by Colin Wilson
The Society sent Miss Goodrich-Freer to the Highlands to investigate the whole subject of second sight; it emerged later that she simply borrowed a manuscript from a folklore-collecting priest and printed his material as her own. Sent to investigate a haunting in Surrey, she told the owners of the house that she had seen nothing, but told the SPR that she had seen a hooded female ghost as she dressed for dinner. That should have made them suspicious, but the attractive and well-mannered Miss Goodrich-Freer seemed above suspicion.
In 1897 she heard rumours that Ballechin House, in Scotland, was haunted, and persuaded a member of the SPR to rent it for her, for ‘shooting and fishing’. Once there, she claimed to have witnessed all kinds of unearthly phenomena—thumps, bangs, ghostly screams, phantom footsteps, and elusive presences. There was a poltergeist that tore the clothes off the bed, and a ghostly nun, who was spotted by Miss Goodrich-Freer in a nearby glen. Oddly enough, guests who came to stay with Miss Goodrich-Freer never encountered the more terrifying phenomena, but they heard ominous bangs and footsteps. Back in London, she proceeded to write her Alleged Haunting of Ballechin House, but was incensed when one of her guests, a certain J. Callendar Ross, beat her past the post with an article in The Times entitled ‘On the Trail of a Ghost’; its tone was sceptical, not to say satirical. A furious correspondence ensued in the columns of The Times, in the course of which it became clear that Miss Goodrich-Freer and the SPR had rented the house under false pretences. Its owner was naturally displeased at the damage to his rental prospects from all this sensational publicity. Myers, who had been a visitor to Ballechin House, naturally felt obliged to support Miss Goodrich-Freer. But when the wife of the owner denounced the SPR in The Times, he hastened to declare that he had long ago decided against publishing his own observations. Another guest who had been at Ballechin with him immediately contradicted him, saying that Myers had definitely expressed his intention of writing about the haunting. Miss Goodrich-Freer herself was enraged by what she felt to be Myers’s unchivalrous desertion. And Mr Callendar Ross expressed the general feeling when he referred to ‘the suspicion and disgust that close contact with the SPR tends to excite’. When Miss Goodrich-Freer published her book on Ballechin, there was still more bad feeling.
The scandal may well have brought on the illness that was to kill Myers in 1901. Miss Goodrich-Freer herself experienced a sudden coldness on the part of other SPR members, and, in his review of her book on Ballechin, Frank Podmore came very close to calling her a liar. There is evidence1 that she was caught cheating at a table-rapping seance in 1901, and decided to leave England for Jerusalem, where she married a man who was sixteen years her junior—convincing him that she was two years younger than he was . . . She died in 1931 at the age of 74 but continued to lie to the end—her death certificate gives her age as 56.
These preposterous scandals—mediums in their underwear and ghosts with double-jointed big toes—had the unfortunate effect of suggesting that the SPR was a collection of bumbling crackpots. In fact, looking back after more than a century, we can see that its achievement during those first two decades was monumentally impressive. It had set out to answer the question: Can the paranormal be taken seriously, or is it a collection of old wives’ tales and delusions? What undoubtedly surprised those pioneers was the sheer mass of evidence for the paranormal. It must have seemed incredible that one person in ten had experienced a hallucination, and that so many people had seen apparitions of dying relatives or had out-of-the-body experiences. Newspaper scandals about fake mediums may have impressed the public, but what impressed the SPR was that so many mediums were obviously genuine, and that so much evidence for life after death stood up to the strictest examination. When Callendar Ross spoke about the ‘suspicion and disgust’ excited by the SPR, he was expressing the feeling of most healthy-minded people towards a ‘morbid’ subject like psychical research. But morbid or not, it refused to go away. And the Society made it harder to ignore by accumulating a positive mountain of evidence. Phantasms of the Living may be one of the most boring books ever written, but its 2,000 pages of cases finally batter the mind into the recognition that this is something that has to be faced.
Since we have devoted so much space to scandals and exposures, it is only fair to look more closely at a cross-section of the kind of evidence that finally convinced those pioneers that they were dealing with reality.
