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

by Will Storr

  On reflection, young Jung decided that the experience had been triggered by the smell, which had reminded his subconscious of an old patient of his. He claimed that the knockings were his heartbeat and the rustlings were miscellaneous room sounds that were amplified and morphed by the power of the hypnogogic (half asleep) state. He was stumped by the dripping water, though, because he was wide awake at the time and a thorough investigation of the area revealed neither a water source nor a mechanism for its drippage.

  In 1919, Jung gave a lecture to the SPR, in which he claimed that there were three sources for belief in ghosts – dreams, apparitions and ‘pathological disturbances of psychic life’ (which, simply translated, means – I think – being a bit mad).

  Abraham Lincoln believed in ghosts and so did Jesus. The King of the Jews spends a good deal of time in the Bible exorcising possessed people – who were presumably poltergeist epicentres. There’s even a quote in the Book of Job (4:15): ‘Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.’

  Next, I set out to find ghost stories from the most distant reaches of history and geography. And I soon discover that the whole world is haunted. In ancient Egypt, the high priest of Amun was visited nightly by the irritable spirit of the ex-chief treasurer to King Rehotep. Chronicles from Roman times tell of a struggling philosopher called Athenodorus who bought a house on the cheap, only to find that the reason for its bargain price was there was someone dead living in it. The ancient Greeks, too, suffered from lingering dark traces. The site of the Battle of Marathon was a no-go area for years as 10,000 men were slaughtered there and it was as if the sound of the massacre became soaked into the wind that blew around the blood-drenched acres. ‘Every night,’ wrote witness and chronicler Pausanias, ‘you may hear horses neighing and men fighting.’

  Over in China, a friend of Confucius called Chu His wrote in 5BC, ‘If a man is killed before his life span is completed, his vital spirit is not yet exhausted and may survive as a ghost.’ Tibetan Buddhist funeral rites include post-mortal ASBOs that prevent dead people from doing any haunting, and some South American tribes put thorns on the feet of corpses to prevent their souls from rising and committing any upright mischief.

  In Central and South America, they dread the ‘Cihuateteo’. Jamaicans have their ‘Goopies’, Mexican tribes ‘Tlaciques’, Haitians ‘Bakas’, the Bantus of Zambia the ‘Mudzimu’, the Zulus ‘Inzingogo’ and in Guyana the ‘Sakarabru’. The ruins of Babylon, in the south of Iraq, are haunted by two spirits known as Utukku and Ekimmu. In Taiwan, in the Tianan Taoist Temple, an apparition of a man is seen to this day, standing beside a huge stuffed crocodile. Visitors to the Kali Temple of Dakshineswar in Calcutta regularly report seeing and feeling the presence of Ramakrishna, a kindly man who was head priest in 1856.

  On the other side of the planet in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1999, the council had to call paranormal investigators in to their head office after employees experienced apparitions disappearing in the middle of hallways, disembodied whispering voices, footsteps and phones that would ring and ring only for nobody to be on the other end. In Guanajuato, Mexico, the Museo de las Momias is filled with corpses that have been dug up from the nearby Pateon cemetery. Relatives of the deceased that lie in the mountain-top plot have to pay a grave rent, and those who default have the bodies of their loved ones removed and displayed in the museum. In 1969, the ghost of a woman was seen acting frantically in the area of the gnarled exhibits on the baby shelf. Witnesses said it was as if she was searching for her child. More regularly, visitors and staff members often say they hear voices in the empty rooms, as if the corpses are whispering to each other.

  Singapore is said to be the most haunted country in Asia, but Japan is also crammed with ghosts. On 23 June 1590, Hachioji Castle in Tokyo was attacked by the fearsome army of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hachioji’s female inhabitants, desperate to avoid the inevitable rape and torture that would precede their soon-coming deaths, flung themselves en masse off the ramparts and onto the jagged rocks below. After this horrific event, the castle was deserted for 400 years, because nobody could bear to hear the sound of the screams and the thudding of bodies on the rocks that still echoed through the valley. The sound can be heard, I read, to this day.

