The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (105 page)

Another case, cited in
Phantasms of the Living
(which Myers co-authored), has a slightly more sinister touch. A nineteen-year-old girl described how she had begun having dreams of a man with a mole on the side of his mouth, and how these filled her with repugnance. The dreams always began with a feeling of some kind of “influence” coming over her. (In spite of her reticence, it is clear that these dreams were of a sexual nature and that the man was forcing her to participate in sex acts.) Two years later, at a party in Liverpool, she felt the same “influence” and turned around to find herself looking into the face of the man with the mole. She was introduced to him, and he insisted that they had met before, which she denied. But when he reminded her of a Birmingham music festival, she suddenly remembered that she had experienced the same unpleasant sense of “influence” there and had then fainted. After this the man began to pursue her and even began talking about the dreams. She felt instinctively that if she admitted to these, she would be in his power; therefore, she pretended not to understand. Eventually, she left Liverpool and ceased to see him.

Here it seems clear that the man had recognized her as the kind of person over whom he was able to exercise some psychic “influence” and had somehow invaded her dreams. If we can once concede the possibility of such “invasion”, as well as the possibility of “spirits”, then the notion of vampires suddenly seems less absurd.

In a remarkable book entitled
Hungry Ghosts
, the British journalist Joe Fisher has described his own strange experience of “spirits”. Fisher had written a book about reincarnation, in the course of which he had become convinced of its reality. One day, after being interviewed on the radio in Toronto (where he lives), he received a phone call from a woman who explained that she had accidentally become a mouthpiece of “discarnate entities”. She was being hypnotized in an attempt to cure her of leukemia, and various “spirit guides” had begun speaking through her mouth. (Myers points out that a “spirit” can only enter a body when the usual “tenant” is absent, a point to note when considering that early accounts of vampires involve attack
during sleep
.)

The first time Fisher went to the woman’s house, a “spirit” named Russell spoke through her mouth with a reassuring Yorkshire accent and told him that he had a female “guide”, a Greek girl named Filipa, who had been his mistress in a previous existence three centuries earlier. This struck Fisher as plausible, since he had always felt some affinity with Greece. He began attending the seances regularly and devoting
some time every morning to relaxing and trying to contact Filipa. Eventually he succeeded; buzzing noises in his ears would be succeeded by a feeling of bliss and communication. Filipa was a sensual little creature who liked to be hugged, and Fisher implies that, in some sense, they became lovers. It broke up his current love affair; his live-in girlfriend felt she was no match for a ghost.

Other people at the séances were told about their “guides” or guardian angels. One guide was an ex-RAF pilot named Ernest Scott, another an amusing cockney named Harry Maddox. Fisher’s disillusionment began when, on a trip back to England, he decided to try and verify Ernest Scott’s war stories – having no doubt whatever that they would prove genuine. The airfield was certainly genuine; so was the squadron Ernest claimed to have belonged to; the descriptions of wartime raids were accurate; so were the descriptions of the squadron’s moves from airfield to airfield. But there had been no Ernest Scott in the squadron, and a long search in the Public Record Office failed to turn up his name. Fisher went back to Canada in a bitter mood and accused Ernest of lying. Ernest strenuously denied it. Anyway, he said, he was due to reincarnate in another body, so had to leave. The “guide” Russell later told Fisher that Ernest had been reborn in England and gave the name of the parents and date of birth. Oddly enough, when Fisher checked on this it proved to be accurate. He even contacted the parents, who were intrigued but decided they had no wish to get more deeply involved.

With Russell’s approval, Fisher tried to track down the farm in Yorkshire where Russell claimed he had lived in the nineteenth century. Here again, many of the facts Russell had given about the Harrogate area proved to be accurate; but again, the crucial facts were simply wrong. It seemed that Russell was also a liar. And so, upon investigation, was the lovable World War I veteran Harry Maddox. His accounts of World War I battles were accurate; but Harry did not exist.

Finally, Fisher took his search to Greece. In spite of his disillusion with the other guides, he had no doubt whatever that Filipa was genuine. She possessed, he states early in the book, “more love, compassion and perspicacity than I had ever known”. The problem was that all his attempts to locate Theros – a village near the Turkish border – in atlases or gazetteers had failed. Yet that could be because it had been destroyed by the Turks in the past three centuries. But a town called Alexandroupoli, which Filipa had mentioned, still existed. After a long and frustrating search for the remains of Theros, Fisher went to Alexandroupoli, a city that he assumed had been founded by Alexander
the Great. But a brochure there disillusioned him. Alexandroupoli was a mere two centuries old; it had not even existed at the time when he and Filipa were supposed to have been lovers. Like the others, Filipa was a liar and a deceiver.

In a chapter entitled “Siren Call of the Hungry Ghosts”, Fisher tries to analyze what has happened to him. The answer seems simple. He had been involved with what Kardec called “earthbound spirits”, spirits who either do not realize they are dead or have such a craving to remain on earth that they remain attached to it:

Fisher also quotes Lieutenant Colonel Arthur E. Powell’s book entitled
The Astral Body
:

And Fisher cites the modern American expert on out-of-the-body journeys, Robert Monroe:

Kardec had insisted that most human beings can be unconsciously influenced by spirits, since they can wander freely in and out of our
bodies and minds. And a psychical investigator named Carl Wickland, whose
Thirty Years Among the Dead
is a classic of Spiritualism (see chapter 42), declared that “these earthbound spirits are the supposed ‘devils’ of all ages; devils of human origin. . . . The influence of these discarnate entities is the cause of many of the inexplicable and obscure events of earth life and of a large part of the world’s misery”. Wickland states that these entities are attracted to the magnetic light emanating from mortals; they attach themselves to these auras, finding an avenue of expression through influencing, obsessing, or possessing their victims.

