Michael Prescott's Blog

Essay: Of Dinosaurs and Phantoms: The Sequel

NOTE: I used to have several older essays on the paranormal posted on my author site. When I recently updated the site, I removed all this material and decided to post it here. Here's one of those essays, originally posted around 2003. As the title indicates, it's a follow-up to Of Dinosaurs and Phantoms, also reproduced on this blog. 

 

Of Dinosaurs and Phantoms: The Sequel

 

A short time ago, in a perhaps uncharacteristically skeptical frame of mind, I posted an essay speculating that some well-known paranormal phenomena -- the ectoplasmic materializations in the early 20th Century credited to the medium Marthe Beraud, also known as "Eva C." -- had been produced by trickery.

After posting this essay, I read more about the later stages of Marthe's career and began to have second thoughts. I was particularly struck by a series of experiments carried out in Munich by psychiatrist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing under the sponsorship of a wealthy widow, Juliette Bisson. These experiments are described in some detail in Brian Inglis's Natural and Supernatural and its sequel, Science and Parascience. Although I was aware of these tests and even mentioned them in the first essay, I had given them little consideration, preferring to focus on Marthe's earlier work with the physiologist and psychical researcher Charles Richet.

In his two massively documented volumes, Inglis takes pains to establish his credentials as an objective historian of the paranormal, but it is clear that he is sympathetic to the claims of psychics and mediums, and impatient with the objections raised by skeptics. He puts the best possible face on Schrenck-Notzing's investigations of Marthe Beraud, and in the process makes those who have criticized her look petty and narrow-minded.

Having just placed myself in the company of the critics, I felt the sting of this implied rebuke. Could it be that I had defamed Marthe without cause? Could she have been genuine after all?

To address this question, let's first take a look at the kind of phenomena photographed by Schrenck-Notzing. Here is a photo of an ectoplasmic face purportedly being extruded from Marthe's head:

 

As is immediately obvious, this phantom face is  not very realistic. In fact, it resembles a crude sketch. The material -- perhaps cheesecloth or muslin -- on which the portrait is displayed has visible creases, as if it had been folded up for concealment prior to the seance.

In this connection, a comment by British skeptic Susan Blackmore may be relevant: "In the archives of the Society for Psychical Research in London, there is still a piece of [mid-20th Century medium] Helen Duncan's ectoplasm. This looks very much like a large piece of fine muslin and even has stitching around the edges."

Even in Marthe's day, skeptical investigators and magicians argued that ectoplasm was actually paper or fabric regurgitated by the medium or expelled, via abdominal contractions, from her vaginal cavity. Seances were nearly always performed in darkness or very dim light, and Marthe's were no exception. In those conditions, even crude portraits on muslin could look genuine. But when photographed in the light of a popping flash bulb, the phenomena looked markedly less persuasive.

The unconvincing face in Schrenck-Notzing's photo is bad enough. Worse, in another photo from the same period, the letters MIRO can be seen on the back of an ectoplasmic shape issuing from Marthe's head. MIRO was part of the masthead of the newspaper Le Miroir, from which many of the faces seem to have been taken. The obvious implication is that Marthe simply cut out a sketch from Le Miroir and "manifested" it during the seance. (This photo is included in Science and Parascience; I haven't found it reproduced on the Web.) In other cases the face appears to be a hand-drawn copy of a published sketch or photo -- perhaps a copy drawn by Marthe on fabric which was wadded up and concealed on (or inside) her person.

Surely Schrenck-Notzing guarded against such fakery? Yes, he did. Marthe was undressed and subjected to a search before each sitting, a search that even extended to a gynecological examination. Sometimes she was fed an emetic to eliminate the possibility that she was regurgitating previously swallowed items. Given these efforts at preventing deception, it is hard to see how Marthe, unaided, could have smuggled anything into the seance cabinet.

But who says she was unaided? It is not impossible that she had an accomplice -- namely, the sponsor of the experiments, Madame Bisson.

It was Juliette Bisson who undressed Martha and performed the gynecological exam. And it was Juliette who hypnotized Martha to put her into a mediumistic trance. At the very least, Juliette appears to have had a psychological hold on Marthe. One author refers to Bisson as "Eva's Svengali," adding, "Schrenck-Notzing was struck by the medium's passivity, the most memorable evidence of which were physical examinations per rectum et vaginam ... to check for concealed materials. Schrenck-Notzing watched as Bisson probed Eva's vagina; but he himself consented to feel her body only through her leotard ..." (Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches.)

Juliette Bisson was a widow, Marthe Beraud an unmarried woman in middle age. What was the nature of their relationship? Could they have been lovers? Admittedly, I have no evidence to support this speculation, and it is hard to imagine what evidence for or against it could come to light after ninety years. Still, in those days a romantic relationship between two women could not be made public without serious repercussions. Some pretext would have to be found if Marthe were to live in Juliette's house and spend a great deal of time with her. How about a series of sober scientific investigations? Such tests, especially if presided over by a respected medical doctor like Schrenck-Notzing, would be sufficient to forestall any questions.

Since it was Juliette who stripped Marthe and searched her body cavities, Schrenck-Notzing had to take Juliette's word that the she had found nothing. If Juliette had been untrustworthy, Schrenck-Notzing would never be the wiser.

As I said, the actual nature of Marthe's relationship with Juliette can never be known. We can, however, take a look at some of the other precautions that Schrenck-Notzing reported. It is often stated that Marthe was sewn into "a close-fitting garment" (Science and Parascience). Was she? Look at this photo from the Munich experiments:

 

 

The outfit worn by Marthe does not look especially "close-fitting," much less "skintight," as some have described her attire. Nor does it qualify as a "leotard," a word used in some material quoted earlier. Indeed, the outfit would seem to afford copious possibilities for concealment.

Perhaps the "tights" were put on first, with the heavy, loose dress donned over them for modesty. This would still be an unsatisfactory arrangement. The dress itself could have had muslin "ectoplasm" loosely sewn into it, and its heavy folds could have covered up any number of bodily movements.

Another argument made by Marthe's supporters is that she produced ectoplasm even with a veil over her face. Obviously, however, she didn't always wear a veil. No veil is apparent in the photos above, for example, or in the other widely circulated photos of her ectoplasmic manifestations.

Even when she was wearing a veil, did she actually extrude anything through it? Harry Houdini, who witnessed a performance by Marthe, said she did not. Now, it must be admitted that Houdini was not always a reliable witness. His well-known hostility to mediumship almost certainly biased his observations on some occasions, and in one instance he may have resorted to framing a medium (Mina Crandon, a.k.a. "Margery") when he was unable to properly discredit her.

Still, for what it is worth, here is Houdini's report on a sitting with Marthe, which he recorded in a June 22, 1920, letter to Arthur Conan Doyle:

They made Eva drink a cup of coffee and eat some cake (I presume to fill her up with some food-stuff), and after she had been sewn into the tights, and a net over her face, she manifested.

1st. Some froth-like substance, inside of net, 'twas long, about five inches long; she said it was elevated, but none of us four watchers saw it "elevate." ...

2nd. A white plaster-looking affair over her right eye.

3rd. Something that looked like a small face, say four inches in circumference ...

4th. Some substance, froth-like, exuding from her nose, and Baggally and Feilding say it protrudes from her nose, but Dingwall and I are positive that it was inside of net and was not extending from her nose, as I had the best view from two different places I deliberately took advantage to see just what it was ...

5th. Medium asked permission to remove something in her mouth; showed her hands empty, and took out what appeared to be a rubberish substance, which she disengaged, showed us plainly, we held the electric torch, all saw it plainly, when presto! it vanished. (Doyle, The Edge of the Unknown, 1930)

Later, in print, Houdini dismissed the disappearance of the "rubberish substance" as sleight of hand and concluded, "I have no hesitation in saying that I think the two [i.e., Marthe and Juliette] simply took advantage of the credulity and good nature of the various men with whom they had to deal." It is perhaps significant that Houdini implicated both Marthe and Juliette in the scheme.

