by Colin Wilson
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 cycles, 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 28. Kerner’s book The Seeress of Prevorst (the name of the Swabian village where she was born) created a sensation.
In the second half of the 19th 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 20th century it had been virtually forgotten. Writing about it in his Modem Spiritualism (1902), the sceptical 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 sceptical 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 sceptical 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 their cottage’s demolition. 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 18-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 windowsill, 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-storey 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.
The cases described by Justinus Kerner and Heinrich Werner excited widepread interest in Europe, and led to much serious discussion. Catherine Crowe read it and was deeply impressed. When her translation appeared in 1845, it aroused as much interest as it had in Germany. And it convinced Mrs Crowe of the reality of the supernatural.
So far, she had been the disciple of a famous Edinburgh doctor George Combe, Britain’s most famous exponent of phrenology—the doctrine that a man’s character can be read through th
e bumps on his skull—and Combe was a determined sceptic about ghosts and such matters. Kerner—and Friederike—made her a convert. It now came to her as a revelation that the ‘scientific spirit’ had gone too far. ‘Because, in the 17th century, credulity outran reason and discretion, the 18th century, by a natural reaction, flung itself into an opposite extreme.’ And the 19th century had carried this attitude to the point of absurdity; in fact, it had become a new kind of superstition, refusing to face facts that contradicted its dogmas.
Mrs Crowe was not particularly credulous. She set about unearthing her own facts, and found that they seemed to fit together into a logical pattern. Almost everything she wrote about would later be studied more systematically by parapsychologists, and carefully documented in scientific archives: dreaming of the future, death-bed visions, premonitions of disaster, ‘phantasms’ of the living and of the dead, poltergeists, spontaneous psychokinesis, even possession. She reproaches contemporary scientists for insisting that the supernatural can be explained in terms of hysteria or nervous derangement, and points out, quite fairly, that they ‘arrange the facts to their theory, not their theory to the facts’. What is now needed, she says, is investigation. ‘And by investigation I do not mean the hasty, captious, angry notice of an unwelcome fact . . . but the slow, modest, pains-taking examination that is content to wait upon nature, and humbly follow out her disclosures, however opposed to preconceived theories or mortifying to human pride.’ Here she seems to be echoing a famous remark by Thomas Henry Huxley about the duty of the scientist: ‘Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’ It is interesting to discover that Huxley wrote this sentence in 1860, more than a decade after The Night Side of Nature, which was published in 1846; Huxley may, in fact, be echoing Mrs Crowe.
Her aim, she readily admits, is to see whether the evidence proves that some part of man can survive his death. The first step in this direction—and it was later followed by most of her eminent successors, such as Myers and Tyrrell—was to try to show that man possesses powers that cannot be explained by science. She devotes several chapters to dreams and presentiments of the future, and includes a number of experiences gathered from friends:
‘Another friend lately dreamt, one Thursday night, that he saw an acquaintance of his thrown from his horse, and that he was lying on the ground with the blood streaming from his face, and was much cut. He mentioned his dream in the morning, and being an entire disbeliever in such phenomena, he was unable to account for the impression it made on his mind. This was so strong that, on Saturday, he could not forebear calling at his friend’s house, who he was told was in bed, having been thrown from his horse on the previous day, and much injured about the face.’
If Mrs Crowe had lived to become a member of the Society for Physical Research, she would have gone to the trouble of getting signed statements from her friend, the man who had the accident, and the person he told about the dream the morning after. As a pioneer in the field, she obviously felt that this was unnecessary. Otherwise, it is difficult to fault her method.
Like every writer on the paranormal, she is particularly fascinated by out-of-the-body experiences, for she rightly regards these as potential proof that there is something in man that can exist outside the body. Again, she does her best to offer facts that could be checked:
‘The late Mr John Holloway, of the Bank of England, brother to the engraver of that name, related of himself that being one night in bed with his wife and unable to sleep, he had fixed his eyes and thoughts with uncommon intensity on a beautiful star that was shining in at the window, when he suddenly found his spirit released from his body and soaring into that bright sphere. But, instantly seized with anxiety for the anguish of his wife, if she discovered his body apparently dead beside her, he returned and re-entered it with difficulty . . . He described that returning as returning to darkness; and that whilst the spirit was free, he was alternately in the light or in the dark, accordingly as his thoughts were with his wife or with the star. He said that he always avoided anything that could produce a repetition of this accident, the consequences of it being very distressing.’
Mrs Crowe’s main problem was that, working mainly from hearsay, she had no simple way of distinguishing the authentic from the inauthentic. A typical example is a case she cites from Heinrich Jung-Stilling. Now Jung-Stilling was a serious investigator of the paranormal, a Professor of Economics, and a follower of the doctrines of Mesmer. He ought to have been a reliable authority. And the story he tells is in many ways a good case of what was later to be called a ‘phantasm of the living’. In Philadelphia around the year 1740, says Jung-Stilling, a clairvoyant was approached by the wife of a sea captain, who was anxious because she had not heard from her husband for a long time. The clairvoyant asked her to excuse him, and went into another room. After a while, the woman became impatient, and went and peeped through a crack in the door; the clairvoyant was lying on a sofa, apparently asleep. When he came back, he told her that her husband was alive and well, but had been unable to write to her for various reasons, which he explained. At this moment, he said, the captain was in a coffee-house in London, and would soon be back home.
