The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (71 page)

One of America’s most famous cases occurred on the farm of a
Tennessee farmer named John Bell; the case of the “Bell witch” is also unusual – in fact, virtually unique – in that the poltergeist ended by causing the death of its victim, Bell himself. Bell had nine children, one of whom, Betsy, was a girl of twelve; she was almost certainly the “focus”. The disturbances began in 1817 with scratching noises from the walls, and occasional knocks. Then invisible hands pulled bedclothes off the beds, and there were choking noises that seemed to come from a human throat. Then stones were thrown and furniture moved. The “spirit” frequently slapped Betsy, and her cheek would redden after the sounds of the blow; it also pulled her hair. After about a year the poltergeist developed a voice – a strange asthmatic croak. (Poltergeist voices seldom sound like human voices – it is as if the “entity” is having to master an unfamiliar medium). It made remarks like “I can’t stand the smell of a nigger”. After its manifestations Betsy was usually exhausted – she was obviously the source of its energy.

Then John Bell began to be attacked; his jaw became stiff and his tongue swelled. The poltergeist, which had now developed a normal voice, identified itself as an Indian, then as a witch called Old Kate Batts. (It used several voices.) It also declared that it would torment John Bell until he died, which it then proceeded to do. It pulled off his shoes, hit him in the face, and caused him to have violent physical convulsions. All this continued until one day in 1820 he was found in a deep stupor. The “witch” claimed that she had given “old Jack” a dose of a medicine that would kill him. And when Bell did in fact die the witch filled the house with shrieks of triumph. Then the disturbances abated. One day in 1821, as the family was eating supper, there was a loud noise in the chimney, and an object like a cannonball rolled out from the fireplace and turned into smoke. The witch’s voice cried: “I am going and will be gone for seven years”. But she stayed away for good.

One expert on poltergeists, Nandor Fodor, has suggested that the explanation of the Bell witch lies in an incestuous attack made on Betsy by her father, and that the poltergeist is a “personality fragment” that has somehow broken free of the rest of the personality. There is no real evidence for either of these claims.

Another famous American case took place in the home of the Rev. Eliakim Phelps in 1850. This poltergeist began by scattering furniture around and making curious dummies out of stuffed clothes. They were extremely lifelike and were constructed in a few minutes. Then the poltergeist entered the stone-throwing stage (most disturbances seem to go through a number of definite phases), breaking seventy-one windowpanes.
Paper burst into flames and all kinds of objects were smashed. The twelve-year-old boy, Harry, was snatched up into the air, and on one occasion tied to a tree. His elder sister Anna, sixteen, was pinched and slapped. But when mother and children went off to Pennsylvania for the winter the disturbances ceased.

It was in fact a series of poltergeist disturbances that started the extraordinary nineteenth-century craze known as Spiritualism, which began with typical knocking noises in the home of the Fox family in Hydesville, New York State, in 1848; two daughters – Margaret, fifteen, and Kate, twelve – were obviously the “focuses”. A neighbour who questioned the “spirit” (with the usual code one knock for yes, two for no) was told that it was a peddler who had been murdered in the house. (Many years later, human bones and a peddler’s box were found buried in the cellar.) The notoriety of the case caused many other Americans to take up “spiritualism”, sitting around a table in the dark with clasped hands, and asking for spirits to “manifest” themselves. The Hydesville “spirit” finally delivered a message announcing a new era in spirit communication. And in fact spiritualism swept across the United States, then across Europe.

In the early 1850s a French educator named Léon-Denizard-Hyppolyte Rivail became interested in the new spiritualist craze; when two daughters of a friend proved to be proficient in “automatic writing” Rivail asked the “spirits” all kinds of questions, and received unusually constructive and serious answers. In due course these were published in
The Spirits’ Book
, which Rivail published under the pseudonym of Allan Kardec. It became for a while a kind of Bible of Spiritualism, although there was later a split within the movement, many influential Spiritualists rejecting Kardec’s belief in reincarnation.

In Paris in 1860 there had been a series of violent disturbances in a house in the Rue des Noyers – the usual window-smashing and furniture-throwing. Rivail requested to speak to the “spirit” responsible, and an entity that claimed to be a long-dead rag and bone man declared that it had used the “electrical energy” of a servant girl in the house to cause the disturbances. The girl, it said, was quite unaware of this – in fact, she was the most terrified of them all. He had been doing these things merely to amuse himself.

