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

she could, beyond all doubt, “see” colors with her fingertips. Her healing powers were also remarkable—for example, she could make wounds heal up in a very short time simply by holding her hand above them. But it was when they tested her for PK that they discovered her outstanding abilities. She could sit at a table, stare at a small object—like a matchbox or a wineglass—and make it move without touching it. She told investigators that when her concentration “worked,” she felt a sharp pain in her spine, and her eyesight blurred. Her blood pressure would rise abruptly.
    But then, Nina Kulagina’s most spectacular feat was to make an apple fall off a table. Ingo Swann, an American, is able to deflect compass needles by PK; Felicia Parise, who was inspired to try “mind over matter” after seeing a film about Kulagina, can move small objects like matchsticks and pieces of paper. Uri Geller, the world’s best-known “psychic,” can bend spoons by gently rubbing them with his finger, and snap metal rings by simply holding his hand above them.
    Now Geller has, in fact, produced certain “poltergeist effects.” In 1976, I spent some time with Geller in Barcelona, interviewing him for a book I subsequently wrote about him. A number of objects fell out of the air when I was with him, and these seemed to be typical examples of “teleportation.” Another friend, Jesse Lasky, has described to me how, when Uri was having dinner at their flat, there was a pinging noise like a bullet, and a silver button flew across the kitchen; it had come out of the bedroom drawer of Jesse’s wife, Pat: Geller was standing by the refrigerator with a bottle of milk in one hand and a tin of Coca-Cola in the other when it happened. Another odd feature of this incident is that the button—if it came from the bedroom drawer—must have somehow traveled through three walls to reach the kitchen. “Interpenetration of matter” is another curious feature in many poltergeist cases.
    But then, Geller was not trying to make this happen. As I discovered when getting to know him, odd events seem to happen when he is around. On the morning I went to meet him, at an office in the West End of London, he asked me, “Do you have any connection with Spain?” I said that I didn’t. A moment before I walked into the office, a Spanish coin had risen out of the ashtray on the desk, and floated across to the other side of the room, where Geller and a public relations officer were standing. I subsequently came to know the PRO well enough to accept her word that this really took place. When Geller left the Lasky’s flat in central London, he buzzed them from the intercom at the front door and explained with embarrassment that he had damaged the door. A wrought-iron dragon which decorated the center of the door had been twisted—fortunately they were able to force it back without breaking it. Geller explained that he is never sure when such things will happen, or even whether the razor with which he shaves is likely to buckle in
his hand.
    In short, it seems that even the most talented practitioners of psychokinesis cannot produce real “poltergeist effects” at will. But this is not necessarily a proof that they themselves are not responsible. For we now come to the oddest part of this story: the recent discovery that human beings appear to have two different people living inside their heads.
    In a sense, of course, this discovery was made by Freud, who called it the unconscious. Jung went further, and accepted that the unconscious is a kind of great psychic ocean, to which all living creatures are somehow connected. Yet it was not until the early 1960s that scientists began to suspect that the two different “selves” live in different parts of the brain.
    If you could lift off the top of the skull and look at the brain, you would see something resembling a walnut, with two wrinkled halves. Joining the halves is a bridge of nerve fibers called