Beyond the Occult

  I must admit that this was a step that I found myself very reluctant to take. This is not because I am disposed to reductionism — the belief that life can be explained entirely in material terms — but because it has always seemed illogical to me to believe something we cannot prove. In The Outsider and subsequent books I took no interest whatsoever in the problem of life after death: it seemed to me unimportant. In fact it seemed downright irrelevant. The basic questions of existential philosophy are ‘Why are we alive? What are we supposed to do now we are here?’ To reply, ‘Don’t worry — there is another life after this one,’ amounts to begging the question. Even in The Occult I was inclined to steer clear of the questions. I consulted one friend, Professor G. Wilson Knight, who was a spiritualist, and he provided me with some interesting material which seemed to suggest that his mother was able to communicate with him after death. But I remained basically unconvinced — or perhaps a better word would be uninterested.

  Yet I must admit that the evidence for reincarnation struck me as very powerful indeed. The famous case of Shanti Devi, the Indian girl who claimed to have lived a previous life in the town of Muttra, was studied by Professor Hemendra Bannerjee, a psychologist at Rajasthan University, who was convinced of its genuineness. Shanti Devi, born in Delhi in October 1926, began to describe this previous life in detail when she was four. Her husband, she said, had been a cloth merchant named Kedar Nath Chaubey. A school principal who tried writing to the address she gave in Muttra was startled to receive a reply from Kedar Nath. A cousin of Kedar Nath’s who hurried to Delhi was immediately recognized by Shanti Devi. And when the nine-year-old girl was finally taken to Muttra she recognized relatives and was able to direct the carriage around the town. In Kedar Nath’s house she led them to a spot where she said she had buried money in a tin; the tin proved to be empty, but Kedar Nath admitted that he had taken the money … .

  Even more startling is the case of Jasbir Lal Jat, recorded by Professor Ian Stevenson, author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. In 1954 three-year-old Jasbir died of smallpox, but before he could be buried he stirred and returned to life. But the new personality was quite unlike the old one: the new Jasbir claimed to be someone called Sobha Ram who had died in Vehedi at the same time as Jasbir as a result of a fall from a cart. He said he was of Brahmin caste and made difficulties about his food. The family dismissed his claims as childish imagination. When Jasbir was six a Brahmin lady from Vehedi came to Jasbir’s village and he declared that she was his aunt. Taken to Vehedi, Jasbir showed the same kind of intimate knowledge as Shanti Devi had shown of Muttra. His relatives were finally convinced that Jasbir and Sobha Ram were the same person, and the reader of Professor Stevenson’s well-documented account feels much inclined to agree. In that case it would seem that Sobha Ram ‘moved into’ Jasbir’s body more or less at the moment of death, or soon after.

  The problem with such cases is of course that the investigators get there long after it has taken place and therefore have to rely on witnesses who may or may not be lying. But in at least one of his cases Stevenson eliminated this possibility by actually introducing the two families concerned. In Lebanon in 1964 Stevenson heard about a man called Mohammed Elawar, a Druse who lived in the village of Kornayel ten miles east of Beirut. His son Imad had been born in 1958, and the first word Imad had uttered when he learned to speak was a woman’s name, ‘Jamileh’. Then Imad began speaking about his past life as a man called Bouhamzy and insisted that he had recognized one of Bouhamzy’s relatives in the street. Imad said that Bouhamzy lived in the town of Khriby, twenty miles away, and gave details of the house and of his relatives.

  In spite of all this, Imad’s father was too lazy to check on his son’s story. So Stevenson decided to do it for him. He first interviewed Imad and collected details of his life as Bouhamzy, then went to Khriby and talked to Bouhamzy’s family. Introduced to Bouhamzy’s family, the six-year-old boy not only showed intimate knowledge of his ‘relatives’ but astonished them by behaving and sounding like Bouhamzy. Fifty-one out of fifty-seven statements made by Imad about Bouhamzy proved to be correct. (Occasional incorrect statements seem to be due to a blurring of memory: for example he said he had five sons when in fact it was Bouhamzy’s brother who had five sons.) ‘Jamileh’ proved to have been Bouhamzy’s mistress. As Stevenson pointed out, the possibility of fraud was remote: it would have involved the deliberate collusion of seventeen people who had no reason to lie.

