Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (19 page)

A few weeks later, the bailiff of Ludgershall sent the drum to Mompesson’s house in Tedworth.
Mompesson was just on his way to London.
When he came back he found the house in uproar.
For three nights there had been violent knockings and raps all over the house—both inside and out.
That night, when the banging started, Mompesson leapt out of bed with a pistol and rushed to the room from which the sound was coming.
It moved to another room.
He tried to locate it, but it now seemed to be coming from outside.
When he got back into bed, he was able to distinguish drumbeats among the rapping noises.

For the next two months, it was impossible to get to sleep until the middle of the night; the racket went on for at least two hours every night.
It stopped briefly when Mrs.
Mompesson was in labor, and was silent for three weeks—an indication that the spirit was mischievous rather than malicious.
Then the disturbances started up again, this time centering around Mompesson’s children.
The drumbeats would sound from around their beds, and the beds were often lifted up into the air.
When the children were moved up into a loft, the drummer followed them.
The servants even began to get used to it; one manservant saw a board move, and asked it to hand it to him; the board floated up to his hand, and a joking tug of war ensued for twenty minutes or so, until the master ordered them to stop.
When the minister came to pray by the children, the spirit showed its disrespect by being noisier than usual, and leaving behind a disgusting sulphurous smell—presumably to imply it came from Hell.
Scratching noises sounded like huge rats.

Things got worse.
During the next two years lights were seen, doors slammed, unseen skirts rustled, and a Bible was burnt.
The creature purred like a cat, panted like a dog, and made the coins in a man’s pocket turn black.
One day, Mompesson went into the stable and found his horse lying on its back with its hind hoof jammed into its mouth; it had to be pried out with a lever.
The “spirit” attacked the local blacksmith with a pair of pincers, snatched a sword from a guest, and grabbed a stick from a servant woman who was trying to bar its path.
The Reverend Joseph Glanvil—who wrote about the case—came to investigate, and heard the strange noises from around the children’s beds.
When he went down to his horse, he found it sweating with terror, and the horse died soon afterwards.

The phantom drummer seems to have developed a voice; one morning, there was a bright light in the children’s room and a voice kept shouting: “A witch, a witch!”—at least a hundred times, according to Glanvil.
Mompesson woke up one night to find himself looking at a vague shape with two great staring eyes, which slowly vanished.
It also developed such unpleasant habits as emptying ashes and chamber pots into the children’s beds.

In 1663, William Drury was arrested at Gloucester for stealing a pig.
While he was in Gloucester jail, a Wiltshire man came to see him, and Drury asked what was happening in Wiltshire.
When the man said “Nothing” Drury said: “What, haven’t you heard about the drumming in the house at Tedworth?” The man admitted that he had, whereupon Drury declared: “I have plagued him, and he shall never be quiet until he has made me satisfaction for taking away my drum.” This, according to Glanvil, led to his being tried for a witch at Salisbury and sentenced to transportation.
As soon as Drury was out of the country, peace descended on the Mompesson household.
But the drummer somehow managed to escape and return to England—whereupon the disturbances began all over again.
Mrs.
Mompesson seems to have asked it—by means of raps—whether Drury was responsible, and it replied in the affirmative.

How the disturbances ended is not clear—presumably they faded away, like most poltergeists.
Certainly they had ceased by the time Glanvil published his account twenty years later.

The most interesting point about the case is Drury’s admission that he caused the disturbances.
This seems to fly in the face of the most popular theory of poltergeists—that they are the result of the unconscious disturbances of a child at puberty.
If we regard Drury merely as the focus or medium, then we have to explain how he succeeded in causing the phenomena when he was many miles away.
Few writers on the case have even bothered to quote Glanvil’s remark that Drury had been a soldier under Cromwell, and learned magic from some “Gallant Books he had had of a wizard.” Together with Drury’s trial for witchcraft, they seem to add a disreputable air of superstition to a case that otherwise looks like a classic poltergeist haunting.
To make sense of Drury’s admissions, we have to suppose that (a) he knew how to practice some form of magic, and (b) that the spirit or spirits that caused the disturbances could be persuaded to help him obtain his revenge.
These propositions strike a modern investigator as preposterous.
Yet, as we shall see, they fit the facts rather better than modern theories about “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” or Fodor’s sexual theory of the origin of poltergeist activity.
In her book
The Night Side of Nature
—a Victorian bestseller—Catherine Crowe describes a case that occurred in Rambouillet in November, 1846, at a farm house belonging to a M.
Bottel.
Some peddlers came to the door and asked for bread, which they were given.
Later, one of them came back and asked for more; the servant refused him, and the man went off uttering vague threats.
That night, at supper, plates began to roll off the table.
When the servant girl happened to stand on the spot where the peddler had stood, she was “seized with convulsions and an extraordinary rotatory motion.” A carter standing beside her placed himself on the same spot, felt “suffocated” and dizzy, and fell into a pool of water outside the house.
The curé was asked for help, but he was “attacked in the same manner,” and his furniture began to dance about.
The phenomena continued for some weeks before they stopped.

