Beyond the Occult (54 page)

At this point Gooch goes on to describe his own experience of a succubus (the female equivalent of an incubus).
Lying quietly in bed one morning he became aware of another person in the bed with him — a female.
Without opening his eyes he was aware that it was a composite of various ex-girlfriends, including his previous wife.
As his conscious interest in the situation got the better of him, the creature faded away.
But he admits, ‘on subsequent occasions … the presence of the entity was maintained, until finally we actually made love.’

In fact Gooch goes on to conclude that entities like these are not real (in the sense of being genuine spirits) but are
creations of the human mind.
He cites at length the case of Ruth, described in a book by Dr Morton Schatzman
^*
.
At the age of ten Ruth had fought off a rape attack by her father.
After she married and moved to England she had dreams of actually being raped by him.
Then she began having hallucinations of him, or she would hear him walking around the house.
He continued to intimate that he wanted to make love to her.
Then the father began to appear to her in Schatzman’s consulting room, and Schatzman was able to hold conversations with him through the medium of Ruth.
Little by little Ruth realized that she could control her apparitions — she was even able to produce two Schatzmans.
What she was doing was literally self-hypnosis.
A good hypnotist can make his subject see ‘apparitions’ as Dr Carpenter made the young American see Socrates, and psychological tests prove beyond all doubt that the hypnotized subject really sees a solid, three-dimensional being.
On a later occasion Ruth created an apparition of her husband — for whom she had formed an aversion — in bed, and went through a full act of sexual intercourse with it, ending as it ejaculated inside her.
Ruth’s recognition that she could control her hallucinations finally led to her cure.

Gooch’s argument is certainly plausible and serves to remind us that our ‘hidden powers’ are far greater than we normally recognize.
But then Gooch is also convinced that the poltergeist is ‘an extension of some form of living energy projected by the nervous system’ — in other words a manifestation of the unconscious mind.
In my view Playfair is correct, and there is overwhelming evidence that most poltergeists are spirits.
A subsequent book,
This House is Haunted
(1980), is an account of Playfair’s own investigations at a house in Enfield (north of London) where a particularly destructive poltergeist caused problems for more than a year.
The focus on this occasion seemed to be the eleven-year-old daughter of the family, Janet.
In December 1977, five months after the disturbances began, the poltergeist began to make whistling and barking noises and then
began to speak.
It at first identified itself as Joe, then later told the investigators, ‘I am Bill Haylock and I come from Durant’s Park and I am seventy-two years old and I have come here to see my family but they are not here now.’
(I have the tape-recording of these sessions: the voice sounds oddly jerky and mechanical, like a record I possess of an ‘electronic brain’ singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’.) When Guy Playfair asked, ‘Do you know you are dead?’
he was told to ‘fuck off’.
Investigation revealed that the Joe referred to was a Joe Watson who had lived in the house, and that Bill Haylock had been a local resident who was now buried in the graveyard, Durant’s Park.

Playfair commented of the various entities that manifested themselves in the house, ‘It looks as if we had half the local graveyard at one time or another.’
The ‘haunting’ was finally ended by a Dutch medium, Dono Gmelig-Meyling, who persuaded the entities that they were dead and ought to stop tormenting the Harper family.
The Enfield case powerfully supports Playfair’s view that poltergeists are ‘earth-bound spirits’ who are often unaware that they are dead.

This does not mean, of course, that Gooch is incorrect to believe that his own experience with a succubus was some kind of manifestation of his own unconscious mind.
But it certainly means that Gooch is mistaken to believe that
all
such experiences can be explained in these terms.
If it is unlikely that Diane Pritchard’s unconscious mind dragged her upstairs and made bruises on her throat, then it is also unlikely that the unconscious mind of Marcia F., the lecturer in psychology, created the entity that raped her as she lay paralysed in bed.

It seems likely that we shall never know what really happened at witches’ sabbats, or whether the entity that made love to Isobel Gowdie was a genuine incubus or a product of her unconscious mind.
But it
does
seem safe to say that witchcraft in mediaeval Europe was probably a great deal like witchcraft in modern Brazil, and that it would be a mistake to dismiss it entirely in terms of superstitions and delusions.

^*
Morton Schatzman,
The Story of Ruth
, (1980).

In
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Jung reveals that he has come to admit the reality of life after death and describes one of the experiences that finally convinced him.
One night he was lying awake thinking of a friend whose funeral had just taken place.
‘Suddenly, I felt he was in the room.
It seemed to me that he stood at the foot of my bed and was asking me to go with him.
I did not have the feeling of an apparition: rather, it was an inner visual image of him.’
Jung asked himself whether this was a fantasy, then decided that he might as well — for the sake of experiment — assume that it was real.
Thereupon his friend beckoned him to the door.
In imagination (and it must be remembered that Jung had a highly developed faculty of ‘active imagination’) Jung followed him to his house next door.
In the study his friend climbed on a stool and showed Jung the second of five red books on a high shelf.
The next morning Jung called on the man’s widow to ask if he could go into his friend’s study.
There was the stool that he had seen the night before and, near the ceiling, the books with the red bindings.
Jung had to stand on the stool to read the titles.
The book indicated was a novel by Zola with the title
The Legacy of the Dead
.
^*

