Foil Hat Ninja

“The Edge, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”—Hunter S. Thompson

 

Wilson Van Dusen was a clinical psychologist at the Mendocino State Hospital in California between 1968 and 1974 where he worked with all manner of the mentally ill. During that time, he endeavored to gain a greater understanding of what his patients who suffered from hallucinations were going through by attempting to engage the voices that some of them heard in conversation.* The results that he got went far beyond anything he had bargained for and were far stranger than just about anyone could have predicted.

In the chapter “The Presence of Spirits in Madness” from his book The Presence of Other Worlds, Van Dusen begins by clearing up some of the misconceptions that many people have about the mentally ill. Most people think that those who experience hallucinations are all so far gone that the taxis won’t take you there. The truth is that most of them are completely aware that no one else is experiencing what seems completely real to them, and some manage to live with their hallucinations for quite some time in the everyday world without anyone knowing what they’re dealing with. It is supposed that all of them are eventually overcome by their illness, but how would we really know? There may be such a thing as a functioning hallucinator.

I can personally back Van Dusen up on that since I spent a number of hours in the maximum security ward of a state mental hospital for academic purposes several years ago. (No, I wasn’t a patient…smartass.) I was quite surprised at how lucid most of these people who had to be locked up for their own protection were most of the time. There was, however, one man that I avoided having any contact with because he was always engaged in conversation with someone that none of the rest of us could hear. Sometimes he calmly conversed, sometimes he argued, sometimes he laughed, and sometimes he cried. I thought that this guy was so totally gone that he didn’t even know that I was there. Then one day I accidentally said hello to him because I had just arrived and saying “Hi” to someone is just sort of a reflex in that situation. I immediately realized my mistake and braced myself for his reaction. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, but all that did happen was that he said “Hey man,” and then went back to his conversation with whoever he could hear that we can’t. I was completely taken aback at discovering that this person who I thought was living completely in his own little world was actually quite aware of what was going on around him. He just ignored it because whatever was going on in his private world was clearly of far more interest to him

Okay, enough about me. Back to Van Dusen.

The way that he was able to interact with these hallucinations was to use the patient as a go-between. The hallucinations could hear him, and the patient would report their responses to his questions and observations. Van Dusen quickly realized that he could easily categorize the voices into one of two groups: higher and lower order. There was no in-between.

The lower order voices were complete thugs and bullies whose only purpose was to torment the patient mercilessly. They naturally knew everything that there was to know about their victim and used all of it against them. They insulted them and called them every name in the book. They would suggest all varieties of lewd acts and then excoriate the person for thinking about them. They would harp on past misdeeds endlessly, especially the ones that patients felt the most remorse over. They would tell the person to commit some act and threaten them if they refused. If they gave in and did what they were told, they would be mocked for being so stupid and gullible. At times, patients would hear one or more voices plotting to kill them as if it were behind their back. Sometimes the voices told them straight out how they were planning to murder them. One man heard dozens of voices all screaming at him simultaneously and was so traumatized when this happened that he had to be sedated. Some were also able to inflict physical pain and used this as a way of coercing their victims into doing as they were told. In short, they’re totally sadistic douchebags.

Van Dusen quickly noticed that none of the hallucinations of the lower order were particularly bright, even if the patient was, which struck him as a little odd. They also seemed to have no personal memory, identity or knowledge of who or what they were, but would readily accept any role suggested to them. When asked if they were demons, they would enthusiastically confirm that they were. When it was insinuated that they might be spirits, they would affirm this as well. One claimed to have been an engineer, but further questioning revealed that it knew no more than basic arithmetic. They could also perfectly imitate and impersonate any individual ever known to the patient, and they used this ability frequently as part of their arsenal to torture and confuse their victim.

The hallucinations that Van Dusen classified as higher order were different in every way. First, they rarely spoke to the patient and preferred to appear in what could be considered visions where they transmitted information mostly through symbolism, much of which was completely lost on the recipient. There were also times when visual hallucinations occurred with the lower order, but these were more mundane. What the patients saw were usually ordinary, if somewhat scary looking, people in conjunction with the abusive voice, kind of like Zachry and Old Georgie in Cloud Atlas. Higher order beings were also reported much less frequently, making up only about 20% of hallucinations at most. Much of what they attempted to convey seemed to be spiritual in nature, while lower order entities were always indifferent or hostile toward religious or spiritual ideals. One being who appeared to a patient as a beautiful woman showed him thousands of symbols that demonstrated to Van Dusen that she possessed a level of understanding of religious and mythological concepts far beyond the knowledge of the relatively uneducated recipient. This “woman” identified herself to Van Dusen as “an emanation of the feminine aspect of the Divine.” When Van Dusen later referenced her divine nature, she denied this and stated that she was merely an emanation of the Divine, in contrast to the boastful nature of the lower order. After their conversation, the patient asked Van Dusen if he could tell him what the two of them had been talking about. He hadn’t understood any of it. In general, the higher order beings were helpful, supportive, and respectful of the person’s feelings and freedom.

