by Colin Wilson
One day when he took up a pencil to allow his hand to write, the handwriting was quite different from his own. A woman named herself and briefly introduced herself. Brad’s immediate reaction was a powerful sense of rejection. He pushed the paper away, and said forcefully: ‘I will not be a mouthpiece for anyone but myself.’ The ‘communicator’ went away and did not return. Here we seem to have a clear distinction between the ‘voice’ of the right brain and some external communicator or spirit.
In short, whether we accept it or not, it seems there is a prima facie case for the existence of disembodied entities that can, under certain circumstances, ‘get inside the heads’ of human beings. When this happens ‘by invitation’—that is, when the human being goes into a trance and allows himself—or herself—to be used by the entity, it is known as mediumship. When it happens involuntarily, as in the case of Alan Vaughan, it is known as possession.
The case that first drew Adam Crabtree’s attention to the phenomenon dated from the last decade of the 19th century, and had been described in a pamphlet called Begone Satan, by the Rev. Carl Vogel. In 1896, a 14-year-old Wisconsin girl named Anna Ecklund began to be troubled by a desire to commit what she considered ‘unspeakable sexual acts’, and by an inability to enter Catholic churches, complicated by a desire to attack holy objects. Her problems were ignored for sixteen years, then Reisinger, a Capuchin monk from the nearby community of St Anthony at Marathon, performed an exorcism which brought relief. But it was only temporary. In 1928—when Anna was 46—he decided to try again, this time at the convent of Earling, Iowa. The results of the 23-day exorcism were spectacular, and many of the nuns were so exhausted by the appalling goings-on that they had to be transferred to another convent.
Before the exorcism began, a number of the strongest nuns held Anna down on the bed. But as soon as Reisinger began to speak, Anna’s body shot up into the air and landed high up on the wall, apparently holding on ‘with catlike grip’. She was dragged down to the bed again, and as soon as Reisinger began again, began to howl and screech so loudly that people in the street ran to the convent to find out what was happening. Then various ‘demons’ spoke through the girl in different voices, although her mouth did not move. Her face became twisted, and her whole body contorted into extraordinary positions. Her head swelled and became bright red. She also vomited large quantities of ‘foul matter’.
She also displayed another common phenomenon of possession: speaking in languages of which she had no conscious knowledge; when the exorcist spoke in German or Latin, she would reply in the same language. When food was sprinkled surreptitiously with holy water, she knew it instantly.
A ‘demon’ who identified himself as Beelzebub told the exorcist that he and his cohorts had been invited to enter the girl by her father, who had been infuriated by her rejection of his attempts at incest. The exorcist succeeded in ‘summoning’ the father, who confirmed this story. His common-law wife also spoke through Anna’s mouth, and admitted to killing four of her babies (she was probably referring to abortions). During all this time, Anna herself was ‘unconscious’, so in fact the spirits were speaking through her as through a medium.
During the course of the exorcism, the pastor was involved in a strange car accident. And on the twenty-third day, Anna’s body shot erect off the bed so that only her heels remained in contact. Then she collapsed on her knees, and a terrible voice repeated the names of the departing spirits, until it seemed to die away in the distance. As a kind of parting shot, the room filled with an appalling stench. At this point, Anna opened her eyes and smiled.
Crabtree interviewed the monk who had translated Vogel’s pamphlet into English, and who was able to confirm the details. So when he encountered the case of Sarah Worthington, he found it easier to accept that he was dealing with a case of ‘possession’.
In fact, Crabtree insists that he merely accepts possession as a working hypothesis—a hypothesis that happens, in fact, to work. He is saying, in effect, that his cases might really involve some strange, complex activity of the unconscious—like ‘multiple personality’—but that by treating it as possession, he can cure his patients.
But Ralph Allison, another psychiatrist whose work interested Crabtree, had been forced to go a step further. In 1972, Allison was treating a mousy little woman called Janette, who experienced impulses to kill her husband and children. When another psychiatrist expressed the view that Janette was a case of dual personality, Allison asked her to relax deeply (in effect, into a semi-hypnotic state) and asked to speak to the ‘other person’. Immediately, a harsh, grating voice that identified itself as ‘Lydia’ remarked: ‘God, it’s good to be rid of that piss-ass Janette’. Like Gibert’s patient Leonie in Le Havre, Janette clearly had a hostile alter-ego.
