GHOSTWATCH
ALAN MURDIE explores the late Mary Rose Barrington’s research into one-off poltergeist-like events
In my last column, I raised the possibility that unexplained movements of objects and strange noises in haunted houses could be generated by energy emanating from living persons. It is not a new idea, and one long advanced as the possible explanation for poltergeist disturbances since the mid-19th century, prompting a fashion for labelling adolescents and young women typically at their centre as a class of ‘unconscious mediums’ or, more quaintly, ‘electric girls’.
Just as I was writing this continuation piece, there came the sad news of the death of a veteran researcher in this field, Mary Rose Barrington (1926-2020) whom I knew for over 30 years and who was fascinated by all such effects. Joining the Society for Psychical Research in 1957, Mary Rose had a long and distinguished record of serious investigation, specialising in physical manifestations both inside and outside the séance room. Her most evidential success was recording unexplained rapping sounds from the headboard of the bed of a young boy at a family home near Euston Square, London, in 2000 (see ‘Report on Psychokinetic Activity Surrounding A Seven Year-Old Boy’ in Journal of the SPR [2001] vol 65 201-217).
There was a touch of Miss Marple about Mary Rose, but such an impression faded swiftly upon encountering at first-hand her shrewd intellect or finding oneself on the receiving end of her thoughtful and perceptive criticisms. She was particularly intrigued by one-off poltergeist-like events, proposing in 1991 they should be treated as a class of psi phenomenon in their own right. She coined the rather whimsical label, ‘Just-one-of-those-things’ (‘JOTTs’ for short) to classify them (see FT391:42-47 for more on polts and JOTTs).
JOTTs are baffling minor physical incidents, usually occurring only once. Consequently, JOTTs may be dismissed as accidents, coincidence, mistakes, or, in cases of objects that are lost, ascribable to simple forgetfulness.
Originally, I was rather sceptical of such single deeds by poltergeists. They are very anecdotal and might be easy to mistake or fake, though such catch-alls would be less easy to apply to well-witnessed major feats such as large pieces of furniture being moved, or fires.
A classic example reputedly occurred at the riverside Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell, Huntingdonshire, where the ghost of Juliet Tewesley allegedly manifests every St
Patrick’s Night (an accidentally created tradition, exposed in FT342:48-51). Once, it is said, a boatload of visitors turned up a day early, to be told by the landlord, “She’ll not make her presence known tonight”, whereupon a barrel was mysteriously wrenched off the wall (See Haunted Britain, 1973, by Anthony Hippisley Coxe).
A great story, but its one-off occurrence status (assuming it is true) leaves it open to easy dismissal, since a single episode might conceivably have arisen from any number of natural causes.
I am no longer so sceptical, now having enjoyed some direct experience of such
JOTTs myself – though perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is the wrong word. Some can be distinctly troubling; equally some have a reassuring quality occurring soon after the death of friends or relatives. But it’s not my own personal experience that impresses me, rather the sheer quantity of such instances and their persistence reported over many years that I find significant.
Mary Rose commenced a lengthy study of JOTTs with the attention and care of an Edwardian lady butterfly collector. Over the 25 years 1991-2016 she obtained what she considered as 180 well-attested examples, eventually publishing a book in 2018 devoted to analysing 74 of these.
She maintained that JOTTs could be further subdivided into six different categories. She variously labelled these the ‘Walkabout’ where an object disappears from one location and reappears in another; the ‘Turn-up’ in which a known article from an originally uncertain position just appears somewhere else; the very fortean category of the ‘Windfall’ when an article from an unknown origin materialises in a place it could not have been normally; the ‘Flyaway’
– an object disappears and is never seen again – and the ‘Come-back’ where an object disappears from its usual resting place and then returns; and the ‘Trade-in’ where one article disappears and is replaced by an item of unknown origin. She also postulated the ‘Odd-jott’ as an additional type, one so improbable or impossible that the rational mind rebels against it and what is perceived. It is these detectable patterns
and the surrounding circumstances that may suggest a genuine, if wholly mysterious, set of effects at work. And after all, what is a poltergeist but a collection of peculiarities, repeated and writ large? (JOTT: When Things Disappear... and Come Back or Relocate – and Why It Really Happens, 2018, by Mary Rose Barrington)
The basic problem with JOTTs is although they may be briefly surprising or frustrating, they are typically minor. They seem very trivial and unimportant, hardly worth noting, let alone reporting further. Relatively few JOTTs yield what psychologists call ‘flashbulb’ memories, whereby you remember yourself and the circumstances of the moment for years afterwards (e.g. the death of Princess Diana, or the shock of people learning of the Kennedy assassination). Consequently, JOTTs may be far more common than realised, but with many being only vaguely acknowledged, likely as not to be dismissed as ‘coincidence’ or even going wholly unnoticed – save when making people think their houses are ‘haunted’.
