The house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, is no longer there. In October 1996 the city council ordered the removal of all physical traces of the Wests’ home where young girls were raped, tortured and murdered by Fred and Rosemary. Fred had used his builder’s skills to conceal the bodies at the three-storey family home. Nick, a fiftysomething landlord who owned other houses in the street, told me the council had removed every last brick. These were crushed into dust and scattered across a landfill site in unmarked locations.

Why do we demolish and remove houses associated with appalling murders? The same happened to the Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Jeffrey Dahmer lived, and the house where Ian Huntley murdered the two little girls in Soham. Dahmer’s place is now a car park and 5 College Close has been laid to turf.

In 2000, Alan and Susan Sykes sat down to watch a Channel Five documentary about Dr Samson Perera, a Leeds University scientist who, 15 years earlier, had murdered and dismembered his teenage daughter. As the programme unfolded, Alan and Susan were shocked to discover that their house in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was the actual scene of the horrific act, and that police had never recovered all of the 100 body parts. Alan and Susan were distraught. They moved out immediately, selling the house six months later.

Could you live in that house in Wakefield? Even if there were no missing body parts secreted around the building, just the thought of some-thing horrible taking place is enough to keep most away. But not all. Some seek out memorabilia from a murder scene. Less gruesomely, mature adults will pay good money for personal items simply because they once belonged to someone famous: a fragment of bed linen once slept on by Elvis Presley, a swatch of cloth from Princess Diana’s wedding dress. The charity website clothesoffourback.com auctions clothes worn by celebrities for the benefit of children’s charities. It used to offer a dry-cleaning option to successful bidders, but eventually dropped the service because no one wanted the clothing washed - they wanted to own something intimate and personal to their idols. Memorabilia collectors fetishise physical objects, as if they possess some property inherited from the previous owner. Something supernatural, something susceptible to a “supersense”.

The most obvious source of supernatural beliefs is religion, but you don’t have to be religious or spiritual to hold a supersense. You might have beliefs about psychic powers or telepathy, or even plain old luck and destiny.

When a group acts upon these superstitions, we call them ceremonial rituals. Otherwise, they are individual quirks. These range from the simple superstitions handed down through cultures, such as knocking on wood, to idiosyncratic personal rituals we engage in to bring us luck. Even the corridors of power are not free from them. Tony Blair always wore the same pair of shoes for Prime Minister’s Questions. During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama carried a lucky poker chip. His opponent, John McCain, was open about his catalogue of superstitions, always carrying a lucky feather and a lucky compass from his days as a pilot in the Vietnam war. One wonders why, seeing as he was shot down and spent years as a prisoner of war.

Why do people believe in things that go against natural laws? It cannot simply be ignorance. The answer is evidence. The number one reason given by people who believe in the supernatural is personal experience. In one survey, half the number of spouses of recently deceased partners reported feeling the presence of the dead; a third reported seeing their ghost. Even my late father-in-law, a brain surgeon of eminent status, saw the ghost of his recently deceased wife. Throughout his career, he dealt with patients with brain damage and was very familiar with the peculiar experiences the mind can generate. He knew he was hallucinating, but that did not stop him seeing her. For believers, examples of the supernatural are so plentiful, they are impossible to ignore.

Where do we get our supernatural beliefs from? There are two schools of thought: either they are ideas that we hear from other people, stories we tell each other, especially our children; or they are ideas that partly come from within us.

Children believe what they are told by adults. We tell them about fantasy figures such as Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the bogeyman, and we encourage them to take part in the archaic ceremonies and rituals associated with Halloween and Christmas. There is a real benefit to believing what others tell you. And who best to learn from but older and wiser members of the tribe?

This is why Richard Dawkins thinks religion is a form of child abuse. He wants a world without God, religion, or any form of supernaturalism. There is room only for science, he asserts, when it comes to understanding nature. Dawkins accuses the churches of indoctrinating our young people with superstitious beliefs.

In fact, most researchers who study the development of the mind do not regard humans as blank slates for any idea or belief. The bulk of the work on young children’s thinking shows that, before they are capable of instruction, pre-school children have already formulated for themselves a variety of misconceptions. Like the instinct for language found in every society since the beginnings of civilisation, is it possible that a supersense is also part of the human endowment? Do we all start off with an inclination to the supernatural that only some of us can overcome?

In the public lectures I give on the origins of supernatural thinking, I hand out a black fountain pen dating from the 30s that once belonged to Albert Einstein. OK, I lie to the audience about the provenance of the pen, but the reverence and awe towards this object is palpable. Everyone wants to hold it. Then I ask the audience if they would be willing to wear the cardigan I brought along. They are understandably suspicious. After a moment’s consideration, usually around one-third of them raise their hands. So I offer a prize. More hands are raised. I then tell them about Cromwell Street as an image of Fred West rises menacingly from the bottom of the PowerPoint display. Once they are told that the cardigan belonged to Fred West, most hands usually shoot down, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter. People recognise that their change of heart reflects something odd.

There are always the exceptions, of course. Some people resolutely keep their hand raised. Typically, they are male and determined to demonstrate their rational control. Or they suspect, rightly, that I am lying about the owner of the cardigan. What is remarkable is that audience members sitting next to one of these individuals visibly recoil from them: how could someone even consider touching such an appalling garment?

Last year, this stunt earned me some notoriety in Norwich. I was presenting my theory on the origin of a supersense, and why science and rationality will not easily persuade people to abandon such beliefs. I argued that humans are born with brains that infer hidden forces and structures in the real world, and that some of these inferences lead us to believe in the supernatural. Therefore, we cannot put sole responsibility for spreading supernatural belief on religions and cultures, which simply capitalise on our supersense.

The cardigan demonstration was meant to illustrate to an educated, rational audience that sometimes our beliefs can be truly supernatural but have nothing to do with religious indoctrination. Atheists, too, tend to show revulsion at the idea of touching West’s cardigan. If it’s true that our beliefs can be supernatural but unconnected to religion, then it must also be true that humans will not necessarily evolve into a rational species, because a mind designed for generating natural explanations also generates supernatural ones.

News of the cardigan stunt and my comments spread across global digital networks. People were infuriated. The “Fred West cardigan” dramatically revealed that my listeners’ automatic intuition kicked in before they had time to consider why they would not wear it. Sadistic killers disgust most of us and, without even thinking about it, we would not want to come into physical contact with them or their possessions.

I think the main reason the stunt annoyed critics was that they probably experienced the same clash between intuition and logic that my audience felt. Also, there is simply no correct answer to the question, making it all the more vexing. Would you wear a killer’s cardigan for £1? What about £10,000? There is a point at which most people would change their mind, but what is so undesirable in the first place about touching items owned by evil people or living in houses where murders were committed?

Why should a cardigan come to represent the negative association with a killer? If I had chosen a knife or noose, the association would have been clear. A cardigan offers warmth and comfort and, most importantly for my demonstration, intimacy. This combination was meant to jar and shock. The infamous photo of a snarling West taken at his arrest produces a strong association, but personal items such as clothing trigger stronger negative responses. Another study found that more people would rather wear a cardigan that has been dropped in dog faeces and washed than one that has also been cleaned but was worn by a murderer.

It is as if we treat evil as a physical contaminant that could be transmitted by touch. You can’t wash away such contamination as though it were dirt. Most of us would treat the cardigan as if it were imbued with evil.

In the same way that some of us revere holy sites, priests and sacred relics, we also shun places, people and objects that are taboo. To do that, however, we have to attribute something more to them than just their physical properties. We may like to think of ourselves as rational people without superstitions, but this is just one area where we stray into the supernatural.

Read the full article | Print this article