Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  Evans-Wentz asked him about the sidhe or fairies (the same word as Lethbridge’s “sith”), and Russell replied that he divided them into two classes: those which are shining, and those which are opalescent and seem to shine by a light within themselves. “The shining beings appear to be lower in the hierarchies; the opalescent beings are more rarely seen and appear to hold the position of great chief . . .” Asked under what conditions he saw fairies, Russell replied:

  I have seen them most frequently after being away from a city or town for a few days. The whole west coast of Ireland, from Donegal to Kerry, seems charged with a magical power, and I find it easiest to see when I am there. I have found it comparatively easy to see visions while at ancient monuments [i.e., stone circles and monoliths] like New Grange and Dowth because I think such places are naturally charged with psychical forces, and were for that reason made use of long ago as

  sacred places.

  Asked about the shining beings, Russell replies:

  It is very difficult to give an intelligible description of them. The first time I saw them with great vividness I was lying on a hill-side alone in the west of Ireland, in County Sligo: I had been listening to music in the air, and to what seemed to be the sound of bells, and was trying to understand these aerial clashings in which wind seemed to break upon wind in an ever-changing musical silvery sound. Then the space before me grew luminous, and I began to see one beautiful being after another.

  He describes the “opalescent beings”:

  There was at first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-translucent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant electrical fire, to which the heart seemed to be the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras.

  He states that he has had many similar visions, and “I believe they correspond in a general way to the Tuatha De Danann or ancient Irish gods.” This was the phrase mentioned in Geraldine Cummins’ automatic script at the Drumbeg Stone Circle.

  Significantly, Russell says that “among the shining orders there does not seem to be any individualized life . . . Theirs is, I think, a collective life, so unindividualized and so calm that I might have more varied thoughts in five hours than they would have in five years.” Asked if these beings might be “inimical to humanity,” Russell says that he certainly never felt this about the shining beings. “But the water beings, also of the shining tribes, I always dread, because I felt whenever I come into contact with them a great drowsiness of mind and, I often thought, an actual drawing away of vitality.” Asked if there is a resemblance between lower Sidhe orders and elementals, Russell replies: “The lower orders of the Sidhe are, I think, the nature elementals of the medieval mystics.”

  What is so important about Russell’s testimony is that we know we are not dealing with a crank or a liar. Books like Candle of Vision and Song and Its Foundation carry their own mark of authenticity; this man is a genuine mystic with more than a touch of literary genius. Moreover, Russell’s comments on the “power” of the earth at sacred sites—and these comments were made about 1910, before anyone had heard of ley lines—is independently confirmed by Lethbridge and other sources. Like Crombie at Findhorn, Russell was usually in a state of “heightened awareness” when he saw his visions of the Sidhe.

  Evans-Wentz makes the important point that the faculty to see fairies or elementals is no different in kind from the faculty to see ghosts or spirits. This is confirmed by one of the most interesting records of “clairvoyance” of the nineteenth century: the diary edited by Cyril Scott under the title The Boy Who Saw True. Although anonymous, the diary carries a strong air of authenticity—Scott received it from the widow of the diarist after his death. In later life the diarist commented:

  As far back as I can remember I have been clairvoyant, and could see the disembodied entities and the human aura, which I referred to as “the lights.” All the same, I had never heard of clairvoyance, and imagined it was a natural faculty which everybody possessed, like the five senses.

  He saw Jesus standing at the end of his bed on several occasions, and also saw dead relatives. (When he reported this to his parents they usually got very angry; they consulted an occulist and a doctor to find out what was wrong with him.) Having made up his mind to avoid a little girl who wanted to play sex-games, he told his mother:

  I didn’t tell her I was cross with Marjorie because she was always begging me to take down my pantaloons. I just told her I wanted to be by myself and watch the fairies playing among the stones and seaweed on the sea shore—which was true. And then she got very vexed and said she really didn’t know what she was going to do with a little boy that was so untruthful . . .

