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

by Will Storr

  ‘And did it have … horns?’ I say.

  ‘Yes. And it had red eyes and a goatee beard and it was hoofed.’

  ‘And was it muscular?’

  ‘Yes, very much so. Now, as all this was happening,’ Dave continues, ‘I had a strange visitation in the night. When I told my vicar friend what happened, he showed me some mythical illustrations and asked me to identify what I’d seen. When I showed him, he said, “You’re very lucky. This is a guardian. You must be honoured. Not many people have seen this.”’

  I ask Dave Vee if he considers himself to be a sort of ‘chosen one’.

  ‘Well, this thing has only shown itself to people of significant greatness, one being a pope in the fourteenth century and the other being Jesus. And that’s probably about it. So, yes,’ he says, peering at me intently through his small, round glasses, ‘I do consider myself to have been chosen.’

  8

  ‘Turn the light off, bitch’

  THE NIGHT OUTSIDE my window is freezing and still, and the room that I’m sitting in is empty, except for me, my desk and all of the mysteries of the universe. A small lamp casts a net of light over my notes, my computer and the hot pot of tea that’s sending up a trail of steam that rises and curls and becomes, right in front of my eyes, completely invisible. All I can hear is the hum of the fan in the back of my computer and the occasional distant splashing sound of my girlfriend Farrah in the bath. For some reason, I’m uneasy tonight. The ghosts are obviously soaking into my subconscious. I swallow and look around me nervously, into the corners of the ceiling and the edges of the doorframe.

  I pick up the tape player and slide a cassette in. It’s got a white sticker on it with the initials COTC spidered along it in blue biro. It’s the recording I made a couple of days ago, when I went to visit a paranormal organisation called Children of the City who claim to be experts in EVP.

  I pour myself a cup of tea and press play on the tape. A voice comes out of the speakers. It sounds tiny and comical in the looming semi-dark room.

  ‘We’ve got some of the best EVPs in the world,’ it says.

  It’s the voice of Stacey – a co-founder of COTC. I lean back and, as I do, the old wooden kitchen chair I’m sitting on creaks angrily. I try to squeeze the paranoia out of my eyes and drift back to the scene of a couple of nights ago …

  I’m in the lounge of Stacey’s small, modern-brick semi in the village of Tarring near the West Sussex coast. There’s a seating area, with a dining table behind it, and a rubble-strewn desk with a computer on it in the corner. The room is in a state of morose unkemptness. Its corners are chipped, its carpet unloved and there are crumbs. A clinically depressed cat is lying on the sofa with its tail in an ashtray. Stacey is sat opposite me over the table, smoking a cigarette.

  When I overheard some members of the Ghost Club mention Children of the City in hushed and slightly reproachful tones, I decided to look up their website out of curiosity. It turned out that they have a large and impressive EVP collection on it. When I ask her about them, Stacey turns to face her desk, and plays me some of her choice cuts.

  ‘Get out,’ says a voice from Stacey’s PC.

  Like Lou’s, they’re shrouded in static. But these EVP are much clearer than the demonologist’s. You can actually hear what these voices are saying.

  ‘Turn the light off, bitch,’ says a ghost.

  My host turns back to me and, as she does, she releases a small, involuntary groan. Stacey’s large size means that even this minor manoeuvre is something of an effort.

  ‘I mean, that’s scary shit, really, isn’t it?’ she says, and takes a puff on her cigarette. Above Stacey’s desk, there’s a mirror that has a large blue sticker on it. It reads ‘I Am A Goddess’.

  ‘You’re sitting in a haunted house now, you know,’ she says. ‘We get all sorts: bangs, rappings … ’

  The goddess stubs her cigarette out with one powerful drive, pushes her sleeves up, leans on her elbows and looks at me with her face. Smoke comes out of her nose.

  ‘Have you ever had a ghost in this room?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, there’s one in the cupboard,’ she says, motioning past my shoulder.

  I turn and look. There’s a black-painted door in the wall that leads to an under-stair space. I look at Stacey, startled, through her smoke.

