Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell: Haunting that baffled the original ghostbuster

CHASING THE DARK: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SUPERNATURAL by Ben Machell (Abacus £22, 304pp)

In a Somerset village in 1964, a housewife called Heidi ­Whittock-Knott was suddenly ostracised by her curtain-­twitching neighbours.

Hate mail landed on her doormat containing curses, accusations, foul language and demands that she leave the village.

While that was deeply upsetting, it was caused by something terrifying. She and her husband David, a lorry driver, were being hounded by what seemed like malign ­paranormal activity.

Pools of water appeared from nowhere on their living-room floor, even though a plumber assured them nothing was wrong with the pipes. Water gushed from the upstairs water tank, soaking the bedrooms. Returning home, Heidi found the glass doors of a cupboard smashed as though from inside. Small items changed places of their own accord. Heidi saw a hairbrush jump from her dressing table and ‘glide’ 6ft across the room.

Spooky happenings often have a bog standard explanation 

Rather than supporting her in her terror, the neighbours were disturbed by the loud thumps coming from the house while Heidi was out, and they turned on her as if she were some kind of witch.

At her wits’ end, she contacted the one ­person she hoped might be able to help: a man called Tony Cornell, a leading member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the society founded in 1882 to investigate every known variety of ghost and apparition.

For 60 years, from 1950 to 2010, Cornell was the Sherlock Holmes of paranormal investigation – though he was not dashingly clad in an Inverness cape and deerstalker. He looked as boring as an insurance-claims assessor.

Unlike many who worked for the SPR, who were themselves caught up in paranormal fervour, and thus whipped up the anxieties of people experiencing hauntings, Cornell was not a committed believer in ­paranormal activity. He was a benign sceptic.

Obsessed with and fascinated by the overriding question ‘can the dead speak to us?’ – so obsessed that he was almost impossible to be married to, as his three wives would testify – he drove across Britain at all hours of day and night to investigate and try to diffuse cases like Heidi’s.

Strangely, what often happened was that as soon as Cornell arrived at a poltergeist-ridden house, the weird activity stopped: a bit like when you go to the doctor and your symptoms mysteriously vanish.

In Heidi’s case, he did not manage to tamp down the activity. He ascertained that the events took place mainly when her husband was out and her children at school.

She showed him a detailed report by a local plumber, describing how he’d left a bucket of whitewash on the floor, went outside, came back in to the empty house, and the whitewash had somehow been splattered up the wall. He couldn’t account for such ‘surges’.

N or could Cornell. Verdict: inconclusive. The only ­suggestion Cornell had to offer to assuage Heidi’s anguish was to call in a Roman Catholic priest. The priest didn’t help: he just ranted that if religious belief kept declining as it was, the country would soon be overrun with poltergeists.

That Somerset case is just one of hundreds unearthed by author and journalist Ben Machell in a collection of boxes marked ‘Cornell’, tucked away in the Special ­Collections section of Cambridge University Library.

Those boxes contain a treasure trove of over half a century of British paranormal happenings: ‘Sheerness, 1987’. ‘Thetford, 1991’, and so on.

Machell’s compelling book ­Chasing The Dark is really The Casebook Of Tony Cornell, with Machell in the role of a retrospective Dr Watson, selecting and presenting the most gripping cases in the present tense.

It’s spooky stuff: perfect reading for Halloween. We see a nation of ­citizens encountering the super­natural in their own homes and being frightened out of their wits.

There’s a trawlerman, Carl ­Biggins, who claims he’s being repeatedly attacked by a hideous ‘black dog’ only he can see, leaving lacerations all over his body without cutting his clothing.

There’s the Page family, in an old hall in Cambridgeshire, terrified by bangs, low groans and beds that jolt in the night. There’s the famous Enfield Poltergeist case of 1977, in which two sisters, Janet and Margaret Hodgson, 11 and 13, appear to be the focus of powerful poltergeist activity: rappings, footsteps, and a levitating sofa that tips itself over.

T here are also cases of ­people being consoled by contact with the dead, such as the grieving parents of a boy called Russell who died of ­cancer aged nine.

His parents are desperate to make contact with his spirit. They’re thrilled to do so, via a helpful medium called Rita Goold. They see Russell’s form, and hear him ­speaking: ‘I’m sorry if you think I’ve got a bit of a squeaky voice, but I’m Russell.’ He tells his parents he’s happy and has joined a golf club in the spirit world.

Into these various worlds of domestic mystery comes Tony ­Cornell, with his scepticism, his beady eye, and his recording ­equipment.

With the trawlerman, he watched an ‘attack’ taking place, leaving new cuts on the man’s body. Then he spotted a tiny piece of razor blade on the floor. Carl had been cutting himself, perhaps in order to get attention from his wife Wendy.

With the Enfield girls, Cornell secretly left two balloons filled with water in a bucket under the girls’ beds. The ‘poltergeist’, oddly enough, didn’t spot or throw them. Surely he would have, if he were a real poltergeist. The girls confessed to fraud, then withdrew their confession.

With Rita Goold, the red lens fell off the torch she was holding, and revealed that she was on hands and knees, her bare arms serving as the boy’s legs.

With the Page family, Cornell and his young colleague Alan Gauld slept in camp beds in the room where the previous lady of the house had been laid out after her death, to keep an eye and ear on where the weird bangs and groans might be coming from.

Rappings began in the middle of the night. The men asked questions: one knock for ‘yes’ and two for ‘no’. ‘Are you dead?’ Knock. ‘Did you die of natural causes?’ Knock, knock. ‘Were you murdered?’ Knock.

In the morning they found they’d been bolted into the room by a brass toasting fork. They’d arrived as sceptics, but admitted in their final report their scepticism had been undermined by those inexplicable events.

That’s the verdict of this whole fascinating Cornell casebook: inconclusive. Although often, rational explanations and experiments under the strip lights of a laboratory kill off paranormal activity, there are some cases which remain unexplained.

In an old office building in a former school in the 1990s, workers reported hearing children laughing and singing playground songs. Those sounds were recorded. You can hear footsteps coming towards you that ­suddenly stop, and in the background, the sound of children singing, half a second behind the teacher’s voice.