Inside the Supernatural

Dr Alan Gauld, lecturer in psychology at Nottingham University, and his partner Tony Cornell have carried out the most exhaustive and credible study of poltergeists in the world. Gauld and Cornell teamed up many years ago, when Gauld was a student at Cambridge and Cornell was living and working in the town. They met through the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research and, although their partnership is not a formal one and both have done many investigations independently, they still tend to work together much of the time. Gauld, a somewhat laconic intellectual, injects the academic contribution, and it is his work that makes up the statistical core of their book, Poltergeists. Cornell is a tireless enthusiast for field research, described by other members of the SPR as the action man of the pair. They share a sense of humour, a dedication to rooting out conscious or unconscious fraud and natural causes and a reluctance to commit themselves to explanations. In Gauld’s case, this is probably the natural caution of the academic: he takes great pains to eliminate all other possible explanations except a paranormal one and then says that he does not necessarily accept that anything paranormal happened. Cornell’s reluctance is more straightforward: he came to psychical research after an incident that convinced him that the paranormal existed, but his quest for it ever since has left him with only a small residue of evidence. He says that as he gets older (he’s in his sixties), he is less and less sure what it is he is pursuing. None the less, his persistence and the evidence that he does have, belie his words.

The incident that awakened Tony Cornell’s interest in the paranormal happened when he was in India with the army. He went to visit a fakir (a Hindu holy man), who had a considerable local reputation as a mystic. While talking to him, the fakir asked Cornell to turn away for a few seconds. When he turned round again, the fakir was on the other side of a wide river.

‘It was a perfect case of levitation. But, over the years, I have tried to explain it away. At one time, I thought the fakir had hypnotized me and then suggested to me what I thought I saw, but I have since learned that I cannot be hypnotized – various experts have tried. I’ve also wondered whether I had sunstroke but, if I did, I recovered very quickly. Who knows?’

Cornell’s experience came after a childhood with a mother who was ‘sensitive’ and who made various telepathic links with him and other members of the family. Although as a teenager he reacted against it, his experience in India made him interested enough to embark upon a lifetime’s study of the paranormal.

Dr Alan Gauld’s interest stretches back into his childhood and he too says he has inherited it from his mother. At Cambridge in the 1950s, he spent a night with other students involved in the University’s Society for Psychical Research in a reputedly haunted house, with such marked results that he has been hooked ever since. He is critical of laboratory parapsychology, comparing it to a seismologist replicating tiny earthquakes in a lab while the buildings around shake as the result of real earthquakes. Not that he thinks evidence for the paranormal is often as dramatic or as quantifiable as an earthquake, but he believes that it must be studied out in the field where it happens spontaneously. He has encountered many puzzling and unexplained phenomena, but he is very slow to draw paranormal conclusions. In his own private life, too, he has been faced with the inexplicable. Twenty years ago, when his second son was newly born and his older son was three years old, he and his wife Sheila were watching a television programme about the birth of a baby.

‘Sheila was fascinated, I was trying not to look. Just after the baby was born on screen we heard our older son crying upstairs. When Sheila went to him he said “Mummy, lady went into hospital, took off her clothes and had a baby.” There was no possible way that he could have seen or heard anything from the television set, and the only explanation seems to be some telepathic link between him and his mother. We had another instance of it a few weeks later when Sheila, who is vegetarian, was upset witnessing rabbits being shot as they ran across a field in a television programme. Our son again seemed to have picked up the scene, because he said “Rabbits were running, running”. Those were the only two occasions it happened and it seemed to have some connection with Sheila’s heightened emotional state at each time. How can that be reproduced in a laboratory?’

Like Tony Cornell, Alan Gauld’s experience in trying to isolate and define the paranormal outside the laboratory has not made him optimistic about easy solutions:

‘I am less optimistic than I was about the prospect of readily coming to any answers. I have encountered a lot of fraud and natural causes and I’ve become a lot more cautious. I, and other psychic researchers, have incidentally become experts on all sorts of things like plumbing, building research, underground water but, ultimately, it is impossible to say that we have excluded everything.’