For Spiritualist believers, such manifestations are typically blamed on discarnate entities. The French writer Alan Kardec (1804-1869), who attempted a theology of Spiritist beliefs, adopted a kind of ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ approach blaming both unknown human energies and spiritual interventions. He believed the energy of living humans could be tapped by troublesome spirits on the astral plane to make mischief here in the material world.
Charles Fort underwent a puzzling spate of domestic incidents himself while staying in London, with pictures repeatedly falling off the walls of a flat he occupied with Mrs Fort (see FT293:42-45). No Spiritualist, Fort linked them with the mental states of himself and his wife. “Maybe I am a wizard”, he light-heartedly speculated, floating the notion just at the period when researchers began establishing experiments to test for psychokinetic effects in laboratory trials. Fort’s proposal of human-based wizardry, or even the pre-Spiritualist view that such happenings might be explained as ‘witchcraft,’ seem more in line with these than Spiritist ideas of Kardec. While the very mention of witchcraft attracts much scoffing today, this reflects only a relatively short-term change in intellectual fashion, flowing from the tide of materialist prejudices unleashed by the Enlightenment. During the mid-17th century, witchcraft was an early scientific theory of a kind, based around the belief that living minds could achieve external physical effects remotely. Even William Lecky, author of the History of Rationalism (1865), conceded: “If we considered witchcraft probable, a hundredth part of the evidence we possess would have placed it beyond the region of doubt.”
Materialist philosophy and prejudices have relegated any concept of personal wizardry to the realm of Harry Potterdom (or at best spoon-bending) for most people in the English-speaking world today. But some 80 years of laboratory research have bolstered the case for a mind-over-matter effect, albeit a much weaker interaction than the strange events reported in haunted houses or at séances.
One of the cases that stimulated Mary Rose Barrington into conceptualising JOTTs as a class of phenomena in their own right began in England in the early 1960s. Dubbed ‘the flying thermometer case’ it concerned a series of strange occurrences spread over years with what was first reported to the SPR as a haunted property.
The house was occupied by a mature British woman given the pseudonym ‘Mrs Mason’, one half of a professional, upper middle-class couple in their late 30s. From recollections Mary Rose shared with me, Mrs Mason had a degree in English and “one of the great things she had in common with her husband was a fixation on Wuthering Heights!” Her husband was German Jewish in origin, having come to the UK quite young on the Kindertransport as a refugee from Nazi Germany. As a couple, the Masons were initially very happy together, going on to have a daughter.
Around 1962, their daughter, by then
aged five, started talking a lot about ghosts. To calm her, Mrs Mason told stories about a ‘friendly ghost’, with the child seeming to accept the idea that if ghosts existed, they were harmless. Mrs Mason had once experienced in a ‘haunted room’ bedclothes repeatedly pulled from her while she was fully awake, but so far as she or her husband thought about poltergeists at all, they ranked them as superstition.
No further talk of ghosts took place until November 1963, when one day a pencil fell off a shelf. Mr Mason remarked in a joking sort of way “This house must be haunted!” and from that moment their daughter became obsessed with the idea. By the end of January 1964, she would not be left by herself, afraid even to go into the bathroom alone.
Nothing more might have been thought about this but for two strange incidents. At the end of January 1964, Mr Mason made changes to the garden and cut down an acacia tree, burning its remains on a bonfire. Going into the bathroom after the bonfire, Mrs Mason was surprised to find the child’s bathmat spread out across the floor. Folding it up, she placed it back behind the bath panel where it belonged and went into her daughter’s bedroom. Returning to the bathroom approximately a minute later she found the same mat moved again, but this time merely dumped upon the floor instead of spread out.
Five days later, Mr Mason again began gardening, uprooting and burning shrubs and bushes. That night, around midnight, a thermometer was suddenly thrown across the bathroom, falling at an angle of about 30 degrees. This occurred after Mr Mason had cut down an old rose bush to which Mrs Mason had been very attached.
A third phenomenon which jointly frightened the couple was being awoken on the night of 18/19 February 1964 by what they described as an appalling “moaning or wailing” noise, seemingly human rather than animal but “not really human”. The noise was heard at 1.15am, when it seemed to come down the staircase, howling outside their half-open door for some five or 10 minutes. The couple heard strange noises in the house, unexplained footsteps, thumps and bangs, creaking floorboards and strong smells of burning or decomposition. These eerie phenomena were later experienced by visitors, convincing them a haunting was underway.
In November 1967, the Masons began redecorating the house. During this Mr Mason raised the question of clearing the attic, which would mean disposing of the pram and other baby things stored there. The next moment they both heard a loud thump from the attic overhead. They gazed up at the ceiling, at one another, and then for some 20 minutes they found themselves listening to an assortment of thumps and creaks, like those heard in 1964.
