“An empty head will see you through, silly things mean more to you…” – Ghost Talk from the album Drinking Gasoline by Cabaret Voltaire.
“The existence of man’s spiritual body is confirmed by a variety of psychic phenomena – varying greatly in the degree of their cogency.” – The Phenomena of Astral Projection by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington.
The intense shivers and skin crawling nerve tingles I experienced of what I assumed to be strange unseen presences that seemingly hid in plain sight within the darkened landing area of my 1970s childhood home at Tredegar Street, Rhiwderin, South Wales did nothing to calm my young, fertile, reactionary and enquiring mind. In the early days of video production by simply placing sugar scattered gently across black velvet and then focussing the camera to a certain point you could produce a beautiful and exotic star system for any low budget sci-fi film or TV show. Maybe these prickly presences were some form of illusory sensation, passing projections of air, particles and my body reacting to a deep-rooted fearfulness of darkness. The accompanying soundtrack of whispers and echoes to these phenomena did very little indeed to disarm my certainty that somehow our home was haunted. From the corner of my eye shapes of a forbidding nature persistently danced just outside the field of my periphery. The uniform miner’s cottages of which ours was a former manager’s cottage in the middle of the street which had the addition of a deep cellar, robustly and identically lined up standing to attention on the slight hill of Tredegar Street. Our small home was to become a small Welsh Overlook Hotel which would contain the total disintegration and collapse of my father’s psyche. The toxicity of the atmosphere was already dense with occult experimentation that my father had performed in the tiny front bedroom room facing the street on the first floor, amongst which astral travelling was a regular event. Various papers and astrological charts were scattered haphazardly across the floor in this room which became something of an enigma to me. It was only a matter of course then that the supernatural architecture of our home had become wet and raw with untapped writhing visceral energies, the house engorged with spirit, intention and intensity. Mundane bannisters that hemmed in the long landing aside the stairs cast angular noir film shadows at night. After my mother’s second marriage and the subsequent fallout of my father’s internment into Saint Cadoc’s Hospital to treat his clinical depression and schizophrenia myself, my mother and my stepfather moved to Ebbw Vale for two years only then to move again to Somerset. Leaving the then sky-high slag tips, dark valleys and barren Doctor Who location moorlands of early 1980s Ebbw Vale to the green environs of Somerset was a shock.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
The Three Witches,
I attended Yeovil College in Somerset after a three-year struggle to attain the required exams for entry into the ‘A’ Level course. It was there that I became submerged into the culture that was to shape my life for the next few years. It was there that on one fatal night a dress rehearsal of a student’s production of Macbeth would swing open the Gates of Hell. Julian was a wild, funny, sarcastic, charismatic, extremely talented and electric personality who lit up a room wherever he went. He had somehow managed to convince Derek Valentine, Head of the Drama Department, to go along with his idea of putting on a production of Macbeth, which at that point had never been attempted by a student. It was an accolade to get the green light on such a production. I was fortunate to be cast as The Porter and the Doctor of Physic. It was the events leading up to the penultimate dress rehearsal that made me reconsider the witchcraft content within the play and its possible effects of summoning forces beyond human control. As the production rolled into its final phase a sense of dark foreboding unfolded. A sword that was kept off stage on a wooden hook inexplicably fell and landed into the stage, nearly going through a cast members shoulder, putting everyone present on edge. It had been planned to do two dress rehearsals in order to gear up the production into a good place for the performances. The night of the first dress rehearsal was an event that was to tattoo itself into the minds of those that it affected forever. The dress rehearsal began. As soon as the Weird Sister’s began their spell casting in Act 1 a storm so violent and aggressive in its force began to pound the glass walls of the theatre hall at Yeovil College. The pressure was such that the glass windowpanes bowed inwards, thus making a clicking noise. A fearful cold terror overtook the proceedings. Atmospheric accompaniment of the weather is one thing, supernatural threat is another. As the night wore on the dress rehearsal stumbled through, the storm never ceasing or abating in its ferocity. Finally, after what seemed like an age we reached the end of the play. Notes were quickly taken and given, the cast then hurriedly going our separate ways home with casual last second choices made of whom to catch a ride with while the storm and its cacophonous winds lashed around us. In the brutal carnage of the morning light news came through of tragedy that would shut down the production and change the lives of a handful of cast members. A car carrying Julian and four fellow students who were lead characters in Macbeth had jack-knifed on their way home to Crewkerne. The high winds had lifted the car high up off the road surface and smashed it into a brick wall near the town. Everyone inside was seriously injured, two critically. Julian and the driver were in a coma for weeks. Three passengers in the back suffered a variety of serious injuries. During the night one of the cast members had dreamt about a terrible accident. It took months of intensive care to bring four of the five victims anywhere near they were before the accident, but things would never be the same again for Julian who was severely disabled. This episode from my time at college has sat like a black hole inside me. I look occasionally into the horrid darkness it has cast, not even barely able to utter it to anyone since. This written exorcism that you are reading is not an act of superstitious happenstance or occult entertainment. At the time there was a dark, brutal and very specific flavour to this event that has left deep scars which endure to this day in many who were present. Were these the consequences of a spell ridden play performed with considerable force that birthed the summoning of a storm that struck down those that dared to toy with it? I am still at an all-encompassing loss as to understand why this happened, as I look occasionally at this black hole event confounded by its enigmatic presence and persistent gravity.
