GHOSTS LEFT IN SOLE CHARGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 25, 30 January 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

GHOSTS LEFT IN SOLE CHARGE.

QUEER TALES OF HAUNTED HOUSES. TENANTS' NERVES TRIED BEYOND ENDURANCE—A HANDSHAKE THAT INJURED AN INVESTIGATOR —THE MYSTERY OF THE RINGING BELLS—A SUGGESTED REMEDY.

HUNDREDS of houses ill England are left in the undisturbed possession of ghosts—left because these ghosts had tried beyond endurance the nerves of the people who once lived there. The ghost thus is a public menace. You buy an old houee and you may find its peace upset by something out of the grisly past (writes Dr. Nandor Fodor, research officer at the International Office of Psychical Research, in the "Daily Mail"). Others may scoff and laugh, but you know that something is brooding tinder jour roof which strikes terror in tue hearts of your servants and makes your guests leaVe post-haste with impossible excuses. What are you going to do about it? Nothing. You will suffer in silence because you do not wish to expose yourself to public ridicule, and because you do not know that ghosts can be laid. 'Die ghost is in your house probably because he has nowhere else to go. He is anchored there, and will not be dispossessed. It is still, in his view, his own, and he considers you an intruder. I agree that all this sounds fantastic nonsense. But there is nothing sensible about ghosts. There is only one practical way to deal with them. It is this: S.O.S. From the Dead. Assume first that the manifestations are signs of the presence of a tormented soul; that the disturbance is an S.O.S. from the dead. Then find out what is the nightmare from which the dead is suffering. Dissipate it, and with the nightmare the ghost will go. Take a medium to the house, let hiin go into a trance and ask his "controls" for help. They will sense the trouble of your ghost, get hold of him and '"push him" into the medium. Then you can talk to him direct. I cannot assure you yet •whether this practice is free from snags. 1 know, however, that it works. The experimenter must cross-examine the possessing entity, who must be told, if ho does not know it, that he is making himself a nuisance, that the plac-e belongs to him no more, that he is dead. If he does not believe you, let him look into a mirror. The shock of finding himself in a strange body will break the spell. He will stop suspecting or abusing you.

Tell him that he is the victim of a fancy of his own mind, that he should forswear vengeance if he harboured any, that he should pray for guidance. Pray with him if he cannot pray alone. You will find an increasing emotional response, and presently the ghost will slip out of the body of the medium— free. He may never disturb the house again. Recently I had to deal -with two bad cases of haunting. Ghost in Solid Form. An old manor house in Surrey was the scene of one. The ghost walked, knocked, and appeared in a form so solid that the owners of the house—a man and his wife—took him for an intruding tramp. Independently they challenged him and answered his idiotic leer by hitting him. The mail crashed tcf the floor and fainted. His wife tore her hand 011 the lintel of the door in front of which the ghost stood, and then fled in panic. I waited up for three nights hoping to meet tlie gliost and finally, through the help of a famous trance medium. I got hold of him and had an interview more poignant with drama than any scene 1 ever witnessed. The medium grew cataleptic. Then a dreadful change came over her. Her cheeks sank in, her chin dropped, her face became distorted and hideous. It was the face or a tormented man whom pain had deprived of his reason. I beckoned to the owners of th® house to step forward. The man, visibly shaken, declared that the face was the exact image of that of the ghost. His wife almost collapsed. By dint of much persuasion, the ghost began to articulate. He threw himself on his knees and cried for mercv. He seized my hand and held it in a terrific grip. I cried out in pain. For two days afterwards my hand was swollen, and it hurt for two weeks. Using strange, medieval forms of speech which were hard to follow, the ghost gradually told his story. Betrayed by Buckingham nearly 400 years ago. he was imprisoned, maimed and murdered, and was still seeking vengeance on Buckingham. He could not believe he was dead. I fought and argued with him, and, finally, for the sake of his wife and son, he agreed to forswear his vengeance. Almost immediately he cried: "Hold me! Hold me! I am slipping!" The next moment he was gone and the medium's consciousness returned. There are many things about the story which have yet to be verified. But I have the assurance of the man in the l ouse that he now enjoys undisturbed possession. Bell Kinging Mystery. The second recent ghost-laying adventure took me to Yorkshire. An S.O.S. came from an ancient country house the name of which I am not at liberty to disclose. Old-fashioned wire bells, which require a strong pull

and cannot be short-circuited by wires touching or by mice and rate, rang intermittently for five days. Two days after the bells started ring, ing, an. apparition was seen—independently by two servants —bending over an ancient cradle. I found the owners of the house extremely level-headed, intelligent people. There seemed nothing wrong with the bells, and my questioning of the five servants left me satisfied that a genuine mystery confronted me. I was accompanied by a well-known London trance medium. I expected to hear, through her, of ore ghost, but found instead that I had to deal with three. One ghost followed the cradle which belonged to her child. The child was taken from her to be instjl as a substitute in a Court intrigue and she was imprisoned. She got away, without realising that it was by death, and was still seeking her child. The second ghost was a woman who lived in or near the house and had poisoned her husband and killed her child. The third ghost was a deformed boy who was earth-bound because of arrestea mental development. It was this boy who rang the bells. As the ghosts unburdened themselves, a change came about in their mental condition. The pall of darkness which enveloped them seemed to be lightened. In a vision, the deformed boy saw his mother and father beckoning for him in a beautiful garden; a nurse came for the mother who lost her child by court intrigue; and the poisoner was swept out of her state of despair after a passionate prayer. Wrote Own Name. I cannot yet tell how much of these strange stories might be verified by historic research. Neither can I prove that these ghosts were responsible for disturbing the peace of the house, nor eventhat they have been laid. At the best, I could only prove by indirect methods that I was in contact with something beyond our ken. The ghost of the woman poisoner wrote down her name when I pushed a piece of paper under the medium's hand. Back in London, I handed this paper to a well-known woman, of whose psychic powers I have a high opinion. Without reading the paper, she placed it on her forehead and passed into a. state of abstraction. In the course of this, to my surprise, she gave me a number of visual symbols and phrases which

were bewildering nonsense to her, but which fully applied to the story as told by the "host. It was a strange occurrence, but it made me lean strongly towards the assumption tliat I was in touch with grimmer realities than the medium's own power of dramatisation.