Ghosts & Gallows

by Paul Adams

  We will return to the subject of prophetic dreams in a later chapter as our next case has its paranormal element, not as a way of revealing a crime, but as a direct and chilling means of murder …

  NOTE

  1. See Phil Baker’s The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Dedalus Ltd, Sawtry, 2009). Eric Tombe was buried in a family plot in Sutton Cemetery; the memorial is to his brother, Kenneth, who died in America in 1917.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE ENIGMA

  NETTA FORNARIO, 1929

  Haunting apparitions are one of the most familiar and widely reported aspects of the paranormal world. A wealth of records exist for ghosts and ghostly phenomena occurring in and around countless buildings across the country, both humble and historic, from council houses, pubs, railway stations and cinemas, through to prisons, stately homes and ancient castles. Although their causation and reasons for appearing are at present unexplainable, these resident phantoms are for the most part benign and harmless. In his aforementioned The Ghost Hunter’s Guide (1986), Peter Underwood considers these hauntings in terms of ‘mental imprint manifestations’ or ‘atmospheric photograph ghosts’: impressions of former inhabitants or events that have become seemingly ingrained in the building’s fabric and which become active and are either able to ‘play back’ under suitable conditions, or are triggered into action by the presence of a psychic person. Unsettling as these experiences may be to some, they operate within their own realm oblivious to the presence of observers and are on the whole most often regarded, as writers Michael and Molly Hardwicke have described them, as ‘inoffensive members of the community’.

  However, the literature of psychical research is also littered with credible accounts of supernormal happenings which can best be summarised as ‘extreme hauntings’: paranormal experiences that seemingly involve both some form of intelligence or discarnate consciousness together with a varying degree of force or violence directed towards the percipient or observers. Although the boundaries between them are at times somewhat blurred and overlapping, they fall with some exceptions into the following three broad categories: possessions, poltergeist phenomena and psychic attacks.

  Violent or ‘demonic possessions’ have become associated in the public mind in recent years with the disturbing and shocking imagery contained in director William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist, whose screenplay, as well as the novel on which it was based, were both written by New York writer William Peter Blatty. Blatty’s story was itself based on real life events which took place in 1949 in Cottage City, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC, and were centred around a thirteen-year-old boy named Douglas Deen. The youth went into convulsions, screamed obscenities and spoke in Latin, a language with which he was unfamiliar, and these disturbances were also accompanied by powerful physical phenomena of a poltergeist-like nature, including scratching and banging noises together with the movement of objects and furniture. After a protracted exorcism ceremony carried out by Father William Bowdern, a Jesuit priest, the possession ended after several months in May 1949. Modern psychiatric medicine ascribes most instances of possession to personality disorders but a number of cases, such as the Cottage City incident, lend support to the argument of there being in some instances violent person-centred hauntings involving the temporary invasion of a person’s organism by a discarnate ‘spirit’ or ‘entity’ from another realm or world. In Britain, a noted and high-profile exorcist was the late Revd Dr Donald Omand, who was the subject of a full length biography To Anger the Devil (1978) by Australian writer and ghost hunter Marc Alexander.

  Supernormal happenings that today we recognise as poltergeist phenomena have a recorded history stretching back centuries to the time of Homer and Plutarch. The first book in the English language to describe poltergeist hauntings is Ludwig Lavater’s Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght, published in London in 1572, and there have been a number of notable cases from the British Isles since that time, beginning with the famous Drummer of Tedworth in Wiltshire, recorded by the Revd Joseph Glanville in the middle years of the seventeenth century. Glanville issued an account of his investigation in 1661 and just over 300 years separate this and the accounts of another British poltergeist incident, which is now also regarded as a landmark case. In 1977, reports of spectacular and violent disturbances of a supernatural nature in a council house in Enfield, North London, made newspaper headlines and have become one of the most famous paranormal investigations of modern times. For over a year the Hodgson family (given the pseudonym Harper in contemporary and subsequent publicity) were at the centre of bizarre and at times terrifying events which included the violent projection and movement of objects and furniture, knocks and banging sounds, the apparent levitation of family members, apparitions (including bizarrely on one occasion an apparition of one of the investigating members of the Society for Psychical Research) as well as spontaneous fires and paranormal graffiti.

