Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (47 page)

To anyone who reads straight through Fodor’s
On the Trail of the Poltergeist
, it seems obvious that Guy Playfair’s “spirit entity” theory fits better than most.
Both the Fieldings had been ill for some time before the first outbreak.
So Mrs.
Fielding may have been in a suitably “low” condition to enable the entity to begin using her energy.
From then on, it used her continually, and accordingly she began to suffer from nervous exhaustion.
Yet her attitude toward all this must have been ambiguous, for it brought new interest into her life; this could have enabled the entity—or entities—to manipulate her to cheat.
And why should they?
Because, for some reason, poltergeists seem to delight in producing bewilderment and confusion.

The one point that emerges above all others is that Mrs.
Fielding was not just the focus of the poltergeist disturbances; she was a
medium,
and soon began to develop her ability, with apports, travelling clairvoyance, projection of the “double,” and so on.
In short, Mrs.
Fielding was a potential Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Palladino.
And this, it seems probable, is true for all the people who became “focuses” for poltergeist phenomena.
With her illnesses, her early marriage, even the loss of her teeth, Mrs.
Fielding calls to mind another medium, the “Seeress of Prevorst,” whose history forms the starting point of this chapter.
Nandor Fodor, like Justinus Kerner, was a medical man.
Yet it cannot be said that his study of Mrs.
Fielding is as penetrating or as suggestive as Kerner’s study of Friederike Hauffe.
To read
On the Trail of the Poltergeist
after
The Seeress of Prevorst
is a depressing experience.
It is to realize that a century of psychical research has brought very few advances—that, on the contrary, an unimaginative and over-cautious approach to the phenomena has only made them less comprehensible than ever.

eight

Speculations and Conclusions

The more we attempt to study the poltergeist, the clearer it becomes that it has no intention of cooperating.

This was borne in upon me in October 1975, when I received a letter from a man who claimed that he knew the identity of the criminal known as the Black Panther.
Earlier that year the Panther had kidnapped an heiress named Lesley Whittle, and in March her body had been found down an underground tunnel in Bathpool Park, near Kidsgrove.
The Panther was also wanted for a number of burglaries in post offices, during which he had killed three sub-postmasters.
So, in October 1975, he was the most wanted criminal in England.
Understandably, I was intrigued by the letter claiming to know his identity.

It had come from a village not far from St.
Ives, in Cornwall, and on October 16, 1975, I drove down to see the writer, taking with me a guest who happened to be staying with us.
En route, we called in to see Dora Russell, widow of Bertrand Russell, with the result that we arrived at the village in the late afternoon.

The writer of the letter was the village postman, and he was young, bearded, and had an appearance of sturdy common sense.
It was his wife, he explained, who was psychic, and who had discovered the Panther’s identity.
His wife was a slim, pale girl who looked distinctly “delicate.” Their cottage was freezing—he explained that it had to be kept at that temperature to prevent his wife from becoming feverish.

During the next hour, the two of them told us an incredible story.
But they began by asking us if we could stay until eight o’clock.
We asked why.
“Because that’s when the knockings begin.” Every evening, they said, at eight o’clock some entity beat a regular tattoo on their bedroom wall.
It sometimes made such a racket that it sounded like the drums of the Scots Guards.
This had now been going on for several months.
They were disappointed when we said that we had to be back in St.
Austell by eight o’clock to take some friends out to dinner.

The story had begun a few months earlier, when his wife had had a series of vivid dreams and trance communications.
She was Irish, and apparently this kind of thing had been happening all her adult life.
Then, one evening, the rapping noises had started on their bedroom wall.
It was clearly a “spirit,” so they tried to communicate with it by the usual code, one rap for yes, two for no.
They learned it was a girl, that she was recently dead, and that she had been murdered.
Lesley Whittle’s body had only recently been found in Bathpool Park, and when asked: “Are you Lesley Whittle?” the entity set a tremendous triumphant tattoo, as if to say “You’ve got it.”

