Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  • Usually, however, the movement itself is not observed, but only inferred from the results of it, so that the object is suddenly found in an unusual place only a second after it was seen elsewhere.

  • Objects appearing from ‘nowhere’.

  • Glass, furniture, crockery being broken.

  • Doors being opened or closed; curtains billowing when there is no draught causing the movement.

  • Missiles directed at a person with great speed, but usually narrowly missing. Objects may refuse to move when watched, as if ‘shy’, but will immediately move when the observer is momentarily distracted.

  • Water dripping or pools of water appearing.

  • Rarely, spontaneous combustion.

  • Cold spots and, rarely, smells.

  • Sounds of music and jangling of bells.

  • Voices, or baby and child-like sounds such as sucking, smacking of lips, occasional crows and chuckles.

  • Very commonly, interference with electrical apparatus – lights switched on and off, domestic apparatus set in operation, record players and tape recorders made to fluctuate in speed, electric clocks working in reverse, telephones ringing for no reason, bells going haywire.

  Reports of noisy ghosts go back to Roman times and incidents are recorded in the medieval histories of Germany, China and Wales. One of the earliest fully documented poltergeist cases was investigated in 1877 by a founder of the Society for Psychical Research called Sir William Barrett. It occurred in the Irish home of a widower and his five children. Barrett discovered that if he asked the ghost to knock a certain number of times, it would do it. He then realised, to his astonishment, that it would even knock the right number of times if he merely thought the instruction.

  In a meticulously researched book called In Search of Ghosts by Ian Wilson, I find a spectacular report from Long Island in America in 1958, in which flying objects and unexplained noises caused mayhem in a family home. All the scary fuss was witnessed by researchers and the local police, led by a Detective Joseph Tozzi, who went to incredible lengths to uncover the source of the disturbance. With the help of a small army of specialists, he tested for high-frequency radio waves, abnormal electrical activity, structural problems, water issues and local flight paths. He found nothing. The paranormal researchers who were documenting the nasty goings-on noted that only certain objects (including a record player, a night table and almost every bottle in the house) would be affected. This, coupled with the fact that the same things would be repeatedly thrown, signified that there was a process of selection going on. And that is the frightening part. Because it means that whatever was stomping invisibly around the house had intelligence.

  Next I read about a haunting in a Cardiff car workshop in the early nineties, which appears to prove a link between poltergeists and apparitions. For over two years, many observers, including Professor David Fontana who is a fellow of the British Psychological Society and chairman of the SPR Survival Research Committee, saw a huge volume of phenomena, including bombardments of flying stones that would come from one corner and would last for hours, and coins appearing on request (all of which dated from 1912). The family who owned the garage and the shop attached to it assumed the spirit was a young boy because of its childish behaviour. This view was strengthened after an incident that followed the disappearance of a large rubber ball and a teddy bear from their shop. After hearing the sound of a bouncing ball coming from inside the suspended ceiling, the owner, Paul, got his ladder out and went up to investigate. The missing items were there. Then, towards the end of the haunting, Paul saw a full apparition of a boy, who was about twelve years old, sitting in the corner where the stones were thrown from.

  If you take this evidence in conjunction with the findings of Sir William Barrett and others, it means that poltergeists are invisible, sentient ghosts of dead humans that can breeze through the laws of physics and read the minds of the living, and whose simple aim is often simply to persecute a person with massive terror.

  Still in America, I find the true tale behind The Exorcist. The epicentre of the real attack was actually a thirteen-year-old boy, who had been experimenting with a Ouija board. It was 1949 when the family of Roland Doe first started to hear scratching noises in the walls. After that, furniture started moving, his bed would shake in the night and his sheets would be torn off, sometimes with the boy still inside them. He would also fall into trances, drool rivers of phlegm and would be mysteriously injured with scratches and cuts all over his body. A Lutheran minister, the Reverend Schulze, decided he was possessed by demons and led several exorcisms which, eventually, stopped the phenomena. In contrast with the film, however, Schulze managed to survive the encounter.

