Michael Prescott's Blog

Controls, communicators, and personas

One of the most vexing problems in the study of mediumship is the question of the authenticity of the purported communicators. Are they the actual spirits of the deceased, or are they some sort of artificial patchwork constructions created by the medium's subconscious mind?

Although this question has been endlessly debated, I think it is possible to argue that it is fundamentally misconceived. But before we look at my idea, let's take a closer look at the problem itself. The best brief presentation of it that I know is found in Stephen E. Braude's outstanding book Immortal Remains. Braude writes (on pp, 33-35),

Mediums often work through so-called controls or control-personalities. These are recurrent and self-consistent characters who act as interpreters or intermediaries (or masters-of-ceremony) between sitters and communicators.... Most controls are flagrantly artificial personalities, often claiming to be from locales that would be exotic to the medium, and often claiming to be and acting like children.... Often, controls of English mediums have claimed to be Native Americans, Black Africans, Arabs, or Chinese, and their opinions, behavior, and diction had the "stilted and stylized" appearance of a caricature or cinematic concept (Gauld, 1982, p. 115). Moreover, some controls exhibit extreme astrological confusions. One, claiming to be a Black African child, asked C.D. Broad for the key to his wigwam. Another, who claimed to be a Native American chief, requested the sitters to encourage him by singing "Swanee River" (Broad, 1962, p. 254). ...

Given their obvious artificiality, there can be little doubt that the medium constructed [these control personalities] subconsciously. In fact, as Gauld observed in connection with [the medium] Mrs. Piper,

Even the most life-like and realistic controls, such as GP, show signs of being impersonations (not deliberate ones). They break down at just the point where Mrs. Piper's own stock of knowledge runs out, viz. when they are required to talk coherently of science, philosophy and literature (which the living GP could readily have done). (Gauld, 1982, p. 114) ...

Controls will, generally speaking, not admit their blunders. They will rationalize, explain away, concoct any excuse, however tenuous and childish. All other considerations seem subordinated to an overwhelming urge to keep the drama flowing without pause or hiccup. (Gauld, 1982, p. 115)

Granted, some controls are compellingly lifelike. But as Gauld also notes, it doesn't help that the most convincing communicators adamantly vouch for the authenticity of the least plausible controls. That makes it seem as if "the authenticity of the former is inextricably and disadvantageously tied up with the authenticity of the latter" (p. 115). So it doesn't require much of a leap to suspect that realistic communicators are likewise creative constructs, possibly based on information the medium acquired psychically.

I should add that the communicators themselves are also sometimes clearly fictional, although seldom as extravagantly contrived as the controls who apparently transmit their messages. For example, in 1909 Stanley Hall deceived Mrs. Piper's Hodgson control by asking for, and then receiving, messages from a niece, Bessie Beals, who never existed. When confronted by Hall, the Hodgson-control could only offer lame explanations....

So there we have the problem. Some of the controls and communicators appear to be obviously fictitious, yet even the more "lifelike" controls and communicators claim that the fictitious ones are real. Then are they all mere inventions of the medium's subconscious, assisted by "super-psi"? Or are some real and others fictitious, and if so, how can we tell which is which?

Or is it possible that this whole area of investigation has been undermined by a mistaken assumption?

The premise underlying the entire discussion is that there is some meaningful difference between the personality of a "legitimate" communicator and the personality of an "artificial" communicator. In other words, some personas, such as our own, are "real," while other personas, such as those of fictional characters in literature, are merely "made up."

But what if all personas are made up?

This is hardly a new idea. It's a basic tenet of mysticism both in the East and the West. The idea is that our personality or self, at least in the everyday sense of the term, is in some sense an illusion or, more precisely, an artificial construction. Our real being is the timeless, egoless Witness that observes the myriad dramas of the self. (Another way of looking at this is to distinguish between the small self, a.ka. ego or persona, and the big Self which observes it impersonally.)

If all personas are artificial, then there is no way to distinguish between the "real thing" and an invented character, because even the "real thing" is an invented character.

To put it another way, any persona may be seen as a thought form. This is true whether the persona is our own personal character or a character that we read about in a book.

Of course, one difference is that, unlike a character in a book, we are self-aware. But is there any way for a communicator to establish self-awareness? I doubt it. We don't even know for sure that other living people around us are self-aware. We assume they are, because we ourselves have self-awareness and we implicitly project our state of mind onto others. But we don't actually know. There is a leap of faith involved. If we can't be sure beyond any possible doubt even that our friends and neighbors are self-aware, how can we expect to determine whether or not a purported discarnate communicator is self-aware?

