Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (14 page)

The explanation could lie in the concept that I have labeled the “ladder of selves.”
[5]
As we have seen, the “selves” in cases of multiple personality often seem to fall into a distinct “hierarchy”: in the case of Doris, the “guardian angel” was the topmost “self,” then came-Margaret, then Doris, then “Sick Doris,” then “Real Sleeping Doris.” In Christine Beauchamp there was Christine herself; then, above her, Sally; then, above her, B-4.
Christine was so upset and depressed by the death of her mother and by other problems that her personality ceased its normal development in her early teens.
Under pleasanter circumstances, she might have developed the high spirits of Sally and the maturity and balance of B-4.
And it is easy to imagine that there may have been still higher possible levels of personality waiting for her to develop “into them.”

This obviously applies to all human beings.
As we grow up we pass through what is virtually a series of “selves”; everyone has known the surprise of meeting at, say, fifteen, a child one last saw at the age of eight; the change may make him or her unrecognizable.
With luck, we encounter the experiences that allow us to develop our potentialities, and slowly advance up the “ladder” of selves.

This ladder seems to have one peculiarity.
Unlike the ordinary ladder, its sides slope inward, so the rungs became shorter.
Everyone who has been through some personal crisis knows that in order to develop a new level of being, we need to make an effort of compression—we even use the phrase “pulling ourselves together” to express what we do when we have to achieve a higher level of
organization.

This raises the obvious question: what lies at the top of the ladder?
Clearly, it is a question that no one can answer.
But if this theory of a hierarchy of levels has any basis in fact, then it seems that these higher levels
already exist
in us, before we even come to suspect their existence.
In a sense, the Beethoven who wrote the last quartets was already present in the new-born baby, as an oak is latent in the acorn.
But there may have been a dozen other Beethovens waiting to be developed.
The same applies to the rest of us.
Few people develop their obvious potentialities; but even the men and women of genius may be little more than undisciplined children when judged by the standard of their latent potentialities.

This whole problem of the personality and its potential is considered at length in one of the classics of paranormal investigation, F.
W.
H.
Myers’
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
Discussing such problems as multiple personality, hypnotism and “possession,” Myers argues that if we are to dispense with the idea of “spirit guidance” or possession, then we have to posit the notion of an entire “unconscious personality,” with its own thoughts and ideas.
And in an introduction in a recent edition of the book, Aldous Huxley carries this one stage further.

Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with a cellar?
Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath, Freud inclined to the bungalow-with-basement view

In other words, if the mind has an “unconscious” basement, why should it not have a “super-conscious” attic as well—a level of the “self” above the everyday self, yet equally unknown?

And this notion can lead us to a further interesting speculation.
Could this “superconscious” self explain some of the phenomena of paranormal research?
The adult personality is more controlled and disciplined than that of the child, and therefore capable of greater achievements; even Mozart could not have written
The Magic Flute
at the age of twelve.
In that case, the “superconscious” self ought to be capable of still greater achievements.
Could this, conceivably, explain telepathy, “second sight,” psychokinesis, knowledge of the future?
Is it conceivable that “psychics” have some kind of “short circuit” to this superconscious level?
Psychic abilities often appear after shock or severe illness; the Dutch “clairvoyant,” Peter Hurkos, developed his curious abilities by falling off a ladder and fracturing his skull; when he woke up in a hospital he found he could read other people’s minds.
Uri Geller dates the development of his odd powers from a severe electric shock caused by pushing his finger into the works of his mother’s sewing machine when he was three years old.

But here again, there is another possible explanation.
Did Hurkos’ accident and Geller’s shock simply turn them into “mediums”—open some inner gateway to allow them to be “invaded” by “spirits”?

It would, I think, be a mistake at this stage to commit ourselves to either view—or to regard them as mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, let us try to extend the field of investigation by looking at the history of the strange phenomenon known as the poltergeist.

three

Cases Ancient and Modern

There are probably over a thousand recorded instances of poltergeist haunting, and in nine cases out of ten there is a frustrating lack of detail and a dreary similarity.
Objects fly through the air, furniture waltzes around the room, crockery is smashed, bangs and crashes keep everyone awake, stones fly through windows.
Then everything stops as suddenly as it began.
The only possible comment, except for those unfortunate enough to be involved, would seem to be “So what?” It is the one case in ten that throws up the curious incident and, occasionally, the interesting clue; and it is mainly upon these that we shall concentrate.
It may be as well to start with one of those typical cases.
This was published anonymously in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1962.
How, then, can we assume it is true?
Because it is so completely pointless.

A middle-aged businessman and his wife rented a house on Cape Cod for the summer; although it had been built nine years earlier, they were, for some reason, its first occupants.
It was exceptionally isolated.

The man, from internal evidence, was a publisher, and on their first night in the house, he sat up late over a manuscript.
His wife, Helen, had gone to bed early.
Suddenly his wife called: “Was that you?”

