The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (70 page)

Campbell mentions that attempts by Gurdjieff’s pupils to make contact with the monasteries or other teaching centres where Gurdjieff gained his “occult” knowledge were all unsuccessful.

But in 1961 a journalist seeking material for an article on Sufi practices “was unaccountably introduced to every facility for getting material . . . This journalist, Omar Burke, found himself allowed to visit a secret Dervish community whose location has been identified as Kunji Zagh (“Raven’s Corner’) in Baluchistan”. Burke then wrote up his findings in an article in
Blackwood’s Magazine
in December 1961. It was seen by a member of a London Gurdjieff group who realized that one trail to Gurdjieff’s source was being openly revealed in a magazine. But when the London group made contact with the “source” they were told that it would be pointless to come to Baluchistan because the current focus of activity was in England.

Campbell argues that Gurdjieff’s “source” was the Sufic tradition. What is implied, presumably, by the comment about the “current focus” in London is that this is to be found in the group run by Idries Shah, author of the book
The Sufis
. Bennett had in fact handed over his own teaching centre at Coombe Springs to Shah. In his autobiography
Witness
Bennett describes how in 1962 he was told by an old friend about Idries Shah, who had come to England from Afghanistan to seek out followers of Gurdjieff and “complete their teaching”. At a meeting with Shah his first impressions were unfavourable.

Shah, he says, did not claim to be a teacher, but he claimed to have been sent by his own teacher, and that “he had the support of the ‘Guardians of the Tradition’”. He goes on to quote a document Shah gave him, “Declaration of the People of the Tradition”, which stated that a “secret, special, superior form of knowledge” really exists, and could be transmitted

Bennett then goes on to tell how he was persuaded by Shah to hand over Coombe Springs, with no strings attached, and a note of bitterness creeps in when he describes how Shah sold the house for £100,000 only a year later. Yet it remains clear that in spite of a certain personal animosity towards Shah, Bennett still does not discount the possibility that he is precisely what he says he is.

In any case, Campbell’s thesis does not stand or fall by whether the reader is willing to accept Idries Shah as a representative of “the secret people”. It was Bennett himself who invented the phrase “the Hidden Directorate” in
The Dramatic Universe
. Campbell summarizes the thesis of his book:

In 1857 an American schoolmistress and authoress, Delia Bacon, produced her controversial work
Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded
(see chapter 51) in which she suggested that “Shakespeare” was actually a group of Elizabethan scholars, probably led by Francis Bacon, whose aim was to express new ideas that would otherwise have led to torture and imprisonment. The book was received with derision, and Delia Bacon went insane and died soon after. Campbell expresses the same theory at two points in
The People of the Secret
, and skeptics will undoubtedly feel that his whole thesis deserves the same reception as Delia Bacon’s. The commonsense objection is that men who represented turning-points in human history – Mohammed, Cosimo de’ Medici, Darwin, Einstein – were obviously not members of some “Hidden Directorate”. And if no “hidden directorate” is needed to explain their existence or their impact on history, then why bother to entertain such an unnecessary hypothesis?

On the other hand, cultural historians have often observed how certain ideas seem to be “in the air” at certain times, and the Germans coined a word to express this phenomenon, the
Zeitgeist
. Every major discovery and invention seems to have been made by at least two people at the same time (evolution, photography, relativity, sound-recording, television). The biologist Rupert Sheldrake has even produced a theory (“morphic resonance”) arguing that once
any
difficult process has been achieved, from crystallization of a new substance to the creation of a new idea, it “spreads” like a wave on the surface of a pond, facilitating the process wherever it occurs. Again, Jung’s idea of synchronicity (see chapter 54) suggests some connection between the mind and the world of physical matter which finds no support in the western philosophy of science. Such ideas indicate a movement away from the “dead” universe of nineteenth-century science and towards the ”intelligent universe” posited by Dr David Foster. It could be argued that a “hidden directorate”, responsible for evolution, is only a logical extension of this idea.

Campbell mentions Yeats’s book
A Vision
as an example of a work
inspired by “the Tradition”. This work is a “system” of human types, expressed in terms of the phases of the moon, and was produced by Yeats’s wife Georgie through automatic writing. Yeats’s “communicators” also sketched out their own vision of history, which has much in common with that advanced in
People of the Secret
. But when Yeats offered to “spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together” this complex system, he received the reply: “No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry”. Even if the “Hidden Directorate” is accepted only on this level, it remains a fascinating and fruitful hypothesis.

41

Poltergeists

The poltergeist or “noisy ghost” is one of the most baffling phenomena in the whole realm of the paranormal. There are thousands of people who do not believe in ghosts, but who will reluctantly admit that the evidence for the poltergeist is too strong to ignore. The favourite theory of such skeptics is that the poltergeist is some unexplained freak of the human mind.

If the poltergeist is a “ghost” or spirit, as its name implies, then its chief characteristic is as a spirit of mischief. Poltergeists cause objects to fly through the air, doors to open and close, pools of water to appear from nowhere. And they are by no means a rarity; at this very moment some case of poltergeist activity is probably going on within a dozen miles of the reader of this book. (I know of a case that is going on within a dozen miles of me as I write this.)

