The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (76 page)

She goes on to describe how the dead may attach themselves to those they love. Thus far she is in basic agreement with Wickland. But she then states: “Sometimes, of course, the motivating force is quite the opposite, and hate becomes the destroying power. There are many well-known cases of revenge striking from beyond the grave”.

Ms Quartermaine next cites the case of Barbara Graham, executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in June 1953 for her part in the murder of an elderly widow, Mabel Monahan, in the course of robbery. By 1953 Barbara, then thirty, had become a gangster’s moll as well as an alcoholic and drug addict. On 9 March she agreed to help the gang enter Mrs Monahan’s house in Burbank, California, by knocking on the door and asking to use the phone to contact a garage. Her four accomplices, Jack Santo, Baxter Shorter, Emmett Perkins, and John L. True, rushed into the house behind her and tied up the sixty-three-year-old widow while they searched the house for the fortune she was supposed to be guarding for the owner of a gambling casino. What actually happened is uncertain; the body of the woman, strangled with a strip of bedsheet, was found three days later by the gardener; her head, wrapped in a pillowcase, had been battered by a heavy blunt instrument.

The case was puzzling, since the victim’s purse contained $500, and $10,000 worth of jewelry was untouched. But after questioning various underworld figures, the police called on Baxter Shorter, who – under a promise of complete immunity – told them that Santo, Perkins, True, and Barbara Graham had been involved. (A man named William Upshaw had also agreed to take part but had backed out.) Barbara, he said, had rung the doorbell, and when the old lady opened the door, True and Perkins had rushed in. When Shorter finally went in to see what was taking them so long, he saw Barbara pistol-whipping Mrs Monahan. Santo had tied the pillowcase around her head and Perkins had strangled her. A search of the house failed to reveal the gambler’s hoard, and they left empty-handed.

Shorter’s story was accepted and he was released. But he was soon kidnapped by Perkins – who was still free – and murdered. Later, Perkins, Santo, and Barbara Graham were arrested in a motel. Barbara denied that she was present in the Monahan home; whether or not this was true, it is certain that many people in court did not believe that she had done the beating, as True alleged. But the main evidence against her was that she had attempted to bribe a fellow prisoner – in fact, a police officer – to provide her with an alibi for $2,500. She had also told the policeman that Shorter had been “well taken care of”.

Barbara Graham was tried, together with Santo and Perkins (her lover). Mainly on True’s evidence, she was found guilty. She died in the gas chamber on the same day as Santo and Perkins (who had been sentenced to death for a second time for the murder of a whole family committed during the course of robbery).

Helen Quartermaine states:

This account has several minor inaccuracies. Santo and Perkins died the same day, not “at a later date”. John True died in January, not February, 1958, when a Dutch freighter rammed a small craft in a fog. William Upshaw was not the man who informed the police on Barbara Graham – but he certainly died when he drove into a road
obstruction in California. The “other informer” – Shorter – had died long before Barbara Graham.

Helen Quartermaine is convinced that these deaths were actually caused by Barbara Graham’s “personality body”, out for revenge. Wickland, as we have seen, believed that such influence is possible and that Harry Thaw killed Stanford White under the influence of an entity – or entities – seeking revenge. Helen Quartermaine argues that the kind of lapse of attention that caused William Upshaw to drive his car into an obstruction, or that caused the Dutch freighter in the fog to run down the boat carrying divers (including John True), could easily be induced by a “vengeful spirit”.

John True and William Upshaw were responsible for the death sentence that sent Barbara Graham to the gas chamber. The Loudun inquisitors were responsible for the torture of Urbain Grandier and for his agonizing death at the stake. Helen Quartermaine would undoubtedly regard the possession of the Loudun inquisitors as the revenge of Urbain Grandier on his tormentors.

Whether plausible or not, the suggestion may be regarded as a disturbing footnote to Wickland’s
Thirty Years Among the Dead.

