Ghosts & Gallows
Page 20
Many of the psychic impressions connected with the Yorkshire killings that Nella Jones relayed to journalist Shirley Davenport over a period of several months, beginning in the summer of 1979, proved to be highly accurate. Like Robert Cracknell she felt the killer lived in Bradford, but Jones went further: the murderer’s name was Peter and the most significant thing about him were his eyes, which were unsettling and dangerous; he worked as a lorry driver for an engineering firm whose name, written on the cab of his vehicle, began with the letter ‘C’; the name Ainsworth was somehow significant with the case, while in the closing months of 1980, she felt the killer would strike again in Leeds on either 17 or 27 November and the victim’s initials would be ‘JH’. All of this would prove to be chillingly accurate following Peter Sutcliffe’s arrest, from T. & H.W. Clark, the haulage company he worked for and in the cab of whose lorry he was photographed for a publicity brochure, to the death of Jacqueline Hill, the thirteenth and final victim; Peter Hainsworth was the name of a local magistrate in the garden of whose house Marguerite Walls was strangled, and several detectives who interviewed Sutcliffe later commented on the soulless quality of his staring black eyes. In her book, published in 1982, Jones notes a comment she made to a reporter from the Yorkshire Post in the aftermath of Sutcliffe’s trial that, once in prison, the killer would have problems with his eyes. On 10 January 1983, after her book had gone to press, Sutcliffe was attacked in the hospital wing of Parkhurst Prison and sustained four separate wounds to the side of his face. The psychic’s prediction came fully true fourteen years later when the Ripper was again attacked, this time in Broadmoor on 10 March 1997, when he was blinded in the left eye by prisoner Ian Kay who stabbed Sutcliffe in the face with a pen; his right eye was also damaged.
During the second week of his trial, on 11 May 1981, Sutcliffe described under cross-examination the first instance of him hearing what he considered to be the voice of God that would later, so he claimed, instruct him to begin his mission of murder. This took place in Bingley cemetery, where he worked as a grave digger during the mid-1960s, and Sutcliffe described hearing ‘a voice similar to a human voice – like an echo’ coming from the grave of a Polish man named Bronislaw Zapolski. Sutcliffe was alone at the time and in the Catholic section of the cemetery. In 1986, medium and psychic investigator Rita Goold visited Bingley while carrying out research into her family history. Goold’s grandmother, a Catholic, had been buried at Cottingley two miles to the south-east, a small village now famous to psychical researchers for the fairy hoax that fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. At some time in the past, Rita Goold’s grandmother’s coffin, along with a number of others, had been exhumed from Nab Wood cemetery in Cottingley to make way for a new road and had been reinterred at Bingley in the section where Peter Sutcliffe later claimed to have heard disembodied voices. During her visit, Goold spoke with one of the cemetery keepers, who, it turned out, had worked with and knew Sutcliffe twenty years before and who confirmed aspects of his character connected with his employment as a grave digger, notably his morbid fascination with the bones and skulls that they would occasionally unearth during the course of their work. He also claimed that the part of the cemetery where the bodies from Nab Wood had been re-buried had not been consecrated either before or after the burial. Both he and fellow workers had repeatedly heard voices there over the years, often at night, and as such considered it to be a haunted place …
NOTES
1. Investigative journalist and film-maker Michael Bilton’s definitive Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (Harper Collins, London, 2003) contains much background information on all the women mentioned whose lives and tragic circumstances can easily be reduced to mere statistics in a commentary such as the present work.
2. On 21 March 2006, John Humble, an unemployed alcoholic from Sunderland’s Ford Estate, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison for perverting the course of justice by carrying out the ‘Wearside Jack’ hoax.
CHAPTER 12
VIEWING A KILLER
SUZANNE PADFIELD AND INESSA TCHURINA, 1980
Now, some twenty years after his death, the English psychical researcher Benson Herbert has become one of the twentieth century’s forgotten ghost hunters. Born in County Durham of Irish descent on 16 May 1912, Herbert was a man of many parts whose interests included archaeology, photography, mythology and legends, as well as science and ghosts. An Oxford graduate, he joined the Society for Psychical Research in December 1931 while pursuing a career as a physicist, at the same time undertaking archaeological surveys of historic sites in both Britain and Ireland. Herbert became interested in haunted castles and theorised that the paranormal phenomena that took place there was due to anomalous electrical activity isolated from external radio waves and electromagnetism by the buildings’ massive stone walls that performed like ancient ‘Faraday cages’. It was a line of thinking from which the discipline of ‘paraphysics’, the subject with which Herbert is now most closely associated, would grow in the years following the Second World War – that ghosts and hauntings as well as mediumship are due to natural physical phenomena rather than the activities of spirits and discarnate entities.
