Beyond the Occult (61 page)

These various episodes all seem so unlike one another that it is hard to see any overall pattern.
Yet the first and most obvious thing that emerges is that Albert Tucker is naturally ‘psychic’, which means, quite simply, that he is to some extent aware of that ‘invisible world’ that
shamans
like Ramon Medina take for granted.
He mentions that he became aware of this in his early teens but that there was nothing he could pin down as a ‘paranormal event’.
Like many artists he was probably a late developer, so the grey-haired lady who sat on his legs was simply taking advantage of the peculiar energies of adolescence.
(Could it be significant that she vanished when he turned on his back, removing the pressure from the region concerned?) The same explanation applies to the thunderous crash: since it occurred only once it might be interpreted as the poltergeist saying farewell.

The ‘vision’ of the man in the tweed overcoat may be regarded either as clairvoyance or precognition.
If it was clairvoyance then his mind was simply grasping something that was happening a few hundred yards away, as if the intervening fence and houses were non-existent.
But in view of the later episode of the phantom car I am inclined to regard it as precognition.
Because he was totally relaxed his mind was able, in some odd way, to scan the future.
In that case we must assume that the whole episode took place inside his own head, and that if another person had been present in the room he would have heard nothing.
The dog’s response would in that case simply be a response to Tucker’s own reactions, or possibly a telepathic rapport.
The alternative explanation is that Barbara Tucker, driving home,
imagined pulling into the drive and somehow ‘projected’ the event into her husband’s mind.
I have cited elsewhere
^*
the curious case of the Rev.
Mountford of Boston, who was standing by the window in a friend’s house when he saw a horse and carriage arrive; his host also saw it.
But when they reached the front door there was nothing there.
The genuine carriage pulled up ten minutes later.
But in the meantime the daughter of its occupants arrived, looking worried.
She had been walking along the road when the carriage had passed her, and had wondered why her parents ignored her and drove straight past.
In fact her parents were still sitting in front of the fire at home, resting before they set out.
The likeliest explanation is that one of the parents had fallen into a doze or a revery and ‘projected’ the image of the carriage.

The mouse episode raises some interesting questions.
No doubt Tucker was right in assuming that some unpleasant denizen of the spirit world had been able to ‘find the door’ into the physical universe by stealing the energies of the idiot son, and Tucker’s own psychic sensitivity may have made him doubly vulnerable.
The natural assumption would be that it was some ill-disposed ‘low spirit’ — that is, basically a poltergeist.
But poltergeists seldom seem to show any genuine ill-will unless ‘directed’ by a malevolent human being.
This entity seems to have been genuinely malefic in its own right.
Moreover the smell of wet animal fur is the smell often associated with demons in witch trials.
We must accept, at least as a possibility, that the demonic forces of mediaeval theology may have some real existence — even if, as Kardec insists, they are not permanently and irretrievably evil.

Albert Tucker is obviously an unwilling psychic who has no intention of developing his powers and no desire to do so.
This may sound strange, since most of us would like to be able to foresee the future and contact dead loved ones.
But being psychic also has its disadvantages: living ‘between two worlds’ can be a wearing experience.
Anne Bancroft notes that when she was sixteen she ‘became afraid and stopped it all’.
Even Eileen Garrett experienced doubts about it.
Describing her childhood ‘reveries’ she says, ‘These were not the beginnings of my ability to withdraw from the world and live within myself.
I think that I may have had that ability always, but as the practical outer world became more insistent in its demands I developed the faculty for shutting it out … in an instinctive struggle for self-preservation.’

The psychic experience seems to begin with a certain ‘opening up’, which brings with it an intense sensitivity to nature — Anne Bancroft’s sense of a ‘presence’ in woods and fields, Eileen Garrett’s ability to ‘converse’ with trees and flowers.
Another remarkable psychic, Rosalind Heywood — of whom I have written at length elsewhere
^*
— developed her childhood sense of ‘presences’ in the foothills of the Himalayas and cried herself to sleep with nostalgia when her family returned to England.
It was then that she became aware of other ‘presences’ in her grandfather’s house near Dartmoor: a female ‘presence’ in her bedroom (her mother later admitted to seeing the apparition of an old woman there) and other ‘melancholy presences’ in her aunt’s home in Norfolk.
Years later her aunt saw a portrait of a man in seventeenth-century dress and exclaimed, ‘That’s the man who’s always trying to stop me going upstairs.’
She was told that it was Oliver Cromwell, who had been unhappily in love with a girl who had once lived in her house.

We have noted that Eileen Garrett heard ‘singing sounds’ as she stared at the ‘globules of light’ in her room.
Rosalind Heywood devotes a whole chapter of her autobiography
The Infinite Hive
to ‘the Singing’,

… a kind of continuous vibrant inner
quasi
-sound, to which the nearest analogy is the noise induced by pressing a seashell against the ear, or perhaps the hum of a distant dynamo … .
It is far more evident in some places than in others: particularly so in a quiet wood, for instance, or on a moor or a mountain — clean wild places
unspoilt by man.
It is also clear in, say, a church or a college library, places where thought or devotion have been intense for years … .

In this last sentence she seems to be speaking about the ‘information universe’ and the fact that objects can ‘record’ the vibrations of the human mind.

