by Will Storr
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The last few minutes. Will, I’m shitting myself. I keep thinking you’ve brought one of your ghosts home … ’
‘Just turn it off at the plug,’ I say, ‘and call me back if anything else happens.’
I finish the call, put the phone back in my pocket and smile flatly at Charles and Dave.
Next, I decide to test the spirit’s knowledge. If this really is a citizen of the invisible world, then it will know this.
‘What’s my girlfriend’s name?’ I ask.
S to U to S to A to N.
‘It’s not Susan,’ I say.
There’s a silence.
I to S to H to E to R to E.
‘Susan is here,’ says Charles.
‘Who’s Susan?’ I ask.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Charles says. ‘Is anybody else there?’
The glass shoots to ‘Yes’, then D to O to R to E to E to N.
‘Doreen?’ I say.
‘There’s only one Doreen I know,’ says Charles.
Dave looks up at Charles. ‘It can’t be,’ he says. ‘It can’t be Doreen Valiente.’
‘Who’s Doreen Valiente?’ I say.
‘She was a local witch,’ Dave says.
‘Well … local?’ Charles says, with a humph. ‘International.’
Doreen the International Witch starts telling us that we’re in danger, and as the glass moves away from Charles, it tips suddenly, at the end of his finger. Then, shortly afterwards, when the glass is moving towards him, it pulls over again in his direction. The tip of his finger, I notice, is bloodless throughout.
Suspicion begins to nibble at me, like a goldfish going at breadcrumbs. Could Charles, I think, be pushing the glass?
‘Can this work with just two people?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ says Charles.
‘Shall we try and make it work, then,’ I say, ‘just with me and Dave?’
‘All right,’ says Charles. He takes his finger off and sits back and looks at us with his arms crossed.
‘Are we in danger?’ I ask.
Nothing happens. There’s a silence.
‘Come back to us,’ Dave says.
Nothing happens again.
‘We’ve had this before,’ Charles says. ‘When Dave goes on with people, it doesn’t work.’
Dave looks at me mournfully as nothing carries on happening. ‘It’s almost as if I’m blocking it,’ he says.
We sit there in silence for a moment. Charles watches us from the shadows as our fingers stretch out in front of us, uselessly. A breeze lifts through the trees and their leaves start rustling a mocking applause. I begin to feel a bit sorry for Charles. If he was pushing it, maybe it was just because he was desperate for it to work in front of me and didn’t want to risk it by relying on unreliable spirits. There again, what if I’m being unfair? Maybe whatever power was making it move has just ceased, and if Charles rejoins us, it won’t make any difference – the board will stay lifeless.
‘Maybe you should come back on, Charles,’ I say.
And the instant that he does, the glass shoots back into action.
‘Hello, Janet?’
‘Hello.’
‘It’s Will here. Do you remember, we had an arrangement to have an interview?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Well, it’s been a couple of months now, and I was wondering … ’
‘Sorry. I haven’t forgotten. I will be in touch.’
‘Do you have any idea when?’
‘Not at the moment, no.’
‘Oh, OK. Thanks, Janet. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
13
‘We’ve got strangers in the house’
IN A DISMAL Wetherspoons in a town ten miles north of London, Milton slips gently into a back corner booth. He pours his tonic water carefully out of a little bottle, which has deep scratches, from use and reuse, calloused around it. The liquid fizzes into a thin, cheap glass that has three or four melting ice cubes, which look like half-sucked Glacier Mints plopped sloppily into the bottom. Once he’s finished pouring, with the tiniest facial movement, he registers surprise at how little of the bitter effervescent water there is in the glass.
‘Do you want me to get you another?’ I say.
‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s OK.’
He’s got to leave soon. It’s a golden Sunday morning outside of this alcoholics’ grotto, and he’s anxious to get out of here, back to his wife and son. I turn my tape recorder on and he looks at it. An involuntary, embarrassed smile blooms across his face.
