The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  This, of course, could be pure autosuggestion. But what happened after a visit from “satanist” Anton LaVey could not be dismissed in this way. LaVey called on Dorland with the editor of an Oakland newspaper; he claimed that the skull was created by Satan and was thus the property of his church. (LaVey has a keen sense of humor as well as of publicity.) LaVey ended by playing at some length on Dorland’s organ, so that when he left, it was too late to return the skull to the safe deposit box where it was kept. That night, once again, there were many strange sounds that kept Dorland and his wife awake. But when they got up to investigate, they found nothing. The next morning they found that many of their belongings had been displaced, and a crystal rod used as a telephone dialer had leapt thirty-five feet to the front door.

  Dorland’s theory is not that the skull itself possesses a “spirit” (or poltergeist) but that it had absorbed something from LaVey’s presence – that perhaps La Vey’s “vibes” and those of the skull conflicted, producing physical effects. This theory is not as farfetched as it sounds. Clairvoyants use crystals because they claim they can absorb living energies; they keep them covered with black velvet because these energies escape when exposed to daylight. Since the time of the oldest known magical beliefs, crystals have been held in special esteem because of their powers.

  Oddly enough, there is now some kind of scientific backing for this notion. For a decade or more the biologist Rupert Sheldrake has been arguing that learning among human beings and animals is “transmitted” by a process that he calls morphic resonance. The most famous story illustrating this process is of the monkeys on Kojima Island, off the coast of Japan, that learned to wash their potatoes in the sea because the salt improved the taste; subsequently, asserts zoologist Lyall Watson (in Lifetide), monkeys on other islands, with no connection with the original group, began doing the same thing. Morphic resonance might thus be regarded as a kind of telepathy, and Sheldrake believes that it plays an active part in evolution.

  The strange thing is that this phenomenon applies not only to living creatures but to crystals as well. Some new chemicals are extremely difficult to crystallize in the labouratory. But once they have been crystallized anywhere in the world, the process suddenly becomes faster in all labouratories. At first it was suspected that this was because scientists were carrying traces of the crystal in their hair or clothes when they visited other labouratories; but this theory had to be discounted. It seems that crystals, like living creatures, can “learn” by morphic resonance. So the notion that they can absorb living energies and radiate them again is less outlandish than it seems.

  It seems probable that we shall never know the truth about the “skull of doom”, but its resemblance to the British Museum skull suggests that it was probably of Aztec manufacture. What we know of the Aztecs – and their religion of human sacrifice – suggests that it was created as some kind of religious object, possibly used for scrying (short for descrying) – that is, for purposes of divination, as a modern clairvoyant uses a crystal ball. But for whatever purpose it was created, most of those who have seen it seem to agree that it is one of the most beautiful man-made objects in the world.

  53

  Spontaneous Human Combustion

  On the evening of Sunday 1 July 1951 Mrs Mary Reeser, aged seventy-seven, seemed slightly depressed as she sat in her overstuffed armchair and smoked a cigarette. At about 9 pm her landlady, Mrs Pansy Carpenter, called in to say goodnight. Mrs Reeser showed no disposition to go to bed yet; it was a hot evening in St Petersburg, Florida.

  At five the next morning, Mrs Carpenter awoke to a smell of smoke; assuming it was a water pump that had been overheating, she went to the garage and turned it off. She was awakened again at eight by a telegraph boy with a telegram for Mrs Reeser; Mrs Carpenter signed for it and took it up to Mrs Reeser’s room. To her surprise, the doorknob was hot. She shouted for help, and two decorators working across the street came in. One of them placed a cloth over the doorknob and turned it; a blast of hot air met him as the door opened. Yet the place seemed empty, and at first they could see no sign of fire. Then they noticed a blackened circle on the carpet where the armchair had stood. Only a few springs now remained. In the midst of them there was a human skull, “charred to the size of a baseball”, and a fragment of liver attached to a backbone. There was also a foot encased in a satin slipper; it had been burnt down to the ankle.

