about Dr. Leish. She had never heard of him, and she had to admit it was not just the thrill of the unknown; it was the man himself who was mesmerizing. She Googled him (which was cheating, she knew, but she needed the instant gratification), and clicked through several links, skimming eagerly. And all she got was a mystery wrapped in a mystery.
Leish had begun his career as a psychologist with a specialty in hypnotism, but became converted to the study of parapsychology after his experience on the farm in Sussex. He made a name for himself in Europe by investigating haunted houses and lecturing to parapsychology societies, and was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research. He wrote a book specifically about poltergeists, on which he continued to do field investigations into the 1960s.
So was he here at Duke? Laurel wondered. The film had shown footage of the Duke campus, and the shots of Leish testing students with the Zener cards and dice machines in the film certainly looked like photos she’d seen of the Duke lab. She tried Googling “Leish+Duke University,” but found no matches beyond a few articles that mentioned both in general reference to the subject of parapsychology—nothing to indicate he was ever part of the Duke parapsychology lab.
Next she Googled Leish’s book, The Lure of the Poltergeist. It was out of print and going for a staggering $1,800 on Abe Books, when it was even available.
“Well, that’s out,” she murmured wryly.
She returned to clicking through articles online and skimming. As a personality psychologist, she found the whole idea of poltergeists fascinating: that random, inexplicable movements could have a mischievous, teasing quality, even an intention—although surely those qualities were simply projected onto the phenomena by human observers. But that in itself was tantalizing: the psychological projection of human qualities onto inexplicable phenomena.
She was intrigued by Leish’s take on the subject. He’d headed up poltergeist investigations in Europe and reported that poltergeist manifestations almost always increased over the course of an incident—and actually stepped up once outside investigators were on the scene. Leish advanced a theory that a poltergeist was fed by a spiraling group dynamic, that started with the family and then was fed by the expectations of investigators, researchers, even law enforcement officials and the media—in other words, that a poltergeist was actually created by human intention.
A kind of group hypnosis, Laurel thought, or shared madness. There was something that made sense about it, and admittedly, was fascinating.
She clicked onto another article—then her eyes stopped on a phrase:
After Leish’s death in April 1965 …
She sat back in her chair, thinking, So he must have died not long after that film was made.
She felt a curious sense of disappointment, even loss.
She made a notation in her notebook and circled it. After a moment she added a row of question marks as well.
Leish died April 1965
???
She stood from her table and stepped to the window, opening it to let in the cold, wet air. She stood leaning against the sill, watching the rain, and thinking about the maze of boxes.
The initially daunting lack of order to the files had become intriguing. Laurel had a growing suspicion that the chaos had an order of its own, that someone had deliberately scrambled the contents of the boxes so that only someone with a road map could decipher the patterns. The mystery made her even more determined to crack the code.
“There’s something else, too,” she said aloud into the cool dimness of the room.
At first, it was just a question that surfaced again as she worked her way steadily through the boxes, a question she filed away to consider later, but which kept popping up in her mind and then gradually took over her thoughts.
Why the hell did the lab shut down?
She went back to her desk table, and sat in her chair to open the notebook in which she’d been compiling her random notes.
In 1965, the Duke parapsychology lab had shut down completely. All right, Dr. Rhine had retired from the Duke faculty, and he moved his research off campus, continuing his work with the other foundations he’d set up. Laurel could understand that—to a degree. But why shut the entire lab down? All records stopped short in 1965, just when it seemed that the parapsychology lab was more famous than it had ever been, garnering national media attention on the Seaford poltergeist investigation—“The House of Flying Objects”—and the subsequent “Project Poltergeist” case in Newark. The entire