Ghosts & Gallows (12 page)

One of the most famous cases of psychic attack in the early decades of the twentieth century was that involving Eleonore Zügun, a young teenage Romanian peasant girl who became known in psychical research circles in both England and Vienna during the mid-1920s as the ‘Poltergeist Medium’ or ‘Devil Girl’. Under controlled conditions and in the presence of experienced investigators, including English-born Australian entomologist and psychical researcher Robin J. Tillyard, and Harry Price (who we will meet fully in the next chapter), raps sounded in her presence, ornaments and coins moved unaided, and small toys were apported into the test room. However, the most striking phenomena produced by Eleonore, and that for which she is most remembered today, were the painful stigmata which appeared suddenly and without warning on various parts of her body, including her face, back, neck, hands and arms. These took the form of bite marks, scratches and weals, which developed while the medium was under close and constant observation and were both photographed and filmed. A possible explanation is that these stigmata were psychosomatic in origin – Eleonore believed she was being attacked by the
Dracu
, the Romanian word for ‘Devil’ – in which case this would be an intriguing and protracted incident of self-induced psychic attack. With the onset of menstruation at the age of fourteen, Eleonore’s phenomena ceased; she subsequently returned to Romania and went on to open her own hairdressing business in Czernowitz.

Of all psychic attacks the most extreme and controversial is that which involved an American family in Culver City, southern California, during the early 1970s. Doris Bithers, a young single mother of four children in her early thirties, living in semi-squalid conditions in a house with a local reputation for being haunted, claimed to have been physically attacked and raped by malevolent spirits for a period of several years. The case was investigated in 1974 by two parapsychologists, Dr Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor from the University of California, Los Angeles, who reported experiencing poltergeist phenomena in the Bithers house for a period of two months. Taff later acted as technical advisor on the 1983
Exorcist
-style film
The Entity
, which was loosely based on his own investigation.

In England during the same period, reports of unusual happenings centred on the small village of Clapham near Worthing on the South Downs also contained elements that could be described as forms of psychic or paranormal attack. Incidents of UFO sightings, missing animals, several unexplained deaths and Black Magic practices were investigated by a local man, Charles Walker, together with journalist and writer Toyne Newton, who published accounts, initially in the part-work magazine
The Unexplained
, and later as a full-length book
The Demonic Connection
(1987). Newton and Walker record several instances of visitors walking through an area of Clapham Wood being seized and temporarily overtaken by unseen and debilitating forces, while on two occasions during the 1970s, Charles Walker witnessed similar psychic attacks at nearby Chanctonbury Ring, the site of an old hill-fort on the South Downs four and a half miles north-east of Clapham village, that has become associated with the disturbances: in August 1974, a member of Walker’s UFO group was suddenly levitated five feet into the air before being thrown to the ground and, five years later, another researcher was knocked off his feet by a similar unseen force.

At Clapham the inference is quite clear that both Toyne Newton and Charles Walker considered these disturbing experiences not as spontaneous events but due directly to modern day occultism and Satanic practices. As such these psychic attacks could be considered almost as by-products of intentional acts of Black Magic, involving ritual animal sacrifice, being carried out by an organised coven in the area over a period of several years; and, by surviving as localised pockets of psychic energy could, on certain occasions, cause physical and mental effects on visitors who happen to pass either into the vicinity or over a particular path or location. In this particular case there was no suggestion that psychic forces were being directed consciously by members of the occult group involved – the Friends of Hecate – but there are those who consider the ability for an adept of Black Magic or occultism to be able to create a psychic attack as a weapon or means of vengeance against an enemy to be a reality. What concerns us here is the suggestion that such a sinister and paranormal ability was in fact behind a strange and sudden death that took place on a lonely island off the west coast of Scotland in the winter of 1929.

