Ghosts!

Are they born of hallucination or hoax--or is life after life an authentic manifestation beyond our ken?

Surely Nothing in the history of the human race predates man's fear of--and fascination with--the supernatural, the most frightful element of which is no doubt the ghosts of the departed. According to Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, perhaps the most perceptive study ever made of primitive myths and magic, the fear of dead foe and friend is, "on the whole, I believe ... the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion." And old fears die hard.

Today, ghosts and hauntings are not as fearsome and forcible as they were in ancient times, but they have become chic; they're what's happening. Once-suspect societies for psychical research are spreading like forest fires; progressive universities are downright sympathetic to long-scorned paranormal laboratories; and ghost hunters are multiplying like hamsters. Cambridge offers a studentship in psychical studies and the current president of the American Society for Psychical Research is a highly regarded psychologist at the Menninger Clinic. For the first time in its history, the University of California this spring is offering an extension course in parapsychology: Old Myths and New Science, an Overview of Psychic Phenomena. Also, thanks in large part to the persuasion of Dr. Margaret Mead, the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science recently recognized parapsychology as an accredited science and acceptable for affiliation.

Ghosts are status symbols for the "now" generation. Poltergeists--or boisterous ghosts--are plentiful; and exorcisms--or ghost banishings--are as common as weeds. Word has leaked out of Parker Brothers' headquarters in--no kidding--Salem, Massachusetts, that ouija boards are outselling Monopoly sets for the first time since the latter hit the market in 1935. Haunted houses hardly constitute the latest wrinkle, but they are as much in vogue as nudity and Norfolk jackets. Tourist agencies in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland--countries that once claimed a corner on the ghost market--report that visitors, "particularly Americans, want most to go to castles with ghosts in them." Nowadays, ghosts give a castle a cachet of style, where formerly they lent merely terror or enchantment. And the late Bishop James Pike's belief that he had penetrated the veil that obscures the divine mystery to communicate with his dead son sent students of psychic phenomena into paroxysms of hope and righteousness. As Northwestern University's Bergen Evans dryly remarks: "Ghosts are good for half a newspaper column any day the rapists are resting."

Behind this burgeoning interest in the complex business of spirit life is not derangement or schizophrenia but man's bent to explore the unknown, to probe Pascal's "eternal silence of these infinite spaces" that terrifies as it titillates. Beyond that--and setting itself apart from all other great quests--is the perennial yearning for some palpable proof of a life beyond death, or, more appropriately, a life beyond life.

To the horror of natural science and many high churchmen, and to the awe of those pining to recapture contact with their lost loved ones, Bishop Pike felt that a "modest leap of faith" is sufficient for "an affirmation that there is continuity with people who have passed on." This was heady stuff, if not downright revolutionary, considering the stature of the source; thus, what psychic researcher William James called "the will to believe" and Coleridge named "that willing suspension of disbelief" appears for many to have mutated into belief itself. And even doubters no longer inevitably break into that involuntary chortle or twitch foolishly when the word ghost is uttered. All who would invalidate the bishop's séance still have to stomach the subjective truth of an abiding fear: that they are, in the last analysis, desolatingly alone and, thus, as Max Lerner puts it, "desperately need this assurance that somehow they can bridge the gulf that separates them from their [living] sons and communicate with them across a gulf. What counts is not so much that it is a way of communicating with the silent dead but that it is a way of healing the living." Ghosts, then, have become as modern as a moon landing--and perhaps even more relevant to real life.

But what on earth is a ghost, if, indeed, it is on earth at all? And why does it haunt? Your ordinary garden variety of ghost is the apparition of any person who has, in psychic parlance, passed over. To believers, ghosts are variously seen or felt or heard. In the old days, you could spot them because they smelled "sulphurious," Sir Thomas Browne said. Nowadays, ghosts are identified, contacted and explained by more scientific means, though science still gives them short shrift.

Generally, a ghost haunts a habitat in which, as a living being, it was unhappy or in which it died in some traumatic way. It works at night and never casts a shadow. It haunts, dreamlike and harmlessly, because it seeks a redress of earthly grievances, or out of a queer urge to re-enact some mortal crisis or sorrow, or because of some unfinished business, usually bitter. Unlike the ghosts of folklore (demons, evil spirits, harbingers of doom) and of fiction (Oscar Wilde's cheerful The Canterville Ghost, Henry James's malevolent The Turn of the Screw), your garden-variety ghost is a sad, sad shade. "Ghosts are people, or parts of people, and thus governed by emotional stimuli," says the most intrepid of modern ghost chasers, Vienna-born Hans Holzer. "They do not perform, like trained circus animals, just to please a group of skeptics or sensation seekers. One should remember that an apparition is really a re-enactment of an earlier emotional experience and rather a personal matter. A sympathetic visitor would encourage it, a hostile onlooker inhibit it."

