Ghosts & Gallows (11 page)

Together with Divisional Detective-Inspector Hedges and a group of uniformed officers, Carlin visited The Welcomes. After eighteen months of abandonment, the burnt-out farmhouse and stable block were little more than rubble and weed-choked ruins and an examination of the premises revealed nothing out of place; more importantly, there was no sign of a well which Mrs Tombe was insistent contained the body of her son. However, amongst the tall grass on the edge of the paddock, Carlin noted four concrete slabs which proved to be the covers over a series of cesspits. Prising one open, the policemen found a deep circular brick-built pit; it was empty but could conceivably be mistaken for a well by someone unaware of its real purpose. Between them Carlin and Hedges lifted the covers of the remaining pits: two more were empty but the fourth was suspiciously full, almost to the top with bricks and rubble. The Superintendent sent two of the uniformed men to obtain shovels and a pickaxe and on their return they began clearing out the debris.

The cesspit was deep and as darkness fell the work continued by the light of two hurricane lamps. ‘I could not help thinking to myself,’ Carling later recalled, ‘that the grim scene, with the flickering lights of the lanterns shining on the faces and bared arms of the workers as they swung their picks and shoveled away debris, must have looked rather like those nights some seventy years or eighty years ago when the resurrectionists, Burke and Hare, were at their nefarious work in some cemetery.’ Eventually, after removing a large amount of rubble, the policemen reached ground water level and were forced to lower down a bucket. As the rank water was drawn off a sudden shout brought Carlin to the edge of the pit; by the light of a lantern they could see a man’s shoe projecting up out of the rubble with a skeletal foot still attached.

Eric Tombe’s body, a mass of bones only held together by his clothes, was decomposed beyond recognition and only identifiable by items still present on the body – a wristwatch, cuff links, a tie-pin and a gold crown pried from the jaw by a pathologist. The cause of death was a shotgun blast, at close range, to the back of the head and Tombe had died instantly.

At the subsequent inquest, Tombe’s death was put as occurring on or around 20 April 1922, the time that he had gone down to The Welcomes to discuss financing Dyer’s proposed scam on a man named Stephens. Late one night two months later, in June 1922, Ernest Dyer’s wife told the Coroner’s Court she had been disturbed by the sounds of stones falling outside and encountered her husband (who at the time she believed was abroad on business), in a distressed state moving about in the shadows. Dyer had ordered her back inside the house and claimed he was visiting the farm at night to avoid being seen by his creditors; the reality was that Tombe’s corpse was at that moment lying in the water-filled cesspit and Dyer had returned to continue filling it in under the cover of darkness. The inquest returned a verdict of murder by Ernest Dyer, whose precarious financial difficulties had resulted in the killing of his former business partner as a short-sighted and desperate attempt to escape his mounting debts. At Scarborough, Dyer had clearly thought that Detective Inspector Abbott had come to arrest him for Eric Tombe’s murder and had ultimately cheated the hangman by his own hand.

Subsequently, the Revd George Tombe tried to play down the involvement of his wife’s dreams in the discovery of their son’s body. The newspapers began giving conflicting statements as to who actually had the visions and ultimately the family denied that anything of the kind had actually happened. It is not difficult to see why, as any involvement with supernormal happenings of this sort would have brought him far closer to Spiritualism and even necromancy – the divination of hidden information from the dead – than would of been healthy for a Christian minister. Despite this, Francis Carlin was one of several people who acknowledged the mysterious involvement of the paranormal: it was ‘one of the most remarkable things I have ever come across in my career – that a dream should have been the starting-off point in the investigations in this unparalleled mystery,’ was his final comment on the case.

Despite compiling a detailed manuscript on the murder, extracts of which have only been published recently
1
, Eric Tombe’s death had a profound effect on the young Dennis Wheatley; the thriller writer remembered his mentor with affection for the rest of his life and adamantly refused to be drawn into talking about the murder in any way. Today there is little for the curious to see at the former site of The Welcomes. The name still survives but modern houses have been built on the stud farm grounds and much of the original farmhouse has been cleared away, although a series of cottages which once comprised the old stable block still stand.