  ‘So, if I open that cupboard door, right now,’ I say, ‘will I see a ghost?’

  ‘No, it’s more of an energy,’ she says, absentmindedly picking up the corner of her box of Lambert and Butler with her thumb and forefinger. ‘I’m clairvoyant and even I can’t actually see his face. A lot of people feel him, though. I call him my hermit. He just sits in the cupboard. I’ve no idea why. I just leave him there. Sandy’s clairvoyant, too, so she sees him sometimes, don’t you, Sandy?’

  Sandy’s also a member of COTC. She’s here to babysit Stacey’s two children while we’re out in the local graveyard. She’s slumped next to the sad cat on the sofa and gives a small nod, before carrying on with her fag in silence.

  I turn back to Stacey and ask her when she realised she was clairvoyant.

  ‘Probably when I was about eight or nine,’ she says.

  ‘What exactly was it that you noticed?’

  ‘Well, that I was seeing things other people weren’t seeing,’ she says.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Dead people,’ she laughs, self-consciously. ‘Dead people. Walking around.’

  ‘Do you see them a lot?’

  ‘Yeah, all the time,’ she says, in that unexpectedly unshowy, matter-of-fact manner that I’m still not getting used to.

  ‘And do you both see things at the same time?’ I ask, turning back to Sandy.

  ‘Yes,’ Stacey answers for her, ‘and my children do as well.’

  They say that children, like animals, are able to see ghosts much more readily than adults. Kids are more instinctual. They’re not conditioned into seeing and hearing only the things that experience and society has told them they’re supposed to be seeing and hearing. They don’t automatically filter out the anomalies like an adult, who has a fine-tuned, hard-wired, superefficient grown-up life-computer in his skull. It’s like the odd phenomenon of invisible friends. Many otherwise normal youngsters appear utterly convinced that they have companions that nobody else can see. Some paranormal experts are convinced that these ‘invisible friends’ are, in fact, ghosts.

  ‘So, both your children see these ghosts, too?’ I say. ‘Is this like the whole “invisible friends” thing?’

  ‘No!’ Stacey says. She laughs sarcastically and shakes her head in disbelief. ‘They’re not invisible!’

  As Stacey unsheathes another cigarette, a tapping sound comes from the wall. I jump, and look to Stacey for reassurance.

  ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ she says with half a smile. ‘Just the wind or something. Honestly, you’ll know the real thing when it happens.’

  ‘Shall we go?’ I say, and the sound on my tape stops with a static bump, and starts again.

  Durrington Cemetery is a short drive from Stacey’s house. It’s dark, flinty-cold and unsettled in this place. All around me, gravestones jut out of the earth, each one an anchor plunging out from the surface, the only thing keeping the presence of their drowned owners moored in the world of the living.

  ‘How does this work, then?’ My voice sounds smaller, a little carbonised on this portion of the tape. We’re holding our Dictaphones out on the flat of our palms in front of us as we walk. This is to ensure that nothing accidentally brushes up against the microphone. Stacey also says that she instructs members of COTC to speak loud and clear when they’re after EVP so there can be no dispute as to the source of the sound.

  She goes on to tell me that if you blow a dog whistle you’ll barely hear its high-pitched squeal. But, if you blow onto a recording Dictaphone (preferably a modern digital one) and play it back, you’ll hear the sound much more clearly. This proves, she says, that the machines pick up frequencie
s that are outside the range of the human ear. And ghosts can communicate on these frequencies. Stacey has yet more evidence that EVP aren’t, like some claim, stray radio waves. For a start, if these are the voices of radio DJs, they should rattle on and on and on interminably until you feel broken by the whole pointless tedium of it all, like a real DJ does. Stacey has also recorded voices telling her to ‘turn the light off’ when she had just turned it on, ordered her to ‘get out’ when she had just entered a room and, best of all, cried ‘behind you’ when she’d temporarily lost her partner on an investigation. On that occasion, a nearby COTC member had an EMF meter that, she said, went beserk the moment that the EVP was recorded. And, yes – as it turned out, he was behind her.

  ‘Shall we ask some questions, then?’ I say.

