"KNOCK! KNOCK! WHO'S THERE?"
By JOHN HAYWARD
I F the knocking in question is heard after nightfall in an isolated house and is accompanied by such singular mani- festations as vegetable growth sprouting out of the pattern in the carpet, the click of a clock • being wound up, and loud detonations which have been variously described as " like a bomb falling " or " like a horse thrown against a door," it is pretty safe to assume that a Poltergeist is at work on die pre- mises. Who or what a Poltergeist is, however, is a more puzzling question, and one that has never yet been satisfactorily resolved. It is certainly very much more mysterious and pro- voking than any question about what song the Sirens sang or what name Achilles assumed when he hid amongst women. There is, indeed, a " Bibliography of Poltergeists ' to prove how anxiously and with what little success innumerable en- quirers have attempted to answer it from the sixth century down to the present day. By definition, a Poltergeist is a boisterous or noisy spirit— one of the recognised things that go bump in the night and, in so doing, cause, according to circumstance, various degrees of alarm and perturbation. The chain of causation, however, is imperfect. If, by some misunderstanding, a large cart-horse did happen to knock against one's bedroom door in the middle of the night, one might be unnerved for the moment, but in- vestigation would soon satisfy one that it was not a nightmare. The Poltergeist is not so easily laid. If one goes to the door in answer to his knock there is nothing on the landing, and the chances are that a turnip will fall from the ceiling behind one's back and heavy thumps will be heard in another part of the house.
The sceptic will say, and has consistently said, that the whole thing is a nightmare, a delusion, a form of psychological hysteria. He has had good grounds in the past for refusing to suspend his disbelief in preternatural manifestations of this kind, for Poltergeists, like spiritualistic mediums, with whom they have obvious affinities, have frequently been exploited for the benefit of the credulous. Yet, even allowing for a full measure of credulity amongst those who have had the rare experience of witnessing a Poltergeist's peculiar activities, and while admitting that a very considerable degree of reserve, or scientific scepticism, must be permitted to the cautious and un- prejudiced investigator, there remains, nevertheless, a number of exceedingly baffling features which cannot be dismissed out of hand as mere legerdemain and illusion.
No one in need of an easy and entirely absorbing introduc- tion to the whole subject of the Poltergeist's place in the home could do better than spend an evening alone reading Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell's new book.* It is a discursive and thrilling study, containing, as well as the texts of ten classic investiga- tions, Mr. Sitwell's own examination of the evidence, written in a mood that ranges, with his reader's, from qualified scepticism to romantic wonder. Not every Poltergeist is de- serving of justice, as the Great Amherst Mystery shows, but Mr. Sitwell uses both intelligence and sensibility to do justice to the most respectable cases. " It is when the supernatural has been disproved," he says, " that these cases become really interesting." This is an important point, for Poltergeists are generally treated either with complete credulity or dismissed as 'human frauds or practical jokers. They are seldom given the benefit of a serious doubt—the doubt that would allow of the possibility of a person's being possessed by some power outside his or her conscious control impelling its host to indulge in the most bizarre horse-play and, by a combination of the mysterious and mischievous, to frighten simple people out of their skins.
The most disturbing feature of the Poltergeist's activities, however, is not the mere fact of possession, which, under another name, is a condition familiar to alienists and psycho- paths, but the curious correspondences that exist between manifestations of its powers at widely separated times and places. Thus it is a tradition for Poltergeists to displace im- posing pieces of furniture, to hurl crockery about, to practise campanology and play with fire. Several of the most esteemed ones have shared a predilection for hurling brass candlesticks across rooms—elliptically, according to the faithful—and have used the same words, " Chuck! Chuck! " In view of the fact that Poltergeists only work in remote and humble dwellings, this continuity of tradition is hardly explicable on the assump- tion that an ignorant peasant in New England had access to the same source as another in an Irish hovel, or that both had read Glanvill's Sadducismus Triumphatus.
What is at once certain and significant is that the Polter- geist only manifests itself through ignorant, simple people. Socially, its status is low, its visitation-list being confined almost exclusively to young people during their years of puberty, and more often than not to servant-girls in their teens. Indeed, there are moments when the mystery seems to reduce itself to nothing more than the way of a Poltergeist with a Maid. The phenomena traditionally associated with the fugitive and sporadic appearances of this troublesome spirit are almost without exception the kind of annoying, spiteful and futile tricks that a hysterical girl might readily practise, whether from motives of revenge or from a desire to draw attention to herself in a lonely and uncongenial environment. Two of the commonest of them—the shying of domestic utensils and the striking of matches in order to set bedclothes alight—are familiar aberrations in mental defectives, and there are others which are known to be characteristics of psycho- pathological disturbance in adolescence.
What causes the Poltergeist to behave as it does and as it has done for centuries remains nevertheless a mystery. To rationalise its behaviour and call it Sex does not explain the why and the wherefore, any more than calling it, romantically, an Evil Spirit does. For the time being, at any rate, the farmer of Derrygonnelly's words sum up the situation as well as any: " I would have thought it to be fairies, but them late readers and knowledgeable men won't allow such a thing, so I cannot tell what it is! "
* Poltergeists. By Sacheverell Sitwell. 'Faber and Faber. x53.1
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