Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (44 page)

More dramatic than unexpected faces in a photograph, which can always be explained away as “simulacra,” or something wrong with the emulsion, is an incident of Sunday the 28th of August, 1977, on the road north of Belchamp Walter Hall.
The time was precisely 12:52 p.m., and we were driving southwest along the minor road which marks the north end of the Hall grounds, when on the road in front, in the act of turning left into the hedge (I mean our left, across the path of the car), instantaneously appeared four men in black—I thought them hooded and cloaked—carrying a black, old-fashioned coffin, ornately trimmed with silver.
The impression made on both of us was one of absolute physical presence, of complete material reality.
Thelma and I at once agreed to make separate notes without comparing impressions.
We did so, and the descriptions tallied exactly, except that she noted the near left bearer turn his face towards her.
I did not see this as I was abruptly braking at the time.

What I had seen as a hood, she described as a soft tall hat, with a kind of scarf falling to the left shoulder, thrown across the cloaked body to the right.
The face was that of a skull.
.
.
.

The next day we returned to the precise spot at exactly the same time and took a picture.
It is a Kodak colour slide.
In the hedge near the gap where the “funeral party” vanished (there is a path there leading to Belchamp Walter churchyard) is a short figure, apparently cloaked, its face lowered with a skull-like dome to the head.
A year later I returned searching the area where it had apparently stood.
There was nothing, no post or stump that might have provided such an image, nor was there the slightest sign of the ground having been disturbed by the removal of anything that might have been rooted in it.
The image is simply there on the film—we saw nothing wrong with the eye.

That minor road alongside the north edge of the Belchamp Walter Estate precisely coincides with a line passing through the node in the water west of Heaven Wood.
That node itself linked with the node at Borley.

He adds a postscript: “I hazard a guess that the dress of the coffin-bearer is that of the late fourteenth century.
There seems to be no local legend of a phantom funeral.”

If Price invented the ghosts of Borley, he must have been in collusion with a remarkable number of people.

I did not like [Harry Price] because he was a difficult man to like.
He was intensely selfish, jealous, and intent on his own glory at all costs, but these weaknesses of his character do not detract from his investigation as an honest investigator and ruthless exposer of frauds.
This was the shining feature of
his life.

These words were written by another man who deserves to be remembered as one of the prominent ghost-hunters of the twentieth century.
Unlike Price, Nandor Fodor seems to have had no great compulsion to achieve personal glory; the result is that, since his death in 1964, his name has been largely forgotten, and most of his books are out of print.
Yet at least one of his books—his account of the Thornton Heath poltergeist case—deserves the status of a classic.

Fodor was born in Hungary in 1895, studied law, then became a journalist, and visited America.
In 1926, he interviewed two remarkable men: Hereward Carrington, the psychical researcher, and Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s most prominent disciples.
Fodor became simultaneously fascinated by psychoanalysis and psychical research and, in due course, became himself a psychoanalyst.
Predictably, therefore, his analysis of poltergeist cases is dominated by the conviction that they have a sexual origin.
But since—as we have seen—there is a large element of truth in this view, Fodor’s psychoanalytical beliefs distorted his outlook rather less than is often the case with Freudians.

Fodor attended his first séance at the house of a well-known American medium, Arthur Ford, in October 1927 and what he heard there left him in no doubt that the dead can communicate.
In the semi-darkness, a trumpet sailed up into the air, then a voice began to speak.
Various relatives of people who were present then came and (apparently) talked through the medium.
Fodor then asked if the “control” could bring someone who spoke Hungarian.
It was, perhaps, an unreasonable request, but an excellent test for the medium.
And after a few moments, a voice spoke from the air saying: “Fodor, journalist,” using the German pronunciation of the word—just as Fodor’s father did.
Then the entity proceeded to speak to Fodor in Hungarian.
The voice identified itself as Fodor’s father, and mentioned various relatives; it named his oldest brother by his pet name.
The “spirit” was having great difficulty communicating because, explained the control, it was the first time he had tried to speak.
The control helped out by telling Fodor that his father died on January 16.
The “spirit” ended by saying “Isten áldjon meg.
Éides fiam”—“God bless you, my dear son.” After this another Hungarian came through—the deceased brother of Fodor’s wife, who was present.
It mentioned that “poor Uncle Vilmos” was ill and would go blind.
And, in due course, this is exactly what happened to Uncle Vilmos.

It emerged later that the medium—a man called Cartheuser—could speak Hungarian.
Yet this scarcely helps to explain his knowledge of Fodor’s father, and the prophecy about Uncle Vilmos.
Cartheuser also had a speech impediment, due to a hare lip; the voices had no such impediment.

Fodor came to England to work for Lord Northcliffe—owner of the
Daily Mail
—and, in his spare time, compiled an
Encyclopedia of Psychic Science,
which is still one of the best available (a new edition combines it with a similar work by Lewis Spence).
After publishing the book, in 1934, Fodor had first-hand experience of the ambiguous nature of “psychic phenomena.” He heard of a remarkable Hungarian medium called Lajos Pap, a carpenter, whose specialty was causing “apports” of live birds, animals and beetles to appear at séances.
In June 1933, Fodor attended such a séance in Budapest.
Pap was undressed and searched, then dressed again in a robe of luminous cloth, so that his movements in the dark could be clearly seen.
Two men held Pap’s wrists during the séance, although he could move his hands with their hands on him.
In an hour-long séance, Pap groped into the air and produced thirty live beetles, many of them an inch long.
He also produced a cactus plant with soil on the roots and a rose bush.
On other occasions, Pap had produced birds, caterpillars, dragonflies, snakes, and a live goldfish.
His “control,” the Rabbi Isaac (who claimed to have lived six hundred years earlier in Galicia) had a sense of humor.
At one séance, a toy pistol arrived, and a number of explosive caps were fired; the Rabbi claimed to have shot dead twenty-one crickets and, after the séance, dead crickets were found in the room.

