Supernatural (46 page)

‘But you surely don’t believe that stuff?’
said St Clair.
‘You’re all college graduates.’
His friends admitted that they did not believe in it—but nevertheless would not allow him to touch the statue.

After that, St Clair saw many such offerings.
He saw offerings of cooked chicken, and the starving beggars who stared at them, then quietly went away.
He even saw a dog sniff at such an offering, then back away.

St Clair has many stories about
candomblé
and Spiritism.
But the final chapter of the book describes his own experience of a
trabalho.
He had been living in Rio de Janeiro for eight years, and had a comfortable apartment with a fine view.
He also had an attractive maid named Edna, a pretty, brown-coloured girl.
She was, he assures the reader, a maid and nothing more.
Her life had been hard: deserted by the father, her family had been brought up in a shack in a slum.
She was obviously delighted with the comfort and security of her job with St Clair.
She joined a folk-dance group and, after a television appearance, became something of a local celebrity.
And one day, St Clair told her that he had decided it was time for him to leave Brazil.
Edna was now doing so well that he had no doubt she would easily find another job; he told her he would give her 6 months’ wages.

Then things began to go wrong.
A book he had written failed to make any headway; his typist made a mess of it, then fell ill so that it sat in her desk for weeks.
A New York publisher rejected it.
An inheritance he was expecting failed to materialise.
His plans for moving to Greece had to be shelved.
A love affair went disastrously wrong, and a friend he asked for a loan refused it.
He even fell ill with malaria.

One day, he met a psychic friend in the Avenida Copacabana; she took one look at him and said: ‘Someone has put the evil eye on you.
All your paths have been closed.’
A few days later, another friend wrote to say he had been to an
umbanda
session, and a spirit had warned him that one of his friends was in grave danger due to a curse, all his paths had been closed.

An actor friend—who was also a Spiritist—immediately divined that it was Edna who had put the curse on him.
St Clair thought this absurd.
To begin with, Edna was a Catholic, and had often expressed her disapproval of Spiritism and
umbanda.
But his actor friend told him he had attended a Spiritist session where he had been assured that David St Clair’s apartment was cursed.
But how could Edna do that, St Clair wanted to know.
All she had to do, his friend replied, was to go to a
quimbanda
—black magic—session and take some item of his clothing, which could be used in a ritual to put a curse on him.
And now his friend mentioned it, St Clair recalled that his socks
had
been disappearing recently.
Edna had claimed the wind was blowing them off the line.

St Clair told Edna he believed himself to be cursed; she pooh-poohed the idea.
But he told her he wanted her to take him to an
umbanda
session.
After much protest, she allowed herself to be forced into it.

That Saturday evening, Edna took him to a long, white house in a remote area outside Rio.
On the walls were paintings of the devil, Exú.
Towards midnight, drums started up, and the negroes sitting on the floor began to chant.
A ritual dance began.
Then the
umbanda
priestess came in like a whirlwind—a huge negress dressed in layers of lace and a white silk turban.
She danced, and the other women began to jerk as if possessed.
The priestess went out, and when she came in again, was dressed in red, the colour of Exú/Satan.
She took a swig of alcohol, then lit a cigar.
After more dancing, she noticed St Clair, and offered him a drink from a bottle whose neck was covered with her saliva.
Then she spat a mouthful of the alcohol into his face.
After more chanting, a medium was asked who had put the curse on him.
She replied: ‘The person who brought him here tonight!
She wants you to marry her.
Either that, or to buy her a house and a piece of land .
.
.’
The priestess ordered Edna to leave.
Then she said: ‘Now we will get rid of the curse.’
There was more ritual drumming and dancing, then the priestess said: ‘Now you are free.
The curse has been lifted, and it will now come down doubly hard upon the person who placed it on you.’
When he protested, he was told it was too late—it had already been done.