Allison came to the interesting and perceptive conclusion that Janette was simply too passive, and that if she became a more active person, Lydia would gradually vanish. And now—as in the Leonie case—a third and altogether more balanced personality also emerged (identifying heself as Karen). Allison came to refer to such personalities as the ‘inner self-helper’. And with Karen’s help—and Janette’s efforts to be a less passive person—Allison was able to effect a cure. In this case, he was undoubtedly dealing with a case of multiple personality.
In this case, the basic hypothesis of multiple personality covered the facts—that a traumatic childhood had caused the ‘prime personality’ to withdraw from the problems of life, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. But Allison’s next patient, a girl called Carrie, forced him to take the ‘possession’ hypothesis seriously. Carrie was another ‘multiple’ with a history of childhood traumas, including a gang rape. Even without hypnosis, an alter-ego called Wanda emerged and talked to Allison. But it seemed clear that Wanda was not responsible for the suicidal impulses. When told that a ‘psychic’ claimed that Carrie was possessed by the spirit of a drug addict who had died of an overdose in New York in 1968, Allison decided to ‘give the concept of spirit possession a try’. Under deep hypnosis, Carrie agreed that the drug-addict was influencing her life, and Allison’s makeshift ‘exorcism’—using a swinging crystal ball on a chain—apparently succeeded. Then Allison tried ‘exorcising’ Wanda, and was again apparently successful. Unfortunately, the treatment still failed to dislodge two other personalities, and Carrie eventually committed suicide.
Yet Allison continued to reject the notion of ‘spirit possession’ until he encountered a girl called Elise, who revealed several personalities under hypnosis. Most of these were able to describe their history—what trauma had caused them to be ‘born’. But one of them claimed to be a man called Dennis, who explained that he had entered Elise’s body when she was experimenting with black magic as a teenager, and that he enjoyed remaining there because he liked having sex with another of Elise’s personalities, a girl called Shannon. The sex was not, as might be supposed, a bodiless intercourse between two ‘spirits’: when Shannon took over Elise’s body, and had sex with a man, Dennis would enter the man’s body. And although Elise and Shannon shared the same body, Dennis was not interested in sex with Elise, only with Shannon. Eventually, with the help of another ‘inner self-helper’, Elise was cured. It was this case that finally convinced Allison that multiple personality may sometimes be a case of spirit possession.
It was William Blatty’s book The Exorcist—and the film based on it—that caused a flood of popular books and articles on exorcism. The case took place in a Washington suburb, Mount Rainier, in 1949.
13-year-old Douglass Deen was the ‘focus’ of the occurrences, which began with a scratching noise in the walls. A rat extermination company was able to find no sign of rats or mice. The sounds occurred only when Douglass was near by. Then more usual poltergeist phenomena began to occur: dishes flew through the air, fruit was hurled against the wall. A picture floated off the wall, hovered in the air, then went back to its old position. After this, Douglass’s bed began to shake and quiver when he
was in it.
The family asked the local minister, the Reverend M. Winston, for help, and on February 17, 1949 Douglass spent the night in his home. The two retired to a room with twin beds. Douglass’s bed soon began to vibrate, and there were scratching noises in the walls. Winston asked Douglass to sleep in an armchair. The chair slid over to the wall, then slowly tilted until it threw the boy on the floor. The minister improvised a bed on the floor; as soon as Douglass was in it, the bed slid across the room.
As these events continued, the boy was taken to two hospitals—Georgetown and St Louis University, both Jesuit institutions. All attempts to treat him medically and psychiatrically were unsuccessful. Finally, a Jesuit priest undertook the exorcism. He fasted for two and a half months on bread and water, and repeated the ritual of exorcism no fewer than thirty times. The ‘spirit’ showed its objection to these rituals—or perhaps its contempt—by sending the boy into convulsions, making him scream obscenities and blasphemies in a shrill voice, and sometimes making him reply to the exorcism in Latin—a language he had never studied. Finally, in May 1949, the phenomena ceased; the thirtieth exorcism was apparently successful. But then, as we have seen, most poltergeist phenomena last only a month or so; it may have gone away of its own accord.