Still, we may wonder if the two women would have persisted in such a complex hoax for years, when other ways of concealing a romantic relationship could have been found. After all, they made no money off the work -- but then, Madame Bisson did not need money. She was already rich. What she and Marthe did get, perhaps, was the pleasure of fooling a succession of eminent, worldly men who attended their seances and went away baffled. People have been known to conduct elaborate hoaxes for more slender reasons.

Whatever their strengths and weaknesses, Schrenck-Notzing's experiments were not the end of the story. Additional tests were performed by other investigators -- but although Schrenck-Notzing was not always involved, Madame Bisson continued to play the role of Marthe's hypnotist and, often, was the one who stripped and searched her before a sitting.

One of the strongest reports in Marthe's favor was issued by Gustave Geley, a researcher who claimed to have seen "a substance at first amorphous or polymorphous [exuding from] the natural orifices [with] a crawling reptilian movement" and producing fingers, hands, and "a living head, whose bones I could feel under a thick mass of hair ... Here and there from the mass appear temporary protrusions, and these for a few seconds assume the form of fingers, the outline of hands, and then re-enter the mass ... I can see then the extremity thicken like a swelling, and this terminal swelling expands into a perfectly modelled hand. I touch it; it gives a normal sensation. I feel the bones, and the fingers with their nails. Then the hand contracts, diminishes and disappears in the end of the cord. The cord makes a few movements, retracts, and returns to the medium's mouth."

In summary, Geley announced, "I do not say 'There was no trickery.' I say 'There was no possibility of trickery.'" (Quoted in Science and Parascience)

This certainly sounds definitive. After Geley's death, however, his investigation was called into question when, as Inglis recounts, a researcher named Osty "found some photographs which appeared to show that some of the materialisations had been faked -- attached to her by threads, or wires. He showed them to some psychical researchers, but did not publish them; on the advice, he claimed, of Schrenck[-Notzing] and [Charles] Richet. Thirty years later Rudolf Lambert, a German who had been a psychical researcher in the 1920s, explained what happened ... According to Lambert, Osty had shown him the photographs but pledged him to secrecy about them on the ground that it would be disastrous if the story [got out. The consensus formed that the] photographs Osty had found must surely have shown that the phenomena had been faked. All the research carried out with Marthe Beraud in her role as 'Eva C.,' it was assumed, must be set aside as discredited."

Inglis is careful to make the point that other suspicious-looking photos of Marthe's ectoplasmic manifestations had been published by Bisson, Schrenck-Notzing, and Geley (including the MIRO picture), so there was nothing necessarily incriminating about Geley's decision to withhold these particular photos. Nevertheless, as Inglis acknowledges, "the outcome... was that 'Eva C.' was effectively discredited in psychical research circles, along with her investigators." 

Parapsychologist George P. Hansen makes reference to this development in his article "Deception by Subjects in Psi Research." "Previously," he writes,"it has been common practice not to report a subject’s known ability and practice of deception. In the case of Eva C., several prominent researchers protested publishing discoveries of fraud (e.g., see Lambert, 1954)." Hansen gives further examples involving other subjects: "In the very first issue of the Journal of Parapsychology, Pratt (1937) did not report that he had caught Mrs. M. cheating in one of his sessions ... Similar practice continues to the present day. For instance Subject #4 in Baumann, Stewart, and Roll’s (1986) study was Tina Resch, who had received extensive media coverage and had admitted to trickery in the past ... yet none of this was mentioned in the report. In the papers at the 1986 PA convention involving reportedly fraudulent subjects, none of the authors acknowledged the fact in their reports ... I am personally acquainted with the authors of these recent papers and am sure they had only the best intentions (believing their controls to be adequate). However, to those not familiar with the researchers, such practices can appear to be deliberate attempts to mislead the reader. This has long been understood. For instance, Verrall (1914), speaking of reports of Eva C. wrote: 'The omission of any such statement [regarding alleged trickery] would naturally be interpreted as implying that she had [an absolutely clean record]'."

All such criticisms, however, lay in the future. At the time when Geley published his report, he created quite a stir. In an attempt to settle the controversy, the Society for Psychical Research investigated Marthe. This time, though, there was a significant change in procedure. Madame Bisson's involvement appears to have been curtailed.

"On arrival for a seance," Inglis writes, "Marthe was stripped and examined for possible concealed objects by a doctor [note: a doctor, not Juliette Bisson], who 'examined the oral cavity, ears, and hair' (a gynecological examination was considered, but thought unnecessary ...). During the seances, investigators sat on either side of her, each holding a wrist ... The seances were conducted in a faint electric light, but with two flash-light cameras prepared for action at any moment, and a torch [i.e., flashlight] which could be used whenever there were signs of a materialization."

Such precautions, especially the examination by a doctor, were entirely sensible. And the upshot was that, under this protocol, Marthe was not able to produce anything close to her usual range of phenomena. "On a number of occasions," Inglis continues, "what appeared to be saliva oozed from her mouth, solidifying into ectoplasm and taking curious shapes. A photograph showed what looked like a bony hand placed on her shoulder; another revealed what looked like a locket under her chin, on which there was a portrait." These effects were a far cry from the more dramatic and much larger-scale phenomena reported in earlier seances, though they were still sufficient to convince some of the investigators.

To me, what is noteworthy is that when the role of Juliette Bisson was minimized, the materializations were minimized also.

Clearly, the controversy over Marthe Beraud will continue. Various opinions are possible, and any argument can be met by a counterargument. As is true of many subjects in parapsychology, the topic does not lend itself to casual or superficial study. It would take years to wade through all of the literature pertinent to the various investigations of Marthe Beraud. I make no claim to having the necessary patience or leisure time to undertake such an effort, and so I can only report a provisional opinion.

On balance, given the unconvincing nature of the photographs, the fact that the seances were conducted in darkness or near darkness, the apparently less-than-skintight garment, the ambiguous relationship between the Marthe and Juliette, the abatement of the phenomena when Juliette was not closely involved, and the photos by Geley that cast additional doubt on the materializations, I'm content to stand by my original conclusion.

Marthe Beraud, a.k.a. "Eva C.," was a fraud, though an uncommonly good one.

I do, however, reserve the right to change my mind. 

Essay: Of Dinosaurs and Phantoms

NOTE: I used to have several older essays on the paranormal posted on my author site. When I recently updated the site, I removed all this material and decided to post it here. Here's one of those essays, originally posted in 2003. 

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Of Dinosaurs and Phantoms: Some Dubious Phenomena 

Readers of my essays know that I think the skeptics' case against the paranormal is often badly flawed, and that the evidence for psychic powers is much greater than most people suppose. Nonetheless, not all the evidence is equally strong. Some investigations - even some that were noteworthy in their day and continue to attract respectful attention - are less than impressive when viewed with a critical eye. What follows is a case in point.

But first, a brief detour from the world of spirits into the realm of the dinosaurs.

In 1922 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle played a trick on an audience of magicians. As told by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner, "A movie projector was brought in, a screen erected and the lights extinguished. In a brief speech, Doyle said that he would answer no questions about the film he was about to present ... [which] was then screened without titles or comment. The audience was astonished. The [New York] 'Times' reported that 'dinosaurs of one tribe appeared on the screen and rubbed jowls in an affectionate manner. Then entered the tyrannosaurs or dinosaurs of the killing type which preyed on the browsing members of their family. The tyrannosaurs fought among themselves, interlocked their great jaws and wrestled ...'" After more effusive descriptions, the newspaper ended its report by declaring that the monsters on screen "were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces." (The Making of King Kong, 1975; pp. 46-47)

The footage, of course, was fake. It was a reel of stop-motion animation created by special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien for the screen version of Doyle's adventure novel The Lost World. What is remarkable about this story is that no one watching The Lost World today could possibly be fooled by its illusions. The dinosaurs were indeed "masterpieces" of their time, but by modern standards, they are obvious miniatures occupying even more obvious miniature sets, and their movements are jerky and unconvincing. In the era of Jurassic Park, I doubt that even a small child would be fooled by O'Brien's jittery latex-rubber creations. In 1922 the footage could fool an audience of magicians, who prided themselves on their ability to detect trickery.