  Mrs Reeser was a victim of a baffling phenomenon called spontaneous human combustion; there are hundreds of recorded cases. Yet in their standard textbook Forensic Medicine, Drs S. A. Smith and F. S. Fiddes assert flatly: “Spontaneous combustion of the human body cannot occur, and no good purpose can be served by discussing it”. This is a typical example of the kind of wishful thinking in which scientists are prone to indulge when they confront a fact that falls outside the range of their experience. In the same way the great chemist Lavoisier denied the possibility of meteorites.

  The example of Mrs Reeser is worth citing because it is mentioned by Professor John Taylor in his book Science and the Supernatural, a book whose chief purpose is to debunk the whole idea of the “paranormal”, which, according to Professor Taylor, tends to “crumble to nothing” as it is scientifically appraised. Yet he then proceeds to admit that there are instances that seem “reasonably well validated”, and proceeds to cite the case of Mrs Reeser.

  Twenty-nine years later, in October 1980, a case of spontaneous combustion was observed at close quarters when a naval airwoman named Jeanna Winchester was driving with a friend, Leslie Scott, along Seaboard Avenue in Jacksonville, Florida. Suddenly, Jeanna Winchester burst into yellow flames, and screamed, “Get me out of here”. Her companion tried to beat out the flames with her hands, and the car ran into a telegraph pole. When Jeanna Winchester was examined it was found that 20 per cent of her body was covered with burns. But Jeanna Winchester survived.

  Michael Harrison’s book on spontaneous combustion, Fire From Heaven (1976), cites dozens of cases; they make it clear that the chief mystery of spontaneous combustion is that it seldom spreads beyond the person concerned. On Whit Monday 1725, in Rheims, Nicole Millet, the wife of the landlord of the Lion d’Or, was found burnt to death in an unburnt armchair, and her husband was accused of her murder. But a young surgeon, Claude-Nicholas Le Cat, succeeded in persuading the court that spontaneous human combustion does occur, and Millet was acquitted – the verdict was that his wife had died “by a visitation of God”. The case inspired a Frenchman called Jonas Dupont to gather together all the evidence he could find for spontaneous combustion, which he published in a book De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, printed in Leyden in 1763.

  Another famous case of this period was that of Countess Cornelia di Bandi, of Cesena, aged sixty-two, who was found on the floor of her bedroom by her maid. Her stockinged legs were untouched, and between them lay her head, half burnt. The rest of the body was reduced to ashes, and the air was full of floating soot. The bed was undamaged and the sheets had been thrown back, as if she had got out – perhaps to open a window – and then been quickly consumed as she stood upright, so the head had fallen between the legs. Unlike the wife of innkeeper Millet, the countess had not been a heavy drinker. (One of the most popular theories of spontaneous combustion at this period was that it was due to large quantities of alcohol in the body.)

  Two nineteenth-century novelists used spontaneous combustion to dispose of unwanted characters. Captain Marryat borrowed details from a Times report of 1832 to describe the death of the mother of his hero Jacob Faithful (in the novel of the same name), who is reduced to “a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder” in her bed. Twenty years later, in 1852, Dickens put an end to his drunken rag-and-bone dealer Krook in Bleak House by means of spontaneous combustion – Krook is charred to a cinder that looks like a burnt log. G.H. Lewes, George Eliot’s lover, took issue with Dickens and declared that spontaneous combustion was impossible, so in his preface to Bleak House Dickens contradicts Lewes and ci
tes thirty examples from press reports. Yet at the end of his article on Krook in The Dickens Encyclopedia (1924), Arthur L. Hayward states dogmatically: “The possibility of spontaneous combustion in human beings has been finally disproved”. He fails to explain what experiments have “finally disproved” it.

