Ghost Tour With A Difference

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http://www.edinburghnews.com/features.cfm?id=776312003

Ghost tour with a difference

Miranda Fettes

A RETIRED school head- master, Archie Lawrie is everything you would expect - smart, punctual, organised and thorough. Then, as he sits in tweed jacket enjoying a pot of Earl Grey tea, he starts to recount stories which could come straight from the X-Files.

But Archie Lawrie is not deranged nor a sci-fi nut, and definitely not an attention seeker. He’s just Edinburgh’s ghostbuster.

As secretary of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research you can bet that he has heard every excuse and witnessed every deception during his many teaching years. But he is not just convinced of the supernatural - he knows it’s out there.

His first encounter with the paranormal, he says, was when he was a young man of 19 working in the RAF’s radar servicing team during his two years of national service.

"I had an incident on a train journey," explains the 64-year-old grandfather from Kingskettle in Fife. "It was December and there was no heating. There was a blind man on the train who was absolutely freezing, so I gave him my gloves. He told my fortune and the fortune of a fellow airman with me.

"He told me that I was to lose my right arm below the elbow and I thought ‘this is madness’. But then I discovered that the person who was standing in for me while I was away from my post lost his lower arm shortly afterwards in the machinery we used.

"The chap on the train also said I was about to see the dentist and I had an appointment the very next morning. He told my friend that he had just been home on compassionate leave because his father had died and he was about to have an operation on his sinuses, both of which were correct."

Warming to his theme he continues: "There was a team of eight of us who worked on technical blocks sunk into the ground with a gravel path round each block. It was a cold January night and we heard footsteps coming round the path but they went right past and there was nobody there.

"I thought it must be the night policeman or his dog but we opened the windows which jammed across the narrow path to the brick wall so this person would have to duck under the window as we were looking out or we would see the dog, but the footsteps ran right past again.

"We phoned the RAF police post in the camp and asked him if he’d been across to our block or sent the dog across, but he told us he never came across ‘because it’s bloody haunted’.

"It was then that I thought there must be more to this world than the physical things that go on around us - a psychic element."

Leaving the RAF and going into teaching, Archie remained interested in the supernatural, but it was 16 years ago when he got his chance to really start to investigate bumps in the night, when the Scottish Society for Psychical Research was founded.

Now he’s penned a volume of the cases he’s dealt with since then, entitled The Psychic Investigators Case Book. And two-thirds of his work over the past four years has been in Edinburgh, where he has been called to some 200 properties.

"I get some desperate phone calls," he says. "What people want initially is knowledge. Like what is in our house, why is it there, what does it want and will we be murdered in our beds?"

Archie visits people with a medium, Francesca Ryan. First, they establish whether or not there is an entity, who it is and what it’s doing there. Many entities, he says, don’t even realise they are dead.

"Francesca contacts the entity and we listen to its story," he explains. "Some stories of what happened to them during their lives are horrendously sad. We pour out compassion upon that person and for many, that very act of compassion is enough for the entity to back off."

In 40 per cent of cases, he says, once the householder understands who the entity is and why he or she is there, they are content to co-exist with it. But the remaining 60 per cent request the entity to leave them alone.

Of that number, half want the entity completely removed from the house, while the other half are quite happy to reach a compromise with the entity if it agrees to keep itself hidden and refrain from making any noises or smells.

"To give them their due, they usually do," he says. "Strange as it may seem, not everybody who calls me in wants rid of the entity who has chosen to live with them. There is a lovely story of a little old ghost soldier in Edinburgh who only wants to stay where he once lived and to tidy up the young lady’s apartment which was once his own home. Who would want to throw such a helpful little man out on to the paranormal scrapheap?"

Overlooking Greyfriars Kirkyard, Archie says the retired soldier explained that more than 100 years ago, he had lived in an army barracks next to the block of flats, where a fire station now stands, and had moved into the poorhouse next door when his army days were over. When Archie researched the area, he found that the apartment block had indeed been redeveloped from an old poorhouse and that the old barracks had been demolished and replaced by the fire station.

In The Psychic Investigators Casebook, Archie charts dozens of cases between 1999 and 2002, in Edinburgh, east central Scotland and the Borders, where he was called out to investigate hauntings, all of which he does free of charge.

Fourteen of the anecdotes document ghostly goings-on in and around the Capital which he and Francesca have attended. Many of the entities describe all sorts of details about how the decor in the property has changed and talk about individuals living today by name - despite the fact that Archie does not tell Francesca where they are going or who has requested their visit. Some lived hundreds of years ago and some died very recently. And, regardless of language, they all communicate telepathically with Francesca.

"They don’t necessarily appear at the age when they died," explains Archie. "Some come back at an age when they were happy." He goes on to describe the tale of a small boy haunting a medical centre in Perthshire who was murdered by his father as a child but sometimes returns as a young man, despite never having reached manhood during his life.

"While there was no way that either Francesca or myself knew the names of the evening cleaning staff, the boy entity did," says Archie. "He even named the girls in order of ‘teasability’, saying that he could make Mrs X scream far more easily than the others." Archie also talks of transfiguration. "That happens when a medium and sometimes even a possessed person is taken over mentally and physically by an invading entity, so much so that the medium takes on the physical attributes of the entity - particularly facial features," he explains.

At a transfiguration meeting last year at the College of Parapsychology, he observed in amazement as the medium transfigured a dozen times into different individuals, most of whom were recognised by relatives in the audience.

And, he says, entities can fill a place with certain odours. In one case in the Borders, the lady of the house requested the entity, via Francesca, to get rid of his beery breath and replace it with a more pleasant smell. He filled the house with the scent of bananas until the family became utterly sick with it and begged him to change it to something less overpowering, upon which the smell immediately changed to the scent of lavender.

"He was a real character," chuckles Archie. "Although the two main psychic smells are urine and a sweet-smelling tobacco."

He also recounts tales of people paralysed or enveloped by the warmth of entities and he stresses only five per cent of most entities he has documented are ill-meaning. Archie has also made appearances on television and radio, including the Discovery Channel and Grampian TV, and has had psychic consultations filmed.

"It’s a gigantic memory system," says Archie, explaining psychical phenomena. "It is a science and it’s not mumbo-jumbo. The supernatural world is a most extraordinarily wide and diverse theatre of operation."

Such is his interest in the supernatural, that he’s already writing two more books, one Anatomy of a Ghost, which he expects to complete in two years, and a second volume of cases.

One case he still hasn’t resolved is that of a three-year-old girl in Dumbiedykes, who six weeks ago, was behaving very oddly, drumming constantly and shouting orders. Francesca fell into a trance and described an army of hundreds of medieval vagabonds walking along a road which no longer exists, but which Archie has not yet had a chance to research. The girl’s mind seemed to be occupied by that of an army commander.

"We just told them to leave the girl alone, but I haven’t heard anything since.

"In Hollywood parlance I suppose I must be considered a ‘ghostbuster’, an ‘entity-zapper’ or a ‘paranormal-troubleshooter’. In reality all I am is a dedicated caseworker looking after the needs of the countless numbers of unfortunate and puzzled and often scared people who encounter the psychic world at first hand."

• The Psychic Investigators Casebook by Archibald Lawrie is published by 1st Books, priced £10.24

• Archie will be the guest speaker at the Scottish Holistic Health Festival 2003 this weekend at the Grand Lodge in George Street, 10am-6pm on Saturday and 11am-7pm on Saturday