while their father carried on. After stopping to speak to somebody, they turned and saw the Canon waving his hat to them from the opposite side of a small dip and signalling to them to follow him. One of the sisters, Louisa Bourne, provided the following statement, which was also signed as correct by her sister:
‘My sister, the coachman and I all recognized my father and also the horse. The horse looked so dirty and shaken that the coachman remarked he thought there had been a nasty accident. As my father waved his hat I clearly saw the Lincoln and Bennet mark inside, although from the distance we were apart it ought to have been utterly impossible for me to have seen it. At the time I mentioned seeing the mark, though the strangeness of seeing it did not strike me until afterwards.
‘Fearing an accident, we hurried down the hill. From the nature of the ground we had to lose sight of my father, but it took us very few seconds to reach the place where we had seen him. When we got there, there was no sign of him anywhere, nor could we see anyone in sight at all. We rode about for some time looking for him, but could not see or hear anything of him. We all reached home within a quarter of an hour of each other. My father then told us that he had never been in the field in which we saw him the whole of that day. He had never waved to us and had met with no accident. My father was riding the only white horse that was out that day.’
The fact that the girl could clearly see the manufacturer’s mark in her father’s hat at a distance from which it should not have been visible supports the hallucination theory, but there is still the problem of why all three of them saw exactly the same thing at the same moment, unless the apparition came not from their minds but from the mind of the Canon.
The hallucination theory may even hold good for the straightforward apparitions that manifest in the same place, doing the same thing, at different times (classic grey ladies and headless riders reported across the centuries). Fred, who saw the child-like apparition in the Cardiff poltergeist case, actually suggested to Dr Fontana that it might be his own hallucination of himself as a child.
Trying to make all cases conform to the theory is at best a tortuous exercise, and one that is rejected by researchers like Dr Alan Gauld who feels it falls short of explaining the physical phenomena that sometimes attend hauntings: noises, the breaking of crockery, opening and closing doors with visible turning of handles or lifting of latches.
If the hallucination theory is accepted, it’s interesting to note that the human mind can collectively conjure up the personality of a ghost.
Tony Cornell and some friends were called in to investigate a haunted pub, the Ferryboat Inn at Holywell, near Cambridge, in the early 1950s. Cornell had heard that every St. Patrick’s Day a ghost appeared in the bar and pointed at one of the flagstones, which moved. He and his friends went there on the right day, stationed themselves above the flagstone with a ouija board, and conducted a seance. They soon had a communicator, a girl who told them her name was Juliet Tewsley, that she was a Norman, and that she was hanged for her affair with a married man, Thomas Zole, in 1054.
‘There were five of us round the ouija board, possibly talking to our own unconscious minds. But it gave the landlord of the pub an idea, and he asked us to go again the following year – only for us to find that a lot of media people had also been invited. Since then, the story has been added to and added to,’ said Tony Cornell.
‘There is no evidence that this girl existed. The name Juliet didn’t come into the English language until the sixteenth century, the Normans did not invade until 1066. One wonders if this is how all ghost stories start.’
In a more controlled way, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research created their own ghost in 1974. Eight of them, under the supervision of British mathematician Dr A.R.G. Owen, assembled around a table with their hands clearly visible on top and made ‘contact’ with a ghost they had invented themselves: a Royalist knight at the time of the English civil war, called Philip. Philip would answer questions by rapping on the table, and would make the table tilt and eventually levitate off the ground. But the framework of the fictional Philip’s life had all been worked out beforehand by the group: he lived in a large house called Diddington Manor, he had a wife called Dorothea and had been passionately in love with a gypsy girl who was burned as a witch. Philip died by committing suicide, out of guilt for not having saved the girl. The ‘ghost’ of Philip accepted the characteristics assigned to him and even filled in more background details about himself.
Despite each member of the group suspecting the others of cheating, there was never any evidence of it, and some of the physical phenomena staggered everyone present. It was traditional for the group to hand around sweets, leaving one for Philip. On one occasion, when one of them jokingly tried to take Philip’s sweet, the table tilted alarmingly away from him, but the sweet did not slide down it. Neither did others that were put next to it.
The group embarked on ‘creating’ Philip because they were interested in recording physical phenomena. They did not create an apparition of him, but the experiment demonstrates that the mind can create a ghost personality.
Hauntings have been reported since time immemorial. There are many references to them in classical literature. Because their manifestations are generally less dramatic and more sporadic than poltergeist cases, researchers have been present at fewer hauntings when phenomena have occurred, although there are well-attested cases of several witnesses experiencing the same phenomena. Most cases which are quoted in books on the supernatural as prime examples of hauntings are old. This is probably less to do with the frequency or quality of hauntings and more to do with the amount of time and interest available to record them properly. There are reputedly haunted houses in every district of Britain but remarkably few in which independent witness statements have been logged and compared.
The Despard case, which was first reported in 1892, is accepted as a classic and is still being studied and scrutinized in detail by researchers (it is often referred to as the Morton case, after the man who first wrote about it). A ‘tall woman in black’ was seen so often in the Despard family home in Cheltenham that some guests took her for another visitor. The woman always held a handkerchief to the lower part of her face. Unlike many apparitions, she was not confined to one spot but moved around the house and grounds. She was able to walk through objects and trip wires rigged deliberately to catch her. When a circle of people joined hands around her, she passed through the circle between two people and disappeared. Altogether, seventeen people bore witness to having seen her, some of whom had no prior knowledge of her ‘presence’ in the house. There were other assorted phenomena reported: footsteps, doors banging, handles turning.
According to Tony Cornell and Dr Alan Gauld, ‘minor hauntings’, where there are sounds, objects are moved and lights are switched on and off, but where there is no apparition, are far more common than poltergeists or ghosts. Yet because these cases are difficult to assess (and perhaps because they are rather dull) they do not find their way into case collections and parapsychological literature. Cases are also extremely hard to categorize, many of them overlapping the apparition and minor haunting groupings. One case Cornell and Gauld report in their book, Poltergeists, is the story of a haunting that took place in 1971 and 1972, in a substantial five-bedroomed detached house lived in by a married couple, who were both college lecturers, and their four children. After moving into the house, they experienced an assortment of phenomena: a spoon was seen suspended in mid air, a stone which had come out of a ring was moved from inside a jewel box to the bed, a noise was heard as if a trunk was being dragged across the landing, the sound of drawers being opened and closed was heard on numerous occasions, and one of the daughters and her cousin reported seeing an apparition during the night, a man who stood near the mantelpiece in the lounge with his head on his hands. Breathing noises, singing, a voice with a Scottish accent, footsteps and muffled whispers were all heard. The front door bell rang, and so did the telephone, when there was no one there. Gauld and Cornell believe the family were excellent witnesses, and say so in their book:
‘When
