Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  She was a tall, thin girl of fourteen, and the trouble had begun when she started to menstruate. She began sleep-walking, and developed hysterical blindness. Yet she was still able to see through the tip of her nose, and through her left ear. Lombroso tried binding her eyes with a bandage, then took a letter out of his pocket and held it a few inches away from her nose; she read it as if her eyes were uncovered. To make sure she was not peeping under the bandages, Lombroso held another page near her left ear; again, she read it aloud without difficulty. And even without the bandage, she would not have been able to read a letter held at the side of her head.

  Next he tried holding a bottle of strong smelling salts under her nose; it did not make the slightest impression. But when it was held under her chin, she winced and gasped. He tried substances with only the slightest trace of odor—substances he could not smell if he held them two inches away from his own nose. When they were under her chin, she could identify every one of them.

  If he still had any doubts, they vanished during the next few weeks when her sense of smell suddenly transferred itself to the back of her foot. If disagreeable smells were brought close to her heel, she writhed in agony; pleasant ones made her sigh with delight.

  This was not all. The girl also developed the power of prediction. She was able to predict weeks ahead precisely when she would have fits, and exactly how they could be cured. Lombroso, naturally, did not accept this as genuine prediction, since she might have been inducing the fits—consciously or otherwise—to make her predictions come true. But she then began to predict things that would happen to other members of the family; and these came about just as she had foretold.

  In medical journals, Lombroso found many similar cases. One girl who developed hysterical symptoms at puberty could accurately distinguish colors with her hands. An eleven-year-old girl who suffered a back wound was able to hear through her elbow. Another pubescent girl could read a book with her stomach when her eyes were bandaged. Another hysterical woman developed X-ray eyes, and said she could see worms in her intestines—she actually counted them and said there were thirty-three; in due course she excreted precisely this number of worms. A young man suffering from hysteria could read people’s minds, and reproduce drawings and words written on a sheet of paper when his eyes were tightly bandaged.

  Lombroso may have been a determined materialist; but he was willing to study the facts. And the facts led him into stranger and stranger regions of speculation. To begin with, he developed a simple and ingenious theory of the human faculties, pointing out that seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling all take place through the nerves, and that if one of these faculties becomes paralyzed there is no scientific reason why another should not take over. When he attended a séance with the famous “medium” Eusapia Palladino, and saw a table floating up into the air, he simply extended his theory, and argued that there is no reason why “psychological force” should not change into “motor force.” But when he began to study other cases of prediction and “second sight,” he had to admit that it became increasingly difficult to keep the explanations within the bounds of materialistic science. There was the case of a woman who refused to stay in a theater because she suddenly had a conviction that her father was dying; she got home and found a telegram to that effect. A doctor who suffered from hysterical symptoms foresaw the great fire of 1894 at the Como Exposition, and persuaded his family to sell their shares in a fire insurance company which had to meet the claims; when the fire occurred, his family was glad they took his advice. A woman whose daughter was playing near a railway line heard a voice telling her the child was in danger; she fetched her indoors half an hour before a train jumped the rails and ploughed through the spot where her daughter had been playing.

  Slowly, and with painful reluctance, the skeptical scientist was converted to the view that the world was a far more complex place than his theories allowed. His colleagues were outraged. His biographer and translator, Hans Kurella, came to the conclusion that this was all a painful aberration due to the decay of his faculties—an argument difficult to sustain, since Lombroso was only forty-seven when he became interested in these matters, and he lived for more than a quarter of a century longer. Kurella can only bring himself to mention “Lombroso’s Spiritualistic Researchers” in a short afterword to his biography, and his comments are scathing. Talking about Eusapia Palladino, whose séances he had attended, he agreed that she was indeed a “miracle”—“a miracle of adroitness, false bonhomie, well-simulated candor, naivete, and artistic command of all the symptoms of hysterico-epilepsy.” Which may well be true, but still does not explain how she was able to make a table rise up into the air when Lombroso and other scientists were holding her hands and feet.