 

Photo: A family of triceratops, observed by human explorers in the bottom left corner, from The Lost World (1925)

 

What does this musty old anecdote tell us? Only that people living in the early years of the last century had not yet developed the visual sophistication we take for granted today. The art of trick photography and of related visual illusions was new and unfamiliar. To them, seeing was believing. While they were no less intelligent or well-educated than we are, they were in some respects easier to fool. This fact has important implications when we look at early investigations into mediumship, especially so-called "physical mediumship," which involved the manifestation of physical entities, usually phantoms, in the darkness of the séance room.

One of the more notable researchers in this area was the Frenchman Charles Richet. No mere crank, Richet was a celebrated physiologist honored with a Nobel Prize. His investigations in parapsychology were a sidelight to his main work, but one that he took most seriously. Nor was he blindly credulous. He drew sharp distinctions between the "psychic" entertainers of his day, such as the Davenport brothers (who produced apparitional effects on stage) and legitimate mediums who could be tested under controlled conditions. He conceded that nearly all the physical phenomena of mediumship - spirit raps, table tilting and levitation, and the materialization of phantoms - could be simulated through trickery, but felt that adequate precautions would eliminate the possibility of fraud.

He certainly believed that his own precautions were adequate. Indeed, Richet said that fear of being tricked was "my chief, and even only anxiety throughout my experiments," and he exposed one fake medium, Anna Roth, who claimed to be able to materialize flowers out of thin air. Richet found that she had hidden them on her person.

Despite his initial skepticism, Richet came to believe in most forms of physical phenomena. He felt that a properly attuned "sensitive" could emanate an enigmatic substance called ectoplasm - Richet, in fact, coined this term - and that the ectoplasm could shape itself into a variety of physical forms, including hands, faces, and even whole figures that walked and talked. His most memorable experiments in this regard involved Marthe Beraud, who in later years was known by the pseudonym "Eva C."

Marthe had been engaged to the son of General and Madame Noel, and although the young man died on the battlefield before the marriage, Marthe went to live with the Noels anyway. It was at the Noels' home in Algiers that Richet performed a series of experiments with Marthe, producing what he considered to be spectacular and irrefutable results. These sessions, though given little if any weight by most parapsychologists today, are still cited as solid evidence by some proponents of the paranormal.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to suspect that Richet's experimental conditions were not nearly as stringent as they should have been. Consider his own description of the procedures, as presented in his 1923 memoir, Thirty Years of Psychical Research.

The sessions, he writes, "were held in a small, isolated building over a stable. The window was blocked up and remained shut at all times. The only door was locked at the beginning of every séance. It is the only room in the building, and before every séance everything was minutely inspected by [Richet's associate] Delanne and myself. Two curtains were stretched across one corner of the room ... so as to make a kind of dark cabinet ..." As was almost invariably the case in physical mediumship, the enclosed space, or cabinet, was said to be necessary so that the medium could concentrate her psychic powers.

Richet, Delanne, General and Madame Noel, and a woman known in the reports as "Mademoiselle X" were all present for the séances. In addition, Marthe's two younger sisters, Marie and Paule, were in attendance. At times, there was another participant, an African woman named Aischa, apparently a member of the household staff. When Aischa was there, she actually sat in the curtained-off cabinet with Marthe. What purpose she served, and why she was allowed inside the cabinet, are questions Richet does not raise or answer. He does claim, "The part played by Aischa seems absolutely nil. Mme. Noel made a point of her being present, but our best results occurred in Aischa's absence." He also says, reflecting the casual racism of his era, "It is useless to incriminate Aischa, an unintelligent creature sitting passively beside Marthe."

A couple of concerns might occur to us at this point. First, why did Madame Noel want Aischa to attend the séances? Possibly she was worried that Marthe might suffer harm while in her entranced condition, and ordered the servant to stay close to her so as to offer protection or sound an alarm. But there is a less charitable explanation - that Aischa acted as Marthe's confederate.

Second, how closely were Marthe's two younger sisters observed during the séances? Richet states that they "sat far from the curtain," i.e., the cabinet. Even if they were initially seated far away, could they not have come closer once the lights went out? How certain is it that one or both of the sisters did not smuggle props into the room? Were they searched? Was Aischa searched?

The answer to each of the two last questions appears to be no. In fact, astonishingly enough, even Marthe herself was not searched. Richet comments, "Marthe was not undressed, but in that very hot climate she wore only a thin dress, and as I made magnetic passes over her to awake her from trance, I could be sure, by passing my hand all over her body, then she had nothing on but this thin garment."

Surely this is inadequate. By "magnetic passes," Richet means hypnotic gestures (hypnotism being originally associated with "animal magnetism"). These passes probably would not have touched the body, and of course no actual magnet was used. Moreover, Richet carried out this procedure only when waking Marthe from her trance - after the phenomena had been observed. There was nothing to prevent her from hiding items in her dress, carrying them into the cabinet, deploying them in the séance, and then secreting them somewhere else or giving them to Aischa before being "awakened."

Richet states that the room was lit by a photographer's red lamp. "Everything that took place in the room could be seen perfectly well, and I am absolutely certain that no stranger could enter during the séances. As Marthe was not tied, nor her hands held, the conditions of control were less severe than in [a previous] case; they were, however, strict enough to allow of a definite opinion."

Again, this hardly sounds adequate. There were no restraints on the medium. She was free to carry out any sort of trickery. While reddish lamplight was preferable to the total darkness that often prevailed in séances, it probably still did not permit clear viewing.

Even so, Richet feels confident enough to state, "It is therefore established that there was no instrumentation and no theatrical accessories that the medium could use, and that no stranger could enter the room."

If one can judge by his own description, his confidence is badly misplaced. Instruments or theatrical accessories could have been smuggled in by Marthe under her dress, or by either of her sisters, or by Aischa. For that matter, since the stable was on the property where Marthe lived, there was probably nothing to prevent her or an accomplice from entering it prior to the séance and stashing items in a secret location - under a loose floorboard, for instance. There is also no way to ascertain whether or not an accomplice might have concealed himself on the premises before the search was conducted. Someone hiding under the floor or behind a sliding panel in the wall or ceiling would not be found.

Richet then describes one of the more noteworthy appearances of the phantom customarily summoned by Marthe - the spirit, it was said, of an Indian prince named Bien Boa. Although the scientist was skeptical of the claim that Bien Boa was actually who he claimed to be - believing instead that the apparition was an ectoplasmic production of Marthe's subconscious mind - he nevertheless had no doubt as to the phantom's corporeal reality. How could he, when Bien Boa had taken form right before his eyes?

"[A]fter a long wait," Richet writes, "I saw close to me, in front of the curtain which had not been moved, a white vapour, hardly sixteen inches distant. It was like a white veil or handkerchief on the floor; it rose up still more, enlarged, and grew into a human form, a short bearded man dressed in a turban and white mantle, who moved, limping slightly, from right to left before the curtain. On coming close to General Noel, he sank down abruptly to the floor with a clicking noise like a falling skeleton, flattening out in front of the curtain. Three or four minutes later ... he reappeared rising in a straight line from the floor, born from the floor, so to say, and falling back on it with the same clicking noise.

"The only un-metapsychic explanation possible [metapsychic was Richet's term for paranormal] seemed to be a trap-door opening and shutting: but there was no trap door, as I verified the next morning and as attested by the architect."

