All Episodes
Previous Next
June 27, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:26
Edition 465 - John Fraser

Member of the UK Society for Psychical Research John Fraser about his new work on "destructive hauntings" and why we hear less about them than "ghosts"...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name's Tim is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I'm recording these words on a day when the temperature here in London Town is set to hit 34 degrees Celsius.
It is already hot because it was 32 yesterday, so where I'm recording this is pretty sweaty and pretty unbearable.
But hopefully I will stay awake and conscious during what is to come.
But it is damned hot, as they say.
Thank you very much for all of the emails that you've sent in.
If your email has required a reply, then I have done my best to make sure that it gets one.
But if you haven't had a reply yet to something that you were expecting a reply to, please give me a nudge and I'll get it done.
But thank you.
I'm getting a lot of emails now and it's great.
If you would like to get in touch with me, guest suggestions, thoughts about lockdown, anything, go to my website, designed and created and honed magnificently by Adam.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv.
You can send me messages from there.
And if you'd like to make a donation to the online show to help it to continue, you can do that at the website theunexplained.tv.
And if you have made a donation recently, thank you very much for helping.
It is really, really good of you to do that, especially during these times.
No shout-outs on this edition, but I would like to say hello to two people.
One is Pat.
Hello, Pat.
I think you're in the United States.
95 degrees, you told me when you wrote to me recently, and you gave me three good ideas about lockdown.
Thank you for them.
One of the things you said was that we had to remember what it was like for people in previous generations who went through all of this, like the 1918 Spanish flu.
They didn't have the internet and all of the modern accoutrements or whatever the word is that we've got today.
And that's true.
I've been able to carry on working and doing my thing here and making some money, which is, you know, which is good.
Those people usually didn't have that luxury back then.
So I suppose in this modern generation, to that extent, we're lucky, but, you know, so many of us now are starting to have problems with being locked down and stuck in and not being able to go anywhere that I think, you know, we're just longing for it all to end, don't you think?
And hopefully, it will go away as quickly as it came.
But who knows?
We'll keep watching it.
Also, Ginny in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, an expat Brit living in beautiful Melbourne.
You lucky thing, Ginny.
Thank you for what you said about the show.
Very kind.
Now, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained is John Fraser.
He is a member of the British Society for Psychical Research.
He has put together a new book and a new discussion of the Poltergeist phenomenon.
Now, as you will hear, this man is no pushover.
He does not believe every story that he hears and he thinks about things.
So you tell me what you think about John Fraser coming up.
His book is called Poltergeist, A New Investigation into Destructive Hauntings.
He's in South London.
Don't forget, if you get in touch with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
And it's always lovely to hear from you.
Thank you for supporting my work here.
Just to know that you're there during these months of lockdown has been so important to me.
Thank you.
All right, let's get to South London now, and let's speak with John Fraser.
We're going to be talking about poltergeists.
John, thank you for coming on the show.
It's a pleasure to be here, Howard.
And I understand, you know, I talk to people from all over the world.
At the weekend, I spoke to a man in Hamilton, New Zealand, and I speak all the time to people in America.
I understand that you are just down the road from me.
You're in Croydon, South London.
Yes, indeed I am.
As I mentioned in my book, Paul to Guys's New Investigation, Croydon is a surprisingly haunted spot.
Now, that's a funny thing you should say that, because a few weeks ago, I was trying to get somebody on the show, on the radio version of the show, to talk about the Croydon axe murderer.
And I couldn't find anybody.
You might have been the man.
Have you heard that story?
That's the Croydon axe murderer down Bickersboy Lane, is it?
That is exactly the one in Bickersboy Lane.
And it's a fascinating story.
Maybe you'd just like to tell us it quickly.
Because on that night, I couldn't find anyone to speak about it.
Well, funnily enough, Bakersboy Lane's a little bridleway rather than the lane.
And funnily enough, when we were looking for places to go to in the lockdown, we decided, myself and the wife decided to go down to Bakersboy Lane because there's a very nice park nearby.
It was probably me deciding and sort of dragging my half.
So basically, there is a rumor, a legend, or possibly fact, that a Baker boy was walking down Bakersboy Lane before, of course, it was called Bakersboy Lane and got chopped up by a mad axeman.
That's probably as much of the story as you're going to get anywhere on the internet.
That's a grim story, but it made the papers recently because of more claims of the baker boy who sadly met his end in that way, it seems, coming back to haunt.
Yes.
When I started to look at it, it's one of these, we might talk about these a little bit more later, because ghosts and poltergeists are nicely intertwined, but it's one of these wonderful ghost stories that always crop up in books, the internet, that probably don't have too much of a background.
I haven't run into anyone that's specifically seen it.
People walk their dogs for years down there and nothing, obviously people ride their horses down it.
And to the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been any reports at all, except in the last 30 years or something like that.
A lot of ghost stories, whilst wonderful, are probably little more than legends.
Okay, now that's interesting because you are a member of the Ghost Club, according to your book, and you are a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
So it's interesting to hear you knock down a lot of ghost stories.
Well, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of ghost stories that are very knockdownable, and it's quite interesting to do so.
