GHOSTWATCH
ALAN MURDIE examines the various attitudes to the afterlife displayed by prominent ghost hunters
Conversing recently with an Anglican minister from the south of England, I learned how local fellow clergy had just attended a special diocesan training session devoted to deliverance ministry, what is popularly (and frequently inaccurately) called exorcism. Prompting this initiative have been spiralling calls for pastoral help received from people declaring themselves haunted by the recently dead, typically individuals known to them in life as close relatives and friends.
To such appeals the response of the Church is sympathetic counselling, simple blessings and prayer, rather than the full rite of exorcism (the use of which is exceedingly rare). As to what exactly may be triggering this marked increase in calls for spiritual help, this is not of primary concern of the Church, the clergy being more concerned with ministering effectively to those seeking help. However, one suggestion has been that this is a direct consequence of the rise in humanist funerals. Secular ceremonies are conceived, arranged and performed so as to omit any elements of praying for the repose of the souls of the dead. Are the dead, thus deprived of more traditional sacred rites, failing to find rest?
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) considered that every thinking person ought to have a conception as to what may happen with individual consciousness after physical death. In his last and posthumous book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung stated that a person “should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or create some image of it – even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss”. Jung saw this as a necessity to realise one’s position in the bigger picture of the world at large.
What have Britain’s best-known ghost hunters of the last century had to say on survival after death?
It is often assumed that ghost hunters ‘believe in ghosts’ in the sense of viewing them as spirits of the dead, but familiarity with the work and writings of many of the best known since the start of the 20th century shows this is far from the case. Many were uncertain as to whether ghosts were actually the dead coming back and some expressly rejected such an idea.
Having been fortunate enough to know a number of these leading researchers personally, and to have received much help, inspiration and guidance from them in my own early years in psychical research, I am pleased to share what I gleaned as their thoughts on this ultimate question. These were researchers all active in the period 1900-2000, which may be seen historically as the time when the modern conception of ghost hunting developed, in the sense of actively seeking out scientific evidence of localised hauntings. I can vouch for the fact that they entertained no unified or consistent view on life after death and were deeply divided as to the interpretation of the evidence they gathered.
In their endeavours, these researchers were very much pioneers. It should be remembered that ghost hunting, as popularly perceived and practised today, is not very old as an activity, pastime or profession. Many of the techniques they adopted are seen now as routine, but with many basic precautions and safeguards they promoted blithely omitted by imitators today, on both sides of the Atlantic. Regrettably, many would-be investigators of today behave in ways that fall far short of the standards and protocols originally envisaged, consequently attracting extensive and often justified criticism (e.g. in Scientifical Americans: The
Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers (2017) by Sharon Hill; Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits (2017) by Benjamin Radford).
Prior to the 1870s, the ghost hunter was often indistinguishable from the spirit raiser or necromancer, or approached manifestations via static sittings and experiments conducted with mediums
(I omit here instances of mass ghost hunting in urban communities that broke out periodically when crowds went hunting phantoms such as ‘Spring-heeled Jack’). In those days, you invited the ghosts to come to you to communicate, usually via a human medium or a device such as a planchette or –from 1892 – the Ouija board.
This pre-scientific approach remained well represented well into the first half of the 20th century by two ghost hunters and prolific authors, Elliot O’Donnell and Robert Thurston Hopkins.
O’Donnell took up ghost hunting “as an occupation” in the 1890s and was, for nearly 60 years, one of the most active ghost hunters in Britain. He was convinced of survival, but the dead in his books plainly do not rest in peace. O’Donnell is the ‘Penny Dreadful’ dramatist of early 20th century ghost hunters; he didn’t just chase ghosts, they also chased him. Eschewing psychical research and conventional religious interpretations (in spite of his father being a clergyman), he detested Spiritualism, condemning it as either fraud or ‘a menace’.
The ghost hunter was often indistinguishable from the spirit raiser or necromancer
One may agree with the verdict of the master of the literary ghost story, MR James, who commented in 1924 concerning O’Donnell’s output: “I do not know whether to class [his accounts] as narratives of fact or exercises in fiction. I hope they may be of the latter sort, for life in a world managed by his gods and infested by his demons seems a risky business.”
O’Donnell’s conception of an afterlife, so far as it can be ascertained, could be characterised as being closest to that of ancient Mesopotamia or presented in occult literature. O’Donnell places himself in the midst of a frightening world, crammed full of scary and malevolent entities who return to vex the living. He assures us that the most outrageous and evil earthbound entities cause illness, death and insanity and incite weak people into committing crimes. Good seldom triumphs in these stories, but occasionally the terror is relieved by benign spectres from some other realm, hinting at a calmer, more indeterminate and possibly Christian-orientated cosmos. The majority of his stories can be dismissed as unreliable or complete fictions, often lifted from other sources.
