Free Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting by Colin Wilson Page B

dispossessed of my body and the use of its organs, and keeps its quarters, watching the other, the intruder, doing whatever it likes . . . The very soul is as though divided . . . At one and the same time I feel great peace, as being under God’s good pleasure, and on the other hand (without knowing how) an overpowering rage and loathing of God, expressing itself in frantic struggles (astonishing to those who watch them) to separate myself
from Him.
    Now it is by no means impossible to explain all this in purely psychological terms. Poe has written about it in a story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” in which he discusses the way in which we can feel a sudden urge to do something that horrifies us; the narrator of his story has succeeded in committing a “perfect murder,” and cannot resist a compulsion to go and shout about it in the street.
    There is nothing very strange in this. It is simply the operation of what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl calls “the law of reverse effort.” The more a stutterer wants to stop stuttering, the worse he stutters. On the other hand, Frankl mentions a stutterer who was asked to play a stutterer in the school play, and was then unable to stutter. All this is explained by the recognition that “you” live in the left half of the brain, and that another “you” lives a few centimeters away in the other half. As soon as the left begins to interfere too much, it has the effect of “throttling” the right, just as if a man had grabbed himself by the throat. We are all of us “divided selves.”
    But it is one thing to stutter and stammer, and quite another to die of exhaustion in the belief that you are tormented by a devil. Looking detachedly at the case of the Loudun demons, it is difficult not to feel that The Spirits’ Book of Kardec explains it rather better than Huxley does. If we assume that the whole thing began as a plot against Grandier, and a sexual obsession on the part of the nuns—particularly Sister Jeanne des Anges—then we can begin to understand what Kardec’s “St. Louis” meant when he explained: “A spirit does not enter into a body as you enter into a house. He assimilates himself to a [person] who has the same defects and the same qualities as himself . . .” Fathers Lactance and Tranquille behaved with a frightful vengefulness—Lactance superintended the torture of Grandier—and therefore laid themselves open to “possession.” As to Sister Jeanne, she later wrote an autobiography in which it is made perfectly clear that she never much enjoyed being a nun; she was a dominant woman, and dominant women are usually “highly sexed.” She admits that she made no real effort to push aside the indecent thoughts that came into her head when she was praying or taking communion. “This accursed spirit insinuated himself into me so subtly that I in no way recognized his workings . . .” She may have started out with a more or less conscious desire to cause trouble for Father Grandier; but a point came where, like Tranquille and Lactance, she found her body being used by demons. Unlike Tranquille and Lactance, she rather enjoyed
being possessed.
    The case on which William Blatty based The Exorcist took place in a Washington suburb, Mount Rainier, in 1949. Thirteen-year-old Douglass Deen was the “focus” of the occurrences, which began with a scratching noise in the walls. A rat extermination company was able to find no sign of rats or mice. The sounds occurred only when Douglass was near by. Then more usual poltergeist phenomena began to occur: dishes flew through the air, fruit was hurled against the wall. A picture floated off the wall, hovered in the air, then went back to its old position. After this, Douglass’ bed began to shake and quiver when he was in it.
    The family asked the local minister, the Reverend M. Winston, for help, and on February 17, 1949, Douglass spent the night in his home. The two retired to a room with twin beds.