I mean, a little bit further afield for us is this lovely place called Ichtham Moot in Kent, which is supposed to be haunted by Dame Dorothy Selby, a Catholic who apparently betrayed the gunpowder plot and was picked up in one of the rooms in Ichtham Moot.
A skeleton was actually found there, but with just a little bit of research, you actually find Dame Dorothy Selby has a mausoleum in the nearby church of St. Peter's, Igtham, and she died not in 1604, gunpowder plot year, but in about 1643 at the ripe old age of 80 something.
So she wasn't even a part of that story.
And what's the name of this place?
Igtham Moot.
How do you spell that?
I-G-T-H-A-M-M-O-T-E in Kent.
Igtham Moot.
Do you know what?
I've lived in the southeast of England for years.
I've never heard of it.
Okay.
It's worth going for a visit, actually.
They've got the skeleton that they did find there.
But other than that, I mean, there's a possibility it's haunted by something else.
But like a lot of good ghost stories, the person that's supposed to haunt it just doesn't really fit into the plans.
Now, this is the thing about you, and from reading through your book, and I did a speed read on the book, so I can't say that I've read every single word of every single page, but I've certainly skipped through all of it.
You are very methodical about all of this, and you are willing to say when you think that something is not a ghostly phenomenon.
In other words, you're not like some people in the field, you're not going out there for sensation.
You're going to call it like it is.
Yes, I mean, if you're going to be a paranormal investigator, whatever your belief is in it, I think you've got to kind of try to wipe the slate clean and keep an open mind.
There's undoubtedly been frauds along the way.
Especially with ghosts, it's not a question of fraud.
It's a question of when you see something at four o'clock in the morning, possibly ghost hunting, possibly after two cans of red bull.
What is it?
Is it a ghost or is it just a shadow in the corner of the eye that you define as a ghost because you're in a house that's apparently haunted?
But sometimes the evidence, if evidence there is, is hard to deny.
In my own case, the one and only ghost I've ever seen, and I've bored my listeners rigid with this story so many times, so we won't tell it at great length.
I'll just tell it very fast.
I saw in a place that I worked, a man wearing a workman's coat, a cap and a pair of shiny boots who looked at me.
He was standing in front of me and then he disappeared before my eyes.
And a lot of people in that particular working environment have seen that man and I didn't know that before I saw him.
Those are pretty credible reports, I would have said, and those are the ones that in all probability it's very hard to deny, is it not?
Well, that's where it gets interesting because there's a colleague of mine, a chap called Alan Murdy, who's in the Gus Club and the SPR, who is also a barrister.
Mix and match your professions.
Now, he's come out with a very interesting paper which basically says, claims that for judicial reasons, you use something called similar fact evidence.
If enough people see the same thing and witness the same thing at the same time, it can send somebody to jail for a considerably long time.
But if that is sufficient to send some person to jail, why is it not also sufficient to at least prove the possibility of something very strange happening?
If you saw something and nobody else has seen anything else, I mean, there's plenty of theories.
It could be, it could be you've somehow picked up on some kind of ESP.
It could be an afterlife spirit.
It could be a recording.
But it's certainly something that's not accepted by normal science.
Yes.
And one of the other things that you say in this book, which is interesting for the number of times you go off into these territories of researchers like Mr. Murder, you mentioned, and also other people that we'll get into as we talk here.
But, you know, the fact is that, you know, sometimes it's not a good idea to investigate this from a psychological perspective.
And you question, or you don't question, but you remark on the fact in the book that a number of researchers in this field call themselves parapsychologists.
They're in departments of parapsychology or in psychology departments.
And I think you suggest in the book that maybe that's not really the right way to go about it.
No, I mean, there's one particular psychology department that are doing ESP tests at the moment.
I actually asked the person in charge why they don't actually use somebody that claims to be a gifted psychic.
And they didn't think it would be academically credible to do so.
And I think that's totally missing the point.
If you're going to try and find out if a man can run a third minute mile, you don't choose me.
You choose a professional athlete.
Okay, yeah.
Well, I can see that from both sides.
I can see that the academic department would want to be able to prove that this ability, if it is an ability and if people really have it, exists among the common population.
And they might think that if you bring in somebody who claims to be a psychic, then you start muddying the water there.
I can see that.
But I can also see your point that if you want to do this research, you know, if you want to get your car fixed, you call a car mechanic, is what I'm saying.
Exactly.
The other thing, I mean, parapsychology departments do a lot of good work, but the other thing they possibly don't do, at least at the Moment is go to where the phenomena is happening.
They do tend, not exclusively, there's some exceptions, to stay in the laboratories doing tests when there might be something down the road which has plates flying all over the place and glasses flying all over the place and you know a good poltergeist case where you'd love some university expertise.
Yes, I understand that.
You know, the case is one of which we will discuss because it's extensively in the book, The Enfield Poltergeist Case, the most famous UK poltergeist case of all time in the 1970s.
We've talked about it on my shows many times.
That was one that was staked out and checked out by academics and researchers very formally.
But that's unusual, as you say.
Yes, I mean, it was lucky in some sense.
I mean, it was primarily investigated by Guy Playfarer and Morris Gross.
