Inside the Supernatural

Other phenomena have included bolts materializing in mid air, cutlery being taken out of drawers and spread on the table (almost as though Pete was trying to lay the table), cutlery being bent, paper and paperclips materializing to order (the paper often seemed to have come from the offices above the shop, where an accountant has his business). Distinctive teaspoons from a restaurant a few doors away have also turned up on the staircase at Fred and Gerry’s home. On one occasion, Pat challenged Pete to produce a dirty paintbrush and one which was not one of their own arrived at her feet.

Pete seems to be fascinated by the carburettor floats which John uses in his business. These are small rubber floats pierced by a sharp metal pin, which allows them to be stuck into different surfaces. They have been found sticking from the ceiling of the workshop. When Pat asked for money, she found a float holding a crumpled five-pound note on to the ceiling. They have appeared in all sorts of odd places in the workshop and, most surprising of all to John and Fred, they have turned up away from the business premises, usually at Fred and Gerry’s house.

‘On one occasion we left one on top of the heater in the workshop when we locked up at night, challenging it to move. As we drove home, Fred went to buy some fags and when he scooped up his change off the shop counter, there was a float with it,’ said John.

On another occasion, Fred thought he had been stung by a wasp because he felt a sharp prick under his shirt but, when he undid his buttons, he found a carburettor float pinned to him. And once, when Fred, Pat and Gerry were sitting under a sun umbrella in Fred and Gerry’s garden, all three of them saw the pin from a float pierce the canvas umbrella. John and his family are a pragmatic, easy-going group, none of whom have had any previous interest in or experience of psychic matters. Both couples, John and Pat, and Fred and Gerry, are in their fifties, with grown-up families. They have accepted the presence of Pete the Polt in much the same way that they accept any new arrivals in the business – everyone is made to feel welcome. They have even become fond of Pete, and Fred described the experience of encountering such an active poltergeist as ‘a privilege’. But not everything about the experience has been happy. There have been one or two narrow escapes. For instance, when a large bolt of wood was hurled across the workshop and when metal stepladders were thrown across the shop, breaking some of the plates that were on sale. Seed and fertilizer, which is sold in the shop, has frequently been scattered all over the floor and the counter when they have arrived at work in the morning and, on one occasion, fertilizer was thrown over a customer. When Pat is in the toilet she is upset to find stones being thrown around her while the door is locked.

‘I don’t like the idea of him being in there with me,’ she said. Although she does not mind when Pete fingers and plays with her hair.

Other phenomena have worried the family because of the risks. The poltergeist has seemed able to create fire and once they arrived at work to find the engine of a giant lawnmower had been started and left running, emitting dangerous fumes. This happened on a Monday morning, so there was no possibility that the mower had been left on by them: it would have run out of petrol over the weekend. Only a strong man could have started the difficult engine, from which a spark plug had been removed for safety.

‘That worried me a bit. If it could start that engine and put back a spark plug that we had removed, what couldn’t it do?’ said John.

Fred, who was originally very fond of Pete, has had the most alarming experiences, and now tries to discourage the whole affair, ignoring new phenomena. On four occasions he has seen an apparition in the workshop, the figure of a small schoolboy, aged about nine or ten, but dressed in the sort of clothing worn in the 1940s and 1950s – a school cap, grey shorts, heavy shoes. Once, the apparition was sitting on the handle of a lawnmower, swinging its legs; once on the shop till; and once on a set of shelves in the ‘active’ corner. Fred could not make out a face or hands and the apparition seemed not to be limited by the physical shape of the room because when it was sitting on the top shelf in the workshop half of its body should, logically, have stuck through the ceiling. Although John was with Fred during at least one of these sightings, John could see nothing.

When Fred saw the apparition for the fourth time he was alarmed. The ghost child was standing in the workshop, near the doorway to the small kitchen, waving to him. He tried to speak to it, but it disappeared.

The most worrying thing for the whole family was the risk to their business. When the stone throwing was at its height John even spoke to his insurance company about the danger to customers. In fact, only one customer was hit, and not hard enough for injury to be caused, but she left the shop indignantly because she believed one of the staff had fired the missile at her. John and Pat were concerned that publicity would affect them adversely.

‘I never believed in any of this before. I would have thought someone was nuts if they said all this had happened to them,’ said John. ‘So I thought people would think I was nuts.’

Two things rule out the possibility of faking in this case: the family’s lack of motive for it and the substantial number of people who would have to be in on any plot. None of the people involved with the business stood to gain the slightest advantage from having Pete there and they all carefully avoided publicity. The incidents have happened over such a long period of time, and with such a variety of witnesses, that there can be no question of one person faking it all: the minimum number of people involved would have to be five or six, because events have occurred even when none of the four main family members was present. (Dr Fontana witnessed throwing while on his own in the workshop.)

