Poltergeist g-2

by Kat Richardson

  I followed him toward the kitchen. "When did the rhino phase kick in?"

  "About a month ago, right after 'jaggywahr' and 'doggie'. They each lasted about a week. The rhino, however, shows no signs of imminent extinction." He heaved another fifty-pound sigh.

  "Maybe it's just the company he keeps. Albert seems to egg him on."

  Ben frowned, shaking his head as he picked up a plate of sandwiches. "Albert. Sometimes I'm not so sure of Albert's benign nature. His impishness gets pretty mean-spirited once in a while."

  I suspected that Albert wasn't as nice as Ben gave him credit for. Even when he seemed helpful, he caused trouble. It wasn't easy to tell much, though. Albert didn't have an aura of any kind—just a body of Greyness he exposed or not as he pleased.

  While Ben fed the rhino-boy cheddar-and-pickle sandwiches, which were devoured in snapping gulps more suited to a crocodile, I asked about the Philip project. The old didactic glow began to burn in Ben's eyes as he replied to me, while managing his offspring—so far as a normal human could manage the devil's own Energizer Bunny.

  "Oh-ho-ho! The Philip experiments are the cold fusion of parapsychology," Ben stated. "Kind of the unholy grail of ghost enthusiasts. The group who did them said they were entirely scientific and reproducible. Other groups at the time claimed to have reproduced the effects, too. But the documentation has disappeared—newsletters, notes, even a sixteen-millimeter film documentary and a studio recording done by the CBC—and no one has been successful at re-creating the experiments since. Or at least not anyone respectable, with proper scientific processes and verification. But as you know, parapsychology isn't the respectable field it was in the 1970s."

  I refrained from saying it wasn't all that respectable then, either, and had only gotten less respect ever since.

  "This group made an artificial poltergeist of some kind, right?" I prompted.

  "Broadly speaking, yes." He paused to wipe tomato soup off Brian. "They were a self-selected group, led by a respected professor from the University of Toronto who was interested in ghosts and psychic powers, but he was also pretty skeptical—A. R. G. Owen was one of the guys who demonstrated that Uri Geller's spoon-bending wasn't caused by any kind of magic. He believed that the powers of the human mind—whether delusion, imagination, or psychic—were the mechanism for most of what gets attributed to ghosts and hauntings. That was pretty new stuff at the time, though the ideas of self-fulfilling expectation and conflation are now standard concepts in psychology."

  He waved one hand in the air as if clearing an invisible chalkboard. "Not the point, I know. Anyhow. So, the group started with the proposition that poltergeist activity was the result of the power of the human mind. They didn't believe in ghosts and they didn't set out to call one up. They were convinced that since physical poltergeist phenomena could be produced on a small scale by a single person, much bigger and more directed effects could be produced at will by a group who was focusing on producing them. They called it 'PK by committee'— essentially the idea that while the power of a single human mind might not be enough to move a heavy object alone, it should be easy for half a dozen minds together. They suggested that group expectation allowed them to work together toward the creation of phenomena that would otherwise be deemed impossible."

  "So they pretended there was a ghost doing these impossible things?"

  "Not exactly. The experiments were based on PK research by two English psychologists—Kenneth Batcheldor and Colin Brookes-Smith—who'd both noted that PK phenomena occurred most reliably when the parties involved expected that it could happen but weren't actively trying to make it happen, and phenomena grew in strength and frequency when there was a personality to attribute them to. The people producing the phenomena had relieved themselves of conscious responsibility and blamed the movement of objects, table-rapping, noises, writing, electrical effects, and so on, on a personality outside themselves—a 'ghost'. Basically, once there's a personality to attribute the incidents to, it's easier to accept that they might happen. Then the people begin to expect that they can happen and will happen. And, of course, more things happen. It's self-reinforcing behavior. The big difference between the observations of Batcheldor and Brookes-Smith and the Philip project was that the participants created their ghost in advance and consciously—purposely—placed responsibility for phenomena on that constructed personality."

