Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

by Colin Wilson

  Some cases, like that of Isobel Gowdie and the Auldearne witches, are incomprehensible unless we recognize that witchcraft is about “spirits”—the kind of spirits we have been discussing in this book. In 1662, Isobel Gowdie, an attractive, red-headed farmer’s wife, shocked the elders of the local kirk (in Morayshire, Scotland) when she announced that she had been a practicing witch for the past fifteen years, had attended Sabbats, and had sexual intercourse with the Devil (whose semen was “as cold as spring water”). The notion that she was insane or simply hysterical is contradicted by the fact that several of the witches she named made full confession, without torture, and corroborated her statements in detail. Isobel claims that she encountered the Devil, a man in grey, when travelling between two farms, and that she agreed to meet him in the church at Auldearne, where he made her renounce Jesus. He came to her in bed a few days later and copulated with her; she found his penis thick and long and his semen “abundant and as cold as ice.” Elsewhere in this book we have encountered women who had a similar experience—for example, Mrs. Fielding, and Playfair’s Marcia. And from the drop in temperature that usually occurs during spirit manifestations, we might also expect his semen to be cold. Isobel Gowdie also mentions various acts of black magic, by which people are killed, and (significantly) a visit to fairyland, where she encountered the Queen of the Faery.

  Again, the case of the Salem witches suddenly becomes more comprehensible when we consider it in this light. In 1692, the daughter and niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris began having convulsions like the possessed nuns of Loudun—and a doctor gave his opinion that they were bewitched. Parris had come from Barbados, and had brought with him a number of black servants, including a woman called Tituba, who knew a great deal about magic or voodoo. The girls had apparently been trying out some of these magical ceremonies at a remote spot in the countryside. When a magistrate questioned the girls about their convulsions, they screamed and claimed that they were being bitten and pinched. At the trial Tituba fully admitted practicing witchcraft and having dealings with the Devil. The affair was blown up by local hysteria until over a hundred people were accused, and twenty-two executed (not including Tituba). Montague Summers argues convincingly that there was a witches’ “coven” in the area (although its members had nothing to do with “bewitching” the children). But if Tituba was genuinely skilled in voodoo, and the children tried practicing it, then the result may well have been poltergeist manifestations, complete with scratches and bites, and “demoniacal possession” producing convulsions. Anne Putnam, the oldest of the girls, was of the right age—twelve—and was physically mature.

  Magic prescribes certain rituals and precautions to protect the would-be sorcerer from unfriendly spirits. When these are not observed, the results can be alarming. Even a simple séance can be dangerous if the participants are inexperienced. In Mysteries, I have described the experience of Bill Slater, former head of BBC television drama, who made facetious remarks at a séance with a Ouija board, and woke up in the middle of the night convinced that some invisible entity was trying to take over his body. He says that it was “massing itself on my chest, making every effort to take over my mind and body.” It took twenty minutes of intense struggle before he could “push it away.”

  The psychical investigator, Leonard Boucher—quoted in an earlier chapter—has described how, after an improvised séance (in an attempt to contact the recently departed husband of his hostess), he and his wife spent a highly disturbed night at the House of Knock, near Stranraer.

  After retiring and switching off the light, the room seemed to take on a chilly atmosphere, although it was summer time and the air outside was very warm. A few minutes later there came from under the bed a loud scratching noise as if an extra-large cat had been trapped underneath . . . Investigation proved that there was not a single cat anywhere around. Getting back into bed and again turning off the light, we were startled to feel the bedclothes suddenly pulled off the bed. This unpleasant operation was repeated several times over the next hour or so, and throughout the whole night we heard bumps and thuds coming from various parts of the room. Probably looking rather weary and worn, I explained the next morning to our hostess that we had not slept too well; she then remarked that she too had a restless night owing to scratchings and bangings in her room.

  In spite of which, Leonard Boucher states his conviction that the poltergeist is a manifestation of the unconscious mind—a conviction that hardly seems to explain his experience in the House of Knock.

  What this seems to suggest, then, is that almost anybody can “summon up” a spirit, especially if they happen to have mediumistic powers. Witches and shamans summon them deliberately; and in that case, their main problem is controlling them. Much depends, of course, on the intention. People who play around with Ouija boards to pass an idle hour are likely to attract some passing vagabond of a spirit, and the results may then be unpredictable. Mediums seem to attract “controls” who then act as policemen and keep out the undesirables. But even they are not always successful. John Dee, for example, was always being told that the information he received the previous day was all useless because it came from a mischievous intruder . . . But serious intentions are likely to produce the best results, whether or not the “magician” has any previous experience. This is illustrated by a case recounted to me by a Filipino girl, Mimitan Wigan, of the Besao tribe of the Wester Bontoc. The Besao are a breakaway group from the Bontoc (part of the Igarot tribes), who are war-like head hunters. The Besao are peaceable, and have concentrated on developing their natural psychic powers; they are, for example, skilled in healing and rain-making.

