The Child That Never Was?

Deconstructing an Apparition

 

Some years ago I received a call from a Miss Fotheringham (pseudonym) who told me that a neighbour of hers was having her house exorcised that morning because it was haunted.  The next day I contacted the neighbour, Mrs Rossmoyne (pseudonym), of Subiaco and found her to be an intelligent, rational and helpful informant.

Mrs Rossmoyne told me that the previous August a friend had given her an old photograph album, bound in leather with a brass catch, which had been identified as being an Australian album of an unusual design, probably dating from about 1880.  Her friend had purchased this from a second-hand shop.  It was a family album containing approximately twenty photographs, among them one of a grave-stone marking a grave in which were buried George Whitehead, a child aged one year and four months who had died in 1856, and his elder brother, also named George, who had died at the age of twenty-four in a railway accident.  It was impossible to ascertain the location of the grave, but the inscription on the gravestone would seem to indicate that it might be found in or around Darlington.  This could refer either to Darlington, New South Wales, or Darlington, Western Australia, though the latter would appear to be the more likely site.  So far, I have not succeeded in finding the gravestone.

After Mrs Rossmoyne had owned the album for a couple of weeks, she was sitting in front of the fire with her husband, glancing through the photographs, when she suddenly decided that she did not wish to keep the picture of the grave because it was "morbid".  She thereupon took it out of the album and threw it into the fire.  Her husband, who was able to corroborate that she had remarked that she did not like the picture in question, did not actually see her do this.  Mrs Rossmoyne however, is quite positive that she pulled it out of the slots in which it was set and burnt it.

About three weeks later, while showing the album to her younger brother, she noticed to her amazement that the photograph was back in its original place in the album.  She was certain that there could not have originally been two photographs of the gravestone as she had gone carefully through the album on a number of occasions.  She immediately rang a friend of hers who acts as a medium to a Roman Catholic group, and asked her advice as to whether she should burn the picture again.  The medium advised her not to do so.  On 27th December, Mrs Rossmoyne noticed that a photograph of her father, taken when he was approximately two years old, had disappeared from the shelf on which it stood.  A thorough search of the room revealed nothing.  At the end of January, however, when Mrs Rossmoyne and her husband returned from an overseas holiday, the photograph had reappeared, not in its original position but on the shelf beneath, standing up as though it had been put there deliberately.  Mrs Rossmoyne had previously checked this shelf thoroughly.  Since the house had been locked up during their absence it was clearly impossible for the photograph to have reappeared through normal means.

Just before she went on holiday, Mrs Rossmoyne had woken up in the middle of the night feeling thirsty and on walking down the long hall to the kitchen to get herself a drink, had encountered the apparition of a child, who appeared to be about the size of a two-year-old.  Since she is used to baby-sitting toddlers, her immediate reaction was to step back and apologise as though she was dealing with a real child that she had almost bumped into.  When she switched on the light however, she suddenly realised that she had seen a ghost, since there was no child in the house at all at that time.  She described the apparition as looking like a little girl, even though she could not see its clothing or its face, for it seemed like a dark shape.  Nevertheless, though she distinctly had the impression that it was wearing a dress and had long hair, she believed that it may have been the ghost of young George Whitehead, for she was well aware that Victorian boys wore dresses until they were around four years old.

On the morning of 26th February Mrs Rossmoyne was looking after a friend's child, Kay (pseudonym), aged two years and eleven months.  Kay, who Mrs Rossmoyne describes as a precociously intelligent child, complained to her that unseen children were "laughing noisily" and annoying her.  Mrs Rossmoyne was surprised at this as there were no other children in the house and all was quiet.  When she asked if Kay had seen children around the house, Kay replied that on previous occasions, she had seen "a little pink person" (Kay's habitual term for a white-skinned child), smaller than herself, both in the house and in the back garden.  This child was a stranger to Kay and not one of the four children whom Mrs Rossmoyne normally baby-sits.  Kay said she had seen the child, a girl, in the sitting-room on one occasion playing with the photographs on the shelf.  On another occasion, when Kay had been by herself in the toddlers' pool in the garden, the little girl had come up to her and "thrown things", then had told her that she should "put a scarf around her hat".  Kay must have found this odd, as she wasn't wearing a hat.  According to Kay, the little girl had come in through the locked back gate, which is about five feet in height and impregnable to small children, and had walked away in the same way, disappearing through the locked gate.  She had not given Kay her name.

