The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Wickland’s book contains so many cases in its 460-odd pages that it is impossible to summarize. But one typical case will illustrate why he was so convinced that he was dealing with real spirits and not with some strange form of hysteria on the part of his wife. In 1904, at a seance in Chicago, Mrs Wickland began to clutch her throat and cry out, “Take the rope away. I am in the dark”! When the “spirit” had been soothed into speaking normally, she declared that she was a sixteen-year-old girl named Minnie Harmening, who had committed suicide by hanging herself in a Chicago suburb called Palatine (Wickland misheard it as Palestine). She had, she said, encountered the spirit of a big man with a black beard in the barn, and he had “hypnotized” her and made her hang herself.

  Wickland and his wife were on a visit to Chicago at that time and had not heard of what had become known as the Harmening suicide, which had taken place six weeks earlier. The girl’s suicide had baffled her family because it had been without apparent cause (although, Wickland adds, “the girl had always been peculiar”, implying that she was mentally deficient). Moreover, there were some suspicious circumstances – the clothes around the neck had been torn, and there were scratches on her throat. The suicide had taken place – as the girl had said – in Palatine, Cook County, Illinois.

  The spirit appeared again at the next séance and in reply to questions, explained that as soon as she had kicked the box away, she “came to her senses” and clawed at her clothes, tearing them as she tried to loosen the rope.

  Wickland cites many such cases in which he was able to corroborate the evidence of “spirits”. But what is obviously of chief interest in this case is that the girl claimed to have been “hypnotized” (she may simply mean strongly influenced) by a black-bearded spirit and induced to kill herself. That is to say, she had, in effect, been “possessed” by the black-bearded spirit.

  Unfortunately, Wickland was not generally concerned with the kind of corroboration he provides in this case, with the result that his book is seldom mentioned by modern scientific investigators of the paranormal. (Wickland’s own excuse is that the spirits were usually in such a state of confusion that they could not give precise names and dates.) What he might have done is illustrated by his friend F. Lee Howard, a congregational minister, who attended a session in which the Wicklands were attempting to treat the daughter of one of Howard’s friends. Howard questioned a “possessing spirit”, which declared itself to be that of a suicide victim, and he obtained the name and date. A check with the coroner’s records confirmed that such a person had committed suicide on the given date. In another case, a reader of Wickland’s book wrote to say that the details given by one of the spirits convinced him that it was his father’s cousin.

  Another objection raised by modern researchers is that Wickland is often naïve and that he is inclined to mistake mental illness for “spirit possession”. For example, the case of Frank James, the boy who became a juvenile delinquent after a fall from a motorcycle, would nowadays be explained in terms of the science of “split-brain physiology”. This is based upon the recognition that when the corpus callosum, the knot of nerves joining the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain, is severed – as it is sometimes to cure epilepsy – the patient turns into two different people, each of whom resides in a separate hemisphere of the brain. (See also chapter 25.) The normal “everyday self”, the person one thinks of as “me”, lives in the left hemisphere and is basically a logical and practical person, the one who copes with daily chores. The person who lives in the right is a stranger and seems to be altogether more intuitive and instinctive; he seems more concerned with what goes on inside us. You could say that the left-brain self is objective, the right brain subjective; one is, in effect, a scientist and the other an artist. Most of us are unaware of this “other” (right-brain) self, even though we are connected to it by the corpus callosum. In split-brain patients, the “other self” can be studied by directing stimuli to the left eye (actually, the left visual field) or the left side of the body; for some odd reason, the left side of the body is connected to the right brain, and vice versa.

  In a well-known case of the 1870s, a French youth named Louis Vivé was bitten by a viper and became paralyzed in both legs for three years; during this time he was quiet and well behaved. One day he had a “hysterico-epileptic” attack, followed by a fifteen-hour sleep; when he woke up, the well-behaved youth had given way to a violent, aggressive, and dishonest delinquent. But, unlike Frank James, Vivé’s two personalities continued to alternate. This new “criminal” self had a speech defect and was paralyzed down the right side of his body. After receiving a conviction for theft, Vivé was sent to an asylum at Rochefort, where two doctors became interested in his case. At this time there was considerable interest in the influence of magnets and of various metals on physical ailments like paralysis, and the doctors tried stroking his right side with steel. It had the effect of transferring the paralysis to the left side and restoring the patient to his previous quiet and well-behaved personality. All his memories of the “criminal” period vanished, and he could recall only his “own” earlier self – although his “other self” could be brought back by hypnosis.