Morris was an inventor who had just retired and Guy had just come back from doing extensive poltergeist research in Brazil and didn't know what to do with himself, for want of a better way of putting it.
So you had two people that actually had the time to spend on a poltergeist case.
That was fortunate.
I met him.
And in fact, one of the interviews on my collection of podcasts was done in his home about 10 years ago now, nine or ten years ago now, a few years before his death.
And he came across to me as being somebody who was just like a little boy with his enthusiasm for the subject.
If I had seen half of the phenomena at Enfield, I would be like a little boy with my enthusiasm about the subject.
Sadly, I haven't had that depth of experience, so I probably talk in a slightly more neutral way about it.
But if I had had those experiences, I can well appreciate where he's coming from.
Well, no, I remember sitting on his couch and I looked around me and there were shelves upon shelves upon shelves with box upon box of books and tapes all from that time.
And I said to him, guy, what's going to happen to all of this material?
You know, when inevitably all of our times will come?
And he said that he'd made a plan.
And in fact, as you know, somebody has been collating all of that stuff.
Now, you say in the foreword to the book, and we have to say that this book is called Poltergeist, A New Investigation into Destructive Hauntings.
In the foreword, it says, the Poltergeist is perhaps the most discussed, argued over, and misunderstood phenomenon that could infest one's home or workplace.
This book, you say, I actually don't think you wrote this.
I think somebody wrote this as the foreword, but maybe you did.
This book is set to become a definitive work on the subject.
No, it wasn't you.
The author takes you on his personal quest to try and discover the truth behind this complex thing, effectively.
That's a big statement, isn't it, to say that the book is set to become a definitive work on the subject.
Do you think it is?
I would hope it is.
Particularly, oh, thank you, Steve Parsons, for those very nice comments, by the way.
That was actually a chap called Steve Parsons, who is also a paranormal investigator.
But I would very much hope it says, because with one possible exception in the 1990s by John and Anne Spencer, I don't think there has been a book about poltergeist phenomena, as opposed to a book about a particular poltergeist case, for about the last 35 years since Colin Wilson did his poltergeist study of destructive hauntings back in the 1980s.
Why is that, do you think?
I would think because for whatever reason, possibly due to TV and the media, ghosts have kind of taken over as a popular pastime.
We have lots of a particular genre of ghost hunting which had been popularized by TV series such as Must Haunted.
You take a few people in, you have a little bit of equipment, you possibly take a psychic in who may or may not be psychic.
And that particular genre has suddenly been copied and possibly left out the key ingredient, which we'll come into later, which is poltergeist activity.
Now, it's probably surprising to know that in about the mid-1990s, there were probably only about five or six paranormal research groups in the country.
And by about 2007, 2008, there were 1,200, nearly all exploring ghostly phenomena and that sort of genre.
So it does show the effect the media can have.
Right.
And why do you think then the media are more reluctant to investigate poltergeist?
Is it because they are harder to pin down?
Quite possibly, yes.
And quite possibly because poltergeists tend to happen without a story or a background necessarily.
While ghosts, as we mentioned earlier, and non-ghosts for that matter, you know, legends, probably have a far more interesting tale.
A lot of poltergeists happen in very dull council houses or private homes.
Well, ghosts or non-ghosts in some cases tend to happen in lovely photogenic castles, which are a lovely place to spend the night in and even better to film in.
I would think that's probably got something to do with it, but I haven't got all the answers.
It really shocked me when I was looking, when I was actually trying to reference the last Poltergeist book to actually find out, as I say, with one exception in the mid-1990s, we were going back to the early 1980s and late 1970s, in which it was indeed a cluster of them.
Okay, here's a paragraph from the book quite early on then.
And that might speak to what you've just been saying about the fact That poltergeist cases are maybe for those who investigate or those who report them not quite as sexy as ghost cases because you can't easily pin a backstory to them.
This is the quote from the book.
Is it possible that the real-life poltergeist is fairly mundane when compared with its best-selling fiction counterpart?
Do books based on case facts and theories fail to capture the imagination in the same way as, for example, this quote below.
And the quote is, one poltergeist bit a woman, leaving, bit, bit a woman, leaving puncture wounds all over her body.
Another attacked the contents of a warehouse full of glasses and mugs, and yet another lifted furniture into the air and then sent objects flying into another house.
That's astonishing.
Those are the sort of poltergeist cases, number one, I've never heard about, and number two, if they happen more regularly, they would make the papers, wouldn't they?
Oh, they would, and they sometimes do, and they're sometimes actually disguised accidentally as ghost stories.
But the first thing is, when I said, is it possible that poltergeists are mundane, that was rhetorical.
I wouldn't have written the book about a mundane thing.
I then went on to disprove it with that quote from a particular poltergeist case.
Poltergeists are possibly mundane in that they are probably far less intelligent and communicative than people would imagine based on films and TV, but they do a heck of a lot of very interesting things.
And they, unlike ghosts, it's the sort of phenomena that could potentially prove the paranormal.
I mean, basically, if something flies across the room, it's pure fact.
It's either paranormal fact or somebody's playing tricks.
If you can disprove the latter, you've suddenly made some progress.
