Fodor’s own analysis is as follows:
As a child, Mrs Fielding was both accident- and illness-prone. At the age of 6, recovering from tonsillitis, she thought that a muscular black arm tried to strangle her in bed; it vanished when her mother ran in. She was bitten by a mad dog, and attacked (and scarred) by a parrot. She lived in a house with a reputation for being haunted, and Fodor states as a fact that neither the windows nor mirrors ever needed cleaning—they were cleaned by invisible hands during the night.
At 16, she had ‘visions’ of a ghost; a cupboard in her room opened and a man stepped out, then vanished. Subsequently she saw him several times. On one occasion he left a piece of paper with sooty scrawls on it beside her, but her mother burned it. A bicycle accident at this time led to a kidney abscess, which later necessitated many operations. At 17 she made a runaway marriage, had her first baby at 18, her second at 21. (This died of meningitis.) At 20 she contracted anthrax poisoning, and tried to stab her husband with a carving knife. She ran into the street in her nightdress screaming ‘Murder, fire’, and recovered after having twenty-eight teeth extracted.
At 24 she had a vision of her father, trying to pull her away from her husband. He made the sign of the cross over her left breast. When she woke from her trance, this was bleeding. At hospital they discovered she had a breast cancer, and the breast was amputated. At 26, she had an attack of hysterical blindness which lasted for six weeks and, at 27, was in an accident on a steamer which was smashed against Margate pier. At 28 she aborted twins after being terrified when she found a dead rat in among her washing. At 30 she had a kidney operation, and, at 32, pleurisy. Altogether, it can be seen, Mrs Fielding was a thoroughly unlucky woman.
Fodor then proceeds to interpret the evidence from the Freudian point of view. He is convinced that the basic truth is that Mrs Fielding was attacked and raped, probably in a churchyard, by a man in round glasses, before she was 5 years old. Everything else, he thinks, springs from this trauma. On two occasions, when lying awake at night, she felt a shape like a man—but as cold as a corpse—get into bed with her; then it ‘behaved like a man’ (i.e. had sexual intercourse). One day, on her way to the Institute, Mrs Fielding was attacked by a man on the train. Fodor does not doubt that she was attacked—she arrived in an upset condition—but thinks that the man’s round glasses may have aroused in her a mixture of loathing and desire which was wrongly interpreted by the man as an invitation. Fodor goes on to suggest that her husband became somehow identified in her mind with her attacker, so that the poltergeist attacks were due to her unconscious aggressions against him.
There are times when Fodor’s Freudian interpretations verge on the comic. For example, he is convinced that her apports are a cipher ‘in which her tragic life story is hidden’. On one evening, the apports were: elephant’s tooth, tiger claw, Carthage pottery, a tropical nutshell and a piece of coral. These, says Fodor, symbolise the hugeness of the man who assaulted her (an elephant), his savagery and beastliness, his scaliness (the nutshell), while the pottery symbolises the breaking of her hymen; the coral stands for music from the church nearby. (Organ music always made Mrs Fielding cry, and Fodor surmises that the coral was organ-pipe coral.)
There is, of course, one basic objection to the whole theory: Mrs Fielding did not tell Fodor she had been raped, and apparently had no such memory. Fodor naturally thinks it was suppressed. But do memories of that type become so suppressed that they vanish completely? It seems highly unlikely.
Fodor was never able to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion. When he began explaining his rape theories to the Institute for Psychical Research, they objected so strongly that he felt obliged to drop the case. At least it enabled him to believe that Mrs Fielding was getting closer and closer to remembering her rape experience, and would one day have confirmed all his theories. It will be recalled that, in the case of the Bell Witch, Fodor believed that Betsy had been sexually attacked by her father, and that this produced the poltergeist, ‘tearing loose part of the mental system and letting it float free like a disembodied entity’. As a good Freudian, he felt bound to seek a sexual explanation in the Thornton Heath case. Yet, like so many of the ‘primal scenes’ that Freud believed caused lifelong illness, the one posited by Fodor is completely unverifiable.