Much the same may be said of many of stories regaled by R Thurston Hopkins (1875-1958), one ghost hunter of whom O’Donnell actually approved, perhaps because their works share resemblances. A journalistic craftsman of the grotesque, his tales are also a mixture of sensational fact and shameless invention, or embellished folkloric fragments. His spectres may have a nasty face comparable with a “wizened pig’s bladder” or a “wizened bladder of lard” (such as the naked ghost of Rattlesden Rectory, Suffolk). Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising to have found Thurston Hopkins expressing doubts himself about survival, expressed in passing in a short article in a local paper which mentioned the vaguely eerie atmosphere of Warren Lodge, Norfolk, once a small leper hospital. Conscious of his advancing age, he reflected that in a few years he would discover himself whether there was life after death. Such doubts did not restrain him later imagining a bloodcurdling ghost attached to the same site, before he died in 1958 (See Adventures with Phantoms (1946); Ghosts Over England (1953); Bury Free Press, 7 Dec 1941.)
One ghost hunter crossing the boundary between the spirit-raising period and a more scientific approach was Sir Shane Leslie (1885-1971). A devout Roman Catholic, he tackled a haunting at Corpus Christi College in 1904 with exorcism but later joined the Society for Psychical Research.
While maintaining a strictly Catholic view of the afterlife (see Shane Leslie’s Ghost Book, 1955) he emphasised the importance of evidence and would correct any errors he subsequently found in his writings, stating “it is the duty of a member of the S.P.R. to dissolve untrue ghost stories as well as to record well-witnessed ones.” (Journal of the SPR, 1955, vol.38, no.687) .
The most famous ghost hunter of the first half of the 20th century was Harry Price (1881-1948), who presented himself as a scientist in his approach to investigations and also ensured the maximum publicity for his activities wherever possible. Still admired today by many as ‘the Prince of Ghost Hunters’, he popularised the idea of taking measuring instruments on ghost hunts, giving his vigils at least a scientific gloss. However, his ‘Blue Book of Instructions’ issued to ghost hunting volunteers monitoring the notorious Borley Rectory in Essex clearly accepts the possibility that its phantom nun was an unquiet spirit. The later discovery of what was taken to be part of her jawbone in the cellar of the rectory was seen by many as a confirmation of this (see The Enigma of Borley Rectory (1996) by Ivan Banks). Price arranged a Christian burial of the fragment at Liston churchyard.
On survival, Price had an antipathy to Spiritualism, exposing a number of fraudulent mediums with relish and explaining more puzzling cases as telekinesis and telepathy. This did not stop Spiritualists proclaiming the posthumous return of his spirit after his own death in 1948. Price seems to have been impressed by messages received by the American medium Eileen Garrett concerning the R101 Airship disaster near Beauvais in France in 1930 (see The Airmen Who Would Not
Die (1979) by John G Fuller; Light, vol.136, no.1, Spring 2015; Alpha, no.6, Jan/Feb 1980). He appears to have been genuinely taken in by a materialisation séance in a private home in London in which a young girl, ‘Rosalie’, supposedly manifested in 1938 (a mystery which is dissected and plausibly explained by Paul Adams in his excellent The Enigma of Rosalie: Harry Price’s Paranormal Mystery Revisited, 2017). Near the end of his life, Price became increasingly active at his local church in Pulborough, Sussex, so it appears his private views on the afterlife were conventionally religious. He was buried beneath a simple stone cross in Pulborough churchyard and on Good Friday 2018, I, together with members of the Ghost Club, laid a wreath at his grave to mark the 70th anniversary of his death.
The techniques pioneered by Price were developed and extended by an eager new generation of ghost hunters after World War II, many of whom became sceptical of the traditional spirit hypothesis.
Philip Paul (1922-2010) followed Price’s lead at Borley, holding seven unsuccessful vigils on 28 July, the date the nun was said to appear, and then excavating the rectory site in 1955. Paul moonlighted from his ordinary job as a Fleet Street crime correspondent for Psychic News, becoming increasingly disillusioned by the fraud he found in Spiritualist circles. In 2002, he told myself and researcher Milton Edwards he felt he had only met one convincing medium, a woman who cured him of a long-standing medical problem and saved his life. On
survival he became steadily agnostic and doubtful. (See Some Unseen Power (1985) by Philip Paul).
