Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  I kept in touch with Maurice Grosse, who said he would let me know if there were any interesting developments. A few weeks later, Bob Cracknell rang me, to tell me that Shirley had walked out. She had been alone in the downstairs bar late at night, and had apparently seen something. She had refused to say what it was—had simply walked out and refused to go back. (I have her voice on tape saying how much she liked the pub, and that she had no intention of going away.) Mike himself, said Bob, also looked as if he was beginning to feel the strain; but he still said he had no intention of leaving.

  A few weeks later, Bob rang me again. Mike had quite suddenly decided he could take no more, and he too had walked out. He had found himself some kind of job in Africa, and intended to go in mid-January. Meanwhile, he badly needed a rest; could he come down and stay with us in Cornwall? I said he would be welcome and, in early January, Bob drove down with Mike, and left him with us. We could both see that Mike was under severe strain; he seemed exhausted and distracted. He admitted that he had been drinking very heavily, and said that this was because he had begun to feel permanently exhausted. Day after day, as he opened the pub and went down to the cellar, he encountered the same wall of cold at the foot of the stairs. Without Shirley, he had begun to feel the strain. One day, he suddenly felt that if he stayed there any longer, it would drive him into a nervous breakdown. He said that, late one night, he went down to the cellar, and said aloud: “All right, you’ve beaten me, I’m going.” Instantly, the place became freezing cold . . .

  Mike spent only a week with us, then decided to commit himself voluntarily to the local mental home at Bodmin. A few days in St. Lawrence’s Hospital worked wonders; among people who were severely ill, his natural vitality and dominance reasserted themselves. He discharged himself in less than a week, spent a few more days with us—now drinking moderately again—and finally left for Africa. I have a cassette on which he talks for two hours about his experiences in the King’s Cellars, and there is a great deal that I have left out of this account. As a poltergeist, the Croydon spirit was not particularly inventive; only incredibly persistent.

  Bob Cracknell rang me a few weeks later to say that he had interviewed the latest manager, who told him that he did not believe in ghosts. About a month later, he phoned again to say the manager had just left.

  My only other contact in the Croydon area was Stephen Jenkins, the author of The Undiscovered Country; I asked him if he would try and find out anything he could about the pub. His reply begins: “My researches into the supposed manifestations in the King’s Cellars, Park Street, Croydon, have come into the expected ‘no thoroughfare,’ as I rather foresaw . . .”He goes on:

  Two things are clear, however, which suggest strongly that we are dealing with an area in which unusual phenomena might be expected, in view of what your inquiries (and mine) elsewhere in this island have shown.

  First, an enormously long alignment passes quite close to the north-west end of the cellars. The alignment starts at the church in the moated site of Jericho Priory in Essex and goes to the centre of an earthwork at Valdoe. This is northeast of Chichester, and inside the great system of concentric circular alignments that center on the old Roman forum. This great Essex/West Sussex line passes through some important-seeming nodal points, some of which are (supposedly) the sites of curious manifestation . . .

  He goes on to say that a map of Croydon for 1847 shows a house in its own park close to the site of the present King’s Cellars. He concludes:

  All that I can offer is the observation that long experience has led me to expect odd occurrences to be situated on or very near alignments, especially at the nodes. Further, houses or the sites of buildings on or adjacent to leys are more likely to be the haunts of phenomena. I must not omit to note that the vanished house on the plan of 1874 touches—or is on—the long Jericho Priory to Valdoe earthwork alignment . . .

  In the Croydon case, then, the “human focus” theory seems to be unstable. A straightforward haunting remains a possibility, and here we have at least two “suspects”—the landlord who died at the foot of the stairs, and the girl who committed suicide from the Nestlé building. Before the King’s Cellars became a pub, it was a fire station, and this may also have been associated with some tragedy. Yet the disturbances are clearly of the poltergeist type, if we ignore the dubious sighting of a female ghost in the annex. The likeliest theory, then, is that we are here dealing with some mischievous entity of the elemental type, which draws some of its energy from human beings, and some from the site itself.