As maladjusted people who have died, ghosts are regularly "psychoanalyzed" by the sympathetic Herr Holzer until they come to terms with themselves and go away. "Haunted by unhappy memories," says Holzer, "they are incapable of escaping by themselves from the vicious net of emotional entanglements. They don't even realize they are dead. They rattle door handles and brush curtains to make the living take notice of them because they are very insecure." Thus, a typical Holzer exorcism, according to one firsthand observer of the ritual, "explains the fear of the living, sympathizes with the dead and persuades them to go wherever the dead go."

The late Shirley Jackson, whose book The Haunting of Hill House stands as one of the best ghost stories of modern times, felt that no physical danger per se is created by the presence of ghosts: "No ghost in all the long histories of ghosts has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself. One cannot even say that the ghost attacks the mind, because the mind, the conscious, thinking mind, is invulnerable; in all our conscious minds there is not one iota of belief in ghosts.... No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense." Miss Jackson felt we either yield to supernatural forces or fight them--never meeting them halfway--with what she called "the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns," i.e., logic abandoned.

Britain's eminent psychic researcher G. N. M. Tyrrell believes that a ghost is created by telepathic cooperation between the mind of the living "percipient" and the surviving mind of the dead "agent." The perfect apparition, he says, perfectly imitates a human being. "Each of its features rests on solid evidence; but they are not all to be found in any actual single case, although there are cases with a good many of them." In a few cases, he points out, people have been able to touch and feel a postmortem apparition, but usually it avoids physical contact, just as it does light, vanishing without a trace.

Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, who collaborated to form Britain's Society for Psychical Research in 1882, took a middle position: claiming that apparitions of the dead are mind particles or telepathic messages, all right, but that they are transmitted by the agent at the point of death and have somehow been delayed. Thus, their ghosts cannot prove life after death. William James explained ghosts as "objective hallucinations caused by the invisible [unconscious] segments of our minds being acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives." He believed this contact could be effected by the mental-telepathy powers of a good medium.

At the debunking end of the scale, psychologist Joseph Jastrow includes ghosts in "a grotesquerie of deluded prepossession, a weakly rationalized, mainly self-hallucinated projection of fancy presented as facts." And to Bergen Evans, ghost talk is just pernicious twaddle and ghost hunters "an august group of Magi" who live by Saint Augustine's dictim, "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd").

In 1919, Sigmund Freud psychoanalyzed the West's preoccupation with the occult and concluded: "It would seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has traversed it without preserving certain traces of it which can be reactivated, and that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfills the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression." Thus, ghosts are primordial "memory images," as vestigial as the grin on Alice's Cheshire cat. Carl Jung went him one better, or at least farther, by saying that these uncanny elements are not vestigial at all but throbbingly alive and kicking in the mind's very real if shady underside, the unconscious. Jung's classic doctoral thesis of 1899, The Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena, came out of his work with his cousin, a young spiritualist girl medium in whose séances Jung's grandfather appeared to be one of the spirit guides. After several telepathic messages and clairvoyant experiences, Jung became something of his own medium, adopting Philemon, servant of the gods in Greek mythology, as his spirit guide, with whom he carried on conversation, just as Socrates did with his daimon and Cromwell with his personal devil.

The most exhaustive modern survey of the psychology of ghosts was made by the Park Avenue psychoanalyst and psychic detective, Nandor Fodor, who concluded boldly, if still inconclusively: "The ghost is a vision or illusion; whether in dream, hypnotic sleep, trance, drug-induced state or religious ecstasy, it is actually perceived. It may be an image of the imagination, a hallucination, projection of repressed mental contents, wish or fear fulfillment, evidence of bad conscience or disorder of the mind; but it may well be something beyond all this: an apparition of the living asleep or of the dead, a telepathic perception, a vision of something in the past or in the future, and it may be a happening beyond present understanding."

The uninitiated tend to think of ghosts not only as so much balderdash but as boring--like ice shows and Doris Day movies; if you've seen them all, you've seen one. Not so. There are as many kinds of ghosts as there are animals and people and things; and for the very reason that they often seem so human, so much of this earth, they are fun, fascinating and troublesome. There are ghosts of the living as well as ghosts of the dead, angel ghosts, demon ghosts, ghost ships, stay-at-home ghosts and what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "journeying ghosts." There are family ghosts and witch ghosts, nun ghosts, monk ghosts, ghost horses (usually headless and English), animistic ghosts, mongoose ghosts and oversexed ghosts (the incubus and succubus), such as the one that inspired the verse:

A man from Exham made love toa ghost.

