Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting Read Free Page A

for seeing “spirits” and talking to them. Most mediums had “guides,” or people who were already dead, and who came from cultures that took the existence of spirits for granted; many of these said they had been shamans or priests while they were alive, and seemed quite comfortable moving freely between two worlds. What was needed, obviously, was some way of proving beyond all doubt that people survived their deaths. Which is why many members of the SPR swore that when they died, they would come back and demonstrate they were still alive.
    One of the most determined of these was Frederic Myers, who handed Sir Oliver Lodge a message in a sealed envelope, with instructions not to open it until some medium gave him a message from a spirit who identified himself as Myers. This happened not long after Myers’ death in 1901, when a medium passed on a message saying that the envelope contained a comment about Plato’s remark that love conquers death. Lodge quickly opened the envelope, and was disappointed to find no reference to Plato, only to a house called Hallstead in the Lake District. Then he remembered that Myers had written a little book about his cousin Annie, with whom he was in love, and who had lived in Hallstead before she committed suicide by drowning. And the book indeed proved to contain the quotation from Plato.
    That seemed conclusive, and Myers or the spirit who called himself Myers went on to engage in one of the most complex and ambitious projects in the history of psychical research. He, and several dead friends, gave various messages to mediums, none of which made sense on their own, but which had to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. The final result of this attempt known as the “Cross Correspondences” is highly impressive, but also highly complicated and relentlessly highbrow. For example, one set of messages referred to tombs of two members of the Medici family in the church of San Lorenzo, in Florence, which Myers knew well, and to the Michelangelo sculptures on them. There are obscure bits of Medici family history, all communicated through half a dozen mediums who did not even know one another, and the messages included bits in Greek, Latin, and Italian. As a proof of life after death it is overwhelming, but (it must be admitted) far too elaborate to convince anybody who does not have time to read the great fat book about it.
    In the early days of the SPR, it was quickly noticed that some people can see a ghost while others in the same room see nothing. Even odder, some people can both see and hear a ghost, while others can only see it. It is as if people “tune in” to a ghost just as you would tune in to a television station. Well, if your television set has no sound, you call in an engineer. Obviously, what was needed in psychical research was an engineer who could understand the problems of communication between two different dimensions.
    Such a person—the first of many—finally appeared in 1959. One June day, a Swedish birdwatcher named Friedrich Jurgenson recorded the voice of a chaffinch in his garden, and when he played it back, he was startled to hear his dead mother’s voice calling out his pet name “Friedel.” And soon he was recording the voices of many dead friends and relatives on tape by leaving the recorder switched on in an empty room. He labelled this the “electronic voice phenomenon,” or EVP for short. The voices were fragmentary and the messages brief, as if the communicators were having problems getting through.
    Soon after, a Latvian psychologist named Konstantin Raudive read Jurgenson’s book Voices from Space , and began his own experiments. He and Jurgenson began to collaborate, and when Raudive wrote a book called Breakthrough , the “electronic voice phenomenon” became a sensation that was soon discussed all over the world. It looked as if the “spirit people” had were trying out new methods of communication.
    It was in America that the great