Ghosts & Gallows (26 page)

Despite his shoestring budget and anti-establishment approach, Herbert’s Paraphysical Laboratory managed against the odds to establish itself as an international centre of modern paranormal research. The Paralab issued its own publication, the
Journal of Paraphysics
(in reality a photocopied newsletter) that, despite its modest format, included such luminaries as British mathematician Professor John Taylor, Soviet biophysicist Victor Adamenko, and American parapsychologist Stanley Krippner on its editorial board. Herbert courted overseas researchers sympathetic to his style of contemporary psychical research, particularly in the Soviet Union where, in 1972 and 1973, during the course of two visits, he met the remarkable Leningrad housewife Nina Kulagina, who had been filmed moving objects, seemingly by the power of thought alone, and who it was also claimed could see through her own skin.

Back in Britain, Herbert was happy to take part in more conventional ghost busting. In 1963, accompanied by Sybil Leek, a self-professed witch who ran an antique shop by day and a coven at night – both in the New Forest – he was filmed by the BBC at a séance in a haunted house in Southampton and, three years later, also appeared on television investigating Sandford Orcas Manor House in Dorset where the then tenant, Colonel Francis Claridge, whose stirring family motto ‘Fear Nought But God’ appeared on both his coat of arms and later his gravestone, claimed with his wife to be besieged by a veritable army of phantoms including child poltergeists, a seven foot-tall rapist and an insane sailor, as well as the spectre of a murderous priest. In 1975, Herbert was also seen in the company of sceptical BBC producer and presenter Hugh Burnett carrying out a planchette experiment at a haunted pub for the highly regarded documentary
The Ghost Hunters
, which also featured Borley Rectory investigators Peter Underwood and Geoffrey Croom-Hollingsworth. This fraternisation with witches and UFOologists, together with his unconventional approach to the paranormal, put Herbert and his work on the fringe of accepted scientific psychical research and to many parapsychologists he was regarded as an enthusiastic oddball who found ghosts at the slightest flick of a dial and appeared to be surrounded by a never-ending supply of young and attractive female assistants. His death, on 21 April 1991, just a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday, seemed to bring to a close an exciting chapter of experimental paranormal research from the 1960s and ’70s that included not only Kulagina but also Geller and the ‘Raudive voices’.

A number of sensitives and physical mediums took part in experimental work at the Paraphysical Laboratory including psychic healer Josephine Blatch, but the person with whom Herbert had the most success was Suzanne Padfield, a natural young clairvoyant from the West Country who worked as a switchboard operator and wrote poetry and children’s stories in her spare time. As we have seen, genuine mediums become aware of their powers at an early age and Suzanne was no exception, her psychic awareness no doubt accentuated by the fact that over the years she spent much time living in a succession of haunted houses. This led to many strange and startling experiences: at the age of three she felt invisible psychic touches and heard the footsteps of an invisible person walking across her bedroom floor; later, at another house in Shepton Mallet she (and her sister) watched coloured lights float around their bedroom and on several occasions she was thrown out of bed by an invisible force and would often wake up to find herself sleeping on the floor. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, the time when she was most involved with scientific psychical research, eerie spontaneous phenomena took place almost on a day-to-day basis. This was at an old rectory owned by the Deanery of Wells Cathedral that Padfield leased for a peppercorn rent while acting as a temporary caretaker: furniture moved and doors opened by themselves, water taps and an electric fire turned themselves on and off, a black shape appeared in one of the bedrooms and footsteps followed her around the house.

Suzanne Padfield first visited the Paralab not long after it had been established in the mid-1960s and ultimately went on to spend twelve years on and off being tested by Herbert and his merry band of assistants. In her the physicist felt he had discovered the British equivalent of super-psychics like Uri Gellar and the American Ingo Swann, as well as their Soviet counterpart Nina Kulagina, ‘a class of subjects very rare and few in numbers’ that Herbert called ‘The 5D People’, and devised a series of experiments to record her supernormal abilities; these included psychometry, healing, telepathy and psychokinesis. In the Paralab, a table moved around the room by itself and mobiles suspended in sealed jars were rotated simply by her presence. Herbert found that while restrained and isolated she could also induce physical sensations, such as feelings of being touched in other people, and also affect the mechanical workings of clocks and watches. ‘[S]he exhibits a strange, compelling, “magnetic” radiance, of an almost frightening nature,’ he wrote in 1974, describing it as the ‘Padfield Effect’, a clear comparison with the sensational feats of the young Israeli wunderkind who had burst onto the psychic scene the previous year; and proudly accompanied his star subject to the International Congress of Parapsychology in Genoa organised by Count and Countess Galateri and Gerard Croiset’s old mentor, Wilhelm Tenhaeff. The paraphysicist also found Padfield was able to realise a pet project he had nurtured for a number of years and also shared with his Russian counterpart, Professor Dubrov of Moscow. Described as ‘biogravitation’, this involved a psychic subject with a strong 5D (Dubrov called it a ‘psychotronic’) ability to bend the trajectory of a beam of light. Herbert devised a piece of experimental apparatus that involved passing a polarised light source through a sealed tube onto a metering device. He found that when Suzanne Padfield placed her hands near the tube and consciously attempted to affect it, she was able to lower the reading on the meter a significant number of times. During one experiment Herbert recorded twenty-four deflections in succession.