  Another ghostly celluloid legend I looked into was Spielberg’s Poltergeist. In primary school a friend once gave me nightmares by telling me that all the actors in the film had been killed by a curse. You can understand why I was scared. Just as in the movie, evil’s malevolent claw had come right out of the TV screen and pulled the doomed innocents back in with it – probably to hell. Except, I now discover, that it didn’t. Only four of the cast died early. The girl, Heather O’Rourke, died of intestinal stenosis in 1988, aged twelve. The woman who played her older sister, Dominique Dunn, was murdered by her ex shortly after the film’s release. And Will Sampson, who played a ‘good spirit’, and Julian Beck, who played a ‘bad spirit’, died of heart and lung trouble and cancer respectively. All of which, it seems to me, lie well within the floodlit ballpark of simple coincidence. In the end, the most alarming thing I could discover about Poltergeist is that it was a PG.

  The case behind another famous ghost movie is far more murky. In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into a house on 112 Ocean Drive in Amityville, the place where a man called Ronnie DeFeo had murdered his entire family. That much appears to be true. But the Lutzes then told the world they had suffered twenty-eight days of the most bizarre haunting phenomena, which included green slime spewing down the stairs, a spectral marching band, and possession of the girl by an evil pig called Jodie. Their spin-off book and film of these ‘experiences’ made millions. This resulted in law-suits ping-ponging about the place, including, interestingly, an action by Ronnie DeFeo’s lawyer who claimed that he had approached the Lutzes with a concept for a ghost-based money-making scam in the first place and that they had done it without him. The Lutzes then countersued. In one of the cases, Judge Jack Weinstein stated for the record ‘the evidence shows fairly clearly that the Lutzes during this entire period were considering and acting with the thought of having a book published’. The family who moved into Amityville after the Lutzes found nothing paranormally wrong with the house. The only thing that disturbed their peace was the constant stream of ghost-tourists knocking on the window. So, they decided to sue the Lutzes …

  I move on. And am disappointed to find that Ghostbusters apparently has very little basis in reality. Rent-A-Ghost has none.

  The Exorcist, though, unwittingly resembles a genuine incident from the nineteenth century more closely than it does its actual source. I find a report by a German doctor called Justinus Kerner who describes how an eight-year-old girl ‘suddenly was tossed convulsively hither and thither in the bed, and this lasted for more than seven weeks; after which suddenly a quite coarse man’s voice spoke through the mouth of this child’. Another case, in 1889, told of eleven-year-old Dinah Dragg: ‘A deep gruff voice, as of an old man … instantly replied in a language that cannot be repeated here.’ A different case again was documented, of a priest trying to exorcise a young girl. When the priest asked her, ‘As you know so many things, do you also know how to pray?’, the girl replied, ‘I shall shit down your neck.’ Just like Kathy Ganiel.

  Then I come across the chilling story of a British man called Andrew Green. Born in 1927, he is one of the country’s best-known ghosthunters. His father had been a rehousing officer and in 1944, when Andrew was in his teens, he accompanied him on an inspection of an em
pty property. Nobody had lived in 16 Montpelier Road in Ealing for a decade and builders who’d been working in it had complained of the sounds of footsteps, things being moved about and doors slamming in places where doors had been removed. One group of workmen fled after three hours. So Andrew’s father asked a friend at the Met to check out the history of the house. He reported back that there had been a murder there, of a baby that was thrown from the property’s seventy-foot tower. And there was more. There had been twenty suicides at the house, all of which involved people hurling themselves off the same place.

  Their curiosity ignited, Andrew and his father went back to Montpelier Road for a poke about. When Andrew reached the stairs that led up to the tower, he felt invisible hands pushing him up. On reaching the top, he heard a powerful voice in his head telling him the garden was only twelve inches below and that he wouldn’t hurt himself if he jumped. Andrew was only slapped aware of the deadly height of the drop when his dad realised what was about to happen and yanked him back from the edge. He’d saved his life. From that moment, Andrew Green has been obsessed with ghosts.

