Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  Stories of this type inevitably raise suspicions in the mind of the scientific investigator; they sound just a little too dramatic to be true—the young man confined in an iron cage, and so on. Yet since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, thousands of well-authenticated cases have been recorded. Sir Ernest Bennett’s Apparitions and Haunted Houses, for example, contains more than a hundred carefully documented cases, and many of these have the same suspiciously dramatic air that suggests an active imagination. Case five will serve as an illustration: a General Barter of County Cork describes seeing the ghost of a certain Lieutenant B. in India—riding on a pony in the moonlight, complete with two Hindu servants. The general said: “Hello, what the devil do you want?” The ghost came to a halt and looked down at him; and the general noticed that he now had a beard, and that his face was fatter than when he knew him some years before. Another officer who had known Lieutenant B. immediately before his death later verified that he had grown a beard and become stout, and that the pony he was riding had been purchased at Peshawur (where he died of some sickness) and killed through reckless riding.

  It certainly sounds a highly unlikely story. Yet it is confirmed (in writing) by an officer to whom the general told it immediately afterwards, by the general’s wife, and by a major. The wife also states that they heard a horse galloping at breakneck speed around their house at night on several occasions, and adds that the house was built by Lieutenant B. Finally, Bennett himself confirmed with the war office that Lieutenant B. had died at Peshawur in January 1854. So although only General Barter saw the ghost, the evidence for the truth of his story seems strong. Other ghosts cited by Bennett were witnessed by many people—for example, the ghost of a chimney sweep who died of cancer, and who returned to his cottage every night for two months, until the whole family (including five children) began to take it for granted.

  It is worth noting that nearly all ghosts mentioned in the records of the Society for Psychical Research look like ordinary solid human beings; so it seems probable that most people have at some time seen a ghost without realizing it. The late T. C. Lethbridge has described in his book Ghost and Ghoul how, when he was about to leave a friend’s room at Cambridge in 1922, he saw a man in a top hat come into the room—he presumed it was a college porter who had to give a message. The next day he asked his friend what the porter wanted, and the friend flatly denied that anyone had come into the room as Lethbridge went out. It then struck Lethbridge that the man had been wearing hunting kit. If he had not happened to mention it to his friend, he would never have known that he had seen a ghost.

  Now Lombroso, who died in 1909, gradually abandoned his skepticism, and came to accept the spiritualistic hypothesis that ghosts are, quite simply, spirits of the dead, and that the same probably applies to poltergeists, even though these can only manifest themselves when there is a “medium” present. The title of his book about his researches, which was published posthumously, was After Death—What? (This question would have struck him as regrettably sensational twenty years earlier.) In other words, Lombroso made no clear distinction between poltergeists and “apparitions.” But even in 1909, this assumption would have been widely questioned. One of the most obvious things that emerged from the thousands of cases recorded by the SPR was that the majority of ghosts do not seem to notice the onlookers. (In this respect, General Barter’s case was an exception. In fact, they behave exactly as if they are a kind of film projection. They wander across a room looking anxious—like the ghost of the Lion d’Or—as if re-enacting some event from the past. This led a number of eminent investigators—among them Sir Oliver Lodge—to suggest that some ghosts, at any rate, may be no more than a kind of “recording.” In Man and the Universe, Lodge writes:

  Occasionally a person appears able to respond to stimuli embedded . . . among psycho-physical surroundings in a manner at present ill-understood and almost incredible:—as if strong emotions could be unconsciously recorded in matter [my italics], so that the deposit shall thereafter affect a sufficiently sensitive organism and cause similar emotions to reproduce themselves in the sub-consciousness, in a manner analogous to the customary conscious interpretation of photographic or phonographic records, and indeed of pictures or music and artistic embodiment generally.

  Take, for example, a haunted house . . . wherein some one room is the scene of a ghostly representation of some long past tragedy. On a psychometric hypothesis the original tragedy has been literally photographed on its material surroundings, nay, even on the ether itself, by reason of the intensity of emotion felt by those who enacted it; and thenceforth in certain persons an hallucinatory effect is experienced corresponding to such an impression. It is this theory that is made to account for the feeling one has on entering certain rooms, that there is an alien presence therein, though it is invisible and inaudible to mortal sense . . .

  But why should this “hallucinatory effect” be produced only on “certain persons”? Why not everybody? To answer this, we need to understand what Lodge meant by the “psychometric hypothesis.” Psychometry means the ability to “read” the history of objects by touching them. The word seems to have been coined by a professor of medicine called Joseph Rodes Buchanan around the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1842, Buchanan was intrigued when Bishop Leonidas Polk (who would become a civil war general) told him that if he touched brass in the dark, it produced a distinct taste in his mouth. Buchanan tested him and found this to be true. Then he tried experimenting with his students at the

  Cincinnati medical school, wrapping various metals and chemicals in brown paper parcels, and asking students to see if they could identify them by holding them in their hands. An amazing number were successful. Buchanan concluded that our nerves give off some kind of “aura”—like an electric field—which can penetrate the brown paper, and somehow convey the taste of the substance to the mouth.

