Michael Prescott's Blog

Puppet show

A minor but ongoing mystery surrounds a couple of photos apparently taken of the British materialization medium Helen Duncan. The photos show a blindfolded and loosely secured Duncan in a chair during a séance, attended by two different "phantoms" – which, all too obviously, are crude, cartoonish puppets. The implication is that Duncan used these puppets in the dimly lit séance room to fool her clientele, but when they were captured on film in the glare of a photographer's flashbulb, their laughable artificiality was revealed.

Now and then, these photos show up on skeptical websites with some snarky comment to the effect that believers in mediumship actually accept these dolls as spirits. One website claimed that 60% of people on a pro-paranormal forum took the photos as genuine. It appears that the 60% figure was just made up.

I doubt that anyone other than the most hard-core true-believer would be fooled by the puppets, which appear to consist of papier-mâché heads, coat-hanger shoulders, and muslin or cheesecloth "bodies."

The controversy mainly concerns the photos' provenance and whether or not they actually depict Helen Duncan. If you search online, you'll find many sources attributing the photos to photographer Harvey Metcalfe, who took photos of Duncan in her home in 1928. It is said that the photos were reproduced in Harry Price's 1933 book Leaves from a Psychist's Case-Book, though when I searched for the name "Metcalfe" in the Google Books preview edition, nothing came up. (The preview format does not allow me to look for the photos themselves.)

In the forum linked above, a commenter named Open Mind offers this explanation:

The most authoritative book on the Duncan case is Maurice Cassier's Medium On Trial who comments on these photographs' history …

'... Price is silent about their origin in his published works, or about the circumstances under which they were taken—supposedly at Helen’s home ... It is even possible that the photographs are reconstructions of what was supposed to have been seen, in line with others to be presently considered ...'

Manfred Cassier, 1996, Medium on Trial

(Other books imply the photograph was taken by a Harvey Metcalfe due to his claim emerging after Duncan's death, however this claim is doubtful as Metcalfe didn't have the original photographs, only the same 4 photographs as in Harry Price's collection and it is a different name on the back of these)

I've ordered Price's book (used copies are still floating around), and when I get it, I'll let you know if the pictures are really in there and if any attribution is provided. At this point, having read a dozen different versions of the story, I trust no one! 

Another photo that seems to be more solidly attributed to Metcalfe shows Duncan in apparently the same surroundings – at least, the wallpaper looks the same – spewing "ectoplasm" out of her nose to produce a materialized infant.In the puppet photos, the "ectoplasmic cord" extending from the puppet to the medium looks very much like a thick strip of cloth secured under the blindfold.)

Photo taken from the website Survival After Death

In his book Hellish Nell, Malcolm Gaskill similarly attributes the puppet photos to Metcalfe. This seems to be the conventional custom, and they may have originated in just that way.

But a question arises. Duncan was put on trial twice in her life, first in 1933 and later in 1944. In both cases, she was accused of fraud. The puppet photos would have been strong evidence against her, but they were not introduced in either trial. Moreover, Harry Price, who apparently published the photos in his 1933 book, was closely involved in the first trial, so he certainly would have known about the photos, if they existed at that time and if they were photos of Duncan herself.

What I've read in other sources is that the photos were discovered after Price's death, unlabeled and undated, mixed in with miscellaneous items in a desk drawer. People who make this claim say that the photos may have been taken later than Metcalfe's 1928 photo sessions, possibly by Price himself, using a stand-in for Helen Duncan and puppets that Price made in an effort to "re-create" the behind-the-scenes reality of a Duncan séance.

The same Open Mind cited above introduced a new bit of information in a comments thread on Michael Tymn's blog. He quoted from the book Helen Duncan: The Mystery Show Trial, by Robert Hartley:

6th November 1931, Empire News. Harry Price confirms he produced photographs using a model similar to Mrs Duncan and Butter Muslin [a gossamer-thin cloth] and that her husband Mr Duncan could not discern the forgery [p. 296]

The Empire News was a weekly newspaper published on Sundays in the UK.

The point of the quote is not that the puppet photos are the ones mentioned in the article, but simply that Price did sometimes photograph re-creations of séances using a stand-in. If he did it once, he could have done it again. If a stand-in was used, this would explain why the photos never came up in any trial. They could not be submitted as evidence, since they did not depict Duncan herself.