  Ten years before, a less well known but equally impressive period of poltergeist haunting took place in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The case of the Black Monk of Pontefract involved another working class family, the Pritchards, who, like the Hodgsons at Enfield, were subjected to several months of violent and inexplicable phenomena: deafening drumming noises, breaking furniture and crockery, the appearance of pools of water and a strange chalk-like dust, together with a tall apparition thought to be the ghost of a long-dead Cluniac monk hanged for rape in the time of Henry VIII. On one occasion twelve-year-old Diane Pritchard was dragged up the stairs by an invisible assailant, which left a series of red finger marks on her throat. The vast majority of parapsychologists have traditionally assigned poltergeist phenomena to be a form of recurring and spontaneous psychokinesis normally centred around a living person, most often an adolescent youth. However, some researchers, such as Guy Playfair, who spent several months at Enfield during the time of the disturbances, and Colin Wilson, who made a retrospective study of the Pontefract case in the early 1980s, are inclined to believe that poltergeists are actually more closely related to the popular view of possession and are the result of actual discarnate ‘entities’ or non-human personalities rather than the extraordinary effects of the human mind.

  The subject of psychic attack has become somewhat confused in modern times, with the result that alleged contemporary cases or given examples bear only a superficial resemblance to the concept as understood and accepted by researchers and investigators in the past. Today, paranormalists are likely to group a vast array of alleged phenomena (both real and imagined), ranging from anxiety, depression and mood swings through to bad luck, curses and voodooism as evidence of some form of psychic attack, whereas in its true sense the term has more of a close kinship with person-centred poltergeist hauntings or possessions, but without an invading secondary personality and less spectacular psychokinetic (i.e. Macro-PK) effects, such as the physical movement of objects and furniture. During his experiences with the haunted skull of William Corder, Dr Kilner described to Robert Thurston Hopkins’ father an incident which sounds very much like the classical interpretation of a psychic attack: of being stopped in his tracks by an enormous gust of wind while walking into the drawing-room of his house, and experiencing an unseen but tremendously powerful form which took a concerted effort, both mentally and physically, to throw off.

  Psychical research has shown an awareness and interest in the phenomenon of psychic attacks since the very first days of organised investigation and discussion. At a meeting of the Ghost Club – the oldest society devoted to the study of the supernormal, having been founded in Cambridge in the early 1850s – and held in the Burlington Fine Arts Club in August 1893, Mr A.J. Hamilton Wills described several unnerving incidents that he personally experienced while staying at a country house in Somerset. Retiring to bed shortly before midnight, Hamilton Wills became aware of footsteps following him as he made his way upstairs. At the door to his bedroom he paused and heard the footsteps approach and pass
by into the room. Shortly afterwards, after he had undressed and lain down in bed, he was assaulted by a powerful invisible force which tore at the bedclothes and pressed down violently on his throat and chest. The attack lasted several minutes before subsiding and Hamilton Wills likened the strength to that of three fully grown men. During his stay, there were a further two night-time incidents of a similar nature, each less powerful than the previous attack but no doubt equally as frightening and inexplicable.