Three days later, St Clair received a telegram from a magazine, asking for a story; he had suggested it to them months before but they had turned it down.
Now, unexpectedly, they changed their minds, and sent him money.
A week later, the inheritance came through.
The book was accepted.
And ten days later he received a letter asking if his broken love affair could be restarted where it had left off.
Then Edna became ill.
A stomach-growth was diagnosed, and she had to have an operation, for which St Clair paid.
But her health continued to decline.
She went to see an
umbanda
priest, who told her that the curse she had put on St Clair had rebounded on her, and that she would suffer as long as she stayed near him.
She admitted trying to get him to marry her by black magic.
She declined his offer to buy her a house or an apartment, and walked out of his life.

In
The Indefinite Boundary,
Playfair goes on to discuss black magic.
It seems, he says, to be based on an exchange of favours between incarnate and discarnate—man and spirit:

‘Incarnate man wants a favour done; he wants a better job, to marry a certain girl, to win the state lottery, to stop somebody from running after his daughter .
.
.
Discarnate spirits, for their part, want to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh once more; a good square meal, a drink of the best
cachaça
rum, a fine cigar, and perhaps even sexual relations with an incarnate being.

‘The spirit has the upper hand in all this.
He calls the shots.
He wants his meal left in a certain place at a certain time, and the rum and the cigar had better be of good quality.
Incarnate man is ready to oblige, and it is remarkable how many members of Brazil’s poorest classes, who are about as poor as anyone can be, will somehow manage to lay out a magnificent banquet for a spirit who has agreed to work some magic for them .
.
.

‘Who are these spirits?
Orthodox Kardecists and
Umbandistas
see them as inferior discarnates living in a low astral plane, who are close to the physical world, not having evolved since physical death .
.
.
In
Umbanda
they are known as
exús,
spirits who seem to have no morals at all, and are equally prepared to work for or against people.
Like Mafia gunmen, they do what the boss says without asking questions.’

He adds the interesting comment:

‘The
exú
reminds us of the traditional spirits of the four elements: the gnomes of earth, the mermaids of water, the sylphs of air, and the salamanders of fire.
These creatures are traditionally thought of as part human and part ‘elemental’, integral forces of nature that can act upon human beings subject to certain conditions.
There is an enormous number of
exús,
each with his own speciality.
To catch one and persuade him to work for you, it is necessary to bribe him outright with food, drink and general flattery.
An
exú
is a vain and temperamental entity, and despite his total lack of morals he is very fussy about observing the rituals properly.’

All this sounds so much like the poltergeist that it is tempting to feel that we have finally pinned down his true nature and character.

Studying the background of the ‘Nora’ case—already described—Playfair found strong evidence that the poltergeist had been unleashed on the family by black magic.
In 1968 an ‘offering’ of bottles, candles and cigars had appeared in their garden, indicating that someone was working a
trabalho
against the family.
Playfair lists the suspects.
A former boyfriend of Iracy, the daughter, had committed suicide; then there was an elderly aunt who had died abandoned by the rest of the family, and may have borne a grudge.
Then Iracy had had a love affair with a man who was (unknown to her) already married; the man’s wife could have organised the
trabalho.
Or it could possibly have been some former disgruntled lover of Nora, the girl who married the son of the family; photographs of Nora’s husband were frequently disfigured, and they found many notes claiming that she was having an affair with another man.

Playfair mentions that, at the time he was investigating the ‘Nora’ case, Andrade was studying one in the town of Osasco where there was definite evidence that a poltergeist was caused by black magic.
Two neighbouring families were having a lengthy dispute about boundaries, and one of the families ordered a curse against the other.
The result was that the other family was haunted by a poltergeist that caused stones to fall on the roof, loud rapping noises, and spontaneous fires.
One original feature of this case was that when the family went to ladle a meal out of a saucepan—which had been covered with a lid—they found that the food had been spoiled by a large cigar.

