Supernatural (38 page)

But even if we are willing to entertain this hypothesis, it still leaves us with the question: how does the right brain
do
it?
In fact, is there any evidence whatsoever that the right brain possesses paranormal powers?

And the answer to this is a qualified yes.
We can begin with one of the simplest and best authenticated of all ‘paranormal powers’, water divining.
The water diviner, or dowser, holds a forked hazel twig (or even a forked rod made from two strips out of a whalebone corset, tied at the end) in both hands, so there is a certain tension—a certain ‘springiness’—on the rod.
And when he walks over an underground stream or spring, the rod twists either upwards or downwards in their hands.

In fact, dowsers can dowse for almost anything, from oil and minerals to a coin hidden under the carpet.
It seems that they merely have to decide what they’re looking for, and the unconscious mind—or the ‘other self’—does the rest.

I have described elsewhere
¹
how I discovered, to my own astonishment, that I could dowse.
I was visiting a circle of standing stones called the Merry Maidens, in Cornwall—a circle that probably dates back to the same period as Stonehenge.
When I held the rod—made of two strips of plastic tied at the end—so as to give it a certain tension, it responded powerfully when I approached the stones.
It would twist upwards as I came close to the stone, and then dip again as I stepped back or walked past it.
What surprised me was that I felt nothing—no tingling in the hands, no sense of expectancy.
It seemed to happen as automatically as the response of a voltmeter in an electric circuit.
Since then I have shown dozens of people how to dowse.
It is my own experience that nine out of ten people can dowse, and that all young children can do it.
Some adults have to ‘tune in’—to learn to allow the mind and muscles to relax—but this can usually be done in a few minutes.

Scientific tests have shown that what happens in dowsing is that the muscles convulse—or tighten—of their own accord.
And if the dowser holds a pendulum—made of a wooden bob on a short length of string—then the pendulum goes into a circular swing over standing stones or underground water—once again, through some unconscious action of the muscles.

Another experiment performed by Roger Sperry throws an interesting light on dowsing.
He tried flashing green or red lights at random into the ‘blind’ eye of split-brain patients (into the left visual field, connected to the right cerebral hemisphere).
The patients were then asked what colour had just been seen.
Naturally, they had no idea, and the guesses showed a random score.
But if they were allowed a second guess, they would always get it right.
They might say: ‘Red—oh no, green .
.
.’
The right side of the brain had overheard the wrong guess, and communicated by
causing the patient’s muscles to twitch.
It was the equivalent of a kick under the table.

Unable to communicate in any other way, the right brain did it by contracting the muscles.

It seems, therefore, a reasonable guess that this is also what happens in dowsing.
The right brain knows there is water down there, or some peculiar magnetic force in the standing stones; it communicates this knowledge by causing the muscles to tense, which makes the rod jerk upwards.

Most ‘psychics’ observe that deliberate effort inhibits their powers.
One psychic, Lois Bourne, has written:

‘One of the greatest barriers to mediumship is the intellect, and the most serious problem I had to learn in my early psychic career was the suspension of my intellect.
If, during the practice of extrasensory perception, I allowed logic to prevail, and permitted myself to rationalise the impressions I received, and the things I said, I would be hopelessly lost within a conflict.
It is necessary that I totally by-pass my conscious mind .
.
.’

Similarly, Felicia Parise found that she was at first totally unable to cause ‘PK effects’, no matter how hard she tried.
But one day, when she had received an emotional shock—the news that her grandmother was dying—she reached out for a small plastic bottle and it moved away from her hand.
From then on, she had the ‘trick’ of causing PK.

All this underlines something that should be quite clear in any case: that, in a sense, we are
all
‘split-brain patients’.
The logical self interferes with the natural operations of the right brain.
This is why the artist has to wait for ‘inspiration’—for the left brain to relax and allow the right to take over.
Mozart was an example of an artist who was born with an unusual harmony between the two halves of his brain, and he commented once that tunes were always ‘walking into his head’—meaning into his left brain.
In most of us, a certain self-mistrust, a tendency to ask questions, sits like a bad-tempered door-keeper between the two halves of the brain.
When we become subject to increasing tension and worry, this has the effect of increasing the door-keeper’s mistrustfulness.
He thinks he is performing a useful service in keeping out the impulses from the ‘other half.
In fact, he is simply isolating the left-brain self and making it more tense and miserable.
Nervous breakdown is due to the increasingly desperate attempts of this door-keeper to cope with problems in what he considers to be the right way, and which is, in fact, the worst possible way.

