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

by Will Storr

  It’s just gone 6 p.m. when we reach the pub, which is warm, empty and looks as though it has been designed in a ‘modern contemporary style’ by a TV makeover crew on a tough schedule. As I’m trying to decide between chips and onion rings to go with my steak, the Founder receives a call on his mobile from his friend Paul, who used to be one of the paranormal experts on Most Haunted.

  ‘Paul’s a bit worried,’ he tells me, once the conversation is over, ‘about Living TV.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, putting my menu down.

  ‘Well,’ he says. He looks around him, even though the pub is empty. ‘You know how they’ve got all those gay shows on there? The L Word and Queer Eye For the Straight Guy – all that stuff?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Well, he’s worried that they’re going to do a … ’

  ‘A gay ghost show?’ I say.

  ‘Exactly,’ says the Founder. He puts his menu down and looks around him again, conspiratorially. ‘I mean, it’s obvious really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘They’re bound to just bring the two concepts together.’

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  The waitress comes over and we order our food. I read the menu again for a bit. Some time passes.

  ‘I don’t get paid for house-sitting, you know,’ he tells me, suddenly. ‘I don’t get nothing, except for a litre-and-a-half bottle of Southern Comfort.’

  I look at David and smile. My brain is empty again. I begin to feel a bit guilty about it.

  ‘I don’t even drink,’ says the Founder. ‘Well, hardly ever. But he always brings me the same thing. I’ve got a row of bottles of Southern Comfort in my bedroom at home. I’ll wait until I’ve got a caseload and take them to an off licence and say, “Here you are. How much do I get for those?”’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I say.

  I pick up the laminated menu and examine it quizzically. I straighten my knife and fork in front of me. I arrange them exactly one thumb-width from the edge of my place mat, which is dead straight, and precisely a fingernail’s distance from the edge of the table.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, I do like Southern Comfort,’ says David. ‘But one bottle of it lasts me four years.’

  And then, the food comes. It’s served on enormous plates, and it is delicious. We eat it, happily and with slurps.

  After our elaborate coffees have been drunk, we troop back through the freezing night to the house. There’s a full moon. I don’t know if it’s the monochrome lunar light that’s glowing over the roof, walls, bare tree-branches and wide empty fields, or whether it’s the age of the building or what. But as we walk up this remote country lane, the scene in front of us is truly eerie. And not in a cheesy ghost-train way either. The ancient little medieval home at the end of the path looks foreboding, brooding, unhappy. Its blank white walls and mean little windows give a void, pallid and deathly sense and some sunken, primeval instinct is telling me to turn around immediately and leave.

  We walk into the house and the old wooden door, with its heavy iron bolts, is slammed and locked behind us. We take our coats off and trot upstairs to retrieve the Minidisc player. The recording doesn’t cheer me up much. We listen to it sitting at the big table in the main room, with fresh teas. We get past my intro and the sound of us leaving the house and, almost straight away, the latches start going. And then there’s footsteps and crashes and strange swishing sounds.

  ‘The first time I heard this sort of thing,’ he tells me, ‘I was straight out of the door and down the pub. I couldn’t come back in for three hours.’

  ‘What is it?’ I say.

  I suddenly feel impotent and abandoned. What would Amorth say about these noises? That this is Satan’s work? That flocks of demons are dancing through the dimensions and demonstrating that this house is in the darkness, well outside of God’s kingdom? Or could they be Stone Tape sound recordings? Quantum bunches of soul? Rogue radio waves? Or a fault with the recorder? Or insects? Or … or … or … I sit there stilly and all these thoughts coalesce into a terrible theory-twister that ranges through my brain. My head drops into my hands.

  And then I remember what I’ve done. I close my eyes and wish, wish I hadn’t. Earlier on, I insisted that David let me sleep upstairs, tonight, in the ‘haunted room’. I sit and sulk at myself quietly for a time.

