Ghosts & Gallows (14 page)

The judge’s daughter soon fell into a trance and, speaking in the voices and personalities of the two dead Dahl brothers, Ludwig and Ragnar, held several long conversations with their father and mother. Price was present throughout the sitting and was allowed to take full notes of what was said. For the judge it was an intensely emotional experience as he conversed through the entranced Ingeborg and seemingly was again in contact with his dead children. Price found the whole sitting interesting, but as the entire proceedings were in fact totally reliant on the Norwegian couple’s belief that they were indeed speaking to the medium’s two brothers, it was ultimately unconvincing as proof of survival after death. Interestingly, Price later described the Dahls as ‘a very charming, affectionate and united family’, quite at odds with the morbid picture which would be painted by others several years later.

Harry Price remained in contact with the judge and his family and four years after his visit to Fredrikstad was instrumental in getting Ludwig Dahl’s manuscript detailing his paranormal investigations accepted by a London publisher. It was issued in 1931 under the title
We are Here: Psychic Experiences
to which the physicist and radio pioneer Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), himself an important researcher and firm believer in survival, contributed a foreword. There the matter would have rested if it had not been for a series of truly incredible occurrences which read like something from the fiction of Agatha Christie.

Mrs Stolt-Nielsen was a friend of the Dahl family and also a trance medium. At a séance held in 1933, at which Dahl himself was present, Mrs Stolt-Nielsen entranced and, channelling her own dead daughter, spoke to the sitters and gave a grim and ultimately chilling communication. The ‘spirit’ had apparently been asked to pass on a message from Judge Dahl’s son Ragnar, who said that his father would die from an accident which would take place in August 1934. Following the séance, Mrs Stolt-Nielsen wrote down the prophesy and kept it in a sealed envelope. The Norwegian magistrate’s reaction to this startling revelation was not recorded, but through his commitment to Spiritualism he would presumably have had no fear of death and would no doubt have looked on the warning as the time that he would be reunited at last with his loved ones.

Time passed to a point where Dahl and Ingeborg were enjoying a holiday day out together on one of the beaches at Hankö, a neighbouring island and popular seaside resort a few miles from Fredrikstad. It was 8 August 1934 and the same bay where the young Ludwig Dahl had drowned while sailing his yacht fifteen years before. As his daughter relaxed sunbathing on the shore, the judge was swimming when he suddenly got into difficulties. Accounts vary as to what overcame him, possibly cramp, but it seems most likely that he suffered a stroke. By the time his daughter had reached him, the judge was unconscious and, despite desperate attempts at resuscitation, he died.

As if the Dahl family had not suffered enough, an inquest into the judge’s death was the beginning of more strange and tragic events. The judge’s monetary affairs were discovered to be in ruins and an audit at the Bergen town treasury revealed that large sums were missing from the public coffers, sequestered by him to prop up his own ailing finances. An insurance policy covering Ludwig Dahl’s life was also found to have expired on the day following his death on the beach.

At this point Christian Apenes, the Deputy Mayor of Bergen, came forward with information about a private séance he attended with Ingeborg Köber on 4 December 1933, a transcript of which was kept by him at his office in the Town Hall. Apenes stated that Ragnar Dahl had communicated through his sister and had given a warning that their father would die within a year. The spirit said not to tell the judge or his wife anything about what was to happen and that it would provide additional evidence by giving the same information to another medium, whose spirit guide would give confirmation as well as instructions that a record was to be made of the prophesy and kept in a sealed envelope. The medium chosen was Mrs Stolt-Nielsen but, as we have seen, the communication actually took place in the judge’s presence and he was aware of the warning.

Apenes subsequently produced the sealed envelope and opened it in front of witnesses, at which point a public scandal broke out and all the Norwegian newspapers were soon filled with the story. Spiritualists in Norway were quick to champion the case, citing that two separate mediums delivering the same prophesy was convincing evidence for survival after death and foreknowledge by the spirit world. Non-Spiritualists, and even some Spiritualists themselves, were not convinced and felt that the judge’s death was the result of something far more sinister. Judge Bonnevie of the Norwegian Supreme Court, and a cousin of the late Ludwig Dahl, stated publicly that the magistrate had killed himself against his own free will under what he felt was a ‘hypnotic influence’, a ‘Macbeth prophecy’ which used a form of autosuggestion directed by people who wanted the judge out of the way.