  Here it seems clear that the “criminal” Vivé was a condition associated with his right brain – hence the speech disorder. (Speech is controlled by the left side of the brain). Another well-known case of “dual personality”, that of Clara Fowler (described by Dr Morton Prince in his book Dissociation of a Personality – Prince calls her Christine Beauchamp) seems to illustrate the same point. An old friend of Clara’s father made a sexual advance that so upset her that she began to suffer from depression and nervous exhaustion. When Prince placed her under hypnosis, another personality emerged, a mischievous child who called herself Sally. From then on, Sally would frequently “take over” the body and play practical jokes, such as going for a long walk in the countryside, then vacating the body and leaving Clara to walk home. Typically, Sally had a bad stutter, suggesting that, like Vivé’s alter ego, she was associated with the right brain. (It has been noted that left-handed people who have been forced to learn to write with the right hand often develop a stutter.)

  But while it is tempting to explain Wickland’s cases in terms of “multiple-personality disorder” and split-brain physiology, it proves in practise to be an impossible enterprise; we can see that, in the case of the Minnie Harmening suicide, no amount of split-brain physiology can explain how Mrs Wickland was able to describe a case of which she had no knowledge.

  In fact, Wickland’s findings had been anticipated by half a century. In 1855 a French educator named Léon Denizard Hyppolyte Rivail was introduced to a somnambule – a person who “channeled” trance communications when hypnotized – named Celina Bequet, through whom the spirit of the famous hypnotist Franz Mesmer was alleged to speak. Accepting without question that he was in touch with the spirits of the dead – a reasonable assumption under the circumstances – Rivail asked hundreds of questions about life after death and published the result in an influential work entitled The Spirits’ Book. (He used the pseudonym Allan Kardec, suggested to him by “spirits”.)

  According to The Spirits’ Book, man consists of body, “aura”, intelligent soul, and spiritual soul. The aim of human life, according to the spirits, is evolution, and this comes about through reincarnation – rebirth into new bodies. People who die suddenly, or are unprepared for death by reason of wasted lives, are often unaware that they are dead and become homeless, wanderers on the earth, attracted by human beings of like mind, and sharing their lives and experiences. They are able, to some extent, to influence these like-minded people and to make them do their will through suggestion. Some “low spirits” are activated by malice; others are merely mischievous and can use energy drawn from human beings to cause physical disturbances – these are known as poltergeists. When Kardec asked, “Do spirits influence our thoughts and actions”? the answer was, “Their influence upon [human beings] is great
er than you suppose, for it is very often they who direct both”. Asked about possession, the “spirit” explained that a spirit cannot actually take over another person’s body, since that belongs to its owner; but a spirit can assimilate itself to a person who has the same defects and qualities as himself and may dominate such a person. In short, such spirits could be described as “mind parasites”.

  According to Wickland, one of the most famous murders of the early twentieth century was due to “spirit influence”. On the night of 25 June 1906, a wealthy young rake named Harry Thaw sat beside his wife on the roof of Madison Square Garden, watching a new revue. Before her marriage, Mrs Thaw had been Evelyn Nesbit, a beautiful model and showgirl, whom Thaw had persuaded to accompany him to Europe. Thaw was addicted to flogging, and on one occasion, he whipped Evelyn so severely that she was confined to bed for two weeks. When she admitted to him that she had been seduced at the age of fifteen by Stanford White, the architect of Madison Square Garden, Thaw had become almost insane with jealousy. On the night of 25 June, as they were leaving the roof show, Thaw saw White sitting alone at a table, walked up to him, and shot him three times with a pistol.

