Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (37 page)

Playfair speculates that it was Janet who had somehow put it into the neighbor’s head to ring the
Daily Mirror
, and who put it into the journalist’s head to ring the SPR.
So her father became involved in investigating a case that centered around another Janet.
(Kardec claims that spirits often influence our thoughts.)

As to how the poltergeist haunting came about in the first place, Playfair’s speculation is as follows:

When Mr.
and Mrs.
Harper were divorced, an atmosphere of tension built up among the children and their mother, just at the time when the two girls were approaching physical maturity.
They were a very energetic pair to start with, both of them school sports champions, but even they could not use up the tremendous energy they were generating.
So a number of entities came in and helped themselves to it.

As to the identity of the “entities”: “it looks as if we had half the local graveyard at one time or another.” These included Joe Watson, husband of the woman who had died of a cancer of the throat and Bill Haylock, later identified as a former local resident.
There could well have been a dozen entities altogether, and they were able to take energy from practically everyone in the house.
(Mrs.
Harper experienced premonitory headaches before things happened, and while Janet was in hospital, the youngest boy, Jimmy, began having trances.) The Dutch clairvoyant Dono Gmelig-Meyling stated confidently that he would be able to put an end to the haunting (by some kind of intervention “on the astral plane”), and it is a fact that his visits marked the end of the Enfield case.

And why did so many entities invade the Harper residence?
The answer, Playfair believes, may be provided by Kardec, who states that many dead people are quite unaware that they are dead.
In
The Flying Cow
he cites the interesting Ruytemberg Rocha case in support of this view.
In November 1961, a spiritist group in São Paulo found themselves listening to a voice—coming through the medium—which identified itself as Ruytemberg Rocha, a pupil in the second year of the Officers’ School of the São Paulo State Police.
The voice gave details of its family and date of birth, and added that it was wounded by shrapnel in the revolution in 1932.
When Dr.
Carvalho—in charge of the session—said that this was now 1961 the spirit was astonished, and said that that was impossible.
Carvalho assured him that he was dead, and that they would do all they could to help him.

It was an excellent case for verification, since the spirit had given so many details about himself and his family.
A little research revealed that it all checked out—the family, the officer school, the battle in which he had died.
One minor discrepancy was that Rocha had been killed by a bullet through the head, while the spirit spoke only about a shrapnel wound in the chest.
But a bullet in the brain
could
have stimulated the chest area, giving him the impression that this is where he was wounded.
According to Kardec, the state of confusion happens mostly in cases of sudden death, and may last for anything from hours to years.
In the Enfield case, we have seen how angry the “entity” became when Playfair declared that it was dead, and how the quarrelsome old woman asserted “I’m
not
bleedin’ dead.”

Yet, as usual in poltergeist cases, it is practically impossible to get at the truth.
The spirits themselves seldom seem to have any interest in the truth.
In the present case, there are intriguing hints about a man called Gozer or Gober who practiced black magic, and about the involvement of Janet and Rose in witchcraft in a previous existence.
There was a former resident in the house called Joe Watson, who did die in the house much as described by Janet’s bass voice and whose wife did die of throat cancer, and there was a former neighbor called Bill Haylock.
All of which adds at least a semblance of logic and reason to one of the best-authenticated poltergeist cases on record.

Perhaps the last word should go to a medium—and police commissioner—called Dr.
Rafael Ranieri, quoted by Playfair in
The Flying Cow
:

A medium is an open door to the invisible world.
What comes through that door depends to a large extent upon the personality of the medium, and it is quite wrong to suppose that the spirit world consists entirely of angelic beings devoted to our welfare.
There are plenty of evil spirits around, also others who seem to have nothing better to do than fool about and amuse themselves at our expense by such elementary .
.
.
parlor tricks as lifting up tables and throwing things around the room.
This would seem to be the level of spirit most often to be found at some of the widely publicized séances, and those who find spirit communications trivial, as many are, should blame the mediums, not the spirits.

If Janet and other members of the Harper family are unconscious mediums, perhaps it is hardly surprising that the entities who make use of their energies should belong to a fairly low level of the spirit hierarchy.

seven

Ghost Hunters
and Ghost Seers

If the history of ghost-hunting has to have a starting point, then the year 1829 is probably as good as any.
It saw the publication of a book called
The Seeress of Prevorst
, which became one of the bestsellers of the nineteenth century, and familiarized the general public with the idea that we may be surrounded by invisible spirits.
It was written by Dr.
Justinus A.
C.
Kerner, a rich and eccentric doctor who was also a well-known poet and songwriter.
In 1826, the forty-year-old Kerner was practicing in Weinsberg, near Heilbronn, when he was consulted by the relatives of a woman called Friederike Hauffe, who was dying of a wasting disease.
She had lost all her teeth and looked like a walking skeleton.