Here, then, we have a case of poltergeist disturbances that turned into ‘demoniacal possession’, with all the phenomena that occurred in the Loudun case. The ‘psychological’ explanation would be that Douglass Deen’s ‘other self’ began by producing poltergeist disturbances, then took up the game of demonic possession suggested by the Jesuit fathers. (His ability to speak Latin is not as surprising as it sounds; he must have heard a great deal of Latin during his life—at mass—and may have picked it up unconsciously.) But Kardec’s explanation about a mischievous spirit fits equally well. If Kardec is correct, then the physical changes that occur during puberty cause a ‘leakage’ of a certain type of energy that can be used by a poltergeist; this energy is probably some form of nerve-force. When the physical adjustments of puberty have been made, the leak stops, and the poltergeist can no longer manifest itself.
Why did a poltergeist invade the Deen family home? In the film of The Exorcist, a reason is provided: the daughter of the house plays with a ouija board. There is no evidence that this happened in the Deen case, but it is certainly consistent with what we know about poltergeists—we may recall the Phelps case (Chapter 6), which started when the Rev. Phelps began trying to contact ‘spirits’.
All this sounds thoroughly alarming, and may worry people of nervous disposition. But a number of points should be borne in mind. Spirits, according to Swedenborg, have no power to actually ‘invade’ the body—or mind—of a normal person. If they manage to do so because they are more-or-less invited—as in the case of Crabtree’s patient Pat, who became hostess to ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’—the sitting tenant is at a basic advantage, as a householder is encountering a squatter. Pat’s determined refusal to encourage her ‘squatter’ finally had the desired effect, and ‘Elizabeth’ went away.
The conclusion is straightforward. The fact that ‘possession’ can actually occur is no more alarming than the fact that black holes exist. It merely indicates that the universe is a stranger and more complex place than our great-grandparents assumed. But then, even our great-grandparents knew that it is better to be acquainted with facts than to be ignorant of them.
Postscript: A Note on Reincarnation.
The case of Lurancy Vennum and Mary Roff, cited at the beginning of this chapter, raises another important question. The account is consistent with the teaching of Allen Kardec who—as we have seen—asserts the reality of reincarnation in The Spirits’ Book. It is also consistent with Kardec’s view that the body is merely a vehicle which, like any other vehicle, might be used by more than one driver.
Reincarnation, the notion that we return to earth many times, is a part of the religious belief of Hindus and Buddhists. Some of the most convincing accounts of reincarnation come from India.
In the early 1930s the case of a girl called Shanti Devi excited worldwide attention. Kumari Shanti Devi was born in Delhi on October 12, 1926, and, when she was 4, she began to talk about a town called Muttra, a hundred miles away. She claimed that she had lived there in a yellow house, and that her husband had been a man called Kedar Nath Chaubey. The principal of the local school was so intrigued by all this that he examined Shanti, and asked where her husband lived; Shanti gave him an address. The principal wrote to Kedar Nath, and to his astonishment received a reply verifying that he was a widower, whose wife—a girl called Ludgi—had died ten years earlier. He confirmed in detail many things that Shanti had related.
However, a hundred miles was a long way to travel, so Kedar Nath wrote to a cousin in Delhi and asked him to call on Shanti Devi’s family.
The cousin, Kanji Mal, arrived at the door, and was instantly recognized by Shanti. He went away totally convinced. The result was that Kedar Nath hurried to Delhi. Shanti, wildly excited, flung herself into his arms. She then answered in detail all kinds of questions about her life with him. All Kedar’s doubts vanished. This was undoubtedly his former wife. But what on earth could he do about it? He could hardly take a 10-year-old girl back to his home . . . So, sad and perplexed, he returned to Muttra. A few days later, Shanti was taken to Muttra by her parents, together with three scientific investigators. And from the moment she arrived, no one had the slightest doubt that she was genuine. Among the crowd on the station platform she recognized an elderly man as her brother-in-law. Then, in a carriage, she directed the driver, and showed an intimate knowledge of the town—also pointing out a number of houses that had been built since she died. She directed the carriage to the house in which she had lived with Kedar, then to another house into which they had moved later. She led them to an old well, which had now been filled in, and showed the spot in one of the rooms where she had buried a hundred rupees in the earth floor. The men dug, and found only an empty jewel-box—at which point Kedar Nath admitted with embarrassment that he had found the box and spent the money. Later, Shanti recognized her former parents and her brother in the crowd. All this was placed on record, and caused such a stir that it was reported in newspapers all over the world.
