by Colin Wilson
At Guy Playfair’s suggestion, Rose asked why it didn’t go away. ‘I don’t believe in that.’ ‘Why? What’s so different about being up there?’ asked Rose, and received the wistful reply: ‘I’m not a heaven man.’ It went on to say in a jerky manner: ‘I am Bill Haylock and I come from Durant’s Park and I am 72 years old and I have come here to see my family but they are not here now.’
On the tape, the words come out one by one, as if the speaker is so breathless that he can only get out one at a time. (The voice is so obviously that of an old man that the notion of Janet producing it by ventriloquism is absurd.) Rose’s next question is interrupted by a furious outburst: ‘You fucking old bitch, shut up. I want some jazz music. Now go and get me some, else I’ll go barmy.’
Maurice Grosse’s son Richard paid a visit to the house and succeeded in holding a lengthy conversation with the voice. When he asked it what it had done with thirty pence that had vanished it said it had hidden the money in the radio—which is where it was found. Asked how he had died, ‘Bill’ replied that he went blind and had a haemorrhage—he fell asleep and died in a chair downstairs.
Richard Grosse found that if he looked at Janet’s face while the voice was speaking, it would stop. If he thought of looking round, the voice would also stop, as if reading his mind.
Another researcher named David Robertson had no difficulty getting the voice to talk, although the main thing it wanted to discuss was girls’ periods. Then the ghost was asked to levitate Janet, and then draw a line round the light on the ceiling. Robertson withdrew outside, and heard Janet being bounced up and down on the bed. Suddenly there was a gasp and silence. He tried to open the door and found that it was jammed tight. When it opened again, Janet was on the bed and there was a red line around the light. Janet claimed that she had floated through the wall, into the bedroom of the next house—belonging to Peggy Nottingham (who was with David Robertson at the time). She described it as ‘all white’—a fairly accurate description of the light wallpaper. Peggy asked her to try doing it again, and went next door to see what happened. Janet was not there. But on the floor, there was the book Fun and Games for Children, which had been on the mantelpiece in Janet’s bedroom a few minutes earlier.
Robertson handed a red plastic cushion to Janet and said: ‘See what you can do with that.’ ‘All right, David boy,’ said the invisible entity—which seemed to like Robertson—‘I’ll make it disappear.’ Robertson went out of the room, and there was a cry from Janet. When he went back, the cushion had vanished; the window was tightly shut. But a neighbour who was passing the house at that moment suddenly saw a red cushion appear on the roof. Another neighbour later testified that she had also seen the cushion as she walked past. And, looking at Janet’s bedroom window, she had seen books and cushions striking the window, and Janet rising into the air—in a horizontal position—and descending again, as if being bounced on a trampoline. ‘She was definitely lying horizontal, coming up and down.’ Guy Playfair tried bouncing on Janet’s bed, and found that no matter how hard he bounced, it was impossible to get up into the air.
Playfair was struck by Janet’s comment that when she had floated through the wall into Peggy’s bedroom, it was ‘all white’ and there were no colours. He arrived at the conclusion that what had happened was that Janet had had an ‘out of the body’ experience—other astral travellers have observed the lack of colour during ‘OOBs’. But this fails to explain how the book also passed through the wall.
Was there, Playfair asked himself at this point, any more the poltergeist could do to demonstrate its versatility? In fact, it went on to produce a whole variety of new phenomena. It became rather more violent with Janet, making an attempt to suffocate her with the curtains, and making a knife follow her around in the air. (The voice claimed that this was the doing of another entity called Tommy.) It produced a biscuit out of nowhere and stuck it into Janet’s mouth. It put butter and cheese on a piece of bread. (When Guy Playfair tried to touch it the voice rasped, ‘Leave it alone.’) It smeared ordure around the place. It began causing fires in closed drawers—fires which, fortunately, extinguished themselves. It produced some appalling stinks, like rotten cabbages. After a visit from the psychic Matthew Manning, it began scrawling obscene messages on the kitchen walls. When the two pet goldfish died, the ‘voice’ claimed it had electrocuted them by accident (which, if true, seems to confirm that poltergeists use some form of electrical energy).
