Unexplained : True Tales of Unexplained Mysteries with Bestselling Author Steph Young Steph Young

George Chapman, who died in 2006, was brought up in the working-class docklands area of Merseyside, Liverpool. He worked variously as a docker, a firefighter, and he was a professional boxer. Maurice Barbanell, former Fleet Street newspaper editor once remarked about Chapman; ‘When Spiritualism’s history comes to be written, the Lang/Chapman partnership, which has brought health to thousands of sufferers after their cases were called “hopeless”, will contribute some of its most illumined pages’, and this will shortly be explained. During World War II Chapman became an Air Force Commander and then he joined Marines, where he taught unarmed combat. He met his wife Margaret in 1945 and they had a daughter Vivian, but sadly she died just 4 weeks after her birth. This tragedy caused Chapman to consider, was there an afterlife? In search of answers, he turned to the Clergy, but they warned him not to dabble ‘in the supernatural.’ After the War, Chapman joined the Fire Brigade where he met a fellow fireman called Leslie Miles. On the long nightshifts between emergency calls, Miles would experiment with an upturned tumbler and the letters of the alphabet, in an attempt to receive messages from the spirit world, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the fire crew, their curiosity fully aroused, joined in with him. Soon, they were all sitting around the table at night at the fire station, putting their fingers on the glass and watching it move from letter to letter to spell out words and phrases. Meanwhile at home, Chapman began to do the same thing with his wife, and before long he was stunned to receive a message purportedly from his dead mother, who had died when he was just 5 years old. Of course, he needed to check that he wasn’t simply deluding himself, and so he asked his relatives to see if what his dead mother had told him could be verified. To his surprise, his relatives confirmed it all to be completely correct. This helped Chapman to believe that there really could be life-after-death and he began to spend a couple of hours at home every day trying to receive more messages from spirits. To his surprise, many of the messages they gave him told him that he was a healer. As well as being a fireman, Chapman was a professional boxer. How on earth could he be a healer then, he wondered to himself? He had to find out more and so soon he put together a development circle with likeminded people, where further spirit messages repeated to him that he was a healer. Spirits were coming through Chapman – even though he had no idea at the time because he had gone into trance and was completely oblivious to it. The spirits were healers too, they said, and they were going to work with him. According to Chapman’s later biography, ‘One of the spirits was introduced to us as Dr. Lang.’ Dr. Lang told them that Chapman would be working with him to heal sick patients. Of course, Chapman didn’t take this as fact; after all, it sounded completely incredulous, and firstly, he wanted to know if a Dr. Lang had even ever really existed. He wanted absolute proof. ‘Too many alleged spirit guides do not stand up to critical exam,’ he wrote, and the spirit communicating with them, ‘should be able to give dates, names, and details of his earthly experiences.’ Dr. Lang duly went on to give names, dates, places, for the purpose of verification, and Chapman began to check them out.  ‘There were colleagues of Lang still in practice. There were also patients who had consulted him while he was a surgeon on earth…they confirmed that it was the same Dr. Lang they had known.’ Pretty soon, Chapman began to do what the spirits were urging him to do – to become a healer and treat people, and he set up a clinic at his home in Aylesbury. One of his patients was a Dr. Kildare Singer, who had been taught ophthalmology by Dr. Lang at the Middlesex Hospital and was suffering with cancer. When Dr. Singer came to hear that peo

Robert Gambier Bolton, born in 1854, was the official photographer of Queen Victoria’s animals. He was an English anthropologist, naturalist and photographer of natural history. His photography is still sought after by collectors, and some of his pictures are on display in the Natural History Museum.  He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a Fellow of the Zoological Society. He was also the author of Ghosts in Solid Form: An investigation of a certain little-known phenomena: Materializations. His book was the result of carrying out a series of experiments over 7 years, which resulted, rather astonishingly, in multiple manifestations of ‘dead’ people; though it was not without its dangers…

