DAILY MAIL (London)
August 4, 2001
SECTION: Pg. 50;51;52
LENGTH: 3513 words
HEADLINE: THE POSSESSED;
Can the spirits of the dead return to possess the living? In a chilling new series, Britain's leading writer on the paranormal world looks at the evidence . . . starting with the eerie aftermath of a killing that devastated Marlon Brando's family
BYLINE: Colin Wilson
BODY:
AUTHOR Colin Wilson is Britain's most distinguished writer on the paranormal and the occult. Here, in the first part of a fascinating new series, continuing on Monday, he explains why he believes that spirits from beyond the grave can possess the bodies of the living. It sounds impossible to accept. But after reading the evidence, you may start to change your mind.
. .
ON MAY 16, 1990, Marlon Brando's son Christian killed Dag Drollet, the Tahitian lover of his half- sister Cheyenne, by walking into a room where Drollet lay asleep and shooting him at close range through the cheek.
Christian, 31, insisted that Drollet had died accidentally when the gun went off during a struggle, but the fact that Drollet still had a cigarette lighter and tobacco pouch in one hand rather suggested otherwise.
It seems that Christian and his half-sister had been out for a meal, where she confided that Drollet had been beating her.
Christian decided to take revenge - and later received ten years for manslaughter, of which he served five.
The killing attracted headlines around the world, but its aftermath was even more extraordinary. Not long after Drollet's death, Marlon Brando is reported to have told friends that he was haunted by the dead man's spirit.
Sheets flew off his bed, and a voice in his car whispered: 'I should not have died.'
Brando has been quoted as saying: 'I know it's Dag's angry spirit.' His daughter, too, seemed unable to shake off a brooding sense of Drollet's continued presence. Six months after her lover's death, Cheyenne - who had already given birth to Drollet's son Tuki - attempted suicide with an overdose after a visit to his grave.
Ten days later she tried again and was unconscious for ten hours. Her mother stated: 'She was in a terrible state, talking to herself and laughing for no reason.'
As her behaviour became increasingly disturbed, she attended psychiatric units in France and Tahiti. Finally, five years later, she hanged herself.
But even that was not the end of this terrible story. In April this year a news network reported that Drollet's son had been exorcised of the ghost of his murdered father, which appeared to be possessing him.
THE CEREMONY was carried out by Brando's Tahitian common-law wife Tarita.
She read a ceremony of exorcism over the ten-year-old boy, and she and Brando prayed. Finally, holy water was sprinkled on Tuki, and around the room.
Brando has never told the full story of the haunting, but is reported to have said that it had brought him close to nervous breakdown. So what was really going on?
A commonsense explanation would be that these were merely the fevered hallucinations of a family caught in a haze of drugs and alcohol. Christian Brando had been drinking and taking drugs since he was 13, and Cheyenne was also a drug addict. Christian has stated that his mother, the Welsh actress Anna Kashfi, was a violent drunk, and that his whole family were alcoholics.
The problem with this explanation is that Marlon Brando himself is neither an alcoholic nor a drug addict, and it was he who 'nearly cracked' as a result of the haunting. Nor can drugs and drink explain the apparent possession of a ten-year-old boy.
In fact, reports of haunting and spirit possession are far more common than you might suppose. So are the kind of 'poltergeist' effects that Brando experienced, with sheets being whisked off the bed.
Many people find such ideas preposterous. So, once, did I. But after more than 30 years investigating the paranormal, I have turned from sceptic to believer.
The first serious researcher to realise just how common these incidents are was a French educator named Leon Rivail, now better known under his pen name Allan Kardec.
He ran his own school, and lectured in astronomy, anatomy and physics. But he was also intrigued by tales of ghosts and other weird phenomena, and saw no good reason why they could not be explained scientifically.
So when an acquaintance named Baudin told him that his two daughters practised automatic writing - slipping into reveries in which their hands would seem to write of their own accord - Rivail said he would like to meet them.
The two young ladies were far from serious-minded, being preoccupied mainly with young men and dancing. But when Rivail came to see them at their father's apartment in Paris, they seated themselves with pencils and notepads and invited questions.
AS THE two women entered a trance-like state, Rivail offered a series of searching questions about God and the universe. Their pencils flew across the paper, and produced long and highly intelligent answers.
Soon the young ladies were speaking directly to Rivail, with voices that claimed to be spirits.