  Eventually, David starts to tell me about his life, and about his relationship with his fiancée that broke down fifteen years ago. He starts looking sad, so I try to cheer him up by mentioning the good things he’s got going on. His ghost club, his new ITV1 show and, most of all, this place. He’s so obviously passionate about it and truly happy when he’s here. I say, ‘It’s almost as if your love affair is with this house now, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is, yes,’ he says. ‘I am in love with this house and I think if I was unable to come here again I’d be totally devastated, just like I was then. It would be the same feeling. A feeling of dread. That’s a nasty feeling. Your stomach sinks, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does,’ I say. ‘It’s bad.’

  I smile at him, encouragingly. I wonder if this is the moment to go further, to try and get to the bottom of his unusually intense feelings towards this house.

  ‘I was thinking, Dave,’ I say. ‘I get the impression that … do you think that you lived here in a past life?’ I say.

  ‘It’s quite possible,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I also get the feeling that maybe you think you used to own this house? Like, this house is actually yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s very perceptive of you. I do have a sense that, to me, this is home. Someone did say that I looked like one of the faces that has been seen in the window over there.’

  ‘You told me that you play the lottery religiously,’ I say. ‘Is that because you hope to buy this house? To reclaim what’s yours?’

  David picks up his cigarette packet. He puts it down. He stares into space between his head and his hands.

  ‘It would be nice, yes,’ he says. ‘It would be very, very nice. I do think the person that is deserving of it is myself.’

  ‘So, if you used to own this place, some of the ghosts in here could actually be you,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  We sit in silence for a while longer and, eventually, I take my sleeping bag up the stairs and into the haunted room. It’s horrible in here. It’s as if the air is made of invisible sponge. As soon as I walk in, I feel forcibly bounced out again. David describes it well. He says it’s ‘a room that doesn’t like people’. And it’s freezing. The ceiling sags down with age, the beams are jagged and crotchety and the windows are warped and thin. Outside, the moon hangs above the ancient winter trees. I bend down to unzip my sleeping bag and the moment I do, become convinced that somebody is behind me. I turn. Nothing. I start to hum to myself for company, but can’t rid myself of the feeling that I am being watched. It’s as if the room is furious at the impertinence of my presence. There’s an overwhelming feeling that something is terribly wrong. I hum some more, self-consciously, and close the door. And then I stand, rigidly, watching it. I’m convinced that the latch is going to open, just like it did before, with the old lady. I wait and breathe. Eventually, when I’ve sufficiently gee’d myself up, I turn off the light and climb, slowly and with as little noise as possible, into my sleeping bag.

  The darkness curls around me. It seems, somehow, bigger and older than normal night. The room creaks and sits, as if satisfied now that it’s in its favoured state – cold and black and pitiless, like a coffin. I lower my chin into the zip of the bag. Outside the window, the fields and the trees are silent. Inside, I can see floorboards and moonlight and …

  Something. I can hear something. Breathing. And it’s not mine. My eyes stop moving. I’m scared and thrilled and rigid. In, out. It’s there. I heard it. In, out. It is there. And it’s not mine. I hold my breath and look and listen and try to hear it. It seems to be coming from the armchair, behind
me. I can’t move to look. I can’t move at all. The floorboards are hard under me and my toes are cold and I’m suddenly very aware of the parts of me that are exposed to the cold air – my neck and my head and my nose – and I’m scared. I halt a whimper in the back of my throat and listen again and what’s there, what is it? An apparition? A black shadow?

  ‘Who’s there?’ I ask, weakly.

  It stops.

  And I bolt.

  Out of the door and down the steps and round the corner, my sleeping bag trailing after me, my socks falling off my feet.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘I wondered how long you’d last up there,’ David says, peering up from out of his quilt in the blazing light of the unhaunted living room.

  ‘There was breathing!’ I tell him. ‘And it wasn’t mine!’

  ‘Was there?’ he says. ‘Great. I’m amazed you lasted as long as you did, actually. Most people are out of that room within seconds.’