That evening Mrs Rossmoyne's husband was standing in the kitchen when a glass cheese-dome some twenty centimetres tall, flew out of the deep crystal bowl in which it is normally kept, and crashed down onto the seagrass matting in the kitchen with force enough to shatter it to pieces.  Her husband was standing near the sink at least two metres away from the bowl, which was on a top shelf.  Mr Rossmoyne, a librarian by profession, who was described by his wife as being open-minded yet fundamentally rationalist in outlook, was quite certain that the dome could not have fallen naturally from the bowl in which it was kept.

Mrs Rossmoyne at this time was suffering from insomnia, though she is normally a sound sleeper.  Her insomnia had lasted for some three months and had become so severe that she was getting only two to three hours' sleep a night.  Even though she was exhausted, she would wake up shortly after falling asleep and would find it almost impossible to fall asleep again.  She had tried taking Mogadon, a hypnotic, but found it had little or no effect.  From 18th February onwards what sleep she did obtain was troubled by nightmares.  On 27th February, after a day disturbed by events described above, she had to wake her husband to keep her company during the small hours.  Her sleeplessness appears to have been connected with what she described as the oppressive atmosphere of her old house, an increasing sense of tension and depression which finally began to have its effect on her domestic harmony, forcing her to think seriously that she and her husband might have to move in with friends.

At last, on 3rd March – curiously enough, the very day on which I first contacted her – she called in an Anglican Bishop who duly exorcised the house after commenting on the atmosphere of evil that he encountered there [1].  Mrs Rossmoyne was adamant that, though she and her husband had been living in the house for three years, its psychic atmosphere had been wholesome until she burnt the photograph of the gravestone.  She was equally certain that the exorcism had "cleared the air", a statement with which her husband agreed.

At this stage let us take stock of the paranormal features of this case, which may be listed as follows:
1. The reappearance in the album of the burnt photograph.
2. The disappearance of the father's photograph.
3. The apparition of the child.
4. The children's laughter heard by Kay.
5. The child seen in the back garden by Kay.
6. The paranormal breaking of the glass cheese-dome.
7. The growing sense of tension and oppression in the house.

Let me now comment on the above items:

1.   This is clearly the most unusual feature in this case.  I cannot recall another instance in psychical literature involving the reconstitution of an object destroyed by fire.  It could well be, of course, that Mrs Rossmoyne was mistaken and that she did not throw the photograph into the fire though she was strongly tempted to do so.  Since there were no witnesses to her act, we cannot definitely say that it occurred.

2.   The disappearance of the father's photograph is especially interesting, since it depicted him at the age of two years, that is, at about the same age as the younger George Whitehead.  Both Mrs Rossmoyne and her husband were quite certain that the photograph disappeared in December and was replaced at the end of January.  It seems impossible that this could have been done through normal means.

3.   Mrs Rossmoyne's encounter with the apparition was again not witnessed.  We should note that it was seen in the dimness of a shadowed hall and disappeared when the light was put on.  Could it conceivably have been a hallucination?  Yet Mrs Rossmoyne was quite positive that she had seen the figure of a child, even though it only appeared to her as a dark shape.  Certainly her action in stepping back and apologising would indicate that whatever she saw was very real to her.

4 & 5.   Kay's evidence deserves to be taken seriously in spite of her age.  She was described to me as a highly intelligent and sensible only child, who had never before given the slightest that she was in any way psychically sensitive.  Her reaction to the laughter was one of annoyance, verging on anger, and not of fear.  She was quite precise about the "little pink person" she had seen in the house and the garden, and would not budge from her story.  At no time did she give the impression that she was indulging in fantasy.  When Kay said she had seen the child playing with the photographs, she was not aware that one of the photographs had disappeared.  Similarly, when she said that the child had been throwing things she was not aware of the breaking of the cheese-dome, all these phenomena having been kept from her for fear of alarming her.  Her remark that the child had urged her "to put a scarf around her hat" is interesting since, in the Victorian period, no lady in Australia would venture out under our ferocious sun without a large hat, often tied on with a scarf which came around the face and fastened under the chin.  This is just the sort of remark that a Victorian child might well make on seeing a little girl out in the sun without a hat.  Kay's identification of the child as a little "girl" need not be taken literally, as it could well mean no more than that the child had long hair.  A talking apparition is rare but not unknown, as both Myers (1906) and Tyrrell (1963) can testify [2].  In any case this apparition seems to have been a laconic one, for Kay reported no further conversations. I should stress that Kay's remarks were largely spontaneous and that the minimum of questioning was used and then only to clarify details.  As Professor Stevenson has shown, in his studies of cases of the reincarnation type, quite young children can make remarkably accurate witnesses provided the utmost caution is exercised when seeking to elicit information from them.

