It was to their house that Guy Playfair went in October 1973, taking his tape recorder with him. He sat up into the early hours of the morning, reading Frank Podmore—one of the early psychic investigators—on the subject of poltergeists. Podmore came to the conclusion that they are invariably fakes—an example of the kind of stupidity to which members of the SPR occasionally seem to be subject—and at this stage, Playfair thought he might well be correct. Finally, just as he was on the point of dozing off to sleep, he was awakened by a series of bangs that shook the house. The poltergeist had arrived. Playfair was struck by the timing—that it began as he was drifting off to sleep; the same thing had happened to Suzuko Hashizume, the investigator who had spent the previous night in the house. Playfair subsequently came to suspect that poltergeists have an uncanny sense of timing which suggest that they are able to foretell the exact moment when the investigator will be looking the other way.
There was something odd about the bangs. They caused nothing to vibrate, as such bangs normally do, and they seemed to echo longer than they should. Kardec has noted in The Medium’s Book:
Spirit sounds are usually of a peculiar character; they have an intensity and a character of their own, and, notwithstanding their great variety, can hardly be mistaken, so that they are not easily confused with common noises, such as the creaking of wood, the crackling of a fire, or the ticking of a clock; spirit raps are clear and sharp, sometimes soft and light . . .’
In fact, a researcher, Dr J.L. Whitton, subjected tape-recording of ‘spirit raps’ to laboratory analysis, and found that they are quite different in character from normal raps. Shown on a graph, an ordinary sound has a distinctive curve, rising and falling like the slopes of a mountain; spirit raps begin and end abruptly, like cliffs. In fact, they seem to be ‘manufactured’ noises, as if the poltergeist had a BBC sound laboratory at its disposal and had to concoct the noises electronically.
The other odd thing about these loud bangs was that they did not disturb the four dogs, which had barked themselves frantic when Guy Playfair arrived; either they failed to hear them or accepted them as perfectly normal.
These bangs were followed by more, at intervals. Later, Playfair tried to make similar bangs by thumping the end of a broom handle on the floor; it was impossible to make them as loud.
The following night, when Playfair was asleep in the downstairs room, a footstool bounced down the stairs, then a bedroom drawer full of clothes was hurled out of a window into the yard. A pillow shot out from under Nora’s head and flew across the room. Again and again, Playfair noted the poltergeist’s sense of timing—how things seemed to happen precisely as people were falling asleep or waking up. Bumps happened mainly at night. Outbreaks of fire could happen at any time—on one occasion, a wardrobe full of clothes caught fire, and would have burned the house down if it had not been caught in time.
At this point, the IBPP called in their poltergeist-clearance team of mediums, who went into the house, sat in the kitchen, and asked their spirit guides to persuade the poltergeist to move. After this, there was silence for two weeks; then minor disturbances began again. This time, the family decided to call in a candomblé specialist—candomblé being one of the largest of Brazil’s many African-influenced cults. This man brought with him a team of helpers. He told the family that this struck him as a particularly nasty case of black magic. Rites were performed and incense burned. And at the end of it all, the poltergeist finally left the family in peace. (At least, it had not reappeared by the time Playfair wrote his book about two years later.)
Now the notion of a poltergeist being associated with black magic is one that European investigators will find bizarre and outlandish. But in Brazil, it is taken for granted. Hernani Andrade is quoted as saying:
In every case of person-directed poltergeist activity where I have been able to study the family background, there has been evidence that somebody in the house could be the target of revenge from a spirit. It may be a former lover who committed suicide, a jealous relation, a spiteful neighbour, or even a member of the same family bearing some trivial grudge. Any Brazilian is well aware that this country is full of backyard terreiros of quimbanda (black magic centres) where people use spirit forces for evil purposes.
