Supernatural (35 page)

The fraud hypothesis also fails to stand up to close examination.
If Hubbell’s book was the main piece of evidence, then we might well feel suspicious, since he went to Amherst with the hope of writing it, and eventually made a great deal of money from no fewer than ten editions.
But there are accounts in the
Amherst Gazette
that confirm everything Hubbell says.
Moreover, in 1907, more than a quarter of a century after the events, the researcher Hereward Carrington went to Amherst and took various depositions from people who had witnessed the manifestations.
By this time, Esther was unhappily married, and had turned into a sullen middle-aged woman, who agreed to talk to Carrington only on the payment of $100; Carrington felt that such testimony would be valueless.
But there could be no doubt that most of the people involved believed that the manifestations were genuine, including the farmer, Davidson, whose barn had been destroyed—he said that he had often watched Esther as she came downstairs and had noticed that she seemed to fly or float.
(In the Middle Ages, levitation used to be one of the criteria for demoniacal possession.)
But this question of demoniacal possession must be left until a later chapter.

1.
Fr.
Herbert Thurston, S.J.
Ghosts and Poltergeists,
1953.

7

The Scientist Investigates

T
HE NEXT MAJOR STEP
forward in the history of poltergeist investigation was taken by an unlikely figure, Professor Cesare Lombroso.
He was an unlikely investigator because he was known throughout Europe as a hard-line sceptic and materialist.
And this, in turn, was due to the fact that he had been born—in 1835—in Verona, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was Roman Catholic.
And since Lombroso was a Jewish Italian, he naturally hated the Austrians and their religion.
His distaste was increased by several years under Jesuit schoolmasters—he felt they were trying to thrust him back into the Middle Ages.
When he discovered science, he took to it like a duck to water—the simile is painfully hackneyed, but in this case gives an accurate sense of his enthusiasm.
By the time Lombroso was 30, Garibaldi had freed Italy from the stranglehold of Austria—and Roman Catholicism—and Lombroso could proclaim his materialism without danger of finding himself in jail.
Lombroso himself had played a small part in freeing Italy by serving in the army as a surgeon.

When he became a Professor of Psychiatry at Pavia, and the director of a lunatic asylum in Pesaro, he set out to try and prove that insanity is a purely physical illness—he had to believe this, of course, since (as a good materialist) he did not believe that the mind exists.
He spent years studying the brains of madmen and carefully staining their nerve fibres, in an attempt to track down the ‘germ’ of insanity—without success.
Then he learned that the German physiologist Verchow had discovered certain ‘atavistic’ features about the skulls of criminals—that is, that they have a touch of the cave-man about them.
This was the clue he had been looking for.
He proceeded to make a careful study of the inmates in the local prison, and at the age of 41, announced to the world his discovery that the criminal is a throwback to our cave-man ancestors, a kind of human ape.
In other words, a man born with these tendencies can no more help committing crimes than a born cripple can help limping.
The book
Criminal Man
(
L’Uomo Delinquente
) made him famous throughout Europe.
Naturally, it gave violent offence to the Catholic Church, which has always felt that wickedness is a matter of choice; but it also upset psychologists, who liked to feel that man possesses at least an atom of freewill.

Yet in spite of his reputation for aggressive materialism, Lombroso was too good a scientist not to be willing to study new facts.
And in 1882, he encountered a case that baffled him.
A teenage girl had apparently developed some rather peculiar powers—although it sounded too silly to be taken seriously.
According to her parents, she could see through her ear and smell through her chin.
When Lombroso went to see her, he expected to find some absurd deception.

She was a tall, thin girl of 14, and the trouble had begun when she started to menstruate.
She began sleep-walking, and developed hysterical blindness.
Yet she was still able to see through the tip of her nose, and through her left ear.
Lombroso tried binding her eyes with a bandage, then took a letter out of his pocket and held it a few inches away from her nose; she read it as if her eyes were uncovered.
To make sure she was not peeping under the bandages, Lombroso held another page near her left ear; again, she read it aloud without difficulty.
And even without the bandage, she would not have been able to read a letter held at the side of her head.

