Supernatural (42 page)

On another occasion, nine lumps of dirty snow arrived during the seance, and proved to be mixed with horse manure and straw.
The temperature in the room was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, so it would have been difficult to keep the snow unmelted for long if it had been concealed under the medium’s robe.

Fodor arranged for Lajos Pap to be brought to London.
At a seance there a dead snake, more than two feet long, appeared.
Fodor was impressed; but he nevertheless insisted that Pap should have an X-ray examination to find out whether he could have anything secreted in his body.
To Fodor’s surprise and dismay, Pap proved to be wearing a belt of linen and whalebone under his robe.
He said it was a kind of rupture truss, because he had a dropped kidney; but Fodor decided regretfully that this was where the dead snake had been hidden, and that it had been worked out through the neck of the robe.
Accordingly, in his subsequent report, ‘The Lajos Pap Experiments’, Fodor concluded that Pap’s psychic powers should be regarded as ‘not proven’.
Yet he adds:
‘Nor would I be willing to declare him a fraud and nothing but a fraud.
Too long has psychical research been the victim of the fatal delusion that a medium is either genuine or fraudulent.
It is a minimal assumption that mediumship means a dissociation of personality.
There was plenty of evidence that Lajos Pap was suffering from such a dissociation.’

In fact, Pap is still regarded as a non-fraudulent medium, and accounts of his seances at which live birds and insects appeared seem to indicate that his powers
were
remarkable.

Fodor had been appointed Research Officer of the International Institute for Psychical Research.
In November 1936, he was asked to investigate a case of poltergeist haunting at Aldborough Manor in Yorkshire.
The bells for summoning servants had rung almost non-stop for five days, doors had opened and closed of their own accord, and two maids had seen a ghost above an ancient cradle.
Lady Lawson-Tancred, who lived in the house, was afraid she would have to move out if the haunting continued.
But when Fodor arrived, it was already over.
One of the two maids had had a nervous breakdown and left.
The bells had rung during the night she left and the following morning, then stopped.
To Fodor, therefore, it was clear that the maid was the ‘focus’ of the disturbance.
Her nervous breakdown was probably caused by the ‘drain’ upon her energies caused by the poltergeist.
The other maid, a very pretty girl, also had a strange power over animals; birds would settle on her shoulders, and mice run into her hands.
Lady Lawson-Tancred thought that she might also be connected with the disturbances, and dismissed her.
(Fodor seems to have explained to her the difference between a poltergeist and a real ‘haunting’, where the house itself seems to concentrate the negative forces, as at Borley.) After this, Aldborough Manor became peaceful.

The same solution was found in the case of a Chelsea poltergeist that disturbed a house with its knockings.
Fodor went to the house, in Elm Park Gardens, and heard the rappings himself—he said they were like hammer blows.
Fodor looked around for the focus, and soon found it: a 17-year-old servant girl named Florrie.
He engaged her in conversation, and she told him that this was not her first experience of mysterious knockings—the same thing had happened at home four years before, when she was 13.
The children were all sent away, and when they returned, the knocking had stopped.
Clearly, Florrie was quite unaware that she had been the ‘cause’ of the knockings.

Fodor told the house’s owner, Dr Aidan Redmond, that Florrie was probably the unconscious medium.
That night, the raps were like machine-gun fire.
Dr Redmond regretfully sacked Florrie.
And silence descended on the house.

In July 1936, Fodor investigated a case in which the distinction between ghost and poltergeist becomes blurred; this was at Ash Manor, in Sussex, and he disguises the family under the name of Keel.
It is among the most remarkable ghost stories ever recorded.

