Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  numerical questions.

  At this point, the neighbor had the idea of devising an alphabetical code, and asking the spirit to answer questions about itself. It identified itself as a peddler named Charles B. Rosma, who had died in the house five years earlier. Asked for details, it said that it had been murdered in the east bedroom by having its throat cut, and had subsequently been buried in the cellar. Police investigation failed to locate a missing peddler named Rosma, and the murder inquiry was not pursued.[1] Soon afterward, the poltergeist rappings turned into a normal “haunting,” with sounds of a death struggle, horrible gurglings (presumably as the man’s throat was cut) and the sounds of a body being dragged across the floor. (Mr. Fox’s hair turned white as a result.)

  Meanwhile, the rapping noises followed the girls around from house to house. Various committees were set up to try and detect the girls in trickery—entirely without success. When Kate and Margaret separated to avoid the furor, the rappings broke out in both houses they stayed in. A man named Calvin Brown, who lived in the same house as the eldest Fox sister, Leah, seemed to arouse the spirit’s dislike because of his hostile attitude, and it began to persecute him. Various objects were thrown at him—but without ever causing injury. Then the “spirit”’ began snatching off Mrs. Fox’s cap, pulling the comb out of her hair, as well as jabbing pins into members of the family when they knelt down to pray. The rappings turned into deafening bangs like a cannon, which could be heard a mile away.

  The household was in despair until someone decided to try and communicate with the spirit by using the alphabetical code. The result was a message beginning: “Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era . . .” It proved to be correct. The first “spiritualist” meeting took place on November 14, 1849, and within months this new “religion” had spread across America, then across the sea to Europe.

  All three sisters—including Leah—developed into “mediums,” and gave séances. The simplest method of holding a séance is for everyone to sit around the tables and call upon the spirits. And at a very early stage, the spirits began indicating their presence by causing the table to vibrate, or even making it give raps by raising one leg in the air and banging it on the floor. It seemed astonishingly easy to make a table move (as, indeed, it still is). It was discovered that the best method was to take a fairly light table—a card table for preference—and place it on a smooth polished floor. The “sisters” then had to join their fingers in a “chain” and concentrate. And usually, within minutes, the table was sliding around the room, sometimes even rising into the air, in spite of all efforts to hold it down.

  The Parisians were thrilled with this new game; there had been nothing like it since the days when Mesmer had “magnetized” groups of half-naked men and women and sent them into ecstatic convulsions. What astonished everyone was how easy it was to get results. If the phenomena were really due to spirits, then they seemed to be permanently on duty.

  One of Paris’ best-known intellectuals at this time was an educationalist called Leon Dénizarth-Hippolyte Rivail. Rivail was to Paris what John Ruskin and Herbert Spencer would become to London: a kind of universal educator, willing to dispense knowledge on any and every topic. His public lectures on such subjects as chemistry and astronomy were attended by huge audiences.

  Rivail was one of the few people who still believed in the discoveries of Mesmer, that remarkable physician who had been driven out of Paris seventy years earlier by the hostility of the medical profession. Mesmer believed that illnesses can be cured by magnets, and one of his disciples made the discovery with which Mesmer’s name is often identified—hypnotism. But when the doctors succeeded in driving Mesmer out of France, they also succeeded in convincing most people that hypnotism was a fraud. Rivail was sufficiently independent to test it for himself, and discovered that it worked. He also discovered that, contrary to what the doctors insisted, magnets could produce remarkable effects on sick people, as could various metals such as gold and copper. (This interesting notion still awaits rediscovery by the medical profession.) So Rivail was prepared to be open-minded on the subject of table-turning. He did not permit himself to be prejudiced by the fact that every empty-headed

  society woman in Paris was organizing séances, and that even the much despised emperor Napoleon the Third (whom Victor Hugo denounced as Napoleon the Little) held sessions at Versailles. He looked into the matter with his usual intense curiosity and scientific detachment.

  Now it so happened that a friend of Rivail’s named Becquet had two daughters who had begun to experiment with the new craze, and had discovered that they seemed to be excellent “mediums.” It seemed to Rivail that this was not an opportunity to be missed. If the spirits really had anything sensible to communicate, then presumably they would be willing to answer questions put by a man of science. Accordingly, the Becquet girls were asked to devote a few hours every week to automatic writing; and to ask the “spirits” a number of specific questions written down by Rivail.

  The results surpassed his most optimistic expectations. The spirits, it seemed, were anxious to explain themselves at length. Rivail was excited to find that what they said seemed to make sense, and constituted a remarkable and consistent philosophy about life and death. Interestingly enough, they seemed to agree with Mesmer, who said that the universe is pervaded by a vital or magnetic “fluid.” When this fluid is able to flow through living beings, the result is health; when it is blocked, the result is illness.

