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Below is a review of Benjamin Radford's Mysterious New Mexico (2014), which I have just submitted to Amazon's UK website. It may be considered a belated reply to the same author's "The KiMo Theatre Haunting" (Fortean Times, June 2010)—essentially an earlier incarnation of the first chapter of his book—and as such may prove of interest to readers of this message board.
******
Something Spooky in the Fireplace
Benjamin Radford is an objective and unfailingly painstaking investigator of all things weird and mysterious—an inveterate exposer of sloppy research, too. In a field abounding with blockheads, crackpots and charlatans, with cranks of every shade and hue, he is an exception. Yet I have serious reservations about his conclusions in the first chapter of this book concerning the alleged decades-long haunting of the KiMo Theatre in Albuquerque—or, more precisely, the poltergeist activity that purportedly once wrecked a performance there of A Christmas Carol.* According to Dennis Potter, the longtime technical director at the KiMo, "weird things" happened that day: "People were forgetting their lines, people were tripping and falling on stage, odd pieces of equipment would fall from the ceiling, light bulbs exploded. Electrical cables fell down ... light gels came off and fluttered down during dramatic moments. They were having trouble getting through the show. Windows and doors on the set were either not opening, or were opening when they weren't supposed to. It was just really weird. They almost literally didn't get through the show, there were so many disruptions." However, others involved with the performance have no recollection of anything whatever going amiss. Nor did newspaper reviews of the performance mention the odd happenings Potter recalls. Radford concludes: "I don't believe that Potter is a liar or that he's crazy; he simply did something we all do from time to time: he misremembered. Voluminous psychological research has shown that human memory is remarkably fallible. The brain is not, as many suppose, a sort of tape recorder that accurately preserves what we experience. Instead, memories change over time." I wonder.
My parents and I were plagued by poltergeistlike bangings from late 1974 to early 1976, with a respite of some weeks in the intervening summer. I was twelve when they first assailed us and, unknown to anybody but myself, had been attempting to contact the spirit world with a ouija board I had fashioned out of a sheet of cardboard. Performed with a rapidity that seemed superhuman, they would come an hour or two after sunset in bursts lasting several seconds and invariably emanated from the vicinity of our living-room fireplace—the sole fireplace in the property, unused since my early childhood. At first we were treated to just one or two bursts a week; before long an evening without at least one burst was something of an anomaly—and a relief. No likely cause was ever identified. There were only the three of us in the household—four, if you include our cat, who was as unnerved by them as we were—and from the perspective of over 40 years it seems to me that they only ever rang out when my parents and I were together in the living-room. There was no plumbing in that part of the house, no gas installed, no evidence of subsidence anywhere. The fireplace was built into an exterior wall, but there was no nearby tree whose branches could have been scraping against that wall or the chimney, and searches of our garden invariably proved fruitless, as did searches upstairs and down. Though we lived in a detached house, my father asked our next-door neighbours either side whether they, too, were hearing mysterious bangings of an evening; they said they weren't.
There were other phenomena, too. Night after night one of the doors of my wardrobe would spring open while I was trying to get to sleep. (How I came to dread the sound of its doing so!) Yet it required a hefty tug to open and never did this at any other hour. It persisted in its behaviour even when I kept two seven-pound brass weights propped against it. My cassette recorder, furthermore, took to ejecting cassettes as soon as they were inserted but only—perversely—those I was most eager to listen to. A case in point was An hour with Edgar Allan Poe, a selection of the American writer's tales read by Edgar Lustgarten. Only by keeping the cassette chamber held closed could I get it to play. I examined it from every angle, measured it this way and that and checked that the reels turned smoothly but could discern not an ounce of difference between it and cassettes my recorder was willing to play. When my father returned it to the shop from which he had bought it a day or two before, the manager had no problem at all getting it to play on one of his machines. Whatever the cause of the problem, it struck me at the time as decidedly odd, and I have since heard of the same thing happening in other apparent poltergeist cases.
