Ghost Stories

St. John Bosco (1815-88) made a pact with his friend and fellow student Comollo that whoever died first would try to communicate to the other the state of his own soul. Comollo died on April 2, 1839, and on the night of April 3, after the funeral, 23-year-old John Bosco sat waiting on his bed in a dormitory containing 20 other seminarians.

So begins one of the most famous of modern ghost stories. "Midnight struck," as Bosco himself later told it, "and I then heard a dull, rolling sound from the end of the passage . . . While the noise came nearer the dormitory, the walls, ceiling and floor of the passage re-echoed and trembled behind it ... The students in the dormitory awoke, but none of them spoke . . . Then the door opened violently of its own accord without anybody seeing anything except a dim light of changing color that seemed to control the sound . . . Then a voice was clearly heard. 'Bosco, Bosco, Bosco, I am saved.' . . . The seminarists leapt out of bed and fled without knowing where to go . . . All had heard the noise and some of them the voice without gathering the meaning of the words."

To many churchmen St. John Bosco's experience might seem all in the day's work--and not only in Bosco's Italy. Even in supposedly sober England, rectories appear hardly less haunted than castles. Perhaps the greatest expert on those teasing, furniture-tossing, ructious ghosts called poltergeists was the late British Jesuit, Father Herbert Thurston, who wrote two books and various pamphlets on the subject. Just published are two more notable studies by Roman Catholics: Shane Leslie's Ghost Book (Sheed & Ward; $3) and Occult Phenomena, by Father Alois Wiesinger, an Austrian Trappist (Newman Press; $5).

The Thing. Sir Shane Leslie (of Castle Leslie, County Monaghan, Ireland) saw his first ghost while an undergraduate at Cambridge, and he has been collecting them ever since. A convert to Catholicism (1908), he edited the prestigious Catholic quarterly Dublin Review for nearly a decade, now, at 72, cuts a glorious Irish swath through London on his visits, tricked out in mutton-chop whiskers, cockaded tam-o'-shanter, green kilt and dagger in the stocking. He pursues his ghosts with gusto that may well alarm the shyer shades, as well as some readers. To those who are under the impression that the church forbids traffic in ghosts, he explains that the prohibition is against calling them up by necromancy or seance (as did Saul with the Witch of Endor), not against seeing them. Author Leslie limits his Ghost Book to "instances of ghosts, apparitions and messages from the other or twilight world which have come under Catholic cognizance or suggest Catholic interpretations."

Do the dead know when they haunt the living? Writes Sir Shane: "It is possible that they are aware, but the tremendous authority of St. Thomas Aquinas favors the view that the dead are not aware of their own apparitions. Other spirits may be acting the part. In this, St. Thomas has touched one of the stumbling blocks of modern Spiritualism. Manifestations may be genuine, but not the manifester."

Sir Shane's own original contribution to his collection is what he calls "the last word" on the Coonian Ghost--a Thing that troubled the peace of a house in Coonian, Ireland with rappings, rushings, snatchings, snorings and putting out of lights. Three priests were sent by the bishop to cope with it by exorcism and prayer. One reported that he felt it like an eel twisting around his wrist; another saw the bedclothes of an empty bed heaving where the chest of an occupant would be. "Soon we could hear the heavy breathing, the gurgling in the throat . . . what country people would call 'a hard death.' " The Thing won out in the end. The haunted family eventually went off to the U.S., and "the gallant clergy, who made such constant efforts on their behalf, seem to have been the worse for it. One priest had a nervous breakdown, another spinal meningitis and the third facial paralysis."

Pure Spirit. Trappist Wiesinger's closely reasoned, footnote-fortified volume is a serious study of apparitions, demons, second sight, telepathy, witches, mediums, magic, radiaesthesia (divining), crystal gazing, hypnosis and diabolical possession. It is built upon a thesis which the author has constructed out of Thomist theology (the book carries the imprimatur) and depth psychology.

Such occult phenomena, Wiesinger contends, are caused by a part of the soul behaving with the characteristics of a pure spirit--a mode of action which "is a vestigial remnant of the preternatural powers with which our first parents were endowed before the Fall." One of the characteristics of a pure spirit is that its knowledge does not come through sense perception, but intuitively and at will. Hence the telepathic and clairvoyant abilities of certain individuals in a state, says Wiesinger, of partial liberation from the body. Conversely, the partly liberated soul may be that of a dead person bound to a particular place--freer than embodied man but less free than it should be.

Occultist Wiesinger recognizes the possibility of the phenomenon known as "possession," though it is extremely difficult to distinguish from some forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia. He cites as "borderline" the case of Maria Talarico in the town of Catanzaro in southern Italy.

On Jan. 5, 1939, 17-year-old Maria and her grandmother were passing a bridge where three years before the body of Giuseppe Veraldi had been found, apparently a suicide. Maria stopped still, stared at the riverbank and fainted. When she regained consciousness, she spoke in a coarse, masculine voice. "I am Pepe," she said, and she began to drink wine and smoke cigarettes, play cards, and write in the handwriting of the dead Giuseppe Veraldi. She told how his friends had drugged his wine, thrown him over the bridge and beaten him to death with an iron pipe. Then she acted out the crime. Eventually she returned to her normal self when the dead boy's mother ordered '"him" to leave her. Twelve years later a letter came from one of Giuseppe Veraldi's cronies, now living in Argentina, confessing to the crime just as Maria had described it.

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