Paranormalia

The South Shields Poltergeist

I've always thought that the Enfield Poltergeist was one of the best attested. It's often discussed, being relatively recent and the subject of a full length book This House is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse. But here's a very recent case that is its equal in terms of persistent and extreme phenomena. It's described by paranormal investigators Mike Hallowell and Darren Ritson in their new book The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family's Fight Against an Invisible Intruder.

The case occurred over several months in a terraced house in South Shields, a coastal town in north east England.  It started in December 2005 with anomalous movements of furniture and objects, and the following June came to the attention of Hallowell and Ritson, who staged an investigation over a period of several months. The victims were a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and their three-year old son Robert.

Some typical incidents logged by the couple early on include the following:

21.4pm: We ... found two chairs had been stacked on top of one another on top of the table in the bedroom.

12.40pm: Bed, box and drawers were heard moving in [Robert's] bedroom] upstairs.

5.00pm. The chest of drawers [from Robert's room] was pulled out onto the landing on the top of the stairs and the large box full of stuff was moved from one bedroom to another.

5.10pm. While in the bedroom two toys were thrown at Marianne and Marc.

5.20pm: the door leading into the kitchen opened three times on its own..

Often investigators arrive after the disturbances have lost much of their force and don't see much happening. But that's not the case here. The authors were present during many of the disturbances, and photographed and filmed many of them. One particularly convincing incident was a plastic water bottle which one of them saw and photographed balancing diagonally on the table, a quite unnatural position.

Repressed emotion in living individuals is quite often thought to be responsible in cases of this kind, but the investigators soon rejected this. They had a strong sense of an independent entity wanting to stir up trouble.  In fact it soon became obvious that the poltergeist was trying to frighten the couple. Once they found their child's rocking horse hanging by one its reins from the loft hatch in the ceiling. In another particular sinister incident, a large toy bunny was found in a chair placed at the top of the stairs, holding a box cutter blade in one of its paws. The poltergeist also took to writing threatening messages on a doodle-board in the child's bedroom, and in the later stages sent text messages to Marianne's mobile phone, such as 'get you bitch' and 'You're Dead'.

As time wore on the phenomena intensified. Big red weals appeared suddenly on Marc's torso and vanished equally mysteriously, in front of several witnesses. The investigators watched cupboard doors swinging open, light-shades swinging, the quilt on the bed moving. The couple were seriously frightened when the child himself was moved. On the first occasion they found him lying on the floor tightly wrapped in his bed quilt, with a plastic table on top of him. The child himself seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were wide open, as if he was in a trance. Another time the child appeared to have vanished altogether, and was eventually found in a closet, tightly cocooned in a blanket.

In fact no real harm seems to have ever been done, but the couple were terrified, and the authors speculate the poltergeist was trying to create fear in order to generate emotion that it could feed from. They compare the case with the Amherst Incident of 1878 in Nova Scotia, where death threats to the occupants were found scratched on the walls.

What to make of it all? The case fits a classic pattern in many ways, and reads like a very detailed account of what we are long familiar with from other accounts. The investigators quickly eliminated any possibility of Marianne staging a hoax - she was obviously frightened, and in any case was not involved in phenomena they themselves witnessed. They were at first less sure about Marc, largely because he didn't seem to react very much to the incidents, and was the type who might have enjoyed playing pranks. But they were certain he could not have been responsible for incidents they witnessed themselves, and by the end of the investigation had totally abandoned any idea of fraud.

I'm certain this book will soon become a classic of its kind, a very full and detailed description of eye-witness testimony, that will be compared with the Enfield case (Playfair provides a short foreword) and the Columbus, Ohio case described by William Roll in Unleashed.  I'm not sure how much it will resonate with people who are not already convinced that such things do happen. I  would personally like to have seen more independent corroboration of the kind that one often gets in other cases - from reporters, police officers, social workers etc. It's true there are 15 or so statements from other eyewitnesses, but most of these are from paranormal investigators who the authors invited to the house, and only witnessed one set of phenomena. The quantity and quality of eyewitness testimony can count for as much as of the phenomena itself.