  What surprised him even more was that “good psychometers” could take a letter in the hand, and describe the character and the emotions of the person who wrote it. Presumably, then, the character of the writer had somehow been “recorded” on the letter, and could be “picked up” by a sensitive person.

  William Denton, a professor of geology at Boston, was interested by Buchanan’s account of his experiments, and tried repeating them. He used geological samples wrapped in paper. Once again, the success rate was remarkable. A good “psychometer” sensed a volcanic explosion when handed a piece of Hawaiian lava, vast depths of empty space with stars when handed a meteor fragment, and immense depths of ice when handed a pebble from a glacier.

  Now obviously, there is no “powerful emotion” involved when a meteor flies through space or a pebble is frozen in ice. So Denton concluded that all events in nature are somehow “recorded,” and that the human mind possesses a faculty for playing-back the recording—an extra sense that enables us to see into the remote past.

  Unfortunately for Buchanan and Denton, the birth of “Spiritualism” in the late 1840s—when strange rapping noises were heard in the home of the Fox Sisters of Hydesville, New York—made scientists deeply suspicious of anything that seemed connected with this new craze. So instead of being taken seriously, psychometry and its theories were dismissed as a delusion. But Lodge and other psychical researchers revived the idea to explain haunted houses.

  Half a century after Lodge, T. C. Lethbridge—who was Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at Cambridge—stumbled on the “psychometric” theory as a result of his own observations. When he saw the “ghost” of the man in a hunting kit, he was at first inclined to wonder whether it had been purely a mental picture, perhaps “picked up” from somebody else’s mind. Perhaps the huntsman had been a former occupant of the rooms, and was sitting in his armchair at home sipping a whisky as he thought about the good old days at Cambridge; and perhaps somehow the image had got itself transferred into Lethbridge’s mind . . .

  But other experiences led him to revise this notion. On
e day, after he had retired to Devon, Lethbridge and his wife Mina went to collect seaweed from Ladram beach. It was a dull, damp day, and as they walked on to the beach near a stream that ran down the cliff, both suddenly experienced a profound depression. Lethbridge noticed that this vanished as soon as he stepped a few feet away from the stream. His wife, Mina, went to the cliff top to make a sketch, and suddenly had the odd feeling that someone was urging her to jump. (Again, Lethbridge was inclined to think that she could have been picking up someone’s thoughts—

  perhaps someone had stood on that spot, contemplating suicide, then had a change of mind and gone home—but later investigation revealed that a man had committed suicide from exactly that spot.)

  Thinking about it all later, Lethbridge reflected that dampness can cause radio transmitters to short-circuit. Could it have been the dampness on the beach that was somehow responsible for the feeling of depression? He had also been struck by the fact that it seemed to end so abruptly, as if it formed a kind of invisible wall. He had noticed the same kind of thing around the cottage of an old woman reputed to be a witch—who had died under circumstances suggesting murder. There was the same “nasty feeling” around the place just after her death, and he had noticed that he could step in and out of it, as if it ended quite sharply. Could it, Lethbridge wondered, be some kind of “field,” like the field that surrounds a magnet?

  Lethbridge was also an excellent dowser, and it struck him that the “nasty feeling” on the beach (he used the term “ghoul” to describe it) had been around the stream. This led him to the theory that the “field” of water can “tape record” strong emotions, and that people who can dowse are probably able to “pick up” these recordings. In short, a water-diviner would be far more likely to see a ghost than most people.

  This, then, was Lethbridge’s theory about “ghosts” and “ghouls,” which he developed in a number of books written in the last ten years of his life (he died in 1972). It is a natural and logical extension of Buchanan’s “psychometry” and of Lodge’s theory about “recordings.” But Lethbridge has also placed it on a more scientific basis by suggesting that what does the “recording” is some kind of magnetic field associated with water. The principle sounds very much like that of a tape recorder, where a magnetic field “imprints” the sounds on an iron-oxide tape. In Lethbridge’s theory, the magnetic field of water records emotions and prints them on its surroundings—in the case of the “old witch,” on the walls of her damp cottage.

  All this helps to explain why Lombroso’s theory about haunted houses struck many contemporary researchers as “unscientific.” The “psychometric hypothesis” seems to explain the majority of hauntings. For example, the ghost of the young man in the Place du Lion d’Or gave no sign of being aware of the presence of the various people who saw him, and that is what you would expect if a ghost is some kind of “film” or recording of a long-past event.

  As to the poltergeist, the “mischievous spirit” theory found little acceptance among investigators, even in the earliest days of psychical research. The reason was simply that a scientific investigator prefers natural explanations. And where poltergeists were concerned, there were a number of plausible ones. Eusapia Palladino could cause tables to rise into the air. The famous Victorian medium Daniel Dunglas Home frequently caused heavy objects of furniture to float right up to the ceiling, while he himself floated out of third-story windows and came back by the window on the other side of the room. Home and Palladino claimed that their powers came from spirits; but they might have been deceiving themselves. One of the first thing that struck the early scientific investigators of poltergeists is that there usually seemed to be a disturbed adolescent in the house— usually a girl. Lombroso himself had noticed how often teenage girls seemed to be involved in his paranormal cases—like the girl who could see with her ear. And his original “nervous force” theory struck most investigators as far more plausible than his later belief in mischievous spirits.

