A Popular History of Witchcraft

 INTRODUCTION

 During the eleven years which have passed since I published my History of Witchcraft and Demonology a second edition has repeatedly been asked for, and— wisely or no—I have as often delayed this and deferred. The fact is that throughout this time owing to my further researches into an immense subject— as old as the world and as wide as the world—and perhaps more especially owing to the interest and kindness of correspondents from every continent I found that I had accumulated so vast a quantity of new material that in order to include a tithe, and yet keep my work within a reasonable compass, there would have to be frequent excisions from the original pages together with a certain amount of compression. At first I began upon these lines, but I soon recognized that again and again I was at a loss how to abbreviate without in some way impairing the structure and sequence of the chapters, and thus it was a matter of no little difficulty to avail myself to any extent of many recent and extraordinarily interesting narratives and investigations whilst not essentially altering and even recasting the whole. 

 A considerable amount of time also was taken up in closely examining and discussing cases and incidents which were brought under my notice. Not a few persons were, quite naturally, at first reluctant to give details. The majority shrank from furnishing their names, dates, and the exact localities, such precise information as might bring them into a notice they were far from desiring or indeed would for a moment allow. This, an entirely reasonable and prudent point of view, must often hinder and obstruct the student of these dark and riddling mysteries. Yet he has no right whatsoever to complain or show himself embarrassed by the discretion of a reticence which is perfectly justifiable and fair. It was necessary to poise delicate questions and to probe with great tact in order to obtain knowledge together with the confirmation of knowledge which not unseldom was only supplied on condition that it was not publicly utilized, or, if so employed, disguised in such a way that the informant could not be identified. Persons who have been brought in contact with, and it may be who have hardly escaped from the clutches of, the Satanists are loath that their experiences, however valuable to others, should be published. They are afraid too of the vengeance and pursuit of the witches. This is quite understandable, nor are they to be blamed who lack courage to expose and confront those infernal gangs whose weapons are poisons, black magic, and evil spells. 

 As time went on and I was even more frequently being requested to issue a second edition of my book it became increasingly difficult satisfactorily to myself to find a happy issue from the impasse. In the view of so much that was new and vitally important I did not wish to send it from the press without certain added matter. I was, too, perpetually being urged by those whose opinion carries no little weight that I would bring the subject right up to the very day of writing, that I would emphasize the oneness of witchcraft throughout the world, the unchangeableness of the church of Satan throughout the centuries, and thus expose the horrid activities and propaganda of the society of devil-worshippers in our midst. 

 Such arguments were scarcely to be resisted, and I decided that in order to accomplish what was required more efficiently it would be better, rather than to attempt any modification of my first work, to write a new study; and this I have called A Popular History of Witchcraft. 

 My aim throughout my new work has been to show how the profession and practice of witchcraft are the same always and in all places, be it in some remote English village, in a quiet cathedral city, in the sweltering hinterland of Jamaica, or in savage Africa. In the course of the present study I have concentrated upon England and English witchcraft, although I have freely cited parallel circumstances as revealed in foreign trials. 

 Since A Popular History of Witchcraft is designed for the general reader rather than for the specialist I have been advised not to burden the text with a multiplicity of notes. A reader, unless it be the scholar at his desk, pen in hand, is harassed by, or else ignores, a parade of commentary, the details of which he has no intention, even if he had the opportunity, of verifying by making reference to the original source. In quotations, for the same reason, I have given the newer forms of words rather than strictly adhering to the old spelling, which so many find cumbersome and a nuisance, although I have been scrupulously careful neither to alter nor modify. My citations of texts are from the Authorized Version of the Bible, but these have been checked in each instance by the Douai. 

 The last chapter, English witchcraft, is necessarily in the nature of a survey, designed to show the continuity of the thing rather than to enter into details of cases, many of which, however important, I have been obliged to pass without mention. For these particulars I must refer the reader to my Geography of Witchcraft. 

 The present work is designed to awaken the general reader to a sense of the dangers with which he is encompassed and beset. Although A Popular History of Witchcraft is entirely new I have not hesitated to make use of apposite passages from my previously published works, and even to incorporate one or two sentences, the gist of which I felt I was not able better or more forcibly to express. 

 Since I published The History of Witchcraft and Demonology there has been little or nothing, I believe, which covers the same ground. Professor Lynn Thorndike’s work, for example, encyclopaedic in extent, was scarcely designed to touch upon the field I review. The Short Title-Catalogue of my friend Mr. Harry Price will, of course, be in the hands of, and constantly referred to by, every student of occultism, for whom the Proceedings of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research must be an ever ready guide-book, his veritable Baedeker. 

 During the past decade in various journals and magazines there have been published one or two articles of great value. Such are Lieut.-Colonel Spain’s “The Witches of Riding Mill, 1673”, which appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, March, 1929, and Mr. S. Everard’s “Oliver Cromwell and Black Magic”, Occult Review’, April, 1936. Mr. W. Branch Johnson has written a good book in The Age of Arsenic, 1931. Two studies by the Rev. Joseph J. Williams, S.J., Voodoos and Obeahs and Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica are of the first importance, whilst W. B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) is very illuminating in reference to Voodoo in Haiti. 

 With reference to witches in England there have (so far as I am aware) only been three books worthy of note published during the last ten years: Mr. George Lyman Kittredge’s Witchcraft in Old and New England (1928), Mr. G. L’Estrange Ewen’s Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (1929), and Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933). If I may venture a criticism Mr. Kittredge’s book, exhaustive in references and annotation, suffers from presenting a series of unconnected essays, unconnected that is save in so far as they one and all relate to various phases of the same subject. Thus some of the chapters were, I am given to understand, originally published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1907, the American Historical Review, 1917, and in other ephemerides. Mr. L’Estrange’s works, of the most painstaking scholarship, are indispensable to any student of witchcraft, to whom they supply the amplest and most essential material. 

 There have been translations of the Malleus Maleficarum, of Boguet, Remy, Guazzo, Taillepied, and others. Again, such a reprint as The Trial of the Lancaster Witches, 1612, with an introduction by Dr. G. B. Harrison (1929), is a notable piece of no slight value. 

 I am grateful to many friends and correspondents for their warmly appreciative letters and so widespread an interest that is taken in my work. Since she is no longer with us it will not (I am sure) be invidious to particularize Mrs. Violet Tweedale, whose psychic gifts were so truly remarkable, and whose writings on the occult are so justly admired. 

 I have to thank Messrs. Maggs for their generous courtesy in granting me permission to quote from their Catalogue of Books on Medicine, Alchemy, Astrology, etc. (No. 520; 1929), details concerning the interesting and important MS. Book of Black Magic and Conjurations therein described. I am further indebted to their kindness for the reproduction thence of the drawing of the Demon King Maymon. 

 In conclusion I would say that the present study aims at presenting a clear view of the Practice and Profession of Witchcraft, as it was carried on in former centuries and now prevails amongst us. I am convinced that it is most necessary to realize that this is no mere historical question, but a definite factor in politics of to-day, as well as in social life and the progress of humanity. 

 The Black International of Satan—that is the canker which is corrupting and destroying the world. 

IN FESTO TRANS. ALMÆ DOMUS LAURETANæ. 

 1936.

(...)

During the reign of Louis XIV a veritable epidemic  of sacrilege seemed to rage through Paris, and indeed the investigations conducted by the Lieutenant of Police, Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie, let loose such an avalanche of scandal and crime implicating not only persons of low degree but the highest and most powerful names in France that at the last the King in his absolute authority was of necessity compelled to quash the whole business. Poisons had been brewed, Black Masses said, necromancy practised, abortions procured, murders contrived, plots laid for the death of court favourite and political foe, and all these abominations seemed to centre round two figures of the blackest underworld of Paris, the abbé Guibourg and La Voisin. 

 Catherine Montvoisin—La Voisin as she was commonly called—had long been known to the criminal and the curious as midwife, poisoner, bawd and witch. There was no infamy which might not be purchased in the secret chambers of her house, No. 25 Rue Beauregard. She was assisted in the many branches of her mysterious and obscene profession by numerous satellites and lovers, chief amongst whom Romani, a handsome young Italian boy and an actor of great talent, filled many a curious rôle. The two executioners of Paris, M. Guillaume and M. Larivière, contended for her favours, gallants who could bring her fine presents of the limbs and fat of murderers who had swung on the gibbet or been broken on the wheel, whence she made tall black tapers for her secret ceremonies. A wanton hermaphrodite, exotic and perverse, La Trianon dwelt in that awful house, to which also daily resorted some curious old women, whose calling no one rightly knew, La Gallet,  La Lepfère, La Joly, La Filastre, La Bosse, La Thomas. As a matter of fact they were one and all, and a score beside, adepts in the art of poisoning and abortionists of no mean skill and practice. A wit called 25 Rue Beauregard “the centre of the city”, and it is no exaggeration to say that all Paris from duchess to drab, from marshal to muckman, crowded La Voisin’s doors. 

 The Abbé Guibourg, known among the witches as M. le Prieur, the illegitimate son of Henri de Montmorency, was a man of some seventy years, who is described as tall and heavy-limbed with a malign and sensual face. “He can be compared with no one else,” wrote de la Reynie, “for the tale of his poisonings, and his traffic in drugs and witchcraft. He is familiar with every form of villainy, guilty of a large number of horrible crimes and suspected of complicity in many more.” It was M. le Prieur who celebrated innumerable Satanic Masses at the instance of Madame de Montespan in order to secure for her supreme power and the eternal fidelity of the King. Even before Louis had separated from de La Valltère the vicar of St.-Séverin, the Abbé Mariette, had been reciting erotic charms over the hearts of two pigeons consecrated during Mass in the names of Louis de Bourbon and Athénais de Montespan, and apparently the spell had succeeded. But Louis was fickle and apt to be promiscuous in his amours, so his love must be fixed on her alone and the aid of the Abbé Guibourg was requested. In the chapel of the Château de Villebousin near Montlhéry, at Saint-Denis, a long black velvet pall was spread over the altar, and upon this the royal mistress laid herself in a state of perfect nudity. Six black candles were lit, the celebrant robed himself in  a chasuble thickly embroidered with esoteric characters wrought in silver, the gold paten and chalice were placed upon the naked belly of the living altar to whose warm flesh the horrible old priest pressed his bloated lips each time the rubrics directed him to kiss the place of sacrifice. All was hushed save for the low monotonous murmur of the blasphemous liturgy. The Host was consecrated, and then the Precious Blood. An assistant crept forward bearing an infant in her arms. The child was held over the altar, a sharp swift gash across the neck, a stifled cry, and warm red drops fell into the chalice whilst the full tide streamed upon the white figure beneath. The corpse was handed to La Voisin, who flung it callously into an oven fashioned for that purpose, which glowed white-hot. 

 It was proved that a regular traffic had been carried on for years with beggar-women and the lowest prostitutes, who sold their children for this purpose. At her trial La Voisin confessed that no less than 2,500 babies had been disposed of in this manner, for the Black Mass was continually being celebrated not only by Guibourg but by other priests. The figures are so startling that some incredulity has been expressed by those who do not know the Paris of Louis XIV, but there appears no reason to doubt the sum. We may bear in mind that a whole pack of venal and utterly unscrupulous midwives was actively at work; that when the impostume of filth and crime was ripe to bursting no less than 319 warrants were issued, whilst there were very many more whose names were suppressed so deeply did they implicate the highest in the land, nay, the very Throne itself; that six and thirty witches, poisoners and abortionists  were executed; that 147, Guibourg, Lesage, Romani, De Vanens, and others were sentenced to close confinement in the remotest fortresses; that many, such as the magician Blessis, went to the galleys for life; and many, again, were conducted by the police over the frontier, condemned to perpetual exile. Several persons died in prison, and others again (of noble and unblemished lineage) committed suicide in agonies of shame lest they should be involved, however remotely, or even as witnesses, in such scandalous and abominable proceedings. 