Odd coincidences began to occur, obviously engineered by the “spirit.” The wife had a number of vivid dreams or visions of a certain set of park gates with an inscription on them.
Her husband happened to open a
Reader’s Digest Guide to Britain
, and saw gates that sounded like the description; his wife instantly recognized them.
The entity told them by means of raps that the Black Panther had buried his gun under a stone in this park, and the wife saw the spot—in a vision—so clearly that she was able to make a sketch map of the whereabouts of the stone.
Her husband finally rang the police who were hunting the Panther, and, after some difficulty, persuaded them to go to the park and look underneath the stone.
Astonishingly, the stone was there, and the description of the immediate vicinity proved to be accurate; but a metal detector found nothing under the stone .
.
.

They had tried ringing the post office in the village near the park, and had concluded that the people who ran it knew the identity of the Panther, and were shielding him.
They had made the mistake of giving their own telephone number.
And now, they were absolutely convinced, the Panther was “on to them.” A strange car had been parked in the lay-by opposite their house for night after night in August, with a gypsy-like man and woman in it, and someone had prowled around their house trying to break in .
.
.
The car had followed them around, but on one occasion, when they pulled into a beach car park, and the other car turned in a few minutes later, a police car happened to enter the car park, whereupon the other car drove off “like a bat out of hell.”

Their story was extremely long, extremely circumstantial.
The “spirit of Lesley Whittle” had told them that the Panther had escaped through the underground tunnel in a boat, and gone straight to the park, where he hid his gun under the stone.
He lived in a caravan in the garden of a cottage.
When I asked the name of the Panther, they gave it without hesitation: it was W.
E.
Jones, and his caravan was in the village of Baynhall, Worcestershire.

As my guest and I drove away, at about seven o’clock (frozen to the bone), we agreed that it had been an impressive story, and that the husband seemed completely balanced and down to earth, even if the wife seemed a little “fey.” Accordingly, the next morning, I sat down and dictated a long letter to the Commissioner of Police, Sir Robert Mark, with whom I was acquainted.
I told him I agreed it all sounded preposterous, but that the couple struck me as genuine, and it was surely worth checking up on the stone in the park—digging, instead of using a metal detector—and on Mr.
W.
E.
Jones—if he existed—of Baynhall, Worcestershire.
He wrote back, promising to pass it all on to the officer in charge of the case.
And, a couple of weeks later, he wrote again to say that both the stone, and Mr.
Jones of Baynhall, had proved negative.

On December 11, 1975, two policemen at Mansfield Woodhouse saw a man carrying a hold-all, and stopped their police car to ask a few routine questions; he pointed a shotgun at them, climbed into the car and made them drive on.
One of the policemen tackled him; two men in a fish and chip queue joined in, and the man was handcuffed to the railings.
Two “Panther” hoods in his bag revealed that he was the man the police had been looking for.
And when the news of his arrest was broadcast on the television news, I crossed my fingers that this name would turn out to be Jones.
It was not.
It was Donald Nielsen, and he lived in Bradford, not Baynhall.
In due course, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Lesley Whittle and three postmasters.

Oddly enough, the psychic and her husband refused to accept that their poltergeist had been mistaken, and wrote to me asking if I could find out whether Donald Nielsen had paid a visit to Cornwall during August 1975.
I checked with the police officer in charge of the case, and was told that he was pretty certain Nielsen had not been that far south.
The couple declined to believe it.
They had found the “communications” circumstantial and convincing.
My own conclusion was that the “spirit” had simply been a circumstantial and convincing liar.

While I was still collecting material on poltergeists, I was asked if I would write the text of an illustrated book about witchcraft; and since it was a subject on which I have written a great deal—and which would therefore require a minimum of research—I agreed.
It proved to be an excellent preparation for writing a book about poltergeists.
It is possible to believe you know a subject fairly thoroughly, and then to discover, as you write about it, that you have overlooked its very essence.
And as I plunged into the history of witchcraft, it struck me that not only had I failed to understand it, but that the twentieth-century mind had lost the key to the whole phenomenon.
This applies as much to modern witches and “occultists” as to scientists and skeptics.
When we look into a work like Francis Barrett’s
The Magus
(1801), with its pictures of the heads of demons, we feel a kind of irritation that anyone could have been so stupid as to take them seriously.
We can accept the idea of the strange powers of the unconscious mind, even of psychokinesis; but the assumptions that have formed the basis of witchcraft for the past three or four thousand years strike us as absurd superstitions.
Margaret Murray convinced a whole generation that witchcraft was an ancient pagan religion called
wicca,
which was basically a form of nature worship, the cult of the Moon Goddess and the Earth Mother, and that the witches who were burned at the stake were simply carrying on the old practices.
As far as she went, she was probably correct.
But Margaret Murray was a modern rationalist, for whom “magic” was an absurdity.
And
all
witchcraft has been based on the idea of magic: that the witch or magician can make use of spirit entities to carry out her will.
(These are known as “familiars.”)

