Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  Joe Keeton, who has regressed many people into “previous lives” (some of which are described in his book Encounters with the Past), says that he is not necessarily convinced that this is reincarnation—that it could be some kind of persistent memory from a forebear, freakishly carried in the genes. But since Kitty died with her unborn child inside her, this theory hardly seems applicable to the present case.

  So we must admit that, while Kardec’s assertions about spirits and the spirit world would be totally unacceptable to a scientific investigator, they make a strong appeal to common sense, particularly in the light of the evidence about “possession” and reincarnation. Without being too dogmatic, we can say that there is a great deal of evidence that personality is more than a “summation of brain reflexes.” (Most parents have noticed that their children seem to be born with the personalities they possess for the rest of their lives.)

  This still leaves us confronted with the mystery of the nature of personality. While cases like Mary Roff and Jasbir Lal Jat suggest “possession” by another “spirit,” Mary Reynolds and Louis Vivé seem altogether simpler: their “secondary personalities” seem to be merely undeveloped aspects of the “normal” personality. One more example will make this very clear.

  In 1917, various acquaintances of a foreman named Naylor began receiving obscene letters signed “May Naylor,” the name of his daughter. A typical letter addressed to a Mr. Thomas—at the electric company where Naylor and he both worked—stated: “This is to tell you that your Mrs. Thomas came to our house on Saturday. That pig Naylor took her up to the bedroom and then he . . .” The remainder of the letter described various perverted sexual practices in explicit detail and with obscene language. Two more men at the same company received a similar letter at the same time. All were scrawled in the same childish hand and signed

  “May Naylor.”

  But Naylor’s daughter May was a sweet-tempered, inoffensive child of nine who seemed quite incapable of writing such letters.

  The psychologist Cyril Burt investigated the case, and found May to be an intelligent little girl, her mental age more than a year beyond her actual age. Her teachers, both at day school and Sunday school, insisted that she would be incapable of writing the letters. But Burt was convinced otherwise. Naylor had been married twice, and May was the child of the first marriage. He had divorced his first wife for repeated sexual misconduct. May committed many of the same spelling mistakes that were revealed in the letters. She told Burt that her favorite flower was lily of the valley—because it was so “white and pure and clean,” which aroused

  his suspicions.

  May allowed herself to be placed under hypnosis, and was soon openly admitting writing the letters. She was able to describe to Burt the contents of a letter he had received from “May” but had not yet opened. Yet when awakened, she repudiated with horror the idea that she had written the letters, and burst into tears—unaware that her “alter ego” had confessed to writing them. Burt says:

  Behind the visible May was an invisible May; and their natures were exactly opposed. The one was frank, the other cunning; the one was affectionate, the other mean; the one was fastidiously correct and scrupulously pure, the other coarse, revengeful and foul-mouthed. The child was in truth the nearest approach that I have ever known at an age so young to a dual personality. She seemed to be the living counterpart in feminine miniature of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  The cause of the “split” lay in the father’s remarriage. May had actually witnessed her mother having sexual intercourse with various men; yet she loved her so much that she refused to believe any ill of her. When her father remarried, she deeply resented her stepmother, and resented a new baby brother even more. While he was away during the war her father had asked her to write him a letter every week, so now it was natural for her to pour out her hatred and resentment on paper. Occasional meetings with her own mother may have fueled the vengefulness. One of the letters even accused her father of attempted incest—which may just conceivably be true (Burt describes the father as a neurotic type).

  Burt’s treatment was to try to talk the child out of her hypnotic states—instead of snapping his fingers—so that “May Jekyll” could actually hear “May Hyde” confessing to writing the letters. Gradually, says Burt, the barricade between the two contending personalities was broken down, and they were synthesized. “May Jekyll” became rather less prim and proper, but May Hyde, “the jealous and vindictive letter-writer, vanished like a ghost at daybreak . . .”