The house was bought by the family in June 1934; when they said they could not pay the price demanded, the owner dropped his demand so surprisingly that the Keels decided there must be something wrong with the place, probably the sanitation.
But the wife soon began to get extremely unpleasant feelings in a bedroom that had been used for servants.
(The previous owner said they had run away.)
The first manifestations were stamping noises from the attic.
But this room had no floorboards—only the bare joists.
In November 1934 Mr Keel was awakened by three violent bangs on his door.
He went to his wife’s room down the corridor—she had also heard them.
This happened at 3 a.m.
The next night, there were two thumps on the door at the same time, and the following night, one loud thump.
Keel went away on business for a few days, and when he returned, decided to stay awake until 3 a.m.
to see if anything happened.
Nothing did, and he fell asleep.
Then a violent bang woke him up.
Although the room was dark, he could see quite clearly a small, oldish man dressed in a green smock, with muddy breeches and a handkerchief round his neck.
He looked so solid and normal that Keel was convinced this was an intruder and, when he got no reply, jumped out of bed and tried to grab him.
His hand went through him, and Keel fainted.
When he came to, he ran to his wife’s bedroom, babbling incoherently, and his wife rushed out to get some brandy.
Outside her husband’s room she saw the feet and leggings of a man, then looked up and saw the same little old man.
She was also able to see him quite clearly in the dark, although he did not seem to be shining.
She observed that he was wearing a pudding basin hat, that his face was very red, ‘the eyes malevolent and horrid’, and that his mouth was dribbling.
She also asked him who he was and what he wanted.
When he made no reply, she tried to hit him.
Her fist went through him, and she hurt her knuckles on the doorpost.
Her husband was in a faint in her room at the time, so he had not had an opportunity to describe the man he saw; it was only later that they realised both had seen the same ghost.

After this, they continued to see the little old man in green several times a week.
They also heard footsteps and knocking.
The old man usually walked across Keel’s bedroom, appearing from the chimney on the landing, and vanished into a cupboard which had once been a priest hole.
After a while, the family ceased to be afraid of him.
The wife discovered that she could make him vanish by extending a finger and trying to touch him.
The third time she saw him, the old man raised his head, and Mrs Keel could see that his throat was cut and his windpipe was sticking out.
One day she heard heavy footsteps approaching along the corridor, and thought it was her husband.
Her bedroom door—which was locked—flew open and invisible footsteps crashed across the room (although the floor was carpeted), then the footsteps went upwards towards the ceiling, as if they were mounting a staircase.
A trapdoor in the ceiling flew open, and the footsteps continued in the attic—again, sounding as if they were on floorboards, although these had been removed.
A dog in the room was terrified.
Mrs Keel’s 16-year-old daughter Pat was sleeping in her mother’s room, and witnessed the whole episode.
The man who sold them the house told them that there
had
been a staircase in the room, which he had had removed to replace it with the fireplace.

Two psychical investigators who were called in declared that the house had been built on the site of a Druid stone circle, and that this explained why it was haunted.
The ghost, they said, was a man called Henry Knowles, who had cut his throat in 1819 when a milkmaid had jilted him.

As the Research Officer for the International Institute, Fodor was called in to investigate; he had with him Mrs Maude ffoulkes, who also published the story of the manor house in her book
True Ghost Stories
later that year (thus providing independent corroboration of the story).
An amateur photographer had succeeded in taking a picture of a dim shape on the haunted landing, so Fodor took his own photographic equipment.

Fodor now had enough experience of hauntings to look for unhappiness in the house.
The daughter, Pat, struck him as nervous and very jealous of any attention given to her mother, and admitted to suffering from temper tantrums.
On the first night, nothing happened.
The next time, Fodor slept in the ‘haunted room’, but, apart from awful nightmares, had nothing to record.
He decided to ask the help of the famous American medium, Eileen Garrett, who happened to be in England.
In late July Mrs Garrett came to the house and immediately had strong psychic impressions.
The ghost, she said, was a man who had been imprisoned nearby.
There had been a king’s palace nearby, and the man had been tortured.
He had something to do with a king called Edward.
Her further observations suggested that the ‘ghost’ she saw was not the same old man, for she described him as sharp-featured, with blond hair, and said he had taken part in a rebellion against his half-brother, the king.
(In fact, there were two royal castles in the area, Farnham and Guildford.)
Mrs Garrett went into a trance, and was taken over by her trance personality, Uvani, an Arabian.
Uvani made the interesting comment that hauntings take place only when there is someone in a ‘bad emotional state’ who can revivify old unhappy memories.
There were bad emotional states in this house, said Uvani.
‘Life cannot die,’ said Uvani, ‘you can explode its dynamism, but you cannot dissipate its energy.
If you suffered where life suffered, the essence that once filled the frame will take from you something to dramatise and live again.’
About five hundred yards to the west of this house, said Uvani, there had been a jail in the early part of the 15th century, and many unfortunate men and women had died there.
‘There are dozens of unhappy souls about.’
(The early 15th century was the period of the battle of Agincourt, Joan of Arc, and many revolts and rebellions.
The plot against Edward the Fourth—by his brother the Duke of Clarence—was in 1470.)
‘According to this’, says Fodor
¹
, ‘our ghost was a spectral automaton, living on life borrowed from human wrecks—a fascinating conception which was very different from ordinary spiritualistic conceptions and very damning for the owners of the house.’

