The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (41 page)

Skeptics regard the curse of the Hope diamond, like “the curse of
Tutankhamen” as mythical, pointing out that many of its owners suffered no misfortune. Yet while skepticism may be the correct attitude in this case, it would undoubtedly be premature to dismiss the whole notion of curses as superstition. The late T. C. Lethbridge (see chapter 60) was convinced that tragedies and unpleasant events can leave behind their “imprints” on the places where they occurred – a theory first put forward in the early twentieth century by Sir Oliver Lodge, who felt that certain so-called hauntings could be explained as a kind of “recording”. Lethbridge called such recordings “ghouls” – meaning the unpleasant sensations that may be experienced in certain places. When he was eighteen he and his mother had been on a walk in the Great Wood near Wokingham when they both felt suddenly depressed. Later they learned that the body of a man who had committed suicide had been lying close to the spot where they were standing; Lethbridge believed that the man’s depression had been somehow “recorded” by his surroundings. Four decades later Lethbridge and his wife, Mina, set out one afternoon to collect seaweed from a nearby beach – Ladram, in Devon. As they walked to the beach, Lethbridge again experienced a “blanket” of depression, as if he had walked into a fog. A few minutes later Mina said, “I can’t stand this place any longer”, and they left.

The following weekend they repeated the trip. Again, he experienced the same “blanket of depression”. This time Mina went to the top of a cliff to make a sketch and suddenly experienced an unpleasant sensation, as if someone was urging her to jump.

Later, Lethbridge discovered that a man
had
recently committed suicide by jumping from the spot where Mina had been standing. He concluded that this was again the reason for the depression; the man’s misery had somehow been “recorded” on the electrical field of water. (Both days had been warm and damp, and he had also noted that a small stream ran on to the beach at the point where the “depression” was strongest.) It was not the suicide’s ghost that was urging Mina to jump; rather, she was responding to his own suggestion of jumping. This notion of “tape recording” lies behind the theory of
psychometry
, the ability of certain people to “read” the history of an object by holding it in their hands (see chapter 43).

Clairvoyants believe that crystals possess this power of absorption to a high degree – hence the popularity of crystal balls, which are kept wrapped in black velvet to protect them from light and heat (on the same principle that recorded tapes should not be left in hot sunlight or on radiators).

There is also a great deal of documentation on “curses”, which seems to indicate that certain objects can carry “bad luck”. For example, a whole book has been devoted to the career of the ship called
The Great
Eastern
, built by the great nineteenth-century engineer Isambard Brunel. During its construction, a riveter and his boy apprentice vanished; no one realized that they had been sealed into the hull. The ship (the largest ever built at that time) got stuck during its launching and took three months to free. Brunel then collapsed on its deck and died a week later. From then on the career of
The Great Eastern
was a long series of disasters. Five firemen died when a funnel exploded. While in port for repairs, the ship was damaged in a storm. The captain was drowned in a boat with a cabin boy. A sailor was crushed by the wheel; a man was lost overboard. The disasters and the damage continued until the ship was abandoned, a mere fifteen years after its launching. When it was broken up for scrap, the skeletons of the riveter and his apprentice were found sealed in the hull.

Many similar stories could be told of “jinxed” ships, houses, airplanes, and cars.
⁹
The car in which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo (thus precipitating the First World War) went on to bring death or disaster to its next seven owners.

Now if Lethbridge is correct, and a curse is merely a kind of negative tape recording, it also suggests a reason why some people may be affected and others escape unscathed. Lethbridge believed that “sensitives” like himself – for example, good dowsers – would be unusually receptive to these “recordings”, while other people would not even notice them.

If physical objects – like crystals –
are
sensitive to the vibrations of the human mind, it would also seem to follow that under certain circumstances, a “curse” might be deliberately imprinted on them – rather like marking one’s possessions with an invisible marking pen. The ancient Egyptians certainly believed that their tombs could be “cursed” against robbers. The priests of the temple of Rama-sitra may have taken the same precaution with the Hope diamond.