In their book, Gauld and Cornell offer powerful evidence for the existence of poltergeists and ghosts, even if they remain equivocal about their origins and causes. Dr Gauld has computer analysed five hundred cases, all of them well documented, although not necessarily contemporary (the oldest dates back to AD 530, seventy per cent occurred after 1800 and forty per cent during this century). Through complicated statistical analysis of sixty-three different possible characteristics for each case, he has effectively proved that there is a definable difference between hauntings and poltergeists, despite the overlap of characteristics between the groups, and that the basis of categorization is whether the phenomena are based on a person or a place.

Traditionally, poltergeists were centred on young adolescent girls but, in the later cases studied by Gauld, there has been a distinct upswing in the number of men acting as the central poltergeist ‘agent’. Other research shows that the age profile of the agent has changed too, with more elderly people involved. (It has been suggested that the isolation of older people, and the consequent unhappiness it brings, may be making them more ready hosts for poltergeist phenomena.) Some sort of disturbance in the agent does seem to be a common factor and adolescence is often a time of acute emotional upheaval.

Why should poltergeist activity be triggered by some people and not others who are under equal stress? Can the agents in any conscious way control what happens around them? The answer to the second question would appear to be, only when there is a fraudulent element (and some young people, carried away with the attention they get when phenomena first start, cheat to keep their ‘poltergeist’ going). The answer to the first question must be that nobody knows: there has been no thorough comparison of the personality profiles of poltergeist agents.

Two of the most celebrated person-based poltergeist cases are the Rosenheim case (in Germany in 1967 and 1968) and the Miami case (in Florida, also in 1967). These two cases are now standard in poltergeist literature because they were investigated so well, the phenomena persisted long enough for good records to be made and kept and because the evidence appears to be irrefutable.

John Stiles, the investigations officer of the Society for Psychical Research and a noted sceptic who has never experienced anything paranormal in his life, says that the Rosenheim case is the only piece of evidence he has looked into that makes him believe that poltergeists exist.

The poltergeist activity occurred in the offices of a well-established lawyer’s practice in the small German town of Rosenheim. Anne-Marie Schneider, aged eighteen, was a secretary in the Rosenheim office and fairly new to the job. Shortly after she joined, the entire office was reduced to chaos. Light bulbs would swing wildly and explode, showering glass everywhere; fluorescent ceiling lights would go out, sometimes with a bang. (On one occasion, electricians found that the fluorescent tubes throughout the building had been twisted ninety degrees in their sockets. After replacing them all, there was another bang and the same distortions were found in the new tubes.) Fuses blew with monotonous regularity; sometimes cartridge fuses seemed to have been pulled out of their sockets.

Problems with the telephones were the most severe inconvenience for the lawyer’s business. Frequently, all four telephones would ring at once when no one was on the line. Calls were interrupted or cut off. Telephone bills rose astronomically and the office was charged for numerous calls that the staff denied making. Developing fluid from photocopying machines would spill while nobody was near the machine.

Because the disturbances appeared to be confined to electrical and telecommunications equipment, the lawyer called in the appropriate authorities. Experts from both the electricity supply company and the telephone company were able to install monitoring equipment which gives some factual non-human record of what went on. The local power station’s monitoring showed up large irregular surges in the power supply and these continued even after, bewildered, they installed a generator to guarantee a continuous regulated supply of electricity to the offices.

The telephone company’s findings were even more surprising. By recording every outward call, what time it was made and how long it lasted, they found that over a few weeks many calls were made to the speaking clock, often at the rate of six times in a minute, and at times when it is certain that nobody in the office could have been responsible. On one day, forty-six calls were made to the clock in a fifteen-minute period.

With so many staff and technicians in on what was happening, it is hardly surprising that news got out to the local press and, as a result, two television companies made short documentaries about the phenomena. The lawyer, at his wit’s end because his office was being destroyed daily, and business and staff morale were suffering, filed a formal charge with the police against the (unknown) mischief maker. He hoped that, if he were the victim of an elaborate practical joke, this would persuade whoever was doing it to stop. The local CID launched an investigation.

By this stage, Professor Hans Bender, Professor of Parapsychology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, had arrived on the scene with some colleagues, including two physicists who took over the investigation of the electricity supply and the telecommunications equipment. They recorded erratic power deflections and loud bangs, and eliminated causes such as static magnetic fields, variations in the electric current, ultrasonic effects (including vibrations) and, amongst other things, manual intervention or faking.