When I read this, my first thought was that Richet had looked in the wrong direction. Rather than inspecting the floor for a trap-door, he should have inspected the ceiling. I thought that the bearded phantom could have been a life-size marionette, operated on strings from above. In this scenario, an accomplice of the medium would have lowered the figure from the ceiling.

This hypothesis, however, is probably wrong. A more plausible explanation is suggested by Richet's description of a photo taken of Bien Boa: "A thick, black, artificial-looking beard covers the mouth and chin ... Bien Boa would seem to be a bust only floating in space in front of Marthe, whose bodice can be seen. Low down, between the curtain and Marthe's black skirt, there seem to be two small whitish rod-like supports to the phantom form."

Presumably the beard was "artificial-looking" because it was, in fact, artificial, and Bien Boa "seem[ed] to be a bust" because he was a bust. But what is really interesting are the "two small whitish rod-like supports to the phantom form" - the kind of supports that are still used in puppetry today, to manipulate so-called "rod puppets" from behind or below.

Photo: Bien Boa hovering in front of the curtain, with his "artificial-looking beard" and legless body. Note that the curtain appears to be partly open, possibly allowing manipulation of the figure from behind

 

A rod puppet would make an altogether more satisfactory phantom than a marionette. No overhead wires or hidden accomplice was needed. Marthe, operating behind the curtain, manipulated the figure herself. The puppet, lying flat, was pushed out from underneath the curtain, its appearance concealed by smoke effects ("a white vapour"). Marthe then pulled the figure upright ("it rose up still more, enlarged, and grew into a human form"), and made it walk ("limping slightly" - i.e, moving jerkily). After a few steps (which Richet describes elsewhere as "halting"), the puppet was simply made to collapse to the floor, "with a clicking noise like a falling skeleton" - the "clicking noise" of its hollow or lightweight components. The act was then repeated ("he reappeared rising in a straight line from the floor ... and falling back on it with the same clicking noise").

"The phantom of Bien Boa," Richet writes, "appeared five or six times under satisfactory conditions in the sense that he could not be Marthe masquerading in a helmet and sheet. Marthe would have had not only to bring, but also to conceal afterwords, the helmet, the sheet, and the burnous [in modern spelling, burnoose - a hooded cloak]. Also Marthe and the phantom were seen at the same time. To pretend that Bien Boa was a doll is more absurd still; he walked and moved, his eyes could be seen looking round, and when he tried to speak his lips moved."

But rod puppets can move and walk around, and the impression of eyes moving and following the viewer can be created even in a painting. It is interesting that Bien Boa merely "tried to speak" - apparently he could actually speak only through Marthe herself, whose voice at such times was described as "halting and wooden and guttural."

Richet himself points out, though without attaching much importance to the fact, that in one photo of Marthe and Bien Boa together, Marthe's left sleeve "appears empty, though the vacuity is not complete." Could the sleeve have been empty because Marthe's arm was actually engaged in holding up the puppet figure at her side?

It might be objected that only a child could be tricked by a puppet, a thing of stiff rods supporting a sheet and a mask. No adult, and certainly not a sophisticated scientist alert to any sign of chicanery, could be taken in by such a device. But remember O'Brien's dinosaurs, and the magicians who fell for them.

Although a rod puppet could explain some of Bien Boa's appearances, there were other times when a living person must have masqueraded as the phantom. On one such occasion, Richet asked the phantom to blow into a flask of water, which Bien Boa did, producing visible bubbles. A possible explanation was provided by a coachman in General Noel's employ, a man named Areski, who claimed that he had "played the ghost." This assertion was made only after Areski had been fired for theft, and it may be that he was simply seeking revenge on his former boss. Aleski's claim is made somewhat less probable by the fact that he said he had disappeared via a trap door, but as we have seen, no trap door was discovered.

In any case, it was not necessary for the coachman to act as an accessory. There were others who might have been in a position to impersonate the phantom - Aischa for example, or one of the two younger sisters, or Marthe herself.

Sometime after Marthe completed her experiments with Richet, the story circulated that she had confessed to producing her effects by trickery. Whether or not she actually did confess remains unknown. The story was attributed to an anonymous source and could never be checked, and Marthe evidently did not endorse it.
Indeed, she went on to work with other researchers. In these later sessions, far more extensive precautions against trickery were said to have been taken. Marthe was stripped and searched before each séance, a search that included the examination of her hair, nose, mouth, armpits, knees, and even her rectum and vagina. On some occasions she was said to have been given an emetic, forcing her to void her stomach and esophagus, thereby removing any suspicion that she had swallowed some muslin to be later regurgitated as ectoplasm. In addition, detectives were employed to follow Marthe and investigate her background and associates; they found no evidence of fraud.

This all sounds convincing enough, except that if Marthe had secreted her materials in the séance room prior to the session, then no amount of bodily searching would avail the investigators, and if she was acting alone, then the detectives' trail would inevitably be cold. In any case, photographs produced in these later investigations are no more believable than those taken of Bien Boa.

Richet himself seemed to acknowledge this. When writing of some "faces" that seemed to extrude from Marthe's body, he admitted, "these faces (and many others) are not in relief. They are like drawings; and, more strange still, something like folds in the paper of a drawing are visible; as if a drawing had been folded three or four times and unfolded to be photographed, so that the materializations are in these cases flat, or materialized drawings. These folds in flat images gave immense suspicion of fraud. But that presumes extreme stupidity in [Marthe], since she knew that the photographs would be taken."Perhaps it merely presumed extreme boldness in Marthe, who by that point had found that she could get away with almost anything.

 

Photo: Ectoplasmic "face" produced by "Eva C." (Marthe Beraud)

 

Another "face."

 

Great latitude was given to the medium when photographs were taken. Richet complains that photography interrupted a session, necessitating "intermissions of observation while the curtain is drawn," because "continuous observation is not permitted by the medium when waiting for the photograph." Marthe herself would signal the photographer when it was time to take the shot. Obviously this setup gave her both the time and the privacy necessary to arrange her materials for the camera.

During these later researches, accounts of her manifestations became ever more elaborate. Marthe was said to emit ectoplasm from her mouth, navel, breast, and armpits. The damp, enigmatic material, which "resembles moist and sticky muslin," proved elusive. Richet says that when one researcher tried to seize a strand of ectoplasm, he "could grasp nothing, for it disappeared at once." In other instances, some ectoplasm was recovered and subjected to microscopic examination, revealing "vestiges of epithelium, bacterial forms, and a notable amount of fat. In certain cases it looked like vegetable tissue; in others like a filament of cotton surrounded by a granular substance whose nature could not be determined."

One seemingly paranormal phenomenon eagerly cataloged by Marthe's later investigators was the production of paraffin gloves - molds of human hands produced in paraffin wax, ostensibly during the séance. It was asserted that these molds, which endured long after the séance was over, constituted proof that a hand had materialized in the liquid wax and then dematerialized after the wax had set. How else, it was asked, could such molds have been made? If a living hand had been inserted in the wax, it would have broken the mold when it was removed. In fact, when artisans made such molds of living hands, they had to separate the mold into two pieces to release the hand, then reattach the halves. Richet wrote, "We defy the skilful modellers to obtain such moulds without using the plan of two segments separated by thread and afterwards reunited."

It took many years for "skilful modellers" to take up this challenge - but in 1997 a pair of Italian investigators, Massimo Polidoro and Luigi Garlaschelli, decided to give it a try. They found that it was possible to make an excellent paraffin glove of a living hand and to extract the hand, slowly and carefully, without cracking the mold. The extreme maneuverability of the hand allows it to work its way free of the mold in the same way that one might free one's hand from a very tight glove. Even when the mold in question was extremely fragile, made with only a thin shell of wax, it was still possible to extricate the hand and leave the mold undamaged. Whether this technique was actually used during the séance, or was employed in advance, with the completed molds hidden in the room and produced when needed, may never be known. It is worth pointing out that the report on producing paraffin gloves was published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, as just one of many skeptical assessments of paranormal phenomena to appear in that publication. ("Spirit Moulds: A Practical Experiment"; Vol. 62, No. 848; July 1997 p. 58-62).