  Here, we can see, there is no need to assume that the two personalities were different “persons.” Burt’s description—“one was frank, the other cunning” and so on—makes it clear that “May Jekyll” was simply suppressing a part of herself that frightened her.

  What seems to have happened, then, was roughly this. May Naylor was a pleasant, affectionate little girl who, like all children, wanted love and security. Her father became a soldier when she was six, and temporarily vanished from her life; but her letters to him brought affectionate replies and—if she seemed unhappy—a visit. While her father was away, her mother slept with other men; and, since she was also an alcoholic, she made no attempt to prevent May from seeing precisely what happened (May’s letters reveal that her knowledge of unusual sexual practices was comparable to Krafft-Ebing’s). May herself was given to masturbation. Yet all this “impurity” was a severe shock to her; she refused to believe that her mother was “wicked” and blocked it out. She wanted to be a normal little girl with a loving mother and father; she hated being forced into the grimy world of adults. But fate refused to allow her the security she craved; her father divorced her mother and married again, and the birth of a baby intensified her misery. Her own intense love of her father had an incestuous element, which he may or may not have encouraged. May had been prematurely sexually awakened—probably she took after her mother—and imagined her father in bed with her new stepmother. It was all too much of a strain for a nine-year-old girl; part of her determinedly put up the shutters against any knowledge of sin and evil, and tried to be simply a loving and lovable child. Whatever strange mechanism produces “split personality” now came into operation—probably some specific event triggered it—and the repressed “May Hyde” let off steam, and tried to revenge herself, by writing obscene letters. Burt succeeded in turning May into a unified personality by allowing one May to overhear the confessions of the other. One of the first results was that May then insisted on being called May Lomax—her mother’s unmarried name—and allowed her resentment to express itself openly. In due course, the two personalities united—aided, no doubt, by Burt’s acceptance of her confessions, which enabled “May Jekyll” to come to terms with her own urges.

  The problem here can be seen clearly: like Peter Pan, May Naylor refused to grow up; she wanted to remain fixed at a stage of development that was free of conflict. Her problems were all caused by her refusal to go forward—that is, by fear. The same thing seems to have been true of Christine Beauchamp. The shock of her mother’s death, the misery of her life with her drunken father, made her want to retreat from life. But this desire to run away is one of the most dangerous things we can experience, as dangerous as a driver losing his nerve when traveling at full speed. Whether we like it or not, the only “safe” way to go is forward. In Christine’s case, there was no doubt also a perfectly legitimate desire to escape her problems by finding a man to love and protect her—the kind of man her father should have been. Her father’s friend William Jones seemed to be such a man—until he got drunk and made some kind of sexual advance to Christine. It was after this, according to the alter ego Sally, that she became “all queer and moony.”

  What happened then? We can now take our choice of two hypotheses. All the qualities that Christine had repressed—mischief, vitality, outrageousness—united into a “personality complex” called Sally, who became, in effect, “Christine Hyde.” Or we may take the view that with Christine now in such p
recarious possession of her own body, some “spirit” saw the opportunity to invade and take over—as when Jasbir or Lurancy Vennum were unconscious. We may reject the “possession” explanation as too fanciful; but it fits the facts just as well as the other.

  There is, however, one further aspect of the Beauchamp case that I have not so far mentioned, and which affords a further clue. Christine and Sally were not the only two “occupants” of the body. Under hypnosis, Morton Prince discovered a third personality, who was more mature and self-possessed than either Christine or Sally; he calls her simply “B-4.” “B-4” never claimed to be a “guardian angel,” like Doris Fischer’s “Sleeping Margaret.” But in other respects, the resemblance

  seems remarkable.

