by Paul Adams
Three months after the abduction and murder of Keith Bennett, in September 1964, Brady and Hindley moved into Hindley’s grandmother’s newly-built council house at Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley. Number sixteen, a two-storey two-bedroomed end of terrace property, occupied an elevated site and was overlooked by surrounding houses. It was there that ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was taken on Boxing Day the same year. The brutal sexual assault she underwent was documented in the photographs later recovered from the suitcases at Manchester Central Station and Hindley made the tape recordings found at the same time of the child begging for her life before Brady strangled her to death. The horror felt by those present at the Assize Court in Chester when the recording was played at Brady and Hindley’s trial in April 1966 reverberated across the country and is easily the most shocking piece of evidence to be presented in a British courtroom.
The second murder to take place at the house in Wardle Brook Avenue – the killing of Edward Evans the day before Brady’s arrest – was another planned attack, a display of power that formed the culmination of the couple’s grooming of Hindley’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, into their anarchic and deadly lifestyle. Brady had taken Smith to Saddleworth Moor where, as they practiced pistol shooting as a precursor for armed robbery, he had boasted about having killed several times before. Early in October 1965, Brady had visited a gay club in Manchester, where he had struck up a friendship with teenage homosexual Edward Evans. Evans was lured back to Wardle Brook Avenue while Hindley went and fetched her sister’s husband on the pretence that her boyfriend wanted to give him some miniature wine bottles as a present. When Smith walked into the front room he witnessed Brady reigning blows on the screaming and defenceless youth with an axe. Evans fought for his life and Brady was forced to complete his ‘demonstration murder’ by smothering him with a cushion and, when that proved ineffective, using strangulation. While Hindley placated her grandmother, who had been woken up by Evans’ screams, Brady and Smith concealed the body in Hindley’s bedroom, after which all three cleaned up the living room. Smith, promising to return the next day with a pram that they could use to move Evans’ body into Hindley’s car, left the house in the early hours of the morning and went home. There he blurted out the entire episode to Hindley’s sister and the terrified couple went to a public telephone box to call the police. Seven months later, on 6 May 1966, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride and Edward Evans and sentenced to life imprisonment.
By 1987, thirty years after the Moors Murders had come to an end, 16 Wardle Brook Avenue was an empty boarded-up shell. Shunned and locally reviled, it was demolished the same year, the bricks and rubble being carted away and crushed to deter souvenir hunters. In the preceding decades, a succession of residents had claimed, both privately and publicly, that the former home of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley was a haunted house in which the horror of the notorious couple’s shocking crimes lived on. There were stories of an exorcism being carried out by a local priest at the request of one tenant, while another petitioned the local authority to have the house demolished, several years before it was actually pulled down. In March 1985, the experiences of the last occupant of number 16, forty-year-old Brian Dunne and his family, were reported in the national press, and gave an insight into the phenomena alleged to have taken place there, all of which were inextricably linked with the brutal killings of the 1960s1. Dunne, together with his thirty-one-year-old wife Margaret and their three children, three-year-old Joseph, Ann Marie aged two and eight-month-old Brian, all originally from Dublin, moved into Wardle Brook Avenue unaware of its unenviable association. They later claimed to have all experienced a number of strange and inexplicable happenings: loud banging noises and the sound of smashing furniture; the unnerving sound of children’s screams and crying, as well as the outline of a human body impressed on the counterpane of a newly-made bed. The house, unlike the adjoining properties in the same terrace, was mysteriously plagued with damp that representatives from the local housing department could not explain. ‘Damp just runs down the walls. The council have been round but can’t stop it,’ Dunne told newspapermen. ‘The adjoining houses aren’t like it. It is as if this one is crying.’
Claims for ghosts and paranormal activity at Wardle Brook Avenue were always dismissed or sidestepped by Manchester City Council, who felt it was not in the interests of their tenants to discuss such matters. To my knowledge no investigation by psychical researchers was ever undertaken in the house, with the result that practically all of the claims for a haunting cannot be substantiated. During the time that Brian Dunne was living there, he entered into a brief correspondence with Richard Lee-Van den Daele, a paranormal researcher from Shipley in Yorkshire, who also carried out an examination of the Borley haunting in the 1980s. Dunne confirmed a number of his experiences but later declined to talk about the haunting. Not long after, the Dunnes were re-housed and the ‘house of death’ was reduced to rubble. Today nothing remains except a grassed area that is easily overlooked.
