Poltergeist phenomena

Bob Rickard examines exhaustive accounts of two classic cases of anomalous activity

The Sauchie Poltergeist

And other Scottish ghostly tales Malcolm Robinson

Amazon 2020

Pb, 334pp, £9.99, ISBN 9798650294658

The South Shields Poltergeist

One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder

Darren W Ritson

History Press 2020

Pb, 384pp, £12.99. ISBN 9780750994520

For two months in 1960, a poltergeist-like disturbance in the central Scottish town of Sauchie became the biggest such case to have been recorded in Scotland in modern times. Psychical researcher Dr Alan RG Owen said at the time that it “establishes beyond all reasonable doubt the objectivity of poltergeist phenomena”.

Malcolm Robinson’s nearexhaustive account follows “Virginia Campbell” – the young girl, then aged 11, at the centre of the phenomena – and records interviews with some of the principal witnesses, including two local doctors and several Church of Scotland ministers. The typical phenomena included unexplained noises, moving furniture and doors that opened and closed seemingly without any discernible cause, and were equally disruptive at home and in “following” the girl to school. Like some other “poltergeist girls” (as Fort called them), Virginia’s life had recently been disrupted, in her case by relocating from Ireland to Scotland.

In 1987 Robinson, who lived not far from Sauchie and grew up aware of the story, traced and interviewed several of Virginia’s classmates who confirmed to him that they had “witnessed some amazing paranormal happenings in the classroom”. Renewed efforts in 2019 and 2020 resulted in important new testimony from the doctors and ministers. This book is a valuable addition to the original investigation reports.

As the veteran psychical researcher Guy Lyon Playfair observed, books about poltergeists written by people who personally witnessed the phenomena are “very rare”. In June 2006, Darren Ritson – a seasoned writer and investigator of paranormal phenomena in the north-east of England – learned that a young South Tyneside family had endured months of persecution by something malevolent.All the “usual” poltergeist phenomena were present: voices, movements and “arrangements” of objects, smells, communications, apparitions and even physical assaults.

Fortunately, Ritson and his colleague Mike Hallowell were able to call on the experience of the SPR and (via correspondence) Colin Wilson and the Ghost Club’s Peter Underwood. The result – as endorsed in the foreword by Playfair and preface by FT regular Alan Murdie – is that rare thing, a thoroughly documented record of months of intensive study and investigation of anomalous phenomena in which, for once, the investigators were able to be present while it was ongoing, complete with interesting photographs and (in the appendices) witness statements.

This third edition includes a new chapter and also marks Hallowell’s request to have his name removed as co-author due to a “change in his religious faith”. Nevertheless the South Sheilds case, as Murdie notes, is “one of the most significant in the last 50 years”. All it lacks is an index.

Sauchie Poltergeist ★★★★ SouthShieldsPoltergeistHHHH

Pluckley was my Playground

A boyhood memoir 1919-26

Frederick Sanders

Canterley Publishing 2020

Pb, 218pp, £10, ISBN 9781916498150

The village of Pluckley in southeast Kent has for some 50 or more years been styled “the most haunted village in England”. This reputation has stemmed from a number of sources – a TV Times article from the 1950s, Usborne’s

World of the Unknown: Ghosts in 1973 (see FT385:32-37), and being “officially” awarded the accolade by the Guinness Book of World

Records in 1988.

Despite a paucity of contemporary sightings, and rumours that Pluckley resident and Radio 2 DJ Desmond Carrington fabricated a number of the now-canonical hauntings in his interview with Bill Evans in TV Times, the stories have endured. The village website lists upwards of a dozen ghosts scattered across the area, and boasts a healthy ghost-hunting tourist industry to this day.

Pluckley was my Playground is something of an ur-text for those interested in the growth and development of these stories. Written by the son of an Army sergeant whose family returned to Pluckley in 1919, it details Sanders’s childhood time in the village until 1926. It was first self-published in 1955, before slipping out of print.

It is ostensibly a memoir of the Kent countryside, full of the rose-tinted glow of England’s rural idyll remembered: tramping through fields, exploring ponds and forests, playing games and building dens, and local characters, such as Dusty Buss, who lived in a wheeled hut in the woods and trapped and trained wild birds.