It so happened that there had recently been a series of violent disturbances at a house in the nearby Rue des Noyers - typical poltergeist activity in which crockery flew around the room, doors slammed and windows were smashed.
Rivail asked about this, and one of the 'guides' immediately offered to introduce him to the spirit who was responsible.
A moment later, a snarling voice came out of the girl's mouth, demanding: 'Why are you calling me? Do you want to have some stones thrown at you?'
After a few minutes, the entity became more civil, and explained that it was a dead rag-and-bone man called Jeannet. In his lifetime, he declared, people used to treat him with contempt because he drank too much. Now he was getting his own back by being a public nuisance.
When Rivail asked how he got the power to cause so much damage, Jeannet explained that he fed on energy from a maidservant in the house - almost as a vampire might suck blood.
When Rivail asked if the girl was aware of this, Jeannet replied: 'Oh no, she was the most frightened of them all.' As Rivail pursued his researches into the world of spirits, his 'guides' explained the basic workings of their strange parallel universe.
They claimed that disembodied spirits can wander in and out of the minds of the living as easily as a tramp can walk into a house with its doors and windows open. They can influence our thoughts, putting ideas into our heads which we assume to be our own.
But where crucial decisions are concerned, they can only influence people whose basic nature is similar to their own. So a violent spirit can only influence a person who is already prone to violence.
WEAK-MINDED people are very easy to influence, the guides explained, because their heads are empty half the time. The same was true of alcoholics and drug addicts.
The guides instructed Rivail to publish his material in a book, using the name Allan Kardec, which they explained had belonged to him in another life.
The Spirits' Book came out in 1857, and has been in print ever since. In Brazil, where Spiritism is a religion, it continues to sell as many copies as the Bible.
Bizarre though it may sound, Kardec's work does make it possible to understand a tragedy like that of the Brando family Cheyenne's lover had no chance to defend himself, and died suddenly and violently. According to Kardec, the spirits of people who die in this way may not, in fact, realise that they are dead; they are in a semi-dream state, and the first thing they do is to attach themselves to someone close to them.
In this case, Cheyenne would have been the obvious choice, since she was carrying Drollet's child. And as he came to understand that he had been murdered by her brother, he would be bitter and resentful, which is why his voice told Brando: 'I should not have died.' Even after Cheyenne's death, the angry spirit was still not appeased, and seems to have attached himself to his son Tuki.
Whether the exorcism has ended this long-running tragedy is something that only the future can reveal. According to Kardec, exorcism is not an effective method of inducing spirits to go away.
Of course, to the sceptics, exorcism is a waste of time simply because they don't accept that spirits exist in the first place.
At the time I was first asked to write a book about 'the occult', in 1969, I would have agreed with them. I regarded all this as laughable superstition.
I agreed to write the book because I needed the money, but I had no doubt that I would have to keep my tongue firmly in my cheek.
But as I began to research the subject, I realised I was wrong.
The trigger came one day when my wife showed me a story in the author Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand.
Sitwell himself was a confirmed sceptic. Yet he tells a story of how, not long before the outbreak of World War I, a group of his brother officers went to see a famous London palmist, hoping to learn about their love lives.
They were disappointed. As she looked at their hands, she kept repeating: 'I can't understand it. I can see nothing.' They assumed she was making excuses for her failure.
But a few months later the war broke out, and they were all killed in France. Quite literally, they had no futures to read.
That story had a deep effect on me. My scepticism and scorn fell away. It made me realise for the first time that I might not be writing my book with my tongue in my cheek.
As I carried out my research, the evidence piled up before my eyes.
Before I had finished writing, I had no doubt whatever of the real existence of many strange powers, such as telepathy and the ability to foresee the future.
There were simply too many examples of such powers being demonstrated, many of them corroborated by honest and thoughtful investigators.
YET I remained basically sceptical when it came to the idea that the spirit survives death. And although I accepted that poltergeists do exist, I was inclined to swallow the fashionable theory that these episodes were in some way produced by the unconscious minds of disturbed teenagers affecting the world around them.
This itself is a strange enough idea - that the surging hormones of an adolescent could somehow exercise 'psychokinesis', the power of the mind to move matter without direct physical contact. It was to be more than ten years before I changed my opinions.