  One of the most famous cases of psychic attack in the early decades of the twentieth century was that involving Eleonore Zügun, a young teenage Romanian peasant girl who became known in psychical research circles in both England and Vienna during the mid-1920s as the ‘Poltergeist Medium’ or ‘Devil Girl’. Under controlled conditions and in the presence of experienced investigators, including English-born Australian entomologist and psychical researcher Robin J. Tillyard, and Harry Price (who we will meet fully in the next chapter), raps sounded in her presence, ornaments and coins moved unaided, and small toys were apported into the test room. However, the most striking phenomena produced by Eleonore, and that for which she is most remembered today, were the painful stigmata which appeared suddenly and without warning on various parts of her body, including her face, back, neck, hands and arms. These took the form of bite marks, scratches and weals, which developed while the medium was under close and constant observation and were both photographed and filmed. A possible explanation is that these stigmata were psychosomatic in origin – Eleonore believed she was being attacked by the Dracu, the Romanian word for ‘Devil’ – in which case this would be an intriguing and protracted incident of self-induced psychic attack. With the onset of menstruation at the age of fourteen, Eleonore’s phenomena ceased; she subsequently returned to Romania and went on to open her own hairdressing business in Czernowitz.

  Of all psychic attacks the most extreme and controversial is that which involved an American family in Culver City, southern California, during the early 1970s. Doris Bithers, a young single mother of four children in her early thirties, living in semi-squalid conditions in a house with a local reputation for being haunted, claimed to have been physically attacked and raped by malevolent spirits for a period of several years. The case was investigated in 1974 by two parapsychologists, Dr Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor from the University of California, Los Angeles, who reported experiencing poltergeist phenomena in the Bithers house for a period of two months. Taff later acted as technical advisor on the 1983 Exorcist-style film The Entity, which was loosely based on his own investigation.

  In England during the same period, reports of unusual happenings centred on the small village of Clapham near Worthing on the South Downs also contained elements that could be described as forms of psychic or paranormal attack. Incidents of UFO sightings, missing animals, several unexplained deaths and Black Magic practices were investigated by a local man, Charles Walker, together with journalist and writer Toyne Newton, who published accounts, initially in the part-work magazine The Unexplained, and later as a full-length book The Demonic Connection (1987). Newton and Walker record several instances of visitors walking through an area of Clapham Wood being seized and temporarily overtaken by unseen and debilitating forces, while on two occasions during the 1970s, Charles Walker witnessed similar psychic attacks at nearby Chanctonbury Ring, the site of an old hill-fort on the South Downs four and a half miles north-east of Clapham village, that has become associated with the disturbances: in August 1974, a member of Walker’s UFO group was suddenly levitated five feet into the air before being thrown to the ground and, five years later, another researcher was knocked off his feet by a similar unseen force.

  At Clapham the inference is quite clear that both Toyne Newton and Charles Walker considered these disturbing experiences not as spontaneous events but due directly to modern day occultism and Satanic practices. As such these psychic attacks could be considered almost as by-products of intentional acts of Black Magic, involving ritual animal sacrifice, being carried out by an organised coven in the area over a period of several years; and, by surviving as localised pockets of psychic energy could, on certain occasions, cause physical and mental effects on visitors who happen to pass either into the vicinity or over a particular path or location. In this particular case there was no suggestion that psychic forces were being directed consciously by members of the occult group involved – the Friends of Hecate – but there are those who consider the ability for an adept of Black Magic or occultism to be able to create a psychic attack as a weapon or means of vengeance against an enemy to be a reality. What concerns us here is the suggestion that such a sinister and paranormal ability was in fact behind a strange and sudden death that took place on a lonely island off the west coast of Scotland in the winter of 1929.

  The development of psychical research as an organised discipline in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century also coincided with an increase in the Victorian interest for ritual magic and occultism. During the 1880s, occult arts such as astrology, alchemy, ritual magic and cartomancy (the use of cards such as the Tarot to tell fortunes) were being synthesised into one unifying system of Western occultism by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, an eccentric and somewhat enigmatic Englishman in his mid thirties; this become known as the Western Esoteric Tradition. In 1888, the same year that Jack the Ripper stalked the East End of London and Cambridge philosopher Professor Henry Sidgwick presided over the newly formed Society for Psychical Research, Mathers, together with two other fellow Freemasons, founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a semi-secret society dedicated to ceremonial magic and the study of the ‘intellectual forces behind Nature, the constitution of man and his relation to God’.