  Brian brandished his spoon, laughing and sending droplets of tomato soup flying. Then he belched, looked surprised, and laughed harder.

  "OK, feeding time is over," Ben announced, standing up to remove Brian from the chair.

  Brian tossed the spoon, splashed his hands into the dregs of the tomato soup, and smeared two wide orange streaks on his face. "Mud, mud, mud!" he chanted.

  "You are one dirty rhino. You know what that means…" Ben slung the little boy under his arm like an oversized football. "Off to the watering hole with you!" He shot me an apologetic look as he carried the wiggling, giggling Brian off to the washroom.

  While the sound of water running and splashing came from the bath, I carried Brian's plate and bowl to the sink, leaving Ben's untouched food where it was. The cozy country-style kitchen didn't display quite the gleam it used to have. Chasing after the rhino-boy seemed to be having a deep impact on the house as well as its occupants. They were all looking a bit more tired than usual—except for Brian.

  The water cut off and a wet rhino-boy—his hair slicked up into a small horn over his forehead—charged past the kitchen door, followed by a large towel and Ben, thundering behind like the herd in pursuit. They were both laughing, although Ben was a bit out of breath.

  Once Brian was netted in the towel and dried off, Ben tranquilized him with twenty minutes of TV and rolled the sleepy rhino-boy into bed for a nap. Ben gobbled down his sandwich as we headed up the stairs to his office in the attic.

  He licked mustard off his thumb as he rooted through the stacks and boxes until he found a black, cloth-covered book. He handed it to me. The lime green print on the spine identified it as Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis, by Iris M. Owen and Margaret Sparrow.

  "That's the book about the experiments. Unfortunately, it was written for laymen and neither of the authors seems to have thought of including their original newsletter reports or any technical data in an appendix. That may be part of the reason there's been so little success re-creating the experiment."

  Ben threw himself down in the chair behind the desk and sprawled there, limp. Albert drizzled into view in a corner behind him.

  I turned the book over in my hands, but didn't open it. "I don't understand Tuckman's angle," I said. "He's not interested in ghosts and he doesn't believe in them. He claims to be looking at the group's behavior in reaction to 'impossible' phenomena—something about the effect of group stresses and internal factors, how far they would give themselves permission to go while they believe they can make these things happen."

  Ben raised his eyebrows. "That's an interesting angle. The New Horizons group—the original experiment group—noted in passing that there were a lot of tensions among them, including some sexual tension. The group was very diverse—married and single, couples and non-couples, ages from twenty- to fifty-something. The more tension there was, the more phenomena they got. The book claims that the group was harmonious and happy most of the time, but Owen and Sparrow admit that things got more exciting when there were unresolved issues among the participants."

  I frowned. If Tuckman's group had internal tensions—and I thought I might have glimpsed a few in the recorded sessions—maybe it wasn't so far-fetched to imagine a connection to Mark's death. I chided myself for getting sidetracked and tucked the thought away. I couldn't waste my time here; I needed to pick Ben's brain while Brian was still asleep.

  "OK. What about this poltergeist personality? The file copies Tuckman gave me include a six-page biography of this ghost who doesn't exist and the participants seem to accept it as an actual… p
erson, I guess."

  Ben perked up a bit. "Ahh, yes. That was where the Owen group was unique in the study of PK up to that time. They created the personality to which they would ascribe the poltergeist activity first, rather than attributing activity to a random personality only after it happened—which is what you see in classic poltergeist cases. Since their premise was that they controlled the entity, they gave it a distinct background, complete with mistakes, fictionalizations, and historical errors. Then, if the answers to their questions during the séances matched the flawed biography, they were obviously drawing on their own story only—not an actual ghost or collective psychic knowledge of a real person. Philip was a collective endeavor and only existed through the group and under their control. The most interesting sidelight was that Philip's tastes and answers would change depending on which participants were in the séance circle at the time."

  "But they all knew the bio," I objected, "so how could that happen?"