Consider also that we often blur the distinction between real and fictional personalities even in our own minds. For many readers, Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes is more real than some of the people they encounter on a daily basis. Conversely, we may not regard the people around us as fully real. It's all too easy to reduce a person to a symbol or a stereotype -- to say, "He's a vegetarian," or "He's a conservative (or a liberal)," and imagine that we have identified and defined that person.

The truth is, we frequently treat other people as if they were less than fully real - as mere abstractions - and we sometimes treat purely fictional characters as if they were entirely real - as our friends and even loved ones! Readers wept when Little Nell died in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. And they were outraged when Conan Doyle sent Holmes plunging over a waterfall to his (apparent) doom.

Even our own introspection can be similarly complicated. We may be aware that we're doing something stupid and irrational, but we go on doing it anyway. It's as if we're acting out a role in a drama and we can't stop. At other times, we are totally immersed in the role but emerge from it later and look back astounded at the things we said and did. "That wasn't me," we say -- and in a sense it's true.

So let's step back and take another look at this whole issue of communicators and controls in mediumship. We are told that some of the communicators appear to be genuine, while others appear to be artificial constructs. But if all personas are artificial constructs by their very nature, then this distinction falls apart. All personas are thought forms. All personas are equally real -- or unreal, depending on how you wish to look at it. All personas are ultimately ideas in the mind of God or thought forms in Cosmic Consciousness. The medium's special ability is to tap into some reservoir of these thought forms, without distinguishing between those that were originally connected with a self-aware consciousness and those that were not. The personas themselves cannot make such distinctions, either. One thought form is just like another.

This may seem like a bizarre notion, but I submit that it may be the best way of understanding the complexities of mediumistic communication. As a final piece of evidence to support my hypothesis, I would point to the famous experiment detailed in the book Conjuring Up Philip, by Iris Owen and Margaret Sparrow (summarized here and here).

A group of sitters made up a historical character named Philip and then spent some months trying to summon him in a séance. They eventually succeeded. Philip produced a variety of well-documented phenomena, including table movements of a very extreme and violent character, and loud raps that intelligently answered questions. Yet Philip was always understood to be a completely fictional character. There never was any such person, even though the Philip who seemingly manifested in the séance room insisted that this was in fact his identity.

Well, according to my hypothesis, it was his identity. The persona of Philip was an artificial construction -- just like my persona or yours. It was a thought form. It was able to manifest itself just as other thought forms are able to manifest themselves in séances. It was no more or less "real" than any other persona channeled by any other medium - no more or less real than any persona we encounter in our everyday lives ... including our own.

Of course, this idea has potential implications for the question of postmortem survival. Does anything really survive, and if so, what? If what survives is only a thought form without the self-awareness that we bought to it in life, then it is no more than what the mystical tradition has called an astral shell.* It may communicate, may answer questions, may even show initiative -- but it is not us.

The real "us" is the Witness, the self-awareness, and there seems to be no way to determine if that is still in play.

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*From an 1893 book on Theosophy: "The astral shell ... is devoid of soul, mind, and conscience. It is the "spirit" of the seance rooms... The mass of communications are from the astral shell of man."

Lord of the Flies

In an email, I mentioned to a liberal friend that conservatives (like me) fear social breakdown and anarchy. My friend opined that this is because conservatives believe in "forcing and controlling" people. I think the issue is more complex than that, and I wrote a fairly long reply. Since copying and pasting this email is a lot easier than writing anything original, and since, in the words of Krusty the Klown, "I'm a lazy, lazy man" ... here it is.

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The actual reason that conservatives fear anarchy is simple. Conservatives have a sense of history, and we know that anarchy is not an uncommon feature of history. The line between an orderly and a disorderly society is a narrow one. I was in LA in 1992 when the verdict in a police trial led, within hours, to total citywide chaos. Some of my friends had to evacuate their neighborhood because a gas station down the street was on fire. I had my evacuation route planned as well (head north on PCH into Ventura County). The riots ended only because the National Guard came rolling in - armored vehicles in the streets, guys with machine guns enforcing a dusk to dawn curfew.

Before that, there were the riots of the 1960s. Asbury Park, on the Jersey shore, used to be a family-friendly resort with amusement rides on the boardwalk. Then the race riots happened, and Asbury burned. Forty years later, the town is just starting to recover. Large parts of it are still a ghost town. Same thing happened to the Watts neighborhood in LA in the '60s, and in other cities.