Cases like that of Shanti Devi—and there were many others—were studied by Professor Hemendra Banerjee of Rajasthan University. And in America Dr Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia began an exhaustive scientific study of such cases, his first results being published in 1966 under the cautious title of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. His cases come from India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Brazil and Alaska, and all are full of documented evidence. A single one will give a sample of his astonishing material.
In 1954 a 3-year-old boy called Jasbir Lal Jat died of smallpox. Before he could be buried the next day, the corpse stirred and revived. It was some weeks before the child could speak, but when he did his parents were astonished that his personality had changed completely. He announced that he was the son of a Brahmin family (a higher caste than his ‘present’ family) who lived in the village of Vehedi, and he refused to eat food unless it was cooked by a Brahmin. He said that he had been poisoned by some doctored sweets, and had fallen off a cart, smashed his skull and died. Jasbir’s family were, understandably, sceptical, assuming that his illness had affected his mind. But they began to reconsider in 1957 when a Brahmin lady from Vehedi came to Jasbir’s village, and he instantly recognized her as his aunt. Jasbir was taken back to Vehedi and, like Shanti Devi, led the party round the village, showing a detailed knowledge of its lay-out, and recognized members of his family. His name, in his previous existence, had been Sobha Ram. The accusation about the poisoned sweets was never satisfactorily cleared up—Sobha Ram was said to have died of smallpox—but Dr Stevenson’s detailed account leaves no doubt that Jasbir knew too much about Vehedi and the life of Sobha Ram for any deception to have taken place.
The oddest point about this case, o
f course, is that Jasbir was already three and a half when he ‘died’, and was taken over by the ‘spirit’ of Sobha Ram—who died at the same time. The logical explanation, therefore, would seem to be that Jasbir really died, and that the spirit of Sobha Ram grabbed the body before ‘brain death’ occurred and fought his way back to life. This raises some fascinating questions about the whole relation between spirit and matter, life and death . . .
Stevenson points out that most of the really convincing cases of reincarnation take place in cultures that already accept reincarnation as a fact. This, as we have already seen, is not always so. In 1910 a 5-year-old girl named Alexandrina Samona died in Palermo, Sicily, and her mother was wild with grief. Soon after, she had a dream in which her dead child assured her that she would return in the form of a baby. Later that year Adela Samona gave birth to twins, one of whom was the double of Alexandrina, and who was therefore given her name. (The other was a totally different personality.) When the new Alexandrina was ten, her mother took her on an outing to the town of Monreale, where Alexandrina had never been before. Yet the child insisted that she had. She described various things she had seen in the town, and said that she had been there with her mother and a woman with ‘horns’ on her forehead—whereupon Signora Samona recalled that a few months before the death of the first Alexandrina they had been to Monreale, accompanied by a neighbour who had unsightly cysts on her forehead. Other details recalled by Alexandrina also proved correct. This case gave rise to widespread interest, and was reported together with lengthy depositions of everyone concerned, leaving little doubt about the basic accuracy of the facts.
In recent years there has been a steadily increasing interest in reincarnation, dating from 1956 when a book entitled The Search for Bridey Murphy became a best-seller. A hypnotist named Morey Bernstein placed a Colorado housewife, Virginia Tighe, in a trance, and asked her questions about the period before she was born (a technique known as ‘regression’). Mrs Tighe declared that in the 19th century she had been an Irish girl named Bridey Murphy, who lived in Cork—she gave extremely detailed information about her life there. The case caused a sensation, which collapsed abruptly when an American newspaper ran an ‘exposé’, declaring that Mrs Tighe had had an Irish aunt who told her endless stories about Ireland, and that as a child she had lived opposite a woman called Bridey Corkell, with whose son she was in love. . . . Yet on closer investigation it is impossible to dismiss the Bridey Murphy case as unconscious self-deception. To begin with, the newspaper that did the exposé was the one that had failed to gain the serial rights on Bernstein’s book, which had gone to a rival. It emerged that Virginia had never met her ‘Irish aunt’ until she was eighteen, and that she was certainly never in love with Mrs Corkell’s son—who turned out to be the editor of the Sunday edition of the newspaper that denounced her. But the general public are not interested in such fine points as these; as far as they were concerned, Bridey Murphy had been proved to be a fake.