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 ...