  According to Rivail’s informants, the universe is pervaded by spirits of incorporeal intelligences. Human beings are simply “incarnate spirits,” spirits united with a material body. They advance toward perfection by undergoing trials during their lifetime, and after one body dies, they are reincarnated in another one. In between reincarnations, they may wander around without a body. It is these “discarnate spirits” that are responsible for various forms of mischief, such as poltergeist effects.

  In due course, the spirits instructed Rivail to publish the results of his questions. They gave him a title—The Spirits’ Book—and even told him the pseudonym he should use: Allan Kardec—both names he had borne in a previous existence, they told him.

  The Spirits’ Book appeared in 1856, and created a sensation. Kardec became the founder-figure of the French spiritualist movement, and his works attained immense influence. But he died of a heart attack only thirteen years after the book was published, at the age of sixty-five, and his influence was soon being widely questioned by the French spiritualist movement. Rivail was totally committed to the doctrine of reincarnation, the slow perfection of the spirit through a series of rebirths, which can be traced back to ancient India. But most of the “spirits” who spoke through mediums at séances had nothing to say about reincarnation. So Rivail was inclined to be critical about trance mediums, while the trance mediums and their followers denounced Rivail as a dogmatic old man. After Rivail’s death, his influence waned, and within a few years he was half-forgotten. Oddly enough, his works received immediate and widespread acceptance in South America, particularly in Brazil, and became the foundation of a religion—which calls itself Spiritism—which still flourishes there. We shall examine this at length in chapter Six.

  Now in Paris, in 1860, there was a particularly violent poltergeist in the Rue des Noyers; it smashed every window in the place, hurled all kinds of objects around the house (including many which the occupants had never seen before), and finally drove the unfortunate people out of the house. Rivail decided to try to find out what exactly had happened. His medium’s “control” (i.e., the spirit who acts as master of ceremonies) explained that the disturbances were the work of a mischievous spirit. And, at the request of the control (a spirit called Saint Louis), the poltergeist of the Rue des Noyers was summoned. He appeared to be in a bad temper, and asked irritably: “Why do you call me? Do you want to have some stones thrown at you?” Rivail now asked the spirit: “Was there any
one in the Rue des Noyers who helped you play tricks on the inmates?” Certainly, replied the spirit, it had had an excellent “instrument.” It added, “For I am merry and like to amuse myself sometimes.” Who was it, Rivail asked. “A maidservant.”

  “Was she unaware you were making use of her?”

  “Oh yes, poor girl—she was the most frightened of them all.”

  Rivail asked how the spirit managed to throw various objects about the place, and received the interesting answer: “I helped myself through the electric nature of the girl, joined to my own . . . thus we were able to transport the objects between us.”

  Rivail asked the spirit who it was. It replied that it had been dead about fifty years, and had been a rag and bone man. People used to make fun of him because he drank too much, and this was why he decided to play tricks on the inhabitants of the Rue des Noyers. He indignantly denied that he had done these things out of malice; it was merely his way of amusing himself.

  This spirit seemed to belong to a class described in The Spirits’ Book: “They are ignorant, mischievous, unreasonable, and addicted to mockery. They meddle with everything and reply to every question without paying attention to the truth.” This latter remark brings to mind a comment by G. K. Chesterton, who describes in his autobiography how he once experimented with a planchette—a device for automatic writing. The sitters asked one of the “spirits” the name of a distant relative, and the board answered “Manning.” When they said this was untrue, it wrote: “Married before.” “To whom?” “Cardinal Manning.” Chesterton remarks:

  I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural . . . Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power is that it tells lies.

  Elsewhere, Rivail asked the spirits about the subject of “demoniacal possession,” and how far human beings can be unconsciously influenced by spirits. The answer to the latter question was that the influence of spirits is far greater than most people suppose—that they often influence our thoughts and actions. This is a theme that is often repeated in the books of “Allan Kardec.” Asked about possession, the spirit replied: “A spirit does not enter into a body as you enter into a house. He assimilates himself to an incarnate spirit who has the same defects and the same qualities as himself, in order that they may act conjointly.” But, it added, the spirit cannot actually “take over” the body of the person it is “possessing.” This is united indissolubly to the physical body.

  In that case, asked Rivail, can a person be dominated and subjugated by a spirit until its own will is paralyzed? Yes, came the reply, this is precisely what is meant by possession. But the domination is established through the cooperation of the “possessed,” either out of weakness or of their own free will. It added sensibly that many people who seem to be possessed are really cases of epilepsy or madness, and demand a doctor rather than an exorcist. Rivail asked whether exorcism actually has any power over such spirits, and got the answer: “No. When bad spirits see anyone trying to influence them by such means, they laugh.” In fact, any investigator who has had anything to do with poltergeists knows that they cannot be exorcised.