“Kardec” was convinced that poltergeists are “earth-bound spirits” – that is, dead people who for various reasons have been unable to advance beyond the purely material plane.

One of the most remarkable American cases of the nineteenth century was recorded in a book called
The Great Amherst Mystery
by Walter
Hubbell, a stage magician who moved into the house of the Teed family in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1869 to investigate a poltergeist that concentrated its attention on an eighteen-year-old girl named Esther Cox. The disturbances had begun in the previous year, when Esther’s boy-friend, Bob MacNeal, had tried to order her into the woods at gunpoint, presumably to rape her; when interrupted he fled and never returned. Soon after this Esther and her sister Jane were kept awake by mouse-like rustling noises, and a cardboard box leapt into the air. Two nights later, Esther’s body seemed to swell like a balloon, but returned to normal after a sound like a thunder-clap. Bedclothes were thrown around the room. Esther’s pillow inflated like a balloon. In front of many witnesses, writing appeared on the wall saying, “Esther, you are mine to kill”. Esther often complained of an “electric feeling” running through her body. When the poltergeist got into its stride small fires broke out, objects flew around the room, furniture moved, and Esther turned into a kind of human magnet, to which knives and other metal objects stuck firmly. Hubbell succeeded in communicating with the “spirits”, who were able to prove their authenticity by telling him the number inside his watch and the date of coins in his pockets. When a barn burned down Esther was accused of arson and sentenced to four months in prison. When she came out again the manifestations stopped.

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to investigate “psychical phenomena” scientifically. One of its most influential members, Frank Podmore, author of a valuable two-volume history of Spiritualism, was firmly convinced the poltergeists were usually fakes, caused by stone-throwing children, although he
was
willing to admit that a well-known case at Durweston, on Viscount Portman’s estate, was probably genuine. Podmore later had a lengthy correspondence with Andrew Lang, who found Podmore’s skepticism too wholesale; Lang is generally conceded to have won this controversy.

In 1990 the famous criminologist Cesare Lombroso investigated a case of poltergeist haunting in a wine shop in Turin. As Lombroso stood in the wine cellar bottles gently rose from the shelves and exploded on the floor. At first Lombroso suspected that the proprietor’s wife was the cause of the disturbances, but they continued while she was away. Lombroso’s suspicions then focused on a thirteen-year-old waiter. When this boy was dismissed the haunting stopped.

So it was fairly clear to the early investigators that poltergeist phenomena were connected, more often than not, with some particular person, usually an adolescent. (The word poltergeist was seldom used in the early days of psychical research, although it
had
been used to
describe various cases by Mrs Catherine Crowe in her best-seller
The Night Side of Nature
in 1848.) But it was not until the late 1940s that the “unconscious mind” theory became popular. Nandor Fodor put forward his theory that poltergeists are “personality fragments” in
The Journal of Clinical Psychopathology
in 1945. Frank Harvey’s play
The Poltergeist
had a successful West End run in 1946; it was based on a case that had taken place at Pitmilly House, Boarshill, near Fife, in which £50 worth of fire damage had been caused – Harvey transferred it to a Dartmoor vicarage. His play popularized the “unconscious mind” theory, which had first been put forward about 1930 by Dr Alfred Winterstein, in discussing the case of the Austrian medium Frieda Weisl; the latter’s husband described how, when they were first married, ornaments would fly off the mantelpiece when she had an orgasm. The Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki had reached similar conclusions when she examined a young Rumanian girl named Eleanore Zugun, who was continually slapped and punched by a poltergeist – bite-marks that appeared on her were often damp with saliva. By the end of the 1940s the “unconscious mind” theory was generally accepted by those psychical investigators who were willing to believe that the poltergeist was not a fraud. This theory was summarized by BBC investigator Brian Branston in his book
Beyond Belief
(1976):

Yet Branston’s own theory has been contradicted by a case he has cited earlier in the chapter on poltergeists – one that took place at Northfleet in Kent. Branston records that “spooks so upset the various tenants that the house finally became empty. Previous tenants named Maxted had young children, and the usual poltergeist phenomena had taken place – mouse-like scratching noises, then the bedclothes pulled off the bed, ornaments disappearing and reappearing, and so on. When Mrs Maxted saw the ghost of a six-year-old girl they decided to move out. The next tenants had no children; they heard strange noises in the bedrooms, and smelt an unpleasant, rotting smell, but it was only after a year that they
woke up to find one end of the bed rising up into the air, while beside the bed stood a pinkish-orange phantom, partly transparent, of a woman with no head. They also moved out. But even when the house was empty the next door tenants were able to hear thumping noises, and were alarmed when their own bed began to vibrate. So here, it seems, is a case where the “poltergeist” remained in the house throughout two tenancies, and stayed on when the house was empty.

