8.00 am. I engaged email ping-pong to try and establish who is the current administrator of the School’s Facebook account in order to distribute ownership among some of the staff. Mediated access simply doesn’t work. Staff need the capacity to be able to post material for themselves and immediately. The site is relaunched:

10.00 am. I return to the book proposal with some degree of clarity. In the intervening days since I last considered the project, its concept has expanded to embrace the more generalised sphere of sound and spirit (as opposed to religion only). In this respect, the book will represent a sonic parallel to my Photography and Spirit publication:

2.00 pm. I continued in the same vein after lunch. I’ve returned to the tape recordings made by the late Maurice Grosse (a paranormal investigator for the Society of Psychical Research) capturing the supposed voice of a deceased elderly man that emanated from an 11-year old girl. The context was his investigation of the so-called Enfield poltergeist in 1977. (The year that I first went to art school.) I’d heard Grosse play his original cassette tapes of the interrogation of the spirit (one Bill Wilkins) at a conference of the SPR:

MG: I want you to tell me what do you remember — what happened to you when you died? Just before you died, and just after you died.

B: Days before I died, I’d — I went blind. Then I had a haemorrhage, and I fell asleep. And then I died in a chair in the corner downstairs.

MG: Do you have any friends there with you?

B: Yes. . . . 69 dogs.

MG: And what do you got 69 dogs for?

B: Now then they can protect me from you killing me. . .

MG: How can we kill you, Bill?

B: You . . .

MG: And how do we — how do we kill you, if we can’t see you, Bill?

B: By praying to God.

It sent a chill down my spine. Wilkins had lived and died in the council house then presently occupied by the girl and her family. I enjoyed several spine-tingling breakfast conversations with Maurice at the SPR conferences. He talked about levitating wardrobes, apparitions, loud noises emanating from inside solid walls, and violent assaults from spirits as a more or less accepted feature of his everyday life.

7.20 pm. I continued a review of Scole Experiment material, which I’d begun in the late afternoon. This is familiar territory, but the claims represents the apogee (thus far) of so-called physical mediumship, and one which as always challenged my mind to think clearly, openly, and critically about things touched, seen, and heard, that are inexplicable in terms of conventional science. On returning to a subject, one has to spend time adjusting to its peculiar atmosphere again. And this one is most peculiar.