Further statements by Christian Apenes at the inquest began to cast doubt in people’s minds as to the truthfulness of Ingeborg’s account of the death of her father. Rather than immediately going for a doctor, Ingeborg and Mrs Stolt-Nielsen, who she said she met on her way to summon help, telephoned to Mrs Dahl who was in Bergen, and it was several hours before she arrived in Hankö accompanied by Apenes. By this time two doctors had been called but there was nothing they could do except certify death by drowning. There was also a similar delay by Apenes and Mrs Dahl in informing the police of the judge’s death, and rumours soon became rife that Apenes had hatched a plot to kill Ludwig Dahl by hypnotizing his daughter to murder him on the lonely beach by pushing his head under the water.

The whole matter came to a head in the Central Criminal Court in Oslo in front of Judge Trampe Broch. Ingeborg Köber brought the case to court in an attempt to clear the stigma of suicide against her father’s name. Counter-charges were brought that she herself, her mother, Mrs Stolt-Nielsen and Apenes were involved in a murder plot in order to benefit from Ludwig Dahl’s demise – Christian Apenes had after all become Mayor of Bergen and the family had benefitted from the large insurance policy that the judge had taken out on his life, which ended the day after the fateful day he went to the beach with Ingeborg.

The bizarre trial of the Norwegian medium lasted intermittently for three years. The Hungarian journalist and crime reporter Cornelius Tabori (1879-1944), whose son Paul would later become Harry Price’s literary executor and biographer, attended the first five days of the Dahl trial and witnessed first-hand the strange situation as the foremost psychologists and psychiatrists in Norway were called as expert witnesses for the prosecution, while in their defence the Dahls and Christian Apenes quoted openly from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oliver Lodge in the same courtroom. ‘When yesterday Ingeborg Köber spoke of the influences of the Great Beyond and of the happiness which her father achieved,’ Tabori later wrote, ‘the judge turned to the experts and asked them to explain these terms. But the experts just smiled; they seemed to be more interested in the life insurance policy of the late Mayor Dahl.’

In the final summing up the jury were asked to consider several possibilities. Had the judge been murdered on the last day that his insurance policy was valid to solve the dire financial situation of his own family, who had subsequently been brought to justice by forces from beyond the grave? Had Judge Dahl in fact committed suicide knowing that his embezzlement of the Bergen town funds would soon be uncovered, or was he driven to kill himself by the chilling séance room message which had in some way willed him to die. Or was Judge Ludwig Dahl’s death actually a terrible accident and his son’s ‘message’ an eerie coincidence?

Happily for Ingeborg, the jury decided on the last option and she was acquitted in December 1937. The judge’s death was ruled accidental and the tragic woman found some happiness from the whole affair by marrying the chief counsel for the defence, Axel Segelcke, at the end of the trial. This was perhaps as well as the strain of the whole affair became too much to bear for Mrs Dahl and she shocked the country by taking her own life before her daughter’s name was cleared.

What exactly happened in the case of Judge Ludwig Dahl will now never be known. A Norwegian criminologist at the time felt the deaths of the judge and his two sons were linked, and told Cornelius Tabori that ‘under the cloak of Spiritualism an extremely cunning criminal was carrying out a series of murders’. ‘The Dahl Mystery’, as Tabori called it, remains one to this day.

NOTE

1
. Willi Schneider (1903-71) and Rudi Schneider (1908-57), both important physical mediums, were the subject of scientific investigation by several European researchers during the 1920s and ’30s. For a detailed account of their mediumship see Anita Gregory’s
The Strange Case of Rudi Schneider
(The Scarecrow Press, London, 1985).

