The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

  SIR OLIVER LODGE was a close friend of Conan Doyle and like him lost a son during the First World War, which heightened his interest in trying to communicate with the spirits of the dead. A distinguished physicist, who became renowned for his research into electricity and radio, he also devoted a lot of time to researching the life and work of the leading mediums of his time and was President of the SPR in 1904. He created a sensation in 1916 with the publication of Raymond in which he detailed why he was so convinced of the survival of his son as a result of sittings with two mediums, Mrs Leonard and Vout Peters. Sir Oliver also devised a posthumous test to try and demonstrate his own survival, which later promoted other more sophisticated tests. He conducted a series of fascinating and carefully monitored tests with the famous American medium Mrs Leonore Piper and reported on these in Survival of Man (1915).

  THE TRANCE REPORTS

  Location and date: Liverpool, UK, 1890

  At the request of Mr. Myers [of the SPR] I undertook a share in the investigation of a case of apparent clairvoyance.

  It is the case of a lady who appears to go off into a trance when she pleases to will it under favourable surroundings, and in that trance to talk volubly, with a manner and voice quite different from her ordinary manner and voice, on details concerning which she has had no information given her.

  In this abnormal state her speech has reference mainly to people’s relatives and friends, living or deceased, about whom she is able to hold a conversation, and with whom she appears more or less familiar.

  By introducing anonymous strangers, and by catechising her myself in various ways, I have satisfied myself that much of the information she possesses in the trance state is not acquired by ordinary commonplace methods, but that she has some unusual means of acquiring information. The facts on which she discourses are usually within the knowledge of some person present, though they are often entirely out of his conscious thought at the time. Occasionally facts have been narrated which have only been verified afterwards, and which are in good faith asserted never to have been known; meaning thereby that they have left no trace on the conscious memory of any person present or in the neighbourhood, and that it is highly improbable that they were ever known to such persons.

  She is also in the trance state able to diagnose diseases, and to specify the owners or late owners of portable property, under circumstances which preclude the application of ordinary methods.

  In the midst of this lucidity a number of mistaken and confused statements are frequently made, having little or no apparent meaning or application.

  Concerning the particular means by which she acquires the different kinds of information, there is no sufficient evidence to make it safe to draw any conclusion. I can only say with certainty that it is by none of the ordinary methods known to Physical Science.

  WILLIAM JAMES was one of the first and most influential members of the American Branch of the Society for Physical Research set up in Boston in 1885 under the guidance of William Barrett after the professor had generated great interest in the subject with a series of lectures in the USA and Canada the previous year. The son of the Swedenborgian philosopher Henry James, he had become interested in the supernatural while studying philosophy at Harvard and subsequently contributed essays and reviews to the Boston Daily Advertiser. He was particularly intrigued by the claims of mediums to be able to contact the dead and sat in on séances all over the continent. Here he describes what occurred at a typical gathering in 1908.

  MESSAGES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

  Location and date: Boston, USA, 1908

  My own first visit was on Thursday, December 3, 1908. (Thursday is the night on which the circle habitually sits.) Eight persons, counting myself, were present, three women, five men.

  We sat at first with our fingers on the solid table beneath the disk, and various tippings came. Then, with our wrists or palms on the ring and our fingers on the disk, various messages were spelt.

  Mrs B., whose fifth sitting it was, had her fingers automatically jerked away whenever she placed them on the disk. This had happened previously; and, during the previous lifting of the table on November 19th, she had held her hands in the air some inches above the disk. She kept them in that situation on this present occasion whenever we made attempts to have the table lifted. Such attempts were several times repeated, but with no success.

  On the controls then being asked whether they could not make the disk rotate without contact, they spelled “no.”

  Suddenly, while we were sitting with our wrists on the brass ring and our fingers on the disk, which turned and spelled, we perceived that the ring or rail itself was moving. It had never done this on any previous evening. The phenomenon was consequently unexpected, and seemed to strike all present with surprise.

  Someone immediately suggested that all wrists should be lifted, and then, in brilliant light, and no one’s hands in any way in contact with the rail, our fingers, however, resting on the disk, we all distinctly saw the rail or ring slide slowly and for several inches through the collars, as if spontaneously.

  We then stuck a mark upon the ring to make its motion more obvious, and repeated five or six times the experiment, the same result ensuing, though more slightly each time. It always took the contact of our wrists to start the rail, but its motion continued when the contact ceased. This was not from its acquired momentum, for we ascertained that the friction of the collars which held the rail stopped instantly every motion imparted voluntarily by the hand.

  On the succeeding Saturday and Sunday evenings, we sat again (one of the ladies being absent), but nothing but that usual tilting of the table and spelling of messages occurred.

  So much for the “record,” which all present have signed. It will be observed that all the phenomena reported (save the movements of the finger-bowl) were unexpected and startling to the spectators. The explosions and the table’s rising seem to have been eminently so, and to have made a great impression.