Some have maintained that Marthe would not have subjected herself to years of tedious testing merely to pull off a hoax. Brian Ingliss writes, "There was no money in it for the investigators and little enough for the medium; certainly far less than she could have earned displaying her powers on the halls. And there was no kudos; such research attracted only mockery, if it were noticed at all." (Natural and Supernatural, 1992; p. 435)

But human motivation is a tricky thing. There are other rewards besides money and fame. Doctors are familiar with the condition known as Munchausen syndrome, in which a patient makes himself ill - sometimes seriously so - in order to garner the attention of the medical staff. Members of religious cults may surrender all their worldly goods and personal freedom, abandoning even their families, for no obvious gain. Recently there have been news reports of people who opt to have healthy limbs amputated because of an irrational aversion to their own bodies.

Plainly, it is not enough to say that Marthe and her investigators had no reason to cheat or to delude themselves. People's reasons are not always reasonable.

In making these points, I don't mean to say that all the evidence of physical mediumship is equally suspect. Table tilting and the levitation of tables, other objects, and even persons are phenomena that have been widely reported and reproduced. So-called "spirit raps," a catchall term for a variety of sounds and vibrations, have been known since antiquity. There are even cases of spirit manifestations that may be strong enough to count as evidential - as in some sittings of the famed 19th century medium D.D. Home. By no means am I dismissing the great mass of evidence for these assorted phenomena, many of which I believe to be genuine.

But for Marthe Beraud, what evidence is there? In the end, all we have are paraffin gloves that could have been faked, photos of apparitions and ectoplasmic extrusions that are less than convincing, a record of Richet's inadequate precautions against cheating, and the reports of witnesses who may or may not have been reliable.

On the other hand, in Marthe's favor, we have the insistence on the part of later investigators that thorough precautions were taken and that the phenomena continued and became even more impressive. Certainly if we take the researchers at their word, then no amount of trickery can explain what they saw.

Here, for example, are Richet's contemporaneous notes on a session with Marthe:

In the quite small room which I search thoroughly ... Mme. de S., whom I will call A., is alone with Marthe and myself. We both sit close to Marthe, so close that I can touch her hands without getting up. The light is an electric lamp covered with red stuff, and gives light enough to show all the white in Marthe's garments and the white ribbons in her hair. After about half an hour, I open the curtains and see a faint luminosity on the floor, so feeble that I doubt its reality. By degrees this light increases; it is like a small, luminous handkerchief lying on the floor. Marthe's whole body is motionless. The luminous spot grows; its outlines are milky, undefined and cloudy, less defined and softer than would be those of woven stuff. It approaches the chair, increases in size, and takes a serpentine form which tends to rise towards the left arm of A.'s chair. Its outlines become sharper; it is like a mass of half-empty fabric. Then follows an extraordinary sight: a point detaches itself from the mass, mounts up, bends and directs itself to Marthe's breast, her hands being held the whole time. The point continues to advance in a terrifying way like an animal pointing its beak; and as it advances, on the rigid stalk there appears a thin gauzy structure like a bat's wing, so thin and transparent that Marthe's garments can be seen through it. The stem is easily distinguishable from the membrane round it. Marthe is motionless and speaks at intervals.

I can approach and look very closely, only an inch away. I see what looks like a swollen substance, moving as if alive, and changing its form. For five or six minutes I examine it attentively. I see extensions like the horns of a snail, which start up to right and left; these horns are like transparent gelatin, they project from and sink back into the more defined central mass.

And in a later session:

Fairly good light. The curtain remains closed for about an hour. I open it; a white spot on the floor grows rapidly, and two horns protrude from the mass X, from which other horns appear, very mobile, pointing in every direction. The mass, then much larger, disaggregates into particles, taking on the semblance of a hand ... a greyish hand with ill-defined outlines.

This hand moves, looking like the hand of a mummy emerging from some stuff; it raises and lowers itself like a hand. Marthe's hands are firmly held by me and are quite motionless. The fingers of the ectoplasm, thin and spindly, seem to end in cloudy masses. I can examine them very closely. I touch one of these spindles; it feels like a cold liquid. I can press it and it feels like the bone of a finger covered with skin. The hand rests on my knee and I feel the slight friction of a body of little resistance. The hand then rises of itself, swaying on a long stem that connects it with the floor; it falls back on to the floor with a slight noise; it remains there and I think I see the two bones of the forearm as though wrapped in cloudy muslin.

The hand then rises, bends, and moves towards me. The wrist is lowered and the fingers pendant; they move and there seems a torsional movement of this strange fore-arm. I still think I see the carpal bones in the muslin-like cloud.

The hand rests on my knee again. I feel its weight (very light), it makes little movements at my request that I can feel quite well. Then Marthe says to me, 'That is the muscles beginning to form,' and I see, or I think I see, something dark in the space between the two bones. The hand rises and moves very close to me, having no connection with the ground but a slight white trail. It then falls to the ground with a slight noise, rises from it and suddenly disappears at the moment that Marthe gets up.

The key to the whole question is in a few words of the preceding paragraph: "I see, or I think I see."

If Richet really did see these things, then his confidence in Marthe's genuineness must have been justified. But did he only think he saw them? In the dim light (described only as "fairly good"), in the excitement of the moment, perhaps urged on by Marthe's own suggestions ("That is the muscles beginning to form"), did he see what was really there or what he wanted to see?

It may never be possible to know. But we do know that when an audience of magicians watched Willis O'Brien's animated dinosaurs, they saw something that no modern viewer would perceive.

If there are fewer spirit materializations in the modern world, perhaps it is because we now see with clearer eyes.

***

Postscript: After posting this essay, I became aware of some comments by psychical researcher Montague Keen which bear directly on the topic. These comments are found in Keen's essay"The Scole Investigation: A Study in Critical Analysis of Paranormal Physical Phenomena" (2001). 

Keen criticizes the skeptical assumption 

that, because the purported [spirit] communicators do not behave as we would expect ..., they must be figments of the medium's brain ...

The assumption underlying this criticism has very widespread implications. Among the most frequently reproduced photographs designed to illustrate the obviously fraudulent nature of so-called ectoplasmic images of the past are those of somewhat grotesque and crude paper masks. They featured in Baron von Schrenck Notzing's celebrated series of tests on a medium known to history as Eva C. [Marthe Beraud]. But a study of the elaborate precautions taken by the medical investigator and his two qualified colleagues shows that, if Eva had contrived to smuggle in the mask during the séance of August 7th 1912 (to take one example), she would have had to have packed and concealed about her body a plastic mask of natural size, a head shape of paper or textile fabric, and a quantity of a substance, the size of a hand, which would leave traces on her dress. In spite of all the precautions, including prior examination of her bare body, hair, mouth and ears, and being sewn into a séance costume which was found after the sitting to have remained unopened, the medium would have had to pack this equipment in or on her body, open it up, use it before the cameras, fold it all up again and conceal around her bare body so that it would remain undetected despite a subsequent body search. Such precautions, which extended to hand-holding and the unexpected shining of torches and taking of flashlight plates, have had not the slightest effect on those who consider it obvious that no genuine spirit would want, even if able, to project an image with such manifest signs of crude human fabrication.

Nearly a century after the Beraud investigations, the debate goes on.

 

Sources

Orville Goldner and George E. Turner, The Making of King Kong, 1975

Charles Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Kesearch, 1923

Massimo Polidoro and Luigi Garlaschelli. "Spirit Moulds: A Practical Experiment," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. (July 1997.) Vol. 62. No. 848, 58-62 

Brian Ingliss, Natural and Supernatural, revised edition, 1992

Montague Keen, "The Scole Investigation: A Study in Critical Analysis of Paranormal Physical Phenomena," (2001). Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 15 No.2, 167-82

 

New book: Life & Afterlife (pinned post)

Though this blog is kaput, its content — appropriately enough — lives on after death! 

