Title: The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III.
Author: Beresford, J. D. (John Davys), 1873-1947
Language: English
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THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER'S TALE--THE SCEPTICAL POLTERGEIST

From "The New Decameron"--Volume III.

By J. D. Beresford

There was once a time (he began) when I decided that I was a fraud; that
I could not be a psychical researcher any longer. I determined to give
it all up, to investigate no more phenomena nor attend another séance,
nor read a word about psychical research for the remainder of my life.
On the contrary, I planned an intensive study of the works of the later
Victorians, of that blissful period in the history of Europe when
we could believe in the comforting doctrine of materialism. "Oh!" I
thought, "that one had a Haeckel or a Huxley living now to console
us with their beautiful faith in the mortality of the soul!" The
Neo-Darwinians failed to convince me; the works of H. G. Wells left me
cold.

I will tell you the events that brought me to this evil pass.

It is not likely that anyone here will remember the Slipperton case. It
attracted little attention at the time. In 1905 there was still a little
sanity left in the world. A few even of the London dailies were nearly
sane then, and refused to report ghost stories unless they were known to
be untrue. And the Slipperton case had hardly any publicity--an inch
in the _Daily Mail_, headed "Family Evicted by Ghosts," was the only
newspaper report that I saw; though there may have been others. In these
days the story would be given a couple of columns opposite the leader
page; and the Sunday papers...

I was connected with the thing because Edgar Slipperton and his wife
were friends of mine; quiet, old-fashioned people who believed that when
you were dead you _were_ dead, and that that was the end of it.

The phenomena that drove them out of their house at last were of the
ordinary poltergeist type that date back to the days of John Wesley. The
Slippertons had a fat and very stupid cook, whom I suspected of being an
unconscious medium; but they were so attached to her that they refused
to give her notice, as I strongly advised them to do. They told me that
although she was constitutionally unable to grasp a new idea, such as
the idea of a different pudding, she was entirely dependable, always
doing the same things in the same way and with the same results. And
while this confirmed my suspicions that she was a spiritualistic medium,
I recognised that she might have useful qualities as a cook.

The Slippertons stood it pretty well for a time. At first they were only
mildly inconvenienced. Things used to disappear mysteriously, and turn
up in unexpected places. Slipperton's pince-nez, for example, were lost,
and found inside the piano. And Mrs. Slipperton's "false front" would
be moved in the night from the dressing-table to the brass knob of the
bed-post, even after she took to pinning it to the toilet cover. Things
like that; irritating, but not really serious.

But the trouble increased, grew to be beyond endurance in the end. The
poltergeists, with that lack of imagination which always characterises
them, started to play the old trick of pulling off the Slippertons'
bed-clothes in the middle of the night--one of the most annoying of the
spirits' antics. And they followed that by experimenting with the heavy
furniture.

I was out of England when the trouble came to a head, and I heard
nothing of the later developments until after the Slippertons had left
the house. I happened to meet Slipperton by accident in the Haymarket,
and he took me into his club and gave me the whole story. Naturally,
I was glad of the chance to investigate, although I thought it very
probable that the phenomena would cease with the departure of the cook.
I determined, however, to go down and spend a week in the house, alone.
I was not dismayed by the fact that I should be unable to get any help
with my domestic arrangements, owing to the superstitious fears of the
villagers. I rather enjoyed cooking my own meals in those days.

It was fine weather in late May when I went down, and I regarded
the visit as a kind of holiday rather than as a serious investigation.
Nevertheless, from force of habit I carried out my inquiry in the
scientific spirit that is so absolutely essential in these matters.
The Slippertons' house was on the outskirts of a small town in
Buckinghamshire. The shell of the house dated from the early seventeenth
century. (You will find it described in the _Inventory of the
Royal Commission on Historical Monuments_--the second volume of the
Buckinghamshire survey.) But the inside had been gutted and replanned to
suit our modern requirements, such as the need for making each bedroom
accessible without passing through other bedrooms, the necessity for a
fitted bathroom, and so on.

