Ghost-Hunter's Casebook E-Book

Bowen Pearse

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Andrew Green, who died in 2004, was for sixty years one of Britain's most active and best-known ghost-hunters. The Daily Telegraph famously christened him 'the Spectre Inspector'. The author of best-sellers such as Our Haunted Kingdom and Ghost Hunting: a Practical Guide, he investigated hundreds of reported hauntings during his career, from famous cases such as 'the poltergeist girl of Battersea' to cases where a client had simply taken the wrong medication before bed. The most important cases from his lifetime of research are collected together in this volume - alongside new research and many reports that have never previously been published. This is an essential guide to the career of Britain's most famous ghost-hunter, and indeed to the paranormal history of 'our haunted kingdom'.

Leseprobe

To Janie, for unstinting help and support.

What to expect from this book

All entries have been newly researched and the best brought up to date. The nucleus of each entry remains, but because some thirty or forty years have elapsed since the works were originally published, often only a sentence or two of Andrew’s original remains. Some ninety per cent is entirely new material, researched and written in the two years proceeding publication.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

What to expect from this book

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Bedfordshire

Berkshire

Buckinghamshire

Cambridgeshire

Cornwall

Cumbria

Devon

Dorset

East Sussex

Essex

Gloucestershire

Hampshire

Hertford

Isles of Man & Wight

Kent

Lancashire

Leicestershire

London

Norfolk

Northamptonshire

Northern Ireland

Northumberland

Nottinghamshire

Oxfordshire

Scotland

Shropshire

Staffordshire

Surrey

Tyne & Wear

Warwickshire

West Midlands

West Sussex

Wiltshire

Yorkshire

About the author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

My special thanks to Norah, Andrew’s widow, who graciously gave me full access to all Andrew’s files and was never tired by my constant phone calls for this or that concerning Andrew’s life. Thanks too to Chris McCooey and Alan Murdie for also reading the MS, both bringing their own special talents to work. My thanks also to Jeremy Passmore who helped especially in queries over history. It goes without saying that Kent librarians managed to get me every obscure title, and fielded every question bowled at them. I am also indebted to Daryl Burchmore for introducing me to Pluckley, Kent’s haunted village. My especial thanks to Michael Kenny for some of the most amazing ghost stories. And also to all the contributors at each ghostly site who so patiently answered all my endless queries.

Foreword

BY ALAN MURDIE

It is with a mixture of both pleasure and sadness that I write an introduction to Bowen Pearse’s book Ghost-Hunter’s Case Book: Investigations of Andrew Green Revisited. The pleasure is in recalling memories of a mutual friend and one who stimulated my own interest in the subject as a boy when I read Andrew Green’s Our Haunted Kingdom (1973). The sadness is in recalling a friend who is no longer with us, at least on an earthly plane, but one who has left us a legacy of his inspiration, ideas and research into numerous haunted sites which Bowen Pearse revisits here.

Every week dozens, perhaps hundreds of people go out on investigations at haunted properties, taking with them a range of equipment from simple thermometers to complex electronic gadgetry. Relatively few realise that the activity in which they are engaging is very much due to the public influence and example of Andrew Green, one of Britain’s most active ghost-hunters for some sixty years.

Andrew Green was responsible for the world’s first popular book on practical ghost investigation from a scientific perspective, Ghost Hunting: A Practical Guide (1973) and widely promoted a rational approach to the whole subject of the paranormal. Earlier researchers and psychic research societies had frequently kept their techniques and findings to themselves or turned investigations into spiritualist séances. In contrast, Andrew Green actively promoted a wholly scientific style of investigation into ghosts and poltergeists. It concentrated on stripping away the folklore, superstition and dogma which all too often surrounded the topic and demonstrated to a wider audience that these mysterious phenomena could be investigated in a rational and scientific manner by anyone with sufficient interest and determination to do so.

Many ghost-hunting techniques such as the use of tape recorders and video equipment championed by Andrew Green in the early 1970s are now standard procedures, but more important than purely technical advice was his emphasis on the mental approach needed for objective investigation. Would-be ghost-hunters need to be rational, open-minded, well balanced in outlook and able to apply common sense, not least to themselves. Ghost hunting should not be about attempting to confirm pre-existing beliefs but trying to learn about a phenomenon which has puzzled humanity for centuries.