Uvani then said that he would allow the ghost to take possession of Mrs Garrett’s body.
The medium grew stiff and her breathing became laboured.
She seemed to be trying to speak, but was unable.
The ‘spirit’ pointed to its lips, tapped them as if to signal it was dumb, then felt its throat gingerly.
He beckoned to Fodor, then seized his hand in such a powerful grip that Fodor howled with pain.
Although another person present tried to help him free his hand, it was impossible.
Fodor’s hand went numb, and was useless for days after the seance.

The ‘man’ threw himself on his knees in front of Fodor, seemed to be pleading, and clicked his tongue as if trying to speak.
Then it called ‘Eleison, eleison’—pleading for mercy in the words of the mass.
Aware that the ghost was taking him for its gaoler, Fodor tried to reassure it, and said they were trying to help him.
Finally, the man seemed reassured, and sat down.
He began to speak in an odd, mediaeval English (unfortunately, tape recorders did not exist in those days—it would have been fascinating to have an authentic example of the English of Chaucer’s period), and spoke about the Earl of Huntingdon, calling him ungrateful.
It asked Fodor to help him find his wife, then raged about the Duke of Buckingham, (perhaps the one who led a rebellion against Richard III in the late 15th century).
It seemed that the Duke of Buckingham had offered the man ‘broad acres and ducats’ in exchange for his wife, then betrayed him.
The spirit identified itself as Charles Edward Henley, son of Lord Henley.
On a sheet of paper, it wrote its name, then ‘Lord Huntingdon’, and the word ‘Esse’, which was the mediaeval name for the village near the manor house.
It made the curious statement that Buckingham, the friend of his childhood, had ‘forced her eyes’, ‘her’ being his wife Dorothy.
He added: ‘Malgré her father lies buried in Esse’, and went on: ‘You being friend, you proved yourself a brother, do not leave me, but help me to attain my vengeance.’

Remembering that, according to the teachings of Spiritualism, it is remorse or desire for vengeance that often keeps spirits bound to earth, Fodor and another sitter, a Dr Lindsay, tried hard to persuade the spirit to abandon its hatred.
Finally, it seemed to agree, then cried out, ‘Hold me, hold me, I cannot stay, I am slipping .
.
.’
Then it was gone, and Mrs Garrett woke up.

During this seance, the Keels had been present.
Mrs Keel peered closely at the medium’s face while ‘Henley’ was speaking through her, and was horrified to see that it now looked like the old man she had seen.

But
had
the ghost been laid?
Apparently not.
Some time later, Keel rang Fodor to tell him that the old man was back again, standing in the doorway and trying to speak.

Dr Lindsay, who had been present at the seance, had also had a remarkable experience.
At the College of Psychic Science, he had been involved in a seance with another medium when the ghost of ‘Henley’ came through.
He complained that Fodor had promised to stand by him, but that when he had come back the following night, there was no one there.
The old man said he had seen his son, for whom he had been searching, but not his wife.

They had another session with Mrs Garrett that afternoon.
Again, the ghost came through, and made more pleas for help, as well as saying a little more about his background.
He was not particularly informative; but the control, Uvani, had some interesting things to say.
He asserted that the Keels had been ‘using’ the ghost to ‘embarrass’ each other.
What was being suggested was that the ghost-laying ceremony
would
have worked if the Keels had not wanted to cling on to the ghost as a device for somehow ‘getting at’ one another.