Lord of the Flies is not just fiction. Look how fast natural disaster areas degenerate into looting. In the SF earthquake of 1906 more people died being shot as looters than from the quake itself.

Liberals are pleased to think that human nature is basically good and that we could all just get along if not for a few repressive social structures that ought to be changed. Conservatives think that human nature is basically flawed - not necessarily evil, but certainly a far cry from angelic - and that we need social norms to keep society from falling apart. This is why conservatives are concerned about abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, gay marriage, etc. - not because we are necessarily religious prudes (though some are) but because we know that without clear-cut moral guidelines enforced by community standards, there will be escalating chaos.

Similarly, liberals seem to think that war and conflict are an aberration, and that in a normal world there would be peace and harmony. Conservatives think that, human nature being what it is, war and conflict are inevitable. Frankly, we're surprised there isn't more of it.

The ideal situation for a conservative is a society with sufficiently strong moral standards that minimal government intrusion is necessary. People would avoid criminal or irresponsible acts because they were deeply imbued with a sense of propriety foisted on them by their parents, teachers, pastors, etc. Unfortunately we have seen a general breakdown of such standards over the past 50 years, along with the rise of "do your own thing and screw society" attitudes. The result is that many people have only a vestigial sense of personal responsibility and almost no capacity for guilt and shame. It may not be a coincidence that sociopathy is on the ascent in such an environment.

Government then has to step in, in loco parentis, and try to require citizens to act in responsible ways - by limiting welfare assistance so that people cannot live on the dole indefinitely, by banning drugs so people can't become addicts, even by mandating that seat belts be buckled, since many people apparently lack even this rudimentary sense of self-preservation.

One reason many conservatives are fascinated by the Civil War is that this was a time when things fell apart and the center did not hold. And we know it can happen again. Not that there will be another Civil War (at least, not any time soon), but that the bonds of society can be sundered in so many ways. Even now there is a stark difference between the Blue States and the Red States, or the coasts and "flyover country." It wasn't that long ago that the "generation gap" was in the news, and hippies were fighting hardhats in the streets, and the Weathermen were blowing up buildings, and political figures were being shot on a regular basis (RFK, Martin Luther King, and George Wallace, to name three). We see almost the same intensity in the debate over illegal immigration (on the right) and over the war on terror (on the left). Perhaps an accommodating figure (Barack Obama?) can heal these divisions. More likely, a polarizing figure (Hillary Clinton?) will exacerbate them.

But we don't have to look to Gettysburg or Bull Run for an example of societal breakdown. Just look at the inner cities, which have become war zones. And now gang violence is spreading to the suburbs. Drugs are everywhere. Teen pregnancy is out of control. STDs are epidemic. Airhead starlets become famous for flashing their private parts to the paparazzi. Popular culture glorifies gangs and drugs, rape and murder. Videogames encourage kids to think killing sprees are cool. School shootings are trendy. People in Internet chat rooms openly call for the assassination of politicians they disagree with. The documentary film Zoo, recently released, presents a sympathetic portrait of people who have sex with animals. "Bestiality brothels" have become a hot trend in the Netherlands. People have tried to sell their own organs on eBay. Terrorists attack us, and our leaders tell us that we need to "understand" them and not to judge. And the rough beast keeps slouching toward Bethlehem ...

In other words, if we conservatives think that the breakdown of social order is a serious concern, we just might have a point.

Saturday morning rant

And now a brief essay on the world of the literary arts.

******

"Why Hemingway Shot Himself; or: Why F. Scott Fitzgerald Got So Darn Depressed"

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by Michael Prescott

Authors get moody. But why?

I have the explanation.

This guy wrote me asking for signed bookplates 'cause he's such a BIG FAN.

So I sent him two.

He was very appreciative. Here's his email:

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Thank you very much, I just received my book plates! I have read your book "Last Breath" and I'm getting ready to read "Final Sins", I can't wait :)

After that I'm stuck though, those are the ones of yours my library has on the shelves :(

Sincerely,

[Name withheld]

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Get that?

He's "stuck."

Can't read any book that's not IN THE LIBRARY.