Herbert later struck up a friendship with fellow SPR member Richard (R.G.) Medhurst (1920-1971), a British mathematician and electrical engineer with an abiding interest in the paranormal, and the two men held séances together at Herbert’s Chelsea flat, as well as Medhurst’s home in Richmond. Over the course of these experiments, Herbert developed a trance personality and spoke in the voice of a 1,000-year-old Chinese mandarin, although he was disinclined to believe this was a possessing spirit but rather a hidden aspect of his own subconscious mind. Despite believing that mediumship, clairvoyance and healing were subjects based on a hidden and as yet undiscovered faculty of science, Benson Herbert eventually gave up traditional spiritualist-inspired experimentation in favour of a new and radical form of laboratory-based research that drew heavily on his own scientific background as a physicist. In 1966, keen to ensure his experiments were free from the traffic vibration and electrical interference inherent in inner-city environments, Herbert took on the lease of Privett House, a remote farmhouse on a hillside on the edge of the New Forest, near Downton in Wiltshire. There he established the Paraphysical Laboratory, which came to be known informally as the ‘Paralab’, with himself as Director and Egyptian-born psychical researcher, UFO investigator and SPR member Manfred Cassirer as Honorary Research Officer. With the help of visiting students and other enthusiasts who travelled to Downton at weekends, Herbert began a series of unorthodox and original experiments in order to, as he himself described, ‘carry out precise and systematic research into the physics of the paranormal’, something that went against the then fashionable statistics and Rhine-inspired trends of contemporary parapsychology.
Despite his shoestring budget and anti-establishment approach, Herbert’s Paraphysical Laboratory managed against the odds to establish itself as an international centre of modern paranormal research. The Paralab issued its own publication, the Journal of Paraphysics (in reality a photocopied newsletter) that, despite its modest format, included such luminaries as British mathematician Professor John Taylor, Soviet biophysicist Victor Adamenko, and American parapsychologist Stanley Krippner on its editorial board. Herbert courted overseas researchers sympathetic to his style of contemporary psychical research, particularly in the Soviet Union where, in 1972 and 1973, during the course of two visits, he met the remarkable Leningrad housewife Nina Kulagina, who had been filmed moving objects, seemingly by the power of thought alone, and who it was also claimed could see through her own skin.
Back in Britain, Herbert was happy to take part in more conventional ghost busting. In 1963, accompanied by Sybil Leek, a self-professed witch who ran an antique shop by day and a coven at night – both in the New Forest – he was filmed by the BBC at a séance in a haunted house in Southampton and, three years later, also appeared on television investigat
ing Sandford Orcas Manor House in Dorset where the then tenant, Colonel Francis Claridge, whose stirring family motto ‘Fear Nought But God’ appeared on both his coat of arms and later his gravestone, claimed with his wife to be besieged by a veritable army of phantoms including child poltergeists, a seven foot-tall rapist and an insane sailor, as well as the spectre of a murderous priest. In 1975, Herbert was also seen in the company of sceptical BBC producer and presenter Hugh Burnett carrying out a planchette experiment at a haunted pub for the highly regarded documentary The Ghost Hunters, which also featured Borley Rectory investigators Peter Underwood and Geoffrey Croom-Hollingsworth. This fraternisation with witches and UFOologists, together with his unconventional approach to the paranormal, put Herbert and his work on the fringe of accepted scientific psychical research and to many parapsychologists he was regarded as an enthusiastic oddball who found ghosts at the slightest flick of a dial and appeared to be surrounded by a never-ending supply of young and attractive female assistants. His death, on 21 April 1991, just a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday, seemed to bring to a close an exciting chapter of experimental paranormal research from the 1960s and ’70s that included not only Kulagina but also Geller and the ‘Raudive voices’.
A number of sensitives and physical mediums took part in experimental work at the Paraphysical Laboratory including psychic healer Josephine Blatch, but the person with whom Herbert had the most success was Suzanne Padfield, a natural young clairvoyant from the West Country who worked as a switchboard operator and wrote poetry and children’s stories in her spare time. As we have seen, genuine mediums become aware of their powers at an early age and Suzanne was no exception, her psychic awareness no doubt accentuated by the fact that over the years she spent much time living in a succession of haunted houses. This led to many strange and startling experiences: at the age of three she felt invisible psychic touches and heard the footsteps of an invisible person walking across her bedroom floor; later, at another house in Shepton Mallet she (and her sister) watched coloured lights float around their bedroom and on several occasions she was thrown out of bed by an invisible force and would often wake up to find herself sleeping on the floor. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, the time when she was most involved with scientific psychical research, eerie spontaneous phenomena took place almost on a day-to-day basis. This was at an old rectory owned by the Deanery of Wells Cathedral that Padfield leased for a peppercorn rent while acting as a temporary caretaker: furniture moved and doors opened by themselves, water taps and an electric fire turned themselves on and off, a black shape appeared in one of the bedrooms and footsteps followed her around the house.
