by Colin Wilson
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 was 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 at burg, 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 coffee house 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 one*) 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. For example, in the chapter on ‘The Poltergeist of the Germans’, she discusses a recent case of a French girl named Angelique Cottin who, in 1846, had been weaving silk gloves when the loom began to move violently. Angelique — who was 14 — had apparently turned into a human magnet, and objects held close to her would fly through the air and stick to her. Oddly enough, she had no attraction for metals; but this was clearly some form of electricity, for she gave people electric shocks; it could only be prevented if she stood on a piece of thick cork. Mrs Crowe went on to make the sensible suggestion that poltergeist phenomena might be electrical in nature — a remarkably perceptive insight when most writers on the subject assumed that poltergeists were malevolent spectres.
In other ways, her ‘credulity’ 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 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 a modern investigator, Dr Ferenc Andras Volgyesi, 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. But another shows a battle of wills between a bird, the cucullus 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. Volgyesi describes a 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.
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; 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 demons
trate 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.
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 nonexistent 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. 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 nineteen-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 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 13 July 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 nineteenth 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 31 March
1848, in a wooden frame house inhabited by a Methodist farmer named James D. Fox, his wife Margaret, and their two daughters, Margaretta, age 14, and Kate, age 12. Hydesville is a small township not far from Rochester, New York. James 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 31 March, 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.’