Supernatural (47 page)

While Playfair and a
Mirror
photographer waited in the dark in Janet’s bedroom, a marble landed with a bang on the floor.
The odd thing was it did not roll, as a marble normally would.
It stayed put.
Playfair tried hard to duplicate this, but found it impossible; unless dropped from very close to the floor, a marble will roll, particularly on smooth linoleum.

When the photographer tried taking a test picture, all three flash-guns on all three cameras failed to work.
When he examined the guns, he found that they had all been drained of power—although he had charged them a few minutes before trying to take the photograph.

Playfair tried tying the leg of Janet’s bedside chair to the leg of her bed.
He used wire.
Within minutes, the chair had fallen over; the wire had been snapped.
He bound it with several twists of wire.
Not long after, the chair fell over again—the wire had snapped once more.
A big armchair tipped over, then the bed shot across the room.
A book flew off the shelf, hit the door, proceeded on at right angles, and landed upright on the floor; it was called
Fun and Games for Children.
As they looked at one of the pillows on a bed, an indentation appeared on it, as if an invisible head was resting there.
The head seemed to be a small one, which led Mrs Harper to voice her suspicion that this was the ghost of a 4-year-old girl who had been suffocated by her father in a nearby house; some of the furniture from the house has found its way into the Harper home, and Mrs Harper had already thrown it out, suspecting it might be the cause of the trouble.
Clearly, she was mistaken.

There came a point when Guy Playfair began to feel that the ‘entity’ wanted to communicate—it kept up its knocking on one occasion for two hours and a half.
A medium named Annie Shaw came to the house with her husband George.
Annie went into a trance, then suddenly screamed, ‘Go away’, and began to cackle.
When her husband spoke to her, she spat at him.
She moaned: ‘Gozer, Gozer, help me.
Elvie, come here.’
George spoke firmly to the ‘entity’ that had taken over her body, advising it to go away and leave the Harper family alone.
When Annie returned to normal, she stated that the haunting centred around Janet, and that there were several entities behind it, including an old woman.
George added: ‘This Gozer is a nasty piece of work, a sort of Black Magic chap.
The other one, Elvie, is an elemental.’
Annie explained that the auric field around Janet and her mother was ‘leaking’, and that when this happens, poltergeists can use the energy for their manifestations.
The Shaws ‘cleaned’ their auras by a well-known technique—moving their hands from head to foot around the contours of the body, about six inches away.
The trouble, said the Shaws, was due to the negative atmosphere in the house—and Mrs Harper admitted that she
did
feel bitter about her ex-husband, and had been keeping the feeling bottled up for years.
One way of preventing a poltergeist from manifesting itself, said Annie Shaw, was to learn to control one’s energies, so they stop ‘leaking’.

For a few weeks after this healing session, the manifestations almost ceased.
Then, in late October, they started up again—furniture flung around, beds shaking, blankets ripped off beds—Playfair and Grosse recorded about four hundred incidents in a brief space.
Pools of water also began to appear on the kitchen floor—pools with very distinct outlines, as if made by pouring water from a jug immediately on to the lino.
One puddle was shaped like a human figure.

The entity began doing things that could have caused serious damage.
One evening, an iron grille from the bottom of a fireplace sailed across the room and landed on Jimmy’s pillow—a little closer, and it could have killed him.
The next evening, the heavy gas fire was ripped out of the wall—it had been cemented into the brickwork.
(Poltergeists can display frightening strength; in
The Flying Cow
Playfair records a poltergeist that lifted a Jeep forty yards through the air.)

On the advice of the veteran researcher E.J.
Dingwall, Playfair tried communicating with the ‘entity’.
When it rapped, he rapped back.
When he asked it to use the usual code—one rap for yes, two for no—there followed a volley of loud raps.
Playfair asked: ‘Don’t you realise
you are dead?’
which seemed to infuriate it.
Crashes came from a bedroom, and when they rushed up, the room was in chaos, with objects scattered all over.
Evidently ‘Gozer’ was not anxious to make polite conversation.