The earliest literary record of a witch is the story of the witch of Endor in the Bible, and it makes clear that the chief business of a witch in those days (about 1000 B.C.) was
raising the dead
.
And later tales of witches—in Horace, Apuleius and Lucan—make it clear that this was still true a thousand years later on.
After the beginning of the Christian era (whose own major contribution was the idea of the Devil), the witch also became the invoker of demons.
The most famous picture of John Dee, the Elizabethan magician, shows him in a graveyard with the spirit of a dead man he has just raised.
“Necromancy”—the raising of the dead—was a synonym for magic.
We may infer, therefore, that although the ancients knew nothing about Spiritualism, they had stumbled upon the same discovery as the Fox sisters and Daniel Dunglas Home: that it is, apparently, possible to communicate with the “dead,” as well as with other invisible entities.
In his notorious
History of Witchcraft
, the Reverend Montague Summers denounces modern Spiritualism as a revival of witchcraft.
He may simply have meant to be uncomplimentary about Spiritualism; but, as it happens, he was historically correct.
The kind of Spiritualism initiated by the Fox sisters was the nearest approach to what Lucan’s Erichtho, or Dame Alice Kyteler, would have understood by witchcraft.
It begins and ends with the idea that we are surrounded by invisible spirits, including those of the dead, and that these can be used for magical purposes.
Accordingly, magicians like Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee took care to protect themselves in magic circles—or pentagrams—when they conjured “demons,” and to perform the rituals with pedantic exactitude (which, according to Guy Playfair, is essential, the spirits being sticklers for detail).

Some cases, like that of Isobel Gowdie and the Auldearne witches, are incomprehensible unless we recognize that witchcraft is about “spirits”—the kind of spirits we have been discussing in this book.
In 1662, Isobel Gowdie, an attractive, red-headed farmer’s wife, shocked the elders of the local kirk (in Morayshire, Scotland) when she announced that she had been a practicing witch for the past fifteen years, had attended Sabbats, and had sexual intercourse with the Devil (whose semen was “as cold as spring water”).
The notion that she was insane or simply hysterical is contradicted by the fact that several of the witches she named made full confession, without torture, and corroborated her statements in detail.
Isobel claims that she encountered the Devil, a man in grey, when travelling between two farms, and that she agreed to meet him in the church at Auldearne, where he made her renounce Jesus.
He came to her in bed a few days later and copulated with her; she found his penis thick and long and his semen “abundant and as cold as ice.” Elsewhere in this book we have encountered women who had a similar experience—for example, Mrs.
Fielding, and Playfair’s Marcia.
And from the drop in temperature that usually occurs during spirit manifestations, we might also expect his semen to be cold.
Isobel Gowdie also mentions various acts of black magic, by which people are killed, and (significantly) a visit to fairyland, where she encountered the Queen of the Faery.

Again, the case of the Salem witches suddenly becomes more comprehensible when we consider it in this light.
In 1692, the daughter and niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris began having convulsions like the possessed nuns of Loudun—and a doctor gave his opinion that they were bewitched.
Parris had come from Barbados, and had brought with him a number of black servants, including a woman called Tituba, who knew a great deal about magic or voodoo.
The girls had apparently been trying out some of these magical ceremonies at a remote spot in the countryside.
When a magistrate questioned the girls about their convulsions, they screamed and claimed that they were being bitten and pinched.
At the trial Tituba fully admitted practicing witchcraft and having dealings with the Devil.
The affair was blown up by local hysteria until over a hundred people were accused, and twenty-two executed (not including Tituba).
Montague Summers argues convincingly that there
was
a witches’ “coven” in the area (although its members had nothing to do with “bewitching” the children).
But if Tituba was genuinely skilled in voodoo, and the children tried practicing it, then the result may well have been poltergeist manifestations, complete with scratches and bites, and “demoniacal possession” producing convulsions.
Anne Putnam, the oldest of the girls, was of the right age—twelve—and was physically mature.