Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting Read Free

tasted sugar, and pulled a face when he tasted salt. When he pricked himself with a needle she winced, and when he held his hand above the flame of a lamp, she snatched hers away. When he placed a playing card in a book, she was able to hold it against her head, and say that it contained something with red spots on it. She even got the number right. (It was the five of diamonds.)
    So Barrett had proved beyond all doubt that human beings possess powers that science cannot understand. As a result of his studies of hypnotism, science began to take it seriously again. But his really great achievement was to suggest to various distinguished friends that they should form a society to study such mysteries as hypnotism, ghosts, and dowsing. The reason was simple: that since the mid-1840s (when Barrett was born), science had been confronted by a new and baffling problem an event that I sometimes like to call “the invasion of the spirit people.” This started on March 31, 1848, in a log-built house in Hydesville, New York, when the family of a farmer named John Fox realised they had an uninvited guest. The story will be found at the beginning of this book, so I shall not repeat it.
    The Fox case started a flood of psychic activity, so sudden and widespread that it might indeed be labelled “the invasion of the spirit people.” All over America, people discovered that if they held hands around a table in the dark, “spirits” would make rapping noises, and even lift the table. The new craze quickly crossed the Atlantic, and soon Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were trying it at Osborne, and the Tsar of Russia in St. Petersburg. While back in New York state, a new religion called Spiritualism was launched in 1851, and quickly spread all over the world.
    Scientists were disgusted and denounced it as a return to mediaeval superstition. And when some of their own number, like Sir William Crookes and Lord Rayleigh dared to investigate it, they were reviled as traitors to science. A few serious thinkers refused to be shamed into silence. These included William Barrett, who persuaded some of his friends—including the two Cambridge philosophers Henry Sidgwick and Frederic Myers—to join with him in launching a “Society for Psychical Research.” Soon they were joined by eminent Victorians like Gladstone, Tennyson and Ruskin. Even the author of Alice in Wonderland joined the new Society, soon known simply as the SPR, although Lewis Carroll thought the answer might lie in some unknown electrical force. But as hundreds of carefully checked accounts of hauntings poured in, it was soon obvious that he must be wrong, and that ghosts really existed.
    Even the humourist Mark Twain joined. Twain had once had a dream in which he saw his brother in a metal coffin with a red rose on his breast, and a week later saw him in the same metal coffin with a red rose after he had died in a steamboat explosion. Now he wanted to know if his brother might still be alive.
    In those early days, most level-headed people treated spirit phenomena as a new fad that would probably go away, exactly as the World War II
generation felt about the flying saucer craze that started in the late 1940s. However, it did not go away. Like the UFO phenomenon, it has kept on developing and changing. And today, a few parapsychologists are just beginning to see where it is all leading to, and finding it awesome. Briefly, it looks as if the “spirit people” are making the most determined effort so far to reduce the gap between their “dimension” and ours. Already, they have made some almost unbelievable advances—for example, how many people realise that on January 15, 1983, Radio Luxembourg broadcast a live programme in which the voices of the dead spoke through loudspeakers to a studio audience, and answered questions in clear, audible voices?
    The SPR also spent much of its time investigating people that Myers called “mediums,” who seemed to have a natural talent