by Colin Wilson
Unfortunately, a Victorian lady novelist was hardly the person to persuade scientists that they were ignoring an important subject. The Victorians had fought hard for their intellectual freedom. Witches were still being executed in the 1690s; as late as the 1750s, the Church forced the great naturalist Buffon to withdraw his statement that the earth was a fragment of the sun, and that fossils were the remains of primitive ancestors of present-day creatures. By 1800, intellectuals were utterly sick of the authority the Church had been exercising for centuries. They longed to see the downfall of these ecclesiastical bullies. So every time someone dared to challenge the intellectual authority of the Church, cheers echoed throughout Europe. In 1830, two years after The Night Side of Nature was published, the German theologian Ludwig Feuerbach produced a book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, in which he dismissed the idea of a personal God, and jeered at the desire for immortality as selfish stupidity. Feuerbach was persecuted by the police and forced to give up his post at the university. Ten years later, Feuerbach published a far more radical book, The Essence of Christianity, which landed like a bombshell and frightened even the freethinkers; he declared that God and immortality were dangerous delusions, and that man has to learn to live in the present instead of wasting his time dreaming about a non-existent heaven. (The book had a deep influence on Karl Marx, who expressed its basic message in the phrase ‘Religion is the opium of the people’.) In his novel Green Heinrich, the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller describes Feuerbach as ‘a magician in the shape of a bird who sang God out of the hearts of thousands’. And the same book has a portrait of a schoolteacher who has lost his job because he is an atheist, but who travels around Germany exclaiming: ‘Isn’t it a joy to be alive?’, and ‘forever marvelling at the glory of being free from the encumbrance’ of God.
This is why the scientists and philosophers were not willing to pay attention to the evidence for the ‘supernatural’. They were too delighted to see the Church getting a black eye, and had no intention of letting religion sneak in again by the back door. So when Catherine Crowe began her book by admitting that she wanted to prove the reality of man’s immortal soul, most of them read no further. Whether Mrs Crowe intended it or not, she was giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
In fact, in the year The Night Side of Nature was published, this particular enemy was preparing to mount a full-frontal assault . . . With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that the most interesting and significant pages of The Night Side of Nature are those that concern the haunting of a house owned by an industrialist named Joshua Proctor. Here Mrs Crowe presents the kind of carefully documented account that would be the aim of the later investigators of the Society for Psychical Research. This is the true stuff of psychical research. She prefaces the account with a letter from Joshua Proctor to herself, vouching for the accuracy of the details of the report that follows.
The haunted house was a millhouse; it had been built only forty years earlier, in 1800. The newly-built Newcastle and Shields railway passed overhead on a viaduct. In June 1840, news reached the outside world that the Proctor family—who were Quakers—had been disturbed by knocking noises, and had seen some unpleasant things. A surgeon named Edward Drury, who practised in Sunderland, heard about the haunting from a local farmer. Dr Drury was sceptical about such matters. Nevertheless, he had been fascinated by the account of a famous poltergeist haunting at Epworth, in the rectory of the Rev. Samuel Wesley, grandfather of the founder of Methodism (see Chapter 6). This spook, known as Old Jeffrey, had banged and groaned around the rectory for two months in 1716. There were sounds of heavy breathing, breaking glass, footsteps, and various unidentifiable noises. The Rev. Samuel noticed that the disturbances seemed in some way connected with his 19-year-old daughter Hetty, who trembled in her sleep before the sounds began. The scientist Joseph Priestley had investigated the case, and decided it was a hoax. Dr Drury was inclined to agree with him; so when he heard of the ‘haunting’ of Willington Mill, he wrote to its owner, Joshua Proctor, offering to ‘unravel the mystery’ (that is, expose the hoaxer). Mr Proctor replied politely, saying that he and his family were going away on a visit on the date Mr Drury had suggested; one of his employees was going to act as caretaker while they were away. Nevertheless, if Drury wanted to come and stay overnight, he was welcome.
Dr Drury decided to take a friend along for moral support. He also took a brace of pistols, intending to allow one of them to fall on the floor, as if by accident, to deter any practical joker. But when he arrived, he found that Joshua Proctor had returned—alone—from his holiday, and Mr Proctor was so obviously an honest man that Drury decided the ‘accident’ was unnecessary.
What happened to Edward Drury that night convinced him completely of the reality of the supernatural. It also gave him such a fright that he went partially deaf in one ear and suffered a temporary breakdown in health. He seems to have been too shattered to describe what he had seen immediately afterwards, but he promised to write Mr Proctor a letter with a full account. This letter was written on July 13, 1840, ten days after his night in the haunted millhouse.
He arrived with his friend, T. Hudson, and was made welcome by Mr Proctor, who showed him over the house. At eleven o’clock, Dr Drury and Mr Hudson settled down on the third-story landing outside the ‘haunted room’. (Although he says he ‘expected to account for any noises that he might hear in a philosophical manner’, he presumably decided that discretion was the better part of valour.) About an hour later, they heard pattering noises, ‘as if a number of people were pattering with their bare feet’. Then there was a knocking sound from the floorboards at their feet, as if someone was rapping with his knuckles. After this, they heard a ‘hollow cough’ from the haunted room, but seem to have decided not to investigate. Then they heard a rustling noise, as if someone was coming upstairs.