Sceptics would argue that the haunting of Wardle Brook Avenue owes much to the familiar ‘possessed house’ blueprint of the Amityville case, which by the early 1980s was extremely well known, and tenants unhappy with living at an address with such a grim and unpleasant past would be likely to exploit stories of ghostly experiences, real or otherwise, as leverage in a case for being assigned accommodation elsewhere. It was a fact that Brian and Margaret Dunne with their three children plus a fourth on the horizon – Mrs Dunne was expecting at the time her husband was interviewed by the press – were all living in a cramped two-bedroom house clearly too small for their needs. However, it would be subjective and too casual to dismiss the Dunnes’ claims out of hand without a fuller examination of the facts, which now is not possible.
Writing in his The Haunted House Handbook (1978), American psychical researcher D. Scott Rogo reinforces what is still the current state of knowledge regarding haunted buildings – that despite years of study we do not know what makes a house haunted. ‘There are so many types of hauntings – human ghosts, animal hauntings, evil presences, and so on – that no one working in parapsychology has of yet ever come up with … what underlying force causes a house to become haunted’, but he goes on to note: ‘To be sure, there are [Rogo’s italics] cases on record in which houses have become haunted after having been the scene of some violence or tragedy. And the ghosts which appear in these places very often resemble the unfortunate victims of these melodramas.’ Rogo, a respected and prolific writer and researcher on paranormal subjects, himself was the victim of such an incident – on 14 August 1990 he was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home after a robbery.
If, then, the ‘mental imprint’-type haunting mentioned before can be created by an outburst of psychic or electrical energy resulting from a powerful outburst of emotion, to become locked inside either the physical structure or enclosed environment of a building, and is then able to either replay or manifest itself in some way at future times, it would seem that no more suitable building in England could possibly be found than the house that once stood on the former plot of number 16 Wardle Brook Avenue …
NOTE
1. ‘Terror in the house of death’, Daily Express, 9 March 1985.
CHAPTER 15
THE EVIL WITHIN
MUHAMMAD BASHIR, 1991
In the first part of his monumental two-volume history of mankind The Curse of Ignorance (1947), written during the dark days of the Second World War in the imposing setting of Rockingham Castle, Scottish businessman, writer and philosopher J. Arthur Findlay (1883-1964) makes a sweeping but at the same time intuitive statement when he says that ‘All religions are based on psychic phenomena, but are encrusted with theological error, which sooner or later must be dismissed as the drapings of an age of ignorance’. Findlay became convinced as to the reality of life after death after attending séances in Glasgow with the direct-voice m
edium John Campbell Sloan (1869-1951) in the years immediately following the Great War, experiences which were later reinforced in February 1936 when, at the headquarters of the London Spiritualist Alliance, he sat with clairvoyant and trumpet medium Agnes Abbott (1885-1942), who brought him convincing proof of the survival of his mother. Findlay ultimately bequeathed his estate, Stanstead Hall, to the Spiritualists’ National Union as a teaching college for mediumship and psychic subjects on the understanding that his extensive series of books on Spiritualism and survival, including the movement’s first real bestseller On the Edge of the Etheric (1931), remained in print for perpetuity.
Other Spiritualist writers and thinkers have followed Arthur Findlay’s reasoning behind the origins of organised religious beliefs and practices. Maurice Barbanell, who we have already met in connection with the mediumship of Estelle Roberts, writing in This is Spiritualism in 1959, described the story of revealed religion as ‘one that shows the interaction of spirit and matter’. ‘The power of the spirit has always been at work,’ Barbanell notes, ‘adapting itself, through the centuries, to the needs, understanding and capacity of its recipients.’ He continues:
The Bible, like many other sacred books, is a testament to spirit activity. Whether many of its characters are called prophets, seers or mediums makes no difference. They were all the instruments of a higher power which, as it flowed through human channels, produced signs and wonders which were wrongly regarded as miracles.
