Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (52 page)

Notions such as these will strike most people as absurd.
Yet they seem to explain some of the mysteries we have examined in this book more convincingly than the “scientific” theories of psychologists and psychical researchers.
It seems curious that so many cases of multiple personality involve the same pattern—a repressed, well-behaved young woman, like Christine Beauchamp, Doris Fischer, Mary Reynolds, sinking into a state of misery and low vitality, then being “taken over” by a mischievous tomboy.
In many such cases, the “takeover” occurs after some well-meaning psychiatrist has placed the girl under hypnosis, making her defenseless.
In most cases, the invading entity is lacking in intelligence, and in no case has the secondary personality been more intelligent than the primary one.
(In the case of Doris Fischer, a number of less intelligent entities seem to have taken over, each one more stupid than the last.)

Long’s picture of the world of “low spirits” is a depressing one: he even has a chapter discussing “horrid things of darkness.”

The world of invisible spirits is much like our solid earth in as much as it has its jungles and wild animals so to speak.
If in this world a man should go into wild country and meet lions, tigers and gorillas, he would have to defend himself.
The same applies over there in the world of disembodied things living in their shadowy bodies.
Fortunately for us, the contact with the shadowy world is slight.
Only now and then do the dangerous or actively evil things break through to us and endanger our lives or sanity.

Now it has to be admitted that a passage like this—with its suggestion of H.
P.
Lovecraft—arouses an automatic reflex of rejection, which in turn leads one to question the whole system of ideas of the kahunas.
Some of Long’s stories certainly sound like traveler’s tales.
We find it difficult to accept the notion of a jilted girl making her ex-lover seriously ill by asking the spirit of her dead grandmother for vengeance.
Yet everything Long says about poltergeists is consistent with the tentative conclusions reached elsewhere in this book.
They
do
behave like half-witted spirits; they
do
seem to have a certain limited power of “possession”; they
do
seem to be easily influenced by remarks and suggestions thrown off by human beings; they
do
seem to be capable of draining the physical energies of their victims.
At the same time they are not fundamentally evil; their malice has often an almost jovial quality, and—like the fairies of legend—they even seem to enjoy performing small services for people they like.
(Jean Pritchard tells how she arrived home one day and found that the “black monk” had laid the table for tea.) Attempts to question them about their motives usually fail because they lack the ability to reason.
All these characteristics sound very much like the “lower spirits” of Freedom Long, and hardly at all like the rebellious unconscious posited by William Roll, George Owen and Alan Gauld.

It is, of course, this notion of hostile magic that the Western intellect finds most difficult to accept.
Yet Nandor Fodor himself, in spite of his support for the “unconscious” theory, accepts both the idea of black magic and the death wish.
He speaks of a woman he knew in London who claimed to be skilled in the black arts, and who told him how she had conjured up the Devil by hypnotizing a boy and sending him to summon the Devil.
Fodor, in his role as psychoanalyst, says that he has no doubt that she tried to conjure up the Devil, but that he could not believe that he had appeared to her.
What probably happened, he says, is that the boy’s unconscious “rose to the occasion” and summoned up visual auditory hallucinations.
Having said which, he tells how, when the woman lost some silver spoons, she pronounced a curse against the thief, and how the woman’s discharged cook dropped dead at the moment the curse was pronounced.
He goes on to tell a story of a spy of his acquaintance who successfully willed an accomplice to commit suicide.
He goes on: “This man was a weird creature.
He was convinced that he had a familiar spirit always ready to do his bidding .
.
.” Fodor later tells a story about G.
R.
S.
Mead—an eminent student of the occult—in which Mead describes how he himself survived an “astral attack”:

I woke from a troubled sleep, but remained in a twilight state, as if under a spell.
There was a growing chill in the air, or in my mind.
I saw a soft glow and a menacing shape which boded evil and which I thought I recognized.
I knew I was in danger, but the peril was not on the physical plane.

Mead claims to have used his own knowledge to counter attack effectively.
[2]

Cases like these are easier to explain with reference to Long’s Huna concepts than to Fodor’s Freudian theories.
The same is true of the puzzling case of the Barbados tomb, discussed by Father Thurston and many other writers on poltergeist hauntings.
The vault, hewn partly out of solid rock, was opened in 1812—only five years after it had been used for the first time—and two coffins were found standing on end.
Four years later, the coffins had again been scattered when the tomb was opened.
When it happened for a third time, in 1819, the floor was scattered with fine sand; the following year, when the tomb was opened again, the sand was undisturbed, but the coffins had again been thrown around in the vault.
The case seems completely non-typical of poltergeist haunting; not only was there no disturbed teenager to act as “focus,” there was no human being of any kind from whom the entity could have “borrowed” the energy.
But the island of Barbados has its voodoo practices, and the Huna explanation would be that some enemy of the family had sent spirits to discharge their excess
mana
in this way.

The
mana
theory is, in a sense, the essence of Long’s spirit theory, and the aspect that would probably be the easiest to investigate scientifically.
Long points out: “Modern studies of the vital electricity have been made by attaching wires to the skin of the body and of the scalp, then using very sensitive instruments to measure the electrical discharges.” In fact, the experiments of Harold Burr in measuring the “life field” of trees and animals are now well known.
Long adds:

Life
magazine files show in the issue of October 18, 1937, some pictures of tests with charts and graphs.
Two voltages of electricity have been found, a low voltage in the body tissue and a higher voltage in the brain.

