Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (49 page)

Oddly enough, Mike was not unduly disturbed about all this; neither was his wife, Shirley.
She had been there only six weeks, and had seen nothing.
She told me she thought she was “ESP-thick.” Mike now had no doubt that the place was “haunted,” but it did not bother him unduly.
He said, “I love this place, and I intend to stay.” After years of moving from pub to pub, he had found one he liked.
A poltergeist was a nuisance, but it did no real harm—except scaring the staff.
It had swept a whole row of beer bottles off the upstairs bar one day, smashing them all.
One warm evening, it had made the downstairs bar so cold that two huge fan heaters had no effect, and Mike was forced to close it down.
When Maurice Grosse arrived one day with a television crew, it had made a smell so disgusting, accompanied by the usual freezing cold, that they all felt sick.
One day, with customers in the bar, flames suddenly crept up the wall—with an oddly bright light—and across the ceiling; then they extinguished themselves.
The likeliest explanation seemed some odd electrical fault; but neither the fire-prevention officer nor the electricity board could find anything wrong.
Stella, the catering supervisor—who had been there longest—had watched a bottle of wine sail across the room, to shatter itself against a wall.

Maurice Grosse came while Bob Cracknell and I were eating lunch in the downstairs bar, and we talked about the case.
He agreed that the most puzzling thing about it was the lack of a “focus.” The disturbances had been going on for years.
They had not worked themselves up to a climax, as in most cases.
And there seemed to be no single person who might provide the entity—if that was what it was—with energy.

As we were speaking, someone shouted: “It’s happening again.” We all rushed down to the ladies’ lavatory.
It felt icy cold, and the floor was covered in water, which had gushed out of the lavatory pan.

When I left the place at midafternoon, I had reached only one conclusion: This was obviously a thoroughly non-typical case.
A female member of the staff was reported to have seen a ghost—a woman—in an annex of the downstairs bar, but I was unable to speak to her.
A girl had committed suicide by throwing herself from the Nestlé building opposite the pub, landing on the roof, and Mike seemed to think that this could have been the cause of the “haunting.” One of the managers had fallen downstairs late at night, and had been found dead in the morning.
But no one seemed certain exactly when this had occurred.

I kept in touch with Maurice Grosse, who said he would let me know if there were any interesting developments.
A few weeks later, Bob Cracknell rang me, to tell me that Shirley had walked out.
She had been alone in the downstairs bar late at night, and had apparently seen something.
She had refused to say what it was—had simply walked out and refused to go back.
(I have her voice on tape saying how much she liked the pub, and that she had no intention of going away.) Mike himself, said Bob, also looked as if he was beginning to feel the strain; but he still said he had no intention of leaving.

A few weeks later, Bob rang me again.
Mike had quite suddenly decided he could take no more, and he too had walked out.
He had found himself some kind of job in Africa, and intended to go in mid-January.
Meanwhile, he badly needed a rest; could he come down and stay with us in Cornwall?
I said he would be welcome and, in early January, Bob drove down with Mike, and left him with us.
We could both see that Mike was under severe strain; he seemed exhausted and distracted.
He admitted that he had been drinking very heavily, and said that this was because he had begun to feel permanently exhausted.
Day after day, as he opened the pub and went down to the cellar, he encountered the same wall of cold at the foot of the stairs.
Without Shirley, he had begun to feel the strain.
One day, he suddenly felt that if he stayed there any longer, it would drive him into a nervous breakdown.
He said that, late one night, he went down to the cellar, and said aloud: “All right, you’ve beaten me, I’m going.” Instantly, the place became freezing cold .
.
.

Mike spent only a week with us, then decided to commit himself voluntarily to the local mental home at Bodmin.
A few days in St.
Lawrence’s Hospital worked wonders; among people who were severely ill, his natural vitality and dominance reasserted themselves.
He discharged himself in less than a week, spent a few more days with us—now drinking moderately again—and finally left for Africa.
I have a cassette on which he talks for two hours about his experiences in the King’s Cellars, and there is a great deal that I have left out of this account.
As a poltergeist, the Croydon spirit was not particularly inventive; only incredibly persistent.

Bob Cracknell rang me a few weeks later to say that he had interviewed the latest manager, who told him that he did not believe in ghosts.
About a month later, he phoned again to say the manager had just left.

My only other contact in the Croydon area was Stephen Jenkins, the author of
The Undiscovered Country
; I asked him if he would try and find out anything he could about the pub.
His reply begins: “My researches into the supposed manifestations in the King’s Cellars, Park Street, Croydon, have come into the expected ‘no thoroughfare,’ as I rather foresaw .
.
.”He goes on:

Two things are clear, however, which suggest strongly that we are dealing with an area in which unusual phenomena might be expected, in view of what your inquiries (and mine) elsewhere in this island have shown.

First, an enormously long alignment passes quite close to the north-west end of the cellars.
The alignment starts at the church in the moated site of Jericho Priory in Essex and goes to the centre of an earthwork at Valdoe.
This is northeast of Chichester, and inside the great system of concentric circular alignments that center on the old Roman forum.
This great Essex/West Sussex line passes through some important-seeming nodal points, some of which are (supposedly) the sites of curious manifestation .
.
.