One of the earliest known cases was recorded in a chronicle called the
Annales Fuldenses
and dates back to
AD
858. It took place in a farmhouse at Bingen, on the Rhine; the chronicle describes an “evil spirit” that threw stones, and made the walls shake as if men were striking them with hammers. Stone-throwing is one of the most typical of poltergeist activities. The poltergeist also caused fires – another of their favourite activities (although, for some reason, they seldom do serious damage) – in this case burning the farmer’s crops soon after they were gathered in. It also developed a voice – a much rarer feature in poltergeist cases – and denounced the man for various sins, including fornication and adultery. Priests sent by the Bishop of Mainz apparently failed to exorcise it; in fact, it is virtually impossible to get rid of a poltergeist by exorcism ceremonies.

It was only after the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 that the poltergeist was carefully studied. Then it was observed that in the majority of cases there were adolescent children present in
the houses where such occurrences took place; it seemed a reasonable assumption that the children were somehow the “cause” of the outbreak. And in the age of Freud the most widely held theory was that the poltergeist is some kind of “unconscious” manifestation of adolescent sexual energies; but no one has so far offered a theory as to exactly how this can occur.

In England one of the most spectacular cases is also one of the earliest to be thoroughly recorded: the so-called “phantom drummer of Tedworth”. It took place in the home of a magistrate called John Mompesson in March 1661. The whole household was kept awake all night by loud drumming noises. The magistrate had been responsible for the arrest of a vagrant named William Drury, who attracted attention in the street by beating a drum. Mompesson had the drum confiscated, in spite of Drury’s appeals. Drury escaped from custody – he was being held for possessing forged papers – without his drum. It was after this that the disturbances in Mompesson’s household began, and continued for two years. The “spirit” also slammed doors, made panting noises like a dog, and scratching noises like huge rats, as well as purring noises like a cat. It also developed a voice and shouted, “A witch, a witch”! It emptied ashes and chamberpots into the children’s beds, and caused various objects to fly through the air. In 1663 Drury, who was in prison for stealing a pig, admitted to a visitor that he was somehow responsible for the disturbances, and said they would continue until Mompesson gave him satisfaction for taking away his drum. But the phenomena finally seem to have faded away.

A famous poltergeist haunting took place in the home of the Rev. Samuel Wesley – grandfather of the founder of Methodism – at his rectory at Epworth in Lincolnshire. “Old Jeffrey”, as the family came to call it, kept the family awake on the night of 1 December 1716 with appalling groans, and – a few nights later – with loud knocking noises. It also produced sounds of footsteps walking along the corridors and in empty rooms. The “focus” of the disturbances seemed to be nineteen-year-old Hetty Wesley, who was usually asleep when the disturbances began, and who trembled in her sleep. As usual, the disturbances gradually faded away.

The famous case of the “Cock Lane” ghost ended with an innocent man going to prison for two years. The “focus” of the disturbances was ten-year-old Elizabeth Parsons, daughter of a clerk called Richard Parsons. The Parsons family had two lodgers: a retired innkeeper named William Kent and his common-law wife Fanny Lynes, whose sister Elizabeth had been Kent’s previous wife. (This was why they
could not marry, the law preventing a man from marrying his deceased wife’s sister.) One night when Kent was away Fanny Lynes asked the ten-year-old girl to sleep with her to keep her company; they were kept awake by scratching and rapping noises from behind the wainscot. Soon after this Fanny Lynes died of smallpox, and Kent moved elsewhere. The strange rappings continued, and a clergyman named Moore tried to communicate with the “spirit”, using a code of one rap for yes, two for no. By this means the “spirit” identified itself as Fanny Lynes, and accused her ex-“husband” of poisoning her with arsenic.

Parsons was unfortunately unaware that poltergeists tell lies more often than not. And he was not displeased to hear that Kent was a murderer, for he was nursing a grudge against him. Kent had lent him money which he had failed to repay, and was now suing him. So Parsons overlooked the fact that the knockings began before the death of Fanny Lynes, and made no attempt to keep the revelations secret.

In due course, Kent heard that he was being accused of murder by a “spirit”, and came to the house in Cock Lane, to hear for himself. When the raps accused him of murder he shouted angrily, “Thou art a lying spirit”.

The “ghost” became famous. But when a committee – including Dr Johnson – came to investigate, it preferred to remain silent, convincing Johnson that it was a fraud. Then Kent decided to prosecute for libel. The burden of proof lay on Elizabeth’s father who was for legal purposes the accuser. There was another test, and Elizabeth was told that if the ghost did not manifest itself this time, her mother and father would be thrown into prison; naturally, she made sure something happened. But servants peering through a crack saw that she was making the raps with a wooden board. She was denounced as a fake. At the trial Parsons was sentenced to two years in prison, as well as to stand three times in the pillory. His wife received a year; a woman who had often “communicated” with the spirit received six months. Even the parson was fined £588 – a huge sum for those days. But when Parsons was standing in the pillory the crowd was distinctly sympathetic and took up a collection for him – an unusual gesture in that age of cruelty, when crowds enjoyed pelting the malefactor in the pillory, sometimes even killing him. Regrettably, we know nothing of what happened to any of the protagonists after the trial. But it is very clear that the unfortunate Parsons family suffered a great injustice. Many witnesses testified earlier that it would have been impossible for Elizabeth to have faked the rapping noises.