Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (27 page)

The view that was held by Gardner, Doyle and Hodson is that what the children saw were “elementals.” Elementals are nature spirits, particularly of woods and streams.
There are four basic elementals: gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and nereids, being respectively the spirits of earth, air, fire and water.
It would be a fair assumption that in the twentieth century, only members of the lunatic fringe believe in such creatures.
This is not so.
Writing in his classic work
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
, W.
Y.
Evans-Wentz writes:

We seem .
.
.
to have arrived at a point in our long investigations where we can postulate scientifically .
.
.
the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons, all kind of true fairies, and disembodied man .
.
.
The general statement may be made that there are hundreds of carefully proven cases of phenomena or apparitions precisely like many of those which the Celtic people attribute to fairies.

And by way of example, he goes on to cite poltergeists, which, he points out, sound very much like what have been called demons, fairies and elementals.
He goes on to quote the famous French investigator (and astronomer) Camille Flammarion, who points out that the pranks of poltergeists are thoroughly puerile and resemble the mischief of badly behaved children.
Flammarion goes on to make the important statement:

These spirits are not necessarily the souls of the dead; for other kinds of spiritual beings may exist, and space may be full of them without our ever knowing anything about it, except under unusual circumstance.
Do we not find in different ancient literatures demons, angels, gnomes, goblins, sprites, spectres, elementals, etc?
Perhaps these legends are not without some foundation in fact.

The scientist and psychic investigator Sir William Crookes came to the same conclusion, summarizing his theory in the words:

The actions of a separate order of beings, living on this earth, but invisible and immaterial to us.
Able, however, occasionally to manifest their presence.
Known in almost all countries and ages as demons (not necessarily bad), gnomes, fairies, kobolds, elves, goblins, Puck etc.

Moreover, as Evans-Wentz remarks, the kind of people who claim to have seen fairies are not usually excitable, hysterical or neurotic; they tend to be very ordinary.
Andrew Lang made the same observation about people who have seen ghosts—that they are usually “steady, unimaginative, unexcitable people with just one odd experience.” Joe Cooper’s observations bear this out: for example, a National Serviceman out having a picnic with his girlfriend in Gibraltar when the sandwich was snatched from his hand by a little man about eighteen inches high, who then ran away.
The account is completely matter-of-fact: “his features were just human, they weren’t distorted, a big bulbous nose or chin .
.
.
and I noticed he had a hammer in his hand .
.
.”

When I was lecturing at the Edinburgh Festival in 1978, I was interviewed in the local Scottish TV studio by an interviewer named Bobbie (whose second name, regrettably, I failed to note in my journal).
He was apparently a well-known interviewer on Scottish news programs, and he commuted between the Edinburgh and Glasgow studios.
When, afterwards, we sat in the pub next door, he told me casually that he had seen a gnome and that it had “scared the hell out of him.” He was picking up a friend outside a convent, and had seen the gnome—a very thin man—standing on the pavement outside the gate.
Something about the figure had terrified him and he drove off at top speed.
Most stories of “fairy” sightings are like this, oddly circumstantial and oddly pointless.

Marc Alexander tells such a story in his book
Enchanted Britain.
He has been discussing the case of Elsie and Frances, and speculates that these strange beings are not necessarily of a definite shape and size, that would be seen by anyone who happened to be on the spot.
“Mankind down the ages has interpreted visions according to his experience and metaphysical outlook—the old Christians saw angels, we see UFOs.” He goes on to tell a story of a friend named Pat Andrew, whom he knew in New Zealand, and who claimed to have seen a pixie sitting on a gate when he was six.
When a stage hypnotist came to town, Marc Alexander and his friend both began to experiment with hypnosis, and soon became proficient at it.
One day, Marc Alexander tried regressing Pat Andrew to the age of six, to find out whether the story about the pixie was invention.

When he reached this point he exclaimed in a wondering, high-pitched voice: “Look, a pixie.” He then continued, to whatever it was that he was seeing once again on the gate, “Hello, little fellow.” There was a pause, while presumably the pixie returned his greeting, then Pat said: “You’re a pixie, aren’t you?” Again there was a silence from the young man with closed eyes as in his memory the pixie answered his questions.

It was strange to listen to this one-sided conversation, to the questions that a child would ask a pixie such as where did it live, what did it eat, what was its name, and so on.
All I could hear were the words Pat had actually used sixteen years earlier, but they left me in no doubt that as a child my friend had spoken to something sitting on top of a gate which had replied to him as a pixie.

What intrigued Marc Alexander was that Andrew’s description of the little man made it clear that he was a traditionally English pixie with a pointed hat, not the Maori equivalent of pixies, the
turehu
—and until the hypnotic experiment he had been inclined to assume that the pixie had been a figment of his friend’s imagination—not a deliberate lie, but a fantasy that had taken on reality for a small boy.

The dowser Tom Lethbridge, whom we have met in chapter 1, was convinced that there are various types of “earth field” connected with different elements: water fields (which he called naiad fields), oread fields, associated with open spaces and mountains, and dryad fields, associated with woodland.
Each field has its own kind of entity—or spirit—associated with it.
But Lethbridge believes these are simply a property of the field—recordings—not real spirits.
He says:

Little people are seen now and then by many races of men.
They are seen in Africa, for instance, where they are just like tiny Africans.
I do not for a moment doubt that they are seen, but I do doubt the interpretation placed on the seeing.
We can take it as an observed fact that ordinary men and women all over the world have seen little people; but I do not believe that they really exist as such.
Throughout this investigation we are assuming that people do not go out of their way to tell lies.
When they say that they have seen a little man, they are not just making up a story based on tradition.
They have seen something which appeared to their mind as a little man.

