Copyright

Fourth Estate

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A Fontana Original 1992

Copyright © Jean Ritchie 1992

Jean Ritchie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Pictures by Emma Cattell

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Source ISBN: 9780006378099

Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008192082

Version: 2016-05-12

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 The Search Begins

2 Things That Go Bump in the Night

3 Examining the Evidence

4 Out of Body, Out of Mind

5 The Undiscovered Country

6 Quantum Leap

7 The Unbelievers

8 Pay-offs

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

Tell anyone that you are researching a book about the paranormal and they will tell you an anecdote from their own life or one from the experiences of their family and friends. It may be something fairly insignificant: a dream that came true; a strange feeling of a ghostly presence; a clock that, in the words of the song ‘stopped, dead, never to go again, when the old man died’. Or it may be a full-scale haunting with clanking chains, footsteps and headless nuns; a disruptive poltergeist that hurled objects around; a vision of a dying relative many miles away.

The majority of people believe in the supernatural. Sixty per cent believe it is possible to communicate telepathically; fifty-nine per cent believe that some houses are haunted; fifty-nine per cent believe it is possible to dream the future; forty-five per cent believe in reincarnation and thirty per cent believe that we can receive messages from the dead (statistics from a poll carried out for Channel Four in 1987). The word ‘believe’ implies that they have faith in the fact that these things are possible. What this book attempts to do is find out what factual basis there is for their belief.

An anecdotal story, the sort everyone seems to be able to tell about things that go bump in the night, has no scientific worth. It cannot be investigated, bottled, analysed or dissected. It’s like Samuel Goldwyn’s verbal contract: not worth the paper it’s written on. Yet over the many months I was researching this book I came to realize that the sum of all this experience has to be worth something. If every family has within its culture a story of this kind, the sheer volume and universality of the material must amount to a matter of substance. Sure, the sceptics will say that man has demonstrated his need for mystery and that supernatural stories cater for this need. But there are easier ways to inject mystery into life: religion, for a start. The paranormal is a subject that invites scorn: many of the people who have confided their personal experiences to me have done so diffidently, and in confidence: ‘I’ve never told anyone this before in case they thought I was mad,’ is a fairly common fear.

This is not a book about the assorted unconfirmed experiences of all these people. But it is a book for them because it is a book which attempts to explain, in lay person’s language, just what is happening in the serious pursuit of the paranormal.

Are we any nearer today to understanding what ghosts are? What causes poltergeists? Why some people come back from mediums feeling that they have been in close commune with their dead loved ones – and others feel that they have been ripped off? Is there such a thing as telepathy – and, if so, why can’t we harness it and use it?

Research into the paranormal is regarded with some suspicion by the scientific establishment. One eminent American parapsychologist recently estimated that there are no more than fifty scientists worldwide involved in investigating the supernatural on a full-time basis. Fortunately, to counterbalance this, there are some brilliant part-time investigators (several of them, coincidentally, highly-regarded scientists in their own fields) who give their free time and energy to the subject.

Serious psychical research began here in Britain more than a hundred years ago. Although America hhas thrown more money at the subject over the past fifty years, international researchers still look to Britain for good examples of ghost stories: this is the most haunted country in the world.

It is shortsighted of the scientific community to turn its back on psychical research. In terms of world history, it is not long since we all believed that the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth and condemned as lunatics people who talked of stones falling from the heavens (meteorites). We have learned that these beliefs were wrong.

It takes only the quickest glimpse (which is what this book gives you) into the astonishing discoveries of the ‘new’ physics to realize that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. If you can get your brain around ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics – which are now scientifically accepted and verified – how very much easier to foresee the day when extra sensory perception is fully and completely explained. We are no more qualified to reject the possibility of that day coming than we were qualified 500 hundred years ago to call the man who was hit on the head by a meteorite a lunatic.

I have a confession to make. I started research on this book as a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic. I did not believe in the paranormal. I finished writing the book from a different personal perspective. I still maintain a very healthy scepticism about a great deal of so-called ‘evidence’, but I am now convinced that there are many unexplained and fascinating happenings that do not fit into the regular framework of human life, events that can only be encompassed within the definition of paranormal.

I have been greatly helped in researching this book by many experts, whose brains I have picked unashamedly, and to whom the finished product will no doubt appear superficial. To them I quote Oscar Wilde: ‘To be intelligible is to be found out.’ I didn’t set out to further their expertise; I set out to explain to beginners, like myself, just what a vast and fascinating subject this is. I am more concerned with being intelligible than with being found out.

To give you a taste of what the paranormal is all about, let me quote just one of the stories I was told by an acquaintance when she discovered I was writing a book on the subject.

* * *

Dr Betty Cay is an intelligent, well-educated and eminently sensible grandmother, the widow of a GP, and a retired historical geographer in her seventies. As well as spending her days looking after her two grandchildren while her daughter works, she researches and writes local history books, concentrating on areas of her home town, Edinburgh.

Early in 1991 she was trying to put together a book on Saughton, in south-west Edinburgh, and she was running up against a big brick wall. She could not find any information on one crucial small area. She knew that a certain house, known as Sauchton Cottage, was the key to this area. The house, not an impressive manse but an artisan’s dwelling, had been the first to be built in the area, at some time during the eighteenth century. The history of the house and the land that originally surrounded it was fundamental to the history of the development of the area.

‘Because I was looking after the children and running a home for the family, I measured the amount of time I had for research in the odd couple of hours I could squeeze in each day. I was very keen to get on with the book, but I was completely held up by the lack of information I had about this house.

‘I could trace its history back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, but I knew that it went back another hundred years or more and I had no clue as to who had owned it or what land was entailed to it then. If it had been a big, important house, no doubt records would have been kept. But I could find nothing on it.

‘The present occupant of the house was as helpful as possible, and arranged for me to visit his solicitor to see the deeds of the property. But I was told by both him and the solicitor that the paperwork only went back to the start of the twentieth century and I had already got most of that information from other sources.

‘Nevertheless, I went along. The lawyer gave me an empty room to work in and presented me with a typical bundle of legal documents, tied around with red ribbon. On the top was an inventory of all the documents in the pile. I started to work my way through them, taking notes as I went. The papers were in chronological order.

‘Astonishingly, as I progressed, I turned over a document and found underneath it one that dated back to the very beginning of the house in the eighteenth century. It gave the name of the owner of the house and details of his two wives. (He had apparently remarried after his first wife died.) It also gave the name of another woman, who I took to be his third wife.’

The document Dr Cay saw, and from which she made notes, was a ‘memorandum on a feu charter’: a feu charter being an old Scottish term for a conveyancing deed. Dr Cay was able to get all the details she needed about the early days of the house from the document. With it was another eighteenth-century document that was not relevant and did not help her at all.

She continued with her note-taking, moving on to the much more recent documents which covered the early years of this century. Eventually, constrained by lack of time, she re-bundled the documents in the order in which she had found them, noting from the inventory on the front that her eighteenth-century documents were listed, out of chronology, at the end of all the others. She told the solicitor that she would like to return again the following day to do some more research, and the bundle of papers was left out on the desk for her to resume her research.

The next day she was shocked to find that the eighteenth-century documents were no longer in the pile. What’s more, they were not included on the inventory. Upset, Dr Cay called the lawyer, who was in another office. The lawyer insisted that there had never been any eighteenth-century paperwork in the bundle, that there were no papers missing, and that, as Dr Cay had originally been told, it was only possible to trace back ownership of the house through the deeds to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Perplexed, Dr Cay was inclined to wonder whether she had hallucinated the existence of the documents. But she knew she had handled them and read them and she had the evidence of her own notebook in which she had copied out details from them.

Taking the names of the owner and his wives that she had copied from the document, she was able to trace them at Edinburgh’s Register House in the official births, marriages and deaths registers. (Scotland was more efficient than England at starting and keeping good records.) Without the initial input of the names from the ‘non-existent’ document, she would have had no way of knowing where to start. She was able ultimately to find out that the woman she thought was the original owner’s third wife was, in fact, the woman to whom he sold the house.

‘Eventually, everything slotted into place and I was able to trace the early years of the property. Yet the document I used did not exist! Without having seen it, I could have spent years floundering through records and still never have come up with the information I needed.’

Dr Cay has no explanation to offer for her experience. She believes she may have hallucinated when she saw the documents listed on the inventory, but she is certain that the documents themselves were real enough.

Were they hallucinations? Did she already have the information buried somewhere in her subconscious mind (this is highly unlikely, considering the particular and precise nature of the information involved)? Was her mind in some way tuning in to another source of the material? Was her need (she was desperately short of time for her research) a factor in helping her ‘find’ the information? If so, why was there also another, irrelevant, document among the bundle?

There are no easy answers to these question or to most of those posed by the paranormal. But there is no shortage of questions. While this book cannot attempt to ask them all, it looks at some of the main ones, and the work that is going on to try to come up with some of the answers.

1

The Search Begins

What have Prime Minister Gladstone, Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley got in common? The answer is that they were all members of the Society for Psychical Research, a pioneering and highly-respected body set up in London in 1882 with the aim of investigating paranormal phenomena ‘without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated’.

The Society was born out of the general disquiet at the end of the nineteenth century about the nature of the universe. This was before science had taken its quantum leap into the twentieth century, and the prevailing wisdom was that we lived in a mechanical world in which everything – every action and reaction – could be scientifically explained. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had only added to the feeling of being very tiny cogs in a huge well-oiled machine. But the idea that human beings were not the specially-designed central focus of all creation and were simply highly-evolved monkeys, the ‘animals with the big brain’, took a lot of getting used to. There was an undercurrent of belief that this could not be all.