In October 1972, Uri Gellar had stopped off in London on his way to the United States and at the Royal Garden Hotel had been introduced to Dr Edward (Ted) Bastin, a quantum physicist from Cambridge University, who went on to carry out a series of experiments with the Israeli psychic at Birkbeck College. During a television programme devoted to the scientific study of Gellar’s phenomena, Bastin met Suzanne Padfield and the couple subsequently married in 1975. By this time, Padfield had been involved with the Paralab for nearly ten years but eventually she grew tired of the continuing experimentation and, by the end of the decade, had all but given up her involvement with psychical research.

During the 1970s, the Soviet government gradually became hostile towards the subject of parapsychology. In October 1973, at the height of the Gellar explosion in the West, the Brezhnev regime published a statement that psychic phenomena would be studied collectively by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with the result that individual researchers began to find it increasingly difficult to continue working in the field. One of these was a correspondent of Benson Herbert, Victor G. Adamenko, a specialist in laser medicine, who had become deeply interested in Kirlian photography and its relationship with acupuncture. As the 1980s developed, Adamenko became disenchanted with authority control and eventually left Russia and moved to Greece, where he took up a position in the psychobiophysics department of Crete University. In 1988, he spent a period in America working at Joseph Rhine’s Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man before finally returning to Greece.

Early in 1980, at a time when he was still prominent in Soviet psychical research, Adamenko received a letter from a man named Tchurina who lived in Fryazino on the outskirts of Moscow asking for his help. In December 1979, the man’s nine-year-old daughter Inessa Tchurina had gone missing while visiting a local ice rink and several months later the police were no nearer to discovering what had happened to her. In desperation, Tchurina senior requested Adamenko, who he knew had been involved in research with mediums, to get a psychic to try and find out what had become of Inessa. With most of Russia’s top psychics under the watchful eye of the Soviet Academy, Adamenko took the decision to write to Benson Herbert in England with the request that he ask Suzanne Padfield if she would effectively come out of retirement and help with the search for Inessa Tchurina. Knowing from practical experience that with clairvoyance his former star subject had a greater success with three-dimensional objects rather than two-dimensional ones such as drawings, Herbert responded with a request that personal items of the missing girl be sent to him in England. Shortly afterwards, an exercise book of Inessa’s schoolwork together with a photograph arrived at the Paralab and Herbert sent them on to Padfield, who was having breakfast when the package arrived. Almost immediately as she opened the envelope, vivid and disturbing images seemed to fill her head.

She ‘saw’ the young Russian girl at the Fryazino ice rink in the company of a stocky man who appeared to be in his early thirties; he had brown hair, bushy eyebrows and a round bearded face. He talked to her in a friendly way and once outside invited her back to his flat to show her some new ice skates he had recently bought. Trustingly, Inessa went with him but back at the man’s home she screamed when he made to put an arm around her and, as they struggled, the man hit her a glancing blow and the girl fell to the floor. Brutally, rather than going to her aid, the mystery assailant, seemingly frightened by the implications of what he had done, gripped the girl by the throat and strangled her to death. The image was sickeningly real, as was what followed. Padfield had the impression of the girl’s small body being wrapped in blue material and made into a bundle. The killer then took this with him as he left the flat and boarded a bus out of Fryazino. On the outskirts of the town, she had the impression that the blue bundle had been thrown into water; possibly Inessa had been dumped into a river. All these events happened weeks in the past, across the gulf of over 1,700 miles of distance, yet the young British woman was able to view them in real time as if she were watching as a silent and invisible spectator. Suzanne wrote out an account of her vision and sent it to Benson Herbert, who forwarded it to Victor Adamenko in Moscow. The psychical researcher subsequently passed it to the Russian police investigating Inessa Tchurina’s disappearance.