At some point I began logging all these spooky occurrences in a notebook kept specifically for the purpose. Then one day I decided to capture the bangings on tape. I set up my cassette recorder in the living-room, attached a microphone to it, explained to my parents what I was up to, then waited. In due course they came—but stopped the instant I pressed the record button! And they were never heard again. I believe, indeed, that all the phenomena that had been troubling us stopped that day, never to return. And in time, our long-continued occupancy of the house that had served as the backdrop to these phenomena notwithstanding, they ceased to be a subject of conversation among us.
So, do I believe that my dalliance with a homemade ouija board conjured up something supernatural—an earthbound spirit perhaps? I have had more than four decades to mull over the evidence and consider every conceivable alternative explanation. Perhaps behind everything that happened lay something perfectly mundane. Perhaps some demented prankster with nothing better to do of an evening was amusing himself by banging on the other side of our fireplace. Perhaps my wardrobe door was prompted to spring open by some difference in air pressure, though its fit in the frame was such as to allow the flow of air in and out. Perhaps my cassette recorder's perverse behaviour had some mechanical cause that escaped all my attempts at detection. But, having read extensively on the subject of poltergeists, I believe that the phenomena that define them represent something genuinely paranormal and think it very likely that my experiments with that ouija board did attract the attention of an unwelcome, albeit not uninvited, guest.
And the relevance of my story? In 2007, five years after my father died and probably 30 or so after the subject had last been raised, I alluded to the bangings in conversation with my mother, now deceased, and was astonished to discover she had absolutely no recollection of them. I reminded her of the searches upstairs and down and in the garden, in which all three of us had taken part, my attempt to capture them on tape, the weights I had kept propped against my wardrobe door, whose purpose I remember explaining to her at the time—all to no avail. A few days later I brought up the subject again, hoping our earlier conversation might have jogged her memory in the meantime, but it hadn't.
The notebook having been disposed of decades ago, the only evidence now extant that any of this ever happened is a retrospective diary entry dated 18 April 1978, in which I mention a wardrobe door that had, in late 1974, taken to springing open at night despite requiring "quite a tug to get open," two seven-pound brass weights I had kept propped against it in a vain attempt to stop it from doing so and "inexplicable bangings" that had begun plaguing us about the same time. And that exists today only by way of a computer transcription of my old handwritten diaries made between 2012 and 2015.
If Radford were to investigate, in a spirit of strict objectivity (as he undoubtedly would), the events underlying this strange narrative of mine, he would, I fear, point out that the only other surviving witness as of 2007 could not remember a thing about them, cite the complete lack of contemporary written evidence, remind us that "[v]oluminous psychological research has shown that human memory is remarkably fallible" and that "memories change over time" and conclude: "I don't believe that Hutton is a liar or that he's crazy; he simply did something we all do from time to time: he misremembered."
No, I am not a liar. Nor, so far as I know, am I crazy. Have I simply imagined that my parents and I were routinely assailed by mysterious bangings for about one and a half years, that we made repeated searches of the house and garden to determine their cause, that my father asked our next-door neighbours either side (in my presence) whether they, too, were hearing them, that I once tried to capture them on tape, that my wardrobe door persistently sprang open at night, that I kept weights propped against it to stop it from doing so? Was that notebook a figment of my imagination, that diary entry the product of a "remarkably fallible" memory? I would have to be staggeringly, stupendously, monumentally, almost preternaturally delusional to have imagined all this and more.