Whilst accepting the evidence for psychic phenomena as overwhelming, in Andrew Green rejected the idea that ghosts proved survival after death. Rather than discarnate spirits, he thought the answer to ghost experiences lay in the subconscious mind, electromagnetism and the still controversial powers of telepathy and psychokinesis. His views were in keeping with the strong humanist philosophy he maintained throughout his life. His, on occasion frank, remarks in later years (‘Borley isn’t haunted!’ being one) led Andrew Green to be unjustly considered a debunker by some advocates of paranormal. Andrew co-operated with people of goodwill of all faiths and none. Although he would work with mediums he did not uncritically accept the explanations tendered.

One trap that many researchers fall into is one identified by the scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallee. A person may witness a paranormal event, such as an object moving by itself in the presence of a medium. The medium then declares that s/he has moved the object because of the presence of a spirit (or even an alien). In fact there is no independent evidence to support this statement at all. However, having witnessed an inexplicable event the researcher latches on to the first explanation proffered, regardless of actual proof. This is a simple point which many groups and individuals deploying instruments and equipment in search of ghosts could usefully absorb today.

Andrew’s willingness to speak and write from a rationalist perspective on ghost hunting led to numerous articles, media appearances and interviews, including debating the existence of ghosts on Radio 4’s You the Jury and features in a wide range of publications, from TV Times to Police Review and Social Work Today. He was also frequently approached by foreign TV companies seeking an insight into the perceived British obsession with ghosts. Regardless of his own views, Andrew Green always remained respectful and tolerant of differing opinions and admitted he might be wrong. His criticisms were directed against those mediums and superstitious religious groups who exploited vulnerable people, charlatans who claimed black magic powers and researchers who knowingly passed off fictional ghosts stories as fact. He never ridiculed people who believed themselves spectre stricken.

An understanding of the limits of human perception and the potential for error came in very useful on many occasions. For instance, in 1974 he was able to bring an immediate halt to disturbances in a supposedly haunted house in a Midland city where members of a family had been brought to the brink of suicide in the belief they were being persecuted by an evil spirit.* Peace and sanity were quickly restored to the house by simple reassurance and the application of a little common sense. In the process he discovered the family had been victims of conmen and of sheer nonsense talked by mediums and religious representatives, exacerbating psychological problems rather than reducing them. As a parting shot the alleged ghost was supposed to have rapped, ‘I will beat Green!’ In characteristic good humour Andrew enquired how the ‘ghost’ had supposedly spelt Green and how many‘e’s it had used. Nothing was heard of it again.

In another case he was able to bring reassurance and a dramatic transformation of the depressive illness of an elderly lady in Hastings who had been told that the spirit of an evil smuggler possessed her home. It was one of a number of occasions when he was thanked by doctors for bringing relief to people plagued by supernatural fears. Unlike some researchers – and this was the one disagreement he had with the approach of the Society for Psychical Research in the past – Andrew Green was not merely prepared to observe suffering and fraud but actually do something about it.

Much of his working in this area, combating the effects of fear and superstition, more resembled social work and counselling rather than psychic research, and has been little publicised. Andrew’s work was endorsed by doctors, psychologists and clergymen. In 1982 he was even taken on by Brighton local authority to investigate and report upon allegedly haunted council properties. Indeed, it has been this quality of sensitivity towards the feelings and problems of people apparently suffering from manifestations, which enabled him to successfully solve many cases over the years. It was also what made him a person who is warmly remembered by so many who knew him.

On a personal level, Andrew Green was a great friend and a great example for many of us in the Ghost Club. After admiring his work for many years, I went on to correspond with Andrew and then, via his long-time former Ghost Club chairman Tom Perrott, I was able to meet him and get to know both Andrew and his wife Norah personally. It was a great privilege to get to know Andrew both as a researcher and also to be counted as one of his many friends.