Van Dusen frequently seems to be talking about these hallucinations as if they are real, separate entities rather than the simple products of delusional minds, and there’s good reason for this. Years after these interviews with patients, Van Dusen became fascinated with the 18^th century Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. He was struck by the similarities between Swedenborg’s descriptions of the higher and lower spirits and how well they fit the nature of the two orders of beings in his patients’ hallucinations.

In Swedenborg’s theology, there are hierarchies of Heaven and Hell and humanity exists in the confluence of the two and is influenced by both sides. This constant pull between good and evil and which path we choose to follow is what makes up the spiritual life of humanity. The idea that humanity is constantly being pulled in both directions of good and evil without our knowledge is not a new one, but Swedenborg’s personal take on this has a twist. His lower order spirits are just as unaware of us as we are of them. They have no idea that they are exerting an evil influence on us most of the time, but occasionally they find out.

According to Swedenborg, these are spirits in the most literal sense of the word. They are the souls of the dead whose memories have been wiped clean and now exist in a state of not knowing who they really are or where they came from, which is exactly what Van Dusen found in lower order hallucinations. (This is also eerily reminiscent of a being who called himself Mr. Appel, with whom John Keel had some interesting experiences in the late 1960s, but that’s a story for another day.) It’s actually a little more complicated than that, which is why you should read the next paragraph.

A person’s actions and character determine which sorts of spirits become attached to them. Good people attract good spirits and bad people attract bad ones, although Swedenborg also implies that we all have both sorts attached to us to some degree. It is our habits that strengthen the influence of one type while diminishing it for the others. Though both the human and their attached lower spirits are unaware of one another, they experience a sort of shared existence. The memories of the person become the memories of the spirit, who is walking around in a world not that different from our own. For each of their attached person’s worldly experiences, they have a corresponding spiritual experience. Interesting concept, but I’m not really clear on what makes these similar realities Heaven for good spirits and Hell for bad ones. Any Swedenborg experts out there please feel free to enlighten me on what I’m missing here. And unlike any Christian theologian, mystic or philosopher that I’m aware of, Swedenborg claims that all “angels” and “demons” were once human, in stark contrast to mainstream Christian theology. Some would even call that heresy, and some did. Many of his books had to be published in other countries because of this.

Swedenborg states that there is a barrier between the spirits and human consciousness. Were a lower spirit to become aware of his attachment to a human and learn the true source of its memories, it would torment this person constantly and put them in danger of losing their sanity and perhaps even their life. They might also be able to gain control of a person and force them to do and say things against their will, aka demonic possession. This, Van Dusen realized, was precisely what had happened to each of his patients. A seemingly outside entity, but one that knew every last detail about the patient and little else, had attacked them from within and destroyed their sanity. Of course, a purely hallucinatory mental construct would also know everything about them.

It probably goes without saying that Swedenborg was and is not the only person to blame spirits for some mental illnesses. Today we generally consider such people to be/have been primitives and superstitious savages, and a lot of them are/were, though I don’t mean that as the insult that most will probably perceive it to be. There have been more than a few “civilized” individuals who have spent time with these people and come back with stories that, if they are to be believed, might make us reevaluate or own beliefs on the subject of spirits. These peoples’ way of life may have enabled them to remain aware of forces that our higher civilization has caused us to lose the ability to perceive.

Van Dusen wasn’t sure what could have brought down this barrier between his patients and the spirit world, but he suspected that it might have something to do with the social withdrawal which is one of the first symptoms of the onset of schizophrenia. By retreating into their own mental world and brooding on their deteriorating state of mind, he speculated that they might have torn a hole through that veil. What was not known by Van Dusen or anyone else at the time is that schizophrenia is a medical condition caused by an excess of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical in the brain so important to so many different brain functions that entire careers have been devoted to its study. What role dopamine might play in opening up the brain to non-ordinary states of perception is officially unknown as no reputable neuroscientist is going to risk his funding by studying such a preposterous and controversial idea. There is, however, quite a bit of anecdotal data and amateur research that has been done in this area, but again, that’s a story for another day.