  Lombroso struggled manfully to stay within the bounds of science; he devised all kinds of ingenious instruments for testing mediums during séances. But, little by little, he found himself sucked into that ambiguous, twilight world of the “paranormal.” Having studied mediums in civilized society, he turned his attention to tribal witch-doctors and shamans, and found that they could produce the same phenomena. But they always insisted that they did this with the help of the “spirit world”—the world of the dead. And the more he looked into this, the more convincing it began to appear. And so, finally, he turned his attention to the topic that every good scientist dismisses as an old wives’ tale: haunted houses. Here again, personal experience soon convinced him of their reality.

  His most celebrated case concerned a wine shop in the Via Bava in Turin. In November 1900, he heard interesting rumors about how a destructive ghost was making life very difficult for the family of the proprietor, a Signor Fumero. Bottles smashed, tables and chairs danced about, kitchen utensils flew across the room. So Lombroso went along to the wine shop, and asked the proprietor if there was any truth in the stories. Indeed there was, said Fumero, but the disturbances had now stopped. Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had now gone away. “You interest me extremely,” replied Lombroso. “Allow me to introduce myself.” And he presented his card. Fumero looked deeply embarrassed, and admitted that the story about Lombroso was an invention, intended to discourage the curious. For it seemed that the Italian police had been called in, and that they had witnessed the strange disturbances and told Signor Fumero that, unless this stopped at once, he would find himself in serious trouble. So Fumero had invented this story of how the famous Professor Lombroso had visited the house, and the ghost had taken his departure.

  In fact, the proprietor admitted, the ghost was as active as ever; and if the professor would care to see with his own eyes, he only had to step down to the cellar.

  Down below the house was a deep wine cellar, approached by a flight of stairs and a long passageway. The proprietor led the way. The cellar was in complete darkness; but as they entered there was a noise of smashing glass, and some bottles struck Lombroso’s foot. A lighted candle revealed rows of shelves with bottles of wine. And as Lombroso stood there, three empty bottles began to spin across the floor, and shattered against the leg of a table that stood in the middle of the cellar. On the floor, below the shelves, were the remains of broken bottles and wine. Lombroso took the candle over to the shelves, and examined them closely to see if there could be invisible wires to cause the movement. There were none; but as he looked, half a dozen bottles gently rose from the shelves, as if someone had lifted them, and exploded on the floor. Finally, as they left the cellar and closed the door behind them, they heard the smashing of another bottle.

  The cellar was not the only place in the house where these things occurred. Chairs and plates flew around the kitchen. In the servants’ room, a brass grinding machine flew across the room so violently that it was flattened out of shape; Lombroso examined it with amazement. The force to flatten it must have been considerable; if it had struck someone’s head, it would surely have killed him. The odd thing was that the ghost seemed to do no one any harm. On one occasion, as the proprieto
r was bending down in the cellar, a large bottle of wine had burst beside his head; if it had struck him it would have done him a severe injury. Moreover, the “entity” seemed to have the power to make bottles “explode” without dropping them. They would hear a distinct cracking sound; then a bottle would fly into splinters.

  Now Lombroso knew enough about hauntings to know that this was not an ordinary ghost. The ordinary ghost stays around in a house for many years, perhaps for centuries, and manifests itself to many people. But this bottle-smashing ghost was of the kind that the Germans call a poltergeist—or noisy spirit. Such “hauntings” usually last only a short period—seldom more than six months—and they often seem to be associated with a “medium”—that is, with some particular person who “causes” them, in exactly the same way that Eusapia Palladino caused a table to rise into the air.

  In this case, Lombroso suspected the wife of Signor Fumero, a skinny little woman of fifty, who seemed to him to be distinctly neurotic. She admitted that ever since infancy she had been subject to neuralgia, nervous tremors and hallucinations; she had also had an operation to remove her ovaries. Ever since the case of the girl who could see with her ear, Lombroso had noticed that these people with peculiar “powers” seemed to be nervously unstable. He therefore advised Signor Fumero to try sending his wife for a holiday. She went back to her native town for three days, and during that period, the wine shop was blessedly quiet—although Signora Fumero suffered from hallucinations while she was away, believing she could see people who were invisible to everyone else.