  Perhaps the strangest case of all is that of Lurancy Vennum, a thirteen-year-old girl from Watseka, Illinois, who had a fit in July 1877. After this she became prone to fall into trances during which she was apparently ‘taken over’ by a number of disagreeable personalities. A doctor, W. W. Stevens, went to see her and talked to two of these personalities, Katrina Hogan and Willie Canning. When he placed Lurancy under hypnosis the girl declared that she had been possessed by evil spirits and that at present there was a spirit called Mary Roff in the room. A Mrs Roff, who was also present, said, ‘That’s my daughter.’ Lurancy then declared that she would allow Mary to ‘possess’ her for a while. And the next day she was claiming to be Mary Roff. When taken to the Roff household she revealed an intimate knowledge of its inhabitants that Lurancy, who had been born only a year before Mary had died in 1865, could not have acquired. On the way there they passed the house where Mary had formerly lived — the family had moved since — and Mary had to be persuaded that it was no longer her home. She later greeted her relatives by name and recognized her old Sunday school teacher. Mary went on to describe hundreds of incidents in her early life, all in such detail that any doubts were soon forgotten. The evidence was later presented in detail by Richard Hodgson, the member of the Society for Psychical Research who had ‘exposed’ Madame Blavatsky, but who was totally convinced of the genuineness of this case.

  Mary Roff explained that ‘the angels’ would only allow her to stay for three months. At the end of that time she took leave of her family and walked back to Lurancy Vennum’s home. On the way Mary vanished and Lurancy again took over. Lurancy later married a farmer, but Mary continued to drop in to talk to her parents. When Lurancy had a baby Mary put her into a trance so she would not suffer the pangs of childbirth.

  Richard Hodgson’s account concludes, ‘I have no doubt that the incidents occurred substantially as described in the narrative by Dr Stevens, and in my view the only other interpretation of the case — besides the spiritistic … is … secondary personality with supernormal powers.’ This, indeed, is the view that most sensible people would prefer: that Lurancy was a case of multiple personality and that extraordinary powers of telepathy enabled her to read the minds of Mary Roff’s family and convince them totally that they were speaking to their daughter. But is this as plausible as the ‘spiritistic hypothesis’ that Mary’s spirit survived after death and was able to ‘take over’ the body of Lurancy Vennum? That depends, obviously, upon whether you feel inclined to accept the view that the mind can survive death. And in the Lurancy Vennum case the two explanations make equally good sense. But if we also take into account cases like that of Shanti Devi, Jasbir Lal Jat and Imad Elawar, the multiple personality explanation is seen to be inadequate. On the whole it begins to look very much as if the mind survives death.

  Before we allow ourselves to be convinced, however, it is worth taking into account an alternative view advanced by Thomson Jay Hudson and William James. Hudson devotes a number of pages in The Law of Psychic Phenomena to what he prefers to call ‘dual personality’, and concludes that it is simply evidence for his theory of the ‘two minds’. He cites a case that had recently caused a sensation in America, that of the Rev. Ansel Bourne, a Baptist minister of Rhode Island who in January 1887 withdrew five hundred dollars from his bank and disappeared. Two months later Bourne ‘woke up’ to find himself running a shop in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Apparently he had rented the shop and stocked it with sweets and fruit, and had been living quietly under the name of A. J.
Brown. It sounds very much as if Bourne had simply decided to take a holiday from his wife, but everyone who examined him, including William James, was totally convinced of his honesty. Hypnotized by James, Bourne’s secondary personality emerged instantly and described exactly what he had been doing during the past two months. He explained, among other things, that he had left home because there was ‘trouble back there’ and he wanted a rest. A. J. Brown seemed to be a rather weak character who told James, ‘I’m all hedged in — I can’t get out at either end.’ James’s conclusion was that Ansel Bourne had fallen into a spontaneous hypnotic trance to escape from his problems and had given himself a kind of dream identity. Hudson agreed, adding that this was a case in which the subjective mind had decided to take over, as it does in normal hypnosis.