Recently I published a nonfiction book culled from years of blog posts and also containing a great deal of original work. I call it LIFE & AFTERLIFE, and it's available in a variety of editions, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, and trade paperback. The ebook edition is priced at $2.99, the paperback at $9.99 (about as low as I could go, given the publisher's costs).

This is an entirely different book from my earlier effort THE FAR HORIZON, which tackles the same subject but from a more philosophical perspective. With LIFE & AFTERLIFE, my focus is on empirical evidence rather than "what it all means."

This link takes you to the Amazon sales page, where you can find LIFE & AFTERLIFE in paperback and Kindle editions:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQKBVVR7/

You can also visit my newly revamped author site: http://michaelprescott.net.

 

We are all loved

Roger Knights directed me to this story in the Washington Post. It's heartwarming and reassuring, and may provide some comfort in these increasingly crazy (and crazy-making) times.

The story is written by a hospice social worker, Scott Janssen, who, like many people in that field, has encountered patients with compelling stories of deathbed visits and similar phenomena. In this case, an elderly patient remembered a deeply meaningful event from his time in World War II. After a particularly traumatic day of dealing with casualties from a combat operation, the patient was unable to shake the memory of one patient in particular. He said:

“Later that night I was on my cot crying. Couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and all the others I’d seen die. My cot was creaking, I was shaking so hard. I even started getting scared that I was going insane with the pain.”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”

“What was he doing?” I ask.

Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”

“What was it like to feel that kind of love?”

“I can’t put it in words.” He pauses. “I guess I just felt like I was worth something, like all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”

“What was real?”

“Knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”

This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the specter arrived, he’d wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a sense of peace and calm.

“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later, I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’

Janssen asked him why he'd brought up this subject, and Evan replied:

“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”

Janssen goes on to describe some paranormal experiences of his own, which opened his mind to the conviction that his patients were not merely hallucinating. He writes that while he tried to dismiss one such experience as coincidence ...

Inside, though, a part of me knew it was real.

After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of disorientation and crisis. It even sends messages of love and reassurance now and then when we’re in pain.

I would add to this only two things.

First, I think there are times when we all feel we are "going insane with pain." This particular moment in American history may be one of them – and this is true for people on both sides of the increasingly wide political divide. It is comforting to think that others who've endured their own share of earthly misery, perhaps in much larger measure, are watching over us and are ready to take our hand and lead us to a better place when it's our time to go.

As an aside, I sometimes think that only my exposure to spiritualist concepts and the evidence for them has kept me from losing my mind entirely. Admittedly, sometimes I come pretty close to losing it, anyway ... But as G.K. Chesterton reportedly said when told he was a pretty rotten person for all his Christian faith, "Imagine how much worse I would be without Christianity." (Quoted from memory, because I can't track down the actual quote.) In my case, just imagine how much worse I would be without my knowledge of the afterlife and the higher self! I shudder to think of it.

Second, I would note that my own rather limited experience with hospice workers, during the brief time when my father was on in-home hospice care, made me realize that these people – people who deal with death on a daily basis – are often profoundly spiritual in their outlook. In fact, I would even describe them as "Spiritualist." Some of them use the language and concepts familiar to me from my own readings of Spiritualist literature of a hundred years ago.

It is, of course, entirely possible that some people influenced by Spiritualism went into the hospice field precisely so they could attend the dying. But I think it is also the case that hospice workers have witnessed so many examples of anomalous phenomena – deathbed visions, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and so forth – that they have no choice but to adopt the language and mindset of spiritualism in order to make sense of it.

I might add that years ago, I was in a used bookstore when two hospice nurses asked the clerk if she had any of John Edward's books. This was a time when John Edward was the most famous medium in America. I somewhat regret not talking to those nurses, as I imagine they had some interesting stories to tell.

To repeat what hospice patient Evan said, his comfort came from "knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.” This is so easy to forget and so hard to remember. Yet it is true – profoundly true.

Why do we forget? My forthcoming book The Far Horizon has some thoughts on this, essentially suggesting that we are temporarily players in a fully immersive virtual-reality environment. "Fully immersive" means we cannot easily emerge from the illusion of earthly life. We must endure all the Sturm und Drang of our environment even if it is only an illusion. Apparently, this is how we learn and grow. And those who refuse to engage with the world and endure its highs and lows, those who prefer to sequester themselves in ignorance and apathy, are missing out and will probably have to return again and again until they learn their lesson.

The late Bruce Siegel, who often commented on this blog, liked to emphasize the primary role of love in any understanding of life and spirituality. I was frequently inclined to downplay his input, preferring to focus on more "scientific" concepts like information theory. But I'm starting to suspect he was right all along. Without love, what is there? What's the point?

Ultimately, one way or the other, all the pain and drama of this world will fade like a bad dream. That's worth remembering at times when the bad dream becomes especially nightmarish.

Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

MacBeth Act 3, Scene 2

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? 

Bleed-throughs

Matt Rouge's thought-provoking guest post has stimulated a lot of discussion, and it got me thinking, as well. Lying in bed last night around 2 AM, I couldn't help noodling on the whole question of UFOs and some related matters. The idea I kept coming back to was "bleed-throughs."

According to Wiktionary,  the three main definitions of "bleed-through" are:

1. The seepage of ink from one side of a printed page to the other
2. The discolouration of a wood veneer due to seepage of glue
3. A weak imprint of magnetic information transferred to adjacent layers of audiotape, resulting in an unwanted echo.

I remember reading a passage in the Seth material channeled by Jane Roberts in which Seth tells us that reality consists of many parallel dimensions or timelines, only one of which we occupy. There can be intrusions from other dimensions or timelines, resulting in anomalous phenomena. This is essentially what I mean by "bleed-through."

The third definition quoted above is the one closest to my meaning. "An imprint of information transferred to an adjacent layer of the information storage medium" could be a valid explanation – or at least the beginning of an explanation – for UFOs and a variety of other seemingly inexplicable phenomena.

As readers of this blog know, I'm partial to the idea that information is fundamental to our reality. In other words, the physical reality that we perceive with our senses can be likened to the virtual reality rendered in a headset by a computer program. In both cases, the seemingly real world of three-dimensional objects reduces to an unseen realm of data and data-processing algorithms.

If each stream of reality in Seth's multi-dimensional scenario is ultimately a stream of information, then perhaps some of this information can be transferred from one stream to another, either intentionally or by chance. The resulting bleed-through would yield artifacts in our reality that seemingly don't belong here – weird intrusions from other timelines. 

UFOs seem to have much in common with apparitions, which may be another form of bleed-through. Apparitions vary in their degree of corporeality; some seem wispy and insubstantial, while others are reported to be quite tangible and solid. In cases where an apparition has been observed by several people at once, it appears that it is seen from various perspectives, like any other physical thing; the person facing the apparition will see it head on, while the person standing to the side will see it in profile. Apparitions also have been seen reflected in mirrors, and they can match the light-and-shadow conditions of their environment. In some cases, apparitions seem to have been caught on film, videotape, or other recording media, while the field of electronic voice phenomena offers many examples (admittedly often disputed) of voices captured from the ether.

In short, apparitions can, in some cases, seemingly have the physical characteristics we associate with ordinary physical objects. And yet they are certainly not ordinary physical objects, because they walk through walls, appear and vanish unpredictably, and sometimes are seen by only certain observers while remaining invisible to others in the vicinity.

All of these characteristics can be ascribed to UFOs, as well. Do they sometimes show up on radar? Yes. Are they sometimes captured on film or video? Yes. Do they appear and vanish unpredictably? Yes. Are they sometimes seen by certain observers but not others who are equally well situated? Yes.