Bender and his team soon decided that Anne-Marie Schneider was the focus of the activity, which always occurred during office hours, and sometimes started the moment she crossed the threshold. His announcement that he believed they were dealing with a poltergeist precipitated a greater variety of phenomena: paintings began to swing and even turn over on their hooks; decorative plates fell off the walls; drawers opened and closed by themselves; a heavy filing cabinet moved about a foot away from the wall. A video film was made of one of the pictures rotating.

As the investigation progressed, Anne-Marie became more and more nervous and hysterical. Eventually, she was sent home on leave and, immediately, all the problems stopped. She found another job and, although a few disturbances happened at her new place of work, there was nothing so dramatic and eventually these died away. The lawyer’s office remained peaceful after she left. There were about forty witnesses who had observed the phenomena, including the technical experts, clients of the lawyer, journalists and scientists, as well as the staff at the office.

There are some marked similarities between this case and the occurrences in Miami during the same year. In both instances, the poltergeist activity occurred at the workplace of the agent. Personality-profile tests have shown that both agents have some characteristics, which might be important, in common. Both, for example, seemed to have felt some aggression towards those with whom they worked, but were able somehow to displace their aggression into poltergeist activity. (Both, incidentally, had forbearing and long-suffering employers. Other similar cases may be lost to research because employers would justifiably become fed up with such a catalogue of disturbance.)

In the case of the Miami poltergeist, the agent was a nineteen-year-old boy. Julio Vasquez, a Cuban refugee, was a clerk working in the warehouse of a wholesale company dealing in cheap souvenirs and novelty items. The warehouse contained tiers of shelves arranged in aisles and on the shelves were stacked and stored the goods to be supplied to retailers. Many of the items were breakable and many of them were broken, because Julio appeared to cause them to jump off the shelves and smash on the floor, even if he was at the other end of the warehouse.

The strange happenings at the warehouse came to the attention of a writer of popular books on parapsychology, Susy Smith. She was answering questions on a radio phone-in when a member of the warehouse staff called and told her, over the air, what was going on. Smith alerted two prominent American psychical researchers: W.G.Roll, Director of the Psychical Research Foundation in North Carolina, and Professor J.G. Pratt from the University of Virginia. Miss Smith and the two academics witnessed and recorded the astonishing effect Julio appeared to have on the goods on the shelves, detailing two hundred and twenty-four separate incidents in their reports. These were probably only the tip of the iceberg: the Julio effect had been felt for three or four weeks before they became involved and there were days when objects were falling from the shelves more or less non-stop.

The police had been called in more to pacify the other employees than because the owners of the warehouse held Julio to blame. The poltergeist was not shy: four police officers witnessed what was happening, as did several other independent witnesses apart from the staff and the parapsychologists. Among these witnesses was a professional magician, a friend of the owners, who had been unable to spot any possible fraud by Julio or anyone else.

Because the phenomena were fairly straightforward and confined to the area of the warehouse, it was relatively easy to arrange good scientific controls to monitor both Julio and his effect. From vantage points at opposite corners of the warehouse the two parapsychologists were able to make careful notes of who was where and when and Julio’s position relative to anything falling off the shelves. The sheer amount of detailed information they were able to supply, though in many ways tedious and repetitive compared to some of the more exciting poltergeist activities in other cases, makes this one of the strongest cases ever recorded.

On one occasion, the object that fell off the shelf travelled twenty-two feet before it hit the ground. In other instances, a souvenir would leapfrog items in front of it on the shelves and crash to the floor. Sometimes the broken items had been deliberately placed on the shelves by the investigators in positions which seemed to particularly attract the poltergeist activity. Concerted efforts were made to discover natural or fraudulent causes for the succession of breakages: shelves were shaken and prodded, dry ice was used to balance objects precariously on the edge of shelves (with the result that they fell when the ice melted), but the researchers were left with no explanation of how objects from the back of shelves fell. Despite the close scrutiny under which he was held, nobody found any evidence of Julio faking the disturbances. He was a rather mixed-up and unhappy young man, pining for his mother and grandmother who had been left behind in Cuba and facing the prospect of having to move out of his stepmother’s house. There was no doubt that he was under stress. After leaving his job at the warehouse, Julio served a short prison sentence for shoplifting and he was later shot while refusing to hand over the takings from the petrol station where he worked to two armed robbers. Since then, his life, according to Roll, has settled down and there have been no more paranormal phenomena.

