Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (18 page)

The case of the Bell Witch was fully documented in a book written in 1846 by Richard Bell, who had been seven when the witch first appeared, and was later the subject of a full length book by M.
V.
Ingram (1894).
Nandor Fodor, who has written extensively on the poltergeist, discusses it fully in his book
The Poltergeist Down the Centuries.
As well as being a student of the paranormal, Fodor was also a Freudian psychiatrist, and he takes the view that the poltergeist is sexual in origin.
Undoubtedly, he is partly correct—the poltergeist seems to be at its best when it can draw on the energies of a girl (or, less often, a boy) who has just reached puberty.
But Fodor goes further than this, and suggests that the explanation of the Bell Witch lies in an incestuous attack made on Betsy by her father.
This caused Betsy to hate her father, and her repressed hatred expressed itself in the form of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis.” He also believes that John Bell felt a deep guilt about the supposed attack, and cites an occasion when Bell went to dinner with neighbors named Dearden, yet said nothing all evening, seeming depressed and confused; the next day he rode over specially to explain, saying that his tongue had been affected as if his mouth had become filled with fungus.
This, says Fodor, probably represents “self-aggression.”

But this theory hardly stands up to examination.
As we have seen, poltergeists often take a delight in embarrassing people by revealing their most intimate secrets in public—in the Bell Witch case, it hastened the break-up of Betsy and Joshua by embarrassing them with personal revelations.
So it is hard to see why it should have failed to state publicly that John Bell had committed—or tried to commit—incest with Betsy.
Even if it
had
said so, we would be justified in treating the accusation with caution: poltergeists are not noted for truthfulness.
The fact that it failed to say so weighs heavily against the incest theory.
As to the notion that Betsy’s unconscious aggressions caused the disturbances, this fails to explain why Betsy herself was—at first—treated so badly.
It also fails to explain how the witch managed to return when Betsy had left home and was married.

Rather more interesting are Fodor’s speculations about the nature of the poltergeist.
He thinks that its denial of communication with the dead proves that it was not the spirit of a dead person.
He is inclined to feel that the witch was “a fragment of a living personality that has broken free in some mysterious way of some of the three-dimensional limitations of the mind of the main personality.” In other words, poltergeists are explainable as fragments of the “split personality.” But this leaves us exactly where we were before—in complete ignorance of how the split personality performs its paranormal feats.

The truth is that this explanation—about the unconscious mind—sounded far more convincing in the 1930s than it does today, when Freud is no longer regarded as infallible.
Moreover, it simply fails to fit the facts of the “haunting.” On the other hand, Kardec’s views fit them like a glove.
According to
The Spirits’ Book,
only a small proportion of the spirits involved in poltergeist cases are those of dead people—there are many other kinds.
Besides, it seems clear that in the Bell Witch case, there was not one spirit, but several.
So Kardec’s explanation would be that the haunting in the Bell household was the work of a group of rowdy and mischievous spirits or “elementals” of no particular intelligence—the other-worldly equivalent of a cageful of monkeys.
A house with nine children, many of them teenagers, would provide plenty of the energy poltergeists find necessary to perform their antics.
We must suppose that the Bell household was not a particularly happy one—this deduction arises from the fact that there is no record of a poltergeist haunting taking place in a happy family.
No doubt John Bell was a typical nineteenth-century patriarch, dictatorial and bad-tempered; and on a farmstead in a remote rural area, there was no doubt plenty of reason for tension and frustration in the family.

As to why the witch disliked John Bell so much, the reason may lie in an event that took place very early in the case.
Before the first scratching noises were heard, John Bell saw one day a strange, dog-like creature sitting between two corn rows, and shot at it.
The “witch” stated on a number of occasions that she could assume the shape of an animal.
Poltergeists dislike aggression against themselves, and if the strange animal
was
the witch, then it had a cause for feeling resentment about John Bell.
Apart from that, he was the head of the household, the “tyrant.” If the witch was capable of showing generosity and affection toward various members of the family—Lucy, Betsy, young John—then she (they?) would also dislike the bullying paterfamilias.
This is, admittedly, speculation; but it fits better than Fodor’s Freudian guesses.

It would also be interesting to have a “ley map” of Robertson Country, Tennessee, showing the Indian sacred sites, and to know whether the Bell farmstead was situated over a blind spring or underground stream.
A combination of a house with nine children and powerful “telluric currents” would provide an ideal situation for a bored and mischievous “elemental.”

It is important to realize that poltergeists are one of the most common of all “psychic” manifestations: as common, say, as plane crashes, or accidents in which people are struck by lightning.
At any given moment, there are probably dozens of cases going on in different parts of the world.
Nandor Fodor begins his study with brief summaries of about five hundred cases, starting in 355 a.d.
and extending to the Douglass Deen case in 1949.
Other books by researchers of other nationalities—Richet, Lombroso, Aksakov, Bender, Roll—make it clear that there are hundreds more that could be added to the list.