  "There're always details you don't think of at first, like 'What's your favorite color?' or 'Do you like ice cream?' Philip's personality developed over time as those details were filled in and was colored by the preferences of the sitters. Those with the strongest opinions tended to have a stronger influence, but if one of those people was missing, Philip's preferences would change. For instance, one of them didn't like a certain song, so when she was there, Philip didn't like that song, either—but when she was gone, he liked it fine." I'd seen that with Tuckman's group a bit, too.

  "So Philip could manifest even if the whole group wasn't present?" I asked, thinking of Celia's appearances without Ken or Mark.

  "Oh, yes. They discovered that they could get Philip to perform with as few as four of the eight group members—and it could be any four." I was becoming disappointed in Tuckman's group for lack of originality. I wondered when I'd see them break Philip's mold, since I couldn't understand why Tuckman would be so sure someone was messing with him so long as his study continued on the same tracks.

  Albert started to rove around the room, eyeing us both as if he found the conversation distasteful but couldn't quite tear himself away. Ben carried on without even noticing I'd started to glaze over. "Later, they noticed that they individually experienced incidents of minor PK when they were alone, too."

  "What happened?" I prompted.

  "Nothing spectacular—and this was all near the end of the experiment—just object movements, flickering lights that seemed to respond to questions, the sensation of being watched. It might have been suggestion and conflation, but the group attributed the incidents to Philip, even when they happened in multiple locations simultaneously. Unfortunately, none of the at-home incidents was recorded in any objective way.

  "The other telling thing was that they couldn't get anything to happen collectively or individually if they were consciously trying. Phenomena only occurred when the members were expectant, but otherwise relaxed and making no effort to create phenomena. They thought that would change eventually. They said they had hoped to create a visible apparition or an apport, but the group broke up before any greater advances were recorded."

  "Hang on—what's an apport?"

  "Oh, sorry," Ben said, then cleared his throat and continued. "An apport is a real, extant object that appears from empty air. Usually it's something significant."

  I leaned back in my seat on the book-laden sofa and looked at the volume in my hand. It wasn't very thick or heavy. Quite unimpressive. I thought of Tuckman's manipulations and fancy equipment. "Did the Philip group do this in a lab?"

  "No, mores the pity. They did it in a house with very little recording equipment, no monitoring, and no control."

  "Then how is anyone sure it wasn't a hoax?"

  Ben squirmed around and found room to prop his feet on his cluttered desk, tipping the chair far back. Albert dimmed and vanished, giving up on the conversation at last.

  "That's the million-dollar question," Ben said. "Most of what the group claimed they could do has been shown to be possible, but only on small scales and inconsistently. Recent psychological studies into false memory and expectation claim it's all conflation, but they've only addressed the traditional séance, not the Philip experiments themselves, which—for all their flaws—were at least held in a lighted room with an attempt at neutral scientific inquiry. As I said, no one's been able to reproduce the level of phenomena the Owen group got. Most who've tried get little or nothing. That tends to bolster the hoax idea—or self-delusion.

  "But there are broadcast records of a TV episode and a short documentary film about the experiment. The tape and the film have since disappeared. But the book came out in 1976—the original paperback, that is." He pointed to the hardback in my hand. "That one, there, is a later version from 1978 with some additional chapters. A lot of people still remembered those TV episodes in 78. If the book were published in the last ten years and had the same lack of documentation for events that happened thirty years ago, I'd be skeptical, but it's contemporary with the events claimed and though it's been doubted, it's never been debunked. Even the psychological experiments into conflation and false memory don't disprove the events claimed by the Philip group. The fact that some members have since died or disappeared and the rest now refuse to discuss the experiment doesn't help to clear up any questions."

  I sighed. This was a mess. Dicey experiment number one leading to dicey experiment number two. "Did anyone ever get hurt during the Philip experiments?"

  Ben frowned. "No. Not unless you count a few bruises from the table getting frisky—at least I never heard of any injuries. Why?"

