Supernatural (30 page)

An interesting point about the experience is ‘Mrs P”s comment that the figure looked quite solid and normal—most ‘ghosts’ do—and that it cast a shadow.
This obviously suggests that it was made of some kind of solid substance, like the ‘materialisations’ that appeared in the seance room.

A ‘warning’ of a different kind seems to have been involved in a case that came to be known as the ‘red scratch’ case.
It involved a commercial traveller (identified as ‘FG’) who was in his hotel room in St Joseph, Missouri, in 1876, when he became aware of someone sitting at the table.
It was his sister Annie, who had died of cholera nine years earlier.
She looked exactly as she had when alive, except that she had a bright red scratch on her right cheek.
As ‘FG’ sprang to his feet, his sister vanished.

He was so shaken that he took a train straight back to his parents’ home in St Louis.
When he told them about the scratch, his mother fainted.
When she recovered, she told them that she had accidentally made the scratch on the face of the corpse.
She had covered it up with powder, and never mentioned it to anyone.

A few weeks later, the mother died, ‘happy in the belief that she would rejoin her favourite daughter’.
Her son obviously took the view that the purpose of the apparition was to prepare her mother for her own death.
This is another theme that runs fairly constantly through reports of apparitions and ‘death-bed visions’ collected by the SPR.
Sir William Barrett was later to devote a book to them, and its opening case is typical of the kind of thoroughness the SPR brought to its investigations.

Barrett’s wife was an obstetric surgeon in the Maternity Hospital at Clapton in North London.
A woman she calls Mrs B was in labour and suffering from heart failure.
As Lady Barrett was holding her hands, she said: ‘It’s getting dark.’
Her mother and husband were sent for.
Then ‘Mrs B’ looked at another part of the room and said: ‘Oh, lovely.’
‘What is lovely?’
‘Lovely brightness—wonderful things.’
Then she exclaimed: ‘Why, it’s father!’
Her baby was brought in for her to see, and she asked: ‘Do you think I ought to stay for the baby’s sake?’
She looked towards her ‘father’, and said: ‘I can’t stay.’
When her husband had arrived, she looked across the room and said: ‘Why, there’s Vida!’
Vida was her younger sister, who had died two weeks earlier.
But her death had been kept from ‘Mrs B’, so as not to upset her.
She died soon after.
Lady Barrett, the matron and the husband and the mother all vouched that she seemed to remain conscious of the dead relatives up to the time of her death.
With his usual thoroughness, Barrett obtained a letter verifying all this from the mother.
It is the first of a number of cases cited by Barrett in which people on the point of death have ‘seen’ relatives whom they did not know to be dead.
Barrett points out that there is no known case of a dying person ‘seeing’ someone who is still alive.

Sir Oliver Lodge, who was twice president of the SPR, was himself to supply one of the most convincing cases of ‘communication with the dead’; it is recorded in his book
Raymond.

On August 8, 1915, Sir Oliver Lodge received a message from a Boston medium, Leonore Piper, containing an obscure reference to a poem by the Roman poet Horace, about a tree being struck by lightning.
Lodge interpreted this as a warning of some disaster.
The message purported to come from Frederic Myers, who had been dead for fourteen years.
A week later, Lodge heard that his youngest son Raymond had been killed in the Ypres campaign.

After this, a number of mediums relayed messages that purported to come from Raymond, but Lodge remained unconvinced— most of them were of the ‘Having a lovely time’ variety.
But in the following month, Lodge’s wife was taken by a friend to a seance with a remarkable medium, Mrs Osborne Leonard.
Neither the medium nor Lady Lodge knew one another by sight, and they were not introduced.
Nevertheless, Mrs Leonard announced that she had a message from ‘Raymond’, who stated that he had met many of his father’s friends since death; asked to name one of them, Raymond replied ‘Myers’.