Is it possible to give some explanation of the psychic or paranormal forces which enabled Mrs Tombe to see so accurately the grim and hidden grave of her son? During the course of his extensive examination of psychometry and paranormal crime detection, published in 1984 as
The Psychic Detectives
, Colin Wilson considered cases such as the Tombe murder and the Red Barn in terms of ‘dream telepathy’ between the percipient and the victim. Whereas Maria Marten may have been able to transmit an unconscious mental signal as she was being attacked by William Corder, which was subsequently picked up as a series of dreams by Ann Marten, Wilson argues that the circumstances of Eric Tombe’s death – the violent and instantaneous blast from Dyer’s shotgun from behind – would have been so sudden that Tombe would have been completely unable to have sent such a message. As such, a possible explanation of the paranormal revelation of Eric Tombe’s body would seem to lie nearer to the spirit hypothesis of mediums such as Robert Lees and, as we will see, psychics such as Estelle Roberts. As Wilson notes, ‘It is difficult to resist the inference that Eric Tombe somehow communicated with his mother after his death’, although if Dennis Wheatley’s suspicion that Tombe was held prisoner at The Welcomes for some time before he was killed is true, he may well have realised that Dyer intended to murder him, with the result that the ‘dream telepathy’ theory is still valid.

We will return to the subject of prophetic dreams in a later chapter as our next case has its paranormal element, not as a way of revealing a crime, but as a direct and chilling means of murder …

NOTE

1
. See Phil Baker’s
The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley
(Dedalus Ltd, Sawtry, 2009). Eric Tombe was buried in a family plot in Sutton Cemetery; the memorial is to his brother, Kenneth, who died in America in 1917.

Haunting apparitions are one of the most familiar and widely reported aspects of the paranormal world. A wealth of records exist for ghosts and ghostly phenomena occurring in and around countless buildings across the country, both humble and historic, from council houses, pubs, railway stations and cinemas, through to prisons, stately homes and ancient castles. Although their causation and reasons for appearing are at present unexplainable, these resident phantoms are for the most part benign and harmless. In his aforementioned
The Ghost Hunter’s Guide
(1986), Peter Underwood considers these hauntings in terms of ‘mental imprint manifestations’ or ‘atmospheric photograph ghosts’: impressions of former inhabitants or events that have become seemingly ingrained in the building’s fabric and which become active and are either able to ‘play back’ under suitable conditions, or are triggered into action by the presence of a psychic person. Unsettling as these experiences may be to some, they operate within their own realm oblivious to the presence of observers and are on the whole most often regarded, as writers Michael and Molly Hardwicke have described them, as ‘inoffensive members of the community’.

However, the literature of psychical research is also littered with credible accounts of supernormal happenings which can best be summarised as ‘extreme hauntings’: paranormal experiences that seemingly involve both some form of intelligence or discarnate consciousness together with a varying degree of force or violence directed towards the percipient or observers. Although the boundaries between them are at times somewhat blurred and overlapping, they fall with some exceptions into the following three broad categories: possessions, poltergeist phenomena and psychic attacks.

Violent or ‘demonic possessions’ have become associated in the public mind in recent years with the disturbing and shocking imagery contained in director William Friedkin’s 1973 film
The Exorcist
, whose screenplay, as well as the novel on which it was based, were both written by New York writer William Peter Blatty. Blatty’s story was itself based on real life events which took place in 1949 in Cottage City, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC, and were centred around a thirteen-year-old boy named Douglas Deen. The youth went into convulsions, screamed obscenities and spoke in Latin, a language with which he was unfamiliar, and these disturbances were also accompanied by powerful physical phenomena of a poltergeist-like nature, including scratching and banging noises together with the movement of objects and furniture. After a protracted exorcism ceremony carried out by Father William Bowdern, a Jesuit priest, the possession ended after several months in May 1949. Modern psychiatric medicine ascribes most instances of possession to personality disorders but a number of cases, such as the Cottage City incident, lend support to the argument of there being in some instances violent person-centred hauntings involving the temporary invasion of a person’s organism by a discarnate ‘spirit’ or ‘entity’ from another realm or world. In Britain, a noted and high-profile exorcist was the late Revd Dr Donald Omand, who was the subject of a full length biography
To Anger the Devil
(1978) by Australian writer and ghost hunter Marc Alexander.