In the midst of a spasm.

The pure ectoplasm

Said I could feel it almost.

Ectoplasm is the emanation from a medium that may assume the outer forms of the spirit contacted or produce motion in objects without physical contact. Slightly luminous, it is extruded, usually in the dark, from any orifice of the body, mostly the genitalia, of a materialization medium. Bergen Evans dismisses it as "a sort of etherealized bubble gum"; and Bea Lillie recalls that her sister was once ejected from London's Albert Hall for seizing a medium's ectoplasm and pronouncing it "regurgitated cheesecloth."

Because ghosts and hauntings resist scientific documentation, it is supremely difficult to separate the spirits of myth, folklore and fantasy from the "real" things; i.e., all those ghostly phenomena that have been observed and more or less documented, if not explained, by solid sources. "The concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden--perhaps sacred," said Shirley Jackson, "is as old as the mind of man.... It might not be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad." Leviticus describes certain houses as leprous, and Homer called the underworld "aidao domos," the "House of Hades." Mesopotamian clay tablets are glutted with ghost lists, detailing their physical descriptions, the localities of their hauntings and reasons for return. In The Odyssey, shades were doomed to a shadowy existence in the underworld unless fortified with a cup of blood. Improper burial was, and still is in some societies, a good reason for haunting the living. In The Iliad, Patroclus' ghost visits Achilles to complain of being unburied. Spirits of the underworld were actually worshiped in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, but more salient was the ghostly invasion of the mists and moors of the north. "The deep mysticism of the Celtic and Teutonic peoples," write Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser, "prepared a fertile ground for the seeds planted centuries later by the overwrought imaginations of the Middle Ages. It was then, in truth, that all the elements--fire, water, earth and air--were populated with as grisly a crew as the mind of man ever conceived."

Yet so potent were the supernatural powers that they were not even lost to the light of the Renaissance, when audiences thrilled to the noble ghost of Hamlet's daddy and screamed at the blood-soaked shades of Macbeth, all fraught with psychological baggage. In 1764, Horace Walpole wrote his Gothic-romance masterpiece, The Castle of Otranto, which marks the real birth of the horror story and loosed an avalanche of spooky copycats. While the old fears lived on and ghostly visitations continued as forcibly as ever in life, literary tales of terror and the supernatural did not--with the notable exceptions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818 and Charles Nodier's Le Vampire in 1820. Late 18th and early 19th Century audiences were surfeited, and it took the dark genius of Edgar Allan Poe to bring ghoulies and ghosties to modern literature in the 1840s.

In stories such as Poe's and Hawthorne's, America proved that she could scare and enchant with the best of them. Douglas Hill and Pat Williams, who have clinically compiled an immense mass of evidence that unseen energies operate beyond the reach of nature as we understand it, recount the quaint and curious tale of one Dr. Harris, a member of Hawthorne's Boston club. In life, as tradition dictated, neither spoke to the other in the reading room, which they shared in close proximity. After a trip, Hawthorne sat down beside Harris, as usual, only to learn later in the day that the good doctor had died and been buried in his absence. But Hawthorne continued to see Harris in his accustomed place and noticed nothing unusual about his appearance. Finally, the ghost departed, "and Hawthorne always regretted that he had not spoken to it, or even touched it. But, he felt, how could he? They had never been properly introduced."

The most famous ghosts, however, are peculiarly drawn to the British Isles, generally spurning Spain and France, where with the appearance of a ghost one merely calls the police. Most are family or "destiny" ghosts, who glom onto a single household or locale. So far as anyone knows, no family ghost has ever been laid to rest, which is unfortunate, for their presence usually presages death or misfortune. Some are extremely loyal, like the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn or Hag of the Dribble, found in Wales; and the banshee, or Woman of the Fairies, found in Ireland. Unlike the Hag, which never leaves home, banshees faithfully accompany the families to which they are attached, wherever they may go. A banshee, according to one source, is really "a disembodied soul, that of one who in life was strongly attached to the family or who had good reason to hate all its members." Family ghosts manifest their presence by a peculiar ticking sound--which skeptics attribute to the timber-boring beetle--or by ghostly illuminations, as well as by the guttering of a candle, suggestive of a shroud. The Welsh call it corpse candle. "Skeptics will say this phenomenon is due to a draft," says Irish ghost historian Elliott O'Donnell, "but I have seen it occur where there was no draft, and known it to be the precursor of a death in the family of certain of those who witnessed it."