 Perhaps the most sad circumstance that came to light during the investigation of these orgies of witchcraft was the large number of priests concerned. Not to mention the mere panders and poisoners—and Éliphas Lévi says that Black Magic is “above all the science of poisoning”—amongst those who habitually celebrated the Black Mass were the Abbé Brigallier, almoner to Mlle de Montpensier, who married the Duc de Lauzun; the Abbé Cotton who offered in sacrifice to Satan a child baptized with Holy Oils used in the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, and then strangled, and whose speciality was “La Messe du Saint Esprit”, which is said over a piece of goat’s skin sprinkled with holy water and which is intended to cure certain illnesses, to induce love or hate, even to conjure up the demon, all of which Dr. Jean-Baptiste Thiers in his great work denounces as a most pestilent superstition, nay, more, he roundly condemns this practice as a “Witch’s Mass”, and profane in the highest degree; the Abbé Davot, assistant priest at Notre Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle only a few doors from La Voisin’s house, whose custom it was to lay under  the corporal at Mass a piece of paper inscribed with the name of the person who should be brought to love, or if hated, damned to die, a practice eagerly pursued to-day—if a priest may be found; the Abbé Deshayes, who demanded exorbitant fees for his Black Masses and who was also a most skilful coiner; Father Gabriel, a Capuchin, who with the Abbé Seysson, was wont to say Masses at La Voisin’s house over women’s afterbirths and children’s cauls to confect charms of particular potency; the Abbé Lepreux, a schoolmaster, deep in the most shameful court secrets, who dedicated infants to the demon, and consecrated snakes and toads to mingle with poisons for their greater efficacy; the Abbé Mabile, who celebrated the sacrifice of the Death’s Head; the Abbé Maléscot, who had entered into a sort of partnership with the witch and abortionist, La Gallet, for whom he touted with very considerable success; the Abbé Mariette, who whilst still young had been banished from Paris for his sorceries (it is clear that he was only saved from the stake owing to family interest, for he was of a wealthy and good house), but who returned almost openly to place himself at the service of Madame de Montespan; the Abbé Olivier, who consecrated an altar for Black Masses in a brothel; the Abbé Rebours, who said Black Masses on the body of his mistress; the Abbé Tournet, who said Masses in order to kill the child in the womb, and who was in great request among the evil sisterhood. This catalogue of a dozen wizard-priests drawn from the archives of the Bastille could easily be multiplied four or five times. There was also Jean-Baptiste Sébault, of the diocese of Bourges, who whilst lodging in Paris at the house of a doctor, named  Charmillon, seduced Marianne Charmillon, a girl of twenty-two, his host’s daughter, and continually brought her to the Black Mass. The Abbé Guignard celebrated a Satanic Mass in a cellar over her body, and was served by Sébault in a state of complete nudity. An aphrodisiac was brewed at this orgy. The Abbé Lemaignan sacrificed young children, and possessed whole sets of rich vestments in which to celebrate the eucharist of hell. 

 It is only too much to be feared that the evil science of Guibourg and his company was handed down throughout the eighteenth century. The Duc de Richelieu, who was born in 1696 and died at the age of ninety-two in 1788, was much suspected of studying goety and the worst kinds of occult science. It was said that whilst quite a young man he had formed too close an intimacy with an Austrian noble whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose wealth enabled him to purchase the secrets of those who had known the Abbé Guibourg and had been instructed by him in every dark secret of magic. Two Capuchins, who were his chaplains, celebrated Black Masses, at which the devotees assisted, in the old deserted chapel of a lone country-house. After this the Duke and his friend defiled the Hosts, in the hope that thereon Satan would appear to crown and reward their blasphemy. 

 Under the Regency, necromancers and wizards and traffickers in Satanic eucharists abounded, for Philippe d’Orléans was notoriously addicted to occultism of every kind. As might be expected there are revolting pictures of the Black Mass in the lewd pages of de Sade. In Justine such a Mass celebrated in a cloister is  described in filthy detail. When Juliette is initiated into the “Society of the Friends of Grime” the Host and Crucifix are desecrated. Again, a little later, two Satanic orgies are exhibited, when the High Altar is the scene of every defilement. There are other and even more obscene descriptions of the Black Mass in the work, but these it is unnecessary to particularize. 

 Upon the night of the execution of King Louis XVI, 21st January, 1793, a number of French devil-worshippers formed themselves into a definite society to foster revolution and propagate their cult of evil. The third chief of this organization died at Florence about 1905. He was believed to be nearly a hundred years old. This particular Society of Satanists spread very rapidly into Italy and soon penetrated Germany. A little later it had established itself very secretly in England, and there can be no question that it has proved one of the most potent forces for evil since its very inception. It has developed and flourished exceedingly and flung out its poisonous tentacles in all directions. It would be no exaggeration to say that much of the world’s misery and unrest is due to this foul conspiracy against God and humanity. 

 Nowhere in France during the first half of the nineteenth century was religious life more fervent and more zealous than throughout the diocese of Agen. Under such saintly Bishops as de Bonnac (the first to refuse the constitutional oath of 1792), and Jean Aimé de Levezon de Vezins pious associations, communities and confraternities were warmly encouraged, not the least of these devout fellowships being the Children of Mary founded by Adèle de Trenquelléon and the widow of a physician, Madame Belloc. This latter  lady employed a housekeeper, Virginie (whose surname curiously has not been recorded), and to her horror this woman one day revealed to her pious mistress that she was a Satanist of long continuance, the member of an infernal society which had its headquarters under the very shadow of St. Caprasius, the pro-cathedral. Virginie stated that when about twelve years old she had been taken to a house in the city were was an altar dedicated to the devil, at which an aged priest celebrated a Mass of blasphemy during which there occurred a fearful manifestation of corporeal evil. Moreover she was taught that each Communion she must retain the Host in her mouth, and then eject it secretly so that she might bring it to the midnight Sabbats to be horribly profaned by the impious crew, whose necromancies and conjurations were of the vilest and most abominable description. Madame Belloc hastened to call in the assistance of the Abbé Degans, to whom Virginie confessed that she would sometimes attend as many as five or six early Masses in different churches to obtain the Host. Upon her resolution to repent she fell a prey to an unclean spirit which the Abbé Degans expelled with difficulty and after many exorcisms. One curious feature of the case was the continual apports of Hosts, many of which were marked with bloody characters. Much scandal ensued, and an ecclesiastical inquiry followed. Many suspicious circumstances came to light concerning Virginie when she formed a connexion with the pseudo-prophet Eugéne Vintras and his followers, in whose private chapel at Tilly-sur-Seulles (as one of the sect, Gozzoli, quite unequivocally testified) the most horrible  obscenities were practised during the celebration of sacrilegious eucharists. It is significant that in 1845 Vintras came to England and established himself in London as the Master of a dark and evil cult which has never died.

Transsexual cured by an exorcism?

In fact, there is a growing belief among some critics of the psychological establishment that psychoanalysis and contemporary psychology have failed. In his book The Psychological Society, for example, Martin L. Gross—one of psychology’s most acerbic critics—complains that “the psychological revolution has damaged the psychic fiber of individual man and woman” and has brainwashed us into thinking that we are sick and deluded. He posits that psychoanalysis is a religion more than a science. Gross came to this conclusion after making a detailed study of whether psychiatry and psychology have really helped improve the quality of our daily lives. He is far from alone in his views and was interviewed sympathetically in Human Behavior magazine after his book came out.

The following case is an example of the failure of psychiatry, a failure later corrected in a totally bizarre manner.

Dr. David H. Barlow and Dr. Gene G. Abel first met the patient whom they identify only as “John” in 1969. John was a clear case of lifelong gender dysphoria, even by the most conservative criteria. They were counseling him for sexual reassignment surgery at the time of his strange cure.

Gender dysphoria is the psychiatric term for what is commonly called transsexualism, the obsession that one has been born as the wrong sex. This behavioral disorder often leads to conduct that isn’t too socially acceptable, such as cross-dressing (transvestism) and seeking change-of-sex surgery. Surgery is, however, the only treatment that seems to resolve the conflicts that plague transsexuals. But even this treatment is not always successful; for some transsexuals are so confused about their identities that they will go back to role-playing their original gender, even though their surgery is irreversible. Psychotherapeutic forms of treatment seem useless, and there is only a single case in the literature that reports the cure of a transsexual. That cure consisted of months of work with the patient using behavior modification.

What causes gender dysphoria isn’t known, and theoretical explanations for the condition range from psychological causes to possible biological reasons. Extreme gender confusion in early childhood has been suggested as a cause, but an unidentified hormonal disorder could conceivably be a contributing factor also. (For example, girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasm—a disorder in the adrenal glands—will grow up exhibiting masculine behavior.) Whatever the case, transsexualism is a long-lived problem that is resistent to change. For this reason the two psychiatrists at the University of Tennessee Medical School were stunned when John suddenly showed up one day completely cured— not by psychiatry or medicine but as the result of an exorcism!

The strange story began in 1952 when the patient was born. From early childhood John considered himself to be a girl. His gender confusion was probably the result of family problems. His mother and father, who raised their family in Tennessee, were thirty-two and forty-five years old respectively, and they didn’t get along very well. They finally separated when the boy was eight, by which time John’s transsexualism was already fairly ingrained. The couple were already the parents of two other children (a boy and a girl) before John came along, so he was the baby of the family. He was a pampered child, too, for his mother was very protective and wouldn’t let him engage in any rough-and-tumble boys’ play. She instead kept him at home, where he occupied his time—with his mother’s encouragement—cleaning and performing other household work.

When he was four years old, John began to imitate his mother openly by putting on makeup and dressing in his sister’s clothes. This behavior continued even after he started school, and he often made excuses to stay home to indulge his feminine fantasies. The only physical trauma John suffered during these early years came when he broke his leg when he was six. The broken leg didn’t bother him very much, but the cast he was forced to wear prevented him from cross-dressing, which he found a constant source of frustration.

John’s feminine traits and identification soon pervaded his entire life. He refused to participate in gym while at grammar school, while his growing effeminacy caused the other boys at school to make life miserable for him. His older brother often had to come to his defense.

John’s greatest personal satisfaction came when his mother took a job and he took over full responsibility as family housekeeper, a role he enjoyed immensely.

The next phase in John’s ever-increasing gender dysphoria came during adolescence. By this time he was going to high school, but was doing only passably well. His main preoccupation was still his family’s home, where he could engage in his favorite pastime, domestic work.

But when he was fifteen, something happened that permanently changed his life. He read a magazine article about transsexualism, learned about sexual reassignment surgery, and began corresponding with experts at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Surgery seemed to be the obvious course of action for him, so he began to prepare for it. To achieve this goal, the teenager dropped out of school and began studying the literature on transsexualism. He became so versed on the subject that he successfully conned a physician into giving him estrogen by claiming that he needed it to treat a previously diagnosed endocrine disorder. His real purpose, of course, was to prepare himself physically for the change-of-sex surgery.