  Green’s investigation into Montpelier Road never reached a satisfactory conclusion. But a chance meeting with an ex-maid, years later, did suggest a possible occult explanation. She told Green that she remembered a strange routine that took place every Friday. The butler would leave the tower holding two silver candlesticks with black candles in them, as well as a mat covered in ‘strange patterns’ that she had to clean. Was this evidence that satanic rituals were taking place in the tower? Had the owners, with the connivance of the butler, summoned something evil that had remained, lurking amongst the dust and corners of the abandoned house?

  One of the most disturbing aspects of my time in Philadelphia was Lou’s live recording of Electronic Voice Phenomena. So after a lunch of two sandwiches, one coffee and some uneasy rumination, I decide to leap haphazardly into their history. EVP were first discovered in 1936 and, even though huge amounts of research has since been carried out on the subject, in Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, France and America, still nobody knows where the voices come from.

  It was twenty-three years after their discovery, in 1959, that EVP became an international phenomenon. A Swedish documentary-maker called Friedrich Jurgenson was taping some twittering birds in his garden for use in one of his films, and when he played his recording back he was annoyed to find the sound of a man talking about ‘nocturnal birdsong’ in Norwegian all over the top of the tweeting. So, he did it again. And again. And the voices kept coming. Eventually, Jurgenson realised that they didn’t belong to any living human. And his curiosity turned to shock when the voices started talking directly to him, using his familial pet name and mentioning the names of several dead relatives.

  Still, sceptics insist that EVP are just roaming radio waves that have become lost in the ether, or meteors bouncing around the earth’s atmosphere. This is despite more recent research by an American called Raymond Bayless, who has recorded voices under extremely rigorous laboratory conditions, and the Galileo Ferraris Electrotechnical Institute in Turin, who found there was a complete absence, in the voices, of the fundamental frequency that is emitted by human vocal chords. This finding has been backed up by a spaceman. Alexander MacRae worked for NASA on voice authentication programmes on their Skylab project and has confirmed this, as well as discovering several other key differences between EVP and earthly voices.

  Even minor celebrities aren’t immune to the phenomena. When comedienne Sandi Toksvig went on location to a haunted castle, to record an episode of the show Excess Baggage for Radio 4, she and her crew were staggered when they heard strange whispers on their tapes. And this wasn’t the first time EVP have found their way onto the radio. In the mid-eighties, a consultant electrical acoustic engineer called Hans Otto König tried to make a machine that enabled a two-way conversation with the voices (this has been attempted before – in 1977, an electronics engineer called Bill O’Neil had some success with a device he called a ‘Spiricom’). König was invited onto Radio Luxembourg (which was, at the time, one of Europe’s premiere radio stations) to demonstrate his invention to a sceptical crew and the DJ, a man called Rainer Holbe.

  Holbe and a team of technicians watched König set his kit up and, for extra anti-fraud safety, the technicians refused to let König anywhere near his machine during the broadcast – only they were allowed to touch it. Then, during the show, one of the Radio Luxembourg crew asked if there was anybody there, and everybody heard a voice saying, ‘Otto König makes wireless with the dead.’ It answered the next question by saying, simply, ‘We hear your voice.’ By this point, the DJ was physically shaking. He told the listeners, ‘I swear by the life of my children nothing has been manipulated. There are no tricks. It is a voice and we do not know from where it comes.’ Following the broadcast, Radio Luxembourg released a statement confirming that the show was fully supervised and that all the technicians and engineers present were convinced that the EVP were paranormal.

  There have been more recent experiments with two-way EVP conversations. Dr Anabela Cardoso, one of Portugal’s most senior female diplomats, began experimenting with the voices in 1997. Instead of trying to get them to show up against a background of the ‘white noise’ that you find on a cassette tape, she used a detuned radio. She’s chatted with several people who were previously unknown to her, and also many family members. Recently, Professor David Fontana (who also investigated the Cardiff poltergeist) travelled to Lyon, where Dr Cardoso is stationed as consul general, to listen to her tapes. He confirmed that the voices were loud and clear, and that many of them give their names, comment on events in Dr Cardoso’s studio and have given information that she didn’t previously know – such as the full name of the maid she’d just hired. (An interesting side-note: Cardoso sometimes talks to the EVP about the nature of the afterlife. They’ve told her that survival is a natural law for all beings, and that suffering in this world is important for spiritual development.)