Rosalind Heywood also makes it clear why this kind of ‘openness’ can be uncomfortable to live with.
In such states the slightest sound or touch seems like an earthquake.
She describes returning from a concert feeling so ecstatic that she lay down on the bed,

… to mull it over … .
Almost at once the whole vivid soaring climax existed again, simultaneously, not in sound but to my inner eye in colour.
I was swept up into it and up it until I emerged at the top into a vast and beautiful marble hall, oblong, with painted walls and the whole of the east end open to the night sky and the stars.
While I was staring enthralled at these splendid surroundings my husband thought I looked odd and touched me gently.
The effect of his touch was far from gentle: it forced me back sharply and painfully into my body … and shaken and disappointed I told the poor man what I thought of him in no uncertain terms.

On another occasion she was trying to practise a little mind-reading in her bedroom and experienced a feeling ‘like a glorified version … of going under anaesthetic’.
Then she was jerked back to the world by a series of agonisingly loud bangs: her husband was gently tapping on the door to ask if she was ready for breakfast.
This clearly explains why it can be dangerous to suddenly ‘awaken’ a medium who is in a trance: if the medium happens to have a weak heart the result can be fatal.

Rosalind Heywood’s ‘openness’ also made her aware of non-human presences.
When she and her husband walked out on to Dartmoor in the dusk, ‘the incredible beauty swept
me through a barrier.
I was no longer looking at Nature.
Nature was looking at me.
And she did not like what she saw.
It was a strange and humbling sensation, as if numberless unoffending creatures were shrinking back, offended by our invasion … .’
She decided that they ought to stand quite still and try to explain mentally that they came as friends.
Then ‘I seemed to feel their sigh of relief… .
Our apology was accepted.’
A few days later, facing the moor through an open window, she ‘suffered an invasion… .
It was as if, like ebullient children, a covey of little invisibles floated in at the window to say “Hullo!”
and coax me to play with them.’

On a visit to the House of Commons she sat, relaxed, in the entrance to Westminster Hall ‘and let the world fade out’.
She found herself ‘passing beyond the Singing’ and into the presence of ‘a profoundly wise and powerful Being who I felt was brooding over the Houses of Parliament.
In that inner space he towered so high that the actual buildings seemed to be clustered about his feet.’
She decided that she must speak of the experience to a saintly old mystic she knew.
But this proved to be unnecessary: as soon as she arrived he began to speak spontaneously of the ‘Angel’ of the House of Commons … .
A few years later, waiting for her son in the music school at Eton, ‘I once more seemed to pass through the Singing into the ambience of a great Being.
He appeared to have the school in his care and, like his fellow at Westminster, he created an atmosphere of brooding wisdom and calm.’

To ask whether such experiences are ‘real’ raises an interesting question.
It implies that Rosalind Heywood may have been merely imagining the ‘presences’.
Yet if her description is accurate she became aware of them by ‘letting the world fade out’ and falling ‘down the rabbit hole’ into a state of trance-like awareness.
What she ‘saw’ then may well have been merely the creation of her subconscious mind: that is to say her mind may have interpreted its perception symbolically, producing this impression of a gigantic being towering above the building.
Yet our insight into the
workings of clairvoyance suggests that the perception she was interpreting was of something real: the ‘presences’ were not poetic imagination, like the presences Wordsworth felt in the Lake District, but real ‘Beings’.
But if we can accept that possibility then it is hard to see why we should draw a line and describe Wordsworth’s ‘presences’ as imaginary.
The ‘open’ mind of the poet and artist can sense realities beyond the reach of our normal senses.
The real problem is that our materialistic assumptions have a number of false premises built into them: it is only when we recognize this that we see that there is no sharp dividing line between the everyday world and the invisible world of the clairvoyant.

Rosalind Heywood was lucky.
As an upper-class young Englishwoman whose father was in the Indian Civil Service (and whose mother could also ‘see ghosts’), she experienced no conflict between the everyday world and the world of her clairvoyant insights.
In due course she married an ex-army officer who worked in the War Office then became a diplomat, and who was also capable of flashes of clairvoyant perception.
(Her younger son also developed odd ‘powers’: one day she asked him why he was looking at a London atlas and he told her that later in the day some stranger would ask him the way to a particular street.
This happened within the hour.) In due course she was able to join the Society for Psychical Research and pursue her interest in the paranormal in a detached and scientific manner.
There was never any temptation to develop mediumship since she had so many other things to do.

Eileen Garrett’s career was altogether less smooth.
Brought up by an aunt and uncle on a farm in County Meath, Ireland, she was an ‘outsider’ from the beginning.
Her aunt was a strong-minded woman whose attitude towards the paranormal was one of total unbelief: she made the child’s life a misery.
One day, as Eileen was sitting on the porch, her favourite Aunt Leon walked towards her and told her, ‘I must go away now and take the baby with me.’
She ran indoors to fetch her aunt, but when they came out Aunt Leon had vanished.
Eileen was whipped for telling lies and sent to
bed.
But the following day Aunt Leon died in childbirth.
The aunt still refused to believe that the child had seen Aunt Leon and told her angrily that she must never speak of such things again, ‘for they might come true’.
Eileen withdrew into a world of her own and began to develop physical illnesses as a reaction against her rejection.
A few days after the death of her uncle — whom she adored — the door opened and he walked into her room, looking cheerful and healthy, and had a long talk with her.
He explained that she would have to put up with her aunt and do her best, and predicted that in two years’ time she would go to London.
Then he went out, closing the door behind him.
‘It never occurred to me that I had seen a ghost, or that anything strange had taken place.’
But when her cousin Ann died she saw a ‘shadowy grey substance’ rising above her body, gathering itself into a spiral before it disappeared.