Citing this experience, Gooch declines to accept it as proof of life after death, pointing out that our minds have the power to obtain paranormal information by other means.
But he then mentions a case that he regards as
almost
watertight.
It was described in a book called
Life Without Death?
by Nils
Jacobsen.
In 1928 Jacobsen’s uncle was run over by a lorry.
The lorry slammed him against a wall and he died three days later without regaining consciousness.
Six years later, at a seance in England, the medium told his father that his dead brother was present.
The brother then described the accident that had killed him and added that he had not died of an injury to his skull, as his family had always assumed, but that ‘it came from the bones’.
Years later Jacobsen realized that he could check the hospital records, and did so.
The post mortem report showed that his uncle had not died of a skull fracture, but from a brain embolism caused by a blood clot from the bone — lower-bone thrombosis.

The loophole in this story, says Gooch, is that the surgeon who performed the post mortem must have known the truth.
So the ‘information’
was
available in someone’s mind and might have reached the medium’s mind through this source.
It is true that this is remotely possible but it seems so far-fetched that it is hard to take seriously — like believing that the road from London to Southend goes via the North Pole.
We have to suppose that the medium obtained the facts of the accident from the sitter’s own mind and then somehow contacted the mind of the surgeon to find out what really happened.
On the whole it is simpler to believe that Jacobsen’s uncle survived death.

The truth is that these stories, and thousands more like them, are parts of a jigsaw puzzle that build up into an overwhelmingly convincing picture, and the general purport of this picture is that the human soul, or spirit, is independent of the body, and can survive the death of the body.
Again I must admit to a certain embarrassment in writing these words, for in a very real sense I couldn’t care less whether human beings survive their death.
My own increasing conviction that the mind can survive death has not tempted me to become a spiritualist — that is to attend seances or read spiritualist newspapers.
And when I am not actually writing books about ‘the occult’ I am inclined to ignore it altogether and read books on philosophy, science and history.
Yet whenever I return to the subject I am again overwhelmed by
the sheer consistency of the evidence.
And where ‘survival’ is concerned I cannot believe, like Stan Gooch, that we can explain the evidence in terms of telepathy.
Where, for example, is there room for telepathy in the following experience described by Wilbur Wright:

In early 1941 I was stationed at RAF Hemswell, Lincoln, as a ground engineer.
I returned from leave by bus late one Sunday evening completely out of cigarettes, and all the canteens were closed.
But I remembered I had left some cigarettes in the hangar and walked down in the black-out, entering the hangar through the central steel doors at the front.
The aircrew room was on the right, where flying personnel of 61 Bomber Squadron kept their flying clothing.
I heard a noise from the crew room, and opened the door to investigate it.
It was in total darkness and I switched on the light: the black-out curtains were in position and I saw a figure in uniform groping in one of the lockers.
He was wearing a flying helmet, a leather fur-lined jacket, black knee-length flying boots, and I recognized him as Leading Aircraftsman Stoker, a mid-upper gunner on the Hampden bomber, who had to fly with the hood open to look for attacking fighters.
(This was before all aircrew had sergeant rank to gain improved treatment for POWs.)

I said, ‘Hey, Stoke — what are you doing?’

He replied irritably, ‘I can’t find my bloody gloves.’

‘Well, that’s your problem,’ I said.
‘Put out the lights when you go.’

He made no reply to that, and I entered the hangar, found my cigarettes and went back to my billet.
Next morning I went to breakfast, and as always happened, I asked the man next to me what had been happening during my week’s absence.

‘Very dodgy two nights ago,’ he said.
‘They went mine-laying in the Dortmund Ems Canal and we lost McIntyre and his crew, hit at low level by flak, rolled and went straight in.
The mine went off — they had no chance.’

‘My God,’ I said.
‘That chap Stoker had a lucky escape, then!’

‘Stoker?
Oh, he went in with the rest.
There was trouble before they took off — he couldn’t find his flying gloves and he could have frozen to death with the rear gun hatch open.
He was moaning all the way out to the transport.’

I said nothing, but this preyed on my mind, and two days later I reported sick, told the MO what had happened.
He said he believed me, but he gave me some pills to make me sleep, and as time went on the shakes stopped and I forgot about it.
Looking back, the most remarkable aspect was that the air gunner looked perfectly normal to me.
His clothing creaked as usual when he moved, his face was worried but in no way remarkable, and it was only later that I realized that he had been groping round in his flying-clothing locker in pitch darkness.

I took the advice of the Medical Officer on the Station and told the story to nobody else.
He asked me to write an account of it in longhand, which I did on the back of a sheet of Station Routine Orders and gave it to him.
Ever since I have wondered how many of these things we see in broad daylight, regarding them as normal living human beings.
As I see it, there is no way to distinguish them from a living breathing person.