Some ghosts announce themselves with animal noises and presences--the hooting of the tawny owl, the shrill of the death's-head moth or the fluttering of a bird against a window, like the corpse bird in Wales or the robin in the north of England. In Durham earlier this century, one was even known to have served a noble purpose: An elderly miner named Bill Brown had a pretty young wife who, unknown to him, was having an affair with the baker. One morning, as the miner lay ill in bed and the wife sat by his side, trying to unfasten knots in a piece of cord, a robin tapped on the window. "I am going to die," said Bill Brown. "That robin is a ghost bird. It always taps at a window before the death of any of my family. My brother and I heard it before my father died and we heard it again just before the death of one of my sisters." Mrs. Brown fainted, but she recovered in time to run off with her lover the next day. But Bill Brown was wrong. The warning was not for him at all but for his only surviving sister, who died suddenly that same day. Some years later, the miner's wife, on her deathbed, confessed that she had meant to strangle her husband with the piece of cord that she was preparing when the ghost bird felled her.

In Scotland, the best-known ghost is the Drummer of the Airlies, the Earl of Airlie's handsome young hired musician, who made love to his wife and was, alas, caught. The earl had him packed into his drum and hurled from the highest turret of Cortachy Castle, traditional seat of the Airlie earls. According to the family, the drummer's ghost still haunts the place and drums away horrendously just before the death of any of the Airlies.

But no ghosts are quite as famous as the ghosts of London, which frequently has epidemics of hauntings, especially in its misty parks. "I know from experience," says Elliott O'Donnell, "that they are all at times badly haunted." One of the more recent ghosts in St. James's and Green parks, not counting the famous headless woman, who still manifests herself from time to time, is a man in evening clothes, said to be the earthbound spirit of someone who shot or poisoned himself on a park bench around 1900. Anne Boleyn still haunts the Tower of London, where her illumination--a bluish-white light--is seen in the chapel where she prayed for her head and lost. Her topless apparition is also seen near the chopping block, possibly because she seeks a reversal of what appear to have been trumped-up charges against her. And the house in Berkeley Square that inspired Bulwer-Lytton's famous ghost story, The Haunters and the Haunted, actually contained, according to Mayfair magazine, "at least one room of which the atmosphere is supernaturally fatal to body and mind alike. A girl saw, heard and felt such horror in it that she went mad and never recovered sanity enough to tell how and why. A gentleman disbeliever in ghosts dared to sleep in it and was found a corpse in the middle of the floor, after frantically ringing for help in vain. Other cases all ended in death, madness or both. The very walls of the house, when touched, are found saturated with electric horror."

The most recent full-scale exploration of England's haunts was NBC's documentary The Stately Ghosts of England, for which a 15-man crew tried to photograph ghosts in "living" color under the guidance of Tom Corbett, Britain's "society clairvoyant," whose crystal ball is insured with Lloyd's of London, and Miss Margaret Rutherford, who made it clear that she had no intention of mocking ghosts. "She told us she didn't want to do anything to offend them," said producer-director Frank DeFelitta, who did not believe in ghosts at the outset. "She herself is a medium and very much believes in them."

According to DeFelitta, the camera crew was dogged by the inexplicable from the beginning: "We wanted to film the clock in the great hall at Longleat striking midnight--the witching hour. We had our cameras ready and waiting--and every clock in the house struck 12 except the one we were trying to film." Shortly after the sound man uttered an anti-clock oath, he was injured in an automobile accident. A cameraman entered the haunted third story, only to lose his hearing entirely--until he departed in horror. Whole reels of exposed film revealed only "greenish-black fog"; film disappeared for no rational reason and phones went dead. A 500-pound flood lamp moved out of a bedroom ostensibly under its own steam, down a hall and crashed down a deep stair well, barely missing a technician. The camera itself was a focal point for trouble that could not be explained, says psychic sleuth Pauline Saltzman: "It seemed that someone, or something, was deliberately plugging the lens. It should be emphasized that the camera was hidden." Corbett is convinced the "ghosts were watching. In fact, they were so curious they were probably peering into the lens." But after DeFelitta openly and humbly begged the ghosts for permission to get on with the show, everything went swimmingly.

The major news event of the show was the filmed "piece of light" that showed first from a crack in a door, then moved deliberately down the haunted corridor and disappeared into another room. Corbett calls it "the beginning of a manifestation." Miss Rutherford feels the light was definitely of "an ectoplasmic nature." The lighting technician insists there was no possibility of any outside light beams, since there were no windows in the hall and all doors had been closed all night.