A short time afterwards, Adamenko wrote to Benson Herbert with some startling news. The police had made an arrest in the Tchurina case and the suspect had confessed to the Russian schoolgirl’s murder. His statement, as well as the killer’s description, tallied exactly with the account that Victor Adamenko had given to the Fryazino police: the body had been wrapped in a blue blanket and disposed of exactly as Padfield had seen it happen. The murderer, a labourer, had tried to avert suspicion by shaving off his beard (which the psychic had described) and moving to a neighbouring town, but he had already been interviewed and when detectives following up on Adamenko’s information read the description they decided to bring him in for further questioning. Inessa’s body, heavily decomposed, had been recovered from the river a short time earlier. The only inaccuracy between real events and those that Suzanne Padfield had remote-viewed concerned the way the killer had left Fryazino – he had caught a commuter train rather than a bus. Soviet justice in the Tchurina case was swift, as the killer was tried and subsequently executed.

We have already discussed the desire for a perfect case of psychic detection; a crime solved by the direct intervention or involvement of a medium or ‘5D’ person – Colin Godman’s ‘classic work’. The Padfield/Tchurina case is impressive and up until the beginning of the 1980s appeared to be the only documented example of its kind, but some aspects are unfortunately circumspect. Despite researching a number of sources, including previously published accounts, I have been unable to find the killer’s name and the actual dates of the crime, details that are needed to defend the case against the robust attack of the sceptics. This information surely does exist, but the fact that it has not become common knowledge reduces the strength of what could be a well-documented case to one of hearsay. It would be twenty-five years before psychical researchers would publish what they considered to be a watertight case for genuine paranormal crime detection involving statements from both a psychic and the police. It would have its foundation, however, in events that were to take place only three years after Suzanne Padfield’s disturbing vision of events on the other side of the world.

On Sunday, 13 February 1983, police called to an end of terrace house in Lakeside Close, a cul-de-sac road in Ruislip, north-west London, not far from the RAF Northolt air base, made a grim discovery. Concerned that his son’s girlfriend, twenty-five-year-old Jacqueline Poole (known as Jacqui), had not answered her door or responded to telephone calls for two days, George Lee had put a call through to the local police station and was present when Detective Constable Tony Batters, equally unable to obtain a response, broke down the front door. Inside they found the body of the shop assistant and part-time barmaid lying on the living room floor; she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Over the course of the next five hours, DC Batters made a detailed examination of the crime scene while a murder enquiry, under the direction of Detective Superintendent Tony Lundy, quickly got underway. It soon transpired that a large amount of jewellery had been stolen from the flat and the police team made an appeal for anyone who had known Jacqueline to come forward and contact them. A post-mortem concluded that she had been murdered around nine o’clock in the evening two days before, on Friday 11 February.

During the first week of the investigation, the incident room at Ruislip police station received a call with an offer of information and on 17 February, four days after the discovery of Jacqueline’s body, DC Batters, accompanied by Detective Constable Andy Smith, arrived at an address in Ruislip Gardens, some three miles from Lakeside Close, to interview twenty-two-year-old Christine Holohan, originally from County Laois in Ireland, who at that time was working part-time at RAF Northolt to support herself while she trained to become a professional medium. In her semi-autobiographical book
A Voice from the Grave
(2006), Holohan describes her upbringing in Stradbally in the familiar terms of a young and naturally gifted clairvoyant awakening to her strange and at times unwanted other-worldly abilities: of playing with angels and phantom figures, experiencing premonitions and prophetic dreams of family bereavements, and of seeing apparitions. Over the weekend of 12-13 February, Holohan had felt uncomfortable on a psychic level and had experienced a sensation of sudden coldness when told about the murder of Jacqui Poole in a local shop on the Monday morning. That evening, while trying to get to sleep, she had felt a strong presence in the bedroom with her, which, when challenged, made the room lights flicker on and off. Over the next two days the presence returned and Holohan had a visual impression of a figure – ‘a white line like the outline of a person’ – standing beside her bed. This personality, alternating between periods of raging and pleading, identified itself as Jacqui Poole and implored the medium to help in bringing her killer to justice. Holohan received such vivid impressions of the murder and details of the victim’s house (she neither knew Jacqueline Poole or the road where she lived) that finally, on the Thursday, she contacted Ruislip police.