Religion offered some solutions, but the intellectuals of the age did not want to reject the discoveries of the modern scientific world in favour of blind faith. They wanted proof which would demonstrate that man was more than just a sophisticated machine and which would measure up to the new scientific standards. The raw material for that proof seemed to exist: there was no shortage of ghost stories; the ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead – accepted from time immemorial in some cultures – had gone from being a popular craze in the middle of the nineteenth century to being the basis for the Spiritualist religion. ‘Mesmerism’, known today as hypnotism, was beginning to be explored and experiments with telepathy – the linking of two minds without any ostensible means of communication – were being carried out in France.

Perhaps the greatest impetus to investigation was D.D. Home. Today Home is still regarded by many as the most sensational physical medium of all time. Born in 1833 in Edinburgh, taken to America at the age of nine by an aunt, Daniel Dunglas Home was only thirteen when he announced that he was in communication with the spirits of the dead. He became a medium, and rappings and table levitations were common at his seances. Home even appeared to be able to levitate himself, in front of witnesses. He could make objects move around the room, make an accordion play music without touching it, put his head into a burning fire without being singed, and stretch his body, adding as much as six inches to his height while observers held on to him.

Mediums and seances were fashionable at the time, but what distinguished Home from the others – many of whom were undoubtedly frauds extracting easy money from gullible clients – was that he was prepared to work in bright well-lit conditions, and he invited the most sceptical of observers to attend his seances. (Many mediums use the excuse that a sceptic in their midst inhibits their powers.)

He was submitted to fairly rigorous testing. Sir William Crookes, a distinguished physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society, carried out stringent tests, often in the presence of other scientists. Obviously, in the nineteenth century various techniques used by conjurors and frauds today were not understood. None the less, Crookes was not gullible, nor were his peers, and it would be wrong to discredit the witnesses who vouched for Home simply because they belonged to another century. Home did have his critics, among them the poet Robert Browning who disliked the fact that his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a fan of Home. However, in all his long career as a medium, Home was never seriously accused of fraud, and was never caught cheating. Since his death in 1886 there have been many attempts to explain away his feats, the most popular suggestion being that he was an accomplished hypnotist who suggested to his audience that they had witnessed things that never actually happened.

Home lived so long ago, and the eyewitness accounts are so incomplete, that it is impossible to begin to assess the truth. What is certain is that he impressed some distinguished people who, like Crookes, felt that such things should be investigated scientifically and methodically. The Society for Psychical Research was founded by such people, and it attracted the support of some of the most respected scientists, philosophers, politicians and literary figures of the day. Instead of regarding psychical research as a rather suspect pseudo-science, as many people do today, they acclaimed it as an important and developing area. Gladstone said, ‘It is the most important work that is being done in the world – by far the most important.’

The SPR was not the first group to examine the paranormal. The history of Christianity is littered with attempts to appraise objectively miracles and miracle workers. Before the rise of spiritualism religious visions were the most common form of supernatural manifestation in Europe and the New World. Some religions are more comfortable with them than others and accept the existence of seers, shamans, wise ones, yogis.

In the secular world, long before the SPR was dreamed of, attempts had been made to test some areas of the paranormal scientifically. At the court of Queen Elizabeth I the mathematician John Dee tried to find hidden objects by using dowsing. Half a century later, Sir Francis Bacon devised some experiments to test the existence of second sight, as it was called, using cards. His controls were good and the experiments were well thought out: they did not differ greatly from those that were used three hundred years later when serious research began.

In France during the reign of Louis XVI, there was a lot of interest in mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnotism, which took its name from Franz Mesmer, a medical student who discovered he could induce trance states in volunteers. He believed the source of the power was magnetism. During the nineteenth century, experiments with hypnotism were carried out, and by the last quarter of the century its existence was accepted even by the most critical scientists.

Spiritualism took on the status of a religion in the 1840s. Spiritualist beliefs have been around since ancient civilization, but they were formalized into a religion after a whole rash of paranormal events made some people believe that they were in touch with the personalities of the dead. There was a fashionable craze for ‘table turning’, the forerunner of seances, when groups of people in homes all over Europe and America would sit around tables which tilted, turned and even in some instances floated in the air. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were among those who were confounded by the antics of a table. There was probably a great deal of faking going on, but the scientists who investigated the phenomena were unable to prove that it was all fraudulent. Michael Faraday, the physicist, took the line that ‘quasi involuntary’ muscle movements of the sitters were causing the effect without them knowing they were doing it, but many of those who were present when tables and chairs floated around rooms refused to accept this explanation. The fashion for table turning died out, though, mainly because, as with all psi, the phenomena are unpredictable. (Psi is a term now used to cover all paranormal experiences, although it was originally intended to link together ESP and PK.) For every exciting experience, there were many boring evenings passed sitting around tables which remained resolutely rooted to the ground. However, for some people the idea of communication with the dead became the foundation of their religious beliefs and Spiritualist churches sprang up across America and Britain.

The Fox sisters in America were credited with getting spiritualism properly off the ground. In 1848, Margaret and Kate Fox, aged fourteen and twelve, began to ‘communicate’ with the spirits of the dead by a series of rappings that they heard in their home in New York state. The house was reputed to be haunted, and the Fox family complained of strange banging noises. One night the girls tried snapping their fingers to imitate the noise; every time they did so, the rappings mimicked them. Eventually they started to ask questions and dictate a code to the unknown source of the noise, and they got replies that led them to believe they were in communication with the spirits of the dead.

The events in the Fox household were witnessed by many people, starting with neighbours and friends but eventually spreading to the public at large when the press latched on to them. Their stories were not accepted without questions: commissions were set up to investigate them, and they were paraded before panels of experts. The most common explanation offered for the rappings which the sisters seemed able to produce at will was that they were voluntarily able to dislocate their knee joints and make popping noises with them. If this was true, no one has been able to replicate these noises and nobody has explained how the sisters could fill large meeting halls with sound by this means.

The Fox sisters’ strange talents, whether psychic or physical, did not do them any favours. They were marketed by the famous showman, P.T. Barnum, and became nothing more than a music hall act; they were alcoholics, their marriages failed and eventually one of them confessed that they had been cheating all along. Later she denied this, saying that she had made the admission for money. (They were both living in reduced circumstances.) By then, whatever powers they had had waned. The sisters died amid controversy.

Despite this, the Fox sisters’ initial success (and no one has satisfactorily explained how, by knee-popping, they were able to answer so many of the questions put to them by believers and sceptics alike, unless they were able to accumulate information from some non-normal source) spawned a great interest in communication with the dead. Within a few years there were hundreds of mediums across America and Europe who claimed to be able to contact the spirit world.

There were other attempts to set up societies to bring together all those interested in research into the paranormal, and other countries have their own groups. The Parapsychological Association, an international body founded in 1951, is made up of professionals working in the field of parapsychology and has, for scientific reasons, a rather narrower remit than the SPR, though it is more rigorously academic. However, the British SPR remains the most distinguished body of lay people involved in psychic research, even though this research is no longer fashionable, nor as likely to attract as many mainstream scientists as it did in its early years.

After its inception in 1882 the Society divided itself into six different committees, each with a specific area to investigate: thought transference (we call it telepathy today, a word coined in the first year of the Society’s existence by one of its founder members, F.W.H. Myers); mesmerism (hypnotism); Reichenbach phenomena (Baron Carl von Reichenbach, the chemist who discovered creosote and paraffin, believed he had also discovered auras of light created magnetically and given off by all organic matter including human beings); apparitions and haunted houses; physical phenomena; and a literary committee to review and research already-published information about psychic phenomena.

The members were an enthusiastic and hardworking bunch. All the committees (with the exception of the one investigating physical phenomena, which found mediums like Home who could create physical effects in the seance room rather thin on the ground) produced lengthy and detailed reports, and threw themselves with great energy into the time-consuming business of carrying out investigations.

Although it is possible today to snipe at some of the Society’s early investigative efforts, it is important to remember they were breaking new ground and their techniques improved with practice. It took time to come up with all the controls necessary, to work out all (or even most) of the possible sources of fraud, and to even begin to understand the ways in which they themselves might have been unintentionally influenced to see what was not really there.

Yet they were certainly not easily convinced, and they were more than ready to denounce trickery whenever they found it. There was a serious financial motive for mediums and others to be fraudulent just as there still is today a substantial market in bringing ‘messages from the spirit world’ to the bereaved. Then, there was also the possibility of stage fame, and even rich patronage.

One of the most notable exposés in the SPR’s early days was the famous Madame Blavatsky. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a New York immigrant who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, riding the crest of the wave of interest in spiritualism and attracting as many as one hundred thousand members. Madame Blavatsky claimed to get spirit guidance from a group of ‘Mahatmas’ in Tibet and that letters from them were ‘teleported’ to her. When she visited London the SPR set up a committee to investigate her. They tackled the job thoroughly, interviewing witnesses who had seen her physical phenomena and even sending a member to India, to the headquarters of her flourishing movement. Their conclusion, published in 1885, was that ‘she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history’. The Theosophical Society went into decline.

One of the most vigilant and dedicated of researchers was Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick, wife of the first president of the Society, Sir Henry Sidgwick. She denounced a very popular and acclaimed medium, William Eglinton, who produced spirit messages by slate writing. This was a fashionable method of spiritual communication at the end of the last century, and involved holding a slate on the underside of a table. Scratching noises were heard while the ‘spirit’ wrote on the slate, and then the message was produced for all to see. To this day, there are those who believe that Eglinton was genuine: but Mrs Sidgwick described his work as ‘clever conjuring’.

Eglinton inspired researchers to approach their problem from a different angle by perfecting the methods that are used by the fraudsters in an attempt to see how people can be deceived (a tradition carried on today by the professional sceptics as well as by many parapsychologists). One member of the SPR taught himself to produce slate writing as convincingly as Eglinton and then put his conjuring skills to the test by trying it out on witnesses who were told that he was a medium. Nobody detected his tricks, despite the fact that they were not scrupulously hidden, opening up a whole area of research into how and why our eyes deceive us into seeing what we want to believe. The Society’s researchers were so tough that some members felt they went too far. The poet W.B. Yeats commented: ‘It’s my belief that if you psychical researchers had been about when God Almighty was creating the world, He couldn’t have done the job.’

