I Was the World's Most Famous Poltergeist Case

Matthew Manning on poltergeists, laboratory healing, and why he gave up fame at the height of it.

When Matthew Manning was 11, objects began moving around his Cambridge home. His father, an architect, ruled out every logical explanation one by one. The police sergeant he reported it to turned out to have a personal passion for ghost hunting and knew exactly who to call: a professor of genetics at Trinity College, Cambridge, who lived five miles away and was the world's leading expert on poltergeist activity.

That was 1967. By his early 20s Manning had been tested by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in Toronto, influenced cancer cells and blood cells in sealed laboratory flasks under controlled conditions, and sold over a million copies of his first book. Then he went to India, didn't find a guru, climbed to 12,000 feet in the Himalayas, and came home having decided to spend the rest of his life healing instead.

This is one of the strangest and most quietly compelling conversations this show has produced. Manning is not a performer. He describes bunk beds moving in a school dormitory with the same register as someone describing a delayed train. The laboratory results section, blood cells lasting four times longer with his hands present, is the best argument in the episode for taking the question seriously. And his observation that the thirst for something spiritual is stronger now than at any point in his 50 years of work lands at exactly the right moment.