The Haunting of Cassie Palmer

One of the saddest photographs I have ever seen was of my late grandparents standing on a beach with my grandmother's brother and his wife, posing, in a sort of washed-out sunshine shot that could have been an image from the Other Side. I'm not sure what state they were in when they went to visit my Uncle, but all of those people are dead now, ghosts from a distant but not too remote past, caught in a timeless frame of flashbulb memory as the sunset on their eldering lives.

Why watching and reading The Haunting of Cassie Palmer should remind me of that is a little puzzling, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I discovered the television show (six episodes from British television in the 80s) which first aired on Nickelodeon's psychic-themed anthology series "The Third Eye", which also featured the great, forgotten show "Into the Labyrinth", with Rothgo, Belor, Phil, Terry, and little Helen chasing the Nidus around the caverns of Cheddar, England, through one strange period after another. Other shows featured on "The Third Eye" included "Children of the Stones," "The Witches and the Grinnygog," and "Under the Mountain." The show was a creepy entryway for a young child into the world of occult fascination and probably altered the course of my life.

"The Third Eye" Opener

The Haunting of Cassie Palmer is both a book by Viv Alcock, and a television show starring Helen Probyn as Cassie Palmer, Elizabeth Spriggs as her phony medium of a mother, Stephen Bint as brother Tom, and Ruth Adcock as sister Mary. The four of them live in a comfortably spooky house where the mum, who is a fraud medium whose powers are on the wane, gets discovered using tricks and is just as soon threatened with being reported to the police for fraud. Her daughter, Cassie, who hears ghosts in the middle of the night, is being groomed by Mum to be the next family medium, being the "seventh child of a seventh child" (but, we thought it had to be a male progenitor, at least, according to Iron Maiden), but Cassie instead wants to be a doctor. Her brother wants to go away to learn cabinet-making and marry the boss's daughter, and what sister Mary wants is never made quite clear. Cassie wrestles with whether or not she believes any of Mum's Spiritualistic folderol, but the other two siblings seem not to. In the novel, there are four other children already moved away from "home."

There's a family drama over Mum's fraudulent mediumship, the fact that the family may have to move, and Cassie's ever-burgeoning psychic abilities. As a means to test that, the three kids sneak into an old cemetery at night, to resurrect the spirit of a deceased Victorian girl named "Charlotte Webb" (har-har), but instead get the spirit from the next grave over--the cadaverously tall, caped, and creepy "Deverill" (Geoffrey Rose), who sleeps under a neglected marker marked only by the name "Deverill" and the date of birth and death--Eighteenth Century.

Soon, Deverill's shade becomes a boon companion to young Cassie Palmer (a blending of Cassandra, the seeress who in the ancient Greek tragedy of Agamemnon warns him of Clytemnaestra to no avail, and "Palmer" as in "palm-reader"). His weird, sepulchral voice intones bleakly of ways to make wax candles into voodoo dolls and stick pins in them; he twitches at one point. And when Cassie, who isn't sure if he's a ghost or just a sex pervert, asks him if he "has fleas," he replies, "Someone just walked over my grave." It's a scene from the television version (which is almost identical in many respects, including dialogue, to the book) that has stayed with THIS author for his entire life.

Deverill cannot be burned by fire, nor can he be seen by others not "in attune" (the novel makes a tragic mistake in portraying a small dog as being "blind" to him, as this is the exact opposite of the truth--animals are far more sensitive to the presence of ghosts and spirits than humans, being able to see and sense in frequency ranges humans cannot) with the psychic world. He goes over to Mum's for tea (Mum seems at turns skeptical and enraptured by the prospect that young Cassie can conjure up a materialized spirit) and mysteriously vanishes. Mum contacts the Society for Psychical Research. In the end, a promise made by Deverill is fulfilled. He can RIP now.

The television children are all engaging young actors and actresses, and Elizabeth Riggs as Mum and Helen Probyn as Cassie are particularly endearing. Their fraught and dysfunctional family dynamics are realistic and will touch a few young viewers as authentic to their own experience, and the performance of Geoffrey Rose as the gaunt, tall, and menacing but kindly "Deverill" is most excellent. On the whole, The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, both the book and the television series, is engaging, suspenseful, and thought-provoking entertainment for readers (and viewers) both young and old.

Cassie is on the cusp of discovering herself, her true abilities, and her strange place in the scheme of things--these sorts of struggles are metaphorical for the "coming of age" that is the underlying theme of the book. Her loneliness is underscored by her desire not to leave her friends and have to move away because of Mum's fraud and its discovery. She has a clairvoyant vision of a holiday home by a lake with her sister, which happens to come true. She is constantly worried about both Mary and Tom leaving home, leaving her alone--with her ghosts. She wants the happiness, the sense of togetherness, and the assurance that "death is not the end" (to quote a Nick Cave song) that the presence of Deverill gives her. But can she truly handle her "haunting" life?

"The Haunting of Cassie Palmer" was a show I saw over thirty years ago, and not, then, the whole thing--and I had no idea about the book which I just read recently. Viv Alcock was an accomplished writer who wrote in an engaging and lively manner for young adults, and the novel is quite, quite good. Memories of the show, the "Third Eye", and the period when those four people in that photograph I mentioned were still alive, haunt my mind. Like Cassie and sister Mary by the lakeside, that photograph seems a supernal, fantasia-like, dreamlike image where time has stopped, in the "Summer Land" of mystic lore, perhaps.

Unlike Deverill though, unlike Cassie, I will not see any of those four people again.

Not on this side of the grave.

Note: "The Haunting of Cassie Palmer" is available for free viewing on YouTube. However, the quality of the upload is quite poor. The book is out of print but can be purchased from Thriftbooks online relatively inexpensively.

"The Haunting of Cassie Palmer" (1982)