In 1928, the Daily Express reported the sighting of a Cistercian monk at Beaulieu, near Southampton, where no monks had been seen since 1536, when they lived, worked, chanted celestially and buried their own dead there. The monk ghost ordered an unidentified woman to dig in a certain spot to unearth a coffer containing "two round stones and some bones." She dug and found them; even Conan Doyle went out to take a look. Today, when death is imminent on the estate, the monk phantoms still chant; and the Right Honorable Mrs. Lady Varley, sister to Lord Montague, Baron of Beaulieu, not only claims to have seen and heard them but she plays their melody on the piano. The only ghostly phenomenon that manifested itself for Miss Rutherford there was the strong smell of "lovely old incense," but tourists, unaware of the Beaulieu hauntings, have written to Lord Montague, telling him how much they enjoyed their tour of the place, "especially the singing."

The pragmatic Continent is not entirely without its own ghosts. The metaphysical-minded Dante noticed that he, unlike the spirits of the dead, cast a shadow, but that Virgil, his guide through hell and purgatory, did not. The Borgias complained that they were more haunted than haunting. The famous "luminous woman of Pirano" in northern Italy glowed at night while doctors came from all over to study the bluish-white light that emanated from her chest and threw no shadow. Many feel the mysterious voices of Joan of Arc were the voices of post-mortem persons. Napoleon, incarcerated at St. Helena, spoke of seeing the ghost of Josephine, who warned him of impending doom. The Bourbons, too, were a much-haunted family: Henry IV kept in fairly regular touch with ghosts, but his favorite phenomenon was the incessant appearance of human blood on his crap table, just days prior to the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew Day. For seven days after the massacre, Charles IX and several courtiers reported hearing unearthly groans from a flock of ravens on the roof of the Louvre, always at the same hour. Between 1911 and 1920, researchers descended on the Abbé Vacheré to see a picture that was constantly found covered with human blood. And the "Angel of Mons" appeared to many Allied soldiers in Belgian trenches in World War One.

Normandy, easily the most ghost-ridden of the French provinces, is reputedly haunted by phantom lights, like the corpse candles in Wales, foretelling disaster. In the mining districts, white hares like those in Cornwall are the harbingers of death; and in Brittany, the ghost voices of the sea, like the legend of the Lorelei, foretell future drownings.

It is from Germany that we get the word poltergeist, literally "racketing ghost," who is clearly at the bottom of the social scale of the supernatural. But for all his caste lowliness, the poltergeist gets into the very best homes, is the most active, the most mischievous, most cunning, most human, best researched, most credible and, therefore, the most interesting of all ghostly manifestations. He is an unseen imp of a ghost that causes crockery to fly across kitchens, stones to fall from ceilings, bedclothes--and beds, too--to take off into the night, doors and windows to open, to unlock and to break, objects to disappear, temperatures to plummet (even as objects heat up), fires to break out mysteriously, footsteps to fall in the dark, blood to appear on carpets, water to boil without fire, writing to appear on walls, bells to ring, articles to rattle and things to go bump in the night as well as during the day.

So earthbound are poltergeists that they prompted Sir Sacheverell Sitwell to suggest that they are somehow connected with the unconscious self; most parapsychologists tend to agree. The majority of nonfraudulent poltergeist cases have been connected with a house containing at least one child, often a pubescent girl, who is believed to extrude repressed sexual energy that is mysteriously externalized beyond the limits of the body, producing telekinesis. In 1955, on the other hand, psychical researcher G. W. Lambert theorized rather ruefully that poltergeist disturbances were only the effects of tidal patterns, subterranean rivers, slight earth tremors and physical phenomena as pedestrian as squirrels and termites. In any event, poltergeist cases are rarely dismissed as trickery.

Folklore and myth are loaded with poltergeists--such as the shirt of Nessus that killed Hercules. The earliest recorded true-life poltergeist phenomenon occurred in 355 A.D. at Bingen-am-Rhein, when stones were thrown, people were dumped out of bed and "terrific blows" hit a private home without any known natural cause. Surely the most famous of the premodern poltergeist cases is the 18th Century haunting of Epworth Rectory, which John Wesley, founder of Methodism, believed had something to do with a quarrel between his parents long before the mysterious "gobblings like a turkey cock" and violent knockings during prayers. But since Wesley's poltergeist predates psychical research, the evidence has been skimpy and hauntings like his remain largely in doubt today.

In America, poltergeist activity flourished in the 17th Century and peaked in the 19th. In 1679, Increase Mather, the pious father of pious Cotton, wrote of the psychic disturbances in William Morse's Newbury home, which culminated in the Salem pandemonium of 1692: "The boy seems to have developed symptoms of acute hysteria. He was pinched and beaten; his tongue hung out of his mouth; he was thrown into the fire; he made, for a long time together, a noise like a dog and like a hen with her chickens. He began eating ashes." These phenomena, too, remain largely unexplained.