Next he tried holding a bottle of strong smelling salts under her nose; it did not make the slightest impression.
But when it was held under her chin, she winced and gasped.
He tried substances with only the slightest trace of odour—substances he could not smell if he held them two inches away from his own nose.
When they were under her chin, she could identify every one of them.

If he still had any doubts, they vanished during the next few weeks when her sense of smell suddenly transferred itself to the back of her foot.
If disagreeable smells were brought close to her heel, she writhed in agony; pleasant ones made her sigh with delight.

This was not all.
The girl also developed the power of prediction.
She was able to predict weeks ahead precisely when she would have fits, and exactly how they could be cured.
Lombroso, naturally, did not accept this as genuine prediction, since she might have been inducing the fits—consciously or otherwise—to make her predictions come true.
But she then began to predict things that would happen to other members of the family; and these came about just as she had foretold.

In medical journals, Lombroso found many similar cases.
One girl who developed hysterical symptoms at puberty could accurately distinguish colours with her hands.
An 11-year-old girl who suffered a back wound was able to hear through her elbow.
Another pubescent girl could read a book with her stomach when her eyes were bandaged.
Another hysterical woman developed X-ray eyes, and said she could see worms in her intestines—she actually counted them and said there were thirty-three; in due course she excreted precisely this number of worms.
A young man suffering from hysteria could read people’s minds, and reproduce drawings and words written on a sheet of paper when his eyes were tightly bandaged.

Lombroso may have been a determined materialist; but he was willing to study the facts.
And the facts led him into stranger and stranger regions of speculation.
To begin with, he developed a simple and ingenious theory of the human faculties, pointing out that seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling all take place through the nerves, and that if one of these faculties becomes paralysed, there is no scientific reason why another should not take over.
When he attended a seance with the famous ‘medium’ Eusapia Palladino, and saw a table floating up into the air, he simply extended his theory, and argued that there is no reason why ‘psychological force’ should not change into ‘motor force’.
But when he began to study other cases of prediction and ‘second sight’, he had to admit that it became increasingly difficult to keep the explanations within the bounds of materialistic science.
There was the case of a woman who refused to stay in a theatre because she suddenly had a conviction that her father was dying; she got home and found a telegram to that effect.
A doctor who suffered from hysterical symptoms foresaw the great fire of 1894 at the Como Exposition, and persuaded his family to sell their shares in a fire insurance company which had to meet the claims; when the fire occurred, his family were glad they took his advice.
A woman whose daughter was playing near a railway line heard a voice telling her the child was in danger; she fetched her indoors half an hour before a train jumped the rails and ploughed through the spot where her daughter had been playing.

Slowly, and with painful reluctance, the sceptical scientist was converted to the view that the world was a far more complex place than his theories allowed.
His colleagues were outraged.
His biographer and translator, Hans Kurella, came to the conclusion that this was all a painful aberration due to the decay of his faculties—an argument difficult to sustain, since Lombroso was only 47 when he became interested in these matters, and he lived for more than a quarter of a century longer.
Kurella can only bring himself to mention ‘Lombroso’s Spiritualistic Researches’ in a short afterword to his biography, and his comments are scathing.
Talking about Eusapia Palladino, whose seances he had attended, he agreed that she was indeed a ‘miracle’—’a miracle of adroitness, false bonhomie, well-simulated candour, naivety and artistic command of all the symptoms of hysterico-epilepsy’.
Which may well be true, but still does not explain how she was able to make a table rise up into the air when Lombroso and other scientists were holding her hands and feet.

Lombroso struggled manfully to stay within the bounds of science; he devised all kinds of ingenious instruments for testing mediums during seances.
But, little by little, he found himself sucked into that ambiguous, twilit world of the ‘paranormal’.
Having studied mediums in civilised society, he turned his attention to tribal witch-doctors and shamans, and found that they could produce the same phenomena.
But they always insisted that they did this with the help of the ‘spirit world’—the world of the dead.
And the more he looked into this, the more convincing it began to appear.
And so, finally, he turned his attention to the topic that every good scientist dismisses as an old wives’ tale: haunted houses.
Here again, personal experience soon convinced him of their reality.