  On December 3rd, when the ring revolved, the conditions of observation were perfect, the light (from an electric chandelier just overhead) being brilliant, and the phenomena being slow enough, and often enough repeated, to leave my own mind in no doubt at the time as to what was witnessed. I was quite convinced that I saw that no hand was on the ring while it was moving. The maximum length of its path under these circumstances was fully six inches. With this conviction that I saw all there was to see, I have to confess that I am surprised that the phenomenon affected me emotionally so little. I may add, as a psychological fact, that now, after four days’ interval, my mind seems strongly inclined not to “count” the observation, as if it were too exceptional to have been probable. I have only once before seen an object moved “paradoxically,” and then the conditions were unsatisfactory. But I have supposed that if I could once see the same thing “satisfactorily,” the levee by which scientific opinion protects nature would be cracked for me, and I should be as one watching an incipient overflow of the Mississippi of the supernatural into the fields of orthodox culture. I find, however, that I look on nature with unaltered eyes today, and that my orthodox habits tend to extrude this would-be levee-breaker. It forms too much of an exception.

  PROFESSOR JAMES HERVEY HYSLOP became the chief investigator of American phenomena after the death of William James in 1910. Professor of Logic and Ethics at Columbia University, New York from 1869–1912, he was a prolific writer and researcher as well as a great propagandist for survival, declaring in Life After Death (1918), “I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved.” He also claimed that his predecessor William James “returned” after his death and recounted the events in Contact With The Other World (1918). He, too, was alleged to have “returned” according to his secretary, Gertrude Tubby, in James H Hyslop (1929). The following story is one of the most unusual cases of a haunting that he encountered.

  THE OLD WOMAN AND THE COFFIN

  Location and date: New York, USA, 1906.r />
  I shall refer briefly to one collective case of an apparition as involved three percipients, a lady, her nurse, and a little child, which I investigated. A Mrs Hunter of New York looked into her bedroom one night and to her astonishment saw what looked like a large coffin on the bed. Sitting at the foot of it was “a tall, old women steadfastly regarding it”.

  When Mrs Hunter spoke of her experience, she was laughed at. Later she went to the nursery and the nurse complained that she “felt so queer”. The woman explained that at 7 o’clock she had “seen a tall old woman coming downstairs”. This, too, was laughed off.

  About half an hour afterwards, Mrs Hunter heard a piercing scream from her little daughter, aged five. This was followed by loud, frightened tones and then she heard the nurse soothing the child.

  Next morning the child was full of her wrongs. She said, “A naughty old woman was sitting at the table and staring at me. She made me scream.”

  When I attended the scene, the nurse told me that she had found the child awake, sitting up in bed. She was pointing at the table and crying out, “Go away, go away, you naughty old woman!” But there was no one there. The nurse had been in bed some time and the door was locked.

  A day or two afterwards, a letter reached Mrs Hunter. It was from the son of a Mrs Macfarlane, announcing his mother’s death. It said that, “Her last hours were disturbed by anxiety for her husband and family.” It transpired that she had left in Mrs Hunter’s care a large trunk of valuables.

  CAMILLE FLAMMARION, famous as one of the greatest French astronomers, was also a leading figure in investigating paranormal phenomena in the country. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the British SPR and in 1923 was appointed President. Among his relevant books are Mysterious Psychic Forces (1907), Death and its Mysteries (1922) and Haunted Houses (1924). In 1918, Flammarion was involved in a very curious case of haunting that was experienced by himself and his wife as well as several others while staying with some friends in Cherbourg.

  THE HAUNTED BED

  Location and date: Cherbourg, France, 1918

  This little event happened in the night from April 26 to 27, 1918, and the next night, at No. 13, Rue de la Polle, Cherbourg. The house belongs to my friend Dr Bonnefoy, then chief medical officer of the Marine Hospital. I had stayed there in September, 1914, with my wife, my secretary, Mlle Renaudot, and our youthful cook, at the invitation of Madame Bonnefoy, president of the Red Cross and of the Femmes de France, who had begged us to leave Paris on the approach of the barbarian armies. After returning to Paris in the following December we had gone back to Cherbourg in April 1918, on a second invitation from Dr Bonnefoy, in consequence of a new German offensive against Paris, and in order to avoid air raids and Berthas.

  During this interval between December 1914, and April 1918, Mme Bonnefoy died (October 25, 1916).

  There had been a profound affection between us. She had placed in the house a marble plaque recalling my stay there in 1914.

  Her husband had placed in a room which he regarded as a sort of oratory her death-bed, the old furniture she loved, her portraits, and her dearest mementoes.

  At our return in 1918, this room happened to fall to Mlle Renaudot.

  It is in that room that the unexplained noises took place – commotions, movements, sounds of steps. The witnesses are two persons incapable of being influenced by any illusion, and both very sceptical although of different mentalities: Mlle Renaudot, a lady of high scientific culture; and the cook, in conformity with her station, steady and prudent.