And as an example of the use of
mana
he cites the “lifting experiment” that has always been popular at parties.
The subject sits in a chair, and four people attempt to lift him with a single finger placed beneath his knees and armpits; it is, of course, impossible.
All four now place their hands on the subject’s head in an alternating “pile” (that is, so that no person’s two hands are together) and concentrate for a moment.
Then they remove their hands and quickly attempt the lifting again; the subject can usually be raised without difficulty.
(“Professor” Joad was much intrigued by this phenomenon, and described how he had often seen heavy men sailing up toward the ceiling in one case, with a small child as one of the lifters.) According to Long, this is a simple demonstration of the human ability to concentrate
mana.
And, if Long is correct, this is also the energy used by the poltergeist.
(Elsewhere in the book, he mentions the case of the Cottingley fairies, and implies that they are also “thought forms” created by
mana.)

Yet although the “spirit” theory seems, on the whole, to explain the phenomena rather more convincingly than the “unconscious” theory, it would be a mistake to go to the opposite extreme and dismiss the latter as a scientific rationalization.
This would be throwing out the baby with the bath water.
To grasp the real importance of the unconscious theory, we have to go back to the origins of organized psychical research, and to the first attempt by an investigator to create a comprehensive theory—
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
(1903) by F.
W.
H.
Myers, one of the founders of the SPR.
Myers is, in fact, less concerned with “life after death” than with the mysterious powers of the human mind.
There are chapters on multiple personality, on genius, on hypnosis, and on specters of the living and the dead.
Myers is fascinated, for example, by “calculating prodigies,” children (often of less than average intelligence) who can do immense calculations in their heads within seconds.
Myers ends by concluding that “discarnate spirits” exist; but his conclusions are otherwise disappointingly tentative.

Writing at about the same time as Myers, and from the same starting point, the American Thomson Jay Hudson reached far more interesting conclusions.
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
(1892) begins by considering the mystery of hypnosis, in which the powers of the hypnotic subject seem to be enormously increased.
People in hypnotic trances have spoken foreign languages they have never studied (although it is usually found that they had unconsciously “absorbed” them in childhood) and have exercised powers of clairvoyance and telepathy.
(We may recall Barrett’s hypnotized girl who winced when he held his hand over a candle flame, or the boy who could speak aloud the words in a book from which Ochorowitz was reading.)

Hudson then advances an important thesis: that we all contain “two selves” or minds.
He calls these the objective mind and the subjective mind.
The objective mind is the conscious ego, whose business is to “cope” with the physical world.
The subjective mind seems to be more concerned with our internal functions, and it works through intuition.
The subjective mind is far more powerful than the objective mind, which is why hypnotic subjects are capable of feats that they could never perform through conscious effort.
What excites Hudson is that this subjective mind—or unconscious—is the servant of the objective mind, and will obey its commands.
So, in theory we are all capable of becoming clairvoyant, or of curing our own illnesses (and those of other people) at will.
(Hudson convinced himself of the soundness of these theories by performing some remarkable experiments in “absent healing.”)

But because he is so impressed by the amazing powers of the subjective mind, Hudson concludes that it is responsible for all the phenomena of Spiritualism—for example, automatic writing and “spirit voices.” He has, of course, no difficulty in explaining multiple personality in terms of the subjective mind.
He is even convinced that it explains the miracles of the New Testament.
Only one major psychic manifestation is absent from his remarkable book: the poltergeist.
And this is obviously because he feels he would be stretching things too far to explain the violent movement of objects in terms of the subjective mind.
(It was J.
B.
Rhine’s studies in psychokinesis in the 1930s that opened the way for the RSPK theory of poltergeist phenomena.)

In the 1960s, an American doctor named Howard Miller took up the theory of the “two minds” where Hudson left off.
Miller became fascinated by hypnosis when he saw a dentist extract a tooth after hypnotizing the patient and telling her that she would not bleed; to Miller’s astonishment, there was no bleeding.
Bleeding is, of course, controlled by the involuntary nervous system, and cannot, in the normal course of things, be affected by thinking.
Yet here was evidence that the dentist’s “thought” could stop bleeding.
Miller began to try hypnosis on various ailments—including cancer—and was astonished by its effectiveness.
He concluded that our major “control system” lies in the cerebral cortex: the thinking part of us.
In effect, Miller had rediscovered the subjective and objective minds.

Miller carried his thinking an important step beyond Hudson.
If the cerebral cortex, the conscious ego, has the power to control the automatic nervous system, why do we fail to recognize this power?
What stops us from curing our own illnesses, whether headaches or cancer?
Obviously, the main reason is that we never make the attempt.
This is because we feel that consciousness counts for so little compared to the forces of the unconscious mind—the power of the emotions and the body.
And this is not simply because Freud and D.
H.
Lawrence have taught us to distrust the conscious ego.
It is because our own experience seems to support the notion that thought is helpless when compared to the forces of the unconscious.