Another ‘message’ from Raymond was relayed to Lady Lodge via a male medium called Vout Peters; in it, ‘Raymond’ spoke about a photograph showing himself in a group of people, and referring to a walking-stick.
The Lodges knew nothing about such a photograph.
Two months later, the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers wrote to say that she had a group photograph including Raymond, and offering to send a copy.
Before this arrived, Lodge himself visited Mrs Leonard, and when her ‘control’ ‘Feda’ announced Raymond’s presence, he took the opportunity to ask about the photograph.
Raymond explained that it had been taken outdoors, and mentioned that someone had wanted to lean on him.
When the photograph arrived a few days later, it showed a group of officers outside a billet.
Raymond, sitting in the front row, has a cane resting on his leg, and the officer sitting behind him is using Raymond’s shoulder as an arm rest.

Lodge’s book gives many more examples of evidence of Raymond’s ‘survival’; but, as he points out, this one is particularly convincing because it involves two mediums, both of whom spoke of the photograph before Lodge knew of its existence—thus ruling out any possibility of telepathy.

To conclude this chapter, here is a final example of a type of phenomenon so beloved of Mrs Crowe and other early writers on the ‘supernatural’: the full-scale haunting.

In February 1932, the grandchildren of a chimney-sweep named Samuel Bull refused to go to sleep, insisting that there was someone outside the door of the cottage.
(They were sleeping in a downstairs room, recovering from influenza.) Their mother, Mary Edwards, looked outside the door, but there was no one there.
Soon afterwards, she and the children saw the figure of Samuel Bull—who had been dead since the previous June—walk across the room, up the stairs, and through the door of the room in which he had died.
(This was closed).
They all screamed.
This was the first of many appearances of the dead man at his cottage in Oxford Street, Ramsbury, Wiltshire.
The ‘ghost’ was apparently aware of the presence of his family, for he twice placed his hand on the brow of his invalid wife Jane, and once spoke her name.
Samuel Bull—who had died of cancer—looked quite solid, and could be seen so clearly that the children noticed the whiteness of his knuckles, which seemed to be protruding through the skin.
They also noticed that the expression on his face was sad.
After the first appearance, the family no longer felt alarmed—the children seemed ‘awed’ rather than frightened.
They assumed that the ghost was looking sad because of the miserable conditions they were living in—the cottage was damp and some rooms were unfit for habitation.
On the last two occasions on which he appeared, Samuel Bull no longer looked sad, and Mrs Edwards assumed that this was because the family was to be re-housed in a council-house.

The family was already on the move when the two investigators from the SPR arrived, but the local vicar had already interviewed the family and recorded their accounts of what took place.
The investigators were understandably upset that they had not been told about the case earlier, but their conversations with witnesses, and the evidence of the vicar, left them in no doubt that the haunting was genuine.

This rag-bag of assorted visions and apparitions underlines the enormous variety of cases investigated by the SPR in the first century of its existence.
None of them are, in themselves, more impressive than cases cited by Jung-Stilling or Catherine Crowe or Robert Dale Owen.
But they are more convincing because honest investigators have obviously done their best to confirm that they are genuine.
And anyone who is willing to spend a few hours browsing through volumes of the
Proceedings
of the SPR (or its American counterpart) is bound to end with a feeling that further scepticism is a waste of time.
Even if half the cases proved to be fraudulent or misreported, the other half would still be overwhelming by reason of sheer volume.
It is easy to understand the irritation of Professor James Hyslop when he wrote in
Life After Death:

‘I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject.
Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward.
I give him short shrift, and do not propose to argue with him on the supposition that he knows nothing about the subject.’

Where sceptics are concerned, he certainly has a point.
Sir John Bland Sutton, a well-known surgeon, remarked: ‘Death is the end of all.
My experience is that all of those who have studied the subject scientifically and deeply have come to the same conclusion.’
Such a statement simply lacks the ring of truth.
There have been many basically sceptical investigators—Hyslop himself was notoriously ‘tough-minded’, and much disliked by fellow members of the SPR because he seemed an incorrigible ‘doubting Thomas’—but in every single case where a sceptic has persisted in studying the facts, he has ended up more-or-less convinced of the reality of life after death.
I say ‘more or less’ because a few investigators, such as Dr Gardner Murphy and Mrs Louisa Rhine, feel that most of the ‘facts’ can also be explained by what might be called ‘super ESP’—mind-reading clairvoyance, and so on.
Hyslop himself finally abandoned the ‘super ESP’ hypothesis through an experience that has become known as the ‘red pyjamas case’, He received a communication from a medium in Ireland to the effect that a ‘spirit’ calling itself William James had asked him to pass on a message asking him if he remembered some red pyjamas.
Now William James, who had died in 1910, had agreed with Hyslop that whichever of them died first should try to communicate with the other.
But the message about red pyjamas meant nothing to Hyslop.
Then suddenly he remembered.
When he and James were young men, they went to Paris together, and discovered that their luggage had not yet arrived.
Hyslop went out to buy some pyjamas, but could only find a bright red pair.
For days James teased Hyslop about his poor taste in pyjamas.
But Hyslop had long forgotten the incident.
As far as he could see, there was no way of explaining the red pyjamas message except on the hypothesis that it was really William James who had passed it on.