Of course, the researchers’ enthusiasm didn’t mean they were guaranteed to spot fraud. In the early days of the Society, for example, the Creery sisters were believed to be a first-class example of telepathy. Four sisters and a maidservant from their household were able to detect playing cards, names or objects that had been chosen by independent observers while they were out of the room. Their success rate was remarkably high, and Sir William Barrett, an eminent physicist, was very impressed. But they were later caught out cheating, sending messages to each other in code. They admitted it, and claimed that they had done it before, but only rarely. Whether this admission negated everything that they had previously done, or whether, like many mediums or clairvoyants, they found their powers waning and yet felt compelled to produce results, is arguable and is a moot point with other psychics.

Although scepticism was a prized characteristic of these pioneering psychic researchers, they found plenty to reinforce the original enthusiasm that had led to them setting up the SPR. Richard Hodgson (the man who investigated and exposed Madame Blavatsky) emigrated to America, and there encountered a medium called Mrs Leonora Piper. Mrs Piper would go into a trance and then be taken over by her ‘control’, Dr Phinuit, who she claimed had been a French physician. In the trance she was able to give information about those sitting with her. Hodgson, sceptical, assigned a private detective to watch her and her husband to find out how they were researching the information, which she was passing off as obtained from the spirits of the dead. He reluctantly accepted that there was no ‘normal’ way in which Mrs Piper could know many of the things she did. No trace was ever found of Dr Phinuit’s existence in historical records, nor could he speak any French. This is not unusual with mediums, whose ‘controls’ are thought to be secondary personalities of their own rather than real historical people (see chapter 5). However, after one of Hodgson’s own friends, George Pelham, died, he took over as Mrs Piper’s control and Hodgson was provided with a large amount of bafflingly accurate information from his own life. Mrs Piper described a young woman who had died in Australia and to whom Hodgson had been very close – including a description of a birthmark which was a strange spot of blue colour in an otherwise brown eye. On one occasion Hodgson brought a friend with him whom ‘Pelham’ seemed not to recognize, but when told the woman’s name ‘Pelham’ replied that she was ‘the little girl, now grown up’ which was accurate because Pelham had known her as a child.

Although Hodgson scrupulously recorded the details at the time, we can never be sure a century later how much of the ‘proof’ for a medium like Mrs Piper is merely anecdotal and subjective. However, Hodgson was certainly not the only cynical researcher to be impressed by Mrs Piper. When she visited England she was investigated by a distinguished group, including F.W.H. Myers, a leading member of the SPR, and Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist. They took extreme precautions to make sure that she did not meet any of the people who would attend her seances beforehand, and she gave them permission to intercept and monitor all her letters. They, too, were finally unable to explain how she obtained her information unless it was by paranormal abilities. What was not clear – then or now – was whether she was, as she claimed, in touch with the spirits of the dead, or whether she was using highly-developed telepathy to garner knowledge from the individuals who sat with her. She continued to practise as a medium for twenty-five years, and was never discovered acting fraudulently.

Mrs Piper became a celebrated public figure and this encouraged other women to test their own mediumistic abilities. Mrs Margaret Verrall, a Cambridge scholar, showed that she, too, had some exceptional talents. So did a medium who called herself ‘Mrs Holland’, but who was really Mrs Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling. Interestingly, comparisons of the automatic writing of these women (in a trance they would appear to take dictation from their control) revealed quite a few cross-correspondences in the information they gave, as though one was confirming the messages of another, even though it was impossible for them to be in collusion: Mrs Verrall lived in Cambridge and Mrs Fleming in India.

An Italian peasant woman, Eusapia Palladino, gave the early researchers their best opportunity to study a medium who could produce physical effects similar to those produced by D.D. Home. Palladino appeared to be able to levitate tables, move objects around, nudge or pinch sitters who were outside her arms’ reach. Sitters claimed they could actually see her developing extra arms and limbs during seances. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were among the many scientists who, over a thirty-year period, were astonished by her apparent abilities.

Palladino did not shy away from investigation, and she was prepared to work in good light so that those who were watching her could clearly record what went on. Although one early report from the SPR accused her of fraud, a later and more detailed one found that she was capable of producing astonishing phenomena. There is no doubt that she cheated from time to time, but her defenders say that when she was in a trance she had no control of herself and it was up to the investigators to hold tight to her hands and legs to prevent her movement. On one occasion, she even cried out to them to hold her more tightly or she would cheat.

As she grew older and her powers waned she resorted to cheating more. It is hard to condemn a simple peasant who had been catapulted to international celebrity for wanting to perpetuate her failing skills, but unfortunately her predilection for cheating cast a cloud over all her other achievements.

Some researchers believe that anyone who has been caught in any fraud should automatically be discounted from serious research for ever. Others believe (with some evidence from modern laboratory parapsychology to support them) that cheating can facilitate real phenomena, almost as though the mediums have to get themselves in the mood by practising artificially what they want to happen by paranormal means.

Perhaps the greatest of the early mental mediums (as distinct from a physical medium like Palladino) was Mrs Gladys Osborne Leonard, who was the best in the field in the years between the Wars. A Londoner, she first came to the attention of the SPR when she ‘communicated’ with Sir Oliver Lodge’s son Raymond, who was killed in the First World War. She, too, seems to have been beyond suspicion of fraud. The SPR again assigned a private detective to investigate her life, without finding anything that suggested she was researching information. She put herself at the disposal of the SPR for investigation and was paid a retainer by them to be always available for testing. To eliminate the possibility of telepathy, many of her sittings were attended by ‘proxies’, people standing in for those for whom she was asked to get information from the spirit world. Often the proxies knew nothing more than the name of the person they represented, so there was no possibility of Mrs Leonard being able to extract clues from them by telepathy.

The SPR was not concerned only with investigating mediums. In the early days the literary committee took on the formidable task of collecting and publishing a massive chronicle of spontaneous paranormal experiences which they gathered by appealing in the press. They checked out all the cases they published (before telephones were commonplace and when travelling around Britain took days, this in itself was a formidable achievement) and in 1886 published Phantasms of the Living, 701 cases of apparitions and crisis visions. Eight years later they brought out the Census of Hallucinations, another massive tome. Both books are still quoted as reliable source material.

These records were, inevitably, largely anecdotal and subjective, although the SPR did check each case for corroboration. Some Society members were already aware of the need for controlled experiments that could be monitored, verified and repeated, a need that has bedevilled psychical research ever since. As early as 1889, telepathy tests were carried out under stringent conditions, the results obtained measured against those they would expect to find by chance. Consistent with subsequent experience, they found some people who could score above chance, and many others who could not.

This kind of experimentation went on the back burner, though, for nearly twenty years until Professor Gilbert Murray, a Professor of Greek at Oxford University, revived interest. He played a parlour game with his family in which he would go out of the room and then try to ‘guess’ targets that they set for him. Murray fared better when the target set was a scene containing some action and some emotion than when it was a simple object or word. His experience has since been corroborated by recent experiments by parapsychologists like Charles Honorton doing ganzfeld work (see chapter 3). Murray was also unusual in that the whole family, friends and witnesses would try to ‘send’ the picture to him – most telepathy experiments involve only one sender.

Some of his results were remarkable. When the target was ‘Jane Eyre at school, standing on a chair and being called a liar by Mr Brocklehurst’, Murray came up with: ‘My mother being at a French school … I reject that. But a sense of obloquy. Girl standing up on a form in a school … a thing in a book, certainly. I think they are calling her a liar.’

When the subject was the sinking of the Lusitania he got it straight off. ‘I’ve got this violently. I’ve got an awful impression of naval disaster. I should think it was the torpedoing of the Lusitania.’

For a time even Murray himself thought that he might be getting clues to his targets through his extremely good hearing, but he was not consciously aware of hearing the targets being discussed. He certainly fared better when they had been discussed than when a target was simply written down, although this did not completely hamper him. Sometimes he picked up things that were in the minds of the senders, but which they had neither spoken nor committed to paper. For example, when his daughter set him a target of a scene from a Russian book in which some children were being taken to see their grandparents, he came up with the information that they were taken across the River Volga. He had never read the book, nor was the river mentioned when the target was discussed, but in fact he was correct: the book did describe the children being taken across the Volga.

In the 1920s, more and more research time was given over to laboratory-type experiments, with tests for clairvoyance and telepathy through guessing cards. But, by then, this type of research was taken more seriously in America, where universities were getting in on the action and academics were being given funding to study the paranormal full-time (unlike the SPR volunteers).

In the 1930s the work of J.B. Rhine, the founding father of modern parapsychology, firmly established academic interest in the subject. It was Rhine who coined the word ‘parapsychology’ and also ‘ESP’, or extra sensory perception, an umbrella term covering telepathy, clairvoyance and all other forms of paranormal communication.

Rhine was first attracted to the subject after hearing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a dedicated spiritualist, give a talk in Chicago. It sparked an interest in him and his wife Louisa – another great contributor to psychic research – that would last a lifetime. But after an unhappy encounter with a celebrated medium, who they both deemed to be a fraud, the Rhines were convinced that the way forward was through systematic and academically credible research. While working at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rhine professionalized the subject by introducing statistics. Although earlier work had been done with ‘guinea pigs’ who claimed no specific psi abilities, most research had centred on people who claimed or appeared to have specific talents. It was Rhine who initiated large-scale testing of ordinary individuals, and made sure that all his results were compared with those he might have expected to obtain by chance: a protocol that has been adhered to by parapsychologists ever since.