‘You can use a knife to cut bread or to cut a man’s throat, and so it is with the hidden powers of man; they can be turned to good or bad ends, though they remain the same powers. To produce a successful poltergeist, all you need is a group of bad spirits prepared to do your work for you, for a suitable reward, and a susceptible victim who is insufficiently developed spiritually to be able to resist. Black magic is a really serious social problem in Brazil, and we must find reliable ways of getting rid of it.’
Playfair goes on to cite another case in a town near São Paulo, in which the poltergeist made a number of attempts to burn the baby. One day, the baby disappeared, and the mother heard stifled cries coming from a laundry basket. She rushed to it and found the baby buried inside dirty clothes, in the process of stifling to death. The poltergeist also smashed furniture and wrecked the roof by pounding on it; when the family finally left the house, it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. All this is, of course, no proof that poltergeists can be called up by magic, but it indicates that they can, on occasion, behave with something like demonic malevolence.
In his book The Indefinite Boundary, Playfair devotes a chapter called ‘The Psi Underworld’ to this problem of magic and malevolence. He cites the disturbing case of 11-year-old Maria José Ferreira, who, in December 1965, became the centre of violent poltergeist activity. Pieces of brick began to fall inside the house, in Jabuticabal, near São Paulo, and an attempt at exorcism made things much worse. (Poltergeists, as we have seen, seem contemptuous of attempts to exorcise them.) A neighbour who knew about Kardec took the child into his house; things got worse, with bombardments of stones and eggs. One large stone descended from the ceiling and split into two; when someone picked up the two pieces, they snapped together as if they were magnetically attracted to each other. (We have already seen that poltergeists seem to have an affinity with electricity; it is interesting to speculate whether the force that caused the stones to snap together was an example of ‘ley power’ or what has been called ‘Telluric force’.)
For a while, the poltergeist seemed to be in an amiable mood; Maria could ask for a flower or piece of candy, and it would instantly drop at her feet. Then, quite suddenly, the poltergeist began to attack her, biting her and slapping her on the face or bottom. It tried to suffocate her while she was asleep by placing cups or glasses over her mouth and nostrils. Then it began to set her clothes on fire.
When Maria was taken to a Spiritist centre, the hope of ‘curing’ her disappeared. A spirit came and spoke through the medium, saying: ‘She was a witch. A lot of people suffered, and I died because of her. Now we are making her suffer too . . .’ Spirits, of course, are not invariably truthful, and this one may have been inventing the tale that Maria had been a witch in a previous existence. (Kardec, it must be remembered, taught reincarnation as an integral part of Spiritism.) Special prayers and appeals to the spirits failed to stop the attacks on the girl. And, when she was 13, she took a dose of ant killer in a soft drink and was dead when they found her. It would be interesting to know whether Maria took the poison deliberately, or whether the poltergeist placed it there, as the ‘Bell Witch’ dosed John Bell’s medicine.
All this makes it rather difficult to follow William Roll’s reasoning in this central paragraph from his book on poltergeists:
‘I do not know of any evidence for the existence of the poltergeist as an incorporeal entity other than the disturbances themselves, and these can be explained more simply as PK effects from a flesh-and-blood entity who is at their center. This is not to say that we should close our minds to the possibility that some cases of RSPK might be due to incorporeal entities. But there is no reason to postulate such an entity when the incidents occur around a living
person. It is easier to suppose that the central person is himself the source of the PK energy.’
The source, possibly. But the whole cause of the phenomena? It is true that in some cases—perhaps the majority—we can interpret the disturbances as an unconscious attempt by the ‘focus’ to draw attention to his or her problems, as an unsuccessful suicide attempt does. Esther Cox’s manifestations ceased after she was put in prison. But if Maria’s unconscious aggressions were causing her clothes to catch on fire and bite marks to appear all over her body, surely the despair that finally drove her to suicide would have reached through to the rebellious part of her mind and persuaded it to stop? It simply fails to make sense to believe that Maria’s own unconscious aggressions drove her to kill herself.