Such spirits can easily be contacted by means of an Ouija board, a smooth tabletop with letters arranged in a semicircle; the “sitters” place their fingers on an upturned glass, which moves of its own accord from letter to letter, spelling out words. Anyone who has ever tried it will have noticed that the “spirits” seldom tell the truth. G. K. Chesterton devotes several pages of his
Autobiography
to experiments with an Ouija board, and while he concedes that the force that moves the glass is, in some sense, “supernatural”, he nevertheless concludes: “The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power is that it tells lies”.

This is interesting, because Chesterton became a Roman Catholic convert, and the Catholic church has always been strongly opposed to “Spiritualism”. This is not because the Church rejects life after death, but because it is deeply suspicious of the kind of entities that “come through” at séances, taking the view that spirits have no reason to hang around the “earth plane”, any more than adults want to hang around their old childhood schools. Unlike H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, or other modern rationalists, Chesterton did not reject “spirit communication” as a fraud or delusion; but, like Joe Fisher, he was unable to accept the “spirits” at face value.

If we can at once concede the possibility of “psychic invasion”, as well as the possibility of “spirits”, then the notion of vampires suddenly seems less absurd. In
The Magus of Strovolos
, an American academic, Kyriacos C. Markides, has described his friendship with a modern Cypriot mystic and “magus”, Spyros Sathi, known as Daskalos, who lives in Nicosia. Daskalos, like Myers and Fisher, takes the actual reality of spirits for granted, but he also speaks without embarrassment of possession and vampirism.

Some of Markides’s stories of Daskalos are so extraordinary that most readers will suspect him of extreme gullibility. Yet Daskalos’s teachings, as quoted by Markides, make it clear that he deserves to be
classified with such twentieth-century teachers as Steiner and Gurdjieff. And Markides offers many examples that seem to leave no doubt whatsoever of the genuineness of Daskalos’s psychic powers. He was able to describe Markides’s house in America in remarkable detail, although he had no way of learning such details. On another occasion, when Markides and a friend were searching for Daskalos, Markides remarked jokingly that perhaps he was visiting a mistress; when they found him and asked where he had been, Daskalos snapped, “Visiting a mistress”, then went on to say that he had overheard all their “silly conversation”. It becomes clear that Daskalos takes “possession” for granted, and Markides tells a number of stories, in some of which he was personally involved.

There are, Daskalos claims, three kinds of possession: by ill-disposed human spirits; by demonic entities; and by elementals (the latter being human thoughts and desires that have taken on a life of their own). He goes on to describe a case of spirit possession of the first type. Daskalos was approached by the parents of a girl who claimed that she was being haunted by the spirit of her dead fiancé. Although they had lived together, she had refused to allow him to possess her until they were married. He died of tuberculosis, haunted by unfulfilled cravings. “Each night before she would go to bed he would semi-hypnotise her and induce her to keep the window of her room open. He would then enter inside a bat and would come to her. The bat would wedge itself on her neck and draw blood and etheric [energy]”. The local priest told Daskalos how to deal with the situation. He must wait in the next room, and when he heard the bat entering, should go in and quickly shut the window; then, since the bat would attack him, he must stun it with a broom. Then he must wrap the bat in a towel and burn it in a brazier [stove]. Daskalos did this, and as the bat burned, the girl screamed and groaned. Then she calmed down and asked, “Why were you trying to burn me?” The “haunting” ceased thereafter.

Daskalos told another story that has elements of vampirism. On a journey in southern Greece he had encountered another girl who was being haunted by a former lover, a shepherd who had been in love with her and had died in a motor accident. Five years later, when looking for some goats, the girl saw the shepherd – whose name was Loizo – and he followed her, finally making her feel so sleepy that she felt obliged to sit down. He then “hypnotized” her and caused her to experience intense sexual pleasure. When she reported the incident, she was medically examined and found to be a virgin. But three days later the shepherd came to her bed and made love to her. Medical examination revealed
that she was no longer a virgin. Daskalos noticed two reddish spots on her neck. The girl told him: “He kisses me there, but his kisses are strange. They are like sucking, and I like them”.

The doctor who examined the girl believed that she had torn the hymen with her own fingers; Daskalos seems to accept this but believes that Loizo made her do this.

Daskalos claimed that two days later, he saw the shepherd coming into the house and greeted him. Loizo explained that he had wanted the girl for many years and had never had sexual relations with a woman – only with animals like donkeys and goats. Now that he was possessing her, he had no intention of letting her go. He refused to believe it when Daskalos told him he was dead. Daskalos warned him that if he persisted in possessing the girl, he would remain “in a narcotised state like a vampire”. His arguments finally convinced the shepherd, who agreed to go away.

These two cases, taken in conjunction with the others we have considered, offer some interesting clues about the nature of the vampire. According to Daskalos, the “earthbound spirit” of the dead fiancé was able to enter an ordinary bat and then to suck her blood. This was an expression of his sexual desire, his desire to possess her. There have been many cases of so-called Vampirism in the history of sex crimes. In the early 1870s an Italian youth named Vincent Verzeni murdered three women and attempted to strangle several more. Verzeni was possessed by a powerful desire to throttle women (and even birds and animals). After throttling a fourteen-year-old girl named Johanna Motta, he disemboweled her and drank her blood. Verzeni admitted that it gave him keen pleasure to sniff women’s clothing, and “it satisfied me to seize women by the neck and suck their blood”. So it is easy to imagine that the earthbound fiancé mentioned by Daskalos should enjoy drinking the girl’s blood. But we can also see that his desire to “possess” her was also satisfied in another way – by somehow
taking control of her imagination
.