Aspects of the ministry of Jesus have been described in recent times in terms of the paranormal phenomena familiar to and investigated by, as Professor Archie Roy has described them, ‘hard-headed, initially sceptical but brilliant scientists, psychologists and others’, for over 100 years since the founding of organised paranormal study: these include materialisation, psychic healing, telepathy, precognition and psychokinesis, while American parapsychologist Arthur S. Berger has described Jesus of Nazareth as ‘an extraordinary noted witness [i.e. an outstanding and reliable historical figure] whose testimony in support of the paranormal should be considered’. In her book Séances With God (2002), an historical exploration of the eschatological (i.e. after-death) information provided by global mediumship over the course of thousands of years and its relationship with international religions and cultures, Dr Jacqueline Jones-Hunt follows in exhaustive detail in Findlay’s footsteps, examining from the standpoint of the findings of psychical research (a discipline that Hungarian-born writer Paul Tabori described, when writing about the life and work of Sir Oliver Lodge, as ‘the most important (and perhaps the only possible) way to reconcile science and faith’) world faiths including Shamanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
It is with the last of these great religions that we are briefly concerned with here. The psychic world of Islam represents a fascinating and compelling area of study as yet little explored by Western psychical researchers. As with the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, many aspects of the life of Muhammad, who founded the religion of Islam in the seventh century AD, can be considered in the language of modern parapsychology, i.e. prophethood as mediumship, channelling, automatic writing, out-of-body experiences and altered states of consciousness, while a study of the lives of the Sufi shaykhs and mystics reveals a wealth of paranormal phenomena that encompasses remote viewing, bilocation (the ability to be in two places at once), mind over matter and psychic healing. The revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad can be looked upon as spirit communication through automatic writing (the favoured interpretation of commentators such as Arthur Findlay and Dr Jones-Hunt) and other noted Muslims have demonstrated unique and seemingly inexplicable paranormal abilities. Hazrat Ibn al-‘Arabi (d.1240), the noted Sufi theologian and metaphysician (often called the ‘Shaykh Al-Akbar’ or ‘greatest teacher’) of some eight centuries ago, claimed to have visited the moon and compiled written accounts of his experiences, while as a six-year-old child another Islamic saint, the Persian mystic Hazrat Mawlana Rumi (d.1273), is said to have jumped into the air and dematerialised, his spectacular vanishing, apparently in front of his playmates, lasting a whole afternoon. Nearer to our own times, the American Shaykh Moinuddin Chishti, a former Fulbright scholar, writing in his The Book of Sufi Healing (1991) describes an incident that took place in his presence while visiting a Sufi order in northern Afghanistan. During a ceremony of dhikr (described as ‘the touchstone of all mystical practices’ in Islam), which had been carried out every Thursday evening on the same site for an unbroken period of 1,200 years, Chishti heard ‘a loud grinding and whooshing sound’ that filled the entire room and saw a cleft appear in the far wall which almost instantly sealed itself, a collective hallucination witnessed by over forty people and which, according to the shaykh who was leading the meeting, had allowed ‘pious souls’ to enter the building to take part in the dhikr. In the West, other phenomena with its origins in devout religious belief and practice include the levitations of the seventeenth-century Franciscan monk St Joseph of Copertino and the twentieth-century stigmata of Teresa Neumann.
One aspect of Muslim belief for which the Qur’an gives examples and explanations is the existence of jinn, described as invisible beings created from ‘smokeless flame’ which, together with angels, inhabit the earth with mankind; what appears at first glance to be an interpretation in religious language of forces, both for good and evil, in the universe. Western Sufi teacher Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri has commented (in his The Elements of Islam (1993)) that, ‘Made of light, angels have no choice but to follow their prescribed patterning, whereas jinn, who are made of fire and air, reflect their elemental volatility in virtuous or evil behaviour’. For those Muslim persons brought up on a literal or simplistic interpretation of the Qur’an and Islamic traditions (known as hadiths), with its concept of a final Day of Judgement and a Balance of souls for the dead, the jinn have become a blanket explanation for most types of reported paranormal phenomena, including ghosts and apparitions, poltergeists, hauntings and, most importantly, for the subject which concerns us here: diabolical human possession. This view is supported by the fact that practically the only book to appear in the English language in recent years that addresses the subject, Hasan Moiz Ansari’s Islam and the Paranormal (2006), despite the author’s admission of a lifelong interest in the occult and psychical subjects, applies a literal Qur’anic approach, and as such does not look beyond assigning the origins of all reported supernormal phenomena to the workings of the jinn.