It would be a pity to leave this case without at least an attempt at an alternative explanation. And the simplest and most obvious is that Mrs Fielding was a born medium. Her many illnesses turned her into what 19th century investigators liked to call a ‘sick sensitive’. Her vision of the black arm that tried to strangle her in bed may not have been a dream or hallucination, as Fodor thinks. If she lived in a haunted house, then it seems likely that spirit entities drew energy from her, increasing her tendency to illness. And later in life, she actually developed into a medium. During the investigation, she often went into trances, and a ‘control’ called Bremba spoke through her. Sitting near a pub—and a church—in Coulsdon, she had a vision of an evil, leering face, which she continued to see for ten minutes. ‘Bremba’ later stated at a seance that the man she saw had belonged to the church, and had been hanged for interfering with small children. ‘She was probably sitting on the spot where one of the outrages took place.’ When Mrs Fielding came out of her trance, she could not speak or even whisper, then, as they all watched, strangulation marks appeared on her throat. When she could speak she said: ‘I feel as if I am being pulled up’—as if she was suffering from the man’s hanging. Later, when she was telling friends about it, the noose marks again appeared on her throat. Fodor uses this as a support for his theory about the early rape; but it could, in fact, be ordinary mediumship. Bremba could have been telling the truth about the man hanged for sexual offences against children.
Then why did Mrs Fielding begin to cheat? There are two possible explanations. One is that she was enjoying her new position as a subject of investigation. She was a bored housewife, and, as Fodor says, the phenomena meant ‘a new interest, a new life for her’. This could be true; but if Mrs Fielding was developing genuine powers as a medium, then she had no need to cheat in order to keep them. It sounds as if they had been latent since childhood; all she had to do was to allow them to develop.
The other explanation is that she was unconscious that she was cheating—which would explain the stone thrown in front of Fodor, with no attempt at concealment, and her subsequent denial. In a case cited by William Roll, a man being investigated was seen, through a one-way mirror, to throw an object—yet a lie detector test supported his denial that he had done it. We have seen that there is considerable evidence that poltergeists can enter the mind and influence people—mediums more than others.
To anyone who reads straight through Fodor’s On the Trail of the Poltergeist, it seems obvious that the ‘spirit entity’ theory fits better than most. Both the Fieldings had been ill for some time before the first outbreak. So Mrs Fielding may have been in a suitably ‘low’ condition to enable the entity to begin using her energy. From then on, it used her continually, and accordingly she began to suffer from nervous exhaustion. Yet her attitude towards all this must have been ambiguous, for it brought new interest into her life; this could have enabled the entity—or entities—to manipulate her to cheat. And why should they? Because, for some reason, poltergeists seem to delight in producing bewilderment and confusion.
The one point that emerges above all others is that Mrs Fielding was not just the focus of the poltergeist disturbances: she was a medium, and soon began to develop her ability, with apports, travelling clairvoyance, projection of the ‘double’, and so on. In short, Mrs Fielding was a potential Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Palladino. And this, it seems probable, is true for all the people who became ‘focuses’ for poltergeist phenomena. With her illnesses, her early marriage, even the loss of her teeth, Mrs Fielding calls to mind another medium, the ‘Seeress of Prevorst’, whose history we have looked at in an earlier chapter. Nandor Fodor, like Justinus Kerner, w
as a medical man. Yet it cannot be said that his study of Mrs Fielding is as penetrating or a suggestive as Kerner’s study of Friederike Hauffe. To read On the Trail of the Poltergeist after The Seeress of Prevorst is a depressing experience. It is to realise that a century of psychical research has brought very few advances—that, on the contrary, an unimaginative and over-cautious approach to the phenomena has only made them less comprehensible than ever.