Maurice Grosse was more successful a few weeks later.
‘Did you die in this house?’
The rap-code indicated ‘Yes’.
‘Will you go away?’
A loud thud said ‘No’.
The entity indicated that it had lived in the house for a long time—more than thirty years.
It had left fifty-three years ago.
When the raps seemed to become nonsensical, Grosse asked: ‘Are you having a game with me?’
A cardboard box containing cushions flew across the room and struck Grosse on the forehead.
Guy Playfair, who was outside the door with his tape recorder (the poltergeist had taken a dislike to him), recorded all this on tape; the box made an odd swishing noise.
Yet no one actually saw the box flying across the room.
It was as if it had vanished from its old position, and rematerialised as it struck Maurice Grosse on the head.

Like most poltergeists, this one was getting into its stride as it became more skilled.
The children began to see shadowy figures, and 7-year-old Jimmy was terrified when he looked towards the wall, and saw a disembodied face—an old man’s face with big white teeth—staring at him.
In front of Grosse and several other witnesses, it threw Janet off her chair, across the room, a distance of eight feet.
As Rose, the eldest girl, went upstairs, the ghost literally pulled her leg—the investigators found her standing on one leg, the other stretched out behind her, unable to move.
She was only able to walk when Grosse twisted her sideways.

They decided to ask the ghost to write out a message, and left a pencil and paper.
A few minutes later, they found that someone had written: ‘I
will stay in this house.
Do
not show this to anyone else or I will retaliate.’
Another message read:
‘Can I have a tea bag.’
Mrs Harper placed one on the table and, a few moments later, a second tea bag appeared beside it.

When Mrs Harper’s husband came to call to pay his maintenance money, he expressed disbelief in all this, and Mrs Harper showed him the message—forgetting that it had ordered her not to.
She said out loud: ‘I’m sorry, I forgot.’
Another piece of paper appeared on the table:
‘A misunderstanding. Don’t do it again.’

A few days after this, the Society for Psychical Research sent a team of investigators to look at the place.
They had evidently decided that the poltergeist activity was all due to the girls.
Balloons full of water were placed under the beds for some reason; and, when they burst, water dripped through the ceiling.
When the team had left, Grosse and Playfair—who had been present—had some irritable things to say about the SPR’s obsession with fraud.

By now it was very clear that Janet was the poltergeist’s main target.
She was often thrown out of bed seven or eight times before she succeeded in getting to sleep.
When she fell asleep, she twitched and moaned; Playfair began to feel increasingly that she was ‘possessed’.
He recalled the case of Maria Ferreira, the South American girl who had been driven to suicide by a poltergeist, and felt some misgiving.
On one occasion, with a photographer in the bedroom, Janet was hurled out of bed—the event was photographed—and then, as the photographer and Maurice Grosse tried to hold her, she went into convulsions, screamed hysterically, and bit Grosse.
When finally put back into bed, she fell asleep.
Later, there was a crash, and they found her lying on top of the radio set, still fast asleep.

The following night, Janet had more convulsions, and wandered around, talking aloud, ‘Where’s Gober.
He’ll kill you.’

Two of Playfair’s friends from Brazil, who happened to be in London, called at the Enfield house, and succeeded in bringing Janet out of one of her trance-like states.
Their view was that Janet was a powerful medium and ought to be trained to use her powers.
One of the two Brazilian mediums wrote on a sheet of paper: ‘I see this child, Janet, in the Middle Ages, a cruel and wanton woman who caused suffering to families of yeomen—some of these seem to have now to get even with the family.’
Soon after this, Janet began producing drawings, in a state of semi-trance; one of them showed a woman with blood pouring out of her throat, with the name ‘Watson’ written underneath.
Other drawings continued this theme of blood, knives and death.
When Playfair asked Mrs Harper if she knew of a Watson, she replied that it was the name of the previous tenants of the house.
Mrs Watson had died of a tumour of the throat.

Playfair asked Janet if she could bend a spoon like Uri Geller.
He glanced away for a moment, as Mrs Harper spoke to him; when he looked back, the spoon was bent in the middle—it was lying in the centre of the table.
Janet said she had experienced a sudden feeling of headache as the spoon bent.

