that the man she saw had belonged to the church, and had been hanged for interfering with small children. “She was probably sitting on the spot where one of the outrages took place.” When Mrs. Fielding came out of her trance, she could not speak or even whisper, then, as they all watched, strangulation marks appeared on her throat. When she could speak she said: “I feel as if I am being pulled up”—as if she was suffering from the man’s hanging. Later, when she was telling friends about it, the noose marks again appeared on her throat. Fodor uses this as a support for his theory about the early rape; but it could, in fact be ordinary mediumship. Bremba could have been telling the truth about the man hanged for sexual offenses against children.

  Then why did Mrs. Fielding begin to cheat? There are two possible explanations. One is that she was enjoying her new position as a subject of investigation. She was a bored housewife, and, as Fodor says, the phenomena meant “a new interest, a new life for her.” This could be true; but if Mrs. Fielding was developing genuine powers as a medium, then she had no need to cheat in order to keep them. It sounds as if they had been latent since childhood; all she had to do was to allow them to develop.

  The other explanation is that she was unconscious that she was cheating—which would explain the stone thrown in front of Fodor, with no attempt at concealment, and her subsequent denial. I have mentioned the case cited by Roll in which a man being investigated was seen, through a two way mirror, to throw an object—yet a lie detector test supported his denial that he had done it. We have seen that there is considerable evidence that poltergeists can enter the mind and influence people-mediums more than others.

  To anyone who reads straight through Fodor’s On the Trail of the Poltergeist, it seems obvious that Guy Playfair’s “spirit entity” theory fits better than most. Both the Fieldings had been ill for some time before the first outbreak. So Mrs. Fielding may have been in a suitably “low” condition to enable the entity to begin using her energy. From then on, it used her continually, and accordingly she began to suffer from nervous exhaustion. Yet her attitude toward all this must have been ambiguous, for it brought new interest into her life; this could have enabled the entity—or entities—to manipulate her to cheat. And why should they? Because, for some reason, poltergeists seem to delight in producing bewilderment and confusion.

  The one point that emerges above all others is that
Mrs. Fielding was not just the focus of the poltergeist disturbances; she was a medium, and soon began to develop her ability, with apports, travelling clairvoyance, projection of the “double,” and so on. In short, Mrs. Fielding was a potential Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Palladino. And this, it seems probable, is true for all the people who became “focuses” for poltergeist phenomena. With her illnesses, her early marriage, even the loss of her teeth, Mrs. Fielding calls to mind another medium, the “Seeress of Prevorst,” whose history forms the starting point of this chapter. Nandor Fodor, like Justinus Kerner, was a medical man. Yet it cannot be said that his study of Mrs. Fielding is as penetrating or as suggestive as Kerner’s study of Friederike Hauffe. To read On the Trail of the Poltergeist after The Seeress of Prevorst is a depressing experience. It is to realize that a century of psychical research has brought very few advances—that, on the contrary, an unimaginative and over-cautious approach to the phenomena has only made them less comprehensible than ever.

  [1]. Published in Crookes and the Spirit World, edited by R. G. Medhurt. London and New York, 1972.

  [2]. The Haunted Mind, chapter 8.

  [3]. It is also described in Unbidden Guests by William O. Stevens, 1945.

  [4]. See The Occult, part 3, chapter 2.

  eight

  Speculations and Conclusions

  The more we attempt to study the poltergeist, the clearer it becomes that it has no intention of cooperating.

  This was borne in upon me in October 1975, when I received a letter from a man who claimed that he knew the identity of the criminal known as the Black Panther. Earlier that year the Panther had kidnapped an heiress named Lesley Whittle, and in March her body had been found down an underground tunnel in Bathpool Park, near Kidsgrove. The Panther was also wanted for a number of burglaries in post offices, during which he had killed three sub-postmasters. So, in October 1975, he was the most wanted criminal in England. Understandably, I was intrigued by the letter claiming to know his identity.

