Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  From this point on, Stringer’s theory departs from that of Lethbridge or Underwood. He believes that the Telluric force holds people together in a particular place—often country areas—and that people somehow constitute the cells of a larger organism (which he calls the Oikumeos). Stringer’s earth is a living creature, and human beings live in its bloodstream of Telluric force as the tiny independent creatures called mitochondria live in our bodies and assist its vital maintenance. Joe Cooper speculates that Cottingley is one of these places described by Stringer, where the Telluric force makes certain manifestations possible. Stringer, Lethbridge, Underwood and “ley hunters” like John Michell seem to have arrived independently at the same basic theory of earth forces. (Ley hunters point out that in many areas, ley lines are called “fairy paths.”)

  One interesting point quickly emerges from the various accounts of “fairies” or similar entities: the people who see them are almost invariably known to be “psychic.” Elsie Wright saw ghosts as well as fairies. The man whose sandwich was stolen by a goblin later became a healer. The interviewer I spoke with in Edinburgh struck me as a typical Celt, and Celts seem to be more “psychic” than Saxons. Yet they may be totally unaware that they are psychic until they happen to find themselves in a place—like Ardachie Lodge near Loch Ness—where the “Telluric force” enters into a combination with their natural mediumship.

  Lethbridge was also psychic—all good dowsers are (since the faculties amount to the same thing); so the sense of foreboding he experienced as he climbed down the cliff on Skellig Michael was simply a sensitivity to the force associated with the place. But if that force could knock him on his face, then presumably it was more than a tape-recording or “ghoul.”

  In his autobiography, A Foot in Both Worlds, Dr. Arthur Guirdham has also spoken of this sense of evil associated with certain places. He felt it as an Oxford undergraduate, when he spent a vacation “cramming” at an inn in Beckley, on the edge of Otmoor.

  Otmoor was strange and haunted and out of this world, a sunken plain with low hills around it . . . There was always a silence of something beautiful and evil about it . . . Even in summer, with the roses blooming, there was about it a memory of old evil.

  And on the day he returned to Oxford, Guirdham experienced a peculiar fever. “My teeth chattered harshly . . . I felt deathly cold . . . Next day I felt shrunken with cold and horribly ill.” Guirdham’s explanation is that Otmoor was one of the last places in England to harbor malaria, and that because of this, the “yellow men of Otmoor” were traditional in the Middle Ages. But there was no malaria there for Guirdham to catch in the 1920s. He is convinced that his unconscious mind had simply picked up the memory of these sufferings of the past—what Lethbridge would call a ghoul—and begun to vibrate in tune with them, so to speak.

  Guirdham describes in the same book how, as a child, he saw a demon—although he seems to feel it was the Devil.

  I lay on my bed and felt his presence. The air was crackling and electric. A wave of vibration came to me through the door of my bedroom. When the wave ebbed quickly I was drawn towards the door . . . I knew he was calling and that the minute vibrations in the atmosphere were a summons to me. I went from my bed through the air palpitating with a new cold and opened the door, and he was waiting for me . . .

  His face was hairy. It was covered, like his body, with a felt of blue-grey hair. He was man in his features and in his almost upright, slightly leaning posture . . . His legs were different. I was not aware of them as human. They ended in the shaped stump of something like a hoof . . . There was a shining aura about him . . .

  I do not know how I went to bed . . . After he had gone, the night was empty.

  In discussing this experience, Guirdham speculates whether his visitant was the god Pan.

  This experience understandably affected Guirdham’s later attitude to mental illness, particularly obsessive neurosis, and in a later book, Obsession, he makes the bold suggestion that much mental illness may actually be due to the presence of a force of evil which the patient is sensitive (i.e., clairvoyant) enough to pick up.

  Like Lethbridge, Dr. Guirdham believes that houses—particularly damp ones—can pick up negative vibrations; he has described a house in Bath, above an underground stream, in which a number of successive tenants committed suicide or became mentally ill.