  At Thaw’s murder trial, Evelyn gave lurid details of her seduction by the architect (who was more than thirty years her senior), describing how he had taken her virginity after getting her drunk on champagne. (“When I came to I found myself in the bed, naked except for an abbreviated pink undergarment”.)21 The jury was unable to reach an agreement. At the second trial, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to an asylum, from which he escaped in 1913; later that year a jury found him to be sane and authorized his release.

  Three weeks after the murder, on 15 July 1906, Mrs Wickland fell to the floor during the course of a séance and when moved to a chair, shouted in a brusque voice, “Waiter, bring me a drink”! Asked where she thought she was, she replied, “In Madison Square Roof Garden, of course”. Then she began to tremble, explaining that she could see “dead people”, and rushed about the room. As soon as this spirit ceased to “possess” Mrs Wickland, another spirit took over, exulting, “I killed the dog”! But this was not Harry Thaw; in reply to questions the spirit said that his name was Johnson and that he had caused Thaw to shoot Stanford White because “he had trifled too long with our daughters”. (In fact, White was a famous seducer of chorus girls, keeping a special apartment for that purpose; but then, Thaw shared his taste.) Next, a spirit who claimed to be Thaw’s father appeared, begging the people present to “save my boy”. (Thaw senior had been dead for some years, and Thaw’s mother was overindulgent.) He went on to explain that Thaw had been obsessed by “vengeful spirits” when he killed White and that his son was a “psychic sensitive”.

  There is nothing in the two books on the case, or in Evelyn Nesbit’s book, The Untold Story, to suggest that Thaw may have been psychic. But Evelyn’s book makes it clear that Thaw was mentally little more than a child. One account states: “Had Thaw been a poor man, he probably would have been in an asylum”. At his trial, evidence was presented of insanity in his family – in fact, his elder brother, Horace, had died in an asylum. Evelyn Nesbit’s accounts of his violent tantrums – for example, if a waiter dared to try and brush crumbs off the tablecloth he would jerk the cloth away, hurling the dishes to the floor – make it clear that he was mentally disturbed. (The tantrums would vanish with equal suddenness, and Thaw’s face would dissolve into a charming and sunny smile.) While this does not support the case for “obsession” by vengeful spirits, it does support Wickland’s contention that Thaw was the type of person whose mind was open to invasion because he was “not all there”.

  There is one small piece of evidence that suggests that the “spirit” of Thaw’s father was what he claimed to be. He begged Wickland to “write to my wife and my attorney, Mr Olcott”, and in fact, Judge Olcott was Thaw’s attorney, a fact that was unknown to the Wicklands.

  The classic study of “possession”, Possession, Demoniacal and Other (1921), is by a Tübingen professor, T. K. Oesterreich. Oesterreich totally discounts the “spirit” explanation, insisting that possession is always a case of hysteria or mental illness. He will not even accept the hypothesis of multiple personality, since he cannot believe that the human personality can “split”. One of his most impressive pieces of evidence for the hysteria theory is a lengthy account of the famous case of “Achille”, described by the psychiatrist Pierre Janet. Achille, a moderately successful businessman, came from a peasant background and married early. In the winter of 1890, when he was thirty-three, Achille returned from a business trip in a depressed condition, then suddenly went dumb. One day he sent for his wife and child, embraced them despairingly, then went into a cataleptic state for two days. When he awoke he was suffering from delusions; he seemed to think he was in Hell and that demons were burning him and cutting him in pieces. The room, he said, was full of imps, and he was possessed by a devil. After a number of suicide attempts he was sent to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, under the care of the famous physician Charcot. The latter placed Janet in charge of the case.

  Janet watched with interest as Achille displayed all the signs of demoniacal possession, as described in the Middle Ages: in a deep voice he cursed God, then in a shrill voice protested that the Devil had forced him to do it.

  At first all of Janet’s efforts to communicate were a failure; Achille refused to listen to him and resisted all of the doctor’s attempts to hypnotize him. Janet saw the solution when he observed that Achille was extremely absentminded – he compared him to someone searching for an umbrella that he holds in his hand. While Achille was raving, Janet quietly inserted a pencil in his hand, then tried ordering him, in a whisper, to make writing movements. The pencil wrote: “I won’t”. “Who are you”? asked Janet, and the pencil wrote: “The Devil”. “I shan’t believe you”, Janet replied, “unless you can give me proof. Can you make Achille raise his left arm without knowing it”? “Of course”, came the answer – and Achille raised his arm. “Why are you doing that”? Janet asked Achille in his normal voice, and Achille looked at his raised arm with astonishment.