Soon the oral doses and injections took effect, and his body hair began to thin while his breasts enlarged. The estrogen also affected him psychologically, and he later reported that it made him feel more tranquil than he had ever felt before.
It is impossible to determine how far the young man would have gone with this self-therapy were it not for an automobile accident that disrupted his life in 1969. He was then sixteen. His use of estrogen was discovered by the doctors who treated him after the accident, and they informed his family about the situation. They were shocked by the revelation, as might be expected.

The disruption these revelations caused within John’s family can’t be overestimated, and seemed to exacerbate his previously disturbed relationship with his mother. She resolutely insisted that he seek psychiatric treatment, and she even threatened suicide should he refuse. John eventually gave in to his mother’s histrionics and committed himself to a state hospital, but there was nothing the therapists could do for him.

Since he was well in touch with reality and was not psychotic, he was merely formally diagnosed as a transsexual and discharged. This conveniently allowed John to go to work at a fast-food restaurant and once again plan for change-of-sex surgery. The hospital psychiatrists felt, however, that their patient could benefit from psychotherapy, and they encouraged him to see Dr. David H. Barlow at the University of Tennessee Medical School. (Dr. Barlow would later help bring the case to public attention. He is a renowned pioneer in the use of behavior modification techniques for the treatment of sexual disturbances.) This course of action didn’t strike John as unreasonable. He began taking estrogen again, but this time under the supervision of a private psychiatrist. He also went back to cross-dressing.

While personally satisfied with the way his life was going, the only teal problem still facing him was his mother’s possessiveness. He complained that she continually tried to smother him while at the same time she fercely rejected his transsexualism. To escape the situation, the young man—with his psychiatrist’s blessing—joined the Navy in 1972, but he was rejected for psychiatric reasons. His mother tried to take advantage of the circumstances and even tried to move into his apartment with him, much to his annoyance. The situation between John and his mother became so intolerable that finally he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on his medication.

This unsuccessful suicide attempt brought him back to the hospital and back to the attention of Dr. Barlow and his colleague Dr. Gene G. Abel, who had also previously worked extensively with transsexuals. They counseled the patient, agreed with him that surgery would probably resolve his gender dysphoria and began preparing him. This entailed giving him full therapeutic dosages of estrogen and electrolysis and subjecting him to a complete psychiatric examination for gender identity, gender role behavior, and sexual arousal patterns. These standard objective psychological tests, which are always given before change-of-sex surgery is seriously considered, were conducted by Drs. Barlow and Abel.

The results of every one of the tests were consistent with a diagnosis of transsexualism. Even the way John moved and walked was typically feminine, according to a test that the researchers used to check for masculine and feminine motor behavior. For all practical purposes, John was really a woman trapped in a man’s body. For this reason the therapists did not hesitate to continue recommending a change-of-sex operation.

The process leading up to this radical surgery is very slow, however. For two years the researchers kept continual tabs on John, repeatedly giving him tests for gender identity and masculine versus feminine motor behavior. The results consistently came up feminine, which constituted further evidence that change-of-sex surgery was warranted in his ease.

By this time John was living openly as a woman and was going by the name Judy. He successfully adapted to his new lifestyle, and no one who casually knew him realized he was a pre-op transsexual. His therapists even stated when they wrote up the case that he “was successfully wearing a bikini having progressed to bra size 38B.”

By the summer of 1973, John was ready for his change-of-sex operation, to which he was looking forward eagerly. Both of his therapists agreed that his adjustment would probably be successful and that he wouldn’t suffer later conflicts over his decision. They suggested that he have the surgery at a medical center in a nearby state, and he duly checked in.
Then came the shock. The therapists never received word back about the surgery, and several silent months passed before they heard from John again. When he resurfaced the following fall, he had been remarkably transformed.

“One day in late fall,” report Drs. Barlow and Abel, “a research assistant who had worked with the case came back from a half-finished lunch of fried chicken and shouted, ‘Judy is back at the restaurant, but she’s not Judy anymore, she’s John!’ Other reports quickly confirmed the report, and John was invited back to our offices for a session which occurred in early January of 1974. He entered the office in a three- piece business suit with polished shoes, neatly cut short hair, clipped fingernails, and consistently masculine motor behaviors.

Even to trained eyes, the only sign of his former feminine role was the almost complete absence of facial hair, which in view of his light complexion and in the context of his total masculinity would normally go unnoticed.” The story he told was as remarkable as his transformation. While he was working at the fast-food restaurant, he had grown very attached to his employer, who was a Christian fundamentalist. She refused to be judgmental about her employee’s transsexualism, but she did ask that he consult with a physician she knew in town before undergoing the final surgery. This physician was also a fundamentalist. Although John considered himself a Southern Baptist, neither he nor anyone else in his family was religious. But he went to see the doctor anyway as a favor to his boss. The doctor examined him and spoke with him for some time and even agreed that his change-of-sex adjustment would probably be good. He then told John that his real problem was possession by evil spirits! John was astounded by this announcement, even more when the physician asked if he could perform an exorcism. For some reason John agreed.
The exorcism lasted from two to three hours, and it involved prayer, the laying-on-of-hands, and exhortations against the evil spirits possessing the patient. John later explained to his therapists that he fainted several times during the ritual, but when the ordeal was over, the physician assured him that twenty-two spirits had been driven from his body.

(The physician later explained to Dr. Barlow that one of these entities had been female and was the cause of John’s problem.) The result of the exorcism was nothing short of amazing. When the ritual was over, John announced that it had worked! Now, for the first time in twenty years, he perceived himself as a man. His desire to cross-dress ceased instantly and he immediately went to a barbershop to have his hair cut short. This conversion to a totally masculine identity lasted for two weeks, during which time he lived back with his mother.

But then he began to feel his old tendencies returning, so he and his employer visited a fundamentalist faith healer at a public meeting in town. They were able to talk with her and she agreed to pray over John.

Once again he fainted dead away. He fainted again after regaining consciousness for a few moments, which ended the treatment. It was at this point that John realized that another miracle had transpired. While leaving the public platform where he had been treated, he saw that his breasts— fully formed from the estrogen treatment—had returned to normal. He had now fully returned to his male gender, although the effects of estrogen are long-lasting and his claim medically impossible. (While checking into the story, Dr. Barlow received confirmation of the “miracle” from the young man’s employer.) Even though they could plainly see that their former patient’s feminine characteristics had completely and mysteriously disappeared, Dr. Barlow and his colleagues were incredulous about their patient’s story and spent considerable effort in verifying it. The story consistently checked out. But to be sure of their personal observations, the therapists asked John to retake the same battery of psychological tests that they had used to diagnose him a transsexual. This time the test results all came out consistent with a masculine identity . . . which was a total reversal of the prior results he had given while being monitored over the previous two years. Even his gait and body movements were now firmly masculine, possibly for the first time in his life.

The two therapists followed John’s life for the next two and a half years to see if the cure would be permanent. It certainly seemed to be, for John’s transsexual tendencies never returned. By 1975 he was dating women but had not engaged in premarital sex because of his new-found religious beliefs. They learned that he still occasionally felt fleeting homosexual urges, but their former patient assured them that he was perfectly capable of banishing these from his mind when they arose. His adjustment to his masculine life seemed as perfect as it was inexplicable.

What is a psychiatrist to make of such a bizarre case? Does it prove the existence of spirit possession, or could the exorcism have produced some sort of psychological miracle akin to hypnotic suggestion?

It is clear from their report that neither Dr. Barlow nor Dr. Abel feels competent to explain why and how this unexpected cure came about. Writing in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 1977, they noted that “what is important in this case is that no psychotherapeutic procedure of any kind with whatever element of suggestion or persuasion, has been effective for transsexualism, with the possible exception of behavior modification in one case. But even the most facile operant conditioner would be hard pressed to explain the sudden and massive behavioral change observed and objectively measured in this case.” They add that the one reported case of a patient cured through behavior modifi- cation responded only after months of treatment. That patient only learned to behave “masculinely” by practicing new behavioral strategies for walking and acting. The patient had to be carefully taught these strategies, while John’s cure had been instantaneous.

“What cannot be denied,” the two researchers conclude, “. . . is that a patient who was very clearly a transsexual, by the most conservative criteria, assumed a long-lasting masculine gender identity in a remarkably short time following an apparent exorcism.” Dr. Barlow was in a position to know, too, since he has personally specialized in the “cure” of gender dysphoria. He had invariably found that the process takes an extremely long time to complete.

No matter how one chooses to interpret this case, the fact remains that conventional psychiatry cannot explain why John grew up with the internal feelings that he was a woman and not a man, why counseling and therapy accomplished nothing by way of a cure, or how the young man accomplished a 100 percent change in behavior almost instantaneously.

THE INFINITE BOUNDARY A Psychic Look at Spirit Possession, Madness, and Multiple Personality
D. Scott Rogo

Paranormal fire and spontaneous human combustion

 INTRODUCTION

The hero of this book is a former police detective sergeant, now a bus driver. His testimony determined me to write it. He wrote to tell me that he was being visited nocturnally by various incubi and a succubus. A succubus is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a female demon who makes love to men during the hours of darkness. An incubus is a demon who bears down upon people during their sleep, choking and suffocating them, but who also performs the sex act with women.

The significant point about his letter, the synchronistic point perhaps, was that I myself had recently begun receiving visits from a succubus.

Then, only a short time later, a well-known actress wrote to me asking for help. When I visited her she told me she had recently been attacked at night by an entity, an experience which had left her, apart from fearful, with a mouthful of dried blood. Two very interesting facts to emerge about her are that she is left-handed and has an extra nipple. These, of course, are the traditional marks of the medieval witch.

Other material came rapidly to hand. The film The Entity, for example, is based on an actual case reported by a psychiatrist. Here a woman was raped on several occasions by an entity or force, which left her with severe bruising and a damaged mind. In Italy, in 1983, a Scottish girl, Carol Compton, was denounced and tried as a witch. Objects are said to have moved in her presence without being touched, and in particular she was accused of starting three fires paranormally, when she herself was not physically present, in a child’s bedroom.

The question of paranormal fire leads on to a recent case of what is called spontaneous human combustion. According to a Chicago police report, a woman burst spontaneously into flames while walking down a city street, in full view of many witnesses. Incidentally, the bizarre and so far inexplicable occurrence of human beings bursting into flames, in which the flesh of the victim is totally consumed while adjacent objects and sometimes even the victim’s clothing remain unharmed, is one that otherwise skeptical scientists accept as factual. They have to. How can they reject the findings of coroners’ inquests?

The surge of paranormal visitations described in this book is perhaps remarkable for its occurrence at a time when orthodox science has never been stronger, when Western academic opinion in general has never been more ready to pour scorn on what it considers to be the superstitious hysteria of fools. Yet, as this book shows, a growing number of doctors, scientists, and psychiatrists around the world are quietly reporting on aspects of the phenomena under discussion. Increasingly, too, their reports are appearing in the orthodox medical and scientific press.

