Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (10 page)

One morning about five weeks after losing her memory, it came back just as suddenly, and the old Mary Reynolds was back—a dull, cautious girl who had no fondness for nature.
Then, a few weeks later, after an unusually deep sleep, the “new” Mary returned with no memory of the past days.
And the two Marys continued to alternate for the next twenty years, both of them finally coming to accept that the periods of amnesia were due to the revival of the “other self.” Finally, at the age of thirty-five, Mary stabilized, and settled down for the rest of her life in her second personality.
She died of a brain embolism at the age of sixty-one.

The most obvious thing about the case is that the second Mary—the cheerful one—contained elements that were not present in the first Mary: high spirits, love of nature, courage and daring.
It is as if Mary’s unconscious mind got tired of her dullness and lack of enterprise, and decided to take over.
But the “new Mary” was not, in all respects, an improvement; her insistence that bears were hogs makes it sound as if she was slightly deranged.
Eventually, the second Mary became strong enough to control the personality, and keep her “alter ego” out.

Walter Prince suggested that Esther Cox was a kind of variant of Mary Reynolds—and it is certainly true that Esther was, like “Mary One,” a dull and irritable girl, trapped in a rigid personality structure.
The obvious objection is that Prince’s hypothesis about “dual personality” still fails to explain all the poltergeist occurrences.

Yet Prince’s argument begins to look rather more plausible in the light of a case of which he had direct personal experience.
In 1910, Prince’s wife got to know a girl called Doris (in his account, Prince gives her the pseudonym Doris Fischer).
She was an easygoing, sweet-natured girl who lived with her drunken father, and who suffered periodic fits of amnesia, during which she was “taken over” by no fewer than three other personalities.
Prince was so fascinated by the case that he invited Doris to come and live in his home, and ended by completely curing her.

Doris’ problems had started when she was three years old; her father came in drunk one night, snatched her from her mother’s arms, and hurled her on the floor.
This had the effect of causing instant amnesia.
Doris remembered nothing more until the following morning, when she suddenly found herself at the foot of the stairs.
There had been a slight snap of the neck, as if an electric current had been switched on.
Yet her mother had seen her walk upstairs in the normal way.

What Doris did not realize was that while she was in a state of amnesia, another personality had taken over her body, a mischievous little girl called Margaret.
Like Mary Reynolds’ “second personality,” Margaret was a good-natured madcap, a bright, vivacious child who was generally liked.
While Doris was serious and studious, Margaret was empty-headed and a born truant.
Doris would promise her parents not to go swimming in the river; Margaret would go swimming, then slip out of the body and leave Doris to take the punishment.
On one occasion, when Doris reached for a piece of cake, she “blanked out,” and Margaret snatched the cake and ate it.

Oddly enough, Margaret knew all about Doris, but Doris knew nothing about Margaret until, one day, Margaret decided to tell her.
So, leaving Doris’ consciousness fully awake, she told Doris the whole story, using Doris’ mouth to speak the words.
This sounds very much like the “demoniacal possession” of Father Surin, watching his body convulse while unable to do anything about it.

When Doris was in her mid-teens, she graduated at the top of her class and decided to go on to high school.
Margaret, who hated studying, refused; and, since she was the stronger personality, Doris left school and went to work as a seamstress.

At seventeen, another personality “appeared.” One day at work, Doris had a visual hallucination of her mother; she rushed home and found her mother dying of sudden acute pneumonia.
In the early hours of the morning, her mother died.
Then her father staggered in, dead drunk, and, without noticing that his wife was dead, fell into bed and began to snore.
Doris experienced a pain in her head, and again lost her memory.
This new “Doris” was—like the second Mary Reynolds—virtually a new-born baby, entirely without memory.
It was Margaret who had to teach her to speak.
This new personality was nervous and rather stupid, a thoroughly dull, conventional girl with a monotonous voice.

When Doris was eighteen, she slipped and fell on the back of her head; as a result, yet another personality began to take over the body.
This one was even less complex than the previous invader; she seemed to be little more than a memory, and could repeat word for word long conversations that Doris had had in childhood.

When Prince began to study Doris, in 1911, he realized that she seemed to be an incredibly complex series of persons, like Chinese boxes.
First, there was Doris herself, a good-natured sensible girl, who unfortunately never seemed to be able to spend more than a few hours at a time in charge of her own body.
She was likely to be taken over by Margaret, who was a delightful and mischievous ten-year-old—she had stopped developing at that age—who loved playing with dolls, and kept everybody in fits of laughter.
Then there was the dull girl who had taken over when Doris’ mother died, and whom Prince called Sick Doris—she was also rather childlike.
The “tape recorder” personality also made brief appearances—Prince called her “Sleeping Real Doris.” He also discovered that there was yet another personality, more mature and complex than any of the others, whom he called “Sleeping Margaret” because she put in an appearance when Margaret fell asleep.
This personality seemed to be able to see into the minds of all the others.
She also claimed to be a spirit or guardian angel who had come in reply to the prayers of Doris’ mother for someone to protect her daughter.

So the personalities in Doris’ body seemed to form a kind of hierarchy or “ladder.” At the top was “Sleeping Margaret,” the “guardian angel.” Next came the mischievous and childish Margaret.
Then Doris, then “Sick Doris,” then the “tape recorder,” Sleeping Real Doris.

Margaret could “eject” Doris at a moment’s notice.
Sometimes, Doris would be half-way through a sentence when suddenly her expression would alter, and Margaret would take over, with her typical mischievous grin.
But Margaret was unaware of the “guardian angel” and on one occasion when she had unceremoniously forced Doris out of the body, the guardian angel got angry and forced Margaret out.
Later that day, Margaret reappeared and confided to Prince that there must be someone else in this body because someone had thrown
her
out.