But Lethbridge goes on to tell two stories that contradict this hypothesis.
(Lethbridge evolved from book to book, so this often happens.) In July 1922, Lethbridge and a party of friends were visiting the Shiant Islands off the northwestern coast of Scotland.
One of them climbed a hill, and left his waterproof coat and lunch basket there by a marked rock.
When he returned, they had vanished.
Yet the island was deserted (apart from the rest of the party who were elsewhere); there were only seabirds, who could hardly lift a heavy lunch basket.
He was convinced that they had been stolen by the “Sith”—or fairies—and Lethbridge acknowledged later that he felt they were wrong to laugh at this belief.

Lethbridge himself had a supernatural experience on the island of Skellig Michael.
He was with the friend who had lost his lunch.
Lethbridge went off alone to examine the site of a Celtic monastery, then looked over the cliff and decided to climb down and look at the monastery’s rubbish dump.
Halfway there, he had an unpleasant sensation—what he would later call a “ghoul”—the feeling that someone wanted to push him down the cliff.
The feeling became so strong as he went on that he felt giddy.
He decided to go back to the cliff top.
Back at the site of the Celtic church, something suddenly flung him flat on his face.
There was no wind, no animal, no other person.
He later came to accept that what had flung him down was some form of poltergeist and, in
Ghost and Ghoul
, speculates that it may have been associated with a shipwreck of the previous year.

But then, Lethbridge also knew that the sites of churches are often chosen because of some “earth force,” some innate “holiness” in the ground itself, and even pointed out that such churches are often named after St.
Michael, because the saint became the Christian counterpart of the pagan god of light, Lugh (or Lucifer).
This was the way the early Christians tried to “decontaminate” a place from its pagan origins.
Unfortunately, he knew nothing about Guy Underwood’s discovery of ‘holy lines’ around sites like Stonehenge,
[2]
and knew nothing about ley lines, which were only just being rediscovered by John Michell and others during the last years of Lethbridge’s life; he might otherwise have taken the step—to which he comes so close in
Ghost and Ghoul
—of connecting some of these mysterious earth forces with the entity that stole his friend’s lunch basket and knocked him flat on his face on an island named after St.
Michael.

But Joe Cooper takes this step, in discussing the Cottingley fairies.
He discusses a book with the off-putting title
Secrets of the Gods
by E.
T.
Stringer, and published in 1974.
It is subtitled “An Outline of Tellurianism,” and the author—who is a climatologist who teaches at Birmingham University—defines this as a philosophy based on the notion of a Telluric force (earth force, Tellus being the Roman earth goddess).
This, he says, is the force made use of by dowsers and psychic investigators
—that is, Lethbridge’s “fields.” But he adds: “The Telluric force is not a physical force, as is magnetism or gravity.
It cannot be measured by any scientific instrument .
.
.”

From this point on, Stringer’s theory departs from that of Lethbridge or Underwood.
He believes that the Telluric force holds people together in a particular place—often country areas—and that people somehow constitute the cells of a larger organism (which he calls the Oikumeos).
Stringer’s earth is a living creature, and human beings live in its bloodstream of Telluric force as the tiny independent creatures called mitochondria live in our bodies and assist its vital maintenance.
Joe Cooper speculates that Cottingley is one of these places described by Stringer, where the Telluric force makes certain manifestations possible.
Stringer, Lethbridge, Underwood and “ley hunters” like John Michell seem to have arrived independently at the same basic theory of earth forces.
(Ley hunters point out that in many areas, ley lines are called “fairy paths.”)

One interesting point quickly emerges from the various accounts of “fairies” or similar entities: the people who see them are almost invariably known to be “psychic.” Elsie Wright saw ghosts as well as fairies.
The man whose sandwich was stolen by a goblin later became a healer.
The interviewer I spoke with in Edinburgh struck me as a typical Celt, and Celts seem to be more “psychic” than Saxons.
Yet they may be totally unaware that they are psychic until they happen to find themselves in a place—like Ardachie Lodge near Loch Ness—where the “Telluric force” enters into a combination with their natural mediumship.

Lethbridge was also psychic—all good dowsers are (since the faculties amount to the same thing); so the sense of foreboding he experienced as he climbed down the cliff on Skellig Michael was simply a sensitivity to the force associated with the place.
But if that force could knock him on his face, then presumably it was more than a tape-recording or “ghoul.”

In his autobiography,
A Foot in Both Worlds
, Dr.
Arthur Guirdham has also spoken of this sense of evil associated with certain places.
He felt it as an Oxford undergraduate, when he spent a vacation “cramming” at an inn in Beckley, on the edge of Otmoor.

Otmoor was strange and haunted and out of this world, a sunken plain with low hills around it .
.
.
There was always a silence of something beautiful and evil about it .
.
.
Even in summer, with the roses blooming, there was about it a memory of old evil.