Inside the Supernatural

Despite each member of the group suspecting the others of cheating, there was never any evidence of it, and some of the physical phenomena staggered everyone present. It was traditional for the group to hand around sweets, leaving one for Philip. On one occasion, when one of them jokingly tried to take Philip’s sweet, the table tilted alarmingly away from him, but the sweet did not slide down it. Neither did others that were put next to it.

The group embarked on ‘creating’ Philip because they were interested in recording physical phenomena. They did not create an apparition of him, but the experiment demonstrates that the mind can create a ghost personality.

Hauntings have been reported since time immemorial. There are many references to them in classical literature. Because their manifestations are generally less dramatic and more sporadic than poltergeist cases, researchers have been present at fewer hauntings when phenomena have occurred, although there are well-attested cases of several witnesses experiencing the same phenomena. Most cases which are quoted in books on the supernatural as prime examples of hauntings are old. This is probably less to do with the frequency or quality of hauntings and more to do with the amount of time and interest available to record them properly. There are reputedly haunted houses in every district of Britain but remarkably few in which independent witness statements have been logged and compared.

The Despard case, which was first reported in 1892, is accepted as a classic and is still being studied and scrutinized in detail by researchers (it is often referred to as the Morton case, after the man who first wrote about it). A ‘tall woman in black’ was seen so often in the Despard family home in Cheltenham that some guests took her for another visitor. The woman always held a handkerchief to the lower part of her face. Unlike many apparitions, she was not confined to one spot but moved around the house and grounds. She was able to walk through objects and trip wires rigged deliberately to catch her. When a circle of people joined hands around her, she passed through the circle between two people and disappeared. Altogether, seventeen people bore witness to having seen her, some of whom had no prior knowledge of her ‘presence’ in the house. There were other assorted phenomena reported: footsteps, doors banging, handles turning.

According to Tony Cornell and Dr Alan Gauld, ‘minor hauntings’, where there are sounds, objects are moved and lights are switched on and off, but where there is no apparition, are far more common than poltergeists or ghosts. Yet because these cases are difficult to assess (and perhaps because they are rather dull) they do not find their way into case collections and parapsychological literature. Cases are also extremely hard to categorize, many of them overlapping the apparition and minor haunting groupings. One case Cornell and Gauld report in their book, Poltergeists, is the story of a haunting that took place in 1971 and 1972, in a substantial five-bedroomed detached house lived in by a married couple, who were both college lecturers, and their four children. After moving into the house, they experienced an assortment of phenomena: a spoon was seen suspended in mid air, a stone which had come out of a ring was moved from inside a jewel box to the bed, a noise was heard as if a trunk was being dragged across the landing, the sound of drawers being opened and closed was heard on numerous occasions, and one of the daughters and her cousin reported seeing an apparition during the night, a man who stood near the mantelpiece in the lounge with his head on his hands. Breathing noises, singing, a voice with a Scottish accent, footsteps and muffled whispers were all heard. The front door bell rang, and so did the telephone, when there was no one there. Gauld and Cornell believe the family were excellent witnesses, and say so in their book:

‘When one investigates such cases on the spot, and meets the people concerned, the evidence even in the most superficially impressive examples tends to crumble before one’s eyes; but sometimes the witnesses on better acquaintance seem so careful and so conscientious that one can neither dismiss nor yet completely explain away their cases. This was a case of the latter sort.’

One of Cornell’s recent cases involved a newly-married couple who went on honeymoon to a fifteenth-century hotel in a market town in Norfolk.

‘They knew nothing about the hotel, which was reputedly haunted, and they were a pragmatic pair who resolutely did not believe in ghosts. Although they were just married, they had been living together for some years. They had been given the three-night honeymoon as a surprise present from the bride’s father, and had only been told about it that day. They had no chance to learn anything about the history of the hotel,’ he said.

The couple arrived in the evening, had dinner, and went up to their room at about nine o’clock. The door at first refused to open and they both noticed that there was a cold spot outside it. Once inside the room they felt it was cold, despite the fact that the radiators were working normally. It was a typical honeymoon room, with a four poster bed on one side and an open fireplace on the other. Above the fireplace was a piece of glass, covering and protecting an old fresco. As they settled down in bed they both noticed a luminous glow coming from one side of the fireplace. They were puzzled but not disturbed and settled down for the night.