43

Psychometry

“Telescope into the Past”

In the winter of 1921 members of the Metapsychic Institute in Paris met together to test a clairvoyant. Someone produced a letter and asked someone to pass it to her; before it could reach her it was grabbed by a novelist called Pascal Forthunny, who said scathingly: “It can’t be difficult to invent something that applies to anybody”. He then closed his eyes and pronounced solemnly: “Ah yes, I see a crime, a murder . . .” When he had finished the man who had brought the letter said: “That was written by Henri Landru”. Landru was the “Bluebeard” who was then on trial for the murders of eleven women. The sceptic Forthunny had discovered that he possessed the curious ability known as psychometry – the ability to “sense” the history of an object by holding it in the hand.

According to the man who invented the word – an American doctor named Joseph Rodes Buchanan – it is an ability we all possess, although most of us have unconsciously suppressed it. Buchanan – who was a professor of medicine in Kentucky – came to suspect the existence of such a faculty in 1841, when he met a bishop named Leonidas Polk, who claimed that he could always detect brass when he touched it – even in the dark – because it produced a peculiar taste in his mouth. Buchanan was interested in the science known as phrenology – the notion that the “bumps” on our skulls reveal our characters – and he was interested to discover that Polk seemed to have a highly developed “bump” of sensibility. So he decided to perform a scientific test on students who had a similar bump. Various metals were wrapped in paper, and Buchanan was delighted to discover that many of his students could detect brass, iron, lead and so on by merely pressing their fingertips against the paper. They could also distinguish substances like salt, sugar, pepper and vinegar.

Buchanan concluded that the answer lay in some “nerve aura” in the
fingertips, which can detect different metals exactly as we could distinguish them by touching them with the tip of the tongue. This appeared to be confirmed by his observation that it seemed to work better when the hands are damp with perspiration – for after all, a damp skin is more “sensitive” than a dry skin. But this explanation began to seem inadequate when he discovered that one of his best “sensitives” – a man named Charles Inman – could sense the contents of sealed letters, and the character of the writers. Buchanan’s explanation was that the “nerve aura” of the writer had left some kind of trace on the letter, and Inman was able to pick up this trace through his own nerve aura. In other words, Inman’s “sensitivity” was abnormally developed, in much the same way as a bloodhound’s sense of smell. But that theory also broke down when he discovered that Inman displayed the same insight when presented with photographs – daguerreotypes – in sealed envelopes. Even the argument that the photograph had been in contact with the “sitter”, and had therefore picked up something of his “nerve aura”, ceased to be convincing when Buchanan discovered that newspaper photographs worked as well as daguerreotypes.

The professor of geology at Boston University, William Denton, read Buchanan’s original paper on psychometry – the word means “soul measurement” – and decided to try it himself. His sister Anne was “highly impressible”, and she proved to be an even better psychometrist than Inman; she was not only able to describe the character of letter-writers; she was even able to describe their physical appearance and surroundings.

This led Denton to ask himself whether, if a writer’s image and surroundings could be “impressed” on a letter, “why could not rocks receive impressions of surrounding objects, some of which they have been in the immediate neighbourhood of for years”. So in 1853 Denton began testing his “sensitives” with geological and archaeological specimens, “and was delighted to find that without possessing any previous knowledge of the specimen, or even seeing it, the history of its time passed before the gaze of the seer like a grand panoramic view”. When he handed his sister a piece of volcanic lava from Hawaii, she was shaken to see “an ocean of fire pouring over a precipice and boiling as it pours”. Significantly, she also saw the sea with ships on it, and Denton knew that the lava had been ejected during an eruption in 1840, when the American navy had been in Hawaii. A fragment of bone found in a piece of limestone evoked a picture of a prehistoric beach with dinosaurs. A fragment of Indian pottery brought a vision of Red Indians. A meteorite fragment brought visions of empty space, with the stars looking abnormally
large and bright. A fragment of rock from Niagara brought a vision of a boiling torrent hurling up spray (which she thought was steam). A piece of stalactite brought an image of pieces of rock hanging down like icicles. To make doubly sure that his sensitives were not somehow picking up unconscious hints or recognizing the specimens, Denton wrapped them in thick paper. He also discovered that when he tried the same specimen a second time – perhaps a month later – it produced the same result, although the picture was never identical.