His most celebrated case concerned a wine shop in the Via Bava in Turin.
In November 1900, he heard interesting rumours about how a destructive ghost was making life very difficult for the family of the proprietor, a Signor Fumero.
Bottles smashed, tables and chairs danced about, kitchen utensils flew across the room.
So Lombroso went along to the wine shop, and asked the proprietor if there was any truth in the stories.
Indeed there was, said Fumero, but the disturbances had now stopped.
Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had now gone away.
‘You interest me extremely,’ replied Lombroso.
‘Allow me to introduce myself.’
And he presented his card.
Fumero looked deeply embarrassed, and admitted that the story about Lombroso was an invention, intended to discourage the curious.
For it seemed that the Italian police had been called in, and that they had witnessed the strange disturbances and told Signor Fumero that, unless this stopped at once, he would find himself in serious trouble.
So Fumero had invented this story of how the famous Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had taken his departure.

In fact, the proprietor admitted, the ghost was as active as ever; and if the professor would care to see with his own eyes, he only had to step down to the cellar.

Down below the house was a deep wine-cellar, approached by a flight of stairs and a long passageway.
The proprietor led the way.
The cellar was in complete darkness; but as they entered there was a noise of smashing glass, and some bottles struck Lombroso’s foot.
A lighted candle revealed rows of shelves with bottles of wine.
And as Lombroso stood there, three empty bottles began to spin across the floor, and shattered against the leg of a table that stood in the middle of the cellar.
On the floor, below the shelves, were the remains of broken bottles and wine.
Lombroso took the candle over to the shelves, and examined them closely to see if there could be invisible wires to cause the movement.
There were none; but as he looked, half a dozen bottles gently rose from the shelves, as if someone had lifted them, and exploded on the floor.
Finally, as they left the cellar and closed the door behind them, they heard the smashing of another bottle.

The cellar was not the only place in the house where these things occurred.
Chairs and plates flew around the kitchen.
In the servants’ room, a brass grinding machine flew across the room so violently that it was flattened out of shape; Lombroso examined it with amazement.
The force to flatten it must have been considerable; if it had struck someone’s head, it would surely have killed him.
The odd thing was that the ghost seemed to do no one any harm.
On one occasion, as the proprietor was bending down in the cellar, a large bottle of wine had burst beside his head; if it had struck him it would have done him a severe injury.
Moreover, the ‘entity’ seemed to have the power to make bottles ‘explode’ without dropping them.
They would hear a distinct cracking sound; then a bottle would fly into splinters.

Now Lombroso knew enough about hauntings to know that this was not an ordinary ghost.
The ordinary ghost stays around in a house for many years, perhaps for centuries, and manifests itself to many people.
But this bottle-smashing ghost was of the kind that the Germans call a poltergeist—or noisy spirit.
Such ‘hauntings’ usually last only a short period—seldom more than six months—and they often seem to be associated with a ‘medium’—that is, with some particular person who ‘causes’ them, in exactly the same way that Eusapia Palladino caused a table to rise into the air.

In this case, Lombroso suspected the wife of Signor Fumero, a skinny little woman of 50, who seemed to him to be distinctly neurotic.
She admitted that ever since infancy she had been subject to neuralgia, nervous tremors and hallucinations; she had also had an operation to remove her ovaries.
Ever since the case of the girl who could see with her ear, Lombroso had noticed that these people with peculiar ‘powers’ seemed to be nervously unstable.
He therefore advised Signor Fumero to try sending his wife for a holiday.
She went back to her native town for three days, and during that period, the wine shop was blessedly quiet—although Signora Fumero suffered from hallucinations while she was away, believing she could see people who were invisible to everyone else.