I found the house as Slipperton had warned me that I should, in a
chaotic condition inside. Everything movable seemed to have been
moved--without any definite intention, so far as I could see, but just
for the sake of upsetting the decent order of the household. I found
a frying-pan, for instance, hung on the hook that was designed for the
dinner-gong, and the gong inside one of the beds. A complete set of
bedroom ware had been arranged on the drawing-room table; and apparently
some witticism had been contemplated with a chest of drawers, which had
become firmly wedged into the angle of the back staircase. In short, the
usual strange feats that characterise poltergeist phenomena.

I touched none of these misplaced things with the exception of the
frying-pan, which I needed to cook the sausages I had brought with me;
but after I had had my meal, I went through all the rooms and entered
the position of every article in a large note-book, making plans of each
room, besides a full list of the furniture and ornaments it contained.
Later, I went up into the roof and disconnected the water supply,
afterwards emptying the cistern and all the pipes. And before I went
to bed I turned off the electric light at the main switch. All these
precautions, as I need hardly tell you, were absolutely essential. It
might appear difficult to explain the moving of a large chest of drawers
by the sound of water-pipes or the fusing of an electric wire; but the
critics of psychical research have essayed far more difficult tasks than
that, to their own entire satisfaction.

I went up to the bedroom the Slippertons used to occupy, a little before
eleven o'clock. I had with me a couple of spare candles, a new notebook,
and a fountain pen. I was even at that time, I may add, a highly
trained researcher in every way, and was quite capable of taking a full
shorthand report of a séance. I tried my pulse and temperature before
getting into bed and found them both normal. So far, there had been no
sign of any phenomena; and I was not at all nervous. Indeed, I may say
that I have never been nervous with spirits.

I had brought the _Pickwick Papers_ upstairs to read in bed--it is
always as well to choose some book that has no kind of bearing on the
subject of one's investigation--and I was in the middle of the Trial
Scene when my attention was caught by the sound of something moving in
the room. I had left both windows wide open and the curtains undrawn,
and I thought at first that an unusually large moth had flown in and was
fluttering against the ceiling. I laid down my book, sat up and looked
round the room, but I could see nothing. The night was very still, and
the candle on the table by my bed burnt without a flicker. Nevertheless,
the sound continued; a soft, irregular fluttering that suggested the
intermittent struggle of some feeble winged creature. It occurred to me
that a wounded bat or bird might have flown into the room and might be
struggling on the floor out of sight near the foot of the bed. And I
was about to get up and investigate when the flame of the candle sank
a little, and I became aware that the temperature of the room was
perceptibly colder.

I picked up my note-book at once and made an entry of the circumstances,
and the exact time.

When I looked up again, the sound of fluttering had ceased and the
candle was once more burning brightly; but I now perceived a kind of
uncertain vagueness that was apparently trying to climb on to the rail
at the foot of the bed. When I first saw it, it could not be described
as a form. It had rather the effect of a patch of dark mist, with an
irregular and changing outline, that obscured to a certain extent the
furnishings of the room immediately behind it. I must confess, however,
that my observations at this point were not so accurate as they should
have been, owing to the sudden realisation of my stupidity in not having
brought a camera and flashlight apparatus. The Slipper-tons had prepared
me for poltergeists, and I was, at that moment, distinctly annoyed at
being confronted with what I presumed to be an entirely different class
of phenomenon. Indeed, I was so annoyed that I was half inclined to blow
out the candle and go to sleep. I wish, now, that I had....

The Psychical Researcher paused and sighed deeply. Then producing a
large note-book from his pocket, he continued, despondently:

I have got it all down here, and when I come to material that
necessitates verbal accuracy, I should prefer to read my notes aloud
rather than give an indefinite summary. In the first place, however, I
must give you some idea of the form that gradually materialised; of the
form, that is, as I originally saw it.