History's most celebrated ghost hunter, the late Harry Price, called Borley Rectory in Suffolk "the most haunted house in England," due to an orgy of poltergeist activity stretching back to 1863, though Price did not get to the scene of the action until 1929, when a newspaper reported "queer happenings" there. That year, the rector, Eric Smith, was driven away; and a few months later, the new incumbents, a family named Foyster, reported ghostly writings on the walls, bells ringing, stones flying, apparitions of a headless man, a coach and headless horses, a black hand and a girl in white. But what really got long-suffering Mrs. Foyster's dander up was the flinging of her best teapot through a window. In 1935, they left.

Two years later, Harry Price rented the place for one year, to study and write about the phenomena--which went unabated until the rectory burned, mysteriously, in 1939, as predicted by a planchette or "automatic writing" board. Harry reported 2000 paranormal phenomena at Borley, from wine turning into ink to an unseen nun asking for Mass through written messages. Under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research, three other investigators attempted to expose the Borley mystery and accused the then-dead Price of having been the ghost at large.

According to Douglas Hill and Pat Williams, "the mystery has never finally been cleared up," though acoustic tests on the rectory indicated that most of the auditory phenomena could be attributed to natural causes, that Price did suppress some facts and distorted others and that the poltergeist manifestations centered around young Mrs. Foyster. Thus, when she left, Harry was without a ghost. "No greater scandal has ever erupted in psychical research than over this preposterous exposure," says Nandor Fodor, who wrote a fiercely indognant rebuttal of it and defended Price's early reputation as "an honest investigator and ruthless exposer of frauds." Fodor concludes that Price's unpardonable mistake was declaring himself for spiritualism; "for this he had to be destroyed" by those who felt he was bringing "scientific" psychical research into disrepute.

Poltergeist stories constitute an endless flow in too strict a pattern from too many corners of the world to be mere coincidence, much less out-and-out fakery. As poet Robert Graves says: "Poltergeists everywhere show an appalling sameness of behavior; humorless, pointless, uncoordinated." Yet so strange and human are they in the form of their manifestations that, for all their sameness, they go right on bemusing us the most. It's simply not enough to say that these phenomena always have their center of energy in the person of a child responsible for them, both consciously and unconsciously, with what Sitwell calls "a criminal cunning"; nor that the poltergeist is a bundle of projected repressions. There are too many exceptions to these generalizations that the parapsychologists like to pin to the poor poltergeist.

In recent years, the most gaudy exception sent sleuths from the American Society for Psychical Research on a wild and frothy bender from which they are just recovering. If the villa formerly occupied by writer Joe Hyams and his actress wife, Elke Sommer, is not the most haunted house in Hollywood, it's easily the most sensational; it's also the only house whose phenomena are granted "full scientific credence" by the Southern California Society for Psychical Research, which investigated the place for three years. Seventeen mediums went through it, each reporting at least one ghost in the dining room, which later caught fire mysteriously. "I don't believe in ghosts," says Hyams. "That's a lot of shit. I'm a very good shot and if I'd seen anything, I'd have shot it. But I believe in coincidence, and there were too many. I was uneasy a goodly part of the time. The fire--which the mediums called a 'spirit fire'--added to all the other weird sounds, apparitions and unexplainable occurrences which defied logical explanation, like bolted doors and windows coming unlocked, convinced Elke and me to move." The phenomena were intriguing enough, however, to send Hyams on a mostly disappointing ghost hunt of his own.

"The problem with ghost hunting," says Joe, "is that you feel so goddamn foolish most of the time. I sat in a museum, waiting for a nonexistent telephone to ring; I waited in San Diego for one of four house ghosts to rattle chains, open windows or stomp across a bedroom floor; I sipped white wine with a lady in Hollywood who claims that her French doors rattle and shake while a voice whispers, 'Oh, woe, woe, woe. You've got to go, go, go.' I talked with a comely movie star [Susan Strasberg] who had a ghost exorcised because he kept pulling the blanket off her while she slept. I talked with a Manhattan Beach family in which, one evening, three times in succession, a cigarette leaped out of a pack three feet into the air and a woman was forced to iron her own hand twice one afternoon." (The A.S.P.R. investigated this one, concluded it was "a psychological condition not warranting further study.") Joe did not, however, get close to the Beverly Hills manse of Mrs. Eddie Mannix, which is reportedly haunted by the shade of Superman, or, rather, of actor George Reeves, who played him for nine years before killing himself. Mrs. Mannix has been trying unsuccessfully to sell the place since 1959, but even the rental tenants haven't lasted very long. Too many eerie effects.