The investigation of the remarkable events of a succubus–incubus visitation—and of such other allied phenomena as poltergeist attacks—leads us in fact not into some cuckooland of human gullibility and credulity, but into a still more remarkable and altogether real area, the human unconscious mind. In the professional literature we find much relevant documentation not only from “historical” sources such as Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and their associates, but from modern, practicing psychiatrists like Morton Schatzman, Mary Williams, Lorna Selfe, Hervey Cleckley, R. L. Moody, and many others. We find, for instance, a poltergeist–incubus attack occurring in a doctor’s consulting room, a woman whose hallucinations became visible to others, and cases of multiple personality where the alternative, displacing personae exhibit not simply psychological characteristics different from those of the “real” occupant of the body but also different brain waves and other autonomic physiological responses. By no criteria whatsoever can we consider these alternative, usurping personae to be any less actual, any less genuine than the “normal” owner of consciousness—that is, than the “real” you who sits reading this book. So what, then, really is a human personality, and what are not so much the limits of its powers, as the full, unrealized extent of them? The answers to these questions prove to be far more daunting than any alleged world of spirits (the “explanation” usually put forward by occultists and paranormalists); they are so daunting, in fact, that the implications of the wholly authentic instances detailed here are currently totally excluded from “informed” modern Western consciousness. We shall as a passing exercise be documenting a deliberate (although perhaps not fully conscious) policy of total non-discussion of these matters by mainstream Western academic psychology and psychiatry in particular and by Western science in general.

Is it the growing acceptance of supernormal phenomena by the public at large that is leading both to a renaissance of these dramatic events and, above all, to a willingness to stand up and be counted? Or is it the denial and repression by mainstream academic opinion of the forces involved (whatever they may prove to be) which increases the strength of those forces, so that what might otherwise be controlled and channeled bursts out in uncontrolled violence?

The point has certainly been reached where the phenomena in question must be made fully public. As the one-time detective sergeant put it: “This area doesn’t just need investigating. It needs a bloody great searchlight.”

I hope this book is his bloody great searchlight.

**

(...)

In Toronto in 1972 a group of people interested in paranormal phenomena decided to invent a ghost and then see if they could raise a phantom of him.22 Accordingly, they gave the would-be ghost a name, Philip, and invented a history for him. He was a seventeenth-century British aristocrat whose mistress, a gypsy girl, was burned at the stake for witchcraft, whereupon Philip committed suicide by jumping from the battlements of his castle. For over a year the group of eight (which included the wife of a Professor Owen) met and talked about Philip in order to feel they really knew him. Afterwards they sat in meditation in an attempt to raise him. Their efforts produced nothing. Then they read the two reports that are described below and changed their techniques accordingly. Within four weeks they produced rapping sounds from the table around which they were sitting with their hands placed upon it, and the table began sliding around the floor. They began asking the table questions about Philip, to which the table rapped correct answers in a simple code. Philip was talking to them. In due course Philip switched lights on and off at command and produced cool breezes.

In 1975 the group was invited to Kent State University in America for a series of tests by William Franklin, Professor of Physics. For two days raps and movements of the table were produced to order under test conditions, and the sessions were videotaped. One sequence shows Professor Franklin sitting on a floating table. Philip also again went through his paces on a Toronto television program.23Several other groups have since successfully repeated the Philip experiment. (What more proof, one wonders, does the scientific community want?) The two British experiments that set the Toronto group on the right track were as follows.

In 1966 K. J. Batcheldor published his “Report on a Case of Table Levitation Associated Phenomena.”24 The writer and two others (all friends) met a total of two hundred times between April 1964 and December 1965. At these meetings, which lasted two hours with a half-hour break, the three sat, at first in complete darkness but later with a red light, with their hands on a table, concentrating on producing phenomena. Results were fairly rapid. In the eleventh session the table rose clear from the floor. The group was now also producing regular taps, scrapings, and soft thuds on chairs, on the floor, and on the walls. Batcheldor describes some of the later sittings.

The simple table motions of sliding and tilting were capable of enormous variation: the table could glide slowly and silently as if on candle grease, or make a rapid and noisy excursion of six feet or more, causing the sitters to leave their seats and stumble after it . . . it could beat an enormous tattoo, quite disturbing to the neighbours when the table weighed 40 lb! Sometimes it would rotate about its centre, either slowly or so nearly instantaneously as to take the breath away. . . . As the sitting proceeded the movements of the table usually increased in power and extent. Under these circumstances it was often impossible to remain seated, and chairs were pushed back and we continued standing. Sometimes we had to go at a brisk pace from one end of the room to the other . . .25Other phenomena that occurred in various sessions were breezes, intense cold, touchings, pulling back of the chairs, movements of objects in the room, and the “glueing” of the table to the floor so that it could not be moved. There were also two apports: a stone was thrown across the room and matches from the kitchen were sprinkled about.

The author of this paper was at that time a graduate psychologist. Today he is a principal clinical psychologist.

C. Brookes-Smith, D. W. Hunt, and two of their friends took matters a stage farther at the end of the 1960s, as reported in their paper “Some Experiments in Psychokinesis,” published in 1970.26 The four participants were, professionally, an electrical engineer, a photographer, a secretary, and a dental surgeon.

This group worked in full normal light and with a remote-controlled camera. With their hands resting on the table they carried on a normal cheerful conversation. Paranormal effects were obtained in the very first session.

Results were in fact rapidly produced: knocks and raps were heard, apparently from the table, at the first meeting. Tilting of the table occurred at the second meeting and, after a few sessions, the phenomena had developed into violent table movements over which no exact control seemed possible, and which indeed caused anxiety due to the possibility of injury.

These movements . . . included the rising of the table some five or six feet clear of the floor, its movement over the whole of the room whilst in the air, and a peculiar oscillating descent to the floor, sometimes quite gently, sometimes violently.27Subsequently the group caused a lamp to switch itself on and off and produced breezes. They were also able to cause the table to “hop” in a given direction on command and to “dance” to played music.

Distressingly, it is reported that many of these successful experimental groups disband because they grow tired of producing the phenomena and cannot think of anything to do with the energy involved. What an indictment of their imagination. They could, for example, have attempted to produce mutations in seeds or to hasten the growth in plants. They could have attempted to cure individuals with terminal disease—for there is good circumstantial evidence that the poltergeist power is the same energy as is used in psychic healing. At the very least the groups could have issued standing invitations to skeptical scientists and to the staff of scientific magazines, usually completely obtuse in respect of paranormal phenomena. Demonstrations to the general public would also have been of value, to encourage personal experimentation in this area. The more phenomena we have the better.

Poltergeist phenomena, then, exist. What we require is not further proof of them but an explanation of how they work and of their precise relationship to the human personality.

A further link between the poltergeist and the incubus–succubus is possibly provided by an experience of my own. The visits of my own succubus had for a time been interrupted by drastic changes in the house in which I live. The rooms below my flat, formerly occupied by peaceful elderly lecturers, were now taken over by students, with the result that the previous early morning silence was gone—the time when I entertained my paranormal visitor. However, one night I awakened from sleep to find a heavy pressure bearing down on my right leg. I was delighted at the presence of what I knew to be an incubus, and mentally I invited it to do something else. Suddenly the room seemed filled with a fierce breeze, in which the bedclothes appeared to flutter. I say “seemed” and “appeared to” because no one else was present to say whether my experience was merely subjective or genuinely objective. At any rate, this event, if objective, recalls the puckering and rippling bedclothes observed in more than one poltergeist case.

 4 PARANORMAL FIRE

The London Daily Telegraph of 6 August 1982 carried the news that “a woman walking down a street in Chicago burst into flames for no apparent reason and was burned to death yesterday.” The Chicago police logged the event as a case of spontaneous human combustion, adding it to the “several hundred”1 cases recorded in recent centuries.

In spontaneous human combustion “a person’s body is reduced, sometimes within minutes, to a heap of cinders . . . unusual features are the speed and intensity of the process . . . and the way that it is selectively directed, for example, leaving the extremities of the body unharmed and sometimes not even damaging the clothes encasing the body.”2Unlike most of the phenomena discussed in this book, spontaneous human combustion is (albeit grudgingly) accepted by modern science. Science could hardly do otherwise than accept, in view of the police and medical photographic evidence presented at coroners’ inquests (see, for instances of photographs, M. Harrison3 and F. Hitching4). Dr. Gavin Thurston, a London coroner and editor of the Medico-Legal Journal, writes (in 1961) that “there are undisputed instances where the body was burned in its own substance, without external fuel, and in which there has been a remarkable absence of damage to surrounding inflammable objects.”5

Science has no explanation at all to offer for the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. On the paranormal side, fortunately, there are cases where we can, at least cautiously, link the phenomenon with poltergeist activity in general and with poltergeist fires in particular. There are therefore some grounds for considering spontaneous combustion to be an “inner poltergeist”—an uncontrollable burst of emotional energy that cannot escape from the mind out into the environment and which in consequence destroys the human being producing it. Interestingly, we have no record whatsoever of spontaneous combustion generated by animals, just as we have no evidence of animal poltergeist activity. Here then are strong grounds for regarding these phenomena as by-products of the highly evolved, complex human mind.

Eyewitness accounts of spontaneous human combustion—we come to some detailed accounts in a moment—speak of “bluish flames” that can not only not be extinguished by water but are increased by it. There is, further, the remarkable fact that the amazingly intense heat generated tends not to ignite or damage adjacent objects, nor to spread into any general conflagration. In scientific terms, we might consider that what occurs in paranormal human combustion is that body water (H2O), which makes up 70 percent of our physical structure, is electrolyzed into its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen, both highly flammable gases, which are somehow self-ignited. The water sometimes thrown over the victim is, it seems, drawn into the process, so adding fuel to instead of extinguishing the blaze. What exactly causes this possible electrolysis to commence remains a complete mystery. Nevertheless, electrolysis is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and so the reason for the fire’s containment or localization might be the body’s own electromagnetic field. Before examining one or two cases in detail, we should perhaps once more emphasize the quite extraordinarily intense heat that is generated in the process of paranormal combustion.

Mrs. Reeser was the widow of a doctor and the mother of a doctor. On the evening of 1 July 1951 she was sixty-seven years of age, in apparent good health, and living in Florida, a few hundred yards from her doctor son. Her son left her at 8:30 that evening, and her landlady Mrs. Carpenter looked in on her at 9 p.m. Mrs. Reeser was then seated in an easy chair, undressed ready for bed. At 5 a.m. Mrs. Carpenter was roused by the smell of burning. She found the doorknob of Mrs. Reeser’s bedroom to be hot, frighteningly hot. When the door was subsequently opened, a blast of heated air rushed out. Mrs. Reeser was, apparently, not in the apartment, and the bed had not been slept in, but closer examination revealed the truth.

Within a blackened circle about four feet in diameter were a number of coiled seat springs, and the remains of a human body. The remains consisted of a charred liver attached to a piece of backbone, a skull shrunk to the size of a baseball, a foot encased in a black satin slipper but burned down to just above the ankle, and a small pile of blackened ashes.6

Commenting on the case, Dr. W. M. Krogman, Professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that only at the very high temperature of 3000° F do bones even begin to fuse or melt, let alone disappear altogether. He tells how he has observed a body burn for eight hours in a crematorium at over 2000° F, “yet at the end of that time there was scarcely a bone that was not present and completely recognizable as a human bone . . . they were not ashes and powder as in the case of Mrs. Reeser and numerous other deaths by spontaneous combustion.” He goes on:

Never have I seen a human skull shrunk by intense heat. The opposite has always been true. The skulls either have been abnormally swollen or have virtually exploded into many pieces. . . . I have experimented, using cadaver heads, and have never known an exception to this rule.7

Dr. Gavin Thurston wholly supports these views:

To burn a body at an execution, for example, as much as two cart-loads of wood are required: and attempts by criminals to dispose of a body by fire are notoriously unsuccessful . . . this is a well-recognized medico-legal fact.8As Krogman hints, old-fashioned crematoria have to employ someone whose job it is to grind remaining bones to powder after a cremation. Even following industrial fires, let alone house fires, the remains of victims, though terribly charred, are still recognizable as human beings.