  ‘Sometimes it’s better just to chat,’ Stacey says. ‘A lot of the time, spirits try to join in the conversation.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, and think about how I’m going to frame the next question. When I overheard the Ghost Club people discussing Stacey’s group, I got the impression that they thought COTC were a bit dodgy, that they might have been touched by the sinister velvet finger of the occult. Many supernaturalists, including the Church, believe that some haunting situations are linked to the devil. Ghosts, they think, are evil entities that often arrive when people conjure them up for fun using divination. Some sinister groups try to harness their power for their own benefit, as is possible at Andrew Green’s Montpelier Road case. It’s this shady business that Father Bill and Lou warned me about. And, keen to find out more, my curiosity was piqued when I clicked onto COTC’s website and noticed that their logo is a pentagram, which, famously, is the corporate branding of the Satanist. We walk for a while in silence as I try to think up a way of putting it as diplomatically as possible.

  Eventually, I just say, ‘Are you involved with the occult?’

  There is a tense pause.

  ‘Yes,’ says Stacey.

  I look down at my feet walking along the grass-verged path that weaves around the coffin-beds. I stay quiet, not wanting to say anything that might draw attention to her candour. After a silence, she admits, ‘We do have a branch of COTC that centres on the occult. It’s led by Charles Walker, who’s an expert on that side of things. He spends a lot of time down Clapham Woods where there is a lot of very, very bad stuff.’

  Stacey goes on to tell me that an ancient and notorious group called Friends of Hecate do black rituals down there that have turned the woods evil.

  ‘But I don’t want to talk about them,’ she puffs as we walk along, ‘because they’re quite dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s lots of government people involved with it. Please, I don’t want to talk about them. Charles may agree to speak with you. But I can’t.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, and we carry on walking through the grim and silent boulevards of Durrington Cemetery with our recorders stretched out in front of us.

  ‘Using your clairvoyant powers,’ I say, ‘could you sense a spot that might be particularly good for getting some EVP?’

  Stacey snorts again and gives me a look. ‘Er, we’re in a graveyard,’ she says.

  In my defence, Stephen the Druid did tell me that graveyards shouldn’t have any spirits in them because they leave the body at the death site (unless, of course, occultists have been ‘summoning up’). But Stacey disagrees. She tells me that souls can get quite attached to their mortal remains and like to keep watch over them.

  As we pace along in the darkness, I try to distract myself out of the morbid fug that’s settling upon me by mulling over some of the evidence that I’ve found. I want to work out whether the jigsaw pieces of ghostlore fit comfortably together. So …

  There is, all around us, an invisible, parallel world that we go to when we die. To Christians this place is heaven or hell. To others, it’s simply another astral plane. Although its existence hasn’t been proved, clues to the reality of this invisible world are legion. Modern cameras, equipped with infra-red technology, are able to pick up light anomalies that are individual souls floating about in this realm. Because these souls, or ghosts, were once human beings, they vary in nature and in personality. Some of them remain in places that were significant during their lifetime. Many ghosts try to interact with our physical world by materialising – sometimes with the help of conventional power sources – into mists, shadows, bangs, winds, smells or apparitions. Reports of these happenings go back as far as recorded history and span all cultures and continents. If ghosts have enough energy, they can also manipulate very sensitive tools – like dowsing rods, Ouija boards and pendulum devices. Contact can also be made with the inhabitants of this parallel universe by using digital tape recorders that can pick up voices that are inaudible to humans. Some of the more dangerous ghosts hijack still-corporeal bodies and ‘possess’ them. Christians call aggressive spirits ‘demons’ and believe they come from hell. Psychics can interact with ghosts, in a very impressionistic way, as they’re more sensitive to existence on this dimension.

  As I’m thinking, a sudden breeze blows through us as we turn a corner past a cracked granite mausoleum. I decide to ask Stacey if she ever worries that she’s putting herself in harm’s way.

  She thinks for a minute and then replies between heavy, exhausted breaths. ‘People accuse us of dabbling with things and say we don’t know what we’re doing, but that’s just idiotic. We’re actually scientists and we’re investigating something that isn’t known. Without us lot doing it, it’s going to stay unknown.’