6.   The paranormal flight of the cheese-dome would clearly indicate some type of poltergeist activity and may be compared with the previous disappearance and replacement of the father's picture.  Both Mr Rossmoyne, who witnessed the event, and his wife who heard it, were quite positive that there was no way in which the glass cheese-dome could have emerged from the crystal bowl under normal circumstances.  Mrs Rossmoyne was surprised that the dome had broken, since the matting on which it fell was so soft that she had many times dropped delicate glasses onto it without even cracking them.  It appears to have been hurled out of the bowl with considerable force.

7.   The growing sense of oppression and tension in the house from September to March was commented on not just by the Rossmoynes but by their friends, as well as by the Bishop who carried out the exorcism.  It seems to have been directly responsible for Mrs Rossmoyne's insomnia and nightmares.  I should add that during the course of the interview I mentioned to Mrs Rossmoyne that since I began working on the case I had myself been suffering from greatly disturbed sleep, awakening on several consecutive mornings at precisely 2.13 am.  She was astonished, pointing out that she also had been waking up at precisely that time for some weeks.  Clearly some form of telepathy was at work here, with rather unpleasant consequences for the investigator.

To sum up:

I think we may say that although no single feature of this case carries complete conviction, all of them taken together are impressive and certainly exhibit an inner logic which I personally find convincing.  I should also say that I was most favourably impressed by the principal informant, who emerges as a sensitive yet rational witness of considerable commonsense and courage.  I might add that she has resolutely refused to give up either the album or the offending photograph, both of which are still in her possession.
There are certain unusual features about this haunting which should be carefully analysed.  Let us begin by assuming for argument's sake, that we are actually dealing with the manifestation of the ghost of a very young child.  Certain difficulties immediately present themselves if we adopt this hypothesis.  Firstly, the photograph in question was that of a grave in which two members of a family were buried.  Yet, in Mrs Rossmoyne's account, only one of them appears in response to the burning of the photograph, and that one not the elder boy who died violently in a railway accident at a comparatively mature age, but the younger one, no more than a baby, who died when just over a year old.  This is startling, because there is no mention of the ghosts of babies – and seldom of young children in the literature of psychical research.  Traditionally, it is held that such spirits cannot become 'earth-bound' and give rise to hauntings simply because they have not yet had time to form attachments to persons, places or things.  Yet in this case the little ghost seems to have been evoked by a photograph of its grave taken some thirty years after its death.  All in all, this seems so unlikely that we are perforce driven to look for other more plausible explanations of what was actually happening.

We may begin with what I believe is the most important aspect of this case, namely, the growing air of tension and oppression in the atmosphere of the house between the acquisition of the album in August and the successful exorcism in March [3].  Mrs Rossmoyne and her husband both commented on the remarkable change for the better in the psychic atmosphere of their home after the exorcism, commenting that it was as though "a black cloud had been lifted from the house" and "oxygen pumped into the air".  Furthermore, Mrs Rossmoyne's serious insomnia, which had begun with the burning of the photograph, disappeared immediately after the purgative ceremony and so far has not returned.

Here again, we have departed from the pattern of the usual haunting, which is seldom accompanied by such symptoms.  Are we not, in fact, in the realms of the poltergeist here, where tension and depression are only too common?  Apparitions are often connected with poltergeist cases, so much so that William G. Roll includes a section on 'non-physical phenomena', including ghosts, in his useful Questionnaire appended to his book, Poltergeist [4].  In the present case, we have only one classic poltergeist manifestation – the shattering of the cheese-dome – but it seems likely, in view of the increasing tension in the house, that such disturbances would have increased had the exorcist not been called in promptly.  In any case, the disappearance and replacement of the father's picture is a typical poltergeist trick and not one normally connected with apparitions.  I believe that we may therefore be dealing here not just with an apparition but with a rather unusual poltergeist situation, which was scotched before it had a chance to develop fully.

George Zorab (1980, p.290) has well remarked that "in haunting cases as well as in poltergeist cases there is a certain living person who should be regarded as the 'energy centre' producing the phenomena observed and the same paranormal faculties are involved in both types of spontaneous case."  In this instance the focus of the haunting was clearly Mrs Rossmoyne.  It was she who burnt the photograph and witnessed its reappearance.  It was she who saw the apparition; who suffered from insomnia and was in charge of Kay.  It was also her own father's photograph, taken, significantly enough, when he was a child of two, which vanished from the shelf.

