by Aaron Mahnke
The word poltergeist evokes a number of ideas for most people. Most think of the movie. Some picture objects being thrown around a room by an invisible hand. They might even envision the sound of chains rattling and doors creaking open in the night.
And they wouldn’t be too far off from the truth. The word poltergeist is German, and it literally means “noisy spirit.” The idea is that while the typical ghost story only uses one of our five senses, our sight, stories of poltergeists can oftentimes tap all five.
Most poltergeist accounts reference the same types of activity. Objects are mysteriously moved or broken, noises are heard in and around the house, and there are physical attacks such as biting, pinching, hitting, and even tripping. Some people even claim to have seen objects or other people levitated by an unseen force.
And unlike some folklore, stories of noisy spirits are nearly universal. Similar manifestations have been reported by witnesses in dozens of cultures for centuries, from Japan and Brazil to Australia and the United States. For those who view widespread distribution as a major sign of proof, the poltergeist has become an indisputable fact.
One of the earliest records of a poltergeist encounter comes from the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. He recorded an exorcism in AD 94 that sounds eerily similar to those of us familiar with modern exorcism tales. In his report, he describes how, as the spirit was being driven from the person, a bowl of water all the way across the room was suddenly overturned by an invisible force.
Jacob Grimm, one-half of the famous Grimm brothers, who recorded many of the stories we remember from our childhood, also wrote more scholarly books. In his book Deutsche Mythologie, Grimm recorded a story from the German town of Bingen-am-Rhein that took place in the fourth century.
According to the story, people were pulled out of their beds by an unseen force. Loud noises could be heard, as if someone were knocking on the walls or floor. Stones were even thrown, but the person—or spirit—who did the throwing was never found.
Gerald of Wales, the famous clergyman and chronicler, wrote in 1191 of a house in Pembrokeshire that was filled with poltergeist activity. Here, the unseen spirit was said to have thrown handfuls of dirt, as well as tearing clothing and breaking objects in the house. Most frightening to those who experienced it, though, was the fact that this spirit was also said to vocalize all of the secrets of the people in the room.
Similar stories have been recorded countless times in the centuries since Gerald’s day. In one story from the early 1700s, one family encountered unusual activity in the church rectory in Epworth, Lincolnshire. Rev. Samuel Wesley and his wife, Susanna, had ten children, and had lived in the house since it had been built shortly after the previous rectory burned to the ground in 1709.
During the winter of 1716–17, the family began to experience regular noises. They would hear knocking on the walls and doors, or the sounds of people running up and down the stairs. The house was searched from top to bottom in the hope of finding the person responsible, but no cause was found. They even named the noisy spirit Old Jeffrey, and it was said that the spirit made himself visible on Christmas Day that winter. Shortly after, the noises stopped, never to happen again.
In more modern times, one well-known story is that of the Black Monk of Pontefract. There, in the growing community just outside the city of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, England, reports began to circulate about the most violent poltergeist in European history.
Joe and Jean Pritchard lived at 30 East Drive in 1970, along with their son, Philip, and daughter, Diane. According to their report, they were plagued by problems in the house from the start. Objects were thrown, the temperature in rooms would suddenly drop, and they would even find puddles on the floor.
They named the spirit Fred, and soon learned that Fred was not just mischievous but also violent. Not only did the spirit throw eggs and take bites out of their sandwiches, but it also dragged their twelve-year-old, Diane, up the stairs by her neck, leaving handprints on her skin. After Fred attempted to strangle Diane a second time—this time with an electrical cord—the family asked for help.
The police were brought in, as were a number of psychics and paranormal researchers. Even the mayor came by for a visit, but nothing seemed to help. Eventually, the Pritchards moved away, and the noises inside number 30 stopped.
But according to the woman who lives next door in the house that’s connected to number 30, Fred the ghost hasn’t gone anywhere. He still makes frequent visits to her side of the wall, and although he’s usually very quiet, she claims that he sometimes stands in the room and glares at her with menacing eyes.
Under the scrutiny of historical research, though, most recorded poltergeist stories have been shown to be frauds. Oftentimes they were nothing more than pranks put on by the homeowner, or the person who stood the most to gain from the attention. But every now and then, a story comes along that defies explanation.
And when that story involves violent physical attacks and a serious threat to human lives, it becomes downright chilling.
A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT
In 1999, a homeless man broke into a large tomb in a prominent cemetery known as Greyfriars, in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a cold and rainy night, and the man was looking for shelter. I might have gone elsewhere to find a warm, dry place to sleep, but when you’re down and out, anything will do, I suppose.
This man wandered through the graveyard in the dark until he found a large mausoleum, something that looked large enough to allow him to get out of the elements and sleep in relative comfort. This one was known as the Black Mausoleum, and it was enormous. It resembled a large rotunda, with the spaces between the pillars filled in with cut stone.