  It had come from a village not far from St. Ives, in Cornwall, and on October 16, 1975, I drove down to see the writer, taking with me a guest who happened to be staying with us. En route, we called in to see Dora Russell, widow of Bertrand Russell, with the result that we arrived at the village in the late afternoon.

  The writer of the letter was the village postman, and he was young, bearded, and had an appearance of sturdy common sense. It was his wife, he explained, who was psychic, and who had discovered the Panther’s identity. His wife was a slim, pale girl who looked distinctly “delicate.” Their cottage was freezing—he explained that it had to be kept at that temperature to prevent his wife from becoming feverish.

  During the next hour, the two of them told us an incredible story. But they began by asking us if we could stay until eight o’clock. We asked why. “Because that’s when the knockings begin.” Every evening, they said, at eight o’clock some entity beat a regular tattoo on their bedroom wall. It sometimes made such a racket that it sounded like the drums of the Scots Guards. This had now been going on for several months. They were disappointed when we said that we had to be back in St. Austell by eight o’clock to take some friends out to dinner.

  The story had begun a few months earlier, when his wife had had a series of vivid dreams and trance communications. She was Irish, and apparently this kind of thing had been happening all her adult life. Then, one evening, the rapping noises had started on their bedroom wall. It was clearly a “spirit,” so they tried to communicate with it by the usual code, one rap for yes, two for no. They learned it was a girl, that she was recently dead, and that she had been murdered. Lesley Whittle’s body had only recently been found in Bathpool Park, and when asked: “Are you Lesley Whittle?” the entity set a tremendous triumphant tattoo, as if to say “You’ve got it.”

  Odd coincidences began to occur, obviously engineered by the “spirit.” The wife had a number of vivid dreams or visions of a certain set of park gates with an inscription on them. Her husband happened to open a Reader’s Digest Guide to Britain, and saw gates that sounded like the description; his wife instantly recognized them. The entity told them by means of raps that the Black Panther had buried his gun under a stone in this park, and the wife saw the spot—in a vision—so clearly that she was able to make a sketch map of the whereabouts of the stone. Her husband finally rang the police who were hunting the Panther, and, after some difficulty, persuaded them to go to the park and look underneath the stone. Astonishingly, the stone was there, and the description of the immediate vicinity proved to be accurate; but a metal detector found nothing under the stone . . .

  They had tried ringing the post office in the village near the park, and had concluded that the people who ran it knew the identity of the Panther, and were shielding him. They had made the mistake of giving their own telephone number. And now, they were absolutely convinced, the Panther was “on to them.” A strange car had been parked in the lay-by opposite their house for night after night in August, with a gypsy-like man and woman in it, and someone had prowled around their house trying to break in . . . The car had followed them around, but on one occasion, when they pulled into a beach car park, and the other car turned in a few minutes later, a police car happened to enter the car park, whereupon the other car drove off “like a bat out of hell.”

  Their story was extremely long, extremely circumstantial. The “spirit of Lesley Whittle” had told them that the Panther had escaped through the underground tunnel in a boat, and gone straight to the park, where he hid his gun under the stone. He lived in a caravan in the garden of a cottage. When I asked the name of the Panther, they gave it without hesitation: it was W. E. Jones, and his caravan was in the village of Baynhall, Worcestershire.

  As my guest and I drove away, at about seven o’clock (frozen to the bone), we agreed that it had been an impressive story, and that the husband seemed completely balanced and down to earth, even if the wife seemed a little “fey.” Accordingly, the next morning, I sat down and dictated a long letter to the Commissioner of Police, Sir Robert Mark, with whom I was acquainted. I told him I agreed it all sounded preposterous, but that the couple struck me as genuine, and it was surely worth checking up on the stone in the park—digging, instead of using a metal detector—and on Mr. W. E. Jones—if he existed—of Baynhall, Worcestershire. He wrote back, promising to pass it all on to the officer in charge of the case. And, a couple of weeks later, he wrote again to say that both the stone, and Mr. Jones of Baynhall, had proved negative.

