Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (8 page)

In that case, asked Rivail, can a person be dominated and subjugated by a spirit until its own will is paralyzed?
Yes, came the reply, this is precisely what is meant by possession.
But the domination is established through the
cooperation
of the “possessed,” either out of weakness or of their own free will.
It added sensibly that many people who seem to be possessed are really cases of epilepsy or madness, and demand a doctor rather than an exorcist.
Rivail asked whether exorcism actually has any power over such spirits, and got the answer: “No.
When bad spirits see anyone trying to influence them by such means, they laugh.” In fact, any investigator who has had anything to do with poltergeists knows that they cannot be exorcised.

The modern revival of interest in the subject of “demoniacal possession” was largely the result of Aldous Huxley’s book
The Devils of Loudun
, published in 1952 and, later, of William Blatty’s novel
The Exorcist
.
Huxley takes a skeptical view of the possession of a convent full of
Ursuline nuns:

Bogus demoniac possession, artfully faked by a whole convent of hysterical Ursulines, under the coaching of their spiritual directors; monks plotting with lawyers to bear false witness against a hated professional and sexual rival; a fornicating priest, enmeshed in the toils of his own lust and vanity and at last judicially murdered on a false charge and with every refinement of cruelty—it is a story that takes a high place in
the annals of human beastliness in general and religious beastliness in particular .
.
.
[2]

Father Urbain Grandier, the parish priest of the small town of Loudun, was charged in 1633 of “bewitching” the nuns of the local convent, who had been going into convulsions and howling blasphemies in hoarse voices.
When Grandier was finally taken in to perform an exorcism ceremony, the nuns began to accuse him of being responsible.
Convinced of the absurdity of the charge, Grandier made no real attempt to defend himself until it was too late.
Then he was tortured and publicly burnt.

Huxley is undoubtedly correct when he speaks of the plots against Grandier, and about Grandier’s own fornications—he seduced at least two young girls in the confessional and made one of them pregnant.
There also seems to be no doubt that the “plot” against Grandier began as a practical joke, with some of the novices frightening the others by dressing up in a white sheet and pretending to be ghosts.
But when we come to examine the actual “possession,” the skeptical explanation no longer seems adequate.
Four of the priests who came to exorcise the “devils” were themselves possessed, and two of them died of it.
Father Surin, a remarkable mystic, became more-or-less insane for twenty-five years.
The unfortunate Father Tranquille, a famous Capuchin preacher, went along to Loudun convinced that the authority of the Church would protect him from the “devils”; he proved to be mistaken.
He found himself in the horrifying position of writhing around on the ground, listening to his mouth uttering blasphemies, while his mind remained a detached spectator.
This continued until he died in a state of exhaustion.
In a famous study of psychological possession, the German philosopher T.
K.
Oesterreich observes accurately: “This death is one of the most frightful which can be imagined, the patient being sick in mind while fully conscious, and a prey to excitement so violent that finally the organism breaks down under it.” The same thing happened to Father Lactance, who had “expelled three demons” from the prioress of the convent, Sister Jeanne des Anges.

Surin came to Loudun after Grandier had been burnt.
His death did not put an end to the possession of the nuns.
Father Lactance was already dead.
And fairly soon, Surin was writing to a friend:

God has .
.
.
permitted the devils to pass out of the possessed person’s body and, entering into mine, to assault me, to throw me down, to torment me .
.
.
I find it almost impossible to explain what happens to me during this time, how this alien spirit is united to mine, without depriving me of consciousness or of inner freedom, and yet constituting a second “me,” as though I had two souls, of which one is dispossessed of my body and the use of its organs, and keeps its quarters, watching the other, the intruder, doing whatever it likes .
.
.
The very soul is as though divided .
.
.
At one and the same time I feel great peace, as being under God’s good pleasure, and on the other hand (without knowing how) an overpowering rage and loathing of God, expressing itself in frantic struggles (astonishing to those who watch them) to separate myself
from Him.

Now it is by no means impossible to explain all this in purely psychological terms.
Poe has written about it in a story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” in which he discusses the way in which we can feel a sudden urge to do something that horrifies us; the narrator of his story has succeeded in committing a “perfect murder,” and cannot resist a compulsion to go and shout about it in the street.

There is nothing very strange in this.
It is simply the operation of what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl calls “the law of reverse effort.” The more a stutterer wants to stop stuttering, the worse he stutters.
On the other hand, Frankl mentions a stutterer who was asked to play a stutterer in the school play, and was then unable to stutter.
All this is explained by the recognition that “you” live in the left half of the brain, and that another “you” lives a few centimeters away in the other half.
As soon as the left begins to interfere too much, it has the effect of “throttling” the right, just as if a man had grabbed himself by the throat.
We are all of us “divided selves.”