  This, of course, begs the question of what is an “elemental”? In his book Operation Trojan Horse, which deals with the mystery of UFOs, John Keel has a chapter which discusses the problem.

  Throughout history occultists have called these [mysterious visitors] elementals. There are several kinds of elementals in psychic lore. One type is supposedly conjured up by secret magical rites and can assume any form ranging from that of a beautiful woman to hideous, indescribable monsters. Once a witch or a warlock has whipped up such a critter, it will mindlessly repeat the same actions century after century in the same place until another occultist comes along and performs the rite necessary to dissolve it.

  Keel points out that these “thought forms” can be encountered in traditional magic from Tibet to Ireland. In Tibet they are called tulpas, and Alexandra David-Neel’s book on Tibet contains a great deal of information about them. She claims to have created an imaginative “projection” of a monk that looked so solid that a herdsman took him for a real lama. This thought form eventually began to get beyond her control and become hostile, and she claims that it took six months of hard work to “dematerialize” him. Otherwise he might have continued to haunt her, or, more likely, have remained behind in the area where he was created, and been seen by people as a ghost. George Owen’s Toronto team seem to have created a kind of tulpa in Philip, the manufactured ghost. In Psychic Self Defence, the occultist Dion Fortune has a story of how she involuntarily created an “elemental” when she was thinking negative thoughts about someone who had done her an injury. In a semi-dozing state, she thought of Fenris, the Nordic wolf-god—probably (although she does not say so) fantasizing on how satisfactory it would be to set it on her enemy.

  Immediately I felt a curious drawing-out sensation from my solar plexus, and there materialized beside me on the bed a large wolf . . . I knew nothing of the art of making elementals at that time, but had accidentally stumbled upon the right method—the brooding highly charged with emotion, the invocation of the appropriate natural force, and the condition between sleeping and waking in which the etheric double readily extrudes.

  She ordered the creature out of the room and it went. But when people in the house began to dream of wolves and imagine yellow eyes shining out of the darkness, she decided to “re-absorb” it, and succeeded in summoning it and then turning it into a “shapeless grey mist.”

  So, according to this fragment of magical lore, an elemental is not a spirit entity but a “thought form” which has somehow acquired a kind of life of its own. This view certainly offers a better explanation of fairies and similar creatures than Conan Doyle’s suggestion that they are a separate line of evolution. It suggests that “fairies” exist where people believe in them, and that you would expect to find a “ju-ju spirit” in Africa where generations have directed their thoughts at a particular tree as the home of an ancestral spirit, and “sidhe” in Ireland.

  This theory goes a long way toward explaining many traditional hauntings; for example, the old man of Ash Manor could conceivably have been a “thought form,” projected by some previous owner—perhaps accidentally, like Dion Fortune’s wolf—and revitalized by the atmosphere of hostility and neurosis in the family of the latest occupants. But why do so many such “ghosts” seem capable of poltergeist activity? The Cornish historian Harold Phelps has described his own encounter with a “ghost” in his old family home in a Berkshire village; the house had been bu
ilt in the time of Elizabeth the First by Sir John Phelps, executed in 1660. In the early 1920s, Harold Phelps was visiting the aunt who then lived in the house, and when she mentioned a haunted room, asked if he could sleep in it. He was then in his mid-teens and, as a science student, was firmly convinced of the unreality of the paranormal.

  For a considerable time . . . I lay as still as I could listening for the least sound. As absolutely nothing happened, I must have fallen into a deep sleep . . . At some moment in the night I was woken up very suddenly by a most frightful racket in the room. I reached for my torch, half-sitting up in bed, and even before I could switch on the torch I received a stinging slap across my left cheek. At the same instant I got the light on, and the room was obviously empty . . . The two cane chairs were overturned. . . and my money, keys and small effects had been knocked off the dressing-table and scattered all over the room.

