Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (42 page)

Yet in spite of his craving for publicity and his desire to get into Who’s Who, Price did much important and valuable work during these years.
In a sense, his motivation is irrelevant; he was a genuine enthusiast for psychical research.
The majority of his investigations were not spectacular: just the plodding, day-to-day work of a patient researcher, sitting with mediums, psychometrists, healers, miracle workers.
And, if anything, Price was inclined to be over-critical.
In Norway, he visited the home of Judge Ludwig Dahl, and had a sitting with the judge’s daughter lngeborg, whose “controls” were her two dead brothers.
While not regarding her as a downright fake, Price was unimpressed.
Yet one of the dead brothers prophesied that their father would die on August 8, 1934, seven years later, and this was precisely the day on which he did die from a stroke during a swim.

A case which certainly deserves mention in any account of Price’s career is the curious affair of the talking mongoose of Cashen’s Gap.
It was far from being one of Price’s successes; yet it remains an intriguing mystery.

In 1932, Price heard about a farmer called Irving, at Cashen’s Gap on the Isle of Man, who had made friends with a mongoose that could speak several languages.
It could also read minds and sing hymns.
Price could not find time to go to the Isle of Man, but a friend of his, a Captain M.
H.
Macdonald, offered to go.

It seemed that the Irving family—who (significantly) had a thirteen-year-old daughter named Voirrey—had been disturbed by noises from behind the panels of the house: barking, spitting and blowing noises.
The farmer lay in wait with a gun, without success, and tried putting down poison; the creature eluded him.
So the farmer tried communicating with it, making various animal noises; to his astonishment, it seemed to be able to imitate them.
Voirrey tried nursery rhymes, and it began to repeat these.
Finally, it showed itself—a small, bushy-tailed creature that claimed to be a mongoose.
They called it Gef.
And Gef told them he was from India.
Mr.
Irving seldom saw Gef, except in glimpses, as he ran along a beam, but Voirrey and Mrs.
Irving often saw him face to face.

Macdonald arrived at the farm on February 26, 1932, and saw nothing; when he left to go to his hotel a shrill voice screamed: “Go away!
Who is that man?” The farmer said this was Gef.
The next day, as Macdonald was having tea with the Irvings, a large needle bounced off the teapot; and Irving remarked that Gef was always throwing things.
Later, he heard the shrill voice upstairs talking with Voirrey and Mrs.
Irving; when he called to ask if the mongoose would come down, the voice screamed: “No, I don’t like you.” He tried sneaking upstairs, but the mongoose heard a stair creak, and shrieked: “He’s coming!” And from then on, Macdonald saw and heard no more of Gef.

According to Irving, who kept a diary, Gef talked in a language he claimed to be Russian, sang in Spanish and recited a poem in Welsh.
He killed rabbits for them—by strangling them—and left them outside.
He claimed to have made visits to the nearest town, and told the Irvings what various people had been doing; Irving checked and found this was correct.
He was able to tell Irving what was happening ten miles away without leaving the farm.
And when he was asked if he was a spirit, Gef replied: “I am an earth-bound spirit.”

In March 1935, Gef told Irving that he had plucked some hairs from his tail and left them on the mantelpiece; these were forwarded to Price, who had them examined.
They proved to be dog hairs—probably from the collie dog on the farm.

When Harry Price was mentioned, Gef said he didn’t like him because he “had his doubting cap on.” And when Price finally visited Cashen’s Gap, the visit was a waste of time.
Gef only came back to the farm after Price had left.
And this, virtually, was the end of the story—although Macdonald paid a second visit to the farm and again heard the mongoose talking in its shrill voice.

It is possible, of course, that the Irvings were hoaxers.
But they struck the investigators as honest.
And it is difficult to see why, if they wanted attention, they should invent anything as bizarre as a talking mongoose.
Why should Irving have invited Price to stay if he was simply a hoaxer?

What seems rather more probable is that Gef was a poltergeist—an “earth-bound spirit,” as he himself claimed.
Voirrey was a lonely girl who had just reached puberty.
The disturbances started like most poltergeist disturbances, with noises in the woodwork, scratchings and other sounds.
Later small objects flew through the air, and Gef was assumed to have “thrown” them.
But he also seemed to be able to cause “action at a distance”; when a saucepan of water turned over on the stove and soaked Irving’s shoes, he assumed this was Gef.
The clairvoyance also sounds like a poltergeist, and the knowledge of other people’s affairs.
And it seems odd that the rabbits were strangled—not a mongoose’s normal method of killing.
In fact, the Gef case seems to belong on the borderland between the straightforward poltergeist and the elemental or hobgoblin.
(In the mid-nineteenth century, as Robert Dale Owen points out, the word
poltergeist
was usually translated “hobgoblin.”)

Trevor Hall is of the opinion that the poltergeist case which Price claimed to be his first experience of “ghost hunting” was pure invention, and he could be right—Price says that it took place when he was fifteen, at a village which he calls Parton Magna; but since the rest of the details concern his wealthy relatives and his return to a public school, we are probably safe in assuming it never took place.
But with Price, one can never be sure.
In
Confessions of a Ghost Hunter
(1936), he has a chapter called “The Strange Exploits of a London Poltergeist,” in which he states that he is forced to disguise the names and the location because it occurred so recently.
But the case which he goes on to describe is thoroughly well authenticated, and is, in fact, one of the most remarkable of this century.