On the other hand it might not have been in the couple's best interests to involve other people. And it's good to see such a rich episode being written up so fully and so readably. As a recent in-depth description of a puzzling phenomenon the book has few rivals, and will be an important addition to the literature.

The Andover Poltergeist

Here's a familiar story. Two young girls are in bed one night when they hear a curious tapping noise coming from somewhere in the room. This happens on several consecutive nights. It seems to emanate from the wall, and they think at first it must be coming from the house next door. But then, weirdly, they realize that the noise is responding to them, even when they are whispering so quietly that no one outside the room could possibly hear. They find they can communicate with it, by asking questions and getting it to knock once for yes, two for no, and three for don't know. For more complex queries it will rap out the letter of the alphabet (five knocks for E, 13 for M, etc). The whole family soon gets involved, and gather nightly to ask the unseen entity about itself and get it to answer questions about themselves, which it often does correctly.  The house is soon filled with neighbours, local clergy, police, mediums and investigators, all coming to wonder at the phenomenon and try to figure out what's causing it.

The strange story of the Fox sisters is usually the first thing that you read about in any general book about spiritualism and the paranormal. You may go on to hear that that having established they could communicate through raps the spirits later came through  at séances, launching the cult of spiritualism that quickly swept the developed world. If it's a debunking book the mystery will then be revealed: towards the end of their lives the girls admitted it was a prank played on their parents, first by bumping apples tied to string on the floor, and then by manipulating their toes and joints to create the rapping noises. This segues naturally into reflections about the gullibility of the superstitious masses, and their reprehensible failure to accept it was all a trick.

Either way, the impression most of these books leave you with is that the Fox incident was a one-off. But of course this tale of raps and codes and spooky communications is widely reported. It's not exactly common, but it's so distinctive, and often reported in such detail, as to create the appearance of a phenomenon in its own right. When Tony Cornell and Alan Gauld tabulated 500 documented poltergeist-type cases back in the late 1970s they found that around half involved exactly this kind of rapping noises, often described as knocks, thumps, thuds, bangings and suchlike, for which no cause can be found. They say 16% involve communication, of which presumably the majority involve this method. [Poltergeists, pp. 224-40]

The case I mentioned earlier is actually not the Fox sisters, but concerns the Andrews family in Andover, Hampshire, in 1974. It was investigated by Barrie G. Colvin, who says he was prevented by the family from publishing more than an outline at the time. Ten years later they were still unwilling to have it publicised but now that more than 30 years have elapsed, and the family has moved from the area, there is no longer an issue about this, and he has written it up in the latest SPR Journal, using pseudonyms.

Colvin seems to have been quite through, paying a total of nine visits over a ten-week period. As well as interviewing the family about the origins of the case he had plenty of opportunity to hear the raps himself and establish that they were not the result of trickery or other visible cause.  The focus seems to have been Theresa, the younger of the two girls aged 12. Colvin also established to his own satisfaction that the source had intelligence of a sort, calling itself Eric Waters, although it does not seem to have provided any coherent information beyond that. At one point a medium claimed the noises were being made by a young boy whose body was buried under the floorboards; nothing more is mentioned about this, and subsequent investigations failed to turn up anyone of that name who had lived in the area. 

Colvin did attempt a small experiment, persuading 'Eric' to transfer the noises from the wall of the room to the headboard of Theresa's bed. As follows:

[Mrs Andrews] then said: "Eric, please try to knock on the headboard." This was followed by a very soft tap which was heard by us all. I was at that moment standing very close indeed to the headboard, with my ear about 15 cm from it. As Mrs Andrews repeated the request, I put my hand on the headboard to see whether I could feel any sensation. Eric rapped progressively louder on the headboard and I could clearly feel the vibration.

It's interesting how often vibrations in the bed headboard feature in poltergeist literature. This is just one example, from the 1960 case in Sauchi in Scotland:

On entering at the front door he heard loud knockings in progress. Going upstairs he found Virginia awake, but not greatly excited, in the double bed... The loud knocking noise continued and appeared to emanate from the bed-head. Mr. Lund moved Virginia down in to the bed so that she could not strike or push the bed-head with her head, and he also verified that her feet were well tucked in under the bed-clothes, and held in by them. The knocking continued. During the knocking Mr. Lund held the bed-head. He felt it vibrating in unison with the noises. [A.R.G. Owen (1964) Can We Explain The Poltergeist?, pp. 148-9.]

