Margo Williams Archive
Margo and Walter Williams believed they had proof of personality survival after death of the body. What kind of proof, you may ask, is proof ghosts are real?
Proof of Life. Margo Williams Clairaudient Investigator
From the 1970s, Isle of Wight clairaudient investigator Margo Williams compiled one of Britain's most unusual collections of paranormal case material.
This digital archive preserves those investigations and explores them with an open but critical mind.
The trend in psychical research generally has moved away from its early focus on life after death, to quantitative analysis of psychic abilities generated in laboratory tests.
Margo Williams' work returned to its pioneers' preoccupation – the afterlife.
Notoriously difficult to prove to satisfactory scientific standard, since the deceased do not present for lab evaluation or media press events; which is why the talking dead, or 'Drop-in Communicator' evidence, as claimed by Margo and Walter Williams, is highly-valued and rigorously tested.
Who Was Margo Williams
Born in 1922 in the county of Kent in the UK, Margo left school at 14 for work as a London office clerk, then telephone exchange operator in central London during world war two.
Post war, she and Walter emigrated to South Africa where she worked as laboratory assistant; discovered a rare skeleton of a bottle-nose dolphin Icthyosaurus fossil on Noordhoek beach 1952, displayed as exhibit in the Iziko South African Museum.
Nick Hammond
During the early 1970s Margo and her scientist husband Walter returned to the UK and settled in the south coastal town of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight.
Since childhood she had experienced extra sensory abilities. But in her 50s following a period during which her senses of taste and smell were disrupted for many months, she claimed to have heard a ghost in her own home recite a lengthy poem detailing her life in the 1800s, and of how she participated in a homicide.
Sceptical, husband Walter researched some of the information clues in the poem to prove his wife was "hearing voices", a strange but purely biological menopausal symptom. Surprised by the accuracy and inaccessibility of detail, he wondered how his uneducated housewife knew that information.
More profound surprises followed.
What Makes This Archive Unique?
During the months that followed over thirty different "drop-in" communicators spoke to Margo. Walter Williams scoured every line of text to provide historical verification, he manged to establish full identities for 14 of them.
At least eight of the communicants had died over seas in countries as far apart as the U.S.A, Australia, Sicliy and India. They were were from all walks of life, from a humble scullery maid to the wife of an American president.
They also were of widely differing branches of religion: a quaker, a Jew, a Roman Catholic and a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. The majority dated from the 19th century; the most recent was an Afrikaner whose death was recorded in 1965; and the earliest was a mercer's assistant who described his life around 1770; and a smuggler hanged in 1749.
In total there were nearly 600 scripts, about 60, 000 words.
These included a ship's surgeon; a coalminer lost in a colliery disaster; an amateur seaweed specialist; a dismissed public schoolmistress; a US president's wife and a Scottish folklorist poet who dictated a verse collection and anthology.
Walter's investigations were global, contacting media, libraries and archives across the UK and the wider world. Astonished by the details and evidence that his wife could not possibly have access to, local and international media took up their story.
News of Margo's discarnate visitors, and Walter Williams' research in confirming data and identities reached the media, local and national; including the BBC's World at One Programme and an invitation to present their evidence at the Parascience Conferences in London during September 1977 and 1978.
The couple attracted the special interest of senior members of the parapsychology departments at Edinburgh and Virginia university.
In a paper published in the Journal of Psychical Research the pair of academics declared the Williamses fakes.
Later Years. Exorcism or Ghost Rescue?
A purported paranormal experience at an Isle of Wight historic building, Appuldurcombe House set Margo on the course for which most people knew her on the Isle of Wight – ghost rescue and lost object recovery, and author.
Her work continued to feature in news, and interviews; though the Williamses' book The Moving Hand Writes was dropped, the Wilfion Scripts was published. Celtic musings of a famous but forgotten Scots poet, gender neutral insofar as he and she were one, William Sharp and Fiona Mcleod.
The poet grumbled and chewed out poetry from beyond the veil of death. 'Not his finest work,' complained an Isle of Wight critic. Harvard man Konraed Hopkins signed the verse and anthology project live for publication.
A Moment in Time of the Williamses
A snapshot of the Williams in 1981 described a 'normal' household couple; housewife cook and cleaner, ready with meal every night. Watches Coronation Street and mindful of the women's group meetings of the TG, of whom she was president.
Walter busy among the piles of archived scripts, writing letters; research genius in team digs around haunted ground for lost mementoes among the willing helpers out doing some good. “rescuing” quoted in islander magazine.
A portrait is offered, framed in the Williamses' home hallway wherein display a good collection of fossils, minerals, shells; and potted desert plants.
A normal regular small family unit, one of whom hears voices.
The tally of out-on-site cases continued to rise.
Media news reported how Margo was very busily engaged on her rescue work of “earthbound”, wrote the reporter from the Islander magazine.
Margo described how some communicants stayed, or came and went at will directing the Williamses to places where individual discarnate entities resembling human personalities, seemed held captive in time, bound to lost objects.
Ghosts in hauntings.
Lots of People Called Margo About the Ghost in Their home
Interviewers and article writers accompanied her for on-site studies by parapsychology authors and investigators. Media exposure resulted in calls from householders and business-owners on the Isle of Wight who believed themselves victims of ghosts and poltergeist activity, supernatural sitting-tenants who wouldn't leave their home.
“They are earth-bound spirits (I prefer not to use the word 'ghosts' who cannot break free from their earthly experiences,' wrote the Islander interviewer during summer of 1981.
Margo Williams' work presented a complex community of supernatural phenomenon, different kinds of ghosts at work and relationship.
Some incarcerated in situ. Others of subtle influence, the fabled 'guardian angels' guiding as and when.
The Williamses made no appreciable financial gain from their rescue services, only the cost of transport. "Sometimes we get a bag of apples," said Walter.
Mostly successful in homes and business, so testimonials confirm. When asked, Margo told the News of the World she had a 90% success rate in removing ghosts from people's homes.
The archive touches larger questions: survival after death; the power of memory and identity; the nature of time and its relationship to human experience.
What does this tell us about consciousness?
The Archive Today
Decades after the original investigations, the questions remain unresolved.
Were the communicators genuine surviving personalities or products of unconscious creativity?
Were they expressions of memory embedded within places; or do they point toward a reality not yet understood?
The purpose of this archive is not to impose answers, but to preserve the evidence and invite thoughtful exploration.
Explore more.
Nick Hammond
Nick Hammond
Nick Hammond
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