As noted by Haeri and most other Islamic commentators, jinn are regarded in most cases to be mischievous, evil and threatening entities against which the Qur’an provides remedies and suitable protection. However, a closer examination of reports from haunted houses and experiences of apparitions shows that one single explanation does not fit all of the facts and provide, for want of a better description, a general theory of the paranormal. We have already briefly discussed the ‘atmospheric photograph’ or ‘stone tape’ theory as applied to reported encounters with apparitions and phantom figures. To this can be added other forms or ‘types’ of ghost, each of which appear to suggest different explanations for their origins: apparitions of the living (hallucinations of persons known to be alive and well at the time of the experience), death bed visions, crisis ghosts (visions of persons either at the point or moment of death or involved in some tremendous emotional or physical upheaval), cyclical hauntings (a recurring form of the mental imprint ghost), as well as apparitions that impart information in such a way that is highly suggestive of some form of survival after death, i.e. an after-life apparition. In this respect, with such a clear diversity of reported phenomena, the Islamic or Qur’anic jinn appears to be more closely related to the concept of an elemental spirit or discarnate non-human intelligence as concluded by researchers such as Guy Playfair and Colin Wilson to be behind such modern poltergeist hauntings as Enfield, Pontefract and Cardiff. The evil side noted by Shaykh Haeri is amply demonstrated in all three of these well attested cases.
Writing about the use of exorcism on victims of poltergeist activity in The Unexplained magazine in the early 1980s, Andrew Green, who we have already briefly encountered in connection with the Ealing murder house haunting, commented that only around two per cent of poltergeist cases involved genuine inexplicable phenomena, and he questioned the need for any kind of organised exorcism ceremony to take place ‘even in cases where the effects themselves [i.e. poltergeist phenomena] may be explicable in emotional terms, and even regardless of the individual’s religious commitment’. ‘For some atheists,’ Green notes, ‘the rite may be comforting and effective; for some believers, who have unwittingly engaged fanatics or incompetents to perform the rite, the results can be as terrifying as the work of the “demon” itself’. Few cases of Islamic exorcism involving the alleged ‘possession’ of men and women by jinn and evil spirits in Muslim countries such as Malaysia, Egypt and rural Pakistan are reported in the Western media, although they undoubtedly take place on a regular basis and have done so for countless years, in the same way that ‘casting out the devils’ has been a cornerstone since the earliest days of Christianity. However, a case from the north of England in the early 1990s that made newspaper headlines goes a long way to proving that Green’s viewpoint is correct.
During the spring of 1991, Muhammad Bashir, a machine operator in his mid-thirties from Coppice in Oldham, Lancashire, together with his wife, both originally from Pakistan, became increasingly concerned about the well-being of their daughter, twenty-year-old Kousar Bashir. An attractive young woman, over a period of months she had become increasingly withdrawn and depressive, a condition for which initially her parents, both devout Muslims, were unable to offer any explanation. When Kousar failed a driving test for which she had been working for some length of time, her depression grew to the point that her parents considered her behaviour as totally unnatural and turned to their local religious community for help. The cleric or imam from the Bashir’s nearby mosque, sixty-three-year-old Muhammad Nurani Sayeed, quickly diagnosed that Kousar Bashir had become possessed by a jinn which was revealing its presence through the twenty-year-old’s strange and unnatural behaviour. The Bashirs took recourse initially to the Qur’an but when the regular recitation of prescribed passages had little or no effect, they again consulted Imam Sayeed, who felt that there was little choice but to perform an exorcism ceremony to rid Kousar of the unwanted presence. Unable to carry out the ritual himself, Nurani Sayeed advised Mr and Mrs Bashir that an experienced exorcist was needed and recommended them to hire Muhammad Bashir (no family relation), an experienced Islamic teacher in his early sixties. Warned that the exorcism could be a long, drawn-out process, the Bashirs paid a fee of £200 and in June 1991, Imam Muhammad Bashir, together with Nurani Sayeed acting as his assistant, arrived at the family home in Oldham to drive out the possessing jinn. It was to prove the beginning of what was later described as a week-long ‘orgy of violence’ with ultimately tragic consequences.