On October 21, 1893, Prince Victor Duleep Singh, a son of a maharajah, went to bed in a Berlin hotel, where he was staying together with Lord Carnarvon. Before switching off the light, he looked across the room at a framed picture that hung on the opposite wall. To his surprise, he saw the face of his father, looking at him with an intent expression. Thinking that the picture might resemble his father, he got out of bed to see; in fact, it showed a girl holding a rose and leaning on a balcony. Prince Victor described the experience to Lord Carnarvon the next morning. Later the same day, he received a telegram announcing that his father had died of a stroke the previous day. The prince had seen his father’s face at the time when the maharajah was lying unconscious after the stroke, a few hours before he died.
On the night of October 16, 1902, the wife of a railway guard woke up about 3 a.m. for a drink of water. She was alone in bed, because her husband was on night duty, and the room was dimly lighted by a gas mantle. As she looked into the water, she saw a clear image of goods wagons smashing into one another, and observed which of them was most damaged. She was worried about her husband, in case he had had an accident. At nine the next morning he returned home, and she told him what she had seen. He told her that there had been an accident on the line that night, and it had happened just as she had seen.
The odd point about this case is that her husband had passed the scene of the accident twice: once at the time his wife had seen her ‘vision’ in the glass of water, and again four hours later, when his train was on its way back. But when he passed it for the first time, it was dark and he could not see what was happening. At 7 a.m. it was light, and he had then been able to see the scene clearly—as his wife had seen it in the water. Of course, her husband may have seen far more subconsciously than he was aware of seeing. But if this was telepathy, then he had managed to convey to his wife far more than he was aware of seeing.
The next case is perhaps one of the most famous ever recorded by the SPR. On July 9, 1904, the novelist Rider Haggard suffered such a bad nightmare that his wife shook him awake. In his dream, he had seen his daughter’s black retriever dog, Bob, lying on its side among the undergrowth beside some water. Its head was at an unnatural angle, and it seemed to be trying to tell him that it was dying.
The next morning at breakfast Haggard told his daughter Angela about his dream. She was quite unworried because she had seen Bob the previous evening and he was safe and well. It was only later in the day that they learned that Bob was missing. Four days later, the dog’s body was found floating in the nearby river. It had been struck by a train on the night Haggard had dreamed about it. He was able to work out the precise time the accident had taken place—a few hours before he had awakened from his nightmare.
On March 19, 1917, Mrs Dorothy Spearman was in her room in a hotel in Calcutta, feeding her baby son. Her little daughter was also in the room. She felt there was someone behind her, and looked round to see her half-brother, Eldred Bowyer-Bower, standing there; he was an officer in the Royal Flying Corps. He looked perfectly normal, and Mrs Spearman assumed he had been posted to India and come to see her. She told him that she would put the baby down, and then they could have a long talk. But when she had finished tucking in the baby, her half-brother had vanished. Her daughter did not appear to have seen anyone. She learned later that her half-brother had been shot down over the German lines at about the time she had seen him.
On December 7, 1918, Lieutenant J. J. Larkin, an RAF officer, was writing letters in the billet when he heard someone walking up the passage outside. Then the door opened, and his friend Lieutenant
David McConnel shouted ‘Hello boy!’ Larkin turned and saw McConnel standing there, holding the doorknob in his hand. He said: ‘Hello, back already?’ and McConnel replied ‘Yes, had a good trip’. He had been ferrying a plane to a nearby aerodrome. Then McConnel closed the door with a bang and clattered off.
When Larkin learned several hours later that McConnel had crashed that afternoon, he assumed that it must have been after he had seen him. In fact, McConnel had been killed at roughly the same time that Larkin saw him at the door.
The next case has also become famous, and is regarded as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for survival after death. In June 1925, James Chaffin of Davie County, North Carolina, dreamed that his father stood by his bedside, wearing an old black overcoat, and told him: ‘You will find the will in my overcoat pocket.’ The father, James L. Chaffin, had died four years earlier, leaving his farm to his third son Marshall, and nothing to his wife or other three sons. The will had not been contested, since there seemed no reason to do so.