The point is underlined by one of the most remarkable cases described by Guy Playfair, that of a girl who inadvertently incurred a ‘black magic curse’. He calls her Marcia F and mentions that she had a master’s degree in psychology. In May 1973, when Marcia was 28, she went for a family outing to the Atlantic coast near São Paulo. As they walked along the beach, Marcia noticed something lying in the sand—a plaster statue of a woman about six inches high, with much of the paint worn off by the sea. She took it back home to her apartment, which she shared with another girl—in spite of her aunt’s warning that it might bring bad luck to take a statue of the sea goddess Yemanjá, which had obviously been placed there as an offering in return for some favour. But Marcia was a good Catholic as well as a psychology graduate, and thought that the talk of bad luck was nonsense. She placed it on her mantelpiece.
Some days later she was violently ill with food poisoning after eating chocolate. Then she began to lose weight and feel run down. Her vitality was draining away. She began to spit blood, and X-rays showed a patch on her lung. Yet a few weeks later the patch had disappeared—it would normally have taken at least a year. After a holiday at home with her parents, Marcia returned to her flat. The pressure cooker blew up and she suffered second degree burns on her arms and face. Then the oven exploded, shooting out a sheet of flame toward Marcia; an engineer found the incident unexplainable. A few days later, a friend told her that at the moment when her pressure cooker had exploded, Marcia’s photograph had jumped from the wall in her parents’ home.
When a friend warned her again about the statue of Yemanjá, Marcia again dismissed the idea as preposterous.
Now she began to experience suicidal impulses. Crossing the road at a traffic light, she suddenly felt a powerful desire to fling herself under the oncoming cars. Opening the window of her apartment (which was on the fifteenth floor) she seemed to hear a voice inside her urging her to throw herself out.
And at this point, the first unmistakable suggestion of witchcraft entered the case. Her bedroom seemed to be full of presences. Then they entered her bed, and she felt herself being touched all over. And one night, she felt the presence of a male body, which moved on top of her; she felt a penis entering her, and lay there while the entity had sexual intercourse. This went on happening for several nights, until Marcia, wondering if she was going insane, went again to stay with her parents. There, by chance, they were visited by a Spiritist, to whom Marcia told her story. He advised her to go to the local umbanda centre—umbanda is the most popular Afro-Brazilian cult. She also took along the statue, at the insistence of her flatmate. The director of the centre listened to her story, and told her that her problem was undoubtedly a case of a black magic trabalho (work or job) being directed at her because of her removal of the statue. It was only then that Marcia looked more closely at the statue—which had only patches of paint left on it—and realised suddenly that each remaining patch corresponded to a part of her own body that had been damaged: the burn marks on her arms, neck and face matched exactly the paint on the statue, and the patch on the back was just above the ‘patch’ that had been found in her lung. The statue still had paint on its blue eyes, which was ominous. She took the advice of the director, and returned the statue to the spot on the beach where she had found it. Immediately, the run of bad luck ceased.
Playfair personally investigated the case of Marcia, and was not surprised when she told him that, as a result of her experience, her scepticism about ‘bad luck’ and trabalho had given way to a more pragmatic attitude.
Playfair’s observations received strong support from those of another investigator, his friend David St Clair, who has described his experiences of Brazil in a book called Drum and Candle. He speaks of walking down Copacabana Avenue with some friends on his first night in Rio, and noticing on the pavement a circle of burning candles around a clay statue of the devil. When he reached out to touch it, one of his friends pulled him back, saying: ‘It’s despacho—an offering to a spirit.’
‘But you surely don’t believe that stuff?’ said St Clair. ‘You’re all college graduates.’ His friends admitted that they did not believe in it—but nevertheless would not allow him to touch the statue.
After that, St Clair saw many such offerings. He saw offerings of cooked chicken, and the starving beggars who stared at them, then quietly went away. He even saw a dog sniff at such an offering, then back away.