Despite increasing ill-health in the 1990s he continued to broadcast and lecture and in 1996 he held a ghost hunt at the Royal Albert Hall, attended by dozens of journalists. After 1996 failing health prevented him travelling to London but he continued to lecture at Pyke House, Battle in Sussex, where he had begun the world’s first part-time evening courses in parapsychology in 1971, on behalf of Hastings College of Further Education. This was a regular feature of the adult education programme for years and despite official retirement in 1998, he continued to participate in a yearly weekend devoted to the paranormal.

The highlight of these weekends was always Andrew’s lecture delivered on the Sunday morning before lunch and filled throughout by his gentle humour and sardonic observations. In these he reviewed a selection of his interesting cases, a great number of which have been now been extensively revisited and researched by Bowen Pearse for this book. Such work is long overdue and as well as being a valuable update on many haunted sites, I hope this book will also stimulate interest in Andrew Green’s original research and writings.

The writer of a serious ghost book falls between the demands of two audiences. On the one hand there are those who see ghost stories as primarily a superb form of spooky entertainment; on the other are people who are seriously interested in evidence for the paranormal and what it may mean. In this book, I think Bowen Pearse has admirably served the interests of both camps – who frequently overlap in any event.

*(See Journal of the SPR Vol. 49 1977-78 pg 41–46)

Introduction

ANDREW GREEN

The man and his work

On a Sunday three months before his death on 21 May 2004, Andrew Green was presented with a cake to celebrate his sixty years as a ghost-hunter. The icing read ‘the Spectre Inspector,’ a term coined long ago by the Daily Telegraph and a title he celebrated as his own. For some six decades, Andrew had roamed the country looking for ghosts, solving people’s paranormal problems, reassuring the terrified and collecting spooky material to publish in his many books.

For Ghost-Hunter’s Casebook, I have gone through hundreds of Andrew’s investigations and updated the best. There are even a few so new that Andrew’s death prevented him from putting them into print. There are others that Andrew told me about personally but were not published. All these have been included.

Andrew believed in ghosts and defended his position on television, on the radio, in his books and in the many lectures he gave, especially in his always-popular, pioneering adult education classes. In his lifetime, he was a living witness to four ghosts and he himself once became one. After all, he contended, ghosts can include the living.

It really began in September 1944 when a near-fatal experience stimulated a life-long obsession with the paranormal. I first met Andrew in 1967 when we both worked as editors on small magazines put out by the then Thomson Newspapers. One of the first things he told me was of his picture in the Evening Standard of the ‘suicide tower’ and the girl in the window in Ealing – perhaps his most interesting, weird, and unexplained experience.

His father, a senior air-raid warden, was responsible for requisitioning properties in which to store furniture from war-damaged houses. One day he told the seventeen-year-old Andrew that he was visiting a haunted house and would he like to come. The lad jumped at the chance.

Writing later, Andrew remembered it was a glorious autumn day with the sun pouring into the garden. The house was 16 Montpelier Road in Ealing (now demolished) – an address that was to echo down the decades of Andrew’s life and appear in many of his articles, talks and books.

Accompanied by his father, the young Andrew began his exploration by climbing to the third floor of the tower roof. When he got to the top, a good 70ft high, he writes that ‘slowly a mental image entered my mind to have a look at the garden. Walk over the parapet, it urged. It is only twelve inches onto the lawn. You won’t hurt yourself.’ But as he began a step down to an almost certain death, his father appeared and grabbed his son by the scruff of the neck and pulled him back. Andrew then knew the explanation as to why twenty other people had lost their lives from this tower. They were recorded as suicides – and he was so very, very close to being suicide number twenty-one.

EARLY YEARS

However, when Andrew Malcolm Green was born on 28 July 1927, in Ealing, London, his family had already experienced paranormal activity. At the birth of one of his brothers twenty-seven years earlier, loud violent crashes were heard as if crockery was being hurled around. It was a family in which Andrew’s mother, a semi-professional pianist, and his father, a council executive, lived in separate and opposite sides of the one house. There were rows between his parents whenever they met up and the squabbling was exacerbated at family reunions – by everyone. Andrew didn’t think it at all odd that much of his time was taken up nursing his handicapped mother – she suffered from severely ulcerated legs, a result of puerperal fever.

The Greens were an old British family, whose lineage is traceable to before 1400. Over the generations there have been a number of highly placed military men including a general and a vice-admiral. According to Andrew, his mother was an arch snob and as a schoolboy, he was often teased for his ‘posh’ voice.