  Here the deciding factor may have been that the teenage boy was an unconscious medium. But whatever was present in the “haunted room” was presumably there before he arrived. So again, we have the puzzling phenomenon of an entity that declines to fit any of the normal categories of psychical researches.

  Could it be, perhaps, that our preconceptions are simply too rigid, and that this is creating divisions and dichotomies where there are none? We are inclined to make a simple and sharp distinction: between living creatures (or spirits) and “illusions” or tape recordings, which—to some extent—owe their existence to the human mind. So, in a case like the one cited above, we ask: was there really a ghost present in the haunted room, or was it a delusion (or some form of projection) of Harold Phelps’ mind? Yet the two categories may not really be mutually exclusive. In the previous chapter, Eileen Garrett’s “control” Uvani declared: “Life cannot die. You can explode its dynamism, but you cannot dissipate its energy. If you suffered where life suffered, the essence that once filled the frame will take from you something to dramatize and live again.” To our normal way of thinking, this hardly seems to make sense. The “ghost” of the old man sounds like a “person,” not a revivified memory (i.e., a “recording”). But this is because we have the idea of a person so deeply embedded in our own way of thinking. We forget that it is connected largely with the physical body: a person looks solid and real so he must be an “individual.” Yet most people have experienced mental states—for example, in high fever—when the personality seems to have disintegrated. As absurd as it sounds, “I” am still there, but that “I” is not “me.” It is a kind of disembodied being without a “self.” People who have seen someone they know well lose their faculties—through illness or senility—have this same eerie sensation: that the body of the person remains, yet the “person” is no longer in it. In other words, our concept of a “personality” may contain certain fundamental errors. For example, if, in a high fever, “I” exist without my “personality,” then I could imagine my personality going elsewhere, and manifesting itself independent of “me.” And this seems to be getting close to what Uvani is talking about. Perhaps we shall not be in a position to understand ghosts and poltergeists until we have eliminated the errors from our thinking.

  The Glastonbury Scripts hint at this same concept of personality. The monk Johannes asked, at one point:

  Why cling I to that which is not? It is I, and it is not I, but parte of me which dwelleth in the past and is bound to that whych my carnal soul loved and called “home” these many years. Yet I, Johannes, amm of many partes, and ye better parte doeth other things Laus, Laus Deo! [praise be to God]—only that part which remembereth clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet.

  Here there are many suggestive hints “It is I, and it is not I”—“part of me which dwelleth in the past” and “which remembereth [and] clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet.” And this presumably means that if some “sensitive” at Glastonbury saw the “ghost” of Johannes, it would be seeing this part of him that clings to the past, not “ye better parte.” All of which suggests that our simplistic notion of a “soul” inside a body may be too crude to explain the facts of psychic phenomena. It totally fails, for example, to explain what happens in the “projection of the double”—as when Mrs. Fielding made her double visit her husband in their home while her body sat in the laboratory. We have also seen that in many cases, people are unaware that they are projecting their “double”—like Canon Bourne; which implies that the everyday “I” which knows what we are doing is quite ignorant of a great deal that goes on inside us. In occult philosophy, the double—or doppelganger—is also known as the “etheric double.”

  There also seems to be a part of us that could be called the “mental double.” This is illustrated in another classic case, that of Gordon Davis, recorded by the well-known investigator Dr. S. G. Soal. At the turn of the century, Dr. Soal was at school with a boy called Gordon Davis, and in 1920, he heard that Davis had been killed in the Great War. Soal began attending séances with Mrs. Blanche Cooper in 1921, and at one of these séances, the “spirit” of Gordon Davis spoke through the medium. It declared that its only worry now were the wife and children. Davis asked Soal if he remembered their last conversation, and reminded him that it had been a chance meeting on a train. At a subsequent séance, Davis tried to describe the house where his wife lived. There were six steps—or rather, five and a half. It was not in a street but in “half a street.” Opposite the house there was “something like a veranda.” There was a kind of dark tunnel nearby. In the house there was a big mirror and various pictures of landscapes, as well as some large vases. Downstairs, a room with brass candlesticks on the shelf. A woman and a little boy lived in the house . . .