When the homeless man stumbled upon this tomb, it was exactly what he had been looking for. It had plenty of room to stretch out and sleep in, and it was dry. So he did what anyone desperate for shelter would do: he broke in.
Because it’s rare to find a tomb with windows, the interior of the vault was completely black. Thankfully, the man had a lighter or some other form of illumination, and he used it to explore. In the center of the floor was a large iron grate, similar to what you might find over a sewer drain or in the sidewalk over a subway tunnel in New York City.
Beneath the grate was a staircase that curved and twisted its way down to a lower level. I know this sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, but it’s real. And it gets worse. Because beneath the first level, at the bottom of the stairs, this homeless man discovered four wooden coffins.
They were, of course, very old, and the man probably assumed that because of this, they would contain valuables that he could sell. I imagine he set down whatever it was that he was using as a light on one of the nearby coffins, and then began to try and open another of them. When it didn’t open, he resorted to smashing the lid to break the lock. And that’s when he took a step backward.
The boards in the floor must have been very old. The man must have put his full weight in just the right spot. All of the possibilities must have lined up perfectly in that moment. A brief groan from the wooden floor was followed by a loud crash, and the man tumbled backward into a long-forgotten pit, some part of an even lower level that dated back centuries.
The best guess that historians can make is that the pit had actually been used for the illegal dumping of bodies in the wake of the plague in 1645. What they do know, however, is that the pit was sealed very well. So sealed, in fact, that when this homeless man landed on the pile of 350-year-old corpses, they were surprisingly well preserved.
They weren’t skeletal and dry, like you might expect. No, these bodies were wet with something that resembled green slime. Their clothing was intact, albeit ragged and torn, and their hair was matted to their shriveled heads. And of course, there was an overwhelming stench in the air.
The man bolted, and I don’t think
there’s a single one of us who could blame him. Fearing for his life, the man climbed out of the pit, up the stone stairs to the main vault, and out the door. He was in such a hurry that he even fell and cut his head on the doorway to the mausoleum.
Outside, a security guard was patrolling the area with his canine partner when the homeless man burst out of the tomb. Maybe it was the blood running down the man’s face. Maybe it was the white dust that covered him from head to toe because of his adventures below the tomb. Or maybe it was simply the sight of a pale, shrieking figure charging out from the dark crypt.
Whatever it was, when the guard saw the man, he turned tail and ran just as fast as he could, away from the darkness of the cemetery and into the city beyond.
RUDE AWAKENINGS
As difficult as it is to imagine, the frightening events of that night in 1999 were just the beginning. Like a tiny spark igniting an entire barn, the break-in at the Black Mausoleum set in motion something that no one has since been able to adequately explain.
It turns out the mausoleum belonged to none other than Sir George Mackenzie, a man who had died in 1690. Along with being a lawyer and lord advocate to the crown of Scotland, Mackenzie had been instrumental in sending hundreds of Presbyterian Covenanters to their deaths in the late seventeenth century. Today he is known as Bloody Mackenzie, and according to the local reports, this invasion of his resting place set off a series of events that can only be blamed on a very angry spirit. And it didn’t wait very long.
The day after the break-in, a woman was taking a walk through the cemetery. It’s unclear whether she was a tourist interested in seeing the Covenanters’ Prison area of the graveyard or a local just out for a walk. But when she drew near to the mausoleum, she decided to peer through one of the two small grates in the tomb door. As she stood there, a gust of cold wind rushed out of the tomb with such force that, she claimed, it knocked her backward and off the stone steps, onto her back.
A few days later, another woman was found unconscious on the sidewalk outside the tomb, sprawled out on her back as if she had fallen. She claimed that invisible hands had grabbed her around the throat and attempted to strangle her. When she pulled back the collar of her shirt, her neck was ringed by a series of dark bruises, as if fingertips had dug into her skin.
Soon after, another tourist—this time a young man—experienced something eerily similar. For others, though, the consequences of visiting the tomb were more physical and lasting. Some people have found scratches on their arms, neck, or chest, while others have discovered burn marks. Many of these injuries disappeared almost as quickly and mysteriously as they appeared. Some, though, claim to have been permanently scarred.
All told, people have broken fingers, felt their hair pulled, and been pushed or struck, all by an unseen force. People have even felt nauseous or numb, or both. And not just one or two people, but hundreds. Sometimes these attacks happen near the tomb, and sometimes they happen later.
One story in particular stands out. A former police officer reported participating in a tour of the cemetery a few years ago. After returning to his hotel room that night, he picked up the book he had been given on the tour that covered the details of the hauntings. As he did, he felt a sharp pain, as if someone were trying to burn him. When he ran to the mirror to check, he found five deep scratches on his neck beneath his chin.
The following morning, the officer visited his mother and told her what happened. He also gave her the book. According to him, he couldn’t stand to have it around any longer, and so he left it at her house.
When he called her later and asked about the book, he caught her in the bathroom. She was standing in front of a mirror, examining five long scratches on her throat.