When I finished my studies, I moved up to London to study performance art at a drama school during a time when free higher education was a real, living and breathing thing. Richard, a friend from my ‘A’ Level drama class at Yeovil College, had apparently come up to see me or was trying to find me. Richard was a charming, funny and talented young man. His impersonation of Zippy from the 1970s children’s TV show Rainbow was bar-none. Due to the harsh hours and unforgiving demands of the full time course I was on, I’d failed to be able to meet up with him, even though I didn’t know if he knew where I was actually living at the time of his attempted unexpected visit in London. Tragically, after one long and exhausting day on my return home, my fellow housemates delivered the awful news that Richard had committed suicide on his return to Yeovil. A mutual friend Benet found him in his parked car in the middle of a field, the fumes from the engine plumbed into his vehicle. It destroyed me. I was utterly devastated by this act. For years afterwards I constantly rolled over in my mind that if we had met I could have sensed or maybe indeed even stopped him from anything so final. The cruel and painful irony of Richard being offered a job in London on the day after his suicide did not escape me. I was so guilt ridden I couldn’t even go to his highly attended funeral where they played “Bright Eyes” a song written by Mike Batt and performed by Art Garfunkel. My mother very kindly went in my place, explaining my absence. Her presence however was ostracized by various classmates which I found to be a selfish and hard-hearted thing to do. On the day of the funeral itself while grimly walking to a movement class in South Kensington I experienced what can only be called the passing of a great force directly through me. It was like an invisible gale that powered through me. I suddenly felt completely ecstatic, joyful and massively relieved for some strange reason. The overwhelming feeling of freedom expanded and surrounded me like a cloak. Now in retrospect and after some rumination I sincerely consider this to be the phenomena and presence of Richard’s spirit itself. Richard and I were both part of a Yeovil College production of a play called Dark of the Moon by Howard Richardson and William Berney. Richard played John, a strange “witch boy” who upon first beholding the beautiful Barbara Allen immediately falls in love. I played a small part and designed the poster. I also did designs for the program, which featured inside a prescient portrait of Richard, with a tendril armed swirling ghost next to him.
When a neighbour of some years Nancy died a very peculiar thing happened. This elderly, brusque, grandstanding and highly extroverted lady was always attempting either to garner attention or expound in her Scottish malapropic diction views on whom she didn’t currently like. Her strong scolding punch to my upper arm because I’d been forced to return home from London due to chronic unemployment and near bankruptcy from the underhanded, morally and ethically bankrupt and corrupt dealings of a start-up company I’d joined and thus removing any of my mother’s attention from her to me didn’t do much for my fragile state of mind. I tried my best to stay away from her and found that my mother was extremely grateful to have some of her intense co-dependency reflected away from her. Nancy’s pride and joy however and the focus of a considerable amount of her attention was the exploding grotto enclosure that was her back garden. She had remarkably won prizes for it. Amongst the clusters of flowers and plants were a series of figurines, lighting features, flags and various gnomes and water features which made everything seem like a vast frou-frou chintzy Shangri-La dancing carnival of vegetation. A veritable aftermath of orgiastic landscaping that would frighten many a contractor from going near. You could easily get lost in its swirling and dreadful pomposity. The front door to her flat was a very similar story. Pictures of ducks, and many garlands of fake foliage were plastered without censure across the frontage in an attempt to turn the entire simplicity of opening the door and entering into a trial and ordeal by frippery. Her death by cancer was tragic and slow. Her daughters had asked me one day, as she regularly pumped the medication from the ‘Box of Life’ that was strapped to her, to pick her up off the floor and place her back onto her commode chair. The shameful sadness that radiated from her while I did this was palpable to me. I became humbled seeing this once extreme personality brought down into almost a pale shadow of her former self. Seeing her through our front door’s spy hole placed into a rubber zipped bag the day she died and then onto a stretcher wheeled out to the ambulance taught me that no matter how high you ride, your ride will end one day. It was some weeks after this tragic vision that the peculiar thing happened. I was stepping outside to hang out some laundry. Her garden, which her family in anger had ripped up into shreds in an act of vandalism against the housing association and their stringent behaviour, had a surreal and weird white haze of what seemed to be a mist hanging where Nancy used to sit. There used to be chairs and a table upon which she would sit for many hours in the sun in her wide rimmed white garden sun hat. I looked very carefully again and there indeed was a strange cloudy mist. It glowed and seemed to hover in the way a swarm of bees would hover. The thought to capture this in some way never once crossed my mind. This I took to be a miasmic ectoplasmic energy, indeed Nancy’s consciousness itself, coming back to haunt the only thing she truly loved, her prized garden. I felt the mood to chant happen upon me and did so until the glowing, hovering and white cloudy mist slowly but surely disappeared, vaporising gently into the pallid flat West Country daylight.