The prospect of actually going out and BUYING a goddarned book in a frackin' STORE is totally beyond this guy. He can't even imagine PAYING for a book. Nor does he see that this might be a problem in terms of the author earning his livelihood. He's happy to READ the book and even ask the author for a frackin' FAVOR. Just don't ask him to lay down any COLD CASH in actual payment for the product of the author's HARD WORK.

And that's why authors get moody.

The End

One way to cut down on grocery bills

The Daily Mail tells the story of a British professor who claims to have ingested no solid food since January 1, 2002.

He says he survives on air and sunshine, with an occasional glass of fruit juice, water, or coffee.

The human body, he says, doesn't need food. We only believe we need to eat. It's our belief system that makes us vulnerable to starvation. Change our beliefs, and we can survive - and thrive - indefinitely without eating.

It's all part of a movement of people calling themselves Breatharians. The prof says he's been medically tested and has proven he can live without nourishment.

And yet, as the Daily Mail goes on to report, there are a few monkeys in the wrench.

In 1983 Wiley Brooks, the founder of the Breatharian Institute of America and who claimed not to have eaten for 19 years, caused outrage when he was allegedly caught ordering a chicken pie. And several female followers have died after fasting and falling into comas.

Australian Ellen "Jasmuheen" Greves was a leading proponent of the movement in the late Nineties - lecturing all over the world on the benefits of a diet of light, air and one packet of biscuits in 10 years.

However, scepticism crept in after reporters visiting her Brisbane home found it crammed with food - which she insisted belonged to her second husband, Jess Ferguson, a convicted fraudster.

And a British journalist accompanying her to her check-in desk at Heathrow was astonished when the BA clerk asked her to confirm that she'd ordered an in-flight vegetarian meal. "No, no," she replied. "Well, yes, OK, I did. But I won't be eating it."

And an attempt in 1999 to test her skill ended in near disaster. The controlled experiment, under tight security, ended after four days amid fears for her rapidly deteriorating health. She blamed the failure on the stressful circumstances under which the experiment was conducted, rather than lack of food and water.

And then there's the knotty problem of mass starvation around the world.

How can he lead a healthy life on a diet of nothing when thousands of people starve to death every day? After all, there's plenty of light in Africa - couldn't all the hungry people there adopt his principals?

"Fundamentally, I am convinced it would be possible," he says. "The problem is they are convinced they will starve if they don't eat," he adds. "But I do not in any way believe that light nourishment is a method of solving the world hunger problem."

Something fails to compute. If this guy claims he can survive on light and air, why wouldn't "light nourishment [be] a method of solving the world hunger problem"? Presumably if he can do it, others can do it, too.

Unless, of course, he can't do it. Which is my very strong suspicion.

The Daily Mail article ends on an appropriate note of caution:

[The professor says, ] "I can only say I would be stupid to eat again, as I am doing really well. Better than ever before."

Well, perhaps. But we have only his word for it and if ever there was an experiment which should not be tried at home, this is it.

Amen. And pass the catsup, will you?

Cleansing the palette

After the high drama of my Internet radio appearance, with all its attendant controversy, it's time to relax with some humorous tomfoolery.

First up, the best five seconds you can spend on the Internet: YouTube's Dramatic Chipmunk.

(I'm not sure that thing actually is a chipmunk. Looks more like a prairie dog. Whatever, it's still cute as hell.)

Then there's an oldie but goodie, the classic Sneezing Panda.

Though the video quality is poor, the giant mechanical spider is always worth a look. Some enterprising movie producer ought to buy this thing, wrap it in foam latex and yak hair, and make the ultimate giant tarantula movie, without a single frame of CGI.

For cruel humor at the expense of a hapless telemarketer, check out Tom Mabe's inspired riff. (Note: It's funnier if you don't read along.)

Finally, if you missed my appearance on Marcel's show, or you just want to relive the experience again and again and again, you can find it as an MP3 file in the AfterlifeFM archives.

Click here ...

... to listen to Marcel Cairo's Internet radio show, with your humble correspondent as the guest.

The show airs at 7:00 PM Eastern Time tonight (Tuesday). That's 6 PM Central, 5 PM Mountain, 4 PM Pacific for the geographically and/or mathematically challenged (and you know who you are).

Onward ... to glory or humiliation!

(Hey, it turns out I'm actually pretty good at this self-promotional stuff. Maybe I should do a little of it to promote my books - my actual, you know, livelihood - sometime.)

Be passive

Tuesday, at 7:00 PM Eastern Time, I'll be on Marcel Cairo's Internet radio show AfterlifeFM. You can listen here. In preparation for this historic meeting of the minds, I've been reading up on the issue of materialization seances. Below is an interesting fact or two. 