There are other factors involved in whether or not a person may be at a higher risk for schizophrenia, such as a genetic predisposition and stress factors, but dopamine is believed by most to be the real culprit. Much like a weak immune system may be genetic, and stress may weaken it further, ultimately it’s a virus that causes the flu. Those other things just make a person more likely to catch it.

Van Dusen also found that higher order spirits were aware of the presence of the lower order and had power over them to some extent, which Swedenborg also maintained. The same was not true of the lower order. They were unaware that the higher order even existed. Swedenborg’s higher order informed him that the lower order served the purpose of bringing to light a person’s shortcomings, which may explain why they didn’t just get rid of them wherever they found them. They could certainly relieve a lot of suffering were they so inclined, or perhaps allowed. In one case, Van Dusen recommended that a patient embrace these higher spirits, whom the patient was afraid of for some reason. When he did, the voices that the man had heard plotting his death went away, so maybe the higher order would do more to help if they could get a little more cooperation from our end.

Before you start thinking that Swedenborg might have been some sort of prophet, I have to point out that he also claimed to have been given information in his visions that all of the planets and even the moon were populated with humanoid-type beings. Considering what we now know about our solar system, that seems pretty unlikely. Remember what I’ve said in the past about psychic visions being, at least in part, the realm of the Trickster. (Life Imitates Art on the Brooklyn Bridge, An Alien by Any Other Name Part 2) For every piece of verifiable information or potentially useful insight, at least some of the “higher knowledge” that visionaries have had imparted to them would clearly make better fertilizer than philosophy.

As closely as Van Dusen’s findings reflect Swedenborg’s spiritual doctrines, there have been others who have claimed to have access to higher spiritual knowledge and have just as much credibility, however much that is, who would disagree with much of Swedenborg’s theology. Alan Kardec’s spirit contacts denied the reality of any sort of spirit possession on the grounds that it violated a person’s freewill and so would never be permitted. The kahunas of Hawaii believe that the soul exists on three levels, and the lower level can sometimes assume control, usually to the detriment of the individual. Other mystics have assured us that there is no such thing as Hell and that only human minds could come up with such an appalling concept as eternal damnation. Reincarnation is a far more commonly espoused precept for explaining how souls make spiritual progress while also being rewarded or held accountable for their past actions. Hypnotic past life regression affirms this, but hasn’t turned up anything that I’m aware of that backs up Swedenborg’s claims.

I know what to make of Van Dusen. He was a very intelligent, highly educated, compassionate and open-minded man who was seeking a better understanding of the world that he and his patients lived in. His fascination with and admiration for Swedenborg may have caused him to overlook some of this man’s more quirky and highly improbable assertions, but Van Dusen would hardly be the first to fall into that category.

I find myself not knowing quite what to make of Swedenborg. As is almost always the case with mystics, some of what they have to say I find quite compelling, but a lot of it sounds like they’re having some hallucinations of their own. I think that sometimes there’s a fine line between genius and wack-job when it comes to the paranormal, and most of these guys seem to be straddling that fence a lot of the time.

Oh well. Such is the nature of the shaman.

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*In case you’re wondering why a respected clinical psychologist would willingly get involved in such a crazy undertaking, you should know that many psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors know a lot more about the bizarre and mysterious than you would probably suspect. They usually stumble upon it quite by accident through their patients. For one of the best, most interesting and enlightening examples of how this happens, check out Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss, Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. That book is like a dose of Prozac on a rainy day.

 

 

“I am a spirit who was once very happy but have been disturbed and am now unhappy.”—the Bell Witch

 

A little over a century before Gef came along, there was another highly unusual case that is widely regarded as being the work of a poltergeist, but this one had a very different flavor. The Bell Witch is the only known case, or at least the only case known to me, of an alleged poltergeist possibly killing someone. Other than that, there are numerous similarities to Gef, as well as similarities to many other more typical poltergeist disturbances.

In 1817, a farmer in Robertson County, Tennessee named John Bell saw an unusual animal in his corn field. It had the body of a dog and a head like a rabbit, similar to an esquilax, but in this case with a dog’s body. Bell shot at it several times and the animal vanished. Supposedly, he thought no more about it, though that’s hard to believe. Shortly thereafter, the family started hearing scratching and thumping sounds against the side of the house. Things escalated quickly from there.

Before long, the children (there were nine of them!) began to complain that something was pulling the covers off of them in bed. They also began hearing noises like someone choking or gasping for air. All of this was pretty minor stuff, but when things started moving around on their own, it really got their attention. They also started to notice that these things only happened when Betsy, the Bell’s 12-year-old daughter, was around. The next three years were complete bedlam for the entire Bell family.