  But are such “vibrations” merely impressions or “tape recordings,” as Lethbridge believed? Or is some more active force involved? In 1935, Admiral H. Boyle Somerville, a member of Alfred Watkins’ Old Straight Track Club, accompanied Geraldine Cummins, an Irish medium who specialized in automatic writing, to some ancient stone circles in Ireland. Somerville wrote an account of the “automatic communications” that came through Geraldine Cummins. At a group of stones called the Three Fingers, near Castletownshend, County Cork, the pencil in Geraldine Cummins’ hand wrote “Astor is here,” and then told Somerville to touch the stones. When he rested one hand on a stone, and the other on the hand of the medium, she began to write answers to his questions. At one point the script read:

  I see a picture now belonging to the second period [a period of ignorant worship and primitive practices]. A tall man, a priest, near the stones, and the figure of a bound man being dragged forward. He is a heretic, I think. He does not believe, or he is a stranger; and they sacrifice him.

  It goes on to speak of a period of the Great Curse;

  They called on the Spirits of the Elements to guard these stones, and any man or stranger who disturbed or removed any one of them came under the power of the Curse. I see one stone being taken away at a later period. I see a woman who lived, I suppose, in the last century, for her dress is of that period. The men are removing the stone under her orders; I see the invisible Watcher who directs upon her the force of the Curse. All the male descendants of this woman are cursed. Nothing thrives with them, and they in their souls decay. For this is the kind of a curse that assaults the soul. The men of this woman’s race have come to no good in consequence, and have fallen on evil days. The curse does not seem to have fallen on the female side.

  Astor goes on to speak of another man, four or five centuries earlier, who had also incurred the curse by removing stones for building. “He and all his people died violent deaths in wars.” Astor went on to prophecy that the spot would one day again become a spiritual center when “old wisdom will be rediscovered.”

  At the Drumbeg stone circle, in County Cork, on September 23, 1935, Astor stated flatly that he did not like the place

  for I see that it is specially connected with a period of Nature-worship, or rather, an offshoot of Sun-worship, which became allied with Magic . . . I count back three thousand years at least. The Magic practiced here was connected with the Sun in conjunction with the Moon. It seems that in mid-Winter there was a very striking ceremony performed here. Power was drawn from the earth, that is to say, when the Sun was at its lowest, an animal, if not a small child, was sacrificed for the purpose of securing the blood.

  After blood has been used in magical rites, “a Nature Spirit rises like a misty shape out of the dish of blood.”

  Anyway, through the power of the Nature Spirits thus evoked, these men—“Tuatha de Dananaan,” a name I get—these men are able in the coming year to control the tribe that occupied this region; for the elemental beings thus summoned have the power, when re-used and used, to inflict injury, death or madness, as directed by their masters, the Magician-priests who made the circle.

  He goes on to describe a ceremony with dancing in which “men and women stabbed each other in a frenzy . . . It drew the earth-power and the lower elementals to the controlling Masters of Magic.”

  Then comes the interesting comment: “Many hundreds of years later there lingered a tradition concerning these elementals in the countryside, but they were described as ‘fairies’ then, and the knowledge of their origin in connection with this circle was lost.” According to Astor, the circles were originally b
uilt during “a period of pure worship, when these stones were connected with the adoration of Creative Life.” This first period gave way to the second in which the original religion had become adulterated with magic.

  The reason that ill-luck is attached to this place is due to its being the centre, at one time, for the evocation of the maleficent beings I have named. They set a curse upon the place . . . and the power of evil still lingers. If a stone were removed, these elemental spirits would again obtain power to strike at the human being who took the stone away.