Even with your sighting of the Workman backed up with other people's sightings of the Workman, even though it's pretty impressive, it can only go a certain way.
You'll always have psychologists coming out with theories to try to rationalize it, even if it's true.
But there isn't a psychological theory that will explain spontaneous fire starting, spontaneous scratching appearing in somebody's skin, spontaneous objects suddenly flying across the room.
And to those three things that you've just listed there, I knew that the latter one could be classed as poltergeist activity, but those things that include putting marks on people's skin, they are also categorized as being poltergeist.
Yes, poltergeists, poltergeists actually get all the, I can't think of a better way of putting it, the fun and interesting bits of paranormal phenomena and all the kind of ambiguous bits are kind of classified as ghosts.
Personally, I don't think there's a difference.
Now, colleagues of mine in the SPR about 35, 40 years ago actually compared 500 poltergeist cases in a book called Poltergeists, surprisingly.
Chaps called Tony Carnell and Alan Gold.
Now, they actually found there was an overlap of about 30% between a case that had poltergeist activity and visual ghostly phenomena, and also about 30% audio sort of ghostly phenomena, you know, moons, size, that sort of thing.
Now, I would possibly claim that if you take away all the non-ghost stories, the Baker Boy story, Down Croydon and so on, the active cases are probably a combination of the two.
They're probably actually one and the same.
It's just people are kind of differentiating them without actually looking into it more closely.
Nearly every well-authenticated ghost I've looked into has had some poltergeist elements and to a certain extent vice versa.
That's interesting, isn't it?
Because a lot of people dismiss poltergeist activity as being some kind of energy that we may not understand that is connected with the occupants of a particular location.
Well, I would be quite happy if it turned out to be a energy we couldn't understand.
To call that as a dismissal would be, I mean, it wouldn't prove the afterlife theory, which is quite popular, but it would certainly be a huge step in proving the paranormal.
People love stories on this show.
Can you think of any from your own experience that you have seen and encountered poltergeist cases that would raise people's eyebrows and shock them?
Do you mean something that's happened to me personally?
Yeah, something that's happened to you personally or indeed your colleagues.
I don't know.
I haven't had many paranormal normal experiences in my time.
Probably the most interesting one was when I was investigating a haunted aeroplane in RAF Cosworth, an old Lincoln bomber, on behalf of a Ghost Club investigation where quite a famous paranormal author, Peter Underwood, was also there.
And he thought he saw the apparition of an airman.
And as soon as we stopped that session, all the fire exits in the building had swung open.
We didn't physically see them swing open, but we are 98% sure they were shut previously and then open afterwards.
So it's quite interesting that there might have been a combination of phenomena there, his sighting and possible poltergeist activity.
Is that the location or one of the locations where the spirits or the specters of airmen have been found actually sitting rather in the cockpit of planes that maybe they once flew?
That's a particular bomber which has had some paranormal activity, including a pilot sitting in a cockpit however just to make it even more interesting that ghost story doesn't quite hold up because that particular bomber had never actually seen military service so unless you're going to haunt a place where you might have went for a practice flight which is of no great significance in your life i wouldn't have thought it's
kind of difficult to explain why that particular bomber would have had paranormal activity, or at least paranormal afterlife activity.
So you could explain that with something that we talked about just before, the idea that people overlay their expectations onto a situation.
Well, I'd kind of go further than that.
I mean, people do overlay their expectations.
I mean, I think, I can't remember the names, but some psychologists actually did a nice experiment where they took some people into an old house and told them it was haunted and then took other people in and told them it wasn't haunted, let them stay for a few hours.
And not surprisingly, the people that were told it was haunted felt and experienced more subjective things.
But where I think it gets interesting is most poltergeist cases are usually triggered off by some kind of emotional trauma.
The favourite one's adolescence, which, as if you can remember far enough back, is one long emotional trauma at times.
But it can be a house move.
It can be all kinds of things.
And indeed, that was said to be the case, or some people claimed it to be the case, of the Enfield poltergeist situation.
There was, I think there was one particular teenage girl, adolescent girl in the house, and the activity seemed to be focused upon her, didn't it?
That's, there was two adolescent girls in the house, but, and they were focused on both.
But there was definitely, definitely Janet, the younger one, had the most phenomena happening around her.
But I'd also claim that if you go into a haunted house, again, when you believe it's haunted, and get somewhat freaked out, you could possibly get yourself into a state of mind when you can, when you could actually, in effect, build your own poltergeist activity simply by getting, getting the mind in such a state as it, there's a lot of energy going on.
Well, we know that we don't fully understand what the mind can, you know, can accomplish.
We don't understand things like telekinesis and things like that, of which there are documented cases.
I can remember being at school, and one of my, one of my colleagues at school, I think it was Graham was his name, and he told me one night about how he was, you know, lying in bed, and the light bulb above him.
He, he basically swore at it, and thought tremendous energy at it, and the thing blew out.
And that he was, Graham would have been 13 then, that's exactly the kind of age that we're talking about.
Okay.
Never swear at your light bulb.
I remember that one.
No, but we're, you know, I suppose the interesting question that comes out of all of this then is, when we have cases like Enfield, where it is said that an adolescent maybe is the focus of some activity, whether the adolescent or the, the focus, what, whoever it might be of the activity, is opening a portal to something, or is actually creating the something.