  I shrugged. "It just seemed that if you could move a table around, you could also do some damage with it."

  "I don't think they ever got anything so dramatic. It was only a folding card table."

  The original group hadn't invested the time or equipment Tuckman had. That wasn't the only place they differed, but how significant were the differences? The fact that Tuckman's group worked in a lab under monitored conditions would make me expect fewer oddities, not more. I tried another tack. "Why did you recommend me to Tuckman?"

  Ben blinked. "To be honest, I was surprised he asked—I hadn't heard from him since he moved from U-Dub to PNU—but my reputation as the 'freaky-things expert, as he put it, had stuck in his head and he said he figured that if anyone knew an open-minded investigator, it would be me. I'm not sure it was a compliment…"

  I looked askance. "Probably not."

  Ben crooked his mouth into half a smile. He looked about six minutes from falling asleep and his mouth was operating on autopilot. "Yeah, he's a bit of a jerk."

  "Y'think?"

  Something thumped downstairs. Albert rushed into visibility. More thumps echoed up the stairs punctuated with a series of grunts and growls. Ben tried to twist in his chair and fell onto the floor in a tangle of limbs.

  "Oh… drat it! Rhino on the rampage." He dragged himself upright. "I'm sorry. He usually sleeps longer after lunch."

  "When do you sleep?"

  "When Mara's home—which is about four hours twice a week. Or that's what I remember. Brian will probably grow up thinking I have early Alzheimer's and that Mara is my caseworker."

  "I thought your mother babysat on occasion to give you guys a break."

  Ben shook his head as the thumps approached the attic door. "Not for a while. She fell and fractured her leg."

  I stared at him in horror. "Not Brian…?"

  Ben made it to the door. "No. She slipped walking up some steps in the rain. But she's a tough old lady with strong bones, so it's not too bad."

  I heard Brian say "Graah!" on the other side of the door and then the door bulged inward with a cracking noise and a rattle. Ben snatched it open and Brian tumbled through into his legs.

  "Graaaah!"

  Ben tried to look stern, but only looked a little cross-eyed. "Schreck-liches kind!"

  I wasn't sure what it meant but Brian rolled on the floor and giggled. I didn't t
hink that was the effect Ben had wanted.

  "You may need to switch to Russian," I suggested.

  "Unfortunately, my mother's already got him started. German is my last recourse for emotional outbursts and my grammar goes all to hell—heck! — when I'm mad. Soon I'll have to switch to Finnish or learn a new language to stay ahead. How long do you think it will take to learn Urdu?"

  I didn't know if he was serious.

  "Maybe you should try pig Latin."

  Ben hoisted Brian up. "How 'bout frog Latin? If transmogrification actually existed, I would ask Mara to turn him into a frog."

  Brian laughed harder. "Ribbit!" he shouted, clapping his hands.

  I followed them down the stairs, reserving judgment on the existence or nonexistence of anything. "Looks like you don't need a witch to do that."

  Brian planted a loud kiss on his father's cheek, then wriggled out of Ben's arms at the foot of the stairs and charged across the hall toward the living room in full rhino-mode once again.

  "Well. So much for froggy," Ben sighed. "I think I'm going to have to take him to the park, or he'll never run down. Do you want to come along, or would you prefer to cut short your visit to the wild animal park?"

  I did feel a pinch of guilt, but I said, "I'd better get back to work. I've got another couple of quandaries for you, though."

  Ben began stalking the wily rhino-boy as he called back over his shoulder, "What quandaries?"

  "First, how come glass—especially mirrored glass—filters the Grey?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean when I look through glass I see less detail in the Grey. If the glass is mirrored, the filtering is greater, and multiple layers of glass filter still more of the visual component. Why?" I called to him.

  Ben tackled his son and carried him into the hall to put on his coat. He reached for what looked like a dog harness and leash hanging from the coat rack and picked it up while keeping one eye on Brian. "OK, you want to go out and run? Do you need a leash or will you let Papa keep up this time?"