In December 1977, the poltergeist began making noises—whistling and barking sounds.
Maurice Grosse decided to try asking it to speak.
‘Call out my name, Maurice Grosse.’
He went out of the room, and a strange voice said:
‘Maurice
.
.
.
O .
.
.’
Grosse asked it to say its own name.
‘Joe Watson.’
When Guy Playfair asked: ‘Do you know you are dead?’
the voice said angrily:
‘Shut up
!’
And to further requests that it go away, it replied:
‘Fuck off.’
Joe seemed to be incapable of polite conversation.
When another researcher, Anita Gregory, asked it questions, she was told to bugger off.

The investigators wondered whether Janet could be simulating this voice, although it seemed unlikely; it was a masculine growl, and had an odd quality, as if electronically produced.
(I have one of Guy Playfair’s tape recordings of the voice, and it reminds me strongly of a record I have of an electronic brain singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’.) The voice would not speak if the investigators were in the room.
But their attempts were rewarded with long sentences.
The voice now identified itself as Bill, and said it had a dog called Gober the Ghost.
Asked why it kept shaking Janet’s bed it replied: ‘
I was sleeping here.’
‘Then why do you keep on shaking it?’
‘Get Janet out.’
Rose asked: ‘Why do you use bad language?’
‘
Fuck off you,’
replied Bill.
And when Janet asked why it played games with them it replied: ‘
I like annoying you.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From the graveyard.’
It even named the graveyard—Durant’s Park, which is in the area.

At Guy Playfair’s suggestion, Rose asked why it didn’t go away.
‘
I don’t believe in that.’
‘Why?
What’s so different about being up there?’
asked Rose, and received the wistful reply:
‘I’m not a heaven man.’
It went on to say in a jerky manner: ‘
I am Bill Haylock and I come from Durant’s Park and I am 72 years old and I have come here to see my family but they are not here now.’

On the tape, the words come out one by one, as if the speaker is so breathless that he can only get out one at a time.
(The voice is so obviously that of an old man that the notion of Janet producing it by ventriloquism is absurd.) Rose’s next question is interrupted by a furious outburst:
‘You fucking old bitch, shut up. I want some jazz music. Now go and get me some, else I’ll go barmy.’

Maurice Grosse’s son Richard paid a visit to the house and succeeded in holding a lengthy conversation with the voice.
When he asked it what it had done with thirty pence that had vanished it said it had hidden the money in the radio—which is where it was found.
Asked how he had died, ‘Bill’ replied that he went blind and had a haemorrhage—he fell asleep and died in a chair downstairs.

Richard Grosse found that if he looked at Janet’s face while the voice was speaking, it would stop.
If he
thought
of looking round, the voice would also stop, as if reading his mind.

Another researcher named David Robertson had no difficulty getting the voice to talk, although the main thing it wanted to discuss was girls’ periods.
Then the ghost was asked to levitate Janet, and then draw a line round the light on the ceiling.
Robertson withdrew outside, and heard Janet being bounced up and down on the bed.
Suddenly there was a gasp and silence.
He tried to open the door and found that it was jammed tight.
When it opened again, Janet was on the bed and there was a red line around the light.
Janet claimed that she had floated through the wall, into the bedroom of the next house—belonging to Peggy Nottingham (who was with David Robertson at the time).
She described it as ‘all white’—a fairly accurate description of the light wallpaper.
Peggy asked her to try doing it again, and went next door to see what happened.
Janet was not there.
But on the floor, there was the book
Fun and Games for Children,
which had been on the mantelpiece in Janet’s bedroom a few minutes earlier.

Robertson handed a red plastic cushion to Janet and said: ‘See what you can do with that.’
‘All right, David boy,’
said the invisible entity—which seemed to like Robertson—‘
I’ll make it disappear.’
Robertson went out of the room, and there was a cry from Janet.
When he went back, the cushion had vanished; the window was tightly shut.
But a neighbour who was passing the house at that moment suddenly saw a red cushion appear on the roof.
Another neighbour later testified that she had also seen the cushion as she walked past.
And, looking at Janet’s bedroom window, she had seen books and cushions striking the window, and Janet rising into the air—in a horizontal position—and descending again, as if being bounced on a trampoline.
‘She was definitely lying horizontal, coming up and down.’
Guy Playfair tried bouncing on Janet’s bed, and found that no matter how hard he bounced, it was impossible to get up into the air.