Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (3 page)

For three years, O’Neil and Professor Mueller worked on their invention.
And on September 22, 1980, Mueller’s voice suddenly came out of the radio, and O’Neil recorded their conversation.
At last, a dead person was talking direct to a living person.
George Meek’s dream had finally come true.
This breakthrough was announced to the world in April 1982 in Washington.
A roomful of journalists listened to the tapes of Mueller and O’Neill, and were told that Meek was not going to patent Spiricom, but would allow anyone to build it.

In fact, others were already working on a radio for communicating with the dead, and developing their own version of Spiricom.
One amazing result was that incredible broadcast of January 15, 1983, when Radio Luxembourg transmitted a programme in which spirit voices talked live on the radio to members of a studio audience and answered questions.
The communication device had been built by an inventor named Otto Knig.
True, the result was not exactly brilliant radio entertainment—the spirits obviously felt rather awkward about this new experience, and made stilted comments like “We hear your voice,” and “Otto Knig makes wireless with the dead.” But it was all loud and clear, not fragmentary and half-inaudible, like Raudive’s voices.

Ever since that amazing day, scientists have been working on new ways of connecting the two worlds electronically.
A few days after George Meek’s wife died in 1990, he received an e-mail from her which, she told him, was being forwarded with the aid of a group of dead scientists who called themselves Timestream; it even contained a photograph of her in her new environment a landscape of mountains behind a lake.
She told him she missed him and was looking forward to seeing him again, but emphasised that there was no hurry.
Meek died nine years later, aged 89.

The next step, according to Timestream communicators, will be an attempt to create a television link between the two worlds.
There seems to be no reason why not, since the difference between a radio link and a television link is only one of complexity.
Meanwhile, other extraordinary developments seem to emphasise that the “invasion of the spirit people” is just getting into its stride.
The most interesting of these harks back to the “Cross Correspondences” of a century ago.

For half a century, Monty Keen—of whom we have already spoken—was one of the leading investigators for the Society for Psychical Research.
Perhaps his most important work concerned a small group who held seances in the cellar of a farmhouse at Scole, in Norfolk.
They were obtaining some of the most convincing phenomena in the history of psychical research, so convincing that the possibility of fraud was
virtually nil.

Most seances are held in the dark.
At Scole, “spirit lights” would wander round the room so everything could be seen.
When one of the investigators, Professor David Fontana, had an irritating cough and was about to take a sip of water, the light popped into his glass, then drifted out again.
When he drank the water, Fontana’s cough went away.
The light then went inside his chest, wandered around inside him so he could feel it, then emerged through his ribs.

Objects often fell from the air—they are known as apports.
One was a copy of the
Daily Mail
for April 1, 1944, with an account of the trial of a medium named Helen Duncan.
It was in pristine condition, as if just off the press, yet when it was scientifically tested, the paper and ink proved to be of the right age.
Rolls of new film, still sealed, were placed in a locked box, then taken out with photographs impressed on them.

Then, just as he had concluded his most convincing and impressive investigation, Monty died of a heart attack.
Those who knew him well were pretty sure he would soon be back.
And since he had often written about the “Cross Correspondences,” it also seemed likely that he would make contact through more than one medium.
They were right.
Within days of his death, his wife Veronica and his friends were being bombarded with messages, all clearly from Monty.
One night, Veronica was reading in bed at two o’clock in the morning when the phone rang.
A female Irish voice said: “You don’t know me.
I’m an Irish medium, and I’ve got your husband here.
He said it would be all right to ring you
because you were reading in bed.” She then delivered messages that could have been from no one but Monty.

One of his most impressive “reappearances” was at a seance with a “physical medium” named David Thompson, who is an airport baggage handler.
Physical mediums have so much energy that spirits can use it to materialise in the room.
While Thompson sat in a chair in a trance, with a gag in his mouth.
Monty Keen not only materialised in the room, so he could touch and shake hands with people he knew, but went on to make a ten-minute speech about what it was like to be dead, and to explain his aims now he was in another world.
Then he went across the room to one of his old friends, the psychical researcher Guy Playfair, and after asking him how he was, patted him on the shoulder.

I have listened to the tape made of that session.
The voice making the speech is undoubtedly that of Monty Keen.
According to Veronica Keen, Monty says he is part of a group of leading figures in psychical research, such as Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge, whose aim is to continue the work that began in the 1840s and to establish a bridgehead between the two worlds, so that communication will become as easy as picking up a telephone.
Curiously enough, another member of the group is Thomas Edison, who played a central part in the history of the telephone, but was pipped at the post by Bell.
Edison’s papers reveal that he also tried to build a device for direct communicating with the dead.
It is an interesting thought that he should now be working on a device for connecting two dimensions instead of two continents.