A San Diego house that Hyams visited is regularly invaded by psychic researchers, mediums and commercial ghost hunters, who report the presence of its dead owners, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Whaley, a young girl who died in an accident there and "Yankee Jim" Robinson, who was hanged from a spot over which the master bedroom was subsequently built. The beautifully restored 100-year-old house was the first brick structure in the city and was variously used as a courtroom, mortuary, theater and jail. "That little girl's rocking chair in the bedroom," says volunteer guide Bernice Kennedy, "I've seen it move. I've talked to many people who have seen the chains in the courtroom moving. The meat cleaver in the kitchen on the shelf moves every now and then. Some people swear they've heard a baby crying--a Whaley daughter died here when she was 18 months old. The last of the Whaley children, who lived here until 1953, when she died at the age of 89, felt the presence upstairs of something that did not want her, that pushed her against the walls, so she moved downstairs. There have been terrible poundings upstairs when no one was up there, people have heard organ music when no one was playing and many smell Mrs. Whaley's French perfume and Mr. Whaley's Havana cigars."

The master bedroom contains a burglar-alarm system that is linked to the locked windows and doors. Police have been summoned by the alarm several times in recent months, only to find the windows and doors unlocked. "Yankee Jim is still stampin' around in a peeve," says staff member Richard Evans. "It's because he wasn't properly hung. Took him 45 minutes to an hour to die. I've heard him up there--it isn't a creaking-board-type footstep but like a big man in heavy boots, stamping, diagonally, across the room." Yankee Jim was six feet, four.

When one psychic investigator joined a TV personality and his wife for a spend-the-night party in the house, "the wife was sent home early in a taxi, she got so hysterical. The others were scared out of the house before morning by the apparition of Mrs. Whaley, who walked right into the music room all luminously lighted." "Dame" Sybil Leek, who calls herself a white witch and serves as "sensitive" (medium) for Hans Holzer, walked into the house in a celestial gold shroud and declaimed cheerfully: "Oh, this beautiful house and four lovely ghosts." To the astonishment of the San Diego Historical Shrine Association, she held a séance in which she relayed hitherto undisclosed information about the family that was subsequently verified by long-locked-up documents. A local physicist inspected the house and pronounced all the disturbances "sonic reactions of the sort that cause crystal to shatter." Nevertheless, not a single member of a highly intelligent staff dismisses the phenomena as poppycock, and one of them states solemnly: "I was skeptical at first. Now I do believe we have some nice interesting ghosts, yes, I do."

Not surprisingly, Hollywood even has a homosexual ghost. Tart-tongued columnist Joyce ("Hedda") Haber, who moved into "a foundering decrepit house that formerly belonged to a suave screen actor not especially noted for his devotion to women," says only women see the ghost, however. Joyce and her mother-in-law, syndicated columnist Polly Cramer, were standing on the lawn after dinner, when "We saw, through the window of the guest room, which had been the star's bedroom, a swaying, diaphanous figure outlined against the cornflower-blue wall." (Joyce's husband did not see it, though he gave it a name: Irving.) That same night, the cleansing tissue, which the maid insisted she had left beside the bathroom sink, vanished; and several days later, "Our dog, Dorothy, began barking and we heard an insistent, hysterical pleading at the back gate. It was my mother-in-law, standing there in the flimsiest of negligees. Her hair was uncombed and her face was ashen. She said she had awakened to a noise and discovered that her toothbrush, which she had meticulously set down on the shelf the night before, had been moved halfway across the room. When she tried to get out, she found her bedroom door had mysteriously been locked; so she had clawed her way through a window facing the street and run around the house to gain admission."

Later, samples of drapery material that Polly had picked up for the place disappeared. ("Irving might feel that women have no business being decorators.") Mrs. Cramer cut short her visit and flew back East. Dorothy still barks at odd hours in the night, hackles high; and Daphne, the female cat, balks at being carried past a very cold spot near the pool. The male cat does not. "No man has ever seen our ghost," says Joyce, "and no woman has ever failed to see him."

"I don't believe in haunted houses," said the late columnist Danton Walker. "All I know is that I own one." After years of poltergeist activity, his Rockland County, New York, home was visited by Hans Holzer and honored with a séance by Mrs. Eileen Garrett, one of the most respected mediums in the world today and head of the Parapsychology Foundation of New York. It was 1952; Walker had abandoned the main Colonial structure for a simple studio nearby and he longed to lay the ghost to rest and get back into his own bedroom.