There seem to be three possibilities.

1. The photos are of Helen Duncan and were taken by Harvey Metcalfe in 1928. Perhaps they were not introduced at trial because Metcalfe wasn't available to testify about them, or for some other reason.
2. The photos were taken prior to 1933 and depict Duncan, but were not taken by Metcalfe.
3. The photos were taken prior to 1933, were not taken by Metcalfe, and do not depict Duncan, only a stand-in.
4. The photos were taken sometime after 1933, using a stand-in.

In the latter three cases, it is possible that Harry Price himself took the photos as part of his practice of re-creating seances. The post-1933 option is the least credible, because multiple sources attest that the photos are reproduced in Price's book, though at this point, as I said, I want to see for myself.

The controversy is not terribly important. Undisputed photos that Price took of Duncan (reproduced on the official Harry Price website) clearly show that the "ectoplasm" she exuded was cheesecloth or muslin. The tight weaving on the edges, known as selvage, is quite visible.

There was also an embarrassing incident when a sitter at one of Duncan's séances grabbed hold of the "materialized spirit guide" Peggy and tried to wrest "her" away from the medium. An undervest worn by Duncan, torn in the encounter, was later produced as evidence in Duncan's 1933 trial. It appears that Duncan had simply pinned a picture of a baby's face to the vest, something she had done more than once; the vest is littered with telltale pinpricks.

Photo taken from the website Survival After Death

Overall, I think Helen Duncan was a fake, though sending her to prison for nine months, as happened after her 1944 conviction, seems a tad harsh. But was she dim enough to think that her subpar "Punch & Judy" puppetry would stand up to flash photography? Or was she — in this case, at least — a victim of circumstances? 

Perry Mason vs. the paranormal

Lately I've been binge-watching the old Perry Mason TV series, which started in 1957 and continued until 1966. Right now I'm on season five, which seems to be the last one offered for free on Amazon Prime, so it's probably the last one I'll watch. Given that there are roughly thirty episodes per season, I will have watched 150 episodes, more or less, which is probably plenty, inasmuch as all the episodes follow the same formula.

I do like it, though. There are a lot of great guest stars, some of whom had previously made a name for themselves in 1950s (or earlier) cinema and a few of whom were yet to become stars. The writing is generally good, and Raymond Burr really is the perfect Perry Mason. I say this, having watched several Perry Mason movies from the 1930s featuring other actors who did not fill the bill nearly as well as Burr did. (We had Warren William as a drunken playboy Mason, Ricardo Cortez as Perry Mason with an accent, etc.)

All of this is a lead-in to an episode in season five called "The Case of the Meddling Medium," which deals with the paranormal in an unusually intelligent and well-informed way. If you have Amazon Prime, you may want to take a look at it.

For one thing, it involves the well-known parapsychologist Dr. Andrija Puharich (yes, Dr. — he was an MD), probably best remembered for his championship of Uri Geller's psychic abilities. In 1962, Puharich had yet to meet Geller, but he was already a prominent figure in the field, and he shows up in the episode playing himself. In fact, he hosts Perry Mason and perennial adversary Hamilton Burger in his parapsychology laboratory, where (spoiler alert!) he proves Perry's client innocent.

 The principal cast members gather in what is purported to be Puharich's laboratory. 

What's most interesting about the episode is it doesn't develop in the way you would expect. The medium introduced in the opening sequence turns out to be a fraud, who puts on a fake Madame Blavatsky-type accent. This is predictable enough. A little later, a fellow who wants to con his relatives pretends to have developed a talent for automatic writing.

But at the end, we're given to believe that one of the characters actually does have a small but measurable ESP talent, which accounts for some of her behavior.

In general, the episode takes a skeptical look at mediumship and the idea of communicating with the deceased, but is far more open to ESP, which is treated as a proper subject of scientific inquiry.