The next morning, James Chaffin hurried to his mother and asked about his father’s old black overcoat; she told him it had been given to his brother John. He found the coat at John’s house and examined it carefully. Sewn into the lining of the inside pocket—which his father had indicated in the dream—he found a roll of paper stating: ‘Read the 27th chapter of Genesis in my daddy’s old Bible.’
Taking a neighbour as witness, James Chaffin went back to his mother’s house, and unearthed the old Bible. In the 27th chapter of Genesis there was another will—made later than the one that left everything to Marshall—dividing the property between the wife and four sons. The first reaction of Marshall Chaffin was to contest the will, assuming it to be a forgery. But once he examined it, he had to admit that it was obviously genuine. Ten witnesses testified that it was in old Chaffin’s handwriting. So the property was divided according to the wishes of the second will.
Like Marshall Chaffin, the reader’s first reaction is to suspect skulduggery. But the Canadian member of the SPR who heard of the case hired a lawyer to investigate it, and the genuineness of the will was established beyond all doubt. The significance of the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis is that it contains the story of how Jacob deceived his blind father Isaac into granting him the inheritance of his brother Esau. This thought had apparently come to old Chaffin not long before his death, and he made the new will. But instead of having it properly witnessed, he inserted it in the Bible, no doubt expecting it to be found after his death—together with its implied criticism of his son Marshall. Unfortunately, the Bible was decrepit, and it may have been that the Chaffin family was simply not religiously inclined; so after four years, it seems the old farmer had to draw attention to his change of heart . . .
Mrs Crowe’s Night Side of Nature has a whole chapter devoted to similar cases, in which important messages are delivered by dreams or apparitions. She tells, for example, of a butcher who dreamed that he was going to be attacked and murdered on his way to market by two men dressed in blue. He decided to go to market with a neighbour, and, when he came to the place where the attack had taken place in his dream, saw the two men in blue waiting there . . . But all she tells us by way of detail is that the butcher’s name was Bone and that he lived in Holytown. This can hardly be regarded as ‘confirmatory detail’. The records of the SPR contain many equally melodramatic cases. But they took the trouble to get signed statements from all concerned, and the result is far more convincing. In a typical case of 1869, a couple, identified as ‘Mr and Mrs P’, were lying in bed in a dimly lighted room when ‘Mrs P’ saw a man dressed as a naval officer standing at the foot of the bed. Her husband was dozing, and she touched his shoulder and said: ‘Willie, who is this?’ Her husband roared indignantly: ‘What on earth are you doing here, sir?’ The naval officer said reproachfully: ‘Willie!’, and as ‘Mr P’ leapt out of bed, walked across the room, and disappeared into the wall. ‘Mrs P’ said he looked like a solid human being, and that as he passed a lamp on his way across the room, he threw a shadow.
Realising that they had seen a ‘ghost’, ‘Mrs P’ began to wonder if it foreboded some disaster to her brother, who was in the navy. When she mentioned this to her husband, he said: ‘No, it was my father.’ ‘P”s father had been dead for some years.
After this visitation, ‘Mr P’ became seriously ill for several weeks. When he recovered, he told his wife that he had been in financial trouble for some time, and before seeing the apparition, he had decided to take the advice of a certain individual which, he now realised, would have ruined him and probably landed him in jail. He was convinced that the ‘ghost’ had come to warn him not to do it.
Intrinsically, this case is no more convincing that that of Mr Bone of Holytown. But the SPR obtained signed depositions from ‘Mr and Mrs P’, and from two friends to whom ‘Mrs P’ had told the story immediately after it had happened. It is still possible to dismiss it as a dream or a ‘collective hallucination’, or simply as a downright lie. But the signed statements make this seem at least unlikely.
An interesting point about the experience is ‘Mrs P”s comment that the figure looked quite solid and normal—most ‘ghosts’ do—and that it cast a shadow. This obviously suggests that it was made of some kind of solid substance, like the ‘materialisations’ that appeared in the seance room.