  EVP can come in any language, and you can get men, women and children. Sometimes, they even sing. In the early seventies, an SPR researcher called D.J. Ellis conducted his own investigation into EVP. After two years, he concluded that they were ‘highly subjective’ and existed only in the imaginations of the desperate listeners. All this puzzles me. Because what I heard in Philadelphia wasn’t my imagination. And it wasn’t an actual talking voice, either. In fact, we couldn’t make out what any of the voices were saying. Not really. All that was apparent was that they were voice-like and that they sounded evil and angry and scary beyond words. Many other famous EVP experiments, including Dr Cardoso’s, have produced solid, unequivocal voices. The ones that were broadcast on Radio Luxembourg were said to have sounded just as clear as those of the DJ.

  As technology has grown and more electronic devices are invented, the spirits of the dead have discovered new ways of saying hello to the living. In 1985 a startled German called Klaus Schrieber received contact from two of his dead wives on his television. Voices have also been picked up on PCs, radios, telephones and videos. Computer printers have even been known to spontaneously spew messages from the deceased. I look around me, at all the students in the library. I watch them reading, their internal voices all chattering silently to themselves as their eyes pick over the words. I imagine the air around me filled with more chattering tongues than there are in the room. I start to sweat slightly, and decide to stop imagining things.

  In 1967 the ghost of Thomas Edison appeared to a German and announced that anyone could contact the dead simply by tuning their TVs to 740 megahertz. That didn’t work. But, when he was alive, Mr Edison had been convinced that the afterlife could be contacted. In 1920 he wrote in the Scientific American that he was working on a machine that could do just that. Unfortunately, his death came before the invention’s completion.

  Edison, I learn, isn’t the only person of legend to believe in the supernatural. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the S
herlock Holmes books, was a believer in Spiritualism, the ghost-based religion. During a séance in Wales, a grief-ravaged Doyle was convinced he heard the voice of his dead son, Kingsley, speaking to him from heaven. And then, two years later, during a séance with a pair of celebrated mediums called William and Eva Thompson, he embraced the fully materialised spirit of his mother. However, a couple of days after this beautiful reunion, the Thompsons were caught red-handed with a load of wigs, fluorescent make-up and a dead-mother costume. Incredibly, this didn’t dissuade Conan Doyle, despite his wife grumbling to him that his new hobby was ‘uncanny and dangerous’. And he remained convinced until his death – an event his son witnessed. ‘I have never seen anyone take to anything more gamely in my life,’ said Adrian Doyle, who went on to claim that he was convinced his father would return to see his family. ‘Why of course!’ he said. ‘There is no question that my father will speak to us just as he did before he passed over.’ They were so convinced of this that an enormous ‘Sir Arthur reunion’ night was arranged at the Royal Albert Hall. An empty chair was left for Doyle in the middle of the huge Victorian coliseum. Sadly, he didn’t show up. As a postscript to all this, it’s probably worth pointing out that, when he was alive, Doyle also believed in fairies.

  A far less ludicrous but equally renowned paranormalist I read about is the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Growing up, Jung was surrounded by so many supernatural happenings that his mother had to keep a logbook of all the inexplicable events that would take place in the family home. Despite this, Jung saw a ghost only once. He had a long stay in a haunted house and experienced gradually worsening phenomena. On the first night, he heard water dripping. Then he smelled something strange. Then, towards the end of his stay, while trying to sleep, he was assailed with creaks, bangs, rustles and raps on the walls, both inside and outside the room. When Jung opened his eyes he saw a head on the pillow next to him. Half its face was missing and its sole eye was staring at him. He was so scared that he had to spend the rest of the night with the candles on.