Suzanne Padfield first visited the Paralab not long after it had been established in the mid-1960s and ultimately went on to spend twelve years on and off being tested by Herbert and his merry band of assistants. In her the physicist felt he had discovered the British equivalent of super-psychics like Uri Gellar and the American Ingo Swann, as well as their Soviet counterpart Nina Kulagina, ‘a class of subjects very rare and few in numbers’ that Herbert called ‘The 5D People’, and devised a series of experiments to record her supernormal abilities; these included psychometry, healing, telepathy and psychokinesis. In the Paralab, a table moved around the room by itself and mobiles suspended in sealed jars were rotated simply by her presence. Herbert found that while restrained and isolated she could also induce physical sensations, such as feelings of being touched in other people, and also affect the mechanical workings of clocks and watches. ‘[S]he exhibits a strange, compelling, “magnetic” radiance, of an almost frightening nature,’ he wrote in 1974, describing it as the ‘Padfield Effect’, a clear comparison with the sensational feats of the young Israeli wunderkind who had burst onto the psychic scene the previous year; and proudly accompanied his star subject to the International Congress of Parapsychology in Genoa organised by Count and Countess Galateri and Gerard Croiset’s old mentor, Wilhelm Tenhaeff. The paraphysicist also found Padfield was able to realise a pet project he had nurtured for a number of years and also shared with his Russian counterpart, Professor Dubrov of Moscow. Described as ‘biogravitation’, this involved a psychic subject with a strong 5D (Dubrov called it a ‘psychotronic’) ability to bend the trajectory of a beam of light. Herbert devised a piece of experimental apparatus that involved passing a polarised light source through a sealed tube onto a metering device. He found that when Suzanne Padfield placed her hands near the tube and consciously attempted to affect it, she was able to lower the reading on the meter a significant number of times. During one experiment Herbert recorded twenty-four deflections in succession.
In October 1972, Uri Gellar had stopped off in London on his way to the United States and at the Royal Garden Hotel had been introduced to Dr Edward (Ted) Bastin, a quantum physicist from Cambridge University, who went on to carry out a series of experiments with the Israeli psychic at Birkbeck College. During a television programme devoted to the scientific study of Gellar’s phenomena, Bastin met Suzanne Padfield and the couple subsequently married in 1975. By this time, Padfield had been involved with the Paralab for nearly ten years but eventually she grew tired of the continuing experimentation and, by the end of the decade, had all but given up her involvement with psychical research.
During the 1970s, the Soviet government gradually became hostile towards the subject of parapsychology. In October 1973, at the height of the Gellar explosion in the West, the Brezhnev regime published a statement that psychic phenomena would be studied collectively by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with the result that individual researchers began to find it increasingly difficult to continue working in the field. One of these was a correspondent of Benson Herbert, Victor G. Adamenko, a specialist in laser medicine, who had become deeply interested in Kirlian photography and its relationship with acupuncture. As the 1980s developed, Adamenko became disenchanted with authority control and eventually left Russia and moved to Greece, where he took up a position in the psychobiophysics department of Crete University. In 1988, he spent a period in America working at Joseph Rhine’s Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man before finally returning to Greece.
Early in 1980, at a time when he was still prominent in Soviet psychical research, Adamenko received a letter from a man named Tchurina who lived in Fryazino on the outskirts of Moscow asking for his help. In December 1979, the man’s nine-year-old daughter Inessa Tchurina had gone missing while visiting a local ice rink and several months later the police were no nearer to discovering what had happened to her. In desperation, Tchurina senior requested Adamenko, who he knew had been involved in research with mediums, to get a psychic to try and find out what had become of Inessa. With most of Russia’s top psychics under the watchful eye of the Soviet Academy, Adamenko took the decision to write to Benson Herbert in England with the request that he ask Suzanne Padfield if she would effectively come out of retirement and help with the search for Inessa Tchurina. Knowing from practical experience that with clairvoyance his former star subject had a greater success with three-dimensional objects rather than two-dimensional ones such as drawings, Herbert responded with a request that personal items of the missing girl be sent to him in England. Shortly afterwards, an exercise book of Inessa’s schoolwork together with a photograph arrived at the Paralab and Herbert sent them on to Padfield, who was having breakfast when the package arrived. Almost immediately as she opened the envelope, vivid and disturbing images seemed to fill her head.
She ‘saw’ the young Russian girl at the Fryazino ice rink in the company of a stocky man who appeared to be in his early thirties; he had brown hair, bushy eyebrows and a round bearded face. He talked to her in a friendly way and once outside invited her back to his flat to show her some new ice skates he had recently bought. Trustingly, Inessa went with him but back at the man’s home she screamed when he made to put an arm around her and, as they struggled, the man hit her a glancing blow and the girl fell to the floor. Brutally, rather than
going to her aid, the mystery assailant, seemingly frightened by the implications of what he had done, gripped the girl by the throat and strangled her to death. The image was sickeningly real, as was what followed. Padfield had the impression of the girl’s small body being wrapped in blue material and made into a bundle. The killer then took this with him as he left the flat and boarded a bus out of Fryazino. On the outskirts of the town, she had the impression that the blue bundle had been thrown into water; possibly Inessa had been dumped into a river. All these events happened weeks in the past, across the gulf of over 1,700 miles of distance, yet the young British woman was able to view them in real time as if she were watching as a silent and invisible spectator. Suzanne wrote out an account of her vision and sent it to Benson Herbert, who forwarded it to Victor Adamenko in Moscow. The psychical researcher subsequently passed it to the Russian police investigating Inessa Tchurina’s disappearance.