Why did Mrs Rossmoyne wish to burn the photograph of the gravestone?  Her explanation that it was "morbid" does not, I feel, fully account for her action.  Could it be that she felt subconsciously anxious at the sight of a child's grave and was therefore impelled to destroy the disturbing picture?  Mrs Rossmoyne has no children of her own and has never lost a child, therefore the picture could not have evoked unpleasant memories for her, unless it subconsciously evoked recollections of an abortion or a miscarriage, though I felt this was too delicate a question to put to her and therefore refrained from asking it, especially as I should also have had to ask whether, in the case of an abortion, her husband had also been in favour of it.  Certainly, her impulsive destruction of the picture is hard to explain, unless one postulates that it disturbed her subconsciously to such an extent that she felt compelled to get rid of it.  This postulated conflict would also help to explain the return of the picture.  I am convinced that Mrs Rossmoyne was certain she destroyed the picture and equally convinced that she did not do so.  But her shock on seeing the picture intact in the album, after she thought she had destroyed it, like the ghost of a child that never was returning to haunt her, was sufficient to spark off the manifestations that followed.  The first of these was the onset of her insomnia, characterised by that early-morning waking typical of intense anxiety and depression.  The second was the disappearance of her father's photograph, a highly significant occurrence, not only because it was her father's picture that vanished but because it depicted him at the age of two, suggesting that a subconscious equation was being made between the father, who may here have symbolised Mrs Rossmoyne's husband, and the dead child of the "burnt" photograph.

The appearance of her father's photograph after a tension-dissolving holiday away from the house was almost immediately followed by her seeing the apparition of a child to whom she apologised.  This detail is again highly significant, since it clearly indicates a subconscious feeling of guilt that had centred around the child and/or father/husband.  It was about this time that Kay, who was not Mrs Rossmoyne's own child but a neighbour's, began seeing "a little pink person" playing with the photographs on the shelf from which the picture vanished.  In the article mentioned above, Zorab states that "the phenomena in haunting need not be of a purely subjective, hallucinatory nature", a point made also by Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell (1979, pp.179; 250-251) as well as by Andrew MacKenzie (Zorab & MacKenzie, 1980, pp.292-293).

It seems highly likely then that Kay really did see a phantom that not only removed and replaced the photograph of the father but also appeared in the garden, "threw things" and spoke to her before disappearing through a locked gate.  Such an apparition might well have been a thought-form created by Mrs Rossmoyne in much the same way as Madame Alexandra David-Neel (1958) created her celebrated tulpa of a monk.  Against this, however, we might contend that the child's laughter, its advice to Kay about putting a scarf around her hat and the very fact that it spoke (unlike a tulpa), would argue for its existence as an independently existing entity, whether connected with the long-dead George Whitehead or not.

The climax of the haunting came with the hurling of the cheese-dome, which narrowly missed Mrs Rossmoyne's husband, who until then had remained on the periphery of the events.  We should note here that since this act of aggression was directed against her husband, there are traces once again of an unresolved conflict here.  It was, furthermore, this incident that led to his agreeing to let Mrs Rossmoyne call in an exorcist and put an end to a situation which could well have degenerated into a full-blown poltergeist disturbance, which may well have led to actual injury being inflicted on the husband, but never, if my conjectures about the origin of the disturbance are correct, upon anyone else.

It is certain that Mrs Rossmoyne is psychically gifted.  Indeed, at the beginning of our interviews she indicated as much, telling me, among other things, that at the age of sixteen she had seen an apparition in the garden of three people dressed in old-fashioned clothes, which had lasted for a full fifteen minutes!  She also added that her mother possessed the same talents and, like herself, was afraid to develop or even use them.  In this case, I believe, Mrs Rossmoyne used her considerable psychic powers to initiate a haunting of a highly unusual type, which helped to resolve a deep inner conflict brought to the surface by the sight of the photograph.  Precisely what this conflict is, I cannot say, nor is it the task of the psychical researcher who is not an analyst to delve into such matters.  But noting that D. Scott Rogo (1979, pp.236-237) asserts that "unmanageable guilt" is at the root of most poltergeist activity, we may well be inclined to suspect its presence in this case [5].  So powerful, indeed, were Mrs Rossmoyne's psychic talents that she was able not only to initiate the haunting but even to transmit her insomnia to me when I began to work on the case, even to the extent of waking me up at precisely the same time every morning at which she had been accustomed to wake, namely 2.13 am [6].  The time  itself is highly significant, for symbolically I believe it may stand for 'doubly unlucky', ('twice thirteen') which is certainly a reference to the Whitehead family, who were doubly unlucky to lose two of their sons, and perhaps a reference to other circumstances in Mrs Rossmoyne's life (a second miscarriage or abortion perhaps?) which only she could explain.