  Moreover, these two are not the only cases in which the patient exhibited a “higher” personality. Carl Jung’s first paper, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” describes his cousin (whom he calls S.W.), a girl of fifteen who would go into a trance and then speak with various other voices. One of the figures she “became” in her trances was a mature and rather saintly personality called Ivenes, who claimed to be “the real S.W.” S.W. herself was a girl of mediocre intelligence; Ivenes was highly intelligent. She explained that S.W. was only the latest of her many re-incarnations, and that she had been a Christian martyr in the time of Nero, a French countess called de Valours (who had been burnt as a witch), a clergyman’s wife who had borne Goethe an illegitimate child, and another famous psychic of the thirteenth century called Friederika Hauffe, known as the Seeress of Prevorst (and the subject of one of the most popular books of the nineteenth century).[4]

  Jung’s cousin died at twenty-six. Jung speculated that she had an unconscious knowledge of her early death, and that the personality of Ivenes was an attempt to compensate for this—to grow up before her time, as

  it were.

  Jung also believed that the explanation for his cousin’s many trance personalities might be “possession” by spirits; but the psychologist Krafft-Ebing convinced him that the answer lay in psychiatry, probably in sex. Certainly, this sounds plausible when applied to the sexual adventures of some of her previous incarnations, which Jung describes as sounding like a typical adolescent girl’s fantasies. But it hardly seems to explain Ivenes, “the real S.W.”

  Whether we regard Ivenes as “the real S.W.” or as a “spirit,” the problem remains. The evidence of the present chapter suggests that the “spiritualistic explanation” was not as unlikely as Jung finally assumed. Jung’s description of her trances makes it sound exactly like a medium at a séance. When the girl woke up, she used to assert that she had been moving in a realm of spirits. So Kardec’s explanation would fit the facts. But even if we decide that Jung was probably correct to reject it, we are left with a mystery that cannot be reduced to terms of Freudian psychology. Jung was much impressed by the mystic-philosophic system about the universe propounded by Ivenes; Jung later read widely in “occult” philosophy and found many parallels to the system—particularly in the gnostics; but his fifteen-year-old cousin had certainly never read the gnostics.

  Of course, this phenomenon of a “higher” personality can be understood without recourse to “occult” philosophy. Our personalities tend to be a reflection of our environment and the people around us. A person of medium dominance, brought up by highly dominant parents or among dominant brothers and sisters, will probably never develop his natural degree of dominance, because it has no chance to exercise itself. A moderately pretty girl, brought up among dazzlingly pretty sisters, will think herself ugly. In these cases, it is easy to see that an area of the personality remains “latent,” although it may need only a little encouragement to develop. Similarly, we all know stories of mothers sitting by the bedside of their sick children for days without sleep. The crisis calls on a higher level of the personality. Once the crisis is over, she will probably go back to worrying about trivialities; lack of stimulus allows the personality to revert to a lower level of organization.

  So no one would be very surprised if an adult responded to a situation of crisis by becoming more masterful and mature; we would simply feel that he (or she) had been like it all the time “really,” but had allowed the “triviality of everydayness” to conceal it from himself. But it seems rather more difficult to understand in a case like that of Jung’s cousin, or Christine Beauchamp, and well-nigh impossible to understand in the case of Doris Fischer’s “guardian angel.”

  The explanation could lie in the concept that I have labeled the “ladder of selves.”[5] As we have seen, the “selves” in cases of multiple personality often seem to fall into a distinct “hierarchy”: in the case of Doris, the “guardian angel” was the topmost “self,” then came-Margaret, then Doris, then “Sick Doris,” then “Real Sleeping Doris.” In Christine Beauchamp there was Christine herself; then, above her, Sally; then, above her, B-4. Christine was so upset and depressed by the death of her mother and by other problems that her personality ceased its normal development in her early teens. Under pleasanter circumstances, she might have developed the high spirits of Sally and the maturity and balance of B-4. And it is easy to imagine that there may have been still higher possible levels of personality waiting for her to develop “into them.”

  This obviously applies to all human beings. As we grow up we pass through what is virtually a series of “selves”; everyone has known the surprise of meeting at, say, fifteen, a child one last saw at the age of eight; the change may make him or her unrecognizable. With luck, we encounter the experiences that allow us to develop our potentialities, and slowly advance up the “ladder” of selves.