As for the "[v]oluminous psychological research" to which Radford refers, what exactly does it prove? Only that some of us, not all, seriously misremember events. For example, the morning after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 Ulric Neisser distributed a short questionnaire to 106 students in a colleague's introductory psychology class at Emory University, asking how they had learnt about it, where they were, what they were doing and so on.† Three years later 44 of them who were still on campus completed the questionnaire afresh. The disparities between the new and the original answers were in some cases astounding. One participant, RT, first wrote: "I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn't know any details except that it had exploded.... Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that." Three years later she wrote: "When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked." Another participant, GA, first wrote that she had heard the news in the cafeteria: it had made her so sick she had been unable to finish her lunch. Three years later she believed she had been in her dormitory room at the time: a girl in her hall screaming "The space shuttle just blew up" had prompted her to turn her television on for further particulars of the tragedy. Yet another participant, MS, who first heard the news at Emory, as had all Neisser's subjects, believed three years later that she had been at home with her parents at the time. However, many of the later responses proved at least partly right; a few almost completely so. But how, you may ask, do I know my memory is not as fickle as whatever vaguely analogous faculty resides in the heads of RT and her fellow nitwits, GA and MS? When I transcribed my diaries some years ago and found myself reading entries I had for the most part not set eyes on since writing them decades before, I was struck time and again by how accurate my recall of events was. True, there was much I had forgotten or remembered imperfectly, but my memory had not played tricks on me: I had not misremembered.
Is there voluminous psychological research on the human tendency to forget anomalous experiences? It seems not. The census of hallucinations conducted by the Society for Psychical Research between 1889 and 1892 showed that participants rapidly forgot having had either tactile, auditory or visual hallucinations.‡ Walter Franklin Prince, writing four decades later, said it was "the rule" in his experience for an "occult story" to become less detailed and colourful with the passage of time.§ It seems likely, therefore, that my mother's complete failure to remember events that had left an indelible impression on me was due simply to their having fallen outside her frame of reference. It makes me wonder whether Potter's story of actors forgetting their lines and tripping and falling on stage, of light bulbs exploding and electrical cables falling down, of windows and doors either refusing to open or opening when they were not supposed to and so on can really be dismissed as the product of an overactive imagination. It also makes me wonder how many poltergeist cases that go unreported, like mine, are later forgotten by all concerned.
* Benjamin Radford, Mysterious New Mexico (2014), pp. 5–30.
† Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, "Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger," in Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser (editors), Affect and accuracy in recall (1992), pp. 9–31.
‡ Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. X, 1894), pp. 62–68.
§ Walter Franklin Prince, Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences (1928), p. 130.
******
Something Spooky in the Fireplace
Benjamin Radford is an objective and unfailingly painstaking investigator of all things weird and mysterious—an inveterate exposer of sloppy research, too. In a field abounding with blockheads, crackpots and charlatans, with cranks of every shade and hue, he is an exception. Yet I have serious reservations about his conclusions in the first chapter of this book concerning the alleged decades-long haunting of the KiMo Theatre in Albuquerque—or, more precisely, the poltergeist activity that purportedly once wrecked a performance there of A Christmas Carol.* According to Dennis Potter, the longtime technical director at the KiMo, "weird things" happened that day: "People were forgetting their lines, people were tripping and falling on stage, odd pieces of equipment would fall from the ceiling, light bulbs exploded. Electrical cables fell down ... light gels came off and fluttered down during dramatic moments. They were having trouble getting through the show. Windows and doors on the set were either not opening, or were opening when they weren't supposed to. It was just really weird. They almost literally didn't get through the show, there were so many disruptions." However, others involved with the performance have no recollection of anything whatever going amiss. Nor did newspaper reviews of the performance mention the odd happenings Potter recalls. Radford concludes: "I don't believe that Potter is a liar or that he's crazy; he simply did something we all do from time to time: he misremembered. Voluminous psychological research has shown that human memory is remarkably fallible. The brain is not, as many suppose, a sort of tape recorder that accurately preserves what we experience. Instead, memories change over time." I wonder.