Materialization mediums - or the spirits that allegedly speak through them - tell us in no uncertain terms that no light source can be introduced into the seance room. The light beams will damage the delicate ectoplasm, we're told.

Infrared is forbidden, as well. Infrared radiation, they say, is just as harmful to ectoplasm as visible light.

But there are a couple of problems with this argument.

The first problem is that all living bodies and warm objects emit infrared radiation. So there's already infrared radiation in the seance room. The medium himself and the sitters are all emitting infrared.

Okay, the medium (or spirits) might say - but the infrared viewer would produce an unacceptable amount of additional radiation. Which leads us to the second problem.

There are two types of infrared viewers - active and passive. Active viewers do indeed send out a beam of infrared radiation. But passive viewers don't. They simply read the infrared that is already in the environment - the infrared being released naturally by living bodies and warm objects. They don't add any radiation to the room.

Here is a Web page about one passive infrared viewer, complete with photos of what the night vision scope will show you. Note that it operates even in total darkness; no ambient light is required. It would certainly work in a pitch black seance room. It runs on three lithium-ion AA batteries, approximately the same amount of power needed to run a tape recorder or CD player - and both tape recorders and CD players have been allowed in materialization seances. If they can be used, why not passive IR gear?

Although this particular item is a weapon scope, there are many passive IR viewers and cameras that have nothing to do with weaponry. The above-linked site has a long list of such products starting about halfway down the page.

Seance shenanigans?

In preparation for my upcoming appearance on Marcel Cairo's Internet radio show, I've been reviewing the evidence concerning David Thompson's materialization seances. One of our regular commenters, Cyrus, very helpfully pointed me to some audio tapes that he felt were worth considering as positive evidence that something paranormal is going on. Unfortunately, I take a rather dim view of most of this material. (I believe that all of these clips are found on the Circle of the Silver Cord site, although I received copies directly from Cyrus.)

First, there's a clip in which the deceased psychic artist Coral Polge comes through. This is significant because it is the only clip known to me in which a female voice is heard in the seance room. Or is it a female voice? To me, it sounds like a man doing a whispery falsetto. Of course, this kind of assessment is inevitably subjective, but to my ear, it doesn't sound authentic at all. I think almost any man with some acting ability could pull off a voice like this. David Hyde Pierce did a much better old-English-lady voice on an episode of Frasier (the one where they recreate a radio drama).

Next, we have a recording in which sitters are allowed to check David Thompson's gag in red light while a spirit voice is being heard. Described that way, it certainly sounds convincing. But it's  not that simple. The red light is aimed well away from Thompson, and the sitters themselves say they can see nothing. ("Make sure that it does not shine upon young David in any way," the spirit instructs. "Sit absolutely still. ... Can you see anything?" The sitters answer, "No.") The spirit voice of "William" is not heard speaking when the gag is being checked, only before and after. There is ample time for Thompson to remove the gag and retie it each time.

Third, there is an episode in which Timothy Booth, supposedly a materialized child, shows the sitters his small, child-size hands, very different from the medium's. What are we to make of this? For one thing, it seems apparent to me that "Timothy's" voice is that of a grown man imitating a child (and not doing a very good job of it, either). The ridiculous squeaky voice sounds like Mickey Mouse on crack. The only light in the room seems to have been from some plaques illuminated with luminous paint or tape. Using a lighted plaque to illuminate "spirit forms" is another old trick - see The Psychic Mafia by M. Lamar Keene (a crooked medium who went straight) for a mention of its use by the fakes at Camp Chesterfield.

One sitter emailed Cyrus,

Tim's hands are small like mine. The paint was on a plaque and Tim placed his fingers over it and the paint illuminated his fingers which were moving.

What this tells us is that the sitter saw only a silhouette of the hand. Who knows if the fingers were moving? In such chancy lighting conditions, one can imagine seeing movement where there is none.

So what was the hand (or hands) the sitters were seeing? I suspect the truth is disappointingly banal: a small rubber glove. Can people be fooled into thinking a rubber glove is a hand? Yes, indeed; this was a standard trick used by fake mediums in the 1920s and earlier.

Finally, there's an audio clip where David Thompson and "William" count to ten together. This would be pretty persuasive - hearing Thompson's voice and the voice of the spirit at the same time. But that's not, in fact, what we hear.