We can extend the argument by looking at other paranormal or anomalous phenomena such as poltergeists, deathbed visions, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, after-death communications, and episodes of cosmic consciousness. Any of these could be seen as a bleed-through, sometimes accidental, sometimes intentional. This presumes, of course, that one (or more) of the parallel timelines can be characterized as "the afterlife," and that the "spirits" occupying this zone can cross "through the veil" from one timeline to another.

In many of these phenomena, an altered state of consciousness is involved, so we may be talking about a combination of the bleed-through of information and an adjustment of the "frequency" of consciousness to perceive it. As a rough analogy, imagine listening to the radio and hearing a faint signal from another radio station; if you adjust the dial, you can tune in the other station more clearly. The bleed-through itself may be only half the equation, with the fine-tuning of consciousness as the other half. Either factor, alone, can result in some degree of perception of an anomalous phenomenon, but when both factors are in play, the perception will be more vivid.

This notion might go some way toward explaining why both UFOs and apparitions vary in their degree of physical reality. Some UFOs do not show up on radar. Some do not appear on film or video even when the camera operator is certain he got the image in frame. Perhaps the correct combination of informational bleed-through and perceptual fine-tuning is needed to get fully "real" results.

The same line of thinking may also explain why UFO sightings sometimes come in waves. An initial sighting may trigger a subconscious adjustment of perception in other people's minds, making them more likely to perceive UFOs. It is said that when Uri Geller performed his spoon-bending act on television, many people – especially children – started bending spoons spontaneously, something they had never done before. Seeing Geller do it was enough to alter their consciousness so they could do it too, at least temporarily. The same thing  has been known to happen in the "PK parties" hosted by Jack Houck; it can take a while for anyone to start bending spoons, but once one or two people have done it, the rest of the crowd will find it much easier to follow suit. A small adjustment of consciousness, perhaps merely a lowering of inhibitions, seems to help bring the phenomena into being.

Consider also the recurrent waves of excitement about spiritualism from the mid-19th century through the early 20th  century, which can be compared to a social mania. The positive results obtained by some amateur experimenters – hearing raps or getting messages via planchette – would stimulate other people to obtain similar results. Simply seeing or hearing about the phenomena may be enough to alter consciousness just a bit and make it more susceptible to picking up bleed-throughs. 

Returning to our list of anomalous phenomena, we can consider how each one might relate to bleed-throughs.

• Poltergeists — a persistent bleed-through of a particular spiritual entity, often associated with the consciousness of a particular person (typically an adolescent or young adult who is emotionally disturbed or high-strung, perhaps exhibiting traits of altered consciousness).
• Deathbed visions — the bleed-through of the afterlife timeline into our own, as perceived by the altered consciousness of the dying person and sometimes by people nearby.
• Out-of-body experiences — possibly a way of projecting our own awareness into another timeline; in effect, a reverse bleed-through. Are poltergeists in our world simply entities that are having out-of-body experiences in their world?
• Near-death experiences — essentially a combination of deathbed visions and out-of-body experiences, with the altered consciousness that attends the dying process tuning in to information from a nearby dimension and then projecting itself into that timeline.
• After-death communications — intentional bleed-throughs on the part of people who are no longer alive in our timeline, but who have a strong emotional connection to somebody here. These are most common, I think, when the living person is dealing with the emotional shock and disorientation of grief and loss – in other words, when the percipient is experiencing an altered state of consciousness.
• Episodes of cosmic consciousness — "cosmic consciousness," a term coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in his book of the same name, is an epiphany in which a person has a sudden, profound sense of the meaning of life and the ultimate nature of reality. Again, this could be understood as a combination of a shift in consciousness and a bleed-through of information that is normally masked from our perception.

Other phenomena, such as the Mothman, Bigfoot, visions of the Virgin Mary or other iconic figures, alien abductions, and even levitation and miraculous healing may also be connected with the idea of information transfer and consciousness fine-tuning. 

The Devil made them do it

Lately I happened to read Washington Irving's famous story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," about Ichabod Crane and his terrifying steeplechase with the Headless Horsemen. It's a very well written and amusing story, well worth a look. Ichabod, who is depicted in less than flattering terms, is said to be "a perfect master of Cotton Mather's 'History of New England Witchcraft'." I was sufficiently intrigued to buy a digital version of one of Mather's many books on the subject and read it myself.

This particular book is known today as On Witchcraft, though the original title was Wonders of the Invisible World. Its relevance to the subject matter of this blog is twofold: First, it illuminates the attitude of the Puritan settlers of New England toward all manner of things that might be termed "paranormal" today. To be brief, that attitude was one of sheer superstitious terror and fanatical rejection. Second, it includes a fairly detailed and apparently well-attested account of what would now be called a "crisis apparition." This account has little or nothing to do with the main themes of the book, and seems to be included only because Mather found it so interesting.

Of course, it should be noted that Mather's book is crowded with strange portents and inexplicable occurrences, including the case of a bird that began speaking in a human voice and urging people to read Paul's letter to the Colossians and another case in which a cat (said to be a witch in feline form) attacked a man in his bed and was driven off only by his fervent appeals to the Holy Trinity. In other words, we can hardly take Mather as a wholly reliable narrator. Nevertheless, the crisis apparition story has a level of detail that makes it, to me, more credible than some of the other accounts.

Cotton Mather

Let's set the stage by looking at attitudes in New England circa 1692. This was at the tail end of the notorious witch hysteria that gripped Salem, Massachusetts, and surrounding villages, resulting ultimately in the execution of 19 people and two dogs. (The dogs were apparently guilty of witchcraft, as well.) Many others were arrested and held in prison for months, facing the very real possibility of death, only to be released when the tumult finally died down.

It was in this atmosphere that Cotton Mather took it upon himself to write a book defending the witch trials, which were beginning to attract criticism from people who felt the whole matter had gone too far. He was only 29 at the time, but had already made a name for himself after graduating from Harvard at 15 and following in the footsteps of his famous father, Increase Mather, by becoming a noted preacher. Though as far as we know he had no direct involvement in the trials themselves, he did have access to court records, and he knew many of the principals involved.

He informs us that,

I have indeed set myself to countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil against New England, in every branch of it, as far as one of my darkness can comprehend such a work of darkness....

We have been advised by some credible Christians yet alive, that a malefactor, accused of witchcraft as well as murder, and executed in this place more than forty years ago, did give notice of an horrible PLOT against the country by WITCHCRAFT, and a foundation of WITCHCRAFT then laid, which if it were not seasonably discovered, would probably blow up, and pull down all the churches in the country. And we have now with horror seen the discovery of such a witchcraft! An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sword, the first-born of our English settlements: and the houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants, tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether preternatural.

(Note: In all my quotations, I've modernized the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization for easier reading.)

An important theme of Mather's book is that there is not just one devil, but a horde of them – legions, in fact, as the New Testament itself assures us in the story of the man possessed by a "legion" of demons. These evil beings are everywhere; we are cribbed, cabined, and confined by them; they are with us in our homes, in our shops, even in our churches.

When we speak of the Devil, tis a name of a multitude; it means not one individual devil, so potent and scient, as perhaps a Manichee would imagine; but it means a kind, which a multitude belongs unto. Alas, the devils, they swarm about us like the frogs of Egypt, in the most retired of our chambers. Are we at our boards [= dining tables]? There will be devils to tempt us unto sensuality. Are we in our beds? There will be devils to tempt us unto carnality. Are we in our shops? There will be devils to tempt us unto dishonesty. Yea, though we get into the Church of God, there will be devils to haunt us in the very temple itself, and there tempt us to manifold misbehaviors. I am verily persuaded that there are very few human affairs whereinto some devils are not insinuated; there is not so much a journey intended but Satan will have a hand in hindering or furthering of it.

Mather was by no means unusual in holding this view; in New England in that era, almost everyone believed much the same thing. The atmosphere must have been stifling in its superstitious dread and omnipresent paranoia. He invites his readers to imagine that, even as they sit in their pews in church, they are surrounded by hundreds of invisible demons.