It took the shape, I may say, of a smallish man, grotesquely
pot-bellied, with very thin legs and arms. The eyes were
disproportionately large and quite circular, with an expression that
was at once both impish and pathetic. The ears were immense, and set at
right angles to the head; the rest of the features indefinite. He was
dressed rather in the fashion of a medieval page.

(The professor was heard to murmur, "The typical goblin," at this point,
but made no further interruption.)

He sat with his feet crossed on the rail at the foot of the bed and
appeared able to balance himself without difficulty. He had been sitting
there for perhaps a couple of minutes, while I made various entries in
my note-book before I tried the experiment of addressing him.

"Have you a message?" I asked. "If you cannot answer directly, knock
once for 'No,' and three times for 'Yes,' and afterwards we can try the
alphabet."

To my great surprise, however, he was able to use the direct voice. His
tone was a trifle wheezy and thin at first, but afterwards gained power
and clearness.

"I can hear you fairly well," he said. "Now do try to keep calm. It
isn't often that one gets such a chance as this."

I will now read my notes.

Myself. "I am perfectly calm. Go on."

Spirit. "Will you try to answer my questions?"

The Researcher looked up from his note-book with a frown of impatience
after reading these two entries, and said:

But perhaps I had better summarise our earlier conversation for you.
There was, I may say, a somewhat long and distinctly complicated
misunderstanding between myself and the spirit before the real
interest of the message begins; a misunderstanding due to my complete
misapprehension of our respective parts. You see, it is unhappily
true--however much we may deplore the fact and try to guard against
it--that even in psychical research we form habits of thought and
method, but particularly of thought. And I had got into the habit of
regarding communications from spirits as referring to what we assume
to be the future life. Well, this communication didn't. The spirit with
whom I was talking had not, in short, ever been incarnated. He was what
the Spiritualists and Theosophists, and so on, call an "Elemental."
And to him, I represented the future state. I was, so to speak,
the communicating spirit and he the psychical researcher. He was, I
inferred, very far advanced on his own plane and expecting very shortly
to "pass over," as he put it. Also, I gathered that he was in his
own world by way of being an intellectual; keenly interested in the
future--that is, in our present state; and that the Slipperton phenomena
were entirely due to the experiments he had been carrying out ("on
strictly scientific lines," he assured me) to try and ascertain the
conditions of life on this plane.

Perhaps I can, now, illustrate his attitude by a few quotations from our
conversation. For example:

Spirit. "Are you happy where you are?"

Myself. "Moderately. At times. Some of us are."

Spirit. "Are you yourself happy?"

Myself. "I may say so. Yes."

Spirit. "What do you do? Try and give me some idea of life on your
plane."

Myself. "It varies so immensely with the individual and the set in
which one lives. But we--oh! we have a great variety of what we call
'interests' and occupations, and most of us, of course, have to work for
our livings."

Spirit. "I don't understand that. What are your livings, and how do you
work for them?"

Myself. "We can't live without food, you see. We have to eat and drink
and sleep; protect ourselves against heat and cold and the weather
generally, which means clothes and shelter--garments to wear and houses
to live in, that is."

Spirit. "I have inferred something of this very vaguely from my
experiments. For instance, I gather that you put on hair in the daytime,
and take it off when you are--where _you_ are at the present time. Also,
I have noticed that when the coverings which at present conceal you are
pulled away, you invariably replace them. Am I to deduce from that that
you try to keep your bodies warm and your heads cool at night?"

Myself. "Well, that's a trifle complicated. About the hair, you
understand, some of us lose our hair--it comes out, we don't know
why--in middle life, as mine has, and women and some men are rather
ashamed of this and wear--er--other people's hair in the daytime to hide
the defect."

Spirit. "Why?"

Myself. "Oh, vanity. We want to appear younger than we really are."

Spirit. "Why?"