The English woman Estelle Roberts was one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded and versatile of psychic mediums. Her abilities encompassed clairvoyance, healing, direct-voice communication and physical phenomena, including apports and materialisation, and she is revered by Spiritualists as one of the major figures whose quality of mediumship and steadfast lobbying at Westminster during the 1950s resulted in the movement being legalised as a religion by the British Government. Her presence in the case of Mona Tinsley and the child killer Frederick Nodder is the only redeeming factor in the entire dreadful story.

Roberts was born May Estelle Wills in Kensington, London in 1899 and claimed to have had her first psychic experience at the age of eight, witnessing a vision of a knight in shining armour floating in the air outside a third-floor bedroom window. From that time onwards she was able to hear voices and see apparitions that were imperceptible to the rest of her family, who, unsurprisingly, dismissed her claims as the result of a vivid imagination. Leaving school at fourteen, Estelle became a nursemaid to a family in Turnham Green but, despite her change in circumstances, the psychic experiences continued. Three years later she married Hugh Miles and the couple went on to have three children, but the marriage was plagued with financial hardship due to her husband’s almost permanent ill health. On his deathbed in May 1919, she later described seeing the spirit forms of her husband’s mother and father holding a vigil at the bedside and, at the moment of death, Miles’ own etheric double leaving his body and fading away.

Following her husband’s funeral, Estelle continued to work long hours to support her children. Eventually, security for her young family was achieved with a new marriage and a move to Hampton in south-west London. It was here that Estelle Roberts’ psychic powers were recognised and she took the first real steps to becoming a world class medium. Having been unable to fully understand her abilities since childhood, Estelle was encouraged to visit a local Spiritualist church by a sympathetic neighbour. There, during the service, she was singled out by one of the resident clairvoyants, a Mrs Craddock, who explained that she had the potential to develop what was a natural mediumship and had great things to do in the world. The rest of her life’s work began in those few moments.

Back at their Hampton home, Roberts began experimenting with table-tipping, but after a week of regular sitting became discouraged with the lack of result. On the seventh night, which again seemed to be fated to yield nothing and at the point when she made a mental decision to end her involvement with Spiritualism for good, the table suddenly became alive and rose into the air before gently descending to the floor. As she placed her hands on the table top, psychic raps sounded on the surface in a code corresponding with the letters of the alphabet and the name ‘Red Cloud’ was spelt out. This was the native Red Indian spirit guide who would work tirelessly through the medium for the next forty years.

For the remainder of the 1920s and through into the next decade, Estelle continued to progress her mediumship. As her clairvoyance developed she began to give regular demonstrations in Spiritualist churches across south London and the Home Counties, and quickly became a highly respected and sought after psychic. As good as her platform work became, it was in the darkness of her own home séance room that Estelle Roberts and ‘Red Cloud’ were able to provide comfort and convincing evidence of survival for hundreds of visitors over many years. As well as healing and psychometry, Estelle was a gifted trumpet medium, allowing sitters to receive communication from departed loved ones speaking through an aluminium megaphone-like device that floated unaided around the circle of visitors and through which discarnate spirits were able to speak again. The universality of her work was reflected in the people from all walks of life, from dustmen to knights of the realm, who came to sit with her in the séance room.

Psychic journalist Maurice Barbanell (1902-1981), founder of the long-running Spiritualist newspaper
Psychic News
and himself a gifted trance medium, was a great propagandist for the mediumship of Estelle Roberts and attended many of her séances. He claimed on one occasion to have seen the materialised face of ‘Red Cloud’ illuminated in the ghostly glow from two luminous plaques and to have shaken the guide’s materialised hand, while in his editor’s column he described many instances of convincing evidence of survival. They included an account of the widow of racing motorist Sir Henry Segrave, who was killed during an attempt to break the world water speed record on Lake Windemere on 13 June 1930, being reunited with her husband at a direct-voice séance. At another séance, and acting on instructions from a communicator, Barbanell effected a reunion between a mother, Mrs Manning, and her two dead children in what he described as ‘flawless evidence for the after-life’.