Jean Ritchie - Inside the Supernatural

When he investigated the haunting, Tony Cornell was satisfied that the couple were truthful and sincere, and as they had both been firm disbelievers in anything paranormal, there appeared to be no obvious motivation for fraud. But his investigations showed that the owner of the hotel whose picture was hanging in the lounge had died a natural death, had not had a daughter and that there was no record of her having an affair with an ostler.

‘One of the problems with psychical research is that a lot of time is spent on cases that are eighty years old or more,’ he said. ‘But there are still some very good examples happening right now.’

Investigations

It seems odd that we have so little evidence of ghosts and poltergeists and hauntings, apart from witness testimony. Psychical researchers often report back that their cameras failed, their tapes broke, their film turned out to be blank. There is a very high rate of instrument failure on a field investigation.

With the high-tech equipment now available, instrument recording would seem to be the logical way forward. Infra-red cameras can record in the dark, without upsetting any ‘atmosphere’ necessary for whatever is going on, video equipment is becoming more compact, image intensifiers and all sorts of other sophisticated gear are available. Many members of the Society for Psychical Research agree that instrumentation is necessary. Unfortunately what is available has been assembled on an ad hoc basis, mostly at individual expense.

The best device in Britain at the moment is nicknamed SPIDER (Spontaneous Psycho-physical Incident Data Electronic Recorder), which has been devised and assembled by Tony Cornell, Alan Gauld and Howard Wilkinson, who is in charge of technical services in the psychology department at Nottingham University and who works with Cornell and Gauld on many of their field investigations. According to Wilkinson, SPIDER is a ‘glorified burglar alarm’. It consists of a small Sinclair computer in a radiation-proof box, a printer with a series of relays which control infra-red, ultra-sonic and electro-static detectors, as well as video cameras, stills cameras, sound microphones and lights. A grant from the SPR paid for a time-lapse video recorder, but Cornell alone has invested about six thousand pounds in the equipment. He pioneered the assembly of the equipment with the help of two electronics students from Cambridge but, ultimately, it was Howard Wilkinson who assembled it, re-wired it and got it working.

The main drawback of SPIDER is its size: putting it in place involves trailing wires and inconveniently bulky hardware. It is, as Tony Cornell says: ‘Absolutely no use in the average family home, especially if there are dogs, cats and children about. And if you need to cover more than one room at a time with the cameras, it becomes even more difficult.’

But Wilkinson, Cornell and Gauld are keen to use it wherever they can, so that ultimately they can assemble a library of video footage, not just as proof of the phenomena but also as a means of training other field investigators. They have made a start: they have one piece of video tape recording a poltergeist outbreak at a car-hire firm in Arnold, near Nottingham. The case began in August 1990 when an eighteen-year-old youth joined the firm to do the steam cleaning and valeting of their fleet of cars. Small gravel stones were being thrown at great velocity, narrowly but consistently missing people, around the portakabin premises the company was using. Observers were able to throw stones and see them come whizzing back. Milk bottles were rearranged and files floated off desks and dropped on to the floor.

Although in some instances the youth seemed to be cheating by flicking the stones himself, there were others when it was impossible for him to be responsible.

‘On one occasion I was in the office with the lad and Alan was outside able to see everything,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘A stone hit the wall above his shoulder and dropped into a teacup. It was impossible for him to have faked it. And there were occasions when stones could be heard raining down on the roof while he was inside the portakabin. Sometimes as many as forty or fifty stones would be swept off the roof at the end of the day, and the local police had ruled out the possibility of vandalism.’

SPIDER was installed and a video was recorded of the steam arm coming off a steam-cleaning device.

‘It was taken on a dim day at the back of the premises. The handle moved as someone walked past. It doesn’t look as though he touched or nudged it. A clear noise is recorded. But, as luck would have it, the time and date on the tape recording partially obscures what happened,’ said Howard Wilkinson. ‘It is possible today to get edge detection equipment which analyses video tape frame by frame on a computer, blocking out anything which is stationary and only showing up movement.

‘We need this equipment. We also need sound-analysis equipment. And we need to miniaturize what we already have, so that we don’t have to hump a great load of gear about with us.’

Where possible, SPIDER is rigged up with two cameras per room, each in the field of view of the other to eliminate the possibility of tampering. Even after taking as many precautions as possible to ensure that his equipment is as tamper-proof as possible by using tape to secure cables and leads, however, Wilkinson has experienced an unusual number of ‘technical’ faults.

‘I was very excited when I thought that at Arnold there would be some film recording chairs moving. I screeched down there to pick it up, but when I got the film back there was nothing on it. I checked all the equipment and it appeared to be in full working order, but eventually I realized that the F-stop on the camera had been changed so that it did not record in the dark. Everyone swore they had not touched it, and because I had by that time spent weeks on the case and knew them well, I was inclined to believe them, after initially feeling I’d been set up. On other occasions and other cases, I’ve had plugs pulled out of the back of recorders, even though they were taped in. Part of the psychology of dealing with these cases is deciding whether you believe that the people involved did it or not. We will always have the problem of making equipment tamper-proof: until we work out how “spirits” tamper with things!’

SPIDER has been tried out at the scene of various hauntings, without much success. It was installed for fifty-two days at Carnfield Hall, near Nottingham, a large home with a long history of haunting but the most that was recorded were a few strange photographs.

‘One of the problems with hauntings is that they are so unpredictable,’ said Tony Cornell. ‘We’re seriously thinking of advertising for anyone with a large stately home that is haunted to let us install the equipment in a part of the building where it would not be in anyone’s way and where the haunting is supposed to happen.

‘Failing to pick something up on the cameras does not necessarily mean that nothing happened. If someone clearly sees a ghost and it does not appear on the film, that tells us something about the nature of the phenomenon. We have to appraise every bit of technical evidence we get rigorously: so many doubtful photographs have been produced over the years, purporting to show paranormal events, and there seems to have been no effort to eliminate lens flares, double exposures, reflections of light off furniture …

‘If we can get a lot more on video we will really have made a breakthrough. The advantage of filming something is that you can look back at it afterwards. Witnessing an event takes only a couple of seconds and, in retrospect, you start to query your own senses. Did I really see what I thought I saw? A film of it means you can look at leisure, picking up lots of things you missed at the time.’