Ghosts & Gallows (28 page)

The case of Jacqueline Poole and Christine Holohan is an important one, not only as perhaps the nearest we have got to date to a British, and perhaps even an international ‘classic work’ of psychic detection, but also for its farther reaching implications. In his contribution to
A Voice from the Grave
, Keen notes that ‘for a world that is still locked within the narrow walls of a philosophy that denies the existence of consciousness, that sees nothing in life beyond mortal flesh and blood, that discerns neither purpose nor plan behind our existence, and looks upon the soul as a figment of man’s hopes rather than a demonstrable fact, the traumatic communication which Holohan experienced immediately after the brutal murder of Jacqueline Poole is as profound and important contribution to the repudiation of that philosophy as any piece of evidence of modern times’. For a dedicated and respected psychical researcher, it would also seem a fitting epitaph …

NOTES

1
. See
The Scole Report
by Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison & David Fontana, published in the
Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol.58, Pt.220, November 1999; also Robin Foy’s
Witnessing the Impossible
(Torcal Publications, Diss, Norfolk, 2008) and
The Scole Experiment
(Piatkus, London, 1999) by Grant and Jane Solomon.

2
. ‘Did a Medium Identify a Murderer?’ (Updated 14 October 2006). Retrieved from
www.tonyyouens.com
on 11 August 2011.

In 1971, American writer Richard Matheson, known for his apocalyptic vampire novel
I Am Legend
(1954), created the archetypal haunted house with the publication of his supernatural thriller
Hell House
, a grim tale of psychics and investigating scientists forming an uneasy alliance in order to uncover the secrets of life after death. Matheson drew on his lifelong interest in the paranormal as well as the literature of psychical research to populate his ‘Mount Everest of haunted houses’ with chillingly authentic phenomena including apparitions, ectoplasmic materialisations, psychic attacks and telekinesis; and the author also provided the screenplay for director John Hough’s special-effects filled cinema version, which was made two years later. Four years after
The Legend of Hell House
appeared in movie theatres, it seemed as though Richard Matheson had somehow been the literary prophet of future events and that his fictional Belasco Mansion had become a terrible reality. In 1977, Jay Anson published
The Amityville Horror
, seemingly a carbon-copy of Matheson’s earlier work: the only exception being that Anson’s book was presented as non-fiction; everything it contained was said to be true, with the result that it quickly became known as one of ‘the most sensational and controversial cases of alleged diabolical presence’ ever recorded.

‘High Hopes’ was a large Dutch-style colonial house at 112 Ocean Avenue in the suburb of Amityville, Long Island, New York. On the night of 13 November 1974, Ronald ‘Butch’ DeFeo, the twenty-two-year-old son of a wealthy local motor dealer, drugged and shot to death both his parents, Ronald DeFeo Senior and Louise DeFeo, together with his two sisters, eighteen-year-old Dawn and thirteen-year-old Allison, plus his two brothers, Mark and John, aged twelve and seven respectively. ‘Butch’ DeFeo initially told police the slaughter was a contract killing, claiming his father had links with the New York underworld, but it soon became clear under intense questioning that DeFeo, an unhappy youth who had taken to drug-addiction, hated his father and had told his family on one occasion that unless he left home he would end up killing them all. DeFeo claimed insanity at his trial, telling the court that when he held the Marlin 35 rifle in his hands he became God and had murdered in self-defence. He was found guilty and given twenty-five years to life on each of the six counts of murder. ‘High Hopes’ was later refurbished and put up for sale but, unsurprisingly, remained on the market for a year. Eventually, attracted by the low asking price – $80,000 for a substantial six-bedroom house with large grounds, a swimming pool and a boathouse on the water – it was bought by George Lutz, a self-employed construction surveyor and his wife Kathleen. The Lutzes were undaunted by its association with the recent killings and, realising they had picked up a bargain, moved into the house with their three children on 18 December 1975. They stayed a month, and in that time succeeded in laying down the foundations of a modern horror phenomenon that has excited controversy and speculation for over thirty-five years.