Rhine refined the standard card-guessing games by having a colleague, Karl Zener, devise a new set of five cards, each featuring a simple symbol: star, plus-sign, circle, rectangle, wavy line. These cards, made into packs of twenty-five with five of each, are known as Zener cards. The idea behind them was to get away from the emotive connotations of playing cards, and also to give very clearly individual symbols for ‘guinea pigs’ to try to ‘pick up’.

Testing students at random, Rhine soon found several individuals who demonstrated unusual psi abilities. He was able to test them and find consistent patterns: they performed less well when they were tired, they performed less well on certain drugs. He and his fellow researchers devised experiments that distinguished between telepathy and clairvoyance.

It was the publication of Rhine’s book, Extra Sensory Perception, in 1934, that put parapsychology on the map. By and large, Rhine’s methodical approach and statistical rectitude confounded them. The book and its sequel became popular with mass-circulation newspapers and magazines and national radio stations queuing to interview Rhine. The orthodox psychologists (themselves still pioneering a new discipline) gave grudging approval to Rhine’s work.

He was not entirely above criticism although (luckily for the growing band of parapsychologists encouraged by the acceptance of his work) none of the research with which he was associated was seriously discredited until 1978. Even then, it was not Rhine himself who was accused of distorting statistics, but a British mathematician, S.G. Soal, who had tested a great deal of people with a card-guessing experiment in the 1940s. Only when he looked at their results for ‘temporal displacement’ did he find two of them were scoring well above chance. Temporal displacement means that although they were not necessarily getting the right card each time, they were accurately predicting the following card or a preceding card. (In the case of Soal’s examples they were both guessing the card to come, but that need not have been the case.)

Soal was accused of falsifying his results, and Rhine was implicated because his Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University checked and approved some of Soal’s research. Thirty years later a computer expert scrutinized Soal’s research and confirmed that ‘the sad and inescapable conclusion remains that all the experimental series in card-guessing carried out by Dr Soal must, as the evidence stands, be discredited’. Rhine, though not colluding, had been economical with the truth when publishing conclusions that seemed to authenticate Soal’s work.

The Soal scandal is one of relatively few accusations of straightforward cheating that have been levelled at psychical researchers and parapsychologists, although they have regularly been accused of being duped or of misinterpreting data (see chapter 7). In general, the early members of the Society for Psychical Research and the pioneers of laboratory work inspired by Rhine set high standards for those who came after them.

2

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Pete the Polt is an obliging sort of ghost who believes in paying his way: he materializes five-pound notes for the people he is haunting. Crumpled fivers arrive out of thin air. They turn up pinned to the ceiling; wedged between the blades of machinery; one even appeared in the open air and fluttered to the ground at the feet of the man of whom Pete seems to be particularly fond. This man also found a ten-pound note on the window of his car. Altogether, about ninety pounds have appeared, as well as several one-pound coins and handfuls of pennies.

Pete the Poltergeist has been making his presence felt for the last six years – not always in such a benign way. His ‘home’ is a small lawnmower repair workshop, with a hardware shop in front, in the Cathays district of Cardiff.

The business is owned by John Matthews and his wife, Pat. They are helped out by Pat’s brother, Fred Cook, and his wife, Gerry. Fred seems to be Pete’s particular favourite, but all four of them have seen plenty of evidence of Pete’s existence. So, too, have several other people: neighbouring shopkeepers, salesmen visiting the business, customers and other staff who have worked there over the years.

Most impressively, Dr David Fontana, a lecturer in educational psychology at Cardiff University, who was deputed by the Society for Psychical Research to investigate Pete, has been able to witness phenomena occurring. On one occasion, he was accompanied by a colleague from the university when Pete was demonstrating his prowess as a stone thrower.

It was stone throwing that first alerted John Matthews to his uninvited guest. The business was then being run from a single-storey building in the yard at the back of the shop and workshop. At that time, John had a partner, Graham, and both men were constantly irritated by the sound of stones hitting the corrugated roof. They assumed it was vandals and reported it to the police more than once. The police investigated and found nothing.

When the business transferred to the bigger premises, the stone throwing increased – but this time it was inside. As John, Graham and a young lad who worked for them, Richard, were busy repairing lawnmowers, they would hear small stones striking the walls all around them and dropping to the workbenches and the floor. Originally, they suspected each other.

‘So one afternoon after we’d locked the shop and there was nobody else around, we all put our hands on the counter so that none of us could cheat. And the stone throwing continued,’ said John, a down-to-earth Welshman in his fifties who had never even heard the word poltergeist at this stage.

‘After a bit, Richard said we ought to write down what was happening. As soon as he spoke a pen plopped down on the counter. So then he started asking for things. He said, “Bring us a plug. Bring us the big end off a mower.” All sorts of things. As he asked for them, they arrived. I couldn’t have found them that fast myself in the workshop. That’s when we knew it was something intelligent.’

Since then, both Graham and Richard have left, though not because of Pete. Pat has started to work more in the shop and her brother and sister-in-law, Fred and Gerry, are also both there most days. There have been other part-time employees, all of whom have seen and heard Pete.

‘At first Richard seemed to be his favourite, but now it is Fred,’ said John. ‘It does more for Fred than anyone. It was when Fred said, “Why don’t you bring us something useful, Pete,” that the money started coming.’

But the money is a relatively recent development, and has coincided with Pete getting altogether quieter. For a long time, John, his colleagues, and anyone else who was there – including Dr Fontana – were able to have throwing games with Pete, aiming small stones into the most active corner of the workshop (the area where most of Pete’s phenomena occurred) and having stones thrown back instantaneously. By marking the ones they threw they could check that they were not getting the same ones back and, after experimenting with rebounds and different trajectories, David Fontana was satisfied that there was no natural explanation for the stones.

Other phenomena have included bolts materializing in mid air, cutlery being taken out of drawers and spread on the table (almost as though Pete was trying to lay the table), cutlery being bent, paper and paperclips materializing to order (the paper often seemed to have come from the offices above the shop, where an accountant has his business). Distinctive teaspoons from a restaurant a few doors away have also turned up on the staircase at Fred and Gerry’s home. On one occasion, Pat challenged Pete to produce a dirty paintbrush and one which was not one of their own arrived at her feet.

Pete seems to be fascinated by the carburettor floats which John uses in his business. These are small rubber floats pierced by a sharp metal pin, which allows them to be stuck into different surfaces. They have been found sticking from the ceiling of the workshop. When Pat asked for money, she found a float holding a crumpled five-pound note on to the ceiling. They have appeared in all sorts of odd places in the workshop and, most surprising of all to John and Fred, they have turned up away from the business premises, usually at Fred and Gerry’s house.

‘On one occasion we left one on top of the heater in the workshop when we locked up at night, challenging it to move. As we drove home, Fred went to buy some fags and when he scooped up his change off the shop counter, there was a float with it,’ said John.

On another occasion, Fred thought he had been stung by a wasp because he felt a sharp prick under his shirt but, when he undid his buttons, he found a carburettor float pinned to him. And once, when Fred, Pat and Gerry were sitting under a sun umbrella in Fred and Gerry’s garden, all three of them saw the pin from a float pierce the canvas umbrella. John and his family are a pragmatic, easy-going group, none of whom have had any previous interest in or experience of psychic matters. Both couples, John and Pat, and Fred and Gerry, are in their fifties, with grown-up families. They have accepted the presence of Pete the Polt in much the same way that they accept any new arrivals in the business – everyone is made to feel welcome. They have even become fond of Pete, and Fred described the experience of encountering such an active poltergeist as ‘a privilege’. But not everything about the experience has been happy. There have been one or two narrow escapes. For instance, when a large bolt of wood was hurled across the workshop and when metal stepladders were thrown across the shop, breaking some of the plates that were on sale. Seed and fertilizer, which is sold in the shop, has frequently been scattered all over the floor and the counter when they have arrived at work in the morning and, on one occasion, fertilizer was thrown over a customer. When Pat is in the toilet she is upset to find stones being thrown around her while the door is locked.

‘I don’t like the idea of him being in there with me,’ she said. Although she does not mind when Pete fingers and plays with her hair.

Other phenomena have worried the family because of the risks. The poltergeist has seemed able to create fire and once they arrived at work to find the engine of a giant lawnmower had been started and left running, emitting dangerous fumes. This happened on a Monday morning, so there was no possibility that the mower had been left on by them: it would have run out of petrol over the weekend. Only a strong man could have started the difficult engine, from which a spark plug had been removed for safety.

‘That worried me a bit. If it could start that engine and put back a spark plug that we had removed, what couldn’t it do?’ said John.

Fred, who was originally very fond of Pete, has had the most alarming experiences, and now tries to discourage the whole affair, ignoring new phenomena. On four occasions he has seen an apparition in the workshop, the figure of a small schoolboy, aged about nine or ten, but dressed in the sort of clothing worn in the 1940s and 1950s – a school cap, grey shorts, heavy shoes. Once, the apparition was sitting on the handle of a lawnmower, swinging its legs; once on the shop till; and once on a set of shelves in the ‘active’ corner. Fred could not make out a face or hands and the apparition seemed not to be limited by the physical shape of the room because when it was sitting on the top shelf in the workshop half of its body should, logically, have stuck through the ceiling. Although John was with Fred during at least one of these sightings, John could see nothing.

When Fred saw the apparition for the fourth time he was alarmed. The ghost child was standing in the workshop, near the doorway to the small kitchen, waving to him. He tried to speak to it, but it disappeared.

The most worrying thing for the whole family was the risk to their business. When the stone throwing was at its height John even spoke to his insurance company about the danger to customers. In fact, only one customer was hit, and not hard enough for injury to be caused, but she left the shop indignantly because she believed one of the staff had fired the missile at her. John and Pat were concerned that publicity would affect them adversely.

‘I never believed in any of this before. I would have thought someone was nuts if they said all this had happened to them,’ said John. ‘So I thought people would think I was nuts.’