Of note to forteans is that among these recollections are some early published accounts of the Red Lady of St Nicholas’s Church, the White Lady of Surrenden Dering, the Watercress Lady, the phantom carriage, the Colonel of Dering Woods, the Hanging Schoolmaster and the Old Miller.

Most are presented as “local lore” rather than contemporary hauntings, with two exceptions.

In the Hanging Schoolmaster, Sanders recalls a recent tragedy of a local teacher from a neighbouring village who took his own life in a stand of trees to the north of Pluckley. There is a graphic description of the discovery of his decaying body by a local miller, Richard “Dicky” Buss, and some details of the late man’s friendship with Sanders’s schoolmaster, Henry Turff. While Sanders himself writes of the bay-laurel tree plantation where the unnamed teacher was found (“To these great and gloomy evergreens a terrible happening clung”), the haunting itself is not explicit – there’s no mention of a ghost that anybody’s seen – but rather allegorical, recording the trauma of a recent event in the community and its inscription in a liminal part of the village.

Similarly, the story of the Watercress Lady recounts the death of a woman who sold watercress at a small bridge to the south of the village. “Within the memory” of Sanders’s grandmother, Francis Pile, an accident took place in which the woman had fallen asleep, dropping her pipe and igniting her clothing. Here the account is almost verifiable, while also already slipping into folklore.

The hauntings at Pluckley have blurred during the intervening periods. Ghosts move location, and take on one another’s narratives. Sanders’s memoir allows for a certain degree of triangulation of these different accounts. For the Pluckley completist, or anyone interested in examining how hauntings take on a life of their own as part of a sociocultural process, this book is recommended. However, for those seeking “hard evidence” of hauntings, the truth will remain elusive.

Simon Moreton

★★★★

Ridley Scott

A Retrospective Ian Nathan

Thames & Hudson 2020

Hb, 240pp, £30, ISBN 9780500023822

Ridley Scott made his name making television commercials, most notably his 1973 “Boy on the Bike” Hovis bread advert, set in a picture-perfect village, and still regarded as the most iconic UK television commercial of all time.

Like other commercial direc

tors of his generation, Scott was able to use his command of cinematic technique to send us into the realms of unconscious and romantic, mythic landscapes. His fascination with art, music, writing, philosophy, history, technology and photography have all helped contribute to his ability to instil his feature films with well-observed realistic detail and knowledge.

Scott’s first feature, The Duellists, set in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, has continued to gain critical appreciation but it was not a commercial success on release in 1977.

Like the rest of the world, Scott was impressed by Star Wars and in its wake he got the opportunity to direct Alien. This gave him the chance to film a “realistic” science fiction story that would be in complete counterpoint to the glitzy Star Wars, and would draw on the powerful influence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The impressive visuals, tight script by Dan O’Cannon, Jerry Goldsmith’s score, strong casting (notably Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley), plus the input of HR Giger’s disturbing biomechanical alien creations, turned Alien

into a stylish SF horror film that exploits our fears of what lurks in the bleak infinity of outer space.

Tellingly, the ship’s computer is called Mother and she literally brings the crew back to life from their state of suspended animation. This alerts us to the fact that the whole of Alien has the theme of motherhood, birth, survival and death.

Alien helped found the “tech noir” genre, which Scott put into full effect with Blade Runner in 1982. Both films are obsessed with entities (aliens/replicants) different in mind and form from human beings, and take us far, far away from the universe of Star Wars.

Ian Nathan explores the progression of Scott’s career through all his films, which encompass a wide variety of genres and include such highlights as Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, American Gangster, Robin Hood, The Martian and two additions to the Alien franchise, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.

Through his films Scott gives us his unique view of history, the future and the tensions that separate us or bring us together against a common enemy. This large-format book is a welcome and engaging overview of Scott’s approach to film-making accompanied by colour illustrations that remind us of his skill and versatility. For those who want to see or study more of his work a helpful filmography and list of sources is included.