On another occasion, nine lumps of dirty snow arrived during the séance, and proved to be mixed with horse manure and straw.
The temperature in the room was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, so it would have been difficult to keep the snow unmelted for long if it had been concealed under the medium’s robe.

Fodor arranged for Lajos Pap to be brought to London.
At a séance there a dead snake, more than two feet long, appeared.
Fodor was impressed; but he nevertheless insisted that Pap should have an X-ray examination to find out whether he could have anything secreted in his body.
To Fodor’s surprise and dismay, Pap proved to be wearing a belt of linen and whalebone under his robe.
He said it was a kind of rupture truss, because he had a dropped kidney; but Fodor decided regretfully that this is where the dead snake had been hidden, and that it had been worked out through the neck of the robe.
Accordingly, in his subsequent report, “The Lajos Pap Experiments,” Fodor concluded that Pap’s psychic powers should be regarded as “not proven.” Yet he adds:

Nor would I be willing to declare him a fraud and nothing but a fraud.
Too long has psychical research been the victim of the fatal delusion that a medium is either genuine or fraudulent.
It is a minimal assumption that mediumship means a dissociation of personality.
There was plenty of evidence that Lajos Pap was suffering from such a dissociation.

In fact, Pap is still regarded as a non-fraudulent medium, and accounts of his séances at which live birds and insects appeared seem to indicate that his powers
were
remarkable.

Fodor had been appointed Research Officer of the International Institute for Psychical Research.
In November 1936, he was asked to investigate a case of poltergeist haunting at Aldborough Manor in Yorkshire.
The bells for summoning servants had rung almost non-stop for five days, doors had opened and closed of their own accord, and two maids had seen a ghost above an ancient cradle.
Lady Lawson-Tancred, who lived in the house, was afraid she would have to move out if the haunting continued.
But when Fodor arrived, it was already over.
One of the two maids had had a nervous breakdown and left.
The bells had rung during the night she left and the following morning, then stopped.
To Fodor, therefore, it was clear that the maid was the “focus” of the disturbance.
Her nervous breakdown was probably caused by the “drain” upon her energies caused by the poltergeist.
The other maid, a very pretty girl, also had a strange power over animals; birds would settle on her shoulders, and mice run into her hands.
Lady Lawson-Tancred thought that she might also be connected with the disturbances, and dismissed her.
(Fodor seems to have explained to her the difference between a poltergeist and a real “haunting,” where the house itself seems to concentrate the negative forces, as at Borley.) After this, Aldborough Manor became peaceful.

The same solution was found in the case of a Chelsea poltergeist that disturbed a house with its knockings.
Fodor went to the house, in Elm Park Gardens, and heard the rappings himself—he said they were like hammer blows.
Fodor looked around for the focus, and soon found it: a seventeen-year-old servant girl named Florrie.
He engaged her in conversation, and she told him that this was not her first experience of mysterious knockings—the same thing had happened at home four years before, when she was thirteen.
The children were all sent away, and when they returned, the knocking had stopped.
Clearly, Florrie was quite unaware that she had been the “cause” of the knockings.

Fodor told the house’s owner, Dr.
Aidan Redmond, that Florrie was probably the unconscious medium.
That night, the raps were like machine-
gun fire.
Dr.
Redmond regretfully sacked Florrie.
And silence descended on the house.

In July 1936, Fodor investigated a case in which the distinction between ghost and poltergeist becomes blurred; this was at Ash Manor, in Sussex, and he disguises the family under the name of Keel.
It is among the most remarkable ghost stories ever recorded.

The house was bought by the family in June 1934; when they said they could not pay the price demanded, the owner dropped his demand so surprisingly that the Keels decided there must be something wrong with the place, probably the sanitation.
But the wife soon began to get extremely unpleasant feelings in a bedroom that had been used for servants.
(The previous owner said they had run away.)

The first manifestations were stamping noises from the attic.
But this room had no floorboards—only the bare joists.
In November 1934, Mr.
Keel was awakened by three violent bangs on his door.
He went to his wife’s room down the corridor—she had also heard them.
This happened at 3 a.m.
The next night, there were two thumps on the door at the same time, and the following night, one loud thump.
Keel went away on business for a few days, and when he returned, decided to stay awake until 3 a.m.
to see if anything happened.
Nothing did, and he fell asleep.
Then a violent bang woke him up.
Although the room was dark, he could see quite clearly a small, oldish man dressed in a green smock, with muddy breeches and a handkerchief around his neck.
He looked so solid and normal that Keel was convinced this was an intruder and, when he got no reply, jumped out of bed and tried to grab him: His hand went through him, and Keel fainted.
When he came to, he ran to his wife’s bedroom, babbling incoherently, and his wife rushed out to get some brandy.
Outside her husband’s room she saw the feet and leggings of a man, then looked up and saw the same little old man.
She was also able to see him quite clearly in the dark, although he did not seem to be shining.
She observed that he was wearing a pudding basin hat, that his face was very red, “the eyes malevolent and horrid,” and that his mouth was dribbling.
She also asked him who he was and what he wanted.
When he made no reply, she tried to hit him.
Her fist went through him, and she hurt her knuckles on the doorpost.
Her husband was in a faint in her room at the time, so he had not had an opportunity to describe the man he saw; it was only later that they realized both had seen the same ghost.