Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting

  being possessed.

  The case on which William Blatty based The Exorcist took place in a Washington suburb, Mount Rainier, in 1949. Thirteen-year-old Douglass Deen was the “focus” of the occurrences, which began with a scratching noise in the walls. A rat extermination company was able to find no sign of rats or mice. The sounds occurred only when Douglass was near by. Then more usual poltergeist phenomena began to occur: dishes flew through the air, fruit was hurled against the wall. A picture floated off the wall, hovered in the air, then went back to its old position. After this, Douglass’ bed began to shake and quiver when he was in it.

  The family asked the local minister, the Reverend M. Winston, for help, and on February 17, 1949, Douglass spent the night in his home. The two retired to a room with twin beds. Douglass’ bed soon began to vibrate, and there were scratching noises in the walls. Winston asked Douglass to sleep in an armchair. The chair slid over to the wall, then slowly tilted until it threw the boy on the floor. The minister improvised a bed on the floor; as soon as Douglass was in it, the bed slid across the room.

  As these events continued, the boy was taken to two hospitals, Georgetown and St. Louis University, both Jesuit institutions. All attempts to treat him medically and psychiatrically were unsuccessful. Finally, a Jesuit priest undertook the exorcism. He fasted for two and a half months on bread and water, and repeated the ritual of exorcism no fewer than thirty times. The “spirit” showed its objection to these rituals—or perhaps its contempt—by sending the boy into convulsions, making him scream obscenities and blasphemies in a shrill voice, and sometimes making him reply to the exorcism in Latin—a language he had never studied. Finally, in May 1949, the phenomena ceased; the thirtieth exorcism was apparently successful. But then, as we shall see, most poltergeist phenomena last only a month or so; it may have gone away of its own accord.

  Here, then, we have a case of poltergeist disturbances that turned into “demoniacal possession,” with all the phenomena that occurred in the Loudun case. The “psychological” explanation would be that Douglass Deen’s “other self” began by producing poltergeist disturbances, then took up the game of demonic possession suggested by the Jesuit fathers. (His ability to speak Latin is not as surprising as it sounds; he must have heard a great deal of Latin during his life—at mass—and may have picked it up unconsciously.) But Kardec’s explanation about a mischievous spirit fits equally well. If Kardec is correct, then the physical changes that occur during puberty cause a “leakage” of a certain type of energy that can be used by a poltergeist; this energy is probably some form of nerve-force. When the physical adjustments of puberty have been made, the leak stops, and the poltergeist can no longer manifest itself.

  In the Deen case, the two explanations seem equally plausible. But there are other cases where the balance of probability seems to rest closer to the Kardec explanation. One of the best known of these has become known as “the Amherst mystery.” It took place in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1878. A shoe worker, Daniel Teed, lived in a two-story house with his wife and two sons, his wife’s two unmarried sisters, Jane and Esther Cox, who were aged twenty-two and eighteen, his wife’s brother William, and his own brother, John. (The house must have been grossly overcrowded.) All were Methodists. Jane, the elder sister, was pretty; Esther was short and rather stout. Nevertheless, Esther had a boyfriend, a local factory worker named Bob MacNeal.

  In late August, Daniel Teed complained that someone had been milking the cow; Esther was a suspect as she was unusually fond of milk. Esther was suffering from nervous tensions, and ran up from the cellar one night screaming that a rat had run over her leg. Her troubles were probably sexual in origin, as seems to be revealed by a dream she had at the time: hundreds of black bulls with bright blue eyes and blood dripping from their mouths tried to break into the house, while Esther frantically locked the doors . . .

  The following evening, Esther and Bob MacNeal went out for a drive. Bob, who had a bad reputation locally, tried to persuade Esther to go into the woods with him, but she refused. He pulled out a gun and ordered her to get down from the buggy; he looked as if he might fire when the sound of an approaching vehicle distracted him. He leapt on to the buggy, drove back at a dangerous speed, let Esther off, then left Amherst for good. Esther cried herself to sleep, and for the next few days had red eyes.