1. The Haunted Mind, Chapter 8.
1. It is also described in Unbidden Guests by William O. Stevens, 1945.
2. See The Occult, Part 3, Chapter 2.
9
The Spirit Mafia
CONSIDERING THAT poltergeists have been recorded for more than a thousand years, and that eminent scientists have been studying them for about a century, it seems a little surprising that they are still regarded as an insoluble mystery. In the past two decades, there have been three major scientific studies of the poltergeist: Dr A.R.G.Owen’s Can We Explain the Poltergeist?, William Roll’s The Poltergeist, and Poltergeists by Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell. All three raise the question of whether poltergeists could be spirits of the dead or other types of disembodied entity; all three decide that this is unlikely, and that therefore poltergeists are probably some kind of manifestation of the unconcious mind: that is, of ‘spontaneous psychokinesis’. Owen points out that a large number of children in poltergeist cases have mental problems; Roll notes that most objects tends to move counter-clockwise, and suggests that there is some kind of whirlpool or psychic vortex that drags them into motion. But no one explains why poltergeist effects are so much more powerful than the kind of psychokinesis that has been studied in the laboratory.
There is, admittedly, one case that seems to be an exception to this rule. In the early 1970s, members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research, under the direction of A.R.G. Owen, decided to try to manufacture a ghost. For this purpose, they invented the case history of a man called Philip, a contemporary of Oliver Cromwell, who had an affair with a beautiful gypsy girl. When Philip’s wife found out, she had the girl accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake; Philip committed suicide.
Having elaborated this story and created a suitable background—an ancient manor house—they set about trying to conjure up the spirit of Philip. For several months, there were no results. Then one evening, as they were relaxing and singing songs, there was a rap on the table. They used the usual code (one rap for yes, two for no), to question the ‘spirit’, which claimed to be Philip and repeated the story they had invented for him. At later seances, Philip made the table dance all around the room, and even made it levitate in front of TV cameras.
Owen’s group rightly regarded this ‘creation’ of a ghost as something of a triumph, making the natural assumption that Philip was a product of their unconscious minds. But this assumption is questionable. What they did, in effect, was to hold a series of seances until they got results. Philip may have been a manifestation of their collective unconscious minds. Or he may have been another of those bored and untruthful ‘spirits’ we have already encountered, joining in the game for want of anything better to do. The Philip case cannot be regarded as a proof or disproof of the psychokinesis theory.
The trouble is that when scientists start looking for patterns, they are inclined to see what they are expecting to see. If they are good scientists, they finally notice the facts that contradict their theories, and modify the theories. But this sometimes takes a very long time; sometimes, it never happens at all.
On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle. This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.
In 1961, Guy Playfair had been down from Cambridge for two years—he had graduated in modern languages—and was finding life in England difficult and rather boring. And when he saw an advertisement in the personal column of The Times saying that teachers were wanted for Rio de Janeiro at £1,000 a year, he applied immediately. He signed a two-year contract, and at the end of the two years decided to stay on in Rio as a freelance journalist. He was reasonably successful, working as a correspondent for Time and The Economist, then as a writer in the information section of the US Agency for International Development. When Nixon cut the foreign budget in 1971, Guy Playfair was offered a golden handshake, and took it; as a result he was able to move into a comfortable house with a good view of the harbour.