  I asked them to write down their impressions at once, with the most scrupulous accuracy. They did so on May 7. Let them speak for themselves:

  Narrative of Mlle Renaudot

  We arrived at Cherbourg, M. and Mme Flammarion, myself, and the cook, on Thursday, April 25. Ever since Dr Bonnefoy’s invitation came I had been wondering how we should be lodged in that house, where we had shared the family life more than three years before with charming and most devoted hosts, where we should find ourselves in a very different atmosphere, seeing that the doctor had married again. I had not wished to be given the room and the bed of the departed lady, my old friend, who had shown me so much sympathy, and whom I mourned with a profound sorrow.

  It turned out that though I did not get Mme Suzanne Bonnefoy’s room I at all events got her bed, taken from the ground floor, where she died, up to a first-floor room which had been her room as a girl. It was a great Breton bed, very old, of carved wood, and surmounted by a canopy hung with tapestry. The whole room was furnished with artistic old wooden furniture, bedside table, hat-rack, ecclesiastical desk. Opposite the bed was a portrait of Mme Bonnefoy – a photographic enlargement of a striking likeness.

  I was much impressed with it. The memory of the past came upon me constantly. I saw our friend again, as she seemed so happy in her active and harmonious life devoted entirely to good deeds, and I figured to myself how she must have been on this same bed, which for two days and three nights had been her death-bed.

  The first night, April 25 to 26, I did not sleep, thinking of her in the past and the present state of her house. I was also rather indisposed.

  Next day, April 26 to 27, I promised myself a good night. About 11 p.m. I went to sleep and put away my old memories.

  At 4 a.m. on the 27th a loud noise awakened me. On the left of the bed terrible cracklings were heard in the wall, then went on to the table and round the room. Then there was a slighter sound, repeated several times, as of a person turning in a bed. The wood of my bed also creaked. Finally, I heard a noise of a light step gliding along to the left of the bed, passing round it and entering the drawing-room on the right, where Mme Bonnefoy had been in the habit of listening to her husband playing the organ or the piano, he being an excellent musician.

  These sounds impressed me so much that my heart nearly choked me with its beating, and my jaw became stiff.

  In my emotion I got up, lighted a candle, and sat down on a basket standing on the landing outside the room. There I tried to account for the noises. They continued with still greater force, but nothing was to be seen.

  At 5 a.m., a prey to unreasoned terror and unable to hold out, I went up to the cook, Marie Thionnet, who slept on the third floor. She came down with me. After her arrival we heard nothing more. It may be useful to remark that the cook’s character did not at all harmonise with that of Mme Bonnefoy.

  At 5.45 a.m. the doctor, on the second floor, got up and went into his dressing-room. The noises he made on getting up and walking about did not in the least resemble those I had heard an hour before.

  In the course of the day I sought for an explanation of the phenomenon: cats, rats climbing along the walls. I examined the wall to the left of the bed. It was very thick, covered outside with slates, smooth, and overlooking a yard. It was a bad run for cats or rats, as it was the front wall on the Rue de la Polle. Besides, the noises were very different from those produced by animals.

  On Saturday, April 27, I went to bed at 10.45 p.m., disturbed and nervous.

  At 11 p.m. the noises started, as in the morning. I at once went upstairs to the cook, in my trepidation. She came down and lay on the bed beside me. We left our candles alight. For half an hour the noises continued, with loud cracks on the wall on the left. Raps sounded on Mme Bonnefoy’s portrait or behind it, and the raps were so loud that we feared it would fall. At the same time steps glided through the room. The cook heard all this, too, and was much impressed. She is twenty-six years of age.

  At 11.30 p.m. the noises ceased. As these manifestations were very disagreeable, especially as being due to an unknown and incomprehensible cause, I composed myself in the course of the next day, and, supposing that the deceased might be associated with them, since it happened in her house, I begged her to spare me such painful emotion.

  We remained in the house until Saturday, May 4. Having heard nothing more, and having calmed down, I then asked the deceased to manifest herself, and to let me know
in some way what she might desire.

  But I have not observed anything since then, in spite of my wish (mixed with nervousness) to test the phenomena and to obtain, if possible, an explanation of this strange manifestation.

  (Sg.) GABRIELLE RENAUDOT.

  CHERBOURG, May 7, 1918.

  The Cook’s Account.

  On Saturday morning, April 27, 1918, about five o’clock, Mlle Renaudot came for me to witness noises in her room. I went down, but heard nothing.

  The following night, April 27, a little after eleven, Mlle Renaudot came again about the same noises, which had returned. I went down with her and heard noises behind the bedside table, as if somebody were scratching the wood. Then I heard as if somebody glided very quickly over the floor from the table to the drawing-room, and also as if somebody had struck sharp blows behind the portrait of Mme Bonnefoy. These noises lasted about half an hour. I acknowledge that I was much afraid, so that my teeth rattled. There were two lighted candles in the room, and we were wide awake, talking about the noises aloud and localising them as they came.