Ghosts & Gallows

by Paul Adams

  After making the ferry crossing from Mull, the two visitors took up lodgings on the east side of Iona in the house of an island woman named MacDonald, and Netta Fornario settled into the quest that had removed her both physically and spiritually from a harsh materialistic world with which she had little or nothing in common. Today, Norah’s outlook would be described as being distinctly ‘proto-hippie’ or New Age, but back in the late 1920s she was a ‘Bohemian’, in both dress and outlook, whose fascination with folklore and the unseen world about us drew her apart from ordinary people and the humdrum of daily life which she eventually rejected for the solitude and enlightenment of lonely Iona, then a desolate place with neither telephones, electricity or running water. Netta Fornario was also a passionate faith-healer and Spiritualist at a time when the physical aspect of the movement was experiencing a golden age: there were many noted mediums holding blackout séances for ‘spirit’ communication and materialisation phenomena, and it seems that the young woman spent much time attending Spiritualist meetings in an attempt to obtain personal communication with the other side.

  To these ends Netta obtained much support from a friendship and association with Mrs Moina Mathers, sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and wife of Samuel MacGregor Mathers, who was herself a gifted medium and clairvoyant. Moina had assisted her husband in the translation and preparation of several important occult texts and grimoires, including The Kabbalah Unveiled, The Key of Solomon and the fifteenth-century Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, and with her encouragement Netta became a member of the Order of Alpha and Omega, an occult splinter group established after Samuel Mathers’ death, in order to develop her own psychic abilities of faith-healing and telepathy. Mrs Mathers also had a reputation in occult and Spiritualist circles as an adept in her own right, seemingly equal to the paranormal abilities of her late husband. How good her relationship with Netta Fornario was at the time that the young woman and her friend set out on the long journey to Iona in the autumn of 1929 is not clear, although there were some who later felt that it was intimately connected with the tragic events which were ultimately to play themselves out nearly fifteen months later.

  After a short time her travelling companion took the Fionnphort ferry back across the Sound of Iona to Mull and the mainland, and Netta stayed on alone. Soon she left the MacDonald house and moved in as a boarder with the Cameron family in their small cottage on the south-west side of the island. In the late 1980s, Calum Cameron, a twelve-year-old boy at the time Netta Fornario stayed in his parent’s croft, remembered her to writer Richard Wilson as a restless character, much given to wandering the island moors and barren cliff tops on her own, often at night. Islanders at the time recalled she wrote poetry and although likeable talked strangely about being able to communicate with the spirits of the island’s past and was known to spend much time on a large grassy mound known as the Sithean Mor or Fairy Hill near The Machair, an area of farming land on Iona’s western side.

  As the months wore on it became clear even to the young Calum Cameron, and more so to the rest of the family, that the young woman from London was a troubled and disturbed individual whose already eccentric behaviour was becoming alarmingly worse. Netta talked casually of succumbing to week-long trances, of seeing the faces of former ‘patients’ in the clouds through her bedroom window, of receiving spirit messages and seeing phantom figures. Much of her waking time was spent at night, either feverishly typing pages of now lost and unknowable script by lamplight or wandering across the island, oblivious to the darkness and the harsh Scottish weather; dishevelled and exhausted she spent much of the daylight hours asleep. Above all, the islanders felt that Netta Fornario herself seemed to believe she was being pursued by something unknown which, as it came closer, brought about an ever-growing sense of bizarre panic and personal danger.

  On Sunday, 17 November 1929, Netta announced in the suitably mysterious and alarming language with which they had become familiar that instructions from the spirit world had decreed she must leave Iona immediately. The Camerons’ relief at finally seeing the back of their strange lodger was somewhat tempered by the fact that, being the Sabbath, the Fionnphort ferry to Mull would not be running until the following day. Initially unable to grasp the reality of the situation, an extremely frightened and unwell Netta Fornario carried her packed bags down to the shore, where she waited in vain for some time before the realisation sank in that for another twenty-four hours she was still a prisoner on the island. Returning to the Camerons’ croft, she told them that further orders from the other side had told her it was not now necessary to leave and she locked herself in her bedroom. Later that evening, when Netta appeared for supper, she gave the impression of being much recovered from the state of near panic that had gradually overtaken her in the previous weeks and, although resigned to the fact that their boarder was not leaving, the Cameron family felt that with a return to a reasonably normal state of mind it would not be so strange and unsettling to continue to have her presence in their house. When talking to Richard Wilson over sixty years later, Calum Cameron was still able to recall the sequence of disturbing events that played themselves out the following morning …

  Netta Fornario’s bedroom in the Cameron croft was an unsettling sight when Calum’s sister entered after receiving no response when bringing up her breakfast: the lamps were still alight, the bed had not been slept in, and in the fire grate were the burnt remains of the numerous sheets of typescript that she had spent many months labouring in a panic to complete; and despite the fact that her suitcase and all her neatly folded clothes and belongings were still in the room, Netta Emily Fornario was nowhere to be seen.