In the security of Prince’s household, Doris improved steadily.
The personality called Sick Doris began to fade out; she became virtually an idiot, and she and Prince took a final walk together and had a touching leavetaking.
Then she reverted to babyhood, and “died.” As an experiment, Prince tried encouraging the “tape recorder,” seeing if he could turn her into something more like a human being; she responded so well that Prince decided it would be unwise to carry on.
She also faded away.

Margaret also began to “grow backwards” as Doris’ confidence increased, becoming more and more child-like and using the German pronunciations of Doris’ childhood.
Her senses seemed to fade, and her visual field narrowed until she could only see directly in front of her—like a baby.
Then she too faded away.

The “guardian angel” never faded away; she remained around, and sometimes emerged after Doris had fallen asleep, and had long and interesting talks with Prince.
In 1916, when someone suggested that Doris should go to New York to sit with a medium, Prince was dubious until “Sleeping Margaret” assured him that Doris would be perfectly safe in her hands.
She was as good as her word, and the result was a remarkable series of séances in which the spirit of Doris’ mother—or someone who claimed to be—wrote out long messages that showed an intimate knowledge of Doris’ background.
Doris’ “mother” also insisted that all that had happened to her daughter was simply a case of “benevolent possession.” And it has to be admitted that this explanation fits the facts amazingly well.
For, on the whole, Doris’ experience of multiple personality was not unpleasant.
Margaret, although mischievous, was a good-natured and happy child, and the other personalities seem to have been basically harmless.
Prince was disposed to believe the assertion of “Sleeping Margaret” that she was a guardian spirit who had come in answer to the prayers of the mother.

It can now be seen why Prince thought it possible that the Amherst case involved dual personality.
He was more than half convinced that the Doris case of multiple personality was actually one of benevolent possession, so in suggesting that Esther was a dual personality, he was, in effect, hinting that this could be a case of non-benevolent possession.
At the same time, his position as a well-known psychiatrist meant that, for public consumption, he was bound to lay most of the emphasis on the purely psychological explanation—of both the Amherst and the Doris cases.

And what
is
the psychological explanation?
It depends, basically, upon the recognition that we are all, to some extent, multiple personalities, divided selves.
Part of Esther Cox wanted to be seduced by Bob MacNeal, but the personality structure induced by her upbringing made her resist his overtures.
If he had been more subtle, and succeeded in persuading her to become his mistress, then the “old” Esther would have slipped into the background, and the new, sexually experienced Esther would have taken her place.

We all spend our lives trying to get rid of our “old” selves and develop new—and less constricting—personality structures.
This is why we all crave experience, why every boy wants to run away to sea and every girl wants to marry a millionaire with a yacht.
But then, we also spend most of our lives reacting “automatically” to familiar circumstances, hardly aware of anything that is further than the end of our noses.
So it is difficult to escape the “old self,” which consists largely of a set of habits.
It is easy to see how rather dull people—like Mary Reynolds and Esther Cox—become trapped to the point of suffocation in this mechanical, habit-bound personality structure, and how the unconscious life urges—perhaps working through the right brain—can plan to overthrow the dreary tyrant.

But before we allow ourselves to be persuaded by this explanation, there are still a few curious points about the Doris case to consider.
One of these is how several personalities could apparently
reside
together in the same body.
While Doris was “in” the body—i.e., in charge of its movements—Margaret might be also “in,” aware of everything that Doris was watching and thinking, and having her own ideas and opinions.
Doris could be fast asleep, while Margaret was awake, observing her dreams.
Moreover, the “guardian angel,” who explained all this to Walter Prince, was also able to be “in,” observing both Doris
and
Margaret, unobserved by both.

It is difficult to see how this could take place inside the head of a normal person, even if she happened to be torn by self-division.
What the “guardian angel” is explaining sounds like a number of independent spirits, or entities, making use of Doris’ body.
(Significantly, Doris herself was unable to be aware of any of her other “selves” and their activities.)

Again, there exist a number of photographs of Doris’ different personalities.
One photograph shows Doris herself, and the caption explains that “Sick Doris” had sat down for the picture, but Doris had “taken over” for a few moments as the camera clicked.
Another photograph of “Sick Doris” reveals that she is, indeed, a quite different person from Doris—she looks wooden and stolid, quite unlike the gentle, sensitive Doris.
Margaret looks so completely unlike both Dorises that it is hard to realize that she is using the same body.
In the
Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research,
Prince also describes another case of amnesia, a man he calls Heinrich Myer.
Again, the photographs of the primary and secondary personalities are incredibly different.
Physically, they are very similar, yet a different
person
looks out through the eyes of each.
It is tempting for the non-professional observer to say simply that the same body has been taken over by different spirits.

Let us consider again the assertion of the “guardian angel” (and of Doris’ mother) that the Doris case is basically one of “benevolent possession.” Prince tries to explain the coming and going of the personalities in terms of weariness and exhaustion.
Doris was easily tired out, and when she grew tired, Margaret would take over.
While Margaret was “in” the body, she would say that Doris was “resting.” Prince’s theory is that Doris became a dual personality as a three-year-old child—to save herself from total breakdown.
The shock of being snatched from her mother’s arms and hurled on the floor might have seriously damaged her, perhaps turned her into a timid, listless, miserable child.
Instead, the “guardian angel” took over the body (she insisted to Prince that she came first,
before
Margaret), and was later assisted by Margaret.