In one of the most curious séances of modern times, Mrs. Garrett went first into full trance by means of autohypnosis and was possessed by one of her two spirit guides, an East Indian named Uvani, who spoke in a deep masculine voice bearing no resemblance to Mrs. Garrett's own. Mr. Holzer reports that even "facial expression, eyes, color of skin and movements that accompanied many of 'his' words were all those of a native of India." Then Uvani left Mrs. Garrett's body and suddenly she was possessed by the spirit of the ghost itself, who turned out to be a Polish mercenary named Andreas, who had been chased and beaten by British forces in 1779. Walker was stunned to see Mrs. Garrett suddenly "prone at my feet, sobbing convulsively and babbling in broken English." She was reliving the pain of the immigrant Pole. The "rescue circle" tried to persuade the spirit to depart the scene of its sorrow. Though the exorcism was considered only "a partial success," The New Yorker was moved to declare Mrs. Garrett "herself one of the more fascinating psychical phenomena of our times."

Most investigators agree that ghosts cannot be photographed; but spirit photography, which dates back to 1862, remains a subject of wild controversy. Psychic News has displayed infrared photographs taken during a séance at a spiritualist summer camp at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in 1953, showing five stages in the gradual manifestation of the spirit Silver Belle, the guide of the medium Ethel Post-Parrish. No fewer than 81 people claim to have witnessed the materialization, some of whom "walked arm in arm with the spirit."

In the Forties, New York City was stunned to see advertisements requesting the addresses of haunted houses, which a reputable German scientist of 57 wanted to photograph. Sponsored by Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and other Germans of equal standing, he came right to the point: "Haunted houses can be unhaunted, through mediums' releasing the earthbound spirits--but Dr. Oskar Goldberg (a Yale University research man) wants to photograph the apparitions first, by means of ultraviolet rays, to prove their existence, thoroughly, scientifically."

As a faculty member of the University of Munich, specializing in Oriental psychology, Dr. Goldberg took trips to the East and fell in with a famous yogi, Shri Agamya Guru Paramahamsa of Kashmir, who could stop his heart and hold his breath for ten minutes, as well as see ghosts. Dr. Goldberg himself saw 11 of them in Indian Tibet alone and claimed to have "released" them via incantations taught him by the yogi. "That's the only reason for psychic research," he said, "releasing earthbound ghosts, who are all unhappy." All in all, Dr. Goldberg claimed to have seen 24 ghosts and the handiwork of 40 poltergeists. He went to great trouble trying to photograph a ghost in midtown Manhattan and at Columbia, surrounded by experts to bear witness to his honesty. "I do not wish to go to this great trouble and be termed a swindler," he said, but his results were inconclusive.

Hans Holzer says not only that ghosts can be photographed but that he has film to prove it. Medium John Myers, whose gifts for psychic photography are well known, produced "exact likenesses" of Holzer's dead aunt and mother--without having access to his family album or any other source of supply. Myers also has recent photographs, or "extras," of his own late mother, the dead Sir Conan Doyle and the late Lord and Lady Caillard, the last taken at the funeral of her ladyship. More recently, Holzer himself photographed one of the "empty" rooms of a haunted house in the heart of Hollywood, which showed a young lady in a diaphanous gown said to bear a strong resemblance to a former occupant who was murdered there.

Free-lance photographer Allan Grant, who shot pictures of the haunted Hyams house, does not believe in ghosts at all. Nevertheless, he admits he was "a bit shaken and baffled" to find that in the middle of the roll of one proof sheet, there was a kind of fog or solarization that was highly unlikely to happen in any darkroom. On another sheet, two of the first three frames were completely washed out by overexposure, yet Grant had not changed the aperture; and film exposed on jobs immediately before and after that one showed no variation at all. Hyams, too, tried to photograph the haunted dining room, but "Every time I got near that room," he says, "the camera would short." The experience is similar to that of The Stately Ghosts of England cameraman, who reported that cameras jammed after experts had pronounced them in perfect working order and that whole reels fogged up for no good reason.

Thus, in spite of science's efforts to kill off most spook philosophy and tuck ghosts away underground as so much popular delusion, it's difficult, as William James put it, not to suspect that "here may be something different from a mere chapter in human gullibility. It may be a genuine realm of natural phenomena." In his introduction to a collection of ghost stories, M. R. James asks rhetorically: "Do I believe in ghosts? I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me." Each day, there is more evidence that seems to satisfy more and more rational folk. Yet even if we are disinclined to strip off our psychological armor and admit to ghosts, spirit contacts or simply to the presence of some sort of invisible beings, there do, enfin, seem to be operating on earth certain energies, forces or intelligences other than our own. As Britain's E. S. Hartland put it, ghosts furnish the original "theo-plasm, god-stuff" that creates the highly complex mood known as awe, in which various primary feelings, such as fear, wonder and submissiveness, commingle in no very fixed proportions. So it has always been; so, perhaps, it will ever be--a vaunted mystery.