In another typical case, nineteen-year-old Maybelle Andrews was dancing with her boyfriend Billy Clifford

. . . when flames suddenly burst from her back, chest and shoulders, igniting her hair. She died on the way to hospital. Her boyfriend, who was badly burnt trying to put her out, explained that “there were no open flames in the room—the flames seemed to come from the girl herself.”9In December 1966, in Pennsylvania, a local physician, Dr. John Bentley—or what was left of him—was found by a meter reader, who had his own key to the house. Leaning over a small blackened hole in the bathroom floor was the doctor’s walking aid. “Alongside it was the sole, macabre remains of Dr. Bentley: the lower part of his right leg, browned by the heat, the shoe still intact.” In the room below the hole was a small cone of fine ash, about 13 inches high.10

In London, in 1922, Mrs. Euphemia Johnson had returned from shopping on a fine summer’s afternoon. She made herself a pot of tea and had consumed half a cup before she was overwhelmed. Her “calcinated bones” were all that was found lying within her unburned clothes. The varnish of the chair in which she had been sitting was slightly bubbled, and the linoleum beneath the remains was slightly charred: yet the heat generated in the consuming of the body must have been that of a furnace.11

The reality and strangeness of this particular phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion are therefore undoubted. They must dispose us not to dismiss lightly the evidence for other kinds of paranormal fire. Before we move on, however, two points should be made. One is that, as all authorities agree, more women than men are the subjects of spontaneous combustion. To obtain a more precise estimate of the proportions involved, all the cases mentioned by Michael Harrison in his book Fire From Heaven were counted. We may assume that the cases were chosen not on any chauvinist or sexist basis, but on the grounds of their interest. Of a total of 35 cases cited, 12 involved males and 23 involved females. As it happens, this ratio of almost two to one favoring women is the same ratio as that found by A. R. G. Owen in respect of poltergeist activity.12 A similar bias toward the female as originator of phenomena will be found in respect of all types of events bar one described in the present book.

The other point is the abrupt suddenness of the onset of spontaneous combustion; this is an aspect we shall have further occasion to return to.

The starting of paranormal fires during poltergeist activity is a subject already touched on in chapter 3. Probably the classic case that links this fire-raising activity with the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion is that concerning the village of Binbrook in Lincolnshire, England.13 The events in question took place at the turn of the year 1904–5 and were widely reported in the press of the day. They were also summarized by the Rev. A. C. Constance of Binbrook Rectory and a Colonel Taylor for the records of the Society for Psychical Research.

The events began at the rectory itself, and comprised objects hurling themselves about and, on three occasions, items near a “not very good, or big fire” bursting into flames. We must remember that in earlier times, in winter, most rooms in all houses had open coal or wood fires. While a skeptic might feel that open fires were the cause of alleged paranormal blazes within a house, such objection is altogether ruled out in the more modern cases and we may reasonably assume that at least some cases of paranormal fire in former times were not so caused. Indeed, in the present case, a householder in Binbrook, a school teacher, reported to the Liverpool Echo that she had found a blanket blazing in a room which had no fireplace. The focus of events next shifted to Binbrook Farmhouse. Objects fell from shelves and were moved around the house (much as in Matthew Manning’s home). The farmer himself reported that he felt a strong sense of psychological pressure in the vicinity of the house.

Then the farmer discovered the servant girl, who was sweeping the kitchen, with the back of her dress on fire. She was at the other end of the room from the kitchen fire at the time, which was in any case protected by a fireguard (as open fires habitually were) so that no one could approach within two or three feet of it by accident. The farmer grabbed the girl and smothered the flames. Thus far there is nothing paranormal in the narrative.

However, the girl was in fact “terribly burned” and in “terrible pain.” The hospital, approached by a local newspaper, confirmed that the girl was indeed extensively burned on the back and was in a critical condition. They agreed that the girl insisted she was not near the fire at the time of the occurrence.

Such severe burns are not readily consonant with the igniting of a dress which was in any case soon smothered. We need not feel over hesitant in taking the servant girl’s experience as a case of partial self-combustion (for which there are several precedents in the literature). Moreover, not only have other female victims been observed to self-combust from the back—“some who, like the . . . New Hampshire doctor, see the flames beginning to sprout from between the shoulder blades of kneeling women”14—but the servant girl was the typically “lost” and emotionally damaged person (like Carlotta in chapter 2) that we find in many kinds of extreme parapsychological events (see also chapters 10 and 14): “Our servant girl, whom we had taken from the workhouse, and who had neither kin nor friend in the world that she knows of. . . .” She was no doubt the source of all the strange events described.

Sometimes the paranormal fire is outside the producing individual’s own body. Since his twelfth birthday a boy in Budapest, in 1921, had been producing paranormal fires all around him. Irate neighbors finally drove the boy and his mother from their home. It was said that when the boy slept flames flickered around him, singeing the pillow, but not harming him in any way.

A similar case was reported in the New York Times in 1929. Flames were observed to play over a negro girl, Lily White, when she walked in the street. When at home her clothes were said regularly to burst into flames, as did her bedclothes when she was in bed. She herself, however, was not harmed.15 This self-protective aspect also appears in the following case.

In North Carolina in 1932 a Mrs. C. H. Williams’s dress suddenly flared up. She had not been standing near any fire, closed or open, nor any source of flame. Her husband and daughter were able to tear off the dress before Mrs. Williams was burned—or perhaps she was in some way protecting herself from the effects of the flames. Subsequently various other articles in the home burst into flames—a pair of trousers belonging to Mr. Williams and hanging in a closed wardrobe, a bed, curtains in an unoccupied room, and so on. On a number of occasions the flames broke out in full view of witnesses.16

Jennie Bramwell, in 1891, was a fourteen-year-old orphan adopted by a Mr. and Mrs. Dawson of Ontario. The child developed meningitis and while recovering from the illness would drift into trancelike states. In one of these she suddenly pointed to the ceiling and shouted: “Look at that!” The ceiling above the bed was on fire.17This fire was followed by several hundred others, which broke out in full view of the rest of the Dawson family. Fifty fires occurred in the space of one day. While they were dealing with one outbreak at one end of the house, another would start up at the other. Even the cat caught fire while Mr. Dawson sat looking at it. The family insisted that the heat generated by the fires was much more intense than that of ordinary fires (an interesting parallel, perhaps, with the abnormal heat of spontaneous human combustion). A wood-paneled wall, for example, was instantly charred to a depth of half an inch, and the other side of the wall immediately became too hot to touch. At last Jennie was sent back to the orphanage, and the fires ceased forthwith.

Willie Brough, aged twelve, of California was said, in 1886, to start fires merely by looking. His family, convinced that he was possessed by the devil, callously threw him out of the home to fend for himself. He was taken in by a local farmer, who sent him to school. There, as the San Francisco Bulletin reported, five fires broke out on his first day: one in the center of the ceiling, one in the teacher’s desk, one in her wardrobe, and two on the wall. The boy appeared terrified by the incidents. He was expelled from the school that same evening.18These last two stories date from the end of the last century, yet it is hard to doubt them. Let us, however, return to the present day and to the question of general poltergeist activity associated with paranormal fire.

In the previous chapter much evidence of Matthew Manning’s poltergeist-raising was presented. Here it is relevant to mention his ability to generate patches of very high temperature. In considering these events, which date from the 1970s, it is important to remember that they were witnessed and testified to by several of Manning’s school fellows and the school matron.19

On one occasion Manning, another boy, and the matron witnessed, late at night, a patch of light glowing on an interior wall. This was warm to the touch, although the room itself was unusually cold. This light was self-generated—that is, none of the three could establish any normal source for it.

On another, more impressive, occasion Manning was wakened by a prefect and taken along to the junior dormitory, where they were having trouble. (By now, of course, the whole school was “used to,” if that is the right expression, the numerous outbreaks of paranormal events that Matthew was continually producing.) Manning relates:

When I arrived the room was darkened and several people were in there, mostly prefects and boys who had woken up. The room was exceptionally cold and there on the wall was a pool of very bright light, which on touching was too hot for me to keep my hand on. . . . Another small junior dormitory adjoined the one we were in, and we went into it to see if anything was happening in there. Nothing could be seen immediately; the matron put her hand up against the area of wall that backed where the patch of light was manifesting in the other dormitory. She found it to be warm, as I did, and we found it becoming warmer, indicating that the heat was spreading through the wall. . . . In the other room the area had by now become so heated that I switched on the main light, fearing that if some action were not soon taken, the wall would begin to smoulder or burn.20This incident, like the others, passed without actual fire being produced. The headmaster, however, understandably very worried by the threat of fire in a boarding school, determined not for the first time to ban Manning from the school, just as, long ago, Willie Brough had been banished for a similar offence. Ultimately, however, Manning’s headmaster decided to let him stay.

How exactly might paranormal fire come about? The answer seems to lie in a continuum of activity, from “simple” poltergeist activity upwards. If an individual can generate enough projected emotional or psychic energy physically to move objects, then he or she can also cause objects—or, conceivably, atoms—to vibrate vigorously enough to cause them to heat up. (Indeed, heat is nothing but the atoms of a substance vibrating faster and faster.) The vibration eventually reaches a point where combustion spontaneously and suddenly occurs.

Paranormal fire and spontaneous human combustion may well be basically the same phenomenon. We have some evidence that those people who produce the one can sometimes produce the other. An example is related in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Henne Fire.”21 It may seem strange to invoke a fictional story in support of a factual argument, but Singer is faithfully chronicling the legends of his, the Jewish, people; and writers of Singer’s stature are as addicted to the truth as any scientist. At any rate, in the story Henne both produces paranormal fire all around her, and finally, self-immolates. Singer’s account of the blackened skeleton sitting in a chair itself only marginally singed, and everything else in the room untouched, precisely parallels themany modern factual descriptions we have of human self-immolation.

Spontaneous human combustion, then, may be the result of an individual at some point failing to externalize a critical buildup of psychic or libidinal energy (which might otherwise manifest itself as general poltergeist activity) leading to self-immolation. The analogy of an electrical charge failing to discharge itself, relatively harmlessly, in the immediate environment may not be too far from the truth.

In any event, external paranormal fire and general poltergeist activity are quite clearly linked; and, as we shall see poltergeist phenomena are themselves not isolated from general mediumistic and psychological events, such as automatic writing, clairvoyance and the sighting of ghosts.

Stan Gooch

The Origins of Psychic Phenomena ...