What Lois Bourne has said about suspending the rational intellect seems to apply to most forms of ‘extrasensory perception’ and paranormal abilities.
Most people have had the experience of reaching out to pick up the telephone and
knowing
who is on the other end.
Everyone has had the experience of thinking about someone they haven’t heard from in years, and receiving a letter from them the same day.
‘Extrasensory perception’ (ESP) seems to operate when we are relaxed, and thinking about something else.

All this, then,
seems
to offer a basis for an explanation of the poltergeist.
It is true that human powers of psychokinesis seem rather feeble—it would be far more convincing if we could point to some medium or psychic who could cause objects to fly around the room at will.
But then, perhaps the explanation is that the ‘door-keeper’ inhibits the natural powers of the right brain.
Even good ‘mediums’ cannot put themselves into a ‘sensitive’ state at will; some of them need to go into a trance; others need to be in the right frame of mind.
Trance mediums who try to ‘work normally’ (i.e.
when wide-awake) often find it exhausting and frustrating, because the ‘censor’ keeps getting in the way.
So if the poltergeist
is
some peculiar power or force residing in the right brain, perhaps this explains why it cannot be called upon at will, even by gifted psychics such as Uri Geller.

Dowsing also provides us with a possible explanation of the origin of that force.
In some dowsers, the presence of underground water produces such a powerful effect that they go into violent convulsions.
One of the most famous of French dowsers, Barthelemy Bléton, discovered his powers accidentally at the age of 7; he was taking his father’s meal out to the fields when he sat down on a certain spot, and felt sick and faint.
Digging at this spot revealed a powerful underground stream.
Again, an old lady who is a member of the British Society of Dowsers described at a conference a few years ago how she could pick up a large branch from the ground, and it would swing around in her hand like a pointer until it indicated water.

If the dowsing rod is responding to some magnetic force, either in water or standing stones, it seems possible that this same force, channelled through the right brain, could provide the energy for poltergeist effects.

It looks, then, as if the modern psychical investigator is in a far better position than his predecessor of a century ago when it comes to constructing theories about the paranormal.
The recognition of the ‘two people’ inside our heads may be the most important step ever taken in this direction.

Having said this, it is necessary to admit that most of the mystery remains unexplained.
Lodge’s ‘psychometric hypothesis’ and Lethbridge’s theory of ‘ghouls’ may provide an explanation for the majority of ghosts—but what about all those cases in which the witnesses insist that the ghost behaved as if it saw them?
Again, it would certainly be convenient if we could explain the poltergeist in terms of ‘unconscious psychokinesis’.
But why has no psychic been able to duplicate poltergeist effects?
It is not really an answer to say that they have not learned to switch the power on and off.
Many psychics can switch other powers on and off—telepathy, psychokinesis, second sight.
So why not poltergeist effects?

These awkward questions remind us that there are others we have failed to answer.
In the case of Lombroso’s bottle-smashing poltergeist in the Via Bava, why did it stop smashing bottles when the wife went away for the first time?
If Lombroso is correct, and the poltergeist was a ‘spirit’ that drew its energy from people, then we have our explanation.
The spirit needed energy from both the wife and the young waiter to smash bottles and crockery.
When the wife went away for the first time, it lost half its energy supply and decided to take a rest.
But the second time she went away, she cursed it, and it made a special effort to be disagreeable.
In order to do this, it had to make use of the ‘vestigial energy’ she had left on dishes and other objects she had touched.
When the young waiter was eventually dismissed, the wife alone could not provide sufficient energy for its needs and it went elsewhere .
.
.

Modern psychical research has a way of ignoring such questions.
It prefers straightforward distinctions.
If there is a ‘medium’ present (or, as we now say, a ‘focus’), then it is a poltergeist; if not, then it is a ghost.