Andrew experienced near-death twice in his childhood. At the age of about twelve, he suddenly fell into a coma, which lasted for some ten days. As he was coming round, he heard his father making arrangements for his funeral. A few months later, he was to suffer an out-of-body experience. Sitting in the dentist’s chair, he found himself looking down on his own body from the ceiling. He came round with the dentist slapping his face and saying, ‘my God, I think he’s gone.’ Then: ‘cancel the ambulance’. Andrew told me that Dr Susan Blackmore, of the Brain Perception Laboratory, University of Bristol, tried to induce out-of-body experiences with drugs and hypnosis and concluded that the incidents were pure imagination. Andrew, however, reached no definite conclusion.

Andrew was aged about thirteen years when an incident occurred that was to be a foretaste of what was to come. He was called to his mother’s bedroom where an invisible force was trying to pull the bedclothes off the bed. Andrew tugged against it but such was the strength of the force, he was pulled bodily onto the floor.

The empty house in Ealing. Photograph taken in 1944 of an empty house in Ealing in which twenty suicides and a number of deaths had occurred. Is the image in the top left-hand window that of Ann Hinchfield who killed herself when only twelve years of age, in 1886?

Andrew as a child.

For economic reasons, Andrew was forced to leave school at fifteen. Feeling he needed to contribute to the family budget, he took on a succession of humdrum jobs. He also joined the Young Conservatives, where he met his first girlfriend (and much later his first wife). He left the Conservative party after writing a controversial article in the Torch, a publication put out by the local Ealing Conservative Association. This was his first published article.

He wanted to join the police force but at eighteen, he was too young. In 1945, he was conscripted into the Army and posted into the Life Guards. Andrew was secretary to the colonel and part of his job was to organize visits of VIPs such as the Queen of Holland, Bob Hope and Danny Kaye. During his two years National Service, Andrew performed various ceremonial duties and found himself on duty in Horse Guards Parade on the day of the Queen’s wedding on 20 November 1947. He remembered he had ‘a first hand grandstand view’ of the whole proceedings. But Andrew said that what he remembered best was when he accidentally knocked down the Queen.

ANDREW’S BELIEFS AND WORK

Andrew left the army, aged twenty-one, and sprang back into his role as a ghost-hunter. He founded the Ealing Society for Psychic Phenomena in 1949 – one of several such societies that he set up – becoming its first chairman. With the Ealing society, and alone, he continued to visit haunted houses and conduct experiments in extra-sensory perception. His contact with mediums though, both then and later, persuaded him to have little faith in this branch of the paranormal. This conviction continued throughout his life. He was sure that there was no afterlife in any shape or form – and certainly no spirit to be contacted, to give a message from beyond the grave.

Ghosts were a different story. He fervently believed in them and had his own explanation as to what exactly ghosts are. His ideas were fresh, new and challenging – believed by some, bitterly opposed by others. One theory he loved to propound was that ghosts are formed of ‘electromagnetic energy between 380 and 440 “millimicrons” of the infra-red portion of the light spectrum.’

Ghosts as such can be created by people on learning of the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one. Ghosts do not have personalities or intelligence but are a type of electricity situated in a particular locality. They are images of a person or perhaps even a much-loved animal. And – this was something Andrew continually told the afraid – ‘Ghosts cannot harm you’.

When, for example, somebody receives a severe and intense shock such as hearing of the death of a spouse or parent, he or she has an immediate image of the dead person where they were last seen. It could be at home, or miles away. It doesn’t matter. The image remains at that site and can be seen by any person approaching it whose mind at the time is inactive. This unrelated person unconsciously transfers heat to the area, which recharges the apparition and it becomes visible. This explains, Andrew said, ‘why a chill in the air is so often reported by those who see ghosts.’ Ghosts by no means have to be a wispy mist. They can appear quite solid with all the colours of their clothes visible, but colours do fade if the spectre remains unseen for a long time.

Andrew also said that surveys reveal that some 70 per cent of witnessed ghosts are of living people – for somebody doesn’t have to die to create an image. Many apparitions can be created unconsciously by someone’s imagination or strong desire to be in another location. Both smells and sounds can also be recreated at the time of the haunting. They actually become embedded in the building materials and can be regenerated by just the right conditions of moisture and temperature.