  This ladder seems to have one peculiarity. Unlike the ordinary ladder, its sides slope inward, so the rungs became shorter. Everyone who has been through some personal crisis knows that in order to develop a new level of being, we need to make an effort of compression—we even use the phrase “pulling ourselves together” to express what we do when we have to achieve a higher level of organization.

  This raises the obvious question: what lies at the top of the ladder? Clearly, it is a question that no one can answer. But if this theory of a hierarchy of levels has any basis in fact, then it seems that these higher levels already exist in us, before we even come to suspect their existence. In a sense, the Beethoven who wrote the last quartets was already present in the new-born baby, as an oak is latent in the acorn. But there may have been a dozen other Beethovens waiting to be developed. The same applies to the rest of us. Few people develop their obvious potentialities; but even the men and women of genius may be little more than undisciplined children when judged by the standard of their latent potentialities.

  This whole problem of the personality and its potential is considered at length in one of the classics of paranormal investigation, F. W. H. Myers’ Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Discussing such problems as multiple personality, hypnotism and “possession,” Myers argues that if we are to dispense with the idea of “spirit guidance” or possession, then we have to posit the notion of an entire “unconscious personality,” with its own thoughts and ideas. And in an introduction in a recent edition of the book, Aldous Huxley carries this one stage further.

  Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with a cellar? Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath, Freud inclined to the bungalow-with-basement view

  In other words, if the mind has an “unconscious” basement, why should it not have a “super-conscious” attic as well—a level of the “self” above the everyday self, yet equally unknown?

  And this notion can lead us to a further interesting speculation. Could this “superconscious” self explain some of the phenomena of paranormal research? The adult personality is more controlled and disciplined than that of the child, and therefore capable of greater achievements; even Mozart could not have written The Magic Flute at the age of twelve. In that
case, the “superconscious” self ought to be capable of still greater achievements. Could this, conceivably, explain telepathy, “second sight,” psychokinesis, knowledge of the future? Is it conceivable that “psychics” have some kind of “short circuit” to this superconscious level? Psychic abilities often appear after shock or severe illness; the Dutch “clairvoyant,” Peter Hurkos, developed his curious abilities by falling off a ladder and fracturing his skull; when he woke up in a hospital he found he could read other people’s minds. Uri Geller dates the development of his odd powers from a severe electric shock caused by pushing his finger into the works of his mother’s sewing machine when he was three years old.

  But here again, there is another possible explanation. Did Hurkos’ accident and Geller’s shock simply turn them into “mediums”—open some inner gateway to allow them to be “invaded” by “spirits”?

  It would, I think, be a mistake at this stage to commit ourselves to either view—or to regard them as mutually exclusive. Meanwhile, let us try to extend the field of investigation by looking at the history of the strange phenomenon known as the poltergeist.

  [1]. But in 1904, a collapsing wall in the other cellar revealed a male skeleton; a peddler’s box was found nearby.

  [2]. Grey Eminence, p. 208.

  [3]. The case of Dr. Arthur Guirdham; see my Strange Powers.

  [4]. See chapter 6.

  [5]. Mysteries, Introduction.

  three

  Cases Ancient and Modern

  There are probably over a thousand recorded instances of poltergeist haunting, and in nine cases out of ten there is a frustrating lack of detail and a dreary similarity. Objects fly through the air, furniture waltzes around the room, crockery is smashed, bangs and crashes keep everyone awake, stones fly through windows. Then everything stops as suddenly as it began. The only possible comment, except for those unfortunate enough to be involved, would seem to be “So what?” It is the one case in ten that throws up the curious incident and, occasionally, the interesting clue; and it is mainly upon these that we shall concentrate. It may be as well to start with one of those typical cases. This was published anonymously in Harper’s Magazine in 1962. How, then, can we assume it is true? Because it is so completely pointless.