  The Golden Dawn established lodges and taught its hundred or so members practical occult arts: how to set up magical circles, consecrate talismans, how to cast spells, use magical weapons and to master the out-of-body experience of astral travelling. Mathers’ occultism was ceremonial rather than drug dependent or sex magic, but was none the less powerful and deadly effective: he claimed to be able to summon the demon Beelzebub, the supreme chieftain of Hell, but warned his followers that unless the magical circle was drawn with total accuracy, any mistake or slip up would result in self-destruction and the magician would be killed on the spot.

  In November 1898, Mathers accepted a new student member into the Order, a twenty-three-year-old youth named Edward Alexander Crowley, who had become interested in occultism while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. As the self-styled ‘Great Beast’, Aleister Crowley, as he would later call himself – and who seems to have believed he was in reality the biblical Beast whose number is said to be 666 – became one of the most notorious men in England. Known for the mantra ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ from his prose poem The book of the law, a channelled text that Crowley believed he had received as a new gospel for mankind. Crowley became an enthusiastic Neophyte but tensions gradually developed; Mathers and he quarrelled and eventually Crowley was expelled from the Order. If accounts given by Crowley’s biographer John Symonds in his book The Great Beast (1951) are to be believed, this was the beginning of a fierce astral battle between the two occultists as they launched waves of psychic attacks involving invisible vampires, bloodhounds and demons against each other for control of the Golden Dawn. Both men survived but the mystery surrounding Mathers’ death – in Spain at the age of sixty-four in 1918 – makes it possible for some to speculate that the ‘Great Beast’ may in the end have finally succeeded in finishing off his one-time teacher; a more likely explanation is that the ageing magician in reality died of Spanish influenza.

  Crowley would outlive Mathers by nearly thirty years, eventually dying in isolation and virtual obscurity in a Hastings boarding house in 1947, although the occult revival of the 1960s would ensure that his writings and his ‘magick’ would ultimately be encountered by a wide audience, and books, films and plays about his life and work conti
nue to appear to this day. He was clearly a dangerous person to know and associate with: his first and second wives died insane and at least five of his mistresses went on to commit suicide. In 1911, a decade after his break with the Golden Dawn, Crowley became head of the British lodge of a German society named the Order of Templars of the Orient or Ordo Templi Orientis. Its founder Theodor Reuss, an occultist and polymath who took part in the inaugural performance of Wagner’s Parsifal, gave Crowley the honorary title of ‘Baphomet, Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis’, although for many Crowley would always be regarded as ‘the wickedest man in the world’, a similarly grand title bestowed upon him by the English Sunday newspapers.

  The presence of the Scottish isle of Iona in Crowley’s occult pseudonym is an interesting one as it was here, in the same year that the ‘Great Beast’ self-published his four-volume magnum opus Magick in Theory and Practice, that an unusual and seemingly inexplicable event took place which has strange connections with Crowley himself, with Samuel MacGregor Mathers, with the shadowy world of Victorian occultism and, seemingly, the disturbing paranormal phenomenon of psychic attack and murder.

  Netta Emily Fornario (known as Norah Farnario by some authors although her real Christian name was Marie), the daughter of an Italian immigrant physician from Naples and a native Englishwoman, was thirty-two years old and from Kew in south-west London. Born in Cairo, Netta’s mother had died when she was an infant after which she was raised in England by her maternal grandparents, who came from a wealthy family of tea merchants from Coventry. As a youth she spent time living in Italy, where she obtained Italian citizenship before finally returning to Britain, where she lived for a time in Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire. In August 1928, she arrived on Iona accompanied by a travelling companion, but despite the presence of her unnamed friend, wholly personal reasons had brought her to this lonely island community, where St Columba had first arrived to begin establishing Christianity in Scotland over thirteen centuries before. The young Londoner was convinced that many years in the past she herself had lived there in a previous life, and was now searching to establish a link with her previous incarnation in the solitude and peaceful environs of this profound and remote location.