It was an embarrassing admission to have to make. With the exception of Guy Playfair there is probably not a single respectable parapsychologist in the world who will publicly admit the existence of spirits. Many will concede in private that they are inclined to to accept the evidence for life after death, but in print even that admission would be regarded as a sign of weakness. Before that trip to Pontefract I had been in basic agreement with them: it seemed totally unnecessary to assume the existence of spirits. Tom Lethbridge’s ‘tape-recording’ theory explained hauntings; the unconsciousness’ and the ‘information universe’ combined to explain mysteries like telepathy, psychometry, even precognition. Spirits were totally irrelevant. Yet the Pontefract case left me in no probability of some local monk who died in a sudden and violent death, perhaps on the gallows, and who might or might not be aware that he was dead. And I must admit that it still causes me a kind of flash of protest to write such a sentence: the rationalist in me wants to say, ‘Oh come off it. . .’ Yet the evidence points clearly in that direction and it would be simple dishonesty not to admit it.
When I returned from Yorkshire I took a deep breath and plunged into the annals of poltergeist activity with the aid of the library at the Society for Psychical Research and the College of Psychic Studies. The picture that now began to emerge made me aware of how far my preconceptions had caused me to impose an unnatural logic on the whole subject of the paranormal. It was not so much that the conceptions underlying my previous books The Occult and Mysteries were wrong as that they were incomplete. And much of the evidence required to complete them had been staring me in the face from the beginning.
This edition published in the UK and USA in 2011 by
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First published in paperback as The Mammoth Book of Supernatural by
Published by Magpie Books, a Division of Robinson Publishing, in paperback as
The Giant Book of the Supernatural in 1994
Text copyright © Colin and Damon Wilson, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2011
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