A number of interesting points emerge in this narrative.
The first is that Stoker was obviously able to open his locker door and was therefore, in some sense, solid.
This disposes of the theory that perhaps he was a ‘telepathic projection’ of someone else on the station who happened to be thinking about Stoker at that moment.
The second is that Stoker obviously believed that he was alive.
The third is that he looked and acted exactly like a living person.
The notion that ghosts are semi-transparent and look and behave in a ‘ghostly’ manner is an old wives’ tale.
What would have happened if Wright had tried to shake hands with Stoker is difficult to say, but in all probability he would have felt
perfectly normal and solid.
In their book
Apparitions
Celia Green and Charles McCreery devote a whole chapter to touch and pressure in which there are several cases in which people have shaken hands with ghosts.
‘His hand was not icy cold like that of a corpse,’ says one man who shook hands with an apparition of his father, ‘it was only cool.’
And in another well-known case from the records of the SPR, Lieutenant J.
J.
Larkin was writing letters when the door opened and his friend Lieutenant David McConnel shouted, ‘Hello boy!’
Larkin heard a few hours later that McConnel had crashed at roughly the time he had seen him.
His ghost seems to have had no problems opening a door and holding a brief conversation.

Stories already cited about
doppelgängers
seem to suggest that one of our ‘hidden powers’ is an ability to project a more or less solid image of ourselves to other places.
As often as not this seems to be done unconsciously: Celia Green cites a report of a woman who was knitting as she listened to a talk on the radio when her husband (who was in fact at work) entered the room and touched her under the chin.
His hand was icy cold.
Then he disappeared.
^*
However the novelist Theodore Dreiser has described how, after eating dinner at Dreiser’s house, his fellow novelist John Cowper Powys told him that he would appear to him later that night.
Two hours later, as he sat reading, he looked up and saw Powys standing by the door.
The apparition vanished as Dreiser went towards it.
^†
Powys later refused to explain how he did it but it seems certain that he had learned the same odd ‘trick’ as the student Beard.

In the circumstances it seems highly likely that persons on the point of death are able to exercise this faculty of ‘projecting the double’ by means of thought: in other words that apparitions of the dying seen by their relatives are not ‘ghosts’ in the normal sense of the word — i.e.
spirits of the dead — but something more like a mental television picture.
In some cases this ‘picture’ is solid enough to open doors or
shake hands, which seems to argue that scientists like David Bohm and John Wheeler may be correct to believe that reality is to some extent a mental construct (a theme to which we shall return in the final chapter).
But what seems equally obvious is that if Leading Aircraftsman Stoker could still project his image two nights after his body had been blown to pieces, then the ‘image-projecting’ part of his mind must have been operating normally, which could hardly have been possible unless it had survived his death.

In 1979 the mind’s survival of death was even recognized in an American courtroom.
The occasion was the trial of a man named Allan Showery for the murder of a Filipino nurse, Teresita Basa.
She was stabbed to death in her apartment in Evanston, Illinois, on 21 Feburary 1977.
Medical evidence indicated that the forty-eight-year-old nurse had let a man into her apartment and that he had encircled her neck from behind in a Japanese half-Nelson and rendered her unconscious: then he had stripped her and stabbed her between the ribs with such force that the knife went right through her.
He left her in a position that suggested rape to confuse the investigation (his real motive was robbery), then set the place on fire.

Two weeks later, in the Edgewater Hospital where Teresita Basa had worked, one of her colleagues remarked to another Filipino, a respiratory therapist named Remy Chua, ‘Teresita must be turning in her grave.
Too bad she can’t tell the police who did it.’
And Remy Chua replied seriously, ‘She can come to me in a dream.
I’m not afraid.’
Later that day, as she was dozing in the locker room, Remy Chua opened her eyes to see Teresita Basa standing in front of her.
She ran out of the room in a panic.

Remy Chua began to dream of the murder and of the killer, whom she then recognized as a black hospital orderly named Allan Showery.
And one day, as she lay on her bed, a voice spoke through her mouth saying, ‘I am Teresita Basa.
I want you to tell the police… .’
The voice spoke in Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines.
Her husband heard the words although Remy Chua remembered nothing when
she recovered from her trance.
They decided to do nothing about it.
Two weeks later ‘Teresita’ came back and spoke through Remy Chua’s mouth again, this time naming her killer as ‘Allan’.
A few days later she named him as Allan Showery, and said he had stolen her jewellery and given it to his girlfriend — she even gave the telephone number of someone who could identify the jewellery.
She claimed that ‘Al’ had come to fix her television and killed her.

Finally the Chuas called the police.
They were unconvinced and it was several days before they questioned Showery, who admitted promising to repair Teresita’s television but claimed he had simply forgotten.
However when the police questioned Showery’s live-in girlfriend Yanka and asked her if he had ever given her jewellery, she showed them an antique ring that he had given her as a ‘belated Christmas present’.
The police called the number that Mrs Chua had spoken in her trance and two of the victim’s cousins came to the station and identified the ring as Teresita’s.
They also identified some other jewellery that had belonged to her.
Faced with this evidence Showery broke down and confessed.