by Colin Wilson
The account in another document, the Annales Fuldenses, from which Sigebert of Gembloux condensed this account, mentions that the man the spirit tormented was a farmer and that the spirit accused him of adultery and of seducing the daughter of his overseer.
Now at this point, oddly enough, we leave the realm of superstition – if the vampire is indeed superstition – and enter that of actuality. For the poltergeist is undoubtedly one of the best-authenticated of all psychical phenomena; there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of accounts on record. Poltergeists specialize in mischief and seem to be the juvenile delinquents of the psychic world. They drive people to distraction with their pranks, causing objects to fly through the air (and sometimes change course abruptly in midflight) and often making a racket that can be heard for miles. Allowing for the exaggerations of the medieval chronicler, the above case from Sigebert has the ring of authenticity. It is true that speaking poltergeists are unusual; nevertheless, there are a number of cases on record (see chapter 41).
Generally speaking, poltergeists do no harm; Giraldus Cambrensis remarks of a Pembrokeshire poltergeist of A.D. 1191 that it seemed to intend “to deride rather than to do bodily injury.” Again, however, there are a few exceptions. The psychical investigator Guy Lyon Playfair mentions a Brazilian case in which the poltergeist drove a girl to suicide by tormenting her. And the poltergeist known as the “Bell witch,” whose malign activities continued from 1817 to 1821 in Robertson County, Tennessee, fixed its attentions on one particular man, farmer John Bell, and – like Sigebert’s poltergeist – “tormented him without intermission,” beating him black and blue and finally poisoning him.
What exactly is a poltergeist? Writers like Sigebert and Giraldus Cambrensis took the understandable view that it was a spirit. Modern psychical research is inclined to find such a view embarrassing. Frank Podmore, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, concluded in 1890 that they are mischievous children throwing stones. But conscientious investigators soon realized that such a view was untenable. In the mid-twentieth century they finally came to terms with the poltergeist by deciding that it was an example of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” (RSPK) or “mind over matter”. A few gifted psychics are able to move small objects, such as pins, compass needles, or scraps of paper, by concentrating on them. No one has yet succeeded in doing anything more spectacular with “mind force” – even some thing as modest as throwing a stone.
On the other hand, it was soon noticed by investigators that nearly all poltergeist occurrences seemed to centre around an emotionally disturbed adolescent or one on the point of puberty. If these individuals were somehow causing the poltergeist effects, then they must be doing so unconsciously. One of the strongest advocates of this theory was the Freudian psychiatrist Nandor Fodor, who was also a distinguished psychical investigator. Fodor argued that the Freudian unconscious is to blame for the “spontaneous psychokinesis” and that the energies involved are the powerful sexual energies of puberty. Neither Fodor nor any other adherent of the theory could explain how the unconscious mind could cause heavy objects to fly through the air and even cause them to penetrate solid walls. But the theory had a satisfyingly scientific ring and was soon generally accepted.
In the early 1970s, however, one investigator came to have strong doubts about this theory. He was Guy Lyon Playfair, a Cambridge graduate who had gone to teach English in Rio de Janeiro. He became interested in the paranormal after a personal experience of “psychic surgery” and joined the Brazilian Institute for Psycho Biophysical Research (IBPP). In Brazil, a large proportion of the population are adherents of a religion known as Spiritism, based on the writings of the Frenchman Allan Kardec, which accepts communication with the dead and the active role of spirits in human existence. After engaging in a number of poltergeist investigations, Playfair was less inclined to dismiss Spiritism as nonsense – in fact, he concluded that Kardec is correct in asserting that poltergeists are spirits. His investigations into the Brazilian form of voodoo, known as umbanda, also convinced him that it actually works and that umbanda practitioners often perform their “magic” by means of spirits. The experiences that led him to these conclusions are described in his book The Flying Cow.
In a book entitled Poltergeist, I have described how my own investigations led me to conclude that Playfair was correct (see also chapter 41) and how the “spontaneous psychokinesis” theory simply fails to cover all the facts. After being a convinced adherent of this theory, I found myself forced by the evidence to accept the embarrassing view that poltergeists are spirits. Since that time I have met many psychical researchers – particularly in America – who are at least willing to entertain that possibility.