In one of his most interesting experiments he showed his wife a fragment of Roman tile which came from a villa that had belonged to the orator Cicero. She described a Roman villa and lines of soldiers; she also saw the owner of the villa, a genial, fleshy man with an air of command. Denton was disappointed; Cicero had been tall and thin. But by the time Denton came to write the second volume of
The Soul of Things
he had discovered that the villa had also belonged to the dictator Sulla, and that Sulla
did
fit his wife’s description.

Another impressive “hit” was the “vision” induced by a piece of volcanic rock from Pompeii. Mrs Denton had no idea what it was, and was not allowed to see it; but she had a vivid impression of the eruption of Vesuvius and the crowds fleeing from Pompeii. Denton’s son Sherman had an even more detailed vision of ancient Pompeii, complete with many archaeological details – such as an image of a boat with a “swan’s neck” – which proved to be historically accurate.

Denton was immensely excited; he believed that he and Buchanan had discovered a so far unknown human faculty, a kind of “telescope into the past” that would enable us to relive great scenes of history. In effect, everything that had ever happened to the world was preserved on a kind of “newsreel” (although this was not, of course, an image that occurred to Denton) and could be replayed at will.

But while the evidence for the psychometric faculty is undoubtedly beyond dispute, Denton was not aware of how far it can be deceptive. The third volume of
The Soul of Things
, published in 1888, contains “visions” of various planets that we now know to be preposterous. Venus has giant trees like toadstools and animals that sound as if they were invented by Hieronymus Bosch; Mars has a summery temperature (in fact it would be freezing) and is peopled with four-fingered men with blue eyes and yellow hair; Jupiter also has blue-eyed blondes with plaits down to their waists and the ability to float like balloons. Denton’s son Sherman (who was responsible for most of these extraordinary descriptions) had clearly developed the faculty that Jung calls “active imagination”, and was unable to distinguish it from his genuine psychometric abilities.

What impresses the modern reader about Denton’s
Soul of Things
and Buchanan’s
Manual of Psychometry
(optimistically sub-titled The Dawn of a New Civilization) is their thoroughly scientific approach. This also impressed their contemporaries at first. Unfortunately, the period when they were conducting their experiments was also the period when the new craze known as Spiritualism was spreading across America and Europe. It had started with curious poltergeist manifestations in the home of the Fox family in New York state (see chapter 41) in the late 1840s. By 1860 it was a world-wide phenomenon. Scientists were appalled, and most of them dismissed it as sheer delusion. Anything that seemed remotely connected with the “supernatural” became the object of the same skepticism, and the researches of Buchanan and Denton never attracted the attention they deserved. Denton died in 1883, Buchanan in 1900, both in relative obscurity.

The next major experiments in psychometry were made by Dr Gustav Pagenstecher, a German who moved to Mexico City in the 1880s, and who regarded himself as a hard-headed materialist. Some time after the First World War, Pagenstecher was treating the insomnia of a patient called Maria Reyes de Zierold by hypnosis. One day, as she lay in a hypnotic trance, she told him that her daughter was listening at the door. Pagenstecher opened the door and found the daughter there. He began testing Maria for paranormal abilities and discovered that while under hypnosis she could share his own sensations; if he put sugar or salt on his tongue she could taste it; if he held a lighted match near his fingers she felt the heat of the flame. Then he began testing her for psychometric abilities. Like Denton’s subjects, she could describe where some specimen came from. Holding a sea-shell, she described an underwater scene; holding a piece of meteorite, she described hurtling through space and down through the earth’s atmosphere. (“I am horrified! My God”!) Dr Walter Franklin Prince, who tested her on behalf of the American Society for Psychical Research, handed her what he thought was a “sea bean” which he had found on the beach. She described a tropical forest. Professional botanists confirmed that the “bean” was a nut from a tree that grew in the tropical forest, and that was often carried down to the sea by the rivers.