Then, in 1980, I went to investigate a poltergeist outbreak in a house in Pontefract. The spook had smashed most of the crockery, made loud banging noises that kept the whole street awake, and continually threw Diane, the family's teenage daughter, out of bed.
Of course - a teenager daughter.
That just seemed to fit my existing theory.
But it was when Diane was telling me how the poltergeist had dragged her upstairs by the throat, leaving black bruises, that I realised it was not Diane's unconscious mind that was doing this. It was a 'spirit'. And when I came across the work of Allan Kardec, I was sure I had guessed right.
If Kardec is correct, poltergeist cases are a kind of 'possession'. A spirit has to find a living person who is on the same 'wavelength' before it can begin stealing the energy it needs to manifest itself.
And when it has found someone, that person is, in a sense, 'possessed' without even being aware of it.
Put like that, the theory may sound unscientific. Yet there have been many scientists who have come to accept it.
ONE OF these was a remarkable psychiatrist whom I came across in the Eighties.
His name was Wilson Van Dusen, and he worked in the Mendocino State Hospital in California.
In the Sixties, he began a long-term study of patients who were suffering from hallucinations - particularly hearing voices. Most patients preferred not to admit to these experiences, because they were afraid it would be taken as proof that they were mad.
But one patient, a gas fitter of fairly low IQ, was so convinced that his hallucination was real that he asked Van Dusen for help. He believed himself to be in contact with a beautiful girl, who described herself rather grandly as the Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine.
Van Dusen could not speak to this girl directly, but he agreed to ask her questions, and then let the gas fitter relay her answers. It soon became obvious that the mysterious girl's intellect was on a far higher level than the gas fitter's.
One day, after a conversation about mythology, Van Dusen went home and spent the evening studying Greek myths. The next day, he posed some difficult questions to the gas fitter and the 'emanation' answered in a way that convinced Van Dusen she knew far more about the subject than he did.
Astonishingly, under the apparent guidance of this phantasm, the gas fitter was able to write out the Greek alphabet - despite knowing nothing of the language.
After this conversation, the patient had no idea what he'd been talking about.
Van Dusen found his experiences impossible to ignore and looked at his other patients in a new light. As a practising clinician, he took care not to arouse hostility among colleagues by stating that he accepted spiritual possession as a proven reality. But he did insist he found it a useful working hypothesis.
As he investigated other similar cases, he came to make a crucial distinction between what he called the lower order and the higher order of spirits. The lower order were stupid and brutal; their aim was to torment the patient by silly repetition of insulting phrases and obscene suggestions.
Four out of five cases of possession seemed to involve this lower order. But one spirit in five was of what Van Dusen called the higher order - friendly and helpful, and respecting the patient's freedom.
This distinction followed one drawn 200 years earlier by the 18th-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to be able to visit 'the other world'.
Swedenborg said there were two types of spirit, which he called devils and angels.
THE DEVILS, he explained, were actually 'earthbound spirits' who did not know they were dead, and they outnumbered the angelic spirits by four to one.
Once again, common sense seems to rebel against such notions. How can a person be 'possessed' by an angel? Well, the science fiction writer Philip K.
Dick, whose story was adapted for the film Blade Runner, believed it happened to him.
Dick was a highly neurotic personality, with a deeply pessimistic cast of mind. As a teenager, in World War II, he had seen a newsreel showing a Japanese soldier running and screaming after being hit by a flame thrower, and was horrified when the audience began to laugh and cheer.
It filled him with a conviction that there is something terribly wrong with this world. His most famous novels all have a nightmare quality, a feeling that life is a bad joke.
Predictably, his life was miserable and chaotic. Many women thought they could give him the security he needed, but his fundamental instability wrecked every relationship, as his life lurched from crisis to crisis, with nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts.
Then, during one night of despair, he began to see whirling lights and abstract patterns.
Female voices began speaking to him on the edge of sleep. Soon after, he woke up and felt that there was someone else inside him, looking out through his eyes.
This being seemed benevolent, and to know far more than he knew.
It spoke Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit. It told him it was his tutelary spirit, a term he had to look up in a dictionary. Tutelary, he discovered, means serving as a guardian.
VALIS, the name he gave to the spirit, proceeded to rearrange his life.
Under its guidance, Dick discovered that his publisher owed him many thousands of dollars in royalties, and finally got them paid.
It told him that his son had a potentially fatal hernia, and a check with the doctor confirmed this; the condition was remedied with an operation. It advised him on everything from redecorating his house to his next book deal.