  Mimitan’s Aunt Kadmali lived (and still lived at the time of first writing) in the mountain village of Dandanak, on Luzon; she is now in her eighties. When she reached the age of thirteen, she inherited an orchard or plantation that grew pineapples, oranges, lemons and other fruits. But the orchard was mysteriously being plundered. One night, the girl sat outside the house, and prayed and chanted until dawn; she was praying for the nature spirit to reveal to her the identity of the thief. At dawn, she went into the orchard, and, to her astonishment, found a man with his arm uplifted to pick fruit, standing as if paralyzed. Seeing that he was unable to move, Kadmali rushed off to her neighbors and brought them to witness the thief’s discomfiture. The man was able to speak, and was asked how he intended to make reparation for his thefts; he said that he would work for the girl for a year without wages. As soon as he had said this, he was able to move.

  Aunt Kadmali has since become well-known for her psychic powers; but her first experience of them was on this occasion. They are not regarded as in any way unusual among the Besao, who—although Christian—take it for granted that human beings can commune with spirits. She is not regarded as a “witch” as she would be in the West—because the Besao recognize that all human beings possess similar powers, to a greater or lesser extent.

  All this throws a new light on the concept of witchcraft in Western civilization. There must have been a time when our ancestors took “shamanistic” powers for granted, as the Besao do. But this was when people lived close to nature. As soon as cities began to develop, attitudes toward these powers began to change. H. G. Wells remarks that it was only ten thousand generations ago that human beings “were brought together into a closeness of contact for which their past had not prepared them.” And he points out that these cities were not communities, but “jostling crowds in which quite unprecedented reactions were possible.” People were living more closely together than ever before, yet were separated by a new hostility, a sense of mutual isolation. Crime became the rule instead of the exception. And the city dwellers created their own exaggerated mental image of witchcraft and magic. Now they were no longer in daily contact with the real thing, they invented stories of magic and malevolence, witches with sagging breasts and pointed nails who desecrate the dead and summon demons. Lucan’s Erichtho, the foul and evil hag who digs up graves and
destroys crops, is a symbol of horror, like Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster; there is nothing real about her.

  It is tempting to jump to the conclusion that we have simply lost contact with nature and with the hidden powers of the unconscious mind, and that the solution may be to turn a suspicious eye on the idea of technological progress—like the inhabitants of the village of Sagada, on Luzon, who have simply ignored the electricity that has been brought to their homes, and continue to use oil lamps and cooking fires. But this would be an oversimplification. The members of a primitive tribe may have a deeper understanding of nature than do city dwellers; but this does not necessarily mean a deeper understanding of themselves. An animal’s attitude to nature is passive; it simply adjusts itself, and chooses the path of least resistance. Primitive peoples are inclined to do the same. The hardship of city life caused people to take a more active attitude towards their own existence. Witchcraft continued to exist; but it took on a darker coloring, since, as far as the city-dweller was concerned, magic was simply a short cut to power and wealth, or an instrument of revenge. The magician ceased to be the shaman, who lived in conformity with nature and conversed with spirits, and became the sorcerer, the person of power who could “summon up spirits from the vasty deep.” There is a sense in which the magician—from Simon Magus to John Dee or Aleister Crowley—is a new human archetype. These suspect that they have far more power than human beings generally take for granted. And they are undoubtedly correct. The spirit of Cornelius Agrippa and Faust has created modern civilization and modern science. So although this new relation to nature may be in some ways a bad one—full of aggression and alienation and hubris—it is still an important advance beyond the primitive attitude of passivity in the face of nature. It would be absurd for members of Western civilization to think of exchanging hard-won knowledge for the ancient simplicity. What is needed is to rediscover the things we have long forgotten, the truths that the Besao take for granted.

  And if a primitive shaman were asked to state the most basic of these forgotten truths, he would reply: We are not alone on this planet; we are surrounded all the time by unseen spirits. Western men and women find this idea disturbing and disquieting because it seems to be a return to the superstition that made our ancestors cross themselves against the evil eye. Such misgivings may be justified. Nevertheless, we have seen that an objective examination of the facts about the poltergeist points to the conclusion that it is some form of earth-bound spirit. I have to admit that I reached this conclusion with extreme reluctance; from the scientific point of view it would be far more acceptable if we could agree with William Roll that poltergeist phenomena originate in the unconscious mind. But the facts point in another direction.

  How, for example, can the RSPK theory explain the curious events which were still—as I wrote these words—going on in the pub in Croydon called the King’s Cellars?[1] In the autumn of 1980, shortly after I had returned from interviewing the Pritchard family in Pontefract, Guy Playfair told me something of the Croydon poltergeist, which he and Maurice Grosse had been studying for the past year. It apparently caused the usual phenomena—bottles and glasses floating off shelves or simply smashing on the floor, sudden chills, inexplicable malfunctions of tills. As Guy and I were walking along Oxford Street, talking about the case, we encountered a friend of Guy’s from the SPR, who had been in contact with the pub earlier in the day, and who said that several tills had jammed at the same time, although the firm that supplied them could find nothing wrong with them. This piece of synchronicity decided me, and I phoned the pub’s manager—Mike Delaney—to ask if I could come down and see for myself. I asked an old friend, the psychic Robert Cracknell, if he would like to go with me.