The same (as we shall see elsewhere in this volume) applies to the closely related field of “possession”, the notion that human beings may be possessed by “unclean spirits”. The standard view is stated in Aldous Huxley’s well-known study, The Devils of Loudun, in which it is taken for granted that the nuns who writhed on the ground and uttered appalling blasphemies were in the grip of sexual hysteria. Here, even more than in the case of the poltergeist, it seems natural to assume that we are dealing with psychological illness – and no doubt in many cases this is so. Yet a number of American psychiatrists – among them Morton Prince, Ralph Allison, and Adam Crabtree – have produced studies of “multiple personality” in which they admit that it is difficult to explain certain cases except in terms of possession by the spirit of a deceased person. (See chapter 42.)
Another piece of interesting evidence for this view of possession can be found in Professor lan Stevenson’s study, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. He describes the case of a Hindu boy named Jasbir Lal Jat, who apparently died at the age of three in 1954. Before he could be buried, he revived – but with a new personality completely unlike the old one. This new Jasbir claimed to be a man named Sobha Ram, who had died in the village of Vehedi after a fall from a cart. He claimed to be of Brahmim caste and made difficulties about his food. The family dismissed his claims as childish imagination. But when Jasbir was six, a Brahmin woman from Vehedi came to the village, and Jasbir insisted that she was his aunt. She was, in fact, the aunt of a man named Sobha Ram who had died of a fall from a cart at precisely the same time Jasbir had revived. Taken to Vehedi, Jasbir showed an intimate knowledge of the place and of Sobha Ram’s relatives, convincing his own father and mother that he was telling the truth. The conclusion must be that if Jasbir was Sobha Ram, then the “spirit” of the latter took possession of the vacant body at the moment Jasbir “died”.
In his classic work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Frederic Myers, one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research, devotes a chapter to “Trance, Possession and Ecstacy”. He begins by acknowledging that when spiritualist “mediums” go into a trance, they are “taken over” by spirits and that this constitutes the phenomenon that was once called “possession”. He adds that in some cases, the spirit messages may be deceptive and that “they suggest – nor can we absolutely disprove the suggestion – a type of intelligence inferior to humans, animal-like, and perhaps parasitic”. This is as far as he is willing to go in conceding that possession may occasionally be nonbenevolent. But he goes on to cite many cases of what he calls “psychic invasion” – that is, cases in which someone has seen the “spirit” of another person, often someone who has died at exactly that moment. In other cases, the person who “appears” is still alive. A Mrs T., living in Adelaide, recounts how, lying in bed but still wide awake, she saw a former lover standing in the bedroom, as well as another man, whom she felt to be a cousin who had “been the means of leading him astray”. The former lover, who looked very pale, told her that his father had just died and that he had inherited his property. Because her husband was skeptical about this vision, she wrote it down. Some weeks later she heard that her lover’s father had died at exactly the time of the vision and had left him his prop
erty.
Another case, cited in Phantasms of the Living (which Myers co-authored), has a slightly more sinister touch. A nineteen-year-old girl described how she had begun having dreams of a man with a mole on the side of his mouth, and how these filled her with repugnance. The dreams always began with a feeling of some kind of “influence” coming over her. (In spite of her reticence, it is clear that these dreams were of a sexual nature and that the man was forcing her to participate in sex acts.) Two years later, at a party in Liverpool, she felt the same “influence” and turned around to find herself looking into the face of the man with the mole. She was introduced to him, and he insisted that they had met before, which she denied. But when he reminded her of a Birmingham music festival, she suddenly remembered that she had experienced the same unpleasant sense of “influence” there and had then fainted. After this the man began to pursue her and even began talking about the dreams. She felt instinctively that if she admitted to these, she would be in his power; therefore, she pretended not to understand. Eventually, she left Liverpool and ceased to see him.