In Jay Anson’s book, compiled by the author from a series of telephone interviews with both George and Kathy Lutz – Anson, a film and television scriptwriter, never visited the house due to ill health – the Ocean Avenue mansion is portrayed as a literal gateway to Hell populated by an army of violent and terrifying supernatural creatures. The Lutzes claimed to have encountered the apparitions of hooded monk-like figures and a demonic pig with fiery red eyes, fought off unnatural clouds of flies which filled the children’s playroom; and experienced rancid smells, debilitating extremes of heat and cold, as well as copious quantities of green slime which cascaded down the main staircase. George Lutz reported seeing his wife levitate into the air on several occasions and at one point transform into the figure of a ninety-year-old woman. Lutz himself felt he was beginning to identify more and more with Ronald DeFeo and imagined he was gradually taking on the killer’s physical characteristics.

The Amityville Horror
became a best-seller and, like Matheson’s
Hell House
, received cinema treatment two years later. This success spawned sequel books and a movie franchise which went a long way to firmly cementing the possessed-house concept in the public consciousness throughout the 1980s and beyond. Unsurprisingly, the allegedly true nature of the case became the target of sceptical criticism almost from the outset. A number of psychical investigators who spent time examining both the Lutzes’ testimony and Jay Anson’s presentation of the ‘facts’ came to the conclusion that there was little if any evidence for genuine paranormal activity at ‘High Hopes’, findings which were supported by the testimony of Jim and Barbara Cromarty, who had bought the house from George and Kathy Lutz and had reported no strange or unusual happenings while living there. Stephan Kaplan of the Parapsychology Institute of America felt that the story of the haunting was ‘mostly fiction’ while Karlis Osis, a noted researcher from the American Society for Psychical Research, was also disinclined to credit the happenings as genuine phenomena. A major blow to the case’s credibility came from a 1979 local radio interview with Ronald DeFeo’s lawyer, William Weber, who claimed that the entire ‘horror’ was an organised hoax inspired by a drawn-out and wine-fuelled conversation he had had with the Lutzes in the kitchen of their ‘haunted house’ three years before. Weber eventually sued George and Kathy Lutz for a share of the profits from both Anson’s book and
The Amityville Horror
film, claiming that they had reneged on their deal with him to manufacture the haunting and approached the scriptwriter behind his back. This resulted in a countersuit from the Lutzes to reaffirm the reality of their paranormal experiences and, true to the country’s rampant litigation culture, Jim and Barbara Cromarty also went to court to sue both the Lutzes and Jay Anson’s publisher, Prentice-Hall, for $1.1m damages due to the stress caused by constant streams of sensation seekers and tourists standing outside their house at all hours of the day and night. They were successful and received an unspecified amount, as was Father Ralph Pecararo (known as ‘Father Mancuso’ in Anson’s book and ‘Father Delaney’ in the film), who sued the Lutzes and received an out-of-court settlement for invasion of privacy and distortion of events – ‘Mancuso’ was said to have heard a voice commanding him to leave the house while present there alone to bless the building, and later to have suffered sickness and mental trauma due to his violent psychic experiences; Pecararo flatly denied ever entering ‘High Hopes’ and had only spoken to the Lutzes over the telephone.

Despite the controversy, multiple lawsuits, the hoaxing and sensationalism, the Amityville Horror has become the best-known example of a series of reported paranormal experiences centred around a genuine (and in this case notorious) crime scene; for want of a better description, a ‘murder house haunting’. The alleged diabolical nature of the ‘possessed’ building is the one aspect that sets it apart from many cases, but there are others. In his paranormal gazetteer
Our Haunted Kingdom
(1973), author and psychical researcher Andrew Green (1927-2004) describes his own personal experiences at a house in West London with a ghastly history of suicide and murder. Ellerslie Tower, a three-storey Victorian building constructed in 1883 and located at 16 Montpelier Road in Ealing, was named after the 70 foot-high brick structure incorporated into its design. In 1877, a twelve-year-old girl named Anne Hinchfield became the house’s first ‘victim’ when she threw herself from the top of the tower into the garden below. In the years that followed, if Green’s account is to be believed, eighteen more people met their deaths in the same way. In 1934, a nursemaid threw the child she was caring for from the top of the tower and became the final fatality by following the infant to her death.

