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

breakthrough came. George Meek was a businessman who had made his fortune from air-conditioning systems. At the age of forty, he began to find that business success was leaving him oddly unsatisfied. He fought off severe depression by taking an interest in psychic phenomena. This made him decide that as soon as he was sixty (in 1970), he would give up business and devote himself to studying psychic mysteries. And when he heard about the electronic voice phenomenon, he set up a communication network of electronic experts all over the world
    One of these was a radio engineer named Bill O’Neil, who was also a gifted healer. He had been trying to develop a radio device to help deaf mutes to “hear.” And one day as he was tinkering with some unusual wavelengths, he was alarmed when a vague shape began to appear in a corner of his workshop, and a voice introduced itself as Doctor Nick. The doctor, it seemed, had been another radio enthusiast, and soon his shadowy form was appearing regularly and advising O’Neil about building a radio that would pick up voices of the dead. He was able to materialise, he explained, by taking advantage of the fact that O’Neil was a natural medium.
    Soon Bill O’Neil had a second visitor. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to face a distinguished, well-dressed man who introduced himself as George Mueller, a professor who had worked for NASA, and died in 1967. Now, he looked like a normal human being, and told O’Neil he was willing to help him construct a radio through which the dead could communicate direct with the living. He called it Spiricom. O’Neil lost no time in phoning Meek, and Meek checked Mueller’s credentials and found them genuine. Mueller had been an associate professor of engineering and mathematics in California.
    For three years, O’Neil and Professor Mueller worked on their invention. And on September 22, 1980, Mueller’s voice suddenly came out of the radio, and O’Neil recorded their conversation. At last, a dead person was talking direct to a living person. George Meek’s dream had finally come true. This breakthrough was announced to the world in April 1982 in Washington. A roomful of journalists listened to the tapes of Mueller and O’Neill, and were told that Meek was not going to patent Spiricom, but would allow anyone to build it.
    In fact, others were already working on a radio for communicating with the dead, and developing their own version of Spiricom. One amazing result was that incredible broadcast of January 15, 1983, when Radio Luxembourg transmitted a programme in which spirit voices talked live on the radio to members of a studio audience and answered questions. The communication device had been built by an inventor named Otto Knig. True, the result was not exactly brilliant radio entertainment—the spirits obviously felt rather awkward about this new experience, and made stilted comments like “We hear your voice,” and “Otto Knig makes wireless with the dead.” But it was all loud and clear, not fragmentary and half-inaudible, like Raudive’s voices.
    Ever since that amazing day, scientists have been working on new ways of connecting the two worlds electronically. A few days after George Meek’s wife died in 1990, he received an e-mail from her which, she told him, was being forwarded with the aid of a group of dead scientists who called themselves Timestream; it even contained a photograph of her in her new environment a landscape of mountains behind a lake. She told him she missed him and was looking forward to seeing him again, but emphasised that there was no hurry. Meek died nine years later, aged 89.
    The next step, according to Timestream communicators, will be an attempt to create a television link between the two worlds. There seems to be no reason why not, since the difference between a radio link and a television link is only one of complexity. Meanwhile, other extraordinary developments seem to emphasise that the