My parents and I were plagued by poltergeistlike bangings from late 1974 to early 1976, with a respite of some weeks in the intervening summer. I was twelve when they first assailed us and, unknown to anybody but myself, had been attempting to contact the spirit world with a ouija board I had fashioned out of a sheet of cardboard. Performed with a rapidity that seemed superhuman, they would come an hour or two after sunset in bursts lasting several seconds and invariably emanated from the vicinity of our living-room fireplace—the sole fireplace in the property, unused since my early childhood. At first we were treated to just one or two bursts a week; before long an evening without at least one burst was something of an anomaly—and a relief. No likely cause was ever identified. There were only the three of us in the household—four, if you include our cat, who was as unnerved by them as we were—and from the perspective of over 40 years it seems to me that they only ever rang out when my parents and I were together in the living-room. There was no plumbing in that part of the house, no gas installed, no evidence of subsidence anywhere. The fireplace was built into an exterior wall, but there was no nearby tree whose branches could have been scraping against that wall or the chimney, and searches of our garden invariably proved fruitless, as did searches upstairs and down. Though we lived in a detached house, my father asked our next-door neighbours either side whether they, too, were hearing mysterious bangings of an evening; they said they weren't.
There were other phenomena, too. Night after night one of the doors of my wardrobe would spring open while I was trying to get to sleep. (How I came to dread the sound of its doing so!) Yet it required a hefty tug to open and never did this at any other hour. It persisted in its behaviour even when I kept two seven-pound brass weights propped against it. My cassette recorder, furthermore, took to ejecting cassettes as soon as they were inserted but only—perversely—those I was most eager to listen to. A case in point was An hour with Edgar Allan Poe, a selection of the American writer's tales read by Edgar Lustgarten. Only by keeping the cassette chamber held closed could I get it to play. I examined it from every angle, measured it this way and that and checked that the reels turned smoothly but could discern not an ounce of difference between it and cassettes my recorder was willing to play. When my father returned it to the shop from which he had bought it a day or two before, the manager had no problem at all getting it to play on one of his machines. Whatever the cause of the problem, it struck me at the time as decidedly odd, and I have since heard of the same thing happening in other apparent poltergeist cases.
At some point I began logging all these spooky occurrences in a notebook kept specifically for the purpose. Then one day I decided to capture the bangings on tape. I set up my cassette recorder in the living-room, attached a microphone to it, explained to my parents what I was up to, then waited. In due course they came—but stopped the instant I pressed the record button! And they were never heard again. I believe, indeed, that all the phenomena that had been troubling us stopped that day, never to return. And in time, our long-continued occupancy of the house that had served as the backdrop to these phenomena notwithstanding, they ceased to be a subject of conversation among us.
So, do I believe that my dalliance with a homemade ouija board conjured up something supernatural—an earthbound spirit perhaps? I have had more than four decades to mull over the evidence and consider every conceivable alternative explanation. Perhaps behind everything that happened lay something perfectly mundane. Perhaps some demented prankster with nothing better to do of an evening was amusing himself by banging on the other side of our fireplace. Perhaps my wardrobe door was prompted to spring open by some difference in air pressure, though its fit in the frame was such as to allow the flow of air in and out. Perhaps my cassette recorder's perverse behaviour had some mechanical cause that escaped all my attempts at detection. But, having read extensively on the subject of poltergeists, I believe that the phenomena that define them represent something genuinely paranormal and think it very likely that my experiments with that ouija board did attract the attention of an unwelcome, albeit not uninvited, guest.
And the relevance of my story? In 2007, five years after my father died and probably 30 or so after the subject had last been raised, I alluded to the bangings in conversation with my mother, now deceased, and was astonished to discover she had absolutely no recollection of them. I reminded her of the searches upstairs and down and in the garden, in which all three of us had taken part, my attempt to capture them on tape, the weights I had kept propped against my wardrobe door, whose purpose I remember explaining to her at the time—all to no avail. A few days later I brought up the subject again, hoping our earlier conversation might have jogged her memory in the meantime, but it hadn't.
The notebook having been disposed of decades ago, the only evidence now extant that any of this ever happened is a retrospective diary entry dated 18 April 1978, in which I mention a wardrobe door that had, in late 1974, taken to springing open at night despite requiring "quite a tug to get open," two seven-pound brass weights I had kept propped against it in a vain attempt to stop it from doing so and "inexplicable bangings" that had begun plaguing us about the same time. And that exists today only by way of a computer transcription of my old handwritten diaries made between 2012 and 2015.