Mediumship, Channeling, and The Joe Fisher Story

When spirits begin to speak with man, he must beware lest he believe them in anything; for they say almost anything; things are fabricated by them, and they lie; for if they were permitted to relate what heaven is, and how things are in the heavens, they would tell so many lies, and indeed with solemn affirmation, that man would be astonished…They are extremely fond of fabricating: and whenever any subject of discourse is proposed, they think that they know it, and give their opinions one after another, one in one way, and another in another, altogether as if they knew; and if man then listens and believes, they press on, and deceive, and seduce in diverse ways. – Emanuel Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, 1622

When it comes to encounters with “hungry ghosts,” no story is more disturbing and tragic than that of Canadian journalist and best-selling author Joe Fisher. Fisher committed suicide at age 53 on May 9, 2001, throwing himself off a limestone cliff at Elora Gorge, Canada. His body was discovered by a group of teens. One newspaper suggested he may have been murdered. Shortly before his death, Fisher’s final book,The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts, an investigation into channeling and spirit guides – described by its publisher as “his gripping journey into a realm of darkness and deception” – was republished by Paraview Press. What gives this story a strange twist is that, in one of his last communications with editor Patrick Huyghe, Fisher stated that the spirits he had allegedly angered as a result of writing the book were still causing him trouble.Fisher’s works include the metaphysical classics Life Between Life, Predictions and The Case for Reincarnation, the last of which includes a preface by the 14th Dalai Lama. In an article on the topic of “spirit possession,” Colin Wilson, who acknowledges Fisher as a friend, mentions that he “had been cheerful and normal, and no one, including myself, could believe that he had killed himself.” He mentions, moreover, that Fisher believed in life after death and subscribed to the theory of reincarnation. “What baffled me was that he must have been convinced that suicide would only leave him with another set of problems.”

Wilson has a point, because in The Case for Reincarnation, Fisher had written: “Those who learn that they have killed themselves in past lives are quickly brought to the realization that suicide, far from being an answer to life’s problems, is [instead] the violent breaking of the lifeline. If the [suicide] could only realize the resulting intensification of difficulty which must enter the life to come, [suicide] would never be [attempted].”

That Fisher’s death was caused by a group of malevolent discarnate entities – who perhaps influenced his mind – might sound far-fetched and sensational. It is, however, a possibility that cannot be ignored as anyone who’s read Hungry Ghosts would probably agree. Unable to accept that an optimistic, spiritually-minded man like Fisher would want to take his own life, Wilson writes: “I find myself speculating whether his suicide had anything to do with a weird experience he had in the 1980s.”

That “weird experience” began in 1984, when Fisher met an Australian-Canadian medium named Aviva Nuemann, who suffered from chronic leukemia. Aviva had contacted Fisher, suggesting he attend a channeling session at her house because, she said, she did not feel entirely comfortable being a “mouthpiece” for discarnate entities and was hoping that he, an expert on metaphysics, might be able to shed some light on the matter. When they first met, Aviva, a laboratory technologist, stressed the point that she had “never believed in the so-called psychic world. I think astrology is absolute crap, and I’ve got no time for anything that’s supposed to be paranormal…” She then told him the remarkable story of how she became a channeler for “the guides.”

It all started, she said, when she agreed to allow her friend, Roger Belancourt, to try and heal her under hypnosis. His aim was to administer positive medical suggestions to her subconscious mind, such as “Your bone-marrow will start immediately to manufacture the extra red blood cells needed by your body.” These hypnotic sessions took an experimental turn when Roger began probing Aviva’s mind for past-life memories. In an emotionless voice in the third-person, Aviva described having been a peasant woman named Svetlana who lived through the Russian revolution, as well as a Punjabi infant who died of malnutrition before his first birthday. Other “past life memories” were described as well.

Probing deeper still, Roger managed to contact another part of Aviva’s mind, even more knowledgeable than her subconscious. It referred to itself as the “alter-consciousness.” Roger discovered that every organ of Aviva’s body, and every aspect of her personality, appeared to possess its own alter-consciousness, each with its own voice. He used the “voices” to monitor Aviva’s health. By communicating with the blood’s alter-consciousness, for instance, Roger was able to tell whether Aviva’s red blood cell count had increased or decreased. This higher aspect of Aviva’s mind – what one might term her “superconsciousness” – proved to be very knowledgeable about spiritual matters. The aim of reincarnation is “forward development,” it said, which is “understanding of oneself.”

When brought back to full consciousness, Aviva had no memory of what had transpired while in trance. It was as though she had been deeply asleep. “Coming back isn’t much fun,” she told Fisher. “It’s as if I’m being dragged very swiftly up a mineshaft…it’s like hearing an alarm go off when I’m dead to the world.” Seeing as her alter-consciousness seemed to know just about everything, Roger decided to ask it if “spirit guides” actually existed for he had long suspected that he was watched over by a deceased Tibetan Lama named Jai-Lin. Roger found to his delight that he could communicate with Jai-Lin via Aviva’s alter-consciousness, which in Fisher’s words “acted as intermediary, relaying messages from the next world.” His “guide” told Roger that he “must always think positive thoughts,” and that “you have much to learn in self-discipline.”

Annoyed by the fact that Roger was unable to control his negative emotions, Jai-Lin told Roger that he must move on to meet fresh challenges elsewhere. Jai-Lin was eventually replaced by another “guide,” an affectionate entity named Hanni, who claimed to have been Roger’s mother in a previous life in the Netherlands. Every incarnate individual was administered a spirit guide, Roger was told. But this did not necessarily mean that one had the same guide throughout the whole course of one’s life – or, for that matter, several life times. Sometimes a guide would leave their “charge” – the incarnate person whom they were required to “watch over” – and another guide would fill their place.

Having mastered the ability to manipulate Aviva’s vocal cords – a process that was said to take some time – Hanni was able to speak through the entranced Aviva. Fisher describes Hanni’s voice as “soft and tenderly” and totally dissimilar to Aviva’s. While channeling her own guide – a Yorkshire farmer named Russel who claimed to have last lived on Earth during the 19th century – the voice that issued from Aviva’s mouth was also unlike her own, so much so that it left Fisher stunned. “Gone was the high-pitched jocularity with the pronounced Australian lilt. Her enunciation was now unequivocally masculine; the English accent was unmistakable.”

Speaking to Russel, Fisher was not only surprised by Aviva’s change in voice but by her change in personality, too. “This was an entirely different Aviva,” he says, “strangely assertive and uncompromising.” Fisher felt as though he were talking to a separate being and not a fragment of Aviva’s unconscious mind. Russel told Fisher that humanity was divided into two groups: souls and entities. Souls were said to be “created from desire,” while entities were “born of knowledge.” Neither group was superior, said Russel. Although he found the concept difficult to accept, Fisher was glad to be hailed as an entity – clearly the more appealing of the two groups. Entities were classified as individuals, while souls were said to have more of a group mentality.

Fisher’s guide turned out to be a young Greek woman named Filipa Gavrilos. Three centuries earlier, said Russel, she and Fisher had been lovers in a little Greek village called Theros. Apparently they had been together over many lifetimes. The news blew Fisher away as he had always been strongly drawn to Greece, and, as a child, the name Phillipa had appealed to him. Russell described Filipa as an “excitable young lady.” Eventually, he said, she would be able to speak through Aviva. In the meantime, Fisher tried to develop mind-to-mind contact with Filipa, something she had encouraged him to do. Each day, Fisher would close his eyes and will Filipa to communicate with him, a regimen he followed religiously for the next three years.

It didn’t take long before a small group of New Age enthusiasts had gathered around Aviva, all of them eager to communicate with their guides. Regular sessions were held every week. No guide was available for those who were classified as souls, because the souls of guides, it was said, occupied a separate and inaccessible plane to that of entities. In late 1984, Filipa spoke through Aviva for the very first time. Fisher describes her voice as “subdued, pensive and poignantly tender.”

Initially, admits Fisher, he was rather unimpressed with Filipa and had “serious doubts about her intelligence…Her initial responses were almost juvenile, prompting me to remark to Roger and Aviva that I had attracted a ‘disco queen’ for a guide.” As the sessions continued, however, Filipa quickly became “an advisor, a best friend. And my ideal lover.” He adds: “Filipa and I seemed to think alike, feel alike and see the world from a near-identical perspective.”

What complicated the situation is that Fisher had a girlfriend, named Rachel, who also attended the meetings, though very infrequently. Her guide, William, spoke with a thick Scottish accent and claimed to have last lived in Edinburgh during the 17th century. They had strong karmic ties, he said, having shared more than twenty lifetimes together. Fond of William though she was, Rachel couldn’t help but feel slightly repulsed by him and the other guides. “For all their signs and wonders, the guides gave her the creeps,” writes Fisher. While in their presence, she sometimes felt “a certain intangible negativity in the air…” She eventually dropped out of the group, and, in time, she and Fisher drifted apart. He had, after all, found a more suitable partner in Filipa – non-physical though she was – who “knew and understood me more precisely than anyone…”

The guides said they could read the minds of their charges, which seemed to be true. They knew certain things about their charges that only their charges knew. They could, for instance, describe what their charge had been doing or thinking on a particular day and at a particular time – information that could only have been gained psychically.

Every so often, said the guides, it was necessary for them to intervene directly in the lives of their charges. One time Aviva had driven through a snowstorm to collect her six-year-old son from school, despite the fact that Russell had warned her not to, claiming it was too dangerous. She arrived safely at the school. But for some strange reason her car wouldn’t start on the way home. Several drivers gave her a boost, and still the engine wouldn’t respond. “But,” she told Fisher, “as soon as the snowstorm abated, the engine started perfectly, as if nothing had happened.” Questioned about the incident later on, Russell claimed responsibility for the temporary engine failure. Had he not intervened, he said, Aviva would have had a potentially fatal accident on the way home.

Fisher’s daily attempts to communicate with Filipa on a mind-to-mind basis began to yield some interesting results. Whenever contact had been successfully established, “a loud buzzing would reverberate in my ears, a sound that could be likened to an internal droning of cicadas.” (One is reminded of Mary’s “critter” experiences.) During these meditative sessions, images would sometimes appear in his mind. One time he saw the image of woman walking towards him. She was wearing sandals and a long white wrap, her face partially hidden by a garment. He knew the woman was Filipa. “Within seconds, my body was racked with the most profound and unrestrained emotion. I wept out of joy and sadness and loss and anguish, yet to this day I don’t really know why.”

Mind-to-mind contact could best be achieved when Fisher was in a particularly relaxed mood, with very few thoughts running through his head. Sometimes he’d imagine himself hugging Filipa, and this she appreciated greatly. Fisher could tell that she longed for a physical body. “I wish that I could stand there and wipe your face and hold your hand,” she told him on one occasion. Filipa and the other guides disliked nothing more than to be referred to as “spirits” and to be reminded of the fact that they no longer occupied physical bodies. To call one of the guides a spirit was to annoy them, even make them angry. “We’re not spirits!” Russell once shouted. “We’re people just like you. It’s just that we don’t have bodies anymore.” Fisher found it a little dubious that the guides were so attached to the “physical plane,” even though they stressed that they were no more “spiritually evolved” than their charges.

Occasionally, said Fisher, conversations with Filipa “would erupt in my head.” Once, while running up a steep hill, Fisher heard “a voice or implanted thought-form.” So as to make the climb much easier, the “voice” told him to imagine that his feet were not touching the ground. The technique had a positive effect. When next at Aviva’s house, Fisher asked Filipa if she had spoken to him while he was out running. She answered yes, and was able to relate exactly what she had told him. “Somehow,” explains Fisher, “Filipa had to be either living inside me or hovering perpetually close by, picking up via some otherworldly antenna my organism’s every twitch and shudder.”

In a sense, alludes Fisher, he was able to interact physically with Filipa and even have sexual intercourse with her. During a private conversation with Fisher, Wilson asked him if he “meant they [he and Filipa] became lovers in the physical sense, and he said yes, he did. I felt it would tactless to ask exactly how they went about it.”