A medium called Gerry Sherrick told the Harpers that they had all been together in a previous existence, and that the girls had dabbled in witchcraft. He also told them he felt that a nasty old woman was connected with the ‘haunting’, and that she had lived near Spitalfields market. Had there been any smells like rotten vegetables? After this, he went into a trance, and an old woman’s voice announced: ‘I come here when I like . . . I’m not bleedin’ dead, and I’m not going to go away.’ Sherrick performed ‘psychic healing’ on the family—to heal the ‘leaks’ that were causing the trouble. After his visit, the Enfield house became quiet for several weeks, as it had after the two previous visits by mediums.
The case was beginning to turn into something more like a normal haunting. Mrs Harper saw an apparition of a pair of legs in blue trousers going upstairs, and also saw a child. The children continued to see old men. A neighbour who was looking after the house when the Harpers went to the seaside saw a man in his shirtsleeves sitting at the table. Another neighbour knocked on the front door, and through the window saw Maurice Grosse in the hall, then watched him go upstairs. When finally admitted, she discovered that Maurice Grosse had been in the upper part of the house for the past half hour or so. The poltergeist was ‘imitating’ him.
In mid-1978, Janet went into the Maudsley Hospital for observation and testing. Playfair expected the disturbances in Enfield to cease while she was away; in fact, they continued, although on a smaller scale. And Janet claimed that a number of small poltergeist incidents happened to her while in hospital. But Janet’s spell in the Maudsley—which made her healthier and stronger—was the beginning of the end of the Enfield case.
The haunting seems to have been brought to an end by a Dutch clairvoyant named Dono Gmelig-Meyling, who was brought to the house by a Dutch journalist who wanted to study the case. The day before their first visit had been eventful—overturned furniture, knocks, footsteps, sounds of breathing, and excrement smeared on the floor. Dono spent some time in the house, then returned to his hotel. There, he later told Playfair, he went on an ‘astral trip’, and met a 24-year-old girl who was somehow involved with the case. This was an interesting new departure. Later, Dono met Maurice Grosse, and again had a strong sense that he was somehow connected with the haunting—and not purely as an investigator. When Grosse mentioned that his own daughter had been killed in a motor-cycle accident two years before—she would have been 24 if still alive—Dono said: ‘Well that’s it. It’s your daughter . . .’ There was no suggestion that she was responsible for any of the poltergeist activity, only that she was somehow connected. In the final chapter of his account of the Enfield case, This House is Haunted, Playfair tries to draw together his speculations about the disturbances. His suggestion is that Maurice Grosse’s daughter—whose name was also Janet—was involved indirectly. It was she who had drawn her father’s attention to the case. Janet had died after a motor-cycle crash in 1976, and Grosse had been impressed by a series of odd events and coincidences. A birthday card she had sent to her brother just before the accident showed someone with her head swathed in bandages, and an inscription about falling on it. Janet had died of head injuries. Grosse found himself wondering if Janet was somehow still alive, and thought that a suitable sign would be some rain—there had been a drought for months. The next morning, the kitchen roof below Janet’s bedroom window was wet, although everywhere else was dry. It had been because of Janet’s death that Grosse had thought about engaging in active psychical research, and his first case had been the Enfield
haunting.
Playfair speculates that it was Janet who had somehow put it into the neighbour’s head to ring the Daily Mirror, and who put it into the journalist’s head to ring the SPR. So her father became involved in investigating a case that centred around another Janet. (Kardec claims that spirits often influence our thoughts.)
As to how the poltergeist haunting came about in the first place, Playfair’s speculation is as follows:
‘When Mr and Mrs Harper were divorced, an atmosphere of tension built up among the children and their mother, just at the time when the two girls were approaching physical maturity. They were a very energetic pair to start with, both of them school sports champions, but even they could not use up the tremendous energy they were generating. So a number of entities came in and helped themselves to it.’
