Tony Cornell, photo Cornell
Review by JON ELSBY
Chasing the Dark bears the intriguing subtitle ‘Encounters with the Supernatural’. For many people, the supernatural is associated with religion. It is inextricably bound up with belief in the existence and operative agency of God, angels, and demons. But there is another, broader, but also vaguer, sense of the word which refers to any phenomena that cannot be explained naturally, or that appear to defy the known laws of physics. There may also be a tendency to associate the word ‘supernatural’ with ‘superstition’, although the only connexion between them is etymological and tenuous.
It is often claimed that England is a ‘post-Christian’ country, although the most recent census records give only qualified support to that claim. Figures from the 2021–22 census show that 46.2% of people in England and Wales are Christians, 37.2% are non-religious, 6.5% are Muslims, 1.7% are Hindus, 0.9% are Sikhs, 0.5% are Buddhists, 0.5% are Jews, and 0.6% are of other faiths. People who describe themselves as atheists or agnostics are still comparatively few in number (6.8% and 5.3% respectively) but it is indisputable that, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, fewer people are believing and practising Christians than at any earlier period since religious affiliation was first recorded.
Curiously, however, the decline in Christian orthodoxy – a faith grounded in philosophical reason, personal testimony, and historical records – has not been accompanied by any abatement of interest in the supernatural. Ouija boards, Tarot cards, palmistry, I Ching, magic, witchcraft, astrology (of both the Western and Chinese varieties), cases of bilocation, ghosts and poltergeists, spiritualistic séances, and sundry other occult subjects, continue to exert a strange fascination for many people; and even those who are skeptical, whether temperamentally or by conviction, are often willing to concede that ‘there might be something in it’. As G. K. Chesterton remarked: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing; they then become capable of believing in anything.’
Enter Tony Cornell. Chasing the Dark is based largely on his thorough and painstaking records of the 800 cases he investigated on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) – cases which ranged from hauntings and poltergeists to mediums and people who claimed telekinetic powers. Cornell was an unusual man. Skeptical but not cynical, he was dogged and objective in his pursuit of the truth, but also candid and honest enough to admit that he could not explain everything he had encountered. His manner when investigating phenomena was quietly authoritative, affable but dispassionate. He was also naturally observant, a skill he had honed and polished over the years. During his wartime service in the Royal Navy, he proved a proficient boxer, winning his bouts and whole tournaments, despite his small stature and wiry physique. His success was partly due to his ability to ‘read’ his opponents. He could anticipate their moves, evade their attacks, and counter-punch hard and very effectively.1 So even his choice of sport seemed designed to develop precisely those traits that would be of most use to him in his odd, but consciously chosen, profession.2 To complete this list of Cornell’s attributes, he also managed to convey reassurance and empathy to those who had had distressing and frightening experiences that they could not explain or account for.
Apart from some youthful pranks, little in Cornell’s early life hinted at what he would later become. His serious interest in the supernatural was awakened when he was serving in the Royal Navy and stationed in India during World War II. Machell takes up the story—
[Cornell] hears stories about a holy man who lives out in the Nilgiri Hills. Since arriving in India, he has seen all the usual fakirs, snake charmers, rope climbers and fire-walkers in markets and side streets, and he watches them with a withering amusement. They are tricksters performing for coins: talented, yes, but somehow disappointing in their deceit. Mechanical and listless. But something about the word of this holy man draws Cornell in. He is elusive, he is told. An old hermit treated with deep respect by the locals, and who is capable of feats which cannot be explained. On his last full day in Ooty, Cornell decides to find him. He wakes early and pays a local taxi driver to make the hour and a half journey to the foot of the mountain on which the hermit is said to live. Then he hikes towards the summit. All around him is lush, subtropical greenery and, in the distance, terraced tea plantations cover whole hillsides.
After a long climb, Cornell reaches ‘a large, flat ledge of rock overlooking the plains some 6,000 feet below’. And there, standing with his back to him, he sees the hermit, an old man in his seventies or eighties, wearing a tattered brown robe. The view from the ledge is of thick vegetation and trees, and a rushing river. Cornell brusquely declines the hermit’s offer of a cup of tea, whereupon the old man says resignedly: ‘I suppose you want me to perform some magic for your entertainment then?’ ‘Why not?’ says Cornell. The hermit instructs Cornell to fix his eyes upon some distant hills. After a short interval, Cornell starts to feel uneasy. He turns around, but the hermit has disappeared. The ledge is a flat, open space with no hiding places. The only path down from the mountain is the one by which Cornell himself had laboriously ascended a few minutes earlier. So where can the hermit have gone? Then, Cornell sees him. The old man is standing on a rocky outcrop similar to the one where Cornell is standing, but on the other side of the river. He is smiling. The distance is far too great for him to have got there by any normal means. The hermit points again to the distant hills, and Cornell, baffled but understanding what he is being asked to do, turns his gaze towards them. Then, he hears the old man’s voice at his elbow: ‘Well, my son, did that entertain you?’
Cornell is stunned. He can think of no way the hermit can have traversed such a distance over difficult terrain and crossed and re-crossed a river while remaining bone dry. He does not realize it at the time but his encounter with the hermit has changed him permanently. It has stripped him of his confident materialistic certainties, and he never quite regains them.