The guides appeared to have access to an almost unlimited amount of information. They even claimed to know “the nature of God.” However, they said, the amount of time required to explain it would take some three hundred sessions; for this reason, the project was never attempted. Fisher admits to being impressed by the teachings and advice offered by the guides. They were taught, among other things, about the history of Atlantis and Lemuria; about the workings of the mind; about reincarnation, karma, and spiritual development. And so on and so forth. “So rich and so abundant were the insights and observations that there were times when I felt overwhelmed by the veritable geyser of information,” he says. Communicating with the guides was an addictive and thrilling experience.

But as time went on, Fisher grew slightly suspicious of the guides. When, during one session, Filipa said she was aware of every thought he ever had about her, “the remark left me weak with ardent appreciation. Every time I thought of her, she knew. How attentive, I asked myself, can you get?” The guides gave long lectures about the importance of peace and love, but in many ways their teachings rang empty and possessed little substance. Also worrying was that they intervened, both physically and emotionally, in the lives of their charges, while at the same time stressing the importance of free will. Such a massive contradiction was impossible to explain.

In his book The Paranormal, British psychologist Stan Gooch – whose research is detailed in the next chapter – describes the teachings of “spirit guides” as “a kind of intellectual candy-floss…when you chew on these utterances, there is nothing there. The mouth is empty.” The late D. Scott Rogo, a prolific writer and researcher of parapsychological phenomena, was of much the same opinion as Gooch. “I find that most channeled discourses possess the spiritual and philosophical sophistication of a Dick-and-Jane book,” he explains in The Infinite Boundary. He once tried reading the Seth books, he says, “but I eventually found raking up the leaves from my mulberry tree more interesting and spiritually enhancing.”

At times the guides made statements that were just plain ridiculous, one of them being that Jesus Christ was no more “spiritually evolved” than any member of the group. Russell even stated that Jesus has “been back to the earth-bound many, many times.” According to him, the only reason that Jesus managed to achieve what he did is because he spoke the truth, and because he lived during desperate times when people needed someone to follow. As for Guatama Buddha, he hadn’t, to the best of Russell’s knowledge, reincarnated since.

“The more I loved Filipa,” writes Fisher, “the more I hungered for tangible proof of her existence.” For this reason, coupled with the fact that he wished to write a book about discarnate beings and life in the “next dimension,” Fisher set about trying to prove the identities of the guides. He wanted to know if they had lived the lives they said they had. Fisher knew enough about spirits to realize that they were rarely who they claimed to be. He had, in fact, been warned about this by Russell, who, during one of their first conversations, stated clearly that mischievous spirits sometimes like to pose as wise and knowledgeable spirit guides.

The guides were more than happy with Fisher’s desire to prove their identities and were eager to offer him specific details about their lives on earth. First of all, decided Fisher, he would try to follow up on the information given by ex-RAF bomber pilot William Alfred Scott, the guide of a man named Tony. Scott said he had been born in Bristol in 1917, had started his RAF career in 99 Squadron at Mildenhall, Suffolk, and, ironically, had not been killed in the air but in a German bombing raid on Coventry in 1944. Scott knew everything about the squadron, its operations, and his fellow officers. But Fisher discovered, after a visit to the Public Record Office at Kew, that there had been no Flying Officer William Scott in the Squadron.

One surviving member of the Squadron, Norman Didwell, who listened to a recording of Scott’s voice, confirmed that the man had never existed but said that his voice sounded “very, very familiar.” In addition, the alleged place of Scott’s death – a street called Sandrich – was found not to exist. Numerous other details were found to be bogus too. Before leaving England, the country of his birth, Fisher paid a visit to his mother, a devout Christian. “You’re talking to demons,” she told him. “And I don’t like the sound of it one bit.”

When back in Canada and in a bitter mood Fisher confronted Scott as to why he had lied, the once calm and polite entity became peevish and irritable. “I do not wish for my privacy to be violated,” he said. “I have given you all the information you need and, as such, it will stand.” Worming his way out of the situation, Scott claimed that he was unable to stick around for very much longer because he had made plans to reincarnate soon. A suitable “bodily vehicle” had been located in Southern England, he said. After saying farewell, Scott allegedly departed for the “physical plane.” Much later on, Russell provided details of Scott’s “new incarnation” – his name, DOB, place of birth, and the names of his parents. Surprisingly, the information checked out, and Fisher managed to obtain a birth certificate for the infant. Fisher contacted the parents, who, although intrigued by the matter, were unwilling to get involved. He respected their decision.

Attempts to verify Russell’s last incarnation on Earth also met with failure and disillusionment. The same was true of a guide named William Harry Maddox, who claimed to have fought and died during World War I. The war records proved that Maddox had never existed. Fisher’s research, by the way, was absolutely impeccable, as can be expected from a former investigative journalist with many years experience. He searched every nook and cranny for evidence of the guides’ lives. Why it is that some of the information they provided was true, while the crucial facts from their stories were missing, did not make the least bit of sense. If the guides had wanted to be believed, thought Fisher, wouldn’t they have claimed to be people who had actually existed? Were they, perhaps, drawing on the knowledge and memories of other people – either living or dead – to create their identities?

As for his beloved Filipa, she too was found to be a liar and deceiver – or, in Fisher’s words, “a master of deception.” During his travels through Greece, Fisher was unable to find the ruins of Theros, let alone any evidence that the village had actually existed. And not only that, the city of Alexandroupolis, which Filipa had mentioned visiting during the 18th century, had not even existed at that point in history. In fact, Fisher discovered, the city had been named after a 20th century monarch! “I felt like crying for the group of believers in Toronto, for the guides themselves, whoever they were, for the elaborate deception in which I had become entangled, and for all the all-enveloping, myopic struggle of incarnate life,” he writes.

During the remainder of his stay in Greece, while lying in bed late at night and brooding on Filipa’s betrayal, “her buzzing returned to plague me. Once so comforting and reassuring, the noise in my ears took on a shrill and sinister aspect, leaving me sleepless.” At that point, says Fisher, he began to grow afraid of Russell, Filipa, and the other guides. “If they knew us all so intimately – as they had demonstrated on countless occasions – who could say what power they wielded over our lives?”

In Hungry Ghosts, Fisher describes having confronted Russell several times about his lying and manipulative ways, as well of those of “his cronies,” and how, because of their remarkable intelligence and their vast understanding of human psychology, such efforts were totally futile. During one “interrogation,” the group’s “transcriber,” whom Fisher describes as a “slavish apologist,” leapt to Russell’s defense again and again. She was unable to accept the possibility that the guides were even capable of lying. The information needed to prove their identities must be out there somewhere, she insisted.

After the guides had been unmasked, only one or two members left the group. Overall, their faith in the guides had hardly been shaken. Fisher describes Russell – clearly the leader of the guides – as “devious, manipulative and potentially dangerous” and “as slippery as the proverbial eel and a master psychologist to boot.” Fisher was unable to talk to Filipa because, said Russell, “You’ve quite completely shut her out.” They never spoke again. In an article on the Joe Fisher story, the philosopher and paranormal investigator Jonathan Zap suggests that the guides may have actually been “a single shape-shifting entity who, like the devil, ‘hath power to assume a pleasing shape’ and was capable of performing a whole cast of characters of both genders.”

An-ex member of the group, Sandford Ellison, told Fisher how the guides had almost ruined his life. During private sessions with the guides, particularly with Russell, Ellison was told that if he didn’t leave his wife – a soul, not an entity – he would die. They even said that she was trying to kill him “by projecting powerful negative energies” his way. While working with the guides who were teaching him to channel “healing energies,” Ellison suffered from “fierce emotional fluctuations and bouts of muddled thinking.” When no longer in their presence, he felt much better. During his final conversation with Russell, when he explained that he wanted nothing further to do with the guides, Ellison was told “that I would commit suicide in a fit of depression” (my emphasis). Before splitting with the guides, Fisher, like Ellison, had felt poorly. “I was more jittery than usual,” he says, “more susceptible to insomnia and nervous tension…I could not shrug off a cloying sense of contamination which could neither be pinpointed nor explained.”

Having spent years listening to, and talking intimately with, the entities channeled through Aviva, and having spoken with a number of other channeled entities, Fisher was forced to accept, somewhat ruefully, that these ostensibly wise and benevolent beings – “who have wormed their way into that juicy apple of spiritual regeneration known as The New Age” – were nothing more than “lower astral entities” or “hungry ghosts.” Ellison also concluded that the “guides” were “lower astral entities,” adding that they “play on human frailty and feed on our energy and our emotions.”

While investigating the channeling phenomenon (which attracted far more attention during the 1980s than it does now), Fisher befriended a woman named Claire Leforgia, a former nursing assistant who apparently channeled her own spiritual teacher – or guide – an English surgeon from the 19th century named Dr. Samuel Pinkerton. Called “wise” and “adorable” by those in the Toronto New Age community, Pinkerton sometimes “spoke so sweetly that it was hard to tell whether his politeness was genuinely considerate or gloatingly sarcastic,” says Fisher. Fisher eventually concluded that the charming Dr. Pinkerton was yet another hungry ghost posing as a benevolent guru. Attempts to verify his identity were met with failure; Dr. Pinkerton was not who he claimed to be.

When Fisher mentioned to his friend Alexander Blair-Ewart, editor of the Canadian New Age periodical Dimensions, that Dr. Pinkerton enjoyed smoking cigars and drinking alcohol through Laforgia – whom he sometimes referred to as his “instrument” – he was told: “Spirits like Pinkerton get a rush by swooping into a body and satisfying themselves with the sensations of physical life – sensations such as drinking alcohol, for example. This is contrary to the teachings of all the great spiritual masters. This is forbidden. This is possession, not true spirituality” (my emphasis).

In the 2001 edition of Hungry Ghosts, which contains an epilogue not available in the original edition, Fisher relates a chilling story that might help explain the cause of his suicide. Early in 1988, he says, while living in a small house near Lake Ontario and planning to write Hungry Ghosts, he developed a strange abscess on his navel. Each doctor he visited “was equally mystified by the inflammation.” Taking antibiotics did nothing to cure the infection, which got progressively worse and tremendously painful. The third doctor he saw, a wilderness specialist – “a man who had seen everything” – told Fisher “I’ve never seen anything like it.” After treating the infection, he assured Fisher that it would heal in time.

Weeks later, alone, and during the middle of winter, Fisher realized that the infection was only getting worse, and that he needed to take emergency action. He was in so much agony that he had to swallow a strong painkiller every half-an-hour. “Perhaps, I mused, I was under some kind of psychic attack [my emphasis]. Were the various entities, who had ultimately failed to win me over, trying to ensure I would not reveal who they are and what they do?”

Sometime after midnight Fisher climbed into his car and drove twenty minutes to the nearest hospital, hunched over the steering wheel in pain. He was escorted to the emergency ward and given an injection of Dermatol. An ultrasound revealed that he had omphalitis, a condition in which the umbilical cord becomes infected. Rare in adults, omphalitis usually affects newborns and is most likely to occur to those with abraded, ulcerated, or unclean navels. None of these stipulations applied to Fisher, thus it was a complete mystery as to how the abscess had formed. Due to the severity of his condition, Fisher was operated upon within hours of having checked in. After all, he was told, it can sometimes happen that the accumulated pus explodes internally, leading to peritonitis and even death. Fortunately, the operation was successful.