The development of psychical research as an organised discipline in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century also coincided with an increase in the Victorian interest for ritual magic and occultism. During the 1880s, occult arts such as astrology, alchemy, ritual magic and cartomancy (the use of cards such as the Tarot to tell fortunes) were being synthesised into one unifying system of Western occultism by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, an eccentric and somewhat enigmatic Englishman in his mid thirties; this become known as the Western Esoteric Tradition. In 1888, the same year that Jack the Ripper stalked the East End of London and Cambridge philosopher Professor Henry Sidgwick presided over the newly formed Society for Psychical Research, Mathers, together with two other fellow Freemasons, founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a semi-secret society dedicated to ceremonial magic and the study of the ‘intellectual forces behind Nature, the constitution of man and his relation to God’.

The Golden Dawn established lodges and taught its hundred or so members practical occult arts: how to set up magical circles, consecrate talismans, how to cast spells, use magical weapons and to master the out-of-body experience of astral travelling. Mathers’ occultism was ceremonial rather than drug dependent or sex magic, but was none the less powerful and deadly effective: he claimed to be able to summon the demon Beelzebub, the supreme chieftain of Hell, but warned his followers that unless the magical circle was drawn with total accuracy, any mistake or slip up would result in self-destruction and the magician would be killed on the spot.

In November 1898, Mathers accepted a new student member into the Order, a twenty-three-year-old youth named Edward Alexander Crowley, who had become interested in occultism while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. As the self-styled ‘Great Beast’, Aleister Crowley, as he would later call himself – and who seems to have believed he was in reality the biblical Beast whose number is said to be 666 – became one of the most notorious men in England. Known for the mantra ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ from his prose poem
The book of the law
, a channelled text that Crowley believed he had received as a new gospel for mankind. Crowley became an enthusiastic Neophyte but tensions gradually developed; Mathers and he quarrelled and eventually Crowley was expelled from the Order. If accounts given by Crowley’s biographer John Symonds in his book
The Great Beast
(1951) are to be believed, this was the beginning of a fierce astral battle between the two occultists as they launched waves of psychic attacks involving invisible vampires, bloodhounds and demons against each other for control of the Golden Dawn. Both men survived but the mystery surrounding Mathers’ death – in Spain at the age of sixty-four in 1918 – makes it possible for some to speculate that the ‘Great Beast’ may in the end have finally succeeded in finishing off his one-time teacher; a more likely explanation is that the ageing magician in reality died of Spanish influenza.

Crowley would outlive Mathers by nearly thirty years, eventually dying in isolation and virtual obscurity in a Hastings boarding house in 1947, although the occult revival of the 1960s would ensure that his writings and his ‘magick’ would ultimately be encountered by a wide audience, and books, films and plays about his life and work continue to appear to this day. He was clearly a dangerous person to know and associate with: his first and second wives died insane and at least five of his mistresses went on to commit suicide. In 1911, a decade after his break with the Golden Dawn, Crowley became head of the British lodge of a German society named the Order of Templars of the Orient or Ordo Templi Orientis. Its founder Theodor Reuss, an occultist and polymath who took part in the inaugural performance of Wagner’s
Parsifal
, gave Crowley the honorary title of ‘Baphomet, Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis’, although for many Crowley would always be regarded as ‘the wickedest man in the world’, a similarly grand title bestowed upon him by the English Sunday newspapers.

The presence of the Scottish isle of Iona in Crowley’s occult pseudonym is an interesting one as it was here, in the same year that the ‘Great Beast’ self-published his four-volume magnum opus
Magick in Theory and Practice
, that an unusual and seemingly inexplicable event took place which has strange connections with Crowley himself, with Samuel MacGregor Mathers, with the shadowy world of Victorian occultism and, seemingly, the disturbing paranormal phenomenon of psychic attack and murder.