The responsiveness is less common, but is still widely reported. Perhaps the best known case of the kind is reported by William Barrett, investigating a case in a farmhouse in Derrygonnelly in 1877:

To avoid any error or delusion on my part, I put my hands in the side pockets of my overcoat and asked it to knock the number of fingers I had open. It correctly did so. Then with a different number of fingers open each time, the experiment was repeated four times in succession, and four times I obtained absolutely the correct number of raps ['Poltergeists Old and New', SPR Proceedings 25, 1911, pp. 377-412]

The Andrews family seem to have been rather ambivalent about the case, enjoying the novelty of communicating with an unseen entity, but becoming frightened when the taps and raps turned into loud bangings, especially when they went on for hours and deprived them of sleep. By Colvin's last visit it seemed to have faded out, however. While the family treated Eric has a deceased spirit, Colvin's view is that no discarnate entity was involved, and that the case fits the pattern of repressed emotion in the living, although there was no outward sign of this, the family being apparently happy and stable. 

Of course none of this would convince a sceptic: it's hard to share an investigator's conviction of the paranormality of an event without copious reassurances, diagrams, descriptions, signed statements by witnesses with impeccable rationalist credentials, and so on, and probably not even then. But my understanding is that sceptics actually never get that close to the phenomenon, in real life or even in books.  If you look at the debunking literature you will quickly find that there are two main sources: James Randi's article on the Columbus, Ohio case of 1984 and a clutch of cases mentioned by another debunking magician Milbourne Christopher in his book Seers, Psychics and ESP (1970). Neither of the magicians witnessed anything (the families concerned would not let them into the house) and in any case they do not really involve this rapping phenomenon.

I'd be interested to know if debunkers like Joe Nickell who rely on these two sources to such an extent have any sensible ideas about this, beyond insisting that the teenagers are playing tricks, and that everyone else is too dim-witted to notice. Considering how insistent they are that the Fox sisters case was a hoax, and the mileage they get from it, it's a contribution they should be encouraged to make.

The Ghost of Peterlee

Durham Council has paid an exorcist to get rid of a poltergeist. The spook had been causing trouble in a council house in Peterlee: the occupants, 23-year old Sabrina Fallon and her husband Martin, reported 'bangings' in the loft, followed by other strange happenings: doors slamming shut, the ghost of a little girl on the landing and her own dressing gown 'floating down the stairs'.

A local psychic was rung up, diagnosed an angry male named Peter who wanted to possess the couple's 16-month old daughter, and later carried out an exorcism. It seemed to do the trick: peace has returned, the Fallons say. Apparently the council later told them that 50 years ago an occupant of the house hanged himself after killing his wife.

I wonder if someone's going to make something out of this. There has been a notable lack of public outcry so far, probably because it only cost the council £60. You can't fault its reasoning - if it does the job, then why not, and it would have cost far more to rehouse the couple. There have been a few readers' complaints about wasting taxpayers money, along with other comments like this: 'if i was a ghost i wouldnt haunt a dilapidated council house i would go for a statly home'. But no one so far seems too upset, probably because of the paltriness of the sum involved.

Sceptics will blame the couple's overactive imagination (Richard Dawkins recommends that such 'disturbed' people should be 'packed off to a good psychiatrist' -  Unweaving the Rainbow, p. 129). But it's curious how many documented cases of this kind describe 'bangings', also referred to as 'raps' and 'knockings', for which there is seldom any explanation, and which even seem sometimes to have an intelligent source.  (Poltergeists by investigators Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell gives a good idea of the scale of the phenomenon.)

As always, I'm fascinated by an occurrence that everyone involved - the family, the local authorities, the psychic, and, I guess, a large part of the public - accept as what it appears to be, the anguish of a discarnate human, but which science says can't and didn't happen.