Colin Wilson

Cornwall

January 2009

one

Professor Lombroso Investigates

At the age of forty-seven Professor Cesare Lombroso was one of the most celebrated scientists in Italy.
His book
Criminal Man (L’Uomo Delinquente)
had made him an object of discussion throughout the world.
What made it so controversial was Lombroso’s theory that the criminal is a degenerate “throw-back” to our cave-man forebears—a kind of human ape.
According to this view, a man born with these tendencies can no more help committing crime than a born cripple can help limping.
It gave violent offense to the Catholic Church, which has always felt that “sin” is a matter of choice; but it also upset psychologists who liked to feel that man possesses at least an atom of free will.
Lombroso regarded free will as something of a myth.
In 1876, when
Criminal Man
was published, he looked upon himself as a thorough-going materialist.

Six years later, his skepticism received a severe setback.
He was asked to investigate the case of a girl who had developed peculiar powers.
In fact, it sounded too silly to be taken seriously.
According to her parents, she could see through her ear and smell through her chin.
When Lombroso went to see her, he expected to find some absurd deception.

She was a tall, thin girl of fourteen, and the trouble had begun when she started to menstruate.
She began sleep-walking, and developed hysterical blindness.
Yet she was still able to see through the tip of her nose, and through her left ear.
Lombroso tried binding her eyes with a bandage, then took a letter out of his pocket and held it a few inches away from her nose; she read it as if her eyes were uncovered.
To make sure she was not peeping under the bandages, Lombroso held another page near her left ear; again, she read it aloud without difficulty.
And even without the bandage, she would not have been able to read a letter held at the side of her head.

Next he tried holding a bottle of strong smelling salts under her nose; it did not make the slightest impression.
But when it was held under her chin, she winced and gasped.
He tried substances with only the slightest trace of odor—substances he could not smell if he held them two inches away from his own nose.
When they were under her chin, she could identify every one of them.

If he still had any doubts, they vanished during the next few weeks when her sense of smell suddenly transferred itself to the back of her foot.
If disagreeable smells were brought close to her heel, she writhed in agony; pleasant ones made her sigh with delight.

This was not all.
The girl also developed the power of prediction.
She was able to predict weeks ahead precisely when she would have fits, and exactly how they could be cured.
Lombroso, naturally, did not accept this as genuine prediction, since she might have been inducing the fits—consciously or otherwise—to make her predictions come true.
But she then began to predict things that would happen to other members of the family; and these came about just as she had foretold.

In medical journals, Lombroso found many similar cases.
One girl who developed hysterical symptoms at puberty could accurately distinguish colors with her hands.
An eleven-year-old girl who suffered a back wound was able to hear through her elbow.
Another pubescent girl could read a book with her stomach when her eyes were bandaged.
Another hysterical woman developed X-ray eyes, and said she could see worms in her intestines—she actually counted them and said there were thirty-three; in due course she excreted precisely this number of worms.
A young man suffering from hysteria could read people’s minds, and reproduce drawings and words written on a sheet of paper when his eyes were tightly bandaged.

Lombroso may have been a determined materialist; but he was willing to study the facts.
And the facts led him into stranger and stranger regions of speculation.
To begin with, he developed a simple and ingenious theory of the human faculties, pointing out that seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling all take place through the nerves, and that if one of these faculties becomes paralyzed there is no scientific reason why another should not take over.
When he attended a séance with the famous “medium” Eusapia Palladino, and saw a table floating up into the air, he simply extended his theory, and argued that there is no reason why “psychological force” should not change into “motor force.” But when he began to study other cases of prediction and “second sight,” he had to admit that it became increasingly difficult to keep the explanations within the bounds of materialistic science.
There was the case of a woman who refused to stay in a theater because she suddenly had a conviction that her father was dying; she got home and found a telegram to that effect.
A doctor who suffered from hysterical symptoms foresaw the great fire of 1894 at the Como Exposition, and persuaded his family to sell their shares in a fire insurance company which had to meet the claims; when the fire occurred, his family was glad they took his advice.
A woman whose daughter was playing near a railway line heard a voice telling her the child was in danger; she fetched her indoors half an hour before a train jumped the rails and ploughed through the spot where her daughter had been playing.

Slowly, and with painful reluctance, the skeptical scientist was converted to the view that the world was a far more complex place than his theories allowed.
His colleagues were outraged.
His biographer and translator, Hans Kurella, came to the conclusion that this was all a painful aberration due to the decay of his faculties—an argument difficult to sustain, since Lombroso was only forty-seven when he became interested in these matters, and he lived for more than a quarter of a century longer.
Kurella can only bring himself to mention “Lombroso’s Spiritualistic Researchers” in a short afterword to his biography, and his comments are scathing.
Talking about Eusapia Palladino, whose séances he had attended, he agreed that she was indeed a “miracle”—“a miracle of adroitness, false
bonhomie
, well-simulated candor, naivete, and artistic command of all the symptoms of hysterico-epilepsy.” Which may well be true, but still does not explain how she was able to make a table rise up into the air when Lombroso and other scientists were holding her hands and feet.

