Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  It is Playfair’s contention that, after fifteen hundred years of poltergeist observation, and a century of psychical research, it is no longer true to say that our position is one of complete ignorance. “If it were the mating habits of cockroaches, there’d be quite enough evidence for someone to produce a definitive paper in Nature.” In This House Is Haunted, he lists the nineteen or so “symptoms” of what he calls “the poltergeist syndrome,” beginning with raps and ending with equipment failure of cameras, tape recorders and so on. He points out that in some cases, only half a dozen of these appear—let us say raps, overturning furniture, apports, “possession” and outbreaks of fire.

  You always get them in the same order. You don’t get puddles of water before stone throwing, you don’t get fires before raps. So that there is a predictable behavior pattern. They appear to be random to us, but they’re obeying some sort of rules that they understand even if we don’t.[3]

  What can we say about these rules?

  We can say there is a source of energy. There has to be, because physical work is being carried out, and since it’s being carried out in our space and our dimension, then it has to obey at least some of the laws of mechanics.

  And he goes on to suggest that this energy source (the poltergeist) could be compared to a crowd of mischievous children who find a football in a field (some form of energy extruded from a “leaking” human being) and proceed to kick it around, smashing a few windows in the process.

  The Brazilian novelist Chico Xavier, who claims that his novels come through “dictation” from “spirits,” states in one of his books (quoted by Playfair in The Indefinite Boundary) that the source of this “energy plasma” is the pineal gland. This gland, a tiny grey mass like a slightly flattened pea, lies roughly in the center of the brain, and seems to be a vestigial eye. In some creatures, like the Tuatera lizard of New Zealand, it is still a non-functioning eye. One of its chief purposes is the inhibiting of the sexual hormones—people with a damaged pineal show abnormal sexual development. There is some evidence that it also plays some role in the evolution of our higher functions; when the brain cells are deprived of the chemical messenger serotonin (secreted by the pineal gland) we become incapable of rational thought. At puberty, according to Xavier, it ceases to be purely a controlling mechanism, and becomes a fountain of energy, an escape valve. It secretes “psychic hormones” that generate creative energy. These energies represent our “spiritual potential”; unfortunately, most of us are inclined to misuse them for purely animal sensations. (De Sade would probably be a good example of extreme misuse.) When a child suddenly acquires this new force, at the age of puberty, there is a need for a channel or outlet—perhaps vigorous sporting or sexual activity. If this outlet is lacking, Playfair suggests, the energy will be available for “marauding entities to steal and put to their own purposes.” “Perhaps if Brazilian girls played hockey or lacrosse there would be fewer poltergeists in São Paulo.”

  The vital force involved seems to have some resemblance to electricity or magnetism. This is what the Hunas call mana. And since the earth is covered with living creatures and organism—it may even be regarded as a living organism in itself—then it also, presumably, has a permanent supply of this force (what Stringer calls Tellurian force). This force may be said to have been discovered, as far as Europeans are concerned, by Mesmer, who also made the interesting discovery since forgotten by Western science—that it can be influenced by magnets and by various metals. Half a century later, it was rediscovered by Baron Reichenbach, who called it “odic force.” According to the kahunas, this is the force used by poltergeists. (It may even be involved in that still-unexplained phenomenon, spontaneous combustion, which seems to be largely confined to the old in the way that poltergeist phenomena are largely confined to the young.) The poltergeist uses mana to solidify its own “shadowy body,” and so can act upon objects.

  Clearly, there is a great deal of this energy available: not just in children at puberty, but in sexually frustrated adults, and even in the earth itself, where it seems to be concentrated at certain points. (Presumably ancient peoples chose such points as sacred sites because they attracted spirits.) Mediums also seem to produce large quantities of this force—perhaps secreting it as a cow comes to secrete milk. Under the controlled conditions of a séance, this force seems to return to its origin, like an electrical circuit; but mediums who are awakened violently seem to be drained of vitality, and often stunned, as if by an electric shock. (It is another odd fact that very many successful mediums become physically large, as if to compensate for this draining effect; those who—like Home—remain thin often seem to die young.)

  According to Long, each of man’s three “selves” possesses its own astral (or “shadowy”) body. He says: “[Mana] is electrical in its nature and shows strong magnetic qualities. The invisible substance through which the vital force acts is called aka, or ‘shadowy body stuff.’ ” When Long considered the Huna word for the lower self, unihipili, he was puzzled that it contained the root pili, meaning sticky. What was sticky, he later concluded, was the “shadowy body,” which sticks to anything we contact or see, like the glue on fly paper. This explains how psychometry works: the “stickiness” transfers itself through touch, and can be “read” by a “paragnost.” This stickiness can be drawn out into long, fine threads, like spiderweb; and, according to the kahunas, these filaments are the conductors of psychic force. Telepathy operates by means of these telephone wires of aka; people who have “out of the body” experiences remained connected to the physical body by a cord of this substance.

  The “electrical” nature of mana also explains why so many poltergeists seem to be associated with electrical forces. The clergyman in the Esther Cox case was convinced that her powers were basically electrical. And in the case of the Rosenheim poltergeist, which occurred in a small town near Munich in the mid-1960s, all the early manifestations were electrical: strip lights exploded, electrical apparatus failed to function, and even a one and a half volt battery registered three volts. The telephone registered enormous numbers of calls to the “speaking clock”—far more per minute than could actually be dialed—and the investigator Hans Bender, realized that the poltergeist must be getting through direct to the relays. (This need not imply that the poltergeist understood the telephone system; bursts of electrical energy could trip the relays.[4])

  It is also worth noting that one of the commonest delusions of mental patients is that they are being subjected to persecution by electric shocks—which could be explained as an excess of unused mana.

  How does the poltergeist use this energy? Here again, scientific observation has produced a great deal of data. Objects are not thrown in the normal way, for they can change direction in mid-air; they seem to be “carried” by the poltergeist. (Diane Pritchard described to me her sensation of being somehow enveloped in the energy as the poltergeist dragged her upstairs.) Why this should be so is another of those “laws” of poltergeist phenomena which we can observe, but for which we have no explanation. It may be that the poltergeist cannot convert this energy into the ordinary kinetic energy necessary for throwing. And this, in turn, underlines Guy Playfair’s point that poltergeists do not seem to live in our “dimension.” This may explain how they can cause “interpenetration of matter”—like the Borley ghost, which caused bottles from a shed to hurtle into the hall through locked doors, or the “black monk” who emptied eggs from a box when Jean Pritchard was sitting on the lid. This whole phenomenon is again connected with oddities for which we have no explanation. “Apports” are usually warm, and in many cases, objects that have been thrown are heavier than before they were thrown.

  Another oddity is that poltergeist noises do not seem to be normal sounds; when analyzed on a graph they show a “ramp function” which is unlike the “gradual curve” of a normal sound of knuckles rapping on wood. They are like noises manufactured in an electronics lab. Yet there seems to be an “interface,” a po
int of connection, between the “dimension” of the poltergeist and “our world”; when Bill Haylock spoke—in the Enfield case—he somehow used Janet’s vocal cords.

  We have also noted, in the course of this book, that poltergeists seem—to a limited extent—to be capable of “possessing” human beings. In a book called The Supernatural in Cornwall, Michael Williams has described a case that took place at St. Issey in 1941, when poltergeist disturbances began in a small cottage immediately after the death of a baby girl. A nine-year-old boy—brother of the dead child—was suspected of causing some of the effects. The boy admitted this was so, but said that he had been somehow forced to get up from the settee and lift a table. A witness spied on the boy when he was alone in the living room, and saw him throw a tin can across the room—whereupon the tin rose of its own accord and flew back. But the local vicar was unconvinced, and accused the boy of causing all the phenomena. Convinced of his innocence, the boy’s mother tied his hands behind his back with a belt and sent him into the scullery; and, as they watched through the door, they saw pots, pans and chairs dancing round the room. When the boy was sent away, the phenomena ceased. Here it seems clear that the shock of his sister’s death caused the kind of “energy leak” that gave the poltergeist its energy. But it was also able to force the boy to throw things. This should be borne in mind in considering Podmore’s comment that poltergeists are usually children throwing things. No doubt this is often true; and in some of the cases, the child is unable to help it.

  This, then, seems to be the sum of what we know, and what we can deduce, about the poltergeist. It is not, perhaps, a great deal; yet it is surely enough for us to assert that the poltergeist, like the duck-billed platypus, really exists, and that some of its habits have now been positively established.

  One interesting question still clamors for an answer. Why does the malice of the poltergeist seem to be so distinctly limited? They could quite easily kill; yet there is no recorded case in which they have done so. Heavy wardrobes miss people by a fraction of an inch; fires break out in locked cupboards and drawers a few minutes before they are “accidentally” discovered. Is there some psychic “law” that prevents poltergeists from being more destructive? Or does the answer lie—as the kahunas declare—in the nature of the poltergeist itself? They assert that a poltergeist is a “low spirit” that has somehow become separated from its proper middle and high spirit. Unlike the middle spirit, it possesses memory; but it has only the most rudimentary powers of reason. It may be mischievous, but it is not evil. Only the middle spirit is capable of evil—of directed, murderous malice. So, according to the kahunas, the poltergeist is only capable of such malice when it is directed by a human magician.

  As usual, the conclusion seems to be that, where evil is concerned, human beings have a monopoly.

  [1]. The King’s Cellars was later renamed Goody’s Bar. The manifestations have stopped.

  [2]. Fodor: The Haunted Mind, chapters 7 and 9.

  [3]. These comments come from a taped interview with Playfair.

  [4]. There is a full account of the case in my book Mysteries.

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