Candomblé
—one of the bigger Afro-Brazilian cults—seems to have originated among freed negro slaves in the 1830s, and it has the same origin as voodoo, which began in Haiti when the first slaves arrived early in the 17th century.
This, in turn, originated in Africa as ju-ju.
Europeans are naturally inclined to dismiss this as the outcome of ignorance and stupidity; but few who have had direct experience of it maintain that sceptical attitude.

On the evening of September 9, 1977, Guy Playfair attended a lecture on poltergeists at the Society for Psychical Research, and found himself sitting next to a man named Maurice Grosse.
After the lecture, Grosse announced that he was in the middle of a case, and would be glad of some help.
No one volunteered.
A few days later, Playfair heard a broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in which Maurice Grosse described some of the amazing things that were happening in the house of the Harper family down at Enfield.
Reluctantly—because he had just finished a book and was looking forward to a holiday—Playfair decided to offer some help.

The Enfield poltergeist had put in its first appearance on the evening of August 30, 1977.
There were four children in the house: Rose, 13, Janet, 11, Pete, 10 and Jimmy, 7; their mother was separated from her husband.
Pete and Janet shared a bedroom.
That evening, just after Pete and Janet had gone to bed, their beds began to shake in an odd way.
They called their mother, but the shaking had stopped.
She assumed they were ‘larking about’ and told them to get to sleep.
The next evening, the children heard a shuffling noise, like a chair moving.
Mrs Harper came in and asked them to be quiet.
The room all seemed to be perfectly normal.
But when she switched off the light, she also heard the shuffling noise.
It sounded like someone shuffling across the room in slippers.
Then there were four loud, clear knocks.
And when Mrs Harper put the light on again, she saw the heavy chest of drawers moving on its own.
It slid a distance of about eighteen inches across the floor.
She pushed it back.
It slid back again.
She tried to push it back, but it wouldn’t budge—it was as if someone was standing on the other side, preventing it from moving.
Mrs Harper began to shake with fear.
‘All right, downstairs everybody .
.
.’

She went next door and asked the help of their neighbours.
Vic Nottingham and his son went back to the Harpers’ house, and searched it from top to bottom.
Then the knocking started.
Vic Nottingham rushed outside, to see if it was some practical joker on the other side of the wall.
There was no one there.

They sent for the police.
When the lights were switched off, the knocking started.
Then, in the light from the kitchen, everyone saw a chair that was wobbling into motion.
It slid towards the kitchen for three or four feet.

The police could do nothing about ghosts, so they left.
And the Harper family slept in the living-room.

The next day, all was quiet until evening.
Then the poltergeist began throwing things.
Marbles and Lego bricks came zinging through the air as if shot from a catapult.
When someone picked up one of the marbles, it was found to be burning hot.

Wondering what to do, Mrs Harper allowed her neighbour to phone the
Daily Mirror.
A reporter and photographer arrived, but saw nothing.
They decided to go in the early hours of the morning.
As soon as they were outside, the Lego bombardment began again.
Mrs Harper rushed out and told them.
As the photographer came in, his camera raised, a Lego brick flew across the room and hit him over the right eye.
It caused quite a bruise—one of the few examples of a poltergeist actually hurting someone.
Yet the photograph showed no Lego brick flying towards him—it must have been just beyond the range of the camera.
It was later to occur to Guy Playfair that the poltergeist seemed to go to great trouble not to be
seen
doing things.

The
Daily Mirror
contacted the Society for Psychical Research, and the SPR contacted Maurice Grosse, a recent member who was looking for a case to investigate.
A few days later, Guy Playfair made his way down to the house in Enfield.
It was the beginning of a two-year involvement.

Playfair was inclined to suspect Janet, an extremely lively little girl.
He asked Mrs Harper to keep a special watch on her, adding: ‘Even if Janet is playing tricks, it may not be her fault.’
For he had come across a curious discovery made by earlier researchers like Nandor Fodor and William Roll: that the ‘focus’ of a poltergeist case may throw things—in the ordinary way—without being aware of it.
The implication seems to be that a poltergeist can get
inside
someone and ‘make them do things’.