  On September 4, a damp, misty evening, Jane heard Esther sobbing in bed. Then Esther screamed that there was a mouse in bed with her. They searched, but no mouse was found. The following night, both heard a rustling noise, and made a search. It seemed to be coming from a cardboard box containing patchwork, so Jane stood it in the middle of the room, expecting a mouse to run out. Instead the box jumped into the air and fell over. She stood it up, and it jumped again.

  Daniel Teed came in to see what the noise was about, pushed the box under the bed, and told them to go to sleep.

  The next night, Esther went to bed early. Soon after the light went out, she leapt out of bed shouting, “Jane, I’m dying.” Jane lit the lamp and saw that Esther’s face was bright red, and her hair was standing on end. Daniel Teed came in, together with the other two men. Esther got back into bed, but began to scream. Her body appeared to be swelling like a balloon. Suddenly, there was a loud report like a clap of thunder. The men rushed out to search the house, but found nothing. When they came back, Esther was back to normal and fast asleep.

  Two days later, as Esther was getting into bed, she began to feel ill again. All the bedclothes flew off the bed, and landed in the far corner of the room. Jane fainted. Esther began to swell again. The men rushed in, and someone replaced the bedclothes; they promptly flew off again, and a pillow hit John Teed on the head; he left the house never to return. Again, there were some loud explosions. Esther stopped swelling, and fell asleep.

  The following day, a doctor came to see Esther. As she lay in bed, the pillow under her head inflated, as if filled up with air, then collapsed, then re-inflated itself. Raps sounded around the room. The bedclothes flew off. There was a scratching noise above Esther’s bed and, as they all watched, they saw writing appearing on the wall. It said: “Esther, you are mine to kill.” A lump of plaster detached itself from elsewhere on the wall and flew across the room to the doctor’s feet. Then rappings and bangs continued for the next two hours, while Esther lay, terrified, on her bed.

  The following day, Esther complained of an “electric” feeling running through her body. The doctor gave her morphine; instantly, there was a series of bangs and crashes that seemed to go up to the roof.

  These disturbances continued for another three weeks. Then, one night, Esther fell into a trance, became rigid, and told the story of what had happened with Bob MacNeal. When she recovered consciousness, she admitted it was true. When Jane said that Bob must be responsible for Esther’s problems, loud knocks suggested that the “spirit” agreed completely. Jane remarked that it seemed to understand what she said, whereupon there were three distinct raps. The doctor tried asking the “spirit” simple questions, with one rap for no, two for “no answer,” three for yes. But the doctor’s attempts to get it to explain itself were a total failure.

  Esther became a subject of controversy; the house was permanently full of people. When a minister called to see her, a bucket of cold water on the kitchen table began to bubble as if it was boiling.

  In December, Esther developed a severe sore throat which turned to diphtheria. While she was ill, the manifestations ceased. Then she went away to convalesce. When she returned, the manifestations started immediately. Esther said she heard a voice telling her that the house was going to be set on fire. As she told the others about this, a lighted match fell from the air on to the bed, and the sheets caught fire. Jane quickly put it out. More lighted matches fell around the room, most of them going out immediately. The rapping noises started later, and when the family asked the “spirit” whether the house would be set alight, it replied that it would not be. At that moment there wa
s smoke from under Esther’s bed; they found that a dress had somehow transferred itself from the bedroom door, and had been set on fire.

  Three days later, Mrs. Teed smelled smoke coming from the cellar. They found a barrel of wood shavings burning vigorously and had some trouble putting it out.

  The villagers were alarmed about this; if the Teeds’ house caught fire, half the village would probably be burned down. They suggested that Esther ought to be sent away. A neighbor named John White offered to take her in if she would do some housework. For two weeks, all went well; then a scrubbing brush flew out of Esther’s hand, went up to the ceiling, and came down and hit her on the head.

  White owned a restaurant, and Esther went to work there. An oven door refused to stay closed, and jumped off its hinges. Metal objects began flying at Esther as if she were a magnet, and a boy’s clasp knife made her back bleed. When iron spikes were laid in her lap, they quickly became too hot to touch.