Andrew Green was born in Ealing in 1927. He later reported that his mother, then a nurse, attended the scene of the double tragedy at Montpelier Road and, while waiting in the garden for a police doctor to finish his examination, witnessed footprints appearing across the lawn in the wet grass in front of her. During wartime in 1944, Green visited Ellerslie Tower with his father, an acting air-raid warden. The house, known locally for its sinister history, had stood empty for the previous ten years, but had recently been the subject of a Government requisition order and was then being used as a store for furniture salvaged from bombed-out buildings. Exploring the house and its grounds, Green was drawn to the tall tower and climbed to the very top. There he was overcome by a force or compulsion that impelled him to step over the edge of the parapet, convinced that the ground was only a few inches away. Luckily for Andrew Green, his father, who unknown to him had followed him up the stairs, appeared and quickly pulled his son back from the edge. The evidence for the haunting of 16 Montpelier Road is made particularly convincing by a photograph that Green took at the time of his visit from a vantage point in the garden at the rear of the house. When the photograph of the back of the building was developed it showed what appears to be the eerie figure of a young woman, possibly one of the many suicides, glancing wistfully out of a first-floor window. Green was adamant that the house was empty and they had met no one inside during the time he and his father were there. Workmen who had previously brought furniture into the house had reported hearing footsteps and experienced doors opening and closing in rooms known to be empty at the time; there was also a strange ‘atmosphere’ and an unusual smell in one part of the building. Reports of similar phenomena were reported regularly in the post-war years after the house had been split into flats. Several years after his own experience, Green met and talked with a former employee who had worked as a maid at Ellerslie Tower as a young woman. From her reminiscences it seems likely that Black Magic rituals were carried out regularly in the tower, at least during the time that she was living there. The house was demolished in 1971 and a modern block of flats, Elgin Court, now occupies the site.

Number 16 Montpelier Road with its imposing tower clearly looked like the traditional haunted house, but it is often the suburban ordinariness of buildings such as the Enfield home of the Hodgson family and 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, that adds to the bizarre unreality of many reported paranormal experiences. This is a point of fact with the building at the centre of another murder house haunting, one that could almost be considered as the British ‘Amityville Horror’…

At around twenty to nine on the morning of 7 October 1965, a police superintendant dressed in the overalls of a baker’s roundsman knocked on the door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersely, on the outskirts of Manchester. When the door was opened by a blonde-haired woman he pushed his way inside, quickly followed by another officer. The woman identified herself as twenty-four-year-old Myra Hindley; on a divan bed in the living room they found twenty-eight-year-old Ian Brady, dressed only in a vest, writing a sick-note to his employer. The police told the couple there had been reports of a disturbance at the house the night before and that they intended to carry out a search of the premises. Upstairs, one of the bedroom doors was found to be locked and, when asked to open it, Hindley stonewalled by saying she had left the key at work. When one of the officers said he would drive her there to get it she relented and unlocked the door. Inside they found the body of a young man – seventeen-year-old Edward Evans – trussed up with rope and wrapped in a polythene sheet; he had been repeatedly battered about the head and strangled with a length of flex. Brady was arrested, after which the police carried out an intensive search of the house. Inside the spine of a prayer book – Hindley was a convert to Catholicism – were found two tickets which were traced to a pair of suitcases at the left luggage office at Manchester Central Station. Inside, the police recovered an assortment of items that included wigs, coshes, paperwork, pornographic photographs and two reel-to-reel tape recordings. A week after Brady’s arrest, Myra Hindley was also taken into custody. It was the beginning of a grim unravelling of past events that, the following year, would stun the country and send shock waves around the world. Even today, during which time an intervening forty-plus years of seemingly perpetually increasing violence has made the reporting of shocking acts of murder commonplace, the Moors Murders remain one of the darkest and most despised chapters in British criminal history.