cases on the spot, and meets the people concerned, the evidence even in the most superficially impressive examples tends to crumble before one’s eyes; but sometimes the witnesses on better acquaintance seem so careful and so conscientious that one can neither dismiss nor yet completely explain away their cases. This was a case of the latter sort.’
One of Cornell’s recent cases involved a newly-married couple who went on honeymoon to a fifteenth-century hotel in a market town in Norfolk.
‘They knew nothing about the hotel, which was reputedly haunted, and they were a pragmatic pair who resolutely did not believe in ghosts. Although they were just married, they had been living together for some years. They had been given the three-night honeymoon as a surprise present from the bride’s father, and had only been told about it that day. They had no chance to learn anything about the history of the hotel,’ he said.
The couple arrived in the evening, had dinner, and went up to their room at about nine o’clock. The door at first refused to open and they both noticed that there was a cold spot outside it. Once inside the room they felt it was cold, despite the fact that the radiators were working normally. It was a typical honeymoon room, with a four poster bed on one side and an open fireplace on the other. Above the fireplace was a piece of glass, covering and protecting an old fresco. As they settled down in bed they both noticed a luminous glow coming from one side of the fireplace. They were puzzled but not disturbed and settled down for the night.
At about half past eleven, they heard someone pacing up and down in the corridor outside their room, then they heard the footsteps inside the room. They both got out of bed to investigate but could see nothing, although they could hear the footsteps going round the foot of the bed. Between three and four o’clock in the morning the husband woke up and saw a young girl, aged between about twelve and fifteen, with a garland of flowers in her hair. As he nudged his wife to waken her, the figure walked to the window and disappeared.
The following day, when they mentioned their experiences to the manager of the hotel, he told them that the American guest in the room next to theirs had also had a disturbed night and had checked out of the hotel. The manager offered them a different room, but despite having by this time heard the history of the haunting, they decided they would stay where they were. The story they were told was that three hundred years previously the owner of the inn, a woman, had been having an affair with an ostler who murdered her in that room. Her daughter, who had been having an affair with the same man, threw herself off the balcony when she learned of her mother’s death.
On the second night, they again had problems opening the door of the room, but this time the room was so hot they had to open a window. Once again, there was a luminous glow by the fireplace and again they heard footsteps both inside and outside their room. During the night the husband felt the bedclothes being pulled over his head. This happened three times.
In the morning, the manager showed them a portrait of the owner who legend said had been murdered. The husband was shocked because he recognized her as an older version of the girl he had seen. That night they experienced the same problems opening the door to their room and saw the glowing light. On closely inspecting the room they found a hand print, the size of a child’s hand, on the inside of the glass covering the wallpainting. The glass, which was held about an inch and a half proud of the wall by a heavy wooden frame, was quite dusty on the inside and the fresh print showed up clearly.
In the early hours of the morning, the husband again woke up and saw the same girl sitting on the end of the bed. He believed he could actually feel the depression caused by her weight. For about fifteen seconds she and he looked at each other and then she once again went to the window and disappeared. When she left, he felt the springs of the bed go up. In the morning another set of fingerprints could be seen on the glass.
When he investigated the haunting, Tony Cornell was satisfied that the couple were truthful and sincere, and as they had both been firm disbelievers in anything paranormal, there appeared to be no obvious motivation for fraud. But his investigations showed that the owner of the hotel whose picture was hanging in the lounge had died a natural death, had not had a daughter and that there was no record of her having an affair with an ostler.
‘One of the problems with psychical research is that a lot of time is spent on cases that are eighty years old or more,’ he said. ‘But there are still some very good examples happening right now.’
Investigations
It seems odd that we have so little evidence of ghosts and poltergeists and hauntings, apart from witness testimony. Psychical researchers often report back that their cameras failed, their tapes broke, their film turned out to be blank. There is a very high rate of instrument failure on a field investigation.
With the high-tech equipment now available, instrument recording would seem to be the logical way forward. Infra-red cameras can record in the dark, without upsetting any ‘atmosphere’ necessary for whatever is going on, video equipment is becoming more compact, image intensifiers and all sorts of other sophisticated gear are available. Many members of the Society for Psychical Research agree that instrumentation is necessary. Unfortunately what is available has been assembled on an ad hoc basis, mostly at individual expense.
The best device in Britain at the moment is nicknamed SPIDER (Spontaneous Psycho-physical Incident Data Electronic Recorder), which has been devised and assembled by Tony Cornell, Alan Gauld and Howard Wilkinson, who is in charge of technical services in the psychology department at Nottingham University and who works with Cornell and Gauld on many of their field investigations. According to Wilkinson, SPIDER is a ‘glorified burglar alarm’. It consists of a small Sinclair computer in a radiation-proof box, a printer with a series of relays which control infra-red, ultra-sonic and electro-static detectors, as well as video cameras, stills cameras, sound microphones and lights. A grant from the SPR paid for a time-lapse video recorder, but Cornell alone has invested about six thousand pounds in the equipment. He pioneered the assembly of the equipment with the help of two electronics students from Cambridge but, ultimately, it was Howard Wilkinson who assembled it, re-wired it and got it working.
The main drawback of SPIDER is its size: putting it in place involves trailing wires and inconveniently bulky hardware. It is, as Tony Cornell says: ‘Absolutely no use in the average family home, especially if there are dogs, cats and children about. And if you need to cover more than one room at a time with the cameras, it becomes even more difficult.’
But Wilkinson, Cornell and Gauld are keen to use it wherever they can, so that ultimately they can assemble a library of video footage, not just as proof of the phenomena but also as a means of training other field investigators. They have made a start: they have one piece of video tape recording a poltergeist outbreak at a car-hire firm in Arnold, near Nottingham. The case began in August 1990 when an eighteen-year-old youth joined the firm to do the steam cleaning and valeting of their fleet of cars. Small gravel stones were being thrown at great velocity, narrowly but consistently missing people, around the portakabin premises the company was using. Observers were able to throw stones and see them come whizzing back. Milk bottles were rearranged and files floated off desks and dropped on to the floor.
Although in some instances the youth seemed to be cheating by flicking the stones himself, there were others when it was impossible for him to be responsible.
‘On one occasion I was in the office with the lad and Alan was outside able to see everything,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘A stone hit the wall above his shoulder and dropped into a teacup. It was impossible for him to have faked it. And there were occasions when stones could be heard raining down on the roof while he was inside the portakabin. Sometimes as many as forty or fifty stones would be swept off the roof at the end of the day, and the local police had ruled out the possibility of vandalism.’
SPIDER was installed and a video was recorded