As to the identity of the ‘entities’: ‘It looks as if we had half the local graveyard at one time or another.’ These included Joe Watson, husband of the woman who had died of a cancer of the throat, and Bill Haylock, later identified as a former local resident. There could well have been a dozen entities altogether, and they were able to take energy from practically everyone in the house. (Mrs Harper experienced premonitory headaches before things happened, and while Janet was in hospital, the youngest boy, Jimmy, began having trances.) The Dutch clairvoyant Dono Gmelig-Meyling stated confidently that he would be able to put an end to the haunting (by some kind of intervention ‘on the astral plane’), and it is a fact that his visits marked the end of the Enfield case.
And why did so many entities invade the Harper residence? The answer, Playfair believes, may be provided by Kardec, who states that many dead people are quite unaware that they are dead. In The Flying Cow he cites the interesting Ruytemberg Rocha case in support of this view. In November 1961, a spiritist group in São Paulo found themselves listening to a voice—coming through the medium—which identified itself as Ruytemberg Rocha, a pupil in the second year of the Officers’ School of the São Paulo State Police. The voice gave details of its family and date of birth, and added that it was wounded by shrapnel in the revolution in 1932. When Dr Carvalho—in charge of the session—said that this was now 1961, the spirit was astonished, and said that that was impossible. Carvalho assured him that he was dead, and that they would do all they could to help him.
It was an excellent case for verification, since the spirit had given so many details about himself and his family. A little research revealed that it all checked out—the family, the officer school, the battle in which he had died. One minor discrepancy was that Rocha had been killed by a bullet through the head, while the spirit spoke only about a shrapnel wound in the chest. But a bullet in the brain could have stimulated the chest area, giving him the impression that this was where he was wounded. According to Kardec, the state of confusion happens mostly in cases of sudden death, and may last for anything from hours to years. In the Enfield case, we have seen how angry the ‘entity’ became when Playfair declared that it was dead, and how the quarrelsome old woman asserted ‘I’m not bleedin’ dead.’
Yet, as usual in poltergeist cases, it is practically impossible to get at the truth. The spirits themselves seldom seem to have any interest in the truth. In the present case, there are intriguing hints about a man called Gozer or Gober who practised black magic, and about the involvement of Janet and Rose in witchcraft in a previous existence. There was a former resident of the house called Joe Watson, who did die in the house much as described by Janet’s bass voice and whose wife did die of throat cancer, and there was a former neighbour called Bill Haylock. All of which adds at least a semblance of logic and reason to one of the best-authenticated poltergeist cases on record.
Perhaps the last word should go to a medium—and police commissioner—called Dr Rafael Ranieri, quoted by Playfair in The Flying Cow:
‘A medium is an open door to the invisible world. What comes through that door depends to a large extent upon the personality of the medium, and it is quite wrong to suppose that the spirit world consists entirely of angelic beings devoted to our welfare. There are plenty of evil spirits around, also others who seem to have nothing better to do than fool about and amuse themselves at our expense by such elementary . . . parlour tricks as lifting up tables and throwing things around the room. This would seem to be the level of spirit most often to be found at some of the widely publicised seances, and those who find spirit communications trivial, as many are, should blame the mediums, not the spirits.’
If Janet and other members of the Harper family are unconscious mediums, perhaps it is hardly surprising that the entities who make use of their energies should belong to a fairly low level of the spirit hierarchy.
10
The Power of the Witch
THE MOST UNEXPECTED bestseller of 1926 was a book called The History of Witchcraft and Demonology by the Rev. Montague Summers. Issued by Routledge and Kegan Paul as part of their History of Civilisation, it was an obviously serious work, full of Latin quotations, lengthy footnotes, and a comprehensive bibliography. What startled the reviewers was that the author clearly believed every word he wrote about the ‘enormous wickedness’ of witches, warlocks and devil worshippers. H. G. Wells was so incensed by the book that he launched a vituperative attack on it in the Sunday Express. The Times, equally disapproving, contented itself with the comment that ‘the more Mr Summers gives proof of general ability, of scholarship and of wide reading, the more the suspicion deepens that a mystification is in progress and that he is amusing himself at our expense’.
