Michael Prescott's Blog

Essay: Psychics and Trickery

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. This essay was originally posted in 2004.

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Psychics and Trickery 

 

I'm sick of Uri Geller.

I mention this because, more than a year ago, I wrote an essay concerning some experiments in ESP in which Geller, the famed Israeli psychic, was the test subject ("Flim-Flam Flummery"). These experiments had come in for severe criticism by well-known skeptic James Randi in his book Flim-Flam. I, in turn, subjected Randi to criticism for what I saw as errors and omissions in his account. Since then I've posted several addenda to the piece - in fact, the addenda are now roughly equal in length to the original essay! Nothing much has been settled, and since these experiments were conducted back in the 1970s, it seems unlikely that the various arguments will ever be resolved.

But that's not why I'm sick of Uri Geller. No, I'm sick of him because in my modest efforts to challenge Flim-Flam's portrayal of the experiments, I had to become Geller's defender. And this put me in an uncomfortable position, because Geller is a hard person to defend.

Consider: This is a man who, at one point, claimed to be in telepathic contact with an intelligent supercomputer piloting an alien spaceship beyond the orbit of Pluto. This is a man who claims to have genuine psychic powers, yet has used them in glitzy stage performances and for such trivial purposes as bending spoons. This is a man who claims to be able to produce "apports," or materializations of physical objects out of midair or through solid walls - yet no apports have ever been detected in laboratory tests with Geller.

In short, this is someone who could easily be dismissed as a faker - not, mind you, a fakir, or Hindu holy man, but a plain old-fashioned phony-baloney snake-oil salesman.

And yet ... I have read of tests in which Geller, under close observation and with no apparent means of cheating, was able to producer results no one could explain.

Which is why I'm sick of Uri Geller. He makes my head hurt. Part of me cannot give any credence to a self-promoting confabulator and stage magician. But another part of me cannot dismiss well-conducted tests that yielded positive results. (The tests discussed in Flim-Flammay or may not have been carried out properly, depending on whom you believe. Examples of other experiments with Geller that appear to have been conducted according to rigorous standards are given in Richard S. Broughton's Parapsychology: The Controversial Science.)

What’s worse is that Geller is by no means unique. The history of research into psychic phenomena is rife with persons who appear to have had genuine paranormal abilities, yet who clearly resorted to trickery on some occasions.

A famous example is Eusapia Palladino, a Sicilian medium known for the "physical" (as opposed to mental) phenomena displayed in her séances. These phenomena took a bewildering variety of forms, including a cold draft clearly felt in the sealed séance room, the billowing of Eusapia's skirt with no apparent cause, the movements and levitations of tables and other objects, partial manifestations of spirit forms, unexplained noises, and the playing of musical instruments without human assistance. This is just a small sampling; a detailed first-hand report is found in Everard Feilding's Sittings with Eusapia Palladino and Other Studies, and a long summary can be read in Stephen E. Braude's The Limits of Influence.

Investigators who studied Eusapia closely and conscientiously most often concluded that she had genuine - and formidable - psychic powers. Experienced magicians testified that no sleight of hand and no use of hidden mechanical contrivances could have produced the effects generated by Eusapia, who often provided her demonstrations in a room chosen by the experimenters - a room carefully searched before and after each sitting.

But here's the thing about Eusapia: As genuine as her abilities seem to have been, she was still a notorious cheat.

Everyone who worked with her commented on this fact. Eusapia would cheat whenever she thought she could get away with it. She took a childish delight in cheating and showed no remorse when caught. She seemed to regard the experiments as a game, and the experimenters as stuffed shirts whom she was eager to deceive.

If Eusapia, was a cheat, how can any of her phenomena be taken seriously? For the simple reason that under conditions in which cheating was almost certainly impossible, she continued to produce results. In fact the results she obtained through the legitimate use of her powers were far more impressive than the crude parlor tricks she sometimes resorted to.

So here we have another case of a psychic with some measurable - in fact, quite dramatic - supernormal talents, yet who had a marked proclivity to deceive. Other possibly genuine psychics or mediums who nevertheless may have resorted to trickery include Kate and Margaretta Fox,  Florence Cook,  Madame Blavastky, Marthe Beraud (see my essay "Of Dinosaurs and Phantoms" and its sequel),  and Mina Crandon (see my essay "The Two Faces of Margery").  