  No, I dislike this place. I feel I had better stop writing, for I can’t get through to the time of a clearer, purer worship. The spirits of darkness guard this place, and keep it as their own.[3]

  In 1944, a series of disturbances at the village of Great Leighs in Essex followed the removal of an ancient stone by the American army—it obstructed army trucks, at the crossroads, trying to get into the camp. Journalist Charles Curzon reports:

  Within hours of the stone’s removal, things began to happen. The bell in the church tower tolled in the small hours of the morning when nobody was near it. For several days running, the church clock struck midnight at two-thirty in the morning. Hens stopped laying. Chickens were found drowned in water butts . . . Farmer Ernest Withen of Chadwick’s Farm found his newly built stacks tumbled and spread all over his yard—although it had been a windless night. And his hay wagons were all turned the wrong way round in his sheds . . . In Charlie Dickson’s building yard, piles of heavy scaffolding poles, that needed a strong man to lift them, were found scattered like matchsticks . . . Thirty sheep and two horses were found dead in a field. Chickens in a run and rabbits in a hutch mysteriously changed places—and the fasteners of the hutch were found to be undisturbed . . . In the St. Anne’s Castle Inn, a bedroom suddenly became haunted. The furniture was thrown all over the place—a chest of drawers tipped on its side, bedclothes were strewn across the floor, a heavy wardrobe shifted to another position. Mr. Sykes tidied it up. Next morning it was a shambles again.

  A week after the disturbances started, a group of men and women recovered the Witches Stone, from where the Americans had flung it, and in a midnight ceremony, they replaced it at the crossroads, exactly where it had been for generations. The hauntings stopped from that moment. Curzon reports that the Witches Stone has since vanished completely, but the disturbances have not started again.

  A huge ancient stone called the Humber Stone, near my home town, Leicester, has similar legends associated with it. It is also known as the Hell, Holy and Host stone, the last two suggesting it was once used for ritual purposes. It is believed to have been washed down the valley of the River Soar by an ice-age glacier. At the time of writing (1981) the Leicester planning authorities are thinking of building a housing estate around the site of the stone, and the Old Humberstone Historical Society has been approached about the possibility of excavating it and superintending its removal.[4] In the Leicester Mercury, Mrs. J. Dailey of the Society is quoted as saying that the Society doesn’t want to excavate because of what has happened to others. She speaks of a young man who placed a clock on top of the stone—and it promptly stopped; a clockmaker could find nothing mechanically wrong with it, but it still refused to start. Mrs. Bailey had an interesting suggestion about moving the stone: “Talk to it. I believe that if you told it that it would be removed to a safe place where no damage would come to it, there would be no trouble. I believe there would be disastrous results otherwise.” This suggestion, which sounds preposterous in twentieth-century England, would still strike most Africans as perfectly reasonable.

  The article mentions events that sound similar to the “curse” on the Irish stone circles: in the nineteenth century, William Pochin of Barkby investigated the Humber Stone, and then had an accident with a firearm in which he blew off half his hand. The farmer who owned the land allowed his plough to break off parts of the stone in the eighteenth century; legend has it that he never again prospered, and died in the workhouse. A curate who covered over the stone (it was almost totally buried in the ground in the early nineteenth century, as it is again today) was thrown from his gig shortly afterwards.

  Another issue of the Leicester Mercury[5] specifically suggests that the stone is associated with “supernatural” forces. A ten-year-old boy named Billingham startled his art teacher by drawing a creature with a goat’s head, long curving horns, a man’s body and cloven hoofs. He explained that it was a thing he often saw at the end of his bed. The house he lived in was close to the Humber Stone. The boy’s mother subsequently decided to move from the house alleging it was haunted; the people who took it over also moved within two months. Mrs. Billingham said that she and her husband had once heard crying when the children were in bed; they went to investigate and found they were quietly reading. “My husband and I saw a cat which jumped on our bed. We searched for it but couldn’t find it. We never owned a cat. I felt I was never alone in that house.” In this case, the Humber Stone seems to affect several houses in the area. When they told their neighbors why they were moving, the neighbors described waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a monk in an attitude of prayer in their bedroom. Two exorcisms had been carried out in nearby houses.