  The Cameron family immediately realised something was wrong and spent several hours looking for her. Later, when it became clear that rather than having gone off, albeit under very alarming circumstances, in one of her ‘trances’ or solitary walks across the windswept winter coastline, the young woman was in fact missing, Calum Cameron’s parents raised the alarm. By the end of the day there was no sign of the troubled visitor from London and early the next morning several islanders went across on the ferry to Mull to alert the authorities, returning with the island policeman, who immediately organised a series of search parties to began a detailed and systematic search. During the afternoon, two farmers scouring the moorland in the vicinity of The Machair were alerted by the frantic barking of their collie dog to a spot on the side of the Fairy Hill, the one place on Iona that seemed to have attracted the New Age traveller the most, and it was here on the Sithean Mor that they made a grim discovery.

  Netta Emily Fornario lay dead and it seemed that she had spent the last moments of her tortured time on Earth fighting off some dreadful and unknowable evil: her body was naked except for a black cloak decorated with the strange occult insignia of the Order of Alpha and Omega and a tarnished silver chain around her neck; the balls of her feet were bruised and cut as though she had been fleeing for her life across the rough and stony moorland, while a long-bladed steel knife had to be forcibly pried from the fingers of one hand, which held it in a powerful death grip. Tellingly, the corpse lay within a large cross-shape, which had been cut out of the moorland turf seemingly as some form of symbolic defence against an intangible assault which for Netta was shockingly real. The island doctor recorded death as being due to exposure but for those who saw it, the way her face was distorted with terror, made this verdict seem somewhat less of a representation of the truth: the young woman seemed to have been literally scared to death. Three days later, Netta was buried in the grounds of Iona Abbey, in the graveyard of St Odhrain’s chapel; many of the islanders attended her funeral and the grave is marked by a simple white stone bearing the inscription ‘N.E.F. Aged 33. 19th November 1929’, a cryptic testament to strange events now almost beyond living memory.

  What is the real truth behind the death of Netta Fornario? She was clearly a mentally disturbed and unstable woman for whom the powers of Black Magic,
exacerbated by a morbid, and for her, unhealthy obsession with Spiritualism and mediumship, were a deadly reality. It is easy for those persons – the vast majority of us in fact – who do not view the world through the eyes of the clairvoyant or the psychic, to dismiss her fears as paranoid delusions, tragic nonetheless but ultimately a clinical reality easily established by modern medicine. If Netta did die from a psychic attack, then it was one she created within her own mind and that led her to venture out into the blackness of a harsh Iona winter’s night dressed only in a thin cloak to unwittingly die of natural causes on the mysterious and lonely Fairy Hill, where mysterious blue lights were reported as being seen around the time the body was found.

  It is easy to see how conventional science can today explain away extreme hauntings such as psychic assaults and possession. In 2008, shortly before his death from cancer, American paranormal investigator Lou Gentile spent a week with English psychological illusionist Derren Brown for the Channel 4 television programme Derren Brown Investigates. In line with the debunking nature of the series and Brown’s sceptical approach to the subject, much if not all of the Philadelphia ghost hunter’s evidence for paranormal phenomena was made to look to be the result of misinterpretation of natural events or happenings – a possessed man ‘exorcised’ by Gentile on a video recording was subsequently diagnosed by a consulting doctor to be an epileptic, while ‘spirit’ photographs and EVP recordings were put down to simulacra and static interference; Brown himself felt Gentile was sincere but sadly misguided.

  But there were those, some intimately connected with the contemporary world of Netta Fornario, who were convinced that she had died as the result of a powerful and murderous psychic attack. Violet Mary Firth, more readily known by the pseudonym Dion Fortune, was an important modern occultist of the first half of the twentieth century who claimed to receive occult and spiritual teachings directly from other planes of consciousness. As a practising magician, Violet Firth joined the Golden Dawn and later became a disciple of Aleister Crowley; in the late 1920s she knew Netta well.

  Violet Firth, who died in 1946 at the age of fifty-five, clearly believed paranormal murder was possible and had herself written a handbook entitled Psychic Self-Defence (1930) on how to combat such attacks. In the same volume she gives a personal insight into Netta’s tragic demise:

  She was … of unusual intellectual calibre, and was especially interested in the Green Ray elemental contacts; too much interested in them for my peace of mind, and I became nervous and refused to co-operate with her. I do not object to reasonable risks, in fact one cannot expect to achieve anything worth while [sic] in life if one will not take risks, but it appeared to me that ‘Mac,’ as we called her, was going into very deep waters, even when I knew her, and that there was certain to be trouble sooner or later.

  She had evidently been on an astral expedition from which she never returned. She was not a good subject for such experiments, for she suffered from some defect of the pituitary body. Whether she was the victim of a psychic attack, whether she merely stopped out on the astral too long and her body, of poor vitality in any case, became chilled lying thus exposed in mid-winter, or whether she slipped into one of the elemental kingdoms that she loved, even as Swinburne swam out to sea, who shall say? The information at our disposal is insufficient for an opinion to be formed. The facts, however, cannot be questioned, and remain to give sceptics food for thought.

