Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

“pick up” these recordings. In short, a water-diviner would be far more likely to see a ghost than most people.
    This, then, was Lethbridge’s theory about “ghosts” and “ghouls,” which he developed in a number of books written in the last ten years of his life (he died in 1972). It is a natural and logical extension of Buchanan’s “psychometry” and of Lodge’s theory about “recordings.” But Lethbridge has also placed it on a more scientific basis by suggesting that what does the “recording” is some kind of magnetic field associated with water. The principle sounds very much like that of a tape recorder, where a magnetic field “imprints” the sounds on an iron-oxide tape. In Lethbridge’s theory, the magnetic field of water records emotions and prints them on its surroundings—in the case of the “old witch,” on the walls of her damp cottage.
    All this helps to explain why Lombroso’s theory about haunted houses struck many contemporary researchers as “unscientific.” The “psychometric hypothesis” seems to explain the majority of hauntings. For example, the ghost of the young man in the Place du Lion d’Or gave no sign of being aware of the presence of the various people who saw him, and that is what you would expect if a ghost is some kind of “film” or recording of a long-past event.
    As to the poltergeist, the “mischievous spirit” theory found little acceptance among investigators, even in the earliest days of psychical research. The reason was simply that a scientific investigator prefers natural explanations. And where poltergeists were concerned, there were a number of plausible ones. Eusapia Palladino could cause tables to rise into the air. The famous Victorian medium Daniel Dunglas Home frequently caused heavy objects of furniture to float right up to the ceiling, while he himself floated out of third-story windows and came back by the window on the other side of the room. Home and Palladino claimed that their powers came from spirits; but they might have been deceiving themselves. One of the first thing that struck the early scientific investigators of poltergeists is that there usually seemed to be a disturbed adolescent in the house— usually a girl. Lombroso himself had noticed how often teenage girls seemed to be involved in his paranormal cases—like the girl who could see with her ear. And his original “nervous force” theory struck most investigators as far more plausible than his later belief in mischievous spirits.
    This younger generation of investigators had another reason for dismissing the spirit theory. By 1909, Freud had made most psychologists aware that the unconscious mind is a far more powerful force than Lombroso had recognized. Lombroso has a section on the unconscious in After Death—What? , and it reveals that he thought of it as little more than another name for absent-mindedness or poetic inspiration. Freud had made people aware that the unconscious is a kind of ocean, full of dangerous currents and strange monsters. Moreover, Freud emphasized that the most powerful of these unconscious forces is the sex drive. Could it be coincidence that most poltergeist cases involve adolescents at the age of puberty?
    This, of course, still fails to explain how the unconscious mind of a disturbed adolescent can make bottles fly through the air. But again, science had some plausible theories. In Basle, a university student named Carl Jung was intrigued by a female cousin who began to go into trances at the age of puberty, and spoke with strange voices. And at about the time this started, the dining-room table suddenly split apart with a loud report. There was also a sudden explosion from a sideboard, and when they looked inside, they found that a bread knife had shattered into several pieces. Jung suspected that his cousin’s “illness” was responsible for these events, and he coined the term “exteriorization phenomenon” to explain