  Later he writes:

  There is a lovely old tree in Uncle John’s garden, and today I sat a long time watching a funny old gnome who lives inside it, like one of the gnomes in my fairy-tale book. He has great long thin legs and wears a red cap, though the rest of him is like the colour of the trunk of the tree. Some times he comes out of his tree and goes prancing about in the grass and looking so funny that I wanted to giggle, but was afraid I might make him offended.

  At Keswick, on holiday, he records: “We have been here for a week now, and I have seen crowds of fairies and elves and mannikins and gnomes, and it’s simply lovely.”

  On holiday at Harlech, in Wales, the boy again saw his deceased grandfather in the room, and was told by him that he would find it easier to see things here because the nature forces were so strong. And when the party went on a picnic to standing stones, the boy records: “I was able to see a lot of queer looking men dressed in long clothes sort of praying and doing peculiar things . . .”

  In one interesting passage toward the end of the diary, the boy describes a visit to a “fortune teller” (who seems to be a spirit medium) with his tutor. He is able to see the spirit of a Red Indian “hanging about,” and when she goes into a trance, the spirit “disappears” inside her, suggesting that mediumship may be a form of “possession.” Another spirit is described as trying to get inside her “but didn’t seem to be able to manage it properly,” and the words the spirits speak to her become jumbled and incomprehensible when she repeats them—a point worth bearing in mind when studying the séance utterances of mediums. It seems clear that the writer often finds spirits rather comic and pretentious—as in an early entry when a spirit who seems to be a clergyman delivers a “message” full of religious platitudes.

  In an entry for January 24, 1887, the boy reports a “spirit” as saying that some souls who didn’t want to come back to earth again (presumably in reincarnated form) can become devas, “or sort of gods or what we imagine are angels.” He also states that some devas become attached to a human being and become a person on earth “so as to be close to the person they love.”

  He contended that stories about fairies becoming ordinary people like we are and you meet with in fairy tales are not all flapdoodle. He then told us the queerest thing of all. He stated that ages ago, I had been a deva . . . Because I’d been a deva, I was able to see a lot of things other people couldn’t see . . .

  It is a pity that Scott was unable to provide better evidence of the diary’s authenticity (although his own account of the diarist’s later life, and quotations from his letters, are certainly convincing). It contains much that seems to support views we have encountered elsewhere. The notion of spirits reborn as devas or angels rather than as human beings sounds as if it comes straight out of Kardec. “Devas who become attached to human beings” sounds like the “higher selves” encountered in some cases of multiple personality—like Doris Fischer’s “guardian angel.” What the diarist has to say about “lights” can be found in many books on the “human aura,” and has been made the subject of an important study by Dr. Shafica Karagulla, a brain physiologist wh
o became convinced that many doctors have an intuitive ability to diagnose illness through the “energy field” of the patient.

  From the point of view of the present chapter, one of the most interesting passages in the book is the grandfather’s comments about the Harlech area, that

  this is a very old part of the world and used to be part of a huge continent called Atlantis or some such name, most of which had gone down under the sea, and that the something or other, I’ve forgotten the words (probably Nature-forces) were very strong and would help me see things.

  It was John Michell’s book The View Over Atlantis (1969) that first put forward the notion—which we have already encountered in Stephen Jenkins—that there is a connection between nature forces at specific places and “supernatural” manifestations. Michell devotes special attention to the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and Glastonbury Tor. The last is believed to be one of the oldest sacred sites in England, and the point of intersection of a large number of “ley lines.” And between 1908 and 1920 Glastonbury was the subject of a remarkable series of experiments that are often cited as conclusive proof of the existence of “supernatural intelligences.”

  Glastonbury Abbey was founded in the fifth century (according to tradition, by St. Patrick) and was destroyed under Henry the Eighth, who was anxious to acquire its land and revenues. Within a few generations, much of the Abbey had been used by local farmers for building. In 1907, the ruins of the Abbey were bought by the nation for £30,000, and an architect named Frederick Bligh Bond was appointed to take charge of the excavations.