Upon interviewing Mrs Mason, Mary Rose gained the impression (later corrected) that Mrs Mason reacted angrily to words about “getting rid of the pram” spoken by her husband, encouraging an interpretation that the knockings were a psychokinetic ‘substitute’ for Mrs Mason stamping on the floor or metaphorically ‘hitting the roof’.
This interpretation was rejected by Mrs Mason, who felt that her reaction was one of sorrow rather than anger, arising from unresolved emotional problems. She believed that if that attic knocking had any meaning, it was a symbolic representation of that most critical moment of being “deprived of the child who would have made use of the pram” and that “mention of the pram in the loft forced into my mind a flood of distressing memories of past events.”
This led to more probing questions about her personal history. It emerged Mrs Mason had suffered a depressive illness after the birth of her daughter. During treatment for this, she was found to be pregnant, and her doctor insisted on an abortion on psychiatric grounds.
Mrs Mason stated: “I was very happy about the pregnancy and delighted at the prospect of a second child… For many weeks I resisted the doctor’s repeated arguments and dire warnings and refused a termination” (at the time abortions were illegal in England, save on extreme medical grounds). Mrs Mason was then warned against ever having another baby, as this would probably precipitate a mental illness from which she might never recover and would confine her to an asylum.
Eventually the doctor succeeded in breaking down her resistance, and the pregnancy was terminated at five months. This proved to be a considerable physical ordeal, as well as a thoroughly unwanted procedure.
Mrs Mason said she remained for some years “in a state of severe unresolved mental conflict – bitterly regretting the termination of my second pregnancy… despite myself, heeding the warnings of my doctor.” Coping as best she could, she found herself thrust into a mire of uncertainty, engendering a chronic anxiety neurosis.
Mrs Mason’s own preferred explanation of the uncanny knocking was that it was inspired by intimidating behaviour from the doctor, including his thumping his fist on the table, admitting this had been what “finally broke my will”.
Mary Rose considered that the second lost child obsessed Mrs Mason’s thoughts at the time and provided the meaning of the effects, including the movements of the baby’s bathmat and the thermometer used to test the water temperature of the child’s bath when an infant. Mrs Mason was also facing seeing the same doctor responsible for the terminated pregnancy.
This element of conflict was strongly present in Mrs Mason’s mind around the time of the manifestations. It supplied a link with the bonfire of vegetation in the garden. It appeared Mrs Mason was greatly averse to the stunting of any form of living growth, an extended form of empathy towards all things growing, fertile, and fruitful. She was particularly very devoted to her acacia tree, considering it the most pleasant feature of her garden.
Mary Rose subsequently told me of keeping in touch with Mrs Mason, gleaning that, until the end of her life, she harboured some resentment against her husband, “starting with his refusal to let her have another child”. Mr Mason predeceased his wife in 1973 having become “a semi-detached family member” amid later rumours of another woman, though a fact not established. He died from an overdose of painkillers, interpreted as an act of suicide in 1973. Overall, Mrs Mason considered her late husband very manicdepressive. (Sources: ‘The Case of the Flying Thermometer’, Journal of the SPR vol.43, 1965-66, pp.11-20; ‘A Poltergeist Revived: The Flying Thermometer Case Again in Journal of the SPR vol.48, 19756, pp.293-97). Altogether, the picture presented suggests a human causation for the disturbances in what otherwise might have been logged as another haunted house troubled by ghosts.
Unfortunately, the stop-start nature of research into spontaneous cases means that often it is not possible to either discover or monitor long-term psychological history of families living in haunted homes. The case of the Masons might be compared with an analogous case of minor physical disturbances at the apartment of a Brazilian couple in São Paulo who were considering whether to embark upon stating a family, recorded in the early 1990s. Psychologist Fatima Marchado considered the odd events reflected an expression of the wife’s “desire to have a baby” and “her desire to punish [her husband] because it was his fault they were childless.” (See Fatima Marchado, 2001, in Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary perspectives, eds. J Houran & R Lange, pp.195-213).
More widely, the link with cutting down garden plants also reminds one of the Ardachie Lodge case in Scotland in August 1953, where strange rapping sounds were interpreted as manifestations by the female ghost of a past owner expressing concern about the fate of a rose garden. However, a possible human causation arising from a living individual, a highly-strung woman, who had just arrived at the property, might not be ruled out and could have provided a better solution. (see PJM McEwan, ‘The Ardachie Case’ in Journal of the SPR (195556) vol.38, pp.159-72). But there was no opportunity for any deeper analysis of the personality of the woman concerned, or the psycho-dynamics of the household.
However, any theoretical model based upon purely human causation does not easily explain hauntings that involve apparitions, or persistent phenomena that continue in one place regardless of changes in occupancy. And in most cases, the people affected just simply want all phenomena to stop.