Only "William's" voice is heard. The other voice is not Thompson's - it's that of the circle leader who initiates the count. Even the circle leader admits that this was not what he wanted, but "William" assures him that when the tape is played back, his and Thompson's voices will be heard. I listened carefully and heard only William and the circle leader. My guess is that Thompson, knowing he could not pull off this trick, jumped in as soon as the circle leader started counting; he knew that no one would be able to separate his voice from that of the other man, and the recording would be so muddled that it could never be checked definitively.

This episode also illustrates my general objection to these experiments - the sitters are far too deferential to the medium and the "spirits." The circle leader should have asked "William" and Thompson to do the count again, this time without his (the leader's) voice in the mix. Instead he meekly accepted the claim that his request had been complied with, even though it hadn't.

Cyrus also pointed out one other item which is of more interest to me. In one session, Camilla Persson, a Swedish writer on psi phenomena, received a handwritten note (click here for PDF)purportedly from her deceased brother. The note was written in Swedish. This in itself is not too significant; David Thompson could have prepared the note in advance. What is somewhat interesting is that Camilla's first name was written in a distinctive way, with the first three letters capitalized and the rest in lower case: CAMilla. Apparently this is the way her brother always wrote her name. Coincidence? Or evidence of genuine paranormal abilities at work? I can't say.

It should be noted that materialization phenomena constitute a very small part of the evidence offered for psi and life after death. The majority of researchers, especially since the 1930s, have been skeptical of this evidence even when they were convinced of postmortem survival on other grounds. So criticizing materialization mediumship is not the same thing as criticizing evidence for the afterlife in general.

Also, a distinction should be drawn between materializations and other physical phenomena, and even between full materializations and partial ones. Such events as raps, table movements and levitations, cold winds in the seance room, and the playing of musical instruments by no apparent means have all been well documented; the 1908 Naples sittings with Eusapia Palladino alone are good evidence for all these things. There is also pretty good evidence (some of it from the same sittings) for partial materializations - the appearance of hands that terminate at the wrist, for instance. Evidence for full-form materializations is much harder to come by and much less persuasive, in my opinion.

College: it's not just for skeptics anymore

A poll of college students from last January shows that the more educated you are, the more likely it is that you believe in paranormal phenomena.

The pollsters profess surprise at these results, although I've read of similar survey findings in the past (detailed in Best Evidence, by Michael Schmicker).

"As people attain higher college-education levels, the likelihood of believing in paranormal dimensions increases," [pollsters] Farha and Steward write.

What could explain such results?

The media are likely responsible for some people's beliefs in alien abductions and other paranormal concepts, the scientists write, based on their survey of existing studies. And some people tend to selectively confirm whatever ideas might be in their heads. Even smart people might believe in something offbeat because, in part, they're good at defending whatever they believe.

Or ... how about this for a possibility? Maybe "smart people believe in something offbeat" because there's good evidence to support it? Evidence that only a fairly well-read person would be able to track down, since it's largely embargoed by the popular media, which prefer to treat the whole subject as a goof?

On the other hand, the explanation for this particular poll may lie in the fact that it was taken at the University of Oklahoma, whose student body probably includes more evangelical Christians than, say, Yale or Berkeley. Which might explain why the proposition "people are sometimes possessed by the devil" was believed by 40%  of respondents, while ESP was accepted by only 28% and "people can hear from or communicate mentally with someone who has died" was accepted by only 16%. (Reincarnation, another concept at odds with most Christian teachings, got a nod from only 14%.)

What is interesting in any event is that seniors were more open to psi than freshmen, and graduate students were more open than undergrads. Again, this is consistent with earlier surveys detailed in Schmicker's book. Exposure to more information makes belief in the paranormal rise.   

Not-so-great moments in mediumship

For your viewing pleasure (click any image to enlarge) :

1. Scottish materialization medium Helen Duncan extrudes her ectoplasmic spirit guide, "Peggy."

2. Close-up of the remarkably lifelike (?) Peggy.

3. Another materialization of Peggy. (Correction: I think this one is actually "Albert," a different spirit. In the words of one site, " 'Albert' is also seen to look like a third-rate carnival monster composed of muslin on a coat hanger and a very bad, grotesque papier maché face.")

4. As Survival After Death wryly puts it, "Wrapped in black from neck to toe, Helen Duncan materialised a spirit hand that bears a remarkable resemblance to a rubber glove."

Hat tips to Bad Psychics and Survival After Death.