In what sounds like something out of the paranormal thriller The Mothman Prophecies, Fisher received, about an hour after the operation, a mysterious telephone call from Laforgia, who inquired as to his condition. When he asked Laforgia how she had known he was in hospital – for no one had been notified of his admission – she said that Dr. Pinkerton had informed her. That Dr. Pinkerton had attacked him psychically, giving him omphalitis, is a possibility that Fisher was unable to ignore. He writes: “The site of the abscess was symbolic indeed; the navel, the very core of my being.” Following his recovery and while working on Hungry Ghosts, Fisher was in a state of almost constant paranoia – and perhaps understandably so: “Even if my onetime friends ultimately found a way to take my life, I told myself, the book must be finished.”

In his aforementioned article on “spirit possession,” Wilson asks the question: “Was his suicide an attempt to rejoin Filipa?” To support this theory, Wilson explains how Fisher’s involvement with Filipa had “spoiled him for a normal sex life,” as revealed in the following quote, taken from Hungry Ghosts: “My terrestrial love life was doomed. No woman of flesh and blood could hope to emulate Filipa’s love and concern. No incarnate female could ever begin to understand me in the fashion to which I had become accustomed. In a sense, I was lost to the world, living in a limbo land…”

Wilson offers another compelling theory: “I talked about the mystery of Joe’s suicide to Suzanna McInerny, who is the president of the College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington. Suzanna confirmed that long-term involvement with ‘hungry ghosts’ can cause difficult inner problems. A kind of dirt sticks to the medium’s ‘aura’ (or vital energies), which has to be cleaned off by another medium, like a window cleaner polishing off grime. This dirt can cause depression and a sense of unreality. And sometimes, Suzanna said, a ‘hungry ghost’ can even hang around inside somebody, quite unsuspected, and can only be evicted by a medium who understands such matters. She agreed with me that this could well be the explanation of Joe’s suicide.”

Fisher was of the opinion “that no highly-evolved, spiritual being would ever speak through a medium.” He quotes the late Tibetan Buddhist lama Namgyal Rinpoche, founder of the Dharma Centre of Canada, who makes the same point: “As a general spiritual law, no enlightened being would speak through an ordinary human. 

(...)

Channeled entities are not just anyone; they’re more “spiritually evolved” than Great Uncle Joe on “the other side” – or at least they profess to be. They include entities like Seth, who spoke through the late Jane Roberts and described himself as an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality.” Seth first made his presence known in the early 1960s, when Roberts and her husband began experimenting with an Ouija board – a device known to attract only the lowest class of discarnate entities. Were it not for the publication of Seth’s voluminous, intellectual “teachings,” channeling would never have gained the popularity that it did – and still enjoys, to some extent.

Before receiving him in light trance then full trance, Roberts could hear Seth’s voice in her head. Like so many other mediums, Roberts died at a young age, at 55, in fact, after a long battle with what appeared to be an autoimmune disease. If Seth was indeed a highly evolved being, one can’t help but wonder why he felt the need to invade the body of a human being through whom he enjoyed various physical pleasures, such as drinking the odd glass of wine or beer. He even admitted to enjoying the material realm through Roberts’s senses.

Prior to coming in contact with Seth, Roberts had a mystical experience of sorts – an experience that opened her up to the channeling phenomenon. It was, she recalls, “as if someone had slipped me an LSD cube on the sly…A fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume.” The experience Roberts described sounds a little unpleasant, but nowhere near as unpleasant as Australian channeler Shirley Bray’s description of how she was first contacted by a group of entities calling themselves “the Nine”: “I felt as if thin wires, like acupuncture needles, were being inserted into the base of my skull. It was uncomfortable so I stirred, moving my head from side to side. A voice firmly but gently said, ‘Be still, it will not be long.’”

By far the most popular and controversial channeler at work today is the American J.Z. Knight, whose “gift” has earned her many millions of dollars. In 1977, says Knight, while in the company of her husband, she placed a paper pyramid on her head, and “we both started laughing until we cried.” The next thing she knew, a “very large entity” was standing before her. “He looked at me with a beautiful smile and said, ‘I am Ramtha, the Enlightened One. I have come to help you over the ditch.’”

At Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment (RSE), which has attracted some 5,000 students (known as “masters”) worldwide and is based in the town of Yelm, Washington, one can learn, according to their mission statement, “the tools and knowledge to tap into the powers of the mind and explore our human potential.” One can master remote viewing in just four days, promises RSE, and thus be able to “see the past, present and future of anything at any distance at any time.” A weeklong RSE retreat costs about US $1,000. It’s estimated, moreover, that Knight’s company, JZK Inc., earns a whopping US $10 million per year, perhaps even more.

The less than humble Ramtha describes himself as a 35,000-year-old Lemurian Warrior, who, all those years ago, conquered three-quarters of the world, realized the error of his ways, and quickly gained enlightenment. Ramtha makes no qualms about calling himself a god. We, too, are gods, he says – or, more accurately, “sleeping gods” who have forgotten their true potential. Once we begin to love ourselves, and once we come to realize that we create our own reality, we can achieve anything, says Ramtha. Like many a channeled entity of questionable integrity, Ramtha likes to make dire predictions concerning natural disasters and has even directed RSE students and staff to build underground bunkers stockpiled with emergency supplies. He predicted, in 2000, that 56 square miles of South Sound, Washington, would eventually flood. Ramtha has also predicted earthquakes as well as infections from tainted water supplies.

According to various ex-members of RSE, such as outspoken Yelm-resident David McCarthy who belonged to the organization from 1989 to 1996, Knight is nothing but a cult-leader and a “spiritual predator.” The organization, he says, has a small inner circle, to whom its most esoteric Ramtha teachings and pronouncements are revealed – one of them being that the ancient figure Jehovah will return to earth in a spaceship, accompanied by an entourage of flesh-eating “lizard people.” Says McCarthy: “A lot of people deny that these things happened. They say these are sacred teachings and that you (outsiders) wouldn’t understand.”

As was the case with Seth, Ramtha is attached to earthly pleasures and enjoys the occasional glass of alcohol, so much so that he even leads “wine ceremonies.” “Many people now speculate that whatever energy came through J.Z. Knight has either shifted, departed, or been replaced by a less benign entity,” writes journalist Craig Lee in an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Weekly in November 1986.

Were Rivail alive today, it’s fair to say that he would probably be highly suspicious of most, if not all, of the entities who speak through channelers, for as we are warned in The Mediums’ Book: “Repel all spirits who counsel exclusiveness, division, isolation. Such spirits are always vain and shallow; they impose on the weak and credulous by exaggerated praises, in order to fascinate and to domineer over them. As a general rule, distrust all communications of a mystic or fantastic character, as well as those which prescribe ceremonies or eccentric actions.”

The Tibetan Buddhists, believe it or not, have mediums of their own. The Tibetan word for medium is kuten, which means “the physical basis,” and it is through such people that oracles are consulted. Although the practice is rare these days, there used to exist hundreds of oracles in Tibet, probably more. Today there are very few oracles in existence – or, perhaps more accurately, there are very few trained mediums through whom these beings are able to communicate. China’s takeover and assimilation of Tibet probably had something to do with this. And, considering that many of these deities were used to assist governmental decision-making and provide intelligence on matters of state, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese communist government outlawed the consultation of oracles many years ago.

However, the Tibetan government (that is, the Tibetan government in exile) still consults its oracles from time to time, the principal one being the Nechung Oracle, the main protector divinity of the Tibetan Government and the Dalai Lama. Anyone who’s seen the Martin Scorsese film Kundun, about the early life of the fourteen Dalai Lama, would remember a rather disturbing scene in which the oracle is summoned and various political questions are put to it, some of them relating to the Dalai Lama’s safety. In his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama confesses that he has dealings with Nechung “several times a year,” and that “some Tibetans…have misgivings about my continued use of this ancient method of intelligence gathering.” The Dalai Lama describes Nechung as a “wrathful” deity, a “protector and defender.” They are, he says, “very close, friends almost.” Even so, their relationship is such that “I never bow down to him. It is for Nechung to bow to the Dalai Lama.”

In Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama writes: “Nechung has always shown respect for me…he invariably responds enthusiastically whenever asked anything about me. At the same time, his replies to questions about government policy can be crushing. Sometimes he just responds with a burst of sarcastic laughter. I well remember a particular incident that occurred when I was about fourteen. Nechung was asked a question about China. Rather than answer it directly, the Kuten turned towards the East and began bending forward violently. It was frightening to watch, knowing that this movement combined with the weight of the massive helmet he wore on his head would be enough to snap his neck. He did it at least fifteen times, leaving no one in any doubt about where the danger lay.”

When he begins to channel Nechung, the transformation that comes over the medium is a very dramatic thing to watch. The medium’s face changes completely, says the Dalai Lama, “becoming rather wild before puffing up to give him an altogether strange appearance, with bulging eyes and swollen cheeks. His breathing begins to shorten and he starts to hiss violently.” At the beginning of the ritual, a heavy helmet, weighting approximately thirty pounds (13.6 kg), is tied to the medium’s head. In former times, this helmet weighed over eighty pounds (> 36 kg). As to why the helmet was reduced in weight, the Dalai Lama does not say, leading one to speculate that maybe there were more than a few cases of fractured necks.

While channeling Nechung, the medium behaves as though his body were occupied by the devil himself. The process is violent and crass. There can be little doubt that Nechung has no respect for the medium, let alone the medium’s body. Trance mediumship, as a general rule, is most exhausting for the medium and in some cases may even be detrimental to their health. This is certainly true when it comes to Tibetan Buddhist mediumship – more so, in fact, than the type of mediumship witnessed in the West, for it is said that kutens live very short lives. According to the Dalai Lama, this can be explained by the fact that “the volcanic energy of the deity can barely be contained within the earthly frailty of the kuten.” Assuming this is true, the process could be likened to what happens when the fictional character Dr. Robert Bruce Banner becomes angry and suddenly transforms into the Hulk, his clothes tearing at the seams.

Perhaps the Nechung oracle is nothing more than another deceptive lower astral entity. This is an intriguing thought, and one that very few Tibetan Buddhists would be willing to entertain. That the Dalai Lama, said to be an emanation of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion, has been fooled by a “demon” is enough to make one laugh with incredulity. It is, however, a very real possibility, as Fisher’s story clearly illustrates.

Thanks to what we know so far about the SP phenomenon, and the ways in which spirits are able to influence the minds of humans, a couple of details of Fisher’s story stand out as being of great significance. Firstly, that Fisher achieved partial mind-to-mind contact with Filipa and was able to communicate with her telepathically (though obviously to a limited extent). And secondly, that he was able to have sexual intercourse with her – which, I’m sure, would have occurred on an astral level and which would have been similar in nature to the “succubi” experiences of SP sufferers and others.

Fisher was clearly a victim of spirit possession and to a fairly advanced extent. Being a gentleman, he refused to say much about his sexual encounters with Filipa, which is a shame, I think, because this may have been – probably was, in fact – one of the most important aspects of his relationship with her. Ridiculous though it sounds, they most likely enjoyed a good “astral sex life” and remained closely bonded as a result. Fished stated, remember, that his involvement with Filipa had ruined him for a normal sex life, as pointed out by Wilson.

Perhaps the last word should go to Zap, who warns: “We need to consider the subtle ways that discarnates may influence our thoughts, emotions, sexuality and behavior. Joe Fisher’s apparent suicide adds an ominous implication that these entities are not to be underestimated…”

DARK INTRUSIONS

An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences

By Louis Proud