Moreover, screenwriter Samuel Newman took the trouble to learn something about the basic terminology of the field. The (fake) medium who handles people's personal items in order to divine things about their deceased donors is properly described as a "psychometric medium." (Well, maybe she should be a psychometric psychic, but whatever …)  The terms automatic writing and Spiritualist are used correctly, and the procedures in a parapsychology lab of that period – including a Faraday box – seem to be accurately reproduced, perhaps in part because of Dr. Puharich's participation. It's possible that Samuel Newman had a legitimate interest in this area. Unlike many of the earlier Mason shows, this one isn't based on an Erle Stanley Gardner novel, which makes me wonder if Mr. Newman didn't come up with the idea in order to indulge his interest in parapsychology — and to give the show a rare opportunity to employ some horror-movie atmospherics. 

The episode ends, as most of Perry Mason's adventures do, with a confession from the "real killer," this time not in a courtroom but in Mr. Puharich's laboratory. As a story, it's no better than average, but the parapsychology elements make it worth a watch. If you have Amazon Prime, you can see it for free: Perry Mason, "The Case of the Meddling Medium." Take a look.

By the way,  if you want to see what is (in my opinion) the best movie ever made about mediumship, check out Séance on a Wet Afternoon. It's not particularly pro-paranormal, though it does include a police detective who is — at least according to his own statement — a member of the Society for Psychical Research, but it's a brilliant movie with great performances.

From the archives: Things to do on Jersey when you're dead

This post is from 2008. If I were writing it now, I might give more attention to the possibility of low-level spirits communicating through the planchette, rather than focusing on "ordinary" psi. 

The title, by the way, is a pun on a movie called Things to Do in Jersey when You're Dead. Or at least I thought it was. I was sure I'd seen an ad for a movie with that title. But when I looked for it just now, I could find no reference to it online. I have no idea why I thought there was such a movie. Anyway, the title seems a lot less clever now. 

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For two years during the early part of his long exile from France, Victor Hugo engaged in regular séances using a planchette – a forerunner of the Ouija board, which worked by tapping out words one letter at a time. Two small tables were employed, a three-legged table perched atop a four-legged one. The tilting of the tables produced the taps. Hugo and his family and friends, exiled to the Isle of Jersey (and later the Isle of Guernsey) would gather in the evenings and coax messages from the Beyond. Hundreds of messages were received, and the material appears to have had a profound effect on Hugo's thinking and on the writing of Les Miserables, in which he was presently engaged.

This intriguing corner of the great novelist's life is exceptionally well documented in Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World, by John Chambers. Chambers, the first person to translate the séance transcripts into English (in an earlier edition of this book), does a fine job of evoking the atmosphere of the exiles' home away from home, their bitter homesickness and burgeoning fascination with the occult. His book is unusually well written for a study of this kind, laced with keen character sketches and absorbing sidelights on William Blake, James Merrill, and Kabbalah. He presents the facts without undue speculation and lets his readers draw their own conclusions.

The first question to ask is, naturally: Were these phenomena really paranormal? Nearly always, Victor's elder son Charles – who seemed to have the most natural mediumistic ability – would be one of the two persons operating the planchette. Charles' constant participation has led some critics to suggest that he unconsciously fabricated the messages to please his domineering father. But some of the messages were tapped out in languages of which Charles was ignorant – Hungarian and English, for instance. And in some cases (e.g. the January 22, 1854 séance, described on p. 113 of Chambers' book), Charles did not operate the planchette.

Other apparently paranormal events that took place in conjunction with the séances cast additional doubt on the skeptical view. When dogs throughout the area began barking in the night, the planchette told them sternly to shut their mouths – and they did. Strange singing was heard in different parts of the house when Hugo's son was ill. A communicator calling itself the Lady in White arranged for a rendezvous at three AM; no one was bold enough to keep the date, but at three AM the Hugos' doorbell inexplicably rang.

Some of the spirits' statements are intriguing and possibly prescient. Distance, we are told, is illusory, and the entire universe can be found in – and reconstructed from – its smallest part. These ideas remind John Chambers of Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe, which explores the cosmology of David Bohm.

But for the most part, the communications are rather banal. Nothing of evidential value was produced, and the sitters don’t appear to have pressed the spirits for proof of identity. When the spirits did make factual claims about their earthly lives, these claims were often wrong. The great Carthaginian general Hannibal, purportedly speaking through the planchette, described the city of Carthage as a vast expanse of six thousand temples on streets three hundred feet wide. This grandiose portrayal does not tally with any historical or archaeological findings. (On the other hand, when "Shakespeare" insisted that he had not died on April 23, 1616, we might wonder if it was the shade of Edward De Vere that the sitters were hearing from ... But the channeled Shakespearean drama produced by the sitters, though highly interesting and creative, does not bear any resemblance to the earthly Bard's work.)