Twenty-six years after Hyslop’s death, he was quoted by the psychologist Carl Jung in a letter.
Jung was discussing the question of the identity of ‘spirits’ who communicate through mediums:

‘I once discussed the proof of identity for a long time with a friend of William James, Professor Hyslop, in New York.
He admitted that, all things considered, all these metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious.
And here, on the basis of my own experience, I am bound to concede he is right.
In each individual case I must of necessity be sceptical, but in the long run I have to admit that the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other.’
¹

Yet it is significant that Jung never made this admission in any of his published work, where he continued to insist that the facts about the paranormal could be explained in terms of the powers of the unconscious mind.
¹

As far as the present investigation is concerned, we shall proceed on Jung’s assumption that the ‘spirit hypothesis’ fits the facts better than any other.
The question of whether it is ultimately true must, for the time being, be left open.

1.
Trevor H.
Hall,
The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney,
1964.

1.
John L.
Campbell and Trevor Hall,
Strange Things,
1968,
p. 211
.

1.
Collected Letters,
Vol.
1,
p. 431
.

1.
This is discussed at length in my book on Jung,
The Lord of the Underworld
(1984).

6

On the Trail of the Poltergeist O
NE DAY IN
March 1661, a magistrate named John Mompesson, who lived in Tedworth in Wiltshire, was visiting the small town of Ludgershall when he was startled by loud drumming noises that came from the street. He was told that the racket was being made by a vagrant named William Drury, who had been in town for a few days. Drury had been trying to persuade the local constables to give him public assistance, on the strength of a ‘pass’ signed by two eminent magistrates. The constable suspected that the pass was forged.

Mompesson ordered the drummer to be brought before him, and examined his papers; just as the bailiff had suspected, they were forged.
Mompesson seems to have been an officious sort of man who enjoyed exercising his authority; he ordered the drummer—a middle-aged man—to be held until the next sitting of the local Bench, and meanwhile confiscated his drum.
The man seems to have tried hard to persuade Mompesson to return the drum, but without success.
As soon as Mompesson’s back was turned, the constable seems to have allowed Drury to escape.
But the drum stayed behind.

A few weeks later, the bailiff of Ludgershall sent the drum to Mompesson’s house in Tedworth.
Mompesson was just on his way to London.
When he came back he found the house in uproar.
For three nights, there had been violent knockings and raps all over the house—both inside and out.
That night, when the banging started, Mompesson leapt out of bed with a pistol and rushed to the room from which the sound was coming.
It moved to another room.
He tried to locate it, but it now seemed to be coming from outside.
When he got back into bed, he was able to distinguish drumbeats among the rapping noises.

For the next two months, it was impossible to get to sleep until the middle of the night; the racket went on for at least two hours every night.
It stopped briefly when Mrs Mompesson was in labour, and was silent for three weeks—an indication that the spirit was mischievous rather than malicious.
Then the disturbances started up again, this time centring around Mompesson’s children.
The drumbeats would sound from around their beds, and the beds were often lifted up into the air.
When the children were moved up into a loft, the drummer followed them.
The servants even began to get used to it; one manservant saw a board move, and asked it to hand it to him; the board floated up to his hand, and a joking tug-of-war ensued for twenty minutes or so, until the master ordered them to stop.
When the minister came to pray by the children, the spirit showed its disrespect by being noisier than usual, and leaving behind a disgusting sulphurous smell—presumably to imply it came from Hell.
Scratching noises sounded like huge rats.