That is a $60,000 question.
I, now a lot of people in the paranormal field would disagree with me, but I tend, I tend to think there's probably less evidence for the portal theory than there is just for, creating energy um i mean a very similar very similar case to the the Enfield one in some ways is a grown-up lady of 19 in a place called Wottenheim, Germany.
She had a messy breakup of an engagement, started walking into the law office where she was a junior assistant or something, and all the lights started blowing just like your 13-year-old friend Graham.
Now, I mean, there was no sense of any spirits being there.
It was just an ordinary law office.
And you kind of get the feeling that you don't really need a discarnate spirit to have a poltergeist.
In fact, it goes even further than that.
Poltergeists don't seem to do much of any intelligence.
They kind of behave like two-year-olds, you know, breaking glasses, breaking light bulbs.
If they do communicate by knocks, it tends to be, at best, you'll...
Right.
I'm glad you got to the Andover case because I hadn't heard about this.
This is from the 1970s, I think.
And did it involve somebody called Dr. Barry Colvin?
It very much involved Dr. Barry Colvin, who is also a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Right.
And I'm just quoting from the book here.
Colvin noted during his first visit the appearance of a happy family in this location who were not unduly concerned by the events that had been happening.
However, this perception somewhat changed after the unhelpful visit of a member of the local spiritualist church who explained that the house had a spirit who was trying to take over the personality of Teresa.
And even more melodramatically, it was the spirit of a young boy who was buried under the floorboards.
This is a heck of a case.
Well, yeah, it's a heck of a...
They didn't dig up the floorboards.
That story seems to come straight from the Fox sisters, who also claimed somebody was buried under the floorboards and totally invented spiritualism through the powers they got, started off in that particular house.
So it seems a very common genre story.
It's a sort of story that if there was a little bit of nervous energy going around the house, it was likely to create a heck of a lot more.
And even if you are of that belief and it's a perfectly respectable belief, I would be wary about going into any house and saying you've got an evil demon in it because it's going to frighten people silly and could have all kinds of untowards consequences and probably did make the phenomena worse.
Okay, so what had the family before this person got involved?
What had they been experiencing?
From memory, it's a case I've only researched from the archives.
I mean, they'd been experiencing raps and bangs and possibly intelligent communications, but it got generally worse after the medium came in, which is why you should treat your own belief systems with care, because if somebody thinks something's buried in the cellar, it's going to quite possibly set off a whole new round of emotional energy.
I mean, I'll give you a good example.
I mean, you can actually, and it's not to be recommended for viewers at home, but you can actually create your own poltergeist.
It's been proved.
There was a group in Canada.
They, in the 1970s, early 1980s, decided to create an entity that didn't exist, drew pictures of it, said it was a cavalier called Philip, whose wife had committed suicide.
And they started talking about him and getting into his fake personality.
And gradually, certain poltergeist events, such as table tilting, started to occur, which has actually been recorded in Canadian TV.
But how do we know?
I mean, look, you can argue these things either way, can't you?
I knew nothing about that case, but how do we know that they weren't, in fact, tapping into something that, if I can use the word real in the paranormal realm, that might have been real?
In other words, you know, they created this thing, but how did they know they weren't maybe channeling something?
Technically, you're quite right.
I've got every respect for the afterlife theory.
You could indeed have had a mischievous, evil afterlife spirit or a mischievous afterlife spirit that decided to come down and play the role of Philip.
But I think it lacks a certain simplicity, if you know what I mean, which is why I would tend to favour the other theory.
But it's anyone that says they've proved anything with regards to the paranormal is an about of grandeur self-confidence.
I certainly wouldn't say I've proved it.
I've provoked a question and hopefully provoked a debate to be further researched.
And I mean, you keep talking about this, talking about if it is a power within us, the way you're expressing it is kind of mundane.
I would think it's absolutely fantastic that we have this sort of hidden power.
Oh, boy.
Well, I hope I didn't give that impression because I think even if it is something that's within us and that we don't understand, I think that is absolutely phenomenal.
Literally.
Blew a physics into another century.
True enough.
You talk in the book about something I've only peripherally heard about, and I think I did do one interview years ago about this.
The nature of raps and bangs that are associated with poltergeists and if you, which we can do now, you know, that's how I do my editing for my interviews and things that I do for work.
These days we don't record stuff on tape.
We record into a digital medium and you see the waveform.
You see a representation of the actual sound itself.
And you can do edits on that and you can see how the sound varies, you know, the high parts, the low parts, the bits that you might want to cut out or whatever.
And those who've looked into the waveforms, the spectral, if that is the phrase, depiction of sounds, have actually seen that the sounds that are produced by the knocking and banging of something that you might call a poltergeist look different from, for example, if I bang on this table here.
That's correct.
That's actually down to the initial work of good old Dr. Barry Colvin again, who actually managed to get tapes from about seven or eight major poltergeist cases, including Enfield, and tried to replicate the raps.
And in the poltergeist cases, the vaps tended not to peak immediately and then echo down at a totally different sound envelope where they seemed to peak gradually as if the sound was coming from the table or the wall rather than being put into the table or the wall.