Then there is the case of the Lion of Androcles. At times the sitters heard from the spirit of this beast, famous in folklore for having spared Androcles in the arena. It is, of course, quite unlikely that this folktale was based on fact, and even more unlikely that the noted lion was communicating with the Jersey exiles from beyond the grave. But what makes the Lion especially relevant is an incident that occurred on April 25, 1854. The Lion-persona, tapping out a lengthy poem, suddenly stopped after writing the lines

They raise against the saints their sacrilegious paw
And bury their blood-stained claws in the liv–.

A pause followed after which the Lion rewrote the last two lines, which apparently dissatisfied him. But in the interim, Victor Hugo wrote his own ending to the stanza, and showed his work only to one person (who, like Hugo, was not operating the planchette). Hugo's lines read:

They ripped open the saints dying in the mire
And their hideous claws enlarged the wound
In the side of Jesus Christ.

We are told that "almost immediately" after Hugo had written these words, the tapping recommenced, and the planchette spelled out

Their paws ripped open the martyrs here and there in the mire
And Jesus Christ slipped their claws into his wounds,
For a gift of nails to the gibbet.

The close similarity of the two verses suggests that the planchette operators – or the planchette itself – picked up the imagery from Hugo's own mind. But since the planchette operators had not seen Hugo's lines, the message must have been communicated via telepathy or via some even more mysterious influence.

In the final analysis, if we view the sessions as spirit communications, they are unconvincing and unsatisfying. But if we view them as Consciousness interacting with itself – Consciousness creating a kind of feedback loop between the sitters on the one hand and the planchette on the other – then things get more interesting. To read excerpts from the transcripts is like reading an inner dialogue carried out at the unconscious level between Hugo and himself (with occasional contributions from other members of the party). The sessions perhaps can be best understood as the externalization of the unconscious, a breakdown of the seemingly solid barrier between objective and subjective experience. The stream of consciousness running through the deeper channels of Hugo's mind seems to have been objectified, brought out into the open. In a deep sense, Hugo was talking to himself.

No wonder, then, that the tables mostly told him what he wanted to hear. The tables reported that Hugo's archenemy Napoleon III would die in two years – when actually the dictator lived another two decades. The discarnate Shakespeare opined that French was superior to English. Other spirits verified Hugo's theory of a cycle of reincarnation that proceeds through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and his idea of the universe as a vast darkness, with only the shining stars retaining God's pure light.

The strengths and weaknesses of the communicators matched Hugo's own talents. The spirits were good at improvising poetry and long, eloquent monologues; so was Hugo. The spirits were useless at composing music, even when Mozart himself ostensibly spoke through the planchette. Hugo had no musical training.

The appearance of so many famous names among the spirits – Aeschylus, Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, even Jesus – also makes sense in terms of Hugo's psychology. No one ever accused Victor Hugo of being humble. His self-regard bordered on megalomania. Who would seek him out, if not the spirits of world-historical heroes like himself? Nothing less would do.

And what of the more abstract or surreal entities, such as Civilization, Death, and Idea, or Balaam's Ass and the Lion of Androcles? In the highly intellectual atmosphere of Hugo's salon, large abstract concepts and mythological or folkloric imagery must have been part of everyday conversation. It was how these people talked, part of their mental furniture. And Hugo had a particular fascination – part sentimental, part mystical – with the idea that animals are ensouled, and was especially fond of the Lion of Androcles tale.

How about the most consistent, overarching motif to appear in the communications – that the earth is a prison, a penal colony for wayward souls? It matches up quite closely with the gloomy outlook of the dispirited, homesick exiles, persecuted by a dictator, stranded among fellow outcasts on a tiny outcrop of rock. All the more reason to believe that the tilting tables were reflecting the sitters' own ideas and feelings back at them. Perhaps the isolation of their exile, and the intense emotions it stirred up, actually made it easier for the sitters to access the unconscious mind, or universal consciousness itself.

Whatever the explanation, Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World is a superb contribution to literary history and to the study of the paranormal. I recommend it highly.