It seemed that marriage was responsible for her sad condition.
Ever since childhood she had fallen into trances, seen visions, and conversed with invisible spirits.
She could also accurately predict the future.
When she was nineteen, she had married a cousin, and gone into depression; at twenty, her first child was born, and she began to develop hysterical symptoms.
Every evening, she fell into a trance in which she saw spirits of the dead.

Kerner was at first inclined to be skeptical about her visions and spirits—he put them down to hysteria.
Yet he found Friederike Hauffe a fascinating case for study.
She claimed to be able to see into the human body, and certainly had a remarkably precise knowledge of the nervous system.
She could read with her stomach—Kerner tested her by making her lie down with her eyes closed, and laid documents on her bare midriff; she read them perfectly.
She could make geometrical drawings at great speed, even in the dark, and could draw perfect circles that looked as if they had been drawn by compasses.
She claimed that her spirit often left her body and hovered above it.

Kerner tried ordinary medicines on her, but they had no effect.
Friederike told him that if he placed her in a “magnetic trance” the spirits would instruct him on how to treat her, but he was reluctant to accept this advice.
Eventually, he decided that he might as well try the effects
of mesmerism.

This, it should be explained, is not another name for hypnotism.
Franz Anton Mesmer believed that the human body is permeated with a vital fluid, which needs to move around freely if we are to remain healthy.
If this fluid becomes “blocked,” the result is illness.
(Modern acupuncture holds roughly the same belief.) According to Mesmer, this vital fluid could be moved around the body by stroking it with magnets—a technique that sometimes produced the “magnetic trance.” (It was his pupil, the Marquis de Puysegur, who accidentally discovered the parallel technique of hypnosis.)

Friederike reacted well to “magnetism,” passing easily into a trance.
But Kerner remained skeptical about the things she said in this condition.
Then, one day, a remarkable experience changed his mind.
Friederike declared that she was being haunted by an unpleasant man with a squint.
From her description, Kerner recognized him as a man who had died a few years earlier.
It seemed, according to Friederike, that the man was suffering from a guilty conscience.
He had been involved in embezzlement and, after his death, another man had been blamed.
Now he wanted to clear the man’s name, for the sake of his widow.
This could be done by means of a certain document, which would be found in a chest.
The spirit “showed” Friederike the room where the document was to be found, and a man who was working there.
Her description was so good that Kerner was able to identify him as a certain Judge Heyd.
In her “vision,” Friederike had seen Judge Heyd sitting in a certain place in this room, and the chest containing the document on the table.
The document was apparently not in its proper numerical order, which is why it had not been found.

When Kerner told him about his patient’s vision, Judge Heyd was astounded; he
had
been sitting in the position described on that particular day (Christmas Day), and the chest, contrary to regulations, had been left open on the table.
When they searched, the document turned up where Friederike had said it would.
The widow of the man who had been wrongly accused was able to obtain redress.

From now on, Kerner believed in Friederike’s supernatural powers, and took whatever she said seriously.
She told him that we are surrounded by spirits all the time, and that she was able to see them.
These spirits often try to attract our attention in various ways: knocking, movement of objects, throwing of sand.
And by way of convincing him, Friederike persuaded one of the spirits to make rapping noises, to make gravel and ash fall from the air, and to make a stool float up into the air.
Kerner watched with amazement as the stool rose gently, then floated down again.

Friederike provided him with further proof of the accuracy of her visions when she succeeded in putting an end to a haunting.
Kerner heard about a house where the ghost of an old man was frightening the inhabitants.
He brought one of them, a woman, along to see Friederike; the seeress went into a trance and explained that the ghost was that of a man called Bellon, who was an “earth-bound spirit” as a result of defrauding two orphans.
Kerner made inquiries, but no one had ever heard of a man called Bellon.
But since the ghost claimed that he had been Burgomeister, it seemed probable that some record existed.
He claimed he had been Burgomeister in the year 1700, and had died at the age of seventy-nine.
Armed with this information, Kerner asked the present mayor to check the legal documents; they soon found that in the year 1700, a man called Bellon had been Burgomeister and director of the local orphanage.
He had died in 1740 at the age of seventy-nine.
After “confessing,” the spirit took its departure.

While Friederike was in Kerner’s house, there were constant poltergeist phenomena: knocks and raps, noises like the rattling of chains, gravel thrown through the window, and a knitting needle that flew through the air and landed in a glass of water.
When Friederike was visited by a spirit one night her sister heard her say: “Open it yourself,” then saw a book on the table open itself.
A poltergeist tugged her boots off her feet as she lay on the bed, and threw a lampshade across the room.
In the Kerners’ bedroom, a table was thrown across the room.
The poltergeist threw a stool at a maidservant who went into Friederike’s room while she lay asleep.
It extinguished a night light and made a candle glow.