Nigel Watson

★★★★★

A Series of Fortunate Events

Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life and You

Sean B Carroll

Princeton University Press 2020

Hb, 213pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780691201757

Humans are notoriously poor at grasping probabilities, to the continuing relief of the gambling industry. This is also at the root of Creationist thinking which cannot accept that humans are the product of chance events. While Sean Carroll does not explicitly lock horns with Creationism, this entire book acts as a rebuttal to that way of thinking.

A Series of Fortunate Events is an amusing and discursive wander through the role chance has played in the formation of our planet, evolution and human life, taking in the perils of gambling,

Kim Jong-Il’s highly dubious golf scores,

Soviet efforts to breed human/ chimp hybrids, Roy Sullivan’s unfortunate affinity for lightning and the delightfully named “ejaculatome”.

His meandering and discursive style does not prevent Carroll from also being admirably clear and focused when it comes to looking at the role chance has played in our evolutionary history – we wouldn’t be here if the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs had arrived 30 minutes earlier or later as it would have missed the planet and so mammals would never have had the opportunity to diversify as they did.

While Carroll is dealing with complex and challenging science, particularly when it comes to genetics and evolutionary biology, he still makes it comprehensible to the non-specialist reader. He makes it possible to grasp how chance mutations create variation that natural selection can seize upon to drive evolution, but can also lead to genetic defects and cancer under different circumstances. His message is that we are all here by luck, both individually and as a species, and he puts this over with charm and clarity, without ever losing sight of the possibility that if it wasn’t us that made it, something else might have instead.

Given his delight in the peculiarities of chance, he has not been able to resist the call of serendipity beloved of forteans. He points out that we would not have the film Ted, about an animate, foul-mouthed teddy bear, had not its script writer Seth McFarlane and star Mark Wahlberg both, separately, missed a crucial plane on 9/11. Indeed, his appreciation of the potential of writers and comedians to throw light on the absurdities of chance have led him to include an afterword that involves a constructed conversation with several people (including a couple, such as Kurt Vonnegut, who are no longer with us) that explore their experiences of chance and its role in their lives.

The result is a short and charming book that will give you a new appreciation of the vagaries of life and their influence.

Ian Simmons

★★★★

How Zoologists Organise Things

The Art of Classification David Bainbridge

Quarto/Frances Lincoln 2020

Hb, 256pp, £20, ISBN 9780711252264

This book is so much more than an explanation of the title; it is a visual feast. Every page has carefully chosen and beautifully reproduced illustrations. The author has selected from a huge range of zoological material and has included mediæval bestiaries from as early as the 1200s, to present-day genetics diagrams which are in themselves a visual delight, to subtly coloured electron microscope photographs of chromosomes.

The text is well written and concise, giving a clear interpretation of the illustrations and enough background to enable one to understand something of the many zoologists who created numerous ways to understand the natural world of animals.

Many of the early accounts of the animal kingdom concentrate on land animals. The early Noah’s Ark pictures, in particular, allow a neat arrangement of Earth’s known terrestrial biodiversity all in one place. The Noah’s Ark arrangements of life must have been a great temptation for taxonomists to use and with males and females of all the species, they are an impressive early example of conservation. Early illustrations of marine animals show how the artist has struggled to portray a stranded and perhaps decomposing whale as a living animal. In the bestiaries, illustrations of elephants and camels show how the artist never saw the animals in life, whereas paintings of unicorns and other mythical beasts are quite convincing.

Throughout the book, representations of the animal kingdom as a “tree of life” are shown, starting with the Great Chain of Being. Early attempts to show the origins of life as complete charts and diagrams are fascinating, as are charts to represent the diversity of groups of animals, including man. Sadly towards the end of the book such charts of diversity are shown to document the decline of species; the “Impending extinction crisis of the world’s primates” from 2017 is particularly depressing.

All chapters include whole animal illustrations, including birds and fossils, often by the most famous illustrators of the time. Also there are drawings of skeletal material, birds’ eggs, invertebrates, insects, crustaceans, diatoms and several pages on molluscs, shells and cephalopod bodies. There are pages on embryotic development and anatomy, including brains. Reconstructions of past environments feature as well.

This is a worthwhile account covering the work of many of the scientists, from a Western perspective, who have over the ages attempted to illustrate the order in Earth’s animal biodiversity. Ray Heaton

★★★★★