Supernatural (3 page)

3 Visions of the Past

Buchanan discovers psychometry.
Pascal Forthuny ‘reads’ a murderer’s letter.
The strange talents of Bishop Polk.
Buchanan practises on his students.
Baron von Reichenbach discovers Odic force.
The mystery of Caspar Hauser.
William Denton decides to ‘psychometrise’ geological specimens.
A vision of a volcanic eruption.
Why Denton forgot to guard against telepathy.
Plesiosaurs on a prehistoric beach.
A mastodon’s tooth.
Cicero’s Roman villa.
A description of life in Pompeii.
Newton on eidetic imagery.
Hudson’s objection to Denton.
Calculating prodigies.
Death of Buchanan and Denton.

4 The Coming of the Spirits

The rise of Spiritualism.
Mrs Crowe and
The Night Side of Nature.
Friederike Hauffe, the Seeress of Prevorst.
Out-of-the-body experience of a banker.
Jung-Stilling’s story of travelling clairvoyance.
Mrs Crow on hypnosis.
Why the Victorians were sceptical about ‘the occult’.
The haunting of Willington Mill.
Doctor Drury sees a ghost.
The Hydesville affair.
The Fox family and the beginning of Spiritualism.
The Davenport brothers.
The life of Allan Kardec.
Kardec on Poltergeists.
Hudson on Spiritualism.
The career of Daniel Dunglas Home.

5 Enter the Ghost Detectives

The scientific revolt against Spiritualism.
Alfred Russel Wallace hypnotises a schoolboy.
Mrs Guppy flies through the air.
Myers and Sidgwick go for a starlit walk.
The founding of the Society for Psychical Research.
Why the SPR was not taken seriously.
The Florence Cook scandal.
The exposure of Rosina Showers.
The Creery sisters admit to cheating.
The Fox sisters confess.
The inefficient cheating of Eusapia Palladino.
The death of Edmund Gurney.
The Portsmouth hoax.
Myers is taken in by Ada Goodrich-Freer.
Assorted cases.
Prince Duleep Singh sees his father looking out of a picture frame.
The wife of a railway worker has a vision of an accident.
Rider Haggard and his daughter’s retriever Bob.
Mrs Spearman sees her dead half-brother.
Lieutenant Larkin sees a ghost.
The Chaffin Will case.
An apparition delivers a warning.
The red scratch case.
Sir William Barrett’s case of a death-bed vision in a maternity hospital.
Sir Oliver Lodge and the Raymond case.
The ghost of the chimney sweep Samuel Bull.
‘Death is the end of all.’
The red pyjamas case.
Jung: ‘.
.
.
the spirit hypothesis yields better results than any other.’

6 On the Trail of the Poltergeist

The phantom drummer of Tedworth.
The Wesley poltergeist.
The Cock Lane ghost.
The Stockwell ghost.
The case of the Bell Witch.
The Phelps case.
The case of Esther Cox.

7 The Scientist Investigates

Professor Lombroso and man’s criminal tendencies.
Lombroso is asked to investigate a poltergeist.
T.C.
Lethbridge and his theory of ‘ghouls’.
Are ghosts tape-recordings?
The theory of disturbed adolescents.
Are poltergeists due to the right brain?

8 Ghost Hunters

The Cross Correspondences case.
Harry Price, ghost -hunter extraordinary.
Willi Schneider.
Stella C.
The case of Eleonora Zugun.
The
Dracu
that bit and scratched.
The talking mongoose.
The Battersea poltergeist.
The case of Borley Rectory.
The phantom nun.
Borley’s poltergeists.
Andrew Green hears the phantom nun.
Stephen Jenkins sees a ghostly funeral.
The career of Nandor Fodor.
Fodor’s first seance.
The Lajos Pap case.
The case of Aldborough Manor.
The Chelsea poltergeist.
The ghost of Ash Manor.
Eileen Garrett’s seance.
Fodor’s investigation of the talking mongoose.
The case of Mrs Fielding.

9 The Spirit Mafia

Modern theories of the poltergeist.
The case of Philip, the invented ghost.
Guy Playfair in Rio de Janeiro.
Playfair undergoes ‘psychic surgery’.
How Edivaldo became a psychic surgeon.
Laboratory analysis of poltergeist noises.
Are poltergeists caused by black magic?
The case of Maria Ferreira.
The case of Marcia and the statue of the sea goddess.
David St Clair’s experience of a black magic curse.
Guy Playfair investigates the Enfield poltergeist.