Two things rule out the possibility of faking in this case: the family’s lack of motive for it and the substantial number of people who would have to be in on any plot. None of the people involved with the business stood to gain the slightest advantage from having Pete there and they all carefully avoided publicity. The incidents have happened over such a long period of time, and with such a variety of witnesses, that there can be no question of one person faking it all: the minimum number of people involved would have to be five or six, because events have occurred even when none of the four main family members was present. (Dr Fontana witnessed throwing while on his own in the workshop.)

Dr Fontana scrupulously investigated the possibility of underground water or vibrations from traffic or other physical events causing disturbance in the building. He went to the premises on numerous occasions, often unannounced, and never saw anything that made him suspect trickery. (Although Graham, John’s original partner, was a practical joker and was known at times to flick stones about when everything was otherwise quiet. Graham’s leaving the business did not end Pete’s activity, and there were plenty of times before that when things occurred and Graham was not present.)

The case was ideal for investigation because the activity has lasted a long time and the poltergeist has not been shy about performing in front of strangers.

‘The chances of getting another case as good as this are slim,’ said Dr Fontana. ‘It is the sheer volume of activity and the number of witnesses, many of whom I have tracked down and interviewed, that make it special. Poltergeists sometimes will not “perform” in front of anyone except the inhabitants of the house or building and investigators have to take a great deal on trust. That has been partly true with Pete. I have sometimes gone to the workshop when John has rung to say there was a lot of activity, only to find nothing happens while I am there. But I have also been able to witness actual phenomena and, on many occasions, I have seen the results of activity (for instance, the shop floor and counter covered in seed).

‘It is very time consuming investigating a case like this, but very rewarding. The amount of activity was so great that at times I had to guard against getting blasé – I’d find myself feeling bored with the stone-throwing games and wishing something else would happen. Yet I know that most investigators would be delighted to witness and take part in reciprocal stone throwing with a poltergeist.

‘I was also intrigued by my own reactions. When I was there, I would eliminate all possibilities of fraud or natural causes and would know that I was seeing genuine phenomena. But as soon as I was away from the premises and reflecting on what I had seen, I would find myself trying to reject the evidence of my own senses by coming up with all sorts of tortuous rationales for what was happening.’

The Cardiff case is still being monitored, and will probably become one of the Society for Psychical Research’s celebrated cases. One of the most unusual features about it is that, unlike most poltergeist cases, it is not centred on an adolescent or young person, nor are any of the main participants emotionally unstable. John Matthews points out that the highest peak of Pete’s activity coincided with his business going through a bad time: two very dry summers had reduced the need for lawnmowers, and consequent lawnmower repairs. But he and his relatives are equable people, old enough to have lived through other vagaries in their business life and uninclined to let problems get them down.

Another unusual feature is the reciprocal nature of the phenomena. At one time, it was possible to ask Pete to start throwing stones more or less at will. It was possible to ask not just for paper clips but for coloured paperclips and even to name the colour.

The word ‘poltergeist’ is German for noisy spirit (although the Germans themselves do not use the word, preferring ‘spuk’) and a noisy spirit is certainly present in the Cardiff case. Poltergeists and ghosts are generally regarded as different phenomena, although there are so many overlaps in the definitions of the two that it is not always possible to keep them apart. Classically, a ghost is an apparition which goes about its own business, regardless of whoever or whatever is around. Haunted houses, with their tales of headless knights, cowled monks and grey ladies, abound. The apparition can be seen, perhaps frequently, but it does not interact with those who see it.

A poltergeist, on the other hand, does interact. The Cardiff case is exceptional: most are not as intelligent or as responsive as Pete. But poltergeist cases always involve some attempt, however crude, to monopolize the attention of the living. Typical poltergeist activity includes rapping and making other noises, moving around ornaments and furniture, ‘bringing’ objects from other places. When small items are seen moving they often appear to travel as though being carried and, instead of losing height in a gradual trajectory, fall as though dropped. Although poltergeists rarely harm anyone, they can be destructive of property and they can pinch or push human beings. Some poltergeists produce water in unexplained pools, some seem to make objects hot to touch. There have been changes over the years. Before this century, cases did not involve switching on and off electric lights or causing electrical equipment to malfunction, and there are now more cases involving water, probably because today buildings are linked to the mains water supply. On the other hand there are fewer cases today of one of the poltergeists’ nastier habits, the daubing of excrement, possibly because there are far fewer cess pits around.

These two groups, ghosts and poltergeists, are separated by large grey areas which overlap, or fit into neither category. The Cardiff case involved an apparition and, in other ways, it was outside the norm for poltergeist cases. The most common reported paranormal incidents do not fit into the definition of either ghosts or poltergeists and deserve a category of their own: hauntings. Like ghosts, these are centred on a place not a person, but they do not involve an apparition. Their standard trademarks are raps, imitative noises, voices, luminous effects and the opening and closing of doors.

Despite the limitations of this arbitrary breakdown, most investigators believe it is easier, if not always completely accurate, to categorize phenomena in one of these three groups: ghosts, hauntings or poltergeists.

There is no shortage of material to categorize, although the numbers of properly attested and witnessed cases are not as great as might be expected. Poltergeists have probably come in for the most investigative attention, simply because they make their presence so powerfully felt and are so disruptive that their hosts seek help. Hauntings are not so threatening and many old inns, hotels and stately homes regard ghosts as attractions. Plenty of families cheerfully co-exist with them.

Dr Alan Gauld, lecturer in psychology at Nottingham University, and his partner Tony Cornell have carried out the most exhaustive and credible study of poltergeists in the world. Gauld and Cornell teamed up many years ago, when Gauld was a student at Cambridge and Cornell was living and working in the town. They met through the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research and, although their partnership is not a formal one and both have done many investigations independently, they still tend to work together much of the time. Gauld, a somewhat laconic intellectual, injects the academic contribution, and it is his work that makes up the statistical core of their book, Poltergeists. Cornell is a tireless enthusiast for field research, described by other members of the SPR as the action man of the pair. They share a sense of humour, a dedication to rooting out conscious or unconscious fraud and natural causes and a reluctance to commit themselves to explanations. In Gauld’s case, this is probably the natural caution of the academic: he takes great pains to eliminate all other possible explanations except a paranormal one and then says that he does not necessarily accept that anything paranormal happened. Cornell’s reluctance is more straightforward: he came to psychical research after an incident that convinced him that the paranormal existed, but his quest for it ever since has left him with only a small residue of evidence. He says that as he gets older (he’s in his sixties), he is less and less sure what it is he is pursuing. None the less, his persistence and the evidence that he does have, belie his words.

The incident that awakened Tony Cornell’s interest in the paranormal happened when he was in India with the army. He went to visit a fakir (a Hindu holy man), who had a considerable local reputation as a mystic. While talking to him, the fakir asked Cornell to turn away for a few seconds. When he turned round again, the fakir was on the other side of a wide river.

‘It was a perfect case of levitation. But, over the years, I have tried to explain it away. At one time, I thought the fakir had hypnotized me and then suggested to me what I thought I saw, but I have since learned that I cannot be hypnotized – various experts have tried. I’ve also wondered whether I had sunstroke but, if I did, I recovered very quickly. Who knows?’

Cornell’s experience came after a childhood with a mother who was ‘sensitive’ and who made various telepathic links with him and other members of the family. Although as a teenager he reacted against it, his experience in India made him interested enough to embark upon a lifetime’s study of the paranormal.

Dr Alan Gauld’s interest stretches back into his childhood and he too says he has inherited it from his mother. At Cambridge in the 1950s, he spent a night with other students involved in the University’s Society for Psychical Research in a reputedly haunted house, with such marked results that he has been hooked ever since. He is critical of laboratory parapsychology, comparing it to a seismologist replicating tiny earthquakes in a lab while the buildings around shake as the result of real earthquakes. Not that he thinks evidence for the paranormal is often as dramatic or as quantifiable as an earthquake, but he believes that it must be studied out in the field where it happens spontaneously. He has encountered many puzzling and unexplained phenomena, but he is very slow to draw paranormal conclusions. In his own private life, too, he has been faced with the inexplicable. Twenty years ago, when his second son was newly born and his older son was three years old, he and his wife Sheila were watching a television programme about the birth of a baby.

‘Sheila was fascinated, I was trying not to look. Just after the baby was born on screen we heard our older son crying upstairs. When Sheila went to him he said “Mummy, lady went into hospital, took off her clothes and had a baby.” There was no possible way that he could have seen or heard anything from the television set, and the only explanation seems to be some telepathic link between him and his mother. We had another instance of it a few weeks later when Sheila, who is vegetarian, was upset witnessing rabbits being shot as they ran across a field in a television programme. Our son again seemed to have picked up the scene, because he said “Rabbits were running, running”. Those were the only two occasions it happened and it seemed to have some connection with Sheila’s heightened emotional state at each time. How can that be reproduced in a laboratory?’

Like Tony Cornell, Alan Gauld’s experience in trying to isolate and define the paranormal outside the laboratory has not made him optimistic about easy solutions:

‘I am less optimistic than I was about the prospect of readily coming to any answers. I have encountered a lot of fraud and natural causes and I’ve become a lot more cautious. I, and other psychic researchers, have incidentally become experts on all sorts of things like plumbing, building research, underground water but, ultimately, it is impossible to say that we have excluded everything.’

In their book, Gauld and Cornell offer powerful evidence for the existence of poltergeists and ghosts, even if they remain equivocal about their origins and causes. Dr Gauld has computer analysed five hundred cases, all of them well documented, although not necessarily contemporary (the oldest dates back to AD 530, seventy per cent occurred after 1800 and forty per cent during this century). Through complicated statistical analysis of sixty-three different possible characteristics for each case, he has effectively proved that there is a definable difference between hauntings and poltergeists, despite the overlap of characteristics between the groups, and that the basis of categorization is whether the phenomena are based on a person or a place.