Was it a legpull? Or a cynical attempt to achieve a succès de scandale? Apparently neither. The Reverend Montague Summers was a respectable Catholic scholar, editor of several Restoration dramatists, and founder of a theatrical society called the Phoenix, which revived Restoration plays on the London stage. It is true that his name was not to be found in the clergy lists of either the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England; but this was not—as rumour had it—because he was an unfrocked priest; in fact he had been ordained a Deacon of the Church of England in 1908, a year before he became a Roman Catholic convert. It is also true that he allowed people to suppose that he was a Roman Catholic priest, and used to say Mass in his own private oratory, in spite of the fact that he had been rejected as a Candidate for the priesthood by his superiors. The gusto with which he recounts sexual details of the satanic rites—even though most of them are decently clothed in Latin—may suggest why his superiors had found him unsuitable. In spite of these foibles, Summers was a genuine scholar. And the views he expressed were the views held by the Roman Catholic Church in his own day—as they still are.
What is the truth about witchcraft?
Between 1275 and 1692, thousands of men and women were tortured and burnt to death in Europe, accused of worshipping the Devil, and having intercourse with spirits and demons.
The first known victim was a 60-year-old woman called Angéle de la Barthe, who was accused of having had sexual intercourse with a demon, and given birth to a monster. This creature had to be fed on the flesh of dead babies, so—according to the accusation—Angéle either murdered children, or dug up their corpses from graveyards. Tried before the Inquisitor Hugues de Baniols at Toulouse, she was sentenced to be burned to death.
It is natural for us to feel outrage at such appalling inhumanity, and to conclude that the evidence against Angéle amounted to the grossest superstition. Yet the last chapter suggests another possibility. If the umbanda magicians of Brazil are capable of ‘using’ spirits to cause mischief—even to wreck houses—how can we be certain that at least a few of the witches of the Middle Ages were not guilty as charged?
Before we attempt to answer that question, let us look briefly at the history of the ‘witchcraft craze’.
The first thing we have to understand is that witches are as old as history, and that they were not sinister old ladies who dabbled in black magic, but priestesses whose business was to aid the hunters of the tribe in thei
r search for game, and later, to ensure a good harvest. (We call male witches shamans.) They were servants of the moon goddess, known in Egypt as Isis, in Greece as Selene, and in Rome as Diana. Early witches were beautiful enchantresses, like Homer’s Circe, who turned men into swine, or Theocritus’s Samaetha, who performs a magical ceremony to bring back her faithless lover. It was only in later years that the image of the witch changed to the horrible old crone who digs up corpses or raises the spirits of the dead—like the Witch of Endor in the Bible. On the whole, witches were regarded as useful—if rather frightening—members of society.
Then why does the Bible say: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’? Because as the old Nature religion disappeared, to be replaced by religions like Judaism and Christianity, the witch was regarded with increasing dislike and suspicion. She was a remnant of mankind’s dark past, and everyone wanted to forget her.
It was another Christian invention, the Devil, that made the witch an object of superstitious terror. The Satan of the Old Testament—like the Book of Job—was a satan, the Hebrew word meaning an adversary or obstructor—in other words, a kind of demon, but not the Prince of Darkness. The Christian Devil can be traced back to St Paul, who invented the idea that Jesus had died to save man from the sin of Adam (a claim Jesus himself never made), and that Adam fell because Eve was tempted by the Devil in the form of a serpent. (There is no suggestion in the Old Testament that the serpent was anything but an ordinary snake.)
In the hands of the early Church Fathers, Christianity became a grim religion, obsessed by sin and evil—and, of course, by the Devil. When the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313 AD, Christians immediately began to torture and burn one another—the aim being to stamp out ‘heresy’. But as the Church became increasingly successful, it also became—inevitably—increasingly corrupt. Reformers who felt the Church was growing too fat and self-indulgent now became the Enemy, servants of the Devil. The Cathars, for example, (the name means ‘pure ones’) wanted to respiritualise Christianity. The Church of Rome declared a crusade against them in 1208, and thousands of Cathars were slaughtered in France, particularly in the area of Toulouse (where 20,000 were burned or put to the sword). The few survivors withdrew to remote mountain villages, where they continued to practise their religion. They were known under various names (Albigenses, Waldenses, Bogomils), but as far as the Church was concerned, they were all Devil-worshippers. They became known as ‘witches’. And Angéle de la Barthe, whom we have met, was accused of being one of them. She was tried—and burned—for heresy, not for witchcraft.