  What the Church of England—Bond’s employers—did not know was that he was deeply interested in Spiritualism, having been an enthusiastic student of Catherine Crowe’s Night Side of Nature since his teens. One of the chief problems in excavating the abbey was simply to know where to start digging. Old records suggested the existence of two chapels, built in the last few decades of the abbey’s existence as a monastic order; but no plans existed, and no one knew where to start looking. Bond decided to ask the cooperation of a friend named John Allen Bartlett, who was able to produce automatic writing. On the afternoon of November 7, 1907, Bartlett and Bond sat on opposite sides of a table in Bond’s Bristol office, Bartlett holding a pencil over a sheet of paper, and Bond’s own hand resting very lightly on top of it. Bond asked aloud the question: “Can you tell us anything about Glastonbury?” and the hand wrote rapidly: “All knowledge is eternal and is available to mental sympathy. I was not in sympathy with the monks—I cannot find a monk yet.” But soon this difficulty was overcome, and Bartlett’s hand was swiftly drawing an outline plan of the abbey, with a long rectangle stuck on its eastern end. It was signed “Gulielmus Monachus”—William the Monk. Bligh Bond thought the rectangle looked too big to be the missing chapel and asked for more information. “William the Monk” insisted that this was correct, and made a more precise drawing. He said it was the Edgar chapel, built by Abbot Bere. Another monk who called himself Johannes Bryant, monk and lapidator (stonemason) added more details.

  Some of the communications were in Latin, some in Old English. The invisible communicators claimed to include Abbot Bere (the last abbot but one), Ambrosius the Cellarer, and Peter Lightfoot the clockmaker, as well as those already mentioned. Eventually, they were to provide detailed accounts—including the exact dimensions and color of the stained glass—of two chapels, the Edgar and Loretto chapels. They also mentioned two towers that had existed in the west end of the building, underground passages, and various other items that were totally unknown.

  In 1908 the money for the excavations was obtained. Bond’s workmen began to dig beyond the east wall. Soon they came upon a huge and unsuspected wall running north for thirty-one feet. Bond had found the Edgar Chapel, and its dimensions turned out to be exactly those that had been given by the monks. They had told him the chapel would be ninety feet long, which seemed too large. It proved to be eighty-seven feet long, and the wall and plinth added another three feet. The windows proved to be azure-colored, as the monks had foretold. Abbot Bere said the roof had been painted in gold and crimson; fragments of arch mouldings still had gold and crimson paint on them.

  Bond’s employers were delighted and astounded at his success; it seemed to them incredibly good luck that he seemed to dig trenches just where they would intersect a wall. Bond, understandably, decided to keep his source of information secret. The Church of England has always been thoroughly ambivalent about Spiritualism. Although Christians believe in life after death, the Church has always declined to be convinced that the “dead” who communicate at séances are really what they claim to be (an attitude, we have seen, that is to some extent justified). As late as 1936, the Archbishop of Canterbury commissioned a study on Spiritualism which eventually came up with the finding that its claims are probably true, and that there is no contradiction between its beliefs and that of the Church; the report was promptly suppressed.

  So Bond decided to keep his own council about his “communicators,” who called themselves the “Company of Glastonbury” or the “Watchers from the Other Side.” At times, this must have been difficult. Digging on the south side of the nave, looking for the towers (which proved to be exactly where the monks said they would be), Bond came upon a skeleton of a man almost seven feet fall. Between his legs there was another skull. It could hardly have been a case of murder, since the head of the skeleton rested on a stone cradle. Then why no coffin, and whose was the other skull in the grave? Bond asked his communicators, and they provided a prompt explanation. The skeleton—which was almost seven feet fall—was that of Radulphus Cancellarius, Ralph the Chancellor, a Norman who slew Eawulf the Saxon in fair fight. Eawulf was buried, and Ralph the Norman lived on for many years, although his bones had been broken by Eawulf’s axe. It was an odd coincidence that Eawulf’s skull should have turned up in the grave. Ralph asked to be buried outside the church he loved so much; Eawulf had been buried nearby, and his skull rolled into the grave . . .