The Researcher bent a little lower over his notebook as he said:

I seem to have written "Damnation" at this point; but so far as I can
remember I did not speak the word aloud. You will see, however, that I
tried my best to be patient in what were really the most exasperating
circumstances. But I will miss the next page or two, and come to more
interesting material. Ah I here:

Spirit. "This thing you call death, or dying? Am I to understand that it
corresponds to what we call incarnation?"

Myself. "We are not sure. Some of us believe that our actual bodies will
rise again in the flesh; others that the body perishes and the spirit
survives in an uncertain state of which we have very little knowledge;
others, again, that death is the end of everything."

Spirit. "In brief, you know nothing whatever about it?"

Myself. "Uncommonly little."

Spirit. "Do you remember your lives as elementals?"

Myself (definitely). "No!"

Spirit. "Then where do you suppose yourselves to begin?"

Myself. "We don't know. There are various guesses. None of them
particularly likely."

Spirit. "Such as?"

Myself. "Oh, some of us believe that the soul or spirit is a special
creation made by a higher power we call God, and breathed into the body
at birth. And some that the soul or spirit, itself eternal, finds a
temporary house in the body, and progresses from one to another with
intervals between each incarnation."

Spirit. "Then this being born is what we should call dying?"

Myself. "Quite. It makes no difference. And, as a matter of fact, the
overwhelming majority of us--that is to say, all but about one in every
million--never bother our heads where we came from, or what's likely to
happen to us when we die, or are born, as you would call it."

I have a note here that after this we were both silent for about ten
minutes.

Spirit (despondently). "I wish I could get some sort of idea what you do
all the time and what you think about. I thought, when I so unexpectedly
got into touch with someone in the future state, that I should be able
to learn everything. And I have, so far, learnt nothing--absolutely
nothing. In fact, except that I have been able to correct my inferences
with regard to one or two purely material experiments, I may say that
I know less now than I did before. And, by the way, those things over
there--he pointed to the washstand--I noticed that at certain times you
go through some ceremony with them upstairs, and as I wished to discover
if there was any reason why you should not perform the same ceremony
downstairs, I moved the things. Well, I noticed that the spirit who
was here before you was apparently very annoyed. Can you give me any
explanation of that?"

Myself. "Our bodies become soiled by contact with matter, and we wash
ourselves in water. We prefer to do it in our bedrooms."

Spirit. "Why?"

Myself. "We use a certain set of rooms for one purpose and another set
for other purposes."

Spirit. "Why?"

Myself. "I don't know why. We do."

Spirit. "But you are sure of the fact, even if you can give no reason?"

Myself. "Absolutely."

Spirit. "I wish I could prove that. One of my fellow-scientists, who has
recently been able to press his investigations even further than I have
up to the present time, has recently brought forward good evidence to
prove that spirits are all black, wear no coverings on their bodies,
live in the simplest of dwellings, and, although they have a few
ceremonies, certainly have none which in any way corresponds to that you
have just described."

Myself. "He has probably been investigating the habits of the Australian
aborigines."

Spirit. "What are they?"

Myself. "Men, or, as you would say, spirits, like us in a few respects,
but utterly different in most."

Spirit. "Have you ever seen them?"

Myself. "No."

Spirit. "Or met anyone who has?"

Myself. "No."

Spirit. "Then this account of them tallies with nothing in your
experience."

Myself. "No, but they exist all right. There's no doubt of that."

Spirit. "I question it. In any case, I could not accept your word as
evidence, seeing that you have neither seen them yourself nor met with
anyone who has."

And so on, you know (the Researcher muttered, flicking over the pages of
his note-book).

He was infernally sceptical about those aborigines. It seems that he
had had a tremendous argument with the other investigator about the
possibility of "spirits" being black and naked, and he was dead set on
proving that he had been right. I think, as a matter of fact, that what
I said tended to confirm him in his theory. He put it that if there were
such spirits on this plane, I must have seen them or have had some quite
first-hand evidence of their existence; and when I said that I had
seen black people, Indians, and so on, he cross-examined me until I
got confused. You see, I had to confess that they weren't, strictly
speaking, black, that they wore clothes, and washed, and lived in
houses; and he got me involved in apparent contradictions--you have no
idea how easy it is, when you are trying to be very lucid--and then he
changed the subject with the remark that I was a very poor witness.