  All this seemed to support the suspicion that Esther was somehow “electrified.” They tried making her wear a special pair of shoes with glass soles; but these gave her headaches and made her nose bleed.

  When furniture began to move around the restaurant, John White decided it was time for Esther to go home. Again, she left Amherst for a few months; first to stay with a man and his wife in New Brunswick, then to a farm three miles from Amherst. She told various visitors about the “voices” that spoke to her—voices which claimed to be the spirits that were causing the mischief. One of these spirits, “Bob Nickle,” threatened her with fire and stabbing.

  In June, 1879, a stage magician named Walter Hubbell moved into the Teeds’ cottage as a paying guest; he had heard about the “haunting” and thought it might make the subject of a book. Within a few minutes of arriving, he had no doubt that this was no fraud. His umbrella sailed through the air, then a carving knife landed at his feet, then his bag was “thrown,” then a chair shot across the room and hit his own so hard that he nearly fell on the floor. From then on, the chairs in every room he entered performed a dance. Esther told him he was unpopular with the spirits. Undeterred, Hubbell tried asking them questions by means of raps, and the spirits were able to tell him the number engraved on his watch, and the dates of coins in his pockets. Later, Hubbell lay down on the settee and closed his eyes; Esther came into the room, and Hubbell cautiously peeped at her, perhaps hoping that she would give herself away as a cheat. Instead, he saw a large glass paperweight float up across the room and rebound off the arm of the settee.

  During the next few days the poltergeist put on a special show for Hubbell. Objects floated around, strange noises were heard—like sawing wood and drumming on a washboard—and Esther was attacked by “six spirits” who stuck no fewer than thirty pins in her. Small fires broke out—on one day there were forty-five of them—and the sound of a trumpet echoed through the house; they later found a small silver trumpet which no one had ever seen before. When Esther went to the local minister to pray, “Bob Nickle” attacked her viciously on her return, cutting her head open with a bone and stabbing her in the face with a fork.

  Hubbell thought he saw a way of making money. He hired a hall and persuaded Esther to put on a “show” or the people of Amherst. Inevitably, the spirits declined to operate, and the audience demanded their

  money back.

  Tired of the non-stop disturbances, Daniel Teed sent Esther off to stay with some obliging friends; Hubbell, who now had enough material for his book, went to St. John to write it. It appeared in due course and went through several editions.

  During Esther’s stay with her friends, the spirits let her alone. She then took a job on a farm owned by people called Davidson. Her friends found that various articles were missing, and these were located in the Davidsons’ barn. Esther was suspected of theft, but before the case could be investigated the barn caught fire and burned to the ground. Esther was accused of arson, and was sentenced to four months in jail. After this, the manifestations came suddenly to an end.

  This abrupt termination of the “haunting” seems to favor the view that Esther’s own unconscious mind was responsible. This is, in fact, the view I favored when I described the case briefly in a book called Mysteries. Esther was sexually frustrated, and if Bob MacNeal had adopted a more gentlemanly way of seducing her, there would have been no Great Amherst Mystery (the title of Hubbell’s book). Esther was a classic case of “the divided self”: a part of her longing to give herself to her lover, while the inhibitions induced by her background and training made this impossible. So when she rejected his advances, and he vanished into the night, her unconscious mind said, in effect: “Now see what you’ve done, stupid!” and set out to punish her. As to the effects themselves, many of them fit the hypothesis I have suggested: that the “energy” comes from the earth. When Esther wore shoes with glass soles, the manifestations stopped but she developed headaches and nosebleeds. Her sensation of electric currents is also highly suggestive. There have been dozens of well-authenticated cases of “human electric batteries.” Again, nearly all concern girls or boys at the age of puberty. Caroline Clare of Bondon, Ontario, began to lose weight at the age of seventeen (in 1877), then developed such powerful electric currents that people who touched her received severe shocks; pieces of metal stuck to her as if she were a magnet. Jennie Morgan of Sedalia, Missouri, became an electric battery at fourteen; when she touched metal objects, sparks flew. Frank McKinistry, also of Missouri, would develop an electric charge during the night and slowly lose it during the day. When highly charged, his feet would stick to the ground so that he had difficulty in walking—which sounds again as if the electricity comes from the earth. (Good dowsers receive a “tingling” sensation when they touch standing stones.) The Amherst minister, the Reverend Edwin Clay, was convinced that the secret of Esther’s manifestations was electricity, and even delivered a lecture to that effect.