  The Founder puts his head back down again. I stand still for a moment and look at him. I feel anti-climactic. This isn’t fair. This is my big moment. I try to prolong it.

  ‘It’s horrible in there,’ I say.

  David doesn’t lift his head from his pillow. ‘It is,’ he says. ‘I can’t go in there for long.’

  ‘Has anybody heard breathing before?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s been heard before.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘Not very often. It has been documented by visitors who’ve come here. There was one girl who heard heavy breathing followed by the words “get out of this room”. She was quite upset.’

  ‘It was incredible,’ I say.

  And it was. But as soon as I lie down on my sofa, my brain starts trying to rationalise it. The first query it slips me is: was the whole thing a dream? But I’m sure I wasn’t asleep. Next, I remember that Ian Wilson, the author of one of the books I read at the British Library, heard ghostly breathing in a haunted bedroom. So did Jung and Lou Gentile. Coincidence? Or did I have some sort of auditory hallucination triggered by the memory of those things? What if Dr Mark was right? What if I heard the trees in the wind and fear pushed me into an intense, super-aroused state and my mind jumped to a wrong conclusion?

  And then I start berating myself for not having the courage to look at the source of the sound. What if there was an actual, visible ghost there? What if a fully formed black shadow, or a detailed apparition or a demon was standing there and terror made me miss it?

  The next morning dawns pale and dank and ordinary. But as the Founder drives me to the station, the world, to me, seems more alive and magical and bewildering than it has for a long time. Now, more than ever, I’m sure that there is more to life than love, money and worrying. There is more to reality than we can see. And that’s the best news that any human can have. I look out of my window. The car passes a bus stop and a supermarket and a dark stone church with a tall spire. It has a fluoro-orange poster with some pro-Jesus propaganda written on it. I follow it with my eyes, my head craning, until we pass it completely.

  ‘Every time I leave that house, I get a tear in my eye and a lump in my throat,’ David is saying.

  ‘But when you die,’ I say, ‘you’ll be there for ever. And then you can meet all the ghosts that haunt it and hang out with them.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’d probably not be able to see them because there’s a difference in time periods.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Won’t that be quite lonely? Not being able to see anyone else for all eternity?’

  The Founder looks at me, his eyes big and heartbreaking behind his fragile glasses. ‘No,’ he says in a small voice. ‘I think that it would be quite nice.’

  ‘I got one for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry? Who is this?’

  ‘What time is it over there?’

  ‘ … um … ’

  ‘About four-thirty a.m., right?’

  ‘Yeah, I … is this Lou?’

  ‘Listen, Will. I got one for you. I’m going to need you to be at Philadelphia airport within the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘What? That’s impossible! Twenty-four hours? I can’t be –’

  ‘We’ll be going to Kentucky to see a boy who is possessed and we’ll be going to his house where they’ve had black shadows, knocking, banging, voices, faces in mid-air. We’re going to be driving all the way, all night, and this time, you gotta follow the rules. Make sure you stay with me and DO NOT provoke anything. I already have the demon’s name and things could get real bad.’

  ‘Lou, I’m sorry. There’s no way I can just get on a plane and be in Philadelphia in twenty-four hours.’

  21

  ‘And that’s God?’

  BEYOND THE QUIET rumble of the car engine, there’s another, stranger sound. I first heard it when we last stopped, about 150 miles ago. I try to pick it up again now, through the steady hum of cruising tyres on interstate tarmac. The coffee dregs, inside two big-gulp beakers that are held from the dashboard in special cup-holders, are now cold. Their smooth, liquid surfaces pitch back and forth in time with the rhythm of the engine. The rosary that’s hanging down from the rear-view mirror is also swinging to the beat of the road. Every now and then it hits the glass of the windscreen. It’s hypnotic.

  ‘There’s a battle going on,’ says the demonologist. ‘There’s a battle going on between good and evil. Between things that are in the light of God and things that are out of the light of God.’