H Healer and clairvoyant John Cain stood in the local civic hall with his hands on a patient, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a bottle of whiskey nearby. As you can imagine, he was not typical of many involved in the spiritualist movement, whose attitude at times can tend towards holier than thou. Cain was born in 1931 in the village of Eastham, Merseyside, near Liverpool. During his national service in the Army he was a physical training instructor, and he was also a boxer and black belt in Judo. In 1956 he started his own business as a blacksmith and he became incredibly successful, employing thirty people and driving a Rolls Royce; but he would soon give it all up to devote himself to giving spiritual healing for free to anyone in need. One day, he’d been sitting in the pub with his wife, as he did most evenings, when he noticed he could see something out of the corner of his eye that looked like shimmering mist. Instinctively, he believed this had to be some kind of ‘energy,’ and he felt suddenly inclined to place his hands on a nearby person in the pub who he felt was in need of healing. As he did so, the person’s pain, that they’d been feeling for a long while, suddenly disappeared. Cain is interviewed on an old radio show called ‘Beyond Belief’ for Radio Merseyside, and presenter Kieran Devay says, “Cain smokes up to 50 cigarette a day, swears like a trooper, and is more than partial to Scotch Whisky. He works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. His wife Audrey acts as his secretary, dealing with the hundreds of letters he receives each week asking for his help.” Cain says, “Going back to when I was about five years old my mother suffered with migraines. I just used to rub her temples and the pain would disappear.  At the age of 14 I joined a boxing club. Later on, I practiced Judo for 25 years.” When members of his sports clubs would suffer sprains or other injuries, Cain found he could take away the pain by massaging and manipulating the injured areas of the body. “I found I could take the pain away – but didn’t realise it was the gift of healing.” Cain says he was brought up in the Church of England but as a young man, his interest turned to Spiritualism and what spiritualists call a development circle, where people attempt to make communication with the dead. However, Cain didn’t last long in the circle at his local spiritualist church, for understandable reasons; “We sat in the silence for an hour, and then you say what happened in that hour. Well, the lady sitting opposite me said, “You’ll never believe whose been with me tonight John.” I said, “Well, go on, try me.” She said, “Well, I’ve had Long John Silver with me, and we’ve been walking for hours along the beach.” So, I said to her, “Did he tell you where the treasure’s buried?” She said, “No,” so I said, “Well, let’s go back into the silence, find out where he buried the treasure, and we’ll all go and have a bloody good holiday in the Bahamas.” Then the lady sitting next to her said, “Isn’t that funny Nancy, I’ve had his parrot sitting on my shoulder all night.” Well, I thought to myself, this is the time you bail out John!” After such nonsense, Cain decided he would leave the circle that night, but when he went back the following week to tell them this, one of the ladies in the group became upset and asked him how she would get her healing if he left the group. Cain didn’t understand what she meant and so she explained that since he’d been attending the circle, her back pain had vanished. Then another lady in the group chipped in, telling Cain that she was in a lot of pain that evening and would he be kind enough to put his hands on her. Cain did as she asked, and her pain vanished. This was before Cain had become a healer, and he couldn’t understand how this could be happening. At the same time, his daughter was suffering with a huge number of warts on one

We are getting closer now… we are coming through the walls…

‘In 1981 I would begin to experience visitations by the Harlequin that would haunt me for years to come.  It would often enter my room in the dead of night and communicate to me without words.  I was never awakened by it, I always seemed to be spontaneously engaged in the communication and spontaneously wide-awake. In other words, there was never a beginning to any of these memories, just an “all-of-a-sudden.” During these early visitations, the Harlequin communicated through a series of movements that I was intuitively able to understand naturally with my young mind.  This was sort of the opposite of an interpretive dance.  Its body was very lithe and its movements extraordinarily graceful.  Not even the best dancers on earth could replicate these types of movements.  The Harlequin’s body would stretch and contort in ways that would cause bones to break and muscles to tear.  I struggle to remember its clothing but remember them being motley in appearance.  There were strange hats and clothes that couldn’t be fit into a specific period of history.  The communications, from what I remember, always took the form of intuitive concepts.  In alien abduction lore, this might be similar to telepathic communication. Now the gender of the Harlequin had always vexed me.  In my early childhood experiences, it was unmistakably androgyne.   I viewed it either as a male or female being.  Its face, nevertheless, had an ancient appearance.  Its skin was pale white and sometimes appeared to be blue.  On closer examination, the skin had subtle cracking as if I were looking at an old statue that had suddenly come alive.  Its eyes were large and blue and their movement was always dramatic as if it were trying to be comedic.  The movement of the eyes could best be described as mime-like in that they were expressive to make up for the lack of verbal communication.  When it looked at me, I felt like I had absolute attention on me.  This attention was so prominent that I could feel the Harlequin’s attention as if it were my own.  To clarify that, I was able to see these encounters as if I was slightly outside the body looking in.  The most memorable physical feature were its hands.  The hands looked similar to my mother’s hands.  It had thin fingers and somewhat bulbous knuckles on the finger joints. It perhaps sounds strange, but the hands had the appearance of ancient wisdom.  It was like I was looking at the hands of a sage or individual of great knowledge. The sight of its hands always made me feel comforted as though the Harlequin had a familial relation to me.  I often linked the Harlequin to my mother because she more than anyone else seemed to sense its presence.  The beings mouth was always open in the shape of an “O.”  It never moved which solidified my belief that its face looked like a living statue.  That characteristic always gave the Harlequin a look of shock and bewilderment which seemed to increase the intensity of its presence.  The mouth being open in that manner made it seem as if it was trapped in a state perpetual horror…’