  Those wars, though, are ancient. Vojvode Putnika Boulevard in Sarajevo, which became known as Sniper Alley during the recent conflict in Bosnia, is said to be haunted with new ghosts from the nineties. Similarly, nearby in Bijeljina, the spirit of a man who was killed by a Serbian strike force is said to stalk the night streets. He’s been identified by witnesses as a Muslim called Mehmed.

  And Muslims, it seems, do suffer from the same nightmares as Christians. To my surprise, I discover that exorcism isn’t, as I’d assumed, just a biblical tradition. I find a report in a newspaper from Kuala Lumpur about the long tradition of Muslim exorcists, who recite verses from the Koran before demanding that the demon leaves its writhing victim.

  Finally, at the end of the day, I pick up a book called This House is Haunted, by Guy Lyon Playfair. It’s a first-hand account of the poltergeist case in Enfield, north London in 1977. It documents things that happened to the author and his fellow investigator, Maurice Grosse. Maurice, I remember, is the man that Lance from the Ghost Club called ‘our most distinguished living investigator of polts’. This is the third time I’ve stumbled across this troubling story. And, remembering what Lou Gentile told me about things that happen in threes, I open the book gingerly and decide to pay this case the strictest attention possible.

  ‘Hello, Andrew Green.’

  ‘Hello, Andrew. My name’s Will Storr and I’m doing some research into ghosts. I wonder if you could spare the time to meet me and have a chat about your experiences.’

  ‘Did you know that somebody is writing my biography?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. That sounds fascinating.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘ … Is there any chance that we could meet, then?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Would you be so kind as to give me a call back in a couple of weeks? I’m quite busy with things at the moment.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll call you back then.’

  ‘Many thanks. Goodbye.’

  4

  ‘Come back, Rain-On-Face’

  RAIN-ON-FACE is holding a pink gemstone up to a car window and examining it closely. He’s a Native American – a member of the Eagle Owl Clan – and is counselling a young woman who has come to him for advice. Rain-On-Face is in his forties and wears a light denim shirt with four buttons open, revealing a captivating collection of beads and feathers on leather strings around his neck. He’s a large man, and his bat-black hair is greased back into a tight ponytail. Rain-On-Face is also, I cannot fail to notice, white. He’s got pudgy, rosy cheeks, a stumpy, pug nose and a Geordie accent so thick it could curdle lava. Rain-On-Face’s young student is worried because she put her stones under her pillow one night and when she woke up, one of them had gone cloudy.

  ‘Did you dream that night?’ asks Rain-On-Face, holding the triangular rock between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Yes,’ says the girl. She sounds astonished. She can’t believe he knew that. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Was it a happy dream?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, smiling, ‘definitely.’

  ‘Then you should keep hold of that. What’s happened is, the stone has caught your dream and now it’s got some of your medicine in it. Here,’ he says, handing it back, ‘you should wash that in a light solution of salt water, because it’s got my medicine on it now.’

  The girl takes it back and stares at it for a moment, before stroking it softly with her thumb and pushing it deep into her denim jacket pocket.

  I lean forwards to speak to Rain-On-Face. ‘What do you mean by “medicine”?’ I ask him.

  ‘Medicine is a Native American term,’ he shouts back to me from the front passenger seat. ‘It simply means power, energy, spirit. So they talk about good medicine
and bad medicine, if it’s a good spirit or a bad spirit.’

  There is a small pause. He turns round and gives me an accusatory look.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with drugs,’ he says.

  I’M HERE ON the invitation of Stephen the Druid. We’re all squashed into a people carrier, en route to an investigation with a local paranormal research society called Avalon Skies to which he’s affiliated. We’re on our way to see Rosemary and Paul Astley, who live in a house that generations of Tow Law village residents have regarded as thoroughly haunted. Although they haven’t experienced anything themselves, a friend of the family did see something astonishing when they hired him to clean the carpets. A former forces man and ex-prison officer, he was alone in the house while cleaning and turned around to see a little girl standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching him. When Paul came home from work, he said the friend ‘looked very shaken – it was like cold water had been poured down the back of his neck’.