Here it seems clear that the man had recognized her as the kind of person over whom he was able to exercise some psychic “influence” and had somehow invaded her dreams. If we can once concede the possibility of such “invasion”, as well as the possibility of “spirits”, then the notion of vampires suddenly seems less absurd.
In a remarkable book entitled Hungry Ghosts, the British journalist Joe Fisher has described his own strange experience of “spirits”. Fisher had written a book about reincarnation, in the course of which he had become convinced of its reality. One day, after being interviewed on the radio in Toronto (where he lives), he received a phone call from a woman who explained that she had accidentally become a mouthpiece of “discarnate entities”. She was being hypnotized in an attempt to cure her of leukemia, and various “spirit guides” had begun speaking through her mouth. (Myers points out that a “spirit” can only enter a body when the usual “tenant” is absent, a point to note when considering that early accounts of vampires involve attack during sleep.)
The first time Fisher went to the woman’s house, a “spirit” named Russell spoke through her mouth with a reassuring Yorkshire accent and told him that he had a female “guide”, a Greek girl named Filipa, who had been his mistress in a previous existence three centuries earlier. This struck Fisher as plausible, since he had always felt some affinity with Greece. He began attending the seances regularly and devoting some time every morning to relaxing and trying to contact Filipa. Eventually he succeeded; buzzing noises in his ears would be succeeded by a feeling of bliss and communication. Filipa was a sensual little creature who liked to be hugged, and Fisher implies that, in some sense, they became lovers. It broke up his current love affair; his live-in girlfriend felt she was no match for a ghost.
Other people at the séances were told about their “guides” or guardian angels. One guide was an ex-RAF pilot named Ernest Scott, another an amusing cockney named Harry Maddox. Fisher’s disillusionment began when, on a trip back to England, he decided to try and verify Ernest Scott’s war stories – having no doubt whatever that they would prove genuine. The airfield was certainly genuine; so was the squadron Ernest claimed to have belonged to; the descriptions of wartime raids were accurate; so were the descriptions of the squadron’s moves from airfield to airfield. But there had been no Ernest Scott in the squadron, and a long search in the Public Record Office failed to turn up his name. Fisher went back to Canada in a bitter mood and accused Ernest of lying. Ernest strenuously denied it. Anyway, he said, he was due to reincarnate in another body, so had to leave. The “guide” Russell later told Fisher that Ernest had been reborn in England and gave the name of the parents and date of birth. Oddly enough, when Fisher checked on this it proved to be accurate. He even contacted the parents, who were intrigued but decided they had no wish to get more deeply involved.
With Russell’s approval, Fisher tried to track down the farm in Yorkshire where Russell claimed he had lived in the nineteenth century. Here again, many of the facts Russell had given about the Harrogate area proved to be accurate; but again, the crucial facts were simply wrong. It seemed that Russell was also a liar. And so, upon investigation, was the lovable World War I veteran Harry Maddox. His accounts of World War I battles were accurate; but Harry did not exist.
Finally, Fisher took his search to Greece. In spite of his disillusion with the other guides, he had no doubt whatever that Filipa was genuine. She possessed, he states early in the book, “more love, compassion and perspicacity than I had ever known”. The problem was that all his attempts to locate Theros – a village near the Turkish border – in atlases or gazetteers had failed. Yet that could be because it had been destroyed by the Turks in the past three centuries. But a town called Alexandroupoli, which Filipa had mentioned, still existed. After a long and frustrating search for the remains of Theros, Fisher went to Alexandroupoli, a city that he assumed had been founded by Alexander the Great. But a brochure there disillusioned him. Alexandroupoli was a mere two centuries old; it had not even existed at the time when he and Filipa were supposed to have been lovers. Like the others, Filipa was a liar and a deceiver.
In a chapter entitled “Siren Call of the Hungry Ghosts”, Fisher tries to analyze what has happened to him. The answer seems simple. He had been involved with what Kardec called “earthbound spirits”, spirits who either do not realize they are dead or have such a craving to remain on earth that they remain attached to it:
These earthbound spirits or, in Tibetan Buddhist phraseology, pretas or “hungry ghosts”, are individuals whose minds, at the point of physical death, have been incapable of disentangling from desire. Thus enslaved, the personality becomes trapped on the lower planes even as it retains, for a while, its memory and individuality. Hence the term “lost soul”, a residual entity that is no more than an astral corpse-in-waiting. It has condemned itself to perish; it has chosen a “second death”.
