Beyond the Occult (51 page)

In fact for Playfair this was only a beginning.
He joined the IBPP — Brazilian Institute for Psycho Biophysical Research — moved to Sao Paolo, and studied more psychic surgeons.
Then he heard of a case of poltergeist haunting and agreed to look into it for the Institute.
In October 1973 he sat in the home of a divorced Portuguese woman reading Frank Podmore — the highly sceptical investigator of the Society for Psychical Research — on poltergeists and waiting for something to happen.
It all began as he was falling asleep: a series of loud bangs that shook the house yet failed to cause things to vibrate as bangs normally do.
In fact laboratory analysis has shown that poltergeist bangs seem to differ from ordinary bangs.
Shown on a graph an ordinary sound has a curve that rises and falls like a mountain: spirit bangs begin and end abruptly, like cliffs.
Later a footstool bounced down the stairs, a drawer full of clothes was shot out into the yard and a pillow was pulled from under the head of Nora, the daughter-in-law of the house.
Again and again Playfair noticed that such things seemed to happen when people were falling asleep or waking up: he assumed that this was simply clever timing, to avoid observation.
But Mavromatis’s investigations into hypnagogic states suggest another explanation.
If the twilight state between sleeping and waking makes human beings more ‘psychic’ (i.e.
allows them entry into another condition of being), then it may be a two-way door that also allows the denizens of the psychic realm to invade the physical world.

Once the IBPP team was convinced they were dealing with a genuine poltergeist and not with a mischievous child or malicious adult, they took steps to get rid of it.
The Pritchard family of Pontefract had sent for the vicar, unaware that exorcism is quite useless in poltergeist cases.
(This, Kardec explains, is because poltergeists are not evil spirits but merely
mischievous practical jokers.) The Brazilians, more experienced, know that the best way is to use mediums to contact the spirit.
A team of four mediums came to the house, and although they failed to ‘make contact’ they asked their own ‘spirit guides’ to persuade the poltergeist to go elsewhere.
For two weeks it looked as if this had worked: then the manifestations began again.
(The poltergeist had a nasty habit of starting small fires.) So the family decided to take the ultimate step.
They called in a
candomblé
specialist —
candomblé
being an African-influenced cult allied to voodoo.
The
candomblé
team spent several days burning incense and invoking their own spirits to drive away the poltergeist.
And this apparently worked: when Playfair checked three months later, all was silent.

At this point in his narrative Playfair makes a statement that would undoubtedly cause raised eyebrows among the members of the Society for Psychical Research:

Hernani Guimaraes Andrade, the spiritist scientist; Father Carlos, the Catholic professional exorcist; and the young
candomblé
father-in-sainthood have one view in common.
They are convinced that poltergeists are the result of black magic, except where the premises rather than the people are being haunted.

‘In every case of person-directed poltergeist activity where I have been able to study the family background,’ says Mr Andrade, ‘there has been evidence that somebody in the house could be the target of revenge from a spirit.
It may be a former lover who has committed suicide, a jealous relation, a spiteful neighbour, or even a member of the same family bearing some trivial grudge.
Any Brazilian is well aware that this country is full of backyard
terreiros
of
quimbanda
(black magic centres), where people use spirit forces for evil purposes.’

For anyone educated in the West this seems a breathtaking statement, startling in its absurdity — nothing less than primitive superstition.
Playfair’s
experiences in Brazil convinced him that it is the literal truth, as Max Freedom Long’s experiences in Hawaii had convinced
him
that poltergeists (low spirits) can be used for malevolent purposes.
In fact when Playfair read Max Freedom Long’s
Secret Science Behind Miracles
, he recognized immediately that Long and Andrade were in fundamental agreement about spirits.
According to the Hunas, man’s three ‘souls’ may be separated at death.
The low self, which possesses memory, may be persuaded to commit mischief by a magician-priest or a practitioner of black magic: these are poltergeists, the spirits used in the death prayer.
If the middle self becomes detached it becomes a ghost, a mindless wanderer around the scenes of its past life, for it has no memory.

In the case of the Portuguese household the
candomblé
specialist was of the opinion that this was a case of black magic, and the IBPP was inclined to agree.
The case had been going on for six years, ever since Nora had married the son of the household.
Family members had received hostile telephone calls; photographs of one of the daughters, stitched with thread, had been found on the floor — a sign of witchcraft; the family had changed houses three times during the haunting, and Nora had attempted suicide twice.
Most poltergeist hauntings last only a short time — perhaps, as in the case of the Black Monk of Pontefract, a few months.
For a case to continue unabated for six years it seems that the entity needs to have some purpose apart from its own juvenile sense of mischief.
That purpose, according to the IBPP, can only be provided by a black magician — probably, as Andrade says, some ‘backyard
terreiros’
who will cast spells for payment.

In his book
Drum and Candle
Playfair’s friend David St Clair has described his own experience of being ‘bewitched’.
For eight years he had lived in a pleasant Rio de Janeiro apartment, served by a pretty brown-skinned maid named Edna.
She was, he assures the reader, nothing more than a maid.
Finally, when St Clair decided it was time to leave Brazil, he gave her six months’ notice.
Suddenly everything began to go wrong: the book he was working on jammed firmly; his publisher rejected it; an inheritance failed to materialize; a love affair went wrong; he fell ill with malaria.
His plans for moving to Greece had to be shelved.

