Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  The monk who had translated the pamphlet from the German was in the same monastery as Crabtree, and he verified the details of the story. Crabtree knew him to be a level-headed, good-humoured man; yet he still found the monk’s story preposterous.

  In due course, Crabtree decided that the monastic life was not for him, and entered psychotherapy in 1969:

  As a psychotherapist, I fairly quickly came to accept the reality of the less spectacular paranormal phenomena, specifically telepathic and clairvoyant experiences. These seemed to be undeniable from the extensive evidence my clients spontaneously provided from their intuitions and particularly from their dreams. But in those early years I was extremely reluctant to go beyond this minimal acceptance.*

  It was not until 1976 that a colleague spoke to him of a patient who seemed to be ‘possessed’ by a spirit, and Crabtree was able to witness this phenomenon. He still declined to take it seriously. But in the following year, he began to encounter cases of the ‘possession type’ in his own practice — as described in the first chapter of this book — and decided, from the purely pragmatic point of view, to treat them as possession.

  Crabtree insists that, as a psychotherapist, he remains a phenomenologist: that is to say, he does not say: This is possession, but: This patient shows all the signs of ‘possession’, and treating it as possession will probably be the simplest way to affect a cure. But he is a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and his book makes it clear that he is willing to give serious consideration to the ‘possession’ hypothesis.

  Another psychotherapist, Dr Ralph Allison, who practises in Santa Cruz, California, has written a book on multiple personality** which makes it clear that he has come to accept the real possibility of ‘possession’. In 1972, Allison encountered a case of multiple personality. In her teens, Carrie had been the victim of a gang rape, and it was after this that she began to experience black-outs in which another personality took over. Also in her teens, Carrie had been involved in amateur witchcraft, and simply as a therapeutic measure, Allison tried ‘exorcism’ under hypnosis. It worked, but Allison considered that this had simply been due to suggestion. But in subsequent years, Allison encountered cases of multiple personality in which he could not accept that the ‘other selves’ were genuine alter-egos. ‘An alter personality serves a definite and practical purpose — it is a means of coping with an emotion or a situation that the patient cannot handle.’ But in some cases, this did not appear to be so. He placed a girl called Elise, who was suffering from multiple personality, under hypnosis, and a male alter-ego who called himself Dennis emerged. ‘Dennis’ seemed to serve no purpose. And he insisted that he was ‘possessing’ Elise solely because he was sexually interested in another of her personalities, a girl called Shannon, who had ‘taken over’ after Elise had been prostrated by the loss of a baby. When he asked ‘Dennis’ how he hoped to have sex with ‘Shannon’, ‘Dennis’ explained that he entered the bodies of men ‘Shannon’ went to bed with, and so enjoyed making love to her. Allison found this an interesting concept: obviously, Elise’s body was the same as ‘Shannon’ ‘s; but ‘Dennis’ was not in the least interested in it when Elise was ‘in’ it.

  When Allison questioned ‘Shannon’, she confirmed all that ‘Dennis’ had said. Allison was baffled at the idea of an alter-ego entering someone else’s body (although if he had read Kardec or any other number of spiritualists he would have found it familiar enough). But Elise’s other personalities also insisted this was so. ‘Dennis’ himself claimed that he had once been a stockbroker, who was killed during a robbery. He claimed that Elise was not the first person he had ‘inhabited’. He also explained that if ‘Shannon’ would settle down with one lover, he would be glad to enter the man permanently. But she ‘moved around’ too much. Allison admits: ‘Despite all my efforts, I was unable to find a more plausible explanation for his existence than the spirit theory.’

  Under hypnosis, another alter-ego emerged, a girl called Michelle who insisted that, like ‘Dennis’, she was not a sub-personality but a spirit. She also claimed there was a third ‘spirit’ involved. A few days later, after Elise had experienced some violent convulsions, one of the sub-personalities told Allison that the three ‘possessing spirits’ had now left. Allison was inclined to accept this. ‘Nothing in the psychological literature could account for what I had seen.’ Some time later, another of the sub-personalities told Allison that ‘Shannon’ was herself a ‘possessing spirit’ — the spirit of Elise’s dead baby. ‘Shannon’ herself confirmed this, and told Allison she was willing to ‘leave’. Elise woke from the session with amnesia; but ‘Shannon’ never reappeared.