  How far does this theory fit the facts? The answer is that on the whole it fits them very well. Consider Hudson’s case of the young man who held a long conversation with Socrates under hypnosis. If the hypnotist had suggested that Socrates was inside his head, or that he was Socrates, then he would have become in effect a dual personality. If the hypnotist had then gone on to suggest that he was also Kant, Hegel and Marx, he would have become — temporarily — a multiple personality. The self-hypnosis theory would also explain Clara Fowler, Doris Fischer, Christine Sizemore and even Billy Milligan. Milligan’s sub-personality that could speak Serbo-Croat might have learned it unconsciously by overhearing it, like the girl cited by Coleridge who spoke Latin, Greek and Hebrew. It is a little more difficult to explain how Sybil could have a number of distinct sets of brainwave patterns, but Hudson would undoubtedly reply that the powers of the subjective mind are far greater than we realize. The conclusion is that it is possible to explain most cases of multiple personality in terms of Hudson’s theory of the ‘two minds’. (We shall reserve some of the cases that refuse to fit the theory for a later chapter.)

  Hudson went further. At the time he was writing, hundreds of thousands of Americans worshipped at spiritualist churches. This had come about as a result of a series of strange events that took place in Hydesville, New York in 1848, when the Fox family home was invaded by a poltergeist — a banging ghost. Its loud banging noises were unintelligible until a neighbour asked it to use a code of one rap for no, two for yes, whereupon it explained that it was the spirit of a pedlar who had been murdered by the previous tenant and buried in the basement. (When the basement was excavated half a century later human bones and a pedlar’s tin box were discovered.)

  When the two teenage daughters of the Fox family moved into the homes of relatives the disturbances followed them: the ‘spirit’ began to behave like a conventional poltergeist, throwing things around and attacking people with pins. And one day, using an alphabetical code, the spirit spelled out the words, ‘You must proclaim this truth to the world.’ The result was the setting up of the first spiritualist church in Rochester, NY. The rest of the country quickly followed suit. Suddenly hundreds of people discovered that they were ‘mediums’. In darkened seance rooms all over America ghostly hands stroked the heads of the audience and accordions and trumpets floated in the air and played mournful melodies. For some odd reason the Fox sisters had started a spiritualist explosion, and within twenty years it had spread to every civilized country in the world.

  Understandably, scientists found it all infuriating, a return to mediaeval superstition. Yet although there were undoubtedly dozens of fraudulent ‘mediums’ (the word meant an intermediary between this world and the next) there can be no possible doubt that a very large percentage of the manifestations was genuine. This is why, in 1882, Frederick Myers and a small group of Oxford intellectuals decided to set up a Society for Psychical Research to try to discover once and for all whether human beings survived their deaths.

  Hudson’s contribution to the argument, in the early 1890s, was to admit that the phenomena were amazing and then to insist that they could all be explained in terms of the subjective mind. For Hudson the ‘spirits’ were quite simply the creation of the subjective mind — like the ‘spirit’ of Socrates which had conversed so brilliantly that many people thought it might well be genuine. ‘The man who denies the phenomena of spiritism today is not entitled to be called a sceptic: he is simply ignorant … . I shall indulge in the hope, however, that by explaining the origin of the phenomena on rational principles, and thus removing them from the realm of the supernatural, those who now assume to be sceptical may be induced to investigate for themselves.’ He admits that as a Christian, he believes that the soul survives death, but says that this has nothing whatever to do with spiritualism, which is entirely a matter of the strange powers of the subjective mind. He does not explain by what strange ability the subjective mind can make a trumpet float through the air and play tunes, but he has no doubt that it is possible.