All told, nearly four hundred people have claimed to have been attacked by something otherworldly around the tomb. Almost two hundred of those are people who have actually passed out during a ghost tour. Sometimes every person in the tour will feel the exact same thing. Oftentimes complete strangers will independently report the exact same experience.
But the odd experiences extend beyond the tours. An unusually high number of dead animals have been found in the area around Mackenzie’s tomb. Unexplainable fires have broken out in nearby buildings. People have reported cold spots, and the usual photographic and electronic malfunctions have occurred as well.
Some have gone looking for an explanation for such a large number of unusual reports, but the theories are as varied as the types of attacks. One idea tries to connect the dots between nearby Edinburgh University’s Artificial Intelligence Unit—which uses high-voltage machinery—and the sandstone deep underground beneath the ancient cemetery. The porous stone, they say, absorbs the energy and releases it later, causing the odd experiences.
But this is a difficult theory to swallow, especially for the people who have been physically assaulted by whatever it is that haunts the tomb. The company that conducts the tours through the graveyard is just as interested in finding the cause, though, and that’s why they’ve spent years collecting photographs of injuries, firsthand accounts, letters from witnesses, and other documentation.
Unfortunately, most of those records were destroyed in 2003, when a fire swept through their office. Everything inside the tour company’s space was incinerated, but nothing more. Every single nearby building remained untouched.
The insurance company never found the cause.
THE UNSEEN
Outside of places with frequent earthquake activity, most people don’t think it’s normal for photographs to fall off their wall, or for a chair to slide across the floor, or to find themselves knocked down by an unseen force. For some, these events are equal parts unusual and inconvenient. For others, though, they are frightening.
It’s difficult to say what’s really going on in these stories. Some events can be chalked up to natural causes, or the human tendency to misinterpret the things we see.
We are very good at finding patterns, after all. It’s called pareidolia, that moment when we see patterns where they don’t really exist. We do this when we look up at clouds and see the shape of a turtle, but it also happens subconsciously. Our minds are always searching for patterns.
Or perhaps there’s something more to the stories. What if there really are sinister, violent spirits that can attack us if provoked? In many stories, priests are brought in to bless the homes or perform exorcisms, a solution that certainly assumed there’s a supernatural source. And sometimes it’s worked.
In the years since the break-in at the Black Mausoleum, there have been two attempts at exorcism. The second of those took place in 2000, just a year after the activity began.
Colin Grant, minister of a spiritualist church and professional exorcist, was brought to Greyfriars Cemetery. Standing in front of the Black Mausoleum, he performed his ceremony. While doing so, he claimed to feel overwhelmed by the sensation of oppression, that hundreds of tormented souls were swirling around him, trying to break through into our world. He said he had feared for his life, and quickly left before he could finish.
Just a few weeks later, Colin Grant was found dead, victim of a sudden heart attack.
DURING HIS HISTORIC journey aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin spent over a month on a small island off the coast of Chile known as Chiloé. It wasn’t his final destination, but he still managed to work and collect information and specimens, including a small endangered fox now known as Darwin’s zorro.
He also witnessed the aftereffects of an earthquake, and made note of a rainbow that transitioned from the typical semicircle to a full circle right before his eyes. But it was the people he encountered that seemed to impact him the most.
He later wrote, “They are a humble, quiet, industrious set of men. Although with plenty to eat, the people are very poor…and…the lower orders cannot scrape together money sufficient to purchase even the s
mallest luxuries.”
He also noted seeing a pair of black-necked swans, but thankfully Darwin didn’t have the same view of birds that the local people did. And still do, actually. One local historian recalls how, when he was a boy, a hunchbacked heron flew low over his fishing boat. When he told his father, the older man grabbed his shotgun and waited for the bird to return.
Why? Because for as long as anyone could remember, the people of Chiloé have believed that some birds are more than they appear. Some people, it seems, believe they are warlocks. Seeing one was a bad omen, hinting that someone close to you would soon die.
All of us are ruled by authority to some degree, whether it’s through our government, our religion, or our family ties. Often it’s all three. But there’s another governing body, one that’s as old as time itself, and on Chiloé, it controlled people for centuries.
Sometimes, you see, people are ruled by fear.
BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
The Incas called it the Place of the Seagulls. They stayed away from the area, believing it was the border between their empire of prosperity and safety and the cold, dark wilderness to the south.
Chiloé isn’t a large island—perhaps less than a hundred miles from north to south—but it’s certainly the largest in the collection of small islands there off the coast of Chile. And to visit it is to go back in time. Green hills, mountains in the distance, the dark waves of the Pacific lapping on the shore where colorful houses are built on stilts to stay above the mud and rocks.
Darwin described it as beautiful in 1835. He wrote of the mixture of evergreen trees and tropical vegetation, of rolling hills and thick forests. And all of that green, Darwin postulated, was due to the enormous amount of rainfall. Gray skies and wet soil are a constant of life in Chiloé, then as now.