A ‘warning’ of a different kind seems to have been involved in a case that came to be known as the ‘red scratch’ case. It involved a commercial traveller (identified as ‘FG’) who was in his hotel room in St Joseph, Missouri, in 1876, when he became aware of someone sitting at the table. It was his sister Annie, who had died of cholera nine years earlier. She looked exactly as she had when alive, except that she had a bright red scratch on her right cheek. As ‘FG’ sprang to his feet, his sister vanished.
He was so shaken that he took a train straight back to his parents’ home in St Louis. When he told them about the scratch, his mother fainted. When she recovered, she told them that she had accidentally made the scratch on the face of the corpse. She had covered it up with powder, and never mentioned it to anyone.
A few weeks later, the mother died, ‘happy in the belief that she would rejoin her favourite daughter’. Her son obviously took the view that the purpose of the apparition was to prepare her mother for her own death. This is another theme that runs fairly constantly through reports of apparitions and ‘death-bed visions’ collected by the SPR. Sir William Barrett was later to devote a book to them, and its opening case is typical of the kind of thoroughness the SPR brought to its investigations.
Barrett’s wife was an obstetric surgeon in the Maternity Hospital at Clapton in North London. A woman she calls Mrs B was in labour and suffering from heart failure. As Lady Barrett was holding her hands, she said: ‘It’s getting dark.’ Her mother and husband were sent for. Then ‘Mrs B’ looked at another part of the room and said: ‘Oh, lovely.’ ‘What is lovely?’ ‘Lovely brightness—wonderful things.’ Then she exclaimed: ‘Why, it’s father!’ Her baby was brought in for her to see, and she asked: ‘Do you think I ought to stay for the baby’s sake?’ She looked towards her ‘father’, and said: ‘I can’t stay.’ When her husband had arrived, she looked across the room and said: ‘Why, there’s Vida!’ Vida was her younger sister, who had died two weeks earlier. But her death had been kept from ‘Mrs B’, so as not to upset her. She died soon after. Lady Barrett, the matron and the husband and the mother all vouched that she seemed to remain conscious of the dead relatives up to the time of her death. With his usual thoroughness, Barrett obtained a letter verifying all this from the mother. It is the first of a number of cases cited by Barrett in which people on the point of death have ‘seen’ relatives whom they did not know to be dead. Barrett points out that there is no known case of a dying person ‘seeing’ someone who is still alive.
Sir Oliver Lodge, who was twice president of the SPR, was himself to supply one of the most convincing cases of ‘c
ommunication with the dead’; it is recorded in his book Raymond.
On August 8, 1915, Sir Oliver Lodge received a message from a Boston medium, Leonore Piper, containing an obscure reference to a poem by the Roman poet Horace, about a tree being struck by lightning. Lodge interpreted this as a warning of some disaster. The message purported to come from Frederic Myers, who had been dead for fourteen years. A week later, Lodge heard that his youngest son Raymond had been killed in the Ypres campaign.
After this, a number of mediums relayed messages that purported to come from Raymond, but Lodge remained unconvinced— most of them were of the ‘Having a lovely time’ variety. But in the following month, Lodge’s wife was taken by a friend to a seance with a remarkable medium, Mrs Osborne Leonard. Neither the medium nor Lady Lodge knew one another by sight, and they were not introduced. Nevertheless, Mrs Leonard announced that she had a message from ‘Raymond’, who stated that he had met many of his father’s friends since death; asked to name one of them, Raymond replied ‘Myers’.
Another ‘message’ from Raymond was relayed to Lady Lodge via a male medium called Vout Peters; in it, ‘Raymond’ spoke about a photograph showing himself in a group of people, and referring to a walking-stick. The Lodges knew nothing about such a photograph. Two months later, the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers wrote to say that she had a group photograph including Raymond, and offering to send a copy. Before this arrived, Lodge himself visited Mrs Leonard, and when her ‘control’ ‘Feda’ announced Raymond’s presence, he took the opportunity to ask about the photograph. Raymond explained that it had been taken outdoors, and mentioned that someone had wanted to lean on him. When the photograph arrived a few days later, it showed a group of officers outside a billet. Raymond, sitting in the front row, has a cane resting on his leg, and the officer sitting behind him is using Raymond’s shoulder as an arm rest.