The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (104 page)

Marigny goes on to cite four cases described by the twelfth-century chronicler, William of Newburgh, author of
Historia rerum Anglicarum.
These are too long to cite here (although they can be found in full in Montague Summers’s
The Vampire in Europe
). The first, “of the extraordinary happenings when a dead man wandered abroad out of his grave,” describes a case in Buckinghamshire, recounted to the chronicler by the local archdeacon. It describes how a man returned from the grave the night after his burial and attacked his wife. When this happened again the following night, the wife asked various neighbours to
spend the night with her, and their shouts drove the ghost away. Then, like Cuntze and Weinrichius, the ghost began to create a general disturbance in town, attacking animals and alarming people. That he
was
a ghost, and not a physical body, is proved by the comment that some people could see him while others could not (although they “perceptibly felt his horrible presence”). The archdeacon consulted the bishop, Hugh of Lincoln, whose learned advisers suggested that the body should be dug up and burned to ashes. Hugh of Lincoln felt this would be “undesirable” and instead wrote out a charter of absolution. When the tomb was opened, the body proved to be “uncorrupt,” just as on the day it was buried. The absolution was placed on his chest and the grave closed again; after that, the ghost ceased to wander abroad.

William of Newburgh’s other account sounds slightly more like the traditional vampire in that the ghost – of a wealthy man who had died at Berwick on Tweed – had an odor of decomposition that affected the air and caused plague. The body was exhumed (it is not recorded whether it was undecayed) and burned.

The third story concerns a priest, chaplain of a lady of rank, at Melrose Abbey, whose life had been far from blameless; after death, his ghost haunted the cloister and appeared in the bed-chamber of the lady of rank. The body was exhumed and burned.

In the fourth story, a dissolute lord of Alnwick Castle, in Northumberland, spied on his wife’s adultery by lying on top of the “roof” that covered her four-poster bed. The sight of his wife and her lover “clipping at clicket” so incensed him that he fell down and injured himself, dying a few days later without absolution. He also returned as a ghost to haunt the district, his stench causing a plague that killed many people. When the corpse was exhumed, it proved to be “gorged and swollen with a frightful corpulence”; when attacked with a spade, there gushed out such a stream of blood “that they realized that this leech had battened on the blood of many poor folk.” The body was cremated and the haunting ceased.

These stories have the touches of absurdity that might be expected from an ecclesiastical chronicler of that period; yet their similarity to the other chronicles cited suggests that they have some common basis. The same applies to another work,
De nugis curialum
by Walter Map (1193), also cited at length by Summers.

All these cases took place long before western Europe heard tales of vampires from former Turkish dominions, and, except in the case of the “leech” of Alnwick, there is no suggestion of blood drinking. But in most ways, the revenants behave very much like Peter Plogojowitz and the
vampires of Medvegia. They haunt the living, climb into bed with people when they are asleep, and then throttle them, leaving them drained of energy. And when the bodies are disinterred, they are found to be undecayed. It seems very clear that there is no basic difference between the vampires of 1732 and the revenants of 1592. And when we look more closely into the accounts of the vampires, we discover that they are energy suckers rather than blood suckers. Peter Plogojowitz has fresh blood in his mouth, but it is merely a matter of hearsay that he sucked the blood of his victims – the account mentions only throttling. Otherwise, these earlier revenants behave very much like the paranormal phenomena known as poltergeists – they throw things and create disturbances.

One of the earliest accounts of poltergeist activity can be found in a document known as
Sigebert’s Chronicle
, by one Sigebert of Gembloux (Belgium), which dates from the ninth century. One passage runs as follows:

The account in another document, the
Annales Fuldenses
, from which Sigebert of Gembloux condensed this account, mentions that the man the spirit tormented was a farmer and that the spirit accused him of adultery and of seducing the daughter of his overseer.

Now at this point, oddly enough, we leave the realm of superstition – if the vampire is indeed superstition – and enter that of actuality. For the poltergeist is undoubtedly one of the best-authenticated of all psychical phenomena; there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of accounts on record. Poltergeists specialize in mischief and seem to be the juvenile delinquents of the psychic world. They drive people to distraction with their pranks, causing objects to fly through the air (and sometimes change course abruptly in midflight) and often making a racket that can be heard for miles. Allowing for the exaggerations of the medieval chronicler, the above case from Sigebert has the ring of authenticity. It is true that speaking poltergeists are unusual; nevertheless, there
are
a number of cases on record (see chapter 41).

Generally speaking, poltergeists do no harm; Giraldus Cambrensis remarks of a Pembrokeshire poltergeist of
A
.
D
. 1191 that it seemed to intend “to deride rather than to do bodily injury.” Again, however, there are a few exceptions. The psychical investigator Guy Lyon Playfair mentions a Brazilian case in which the poltergeist drove a girl to suicide by tormenting her. And the poltergeist known as the “Bell witch,” whose malign activities continued from 1817 to 1821 in Robertson County, Tennessee, fixed its attentions on one particular man, farmer John Bell, and – like Sigebert’s poltergeist – “tormented him without intermission,” beating him black and blue and finally poisoning him.