The death of my father after a prolonged and agonising deterioration extruded and ejected some surreal and notable phenomena that I had hitherto believed would not be at all possible or even viable. His sister had reported witnessing a vision which seemed to come from an old strange vintage film. Jennifer had called us to say that she had seen him appear before her while a specific piece of music from Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff, the Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 I believe, played on the radio. His wild manic laughing face had been beheld by her in a silent and mad performance hanging in dead space. It was however the bizarre personal artefacts that I witnessed of the final dissolution of his consciousness which ultimately perplexed me. In the two weeks after his passing a deeply surreal moment occurred. While I was chatting with my mother during dinner a clear and specific voice said a phrase which was extremely and highly improbable to replicate or even ascertain. “Mung beans.” said the voice. Mung beans are beans from a plant species in the legume family and found mainly cultivated in East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. During my father’s mental breakdown, he would often fixate on a phrase or collection of words that amused him. Mung beans was one such phrase and it was a phrase that he had uttered in front of myself and my mother in the 1970s. Both myself and my mother instantly knew that only my father would know such a phrase. I had not heard it for some considerable years up to that point. It just literally dropped in from nowhere. The intonation, the way it was said, the pitching was incontrovertibly my father’s and could be from no-one or nothing else whatsoever. It was from a very rare and solitary instance of family life that was untainted and untouched by any cruelty or violence. An artefact appearing decades after it had been initially uttered. We were both convinced that this phrase had appeared without promotion or encouragement from either myself or my mother. Shocked and disturbed we discussed this at length and knew that his disembodied spirit was presently in the room with us. It was the manifestation of an ectoplasmic shape seen in a half sleep in my room however that made me shudder and jump up out of my bed from an afternoon nap. I saw my father standing in front of the opened curtained window of my bedroom blocking the light. I felt that the time had come to dispel the unwanted attentions of the spirit of my wandering father and perform a ritual that was to guide him into his next life. I took a photograph of him, placed it onto my shrine, and then began chanting a specific mantra. I placed his name carefully inside the mantra and continued to chant with focus and clarity. A wrathful and red coloured unidentifiable female deity then uncloaked herself suddenly before me. Under the lids of closed eyes in a scene that transpired before me, I saw my father’s body arose quickly into the sky, as the wrathful deity stuck her sword into him, passing his flailing body into the swirling lips of a vortex which had opened its vast mouth behind her. Stunned by the ferocity and ultra-peculiar vision of this act I watched, still chanting and still mindful, as my father disappeared deep into the dark, merry-go-roundabouting, vorticitating vortex. Lighting incense I sat quietly meditating, quietly stunned and in some considerable awe, for the next hour pondering on what I had just happened and how I felt about it. This cosmic machine we inhabit, this sublime and unknowable continuum, we are but toys in the attic of a Brobdingnagian hypersphere, performing rituals and casting spells as if throwing snowballs into a flaming challis. I’m just a Dung Beetle navigating myself to the glow of the Milky Way, only knowing where and when I am to collect, roll and bury my carefully tended ball of slowly expanding excrement.
This article first appeared in Rituals & Declarations – Volume 2, Issue 4 – Winter/Spring 2022.
Sheer Zed ~ Author • Buddhist Shaman • Musician 