Now, that's very much a walk in progress.
There's a few hurdles to overcome.
There's a few questions to answer, but at least as a walk in progress, it could show that poltergeists have a...
And there is also the fact that a lot of people who report these things say that they are much louder, perhaps, or they certainly shake you more than a natural sound might.
Yeah, there's two things people report.
It can be, I mean, I was in an investigation in a place called Charton House.
I was in a different room, unfortunately, but a wooden ornamental mushroom flew across a room, apparently, according to four witnesses, and slammed down the floor with a far greater noise than you'd expect a small three-inch wooden ornamental mushroom to make.
The other thing that sometimes happens is if somebody is maybe holding a table where rapping is coming from, It's as if there's a vibration before the rapping actually begins, as if the energy is building up.
So yes, there's two different ways in which it doesn't seem to just be normal rappings or tappings or objects dropping.
We talked a few minutes ago about how, you know, poltergeist activity might be something that emanates from us or is possibly, on the other hand, the opening of a portal by us or the focusing of something upon us.
I'm saying us as the focus of the energy.
What kind of work is being done to prove or disprove those views?
There's quite a lot of groups trying to investigate and believe in the portal to the other side theory.
as to as to As to work in the evidential sense.
Now, the problem with probably everybody in the paranormal community is it is a little bit like the, if you've seen the film The Life of Brian, it is sometimes a little bit like the People's Front of Judea and the Judeans People's Front.
There is a certain amount of non-peer review, certainly not as much peer review as there should be, people keeping the cases to themselves, in all sides of the spectrum.
And so how evidential that is, I couldn't say.
All I would say is I don't like talking about portals because it's kind of a word nobody knows the meaning for.
You can draw a pretty picture of a kind of beam of light, but I mean, what does it actually mean?
It's kind of just like talking about imps and goblins and wicked spirits.
It doesn't have any real meaning other than in a sort of whimsical sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
I understand.
It sounds to me, just having this conversation, that you've done investigations yourself, and you've known a lot of people, some of them famous who've done investigations.
And it strikes me that, and I like your balanced approach about it, but nothing much that you've seen particularly convinces you.
Is that right?
Afterlife-wise, probably not.
Because most ghosts and poltergeists, because I think they're probably one the same, don't really do anything intelligent.
If you were going to go out for a pint, you wouldn't, which we can do now in the very near future at least, you wouldn't want to take a poltergeist with you because they don't say much, they don't do much, they have the odd tantrum.
They might knock over you a glass of beer, but they're not going to say much of intelligence.
I mean, I studied a place in some detail called the Cage Centers of Sessex, which there was a lot of, well, I've heard of this.
This is, yeah, they call it the cage, don't they?
This is at St. Joseph in Essex.
And I think they called it the witch's prison, did they?
Yes, that's right, because there is a plaque up there saying it was some witches were kept at that place in the 16th century, and some witches were indeed kept at St. Joseph's as to whether it was that particular build, old lock-up converted into a house is open for debate.
But there's a plaque up there, so it's an obvious way of giving an identity to some paranormal happenings.
But only the owner ever once saw an old lady carrying herbs.
Psychics were in there and picked up everything from the witchfinder general to totally ad hoc spirits.
Even from a psychic point of view, you didn't pick up any witches.
And I would tend to think it was just a series of poltergeist events because there was no real sense to it.
Other than the consistency of events, there was particular spots where doors consistently slammed.
There was particularly hot spot on the staircase, which was actually the site of a real-life suicide previously.
And people were aware of that to a certain extent as well.
And so the witches, if it was haunted by Ursula Lekemp, the witch who was, who wasn't actually a witch, poor old herbalist that was hung at Chelmsford Assizes, she didn't make it very clear, if you know what I mean.
At no point did she try to knock, I am Ursula Lekemp, and here's a few interesting facts that will prove I'm Ursula Kemp.
And there was no consistency of personality.
There was a heck of a consistency of phenomena, though, which goes way beyond just Diona and even Diona's colleagues and flatmates to people who investigated.
So it can't be written off as just somebody's imagination or anything like that.
But you can't pin a personality on it unless you want to pin a personality on it because it makes it nice and convenient to write a good ghost story up in the mail online, which it features on quite frequently.
It's far easier to talk about it as a witch's prison.
There's a plaque there that says it is, rather than just as, and it's far more fun and interesting in some ways as well, rather than just a particular series of weird, quite potentially paranormal events.
Which you think is more like it.
You don't think it's a whole cavalcade of events linked to the witches who met their fate there, but you think it's maybe just a whole series of, not happenstance, but a whole series of focused paranormality.
Yes, I would tend to think that.
A lot of people would disagree with me, including Vanessa Mitchell Leona, who has had a lot of interesting and frightening experiences, and she could be right.
Or there could be something else going on here: that perhaps there is a bespoke nature of some paranormal experiences that, again, we don't understand and can't really begin to.
That different people experience different things in different ways, which sounds simplistic on the face of it.
But, you know, you went in there with a balanced view of it, so you came out with a balanced set of findings.
And the people who went in there expecting to communicate with the witches kind of communicated with the witches.
Well, one thing they didn't do is communicate with the witches.
People that did go in there trying to investigate picked up all kinds of strange things, but very, very, very little witches.
So even with the expectation, there was not a lot of Ursula Kemp ever coming out of the cage.
There was, as I say, every group that came in that did try to use psychics picked up something different, which kind of slightly backs up my theory.
But I'm not saying it's any more than a theory.
It's a good talking point on which to build or knock down my case.
It's just where I am at the moment.
There was another investigation at, and this is one that you were involved in, the Clark and Well House of Detention.
Now, this is East London.
That's right, yes.
It used to be a prison museum.
It's sadly shut down now, unless you've got a lot of money to pay to rent it out as a sort of film studio or something like that.
And what did you find there?
Well, we found, it's a funny place because it's an underground prison museum complete with a chamber of horrors tucked in for good effort, for good effect.
So when you dim the lights, it's an incredibly scary place to be in.
It's actually the remains of Clark and Well House of Detention, which was a reman prison in the 19th century.
And nothing definitely paranormal actually happened, but half my team got freaked out, picking up all kinds of subjective things.
Somebody thought they smelt burning flesh, one of the psychics.
Somebody thought they were communicated with somebody begging for mercy because they were being hanged for a crime that they didn't commit.
Now, bear in mind, this is a remand debtor's prison.
It's highly unlikely there would be anyone there that was going to be hung.
And you kind of get the feeling that the psychologists, in some cases, do have a point.
When you take people into an old, creepy house and they don't come older or creepier than the house of detention, trust me, it's an amazing place to investigate.
The mind can actually play tricks.
And that's probably a good example for the psychologists.
It's possible these experiences were genuine, but even if they were, proving them is also a very different thing.
And what about you?
What did you experience?
Absolutely nothing.
I'm about a psychic as a brick, to be honest.
Which is good and bad.
It allows me to be objective, but I miss out on all the fun.
Yeah, but exactly.
I mean, that's good, I think.
But if you've experienced so little of all of this, why do you keep doing it?
Because there's enough people, not just in England, not just in America.
If you go to Romania, you've got lots of historic vampire cases, which when you actually listen to the facts, turn out to be very similar to poltergeist ones.
People love giving an entity a name, be it a witch, a vampire, black monk of Pontefract in a council house.
But all around the world, you've got the same sort of events happening.
Stones being thrown, occasionally fires being lit.
That's quite rare, thankfully.
Sometimes bruises, sometimes pools of water appearing.
Now, why would all these things happen in different cultures that aren't communicating with each other, given different names?
They're called Duande in Colombia, which is basically calling them goblins.
But nevertheless, when you look at it, there's a lot of stones throwing and similar poltergeist activity.
When they're happening all around the world, people that don't communicate with each other, you can't write it off as somebody's imagination.
Well, you can't.
If it's an international phenomenon, you can't.
Sorry to interrupt.
John, can I ask you just a quick favor?
You've got a headset and you're popping it slightly by being too close to the microphone part of it.
Can you move the microphone slightly away from your mouth?
It'll just, you know, those P's and B words, it'll just stop them exploding in my listener's ears.
Absolutely.
Is that any better?
That's much better.
Thank you.
Shall I say Poltergeist?
Oh, no.
Hang on.
It's just happening.
If you could just move it a bit further.
Poltergeist.
Okay, we'll live with that.
So you're saying, you know, look, we're not dissing or running down all of these things because they're international phenomena and they are called different things in different cultures and countries, but they are being reported by supposedly sane people.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, there's a case in America that I've just started to research, so I can't really go into detail.
I did a book swap with a chart that's self-published.
IT professional, no reason to moved into a new build home.
The book's called The Bottle House Horror, I think.
The Bottlehouse Horror, Poltergeist of Washington State, and suddenly had his life taken over with poltergeist activity, including some quite severe stuff, Bibles being set on fire And all the normal crashes and bangs and door slamming as well.
Now, he was totally professional guy, new built house, no history behind it, no reason to make it up.
And yes, these things happen all over the world.
So what are you going to do about that investigation?
How will you take that on?
I will probably, to be honest, just swap notes with some Keith Linda.
At the moment, it's impossible to get to America.
I probably haven't got the budget.
I don't think even the SPR has a budget for that.
But I will definitely continue to stay in touch with Keith because it's an incredibly interesting case.
I like your balanced approach to it, John.
I do.
If there was one place that you could stake out and spend some time at and investigate in the way that you would like to, where would that be?
I mean, look, for example, I live not too far from walking distance from Hampton Court, which is said to be one of the most haunted buildings in the United Kingdom, if not the world.
Would that be somewhere perhaps you'd want to go and stake out?
Well, there's two reasons for staking some place out.
Because it's particularly active.
And there's also the good old-fashioned romantic ghost story, which is very interesting, even though I've downed it a little bit.
I would probably love to stay at Glam's Castle, simply because it's so steeped in mythology and it's nearly impossible to stay there.
It's supposed to have about seven or eight ghosts, including a madman locked in the attic.
It's also supposed to have different number of windows from the outside than from the inside, indicating an unfound secret compartment.