  This younger generation of investigators had another reason for dismissing the spirit theory. By 1909, Freud had made most psychologists aware that the unconscious mind is a far more powerful force than Lombroso had recognized. Lombroso has a section on the unconscious in After Death—What?, and it reveals that he thought of it as little more than another name for absent-mindedness or poetic inspiration. Freud had made people aware that the unconscious is a kind of ocean, full of dangerous currents and strange monsters. Moreover, Freud emphasized that the most powerful of these unconscious forces is the sex drive. Could it be coincidence that most poltergeist cases involve adolescents at the age of puberty?

  This, of course, still fails to explain how the unconscious mind of a disturbed adolescent can make bottles fly through the air. But again, science had some plausible theories. In Basle, a university student named Carl Jung was intrigued by a female cousin who began to go into trances at the age of puberty, and spoke with strange voices. And at about the time this started, the dining-room table suddenly split apart with a loud report. There was also a sudden explosion from a sideboard, and when they looked inside, they found that a bread knife had shattered into several pieces. Jung suspected that his cousin’s “illness” was responsible for these events, and he coined the term “exteriorization phenomenon” to explain them—meaning more-or-less what Lombroso meant by “nerve force.” Jung had no doubt that it was caused by the unconscious mind, and a personal experience confirmed him in this view. One day he was arguing with Freud about “exteriorization” and Freud was highly skeptical. Jung’s rising irritation caused a burning sensation in his chest “as if my diaphragm was becoming red hot!” Suddenly, there was a loud explosion in the bookcase. “There,” said Jung, “that was an exteriorization phenomenon.” “Bosh,” said Freud, to which Jung replied: “It is not bosh, and to prove it, there will be another explosion in a moment.” And a second explosion occurred. Jung had no doubt that he had somehow caused the explosions by getting angry.

  Most modern investigators of poltergeist phenomena would agree with Jung. One of the rare exceptions was the late Harry Price, who wrote in Poltergeist Over England: “My own view is that they are invisible, intangible, malicious and noisy entities . . .” He adds: “Poltergeists are able, by laws yet unknown to our physicists, to extract energy from living persons, often from the young, and usually from girl adolescents, especially if they suffer from some mental disorder.” Unfortunately, Price’s reputation has declined steadily since his death in 1948, with accusations of lying, cheating, publicity seeking, and fraud; so most psychical researchers would dismiss his views on poltergeists as a deliberate attempt at sensationalism. Besides, Price himself admitted that poltergeists seem to be connected with sexual energies; and he described how the husband of the Austrian medium Frieda Weisl told him that, during their early married life, ornaments jumped off the mantel shelf when she had a sexual orgasm. This certainly sounds like Jung’s “exteriorization phenomenon.”

  We may say, then, that the modern consensus of opinion is that a poltergeist is a person, not a spirit. The view is summed up by Richard Cavendish:[1]

  Because poltergeist incidents usually occur in close proximity to a living person, parapsychologists tend to regard them as instances of psychokinesis or PK. Since poltergeist incidents are recurrent and arise unexpectedly and spontaneously, they are commonly referred to as instances of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” or RSPK. They appear to be unconscious cases of PK since the person who seems to bring them about is usually unaware of his involvement. Some persons remain convinced that RSPK phenomena are due to the agency of an incorporeal entity, such as the spirit of a deceased person or a “demon” which has attached itself to some living person and which causes the incidents by PK. However, since there is no evidence for such spirits apart from the phenomena themselves, most parapsychologists are of the opinion that poltergeist phenomena are examples of unconscious PK exercised by the person around whom they occur.

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; “Psychokinesis” means, of course, “mind over matter.” And it has been widely accepted by investigators since the mid-1930s, when Dr. J. B. Rhine, of Duke University, conducted a series of experiments with a gambler who claimed that he could influence the fall of the dice by concentrating on them. Rhine’s experiments showed that the gambler was correct; he could, to some extent, influence the dice to make it turn up sixes. Since then, there have been thousands of similar experiments, and the evidence for PK is regarded as overwhelming.

  Yet it has to be admitted that even its “star performers”—Nina Kulagina, Felicia Parise, Ingo Swann, Uri Geller—cannot make objects fly around the room as poltergeists seem to be able to. The Russian Kulagina first came to the attention of scientists when she was in hospital after a nervous breakdown; her doctors were fascinated to see that she could reach into her sewing basket and take out any color of thread she wanted without looking at it. They tested her and found that she could, beyond all doubt, “see” colors with her fingertips. Her healing powers were also remarkable—for example, she could make wounds heal up in a very short time simply by holding her hand above them. But it was when they tested her for PK that they discovered her outstanding abilities. She could sit at a table, stare at a small object—like a matchbox or a wineglass—and make it move without touching it. She told investigators that when her concentration “worked,” she felt a sharp pain in her spine, and her eyesight blurred. Her blood pressure would rise abruptly.