  A few days later, the Mercury followed up the earlier story. Mrs. Billingham’s parents still live in the area, and they contacted the reporter to report their own experience. On one occasion, they stayed in the house overnight, looking after the children while the Billinghams were away,

  On the night in question we went to bed about 11 pm and fell asleep. However, I was roughly awakened, feeling that my life was being choked out of my body. Although I couldn’t see anyone in the darkness, I suffered the terrible sensation of being strangled and could actually feel someone—something—exerting a vice-like grip around my throat, so much that I was forced back into the pillow. It was not a nightmare. I was fully awake, but unable to scream. I shook my husband from what seemed a trance-like slumber. He immediately switched on the light, and although we couldn’t see anyone in the room, the temperature had dropped considerably. I was unable to utter a word for several minutes . . . [I don’t know] whether it was because I am slightly psychic that the presence was drawn to me. I only know that I could sense evil in that house.

  Her husband, like Mrs. Billingham’s, never experienced anything unusual, but “did witness the extremely disturbing effects on his wife, daughter and grandchild.”

  Reading this account, I was reminded of Diane Pritchard’s experiences with the Black Monk. The fall in temperature, the sense of a presence in the room, all sound more like a poltergeist than a normal “haunting.” I obtained Mrs. Billingham’s new address from the Leicester Mercury and wrote to her, asking if she could tell me more about the experiences that drove her out of the house. She replied that it had all been so horrible that she had no desire to talk about it—she merely wanted to forget it.

  In an article called “Gremlins at the Gates of Dawn,” Paul Devereux, editor of The Ley Hunter,[6] writes:

  It has been noted by earth mystery researchers from time to time that things often seem to go wrong when ancient sites are being investigated: to use a romantic notion, as if some invisible guardian of a site is making things difficult for the human investigators. Cameras inexplicably jam, accidents happen, people are taken ill. An example happened to your editor in an aircraft over Wandlebury Camp . . . an expensive, newish camera internally fell apart at the precise moment when infra-red pictures of the Gog Magog figures [first discovered by Lethbridge] were to be taken. Yet the camera had functioned perfectly before take-off.

  And the article goes on to describe at length all kinds of mishaps that accompanied a trip to photograph the winter solstice sunrise at the Castle Rigg stone circle in Cumbria.

  The travel writer Laurens Van der Post describes a similar incident in book The Lost World of the Kalahari, when his expedition, seeking the vanished bushmen of South Africa, approached a place called the Slipp
ery Hills. Their guide, Samutchoso, had insisted that there should be no shooting of game as they approached, or the gods would be angry. Van der Post had forgotten to tell the advance party, and they shot a wart-hog, to Samutchoso’s alarm. From then on, everything went wrong. They were attacked by wild bees, and all stung. When a movie camera was focused on a rock-painting, it promptly jammed, although the magazine was new. They loaded another magazine, it jammed again. The same thing happened to a third magazine. In a natural amphitheatre, Samutchoso knelt to pray, but was pulled violently backwards, tearing both his knees. The advance party returned to camp to collect more magazines; these all jammed just as promptly. At dawn they were invaded by more bees. And as soon as they began to try to film again, the camera jammed, and continued to do so for the rest of the day. Their tape recorder simply went dead. The next day, it was the same story all over again, from the dawn attack by bees. A steel swivel of a camera—so reliable that no spare was carried—also failed.

  Finally, Samutchoso offered to consult the spirits by a traditional method, in which a needle was placed along the lifeline on the palm of his hand, and he stared into it. As Van der Post and the party watched, they heard a one-way conversation, during which Samutchoso broke off periodically to listen to the spirits. Finally, Samutchos told Van der Post: “It is as I thought, the spirits of the hills are very angry with you, so angry that if they had not known your intention in coming here was pure they would long since have killed you. They are angry because you have come with blood on your hands.”

  Van der Post thought of an expedient to placate the spirits; he wrote a note of humble apology, made everyone sign it, and buried it in a ledge. Then Samutchoso again consulted the spirits, and told Van der Post that all would now be well. The spirits also warned him that he would find bad news at the next place he went to; in fact, he learned that his father had died.