  On December 11, 1975, two policemen at Mansfield Woodhouse saw a man carrying a hold-all, and stopped their police car to ask a few routine questions; he pointed a shotgun at them, climbed into the car and made them drive on. One of the policemen tackled him; two men in a fish and chip queue joined in, and the man was handcuffed to the railings. Two “Panther” hoods in his bag revealed that he was the man the police had been looking for. And when the news of his arrest was broadcast on the television news, I crossed my fingers that this name would turn out to be Jones. It was not. It was Donald Nielsen, and he lived in Bradford, not Baynhall. In due course, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Lesley Whittle and three postmasters.

  Oddly enough, the psychic and her husband refused to accept that their poltergeist had been mistaken, and wrote to me asking if I could find out whether Donald Nielsen had paid a visit to Cornwall during August 1975. I checked with the police officer in charge of the case, and was told that he was pretty certain Nielsen had not been that far south. The couple declined to believe it. They had found the “communications” circumstantial and convincing. My own conclusion was that the “spirit” had simply been a circumstantial and convincing liar.

  While I was still collecting material on poltergeists, I was asked if I would write the text of an illustrated book about witchcraft; and since it was a subject on which I have written a great deal—and which would therefore require a minimum of research—I agreed. It proved to be
an excellent preparation for writing a book about poltergeists. It is possible to believe you know a subject fairly thoroughly, and then to discover, as you write about it, that you have overlooked its very essence. And as I plunged into the history of witchcraft, it struck me that not only had I failed to understand it, but that the twentieth-century mind had lost the key to the whole phenomenon. This applies as much to modern witches and “occultists” as to scientists and skeptics. When we look into a work like Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801), with its pictures of the heads of demons, we feel a kind of irritation that anyone could have been so stupid as to take them seriously. We can accept the idea of the strange powers of the unconscious mind, even of psychokinesis; but the assumptions that have formed the basis of witchcraft for the past three or four thousand years strike us as absurd superstitions. Margaret Murray convinced a whole generation that witchcraft was an ancient pagan religion called wicca, which was basically a form of nature worship, the cult of the Moon Goddess and the Earth Mother, and that the witches who were burned at the stake were simply carrying on the old practices. As far as she went, she was probably correct. But Margaret Murray was a modern rationalist, for whom “magic” was an absurdity. And all witchcraft has been based on the idea of magic: that the witch or magician can make use of spirit entities to carry out her will. (These are known as “familiars.”)

  The earliest literary record of a witch is the story of the witch of Endor in the Bible, and it makes clear that the chief business of a witch in those days (about 1000 B.C.) was raising the dead. And later tales of witches—in Horace, Apuleius and Lucan—make it clear that this was still true a thousand years later on. After the beginning of the Christian era (whose own major contribution was the idea of the Devil), the witch also became the invoker of demons. The most famous picture of John Dee, the Elizabethan magician, shows him in a graveyard with the spirit of a dead man he has just raised. “Necromancy”—the raising of the dead—was a synonym for magic. We may infer, therefore, that although the ancients knew nothing about Spiritualism, they had stumbled upon the same discovery as the Fox sisters and Daniel Dunglas Home: that it is, apparently, possible to communicate with the “dead,” as well as with other invisible entities. In his notorious History of Witchcraft, the Reverend Montague Summers denounces modern Spiritualism as a revival of witchcraft. He may simply have meant to be uncomplimentary about Spiritualism; but, as it happens, he was historically correct. The kind of Spiritualism initiated by the Fox sisters was the nearest approach to what Lucan’s Erichtho, or Dame Alice Kyteler, would have understood by witchcraft. It begins and ends with the idea that we are surrounded by invisible spirits, including those of the dead, and that these can be used for magical purposes. Accordingly, magicians like Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee took care to protect themselves in magic circles—or pentagrams—when they conjured “demons,” and to perform the rituals with pedantic exactitude (which, according to Guy Playfair, is essential, the spirits being sticklers for detail).