Dr Fontana scrupulously investigated the possibility of underground water or vibrations from traffic or other physical events causing disturbance in the building. He went to the premises on numerous occasions, often unannounced, and never saw anything that made him suspect trickery. (Although Graham, John’s original partner, was a practical joker and was known at times to flick stones about when everything was otherwise quiet. Graham’s leaving the business did not end Pete’s activity, and there were plenty of times before that when things occurred and Graham was not present.)

The case was ideal for investigation because the activity has lasted a long time and the poltergeist has not been shy about performing in front of strangers.

‘The chances of getting another case as good as this are slim,’ said Dr Fontana. ‘It is the sheer volume of activity and the number of witnesses, many of whom I have tracked down and interviewed, that make it special. Poltergeists sometimes will not “perform” in front of anyone except the inhabitants of the house or building and investigators have to take a great deal on trust. That has been partly true with Pete. I have sometimes gone to the workshop when John has rung to say there was a lot of activity, only to find nothing happens while I am there. But I have also been able to witness actual phenomena and, on many occasions, I have seen the results of activity (for instance, the shop floor and counter covered in seed).

‘It is very time consuming investigating a case like this, but very rewarding. The amount of activity was so great that at times I had to guard against getting blasé – I’d find myself feeling bored with the stone-throwing games and wishing something else would happen. Yet I know that most investigators would be delighted to witness and take part in reciprocal stone throwing with a poltergeist.

‘I was also intrigued by my own reactions. When I was there, I would eliminate all possibilities of fraud or natural causes and would know that I was seeing genuine phenomena. But as soon as I was away from the premises and reflecting on what I had seen, I would find myself trying to reject the evidence of my own senses by coming up with all sorts of tortuous rationales for what was happening.’

The Cardiff case is still being monitored, and will probably become one of the Society for Psychical Research’s celebrated cases. One of the most unusual features about it is that, unlike most poltergeist cases, it is not centred on an adolescent or young person, nor are any of the main participants emotionally unstable. John Matthews points out that the highest peak of Pete’s activity coincided with his business going through a bad time: two very dry summers had reduced the need for lawnmowers, and consequent lawnmower repairs. But he and his relatives are equable people, old enough to have lived through other vagaries in their business life and uninclined to let problems get them down.

Another unusual feature is the reciprocal nature of the phenomena. At one time, it was possible to ask Pete to start throwing stones more or less at will. It was possible to ask not just for paper clips but for coloured paperclips and even to name the colour.

The word ‘poltergeist’ is German for noisy spirit (although the Germans themselves do not use the word, preferring ‘spuk’) and a noisy spirit is certainly present in the Cardiff case. Poltergeists and ghosts are generally regarded as different phenomena, although there are so many overlaps in the definitions of the two that it is not always possible to keep them apart. Classically, a ghost is an apparition which goes about its own business, regardless of whoever or whatever is around. Haunted houses, with their tales of headless knights, cowled monks and grey ladies, abound. The apparition can be seen, perhaps frequently, but it does not interact with those who see it.

A poltergeist, on the other hand, does interact. The Cardiff case is exceptional: most are not as intelligent or as responsive as Pete. But poltergeist cases always involve some attempt, however crude, to monopolize the attention of the living. Typical poltergeist activity includes rapping and making other noises, moving around ornaments and furniture, ‘bringing’ objects from other places. When small items are seen moving they often appear to travel as though being carried and, instead of losing height in a gradual trajectory, fall as though dropped. Although poltergeists rarely harm anyone, they can be destructive of property and they can pinch or push human beings. Some poltergeists produce water in unexplained pools, some seem to make objects hot to touch. There have been changes over the years. Before this century, cases did not involve switching on and off electric lights or causing electrical equipment to malfunction, and there are now more cases involving water, probably because today buildings are linked to the mains water supply. On the other hand there are fewer cases today of one of the poltergeists’ nastier habits, the daubing of excrement, possibly because there are far fewer cess pits around.

These two groups, ghosts and poltergeists, are separated by large grey areas which overlap, or fit into neither category. The Cardiff case involved an apparition and, in other ways, it was outside the norm for poltergeist cases. The most common reported paranormal incidents do not fit into the definition of either ghosts or poltergeists and deserve a category of their own: hauntings. Like ghosts, these are centred on a place not a person, but they do not involve an apparition. Their standard trademarks are raps, imitative noises, voices, luminous effects and the opening and closing of doors.

Despite the limitations of this arbitrary breakdown, most investigators believe it is easier, if not always completely accurate, to categorize phenomena in one of these three groups: ghosts, hauntings or poltergeists.

There is no shortage of material to categorize, although the numbers of properly attested and witnessed cases are not as great as might be expected. Poltergeists have probably come in for the most investigative attention, simply because they make their presence so powerfully felt and are so disruptive that their hosts seek help. Hauntings are not so threatening and many old inns, hotels and stately homes regard ghosts as attractions. Plenty of families cheerfully co-exist with them.

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.