10 The Power of the Witch

Montague Summers causes a scandal.
The witchcraft craze in Europe.
Angéle de la Barthe.
The moon goddess Diana.
‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’
The Devil.
The Cathar heresy.
The Knights Templars.
The case of Jehanne de Brigue.
The Papal Bull denouncing witchcraft.
The
Malleus Maleficarum.
Witchcraft in Germany.
The North Berwick case.
Did the North Berwick witches possess genuine magical powers?
The case of Isobel Gowdie.
The career of Matthew Hopkins.
The case of the Salem witches.
The Chambre Ardente affair.
African witch-doctors and rain-making.
The case of the band-saw.
Charles Leland and the English Gypsies.
Leland’s
Aradia.
The Witchcraft Act is finally repealed in Britain.
Gerald Gardner and modern wicca.
The case of the Jersey rapist.

11 Possession: Illusion or Reality?

Kardec on possession.
Oesterreich’s book on possession.
Janet’s case of Achille.
Wickland’s
Thirty Years Among the Dead.
Wickland’s possessed patients.
Is possession due to infected tonsils?
The spirit from the dissection room.
Ghosts who believe they are still alive.
The case of Minnie Morgan.
Anita Gregory on Wickland.
The case of Lurancy Vennum.
The Devils of Loudun.
The possessed priests.
Madeleine de la Palud is seduced by her confessor.
Fornication among the clergy.
Possession of the Louviers nuns.
Max Freedom Long and his theory of the ‘three selves’.
William James and Doctor Titus Bull on possession.
The Thompson case.
Doctor Adam Crabtree and ‘voices in the head’.
The case of Sarah Worthington.
The case of Art.
Julian Jaynes’s theory of the ‘bicameral mind’.
The case of Anna Ecklund.
Ralph Allison and the case of Janette.
Is possession ‘multiple personality’?
The case of Elise.
The case of Douglass Deen.
A note on reincarnation.
The case of Shanti Devi.
The case of Jasbir.
The Search for Bridey Murphy.
Arnall Bloxham and hypnotic regression.
Doctor Arthur Guirdham and the Cathars.
The scepticism of Ian Wilson.
The case of the Pollock twins.

12 Magicians and Wonder Workers

What is a magician?
Simon Magus.
The Faust legend.
Paracelsus.
The system of the Cabala.
The career of Doctor John Dee.
Casanova as magician.
The career of Cagliostro.
Frances Barrett and
The Magus.
Eliphas Levi and his
History of Magic.
Levi raises the spirit of Apollonius.
Madame Blavatsky.
The Golden Dawn.
The magic of Aleister Crowley.
The career of Rasputin.
Gurdjieff and ‘The Work’, The career of Dion Fortune,
13 The Mystery of Time

Professor Joad and ‘The Undoubted Queerness of Time’.
The Versailles case.
Dunne’s experiment with time.
H.G.
Wells’s Time Traveller.
Sir Victor Goddard sees Drem airfield as it will be in the future.
Goddard’s dream of disaster.
Peter Fairley dreams the Derby winner.
Wilder Penfield learns how to replay the ‘memory tape’.
Peter Hurkos falls off a ladder.
Jane O’Neill and the old church at Fotheringhay.
Faculty X and the nature of time.
The ‘ladder of selves’.
The problem of synchronicity.
The case of M.
Fortgibu.
The
I Ching.
Rebecca West in the London Library.
Jacques Vallee and the cult of Melchizedek.
‘As above so below’.
The prophecies of Nostradamus.
Mother Shipton.
The Brahan Seer.
The prophecy of Jacques Cazotte.
Is the future predetermined?
Warning dreams.
Chaos Theory.
The wreck of the Titanic.

14 Vampires, Werewolves and Elementals

Stan Gooch becomes a medium.
Stan Gooch and the female demon.
Sandy and the incubus.
The original vampire—Vlad the Impaler.
The beginning of the vampire craze in Europe.
The Mykonos vampire.
The case of the vampires of Medvegia.
Do vampires drink blood?
Is vampirism another example of possession?
The Buckinghamshire poltergeist.
The vampire of Berwick on Tweed.
The Shoemaker of Breslau.
The case of Johannes Cuntze.
Daskalos, the Magus of Strovolos.
Daskalos and the vampire bat.
The ghost of the shepherd Loizo.
Are vampires ‘earth bound spirits’?
The vampire as sexual pervert: Vincent Verzeni.
Plato’s legend of the creation of woman.
Hungry ghosts.
Jo Fisher’s case of Filipa.
The werewolf.
Early European cases.
Peter Stubbe.
The Gandillons.
Man into Wolf.
Elemental spirits.
T.C.
Lethbridge’s theory of elementals.
Lethbridge on Ladram beach.
Lethbridge and dowsing.
The suicide in the Great Wood of Wokingham.
The poltergeist on Skellig Michael.
Lethbridge on poltergeists.
Yeats and Lady Gregory go hunting fairies.
AE’s theory of lower elementals.
The case of the Cottingley fairies.
Frances confesses to fraud.
Were there really ‘fairies at the bottom of the garden’?
Cooper’s other cases.
Marc Alexander hypnotises a friend.
Lois Bourne sees an elf.

