Inside the Supernatural. Jean Ritchie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