  Three years later, Soal learned by chance that the house was in Southend-on-Sea, and he went to investigate. Everything was exactly as the “spirits” had described it. The house was on the esplanade facing the sea—therefore on “half a street.” Opposite the house was a bus-shelter—a kind of “veranda.” There were six steps, one of which was very thin. There was a dark tunnel next to the house leading to the back gardens of the block. Inside the house there was a large mirror, various landscapes, big vases, and brass candlesticks in the downstairs dining room. And Gordon Davis himself was in the house, alive and well, together with his wife and five-year-old son. Davis had no knowledge whatever about the “spirit” that had given all this information at the séance.

  It is conceivable, of course, that this was another earth-bound spirit playing games. But if not, then it was a fragment of Davis’ personality that was wandering around—unknown to its owner.

  A book called Journeys Out of the Body seems to support this latter view. The author, Robert Monroe, is an American businessman who one day, to his astonishment, found that he could leave his body—the ability known as “astral projection.” In August 1963, he decided to “visit” a female business acquaintance whom he calls R.W. He found himself in her kitchen, sitting in a chair and drinking from a glass; two girls were also with her. He asked R.W. if she knew he was there, and she replied (mentally), “Oh yes.” He asked her if she would remember, and she said she would. Monroe said he would pinch her to make sure, and did so; she gave a loud shout of pain. Later, Monroe asked her what had happened. She had no memory whatever of seeing or conversing (mentally) with Monroe. But she was in the kitchen with two girls; she suddenly felt a pinch, and jumped up in alarm. She showed Monroe the bruise produced by the pinch (which seems to demonstrate, beyond all doubt, that the “astral body” can produce physical effects). On another occasion, Monroe visited the researcher Andrija Puharich in his study, and held a mental conversation with him. Puharich later agreed that he had been in the study and that everything Monroe said about it was correct; but he had no memory of a conversation.

  In his book The Romeo Error, Lyall Watson reviews the evidence for “astral travel,” and makes the suggestion that human beings may have no less than seven “bodies” or levels upon which they exist, the first three being the physical body, the ??
?etheric” level (the level of the “aura” which is supposed to surround the human body), and the astral level. The Spiritualist philosophy asserts that when we die, we move on to the “astral plane,” shedding the physical body like a garment; but there are various planes beyond this. This suggests the interesting notion that if human beings possess an “astral body,” they may also possess “bodies” belonging to the various other planes. And we have already seen that some such notion seems to be suggested by the whole problem of multiple personality. It is as if human beings contain a whole series of “selves,” arranged in the form of a ladder (a concept I have developed at length in a book called Mysteries).

  Monroe’s experiences “outside the body” seem to be in many ways consistent with notions explored in this book. For example, in a chapter called “Intelligent Animals,” he writes: “Throughout man’s history, the reports have been consistent. There are demons, spirits, goblins, gremlins and assorted sub-human entities always hanging around humanity to make life miserable.” And he, goes on to describe a number of disturbing experiences in his “OOB” states. A kind of child climbed on to his back, and forced him to “retreat” back into his body. The next time he “left the body,” the same entity climbed on to his back; when he tugged at the leg, it stretched like rubber. Two of the rubbery beings—which now seemed shapeless—proceeded to “attack”’ him, although it was with a casual persistence rather than malice. Finally, a “man” came along, picked up the two entities, and seemed to cause them to deflate. On another occasion, Monroe was threatened—or attacked—by three humanoid figures who seemed to be hooligans of the astral plane. He also describes an attack from some sort of invisible animal that seemed to be determined to “take” vitality from him—a struggle he terminated by returning to his physical body, which lay in bed.