Occupying Price’s seat at the Ghost Club for many years was Peter Underwood (19232014) serving as its President between 1962-1993. Underwood pursued ghosts for decades, penning numerous books on psychic topics, including reincarnation and exorcism. Privately, he was less sure of life after death himself, eventually telling the press in the mid-1990s that he was still not convinced of any form of survival. Writing in 2009 to John Fraser, the author of Ghost Hunting: A Survivor’s Guide: “I always hoped during one of the ghost hunts I organised and supervised over the last sixty years that irrefutable proof would become evident of something existing after death but I never found anything lasting, perhaps we are not meant to find it… I never encountered anything that proved life after death to my satisfaction. However… I am still hoping.” Closing his autobiography, No Common Task (1983), he wrote “that to live in the hearts and memories of those we leave behind is not to die”.
Tom Perrott (1921-2013), chairman of the Ghost Club for 29 years, expressed similar reservations. He witnessed genuine poltergeist activity at a house in Spencer Grove, Hackney, in 1969, and manifestations at a hotel in Herefordshire, but had not found anything that had convinced him of personal survival. He told me: “In most cases my ghost hunting equipment consists of a note book, a pencil and a sympathetic ear”.
Andrew Green (1927-2004) described himself as “a ghost hunter who does not believe in ghosts”. Though joking in his Our Haunted Kingdom (1973) that he would be interested in ghosts “until I became one myself”, he ardently rejected survival entirely. A convinced atheist and humanist, he explained hauntings as a mixture of telepathy, psychokinesis and impersonal energies (electromagnetic in nature). He considered talk of spirits of the dead had no place in science. Regularly he reminded me and others that up to 40 per cent of recognised apparitions are of living people. Adopting a more relaxed and tolerant attitude towards mediums than many sceptics, he credited a minority of mediums as enjoying genuine ESP powers, but viewed their messages as products of the unconscious mind, either theirs or their sitters.
A most experienced investigator of mediums and haunted houses from the 1940s through to his death in 2010 was Tony Cornell, Vice President of the SPR and President of the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research. Together with Dr Alan Gauld, he deployed an automatic monitoring device utilising a thermometer, video camera and sound recorder at over 100 different locations in 20 years to capture evidence at haunting premises with negligible results. Tackling the totality of evidence and refusing to be selective, he concluded that the presence of the living rather than the dead was necessary for hauntings and séance room phenomena. In Investigating the Paranormal (2003), he stated: “Evidence for any discarnate responsibility, for these events is far from substantial. It is certainly not enough to be indicative, let alone conclusive”. However, from personal conversations we shared at his Cambridge home, I know he did not completely discount survival or consider it falsified. Indeed, one intriguing report has been heard since his death from another psychical researcher that might be suggestive of a post-mortem communication from him.
Yet it would be wrong to assume all ghost hunters of this period held pessimistic views on personal survival following bodily dissolution. American Dr Hans Holzer (included here on account of his book Great British Ghost Hunt, 1976), believed ghosts were often spirits of the dead and readily took mediums, psychics and witches on his numerous investigations.
Professor Archie Roy (1924-2013), who investigated a number of haunted houses in Scotland, was convinced of survival by the weight of evidence accumulated by the early psychical researchers and sittings with mediums, rather than his work on spontaneous cases.
Joan Forman, the author of Haunted East Anglia (1975) and Haunted Royal Homes (1987), spent a year travelling around the eastern counties (she cast her net wide, taking in Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire as well as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex). She ascribed most ghosts to residues of energy imprinted like recordings on the material environment or others as being generated by the living, but conceded there was no allencompassing explanation and concluded some apparitions were the recently dead. She was impressed by the story of the life-like apparition of a deceased American airman who spoke to a witness at a farm near Bishops Stortford shortly after World War II, being heard to say, “It’s kinda cosy here”. He had only visited the farm briefly in life, before being killed in a wartime raid, and she considered there had been no time for him to leave an imprint at the property. She later wrote The Golden Shore: The Survey of Evidence for Death Survival (1988).
Of all the ghost hunters I have known personally, writer and broadcaster Dennis Bardens (1911-2004), author of Ghosts and Hauntings (1965), was the most eloquent and optimistic concerning post-mortem survival. Speaking at a meeting of the Ghost Club at the Wig and Pen Club in November 1999, he compared dying to “moving from one room to another” or a “chrysalis turning into a butterfly”. He was convinced by personal experiences and those of many others he had met over a 70-year period as well as that accumulated by psychical researchers from 1882. At his funeral in February 2004, the cheerful song ‘Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries’ was played as the closing music to remind us.