  Accounts of Netta’s death often cite Dion Fortune’s apparent belief that it was a psychic murder resulting from a fall out in her relationship with the mysterious Moina Mathers, who had sent powerful forces to destroy her. Although the fact that Mrs Mathers died in 1928 at the age of sixty-three would make this impossible (unless it was an attack from beyond the grave), it would be unwise to dismiss the possibility out of hand. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats, himself a member of the Golden Dawn and also the Ghost Club, testified to the combined power of MacGregor Mathers and his wife: during visits to their house the three were said to have enjoyed a form of four-handed chess game together, with Yeats and Moina Mathers pitting themselves against MacGregor Mathers and a materialised spirit which he had specifically summoned as his playing partner.

  In 2011, a stage production, The Mysterious Death of Netta Fornario by dramatist Chris Lee, premiered by the Mull Theatre Company, shows a continuing fascination with the case over eighty years after the events of November 1929. Lee’s script was an imaginative blend of fiction and reality involving the presence of a mysterious cloaked figure reported by local newspapers as being seen at the time in the vicinity of the Fairy Hill.

  Despite the enduring interest, perhaps the truth of the life and death of the enigmatic Netta Fornario will always lie between fact and fantasy somewhere out in the wilds of the enchanted isle of Iona, the place that she was ultimately never to leave …

  CHAPTER 6

  AN ENGLISH GHOST HUNTER ABROAD

  HARRY PRICE AND LUDWIG DAHL, 1934

  The English ghost hunter Harry Price (1881-1948) is a well known figure in the history of psychical research and any collection of writings on the paranormal seem to be lacking without either a reference to his activities or a contribution from his case files. His love of the limelight and flamboyant style of self-promotion made him controversial among his contemporaries, but he was a sincere and dedicated investigator whose great knowledge and experience in psychical matters, particularly the investigation of Spiritualist phenomena and mediumship, have become overshadowed in the years following his death by the controversy surrounding his most high-profile case, that of Borley Rectory, the ‘most haunted house in England’.

  An amateur magician, inventor and writer, Price, always fiercely independent, followed a career path that contained a mixture of psychic journalism and the scientific investigation of the paranormal in equal measure. He carried out controlled experiments with the leading mediums of the day, such as the famous Austrian brothers Willi and Rudi Schneider1, but had a talent for presenting the results as part of popular digests of his adventures aimed at the general reader, something which made fellow researchers suspicious of his motives, but at the same time resulted in him becoming a household name where the investigation of ghosts and haunted houses was concerned. It is this accessible approach which continues to inspire over six decades after his death and as the ‘father of modern ghost hunting’, he has many admirers throughout the worldwide paranormal community of today.

  The strange story of Judge Dahl is one in which Harry Price had personal interest and made reference to in a selection of his writings, notably his Fifty Years of Psychical Research (1939), regarded as his most important contribution to paranormal literature. It is the closest so far in the present work to what could be described as a ‘Spiritualist murder’. Price was an enthusiastic traveller and made many trips to the Continent, always trying to keep ahead with the new developments in the world of psychical research, sitting with the latest mediums, exchanging views and ideas with fellow investigators and collecting material for future books. If there was one ghost hunter who would have the opportunity to get involved in the Dahl case it would be Harry Price.

  The Dahl family of Norway were one beset with tragedy. Ludwig Dahl was a magistrate in the sea-port town of Fredrikstad, just under sixty miles from the capital Oslo. In addition to being the local judge, Dahl served as mayor of Bergen and was also an amateur psychical researcher and convinced Spiritualist whose interest in psychic matters had begun around 1915 but was eventually centred around the mediumship of his married daughter, Ingeborg Köber. Ingeborg’s trance mediumship had apparently developed following the deaths of both her brothers, Ludwig, who drowned while sailing in 1919, and a younger brother Ragnar, who died a few years later also in an accident. While in a trance state, the judge’s daughter was allegedly able to channel both young men, and their father eventually compiled a manuscript in which he recorded details of the communications.

  The Dahls embraced Spiritualism and became what
was later described as a ‘fanatically religious and occultist family’. The judge, however, certainly found great comfort in the movement, through which he was able to come to terms with the loss of his sons. In his manuscript he wrote: ‘Our family home has not become poorer by their deaths. The passing of the two boys made our lives richer, fuller, than ever before.’ Statements such as this were to have serious consequences at a later date.

  In June 1927, Harry Price visited Norway and Denmark as part of a lecture tour, promoting his activities at his own London-based National Laboratory of Psychical Research. Since visiting the countries at the beginning of 1925, when he opened an International Psychic Exhibition in Copenhagen, Price had been busy carrying out experiments with several mediums including the English nurse Stella Cranshaw, Eleonore Zügun (the aforementioned Romanian ‘Devil Girl’), and both the Schneider brothers, and he was keen to keep his Scandinavian colleagues up to date with his work. At the time Price was also the Foreign Research Officer for the American Society for Psychical Research, and contributed a regular series of articles to their journal.