Traditionally, poltergeists were centred on young adolescent girls but, in the later cases studied by Gauld, there has been a distinct upswing in the number of men acting as the central poltergeist ‘agent’. Other research shows that the age profile of the agent has changed too, with more elderly people involved. (It has been suggested that the isolation of older people, and the consequent unhappiness it brings, may be making them more ready hosts for poltergeist phenomena.) Some sort of disturbance in the agent does seem to be a common factor and adolescence is often a time of acute emotional upheaval.

Why should poltergeist activity be triggered by some people and not others who are under equal stress? Can the agents in any conscious way control what happens around them? The answer to the second question would appear to be, only when there is a fraudulent element (and some young people, carried away with the attention they get when phenomena first start, cheat to keep their ‘poltergeist’ going). The answer to the first question must be that nobody knows: there has been no thorough comparison of the personality profiles of poltergeist agents.

Two of the most celebrated person-based poltergeist cases are the Rosenheim case (in Germany in 1967 and 1968) and the Miami case (in Florida, also in 1967). These two cases are now standard in poltergeist literature because they were investigated so well, the phenomena persisted long enough for good records to be made and kept and because the evidence appears to be irrefutable.

John Stiles, the investigations officer of the Society for Psychical Research and a noted sceptic who has never experienced anything paranormal in his life, says that the Rosenheim case is the only piece of evidence he has looked into that makes him believe that poltergeists exist.

The poltergeist activity occurred in the offices of a well-established lawyer’s practice in the small German town of Rosenheim. Anne-Marie Schneider, aged eighteen, was a secretary in the Rosenheim office and fairly new to the job. Shortly after she joined, the entire office was reduced to chaos. Light bulbs would swing wildly and explode, showering glass everywhere; fluorescent ceiling lights would go out, sometimes with a bang. (On one occasion, electricians found that the fluorescent tubes throughout the building had been twisted ninety degrees in their sockets. After replacing them all, there was another bang and the same distortions were found in the new tubes.) Fuses blew with monotonous regularity; sometimes cartridge fuses seemed to have been pulled out of their sockets.

Problems with the telephones were the most severe inconvenience for the lawyer’s business. Frequently, all four telephones would ring at once when no one was on the line. Calls were interrupted or cut off. Telephone bills rose astronomically and the office was charged for numerous calls that the staff denied making. Developing fluid from photocopying machines would spill while nobody was near the machine.

Because the disturbances appeared to be confined to electrical and telecommunications equipment, the lawyer called in the appropriate authorities. Experts from both the electricity supply company and the telephone company were able to install monitoring equipment which gives some factual non-human record of what went on. The local power station’s monitoring showed up large irregular surges in the power supply and these continued even after, bewildered, they installed a generator to guarantee a continuous regulated supply of electricity to the offices.

The telephone company’s findings were even more surprising. By recording every outward call, what time it was made and how long it lasted, they found that over a few weeks many calls were made to the speaking clock, often at the rate of six times in a minute, and at times when it is certain that nobody in the office could have been responsible. On one day, forty-six calls were made to the clock in a fifteen-minute period.

With so many staff and technicians in on what was happening, it is hardly surprising that news got out to the local press and, as a result, two television companies made short documentaries about the phenomena. The lawyer, at his wit’s end because his office was being destroyed daily, and business and staff morale were suffering, filed a formal charge with the police against the (unknown) mischief maker. He hoped that, if he were the victim of an elaborate practical joke, this would persuade whoever was doing it to stop. The local CID launched an investigation.

By this stage, Professor Hans Bender, Professor of Parapsychology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, had arrived on the scene with some colleagues, including two physicists who took over the investigation of the electricity supply and the telecommunications equipment. They recorded erratic power deflections and loud bangs, and eliminated causes such as static magnetic fields, variations in the electric current, ultrasonic effects (including vibrations) and, amongst other things, manual intervention or faking.

Bender and his team soon decided that Anne-Marie Schneider was the focus of the activity, which always occurred during office hours, and sometimes started the moment she crossed the threshold. His announcement that he believed they were dealing with a poltergeist precipitated a greater variety of phenomena: paintings began to swing and even turn over on their hooks; decorative plates fell off the walls; drawers opened and closed by themselves; a heavy filing cabinet moved about a foot away from the wall. A video film was made of one of the pictures rotating.

As the investigation progressed, Anne-Marie became more and more nervous and hysterical. Eventually, she was sent home on leave and, immediately, all the problems stopped. She found another job and, although a few disturbances happened at her new place of work, there was nothing so dramatic and eventually these died away. The lawyer’s office remained peaceful after she left. There were about forty witnesses who had observed the phenomena, including the technical experts, clients of the lawyer, journalists and scientists, as well as the staff at the office.

There are some marked similarities between this case and the occurrences in Miami during the same year. In both instances, the poltergeist activity occurred at the workplace of the agent. Personality-profile tests have shown that both agents have some characteristics, which might be important, in common. Both, for example, seemed to have felt some aggression towards those with whom they worked, but were able somehow to displace their aggression into poltergeist activity. (Both, incidentally, had forbearing and long-suffering employers. Other similar cases may be lost to research because employers would justifiably become fed up with such a catalogue of disturbance.)

In the case of the Miami poltergeist, the agent was a nineteen-year-old boy. Julio Vasquez, a Cuban refugee, was a clerk working in the warehouse of a wholesale company dealing in cheap souvenirs and novelty items. The warehouse contained tiers of shelves arranged in aisles and on the shelves were stacked and stored the goods to be supplied to retailers. Many of the items were breakable and many of them were broken, because Julio appeared to cause them to jump off the shelves and smash on the floor, even if he was at the other end of the warehouse.

The strange happenings at the warehouse came to the attention of a writer of popular books on parapsychology, Susy Smith. She was answering questions on a radio phone-in when a member of the warehouse staff called and told her, over the air, what was going on. Smith alerted two prominent American psychical researchers: W.G.Roll, Director of the Psychical Research Foundation in North Carolina, and Professor J.G. Pratt from the University of Virginia. Miss Smith and the two academics witnessed and recorded the astonishing effect Julio appeared to have on the goods on the shelves, detailing two hundred and twenty-four separate incidents in their reports. These were probably only the tip of the iceberg: the Julio effect had been felt for three or four weeks before they became involved and there were days when objects were falling from the shelves more or less non-stop.

The police had been called in more to pacify the other employees than because the owners of the warehouse held Julio to blame. The poltergeist was not shy: four police officers witnessed what was happening, as did several other independent witnesses apart from the staff and the parapsychologists. Among these witnesses was a professional magician, a friend of the owners, who had been unable to spot any possible fraud by Julio or anyone else.

Because the phenomena were fairly straightforward and confined to the area of the warehouse, it was relatively easy to arrange good scientific controls to monitor both Julio and his effect. From vantage points at opposite corners of the warehouse the two parapsychologists were able to make careful notes of who was where and when and Julio’s position relative to anything falling off the shelves. The sheer amount of detailed information they were able to supply, though in many ways tedious and repetitive compared to some of the more exciting poltergeist activities in other cases, makes this one of the strongest cases ever recorded.

On one occasion, the object that fell off the shelf travelled twenty-two feet before it hit the ground. In other instances, a souvenir would leapfrog items in front of it on the shelves and crash to the floor. Sometimes the broken items had been deliberately placed on the shelves by the investigators in positions which seemed to particularly attract the poltergeist activity. Concerted efforts were made to discover natural or fraudulent causes for the succession of breakages: shelves were shaken and prodded, dry ice was used to balance objects precariously on the edge of shelves (with the result that they fell when the ice melted), but the researchers were left with no explanation of how objects from the back of shelves fell. Despite the close scrutiny under which he was held, nobody found any evidence of Julio faking the disturbances. He was a rather mixed-up and unhappy young man, pining for his mother and grandmother who had been left behind in Cuba and facing the prospect of having to move out of his stepmother’s house. There was no doubt that he was under stress. After leaving his job at the warehouse, Julio served a short prison sentence for shoplifting and he was later shot while refusing to hand over the takings from the petrol station where he worked to two armed robbers. Since then, his life, according to Roll, has settled down and there have been no more paranormal phenomena.

One of England’s most famous – and most controversial – poltergeist cases is the Enfield case, investigated by two members of the Society for Psychical Research, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair. The case lasted for eighteen months, starting in August 1977, and centred round one family: a divorced mother and her four children, thirteen-year-old Rose, eleven-year-old Janet, ten-year-old Pete and Jimmy, aged seven. It started with furniture moving about and rapping noises in the family’s Enfield council house and progressed through some of the most startling phenomena reported: there were levitations, fires, water appeared from nowhere, excrement was daubed, apparitions were seen, writing appeared on walls and the two girls apparently developed the ability to talk with the voice of an old man, using language and vocabulary that were alien to them. Playfair wrote a book, This House is Haunted, giving a chronology of the case, which attracted media attention from all over the world. The book shows how the poltergeist, whose agent was originally thought to be Janet, could have moved around amongst different members of the family.

The case attracted controversy as vigorously as it attracted publicity. Other psychical researchers were not happy with the protocols established by Grosse and Playfair. There were suspicions that the children were colluding in fraud and that other witnesses were affected by the hysteria that was generated. At best, several of them feel that there may have been genuine poltergeist activity in the first few weeks at Enfield but that, from then on, the children enjoyed the attention they were getting and fabricated phenomena to keep up the interest. Ventriloquists and magicians were called in, as well as mediums and psychiatrists.

Maurice Grosse is hurt by any suggestions that the case was not genuine. He committed a great deal of his time and energy to investigating it and fifteen years later, with a number of other investigations under his belt, still feels that it was ‘the case of the century’.

‘It is very easy to cry “fakery” when we don’t have any real answers,’ he said. ‘We have theories about poltergeists but we don’t understand them. Fraud is one of the handiest explanations to latch on to. It stops us having to delve any further. I know the problem other researchers had – they didn’t see what was happening at Enfield. It is one thing hearing about phenomena, quite another to witness them. It was my first investigation and I saw more startling evidence there than most researchers see in a lifetime of different cases.’

Maurice Grosse has tape recordings of various aspects of the case, including the gruff voice the girls could produce. Photographs were also taken, some of which purport to show the girls being thrown out of bed, their bedding whipped off them and levitations. Unfortunately, no video film was obtained of the phenomena. There was a persistent tendency for electrical equipment, mains or battery, to malfunction at the Enfield house.

Ghosts and Hauntings

When Andrew Green and his wife moved into a new house in Bramley, Surrey, the garden was what attracted them. It was an acre in size, and relatively undeveloped, with a wooded area and a trout stream running through it. A very keen gardener, Andrew spent most of his leisure time working on it. It preoccupied him – he even daydreamed about it while commuting into London to his publishing job. His favourite spot was a large rockery in one corner, which he built entirely alone, lugging heavy rocks into place and spending hours browsing through catalogues and garden centres to decide which plants to put in.

Unfortunately, Andrew and his wife divorced and had to move. They sold the house to a couple with two young children. During the sale, Andrew became friendly with the couple and invited them to call on him if ever they were passing through Robertsbridge in Sussex, where he now lives. Eighteen months later, they rang to say they would be in the area and would pop in to see him, bringing their children, who had never met Andrew, with them.

‘As they got out of the car, their twelve-year-old daughter went very pale and fainted. When we got her up and into the house, she told her father that I was the man she had seen on the rockery. Apparently, she had been telling her parents for some time that she kept seeing a man on the rockery in the garden. They had not believed her, although her description had sounded quite like me. After meeting me in the flesh, she never saw me again in the garden.’

Andrew Green admits that it was an enormous wrench for him to leave the garden at Bramley and that he felt especially attached to the rockery because it was entirely his own work. At his new home, he woke up several times imagining he was back there.

‘Obviously, the attachment wore off and I suspect that as it did the girl no longer saw me.’

Andrew Green appears to have been able to leave some sort of imprint of himself on the surroundings that were so important to him. It seems more likely that he created the apparition, than that it was created by the girl who had never clapped eyes on him before. Yet many experts say that all apparitions are hallucinations. They get round the problem of different people at different times seeing the same ghost by suggesting that the hallucination is transferred from one person to another by telepathy. In some way, the emotions of the first person to see the ghost transmit themselves to others at the scene and they then share the hallucination.

A classic group hallucination was reported by F.W.H. Myers in 1903 and happened in 1887. Canon Bourne and his two daughters went out hunting and at midday the two girls decided to return home with the coachman while their father carried on. After stopping to speak to somebody, they turned and saw the Canon waving his hat to them from the opposite side of a small dip and signalling to them to follow him. One of the sisters, Louisa Bourne, provided the following statement, which was also signed as correct by her sister:

‘My sister, the coachman and I all recognized my father and also the horse. The horse looked so dirty and shaken that the coachman remarked he thought there had been a nasty accident. As my father waved his hat I clearly saw the Lincoln and Bennet mark inside, although from the distance we were apart it ought to have been utterly impossible for me to have seen it. At the time I mentioned seeing the mark, though the strangeness of seeing it did not strike me until afterwards.

‘Fearing an accident, we hurried down the hill. From the nature of the ground we had to lose sight of my father, but it took us very few seconds to reach the place where we had seen him. When we got there, there was no sign of him anywhere, nor could we see anyone in sight at all. We rode about for some time looking for him, but could not see or hear anything of him. We all reached home within a quarter of an hour of each other. My father then told us that he had never been in the field in which we saw him the whole of that day. He had never waved to us and had met with no accident. My father was riding the only white horse that was out that day.’

The fact that the girl could clearly see the manufacturer’s mark in her father’s hat at a distance from which it should not have been visible supports the hallucination theory, but there is still the problem of why all three of them saw exactly the same thing at the same moment, unless the apparition came not from their minds but from the mind of the Canon.

The hallucination theory may even hold good for the straightforward apparitions that manifest in the same place, doing the same thing, at different times (classic grey ladies and headless riders reported across the centuries). Fred, who saw the child-like apparition in the Cardiff poltergeist case, actually suggested to Dr Fontana that it might be his own hallucination of himself as a child.

Trying to make all cases conform to the theory is at best a tortuous exercise, and one that is rejected by researchers like Dr Alan Gauld who feels it falls short of explaining the physical phenomena that sometimes attend hauntings: noises, the breaking of crockery, opening and closing doors with visible turning of handles or lifting of latches.

If the hallucination theory is accepted, it’s interesting to note that the human mind can collectively conjure up the personality of a ghost.

Tony Cornell and some friends were called in to investigate a haunted pub, the Ferryboat Inn at Holywell, near Cambridge, in the early 1950s. Cornell had heard that every St. Patrick’s Day a ghost appeared in the bar and pointed at one of the flagstones, which moved. He and his friends went there on the right day, stationed themselves above the flagstone with a ouija board, and conducted a seance. They soon had a communicator, a girl who told them her name was Juliet Tewsley, that she was a Norman, and that she was hanged for her affair with a married man, Thomas Zole, in 1054.

‘There were five of us round the ouija board, possibly talking to our own unconscious minds. But it gave the landlord of the pub an idea, and he asked us to go again the following year – only for us to find that a lot of media people had also been invited. Since then, the story has been added to and added to,’ said Tony Cornell.

‘There is no evidence that this girl existed. The name Juliet didn’t come into the English language until the sixteenth century, the Normans did not invade until 1066. One wonders if this is how all ghost stories start.’

In a more controlled way, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research created their own ghost in 1974. Eight of them, under the supervision of British mathematician Dr A.R.G. Owen, assembled around a table with their hands clearly visible on top and made ‘contact’ with a ghost they had invented themselves: a Royalist knight at the time of the English civil war, called Philip. Philip would answer questions by rapping on the table, and would make the table tilt and eventually levitate off the ground. But the framework of the fictional Philip’s life had all been worked out beforehand by the group: he lived in a large house called Diddington Manor, he had a wife called Dorothea and had been passionately in love with a gypsy girl who was burned as a witch. Philip died by committing suicide, out of guilt for not having saved the girl. The ‘ghost’ of Philip accepted the characteristics assigned to him and even filled in more background details about himself.

Despite each member of the group suspecting the others of cheating, there was never any evidence of it, and some of the physical phenomena staggered everyone present. It was traditional for the group to hand around sweets, leaving one for Philip. On one occasion, when one of them jokingly tried to take Philip’s sweet, the table tilted alarmingly away from him, but the sweet did not slide down it. Neither did others that were put next to it.

The group embarked on ‘creating’ Philip because they were interested in recording physical phenomena. They did not create an apparition of him, but the experiment demonstrates that the mind can create a ghost personality.

Hauntings have been reported since time immemorial. There are many references to them in classical literature. Because their manifestations are generally less dramatic and more sporadic than poltergeist cases, researchers have been present at fewer hauntings when phenomena have occurred, although there are well-attested cases of several witnesses experiencing the same phenomena. Most cases which are quoted in books on the supernatural as prime examples of hauntings are old. This is probably less to do with the frequency or quality of hauntings and more to do with the amount of time and interest available to record them properly. There are reputedly haunted houses in every district of Britain but remarkably few in which independent witness statements have been logged and compared.

The Despard case, which was first reported in 1892, is accepted as a classic and is still being studied and scrutinized in detail by researchers (it is often referred to as the Morton case, after the man who first wrote about it). A ‘tall woman in black’ was seen so often in the Despard family home in Cheltenham that some guests took her for another visitor. The woman always held a handkerchief to the lower part of her face. Unlike many apparitions, she was not confined to one spot but moved around the house and grounds. She was able to walk through objects and trip wires rigged deliberately to catch her. When a circle of people joined hands around her, she passed through the circle between two people and disappeared. Altogether, seventeen people bore witness to having seen her, some of whom had no prior knowledge of her ‘presence’ in the house. There were other assorted phenomena reported: footsteps, doors banging, handles turning.

According to Tony Cornell and Dr Alan Gauld, ‘minor hauntings’, where there are sounds, objects are moved and lights are switched on and off, but where there is no apparition, are far more common than poltergeists or ghosts. Yet because these cases are difficult to assess (and perhaps because they are rather dull) they do not find their way into case collections and parapsychological literature. Cases are also extremely hard to categorize, many of them overlapping the apparition and minor haunting groupings. One case Cornell and Gauld report in their book, Poltergeists, is the story of a haunting that took place in 1971 and 1972, in a substantial five-bedroomed detached house lived in by a married couple, who were both college lecturers, and their four children. After moving into the house, they experienced an assortment of phenomena: a spoon was seen suspended in mid air, a stone which had come out of a ring was moved from inside a jewel box to the bed, a noise was heard as if a trunk was being dragged across the landing, the sound of drawers being opened and closed was heard on numerous occasions, and one of the daughters and her cousin reported seeing an apparition during the night, a man who stood near the mantelpiece in the lounge with his head on his hands. Breathing noises, singing, a voice with a Scottish accent, footsteps and muffled whispers were all heard. The front door bell rang, and so did the telephone, when there was no one there. Gauld and Cornell believe the family were excellent witnesses, and say so in their book:

‘When one investigates such cases on the spot, and meets the people concerned, the evidence even in the most superficially impressive examples tends to crumble before one’s eyes; but sometimes the witnesses on better acquaintance seem so careful and so conscientious that one can neither dismiss nor yet completely explain away their cases. This was a case of the latter sort.’

One of Cornell’s recent cases involved a newly-married couple who went on honeymoon to a fifteenth-century hotel in a market town in Norfolk.

‘They knew nothing about the hotel, which was reputedly haunted, and they were a pragmatic pair who resolutely did not believe in ghosts. Although they were just married, they had been living together for some years. They had been given the three-night honeymoon as a surprise present from the bride’s father, and had only been told about it that day. They had no chance to learn anything about the history of the hotel,’ he said.

The couple arrived in the evening, had dinner, and went up to their room at about nine o’clock. The door at first refused to open and they both noticed that there was a cold spot outside it. Once inside the room they felt it was cold, despite the fact that the radiators were working normally. It was a typical honeymoon room, with a four poster bed on one side and an open fireplace on the other. Above the fireplace was a piece of glass, covering and protecting an old fresco. As they settled down in bed they both noticed a luminous glow coming from one side of the fireplace. They were puzzled but not disturbed and settled down for the night.

At about half past eleven, they heard someone pacing up and down in the corridor outside their room, then they heard the footsteps inside the room. They both got out of bed to investigate but could see nothing, although they could hear the footsteps going round the foot of the bed. Between three and four o’clock in the morning the husband woke up and saw a young girl, aged between about twelve and fifteen, with a garland of flowers in her hair. As he nudged his wife to waken her, the figure walked to the window and disappeared.

The following day, when they mentioned their experiences to the manager of the hotel, he told them that the American guest in the room next to theirs had also had a disturbed night and had checked out of the hotel. The manager offered them a different room, but despite having by this time heard the history of the haunting, they decided they would stay where they were. The story they were told was that three hundred years previously the owner of the inn, a woman, had been having an affair with an ostler who murdered her in that room. Her daughter, who had been having an affair with the same man, threw herself off the balcony when she learned of her mother’s death.

On the second night, they again had problems opening the door of the room, but this time the room was so hot they had to open a window. Once again, there was a luminous glow by the fireplace and again they heard footsteps both inside and outside their room. During the night the husband felt the bedclothes being pulled over his head. This happened three times.

In the morning, the manager showed them a portrait of the owner who legend said had been murdered. The husband was shocked because he recognized her as an older version of the girl he had seen. That night they experienced the same problems opening the door to their room and saw the glowing light. On closely inspecting the room they found a hand print, the size of a child’s hand, on the inside of the glass covering the wallpainting. The glass, which was held about an inch and a half proud of the wall by a heavy wooden frame, was quite dusty on the inside and the fresh print showed up clearly.

In the early hours of the morning, the husband again woke up and saw the same girl sitting on the end of the bed. He believed he could actually feel the depression caused by her weight. For about fifteen seconds she and he looked at each other and then she once again went to the window and disappeared. When she left, he felt the springs of the bed go up. In the morning another set of fingerprints could be seen on the glass.

When he investigated the haunting, Tony Cornell was satisfied that the couple were truthful and sincere, and as they had both been firm disbelievers in anything paranormal, there appeared to be no obvious motivation for fraud. But his investigations showed that the owner of the hotel whose picture was hanging in the lounge had died a natural death, had not had a daughter and that there was no record of her having an affair with an ostler.

‘One of the problems with psychical research is that a lot of time is spent on cases that are eighty years old or more,’ he said. ‘But there are still some very good examples happening right now.’

Investigations

It seems odd that we have so little evidence of ghosts and poltergeists and hauntings, apart from witness testimony. Psychical researchers often report back that their cameras failed, their tapes broke, their film turned out to be blank. There is a very high rate of instrument failure on a field investigation.

With the high-tech equipment now available, instrument recording would seem to be the logical way forward. Infra-red cameras can record in the dark, without upsetting any ‘atmosphere’ necessary for whatever is going on, video equipment is becoming more compact, image intensifiers and all sorts of other sophisticated gear are available. Many members of the Society for Psychical Research agree that instrumentation is necessary. Unfortunately what is available has been assembled on an ad hoc basis, mostly at individual expense.

The best device in Britain at the moment is nicknamed SPIDER (Spontaneous Psycho-physical Incident Data Electronic Recorder), which has been devised and assembled by Tony Cornell, Alan Gauld and Howard Wilkinson, who is in charge of technical services in the psychology department at Nottingham University and who works with Cornell and Gauld on many of their field investigations. According to Wilkinson, SPIDER is a ‘glorified burglar alarm’. It consists of a small Sinclair computer in a radiation-proof box, a printer with a series of relays which control infra-red, ultra-sonic and electro-static detectors, as well as video cameras, stills cameras, sound microphones and lights. A grant from the SPR paid for a time-lapse video recorder, but Cornell alone has invested about six thousand pounds in the equipment. He pioneered the assembly of the equipment with the help of two electronics students from Cambridge but, ultimately, it was Howard Wilkinson who assembled it, re-wired it and got it working.

The main drawback of SPIDER is its size: putting it in place involves trailing wires and inconveniently bulky hardware. It is, as Tony Cornell says: ‘Absolutely no use in the average family home, especially if there are dogs, cats and children about. And if you need to cover more than one room at a time with the cameras, it becomes even more difficult.’

But Wilkinson, Cornell and Gauld are keen to use it wherever they can, so that ultimately they can assemble a library of video footage, not just as proof of the phenomena but also as a means of training other field investigators. They have made a start: they have one piece of video tape recording a poltergeist outbreak at a car-hire firm in Arnold, near Nottingham. The case began in August 1990 when an eighteen-year-old youth joined the firm to do the steam cleaning and valeting of their fleet of cars. Small gravel stones were being thrown at great velocity, narrowly but consistently missing people, around the portakabin premises the company was using. Observers were able to throw stones and see them come whizzing back. Milk bottles were rearranged and files floated off desks and dropped on to the floor.

Although in some instances the youth seemed to be cheating by flicking the stones himself, there were others when it was impossible for him to be responsible.

‘On one occasion I was in the office with the lad and Alan was outside able to see everything,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘A stone hit the wall above his shoulder and dropped into a teacup. It was impossible for him to have faked it. And there were occasions when stones could be heard raining down on the roof while he was inside the portakabin. Sometimes as many as forty or fifty stones would be swept off the roof at the end of the day, and the local police had ruled out the possibility of vandalism.’

SPIDER was installed and a video was recorded of the steam arm coming off a steam-cleaning device.

‘It was taken on a dim day at the back of the premises. The handle moved as someone walked past. It doesn’t look as though he touched or nudged it. A clear noise is recorded. But, as luck would have it, the time and date on the tape recording partially obscures what happened,’ said Howard Wilkinson. ‘It is possible today to get edge detection equipment which analyses video tape frame by frame on a computer, blocking out anything which is stationary and only showing up movement.

‘We need this equipment. We also need sound-analysis equipment. And we need to miniaturize what we already have, so that we don’t have to hump a great load of gear about with us.’

Where possible, SPIDER is rigged up with two cameras per room, each in the field of view of the other to eliminate the possibility of tampering. Even after taking as many precautions as possible to ensure that his equipment is as tamper-proof as possible by using tape to secure cables and leads, however, Wilkinson has experienced an unusual number of ‘technical’ faults.

‘I was very excited when I thought that at Arnold there would be some film recording chairs moving. I screeched down there to pick it up, but when I got the film back there was nothing on it. I checked all the equipment and it appeared to be in full working order, but eventually I realized that the F-stop on the camera had been changed so that it did not record in the dark. Everyone swore they had not touched it, and because I had by that time spent weeks on the case and knew them well, I was inclined to believe them, after initially feeling I’d been set up. On other occasions and other cases, I’ve had plugs pulled out of the back of recorders, even though they were taped in. Part of the psychology of dealing with these cases is deciding whether you believe that the people involved did it or not. We will always have the problem of making equipment tamper-proof: until we work out how “spirits” tamper with things!’

SPIDER has been tried out at the scene of various hauntings, without much success. It was installed for fifty-two days at Carnfield Hall, near Nottingham, a large home with a long history of haunting but the most that was recorded were a few strange photographs.

‘One of the problems with hauntings is that they are so unpredictable,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘We’re seriously thinking of advertising for anyone with a large stately home that is haunted to let us install the equipment in a part of the building where it would not be in anyone’s way and where the haunting is supposed to happen.

‘Failing to pick something up on the cameras does not necessarily mean that nothing happened. If someone clearly sees a ghost and it does not appear on the film, that tells us something about the nature of the phenomenon. We have to appraise every bit of technical evidence we get rigorously: so many doubtful photographs have been produced over the years, purporting to show paranormal events, and there seems to have been no effort to eliminate lens flares, double exposures, reflections of light off furniture …

‘If we can get a lot more on video we will really have made a breakthrough. The advantage of filming something is that you can look back at it afterwards. Witnessing an event takes only a couple of seconds and, in retrospect, you start to query your own senses. Did I really see what I thought I saw? A film of it means you can look at leisure, picking up lots of things you missed at the time.’

Robin Furman runs an organization he calls Ghostbusters UK (it used to be called Grimsby Ghostbusters but they have spread their wings to take in the whole country). A psychotherapist who works from home, Furman and his son Andy, with Rodney Mitchell, a computer consultant, and Janice Paterson make up the Ghostbuster team, and, in great contrast to the low-key style of Dr David Fontana, Dr Alan Gauld, Tony Cornell and other serious investigators, they court publicity. They travel to their cases in a 1959 Austin Princess, an ex-mayoral limousine, which they have dubbed the Ghostmobile. Furman says they do not have the registration plate ECTO 1 (as in the film Ghostbusters) but you get the impression that they would if they could.

The equipment the Ghostbusters use also has a cute name: they call it the Roboghost. It is an Acorn computer which can monitor changes in temperature, light and vibrations, as well as being attached to sound-recording equipment. Any change registers a blip on the screen of the computer and Furman and his crew are hoping to build up a sufficient body of printouts of different types of paranormal events to be able to find patterns.

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