  Dealing with another case of multiple personality, a girl called Sophia, Allison succeeded in fusing most of her alter-egos under hypnosis. But two sub-personalities remained: two women called Mary and Maria. When Sophia was under hypnosis, Allison was told that Mary and Maria were her twin sisters. The doctor who had delivered the triplets was also her mother’s lover, and he smothered the first two babies; however, a visit from a neighbour prevented him from killing Sophia. Sophia said that ‘spirits’ of all three babies had been waiting to enter them after each one was delivered. Concerned that the other two might be lonely, Sophia had invited them to share her body with her. Eventually, Allison succeeded in persuading ‘Mary’ and ‘Maria’ to leave during a hypnotic session. After this, his attempts to re-invoke them under hypnosis were a failure.

  Allison’s stories sound preposterous — yet to anyone who has read the rest of this book, they have the ring of authenticity. The underlying theme that has run through psychical investigation since the days of Jung-Stilling and Catherine Crowe has been the notion that human beings consist of bodies inhabited by spirits — personalities already formed, so to speak — and that these spirits survive death. In some cases in Chapter Six, we have encountered instances in which a spirit has apparently moved from one body to another, so Lurancy Vennum became Mary Roff, and Sobha Ram became Jasbir Lal Jat. We may decide that such cases do not constitute proof of reincarnation and ‘possession’. But at least we have to recognise the consistency of the underlying theme: that personality is not a mere reflection of the body, a ‘summation of the different contributions to behaviour from the various control units of the brain’, but an independent entity which controls the body — and which might be capable of far greater control if it was fully aware of its own status.

  This recognition encapsulates the aim of the present book. It is not my purpose to try to convince anyone of the reality of life after death: only to draw attention to the impressive inner consistency of the evidence, and to point out that, in the light of that evidence, no one need feel ashamed of accepting the notion that human personality survives bodily death.

  *Charles Higham: The Adventures of Conan Doyle, p. 261.

  *See p. 128.

  *Post Mortem Journal.

  *See p. 127.

  *The Romeo Error, p. 63.

  *Spring 1979. Quoted by William R. Corliss: The Unfathomed Mind, A Handbook of Unusual Mental Phenomena, 1982, p. 584.

  *I am grateful to Margot Grey for lending me chapters of the typescript of her book, and of Kenneth Ring’s Introduction.

  *See p. 128.

  *Mysteries, p. 615.

  *Quoted from Renée Haynes: The Society for Psychical Research, A History, 1882–1982, p. 203.

  *Letter to the author, 1 January 1985, quoted with Dr Crabtree’s permission.

  **Minds in Many Pieces, 1980.

  Postscript

  In 1968, I went to Cambridge to interview the philosopher C. D. Broad for a colour supplement article. Broad, a kindly and modest soul, was rather irritated at the time because his college — Trinity — had just made him kitchen steward, at the age of eighty, and he was looking forward impatiently to completing his present duties and getting back to his beloved Scandinavia.

  After talking about his philosophical ideas and his views on the younger generation, we
turned to psychical research; Broad had joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1920, and had twice been its president. He made the interesting comment: ‘If these facts of psychical research are true, then clearly they are of immense importance — they literally alter everything.’ I reminded him that, in his autobiography,* he had remarked: ‘So far as I can tell, I have no desire to survive the death of my present body, and I should be considerably relieved if I could feel much surer than I do that no kind of survival is possible.’ But Broad insisted there was no contradiction here:

  I’ve been terribly lucky in this life; everything has gone very well. I’ve achieved all the success I could probably want — probably far more than I deserve — so I don’t like the idea of taking a chance in another world. I’d rather just come to an end.