Friederike also produced what would later be called “spirit teachings,” an amazingly complex system of philosophy in which man is described as consisting of body, soul and spirit, and of being surrounded by a nerve aura which carries on the vital processes.
She spoke about various cycles in human existence—life cycles (or circles) and sun circles, corresponding to various spiritual conditions.
She also described a remarkable universal language from ancient times, said to be “the language of the inner life.” (A mystical sect was founded to expound those doctrines after her death.)

All these mediumistic activities made Friederike more and more feeble, and she died in 1829 at the age of twenty-eight.
Kerner’s book
The Seeress of Prevorst
(the name of the Swabian village where she was born) created a sensation, and was equally successful when it was translated into English in 1845 by Catherine Crowe, whose own book,
The Night Side of Nature
, created an equal sensation four years later.
It is arguable that
The Seeress of Prevorst
and
The Night Side of Nature
were two of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the scientific reaction against Spiritualism increased,
The Seeress of Prevorst
ceased to be taken seriously by those engaged in psychical research, and by the twentieth century it had been virtually forgotten.
Writing about it in his
Modern Spiritualism
(1902), the skeptical Frank Podmore—who believed that all poltergeists are due to naughty children—dismisses most of the evidence as second-hand, while another eminent researcher, E.
J.
Dingwall (writing in
Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena
) seems to feel that Kerner was stupid to take her claims seriously, and that if he had remained skeptical and treated her simply as a case of hysteria, she would have lived longer.
But reading Kerner’s own account, it is difficult to see how he would have remained skeptical without being downright dishonest or blind; on one occasion, he saw a cloudy figure hovering in front of her, and although it had vanished when he came back with a lamp, Friederike continued to stare at the spot as though listening to it.

In fact, we can see that the case of the seeress of Prevorst is a thoroughly typical case of poltergeist phenomena caused by a medium.
In detail after detail, it sounds like any number of other cases of “haunting.” If anyone killed Friederike Hauffe, it was the spirits themselves, who must have been using her energy to manifest themselves.
No doubt the poltergeist phenomena were unspectacular because Friederike was weak from the moment Kerner set eyes on her.
(In a case cited by the novelist William de Morgan, a maidservant who was able to cause rapping noises gradually lost her powers as she became weaker from tuberculosis.)

In another of his books, Kerner describes another remarkable case with some of the characteristics of poltergeist haunting.
He was asked to treat a “possessed” peasant girl in Orlach, near Stuttgart.
For some reason which is not clear, she was persecuted by “spirits” from the age of twenty, and there were the usual bangs and crashes, movements of furniture, and even outbreaks of fire.
Then, after five months of this, she saw two ghosts, one of a nun dressed in white, the other of a monk dressed in black.
The nun asserted that she had been smuggled into the monastery disguised as a cook, and had had two children by the black monk, both of whom he had killed at birth.
He also murdered three monks during the four-year period she was with him; and, when he suspected she was about to betray him, he killed her too.
The black monk also spoke to the possessed girl, saying that he was the son of a nobleman from nearby Geislingen, and that as the Superior at the monastery of Orlach, he had seduced a number of nuns and killed the children they bore.
He also confessed to killing monks.
The bodies, he said, he threw into a hole in a wall.

The white nun told the girl that her sufferings would cease only if her parents agreed to allow their cottage to be demolished.
By this time they were so desperate that they agreed.
On March 5, 1833, the house was finally demolished.
Most of the walls were made of mud, but one corner was constructed of limestone, obviously part of a far older building.
When this was pulled down, they found underneath it an empty well containing a number of human bones, including those of children.
The girl’s possession ceased from the moment the wall collapsed.

The story sounds like a typical invention of a German romantic novelist; but Kerner devotes a whole book to it, describing it in the same detail as his investigation of Friederike Hauffe.
In spite of this, modern investigators are inclined not to take it seriously.
Yet readers who are impressed by the clarity and detail of Kerner’s reporting may feel that this case of the possessed girl of Orlach is one of the most convincing arguments for the close connection between poltergeists and spirits of the dead.

Ten years after publication of
The Seeress of Prevorst
, another doctor—this time of philosophy—produced an equally remarkable account of a case of possession, this time benevolent.
In
Die Schutzgeister
(
The Guardian Spirit
, 1839), Heinrich Werner identifies his eighteen-year-old subject only as “R.O.” Like Friederike, she had been subject to all kinds of illnesses; then, at a certain point, found herself haunted by spirits.
One day the girl fell into a trance; and from then on she was able to do so at will, and to supply Werner with all kinds of information obtained “clairvoyantly.” She had a guardian spirit called Albert, who seems to have acted rather like the “spirit guide”’ of later mediums.
And the spirit who caused her so much trouble was—again—a wicked monk.
One day when the girl claimed that the wicked monk was present in the room, Werner was puzzled to hear an odd sound coming from a small table—like a cup rattling on a saucer.
This occurred a number of times, becoming steadily louder (a typical characteristic of poltergeist noises); R.O.
said that the monk was producing the noise, and was delighted at Werner’s astonishment—which also sounds typical of a poltergeist.