Lombroso struggled manfully to stay within the bounds of science; he devised all kinds of ingenious instruments for testing mediums during séances.
But, little by little, he found himself sucked into that ambiguous, twilight world of the “paranormal.” Having studied mediums in civilized society, he turned his attention to tribal witch-doctors and shamans, and found that they could produce the same phenomena.
But they always insisted that they did this with the help of the “spirit world”—the world of the dead.
And the more he looked into this, the more convincing it began to appear.
And so, finally, he turned his attention to the topic that every good scientist dismisses as an old wives’ tale: haunted houses.
Here again, personal experience soon convinced him of their reality.

His most celebrated case concerned a wine shop in the Via Bava in Turin.
In November 1900, he heard interesting rumors about how a destructive ghost was making life very difficult for the family of the proprietor, a Signor Fumero.
Bottles smashed, tables and chairs danced about, kitchen utensils flew across the room.
So Lombroso went along to the wine shop, and asked the proprietor if there was any truth in the stories.
Indeed there was, said Fumero, but the disturbances had now stopped.
Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had now gone away.
“You interest me extremely,” replied Lombroso.
“Allow me to introduce myself.” And he presented his card.
Fumero looked deeply embarrassed, and admitted that the story about Lombroso was an invention, intended to discourage the curious.
For it seemed that the Italian police had been called in, and that they had witnessed the strange disturbances and told Signor Fumero that, unless this stopped at once, he would find himself in serious trouble.
So Fumero had invented this story of how the famous Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had taken his departure.

In fact, the proprietor admitted, the ghost was as active as ever; and if the professor would care to see with his own eyes, he only had to step down to the cellar.

Down below the house was a deep wine cellar, approached by a flight of stairs and a long passageway.
The proprietor led the way.
The cellar was in complete darkness; but as they entered there was a noise of smashing glass, and some bottles struck Lombroso’s foot.
A lighted candle revealed rows of shelves with bottles of wine.
And as Lombroso stood there, three empty bottles began to spin across the floor, and shattered against the leg of a table that stood in the middle of the cellar.
On the floor, below the shelves, were the remains of broken bottles and wine.
Lombroso took the candle over to the shelves, and examined them closely to see if there could be invisible wires to cause the movement.
There were none; but as he looked, half a dozen bottles gently rose from the shelves, as if someone had lifted them, and exploded on the floor.
Finally, as they left the cellar and closed the door behind them, they heard the smashing of another bottle.

The cellar was not the only place in the house where these things occurred.
Chairs and plates flew around the kitchen.
In the servants’ room, a brass grinding machine flew across the room so violently that it was flattened out of shape; Lombroso examined it with amazement.
The force to flatten it must have been considerable; if it had struck someone’s head, it would surely have killed him.
The odd thing was that the ghost seemed to do no one any harm.
On one occasion, as the proprietor was bending down in the cellar, a large bottle of wine had burst beside his head; if it had struck him it would have done him a severe injury.
Moreover, the “entity” seemed to have the power to make bottles “explode” without dropping them.
They would hear a distinct cracking sound; then a bottle would fly into splinters.

Now Lombroso knew enough about hauntings to know that this was not an ordinary ghost.
The ordinary ghost stays around in a house for many years, perhaps for centuries, and manifests itself to many people.
But this bottle-smashing ghost was of the kind that the Germans call a
poltergeist
—or noisy spirit.
Such “hauntings” usually last only a short period—seldom more than six months—and they often seem to be associated with a “medium”—that is, with some particular person who “causes” them, in exactly the same way that Eusapia Palladino caused a table to rise into the air.

In this case, Lombroso suspected the wife of Signor Fumero, a skinny little woman of fifty, who seemed to him to be distinctly neurotic.
She admitted that ever since infancy she had been subject to neuralgia, nervous tremors and hallucinations; she had also had an operation to remove her ovaries.
Ever since the case of the girl who could see with her ear, Lombroso had noticed that these people with peculiar “powers” seemed to be nervously unstable.
He therefore advised Signor Fumero to try sending his wife for a holiday.
She went back to her native town for three days, and during that period, the wine shop was blessedly quiet—although Signora Fumero suffered from hallucinations while she was away, believing she could see people who were invisible to everyone else.

It looked as if Lombroso had stumbled on the correct solution.
But it was not so simple.
On Signora Fumero’s return, all the disturbances began again; so, to make doubly sure, Lombroso again suggested that she should go home for a few days.
The poor woman was understandably irritated at being banished from her home on account of the spirits; and before she left, she cursed them vigorously.
That apparently annoyed them, for this time the disturbances went on while she was away.
On the day she left, a pair of her shoes came floating out of her bedroom and down the stairs, and landed at the feet of some customers who were drinking in the bar.
The following day the shoes vanished completely, to reappear under the bed a week later.
Worse still, plates and bottles in the kitchen exploded or fell on the floor.
But Signor Fumero noticed an interesting fact.
It was only the plates and bottles
that had been touched by his wife
that smashed.
If another woman set the table—preferably in another place—nothing happened.
It was almost as if the objects she had touched had picked up some form of
energy
from her .
.
.