But it is one thing to stutter and stammer, and quite another to die of exhaustion in the belief that you are tormented by a devil.
Looking detachedly at the case of the Loudun demons, it is difficult not to feel that
The Spirits’ Book
of Kardec explains it rather better than Huxley does.
If we assume that the whole thing began as a plot against Grandier, and a sexual obsession on the part of the nuns—particularly Sister Jeanne des Anges—then we can begin to understand what Kardec’s “St.
Louis” meant when he explained: “A spirit does not enter into a body as you enter into a house.
He assimilates himself to a [person] who has the same defects and the same qualities as himself .
.
.” Fathers Lactance and Tranquille behaved with a frightful vengefulness—Lactance superintended the torture of Grandier—and therefore laid themselves open to “possession.” As to Sister Jeanne, she later wrote an autobiography in which it is made perfectly clear that she never much enjoyed being a nun; she was a dominant woman, and dominant women are usually “highly sexed.” She admits that she made no real effort to push aside the indecent thoughts that came into her head when she was praying or taking communion.
“This accursed spirit insinuated himself into me so subtly that I in no way recognized his workings .
.
.” She may have started out with a more or less conscious desire to cause trouble for Father Grandier; but a point came where, like Tranquille and Lactance, she found her body being used by demons.
Unlike Tranquille and Lactance, she rather enjoyed
being possessed.

The case on which William Blatty based
The Exorcist
took place in a Washington suburb, Mount Rainier, in 1949.
Thirteen-year-old Douglass Deen was the “focus” of the occurrences, which began with a scratching noise in the walls.
A rat extermination company was able to find no sign of rats or mice.
The sounds occurred only when Douglass was near by.
Then more usual poltergeist phenomena began to occur: dishes flew through the air, fruit was hurled against the wall.
A picture floated off the wall, hovered in the air, then went back to its old position.
After this, Douglass’ bed began to shake and quiver when he was in it.

The family asked the local minister, the Reverend M.
Winston, for help, and on February 17, 1949, Douglass spent the night in his home.
The two retired to a room with twin beds.
Douglass’ bed soon began to vibrate, and there were scratching noises in the walls.
Winston asked Douglass to sleep in an armchair.
The chair slid over to the wall, then slowly tilted until it threw the boy on the floor.
The minister improvised a bed on the floor; as soon as Douglass was in it, the bed slid across the room.

As these events continued, the boy was taken to two hospitals, Georgetown and St.
Louis University, both Jesuit institutions.
All attempts to treat him medically and psychiatrically were unsuccessful.
Finally, a Jesuit priest undertook the exorcism.
He fasted for two and a half months on bread and water, and repeated the ritual of exorcism no fewer than thirty times.
The “spirit” showed its objection to these rituals—or perhaps its contempt—by sending the boy into convulsions, making him scream obscenities and blasphemies in a shrill voice, and sometimes making him reply to the exorcism in Latin—a language he had never studied.
Finally, in May 1949, the phenomena ceased; the thirtieth exorcism was apparently successful.
But then, as we shall see, most poltergeist phenomena last only a month or so; it may have gone away of its own accord.

Here, then, we have a case of poltergeist disturbances that turned into “demoniacal possession,” with all the phenomena that occurred in the Loudun case.
The “psychological” explanation would be that Douglass Deen’s “other self” began by producing poltergeist disturbances, then took up the game of demonic possession suggested by the Jesuit fathers.
(His ability to speak Latin is not as surprising as it sounds; he must have heard a great deal of Latin during his life—at mass—and may have picked it up unconsciously.) But Kardec’s explanation about a mischievous spirit fits equally well.
If Kardec is correct, then the physical changes that occur during puberty cause a “leakage” of a certain type of energy that can be used by a poltergeist; this energy is probably some form of nerve-force.
When the physical adjustments of puberty have been made, the leak stops, and the poltergeist can no longer manifest itself.

In the Deen case, the two explanations seem equally plausible.
But there are other cases where the balance of probability seems to rest closer to the Kardec explanation.
One of the best known of these has become known as “the Amherst mystery.” It took place in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1878.
A shoe worker, Daniel Teed, lived in a two-story house with his wife and two sons, his wife’s two unmarried sisters, Jane and Esther Cox, who were aged twenty-two and eighteen, his wife’s brother William, and his own brother, John.
(The house must have been grossly overcrowded.) All were Methodists.
Jane, the elder sister, was pretty; Esther was short and rather stout.
Nevertheless, Esther had a boyfriend, a local factory worker named Bob MacNeal.

In late August, Daniel Teed complained that someone had been milking the cow; Esther was a suspect as she was unusually fond of milk.
Esther was suffering from nervous tensions, and ran up from the cellar one night screaming that a rat had run over her leg.
Her troubles were probably sexual in origin, as seems to be revealed by a dream she had at the time: hundreds of black bulls with bright blue eyes and blood dripping from their mouths tried to break into the house, while Esther frantically locked the doors .
.
.

The following evening, Esther and Bob MacNeal went out for a drive.
Bob, who had a bad reputation locally, tried to persuade Esther to go into the woods with him, but she refused.
He pulled out a gun and ordered her to get down from the buggy; he looked as if he might fire when the sound of an approaching vehicle distracted him.
He leapt on to the buggy, drove back at a dangerous speed, let Esther off, then left Amherst for good.
Esther cried herself to sleep, and for the next few days had red eyes.

On September 4, a damp, misty evening, Jane heard Esther sobbing in bed.
Then Esther screamed that there was a mouse in bed with her.
They searched, but no mouse was found.
The following night, both heard a rustling noise, and made a search.
It seemed to be coming from a cardboard box containing patchwork, so Jane stood it in the middle of the room, expecting a mouse to run out.
Instead the box jumped into the air and fell over.
She stood it up, and it jumped again.

Daniel Teed came in to see what the noise was about, pushed the box under the bed, and told them to go to sleep.