He goes on to say that a map of Croydon for 1847 shows a house in its own park close to the site of the present King’s Cellars.
He concludes:

All that I can offer is the observation that long experience has led me to
expect
odd occurrences to be situated on or very near alignments, especially at the nodes.
Further, houses or the sites of buildings on or adjacent to leys are more likely to be the haunts of phenomena.
I must not omit to note that the vanished house on the plan of 1874 touches—or is on—the long Jericho Priory to Valdoe earthwork alignment .
.
.

In the Croydon case, then, the “human focus” theory seems to be unstable.
A straightforward haunting remains a possibility, and here we have at least two “suspects”—the landlord who died at the foot of the stairs, and the girl who committed suicide from the Nestlé building.
Before the King’s Cellars became a pub, it was a fire station, and this may also have been associated with some tragedy.
Yet the disturbances are clearly of the poltergeist type, if we ignore the dubious sighting of a female ghost in the annex.
The likeliest theory, then, is that we are here dealing with some mischievous entity of the elemental type, which draws some of its energy from human beings, and some from the site itself.

This, of course, begs the question of what
is
an “elemental”?
In his book
Operation Trojan Horse
, which deals with the mystery of UFOs, John Keel has a chapter which discusses the problem.

Throughout history occultists have called these [mysterious visitors] elementals.
There are several kinds of elementals in psychic lore.
One type is supposedly conjured up by secret magical rites and can assume any form ranging from that of a beautiful woman to hideous, indescribable monsters.
Once a witch or a warlock has whipped up such a critter, it will mindlessly repeat the same actions century after century in the same place until another occultist comes along and performs the rite necessary to dissolve it.

Keel points out that these “thought forms” can be encountered in traditional magic from Tibet to Ireland.
In Tibet they are called
tulpas,
and Alexandra David-Neel’s book on Tibet contains a great deal of information about them.
She claims to have created an imaginative “projection” of a monk that looked so solid that a herdsman took him for a real lama.
This thought form eventually began to get beyond her control and become hostile, and she claims that it took six months of hard work to “dematerialize” him.
Otherwise he might have continued to haunt her, or, more likely, have remained behind in the area where he was created, and been seen by people as a ghost.
George Owen’s Toronto team seem to have created a kind of
tulpa
in Philip, the manufactured ghost.
In
Psychic Self Defence
, the occultist Dion Fortune has a story of how she involuntarily created an “elemental” when she was thinking negative thoughts about someone who had done her an injury.
In a semi-dozing state, she thought of Fenris, the Nordic wolf-god—probably (although she does not say so) fantasizing on how satisfactory it would be to set it on her enemy.

Immediately I felt a curious drawing-out sensation from my solar plexus, and there materialized beside me on the bed a large wolf .
.
.
I knew nothing of the art of making elementals at that time, but had accidentally stumbled upon the right method—the brooding highly charged with emotion, the invocation of the appropriate natural force, and the condition between sleeping and waking in which the etheric double readily extrudes.

She ordered the creature out of the room and it went.
But when people in the house began to dream of wolves and imagine yellow eyes shining out of the darkness, she decided to “re-absorb” it, and succeeded in summoning it and then turning it into a “shapeless grey mist.”

So, according to this fragment of magical lore, an elemental is not a spirit entity but a “thought form” which has somehow acquired a kind of life of its own.
This view certainly offers a better explanation of fairies and similar creatures than Conan Doyle’s suggestion that they are a separate line of evolution.
It suggests that “fairies” exist where people believe in them, and that you would expect to find a “ju-ju spirit” in Africa where generations have directed their thoughts at a particular tree as the home of an ancestral spirit, and “sidhe” in Ireland.

This theory goes a long way toward explaining many traditional hauntings; for example, the old man of Ash Manor could conceivably have been a “thought form,” projected by some previous owner—perhaps accidentally, like Dion Fortune’s wolf—and revitalized by the atmosphere of hostility and neurosis in the family of the latest occupants.
But why do so many such “ghosts” seem capable of poltergeist activity?
The Cornish historian Harold Phelps has described his own encounter with a “ghost” in his old family home in a Berkshire village; the house had been built in the time of Elizabeth the First by Sir John Phelps, executed in 1660.
In the early 1920s, Harold Phelps was visiting the aunt who then lived in the house, and when she mentioned a haunted room, asked if he could sleep in it.
He was then in his mid-teens and, as a science student, was firmly convinced of the unreality of the paranormal.

For a considerable time .
.
.
I lay as still as I could listening for the least sound.
As absolutely nothing happened, I must have fallen into a deep sleep .
.
.
At some moment in the night I was woken up very suddenly by a most frightful racket in the room.
I reached for my torch, half-sitting up in bed, and even before I could switch on the torch I received a stinging slap across my left cheek.
At the same instant I got the light on, and the room was obviously empty .
.
.
The two cane chairs were overturned.
.
.
and my money, keys and small effects had been knocked off the dressing-table and scattered all over the room.

Here the deciding factor may have been that the teenage boy was an unconscious medium.
But whatever was present in the “haunted room” was presumably there before he arrived.
So again, we have the puzzling phenomenon of an entity that declines to fit any of the normal categories of psychical researches.