  While Stacey was talking I suddenly and unaccountably got spooked. A lizard chill slithered through my nervous system. I look around me. There’s nobody here but me, the Goddess and several thousand sunken corpses. I try to shake the creeps out of me by going ‘brrrr’ and pretending that I’m just a bit cold.

  ‘Do you know what?’ Stacey puffs, breathlessly. ‘I am actually getting a feeling about a location. I feel that over there might be a good place to get some EVPs,’ she says.

  Stacey has spotted a bench.

  ‘The Church has a very clear policy about EVPs,’ she says, as we approach the seat. ‘They say it’s conjuration of the spirit.’

  ‘La-la.’

  Suddenly, at my desk, I sit up bolt straight. The old kitchen chair lets loose a wail of wooden protest. I rewind the tape again.

  ‘The Church has a very clear policy about EVPs. They say it’s conjuration of the spirit.’

  ‘La-la.’

  And again.

  ‘The Church has a very clear policy about EVPs. They say it’s conjuration of the spirit.’

  ‘La-la.’

  There’s the sound of a woman singing on my tape. It’s only a couple of notes, but it’s there. I stand up and walk around and sit down again. I rewind the tape.

  ‘The Church has a very clear policy about EVPs. They say it’s conjuration of the spirit.’

  ‘La-la.’

  It’s so small that the adult, rational brain would filter it out. It would dismiss it as unimportant auditory information. I only noticed it because I was carefully listening out for background weirdness. I sit still and stare, the shock temporarily fazing me out. The simple fact is, nobody was with us. Nobody was singing. And yet, I have just heard two sung notes on my Dictaphone.

  I plug some earphones into the player and listen again. It’s even clearer now. I get out of my chair again and walk into the bathroom. My girlfriend is lying under a loose arrangement of bubbles.

  ‘Listen to this.’

  Farrah puts the earphones in her ears and I press play.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  ‘The singing?’ she says.

  ‘There was nobody singing,’ I say.

  ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘That’s sent a chill down my spine,’ she says. ‘Let me listen again.’

  9

  ‘I was very upset at what I saw’

&nbs
p; I’M WORRIED ABOUT Maurice Grosse’s daughter. A pretty, sparky young journalist at the Cardiff Leader, Janet seems to preoccupy her father during his darkest moments. As soon as her name is mentioned, it’s like someone has blown Maurice’s candle out. His natural bright feistiness is unexpectedly completely extinguished and his quick, spirited chatter turns weighty and drowned. It’s as if he’s been suddenly submerged in something oppressive and cold and sad.

  ‘She sent a card to my son on his birthday,’ he says, looking into his cup of tea. ‘It was the most extraordinary thing. On the front, there’s a picture of a girl with her head swathed in bandages. And it said, “I was going to buy you a bottle of toilet water”, and when you turn it over, “but the lid fell on my head.” And she’d written on it, “And there won’t be much of that left soon, either!” with an arrow pointing to the word “head”.’

  He runs his tongue along his lower lip, clears his throat and glances away.

  ‘It was as if she knew that she was going to die. She was a pillion rider on a motorcycle, you see.’

  Janet Grosse died of head injuries after being in a motorbike accident on her brother’s birthday, the same day that he got the card – 5 August 1976. A series of events that Maurice considers to be ‘very strange’ happened around the tragedy that convinced him that the world was filled with supernatural mysteries, and rerouted his life for ever.

  The moment I discover this, on a cold morning in the front room of his well-groomed Muswell Hill semi, I begin to worry. Maurice Grosse is an almost mythical figure in ghostly circles and he’s a council member of the SPR and chairman of their Spontaneous Cases Sub-Committee. But is his faith, his passion for the supernatural, just the reaction of a devastated and desperate father trying to convince himself that his daughter is, somehow, still with him? Perhaps his thirty years of paranormal research have just been a frantic rebellion against the scientist who, with calm, certain and heartless logic, would insist that his treasured daughter has simply vanished from existence.