Netta Emily Fornario (known as Norah Farnario by some authors although her real Christian name was Marie), the daughter of an Italian immigrant physician from Naples and a native Englishwoman, was thirty-two years old and from Kew in south-west London. Born in Cairo, Netta’s mother had died when she was an infant after which she was raised in England by her maternal grandparents, who came from a wealthy family of tea merchants from Coventry. As a youth she spent time living in Italy, where she obtained Italian citizenship before finally returning to Britain, where she lived for a time in Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire. In August 1928, she arrived on Iona accompanied by a travelling companion, but despite the presence of her unnamed friend, wholly personal reasons had brought her to this lonely island community, where St Columba had first arrived to begin establishing Christianity in Scotland over thirteen centuries before. The young Londoner was convinced that many years in the past she herself had lived there in a previous life, and was now searching to establish a link with her previous incarnation in the solitude and peaceful environs of this profound and remote location.

After making the ferry crossing from Mull, the two visitors took up lodgings on the east side of Iona in the house of an island woman named MacDonald, and Netta Fornario settled into the quest that had removed her both physically and spiritually from a harsh materialistic world with which she had little or nothing in common. Today, Norah’s outlook would be described as being distinctly ‘proto-hippie’ or New Age, but back in the late 1920s she was a ‘Bohemian’, in both dress and outlook, whose fascination with folklore and the unseen world about us drew her apart from ordinary people and the humdrum of daily life which she eventually rejected for the solitude and enlightenment of lonely Iona, then a desolate place with neither telephones, electricity or running water. Netta Fornario was also a passionate faith-healer and Spiritualist at a time when the physical aspect of the movement was experiencing a golden age: there were many noted mediums holding blackout séances for ‘spirit’ communication and materialisation phenomena, and it seems that the young woman spent much time attending Spiritualist meetings in an attempt to obtain personal communication with the other side.

To these ends Netta obtained much support from a friendship and association with Mrs Moina Mathers, sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and wife of Samuel MacGregor Mathers, who was herself a gifted medium and clairvoyant. Moina had assisted her husband in the translation and preparation of several important occult texts and grimoires, including
The Kabbalah Unveiled
,
The Key of Solomon
and the fifteenth-century
Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage
, and with her encouragement Netta became a member of the Order of Alpha and Omega, an occult splinter group established after Samuel Mathers’ death, in order to develop her own psychic abilities of faith-healing and telepathy. Mrs Mathers also had a reputation in occult and Spiritualist circles as an adept in her own right, seemingly equal to the paranormal abilities of her late husband. How good her relationship with Netta Fornario was at the time that the young woman and her friend set out on the long journey to Iona in the autumn of 1929 is not clear, although there were some who later felt that it was intimately connected with the tragic events which were ultimately to play themselves out nearly fifteen months later.

After a short time her travelling companion took the Fionnphort ferry back across the Sound of Iona to Mull and the mainland, and Netta stayed on alone. Soon she left the MacDonald house and moved in as a boarder with the Cameron family in their small cottage on the south-west side of the island. In the late 1980s, Calum Cameron, a twelve-year-old boy at the time Netta Fornario stayed in his parent’s croft, remembered her to writer Richard Wilson as a restless character, much given to wandering the island moors and barren cliff tops on her own, often at night. Islanders at the time recalled she wrote poetry and although likeable talked strangely about being able to communicate with the spirits of the island’s past and was known to spend much time on a large grassy mound known as the Sithean Mor or Fairy Hill near The Machair, an area of farming land on Iona’s western side.

As the months wore on it became clear even to the young Calum Cameron, and more so to the rest of the family, that the young woman from London was a troubled and disturbed individual whose already eccentric behaviour was becoming alarmingly worse. Netta talked casually of succumbing to week-long trances, of seeing the faces of former ‘patients’ in the clouds through her bedroom window, of receiving spirit messages and seeing phantom figures. Much of her waking time was spent at night, either feverishly typing pages of now lost and unknowable script by lamplight or wandering across the island, oblivious to the darkness and the harsh Scottish weather; dishevelled and exhausted she spent much of the daylight hours asleep. Above all, the islanders felt that Netta Fornario herself seemed to believe she was being pursued by something unknown which, as it came closer, brought about an ever-growing sense of bizarre panic and personal danger.