DEFENDING GHOSTS ON THE BBC

Two nights before Christmas 1978, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the popular programme, You the Jury, with Andrew Green defending the proposition that ghosts exist. As he must have done a thousand times before and since, he defined a ghost. Andrew called it the current idea as to what constitutes a ghost, although perhaps he should have said it was his idea, his definition. Here it is, just as he put it then:

Ghosts exist as an objective form of phenomena, as a type of electricity situated in a particular locality. This static is, we suggest, in a wave pattern, which can be visualized by a person as the transmission from their mind which matches the original impression. The witness feels cold as a result of an electro-chemical process and immediately afterwards sees the ghost.

This cold sensation could well be the catalyst which switches on the mentally recreated picture so to speak. The picture is merely a mental image of some person or a pet animal, the death or injury of which causes intense shock to the creator of that image. This picture is transmitted unconsciously to the actual site and visualised in a telepathic fashion and as such exists.

Andrew’s ghosts made him famous. Other writers and researchers like Guy Lyon Playfair – who has written extensively about Britain’s haunted world – told me that he has personally never seen a ghost. The same can be said for Tony Cornell, whose recent book, Investigating the Paranormal, outlines a lifetime’s search; he too told me that he has not had Andrew’s experience. Not even one ghost (although it must be said that both men have witnessed poltergeist activity).

But there was also something very special about Andrew. He was born with temporal lobe epilepsy which, according to the British Epilepsy Association, can make one susceptible to paranormal experiences.

ANDREW’S PERSONAL GHOSTS

Andrew met his first ghost in August 1951 in a comfortable B&B in Worthing in Surrey. He settled in for a good night’s rest. The next morning, he was woken by a little boy in period dress who had apparently left a welcoming cup of tea by the bedside. Andrew stretched out his arm to take a sip and found the tea cold. He looked round for the boy – he had simply disappeared.

When he went downstairs Andrew told the landlady of his experience. She replied that there was no boy on the premises but that she had left the tea for him the previous night – perhaps he hadn’t noticed it. At breakfast, he told his story of the boy to those with whom he shared a table. One of his companions had stayed in Andrew’s room before, and he had seen the same boy and heard the same explanation. Apparently, the ghost of the boy from a previous time always appeared to guests in that bedroom. The landlady, afraid that the appearance of a ghost might put people off staying there, always said the same thing – that she had left tea in the room the previous night and it couldn’t have been noticed.

Little is known about ghost number two. Andrew was at a neighbour’s house when he saw somebody sitting by the window. Andrew said: ‘there’s a lady you haven’t introduced me to.’ But as he looked towards her again, ‘she simply faded away’. His neighbour listened carefully to Andrew’s description. ‘That sounds very like my previous wife who died some twelve years ago’, he said. Apparently she had been sitting by the same window a few minutes before her death.

This takes us up to ghost number three. In 1971 Andrew was recovering from the unpleasantness of a divorce from his first wife after twenty years of marriage. When the final papers came through, he decided on a modest celebration by himself in Sidmouth in Devon.

He found a good B&B and went to bed early. For no good reason that he knew of then, Andrew woke at precisely 2.15 a.m., shown on his bedside clock, and there in front of him was a brown and white fox terrier. He thought it strange, particularly as there was a house rule forbidding dogs upstairs and anyway, the only dogs in the house downstairs were two cocker spaniels. He watched the fox terrier for perhaps a minute when it simply disappeared. Andrew settled down to sleep again.

The next morning he learned that he was not the only one to see his night visitor. Six others had also seen the fox terrier in that room over the past year. But the explanation was brutal. The previous house owners had had a fox terrier named Spot; he had strayed onto the road and been squashed by a passing car. Significantly, the time had been 2.15 a.m. in the morning. Andrew now understood what had awoken him at this time.

In Andrew’s 1977 Phantom Ladies, he refers briefly to the fourth ghost. It was an evening in 1971, near Buxted, in East Sussex. He was heading for home along Tuck’s Lane. Andrew didn’t know it then but the lane had a sad history: in the seventeenth century, a Nan Tuck was persecuted and driven from the village, the crowd yelling that she was a witch. She ran away down the lane which now bears her name but the ordeal had been too much for her. The following day, her dead body was found hanging from a tree. Apparently, she was devoutly buried.

Leaving Buxted on his way home, Andrew drove down Nan’s Lane. He was puzzled by a shadow which persistently kept just in front of his headlights moving in the hedgerow. Risking blocking the twisty road, he stopped to check his headlights. He said, ‘there was no cause for the peculiar impression so I resumed my journey, but for at least half a mile this human-sized and human-shaped darkness kept flitting along. Then suddenly it was not there any more.’

Some two months later, he learned the story of Nan Tuck for the first time.

ANDREW THE GHOST

Those were the ghosts Andrew experienced in a lifetime but there was a fifth spectre – and this ghost was Andrew himself.

This story really begins in his Guildford garden, shortly before his 1971 divorce. He had become obsessed with the potential of his one-acre garden and had decided to make a large rockery. Every spare minute went into its creation and he wonders now if paying more attention to his rockery rather than to his wife might well have hastened the divorce. Hazel never liked gardening.

A cartoon of Andrew by Fred Towers.

After Hazel left him, Andrew sold the house to an engineer and his family from Harrow. They had a twelve-year-old daughter whom Andrew had never met. Some months later, the engineer and his family came round to visit Andrew in his new house at Iden. They were not prepared for what happened next. Nobody was. As they gathered around the door, the daughter stood at the back and had not yet seen Andrew. But as it turned out, she had seen him – many times. More often than she realized. More often than she would have liked.

After her parents had made their introductions, it was her turn and she came forward. One look at Andrew and she fainted. Clean out. Andrew was much puzzled. ‘I’ve seen you before many times Mr Green’, she said on recovering. ‘On the rockery in the garden – your rockery that you sold to us.’ It was Andrew’s ghost she had seen – a live ghost. And she had not been ready to greet him in the flesh.

She fainted a second time and when she came round, she pinched Andrew’s arm to make sure that ‘this one’ this time was real. Andrew’s comment was that the incident confirmed his theory that a mental image of a ghost can be created by someone’s strong desire to be in another location. He dearly missed working in his rockery.

THE GHOST-HUNTER AS COUNSELLOR

In 1961, aged thirty-four, Andrew became the co-founder of the Institute of Service Management. He was later group editor with the Trade and Technical Press. Throughout his lifetime, Andrew had a variety of jobs – industrial chemist, PR man and magazine editor. He took a science degree and an M.Phil at the London School of Economics. He even set up his own publishing firm.

But ghost-hunting remained his greatest passion. In 1956 he investigated the well known ‘poltergeist girl of Battersea.’ The girl claimed that she was haunted by the spirit of Donald Capet, a dead member of the French monarchy. Andrew received a letter from the spirit – although he knew full well it was written by the girl herself. This got into the Guinness Book of Records as the only known letter written by a poltergeist. Somehow Andrew felt proud to have the entry, despite the extenuating circumstances. It was apparently one of many such letters sent out.

But poltergeist activity is only one of many varied instances in Andrew’s Our Haunted Kingdom and one of many problems a ghost-hunter is expected to tackle. He needs to be a doctor, a counsellor, a psychiatrist, even a marriage-broker and a detective, often all at the same time. Around the time of the publication of Andrew’s bestseller, there were several interesting cases all to do with council properties. At the time, they could not be published for reasons of confidentiality, but the years have gone by and they are reported here for the first time.

There was the case of the Haunted Marriage Bed – related in the body of this book – when Andrew became a marriage counsellor.

In the next case, the researcher dons the mantle of a general practitioner. A couple, whom we shall call Barbara and Alex, had recently moved into a local council house where Barbara had been plagued by an unseen voice, apparently that of the previous owner, recently dead, whom Barbara heard loudly calling out, ‘this is my house. Get out! Get out!’ The tenant mentioned this to the council who, convinced of the serious nature of the repeated incidents, called for the services of a ‘ghost-hunter’. A councillor had previously been to one of Andrew’s adult lectures and he asked Andrew if he would assist.

