Beyond the Occult (62 page)

Two years later, at the age of sixteen, Eileen Garrett found herself in London, and she soon married a pleasant young man whom she met at dinner in the house of her aunt’s cousin.
But when they came back from their honeymoon he told her seriously that she must abandon her tendency to ‘visioning’ and that it might lead to insanity.
She felt more self-divided than ever.
The birth of a son delighted her, until an unseen presence warned her that he would not be with her very long.
A second child was born, but she felt a premonition that he would die young.
Not long after this both children died of meningitis.
Her marriage ended in divorce.
During the First World War she met a young officer and married him.
Not long after, in a crowded restaurant, she felt she had been caught in the midst of a violent explosion then ‘saw’ her husband blown to pieces.
Two days later she was notified that he was missing.

She married again and had a daughter.
The child developed pneumonia, and one day she overheard the doctor saying that he had given up hope.
She took the child out of the cot and held her close.
Suddenly she heard a voice say, ‘She must have more air.
Open the window.’
When she had done this she became aware of a man standing beside the
bed: her fear suddenly left her.
‘The next thing I recall was a resounding noise in my ears, which turned out to be someone knocking at the door.’
(This seems to indicate that she was in a condition of trance at the time.) It was her husband.
When they looked at the child she was sleeping quietly, the crisis over.

Eileen Garrett then joined a spiritualist society and attended lectures on clairvoyance and psychometry.
She also joined a group of women who held seances.
At the third meeting she grew drowsy and fell asleep.
When she woke up she was told that the dead had spoken through her and that she was a gifted medium.
Someone advised her to consult a Swiss clairvoyant named Huhnli.
In his presence she once again ‘fell asleep’.
When she woke up Huhnli told her that her ‘control’, a spirit named Uvani, had spoken to him, and that Uvani wanted to ‘do serious work to prove the theory of survival’.
When she went home and told her husband he was furious and told her she was going insane.
She ignored him and continued to visit Mr Huhnli.
Finally her conflicts caused a serious haemorrhage.
As she lay recovering she at last began to understand what had been happening to her throughout her life.
The passage in her autobiography in which she speaks of this makes it very clear how close her own experience had been to that of many of Ralph Allison’s multiple personality patients:

I saw for the first time that the trance state might be part of a psychological pattern which had its inception in my early childhood.
I began to understand how the pain and suffering of these early days had made me withdraw from the world of people into the world of light and colour and movement.
I could now recall that the first time I had been successful in
escaping
the pain of the punishment inflicted on me by my aunt was when I so separated myself that I could see her lips moving as she scolded me, but not a word penetrated my ears.
I now remember also that when the physical punishment became almost unbearable … I learned to draw inside myself and would fall promptly to
sleep, thereby banishing the painful after-effects of a beating … .
I also recall the many episodes of amnesia which had taken place during the early and unsatisfactory years of my first marriage, and during the tragic episodes of my sons’ deaths.
I understood now more clearly that these periods of so-called amnesia were also forms of escape from the too-painful conditions of living.

All this makes it clear that Eileen Garrett was lucky to escape becoming a multiple personality.
A sceptic might argue that she
had
become a multiple personality and that Uvani was only another aspect of herself.
Yet the incredible successes of her later mediumship argue strongly against this.

In fact her second important mentor, Hewat McKenzie, founder of the College of Psychic Science, startled her with his refreshingly sceptical attitude towards ‘controls’.
He explained that it was a mistake to regard the pronouncements of ‘controls’ as the word of some higher power — they were often limited personalities who needed just as much education and training as the medium.
Lack of this, he thought, had allowed mediumship to deteriorate until it functioned mainly on the emotional and sentimental levels.
This led Eileen Garrett herself to express doubts about whether Uvani was a real ‘control’ or merely a split-off fragment of her own mind — an attitude that shocked McKenzie.

Her third marriage having now broken up, Eileen Garrett became a full-time medium.
As far as she was concerned it was rather frustrating.
It simply meant that she became unconscious and was told what had happened when she woke up.
It was only occasionally rewarding, as when Hewat McKenzie asked her to help him investigate a poltergeist disturbance.
Uvani apparently talked to the ‘disturbed spirit’ and found out why it was causing so much trouble to its relatives: it turned out that the problem had to do with a lost will, which was found behind a picture frame.
After this the disturbances ceased.
But at most of her sittings she felt that the sitters were basically frivolous.
They wanted to contact
dead relatives for their own purely emotional reasons and had no real interest in the mysteries of life after death.
It all struck her as irritatingly trivial and she began to feel revulsion at the part she was playing.

The level of the trance communications suddenly improved when a new ‘control’ called Abdul Latif began to appear.
He claimed to have been a Persian physician at the time of the Crusades, and she was interested to discover later that she was not the first medium through whom he had manifested.
Yet her sense of revulsion persisted, and she finally decided to give up mediumship and to accept a proposal of marriage from an old friend.
Then once again she heard the voice that had announced the death of her child: it told her to make the best of her happiness since it would not last.
On the day the marriage banns were published she developed a mastoid and he caught a chill: within a week he was dead.
When she recovered from a serious illness she realized that her clairvoyant faculties were more highly developed than ever.
At that point, sick of the vague sentimentality of English spiritualists, she decided to go to America.
It was the autumn of 1931 and she was thirty-eight years old.