  Harrison’s book, which gathers together the result of many studies, leaves no possible doubt of the reality of spontaneous combustion. But what causes it? At present it must be confessed that the phenomenon baffles medical knowledge. But Harrison offers some interesting clues. He speaks of the researches of an American doctor, Mayne R. Coe junior, who was interested in the subject of telekinesis – mind over matter. Coe was able to move aluminium strips pivoted on the points of needles by moving his hand over them – this was obviously due to some natural physical “magnetism”. He began various yoga exercises in an attempt to develop his bioelectricity; sitting one day in an easy-chair, he felt a powerful current passing downward from his head throughout his body; he thought it was of high voltage but low amperage. He suspended a cardboard box from the ceiling on a length of string, and found that he could cause it to move from a distance – when the room was dry, from as much as eight feet. He then charged his body with 35,000 volts DC, using an electric current, and found that he could move the box in exactly the same way. This seemed to prove that he was in fact generating a high voltage current with his mental exercises. He also went up in an aeroplane to an altitude of 21,000 feet, where the air was extremely dry, and produced electric sparks after he had charged his body to 35,000 volts. Coe theorized that this could explain the phenomenon of levitation – when the yogi’s body floats off the ground – with the positively charged human body repelling the negatively charged earth.

  Harrison also cites cases of human “batteries” and magnets people (usually children) who have developed a powerful electric charge. In 1877 Caroline Clare of London, Ontario, turned into a human magnet, who attracted metal objects and could give a powerful electric shock to as many as twenty people holding hands. She was suffering from adolescent depressions at the time. Frank McKinistry of Joplin, Missouri, developed a magnetic force which caused his feet to stick to the earth. In 1895 fourteen-year-old Jennie Morgan of Sedalia, Missouri, generated a charge sufficient to knock a grown man on his back, and when she touched a pump handle sparks flew from her fingertips. It is also worth noting that many teenagers who became the focus of “poltergeist effects” (see chapter 41) developed magnetic or electrical properties; in 1846 a French girl named Angélique Cottin became a kind of human electric battery; objects that touched her flew off violently, and a heavy oak loom began to dance when she came near it. On the other hand, Esther Cox, the “focus” of the disturbances at Great Amherst in Nova Scotia, developed a magnetism that made cutlery fly to her and stick fast. It seems that there must be two kinds of charges, positive and negative.

  According to Dr Coe, each human muscle cell is a battery, and a cubic inch could develop 400,000 volts. (The inventor Nicola Tesla used to demonstrate that the human body can take immense electrical charges – enough to light up neon tubes – provided the amperage is kept very low.)

  But this seems unlikely to explain spontaneous combustion: the whole point of Tesla’s experiments was that he did not burst into flame. It is high amperage that can cause “burn-ups”. (If two 12-volt car batteries are connected by thin wire, the wire will melt; even thick wire becomes hot.) And this could begin to explain why the surroundings of victims of spontaneous combustion are undamaged; they are non-conductors.

  Victims of spontaneous combustion tend to be the old and the young. On 27 August 1938, the 22-year-old Phyllis Newcombe was dancing vigorously in Chelmsford, Essex, when her body glowed with a blue light which turned into flames; she died within minutes. In October of the same year a girl called Maybelle Andrews was dancing in a Soho nightclub with her boy-friend, Billy Clifford, when flames erupted from her back, chest and shoulders. Her boy-friend, who was badly burned trying to put her out, said that there were no flames in the room – the flames seemed to come from the girl herself. She died on the way to hospital. In such cases it seems just conceivable that the activity of dancing built up some kind of static electricity. Michael Harrison even points out that “ritual dancing” is used by primitive tribes to build up emotional tension in religious ceremonies, and suggests that this is what has happened here.

  Michael Harrison also points out some curious geographical links. On 13 March 1966 three men were “spontaneously combusted” at the same time. John Greeley, helmsman of the SS Ulrich, was burnt to a cinder some miles west of Land’s End; George Turner, a lorry-driver, was found burnt at the wheel of his lorry at Upton-by-Chester – the lorry overturned in a ditch; in Nijmegen, Holland, eighteen-year-old Willem ten Bruik died at the wheel of his car. As usual in such cases, the surroundings of all three were undamaged. Harrison points out that the three men were at the points of an equilateral triangle whose sides were 340 miles long. Is it conceivable that the earth itself discharged energy in a triangular pattern?