  The King’s Cellars proved to be less of a public house than a kind of continental bar, with a cellar which is also a restaurant. The downstairs bar has been decorated to look “ancient,” with imitation masonry. The manager, Mike, had been there for only a few months; the previous manager and his wife had left abruptly, after deciding to separate. This, Mike told us, seemed to be one of the unfortunate characteristics of the place: in the twelve years it had been open, it had wrecked the marriages of about a dozen couples.

  He had been sent there by the brewery to act as a stop-gap until another manager could be found—he was the brewery’s “trouble-shooter,” who went to pubs that were having problems. When he arrived, he knew nothing about the place, and certainly did not believe in ghosts or poltergeists. On the fifth night, he stayed late to examine and balance the books. And, since it was a lock-up pub, he decided to stay there overnight in a sleeping bag. After working at the books, he lay down in the sleeping bag on a padded seat. The place seemed unusually cold—far colder than it should have been. And as he closed his eyes, he heard the sound—a rattle of glasses. He sat up, then went over to the bar. All the glasses on the top shelf were vibrating, as if a juggernaut lorry was going past. But there was no juggernaut; all was silent. The place was now so icy that he decided to go upstairs and sleep in the office. The next morning he went back to the hotel where he was staying for a shower, locking the pub behind him. When he returned to the downstairs bar, he was surprised to find it covered in broken glass. The row of glasses that had been vibrating had been swept all over the floor. To do this, three dozen glasses had had to cross the bar.

  Then the tills began to go wrong. They were new electronic tills, and were supposed to be foolproof. One night, one of the tills was apparently more than £26,000 short. It was absurd. When a member of staff was approaching a till—together with a stocktaker—it suddenly rang up £999. The suppliers sent an engineer, who could find nothing whatever wrong. The telephones would also begin to malfunction, for no obvious reason; again, engineers could trace no fault. One morning, all the ashtrays—which had been left, full, on the top of the bar—had been neatly emptied on to the floor, making a long, continuous line of ash; but they had been on the bar when Mike had locked up the pub the night before.

  Another problem was the lavatories. These would flood for no obvious reason—even when there was no one in them. When this happened, they went icy cold. On one occasion, a stream of water shot up out of the urinal, flooding the place. But this should have been impossible, for the urinal was simply a metal trough, at thigh level, with a pipe descending from it into the floor-level gutter; water could flood into the trough from the tank above, but this was shooting up from the trough itself. Plumbers could find nothing wrong with the water system in the lavatories.

  Oddly enough, Mike was not unduly disturbed about all this; neither was his wife, Shirley. She had been there only six weeks, and had seen nothing. She told me she thought she was “ESP-thick.” Mike now had no doubt that the place was “haunted,” but it did not bother him unduly. He said, “I love this place, and I intend to stay.” After years of moving from pub to pub, he had found one he liked. A poltergeist was a nuisance, but it did no real harm—except scaring the staff. It had swept a whole row of beer bottles off the upstairs bar one day, smashing them all. One warm evening, it had made the downstairs bar so cold that two huge fan heaters had no effect, and Mike was forced to close it down. When Maurice Grosse arrived one day with a television crew, it had made a smell so disgusting, accompanied by the usual freezing cold, that they all felt sick. One day, with customers in the bar, flames suddenly crept up the wall—with an oddly bright light—and across the ceiling; then they extinguished themselves. The likeliest explanation seemed some odd electrical fault; but neither the fire-prevention officer nor the electricity board could find anything wrong. Stella, the catering supervisor—who had been there longest—had watched a bottle of wine sail across the room, to shatter itself against a wall.

  Maurice Grosse came while Bob Cracknell and I were eating lunch in the downstairs bar, and we talked about the case. He agreed that the most puzzling thing about it was the lack of a “focus.” The disturbances had been going on for years. They had not worked themselves up to a clima
x, as in most cases. And there seemed to be no single person who might provide the entity—if that was what it was—with energy.

  As we were speaking, someone shouted: “It’s happening again.” We all rushed down to the ladies’ lavatory. It felt icy cold, and the floor was covered in water, which had gushed out of the lavatory pan.

  When I left the place at midafternoon, I had reached only one conclusion: This was obviously a thoroughly non-typical case. A female member of the staff was reported to have seen a ghost—a woman—in an annex of the downstairs bar, but I was unable to speak to her. A girl had committed suicide by throwing herself from the Nestlé building opposite the pub, landing on the roof, and Mike seemed to think that this could have been the cause of the “haunting.” One of the managers had fallen downstairs late at night, and had been found dead in the morning. But no one seemed certain exactly when this had occurred.