Professor Ian Stevenson (1972) has argued that not all poltergeist cases can be explained psychologically in terms of the projection of repressed feelings by the subconscious or unconscious mind.  While agreeing wholeheartedly with Professor Stevenson that this is so, I was nevertheless driven to the conclusion that in this instance we cannot conclusively ascribe the events witnessed to a discarnate entity, though certain aspects of the case argue in favour of this hypothesis.  Beside those aspects mentioned above, the only other indication in favour of such a thesis is the fact that the haunting ceased after the exorcism.  But here again it could be argued that this was due to the calming effect this impressive ceremony had on Mrs Rossmoyne rather than that the ceremony was instrumental in banishing a child's unhappy ghost.

D. Scott Rogo (1982, p.236) has rightly pointed out that poltergeists are sometimes "reactions to a total family situation" and not necessarily "a psychic eruption revolving around a central agent".  In this case, however, I would argue that it seems probable that we are dealing not with a situation generated by a family disturbance, for the household in question is a harmonious one, but with an outbreak centering around a single person, who undoubtedly suffered a great deal from the haunting, regardless of whether it was self-generated or not, and was deeply relieved when it was terminated by a traditional exorcism.

Notes
1.   The bishop, an experienced exorcist, was insistent that the focus of the evil he sensed in the house lay in the kitchen, scene of the poltergeist activity.
2.   See Forman, 1978, for a description of a group encounter with a loquaciously shrewish apparition of an old lady.
3.   Such an atmosphere of depression and tension is frequently associated with both hauntings and poltergeists.
4.   Roll, 1976, p.190; Rogo, 1979, passim.  Rogo, 1982, 237, observes rightly that "it may be very difficult to clearly differentiate between hauntings and poltergeists and...some cases which we classify as hauntings may be hidden poltergeist cases."
5.   Rogo, 1982, p.252, states that, "Each poltergeist agent is imbued with the ability to create a PK-being from his inner guilt, hate and repression, knowing only that it exists to cause destruction."  In the case under review there was no destruction beyond the breaking of the cheese-dome, though little Kay stated that the apparition "threw things".
6.   A careful search of my case-notes has made it certain that Mrs Rossmoyne did not inform me of the time of her early morning waking until after I had mentioned mine to her, so I was not consciously influenced by her experience.

Bibliography:

David-Neel, Alexandra, 1958,  Magic and Mystery in Tibet, New Hyde Park.
Forman, J., 1978,  The Mask of Time, London.
Gauld, A. & A.D. Cornell, 1979,  Poltergeists, London.
Haining, Peter, 1988,  Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts, London.
Kettlekamp, Larry, 1980,  Mischievous Ghosts: The Poltergeist and PK, New York.
Myers, F.W.H., 1906, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, London.
Playfair, Guy Lyon, 1982,  This House is Haunted: An Investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist, London.
Rogo. D. Scott, 1979,  The Poltergeist Experience, London.
Rogo. D. Scott, 1986,  On the Track of the Poltergeist, London.
Rogo. D. Scott, 1982, 'The Poltergeist and Family Dynamics', Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 51, No.790, 233-237.
Roop, Peter, 1982,  Poltergeists: Opposing Viewpoints, London.
Spencer, John & Anne, 1997, The Poltergeist Phenomenon: An Enquiry into Psychic Experience, London.
Stander, Philip & Paul Schmolling, 1996,  Poltergeists and the Paranormal. Fact Beyond Fiction, New York.
Stevenson, Ian, 1972,  'Are Poltergeists Living or are they Dead?', Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 66, 235-252.
Thurston, Herbert & J.H. Crehan,  Ghosts and Poltergeists, London.
Tyrrell, G.N.M., 1963,  Apparitions, New York.
Williams, Gurney, 1979,  Ghosts and Poltergeists, New York.
Williams, Jobeth, 1997,  Poltergeist, VHS Tape, New York.
Wilson, Colin, 1993,  Poltergeist: A Study in Destructive Haunting, London.
Zorab, G. & Andrew MacKenzie, 1980,  'A Modern Haunting',  Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 50, No.783, 284-293.

Any reader who may have come across this gravestone, or knows where it might be found, is asked to contact me.  JDF

 

[Journal of Alternative Realities, Vol 6, Issue 1, 1998]

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM