Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (34 page)

Then things began to go wrong.
A book he had written failed to make any headway; his typist made a mess of it, then fell ill so that it sat in her desk for weeks.
A New York publisher rejected it.
An inheritance he was expecting failed to materialize.
His plans for moving to Greece had to be shelved.
A love affair went disastrously wrong, and a friend he asked for a loan refused it.
He even fell ill with malaria.

One day, he met a psychic friend in the Avenida Copacabana; she took one look at him and said: “Someone has put the evil eye on you.
All your paths have been closed.”’ A few days later, another friend wrote to say he had been to an
umbanda
session, and a spirit had warned him that one of his friends was in grave danger due to a curse; all his paths had been closed.

An actor friend who was also a Spiritist immediately divined that it was Edna who had put the curse on him.
St.
Clair thought this absurd.
To begin with, Edna was a Catholic, and had often expressed her disapproval of Spiritism and
umbanda.
But his actor friend told him he had attended a spiritist session where he had been assured that David St.
Clair’s apartment was cursed.
But how could Edna do that, St.
Clair wanted to know.
All she had to do, his friend replied, was to go to a
quimbanda
—black magic—session and take some item of his clothing, which could be used in a ritual to put a curse on him.
And now his friend mentioned it, St.
Clair recalled that his socks
had
been disappearing recently.
Edna had claimed the wind was blowing them off the line.

St.
Clair told Edna he believed himself to be cursed; she pooh-poohed the idea.
But he told her he wanted her to take him to an
umbanda
session.
After much protest, she allowed herself to be forced into it.

That Saturday evening, Edna took him to a long, white house in a remote area outside Rio.
On the walls were paintings of the devil, Exú.
Toward midnight, drums started up, and the negroes sitting on the floor began to chant.
A ritual dance began.
Then the
umbanda
priestess came in like a whirlwind—a huge negress dressed in layers of lace and a white silk turban.
She danced, and the other women began to jerk as if possessed.
The priestess went out, and when she came in again, was dressed in red, the color of Exú/Satan.
She took a swig of alcohol, then lit a cigar.
After more dancing, she noticed St.
Clair, and offered him a drink from a bottle whose neck was covered with her saliva.
Then she spat a mouthful of the alcohol into his face.
After more chanting, a medium was asked who had put the curse on him.
She replied: “The person who brought him here tonight!
She wants you to marry her.
Either that, or to buy her a house and a piece of land .
.
.” The priestess ordered Edna to leave.
Then she said: “Now we will get rid of the curse.” There was more ritual drumming and dancing, then the priestess said: “Now you are free.
The curse has been lifted, and it will now come down doubly hard upon the person who placed it on you.” When he protested, he was told it was too late—it had already been done.

Three days later, St.
Clair received a telegram from a magazine, asking for a story; he had suggested it to them months before but they had turned it down.
Now, unexpectedly, they changed their minds, and sent him money.
A week later, the inheritance came through.
The book was accepted.
And ten days later he received a letter asking if his broken love affair could be restarted where it had left off.
Then Edna became ill.
A stomach-growth was diagnosed, and she had to have an operation for which St.
Clair paid.
But her health continued to decline.
She went to see an
umbanda
priest, who told her that the curse she had put on
St.
Clair had rebounded on her, and that she would suffer as long as she stayed near him.
She admitted trying to get him to marry her by black magic.
She declined his offer to buy her a house or an apartment, and walked out of his life.

In
The Indefinite Boundary,
Playfair goes on to discuss black magic.
It seems, he says, to be based on an exchange of favors between incarnate and discarnate-man and spirit.

Incarnate man wants a favor done; he wants a better job, to marry a certain girl, to win the state lottery, to stop somebody from running after his daughter .
.
.
Discarnate spirits, for their part, want to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh once more; a good square meal, a drink of the best cachaça rum, a fine cigar, and perhaps even sexual relations with an incarnate being.

The spirit has the upper hand in all this.
He calls the shots.
He wants his meal left in a certain place at a certain time, and the rum and the cigar had better be of good quality.
Incarnate man is ready to oblige, and it is remarkable how many members of Brazil’s poorest classes, who are about as poor as anyone can be, will somehow manage to lay out a magnificent banquet for a spirit who has agreed to work some magic for them .
.
.

Who are these spirits?
Orthodox Kardecists and Umbandistas see them as inferior discarnates living in a low astral plane, who are close to the physical world, not having evolved since physical death .
.
.
In Umbanda they are known as exús, spirits who seem to have no morals at all, and are equally prepared to work for or against people.
Like Mafia gunmen, they do what the boss says without asking questions.

He adds the interesting comment:

The exú reminds us of the traditional spirits of the four elements; the gnomes of earth, the mermaids of water, the sylphs of air, and the salamanders of fire.
These creatures are traditionally thought of as part human and part “elemental,” integral forces of nature that can act upon human beings subject to certain conditions.
There is an enormous number of exús, each with his own specialty.
To catch one and persuade him to work for you, it is necessary to bribe him outright with food, drink and general flattery.
An exú is a vain and temperamental entity, and despite his total lack of morals he is very fussy about observing the rituals properly.

All this sounds so much like the poltergeist that it is tempting to feel that we have finally pinned down his true nature and character.

Studying the background of the Ipiranga case—already described—Playfair found strong evidence that the poltergeist had been unleashed on the family by black magic.
In 1968 an “offering” of bottles, candles, and cigars had appeared in their garden, indicating that someone was working a
trabalho
against the family.
Playfair lists the suspects.
A former boyfriend of Iracy, the daughter, had committed suicide; then there was an elderly aunt who had died abandoned by the rest of the family, and may have borne a grudge.
Then Iracy had had a love affair with a man who was (unknown to her) already married; the man’s wife could have organized the
trabalho.
Or it could possibly have been some former disgruntled lover of Nora, the girl who married the son of the family; photographs of Nora’s husband were frequently disfigured, and they found many notes claiming that she was having an affair with another man.

Playfair mentions that at the time he was investigating the Ipiranga case, Andrade was studying one in the town of Osasco where there was definite evidence that a poltergeist was caused by black magic.
Two neighboring families were having a lengthy dispute about boundaries, and one of the families ordered a curse against the other.
The result was that the other family was haunted by a poltergeist that caused stones to fall on the roof, loud rapping noises, and spontaneous fires.
One original feature of this case was that when the family went to ladle a meal out of a saucepan—which had been covered with a lid—they found that the food had been spoiled by a large cigar.

Candomblé
—one of the bigger Afro-Brazilian cults—seems to have originated among freed negro slaves in the 1830s, and it has the same origin as voodoo, which began in Haiti when the first slaves arrived early in the seventeenth century.
This, in turn, originated in Africa as ju-ju.
Europeans are naturally inclined to dismiss this as the outcome of ignorance and stupidity; but few who have had direct experience of it maintain that skeptical attitude.
James H.
Neal—whose anecdote about the immovable tree has already been cited—describes his own experience in
Ju-Ju in My Life
.
When, as chief investigations officer for the Government of Ghana, Neal caused the arrest of a man who had been extorting bribes, he found that he was the target for a ju-ju attack.
It began with the disappearance of small personal items of clothing as in the case of David St.
Clair.
One day he found the seat of his car scattered with a black powder; his chauffeur carefully brushed it off, and urinated in it to destroy its power.
Then, one night, Neal became feverish, and experienced pains from head to foot.
He felt he was going to die.
Suddenly, he found himself outside his body, looking down at himself on the bed.
He passed through the bedroom wall, and seemed to be traveling at great speed, when suddenly he seemed to receive a message that it was not yet his time to die; he passed back into his room, and into his body.
After this he spent three weeks in a hospital suffering from an illness that the doctors were unable to diagnose.
An African police inspector told him he was being subjected to a ju-ju attack.
More black powder was scattered in his car.
One night, lying in bed, he felt invisible creatures with long snouts attacking his solar plexus and draining his vitality.
A witch-doctor who was called in described in detail two men who were responsible for the attacks—giving an accurate description of two men involved in the bribery case.
Finally, after a ceremony performed by a Muslim holy man—who surrounded the house with a wall of protection—Neal slowly recovered.
The white doctor who tended him agreed that he had been the victim of a ju-ju attack.

He also describes how, not long after the “exorcism” ritual, his servant killed a cobra outside his bungalow.
As they were exulting about the death of the snake, Neal noticed another snake—this time a small grey one—slithering toward them.
When he drew the servant’s attention to it, the man went pale.
This, the man said, was a “bad snake”—meaning a snake created artificially by witch-doctors; a man bitten by such a snake has no chance of recovery.
Neal was understandably skeptical.
Then he saw the snake—which was still slithering at a great speed toward them—come to a halt as if against an invisible wall.
It had encountered the “wall of protection” put there by the holy man.
With a single stroke, the servant chopped off its head with a cutlass.
No blood came out.
Soon after this, Neal began to itch all over.
Two perfectly healthy trees just beyond the “wall of protection” split down the middle with a loud crash.
Consultation with another skilled sorcerer elicited the information that both Neal and his servant were victims of a new ju-ju attack, but that because of the protection, Neal could not be seriously harmed; the itch was the worst the magician could do.

This kind of witchcraft can be found in primitive societies all over the world.
In a book called
Mitsinari,
a Catholic priest, Father André Dupreyat, describes his years in Papua, New Guinea.
When he clashed with local sorcerers, he was also placed under a “snake curse.” One day, walking toward a village, he was surprised to see a silvery-colored snake wriggling toward him.
The villagers all scattered.
Knowing it would have to lower its head to come closer, Dupreyat waited until it was no longer in a position to strike, and killed it with his stick.
The next day, when he was lying in a hut, a snake lowered itself from the roof-beam and dropped on to his chest.
He lay perfectly still until it slid down to the floor, when he was able to kill it with a stick.
A few days later, as he lay in a hammock, a native warned him that two black snakes had writhed up the support of the hammock, and were close enough to bite him.
They cautiously handed him a knife and told him when to strike; he succeeded in killing both snakes.