  Ironically enough Hudson’s explanation of poltergeists came to be generally accepted several decades after his work had been forgotten. From a fairly early stage investigators observed that there was usually a child or an adolescent in the house where poltergeist phenomena took place. In 1900 Professor Cesare Lombroso — a determined sceptic who had been converted to spiritualism by the sheer weight of evidence — went to investigate a poltergeist in a restaurant in Turin. As he stood in the cellar empty bottles began spinning on the floor and shattered against a table, and another half dozen rose gently from the shelves and smashed on the floor. As Lombroso and the proprietor went back upstairs they heard another bottle shatter behind them.* Lombroso observed that there was a young waiter, an unusually tall lad of thirteen. His tallness suggested that his body was being flooded with growth hormones, including those that intensified his sexual awareness … . At Lombroso’s suggestion the boy was dismissed, and the disturbances ceased immediately.

  It was not until the 1930s that the notion that poltergeists were connected with sexually-disturbed adolescents began to gain wide currency. This was largely the work of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, who had arrived in America in his late twenties and become simultaneously fascinated by psychical research and psychoanalysis. At his first seance, at the home of the well-known medium Arthur Ford, Fodor was convinced that the dead could communicate with the living. After the voice of the medium’s ‘control’ began to speak — a control being a spirit who acts as Master of Ceremonies — Fodor made the rather unreasonable request that he would like to speak to someone who spoke Hungarian. The astonishing result was that a voice that claimed to be Fodor’s father proceeded to address him in good Hungarian, pronouncing the word ‘journalist’ with a German accent just as Fodor’s father did. The spirit declared that he had died on 16 January. (This proved not quite correct: Fodor’s father had been buried — some years earlier — on 16 January.) And he prophesied — correctly as it turned out — that Fodor’s Uncle Vilmos would go blind.

  It was Fodor who, as a psychoanalyst and a psychical researcher, first popularized the notion that a poltergeist is yet another manifestation of repressed sexual energies. And it is undoubtedly true that some of the most famous poltergeist cases have involved adolescents who have just reached puberty. The Esther Cox case, which became famous as ‘the Amherst Mystery’, took place in Nova Scotia in 1878. It began when twenty-two-year-old Esther escaped an attempted rape by her boyfriend, who then fled the area. Esther became depressed and disturbed. One night her bedclothes began flying around the room, her pillow inflated, then she herself began to swell like a balloon. There was a loud explosion and she ‘deflated’. As she lay there an invisible hand scratched on the wall above her bed, ‘Esther, you are mine to kill.’ The raps continued for hours. This poltergeist continued to persecute Esther for several months: furniture moved around, fires were started spontaneously and metal objects stuck to her as if she were a magnet. When a barn caught fire and Esther was jailed for arson the manifestations suddenly ceased.

  This and many other similar cases seem to support the view that a poltergeist is simply a manifestation of the
sexual energies of a disturbed adolescent or a kind of juvenile delinquent in the unconscious mind — or the right side of the brain. The fact that Esther’s manifestations ceased after she was jailed for four months seems to indicate that her unconscious mind finally decided to stop playing jokes. This was my view of the case when I presented it in Mysteries, and my feelings were confirmed by a more recent case that I presented on BBC television in 1976.

  In 1967 the office of a lawyer in Rosenheim, Bavaria, became the scene of a number of violent poltergeist disturbances. Light tubes shattered, pictures turned on the walls and a heavy filing cabinet was moved as if it weighed only a few pounds. Moreover the telephone bill was enormous because hundreds of calls had apparently been made to the talking clock — more calls than were physically possible in the time available. The ‘poltergeist’ was apparently getting straight through the relays. A well-known professor of parapsychology from Freiburg, Hans Bender, went to investigate the case and soon observed that the disturbances only took place when a young girl named Anne-Marie Schaberl was in the office. Anne-Marie was a country girl who was unhappy working in a town; her family life had been difficult — her father was a strict disciplinarian — and she was mistrustful and tense. Bender took her back to his laboratory to try various tests for extra-sensory perception and she showed remarkable telepathic abilities. And while Anne-Marie was in Freiburg the disturbances stopped. So she was sacked from the job and the disturbances in the office ceased. But they continued at the mill where she found work: when someone was killed in an accident Anne-Marie was blamed, and she left. Her fiance broke off his engagement to her because she had such an extraordinary effect on the electronic scoring equipment at his favourite bowling alley. Finally she married and had a child, and the manifestations ceased.