  But how did Esther’s unconscious mind know the number of Hubbell’s watch and the dates of coins in its pocket—which no doubt he did not know himself? How did her mind scratch “Esther, you are mine to kill” on the wall above her head? How did it blow a trumpet all over the house? The truth is that the unconscious mind theory needs to be stretched so much that it loses the chief virtue of a good theory—simplicity.

  But perhaps the strongest argument against the unconscious mind theory is simply that Esther’s torment went on for so long. To actually read the case in detail is to feel that no one could get so angry with herself that she would continue relentlessly for more than a year. We may say, “Oh, I could kick myself,” when we do something stupid; but no one has ever done it.

  The fraud hypothesis also fails to stand up to close examination. If Hubbell’s book was the main piece of evidence, then we might well feel suspicious, since he went to Amherst with the hope of writing it, and eventually made a great deal of money from no fewer than ten editions. But there are accounts in the Amherst Gazette that confirm everything Hubbell says. Moreover, in 1907, more than a quarter of a century after the events, the researcher Hereward Carrington went to Amherst and took various depositions from people who had witnessed the manifestations. By this time, Esther was unhappily married, and had turned into a sullen middle-aged woman, who agreed to talk to Carrington only on the payment of a hundred dollars; Carrington felt that such testimony would be valueless. But there could be no doubt that most of the people involved believed that the manifestations were genuine, including the farmer, Davidson, whose barn had been destroyed—he said that he had often watched Esther as she came downstairs and had noticed that she seemed to fly or float. (In the Middle Ages, levitation used to be one of the criteria for demoniacal possession.)

  In 1919, Walter Franklin Prince, another eminent investigator of paranormal phenomena, wrote his own account of the Amherst case in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, heavily criticizing Hubbell for vagueness and inaccuracy. But Prince had to end by agreeing that there was n
o question of fraud. What Prince suggested was an interesting variant of the “unconscious mind” theory: the notion that Esther Cox was an example of a baffling psychological illness called “multiple personality,” in which an individual splits into two or more completely different persons. One of the most famous cases of the twentieth century was that of a girl named Christine Sizemore, which became the basis of a book (and film), The Three Faces of Eve, by Thigpen and Cleckley. But similar cases have been observed and recorded in detail since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1811 a young woman named Mary Reynolds, described as being “dull and melancholy,” fell into a deep sleep for twenty hours, and when she woke up had lost her memory. She was like a newborn baby. She recognized no one, and became lost in familiar places. She had to be taught to speak, then to read and write—but learned so quickly that it was clear that her buried memory was coming to her aid. Her brothers and sisters were astonished at the change in her disposition. Suddenly, she was cheerful and buoyant. But she worried her family by taking long walks in the Pennsylvania wilderness, and ignoring their warnings about bears and poisonous snakes. She insisted that the bears were actually black hogs. One day, she actually met one in the woods, when she was on horseback, and the horse refused to go on. When the “hog” ignored her orders to get out of the way, she took a stick and walked toward it; at the last moment the bear dropped on all fours and went away.

  One morning about five weeks after losing her memory, it came back just as suddenly, and the old Mary Reynolds was back—a dull, cautious girl who had no fondness for nature. Then, a few weeks later, after an unusually deep sleep, the “new” Mary returned with no memory of the past days. And the two Marys continued to alternate for the next twenty years, both of them finally coming to accept that the periods of amnesia were due to the revival of the “other self.” Finally, at the age of thirty-five, Mary stabilized, and settled down for the rest of her life in her second personality. She died of a brain embolism at the age of sixty-one.