St Clair has many stories about candomblé and Spiritism. But the final chapter of the book describes his own experience of a trabalho. He had been living in Rio de Janeiro for eight years, and had a comfortable apartment with a fine view. He also had an attractive maid named Edna, a pretty, brown-coloured girl. She was, he assures the reader, a maid and nothing more. Her life had been hard: deserted by the father, her family had been brought up in a shack in a slum. She was obviously delighted with the comfort and security of her job with St Clair. She joined a folk-dance group and, after a television appearance, became something of a local celebrity. And one day, St Clair told her that he had decided it was time for him to leave Brazil. Edna was now doing so well that he had no doubt she would easily find another job; he told her he would give her 6 months’ wages.
Then things began to go wrong. A book he had written failed to make any headway; his typist made a mess of it, then fell ill so that it sat in her desk for weeks. A New York publisher rejected it. An inheritance he was expecting failed to materialise. His plans for moving to Greece had to be shelved. A love affair went disastrously wrong, and a friend he asked for a loan refused it. He even fell ill with malaria.
One day, he met a psychic friend in the Avenida Copacabana; she took one look at him and said: ‘Someone has put the evil eye on you. All your paths have been closed.’ A few days later, another friend wrote to say he had been to an umbanda session, and a spirit had warned him that one of his friends was in grave danger due to a curse, all his paths had been closed.
An actor friend—who was also a Spiritist—immediately divined that it was Edna who had put the curse on him. St Clair thought this absurd. To begin with, Edna was a Catholic, and had often expressed her disapproval of Spiritism and umbanda. But his actor friend told him he had attended a Spiritist session where he had been assured that David St Clair’s apartment was cursed. But how could Edna do that, St Clair wanted to know. All she had to do, his friend replied, was to go to a quimbanda—black magic—session and take some item of his clothing, which could be used in a ritual to put a curse on him. And now his friend mentioned it, St Clair recalled that his socks had been disappearing recently. Edna had claimed the wind was blowing them off the line.
St Clair told Edna he believed himself to be cursed; she pooh-poohed the idea. But he told her he wanted her to take him to an umbanda session. After much protest, she allowed herself to be forced into it.
That Saturday evening, Edna took him to a long, white house in a remote area outside Rio. On the walls were paintings of the devil, Exú. Towards midnight, drums started up, and the negroes sitting on the floor began to chant. A ritual dance began. Then the umbanda priestess came in like a whirlwind—a huge negress dressed in layers of lace and a white silk turban. She danced, and the other women began to jerk as if p
ossessed. The priestess went out, and when she came in again, was dressed in red, the colour of Exú/Satan. She took a swig of alcohol, then lit a cigar. After more dancing, she noticed St Clair, and offered him a drink from a bottle whose neck was covered with her saliva. Then she spat a mouthful of the alcohol into his face. After more chanting, a medium was asked who had put the curse on him. She replied: ‘The person who brought him here tonight! She wants you to marry her. Either that, or to buy her a house and a piece of land . . .’ The priestess ordered Edna to leave. Then she said: ‘Now we will get rid of the curse.’ There was more ritual drumming and dancing, then the priestess said: ‘Now you are free. The curse has been lifted, and it will now come down doubly hard upon the person who placed it on you.’ When he protested, he was told it was too late—it had already been done.
Three days later, St Clair received a telegram from a magazine, asking for a story; he had suggested it to them months before but they had turned it down. Now, unexpectedly, they changed their minds, and sent him money. A week later, the inheritance came through. The book was accepted. And ten days later he received a letter asking if his broken love affair could be restarted where it had left off. Then Edna became ill. A stomach-growth was diagnosed, and she had to have an operation, for which St Clair paid. But her health continued to decline. She went to see an umbanda priest, who told her that the curse she had put on St Clair had rebounded on her, and that she would suffer as long as she stayed near him. She admitted trying to get him to marry her by black magic. She declined his offer to buy her a house or an apartment, and walked out of his life.