Inside the Supernatural. Jean Ritchie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