She had heard a sound like someone tapping with a cane on the brick wall near the front door.
Neither paid much attention to the incident.
But the next night, as they sat in the living room, the sounds came again—exactly like a cane on the brick wall.
The husband rushed outside with a torch.
As he opened the door, the tapping stopped.
There was nothing to be seen.

During the next few months, they heard the sound again and again—almost every night, and always at about ten o’clock.
The husband tried standing by the door at ten; but the moment he opened it, the tapping stopped.

During the second week, the man was awakened three times by noises.
The first was a sound like a box of matches falling on the floor.
He switched on the light and looked around the room; nothing had fallen down.
The second night, it was a distinct sound like a sheet of newspaper swishing the length of the room.
Once again, there was nothing to account for it.
The third night, it was a noise like a rolling pin which seemed to fall on the floor, roll across the room and come to rest against the wall.
But there was no rolling pin or anything else.

Then the clicking noise began—just a clicking that came from the walls.
It could happen in any room of the house at any time of the day or night.
It happened several hundred times during their four months in the house.

The third week, the footsteps began.
They were loud and clear, like a man in leather shoes with solid heels, tramping loudly over the wooden floor.
When they were downstairs, they came from the room above; when they were upstairs, from below.
These happened about forty times during their four months.
Helen often heard sounds from another room and went to look, assuming someone had come into the house—they had made a few friends in the area.
There was never anyone there.

Then, in midsummer, came the noise they called “the grand piano smash.” One night there was a deafening crash from the garage, enough to set the house quivering.
He describes it as sounding as if a grand piano had suddenly lost its legs and fallen to the floor.
Naturally, the garage—which was used to store books—was empty.

In September, they had visitors—his lawyer, and his wife and daughter.
The lawyer was completely skeptical about the “ghost.” On the first evening, the three women went out to an amateur theatrical and the two men stayed behind to work on a contract.
The lawyer remarked: “I wish to heaven I could hear from your precious ghost.” As they sat working, there was a crisp little click from the wall behind their heads.
“The Universal Click?” inquired the lawyer.

“Yes.”

“Drying wood.”

Twenty minutes later, footfalls sounded from overhead.
The narrator, with a considerable effort of will, went on reading; the lawyer, shouted: “What on earth is that?”

“Only the ghost.”

“Nonsense, there’s a man upstairs.” They rushed upstairs, and the lawyer’s jaw dropped when they found the room empty.
He insisted on ransacking the bedrooms and attics with a torch, but found nothing.

That night, the lawyer and his family slept in Helen’s large bedroom, while Helen moved into her husband’s single room; he slept on the settee downstairs.
The next morning, the lawyer asked: “What was that awful crash?” They described the “grand piano smash.” It had been so loud that they had thought the garage ceiling had fallen in.
They had been so alarmed that they had taken their daughter into bed between them.
Yet the husband and wife had heard nothing.

That is the end of the story; and it is, in all respects but one, a typical poltergeist story.
If it had been recorded in Latin in the year 1200, it would no doubt read: “In a house on Cape Cod there sounded footsteps, tapping sounds and loud noises, all without apparent cause.
The spirit gave no indication of its purpose or identity.” And, in fact, this
is
about the amount of detail we find in the majority of recorded cases.
It can be seen why a comprehensive history of the poltergeist would be unreadable.

The one non-typical detail is, of course, the lack of a focus or “medium.” The author mentions nothing about having a child, or of any children ever being in the house.
In fact, he never mentions the word “poltergeist.” Yet this case clearly belongs to the type of poltergeist haunting rather than to the “spectral” kind.
And this, in itself, is an important clue.
In ninety-nine percent of poltergeist cases, there is a pubescent teenager—or a child—present, and it is therefore a valid assumption that what is happening is “spontaneous psychokinesis.” One of the earliest psychical researchers, Professor Charles Richet, reached exactly that conclusion in his huge and comprehensive
Thirty Years of Psychical Research.
But if in even one percent of the cases there is no disturbed adolescent, then the assumption becomes questionable, and we find ourselves reconsidering Lombroso’s view that a poltergeist is a mischievous spirit.
But where, in that case, does it get the energy?

One clue may be found in a remark thrown off casually by a popular writer on true ghost stories, Elliott O’Donnell, who notes that Windsor Castle seems to have an unusual number of ghosts, although no tragedies are associated with it, “an argument,” he adds, “in favor of the theory that hauntings do not necessarily originate in tragedies .
.
.” Then what
do
they originate in?
T.
C.
Lethbridge has already offered a clue when he speculates that ghosts and “ghouls” may be
tape recordings
, somehow preserved on the “energy field” of water.
For, as a dowser, Lethbridge also observed the same powerful energy fields in the area of standing stones.
He describes how, when visiting the Merry Maidens in Cornwall, he placed one hand on a stone and held a pendulum in the other, and felt an electrical tingling in his fingers, while the pendulum began to revolve like an airplane propeller.
Lethbridge also notes that most “sacred sites” seem to have been used continuously down the centuries—so that, for example, a pagan sacred site may later become the location for a monastery, and later perhaps of a modern church.
(More often than not, such churches are named after Saint Michael, who seems to be the Christian equivalent of the pagan sun god, to whom most ancient sites were dedicated.) And he observed in such places a powerful force of earth magnetism.