If Radford were to investigate, in a spirit of strict objectivity (as he undoubtedly would), the events underlying this strange narrative of mine, he would, I fear, point out that the only other surviving witness as of 2007 could not remember a thing about them, cite the complete lack of contemporary written evidence, remind us that "[v]oluminous psychological research has shown that human memory is remarkably fallible" and that "memories change over time" and conclude: "I don't believe that Hutton is a liar or that he's crazy; he simply did something we all do from time to time: he misremembered."
No, I am not a liar. Nor, so far as I know, am I crazy. Have I simply imagined that my parents and I were routinely assailed by mysterious bangings for about one and a half years, that we made repeated searches of the house and garden to determine their cause, that my father asked our next-door neighbours either side (in my presence) whether they, too, were hearing them, that I once tried to capture them on tape, that my wardrobe door persistently sprang open at night, that I kept weights propped against it to stop it from doing so? Was that notebook a figment of my imagination, that diary entry the product of a "remarkably fallible" memory? I would have to be staggeringly, stupendously, monumentally, almost preternaturally delusional to have imagined all this and more.
As for the "[v]oluminous psychological research" to which Radford refers, what exactly does it prove? Only that some of us, not all, seriously misremember events. For example, the morning after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 Ulric Neisser distributed a short questionnaire to 106 students in a colleague's introductory psychology class at Emory University, asking how they had learnt about it, where they were, what they were doing and so on.† Three years later 44 of them who were still on campus completed the questionnaire afresh. The disparities between the new and the original answers were in some cases astounding. One participant, RT, first wrote: "I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]. I didn't know any details except that it had exploded.... Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that." Three years later she wrote: "When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked." Another participant, GA, first wrote that she had heard the news in the cafeteria: it had made her so sick she had been unable to finish her lunch. Three years later she believed she had been in her dormitory room at the time: a girl in her hall screaming "The space shuttle just blew up" had prompted her to turn her television on for further particulars of the tragedy. Yet another participant, MS, who first heard the news at Emory, as had all Neisser's subjects, believed three years later that she had been at home with her parents at the time. However, many of the later responses proved at least partly right; a few almost completely so. But how, you may ask, do I know my memory is not as fickle as whatever vaguely analogous faculty resides in the heads of RT and her fellow nitwits, GA and MS? When I transcribed my diaries some years ago and found myself reading entries I had for the most part not set eyes on since writing them decades before, I was struck time and again by how accurate my recall of events was. True, there was much I had forgotten or remembered imperfectly, but my memory had not played tricks on me: I had not misremembered.
Is there voluminous psychological research on the human tendency to forget anomalous experiences? It seems not. The census of hallucinations conducted by the Society for Psychical Research between 1889 and 1892 showed that participants rapidly forgot having had either tactile, auditory or visual hallucinations.‡ Walter Franklin Prince, writing four decades later, said it was "the rule" in his experience for an "occult story" to become less detailed and colourful with the passage of time.§ It seems likely, therefore, that my mother's complete failure to remember events that had left an indelible impression on me was due simply to their having fallen outside her frame of reference. It makes me wonder whether Potter's story of actors forgetting their lines and tripping and falling on stage, of light bulbs exploding and electrical cables falling down, of windows and doors either refusing to open or opening when they were not supposed to and so on can really be dismissed as the product of an overactive imagination. It also makes me wonder how many poltergeist cases that go unreported, like mine, are later forgotten by all concerned.
* Benjamin Radford, Mysterious New Mexico (2014), pp. 5–30.
† Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, "Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger," in Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser (editors), Affect and accuracy in recall (1992), pp. 9–31.
‡ Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. X, 1894), pp. 62–68.
§ Walter Franklin Prince, Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences (1928), p. 130.