Suddenly, I feel awkward. In that instant, I become overpoweringly aware that Milton didn’t want his story on the record, and that I’ve sort of nagged him into it. He takes a sip of his tonic water, partly, I suspect, to pull the attention away from the moment.
‘OK,’ I ask, ‘how old were you when you saw it?’
‘I can’t be certain,’ he says, putting his drink down and his hands on the table, ‘but I reckon I must have been around five or six years old.’
‘And had you just moved into the house?’
‘No,’ he says, ‘we lived in this house for quite a while.’
‘And this house was in north London?’
‘It was a house in Birmingham, Edgbaston.’
‘Was it a modern house?’
‘No, it was an old terrace house.’
‘And you were in the bath?’
‘No, I wasn’t in the bath. I was in the bathroom.’
There’s a small pause. Milton glances, again, at the red light on my tape recorder.
‘Hmmm,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you just tell me the story in your own words?’
‘OK,’ he says, and he takes another sip and begins.
‘I’m sure it must have been a weekend, because all the family were in. It was a bright, sunny day. It was really hot and my mum was outside, hanging the washing on the line, and my dad was outside, too. I don’t know where my sister was. Me and my brother, who was two years older than me – we were playing in the house. We went upstairs, into the bathroom, and we started mucking about. We were getting bits of toilet paper, putting it under the tap, and making balls and flicking it at each other. We were, like, howling with laughter, we were really happy and elated, when all of a sudden, we saw something happening by the window, so we stopped. We both looked, and the way I recall it is that two figures were, like, materialising. I can’t recall the actual materialisation. My brother’s talked about this before, and he reckons that they, like, floated upwards, and appeared. In my mind, I see them being faint and becoming more clearer. At the end of the materialisation, there were two ladies standing in front of us. They were solid, you couldn’t see through them, they were like normal people. Their ages – they weren’t like old ladies. They weren’t young. They were middle-aged. The clothes I remember them wearing, I’d say it was like 1930s, 1940s kind of clothing. And I think that they had hats on, and they were smiling at each other and looking at us and they were really happy. We were just stood there. We knew it was impossible. Things like this don’t happen every day. But they were there and we didn’t feel they were going to harm us or anything, they were just smiling at us, staring at us. And I said, “Do you want us to get our mummy and daddy?” because, as far as I was concerned, they were adults, and when there’s an adult in the house, you’ve got to get your mum and dad and tell them. So they said, “Oh yes, go and get your mum and dad.”
‘So we both ran out. Ran down the stairs, ran outside. “Mum! Mum! Dad! Dad! We’ve got strangers in the house.” And my mum just carried on putting the washing on the line and said, “Go and tell your dad.” So we ran and told our dad and he was sawing wood. I remember it clearly because of the smell of the wood, and it was a bright, blistering hot day, and I was quite shocked that no one would believe us. It was like, hang on, there’s people in the house, we don’t know who they are, they could be walking around, going in our things. There’s people in
the house, we’re telling you, and you’re not believing us. We just couldn’t believe it. So we ran back into the house, as fast as we could, back into the bathroom and we looked and they were gone.’
And there it is. The best ghost story I’ve ever heard. It’s great because it appears to defy all the psychiatric theories I’ve been told. Although they were clearly in a state of high arousal, Milton and his brother were not expecting to see ghosts. They weren’t in a spooky location where the feng shui was supernaturally significant. And most of all, they’re definitely not the kind of people who are ‘the type’ to believe in the paranormal. I’ve been on a vigil with Milton, and he is the most sceptical investigator I’ve ever seen. He was unwavering in his unimpressedness, dogmatic in his doubting. Really, on every level, this is not your typical ghost enthusiast: he’s not defensive or boastful, he doesn’t wear supernaturally significant pendants, crystals or rings, doesn’t have a Messiah complex or voices in his head, he’s got normal hair. In fact, Milton is only a member of the Ghost Club at all because he wants to find an explanation for what happened on that strange summer morning. And, throughout all the vigils he’s ever been on, he’s never seen another ghost. He did, in a pub in East Sussex one night, see a door handle move by itself (the door was open, against a wall, and he was on the other side of it). But that’s it, in the thirty years since the spectral women.