Andrew agreed and he followed his usual procedure and asked for the name of the couple’s GP with permission to contact him if he felt it was necessary. The doctor admitted that Barbara had been on the same strong medication for depression for some time but had not been back to the surgery to check the treatment. It turned out that the patient had been afraid to go for another consultation as she suspected she might be sent to a psychiatrist – a course of action the doctor admitted would have probably taken place. The medication was immediately cancelled and replaced with another more suitable. The result was that the client no longer heard the mysterious, horrifying voices or suffered the irrational fear and is no longer ‘under the doctor’.

In another case, in the Midlands, the wife, whom we shall call Helen, was suffering horrific hallucinations, to the point where the whole family were considering suicide. They had contacted the police, two or three religious groups and unfortunately a couple of self-styled ‘spirit healers’, one of whom charged them an outrageous £100 on each weekly visit to ensure their home was ‘ghost free’.

After meeting the family and observing their actions for several hours, Andrew realised that he found it was another case calling for contact with their doctor. The medication Helen was taking had precise instructions on the bottle – but these were being ignored. The tablets were to be taken early and Helen took them late. There was a warning that anybody taking the drug should never eat cheese during the course of treatment but Helen loved her cheese sandwiches just before going to bed with the pills. And as if this wasn’t enough to be causing hallucinations and hysteria, the family lived next to a cemetery where vandals would often leave the corpse of a dog or cat on a tombstone – ‘just for fun.’ As a rationalist Andrew has experienced many such cases when the solution appears to be fairly simple. It was the same with this case. As soon as the family carried out the instructions on the new medicine’s label and followed everything their GP had to say, all was well.

THE REASON WHY

Why did Andrew do it? Why did he travel all over the country only to advise that somebody should change their medication? In such cases, Andrew asked for no money except his travelling expenses. He does it, he told me, because of the great satisfaction he feels. Andrew was rather like that. A quiet, polite man with a strong professional streak, who insisted that everything must be honest and above board. He would say: ‘I am simply trying to rationalise and offset the scare mongering and hysteria-provoking material proffered by some fanatics, often supported by undesirable aspects of the media.’

He sadly divorced his first wife in 1971 but made an important step in his career. He introduced the first twenty-five-week course evening classes on the paranormal. This proved so popular that he gave courses in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Cambridge and London. Once established, they continued after Andrew left. In 1972, he became a member of the Society for Psychical Research and remained a member until his death in 2004.

By 1971, he had gathered so much ghostly material that he decided to put it all in one book. Our Haunted Kingdom was the result and with publication in hardback and then paperback, the book proved a minor bestseller.

This was followed by Ghost-Hunting, a Practical Guide, the world’s first book devoted to scientific ghost hunting techniques and still the best book on the subject. He promoted the use of tape-recorders, film and thermometers in investigations – all of which have become standard equipment among ghost-hunters. Andrew emphasised that the explanations for many ghostly phenomena lay within the human mind, involving as-yet-unexplained powers of telepathy and psycho kinesis. The book ran to several editions and was translated into Italian.

PERFECT MARRIAGE AT LAST

In 1973, Andrew was called to investigate a house in which perfume at times wafted in the air and no one knew why. He was able to explain that the perfume had seeped into the timber of the cottage and was released whenever a fire was lit.

But this also turned out to be perhaps the most significant investigation of his life. For the owner of the perfumed house would in time become his second wife – the teacher and poet, Norah Cawthorne. Norah had frankly wondered what the fuss was all about, despite the fact that two students boarding with her had fled in fright. Why had they left so rapidly?

It was for more than one incident and several things added together. Norah’s tenants had heard unexplained footsteps in the middle of the night. That was the beginning. And one of the students, a girl, woke to find a tall man in a blue dressing gown at the foot of her bed. She screamed and he went away: ‘just disappeared’, she said. Later, the same figure was seen coming down the stairs heading for the bathroom. Norah wasn’t at all frightened. Yes, she remembered, Daddy did have a blue dressing gown. She somehow thought it was all quite natural. Many years later, in the days after she lost Andrew, she told me that she had waited in vain for a signal from the grave. Just a whisper, a signal, some form of contact.

Andrew and Norah on their wedding day.