“The Attleborough Poltergeist” is a ghostbreaking tale from Science fiction writer, Richard Cowper. It appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1980. Cowper often appeared in F&SF with great stories like “The Hertford Manuscript” (October 1976) that is a sequel to Wells’s The Time Machine, and “A Message to the King of Brobdingnag” (May 1984) obviously inspired by Gulliver’s Travels. I thought perhaps “The Attleborough Poltergeist” may have been inspired by Colin Wilson’s Poltergeist but that book appeared a year later in 1981.
The plot of this novella has a group of doctors trying to explain some strange occurrences in Laurel House in Attleborough in 1944. The seventeen year old Alice Hobson, who lives with her aunt and uncle, the Fletchers, is experiencing fainting spells and sessions of automatic writing. Loud explosions and flying objects also frightened the inhabitants. The doctors from the SPR bring in James Hartson after a code in an automatic message names him, along with plenty of mathematical gibberish. Hartson experiences a strange sense of deja vu when he arrives. One night Alice walks naked into his room, sleepwalking and making things possibly difficult for the man. Later Hartson constructs from wires and tubes a glistening machine to tap into the psychic waves. This calls a glowing ball of light that destroys the machine when Dr. Martin touches Alice in alarm. The incident ends the investigation without answering much.
Hartson abandons psychic research (what he calls PR) for psychics. He goes off to work on the atomic bomb. During that last session he and Dr. Martin hear the voice of an older man crying “stop stop stop cam for the love of god cam stop now i beg“. Cam was Hartson’s name as a child, from his middle name Cameron. Hartson later dies. His son wonders if it was his own voice trying to warn him about nuclear energy and war.
Cowper uses several tricks, not from Science Fiction, but ghost stories. He buries the narrative in a tale within a tale. Like Edward Lucas White’s “Lukundoo”, F. Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” or a later tale by H. P. Lovecraft, the events are not boldly exposed but related by one who has them from a source who got it from a letter…. This technique allows the writer to hint things, suggest ideas without fully explaining them. Since this is a tale of ghostbreakers the use a ghost story technique is both brilliant and appropriate. For one thing, it gives the whole thing a Victorian feel, with smoking rooms, and clubs and doctorly collegiality much as Wells’s The Time Machine does at the opening. The story is taking place in 1944 but it really feels like 1894. (By contrast, in 1944 John W. Campbell and the Golden Agers had created their own nuts-and bolts-no Victorian frills-kind of SF diction. Cowper wisely avoids this.)
I was a little surprised by when this story was published, 1980. After the occult novels of the 1970s (Carl Kolchak, Dr. Orient, The Satan Sleuth, etc.) serious SF writers shied away from any kind of ghostbreaker. (Until 1984 and Ghostbusters would change everything again!) Cowper, of course, uses the whole thing for his own purposes, those of a Science Fiction writer first. He asks could a man working on nuclear psychics and send a message back in time to himself? Boldly stated and executed this would be a very different story. Hidden inside a ghostbreaking tale, Cowper can pull the whole thing off with a cautious but not condescending look at the SPR movement at the beginning of the century.