It actually was owned by the, I think it was owned by the Queen Mother's family.
It is open to the public to visit, but the chances of staying the night there are entirely remote.
It may well just turn out to be a wonderful Victorian romantic ghost story, but I would love to find out for sure.
And along the lines of finding out for sure, if you could have one paranormal experience, maybe be the subject of a poltergeist or maybe communicate with a ghost or whatever, I'm putting ideas into your mind now, but if you could have one experience that for you would be revelatory, what would you like to have?
I would like to have a full-on unambiguous series of poltergeist events happening because then when I got home, I couldn't say, have I had too many cans of Red Bull or whatever I take to keep myself up at four o'clock in the morning?
It's because it's unambiguous.
I've kind of started out as a ghost researcher, investigator, hunter.
But I think if you're ever going to prove anything, it's got to be through poltergeist phenomena because they're the only ones that can't be psychologically disproved.
So yeah, give me a full on poltergeist.
I'll probably think differently when it's happened.
But I mean, by definition, we do, if we are researching the paranormal, we do want paranormal things to actually happen.
Yep.
And I understand now in a way that I didn't before we had this conversation why it is valid to investigate poltergeists and why they're different from ghosts, because you cannot read so much of the human imprint into them.
You know, they're in some ways pure energy.
Oh, exactly.
I mean, that's why I probably wrote the book poltergeist, a new investigation, because it had been neglected for so long, but it struck me as the only way we're going to actually make progress, because we have been kind of going around in circles for about 150 years.
There are the believers, there are the disbelievers, and both in their own camps, have their own belief sets.
But if we're going to get anywhere, it'll be through our old friend the poltergeist, who might be very mundane and unintelligent and not a good person to have a paint in the pub with, but nevertheless has amazing powers.
In the United Kingdom, as far as you're aware, I don't see Poltergeist reports that often in the papers, a couple of times a year.
How many of these sorts of cases manifest themselves in a typical year?
It's impossible to say because, as I said, there's 1,200 paranormal groups now.
The Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research has far more competition than it used to have previously.
But I mean, we're often getting regular reports.
We might just swap a few emails or a couple of phone calls.
So it happens reasonably frequently.
And I'll give you another quick thought.
It might be a lot more common than it seems, because an early symptom of a poltergeist case is things disappearing and reappearing in strange places or disappearing and reappearing in the same place when you've already searched that place regularly.
Now, that's probably happened to everybody, and you just kind of shrug your shoulders and get on with your life.
Now, wouldn't it be interesting if that was actually minor poltergeist activity?
Because it is part of cases where the major stuff happens.
Yeah.
Just a possibility.
Yeah, no, and it would also suggest what I've often said, that more people live adjacent to and have experienced paranormality than they believe or would wish to acknowledge.
Fascinating stuff.
Just to go back to where we started, just at the very end here, I've just found on a website here, on the My London News website, which I think is an amalgamation of local newspapers, the Croydon axe murder, this boy on Baker Boy Lane.
According to My London, the story goes that in the early 1700s, a baker's Delivery boy was either walking or riding a bike along Baker Boy Lane, which runs from Forest Dale to Selsdon.
While on his way home, the young boy was apparently murdered by a woodman who was hiding among the trees.
The attacker was armed with an axe.
This is horrible.
Hacked the young boy to death before fleeing, leaving the murder weapon hidden near to a tree.
Over the past 300 years, quotes, a number of residents have reported seeing the young boy's ghost near to where he was murdered.
That's the story.
That's the story.
That's a lovely story.
You know what I might just do is try and find out.
The only way we're going to get to the bottom of this is find out why it's called Baker's Boy Lane, and there might be some records of that.
And once we've got there, we might find the truth of it.
It's actually a lovely ghost story, and it actually made for a lovely walk when we're in the middle of the lockdown.
So, and perhaps I'll go there at midnight and see.
That'll be another conversation then.
John, your book is called Poltergeist, A New Investigation into Destructive Hauntings.
Yeah.
That's correct.
Long title.
Okay, and I should have asked you this right at the beginning, but destructive hauntings is another term for poltergeist.
Destructive hauntings is not a technical term for poltergeists.
It's what Colin Wilson referred to them in the book he did.
And as I say, it's been about 37 years since Colin Wilson's excellent book.
And I thought I would, the book to a certain extent reinvestigate some of Colin Wilson's cases.
So I thought I would keep the destructive hauntings bit in.
I mean, to be honest, it's probably unfair to call them destructive.
They might break a couple of things or what have you.
But just in case anyone has had any poltergeist activity, very little harm ever gets done to anyone.
So that's just a little thing that can calm things down knowing that.
Well, I think I'm kind of relieved by that.
I think probably I've gone as far as I can go, John.
I don't know about you, but the temperature in here is getting a little hot.
And you might have heard, just to explain to my listener, the odd motorbike or car go past.
It's because I had the window open.
And I never have the window open when I'm doing these things.
But it is damned hot as I record this.
John, thank you so much.
Really good to talk with you.
It's been a pleasure.
John Fraser, your thoughts about him and all of the guests we have here, very gratefully received.
Please go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
More great guests in the pipeline as we cruise out of June and into July here on The Unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection