Psychic Detectives E-Book

Jenny Randles

• Herausgeber: Amber Books Ltd
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 417

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Crime investigation is not always a matter of gathering hard evidence. Just as police officers sometimes follow a "hunch", people with psychic abilities have often supplied invaluable leads to help crack the most baffling cases. Through dreams, visions, telepathy, and a host of other means, psychics have also predicted and tried to prevent many serious crimes. Psychic Detectives allows you to enter their world, revealing their astounding experiences and the often heavy price they pay for sharing what they know. Police agencies are generally reluctant to admit to the use of psychics during or even after the completion of an investigation for fear of ridicule from the public and other members of the law enforcement community. Despite this, psychics have often become involved in a large number of highly publicised investigations into serial murders conducted over the last 20 years or more. Featured cases include: the Kennedy assassinations • Jack the Ripper • Charles Manson murders • Uri Geller's diamond find • David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") • Los Angeles Olympic Games bombing • Moors murders • Peter Sutcliffe ("The Yorkshire Ripper") • IRA bombing, Manchester • disappearance of Lord Lucan • Patty Hearst kidnapping • and many more ...

Leseprobe

PSYCHIC DETECTIVES

PSYCHIC DETECTIVES

USING THE POWER OF THE MIND TO SOLVE TRUE CRIMES

JENNY RANDLES & PETER HOUGH

This updated digital edition published in 2024

Copyright © 2021 Amber Books Ltd

First edition published in 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Published by

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Project Editor: Jill Fornary

Design: Floyd Sayers

Picture Research: Lisa Wren

eISBN: 978-1-83886-548-1

Contents

Psychics and Criminals

CHAPTER 1The First Psychic Detectives

CHAPTER 2Tools of the Trade

CHAPTER 3Supernatural Crime-Busting

CHAPTER 4Profile of a Psychic Sleuth

CHAPTER 5The Police View

CHAPTER 6In the Courtroom

CHAPTER 7The Danger of Being Right

Bibliography

Index

Psychics and Criminals

UNFORTUNATELY, CRIME IS an unavoidable part of modern society. As recently as 60 years ago one author of this book played without supervision, unaware that three kilometres (2 miles) away a notorious child killer hunted for young victims. Their horrific crimes feature later in this book when the supernatural intervene. Of course, today people are more worldly wise and accounts of such crimes fill our multi-channel TV screens. We know the need to protect from such depravity and even young children can hear about the darker side of human nature via social media.

Fascination with crime is also widespread. Newspapers, movies and television fill our heads with images of violence and portray all aspects of the justice system, from police methods to court proceedings. We all want to know how crimes happen and, more importantly, how they are solved.

Yet the process of investigating crimes is often less sensational than it appears in the movies or in television drama series. It is less about shoot-outs and sudden breakthroughs and more about persistence, hard work, and sheer luck. Sometimes a case will be cracked immediately by a team of dedicated specialists following clues and working on forensic evidence with scientific precision. On many other occasions, however, it can take years for a criminal to be brought to justice because that one vital lead never comes.

The most puzzling criminal investigations have sometimes been aided by people using paranormal capabilities. Many psychics discover the fate of missing persons in dreams, or claim to receive visions while in an altered state of consciousness.

Today’s police forces employ ever more sophisticated techniques, including DNA testing, psychological profiling, satellite tracking and computer analysis. Nonetheless, success in solving crimes is not always the result of conventional investigative work. Many detectives admit that they rely to some degree on ‘hunches’ – but is a hunch simply inspired guesswork based on a wealth of experience, or an illustration of some other, inexplicable, type of insight at work? The validity of this sort of ‘intuition’ is widely accepted, as it is seen as a form of professional wisdom and follows in the familiar tradition of famous fictional detectives that began with Sherlock Holmes.

Dowsing – usually with a pendulum over a map – has been widely used by psychic detectives in their search for suspects, clues, and even bodies.

What is less well recognized is that the police have often received help from individuals offering information obtained from sources that clearly lie beyond our rational world. The unexplained paranormal powers of these so-called ‘psychic detectives’ have sometimes provided the key to unravelling the most perplexing criminal cases. Their help can take many forms – many psychics receive visions while in an altered state of consciousness; some uncover significant facts by dangling a pendulum over a map; still others discover the fate of missing persons in their dreams, or claim to be able to contact the dead. This book will explore some of the most fascinating real-life cases from around the world, in which psychic forces have played a part in solving crimes and apprehending culprits.

Yet because of a general reluctance to acknowledge the existence (and the reliability) of psychic phenomena, the role of these supernatural crime-busters has often gone unsung. It was not always so. Ancient civilizations routinely turned to seers, known as ‘shamans’ or ‘oracles’, to decide matters of justice; these people were held in great esteem for their extraordinary insights and powers of divination. The paranormal was not only accepted, it was fully integrated into everyday life. By the Middle Ages, however, many societies had come to view the supernatural with suspicion and fear, and many individuals who today might be called ‘psychic’ were persecuted as witches. Nevertheless, over the next few centuries, it was not unheard of for crimes to be resolved by testimony received through apparitions or visions.

In today’s high-tech world, the very notion of consulting ‘spirits’ seems alien to our concept of modern crime investigation. Yet the task of hunting criminals and preventing crimes is a daunting one for police, and relies on the co-operation of many different people working as a team and using their combined skills for the common good. In cases where ordinary detection methods have failed, why should we dismiss the help of anyone who claims to have some information – even if we cannot explain precisely where that knowledge comes from? Only prejudice and superstition stands in the way – considerations that should be set aside if a dangerous criminal can be removed from the streets more quickly. Police investigators who have been receptive to offers of assistance from self-confessed psychics have adopted this open-minded attitude on the basis of ‘no stone unturned’.

The oracle of Delphi was the most influential medium of the classical world. The oracle would receive guidance while in a trance-like state; the messages were often ambiguous and enigmatic.

Yet what do senior police officers really think of ‘psychic detectives’, and how successful has their collaboration been? How has media coverage affected the role of psychics in crime investigations? And how do the psychics themselves regard their work? In this book, these attitudes and issues are explored through interviews and case histories.

Conventional methods of criminal investigation used by the police include meticulous searches based on information provided by members of the public. Many law-enforcement officers have received useful leads from people claiming to have psychic abilities.

The evidence for psychic phenomena is also assessed by presenting the results of scientific experiments conducted to determine the truth about phenomena such as clairvoyance and dowsing. Are extrasensory abilities part of our genetic inheritance, and do psychics have access to unique areas of the brain denied to most of us? And how valid are the criticisms of sceptics who scoff at the notion of paranormal powers?

If psychic abilities truly exist, how can we distinguish the genuinely gifted individual from the scores of would-be psychics attracted to high-profile cases, who in reality are either deluded or frauds? The statements of many law-enforcement officers suggest that there have been some very successful cases of psychic detection, yet useful leads have sometimes been disregarded or overlooked amid a flood of false information.

To complicate matters still further, even the most respected supernatural sleuths, with established reputations, cannot always supply straightforward insights to order. Before they can be of assistance to police, psychics must first learn to interpret their own often enigmatic impressions.

The struggle to yield practical leads and hard evidence can be both frustrating and emotionally traumatic for anyone working as a psychic detective. And when a person’s life hangs in the balance or a criminal is at liberty, the pressure to ‘perform’ can become unbearable.

The prospect of facing scepticism or ridicule places a great burden on psychic detectives. Yet there are other dangers to face. Some psychics have offered information, only to be suspected of having committed the crime themselves. Others, in their pursuit of justice, have even accepted life-threatening risks. By pointing the finger at a criminal, they may also be placing themselves in the firing line. And that takes just as much guts as it does special powers.

When someone’s life is hanging in the balance, psychics are under enormous pressure to provide a crucial lead that may solve the case. For a psychic detective, the burden of responsibility is immense, and the pressure can be intolerable when all efforts to help fail.

The First Psychic Detectives

THE BELIEF THAT CERTAIN individuals are able to foresee events, or to understand things that cannot be fathomed using the known senses, is a time-honoured one. Many early civilizations, from tribal cultures to the ancient Greek and Roman societies, not only acknowledged that such powers existed, but elevated those who possessed them to positions of great authority and influence. The concept of the ‘oracle’ is also present in the Bible, which contains many accounts of visions received as messages from God. In the Middle Ages, the self-proclaimed mystic, Nostradamus, produced a volume of prophecies that is still examined today, while nowadays interest in the paranormal is reflected in countless books, films, and television shows.

Similarly, the use of alleged psychic phenomena to help solve crimes is not merely the product of a modern-day ‘new age’ mentality. Centuries ago, without the benefit of today’s sophisticated police methods and forensic science techniques, the quest for justice was often difficult, and supernatural assistance was not discounted. In medieval times, culprits were sometimes convicted not on the basis of organized investigation and evidence-gathering, but through the testimony of ‘spirits’. In the Victorian era, as the new ‘spiritualist’ movement gathered force, adherents communicated with the dead during seances. With the infamous case of Jack the Ripper came the first major involvement of psychics in a serial murder enquiry, and the emergence of the contemporary ‘psychic detective’.

In the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, oracles were consulted as a matter of course to decide crucial political and personal issues. These individuals were regarded as messengers of the gods, conveying information from beyond the boundaries of time and space. The insights of the oracles were to be heeded almost without question.

Humankind has always had a desire to see the future, and has often chosen to do so by consulting with ghosts or spirits. Around the globe, very few cultures emerged that did not have their own ‘wise men’, or ‘shamans’, whose paranormal insights from beyond known science directed everyone from tribal leaders to humble citizens. Their pronouncements empowered decisions of law, condemned criminals to their fate, and dictated battle tactics that risked the future of an entire civilization.

Most tribal societies had shamans. These leaders and spiritual guides were often chosen because they experienced visions and had intuitive knowledge beyond what others could glimpse. Among humanity’s first recognized psychics, shamans still exist in some cultures.

Even today, there are tribal cultures that rely upon what we would consider to be ‘psychic inspiration’. They can be found all over the world in areas that have been less touched by the march of rationalism that dominates our technology-driven cities. While we may term these indigenous tribal peoples as ‘primitive’, this label belies the richness and sophistication of many of their societies, as well as their familiarity with the hidden forces that we once all accepted as factual reality. Science may tell us that these things are simply a figment our imagination, yet thousands of years of human experience have often suggested otherwise. Perhaps we have not evolved from the days of mere superstition, but instead have fled from the truth. Otherwise, why do we still seek out fortune-tellers and psychics, with so many sources of information and means of communication at our disposal?

POWER OF THE ORACLES

The ancient Greek and Roman empires had their own shamans in the form of oracles. From unknown ages – certainly before 1000 BC – these women (as most of them were) became revered as priestesses for their ability to see the future and for the guidance they offered to both kings and paupers.

Oracles such as the Sibyl, in a volcanic grotto near Naples, Italy, or those at the famed temple of Delphi, in Greece, passed their skills on to their descendants over many generations. They had both innate powers – to see visions inside their minds – and superstitious divination methods, which ranged from interpreting leaves rustling in the trees to reading the symbols in blood and guts spilled from sacrificed animals. But what the oracles said was rarely ignored; they wielded real power.

In 500 BC, the (then) holder of the Sibyl priesthood, Herophile, produced scrolls setting out the entire future history of the empire. From the scraps that have survived through the centuries, these visions seem to have painted an impressive picture of the rule of the last Caesars – despite these events lying many years in the future. According to legend, the prophetess, using her gift of foresight, was able to map out in some detail all the major court intrigue, assassination attempts, and battles that would bring an end to more than 1,000 years of empire. Her warnings were carefully followed, and are believed to have been behind several decisions to execute ‘traitors’.

Oracles uttered their pronouncements while in a trance-like state. Here, the oracle at Delphi relates what she is seeing, and a scribe writes down the prophecy. Visions received during an altered state of consciousness are often used by many modern-day psychic detectives.

As the centuries rolled by, other ‘oracles’, even within the Christian era, have performed surprisingly similar duties. Almost 900 years ago, the Catholic scholar Malachi set out a series of visionary insights into the reign of every pope. Many of his verses were remarkably apt; for example, one decreeing that the Holy Father would be ‘of the half moon’ was dedicated (hundreds of years ahead of time) to the priest who was to hold the shortest papal office and who died between one moon and the next! The description of the last pope of the twentieth century as ‘of the labour of the sun’ also proved appropriate, in two ways. First, the labour movement in his native Poland signalled the end of Communism and inspired a spiritual revolution across eastern Europe. Second, the labours of the real sun, thanks to a newly discovered hole in the ozone layer and the build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, were causing rising temperatures which threatened to bring ecological doom to the planet.

CRIME FILE:

Jeanne Dixon: Assassination foreseen

Could President Kennedy’s life have been saved by heeding psychic warnings?

It is said that people who are old enough to remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 have an image in their minds of the moment they first heard the news. Just as this killing seems to have caused shock waves in the human consciousness, it also reportedly caused an unprecedented number of visions and was foreseen by many. There are apparent allusions to the murder in the readings of psychics over several centuries. Nostradamus’s writings contain what some people see as unambiguous references, and numerous contemporary psychics claim to have seen the tragedy ahead of time and tried to warn the president.

President John F. Kennedy slumps forward into the arms of his wife, Jacqueline, seconds after being shot by a sniper’s bullet as his motorcade passed the Texas Book Depository in the city of Dallas.

Among these was celebrity psychic Jeanne Dixon. A doyenne of Washington society, she mixed in influential circles and often gave readings to the rich and famous. Her books and magazine columns were avidly read and, when she correctly predicted Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 election (against the odds), her fame was at its height.

But Dixon saw catastrophe looming soon after and had a vision of the dead president shortly before his assassination. Although she tried to get word to the White House, the die was cast. Of course, we cannot assume that by acting we will stop the tragedy; the very action we take may unexpectedly lead to it. Yet politicians often have their lives threatened and cannot be seen to change their plans in response to a psychic warning. When Kennedy died in a hail of bullets, many psychics were shocked, saddened, and unsurprised in equal measure.

Psychic Jeanne Dixon was well known for many successful predictions, including Kennedy’s assassination. However, she also incorrectly claimed that the 1990s would see a female president in the White House and a giant comet strike the Earth.

During the sixteenth century, more prophecies were written by a mystical French doctor called Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus). He wrote cryptic stanzas in Sibyl-like terms that he claimed would set out all major future events in the history of the world. It is not easy making sense of Nostradamus’s anagrams and riddles, and their predictive success is usually hailed only after the fact, making them contentious, at best, as visionary material. But they do forewarn, some experts say, every major political act. Numerous crimes over the centuries, from the alleged murder of the young princes by Richard III in England, to the assassinations in the United States of John and Robert Kennedy (called ‘two brothers of the new land’ in the verses), can be read here if a liberal interpretation is adopted.

This eighteenth-century woodcut depicts the French doctor and mystic Nostradamus, whose amazing verses written centuries ago purport to document the future from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of world, more than 2,000 years from now.

Either way, the enduring fascination of these prophecies remains. Apart from the Bible, the visions of Nostradamus are the only work of non-fiction to have been constantly available in book form since the invention of the printing press. Even in the cynicism of today’s Space Age, an entire cottage industry exists around this form of ‘oracle’, with countless books regularly offering new interpretations, and the production of big-budget movies and television drama series such as Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘First Wave’ (1998), inspired by the verses.

Dreams of the future are recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible and are among the earliest para-normal phenomena known to humankind. Here, Jacob, while sleeping, has a vision of steps leading up to heaven and attended by angels.

DREAMS AND VISIONS

Naturally, it is difficult to make sense out of the enigmatic centuries-old verses written by Nostradamus or Malachi, but this in itself is not an unusual problem. The unconscious mind operates through dreams and symbols, not logical imagery, and often delivers messages to the conscious mind through analogies.

This is seen readily in the world of dreams, where bizarre events may occur each night and are usually dismissed as flights of imagination. However, they form the raw material from which supernatural experiences have always been drawn. It may be that oracles and shamans of past times, like mediums and psychics today, simply learned to read their dreams and visions in the same way as fortune-tellers might read tea leaves.

History has many examples of the power that can be found within dreams. Indeed, the Bible is full of such visions, sent to prophets by God as warnings of coming events such as plagues and famines. Joseph, for example, would today be deemed a great psychic whose frequent dreams were perceived to be messages from Heaven. In his day, he was used as a political tool to guide the Egyptian Pharaoh, who elevated his visionary to a position of trust and authority. Psychic detectives operate much like this.

In the ancient world, it was never thought wise to trifle with the abilities of a psychic. You were grateful that they were on your side, and you used them to steer your administration in healthy directions. Indeed, widespread doubts by the powers-that-be, sensing that it was not possible to look beyond the boundaries of time and space, are a relatively recent phenomenon. These suspicions were born both of the age of reason and the triumph of science that began in the seventeenth century. Even until shortly before then, a vision was treated with reverence and could – indeed, often did – bring about swift retribution for any wrongdoer.

SUPERNATURAL JUSTICE

An early well-recorded case of psychic detection in Britain, connected with a tragic crime, was simply a continuation of practices dating back to the Sibyl. It was September 1631, and Christopher Walker lived in a brooding house overlooking Chester Moors, just south of Chester-le-Street in County Durham. His niece Anne, a pretty teenager, had arrived to take over the care of his home after the death of his wife, but talk was soon rife among the villagers of the small community of Great Lumley that the relationship between Anne Walker and her step-uncle was rather closer than it ought to have been.

Tongues were silenced when the niece was sent to live with another relative in Chester-le-Street. Indeed, the ploy seemed to have succeeded at the time, as the young girl quietly disappeared from both the sight and the minds of Great Lumley’s villagers.

Yet, as Christmas approached, a local miller named James Graham had an extremely strange and unsettling experience. As he worked late into the night in his locked mill, he heard muffled sounds from the floor below and caught a brief glimpse of an intruder. Steeling himself for confrontation, Graham calmly climbed down and prepared to face the unwelcome visitor, but was relieved to discover that it was simply a young girl who seemed to be in need of shelter. She looked dirty and dishevelled, with her dress torn and her hair matted with blood across gaping cuts that slashed her forehead. As Graham stared at her shocking appearance, a chill ran through his body.

This stained-glass window at Lincoln Cathedral in England commemorates an ancient example of a psychic dream. The Egyptian Pharoah foresaw in symbolic terms the coming years of famine when he dreamt of seven lean cattle alongside seven fat ones.

There was something not quite right about the girl’s gaze: it was clouded by an ethereal look. Her eyes stared right at him, yet they seemed somehow vacant. In those days of superstition and widespread belief in witchcraft and demons, one answer seemed obvious – this was some form of apparition.

The spectral girl began to talk. She explained that her name was Anne Walker and insistently related a tale of the terrible crime she had endured. As she described her trauma, the miller’s head was filled with images. He could now see the scene unfolding in his mind. He watched – and felt – the terror, as the girl related her awful fate. She reported how she had become unexpectedly pregnant by her step-uncle. Fearful that the scandal would destroy his reputation, Christopher Walker had sent her away. But he knew that, as the birth grew near, her physical condition would become obvious, and something had to be done. So, telling his niece that he had arranged lodgings far away in Lancashire until after the child was born, she was put into the care of a miner returning to work across the bleak moors, and she said goodbye to her guardian.

But Mark Sharp, the miner, had no intention of taking her to Lancashire. He had other orders. Once they were on desolate moorland west of the village, he struck the girl violently with his pick, killing her in a bloodied frenzy. The miller watched all this unfold inside his mind’s eye, and he winced as he felt the pain of her violent death.

The ‘spirit’ of Anne Walker described the means by which the miner completed his conspiracy of murder. He did this by tossing her body into a coal pit, burying his pick, and hiding his stockings, having failed to clean off the spurting blood. But now, with a burning need for justice, the ghostly image of the dead teenager pleaded with the miller to go to the town elders and help them to find her body, in order to make her killers pay. Having spoken her piece, the spectral girl then disappeared.

The bleak Durham moorland, where young Anne Walker was brutally murdered in the seventeenth century. This was the scene of one of the first ‘psychic detective’ cases in which a criminal was allegedly brought to justice from beyond the grave.

Aware of Christopher Walker’s standing in the community, Graham decided that he could not go to a magistrate with this extraordinary story. To do so would earn the wrath of those upon whom his livelihood depended. But he bargained without the persistence of the murdered woman. She returned in visions and in dreams twice more over the next few days, telling the miller that she could never rest until he had acted.

On December 21, Graham took the news to Thomas Liddell, who was chief justice for the area. Even in this age, there was a sense of equity, and the maxim ‘innocent until proven guilty’ applied in Britain, especially for the well-to-do. Unable to simply accept his story, two magistrates subjected the miller to intense questioning before concluding that he was sincere. Investigations further revealed that Graham had never met Anne Walker and that he had no motive to invent this story. This was deemed sufficient grounds for the law to act, and a search party was mounted.

Since the invention of photography, there have been pictures reputed to reveal ghosts. This one, taken in a church in Sussex, England, appears to show the figure of a priest at the altar. Stray light or film faults may be the real cause of such phantom-like images.

GRIM DISCOVERY ON THE MOORS

As had been feared, the dead woman’s body was found where Graham told them it would be. The pick and the bloodied stockings were also unearthed. Both Christopher Walker and Mark Sharp, who had now somewhat foolishly returned to the area, were arrested and committed for trial in Durham.

The trial was driven by suspicion and fear, but little beyond circumstantial evidence existed to associate Walker with Sharp’s widely accepted crime. However, as the proceedings wound on, one of the witnesses told, with a look of horror, that he could see the spirit of Anne Walker standing in the courtroom identifying her own uncle as the man who had ordered her death! After this moment of high drama, there was little doubt what the jury would decide. Both Walker and Sharp were convicted of murder. It seems likely that this was the first guilty verdict to be brought at a murder trial in which the main prosecution witness was the victim.

The belief that the dead could return briefly to life to ensure that justice was done has never completely left society, despite the march of rationalism. Several opinion poll surveys taken in Britain and the United States in 1999 revealed that 35 percent of people believe that ghosts are real, and that more than two-thirds are tolerant of the possibility. These findings help to explain why, in a very different world today, the use of psychic detection to aid the authorities is still remarkably common.

Poltergeist effects have long been reported. This video footage shot in 1967 at Rossenheim, in Germany, shows a ceiling lamp swinging violently inside a lawyer’s office. This inexplicable phenomenon was believed to be the violent ‘outburst’ of a poltergeist connected with a young woman who worked there.

Indeed, the birth of modern psychic research owes itself to a case of supernatural criminology. In 1847, John Fox, a farmer and devout Methodist, moved into a home in Hydesville, New York, with his two Canadian-born daughters aged 12 and 14. These two became the focus of a poltergeist attack. Unusual rapping sounds were heard, and objects began to move around the house of their own accord with no obvious cause. Soon the girls announced that the phenomena resulted from the spirit of a dead man called Charles Rosna. They claimed that he told them, by means of various raps, that he had been killed in the old Fox house by blacksmith John Bell.

Following this ghostly advice, the Foxes dug up their cellar and found bones. The dead man was thought to have been a tinker who had been killed during the previous century. However, there was no record of his murder, and justice was not to be served by this case of psychic detection.

Rather more remarkably, the Fox sisters started a craze for communicating with the dead using intermediaries, or mediums as they came to be called, using such knocking sounds – one knock for ‘yes’, two for ‘no’ being the agreed basis of the resulting contact. The craze spread to Europe, in particular to Britain, as early as 1852, and the United Kingdom soon became the home of the new ‘spiritualist’ movement that thrives even into the twenty-first century. Modern mediums such as Doris Stokes have become entertainers and television stars.

Psychic News was created in 1932 with the stated aim to reveal evidence 'that there is no death'. It remains the longest standing global publication reporting on mediums and psychic visions.

CRIME FILE:

Alan and Clara: Till death us do part

Foreseeing their own murders did not save this tragic couple, yet justice still triumphed from the grave.

For young lovers planning to elope in eighteenth-century England, there was just one place to go – Peak Forest, a village in north Derbyshire, set amid the white limestone moors. At that time, there was special dispensation for people to marry instantly in Peak Forest, in the same fashion as Las Vegas today. Young couples regularly fled there from miles around when circumstances prevented an ordinary betrothal.

Alan and Clara were escaping the wrath of Clara’s rich parents, who had declined to accept her intended spouse. So, the couple fled on horseback from Yorkshire, across the Pennine mountains. On the first night of their journey, Clara suffered a terrifying dream. In it, she saw Alan being attacked as they picked their way through an unfamiliar rock-strewn pass. She saw him fall down dead as the assailants then turned on her. At that point, she woke up screaming. Afraid that her brothers might be in pursuit to prevent Alan marrying her at any cost, the pair hastened on their journey, and they spent the night before their wedding at Castleton, in an inn surrounded by the caverns of the area. Peak Forest was only a short ride from there.

The eerie winter isolation of Winnats Pass in Derbyshire’s Peak District, scene of the murderous assault on young lovers Alan and Clara in the 1700s. Do their spirits still haunt this lonely spot, where they wreaked a supernatural revenge on their killers?

But, as they left the inn in cheerful spirits, relieved that prior threats made by her brothers had not been fulfilled, they were directed by a gang of miners to take a short cut through Winnats Pass, a notorious path that would speed them toward Peak Forest. Little did the lovers know that the four men, having joined up with a fifth, had gone ahead to ambush the evidently wealthy young couple as they edged through the rocky outcrops.

By now a terrified Clara had recognized the horrific scene from her dream, but it was too late to turn back. As the mass of the High Peak rose up all around them, they could only go forward without great danger to themselves. Then, out of nowhere, the brigands struck, dragging the pair from their horses and gleefully snatching the money that they had brought with them to Derbyshire in order to start a new life.

As Alan pleaded with the men for their release, Clara was bundled into a nearby shack. She watched in horror as they beat her fiancé to death with heavy mining tools. When finished, they then turned on her. This time there was no means of escape by waking from the nightmare. She was helpless as they murdered her before fleeing with £200 in gold coins – a not inconsiderable fortune at that time.

Sadly, the forewarning vision of death had not saved these tragic lovers. However, the killers never recovered from the horrors they had inflicted in Winnats Pass and were haunted, both figuratively and literally, by the two people whose lives they had so violently ended. Two of the men, Nicholas Cook and John Bradshaw, died soon afterward in mysterious accidents in the very pass where the murder was committed – one falling from a rocky perch and the other smashed to death when a heavy rock inexplicably came loose and crashed onto his head. Rumours soon grew that Alan and Clara were seeking some sort of spectral revenge.

As for the other two men, now constantly plagued by their own demons, Thomas Hall hanged himself to escape the torment, and Francis Butler was driven insane by visions of the couple whose life he had so brutally terminated. The final survivor was James Ashton. He quickly lost his share of the money, which he had invested in horses, when all of his stock died in a mystery plague. Driven by despair, and fearing his own imminent retribution, he confessed to the murders and named the other guilty men in the hope that their souls might be eased by this admission.

The saddle recovered from Clara’s horse after it fled the scene of her murder is now on public display in the museum at Speedwell Cavern, Castleton, Derbyshire.

Ten years later, the remains of the young couple were recovered from an old mine shaft, where James Ashton had dumped the bodies. The story of their deaths has become legend in the Peak District, and the preserved saddle from Clara’s horse – recovered when the animal fled riderless from the scene of the murder back to Castleton – can be seen at the now popular tourist attraction of Speedwell Cavern nearby.

Ironically, long after the Fox sisters left Hydesville, when they were old ladies and had been discredited by many critics as tricksters, the complete skeleton of a man was found under their old house. A tinker’s tin was buried next to the remains. It seems that the murder of Charles Rosna had been real after all.

Victorian melodramas were written around this new fascination for psychic phenomena, and the role that the supernatural could play in crime was swiftly recognized. For example, writers such as Charles Dickens (who had been a court reporter) were aware of the way in which old beliefs and new materialism were clashing head-to-head. The fictional stories of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, himself a spiritualist, saw his great detective bring murderers to book by employing intuitive powers that deliberately bordered on the realms of the psychic. A number of supernatural elements, such as phantom hounds and omens, fill these tales.

The character of Sherlock Holmes, conceived by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a detective with near-supernatural flashes of insight. Doyle was deeply interested in the paranormal and devoted much of his life to investigating such phenomena.

Things are little different today, with various ‘high-tech’ television dramas and big-budget movies featuring visions seen from the spirit world or mediums who help police to track serial killers. Psychics still see crimes before they happen. Murder victims still return as apparitions or in dreams to plead that their killers be brought to justice. And in real-life crime investigations, despite the wonders of forensic science and new methods of empirical detection, an incredible number of police forces worldwide have used and continue to use supernatural aids in their quest for the truth. Indeed, psychic detection, arguably one of the oldest servants of justice in the world, is very much alive and well amid the computers, DNA testing, and satellite surveillance techniques of our sophisticated modern civilization.

A horned devil presides over the Sabbat, as demons and witches dance frenziedly around him. In the Middle Ages, Christians demonized those with psychic powers, claiming that clairvoyance was Satan’s ‘gift’ in exchange for a human soul.

THE SPECTRE OF WITCHCRAFT

There was once a time when those deemed to possess special powers, and who offered psychic insights, were feared and hated. The result was almost 300 years of persecution, during which anything from 200,000 to one million men, women, and children were put to death in continental Europe, Britain, and the United States. People that today might be deemed ‘psychic’ are, in fact, very much yesterday’s ‘witches’.

FACT FILE:

Spooky TV

In recent years, Hollywood has been quick to translate public interest in the paranormal into box-office success.

Twenty-first century TV has embraced psychic detectives with series from Ghost Whisperer (2005–10), starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, to Saving Hope (2012–17), where Michael Shanks plays an ER doctor helping dying patients.

Pioneer ITV series Afterlife (2005–6) saw Andrew Lincoln – just before leading global TV phenomenon The Walking Dead – play a sceptical scientist finding a genuine medium.

Stephen Volk, creator of Afterlife, had in 1992 made BBC drama Ghostwatch where Michael Parkinson hosted what aired as if a 'live' investigation on site of a real haunting. Written as part of a series never made it led to public outrage but trailblazed real ghostwatch shows.

Following Afterlife, Volk created a trilogy of novels – published as a 2018 compendium, The Dark Masters – where he continues to blend fact and fiction as real-life mystics such as Aleister Crowley and horror genre icons Alfred Hitchcock and Peter Cushing, interact with fictional tales and stories.

The TV series Afterlife (2005–6) starred Andrew Lincoln (pictured left), who later became a star in the long-running global drama The Walking Dead.

Witchcraft grew out of the ancient pagan religions. Our forefathers worshipped the dark and light forces that controlled their lives. Much later, the wise woman of the village was someone skilled in the use of healing herbs, knowledgeable in ritual magic, and possessed of the ability to foresee the future. She could also detect things by what today we might call ESP (extrasensory perception). In the days before scientific enquiry, these powers instilled the great fear that the devil was their paymaster.

During the Middle Ages, paganism was outlawed, giving impetus to a more violent conflict. Anyone caught practising pagan rituals or dabbling with supernatural forces was deemed by implication to be challenging the Christian God. In the terror that followed, Catholic and Protestant witchfinders alike created a veritable blood bath that lasted for years.

MEDIEVAL WITCH-HUNTS

Perhaps the most famous ‘witch’ to be tried and then burnt at the stake was Joan of Arc. This ‘Maid of Orleans’, daughter of a well-to-do peasant in fifteenth-century France, appeared to be an extraordinary clairvoyant and clairaudient. She had premonitions and, from the age of 13, claimed to hear voices under a ‘fairy tree’ near her home. She identified the voices with a number of saints, who encouraged her to remain pure in body and in thought. When news reached Lorraine that Orleans was under siege by the English, these same voices ordered Joan of Arc to save the city!

Despite her success in relieving Orleans, the young heroine was handed over to the English on May 23, 1430 by the Burgundian commander. She became the subject of a show trial designed to discredit Charles VII of France. For political reasons, the trial’s conclusion was preordained. Joan of Arc was executed as a witch a week later.

Joan of Arc was both clairvoyant and clairaudient. Today, she would be a media star, but in fifteenth-century France only one fate awaited her – burning.

Central to the ensuing witch-hunt that obsessed medieval Europe were two Dominican friars who conducted the inquisition of suspected witches with a fanatical fervour. Their paranoid beliefs included the view that many bishops and cardinals practised the ‘black arts’. With twisted logic, they concluded that anyone who opposed the execution of ‘witches’ must also themselves be a follower of Satan. Even children did not remain immune from this terror. Many were tortured and executed, while others were granted immunity from prosecution on the provision that they implicated their elders.

Although this paranoia gripped much of medieval Europe, by far the worst atrocities were committed in Germany. In a period of 13 years, 300 alleged sorcerers were executed in the state of Bamburg alone. Nothing matched the cruelty exhibited by their German prosecutors. This savagery became a massive industry, lining the pockets and fattening the bellies of judges, clerks, witchfinders, jailers, torturers, executioners, and the merchants who provided the scaffolding and wood for the fires to burn the so-called ‘witches’.

The ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins, was paid generously to find witches. Although torture was outlawed in England, Hopkins devised many ‘tests’ to obtain confessions.

Torture was prohibited in England except by special Act of Parliament. Although burnings did take place in Scotland, by and large the punishment for convicted witches was hanging. Yet, although torture was not officially allowed, pressure was applied in more subtle ways. Suspects were often ‘swum’, a process that involved shackling their arms and legs together, and then tossing them into a river. If they sank, they were judged to be innocent. However, if they floated, invisible demons were thought to have supported them, and they were summarily executed as disciples of the devil.

CRIME FILE:

Maria Marten: When the dead tell tales

Did the spirit of a murdered girl enter her mother’s dreams to explain her mysterious disappearance?

William Corder was a pig farmer and landowner in Polstead, near Sudbury in Suffolk, England. In 1827, as a 24-year-old, he had inherited the business from his father and brothers, all of whom had succumbed to illness within a few months. In this tiny community, William Corder had inherited rather more than property. His older brother, Thomas, had had an affair with local teenager Maria Marten, and now William was sharing in her favours, too. Indeed, they had had a child together. Forced by the Victorian morals of the day to consider marriage, William advised the girl’s mother, Anne, that on May 19 they would go to Ipswich to be wed.

Instead, Maria was smuggled out of her home dressed as a boy, since, as William had said, she was afraid that she might be arrested for previous minor indiscretions. Her family were bemused, but this was the last Anne Marten ever saw – or heard – of her daughter.

The infamous Red Barn in Polstead, Suffolk, where the body of Maria Marten was found in 1828. Did her ghost return to identify the killer, or was the supernatural used as a ploy to catch the most logical suspect?

When asked why the wedding had not taken place and where Maria was, William insisted that there had been legal difficulties that were slowly being overcome, but that the girl was in Ipswich waiting for her fiancé and all would be well. After six months had passed, doubts began to grow.

In November, Corder stunned locals by placing an advertisement in the Sunday Times asking for a wife! A girl called Mary Moore replied, and the two very quickly married. They then moved to Essex, where Corder announced that he was giving up farming to become a teacher.

Meanwhile, Anne waited and waited to hear from her estranged daughter, who was to be welcomed home now that her marriage to Corder would not be taking place. His vague promises before leaving the area had suggested that something was wrong.

At the turn of the year, Anne Marten shocked the local community by insisting that she had been visited twice in nightmares by visions of Maria. In her dreams, her daughter was showing her her own murder scene. Anne urged her husband, Tom, to visit the now-empty Corder farm, in particular its Red Barn, where the girl’s body had been left by Corder after he had killed her. She knew this because Maria had told her.

It was necessary to obtain a court order to search the Red Barn, but by April 1828, Tom Marten had finally succeeded. Almost immediately the badly decomposed body of Maria was discovered there – exactly where his wife had insisted that it would be found, hastily buried under a makeshift pile of stones and decaying corn.