One of England’s most famous – and most controversial – poltergeist cases is the Enfield case, investigated by two members of the Society for Psychical Research, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair. The case lasted for eighteen months, starting in August 1977, and centred round one family: a divorced mother and her four children, thirteen-year-old Rose, eleven-year-old Janet, ten-year-old Pete and Jimmy, aged seven. It started with furniture moving about and rapping noises in the family’s Enfield council house and progressed through some of the most startling phenomena reported: there were levitations, fires, water appeared from nowhere, excrement was daubed, apparitions were seen, writing appeared on walls and the two girls apparently developed the ability to talk with the voice of an old man, using language and vocabulary that were alien to them. Playfair wrote a book, This House is Haunted, giving a chronology of the case, which attracted media attention from all over the world. The book shows how the poltergeist, whose agent was originally thought to be Janet, could have moved around amongst different members of the family.

The case attracted controversy as vigorously as it attracted publicity. Other psychical researchers were not happy with the protocols established by Grosse and Playfair. There were suspicions that the children were colluding in fraud and that other witnesses were affected by the hysteria that was generated. At best, several of them feel that there may have been genuine poltergeist activity in the first few weeks at Enfield but that, from then on, the children enjoyed the attention they were getting and fabricated phenomena to keep up the interest. Ventriloquists and magicians were called in, as well as mediums and psychiatrists.

Maurice Grosse is hurt by any suggestions that the case was not genuine. He committed a great deal of his time and energy to investigating it and fifteen years later, with a number of other investigations under his belt, still feels that it was ‘the case of the century’.

‘It is very easy to cry “fakery” when we don’t have any real answers,’ he said. ‘We have theories about poltergeists but we don’t understand them. Fraud is one of the handiest explanations to latch on to. It stops us having to delve any further. I know the problem other researchers had – they didn’t see what was happening at Enfield. It is one thing hearing about phenomena, quite another to witness them. It was my first investigation and I saw more startling evidence there than most researchers see in a lifetime of different cases.’

Maurice Grosse has tape recordings of various aspects of the case, including the gruff voice the girls could produce. Photographs were also taken, some of which purport to show the girls being thrown out of bed, their bedding whipped off them and levitations. Unfortunately, no video film was obtained of the phenomena. There was a persistent tendency for electrical equipment, mains or battery, to malfunction at the Enfield house.

Ghosts and Hauntings

When Andrew Green and his wife moved into a new house in Bramley, Surrey, the garden was what attracted them. It was an acre in size, and relatively undeveloped, with a wooded area and a trout stream running through it. A very keen gardener, Andrew spent most of his leisure time working on it. It preoccupied him – he even daydreamed about it while commuting into London to his publishing job. His favourite spot was a large rockery in one corner, which he built entirely alone, lugging heavy rocks into place and spending hours browsing through catalogues and garden centres to decide which plants to put in.

Unfortunately, Andrew and his wife divorced and had to move. They sold the house to a couple with two young children. During the sale, Andrew became friendly with the couple and invited them to call on him if ever they were passing through Robertsbridge in Sussex, where he now lives. Eighteen months later, they rang to say they would be in the area and would pop in to see him, bringing their children, who had never met Andrew, with them.

‘As they got out of the car, their twelve-year-old daughter went very pale and fainted. When we got her up and into the house, she told her father that I was the man she had seen on the rockery. Apparently, she had been telling her parents for some time that she kept seeing a man on the rockery in the garden. They had not believed her, although her description had sounded quite like me. After meeting me in the flesh, she never saw me again in the garden.’

Andrew Green admits that it was an enormous wrench for him to leave the garden at Bramley and that he felt especially attached to the rockery because it was entirely his own work. At his new home, he woke up several times imagining he was back there.

‘Obviously, the attachment wore off and I suspect that as it did the girl no longer saw me.’