It actually took place in Number 8 Eland Road, Battersea, and began on November, 29, 1927, when lumps of coal, chunks of washing soda, and copper coins began to rain down on the conservatory roof.
The house was occupied by an eighty-six-year-old invalid, Henry Robinson, his son Frederick (twenty-seven), his three daughters, and a grandson of fourteen, Peter.
When some of the falling objects smashed the glass, they sent for the police.
As the constable stood in the back garden, a lump of coal knocked off his helmet.
He rushed to the garden wall and pulled himself up—but there was no one around.

The Robinsons’ washerwoman was terrified when she went into the wash-house and found the place full of smoke, and a pile of red hot cinders on the floor; she gave notice.

Then the poltergeist began to get into its stride—and it was an exceptionally destructive spirit.
Ornaments smashed against walls, articles of furniture overturned, windows were broken.
When they moved the old man out of his bedroom, a huge chest of drawers toppled over; a few minutes later the hall stand began to move, and broke in two when Frederick tried to hold it.

In January, an out-of-work journalist named Jane Cunningham was passing the house when she heard an almighty crash.
A young man in shirtsleeves ran out.
Jane grabbed her notebook and went in to investigate.
This time, the poltergeist had smashed the whole conservatory just as if it had placed a bomb in it—all over the garden there were glass, lumps of coal and washing soda—and pennies.
Her report on the occurrence led to widespread press interest in the case.

Price went to see the house, and the poltergeist threw a gas-lighter past him; otherwise, nothing much happened.
Soon afterwards, Frederick had a mental breakdown and had to be sent to a hospital.
Chairs marched down the hallway in single file.
When Mrs.
Perkins—the mother of the boy Peter—tried to lay the table, chairs kept scattering all the crockery.

Price assumed that Peter was the “focus” and suggested he should be sent away; he went to stay with relatives in the country.
But the poltergeist remained.
Objects continued to be thrown around.
The old man had to be removed to a hospital, and one of the daughters fell ill.
The police could only advise the family to vacate the house for the time being, which they did, staying with friends.

A medium held a séance in the house, and began to shiver.
But she was unsuccessful in identifying the “spirit.” Price paid another visit, with a newspaperman, and more objects were thrown—although not when anyone was watching.
Finally, Frederick Robinson came home from the mental home where he had been confined, and quickly moved the whole family elsewhere.
This was virtually the end of the story.

Yet there was a postscript.
Price had heard that small slips of paper with writing on them had fluttered from the air.
Frederick, sick of the whole business, declined to comment.
But many years later, in 1941, he broke silence in the Spiritualist newspaper
Two Worlds
, stating that slips of paper
had
fallen from the air, and that some of them contained writing made by tiny pinholes.
(The Seeress of Prevorst also produced sheets of paper with geometrical drawings made by the same method.) One of these messages read: “I am having a bad time here.
I cannot rest.
I was born during the reign of William the Conqueror.” It was signed “Tom Blood.” Other messages were signed “Jessie Blood.”

The Battersea poltergeist seems to be in every way typical of the species.
Whether or not it was genuinely an earthbound spirit from the days of William the Conqueror must remain in doubt; poltergeists are not necessarily truthful.
(But, as the Rochenberg-Rocha case shows, the dead have no sense of passing time.) The chief mystery of the case is where it obtained the energy to continue the “haunting” after the boy Peter left—for it seems reasonable to assume he was the “focus.” The answer may be provided by Price’s observation that at the back of the house there was a mental home.
Price actually suggested that some ex-servicemen patients in this home might have thrown lumps of coal (but this is probably an example of his desire to be regarded as a hard-headed skeptic).
The mentally disturbed are often the “focuses” of poltergeist activity, so it seems possible that the “spirit” found a convenient reservoir of surplus energy just over the garden wall.

The case with which Price’s name has become most widely associated is, of course, that of Borley Rectory.
And in spite of the “debunking” that has taken place since Price’s death in 1948, it remains one of the most interesting hauntings of the twentieth century.
After Price’s death, a whole volume of the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
was devoted to “The Haunting of Borley Rectory, A Critical Survey of the Evidence,” by Dingwall, Trevor Hall and Kate Goldney.
They allege that Price probably produced some of the “poltergeist” phenomena himself by tossing pebbles—which, from our knowledge of Price, must be admitted as possible.
Their overall conclusion is that there are so many doubts that it would probably be simplest to regard the haunting of Borley as a fairy story.
But this is to ignore the fact that stories of hauntings were common long before Price came on the scene, and have continued since he left it.
Anyone who feels that the SPR survey proves that Price was a liar should read the long account of Borley in Peter Underwood’s
Gazetteer of British Ghosts
, with Underwood’s own first-hand reports from interviews with witnesses.

Borley Rectory was built in 1863 on the site of Borley Manor House, which in turn seems to have been built on the site of a Benedictine abbey.
It was built by the Reverend H.
D.
E.
Bull.
It is difficult to pin down the earliest known “sightings,” but it is clear that during Henry Bull’s tenancy, a number of people saw the apparition of a nun.
Henry Bull himself knew of the legend that a nun and a Benedictine monk had tried to elope, been caught, and had both been killed, the nun being bricked up alive.
Bull’s daughter Ethel confirmed in a letter to Trevor Hall in 1953 that she had awakened to find a strange man standing beside her bed, and had felt someone sitting down on the bed on several occasions; she also told Peter Underwood how, on July 28, 1900, she and her two sisters all saw a nun-like figure gliding along “Nun’s Walk,” apparently telling her beads.
The other sister, Elsie, saw the nun, who looked quite solid, and went to ask her what she wanted; the nun vanished.