It was about this time that I began to lose my temper. It was after
three o'clock when we got to that point, and I was getting very
tired, and, strange as it may appear, curiously doubtful about my own
existence. I had for some time been coming to the conclusion that he did
not quite believe in my reality; and after he had dismissed my account
of the black races as being untrustworthy, he said, half to himself,
that quite probably I was nothing more than an hallucination, a
thought projection of his own mind. And after that I got more and more
annoyed--partly, I think, because I had a kind of haunting fear that
what he had said might be true. When you have been talking to a spirit
for over three hours in the middle of the night, you are liable to doubt
anything.

But it was foolish of me to try and prove to him that I had a real
objective existence, because obviously it wasn't possible. I tried to
touch him, and my hand went through him as if he were nothing more than
a patch of mist. Then I got right out of bed and moved various articles
about the room, but, as he said, that proved nothing, for if he had an
hallucination about me, he might equally well have one about the things
I appeared to move. And then we drifted into a futile argument as to
what I looked like.

It began as a sort of test, to try if my own conception of myself
tallied with his; and it didn't--not in the very least. In fact, the
description he gave of me would have done very well for the typical
goblin of fairy-tale, which, as I told him, was precisely how _I_ saw
_him_. He laughed at that, and told me that, as a matter of fact, he had
no shape at all, and that my conception of him proved his description of
me was the correct one, because I had visualised myself. He said that he
would appear to me in any shape that I happened to be thinking of, and
naturally I should be thinking of my own. And I could not disprove a
thing he said; and when I looked at myself in the cheval glass, I was
not at all sure that I did not look like the traditional goblin.

Well, I assure you that I felt just then as if the one possible way left
to demonstrate my sanity, my very existence, was to lose my temper;
and I did it very thoroughly. I raved up and down the room, knocked the
furniture about, chucked my boots through him, and called him a damned
elemental. And although it had no more effect upon him than if I had
been in another world--as I suppose in a sense I actually was--that
outbreak did help to restore my sanity.

Perhaps you may have noticed that if a man is worsted in an argument
he invariably loses his temper? It is the only means he has left to
convince himself that he is right. Well, my temper did that for me on
this occasion. I could not prove my existence to that confounded spirit
by any logic or demonstration, but I could prove it to myself by getting
angry. And I did.

The Researcher glared round the circle as if challenging anyone there to
deny the validity of his existence, then slapped his note-book together
and sat upon it.

I do not expect you to believe my story (he concluded, with a touch of
vehemence). Indeed, I would much sooner that you did not believe it.
I have been trying to doubt it myself for the past eleven years, and I
still hope to succeed in that endeavour, aided by my intensive study of
the comforting theories of the later Victorian scientists. But I must
warn you that there was just one touch of what one might call evidence,
beyond my own impressions of that night--which may have been, and
probably were, a mixture of telepathy, hallucination, expectancy, and
auto-suggestion, that found expression in automatic writing.

This rather flimsy piece of evidence rests upon a conclusion drawn from
the end of my conversation with the spirit. I was still banging about
the room, then, and I said that I had finished with psychical research,
that never again would I make the least inquiry with regard to a
possible future life, or any kind of spiritualistic phenomenon. And,
curiously enough, the poltergeist precisely echoed my resolve. He said
that that night's experience had clearly shown him that the research was
useless, that it could never prove anything, and that, even if it did,
no one would believe it. _For if_, as he pointed out, _we who were in a
manner of speaking face to face, were unable to prove our own existence
to each other, how could we expect to prove the other's existence to
anyone else?_

It was getting light then, and he faded out almost immediately
afterwards.

But it is a fact that there were no more poltergeist phenomena in that
house, although the Slippertons went back to it a month or two later and
still have the same cook.





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