15 Standing Stones and Space Men

Lethbridge on Christian churches.
The sacredness of Stonehenge.
Ley lines and Alfred Watkins.
‘Ranging a line’.
Guy Underwood and Aquastats.
John Michell and Atlantis.
The legend of Atlantis.
Was Atlantis Santorini?
St Michael and the standing stones.
Legend of the sons of God.
Was Stonehenge a beacon for space men?
Daniken and
Chariot of the Gods?
Ancient astronauts.
Daniken’s inaccuracies.
The underground library in Ecuador.
The Dogon and the Sirius mystery.
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.
Was there a maritime civilisation 12,000 BC?
Lethbridge and flying saucers.
The first sightings.
John Keel is pursued by a UFO.
Are UFOs spirits?
Andrija Puharih and ‘The Nine’.
Prelude to a Landing on Planet Earth.
The case of Catherine Muller.
F.W.
Holiday and the Loch Ness Monster.
Holiday on phantoms.
Holiday sees a ‘Man in Black’.

16 The Expansion of Consciousness

The career of Ouspensky.
Ouspensky and mystical consciousness.
The discovery of laughing gas.
The nitrous oxide trance.
The ‘Connectedness’ of consciousness.
A world of mathematical relations.
Foreseeing the future.
‘Coming down to earth.’
Raskolnikov on his narrow ledge.
‘Upside-downness.’
The passivity of human consciousness.
The Robot.
The seven levels of consciousness.
Why man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough.
The problem of negative feedback.
My experience in Tokyo.
The billiard balls.
Man’s hidden powers.

Appendix: Why I changed my view of poltergeists.

Preface

If someone had told me when I was 15 that I would one day be the author of a bestseller called
The Occult,
I would have repudiated the idea with contempt.
For at that age I had no doubt whatever that the greatest future hope for humanity lay in the idea of science.
But then, I was 15 in 1946, and H.
G.
Wells was still alive, and Wells had been the single greatest influence on my ideas and my life.

This was understandable.
Wells, like me, came from a working-class background — his parents kept a not-very-successful shop in Kent, which soon went bankrupt.
Thereafter, his mother, who was the driving force in the family, made an attempt to get him apprenticed to a draper’s shop, but he hated it as much as Charles Dickens had hated the blacking factory to which he had been condemned as a teenager.
Wells ran away several times, until his mother got the much better idea of making him a schoolteacher.

For me at 15, born in the industrial town of Leicester, there seemed no chance of the blacking factory or its equivalent, for the Victorian age lay far behind us, and my academic record had been excellent: I won a scholarship to a secondary school as easily as a good racehorse takes a ditch.
Had my income not been needed at home to help support the family, I would have gone to university, got a science degree and gone on from there.

But I can still remember my sadness when Wells died in August of that year at the age of 80.
That month was also a turning point in my own life, for it was then that I left school at the age of 16, and the Labour Exchange sent me to a wool factory, where hanks of wool were wound on to bobbins before being used in hosiery factories (Leicester’s other main industry after the shoe trade).
I worked from 8 am until 6 pm (plus Saturday mornings) with a half hour break for lunch, and it was the hardest work I had ever done.
It was a man’s job, heaving around great crates of wool, and I hated it as furiously as Dickens had hated the blacking factory or Wells the drapery emporium.

Then rescue arrived.
My old school offered me a job as a laboratory assistant, with the prospect of going on to take a science degree.
It should have been the solution to all my problems.
But there was a completely unforeseen obstacle: in those grim months of factory work, I had been so plunged into depression and desperation that I had lost interest in science.
Fortunately, however, a new enthusiasm had replaced it.
.
.

A year or so earlier, I had come upon a little book called
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury,
an anthology of poetry from Spenser to the late Victorians, and I realised I enjoyed poetry.
And now poetry became the answer to the boredom of the factory.
Every evening when I got home I retired to my bedroom and plunged into poetry as into a warm bath.
By now I had a shelf full of books, from Milton to Eliot.
I planned my reading as I might have planned the itinerary of a holiday.
I usually began with poetry that reflected my pessimism: Poe’s
Raven
or
Ulalume,
Thompson’s
City of Dreadful Night,
Eliot’s
Hollow Men
and
Waste Land;
then, as I began to feel better, Keats’
Ode to a Nightingale,
Shelley’s
Adonais,
Coleridge’s
Dejection,
Fitzgerald’s
Rubaiyat;
and might well end with Milton’s
L’Allegro
or even Lewis Carroll’s
Walrus and the Carpenter.
And by that time I had returned to my usual buoyant optimism.