  The demon went on to demonstrate his powers by making Achille dance, stick out his tongue, and kiss a piece of paper. Finally, Janet asked him if he could put Achille into a deep sleep. Moments later, Achille was in a trance. Now Janet was able to question him about the cause of his illness. He quickly learned that Achille had been unfaithful to his wife while away on his business trip and that deep and intense guilt had caused the depression and other symptoms. Now that he was able to induce hallucinations, Janet made Achille believe that his wife was in the room and had forgiven him for his infidelity. (It is not quite clear from Janet’s account whether the wife actually came to the hospital.) After this, Achille’s psychological problems soon cleared up.

  This is certainly a remarkable case. Yet as a refutation of the “spirit” theory, it is obviously open to one serious objection. According to Wickland, people suffering from nervous traumas or states of intense guilt and misery are more likely to become “obsessed” by spirits than normal healthy persons. Wickland would point out that Achille may have been genuinely “obsessed” by a mischievous spirit and that as soon as Janet had made him feel that he was forgiven, the spirit was “driven out”.

  In her introduction to Oesterreich’s Possession, Anita Gregory, an investigator of the paranormal, has some harsh words to say about Wickland and his Thirty Years Among the Dead. She points out that there is a basic sameness to all his cases – he always has to convince a spirit that it is dead – and his account of how the spirits of Madame Blavatsky and Mary Baker Eddy expressed contrition for their false doctrines is almost laughable. She also points out that Oesterreich’s rationalism is often crude and unconvincing and that he deals with subtleties by ignoring them.

  Perhaps the most obvious example of Oesterreich’s failure to allow facts to speak for themselves is in his account of one of the most famous o
f all cases of “possession”, that of “the Watseka wonder”, a girl named Lurancy Vennum. In July 1877 thirteen-year-old Lurancy, of Watseka, Illinois, had a fit, after which she became prone to trances. In these trances she became a medium, and a number of disagreeable personalities manifested themselves through her. On 11 February 1878, placed under hypnosis by a local doctor, Lurancy stated that there was a spirit in the room named Mary Roff, and a Mrs Roff who was also present exclaimed, “That’s my daughter”. Mary had died twelve years earlier, at the age of eighteen. Lurancy then stated that Mary was going to be allowed to take over her body for the next three months.

  The next day Lurancy claimed to be Mary Roff. She asked to be taken back to the Roff’s home, and on the way there, she recognized their previous home, in which they had lived while she was alive and which was unknown to Lurancy. She also recognized Mary Roff’s sister, who was standing at the window. And during the next few weeks, “Mary” showed a precise and detailed knowledge of the Roff household and of Mary’s past, recognizing old acquaintances and toys and recalling long-forgotten incidents. On 21 May, the day she had declared she had to leave, she took a tearful farewell of her family, and on the way home, “became” Lurancy again. The case was investigated by Richard Hodgson, one of the most skeptical members of the Society for Psychical Research, who was convinced of its genuineness.

  Readers of Hodgson’s account of the “Watseka wonder” will find it very hard to find loopholes; Mary provided such detailed proof of her knowledge of her early years, and of the family background – recognizing unhesitatingly anyone Mary had known – that the notion of trickery or delusion becomes untenable; it is perhaps the single most convincing case of “possession” in the history of psychical research. But Oesterreich merely quotes William James’s summary of the case (from The Principles of Psychology), making no attempt to analyze it and passing on quickly to other matters – in spite of the fact that James himself had spoken of “the plausibility of the spiritualistic interpretation of the phenomenon”. And Anita Gregory concludes her introduction by admitting that she is unable to declare that all the people in Oesterreich’s book are frauds, dupes, lunatics, and psychopaths, ending with the words: “So I shall conclude . . . that the phenomena described by Oesterreich are very much in need of an explanation”.