Maria had been brutally murdered, both shot and stabbed, and then put into a sack. Only one man was sought in connection with this crime – William Corder. He was duly arrested, tried, and quickly convicted. Sentenced to death, he was hanged at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on August 11, 1828.

As was common in that day, Corder did not die easily on the scaffold. It took many minutes to force his final breath after numerous attempts. Hundreds watched the scene, and interest in the case was so intense that souvenir hunters stripped the Red Barn, while ghoulish entrepreneurs actually sold pieces of the killer’s skin and lengths of the hangman’s rope! Part of Corder’s skin was even used to bind a book telling the story, and this is still on show at the 800-year-old Moyses Hall in Bury.

There are persistent doubts about what really happened regarding Anne Marten’s supposed visions of her murdered daughter. Crime writer Colin Wilson suspects that Anne may have picked up a telepathic message from the teenager at the point of her death – although this presumes that the youngster was alive for seven months after her disappearance and died only around Christmas 1827. Another possibility is that Maria’s ghost returned in a dream to ensure that her killer was caught. A more mundane explanation is that Anne, convinced that Corder had harmed Maria, merely invented the dream as a dramatic means of persuading the authorities to act. Maria Marten was last seen heading toward the Red Barn; therefore, it was not too unlikely to suspect that she had met her end there.

Interestingly, at the time that she had her dream, Anne Marten had owned a copy of a popular novel called The Old English Baron, in which a man finds his missing daughter’s body thanks to directions given to his wife in a dream. Perhaps, then, it was not the spirit of the dead girl that exposed her killer, but her mother’s clever manipulation of the public mood and the Victorian fascination for melodrama and the supernatural.

THE PENDLE WITCHES

The best-documented witch trials were probably those of 19 men and women in Lancashire, England, in 1612. This came out of a number of disputes between ‘witch’ families in the Pendle Forest area near Burnley, Lancashire. In this case, the accused claimed to have psychic powers that they used to harm their neighbours.

The bizarre episode began in 1595 when Christopher Nutter and his son, Robert, died within a short time of one another. The family claimed that they had been bewitched by an old lady called Chattox and her daughter, Alizon. Various members of the community had been grumbling for months about their alleged witchcraft practices, but it was an incident occurring on March 18, 1612 that attracted the attention of the authorities.

Alizon was travelling along the road to Trawden when she met a peddler called John Law. The young woman asked him for some pins, but he refused to undo his pack. Alizon became angry with him, and, as he turned away, a stroke overcame him. He was taken to a nearby alehouse, and his son Abraham arrived from Halifax. Alizon was found, and, now with his speech restored, the peddler accused her of bewitching him and bringing about his sickness. She admitted this was indeed the case, but begged forgiveness, which the victim granted.

The self-confessed Pendle Witches of Lancashire are pictured casting spells around a burning cauldron. There is no doubt that the two families involved in this case believed they had psychic powers, which they admitted using to harm their neighbours.

Abraham Law was not satisfied, however, and Alizon went before a magistrate to repeat her confession. She then described her initiation into witchcraft by her grandmother and implicated both families in the possession of such powers. Arrests were made, and neighbours were found to testify against the accused. Their confessions revealed how they consorted with demons and murdered people using ‘sympathetic magic’. One man readily admitted to murdering Christopher and John Nutter in this way. In August 1612, no fewer than 19 ‘witches’ from the area went up for trial before a jury in Lancaster. The majority of them died on the gallows.

Former US Navy special ops veteran Chuck Bergman is a Florida-based psychic detective.

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

Another well documented case of mass hysteria occurred in the village of Salem, Massachusetts. During February 1692, young females claimed they were bewitched by three local women. As in Europe, others then became implicated as the contagion spread. Fifty executions followed.

Most modern commentators believe those accused of witchcraft had no psychic powers, but were innocently caught up in an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Certainly, most of those charged were victims of an hysteria that was used to purge what were considered ‘undesirables’ from society. However, evidence of clairvoyance, the mainstay of today’s ‘psychic detective’, was seen in those deemed to be witches.

Three centuries later, US Navy special ops veteran and real life 32 year Salem detective, Chuck Bergman, emulated these witches in retirement. Working now in Florida as a psychic murder detective, he gives talks titled ‘Solving crimes with the help of the deceased’ and appears reularly on TV. In 2011 he co-authored The Everything Guide to Evidence of the Afterlife.

PSYCHIC SEARCH FOR JACK THE RIPPER

In the annals of criminology, no case has gripped the public imagination more than the ghastly murders of five women in the East End of London, England, attributed to one assailant – known as ‘Jack the Ripper’. Ever since they were first committed in the autumn of 1888, these still-unsolved killings have attracted many bewildering theories, spawning numerous films and books. The case has also attracted the attentions of psychic investigators, themselves keen to throw light on what became the first widely touted occult murder hunt.

Jack the Ripper was the first recognized serial killer of the modern era. The exact number of victims in his murder spree has been difficult to ascertain. Up to 14 were credited to him by the press, but in fact the police accepted only five. Psychic Pamela Ball, during her recent investigations into the crimes, chose to include a sixth victim, Martha Tabram, because she fitted in with the time frame, although she was not mutilated as the others had been.