Suddenly, Dick's life ceased to be chaotic, and became far happier.
Sometimes the 'angel' spoke through his lips - with somewhat odd results. It addressed Dick's wife Tessa as 'ma'am', and referred to the female dog as 'he' and the male cat as 'she'.
However, it certainly changed Dick's life, and he remained a far happier man until his death in 1982.
It could, of course, have been merely Dick's imagination, or his unconscious mind coming to the rescue. Yet his wife Tessa vouched that the turmoil in his life before the 'angel' arrived was not simply a matter of delusion - for example, the radio would often turn itself on during the early hours of the morning, even when it was unplugged.
Perhaps, like Wilson Van Dusen, we should accept that spiritual possession is a hypothesis we should not dismiss in such cases.
Certainly, that was the attitude of a remarkable Canadian psychiatrist named Adam Crabtree, whom I met during the Nineties.
Crabtree told me about the first case that had shocked him out of his Freudian assumptions. The patient was a young woman named Sarah Worthington, who was suffering from suicidal depression. She also admitted that she heard voices inside her head.
Crabtree asked her to lie on the couch, relax deeply, and try to recall what these voices had said. Sarah's body tensed, and she exclaimed: 'Oh, the heat!
I'm hot!'
The voice was quite unlike Sarah's. Sarah was lacking in self-confidence; this voice was somehow stronger and firmer. And when Crabtree asked the woman what she wanted, she replied: 'Help Sarah.'
ASKED who she was, she explained she was Sarah's grandmother. With further questioning, Crabtree learned that the fire the grandmother was talking about had happened in 1910, long before Sarah was born.
The grandmother had been at work when she heard there was a fire in her street, and had rushed home to find the whole neighbourhood ablaze, including her home.
For two hours she had searched frantically for her seven-year-old son, until she finally discovered that he had been rescued by neighbours.
The experience had implanted itself deeply in her mind.
The grandmother, who had died when Sarah was only a child, went on to tell Crabtree that she had 'taken possession' of Sarah when she was playing the piano (they both loved music).
But it soon became clear that the grandmother's motive was not entirely to 'help Sarah' as she claimed. She had her own guilt to contend with.
She had treated her daughter Elizabeth so badly that the girl had grown up unhappy and neurotic, and had in turn treated her own daughter - Sarah - equally badly.
Sarah had grown up neurotic and confused as well.
It frightened Sarah to hear her grandmother's voice in her head, because she thought she was going mad. Although she was astonished to hear that her grandmother was 'possessing' her, she was relieved to have an explanation that showed she was not insane.
Her anxiety and depression soon vanished, and in two months she was cured.
Indeed, when Crabtree suggested asking her grandmother's spirit to go away, Sarah said she would prefer that she stayed.
She had been fond of her grandmother, and the feeling that she was still there gave her a sense of comfort. It really does seem that possession can sometimes be good for us.
One of Crabtree's strangest cases suggested that we can be possessed by the living as well as by the dead.
The patient was a university professor called Art, who was about to get married for the second time.
But he kept hearing a voice nagging inside his head, which criticised his fiancee as well as various friends.
Art admitted that this censorious voice reminded him of his mother, who had always been intensely possessive.
WHEN Crabtree placed Art in a semi-hypnotic state, he found he could open a dialogue with the mother, who had a great deal to say for herself. She seemed naively self-centred, and explained that she thought her son was being duped by unworthy people.
From what we've seen already, this might appear to be a classic case of spiritual possession. Yet Art's mother was not dead.
On the contrary, she was living alone in Detroit, leading a drab and boring existence, and spent all her time brooding about her son.
Crabtree interrogated the 'spirit' of Art's mother, and she admitted that her son was constantly in her thoughts. Crabtree persuaded her that all this interference was not good for her son or for herself, and she finally agreed.
In fact, Art's mother had developed a cancerous growth, and - speaking through Art's lips - she admitted that this was probably due to robbing herself of vitality by her obsessive thoughts about her son's life.
At this point, Art's 'inner voice' began to fade, until it vanished altogether. Meanwhile, in Detroit, his mother began going out and making new friends until she became a far happier person.
On Monday, we shall look at some even stranger cases of uninvited guests - including a man who fell in love with the spirit that possessed him so profoundly that it ended in tragedy. |