Here we can note a number of points of interest.
Mrs.
Crowe does not say so, but if the peddlers formed a group, then it seems probable they were gypsies, and gypsies have a strong magic tradition—in the nineteenth century it was studied by a remarkable investigator, Charles Godfrey Leland.
It seems curious that the servant girl was seized with convulsions on the exact spot where the peddler had stood, and that the carter also felt dizzy and suffocated.
This immediately calls to mind some of Lethbridge’s comments about “ghouls;” He experienced a sense of dizziness and suffocation on Ladram Beach, and his wife Mina felt the same as she stood on the clifftop at the spot where the man had committed suicide.
The French dowser Barthelemy Bléton discovered his powers when he felt suffocated and dizzy over a powerful underground stream.
It seems conceivable that the forces involved in this type of “magic” may involve the earth.
Yet since the poltergeist also attacked the curé in his own home, we have to assume that it was an active force—in fact, one of Kardec’s spirits.

Glanvil wrote his book on strange occurrences—
Saducismus Triumphatus
—just before the dawning of the eighteenth century, the age of reason.
Even in the 1660s, the magistrate Mompesson was widely suspected of somehow fabricating the story of the phantom drummer, and “he suffered by it in his name, in his estate, in all his affairs .
.
.” A quarter of a century after its publication, Glanvil’s book was regarded as an absurd relic of an age of credulity.
The main reason was that the civilized world was finally—after four centuries—shaking off the belief in witchcraft.
In England, there had been no mass trials of witches since the death of Matthew Hopkins, the “witchfinder general,” in 1646; in America, the witch hysteria came to an end after the Salem trials in 1692.
The age of science had dawned; there was no room for books like
Saducismus Triumphatus
in the age of Newton and Leibniz.

One of the most remarkable cases of the early eighteenth century was investigated by the eminent scientist Joseph Priestley who, predictably, decided that the phenomena were caused by a hoaxer.
It began at the rectory of Epworth, in Lincolnshire, inhabited by the family of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, grandfather of the founder of Methodism.
On December 1, 1716, the Wesleys’ maidservant was in the dining-room when she heard appalling groans, like someone dying.
The family made a joke of it.
But a few nights later, they were awakened by loud knocking sounds, which usually seemed to come from the garret or nursery.
The only person who failed to hear them was the Reverend Wesley himself, and the family decided not to tell him in case he thought it was an omen of his death.
When they finally told him, he refused to believe them; that night, as if to convince him, there were nine loud knocks by his bedside.

From then on, the house was in a constant state of disturbance, with footsteps in empty rooms and up and down the stairs—often more than one set of footsteps at a time—noises like smashing bottles, and a curious sound which was compared to the “winding up of a jack” or someone planing wood.
When Mrs.
Wesley heard knocking noises from the nursery, she tried repeating them, and the poltergeist then made the same knocks resound from the floorboards under her feet.
When she looked under the bed, an animal like a badger ran out.
A manservant who saw the animal sitting by the dining-room fire said it looked like a white rabbit.

The family were at first afraid that it portended someone’s death, either that of the Reverend Samuel Wesley or of his elder son (of the same name).
When nothing of the sort occurred, they decided that they were dealing with witchcraft—against which the Reverend Samuel had preached.
Yet they also noticed that the disturbances seemed connected with the nineteen-year-old Hetty Wesley; she often trembled in her sleep before the sounds began.

After two months, the poltergeist went away, although it is said to have made occasional brief reappearances in later years.
The family came to refer to it as “Old Jeffrey.” And Mrs.
Wesley remained convinced that Old Jeffrey was the spirit of her brother, who worked for the East India Company, and who vanished without a trace.
She could well have been right.
In some respects, the poltergeist behaved like a ghost.
Its activities always seemed to begin at a quarter to ten every night (few poltergeists keep to an exact timetable)—and the very first sounds heard were groans and heavy breathing, not the usual raps.
Poltergeist disturbances usually—almost invariably—occur in a certain sequence.
The earliest stage is usually some kind of scratching noise like rats; then raps and bangs, then flying stones or other small objects, then larger objects, then other forms of physical mischief—moving furniture, blankets pulled off beds.
If voices occur, they usually occur after this stage—as, for example, in the case of the Bell Witch.
It is almost unknown for phenomena to occur in a different order.
So in that respect, the Wesley case is unusual, starting with what is usually one of the later developments.
The chief objection to Mrs.
Wesley’s theory is that if the spirit of her dead brother was behind the disturbances, then why did he not try to communicate—for example, when the Reverend Samuel tried to get him to answer questions by means of raps?

One of the more obvious features of the Epworth case is that there were none of the usual physical phenomena—falling stones, dancing furniture.
The explanation, presumably, is that there was not enough energy available for the poltergeist to do anything more spectacular than make noises.
This is also true of the most notorious poltergeist of the eighteenth century, the “Cock Lane ghost.” This began with knocking noises in the house of Richard Parsons, clerk of St.
Sepulchre’s church in Smithfield, London, in November, 1759.
One night, a woman named Fanny Lynes, who was lodging in the house, asked ten-year-old Elizabeth Parsons, the eldest daughter, to sleep with her while her common-law husband was away on business.
All went well for a few nights; then the two were kept awake one night by scratching and rapping noises from behind the wainscot.
When they told Richard Parsons about it, he said it was probably the cobbler next door.

Soon afterwards, Fanny became ill with smallpox; she was six months pregnant, and her “husband” was understandably anxious.
He and Fanny were unmarried only because she was his deceased wife’s sister.
William Kent had married Elizabeth Lynes two years earlier, but she had died in childbirth; now it looked rather as if the story was repeating itself.
He moved Fanny into a house nearby, where, on February 2, 1760, she died of smallpox.