Contemporary woodcut of Mather, protected by a magic circle, confronting the Devil  

"That there is a Devil," Mather writes, "is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil. For any to deny the being of a Devil must be from an ignorance or profaneness worse than diabolical." Ergo, disbelief in the Devil proves that one is an agent of the Devil! It is not likely that many people expressed such disbelief publicly, even in the (unlikely) event that they had any private doubts.

Another theme of Mather's book is that New England has been singled out for a no-holds-barred attack by the devil and his minions. Here, in the unspoiled wilderness where a small band of faithful are attempting to build a new Jerusalem, the devil sees his infernal plans most at risk. He has brought his full wrath and his total arsenal of weapons to bear against the hapless New Englanders in a desperate attempt to derail their utopian project. Thus, it is only to be expected that New England will be a hotbed of demonic possession, hexes, pestilence, and other ills. And what do you know? All these things are happening! Crops have failed, cattle have died, winters have been harsh, plagues have devastated whole communities. Now witch covens are being uncovered by the score. It all points to the conclusion that, following the Book of Revelation, we are entering the last days, when our ordeals will be most severe.

Although in his later years, Mather was known for advocating inoculation against disease (an advanced and controversial position for his time), in 1693 he put the blame for illness squarely on the Devil. Here's a look at the state of medical science in New England in the late 17th century:

’Tis the destroyer, or the Devil, that scatters plagues about the world. Pestilential and contagious diseases, ’tis the Devil who does oftentimes invade us with them. ’Tis no uneasy thing for the devil to impregnate the air about us with such malignant salts as meeting with the salt of our microcosm shall immediately cast us into that fermentation and putrefaction which will ultimately dissolve all the vital ties within us; even as an aqua fortis, made with the conjunction of niter and vitriol, corrodes what it seizes upon. And when the devil has raised those arsenical fumes, which become venomous quivers full of terrible arrows, how easily can he shoot the deleterious miasms into those juices or bowels of men’s bodies, which will soon inflame them with a mortal fire! Hence comes such plagues, as that be some of destruction, which within our memory swept away such a throng of people from one English city in one visitation; and hence those infectious fevers, which are but so many disguised plagues among us, causing epidemical desolations.

As you might expect, Mather is suspicious not only of those accused of witchcraft, but also of those who practice other socially marginalized arts.

It was said in Deuteronomy 18 – 10, 11, 12, There shall not be found among you an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer; for all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations, the Lord thy God doth drive them out before thee....

Persons who have never made any express contact with apostate spirits yet may act strange things by diabolic aids which they procure by the use of those wicked forms and arts that the Devil first imparted unto his Confederates.… Some of them that have been cried out upon [as] employing evil spirits to hurt our land have been known to be most bloody fortunetellers; and some of them have confessed that when they told fortunes, they would pretend the rules of chiromancy and the like ignorant sciences, but indeed they had no rule (they said) but this, The things were then darted into their minds. Darted! Ye wretches; by whom, I pray? Surely by none but the devils; who, though perhaps they did not exactly foreknow all the thus predicted contingencies, yet having once foretold them, they stood bound in honor now to use their interest, which alas, in this world, is very great, for the accomplishment of their own predictions.

It's interesting that the so-called fortunetellers "confessed" that they didn't actually use any esoteric methods, but simply allowed relevant thoughts to enter their minds. In other words, they received psychic impressions, while the crystal ball, tarot cards, or whatever items they pretended to employ were merely props. I suspect that this is still true today; there is no power in crystals or cards and no meaning in the random distribution of creases on someone's palm, but concentrating on such things may free a sensitive mind to receive impressions via psi. Of course, to the Reverend Mather, it's all the work of that old trickster, the Devil.

1892 lithograph imaginatively representing a Salem witch trial 

And what a monster the Devil is. Or at least, what a monster he became in people's minds, leading them to acts of self-destruction and the destruction of their loved ones. At the height of the witch hysteria, neighbors were accusing neighbors, prominent pastors and their wives were accused of consorting with demonic powers, and family members across New England were informing on each other. Children, the most suggestible of persons, confessed to their own heinous crimes while implicating their parents:

It would break an heart of stone to have seen what I have lately seen; even poor children of several ages, even from seven to twenty, more or less, confessing their familiarity with devils; but at the same time, in doleful bitter lamentations that made a little portraiture of hell itself, expostulating with their execrable parents for devoting them to the devil in their infancy and so entailing of devilism upon them!

All of it was enough to make a good Christian desire an end to earthly life. Despite the promise of better times to come, the 29-year-old Mather had a morbid preoccupation with the sweet release of death.

For, though when we call to mind that the Devil’s time is now but short, it may almost make us wish to live unto the end of it.… Yet when we bear in mind that the Devil’s wrath is now most great, it would make one willing to be out of the way.… We should not be inordinately loath to die at such a time. In a word, the times are so bad that we may well count it as good a time to die in as ever we saw.

This, then, was the world of Cotton Mather. It's a depressing place, and we should be glad to have left it behind. After all the above, it may be hard to take anything that Mather says very seriously. Clearly, despite his academic achievements and undoubted brilliance in some areas, he was led by his unbending theological dogmas to believe in all manner of superstition.

Accordingly, we should take his account of a possible crisis apparition with due skepticism. But since his report is similar in many ways to better attested and more recent accounts of the same type, and since it was recorded long before the idea of crisis apparitions was formalized by the Society for Psychical Research, it's at least worth considering, if only for its historical interest.

Here is the relevant passage in full:

It was on 2 May in the year 1687 that a most ingenious, accomplished and well-disposed gentleman, Mr. Joseph Beacon by name, about 5 o’clock in the morning, as he lay, whether sleeping or waking he could not say (but judged the latter of them), had a view of his brother then at London, although he was now himself at our Boston, distanced from him a thousand leagues. This his brother appeared unto him, in the morning about 5 o’clock at Boston, having on him a Bengal gown, which he usually wore, with a napkin tied about his head; his countenance was very pale, ghastly, deadly, and he had a bloody wound on one side of his forehead. Brother! says the frightened Joseph. Brother! answered the apparition. Said Joseph, What’s the matter, brother? How came you here! The apparition replied, Brother, I have been most barbarously and injuriously butchered by a debauched drunken fellow to whom I never did any wrong in my life. Whereupon he gave a particular description of the murderer, adding, Brother, this fellow, changing his name, is attempting to come over on to New England in Foy or Wild [transatlantic passenger ships]; I would pray you on the first arrival of either of these to get an order from the governor to seize the person whom I have now described; and then do you indict him for the murder of your brother: I’ll stand by you and prove the indictment. And so he vanished. Mr. Beacon was extremely astonished at what he had seen and heard; and the people of the family not only observed an extraordinary alteration upon him for the week following, but have also given me under their hands a full testimony that he then gave them an account of this apparition.

All this while, Mr. Beacon had no advice of anything amiss attending his brother then in England; but about the latter end of June following, he understood by the common ways of communication that the April before, his brother, going in haste by night to call a coach for a lady, met a fellow then in drink, with his doxy [= female companion, trollop, wench] in his hand: some way or other the fellow thought himself affronted with the hasty passage of this Beacon, and immediately ran into the fireside of a neighboring tavern, from whence he fetched out a fire-fork, wherewith he grievously wounded Beacon in the skull; even in that very part where the apparition showed his wound. Of this wound he languished until he died on 2 May, about five of the clock in the morning at London. The murderer it seems was endeavoring to escape, as the apparition affirmed, but the friends of the deceased Beacon seized him; and prosecuting him at law, he found the help of such friends as brought him off without the loss of his life; since which, there has been no more heard of the business.

This history I received of Mr. Joseph Beacon himself, who a little before his own pious and hopeful death, which followed not long after, gave me the story written and signed with his own hand, and attested with the circumstances I have already mentioned.