Supernatural (21 page)

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 cycles, 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 28.
Kerner’s book
The Seeress of Prevorst
(the name of the Swabian village
where
she was born) created a sensation.

In the second half of the 19th 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 20th century it had been virtually forgotten.
Writing about it in his
Modem Spiritualism
(1902), the sceptical 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 sceptical 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 sceptical 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 their cottage’s demolition.
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 18-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.

One day, Werner was startled to hear a loud crash from an empty room; he rushed in to find that two large flowerpots, which had stood on the windowsill, had been hurled to the floor so violently that there was earth all over the room.
The blind was closed and there was no breeze.
One of the curtains had also been twisted around a birdcage.
Later that day, Werner went to call on R.O., who went into a trance, and then told Werner that the black monk had been responsible for smashing the flowerpots (Werner had not mentioned this to her).
Albert, apparently, had ejected him from the house.

Werner was greatly impressed by his patient’s clairvoyant powers.
She demonstrated these one day when she woke up from a trance and told him that she had seen herself driving in a green-lacquered chaise.
Now Werner had, at the time, made some enquiries about a chaise that was for sale in a town some fifteen hours away, and he expected to get an answer in about a week.
R.O.
told him he would hear much sooner than that—in fact, the following afternoon; she also went on to describe the chaise, in some detail.
The following afternoon, Werner received a message about the chaise, and discovered that the girl was right in every detail.

Her most dramatic piece of clairvoyance concerned her younger sister.
One day, in a trance, she cried out ‘Albert, help me!
Emilie is falling down into the street.’
Then, after a short period, she said: ‘Thank God, help has already come!’

Asked what had happened, she explained that her little sister had been leaning out of a top-storey window, trying to grab a rope suspended from a winch above the window; she had been on the point of falling when her father had entered the room and pulled her back.

Werner contacted the father to ask if anything remarkable had happened on that particular day, and received a reply which Werner printed in his book; it said that the father had been sitting in his office when he had felt uneasy.
He went home, and went upstairs, in time to find his daughter had leaned too far out of the window to catch the rope, and could not get back into the room; he grabbed her dress and hauled her back in.
R.O.
said that it was Albert, the guardian spirit, who had made her father feel uneasy.

The cases described by Justinus Kerner and Heinrich Werner excited widepread interest in Europe, and led to much serious discussion.
Catherine Crowe read it and was deeply impressed.
When her translation appeared in 1845, it aroused as much interest as it had in Germany.
And it convinced Mrs Crowe of the reality of the supernatural.

So far, she had been the disciple of a famous Edinburgh doctor George Combe, Britain’s most famous exponent of phrenology—the doctrine that a man’s character can be read through the bumps on his skull—and Combe was a determined sceptic about ghosts and such matters.
Kerner—and Friederike—made her a convert.
It now came to her as a revelation that the ‘scientific spirit’ had gone too far.
‘Because, in the 17th century, credulity outran reason and discretion, the 18th century, by a natural reaction, flung itself into an opposite extreme.’
And the 19th century had carried this attitude to the point of absurdity; in fact, it had become a new kind of superstition, refusing to face facts that contradicted its dogmas.

Mrs Crowe was not particularly credulous.
She set about unearthing her own facts, and found that they seemed to fit together into a logical pattern.
Almost everything she wrote about would later be studied more systematically by parapsychologists, and carefully documented in scientific archives: dreaming of the future, death-bed visions, premonitions of disaster, ‘phantasms’ of the living and of the dead, poltergeists, spontaneous psychokinesis, even possession.
She reproaches contemporary scientists for insisting that the supernatural can be explained in terms of hysteria or nervous derangement, and points out, quite fairly, that they ‘arrange the facts to their theory, not their theory to the facts’.
What is now needed, she says, is investigation.
‘And by
investigation
I do not mean the hasty, captious, angry notice of an unwelcome fact .
.
.
but the slow, modest, pains-taking examination that is content to wait upon nature, and humbly follow out her disclosures, however opposed to preconceived theories or mortifying to human pride.’
Here she seems to be echoing a famous remark by Thomas Henry Huxley about the duty of the scientist: ‘Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’
It is interesting to discover that Huxley wrote this sentence in 1860, more than a decade after
The Night Side of Nature,
which was published in 1846; Huxley may, in fact, be echoing Mrs Crowe.

Her aim, she readily admits, is to see whether the evidence proves that some part of man can survive his death.
The first step in this direction—and it was later followed by most of her eminent successors, such as Myers and Tyrrell—was to try to show that man possesses powers that cannot be explained by science.
She devotes several chapters to dreams and presentiments of the future, and includes a number of experiences gathered from friends:

‘Another friend lately dreamt, one Thursday night, that he saw an acquaintance of his thrown from his horse, and that he was lying on the ground with the blood streaming from his face, and was much cut.
He mentioned his dream in the morning, and being an entire disbeliever in such phenomena, he was unable to account for the impression it made on his mind.
This was so strong that, on Saturday, he could not forebear calling at his friend’s house, who he was told was in bed, having been thrown from his horse on the previous day, and much injured about the face.’

If Mrs Crowe had lived to become a member of the Society for Physical Research, she would have gone to the trouble of getting signed statements from her friend, the man who had the accident, and the person he told about the dream the morning after.
As a pioneer in the field, she obviously felt that this was unnecessary.
Otherwise, it is difficult to fault her method.

Like every writer on the paranormal, she is particularly fascinated by out-of-the-body experiences, for she rightly regards these as potential proof that there is something in man that can exist outside the body.
Again, she does her best to offer facts that could be checked:

‘The late Mr John Holloway, of the Bank of England, brother to the engraver of that name, related of himself that being one night in bed with his wife and unable to sleep, he had fixed his eyes and thoughts with uncommon intensity on a beautiful star that was shining in at the window, when he suddenly found his spirit released from his body and soaring into that bright sphere.
But, instantly seized with anxiety for the anguish of his wife, if she discovered his body apparently dead beside her, he returned and re-entered it with difficulty .
.
.
He described that returning as returning to darkness; and that whilst the spirit was free, he was alternately in the light or in the dark, accordingly as his thoughts were with his wife or with the star.
He said that he always avoided anything that could produce a repetition of this accident, the consequences of it being very distressing.’

Mrs Crowe’s main problem was that, working mainly from hearsay, she had no simple way of distinguishing the authentic from the inauthentic.
A typical example is a case she cites from Heinrich Jung-Stilling.
Now Jung-Stilling was a serious investigator of the paranormal, a Professor of Economics, and a follower of the doctrines of Mesmer.
He ought to have been a reliable authority.
And the story he tells is in many ways a good case of what was later to be called a ‘phantasm of the living’.
In Philadelphia around the year 1740, says Jung-Stilling, a clairvoyant was approached by the wife of a sea captain, who was anxious because she had not heard from her husband for a long time.
The clairvoyant asked her to excuse him, and went into another room.
After a while, the woman became impatient, and went and peeped through a crack in the door; the clairvoyant was lying on a sofa, apparently asleep.
When he came back, he told her that her husband was alive and well, but had been unable to write to her for various reasons, which he explained.
At this moment, he said, the captain was in a coffeehouse in London, and would soon be back home.