But even this pleasantly simple distinction proves to be less useful than it looks.
The ‘spirits’ themselves seem to dislike being type-cast, and often decline to stick to their proper role.
A case that starts as an ordinary haunting may develop into a poltergeist haunting, and vice versa.
And then, just to confuse the issue, the spirits occasionally identify themselves as devils and demons, and manifest themselves in the highly disturbing form known as ‘possession’.
This subject is so complex that it deserves a chapter to itself.

1.
Lethbridge’s theories will be further discussed in
Chapter 14
.

1.
Encyclopedia of the Unexplained,
p. 197
.

1.
In
Mysteries,
p. 116
.

8

Ghost Hunters

B
Y THE TIME
Lombroso died, in 1909, psychical research was marking time.
Spiritualism continued to flourish; but as scientific investigation, it had come to a halt.
The reason can be seen by anyone who reads Owen’s
Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World
and then turns to Lombroso’s
After Death—What?
The books were published fifty years apart; yet they might both have been written at exactly the same time.
Lombroso offers some ‘scientific evidence’, by way of a few experiments in telepathy; otherwise, he presents just the same kind of evidence that Robert Dale Owen had presented.
There was plenty of evidence for ghosts, for poltergeists, for telepathy, for precognition, for ‘out of the body experiences’, and a dozen other varieties of ‘paranormal’ experience.
But the evidence seemed to lead nowhere.
One remarkable case had even proved life after death, to the satisfaction of most open-minded enquirers.
This was the celebrated ‘cross-correspondences’.
By 1904, three of the chief founders of the SPR—Henry Sidgwick, Frederick Myers and Edmund Gurney— were dead, and it seemed logical to hope that if they were still alive in another world, they would try to communicate through mediums.
In the previous year, a psychic named Mrs Holland, the sister of Rudyard Kipling, began receiving written messages— through automatic writing—that seemed far more intelligent and thoughtful than the majority of such scripts.
And in 1904, another psychic, Mrs Verrall—the wife of a Cambridge don—also received some messages, one of which included the words ‘Record the bits, and when fitted they will make the whole’.

And it slowly became clear that the ‘senders’ claimed to be the spirits of Sidgwick, Myers and Gurney, and that what they were attempting was a ‘proof’ of such complexity that there could be no possibility of fraud.
In effect, they seemed to be using a large number of mediums—others included Mrs Flemming, Mrs Forbes, and the famous American medium Mrs Piper—to produce a complex jigsaw puzzle or conundrum, giving each woman only part of the puzzle, so that there could be no possible doubt that there was no collusion between them.
Unfortunately, the conundrums were so complex that it would take a short book even to give a simple outline.
A typical one is as follows:
In 1906, Mrs Flemming produced a script containing the words Dawn, Evening and Morning, a reference to bay leaves, and the name Laurence.
Six weeks later, Mrs Verrall wrote out a message mentioning ‘laurel’ and a library.
Mrs Piper came out of a trance speaking of laurel, ‘nigger’, and a phrase that sounded like ‘more head’.
Mrs Flemming produced more scripts referring to Night and Day, Evening and Morning, and also a reference to Alexander’s tomb with laurel leaves.
And eventually, all these clues pointed to the tomb of the Medicis in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence.
It had been designed by Michelangelo, and contained his sculpture of Night and Day, Evening and Morning.
Lorenzo de Medici’s emblem was the laurel, and near the tombs is the Laurentian Library.
Alexander (or Alessandro) de Medici was half negro; after his murder, his body was hidden in the tomb of Giuliano.
‘More head’ was actually ‘Moor head’—the head of a negro.
This conundrum was solved only four years after the first ‘clue’, and there could be no question of telepathy between the mediums, since they did not understand what it was all about.
Altogether, the case of the cross-correspondences is one of the most impressive—perhaps the most impressive—in the history of psychical research.
It is true that the various ‘clues’ are so complicated that few people have ever taken the trouble to study the case.
Yet the sheer complexity of the code at least indicates that it originated on a far higher level of intelligence than most spirit messages.
In addition to which, it effectively disposes of the objection that spirits never have anything interesting to say.