  It looked as if Lombroso had stumbled on the correct solution. But it was not so simple. On Signora Fumero’s return, all the disturbances began again; so, to make doubly sure, Lombroso again suggested that she should go home for a few days. The poor woman was understandably irritated at being banished from her home on account of the spirits; and before she left, she cursed them vigorously. That apparently annoyed them, for this time the disturbances went on while she was away. On the day she left, a pair of her shoes came floating out of her bedroom and down the stairs, and landed at the feet of some customers who were drinking in the bar. The following day the shoes vanished completely, to reappear under the bed a week later. Worse still, plates and bottles in the kitchen exploded or fell on the floor. But Signor Fumero noticed an interesting fact. It was only the plates and bottles that had been touched by his wife that smashed. If another woman set the table—preferably in another place—nothing happened. It was almost as if the objects she had touched had picked up some form of energy from her . . .

  So his wife came back from her home town, and the disturbances continued as before. A bottle of soda water rose up gently in the bar, floated across the room as if someone were carrying it, and smashed on the floor.

  It seemed, then, that Signora Fumero was not to blame; at least, not entirely. So who was? There were only three other suspects. Signor Fumero could be dismissed—he was a “brave old soldier,” and not at all the hysterical type. There was a head waiter, who seemed to be an ordinary, typical Italian. But there was also a young waiter—a lad of thirteen, who was unusually tall. Lombroso may have recalled that the girl who could see through her ear was also unusually tall, and that she had grown about six inches in a year immediately before her problems began. This boy had also reached puberty.

  Accordingly, he was dismissed, and the “haunting” of number 6 Via Bava immediately ceased.

  As a scientist, Lombroso’s problem was to find an explanation that would cover the facts. At a fairly early stage, he was convinced that they were facts, and not delusions. He wrote to a friend in 1891:

  I am ashamed and sorrowful that with so much obstinacy I have contested the possibility of the so-called spiritualistic facts. I say the facts, for I am inclined to reject the spiritualistic theory; but the facts exist, and as regards facts I glory in saying that I am their slave.

  By “spiritualistic theory” he meant belief in life after death. At this stage he was inclined to believe that he was dealing with some kind of purely mental force.

  I see nothing inadmissible in the supposition that in hysterical and hypnotized persons the stimulation of certain centers, which become powerful owing to the paralyzing of all the others, and thus give rise to a transposition and transmission of psychical forces, may also result in a transformation into luminous or motor force.

  He compared it to the action of a magnet in deflecting a compass needle.

  But ten years later he had come to recognize that this theory failed to cover “the facts.” It might be stretched to cover the case of the wine shop poltergeist, if the young waiter was an “unconscious” medium, and was using his magnetic powers without realizing it. But by that time, Lombroso had also studied many cases of haunted houses, and he concluded that there are basically two types: those like the Via Bava, in which there is a “medium” (and which usually last only a few weeks or months), and the more traditional haunting, which may last for centuries. Lombroso apparently never had a chance to study this second type directly, but he went about collecting evidence from witnesses he judged reliable. When he heard about Glenlee, a haunted house in Scotland, he asked a friend named Professor Scott Elliott to investigate. Elliott went to see a girl who had lived in the house, and sent Lombroso the following story. Glenlee was owned by a family called Maxwell, and was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a lady who had poisoned her husband. A visitor named Mrs. Stamford Raffles was lying in bed beside her husband when she saw in the firelight a cloud of mist, which gradually turned into the shape of an old woman. The room became icy cold. The old woman seemed to be looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. Another visitor, Mrs. Robert Gladstone, had the same experience—but during the day, with the sun shining; the same cloud of mist, the same old woman looking at the clock.