  The communicators said that Ralph was the treasurer in the time of Abbot Thurstan, the first Norman abbot of Glastonbury. When William the Conqueror came to England in 1066, he installed his own Benedictine abbot on the Irish order already at Glastonbury. There was trouble, and some of the Irish monks were killed by Normans. Eawulf, according to the communicator, was the Earl of Edgarley, a nearby village, who was angry about the killings, and engaged Ralph in a combat which led to his own death.

  There was no historical record of an Earl of Edgarley, so Bond set out to find one. After many years, he found an entry in the Chronicle of Fabius Ethelwerd, dated 866 a.d. which mentioned “Eanulf,” a nobleman of Somerset, who was buried at Glastonbury; that might well be an ancestor of the later Eawulf—but Eanulf is not Eawulf, and a nobleman of Somerset is not necessarily the Earl of Edgarley. But the chronicle mentioned that Eanulf had died in the same year as Bishop Ealhstan of Scireburn. Then, in a chronicle called Annals of the Exploits of Alfred, dated 855 a.d., Bond found a reference to Eanwulf, earl of the district of Summurton, who had died at the same time as Bishop Ealhstan of Sherburne—obviously the same person. Summerton (Somerton) is a village close to Edgarley. And Eanwulf is spelled with both the n and w. So this Eanwulf was clearly an ancestor of the one who died in fair fight with Ralph the Chancellor, and he was, like his descendant, buried at Glastonbury. Obviously, the long-dead monks were right again. Moreover, when Bond examined the skeleton of Ralph, he found the forearm had been broken, as if from the blow of an axe, and had healed again—again supporting the story of the Watchers. The communicator added that the monks of Glaston had their reward, for a Saxon again was abbot for a time. History was able to confirm this: Abbot Thurstan’s excesses caused his removal by William the Conquerer, and he was succeeded by the Saxon Herlewin.

  By about 1917, Bond felt that it would probably be safe enough to tell the full story—after all, his excavations had been spectacularly successful. Besides, the Watchers told him that their aim was tha
t Glastonbury should once again be recognized as a major spiritual center, and telling the full story must have seemed to Bond the first step in that direction. So he wrote a book called Gate of Remembrance, in which all the communications are printed in full, together with the story of Ralph and Eawulf, and many others that are equally fascinating (for example, how the monks made their fatal mistake in inviting Henry the Eighth as guest to the abbey, hoping to gain his goodwill; they only succeeded in arousing his greed, and their downfall was assured). Gate of Remembrance came out in 1918. And Bond very quickly found himself out of a job. The Church of England was outraged to find that it had been—even inadvertently—involved in Spiritualism. Bond was squeezed out; by 1921 he had been reduced to cleaning and cataloguing the discoveries at £10 a month; by 1922, excavations at Glastonbury had been stopped, and he was unemployed. The Church even ordered that his books should not be sold at the abbey bookshop, an order which applies to this day.

  Bond went to America, lectured widely about his experiences, and became active in psychical research. But he was never allowed to return to Glastonbury—at one point, there was even an order forbidding him to enter the grounds. He continued to receive communications about the abbey—about underground passages, buried treasure, even about King Arthur and the Holy Grail (a skeleton believed to be that of Arthur was discovered at Glastonbury in 1190, with an inscription: “Here lies the renowned Arthur in the Isle of Avalon”). In later years, a group of Americans succeeded in getting permission to dig at Glastonbury—intending to follow up this information; but as soon as it leaked out that Bond was associated with the group, the trustees withdrew permission.

  Oddly enough, Bond himself did not take it for granted that the “Watchers” were dead monks; he thought that it might have been his own unconscious mind—the same part of the mind that seems to be able to locate underground water with a divining rod, or even dowse for water over a map. But this was typical of Bond. He refused to allow his remarkable success to influence his judgment as a scholar.