At about half past eleven, they heard someone pacing up and down in the corridor outside their room, then they heard the footsteps inside the room. They both got out of bed to investigate but could see nothing, although they could hear the footsteps going round the foot of the bed. Between three and four o’clock in the morning the husband woke up and saw a young girl, aged between about twelve and fifteen, with a garland of flowers in her hair. As he nudged his wife to waken her, the figure walked to the window and disappeared.

The following day, when they mentioned their experiences to the manager of the hotel, he told them that the American guest in the room next to theirs had also had a disturbed night and had checked out of the hotel. The manager offered them a different room, but despite having by this time heard the history of the haunting, they decided they would stay where they were. The story they were told was that three hundred years previously the owner of the inn, a woman, had been having an affair with an ostler who murdered her in that room. Her daughter, who had been having an affair with the same man, threw herself off the balcony when she learned of her mother’s death.

On the second night, they again had problems opening the door of the room, but this time the room was so hot they had to open a window. Once again, there was a luminous glow by the fireplace and again they heard footsteps both inside and outside their room. During the night the husband felt the bedclothes being pulled over his head. This happened three times.

In the morning, the manager showed them a portrait of the owner who legend said had been murdered. The husband was shocked because he recognized her as an older version of the girl he had seen. That night they experienced the same problems opening the door to their room and saw the glowing light. On closely inspecting the room they found a hand print, the size of a child’s hand, on the inside of the glass covering the wallpainting. The glass, which was held about an inch and a half proud of the wall by a heavy wooden frame, was quite dusty on the inside and the fresh print showed up clearly.

In the early hours of the morning, the husband again woke up and saw the same girl sitting on the end of the bed. He believed he could actually feel the depression caused by her weight. For about fifteen seconds she and he looked at each other and then she once again went to the window and disappeared. When she left, he felt the springs of the bed go up. In the morning another set of fingerprints could be seen on the glass.

When he investigated the haunting, Tony Cornell was satisfied that the couple were truthful and sincere, and as they had both been firm disbelievers in anything paranormal, there appeared to be no obvious motivation for fraud. But his investigations showed that the owner of the hotel whose picture was hanging in the lounge had died a natural death, had not had a daughter and that there was no record of her having an affair with an ostler.

‘One of the problems with psychical research is that a lot of time is spent on cases that are eighty years old or more,’ he said. ‘But there are still some very good examples happening right now.’

Investigations

It seems odd that we have so little evidence of ghosts and poltergeists and hauntings, apart from witness testimony. Psychical researchers often report back that their cameras failed, their tapes broke, their film turned out to be blank. There is a very high rate of instrument failure on a field investigation.

With the high-tech equipment now available, instrument recording would seem to be the logical way forward. Infra-red cameras can record in the dark, without upsetting any ‘atmosphere’ necessary for whatever is going on, video equipment is becoming more compact, image intensifiers and all sorts of other sophisticated gear are available. Many members of the Society for Psychical Research agree that instrumentation is necessary. Unfortunately what is available has been assembled on an ad hoc basis, mostly at individual expense.

The best device in Britain at the moment is nicknamed SPIDER (Spontaneous Psycho-physical Incident Data Electronic Recorder), which has been devised and assembled by Tony Cornell, Alan Gauld and Howard Wilkinson, who is in charge of technical services in the psychology department at Nottingham University and who works with Cornell and Gauld on many of their field investigations. According to Wilkinson, SPIDER is a ‘glorified burglar alarm’. It consists of a small Sinclair computer in a radiation-proof box, a printer with a series of relays which control infra-red, ultra-sonic and electro-static detectors, as well as video cameras, stills cameras, sound microphones and lights. A grant from the SPR paid for a time-lapse video recorder, but Cornell alone has invested about six thousand pounds in the equipment. He pioneered the assembly of the equipment with the help of two electronics students from Cambridge but, ultimately, it was Howard Wilkinson who assembled it, re-wired it and got it working.

The main drawback of SPIDER is its size: putting it in place involves trailing wires and inconveniently bulky hardware. It is, as Tony Cornell says: ‘Absolutely no use in the average family home, especially if there are dogs, cats and children about. And if you need to cover more than one room at a time with the cameras, it becomes even more difficult.’

But Wilkinson, Cornell and Gauld are keen to use it wherever they can, so that ultimately they can assemble a library of video footage, not just as proof of the phenomena but also as a means of training other field investigators. They have made a start: they have one piece of video tape recording a poltergeist outbreak at a car-hire firm in Arnold, near Nottingham. The case began in August 1990 when an eighteen-year-old youth joined the firm to do the steam cleaning and valeting of their fleet of cars. Small gravel stones were being thrown at great velocity, narrowly but consistently missing people, around the portakabin premises the company was using. Observers were able to throw stones and see them come whizzing back. Milk bottles were rearranged and files floated off desks and dropped on to the floor.