One of his neighbours was an American film actor called Larry Carr, and it was through him that Playfair became involved in the world of Brazilian Spiritism. One day, Carr asked him casually if he would like to go and watch a healer. Just as casually—having nothing better to do—Playfair accepted. They drove out to a Spiritist centre in an area full of warehouses and run-down bars—’the kind of street you end up in if you get lost on the way to an airport’. The healer, a man named Edivaldo, was late, having had to drive five hundred miles from his home town; he was a school-teacher who, with his spectacles and neat moustache, looked more like a bank clerk, or possibly a bank manager. When Playfair’s group entered the consulting room, Edivaldo would prod the area that was giving the trouble, write something on a prescription pad, and pass on to the next. When Playfair’s turn came, Edivaldo’s hand went straight to the spot on his stomach which had been giving him trouble; pills were prescribed, and Playfair was told to come back later for ‘a little operation’. A few months later, he went back for his operation. When he went into the room, an old man was lying on the bed, and Edivaldo was bending over him. The old man’s stomach had been ripped open, exposing the entrails. Playfair admits that he did not observe as well as he might because he found it all too bewildering. ‘He was sloshing around in blood—it was a pretty gruesome sight.’ He looked away for a moment, and when he looked back again, the man’s stomach was ‘all neat and tidy’, and was being covered with bandage. The man got up, and was helped out by his wife. One of the helpers told Playfair to lie down on the bed. He unbuttoned his shirt. Edivaldo came over and ran his hand over his stomach, then his hands seemed to find what they were looking for and he pressed. Playfair felt a distinct plop and the hands entered his skin and went into his stomach. ‘My stomach immediately felt wet all over, as if I were bleeding to death. I could feel a sort of tickling inside, but no pain at all.’ He seemed to smell ether. Then it was all over and he was told he could get up and go home. He felt curiously stiff as if his middle had been anaesthetised, unable to bend. (This so intrigued him that he later tried to reproduce the same effect—with the aid of a friendly doctor who gave him twenty jabs of local anaesthetic: ‘It wasn’t the same thing at all.’) When he got home, he had to take off his shoes by kicking each one off with the other foot. On his stomach there was a jagged red line where Edivaldo had pressed his thumbs, and two bright red dots nearby.
Later, after a second operation, two more red dots appeared. And Playfair’s stomach complaint, though not permanently cured, was considerably eased.
Some time later, Playfair interviewed Edivaldo, and heard the remarkable story of how he had become a healer. One evening in 1962 he had been called in to sit with a neighbour who had gone temporarily insane. He became unconscious, and during this period he smashed up the room. But when he recovered consciousness, the woman was cured. Soon after that, he visited a woman who had become rigid after childbirth. He suddenly became rigid himself, and the woman’s rigidity disappeared. It was clear that he was somehow ‘taking on’ the illness of other people. A psychiatrist told him he was probably a medium, and advised that he should go to a Spiritist centre. The first evening he did this, he again went into a trance. When he came to, he was being driven home, and was told that he had performed several operations. Apparently he was ‘taken over’ by various spirits who had been surgeons while alive??
?a Dr Calazans, a Frenchman called Pierre, a Londoner called Johnson, and a German called Dr Fritz, who also worked through the famous psychic surgeon Arigó.
For another year, Playfair continued to spend a great deal of time at Edivaldo’s surgeries, and watched innumerable operations—on one occasion, Edivaldo (or rather, the ‘spirit’ who was controlling him) took Playfair’s hand and thrust it into the open stomach. By this time, he was convinced he had discovered the subject he wanted to write about. He began to attend Spiritist sessions (Spiritism is Brazil’s version of Spiritualism, and is based on the teachings of Kardec). When he encountered Hernani Andrade, founder of the IBPP—Brazilian Institute for Psycho Biophysical Research—he decided to move from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, a move that struck his friends as eccentric, since it is the equivalent of moving from, let us say, the Cornish Riviera to the industrial Midlands, or from Florida to Detroit. But Andrade offered Guy Playfair full and unrestricted access to his files, as well as the insights of forty years of Spiritism. As a consequence, Playfair’s interest came to extend from psychic healing to poltergeists, reincarnation, black magic and life-after-death.
In São Paulo, he began by investigating more psychic surgeons. Then he heard of a case of poltergeist haunting, and offered to help the IBPP look into it.
At the time he heard about it, in 1973, the case had been going on for about six years. The family consisted of a Portuguese mother, who had been married to a Lithuanian immigrant, and was now divorced. She had a son and daughter, both adults. There had been the usual bangs and crashes, clothing and bedding had caught fire, or had been soaked with water; and as a result of these disturbances, the family had already moved house three times. There also seemed to be some evidence of black magic involved; photographs of a girl with thread stitched through it had been found in the house. The troubles had begun after the son of the family had married a girl called Nora.