  Some months after the sighting, Paul spotted one of Avalon Skies’ distinctive ‘Who You Gonna Call?’ fliers in a Newcastle café and got in touch. The brilliant thing about this group is that they’re like a band of cartoon superheroes. There’s Stephen the Druid, Debbie the Witch, Trevor the Monsterologist, Rain-On-Face the Native American and a Voodoo Priestess called Michelle who can’t be here tonight because she has a prior baby-sitting commitment. All of them have different spiritual powers that give them unique insights into the paranormal situations that they put themselves in.

  After we arrive at the Astleys’ neat, warm terrace, and I’ve had a chat with Paul, I settle down with Trevor, one of Avalon Skies’ co-founders. I like Trevor. He’s in his thirties and stocky, warm and chipper – a fair-haired, out-of-work plastics moulder and self-trained monsterologist. Most of all, I like the fact that – despite his monster specialism, and the fact that, when we met, the very first thing he told me was that he’d recently been hospitalised after a ‘psychic larvae’ attack – Trevor considers himself a sceptic. He formed Avalon Skies five years ago with his girlfriend Debbie (the Witch) when they found they had irreconcilable paranormal differences with the leaders of the group they belonged to at the time.

  ‘The ideas they were coming up with were absolutely crazy,’ Trevor says.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘You don’t join a paranormal research society because you want to be in a music group.’

  ‘A music group?’

  ‘They were trying to get members to play instruments. They were totally taking it away from research.’

  ‘That sounds absolutely crazy,’ I agree. ‘Were they getting you to play them in haunted locations?’

  ‘No,’ he says, the incredulity widening his eyes. ‘Just as a leisure activity.’

  Trevor’s interest in the supernatural stems from the sudden death of his best friend, Brent. They were seventeen when it happened and studying together in the sixth form. One night, during a drunken walk to a post-pub party, Brent collapsed.

  ‘He just fell over in the street,’ Trevor says, sitting and shrugging on the sofa next to me, ‘and that was it. Lights out.’

  Brent’s heart had failed. In the months after his death, Trevor would often bunk off school to visit his old friend’s parents. Brent’s mother had a sister who was a keen Spiritualist and had been trying to persuade her, without success, to attend a service. Then, one night, Trevor had a dream.

  ‘I was in the science block at school,’ he says, ‘and I turned to go upstairs and there was Brent, standing at the top of the stairs. I went up and I shook his hand and said, “Aaah, fucking hell, how you doing? Haven’t seen you in a while.” He said, “I’m all right, but I’m in limbo.” And then I woke up.’

  Trevor didn’t think much more about the dream, and didn’t mention it to anybody. Two days later, he visited Brent’s parents.

  ‘Brent’s mam sits me down,’ he says, ‘and she goes, “I went on Sunday, to the Spiritualist church. I got a message.” And I go, “Oh, what is it?” She says, “Brent’s all right, but he’s in limbo.”’

  Trevor didn’t tell Brent’s mother about his dream because he was worried about upsetting her more. She still, to this day, doesn’t know.

  I sit back on the sofa for a moment and absorb the facts of Trevor’s tale. You could argue that the word ‘limbo’ might have been implanted into the subconscious of Trevor and Brent’s mother while they were together at some point. Perhaps it was used in a TV programme that they both overheard, or in a newspaper headline. Then, coincidentally, their unconscious minds threw the word back up again in the context of their grieving. But that doesn’t add up, because it was a Spiritualist medium who passed the message – and the word – on to Brent’s mother. And she was a stranger, a completely independent third party, that neither of them had met.

  ‘Fancy getting some chicken drumsticks, then?’ Trevor says, and we walk into the busy, toasty kitchen, where Paul Astley is preparing himself a pre-vigil hotdog amongst the chattering members of Avalon Skies.

  ‘Before I moved in here,’ Paul tells me, leaning against his Aga, ‘my attitude to ghosts and the like was “bollocks to it all”. Even when the little girl was seen, I just dismissed it. But then me and Rose started watching Most Haunted on the telly. We’d watch that and go, “Ah, I cannot treat it as mumbo-jumbo now.”’