  Another investigator, Larry Arnold, put forward his own theory in the magazine Frontiers of Science (January 1982): that so-called “ley lines” – lines of “earth force” may be involved. The man who “discovered” ley lines, Alfred Watkins, noted how frequently places called “Brent” occur on them (brent being an old English form of “burnt”). Other “ley-hunters” have suggested that megalithic stone circles are placed at crucial points on ley lines – often at crossing-points of several leys. It is again interesting to note how many stone circles are associated with the idea of dancing – for example, the Merry Maidens in Cornwall; Stonehenge itself was known as “the Giants’ Dance”. It has been suggested that ritual dances occurred at these sites, so that the dancers would somehow interact with the earth energy (or “telluric force”).

  Larry Arnold drew a dozen or so major leys on a map of England, then set out to find if they were associated with mystery fires. He claims that one 400-mile-long “fire-leyne” (as he calls them) passed through five towns where ten mysterious blazes had concurred. He also notes several cases of spontaneous combustion occurring on this “leyne”. He cites four cases which occurred on it between 1852 and 1908.

  Harrison believes that spontaneous combustion is basically a “mental freak”, where the mind somehow influences the body to build up immense charges. The answer could lie in either of the two theories, or in a combination of the two.

  54

  Synchronicity or “Mere Coincidence”?

  The Sunday Times journalist Godfrey Smith was thinking of writing something about the “saga of lost manuscripts” – Carlyle’s manuscript of The French Revolution, burnt by a careless maid, T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, left in a taxi, Hemingway’s suitcase full of early manuscripts, stolen from a train – and decided to call on the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, a treasure-house of similar stories. But before he could introduce the subject into the conversation a girl sitting with them – the wife of the novelist Nicholas Mosley – mentioned that her husband was upset because he had just had the first 150 pages of his new novel stolen from his car. Smith remarked in his Sunday Times column: “We are back in what J. W. Dunne called serial time, and Arthur Koestler called synchronicity, and some of us still call coincidence . . .”

  It was Jung in fact who coined the word “synchronicity” for meaningful coincidence. But Arthur Koestler was equally intrigued by the subject, and discussed it in a book called The Roots of Coincidence in 1972. In the following year he wrote an article about coincidence in The Sunday Times and appealed to readers for examples. Many of these were utilized in his book The Challenge of Chance (1973), co-authored by Sir Alister Hardy and Robert Harvie. He begins with a section called “The Library Angel”, describing coincidences involved with books. In 1972 Koestler had been asked to write about the chess championship between Boris Spassky and Bobbie Fischer, so he went to the London Library to look up books on c
hess and books on Iceland. He decided to start with chess and the first book that caught his eye was entitled Chess in Iceland by Williard Fiske.

  He then tells of how Dame Rebecca West was trying to check up on an episode related by one of the accused in one of the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, and how she discovered to her annoyance that the trials are published in the form of abstracts under arbitrary headings and are therefore useless to a researcher. After an hour of fruitless searching she approached a librarian and said: “I can’t find it . . .”, and casually took a volume off the shelf and opened it. It opened at the page she had been searching for.

  This anecdote is particularly interesting because it involved an apparently “random” action, a casual reaching out without logical purpose. The word “synchronicity” was coined by Jung in connection with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which the Chinese consult as an “oracle”. The method of “consulting” the I Ching consists of throwing down three coins at random half a dozen times and noting whether there are more heads or tails. Two or three tails gives a line with a break in the middle, thus three heads gives an unbroken line. The six lines, placed on top of one another, form a “hexagram”:

  The above hexagram is number 58, “The Joyous – Lake”, with a “Judgement:”: “The Joyous, Success – Perseverance is favourable”. But from the logical point of view it is obviously impossible to explain how throwing down coins at random can provide an answer – even if the question has been very clearly and precisely formulated in the mind before the coins are thrown.