Fisher also quotes Lieutenant Colonel Arthur E. Powell’s book entitled The Astral Body:
Such spooks are conscienceless, devoid of good impulses, tending towards disintegration, and consequently can work for evil only, whether we regard them as prolonging their vitality by vampirising at séances, or polluting the medium and sitters with astral connections of an altogether undesirable kind.
And Fisher cites the modern American expert on out-of-the-body journeys, Robert Monroe:
Monroe tells of encountering a zone next to the Earth plane populated by the “dead”, who couldn’t or wouldn’t realize they were no longer physical beings . . . The beings he perceived “kept trying to be physical, to do and be what they had been, to continue being physical one way or another. Bewildered, some spent all of their activity in attempting to communicate with friends and loved ones still in bodies or with anyone else who might come along”.
Kardec had insisted that most human beings can be unconsciously influenced by spirits, since they can wander freely in and out of our bodies and minds. And a psychical investigator named Carl Wickland, whose Thirty Years Among the Dead is a classic of Spiritualism (see chapter 42), declared that “these earthbound spirits are the supposed ‘devils’ of all ages; devils of human origin. . . . The influence of these discarnate entities is the cause of many of the inexplicable and obscure events of earth life and of a large part of the world’s misery”. Wickland states that these entities are attracted to the magnetic light emanating from mortals; they attach themselves to these auras, finding an avenue of expression through influencing, obsessing, or possessing their victims.
Such spirits can easily be contacted by means of an Ouija board, a smooth tabletop with letters arranged in a semicircle; the “sitters” place their fingers on an upturned glass, which moves of its own accord from letter to letter, spelling out words. Anyone who has ever tried it will have noticed that the “spirits” seldom tell the truth. G. K. Chesterton devotes several pages of his Autobi
ography to experiments with an Ouija board, and while he concedes that the force that moves the glass is, in some sense, “supernatural”, he nevertheless concludes: “The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power is that it tells lies”.
This is interesting, because Chesterton became a Roman Catholic convert, and the Catholic church has always been strongly opposed to “Spiritualism”. This is not because the Church rejects life after death, but because it is deeply suspicious of the kind of entities that “come through” at séances, taking the view that spirits have no reason to hang around the “earth plane”, any more than adults want to hang around their old childhood schools. Unlike H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, or other modern rationalists, Chesterton did not reject “spirit communication” as a fraud or delusion; but, like Joe Fisher, he was unable to accept the “spirits” at face value.
If we can at once concede the possibility of “psychic invasion”, as well as the possibility of “spirits”, then the notion of vampires suddenly seems less absurd. In The Magus of Strovolos, an American academic, Kyriacos C. Markides, has described his friendship with a modern Cypriot mystic and “magus”, Spyros Sathi, known as Daskalos, who lives in Nicosia. Daskalos, like Myers and Fisher, takes the actual reality of spirits for granted, but he also speaks without embarrassment of possession and vampirism.
Some of Markides’s stories of Daskalos are so extraordinary that most readers will suspect him of extreme gullibility. Yet Daskalos’s teachings, as quoted by Markides, make it clear that he deserves to be classified with such twentieth-century teachers as Steiner and Gurdjieff. And Markides offers many examples that seem to leave no doubt whatsoever of the genuineness of Daskalos’s psychic powers. He was able to describe Markides’s house in America in remarkable detail, although he had no way of learning such details. On another occasion, when Markides and a friend were searching for Daskalos, Markides remarked jokingly that perhaps he was visiting a mistress; when they found him and asked where he had been, Daskalos snapped, “Visiting a mistress”, then went on to say that he had overheard all their “silly conversation”. It becomes clear that Daskalos takes “possession” for granted, and Markides tells a number of stories, in some of which he was personally involved.