  Most Haunted is the most popular show on the satellite channel Living TV. It features an ex-Blue Peter presenter and a medium called Derek doing vigils much like tonight’s. Lance from the Ghost Club spoke to me briefly about the show. He said it was ‘aimed at people who are not necessarily very well educated’. I got the distinct impression that proper paranormal researchers consider it to be a bit silly.

  ‘Don’t you think that Most Haunted is a bit … ’ I ask Paul, looking for the right word. ‘Funny?’

  ‘I find it funny that they hardly seem to pick any orbs up,’ he replies. ‘I find that very odd.’

  On the other side of the kitchen, Rain-On-Face is sitting with Trevor and Debbie at a table that holds a lustrous pile of freshly grilled hamburgers. I sit down with them.

  ‘Here,’ I say, ‘what do you lot think about Most Haunted?’

  Suddenly, a knotty tension materialises over the table, tangling the atmosphere between us. I wait for an answer. Silence. Then –

  ‘Why are you taping this?’ says Debbie, eventually. She’s peering down at my tape recorder, suspiciously.

  ‘So I can quote you accurately,’ I say.

  ‘You’re not going to Most Haunted, then? You’re not going to play this to them?’

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Well,’ says Rain-On-Face, coming to her rescue, ‘my feeling is, there’s a lot of stuff that … ’ He pauses and looks to Debbie for reassurance. ‘Well, I’m just not sure where it’s coming from, put it that way.’

  ‘I want to know who writes Derek’s autocues,’ Trevor says, with a smile.

  Debbie shoots Trevor a spiky, sideways look, as if to say: Nice one, Trevor. Yet again, with your big bloody mouth.

  ‘What do you think of Derek?’ I ask.

  Debbie’s speech then takes on a careful, diplomatic policeman plod. ‘He’s a very good showman,’ she says. ‘Let’s just say … he’s got the pizzazz to go with it.’

  ‘And the hair,’ Rain-On-Face says.

  ‘Yes.’ Debbie nods. ‘And the hair.’

  There’s another silence.

  ‘I heard he gets twenty-five grand a show,’ Trevor says.

  ‘Put it this way,’ Debbie says firmly, ‘the people on that show … well, they wouldn’t get into our group.’

  ‘Why not?’ I ask.

  She thinks for a moment, with the face of a cautious defendant.

  ‘They’re very … flighty,’ she says.

  ‘Well, they would get in our group,’ Trevor says, ‘but they’d get retrained.’

  ‘Do you think they fake stuff?�
� I ask.

  Suddenly, the tension swells so thick that it threatens to push all the oxygen out of the room.

  ‘That’s not for us to say,’ says Rain-On-Face. He gives me a look. ‘But I’ve got my opinions.’

  ‘They had an orb that was clearly a moth,’ Trevor says. ‘They said it was an orb but it had wings and it was fluttering.’

  Debbie gives Trevor that look again and says sharply, ‘It’s not for us to say’, bringing the subject to a definite close.

  I have been assigned to Trevor’s team, and we’re scheduled to investigate the cellar. Just before we descend, Stephen the Druid walks into the kitchen with several different cameras around his neck. These are back-ups, he tells me, in case he comes across a very common phenomenon of a haunted location – instantaneous power drain.

  ‘You need at least one camera,’ he says, ‘that is based on purely mechanical technology. I’ve seen brand-new batteries drain in an instant on many an occasion.’

  Down in the cellar, we are watching and listening, quiet and alert. The night outside and above us has been swamped by a swift, dense and mixing fog. It hangs above the ground in great surly bales, saturated with glowing orange by the streetlights. It feels ominous and animate, like it’s pushing in on the house and, shut down in this old brick basement, it feels as if we’re hiding from it. To my immediate right is a blocked-up arch passageway that, according to Avalon Skies, has been the centre of some previous activity. Nobody in Tow Law seems to know where the passage leads, why it was built or why it’s been sealed with rocks and concrete.

  I settle down quietly in the dark and breathe in the silence. I peer out into the darkness. Watching. Waiting. Listening. Suddenly, Trevor lets out a thunderous, trembling fart. The two teenagers who make up the rest of our team start sniggering tightly. They’re holding huge guffaws back, up inside their noses.