I’m troubled by Milton’s tale. It’s pulling me back in. You see, I can’t explain his experience. I can’t find a way around his story. Every sceptical path through it is blocked by another detail. It’s not one of Jung’s hypnogogic states because he was nowhere near sleep. It’s not a hallucination, because his brother saw the same thing. It’s not a ‘Stone Tape’ incident, because the women interacted with the brothers. It’s not a result of mental illness or any sort of personality defect, because it’s not part of a pattern of behaviour. And it’s not a false memory, because his brother remembers the same thing.
‘He feels uncomfortable talking about it,’ says Milton, before tipping his head back and milking the last drops from his glass. Outside the pub, the streets have suddenly darkened. The first sopping bullets of a flash rain-storm start hitting the warm street. ‘I talked to him about it through the email. I told him I was going to do this interview with you and I asked him if he minded, and said that we’d keep his name out of it. He knows it happened. Whenever we do talk about it, he goes, “Yeah, yeah, it happened,” but he can’t explain it. We’re both logical people, but I know that illogical things happen in this world. He doesn’t really want to accept that. If he can’t answer it, then he doesn’t want to think about it. If you don’t talk about it, it’s out of your mind, isn’t it?’
TO: [email protected]
FROM: Will Storr
SUBJECT: Stan
Hello
I wonder if you can help me. I saw a report in your local newspaper about Stan and the ghosts he was seeing on a nightly basis. I understand that you are a sceptical investigation group and you came to the conclusion that Stan’s ghosts were something to do with a hypnogogic state. I was wondering if there would be any chance of meeting you and Stan to discuss the case for some research that I am doing?
Many thanks.
Will Storr
‘Hello Stan, my name’s Will and I’ve been working on some research about ghosts.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘I read about your problem in your local paper.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘And I was wondering if I could come up and interview you about it.’
‘I suppose so. That should be fine.’
‘I’m coming up to see Paranormal Dimensions as well.’
‘Paranormal Dim … ? Oh yes. To be honest, that lot, they talked a load of rubbish.’
‘Did they not solve the problem, then?’
‘No, I called the local vicar round and he sorted it out. He did an exorcism. It’s been fine ever since.’
‘Oh, OK. Could I possibly have the phone number of the vicar?’
14
‘They called me Ghost Girl’
SHE WEARS A thin gold necklace with a pendant that rests in the cup of her collarbone. It spells out her name in happy, bulbous cartoon script. The letters increase in size, from the first to the last, and they glint in the light as the movement of her slow talking makes them shift on the surface of her skin. Its comic rendering is like the logo of an iconic superhero and, over the months, that’s almost what this pretty, firm and frequently sorrowful woman has become to me.
Janet. I’ve finally been granted an audience with Janet.
As I sit here, on a creaking wicker chair, between two cat baskets and a washing machine, it feels as though this boxy conservatory in Clacton-on-Sea is the destination of a long pilgrimage. Janet holds enormous power because she holds all the answers. The endless battle between the sceptics and the believers raged around her when she was eleven years old, and she knows who was right and who was wrong. All the answers are here, in front of me, drinking tea and wearing dun-coloured three-quarter-length cargo pants and a tight Nike T-shirt.
‘I mean, we’re talking about twenty-five years or more, aren’t we?’ Janet says quietly, with her tough, thin fingers pushed through the handle of her mug. ‘I can’t remember everything. But I can remember the main events because, you know, they leave scars.’