  Broad was underlining a point that we have touched on repeatedly in this book. To know there was life after death would certainly ‘alter everything’. Yet in another sense, it would alter nothing. A baby opens its eyes on a complex, baffling and rather frightening universe. But it soon develops the conviction that the grown-ups know all the answers. It is rather disconcerting to achieve adulthood and realise that this is not true. Kierkegaard wrote:

  Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?… How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?… And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the manager? I would like to see him.

  To say: ‘Don’t worry — there is life after death’ is no answer. It is true that if death was the end of the individual, it would deepen that sense of pointlessness and futility. But to be told that we shall go on living in another world leaves us facing the same question. William James expressed it: Why is there existence rather than non-existence? To answer that question, we would presumably need to get ‘outside’ existence; and that seems clearly impossible.

  This explains why spiritualism has not made a greater impact on the modern world. When it was launched in Rochester in 1850, its followers had no doubt they were helping to found a new religion. But a religion is an attempt to explain man’s place in the universe. Spiritualism was not based on some mystical insight about the relation of man to God; it was based on the assertion that dead human beings are not really dead at all, but continue to live in a world not unlike the present one. And that leaves the question about man’s place in the universe precisely where it was before. No wonder Roman Catholic theologians joined with agnostic scientists in denouncing it as boring, shallow and irrelevant.

  I was forcefully reminded of these objections a few months before I began to write this book. A correspondent told me that he had just learned of the existence of one of the most remarkable mediums of all time. I shall refer to her as Martha. She was, said my correspondent, a ‘materialisation medium’, and during her seances, perfectly solid people would appear out of thin air and walk about the room. They would behave exactly like normal people, replying to questions, allowing themselves to be touched and sitting down at the side of members of the audience. In short, there was no mystification; it was all as straightforward as a tea party.

  I immediately wrote to Martha, explained that I was about to write a book on life after death, and asked if I could come to one of her seances; I received a friendly reply saying that I was welcome at any time.

  Not long after, I happened to be in the provincial town where Martha lived, and I telephoned to ask if I could come to a meeting. She explained that this was impossible at the moment, because the friends in whose house the seances took place were away on holiday. But she invited me to go to have tea at her home.

  Martha proved to be a rather pretty woman in her thirties. I was introduced to her husband, Bill, and to her son and his girlfriend. What they told me sounded impressive. Martha had been an actress, but since she had been married to Bill — an engineer — she had given up the stage. (Her son still worked in the theatre as a lighting engineer.) They had discovered her powers accidentally one day when she had become exasperated with a friend with whom she was having an argument. She touched a small table, and it shot across the room. When she placed her hands on it, it rocked from side to side. The table answered questions by means of the usual code. They all became fascinated by it, and began spending their evenings asking questions. (Martha emphasised that she had previously had no interest whatever in such matters — in fact, she was a Catholic.) One day, she fell into a trance, and a ‘spirit’ spoke through her mouth. When she woke up, she apologised for falling asleep, having no memory of what had happened. At later seances, spirits ‘materialised’.

  A woman with a strong Scots accent, who identified herself as the medium Helen Duncan, soon became Martha’s ‘control’. And one day, a small boy appeared — let us call him Jeremy — and described how he had died a few years before after an accident. He gave his name and address, and told them that at this very moment, his father was sitting at home alone, because his mother was away for the night. On the ceiling above him, said ‘Jeremy’, there was a red admiral butterfly …

  It was late at night, but they decided to test ‘Jeremy’ ’s story. They found the telephone number, and a man’s voice answered. Bill said: ‘Look, I’m going to ask you a silly question — is there a red admiral butterfly on the ceiling in that room?’ The man answered with astonishment: ‘My God, so there is! But how did you know?’ ‘Because your son just told us …’ The father confirmed all that ‘Jeremy’ had said about his death. And the next day, both parents arrived, and there were tears of joy as they hugged and kissed their son …

  It was an impressive story. In fact, I found Martha and Bill altogether convincing. They seemed a charming couple, completely natural and down-to-earth, and if their story could be confirmed, then there seemed no doubt whatever that Martha was the most remarkable medium since Daniel Dunglas Home. I had little doubt that it would be confirmed, for they assured me that I would not only be able to talk to ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Helen Duncan’, but touch them as well.