  Since the stories cited by Lombroso are second-hand, and lacking in the kind of precise detail that is to be found in that of the wine shop, let me offer here a case of haunting that provides a better comparison. It is to be found in Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book.

  In the 1890s, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould published in the Cornhill Magazine a “true ghost story” about a house in Lille. A Mrs. Pennyman, who had been involved in the case, wrote a long letter in which she corrected the inaccuracies of Baring-Gould’s account. Her own is as follows:

  In 1865, when she was a girl, Mrs. Pennyman’s family had gone to France so that the children could learn French; and they rented a house in Lille, where they had a number of introductions. The rent of the house—in the Place du Lion d’Or—struck them as remarkably low. When they went to the bank to cash a letter of credit, they found out why. The place was reputed to have a revenant—a ghost. In fact, the girl and her mother had been awakened by footsteps overhead, but had assumed it was a servant moving about. After the visit to the bank, they enquired who was sleeping overhead, and were told that it was an empty garret.

  Their maid soon heard the story of the revenant from the French servants. A young man who was heir to the house had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The story had it that he had been confined in an iron cage in the attic by his uncle, who later killed him. The uncle sold the house, but it had never been occupied for long because of the ghost.

  The family went to look in the garret, and found that there was a cage. It was eight feet high and four feet square, and was attached to the wall. Inside there was an iron collar on a rusty chain.

  Ten days later, the maidservant asked if she could change rooms. She and another maid slept in a room between the main stairs and the back staircase, and which therefore had two doors. They had seen a tall, thin man walking through the room, and had buried their faces under the bedclothes. The mother told the maids to move into another bedroom.

  Soon after this, the girl and her brother went upstairs to fetch something from their mother’s room, and saw “a thin figure in a powdering gown and wearing hair down the back” going up the stairs in front of them.
They thought it was a servant called Hannah, and called after her, “You can’t frighten us.” But when they got back to their mother, she told them that Hannah had gone to bed with a headache; they checked and found her fast asleep. When they described the figure, the maids said that it was the one which they had seen.

  Another brother came from the university to stay. He was awakened by a noise, and looked out of the door to see a man on the stairs. He assumed his mother had sent a servant to see if he had put out his candle, and was angry about it. His mother told him she had not sent anyone.

  By now, the family had found themselves another house. Some English friends named Atkyns called a few days before they left, and were interested to hear about the ghost. Mrs. Atkyns volunteered to sleep in the room with her dog. The next morning, Mrs. Atkyns looked tired and distraught. She had also seen the man wandering through the bedroom. The dog seems to have refused to attack it.

  Just before they left the house, the girl herself saw the ghost. By this time they were so accustomed to the footsteps that they ignored them; but they kept a candle burning in their room. She woke up to see a tall, thin figure in a long gown, its arm resting on a chest of drawers. She could clearly see the face, which was that of a young man with a melancholy expression. When she looked again, he had disappeared. The bedroom door was locked.

  This was the story as told by Mrs. Pennyman. Lord Halifax sent it to the Reverend Baring-Gould, who later sent him a letter he received from a reader of his account in the Cornhill Magazine. From this letter, it appeared that the haunted house had been transformed into a hotel in the 1880s. The reader—a lady—described how she and two friends had stayed at the Hotel du Lion d’Or in May 1887, and it is clear that one of the bedrooms they were given was the room in which the two servant girls had seen the ghost. The lady herself slept in the next room, and settled down after dinner to write letters. The hotel was very quiet—they were apparently the only guests—but toward midnight she heard footsteps on the landing outside the door. Then one of the ladies in the next bedroom—which was connected to her own—tapped on the door and asked if she was all right; she had been awakened by footsteps walking up and down. The two ladies unlocked the door and peered out on to the landing; but there was no one there, and no sound either. So they went back to bed. As she fell asleep, the lady continued to hear the slow, dragging steps which seemed to come from outside her door. They left Lille the next morning, and she thought no more about the experience until she read Baring-Gould’s account in the Cornhill and realized that she had probably heard the ghost of the Place du Lion d’Or.