Supernormal happenings that today we recognise as poltergeist phenomena have a recorded history stretching back centuries to the time of Homer and Plutarch. The first book in the English language to describe poltergeist hauntings is Ludwig Lavater’s
Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght
, published in London in 1572, and there have been a number of notable cases from the British Isles since that time, beginning with the famous Drummer of Tedworth in Wiltshire, recorded by the Revd Joseph Glanville in the middle years of the seventeenth century. Glanville issued an account of his investigation in 1661 and just over 300 years separate this and the accounts of another British poltergeist incident, which is now also regarded as a landmark case. In 1977, reports of spectacular and violent disturbances of a supernatural nature in a council house in Enfield, North London, made newspaper headlines and have become one of the most famous paranormal investigations of modern times. For over a year the Hodgson family (given the pseudonym Harper in contemporary and subsequent publicity) were at the centre of bizarre and at times terrifying events which included the violent projection and movement of objects and furniture, knocks and banging sounds, the apparent levitation of family members, apparitions (including bizarrely on one occasion an apparition of one of the investigating members of the Society for Psychical Research) as well as spontaneous fires and paranormal graffiti.

Ten years before, a less well known but equally impressive period of poltergeist haunting took place in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The case of the Black Monk of Pontefract involved another working class family, the Pritchards, who, like the Hodgsons at Enfield, were subjected to several months of violent and inexplicable phenomena: deafening drumming noises, breaking furniture and crockery, the appearance of pools of water and a strange chalk-like dust, together with a tall apparition thought to be the ghost of a long-dead Cluniac monk hanged for rape in the time of Henry VIII. On one occasion twelve-year-old Diane Pritchard was dragged up the stairs by an invisible assailant, which left a series of red finger marks on her throat. The vast majority of parapsychologists have traditionally assigned poltergeist phenomena to be a form of recurring and spontaneous psychokinesis normally centred around a living person, most often an adolescent youth. However, some researchers, such as Guy Playfair, who spent several months at Enfield during the time of the disturbances, and Colin Wilson, who made a retrospective study of the Pontefract case in the early 1980s, are inclined to believe that poltergeists are actually more closely related to the popular view of possession and are the result of actual discarnate ‘entities’ or non-human personalities rather than the extraordinary effects of the human mind.

The subject of psychic attack has become somewhat confused in modern times, with the result that alleged contemporary cases or given examples bear only a superficial resemblance to the concept as understood and accepted by researchers and investigators in the past. Today, paranormalists are likely to group a vast array of alleged phenomena (both real and imagined), ranging from anxiety, depression and mood swings through to bad luck, curses and voodooism as evidence of some form of psychic attack, whereas in its true sense the term has more of a close kinship with person-centred poltergeist hauntings or possessions, but without an invading secondary personality and less spectacular psychokinetic (i.e. Macro-PK) effects, such as the physical movement of objects and furniture. During his experiences with the haunted skull of William Corder, Dr Kilner described to Robert Thurston Hopkins’ father an incident which sounds very much like the classical interpretation of a psychic attack: of being stopped in his tracks by an enormous gust of wind while walking into the drawing-room of his house, and experiencing an unseen but tremendously powerful form which took a concerted effort, both mentally and physically, to throw off.

Psychical research has shown an awareness and interest in the phenomenon of psychic attacks since the very first days of organised investigation and discussion. At a meeting of the Ghost Club – the oldest society devoted to the study of the supernormal, having been founded in Cambridge in the early 1850s – and held in the Burlington Fine Arts Club in August 1893, Mr A.J. Hamilton Wills described several unnerving incidents that he personally experienced while staying at a country house in Somerset. Retiring to bed shortly before midnight, Hamilton Wills became aware of footsteps following him as he made his way upstairs. At the door to his bedroom he paused and heard the footsteps approach and pass by into the room. Shortly afterwards, after he had undressed and lain down in bed, he was assaulted by a powerful invisible force which tore at the bedclothes and pressed down violently on his throat and chest. The attack lasted several minutes before subsiding and Hamilton Wills likened the strength to that of three fully grown men. During his stay, there were a further two night-time incidents of a similar nature, each less powerful than the previous attack but no doubt equally as frightening and inexplicable.