This wealth of material is actually something of an embarrassment, for most cases are so similar that they can teach us nothing new about the poltergeist.
How does it help us to know that in 1170 a.d., the hermitage of St.
Godric was bombarded with showers of stones, and that the poltergeist threw at him the box in which he kept his altar beads and poured the communion wine over his head?
It merely suggests what we already suspect, that poltergeists are mischievous spirits who behave very much like “demons.” More than seven hundred years later, in 1906, the poltergeist is still indulging in the same rather boring escapades on the other side of the world, in Sumatra, when a Mr.
Grottendieck was awakened in the bedroom of a makeshift house by falling stones, which appeared to be penetrating the roof (made of dry leaves).
When he fired his rifle into the jungle, the barrage of stones only increased (another example of a poltergeist resenting aggression).
His “boy” (who was presumably the “focus”) told him that the stones were being thrown by Satan.
But in the Sumatra case, we at least have one interesting detail.
Mr.
Grottendieck tried catching the stones as they fell, but they seemed to avoid his hand.
He says: “It seemed to me that they changed their direction in the air as soon as I tried to get hold of them.” And from this we can make one solid inference.
The stones were not “thrown.” Whatever agency caused them to fly through the air was
still holding them
when Grottendieck tried to grab them.
And this observation is confirmed by case after case in which “thrown” objects manage to perform right-angle turns in mid-air (which, interestingly enough, seems also to be a characteristic of “flying saucers”).

So let us, in the remainder of this chapter, glance at a number of famous cases that offer some new feature or provide a clue, and ignore all the hundreds of others that provide no new information.
All they can tell us is that the poltergeist is undoubtedly a reality, and that anyone who thinks otherwise—like the eminent investigator Frank Podmore, who concluded that naughty children are responsible—is being willfully blind or stupid.

The poltergeist that appeared in the home of a Huguenot minister, M.
Francois Perrault, in September, 1612, is remarkable solely for being one of those rare cases in which the “spirit” developed a voice and became extremely talkative.
When the minister came back to Mâcon after a five-day absence on September 1, 1612, he found his wife and her maid in a state of terror.
The disturbances had started when something drew the curtains in the middle of the night.
The following night, the poltergeist pulled the blankets off the bed.
When the maid tried to go into a room, something pushed on the door from the other side; and when she finally got in, she found that everything had been thrown about.
Every night after that, the poltergeist made loud bangs and crashes.
On the night M.
Perrault returned, the poltergeist hurled pots and pans around the kitchen, convincing him that he was dealing with an evil spirit.
A week later, on September 20, it spoke for the first time, starting with a whistling noise—as did the Bell Witch—then repeating the words “Minister, minister” in a shrill voice.
Finally it began to sing a simple tune of five notes.
Soon the spirit was holding lengthy conversations with various regular visitors to the house, singing French popular songs, saying prayers (to prove it was not a demon) and offering to transform itself into an angel—a promise it never carried out.
It also declared that
M.
Perrault’s father had been murdered, and named the man who did it.
M.
Perrault was inclined to disbelieve this tale, and his skepticism proved justified as the entity invented various other malicious stories about the townspeople of Mâcon.
These strange conversations continued for two months—the spirit obviously enjoyed having an audience—and objects continued to be hurled about.
Toward the end, huge stones weighing two or three pounds were thrown about the house—although, as usual, they caused no harm.
M.
Perrault states his opinion that this was because his household was protected by God; but it seems more likely that the spirit simply lacked destructive tendencies.

One day in November, the racket suddenly stopped.
Twenty-four hours of blessed silence made it clear that the “demon” had departed.
On a nail above the fireplace hung some bells that he had often thrown about the place.
The day after his departure, a large viper—a rare snake in that part of France—was seen leaving M.
Perrault’s house, and was caught; but it proved to be a perfectly normal snake, and presumably had nothing to do with the haunting.

Perhaps the most interesting point about the Perrault case is that the maid was generally believed to be a witch—perhaps because her parents had been accused of witchcraft.
We have seen that she seemed singularly unafraid of the poltergeist—few people would try to force their way through a door when some invisible presence was trying to hold it closed.
The spirit obviously liked her, and enjoyed imitating her broad
patois
.
One day, when she complained that it had failed to bring her any wood, it threw down a faggot at her feet.
When another maid came to the house and shared her bed, the poltergeist tormented the newcomer so relentlessly that she finally had to leave.

Modern writers on witchcraft take the view that it was a delusion due to peasant superstition.
No doubt the majority of women who were burned as witches were innocent; but no one who has studied some of the best-known witch trials, like the Isobel Gowdie case in Scotland, or the notorious Chambre Ardente affair in Paris, can believe that all witchcraft is smoke without fire.
In fact, this whole subject of witchcraft and magic deserves a chapter to itself.

Perhaps the best-known of all poltergeist hauntings is the case that has become known as the phantom drummer of Tedworth.
It took place just half a century after the Mâcon case, and begins on a day in mid-March 1661, when a magistrate named John Mompesson was visiting the small town of Ludgershall in east Wiltshire, and became irritated by loud drumming noises that came from the street.
He inquired what these were, and was told that they were made by a vagrant named William Drury, who had been in the town for a few days.
He had tried to persuade the constable to give him public assistance, on the strength of his papers, signed by various eminent magistrates; but the constable suspected they were forged.

Mompesson ordered the drummer to be brought before him, and examined his papers; just as the bailiff had suspected, they were forged.
Mompesson seems to have been an officious sort of man who enjoyed
exercising his authority; he ordered the drummer—a middle-aged man—to be held until the next sitting of the local Bench, and meanwhile confiscated his drum.
The man seems to have tried hard to persuade Mompesson to return the drum, but without success.
As soon as Mompesson’s back was turned, the constable seems to have allowed Drury to escape.
But the drum stayed behind.