In due course, the captain returned, and confirmed the reasons that the clairvoyant had given for failing to write. And when he was introduced to the clairvoyant, the husband recognised him as a man he had seen in a London coffee-house on the eve of his departure for America. According to the captain, the man had spoken to him, asked him why he had not written to his wife, and then vanished into the crowd . . .
The clairvoyant’s power of ‘projecting’ himself across the Atlantic brings to mind similar stories of Swedenborg bringing messages from the dead. His appearance in a London coffeehouse has dozens of parallels in Phantasms of the Living, compiled in the 1880s by members of the Society for Psychical Research. What rings totally false here is the information that the captain spoke to him and explained why he had failed to write to his wife. There are hundreds of recorded cases of ‘projection’, but in very few (I can recall only one1) does the ‘phantasm’ actually talk to anybody. When we learn that these events supposedly took place in 1740—the year Jung-Stilling was born—it becomes clear that, even if basically true, the story had probably been ‘improved’ in the telling. Mrs Crowe had no way of knowing that the story failed to conform to the general pattern of ‘phantasms of the living’ because in her day there had not been enough research for the pattern to emerge.
In view of this difficulty, Mrs Crowe did remarkably well, and her book deserved its high reputation. Most of her conjectures would do credit to a modern investigator, and, in many ways, her ‘credibility’ was often far ahead of her time. She cites a story from another early researcher, Joseph Ennemoser:
‘It appears that Van Helmont, having asserted that it was possible for a man to extinguish the life of a an animal by the eye alone (oculis intentis), Rousseau, the naturalist, repeated the experiment when in the East, and in this manner killed several toads; but on a subsequent occasion, whilst trying the same experiment at Lyons, the animal, on finding it could not escape, fixed its eyes immovably on him, so that he fell into a fainting fit, and was thought to be dead . . .’
This is the kind of tale that makes us smile sarcastically; we know that these stories of the hypnotic power of snakes and other creatures are old wives’ tales. Yet we have already noted the recent investigations of Dr Ferenc András Völgyesi, who devoted many years to studying hypnosis in men and animals, and arrived at some interesting conclusions. He observed—and photographed—dozens of cases in which snakes ‘fascinated’ rabbits or rats and then ate them. He also observed many cases of ‘battles of wills’ between the snake and its potential victims—his book contains photographs of a giant anaconda ‘fascinating’ a rat, and a python immobilising a hare. Another shows a battle of wills between a bird, the cucullu
s senegalensis, and a rattlesnake. He states: ‘The battle, which begins with a mutual fixing of the gaze, usually ends in victory for the bird.’ Another photograph shows a toad winning a battle of wills with a cobra. Nor let us forget his description of the battle between two lizards; they confronted one another for about ten minutes, gazing intently at one another (as Mrs Crowe says, oculis intentis), then one slowly ate the other, which remained immobile. Van Helmont’s tale about killing animals with the gaze may be an exaggeration, but it is based on an observed reality.
As we have seen, there is a great deal in the literature of hypnosis to support Mrs Crowe’s view that it involves the deliberate use of some mental force. We may recall that in 1885 the French psychologist Pierre Janet observed the experiments of a doctor named Gibert, who could induce hypnosis in a patient called Leonie by merely thinking about her, and summon her from the other side of Le Havre by the same means. In the 1890s, Dr Paul Joire caused blindfolded and hypnotised patients to obey his mental commands, and the same kind of experiments were repeated in the 1920s by the Russian scientist L. L. Vasiliev, who described them in a book called Experiments in Distant Influence; it leaves no possible doubt that some kind of mental force can be exercised at a distance.
What fascinated Mrs Crowe was the clear implication that human powers are far greater than we realise. If people can leave their bodies and witness things that are going on elsewhere, if a hypnotised subject can describe things that are happening in the street, if a girl can turn into a human magnet, if a man can dream accurately about the future—then materialistic science must be somehow fundamentally mistaken about our human limitations. Mrs Crowe had translated The Seeress of Prevorst, and it was perfectly clear to her that unless Kerner was an out-and-out liar, then something very queer was going on. This was not the second-hand reporting of spooks and spectres, as in Jung-Stilling’s Pneumatology; this was first-hand reporting by a man who had no reason to lie or deceive himself. Kerner described—and Mrs Crowe cites in The Night Side of Nature—how Friederike had awakened one night crying ‘Oh, God!’, and how a doctor who was sitting near the corpse of her father, many miles away, clearly heard the exclamation, and rushed into the room to see if the corpse had come to life. This was not a question of spirits; it was some curious power possessed by Friederike herself. And while such powers seem to be beyond the control of the individual who exercises them, Mrs Crowe could see that there is no earthly reason why this should always be so. That is why the hard-headed Victorians found her book so exciting. Their explorers were penetrating new continents, their railways were stretching to the ends of the earth, their industries were creating new wealth, their science was uncovering the secrets of the universe. And if Mrs Crowe was correct, a new science of the ‘supernatural’ would demonstrate that man himself was a far more extraordinary creature then he had ever suspected. Her book was not a morbid collection of tales-to-make-the-flesh-creep, but a work of buoyant optimism about human potentialities.