The United States proved at first to be an immense disappointment.
Once again she found herself expected to work with people whose only interest was in communicating with their dead loved ones.
It was even worse when she reached Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Then she discovered that there
were
a few more serious researchers, like Hereward Carrington, then working with Sylvan Muldoon, and the psychologist William McDougall and his assistant Professor J.
B.
Rhine.
In New York she carried out a classic experiment in astral projection with a Newfoundland doctor who possessed the same ability.
She ‘projected’ herself to a room of his house in Newfoundland while remaining fully conscious of the room in New York.
The doctor came downstairs with a bandage around his head as she ‘arrived’: he sensed her presence and explained that he had had an accident.
When she relayed this information in New York she heard someone
say, ‘That can’t possibly be true — I had a letter a few days ago and he was quite well then.’
The doctor asked her to look at the objects on the table; she described them to the stenographer in New York.
Then he took down a book about Einstein from the shelf and read a paragraph to himself: in New York Eileen Garrett interpreted the sense of what he was reading.
After this the doctor projected himself to the bedroom of a co-experimenter in New York and described it, mentioning that it had been redecorated since his last visit and that two photographs were no longer there.
Then the experiment ended: it had taken fifteen minutes.
The next day they received a telegram from the doctor mentioning the accident to his head; later his detailed notes were checked against the New York stenographer’s record and found to be accurate.

As she became more absorbed in this kind of scientific work she abandoned mediumship in favour of clairvoyance.
She summarizes the result of her years of experience thus: ‘Now I believed I saw a certain principle at work behind all communication —
namely that the subconscious mind was a vehicle capable of expanding indefinitely and able to contact all possible realms of understanding which it might choose to reach’
— in short a recognition that we are living in an ‘information universe’ and that all this information is accessible to certain levels of the human mind.

Oddly enough her attempts to demonstrate her powers at Duke University with J.
B.
Rhine — the man who
would become the father of scientific parapsychology — were unsuccessful: her score in reading Zena cards was no more than average.
This, she was convinced, was because ‘clairvoyance and telepathy depended upon an active radiation registering between two people or between an individual and an object’, and since the Zena cards had no ‘radiation’ there was no link between them.
(According to Max Freedom Long our vital force —
mana
— acts through an invisible substance called
aka
or ‘shadowy body stuff’.
This
aka
is ‘sticky’, according to the Kahunas, and can be drawn out into long, sticky threads, like spiders’ webs; telepathy, clairvoyance and psychometry operate through these invisible telephone lines of
aka
.
This would explain why Eileen Garrett found Zena cards impossible to work with but would not explain why other subjects obtained a high score.)

In 1934 she returned to England and entered into more scientific work with Dr William Brown in his laboratory at Oxford.
Brown thought that she might be simply a multiple personality and wanted to question her under hypnosis.
But although she was able to recall childhood memories in detail under hypnosis there was no sign of her ‘controls’.
It was only when she went into a mediumistic trance at the last session that Brown was finally able to talk to Uvani.

In her autobiography Eileen Garrett is so concerned with explaining the scientific investigations that she fails to make even a passing reference to one of the strangest cases she ever became involved in: the haunting of Ash Manor in Sussex.
The house had been bought in June 1934 by an American named Keel, who had been surprised that the owner asked so little for it — he decided the drains must need extensive repairs.
But one night in November Keel woke up to find an intruder — a little old man — in his bedroom.
When he tried to grab him, his hand went straight through him, and Keel fainted.
Then he rushed to his wife’s bedroom, babbling incoherently, and she went to fetch brandy.
Outside her husband’s bedroom she saw the same old man — wearing old-fashioned clothes including leggings and a pudding-basin hat.
When she tried to hit him her hands went through him and he vanished.
After this the family saw him frequently: he would appear from a chimney and walk into a cupboard that had once been a priests’ hole.
He became such a frequent visitor that the family ceased to worry about him — particularly when Mrs Keel found she could make him vanish by reaching out to touch him.

The research officer for the International Institute for Psychical Research was Nandor Fodor, and he persuaded Mrs Garrett to accompany him to investigate Ash Manor.
She went into a trance, and Uvani took over and explained that hauntings only occur when someone is in a bad emotional state.
(It soon emerged that the Keel family had
serious problems: Keel was homosexual and the daughter had a father-fixation and was jealous of her mother.) There had been a prison close to the house in the fifteenth century and many men and women had died there.

After this Uvani allowed the spirit of the old man to ‘possess’ Mrs Garrett.
The old man seemed to mistake Fodor for his jailer and fell on his knees, seizing Fodor’s hand so tightly that he howled with pain and was unable to free it.
Finally the old man began to speak in an odd mediaeval English, talking about the Earl of Huntingdon and the Duke of Buckingham — who had apparently betrayed him — and begging Fodor to help him find his wife.
The man said his name was Charles Edward Henley, son of Lord Henley, and referred to the nearby village under its mediaeval name of Esse.
When he talked of revenge they tried to persuade him that the desire for revenge was binding him to the earth, and that he should make an effort to forgive.
Finally, crying, ‘Hold me, I cannot stay …’ the spirit vanished.
Mrs Keel, who was also present, said that Eileen Garrett’s face looked like that of the old man while he was ‘possessing’ her.