Then a psychic friend stopped him in the street and told him that someone had put a curse on him: ‘all his paths had been closed’.
In fact it seemed to be general knowledge in
umbanda
, (voodoo) circles.
St Clair’s suspicions finally came to rest on his pretty maid Edna.
It was true that she was a Catholic who claimed to disapprove of
umbanda
, but when St Clair learned that a curse could be invoked by using some personal item of his clothing he recalled that his socks had been disappearing recently, and that Edna had claimed they had blown off the line.
He told Edna that he wanted to go to an
umbanda
session.
After much protest she agreed to take him.

Towards midnight the ritual dance began.
Then the
umbanda
priestess came in and danced as if possessed.
After some ceremonial drinking of alcohol — a mouthful of which she spat in St Clair’s face — a medium was asked who had put a curse on him.
The reply was, ‘The person who bought him here.
She wants you to marry her or buy her a house with a piece of land.’
Then Edna was ordered to leave, after which there was more ritual drumming and dancing to lift the curse.
Finally the priestess told him, ‘Now you are free.’

Immediately afterwards St Clair’s luck changed: money came in, the book was accepted, the love affair restarted.
But Edna herself became seriously ill with a stomach growth.
An
umbanda
priest whom she consulted told her that the curse she had put on St Clair had rebounded on herself and would continue as long as she stayed with him.
At this point Edna admitted that she had tried to make him marry her by means of black magic: she then walked out of his life, acknowledging that she had brought her misfortune on herself.

When St Clair had come to Rio he had been astonished by the superstitions of his intellectual friends.
He tells of seeing a clay statue of the devil surrounded by burning candles on the pavement in a main avenue: when he leaned forward to touch it a friend pulled him back, saying, ‘It’s
despacho,’
an offering to a spirit.
‘You surely don’t believe all that stuff?’
asked St Clair incredulously.
His friends replied that they didn’t — but still would not allow him to touch.
After this St Clair saw many such pavement offerings.
And he noticed
that even starving beggars would not touch offerings of cooked chicken, and dogs would sniff them and back away.

Playfair was intrigued by a case that seemed to show that contrary to the usual assumptions, poltergeists
do
sometimes commit lethal mischief.
In December 1965 a Catholic family living in the small town of Jabuticabal were visited by what Playfair calls ‘one of the most persistently malevolent poltergeists in history’.
It began with stone-throwing — or rather brick-throwing.
A spiritist named Volpe came to survey the situation and decided that the focus of the activity was a pretty eleven-year-old girl named Maria José Ferreira, a natural medium who was unconsciously lending the spirits her energy.
He took the girl into his own home and soon bricks were flying around there too.
But at this stage the spirits seemed fairly amiable: if Maria asked for a flower or a piece of candy it appeared at her feet.
Then the honeymoon period came to an end and the spirits began hurling glasses, plates, flower vases and other items around the house.
While Maria was asleep there were apparent attempts to suffocate her by placing cups or glasses over her mouth, and an attack in the genital region suggested an attempt at rape.
Then the poltergeist began sticking needles into her left heel, and the fact that she was wearing shoes and socks made no difference: one day fifty-five needles were removed at the same time.
When the foot was bandaged the bandages were wrenched off without being untied.
One day at school her clothes began to smoulder from a burn that looked as if it had been made by a cigarette.
Finally the Volpes took her to an
umbanda
centre where a ‘spirit’ came and spoke through Chico, Brazil’s best-known medium.
It declared that Maria had been a witch in a previous life and that many people had suffered through her — including the spirit itself, whose death she had caused.
Pleas were ignored, and although the more painful attacks ceased the poltergeist continued to throw fruit and vegetables around.
Finally Maria died from drinking ant killer in a soft drink.
Whether it was suicide or whether the spirits introduced the poison was never established.

When Playfair had finished reading Maria’s file he asked
Andrade why it was that such cases always seemed to happen in the backwoods to uneducated people.
Andrade shook his head and took a file from his drawer: ‘Look at that.’
The story was so incredible that Playfair decided to double-check and went to meet the girl involved.
She was a Catholic with a master’s degree in psychology, and Playfair calls her Marcia F.
Marcia had incurred the wrath of the spirits by picking up an offering made to the sea goddess Yemanja.
It was a small plaster statue of a woman with most of the paint washed off it, and when Marcia found it on the beach near Santos she decided it would make a nice ornament for the apartment she shared with another girl.
A few days later Marcia was violently ill with food poisoning.
Then she began spitting blood.
A holiday with her parents was pleasant and uneventful — the statuette stayed behind on the mantlepiece.
But when she returned the pressure cooker blew up and burned her face and neck.
The oven exploded, shooting out a sheet of flame towards Marcia; a gas fitter could find nothing wrong with the gas pipes.

Marcia began to experience suicidal impulses — an impulse to fling herself before oncoming cars and out of a window.
A voice inside her seemed to be urging her to throw herself out.
Then she became aware of the presences.
They came at night and entered her bed: she felt hands touching her all over.
Then a male presence climbed on to her and she felt a penis entering her.
She tried without success to push him away.
But the ‘incubus’ — as such spirits were known in the Middle Ages — came for several nights.