25

The Mystery of Hypnosis

Real-Life Svengalis and the Telepathy Theory

In May 1991 a hypnotist named Nelson Nelson (his real name was Nelson Lintott) was tried in Bristol Crown Court on the charge of raping and/or otherwise sexually assaulting 113 girls under hypnosis. Nelson, fifty-seven, had apparently learned hypnosis in South Africa at a party. After a varied career as a driving instructor, swimming pool superintendent, barkeep, and restaurateur, he established the Britannia Lodge Health Centre in Appledore, Devon, where, among other things, he undertook to cure people of all kinds of complaints, from nail biting to smoking.

While the girls were in a trance, Nelson would remove their clothes and commit sexual assaults that were described in court as “perverted”. Nelson also videotaped many of these assaults. His downfall came when one of his employees borrowed a videotape from his bedroom without permission and found that it contained footage of Nelson undressing girls who appeared to be in a trance and committing sexual acts with them. The employee went to the police, who raided Nelson’s premises and found a video camera behind a two-way mirror in his bathroom. They also found forty-five videotapes, loaded guns, and numerous photographs that Nelson had taken over the years; the latter featured 113 different girls and women, ranging in age from ten to thirty-four.

One girl who had worked for Nelson as a barmaid from the age of sixteen described how he had hypnotized her twice a week over a long period to cure her of nail biting. While she was under hypnosis, Nelson had induced her to commit various sex acts; the girl was “distraught and horrified” when she viewed the videotapes and realized what had been happening. Other girls – the police succeeded in identifying 112 out of the 113 – were equally astonished to learn what had happened to them.

Nelson was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment.

The case appears to contradict one of the most basic assertions of psychiatric medicine – that no one can be made to perform acts under hypnosis that he or she would not perform when awake. A mischievous student of the great nineteenth-century French doctor – and hypnotist – Jean-Martin Charcot tried to make a hypnotized girl remove her clothes in a medical class; she immediately woke up. As to criminal acts, the general view is stated by Bernard Hollander in his book
Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis
(1928): “Criminal suggestions would be accepted only by criminal minds”.

The general public became fascinated by hypnosis in the last years of the nineteenth century, when George Du Maurier’s novel
Trilby
(1894) achieved tremendous success. It tells the story of an attractive artist’s model (Trilby) in the Latin Quarter of Paris, who is one day hypnotized by a Hungarian musician named Svengali in order to cure her headache. Three young English artists firmly refuse to allow him to hypnotize her again. But when the English men leave Paris, Svengali again approaches Trilby and hypnotizes her into becoming a great singer. (In her normal state, she cannot even sing in tune.) When her English friends see Trilby again, she fails to recognize them and merely looks vague and confused – until Svengali murmurs something in her ear, whereupon she becomes cold and hostile. Later, when Svengali is stabbed by a fellow musician, she becomes virtually an imbecile. And when he dies, she loses all memory of her years as Svengali’s “slave”. Without her sinister master, her vitality seems to drain away, and she also dies.

Svengali became one of the most famous villains of the century, and his name became a synonym for an evil manipulator, someone who takes over another’s will. (The book implied, of course, that Trilby was also Svengali’s “sex slave”.) But since hypnosis was by that time beginning to achieve a certain medical respectability, psychiatrists lost no time in assuring the public that a real-life Svengali was an impossibility. If a person under hypnosis was ordered to do something that he would normally find repugnant, he would instantly wake up. Charcot’s mischievous student might have induced the girl to undress if he had told her that she was in her own bedroom, about to go to bed; otherwise, her natural modesty would have caused her to wake up.