  I reach down between my legs, pick up another Hickory Smoke Jerky Stick, rip it open with my teeth and bite down.

  ‘You’re always going to have people who say, “There’s no battle,”’ Lou says. ‘But I’ve experienced waaayyyyy too much stuff to even think about saying, “Oh, no, there’s no battle.” There’s a battle.’

  And then, the fog rolls in. Out of an empty sky, the twisting mist rushes quickly towards us, opens up and scoops us in. And all the while, the drum and rock of the car doesn’t falter.

  ‘Right now,’ Lou says, leaning towards my tape recorder that’s on the ledge behind the steering wheel, ‘Will and I are driving through a big cloud.’

  ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Lou – look at the time.’

  The red digits on the dashboard read 3.33 a.m. Lou takes it in and thinks for a beat.

  ‘Hmmm. You know what?’ he says. ‘I ain’t taking any chances either.’

  Lou lifts his petrol-leg a little. The engine drops a pitch as the car slows down. He looks at me sideways and quickly from behind lowered eyebrows.

  ‘We haven’t encountered anything strange, except this,’ he says. ‘We’re driving through a big cloud, even though we just went through about sixty mountains and didn’t see anything like this.’

  Now that the car’s incessant drone has quietened, I push my ear into the window and try to hear the sound again. I think I can hear … something.

  ‘That shit you were telling me about Janet,’ Lou says. ‘That’s some really wild stuff, man.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Honestly. Her voice sounded exactly the same as your EVP.’

  ‘And that one thing you said about when they duct-taped her mouth shut … ’

  ‘And filled it with water … ’

  ‘How about when she levitated in the room? She was fucking levitating! And I can guarantee you that shit still goes on, but she’s not gonna talk about it because she doesn’t want it to come back.’

  ‘Do you know who she reminded me of?’ I say, peeling back the clear plastic wrapper and taking another bite of the jerky stick.

  ‘Kathy!’ Lou says.

  I look at Lou, and nod. He laughs triumphantly and hits the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. The clock flicks to 3.34.

  ‘You see?’ he laughs. ‘I’m telling you, man! You must have been going nuts!’

  ‘Honestly, Lou,’ I say. ‘She gave me this look. It was just the same as the look Kathy gave me.’

  Lou laughs again. A big, rolling guffaw that
fills the car and ends with a ‘woah!’

  ‘And she says that there was something still there,’ I say, ‘until her mother died.’

  ‘It’s there,’ he says, nodding. ‘Oh, it’s there all right. That case is too fucking powerful.’

  ‘She also told me that she did a Ouija board with her sister, before it all kicked off. And when I told Amorth, he said it was the devil.’

  Lou stares straight ahead, at the night and the miles in front of us. ‘Oh yeah, they pulled the devil through,’ he says. ‘Not the devil. A devil. Anytime you use divination like that, forget it. You’re going to wind up with something bad. Ninety-five per cent of the cases I get involved with are to do with Ouija board involvement. And I’m not talking about “ghosty” ghosts, like apparitions. These are bad cases. But you gotta understand, I’m not saying that everything is demonic. You have to understand that. You don’t just walk into somebody’s house and say, “This is a demon.” It really takes a lot of research. I’ll give you an example. It’s like this case we’re going on down to tonight. This one’s different. There’s just too many signs with this one.’

  Lou hunches down and moves his head forward to peer through the fog.

  ‘Man,’ he says, ‘I can’t see where the hell we’re going.’

  The rosary hits the windscreen, again.

  ‘Do you think this fog is anything, y’know, bad? It came at exactly 3.33.’

  ‘Well, we’re now in Kentucky and all this way we didn’t see anything like this. But you got to look at the possibility that it’s fog, and that’s all. Nothing bad is happening and that’s great. I’d rather have it that way.’

  ‘You know when the Carvens’ clock stopped at three o’clock?’ I say. ‘Do you think that was a sign?’