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Life between Life – Dr Joel Whitton and Joe Fisher

For Jenny to call her parents at all indicated a certain desperation. She rarely saw her mother and father. Family get-togethers were usually limited to the Christmas season, weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, Mr and Mrs Saunders responded readily to their daughter's phone call and arrived at the apartment that very evening. Their examination of the stains, conducted with muttered consternation, led to an abrupt appraisal. 'This place is haunted,’ Jenny’s mother declared.

Haunting might have seemed the obvious suggestion to anyone who acknowledges metaphysical reality, this possibility having already occurred to Jenny's friends as well as to Jenny herself. But no one had thus far voiced this interpretation quite so strenuously. Her mother's insistence on 'possession by an evil spirit of some kind' left Jenny so flustered that she fled her apartment in terror.

That night, a Friday, she spent sleeplessly at the home of a friend The next day she found herself another apartment in downtown Toronto and on Sunday moved with all her belongings, including the doll's house. Meanwhile, Jenny's father managed to track down Dr Whitton, who was tucked away in a vacation hide away near Peterborough, Ontario. Having seen Dr Whitton interviewed on television as an expert on 'spooky' phenomena, be begged him to help his daughter. Dr Whitton agreed to see Jenny on his return. He had just one question for Mr Saunders: 'Do you have a sample of the bloodstains?' Too late, Jenny was thinking along similar lines. Once her fears had subsided, she returned to the apartment to take photographs and scrape the walls for evidence but, on arrival, found that the superintendent of the apartment building had spent the previous day repainting the vacated living-room. Attempting to remove the stains with a scrubbing brush dipped in a bucket of soapy water, he had discovered the markings had permeated the plaster beneath the paintwork. His response was to apply a coat of dark grey latex, ensuring that the 'blood on the wall' was lost forever.

By the time Jenny showed up at Dr Whitton's office for her first consultation she was convinced she had attracted a wicked ghost with demonstrably lurid powers. Dr Whitton, however, thought otherwise. Having investigated several cases of poltergeist and psychokinetic activity {a poltergeist is the work of a mischievous spirit, while psychokinesis is the movement and/or materialization of objects by the mind of a living person) he felt that Jenny's psychological state must have produced the mysterious bloodstains as a symbolic expression of internal conflict, According to psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, unwitting behaviour of this kind is indicative of 'a bundle of projected repressions'. Those rare individuals who can trigger PK, as psychokinesis is commonly known, never act just once; they have a history of such manifestations. Two major questions, therefore, demanded answers: Did Jenny have a history of psychokinetic activity? And, if so, what events had provoked the deep conflict that was producing blood on a wall?

The response to the first question was overwhelmingly in the affirmative. Jenny disclosed that she had been connected with, and presumably was responsible for, an array of psychokinetic happenings. Dr Whitton, who came to call Jenny 'the PK lady', would later witness her unconscious powers in the form of flashing lights in his office during a counselling session. For now, he was made aware of the following strange occurrences:

• Tumblers waiting to dry in Jenny's dish rack had exploded spontaneously.
• Curtains closed across the front window of a friend's apartment had parted noisily, and to their full extent, while Jenny and a friend chatted away.
• Visiting her parents' house for dinner, Jenny sat staring at an empty bamboo bird cage that was hanging from the ceiling by a heavy chain. Inside the cage was perched an artificial bird made of colourful synthetic material. Just as Jenny was wondering whether a real bird had ever lived there, the cage and its four-foot-long chain came crashing down. After hitting the floor, the chain disappeared or dematerialized, and has never been found.
• A friend had given Jenny a bud vase made of lead crystal. This friend later telephoned with an invitation to visit her apartment. But Jenny didn't want to go and, feeling uncomfortable, started to make excuses. As she replaced the receiver, the PK lady struck again. Jenny looked on in bewilderment as the bud vase, which was standing on a dresser across the room, broke off at the stem, fell to the floor and smashed to pieces.
• Reluctantly Jenny had allowed a male acquaintance to return to her apartment alter a dinner engagement. He had insisted on coming back 'for a coffee’, and it wasn't long before he started making sexual advances These Jenny neither wanted nor encouraged, and the thought flashed into her mind: 'If only the time was much later, he would feel obliged to leave.' As that thought took shape, all four clocks in the apartment, including Jenny's wristwatch, jumped ahead to show a time of 1.37 a.m. Her visitor promptly got up and left. Closing the door behind him, Jenny turned on the radio to establish the correct time. The 9.00 news was drawing to a close.