After about a year of these disturbances, the covers continued to be pulled off of the sleeping children, but now they were getting slapped in the face by an invisible hand if they tried to stop it. John Bell invited neighbors over to check out the disturbances for themselves. James Johnston and his wife spent the night there and got much the same treatment as the Bells. Accounts vary as to what exactly happened, but when Johnston told the “ghost” to knock it off, possibly invoking the name of God, the rest of the night was event free. That didn’t last. Whatever Johnston said, he seems to have really pissed this thing off, and it took it out primarily on Betsy. She started having her hair pulled and getting her face slapped almost constantly, so hard that it left welts and red handprints on her cheeks. When she was sent to stay with neighbors, things at the Bell house became quiet, but Betsy continued to get smacked around. Now that’s a poltergeist!

Though Betsy was the main focus of most of the hostility at this point, others were not completely ignored. Visitors to the Bell home were slapped, and the other Bell children had stones thrown at them as they walked home from school, usually from the same thicket. The stones didn’t harm the children. As is common in poltergeist cases, flying objects seem to lose their momentum as they strike people and fall harmlessly to the ground. The slaps, however, still stung like hell. Your guess is as good as mine as to why that would be. Balls of white light were seen floating around the area at night and supposedly still are to this day.

The next phase of whatever was going on there was that the gasping noises changed over to a whistling sound and then to an actual voice. In his book Poltergeist, Colin Wilson points out that this is also common in these types of cases. It’s as if the source of the disturbance has to figure out how to speak and starts off with more basic vocalizations, not unlike the preliminary stage of toddlers first learning to talk. Once the entity started to speak, the primary focus of its antagonism switched from Betsy to her father, though Betsy still remained a secondary target of its malice. It also seems clear that Betsy was the source of its power. As soon as it started talking, Betsy began suffering from fatigue, shortness of breath and fainting spells. About this same time, John Bell’s tongue swelled up and his jaw began aching so badly that he would sometimes go more than a day without eating.

At the beginning, the voice sounded to the family like the muffled voice of an old woman singing hymns, also an early favorite of Gef’s. As it became louder and clearer, the voice first claimed to be a spirit that was once happy but wasn’t anymore. A short time later it said that it was the spirit of a Native American, and then that it had been a witch named Kate Batts. The “witch” told John Bell, who she called Old Jack, that she would torment him until she finally killed him.

Four other entities also began speaking. One calling itself Blackdog had a harsh, masculine voice. Another that said that its name was Jerusalem sounded like a little boy. The other two, Cypocryphy and Mathematics, sounded “delicate and feminine.” They were all apparently Dartmouth alums because they frequently slurred their words and filled the house with the smell of whiskey. That seems to be about all that anyone bothered to record about them.

Although the witch clearly hated John Bell, it seemed to begin to like the rest of the family most of the time. It even lightened up on Betsy. One year on her birthday, the voice suddenly announced that it had a surprise and, allegedly, caused a basket of fruit to materialize that included oranges and bananas, items which were not readily available in Tennessee at the time. Once when some of the Bell children were sitting on a sled, she told them to hold tight and then pulled it around the house three times “at great speed,” which they doubtless enjoyed. Another time, when Betsy and some other children were playing in what has come to be known as the Bell Witch Cave, a little boy became stuck between some rocks. The now familiar voice announced “I’ll get him out,” and the boy felt two hands grab him and pull him free.

The witch seemed to be the fondest of John’s wife Lucy. Once when she was sick, the witch did its best to comfort her with the words “Luce, poor Luce” and then showering her with hazelnuts for reasons that are far from clear to the uninitiate. It would seem that even a sometimes malevolent entity knows that any woman who has been through childbirth nine times before the invention of the epidural deserves a break, although it might have had a more tragic and pitiable reason for its compassion.

It has been speculated upon that this entity, whatever its nature and origin, may have had good reason to sympathize with Lucy, hate John, and have an alternately hostile and benevolent attitude towards Betsy. You don’t have to be a family therapist or a social worker to figure out that both Lucy and Betsy may have been victims of abuse. In Betsy’s case, it wouldn’t be unusual for the victim of the sort of abuse that she may have endured to feel not only helplessness, but also guilt and anger, which could explain why she was the recipient of both sympathy and aggression. The “witch” could have been created by her unconscious mind as a way of getting back at her father while her feelings of shame caused her own creation to punish her as well. The general consensus about poltergeists, although I have my doubts, is that they are unconscious manifestation of psychokinesis generated by the person that they are attached to. That seems a nice paranormal version of a Freudian interpretation in this case, but there are some holes in it.