What exactly is a poltergeist? Writers like Sigebert and Giraldus Cambrensis took the understandable view that it was a spirit. Modern psychical research is inclined to find such a view embarrassing. Frank Podmore, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, concluded in 1890 that they are mischievous children throwing stones. But conscientious investigators soon realized that such a view was untenable. In the mid-twentieth century they finally came to terms with the poltergeist by deciding that it was an example of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” (RSPK) or “mind over matter”. A few gifted psychics are able to move small objects, such as pins, compass needles, or scraps of paper, by concentrating on them. No one has yet succeeded in doing anything more spectacular with “mind force” – even some thing as modest as throwing a stone.

On the other hand, it was soon noticed by investigators that nearly all poltergeist occurrences seemed to centre around an emotionally disturbed adolescent or one on the point of puberty. If these individuals were somehow causing the poltergeist effects, then they must be doing so unconsciously. One of the strongest advocates of this theory was the
Freudian psychiatrist Nandor Fodor, who was also a distinguished psychical investigator. Fodor argued that the Freudian unconscious is to blame for the “spontaneous psychokinesis” and that the energies involved are the powerful sexual energies of puberty. Neither Fodor nor any other adherent of the theory could explain how the unconscious mind could cause heavy objects to fly through the air and even cause them to penetrate solid walls. But the theory had a satisfyingly scientific ring and was soon generally accepted.

In the early 1970s, however, one investigator came to have strong doubts about this theory. He was Guy Lyon Playfair, a Cambridge graduate who had gone to teach English in Rio de Janeiro. He became interested in the paranormal after a personal experience of “psychic surgery” and joined the Brazilian Institute for Psycho Biophysical Research (IBPP). In Brazil, a large proportion of the population are adherents of a religion known as Spiritism, based on the writings of the Frenchman Allan Kardec, which accepts communication with the dead and the active role of spirits in human existence. After engaging in a number of poltergeist investigations, Playfair was less inclined to dismiss Spiritism as nonsense – in fact, he concluded that Kardec is correct in asserting that poltergeists are spirits. His investigations into the Brazilian form of voodoo, known as
umbanda
, also convinced him that it actually works and that
umbanda
practitioners often perform their “magic” by means of spirits. The experiences that led him to these conclusions are described in his book
The Flying Cow
.

In a book entitled
Poltergeist
, I have described how my own investigations led me to conclude that Playfair was correct (see also chapter 41) and how the “spontaneous psychokinesis” theory simply fails to cover all the facts. After being a convinced adherent of this theory, I found myself forced by the evidence to accept the embarrassing view that poltergeists are spirits. Since that time I have met many psychical researchers – particularly in America – who are at least willing to entertain that possibility.

The same (as we shall see elsewhere in this volume) applies to the closely related field of “possession”, the notion that human beings may be possessed by “unclean spirits”. The standard view is stated in Aldous Huxley’s well-known study,
The Devils of Loudun
, in which it is taken for granted that the nuns who writhed on the ground and uttered appalling blasphemies were in the grip of sexual hysteria. Here, even more than in the case of the poltergeist, it seems natural to assume that we are dealing with psychological illness – and no doubt in many cases this is so. Yet a number of American psychiatrists – among them
Morton Prince, Ralph Allison, and Adam Crabtree – have produced studies of “multiple personality” in which they admit that it is difficult to explain certain cases except in terms of possession by the spirit of a deceased person. (See chapter 42.)

Another piece of interesting evidence for this view of possession can be found in Professor lan Stevenson’s study,
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
. He describes the case of a Hindu boy named Jasbir Lal Jat, who apparently died at the age of three in 1954. Before he could be buried, he revived – but with a new personality completely unlike the old one. This new Jasbir claimed to be a man named Sobha Ram, who had died in the village of Vehedi after a fall from a cart. He claimed to be of Brahmim caste and made difficulties about his food. The family dismissed his claims as childish imagination. But when Jasbir was six, a Brahmin woman from Vehedi came to the village, and Jasbir insisted that she was his aunt. She was, in fact, the aunt of a man named Sobha Ram who had died of a fall from a cart at precisely the same time Jasbir had revived. Taken to Vehedi, Jasbir showed an intimate knowledge of the place and of Sobha Ram’s relatives, convincing his own father and mother that he was telling the truth. The conclusion must be that
if
Jasbir was Sobha Ram, then the “spirit” of the latter took possession of the vacant body at the moment Jasbir “died”.

In his classic work,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
, Frederic Myers, one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research, devotes a chapter to “Trance, Possession and Ecstacy”. He begins by acknowledging that when spiritualist “mediums” go into a trance, they are “taken over” by spirits and that this constitutes the phenomenon that was once called “possession”. He adds that in some cases, the spirit messages may be deceptive and that “they suggest – nor can we absolutely disprove the suggestion – a type of intelligence inferior to humans, animal-like, and perhaps parasitic”. This is as far as he is willing to go in conceding that possession may occasionally be nonbenevolent. But he goes on to cite many cases of what he calls “psychic invasion” – that is, cases in which someone has seen the “spirit” of another person, often someone who has died at exactly that moment. In other cases, the person who “appears” is still alive. A Mrs T., living in Adelaide, recounts how, lying in bed but still wide awake, she saw a former lover standing in the bedroom, as well as another man, whom she felt to be a cousin who had “been the means of leading him astray”. The former lover, who looked very pale, told her that his father had just died and that he had inherited his property. Because her husband was skeptical about this vision, she wrote it down.
Some weeks later she heard that her lover’s father had died at exactly the time of the vision and had left him his property.