This opens his mind to other possibilities. There are times when, in order to arrive at the truth or at a deeper understanding of the real, we need to be able to let go of false certainties – our illusions of certainty on matters where, in fact, we lack full knowledge. Somewhere, perhaps buried deep in the recesses of our unconscious minds, there are things we think we know, but cannot really be said to know, because they are contrary to fact. If such erroneous beliefs concern matters fundamental to our sense of identity, they will probably prove hard to eradicate. Encounters with the supernatural force us to confront and accept truths that unsettle and challenge our too glib certainties, and call into question what we had previously taken for granted.
However, Cornell soon discovers that his natural skepticism is, more often than not, justified. He is asked to investigate a poltergeist in a home in north London. The house is owned by an elderly man whose wife had died two years earlier. For a time, his son and daughter-in-law shared the house with him, but they have moved out: the daughter-in-law, who believes in ghosts and is mortally afraid of them, was terrified by the rationally inexplicable sudden bangs and crashes caused by the poltergeist. The police, a visiting clergyman, who performed an exorcism, and a spiritualist medium whose advice was sought, were all unable to explain or prevent the noises. The old man refused to leave his home, where he and his wife had lived contentedly for thirty-five years, claiming that he was not bothered by the poltergeist. Cornell suspects that something is ‘off’, and it is not long before his suspicions are confirmed. The old man, he discovers, has cunningly rigged up a contrivance under the floorboards of one of the bedrooms that produces loud metallic noises whenever he pulls a bell wire that runs down one side of the chimney breast in the drawing-room below.
Cornell is not annoyed or disappointed by what some might have regarded as a fraudulent waste of his time. He is more interested in the question, ‘why?’ The old man explains that his daughter-in-law wants the house for herself and has been trying to have him moved into a care home on the grounds that he is infirm and senile. He produces a sheaf of letters she has written to the local council. Cornell, after skimming through a few of them, agrees that they are not the sort of letters that she would have written had she wanted her father-in-law to stay in the house where he had lived for thirty-five years. He also clearly sees that the old man is neither infirm nor senile. He tells the old man that he will keep his secret, but the ‘poltergeist’ must stop, and the old man agrees. He tells his family and neighbours that, for reasons he cannot explain, his house is no longer haunted.
In his early days, Cornell learns from his own mistakes and from the mistakes of others (that faculty of observation again). He came to see his work for the SPR as a form of social work, which involved a certain responsibility to, and for, the people he was trying to help. Often, when investigating alleged hauntings or poltergeists, what he uncovered was a very human story of strained family relationships, sibling rivalries, injured or repressed feelings, jealousy, and so on.
Common sense questions, however, are often interpreted, by mediums and people who believe they are under attack by supernatural entities, as evidence of disbelief and hostility, or what would now be called ‘micro-aggressions’, and are resented accordingly. Cornell has to draw upon all his reserves of courtesy and objectivity in order to pursue his legitimate inquiries without unintentionally causing offence. He comes to question the insistence of some members of the SPR that ‘scientific standards of evidence’ – that is, phenomena that can be successfully predicted and repeated experimentally – should be applied to the cases they investigate. He urges researchers to keep open minds and share whatever data they can amass. The fact that some mediums are frauds does not prove that they all are. Even a medium who has been caught out in a fraudulent practice may not have been a fraud from the start, and Cornell, in an address delivered at an SPR annual conference in Bournemouth, recommends a patient and prudent approach. Ask questions (who? what? when? where? how?), clarify whatever is unclear, collect data and examine the data rigorously, draw upon your previous experiences where appropriate, keep an open mind unless and until you have sufficient evidence to draw a rational conclusion.
Machell’s achievement is to have written an account of Cornell’s life and career that is scrupulously balanced and fair-minded. He does not make the mistake of many journalists when writing about the supernatural: that of adopting a smirking, know-it-all tone of smug superiority. Chasing the Dark is a pleasure to read for the quality of his prose as much as anything else. It is also a fitting memorial to Tony Cornell, who died, aged eighty-six, in 2010. Because he was dyslexic and found writing a struggle, he published little during his lifetime, but he deserves to be remembered for both his integrity as an investigator and his fundamental decency as a man. In Ben Machell, he has had a worthy biographer.
Notes
1Cornell’s pugilistic skills were called upon much later in his life, when he, then in his middle fifties, was taking one of his sons to a football match. Their train carriage was invaded by a group of drunken hooligans. To the delight and, doubtless, the astonishment of his son, Cornell, with little fore-warning, got up and beat several of them very badly.
2In fact, Cornell’s extensive investigations of psychic phenomena were undertaken without pay. He earned his living as a sales rep, first, in agricultural machinery, later, in pharmaceutical supplies. A private, and, in some ways, mysterious man, who preferred to compartmentalize his life, Cornell may also have acted as a British Intelligence operative from time to time.
Jon Elsby is the author of numerous books on aspects of Roman Catholicism, and is a specialist in opera, on which subject he has written a wide-ranging survey of operatic tenors, Heroes and Lovers, published to great critical acclaim.
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