Andrew Green appears to have been able to leave some sort of imprint of himself on the surroundings that were so important to him. It seems more likely that he created the apparition, than that it was created by the girl who had never clapped eyes on him before. Yet many experts say that all apparitions are hallucinations. They get round the problem of different people at different times seeing the same ghost by suggesting that the hallucination is transferred from one person to another by telepathy. In some way, the emotions of the first person to see the ghost transmit themselves to others at the scene and they then share the hallucination.

A classic group hallucination was reported by F.W.H. Myers in 1903 and happened in 1887. Canon Bourne and his two daughters went out hunting and at midday the two girls decided to return home with the coachman while their father carried on. After stopping to speak to somebody, they turned and saw the Canon waving his hat to them from the opposite side of a small dip and signalling to them to follow him. One of the sisters, Louisa Bourne, provided the following statement, which was also signed as correct by her sister:

‘My sister, the coachman and I all recognized my father and also the horse. The horse looked so dirty and shaken that the coachman remarked he thought there had been a nasty accident. As my father waved his hat I clearly saw the Lincoln and Bennet mark inside, although from the distance we were apart it ought to have been utterly impossible for me to have seen it. At the time I mentioned seeing the mark, though the strangeness of seeing it did not strike me until afterwards.

‘Fearing an accident, we hurried down the hill. From the nature of the ground we had to lose sight of my father, but it took us very few seconds to reach the place where we had seen him. When we got there, there was no sign of him anywhere, nor could we see anyone in sight at all. We rode about for some time looking for him, but could not see or hear anything of him. We all reached home within a quarter of an hour of each other. My father then told us that he had never been in the field in which we saw him the whole of that day. He had never waved to us and had met with no accident. My father was riding the only white horse that was out that day.’

The fact that the girl could clearly see the manufacturer’s mark in her father’s hat at a distance from which it should not have been visible supports the hallucination theory, but there is still the problem of why all three of them saw exactly the same thing at the same moment, unless the apparition came not from their minds but from the mind of the Canon.

The hallucination theory may even hold good for the straightforward apparitions that manifest in the same place, doing the same thing, at different times (classic grey ladies and headless riders reported across the centuries). Fred, who saw the child-like apparition in the Cardiff poltergeist case, actually suggested to Dr Fontana that it might be his own hallucination of himself as a child.

Trying to make all cases conform to the theory is at best a tortuous exercise, and one that is rejected by researchers like Dr Alan Gauld who feels it falls short of explaining the physical phenomena that sometimes attend hauntings: noises, the breaking of crockery, opening and closing doors with visible turning of handles or lifting of latches.

If the hallucination theory is accepted, it’s interesting to note that the human mind can collectively conjure up the personality of a ghost.

Tony Cornell and some friends were called in to investigate a haunted pub, the Ferryboat Inn at Holywell, near Cambridge, in the early 1950s. Cornell had heard that every St. Patrick’s Day a ghost appeared in the bar and pointed at one of the flagstones, which moved. He and his friends went there on the right day, stationed themselves above the flagstone with a ouija board, and conducted a seance. They soon had a communicator, a girl who told them her name was Juliet Tewsley, that she was a Norman, and that she was hanged for her affair with a married man, Thomas Zole, in 1054.

‘There were five of us round the ouija board, possibly talking to our own unconscious minds. But it gave the landlord of the pub an idea, and he asked us to go again the following year – only for us to find that a lot of media people had also been invited. Since then, the story has been added to and added to,’ said Tony Cornell.

‘There is no evidence that this girl existed. The name Juliet didn’t come into the English language until the sixteenth century, the Normans did not invade until 1066. One wonders if this is how all ghost stories start.’

In a more controlled way, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research created their own ghost in 1974. Eight of them, under the supervision of British mathematician Dr A.R.G. Owen, assembled around a table with their hands clearly visible on top and made ‘contact’ with a ghost they had invented themselves: a Royalist knight at the time of the English civil war, called Philip. Philip would answer questions by rapping on the table, and would make the table tilt and eventually levitate off the ground. But the framework of the fictional Philip’s life had all been worked out beforehand by the group: he lived in a large house called Diddington Manor, he had a wife called Dorothea and had been passionately in love with a gypsy girl who was burned as a witch. Philip died by committing suicide, out of guilt for not having saved the girl. The ‘ghost’ of Philip accepted the characteristics assigned to him and even filled in more background details about himself.