Janet has a way of looking at me that I find acutely unsettling. It’s as if she’s run a cold hose straight into my marrow. She keeps reminding me of someone, and I can’t think who. It’s her fragile, birdlike quality and her gentle, sad way of speaking, but, most of all, it’s the cavernous gaze that you’ll suddenly find yourself trapped inside. I’m sure I’ve seen it before.
After my meeting with Maurice, I ended up deciding that the Enfield case was so extreme in what it required me to believe that my credulity just shut down, and I went to see a psychiatrist. But, since that encounter with Dr Salter, there have been a couple of incidents which have caused me to call those uncompromising sceptical beliefs into question. Firstly, there’s Milton’s testimony. And, secondly, I met up with one of the doctor’s recent patients. Frances, the logic goes, is just like Debbie, Derek and all the other mediums and supernaturalists that I’ve met. The only difference is that Frances has been cured. My meeting with her was sad and surprising and terrifying. Frances was a highly regarded teacher when she started hearing voices in her head. And now, months later, she’s barely recovered. When I spoke to her, she appeared bashed about with shame and shock over what had happened. It was as if her mental illness was a deranged clown that had jumped into her driving seat and joy-ridden all over her preciously tendered life, with her strapped, a helpless witness, into the backseat. And now he’s gone, and all she can do is look over the wreckage and wonder.
Frances would be ‘possessed’ every day. And, like my paranormalist friends, she’d hear the voices of the things that were possessing her. But Frances’s voices told her that she was God and that she’d started the earth. They also told her that an organisation called Atlantis Revisited had been listening to her thoughts and that witches were attacking her, stealing parts of her body. She’d call Scotland Yard obsessively and ask to be put through to the ‘Dewitching Department’. And that was just the start of it.
I think there are some important differences between Frances’s mental state and those of my witnesses. For one thing, when Frances was going through all this, she was catastrophically paranoid. For another, she was terrified. And for yet another, she was completely out of control. But most of all, Frances was acting without any logic at all. Her mind was loose and free-styling, like an experimental jazz trumpeter lost in space. Debbie, Lou, Dave and all the rest are functioning people. They have beliefs that fit into a pre-existing world with rules. Frances’s world, though, was self-created and utterly anarchic. I thought, for a while, that it was simple, that Frances was just a lot more unwell than my supernaturalist friends. But
then I found out that Frances didn’t actually see any witches or ghosts or demons. She didn’t even see anything move across a sideboard. So, as profoundly sick as Frances was, she actually experienced far less than these other people, who, while doing what they do, continue to be attentive parents, successful small businessmen and lead guitarists in Spider Monkey.
So, my meeting with Janet has come at an expedient time, because if I’m to let the Enfield case make me a true believer, I need to examine it more closely. And the research I’ve done since my visit to Maurice’s has led me to believe there is plenty more examining to be done.
‘I remember when it first started,’ Janet says, in a voice that’s so quiet it’s temporarily drowned by the miaow of an overweight ginger cat that’s just crawled in through a window behind her. ‘I was due to start senior school, I think, the following week. It was the thirty-first, no … ’ she says, and touches her forehead with the tips of her fingers, ‘the twenty-eighth of August. No … it was the thirty-first. The thirty-first of August nineteen seventy-seven. I slept in the back room with my brother Johnny, and we was laying in bed and we sort of heard something and Johnny said, “What’s that?”’
Depending on who you believe, this moment marked either the beginning of the most widely witnessed and documented haunting in history, or one of the most successful wind-ups. The night before this, Janet and Johnny had had another small disturbance which their mother had given short shrift. And when they complained this time, she told them, yet again, to get to sleep. Then the children saw a chest of drawers slide from the side of Janet’s bed towards the door.
‘We shouted, “Mum! Mum!”’ Janet says. ‘Because we were sort of frightened, but also intrigued by what we were seeing. It’s so vivid, some of it,’ she says, as the late autumn sun begins to set over the kids’ bikes and plastic tractors in the garden behind her. ‘And Mum did see it moving in the end.’