A similar case was investigated by the present writer.
²⁰
It took place in the Yorkshire town of Pontefract, in the home of the Pritchard family. Furniture moved, ornaments flew around, green foam gushed out of the taps, the house was shaken by thunderous crashes. A “ghost” – apparently a monk dressed in black – was also seen. But the “haunting” began when the eldest son, Phillip, reached the age of fifteen, and lasted a few days. When his younger sister Diane was fourteen the disturbances began again, and were this time more violent. (Diane had been away on holiday during the first outbreak.) Practically every breakable object in the house was smashed, Diane was thrown repeatedly out of bed and attacked by moving furniture, and a crucifix flew off the wall and stuck to her back, making a red mark. Then, as before, the manifestations faded. Diane herself was aware that the entity was somehow using her energy, and also felt intuitively that it meant her no real harm.

Cases like these suggest that the poltergeist is not a manifestation of the unconscious mind of an unhappy teenager but – as Kardec stated – an actual entity or “spirit”, which remains associated with some place, but which can only manifest itself through the surplus energy of a human being – not necessarily a teenager.

This was the conclusion reached by Guy Lyon Playfair, a paranormal-investigator who went to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1960s. Brazil, unlike England and France, remained faithful to Allan Kardec’s version of spiritualism, and his two works,
The Spirits’ Book
and
The Medium’s Book
, became the basic scriptures of Brazil’s most influential religion, “spiritism”. He investigated a poltergeist for the Brazilian Institute for Psycho-biophysical Research, and began to accept the Brazilian belief that poltergeists are spirits, and that they can be controlled by witch doctors, who may send them to haunt someone they dislike. One young girl named Maria was continually attacked by a poltergeist which tried to suffocate her and set her clothes on fire. A medium relayed a message
saying that Maria had been a witch in a previous existence, through whom many people had suffered, and now she was paying for it. Maria committed suicide with poison at thirteen. Playfair’s books.
The Flying Cow
and
The Indefinite Boundary
present highly convincing evidence that most poltergeist disturbances are due to “spirits”.

In 1977 Playfair and his fellow SPR member Maurice Grosse went to investigate a poltergeist at Enfield in north London. The case is described in detail in a classic book
This House is Haunted
. There were four children in the Harper family, aged respectively thirteen, eleven, ten and seven; it was a one-parent family, and there was considerable psychological tension. The disturbances began with vibrating beds and moving furniture. Playfair tried holding a chair in position with wire; the wire was snapped. A medium who came to the house said that there were several entities, and that eleven-year-old Janet was the “focus”. Playfair and Grosse finally established communication with the entity by means of a code of raps; it stated that it had been a previous tenant of the house thirty years ago and was now dead. It began to write messages in pencil. Eventually it developed a strange, harsh voice, identifying itself as Joe Watson. On another occasion the entity called itself Bill Haylock, and claimed that it had come from a nearby graveyard in Durant’s Park. One of its standard replies to questions (such as “Do you know you are dead”?) was “Fuck off”. Bill Haylock was later identified as a local resident, now deceased. Finally, in 1978, a Dutch clairvoyant, Dono Gmelig-Meyling, spent some time in the house, and somehow put an end to the “haunting”. He reported going on an “astral trip”, and meeting a 24-year-old girl who was somehow involved in the case. Maurice Grosse’s daughter Janet, who was the right age, had been killed in a motor-cycle crash in 1976. Playfair speculates that it was Janet who drew her father’s attention to the case, putting it into the head of a neighbour to ring the
Daily Mirror
, and into the head of a
Daily Mirror
journalist to contact the Society for Psychical Research. (Kardec insisted that our minds are far more influenced by “spirits” than we realize.) But the energy required by the poltergeist or poltergeists was undoubtedly supplied by the children, primarily by Janet Harper. (Playfair commented at one stage that half the contents of the local graveyard seemed to be haunting the house.)