The hypnosis of human beings dates from the last years of the eighteenth century. Hypnosis of animals has been known in Europe since 1636, when the mathematician Daniel Schwenter observed that if a small piece of bent wood was fixed on a hen’s beak, the hen would stare at it and go into a trance. The same thing would happen if a hen’s head
was held on the ground and a chalk line drawn in front of its beak. Ten years later a German Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher, described how, if a hen’s head was tucked under its wing, a few gentle swings through the air would send it into a trance. French peasants still use this method at market when buying a live hen. Africans probably knew about animal hypnosis long before that; in his book
Hypnosis of Men and Animals
(1966), Ferenc Volgyesi describes how wild elephants can be tamed by tying them to a tree and waving leafy boughs in front of their eyes until they blink and become docile.

The man with whose name hypnosis is usually associated – Franz Mesmer – was, in fact, the discoverer of a completely different technique. Convinced that our health depends upon the flow of “vital currents” around the body, Mesmer came to believe that the flow could be increased by stroking with magnets. When, later, he observed that bleeding increased or decreased when he moved his hand above the bleeding, he concluded that human beings exercise “animal magnetism”. He “magnetized” trees and got his patients to embrace them; he magnetized tubs of water and made his patients sit with their feet in them. All of this was supposed to increase the flow of vital energy around their bodies.

One of Mesmer’s disciples, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur, practiced “mesmerism” on his estate at Buzancy. One day he tied a young peasant named Victor Race – whom he was treating for asthma – to a tree, and was making “mesmeric” passes over him when Race’s eyes closed. Yet he continued to reply to Puységur’s remarks. And on Puységur’s orders, he untied himself and walked off across the park. Puységur had discovered hypnosis. He also made another important discovery that has since been forgotten. He could give Race
mental
orders – for example, to repeat the words of a song that he was singing mentally – and Race would obey them. With another excellent hypnotic subject named Madeleine, Puységur would give public demonstrations of mind reading; one total skeptic was converted when he himself was able to order Madeleine – mentally – to put her hand in his pocket and take out an object he had placed there. This ability to influence hypnotized subjects
telepathically
was demonstrated again and again during the nineteenth century; but medicine has continued to dismiss it as a myth.

Mesmer’s enemies drove him out of Paris and Vienna; he died, discredited and embittered, in 1815. And the medical profession made sure that hypnosis was treated as a fraud throughout the nineteenth century; any doctor who practiced it was likely to be struck off the
register. It was only toward the end of the century that Charcot rediscovered it. Charcot had noticed that patients suffering from hysteria behaved as if they were hypnotized. For example, a man who was convinced that his arm was paralyzed would behave exactly as if it
was
paralyzed, although there was nothing physically wrong with his arm. But he could be cured by being told under hypnosis that his arm was not paralyzed – and the paralysis could also be reinduced by hypnosis. When Charcot announced to the medical profession that hypnosis was simply a form of hysteria, his colleagues believed that he had solved the mystery and ceased to regard hypnosis as a fraud. It took some time before it was recognized that Charcot had inverted the truth and that hysteria is, in fact, a kind of hypnosis. A hysterical patient becomes convinced that he is suffering from some disability and “suggests” himself into it. Freud was one of the many who were impressed by Charcot’s theory of hypnosis; he later made it the basis of his own theory of the unconscious.

But what precisely is hypnosis? This is a question that no one at that time could answer – and that remains (officially, at all events) unanswered today. Bernard Hollander’s book includes a chapter entitled “Explanation of Hypnosis” that has some useful suggestions. He points out that a subject under hypnosis
forgets his body
; if his attention is drawn to his body, it feels heavy and immobile. Yet the patient is not asleep. Hollander compares a hypnotized patient to someone absorbed in a play – the mind is wide-awake but totally abstracted. We have all seen a child staring at the television with his thumb in his mouth, so absorbed that he has to be prodded to gain his attention. This seems to imply that we have
two minds
, one of which deals with the world that surrounds us and copes with immediate experience, while the other can go off “inside itself”, into a subjective world, a kind of cinema inside the head.