Although in some instances the youth seemed to be cheating by flicking the stones himself, there were others when it was impossible for him to be responsible.

‘On one occasion I was in the office with the lad and Alan was outside able to see everything,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘A stone hit the wall above his shoulder and dropped into a teacup. It was impossible for him to have faked it. And there were occasions when stones could be heard raining down on the roof while he was inside the portakabin. Sometimes as many as forty or fifty stones would be swept off the roof at the end of the day, and the local police had ruled out the possibility of vandalism.’

SPIDER was installed and a video was recorded of the steam arm coming off a steam-cleaning device.

‘It was taken on a dim day at the back of the premises. The handle moved as someone walked past. It doesn’t look as though he touched or nudged it. A clear noise is recorded. But, as luck would have it, the time and date on the tape recording partially obscures what happened,’ said Howard Wilkinson. ‘It is possible today to get edge detection equipment which analyses video tape frame by frame on a computer, blocking out anything which is stationary and only showing up movement.

‘We need this equipment. We also need sound-analysis equipment. And we need to miniaturize what we already have, so that we don’t have to hump a great load of gear about with us.’

Where possible, SPIDER is rigged up with two cameras per room, each in the field of view of the other to eliminate the possibility of tampering. Even after taking as many precautions as possible to ensure that his equipment is as tamper-proof as possible by using tape to secure cables and leads, however, Wilkinson has experienced an unusual number of ‘technical’ faults.

‘I was very excited when I thought that at Arnold there would be some film recording chairs moving. I screeched down there to pick it up, but when I got the film back there was nothing on it. I checked all the equipment and it appeared to be in full working order, but eventually I realized that the F-stop on the camera had been changed so that it did not record in the dark. Everyone swore they had not touched it, and because I had by that time spent weeks on the case and knew them well, I was inclined to believe them, after initially feeling I’d been set up. On other occasions and other cases, I’ve had plugs pulled out of the back of recorders, even though they were taped in. Part of the psychology of dealing with these cases is deciding whether you believe that the people involved did it or not. We will always have the problem of making equipment tamper-proof: until we work out how “spirits” tamper with things!’

SPIDER has been tried out at the scene of various hauntings, without much success. It was installed for fifty-two days at Carnfield Hall, near Nottingham, a large home with a long history of haunting but the most that was recorded were a few strange photographs.

‘One of the problems with hauntings is that they are so unpredictable,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘We’re seriously thinking of advertising for anyone with a large stately home that is haunted to let us install the equipment in a part of the building where it would not be in anyone’s way and where the haunting is supposed to happen.

‘Failing to pick something up on the cameras does not necessarily mean that nothing happened. If someone clearly sees a ghost and it does not appear on the film, that tells us something about the nature of the phenomenon. We have to appraise every bit of technical evidence we get rigorously: so many doubtful photographs have been produced over the years, purporting to show paranormal events, and there seems to have been no effort to eliminate lens flares, double exposures, reflections of light off furniture …

‘If we can get a lot more on video we will really have made a breakthrough. The advantage of filming something is that you can look back at it afterwards. Witnessing an event takes only a couple of seconds and, in retrospect, you start to query your own senses. Did I really see what I thought I saw? A film of it means you can look at leisure, picking up lots of things you missed at the time.’

Robin Furman runs an organization he calls Ghostbusters UK (it used to be called Grimsby Ghostbusters but they have spread their wings to take in the whole country). A psychotherapist who works from home, Furman and his son Andy, with Rodney Mitchell, a computer consultant, and Janice Paterson make up the Ghostbuster team, and, in great contrast to the low-key style of Dr David Fontana, Dr Alan Gauld, Tony Cornell and other serious investigators, they court publicity. They travel to their cases in a 1959 Austin Princess, an ex-mayoral limousine, which they have dubbed the Ghostmobile. Furman says they do not have the registration plate ECTO 1 (as in the film Ghostbusters) but you get the impression that they would if they could.

The equipment the Ghostbusters use also has a cute name: they call it the Roboghost. It is an Acorn computer which can monitor changes in temperature, light and vibrations, as well as being attached to sound-recording equipment. Any change registers a blip on the screen of the computer and Furman and his crew are hoping to build up a sufficient body of printouts of different types of paranormal events to be able to find patterns.