  At the first opportunity, I hurried back to the suburb where Bill and Martha lived. It was still impossible, for some reason, to hold a seance at the home of their friends; but they offered to do it in their own sitting room. I was invited early for tea — in fact, a large meal with hot sausage rolls and all kinds of cakes and scones — and I was told a great deal more about their contacts with the ‘other world’. It seemed that Martha was having problems with various bloody-minded sceptics, and one of these had accused her of fraud in a well-known spiritualist journal … I found all this surprising; if Martha’s phenomena were half as convincing as they sounded, it was hard to understand why anyone should want to denounce her.

  After about two hours, the seance began. Rather to my surprise, Bill and Donald (their son) began covering the windows with sheets of thick black plastic. They explained that even the slightest ray of light could cause harm to the medium. Martha sat in an armchair; I sat on the settee with Donald and his girlfriend; Bill sat opposite Martha. A tape recorder with popular classical music was switched on, and the lights were turned off, leaving us all in total darkness. The music, they explained, helped to create the right atmosphere. Soon there were several loud raps on the table, which, Bill explained, meant there were thirteen spirits present. Then a small boy’s voice sounded, and ‘Jeremy’ was there. I was introduced to him, and I asked if he would mind if I recorded his voice. He gave permission, and I switched on the recorder I had brought. Then we all went on talking — it was very casual, very normal, like a fireside chat. ‘Jeremy’ had a rather high-pitched voice, with something oddly muffled about it, as if he was speaking with some object in his mouth. After a few minutes, ‘Jeremy’ asked: ‘Can you hear Laura?’ The music had been switched on again — Placido Domingo singing ‘I wouldn’t be without you’ — so I couldn’t detect the newcomer. But Bill greeted her, and again I was introduced. ‘Laura’ took my hand in both of hers — she felt like a perfectly normal human being. ‘Laura’ also sang alo
ng with the music; she had a pleasant voice, but again with something odd about it — I can only describe it as a ‘slight wobble’. At this point, a torch was produced, but it had a red sock over the end, so that it showed practically nothing, even in that total darkness. But it was held close to ‘Laura’s’ bare feet, and I could see them dimly against the rug.

  Suddenly a voice with a Scottish accent said: ‘Hello there! It’s lovely t’ see you all tonight …’, and Bill greeted her: ‘Hello Helen.’ ‘I expect, Colin, that you’re gettin’ a bit of a shock?’ She asked Bill to turn down the music, and explained: ‘We need the music because Martha’s afraid o’ the dark. There’s just enough so her unconscious mind can hear the music.’ She went on to introduce herself to me and welcome me ‘from the bottom o’ my heart’. She’d heard I was a man of many words, and she was a woman of many words …

  After a few more minutes of this, Bill decided it was time for a break. The music was played; then the lights were switched on. There was Martha, sitting in her armchair in her track suit, gradually waking up and asking: ‘Did anything happen?’ We assured her it had.

  After a break of five or ten minutes, the seance began again. There was a great deal more chatter from ‘Jeremy’, then ‘Helen’ offered to do an ‘experiment’. This amounted to taking the torch and showing me her feet, then her knees. Once again, it was practically impossible to see anything but the faint glow of flesh in the dim red light.

  ‘Helen’ was, as she had said, a woman of many words; she talked a great deal. I interrupted her at one point to ask if she recalled a friend of mine, Leonard Boucher, who had attended one of her seances during her lifetime. She said she did, and asked me what had happened to ‘Len’. I said he was now in Zimbabwe. ‘Is he?’ said ‘Helen’ with surprise, ‘I thought he was in Rhodesia.’ We had to explain that they were the same place. She asked me to remind Leonard about Portsmouth …