Video Of The Charlton House Haunting Apport

Sometime within the last few years, I read an interview with Melvyn Willin in which he commented:

A BBC Video Diary programme wanted to film Maurice [Grosse] attending an investigation. ASSAP organised one such event at Charlton House and a cup was caught exploding in a darkened room on video in a locked room with a camera man, Maurice and one other investigator witnessing it. BBC Radiophonic Workshop tested the sound patterns and concluded that it was NOT the sound of a cup being broken in the usual way and further experiments failed to replicate the circumstances. It seemed to implode rather than explode.

In my tribute to Maurice Grosse that I posted a couple of years ago, I linked some videos of the opening segments of that Video Dairies program. To my knowledge, the second half of the show, which includes the material Melvyn refers to, wasn't available on YouTube at the time. But the full program was recently put up, which I saw linked on the Twitter account of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Go here to see the beginning of the relevant segment of the program. The event in question happens at 32:12. After the event, you see some discussion of what happened among the people there at the time and a discussion among some members of the SPR's staff. (Including an argument between Grosse and Mary Rose Barrington, accompanied by a cup-throwing experiment in the SPR's facility!) There's then some intervening material on other subjects, so you can go here to see the remainder of what's relevant to the topic of this post.

For further background about Charlton House and the event under consideration here, read this article at the Occult World web site. I want to quote some comments Guy Playfair made about this incident, then conclude with some comments of my own:

It [the Video Diaries program] also showed what may turn out to be the first ever live 'apport' on film, recorded by associate producer Amir Jamal in the presence of two witnesses: Grosse and ASSAP vigil member Les Herbert. Following a very loud noise, pieces of a teacup were found on the floor within a much smaller area than that of a similar 'control' cup later thrown by human hand as part of the follow up investigation (during which it was found to be quite difficult to get the cup to break at all on the wooden floor).

Each of the three witnesses to this incident is satisfied that none of the others was up to any tricks. Les Herbert described himself as "one hundred percent satisfied" and added "hand on heart, that was not faked. Nobody got in and did that - no human being, at least."

He also noted that the noise sounded to him like an explosion, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop expert John Hunt confirmed that it was indeed more typical of an explosion than a breaking teacup.

Amir Jamal is not likely to have flung anything since he had a torch [flashlight] in one hand at the time and his camcorder in the other. This was running, and pointing at a motionless Maurice. "I have absolutely no idea how the cup came crashing into the room," he says in a written statement, a copy of which is in the SPR library. "It was either so-called 'poltergeist' activity or a very clever hoax. If it was a hoax, I have absolutely no idea how it could be done. I would be genuinely interested to find out how it could have been faked." (The Paranormal Review, May 1997, p. 18)

I think Melvyn Willin's reference to an implosion rather than an explosion is more likely to be correct. If the event was genuine, the closeness of the cup pieces on the floor seems to make the most sense if an implosion occurred shortly before the cup hit the floor. To fake such an event, you might place the cup pieces on the floor, then use a recording of an explosion (or implosion) to make it seem that the cup just broke. But you'd still have more to explain, such as how the cup pieces were placed there without being detected.

Since Grosse and Jamal seem highly unlikely to have faked the incident, for reasons like the ones mentioned above, Herbert is the best candidate for fraud. But it seems unlikely that he'd have had sufficient motive to fake something like that in less monitored circumstances, and he's even more unlikely to have had sufficient motive under the more monitored circumstances in question. Remember, there was a video camera running, a flashlight on, and two people in the room who might see him faking an event if he were to fake one. Grosse comments, during the segment of the video filmed at the SPR's facility, that everybody in the room was accounted for at the time. Herbert's location apparently was known at the time, and even if it hadn't been, the flashlight and camera would quickly have been turned in his direction once the explosion was heard. You hear the sound of people running just after the sound of the incident, so there was a quick reaction to it. Herbert had a flashlight, which would have made his section of the room significantly visible, and the flashlight would have moved with him when he was carrying it. In the video, you can see him moving, with his flashlight, to turn the lights on. It seems unlikely that, under those circumstances, he would have moved to the middle of the room, placed the cup pieces on the floor, then moved back without either of the other two men in the room noticing and without the camera picking it up. There's no sound of anybody opening the door to the room just before the event, and anybody who threw the pieces of the teacup from a distance wouldn't have been able to have gotten the pieces to land in the form in which they did, so close to each other.

And there is precedent for poltergeists and hauntings producing such apports, as Grosse's broken rock pieces from the Enfield case (discussed in the video) illustrate. Furthermore, the building where the event happened had a history of reports of haunting incidents, like the ones involving music mentioned by Herbert in the video. Thus, they had reason to watch and listen carefully. That's what they were there for. Under such conditions, it seems absurd to suggest that Herbert would have moved twenty feet across the room, placed seven pieces of a teacup on the floor, moved twenty feet back, then triggered an audio recording of an explosion (or implosion), all without either of the other men in the room or the camera detecting what he was doing. And if there had been a long stretch of time when the other men were inattentive enough to have not noticed Herbert carrying out a fraud like the one referred to above, I doubt the two of them would have expressed so much confidence (as referred to above) that nobody in the room had faked the event.

It would be good to have more evidence for the paranormality of the incident, and I wouldn't claim to be confident about what happened. However, on balance, it seems more likely than not to be a genuine paranormal event.

But you don't have to think it's likely to be authentic to acknowledge that there's a significant chance that it is. And that should caution us against the popular claim that such events are never caught on video or never have any other supporting evidence of a similar nature, such as significant audio or photographic evidence. I've written elsewhere about paranormal events for which we have better video evidence than we have for this Charlton House incident. But even lesser incidents, like the one under consideration here, have the sort of significance I've just mentioned.

Aside from the point I just made and wanting to make people aware that this Charlton House video is now available on YouTube, I wanted to post about it because of the potential for gathering more evidence. I briefly looked for contact information for Amir Jamal and Les Herbert, but couldn't find any. Maybe somebody else will find a way to contact them. It would be good to get more information from them, such as some comments from Jamal about how much Herbert's activities were being monitored prior to 32:12 in the video linked above. An earlier part of the video shows the room's floor for a while, and it doesn't look like the teacup pieces are there at the time. It would be especially good if segments of Jamal's footage leading up to 32:12, portions not aired during the program, are still available. I doubt they are, but it's a possibility.