This same conclusion was reached by a retired solicitor named Guy Underwood, who decided to devote his retirement to studying dowsing.
Underwood was convinced that at the center of most sacred sites—such as Stonehenge or the Merry Maidens—there is an underground spring, which seems to create a pattern of spiral lines of force around it.
He also found straight lines of force passing through these sites, and often continuing for miles; these lines of force he called “holy lines.”

Now Underwood’s “holy lines” had already been observed more than a quarter of a century before he began his investigations by another lover of the countryside, Alfred Watkins, a retired brewer.
But Watkins did not discover them with a dowsing rod.
He simply noticed that the English countryside seems to be covered with “long straight tracks” which pass through sacred sites; he began by assuming that they were ancient trade routes, and only later concluded—tentatively—that they might have had some religious significance for our remote ancestors.
He called them “ley lines,” from the word “lea”; meaning a meadow.
As a result of Watkins’ researches, documented in his book
The Old Straight Track
(1925), a club of enthusiasts began searching for these lines all over England.
But after Underwood, it began to strike “ley hunters”—chief among whom was a young Englishman named John Michell—that ley lines are, in fact, lines of “earth force.”

A new generation of “ley hunters” soon noticed another interesting thing about ley lines—that a remarkable number of reputed hauntings, poltergeist occurrences and sightings of “unidentified flying objects” seemed to happen on them, particularly at the crossing point of one or more “leys.”

One of the oddest types of haunting sounds so preposterous that it is hard to take seriously; yet it has been convincingly documented: the repetition of historical events.
At Edgehill, in Warwickshire, where one of the great battles of the English Civil War was fought, local residents heard all the sounds of the battle some months later.
It happened so often that King Charles the First sent a commission to investigate; they testified on oath to having witnessed the phantom battle.
The sounds are still heard today, and have been documented by the Reverend John Dening.
Near Wroxham, in the Norfolk Broads, a phantom army of Roman soldiers has been recorded by a number of witnesses over the years, and in a cellar in York, a Roman legion has been witnessed marching by modern workmen (one of whom described his experience on the BBC’s
Spotlight
program).
An investigator named Stephen Jenkins had a similar experience on a track near Mounts Bay in Cornwall—an optical illusion of a crowd of armed men among the bushes in the evening light.
Many years later, when he had discovered the existence of ley lines, Jenkins realized that the track he had been following was a ley, and that he had been approaching a nodal point—a crossing with other leys.

The possibility that begins to emerge, then, is connected with our earlier speculation that “human electric batteries” and “poltergeist mediums” like Esther Cox may derive their power from the earth: it is that poltergeists may also, under certain conditions, obtain their energy from the earth; and these conditions may be fulfilled on the nodal points of ley lines.

In a book called
The Undiscovered Country
, Stephen Jenkins has cited a number of cases that seem to support this theory.
(For example, he prints a photograph taken in Pevensey Castle in 1957 that shows three strange little men—like elves—on a heap of stones; the lady who took the photograph saw no little men; but Pevensey Castle is a nodal point of a number of ley lines.)

It was Stephen Jenkins who drew my own attention to the “ley solution” to a curious case of haunting that I had presented on BBC television—-the Ardachie case.
In 1952, Mr.
and Mrs.
Peter McEwan rented Ardachie Lodge, on the edge of Loch Ness, hoping to raise pigs there, and they hired a couple named MacDonald to act as housekeepers.
The McEwans had two small children—too young to raise the suspicion that they may have been the “focus” of poltergeist phenomena.
On the night of their arrival, the MacDonalds went to bed, but were awakened by footsteps that came up the stairs and went into the room opposite.
A few minutes later, they again heard footsteps.
They went and peeped into the room, which they had supposed to be unused, and found that, in fact, there was no one there.
They went downstairs and asked the McEwans if the house was haunted; the McEwans said no, not as far as they knew.
But back in the bedroom, Mrs.
MacDonald was terrified to see an old woman beckoning to her—neither her husband nor Mr.
McEwan saw it.
Mrs.
MacDonald flatly denied that she was “psychic.” They moved into another room; half an hour or so later they were disturbed by loud rapping noises on the wall.
They looked outside the door, and saw an old woman with a lighted candle crawling along the corridor.
And it was this that convinced the McEwans that this was not mere hysteria; the previous owner of the house, a Mrs.
Brewin, had been an arthritic old woman who thought the servants were stealing from her, so she used to crawl around on all fours at night with a candle—this was vouched for by various people who knew her well.