“I myself look forward to the day when the poltergeist will be attacked neither with exorcism, nor with a sword, as Admiral Jervis, afterwards Lord St Vincent, attacked the ghost in his sister’s house at Hinton Ampner but with much more prosaic weapons, namely, the Geological Survey map of the neighbourhood, and the relevant issue of the Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office (H.M.S.O.).”
Such was the advice of psychical researcher Guy Lambert (1889-1983), the President of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1956 expressing a theory that the forces at work in haunted houses were created by vibrations set off by underground water, high tides, earth tremors and extreme weather events. These would cause weird sounds and shake properties to such a degree that objects inside were displaced. For those caught up in such happenings, the much-parodied opening line of novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton, “It was a dark and stormy night”, became a frightening reality and the prelude to eerie experiences as their imaginations took over. The mystified occupiers of affected properties became convinced ghosts were present with them. Dedication to this theory led Lambert to pore endlessly over geological maps for traces of underground water and trawl through meteorological records to identify major weather events and plot their position in relation to famous haunted houses. (‘The Use of Evidence in Psychical Research’ in Proceedings of the SPR, vol 50, p. 275).
After Britain was battered by storms in February 2022 and recorded the highest ever wind-speed in the UK, I wondered what effect our increasingly violent weather and flooding might be having on perceptions of ghosts.
Today, most researchers