  The modern revival of interest in the subject of “demoniacal possession” was largely the result of Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun, published in 1952 and, later, of William Blatty’s novel The Exorcist. Huxley takes a skeptical view of the possession of a convent full of

  Ursuline nuns:

  Bogus demoniac possession, artfully faked by a whole convent of hysterical Ursulines, under the coaching of their spiritual directors; monks plotting with lawyers to bear false witness against a hated professional and sexual rival; a fornicating priest, enmeshed in the toils of his own lust and vanity and at last judicially murdered on a false charge and with every refinement of cruelty—it is a story that takes a high place in

  the annals of human beastliness in general and religious beastliness in particular . . .[2]

  Father Urbain Grandier, the parish priest of the small town of Loudun, was charged in 1633 of “bewitching” the nuns of the local convent, who had been going into convulsions and howling blasphemies in hoarse voices. When Grandier was finally taken in to perform an exorcism ceremony, the nuns began to accuse him of being responsible. Convinced of the absurdity of the charge, Grandier made no real attempt to defend himself until it was too late. Then he was tortured and publicly burnt.

  Huxley is undoubtedly correct when he speaks of the plots against Grandier, and about Grandier’s own fornications—he seduced at least two young girls in the confessional and made one of them pregnant. There also seems to be no doubt that the “plot” against Grandier began as a practical joke, with some of the novices frightening the others by dressing up in a white sheet and pretending to be ghosts. But when we come to examine the actual “possession,” the skeptical explanation no longer seems adequate. Four of the priests who came to exorcise the “devils” were themselves possessed, and two of them died of it. Father Surin, a remarkable mystic, became more-or-less insane for twenty-five years. The unfortunate Father Tranquille, a famous Capuchin preacher, went along to Loudun convinced that the authority of the Church would protect him from the “devils”; he proved to be mistaken. He found himself in the horrifying position of writhing around on the ground, listening to his mouth uttering blasphemies, while his mind remained a detached spectator. This continued until he died in a state of exhaustion. In a famous study of psychological possession, the German philosopher T. K. Oesterreich observes accurately: “This death is one of the most frightful which can be imagined, the patient being sick in mind while fully conscious, and a prey to excitement so violent that finally the organism breaks down under it.” The same thing happened to Father Lactance, who had “expelled three demons” from the prioress of the convent, Sister Jeanne des Anges.

  Surin came to Loudun after Grandier had been burnt. His death did not put an end to the possession of the nuns. Father Lactance was already dead. And fairly soon, Surin was writing to a friend:

  God has . . . permitted the devils to pass out of the possessed person’s body and, entering into mine, to assault me, to throw me down, to torment me . . . I find it almost impossible to explain what happens to me during this time, how this alien spirit is united to mine, without depriving me of consciousness or of inner freedom, and yet constituting a second “me,” as though I had two souls, of which one is dispossessed of my body and the use of its organs, and keeps its quarters, watching the other, the intruder, doing whatever it likes . . . The very soul is as though divided . . . At one and the same time I feel great peace, as being under God’s good pleasure, and on the other hand (without knowing how) an overpowering rage and loathing of God, expressing itself in frantic struggles (astonishing to those who watch them) to separate myself

  from Him.

  Now it is by no means impossible to explain all this in purely psychological terms. Poe has written about it in a story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” in which he discusses the way in which we can feel a sudden urge to do something that horrifies us; the narrator of his story has succeeded in committing a “perfect murder,” and cannot resist a compulsion to go and shout about it in the street.

  There is nothing very strange in this. It is simply the operation of what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl calls “the law of reverse effort.” The more a stutterer wants to stop stuttering, the worse he stutters. On the other hand, Frankl mentions a stutterer who was asked to play a stutterer in the school play, and was then unable to stutter. All this is explained by the recognition that “you” live in the left half of the brain, and that another “you” lives a few centimeters away in the other half. As soon as the left begins to interfere too much, it has the effect of “t
hrottling” the right, just as if a man had grabbed himself by the throat. We are all of us “divided selves.”

  But it is one thing to stutter and stammer, and quite another to die of exhaustion in the belief that you are tormented by a devil. Looking detachedly at the case of the Loudun demons, it is difficult not to feel that The Spirits’ Book of Kardec explains it rather better than Huxley does. If we assume that the whole thing began as a plot against Grandier, and a sexual obsession on the part of the nuns—particularly Sister Jeanne des Anges—then we can begin to understand what Kardec’s “St. Louis” meant when he explained: “A spirit does not enter into a body as you enter into a house. He assimilates himself to a [person] who has the same defects and the same qualities as himself . . .” Fathers Lactance and Tranquille behaved with a frightful vengefulness—Lactance superintended the torture of Grandier—and therefore laid themselves open to “possession.” As to Sister Jeanne, she later wrote an autobiography in which it is made perfectly clear that she never much enjoyed being a nun; she was a dominant woman, and dominant women are usually “highly sexed.” She admits that she made no real effort to push aside the indecent thoughts that came into her head when she was praying or taking communion. “This accursed spirit insinuated himself into me so subtly that I in no way recognized his workings . . .” She may have started out with a more or less conscious desire to cause trouble for Father Grandier; but a point came where, like Tranquille and Lactance, she found her body being used by demons. Unlike Tranquille and Lactance, she rather enjoyed