At a quarter to one, feeling cold, Dr Drury said he thought he would retire to bed; Mr Hudson said he intended to stay up until dawn. Drury looked at his watch, and noted the time. As he looked up, he saw a closet door open, and ‘the figure of a female, attired in greyish garments, with the head inclining downwards, and one hand pressed upon the chest, as if in pain’ walking towards him. Mr Hudson was fast asleep, but was awakened by Drury’s ‘awful yell’. Drury rushed at the figure, ‘but instead of grasping it, I fell upon my friend, and I recollected nothing distinctly for nearly three hours afterwards. I have since learnt that I was carried down stairs in an agony of fear and terror.’
Mrs Crowe not only publishes the full correspondence between Dr Drury and Joshua Proctor, but an account by a local historian, another by the owner of a local journal, and descriptions by four other people who had seen the ghost. In fact, there seemed to be more than one; there was also a man in a surplice who glided across a second-floor room at a distance of a few feet from the floor. The local historian adds to his account the information that Mr Proctor has recently discovered an old book that states that similar hauntings had taken place in an older house that had been built on the same spot two hundred years before. Mrs Crowe ends her account by mentioning that Mr Proctor has now decided to leave the house, and turn it into ‘small tenements’ for his workpeople.
What makes this report so interesting is that the case resembles in so many respects the ‘haunting’ that would occur eight years later in Hydesville, New York, and that would launch the Spiritualism movement of the 19th century. In Willington, as in Hydesville, there was a mixture of ‘poltergeist’ phenomena and the more conventional type of haunting. If Dr Drury had shown the same kind of courage and curiosity shown later by Mrs Margaret Fox at Hydesville, it seems highly probable that the Spiritualist movement would have been launched ten years earlier in England.
The Hydesville affair began on March 31, 1848, in a wooden frame house inhabited by a Methodist farmer named James D. Fox, his wife Margaret, and their two daughters, Margaretta, aged 14, and Kate, aged 12. Hydesville is a small township not far from Rochester, New York. J
ames Fox had moved into the house in the previous December. A previous tenant, Michael Weekman, had been disturbed by various loud knocks, for which he could find no cause.
The Fox family was also kept awake by various banging noises in the last days of March 1848; but since it was a windy month, they were not unduly disturbed. On Friday March 31, the family decided to retire early to make up for lost sleep. Mr Fox went round the house checking the shutters and sashes. The children observed that when he shook the sashes, to see how loose they were, banging noises seemed to reply like an echo.
The whole family slept in two beds in the same room. Just before the parents came to bed, the rapping noises started again. Kate said cheekily: ‘Mr Splitfoot, do as I do’, and began snapping her fingers. To the amazement of the girls, the raps imitated her. Margaret interrupted: ‘Do as I do’, and began to clap. Again, the sounds imitated her. Remembering that the next day would be April the first, the children decided that someone was playing a joke. In her account of what happened, Mrs Fox wrote:
‘I then thought I could put a test that no one in the place could answer. I asked the noise to rap my different children’s ages, successively. Instantly, each one of my children’s ages was given correctly, pausing between them sufficiently long to individualise them until the seventh [child], at which a longer pause was made, and then three more emphatic little raps were given, corresponding to the age of the little one that died . . .’
Now rather frightened—this was evidently no joke—Mrs Fox asked if it was a human being who was making the raps; there was no reply. ‘Is it a spirit? If it is, make two raps.’ Two thunderous bangs followed, so loud that the house shook. She asked if it was an ‘injured spirit’, and again the bangs shook the house. Further questioning revealed that the knocker was a man who died at the age of 31, that he had been murdered in the house, and that he had a wife and five children. Mrs Fox asked if the spirit had any objection to her calling in the neighbours; the raps replied: ‘No.’
The Foxes summoned in about fourteen neighbours. One of these was a man called William Duesler, who assured his own wife that the whole thing was ridiculous and that there could be nothing mysterious about the noises. When he got there, some of the neighbours were too nervous to go into the bedroom, but Duesler was not worried. He went and sat on the bed, and was astonished when Mrs Fox’s questions were answered with a rapping noise that made the bed vibrate. (Later writers were to insist that the two children made all the noises by cracking their joints; but it is hard to see how the cracking of joints could make the house shake and cause a bed to vibrate.)
Duesler took up the questioning of the ‘spirit’. By a code of knocks, he established that the entity was a man who had been murdered in the house, a pedlar named Charles B. Rosma, who had been attacked for the $500 he carried. The murder had taken place five years earlier, and had been committed by the man who was then the tenant of the house, a Mr Bell. A maid named Lucretia Pulver later confirmed that a pedlar had spent the night in the house, and that she had been sent home; when she returned the next day, the pedlar had gone.