The first flaw in this theory is Betsy’s aborted engagement. She had become involved with a young man named Joshua Gardner whose family owned a nearby farm. Both families were said to be in favor of their marriage, but the witch was firmly against it. She managed to end the relationship at least in part by humiliating both of them by revealing their most embarrassing secrets to the other, usually when they were together. Had Betsy’s father molested her, the witch would almost certainly have made it known, but there’s no evidence that this was the case. Of course, there may be lines of decency that even some poltergeists won’t cross, but that isn’t the norm. There have been numerous other cases of poltergeists revealing the most embarrassing secrets of anyone and everyone present, apparently just for their own amusement. Many times these accusations are known or are later proven to be blatant lies. The idea that Betsy unconsciously created the witch would explain why the manifestations followed her to the neighbors’ house, but not why the witch later returned to the farm years after Betsy had married and moved away.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, things were getting really bad for John. He spent the last year of his life under almost constant attack. He was slapped mercilessly and his face would often contort as if being tugged around by invisible fingers. When he went outside, his shoes would fly off. No sooner would he put them back on than they would fly off again. He also seems to have been sick a lot during this time, and when he was, the witch would taunt him for hours in a voice that could be heard all over the farm. On the morning of December 19, 1820, the family discovered that John had slipped into a catatonic state sometime during the night. John Jr. found a vial containing a smoky liquid in the cupboard, and the witch announced that she had put it there. She said that it was poison and that she had given some to “Old Jack” and he would be dead soon. When the doctor arrived, they put a drop of it on the cat’s tongue.* It went nuts and spun around the room for a few seconds and then died. John Bell died the next day and the witch rejoiced mightily. According to one source, as people were leaving the funeral, the witch began laughing and singing and kept it up until every last person had gone. She really didn’t like that guy.

After John’s death, the disturbances around the house decreased dramatically. John Jr. seems to have been the only one that the witch ever talked to anymore. Then, in April of 1821, as the family was having dinner, there was a loud noise that sounded like something heavy had fallen down the chimney and then burst into a ball of smoke. The witch then announced that she was leaving but said that she would return in seven years.

The witch did return in 1828 as promised…sort of. Only Lucy and two of her sons remained at the farm and they experienced only minor poltergeist-type activity for a few weeks. John Jr. claimed that the witch also paid him two visits that year and they allegedly had discussions concerning the origin of life, civilizations, Christianity, and the need for a mass spiritual reawakening. It would be interesting to know what the witch had to say about these things, but apparently John Jr. never bothered to write any of it down. Maybe it wasn’t as profound as we might imagine. The witch also told him that she would return in 107 years to visit his descendants, but 1935 came and went without anyone descended from the Bell family reporting anything out of the ordinary. And that, seemingly, was that.

There are a number of differences between the Bell Witch and the average poltergeist disturbance, most notably its ability to harm and possibly even kill. (We don’t know for sure that it actually poisoned John Bell, just that it claimed to have done so.) While poltergeists have been known to do considerable property damage, they are rarely able to do anything more than superficial harm to people. The Bell witch seems to have done little, if any, harm to property and grew quite fond of the Bell family, aside from John.

As in the case of Gef, the Bell Witch defies our ability to place it in any convenient category. This entity had a much more developed personality than your average poltergeist and much more complex relationships with the various members of the Bell family. Furthermore, the sightings of balls of light in the area that may continue to this day have more in common with UFO hot spots than poltergeists. Although poltergeist activity in connection with UFOs is not unusual, it is generally much more limited in scope. Things move around, disappear and then reappear in odd places, etc., but there is rarely if ever a distinct personality involved. UFO related poltergeist phenomena also don’t seem to be associated with any particular individual as are the more typical sort. This is why I don’t draw solid lines to separate one type of paranormal phenomenon from another. There’s just too much crossover.

The Bell Witch seemed to be attached to Betsy, but was obviously much more obsessed with John. It was also able to manifest itself without Betsy, in contradiction to the competing theories that poltergeists are either unconscious projections of the associated person or are spirit beings of some type that somehow manage to attach themselves to and draw power from the individual afflicted. In fact, after John Sr.’s death, it seemed much more interested in John Jr. than Betsy. Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings on the part of John Jr. about the witch possibly killing his father, which raises a lot of additional questions that we will probably never know the answers to.

Like Gef, the Bell Witch is an enigma in an already ridiculously enigmatic field of inquiry. Unlike Gef, I would just as soon she didn’t drop by to chat every once in a while. And also like Gef, I may be dead wrong about that.

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*Apparently they weren’t that attached to it.