As news of these amazing occurrences spread throughout the community, hundreds of people came to the house. On Sunday, April 2, Duesler learned from the murdered man that his body had been buried in the cellar. This seemed to offer a method of verification, and James Fox and his neighbours took shovels to the cellar—which had an earth floor—and proceeded to dig. At a depth of three feet they encountered water, and abandoned the attempt. But in July, when the water had gone down, they dug again, and at a depth of five feet found a plank; underneath this, in quicklime, there was some human hair and a few bones.
Mr Bell, on being heard that he had been accused of murder by a ghost, indignantly denied it, and produced a testimonial to his good character from his new neighbours in Lyon, New York. The spirit had already prophesied that the murderer would never be brought to justice.
In his account of the case in Modern Spiritualism, the sceptical Frank Podmore comments: ‘No corroborative evidence of the supposed murder, or even of the existence of the man supposed to have been murdered, was ever obtained.’ This was written in 1902. Two years later, in November 1904, a wall in the cellar of the Fox house collapsed, revealing another wall behind it. Digging between the two walls uncovered a skeleton and a pedlar’s tin box. It looked as if someone had dug up the body from its original grave and interred it next to the wall, then built another wall to confuse searchers.
In those days immediately after the first manifestations, a committee was set up to collect the statements of witnesses. Not all the investigators were convinced that the sounds had a supernatural origin; but no one suggested that the Fox family could be responsible. With the family all together in the same room, it was obviously impossible that either the parents or the children could be causing the bangs.
What everyone soon noticed was that nothing happened unless the children were in the house—particularly Kate. A committee of sceptical Rochester citizens came to the house to investigate; they agreed that Margaret was certainly not responsible. A second, a third investigation produced the same result. The children were stripped and searched to see if they had some mechanical device for producing the sounds; there was nothing. They were made to stand on pillows with their ankles tied; still the raps occurred.
The children were separated; Kate was sent to stay with her elder sister Leah in Rochester, and Margaretta with her brother David in Auburn. The ‘spirits’ followed them both. Rapping noises were heard, and people felt themselves touched by invisible hands. In Leah’s house, a lodger called Calvin Brown took a mildly satirical attitude towards the spirit, and it began to persecute him, throwing things at him. Mrs Fox’s cap was pulled off and the comb pulled out of her hair. When members of the family knelt to pray, pins were jabbed into them. In brother David’s boarding house, similar things were happening. It was clear that the murdered pedlar was not responsible for all this—he was back in the Hydesville house, making terrifying gurgling noises and sounds like a body being dragged across the floor. Mrs Fox’s hair turned white. One spirit who communicated with Kate claimed to be a dead relative named Jacob Smith. Sister Leah Fish discovered that she could also communicate with the spirits, and began producing messages. One 16-year-old girl named Harriet Bebee, who visited the house in Auburn and witnessed the rapping noises, returned to her home miles away and found that the noises had followed her.
The Fox family moved to Rochester, but the manifestations continued. Sometimes the bangs were so loud that they could be heard miles away. Poltergeists had apparently taken over from the original ‘injured spirit’. One day, a visitor named Isaac Post started asking the spirit questions, and was answered by a thunderous barrage of knocks. Then, by means of an alphabetical code, the ‘spirit’ spelled out a message: ‘Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era; you must not try to conceal it any longer. God will protect you and good spirits will watch over you.’ And now began a series of manifestations that were to become typical of ‘Spiritualism’.1 Tables moved and rapped with their legs; musical instruments were played by unseen fingers, objects moved round the room. The ‘spirits’ intimated that they would prefer to manifest themselves in the dark—which confirmed the sceptics in their opinion. But other believers decided it was time to put the ‘spirit”s injunction into operation and ‘proclaim this truth to the world’. On November 14, 1849, the first Spiritualist meeting took place in the Corinthian hall in Rochester.
In his account of the haunting of Willington Mill, the local historian, M. A. Richardson, had remarked:
‘Were we to draw an inference from the number of cases of reported visitations from the invisible world that have been made public of late, we might be led to imagine that the days of supernatural agency were about to recommence, and that ghosts and hobgoblins were about to resume their sway over the fears of mankind.’
For 1840, that was a remarkably perce
ptive observation. Whether it was merely due to improved communications and the increase in the number of newspapers, it does seem clear that there was an apparent increase in ghostly manifestations at about this period. In retrospect, it looks oddly as if the ‘spirits’ had decided that the time had come to make themselves noticed. Of course, there had been such manifestations for centuries—the Elizabethan astrologer Dr John Dee devoted a large book to an account of his communications with spirits through the agency of a ‘scryer’ (or, as they later came to be called, medium) called Edward Kelley. Cases like the Epworth poltergeist, the Stockwell poltergeist (described by Mrs Crowe), the Cock Lane ghost and the phantom drummer of Tedworth had aroused widespread excitement and been the subject of contemporary pamphlets. In 1847, a young American shoemaker named Andrew Jackson Davis was placed under hypnosis and wrote an extraordinary and erudite work called The Principles of Nature which subsequently became a literary sensation. In this remarkable book, Davis prophesies that ‘the truth about spirits will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration, and the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened’. Within four years of its publication, Spiritualism had spread across America and was sweeping Europe.