Before we go on, it's important to observe that not all mediums and pyschics have been accused of trickery. Genuine mediums whose long careers were never tainted with any suspicion of deceit, despite frequent investigations, include D.D. Home, Leonora Piper, Gladys Osborne Leonard, Margaret Verral, and Eileen Garrett, who is discussed in my essay "R-101." 

Nevertheless, the flakes and the occasional deceivers outnumber the more reliable psychics. Any good history of parapsychology will provide numerous examples of this problem. See, for instance, Broughton's above-mentioned Parapsychology: The Controversial Science, or Brian Inglis's Natural and Supernatural and its follow-up Science and Parascience. I won’t belabor the point here. The really interesting question is how to explain this frequent confluence of deception and genuine abilities in the same person, whether that person is Uri Geller, Eusapia Palladino, or anybody else.

Various explanations have been offered. First, because psychic abilities are typically transient and unpredictable, psychics can be hard pressed to produce results on a regular basis. On days when they're feeling "off," they may resort to trickery to supplement their actual abilities.

Second, some psychics report physical and mental strain after a séance. Eusapia was said to be seriously ill for two or three days following any successful demonstration. A psychic wishing to avoid this penalty might be tempted to produce similar effects through legerdemain.

Third, some physics, like Eusapia, seem to regard the testing procedure as a kind of game. They may take a certain glee in showing up the supposed experts who have arrived to pass sober judgment on the case.

Fourth, psychics who become fatigued or disgruntled after an exhaustive series of tests may consciously or subconsciously sabotage the proceedings.

No doubt there is some validity to all these suggestions. Another possibility, related to the third and fourth points but with a slightly different emphasis, involves the nature of what we might call "the psychic personality."

Is there, in fact, a typical personality profile for people with psychic gifts? I suspect that there is, and that true psychics tend to be similar to artists, poets, musicians, and other creative types. That is, they tend to be sensitive, deeply intuitive, and right-brain-oriented. Creative people are generally not known for methodical reasoning and linear thinking, but rather for a more free-form, holistic way of processing information. Psychics, likewise, may not be keen logical thinkers who reason their way from premise to conclusion. Instead they may be more likely to follow a line of thought that "feels right" or "just seems to make sense," operating in a nonlinear, intuitive fashion.

This mindset is both the psychic's strength and weakness. It is the psychic's strength because it allows the uncensored, unconstrained development of a socially disreputable and psychologically unsettling talent. It is the psychic's weakness because it renders the psychic peculiarly vulnerable to any stray thought or passing impression. If the thought pops into Uri Geller's mind that he's in contact with an extraterrestrial supercomputer, he may lack the critical faculties necessary to subject this idea to rigorous analysis. To him, this idea might be just as true, this impression just as real, as any other idea or impression that registers with him. He may not be a critical thinker who can readily distinguish valid insights from nonsense.

Similarly, if Eusapia finds it entertaining to fool the investigators who have come to examine her, then she will have her fun. For her, there is no conception of the possible importance of the investigators' work. They are seeking data in their methodical, no-nonsense way, while she is a free spirit, uninterested in hypotheses and theories, evidence and proof. She cannot take them seriously because she cannot understand them - just as they, with their logical, analytical minds, cannot understand her.

Imagine how Picasso would respond if a team of scientists tried to study him in a lab. He would probably end up painting mustaches on their faces. They would call him crazy, and he would call them boring. They would accuse him of taking nothing seriously, and he would accuse them of having no sense of humor. They might even decide that he had no real talent, since they were not able to measure it - while he would conclude that they had no conception of talent, because they didn’t know how to recognize it when it was right in front of them. Between the two sides there would be an unbridgeable chasm - the distance between two very different mindsets.

I think this way of looking at things helps us to realize why the study of psychic phenomena can be so frustrating, so crowded with contradictions. The people gifted with these "wild talents" (as they are known in some cultures) are exactly the sort of folks who will not respond favorably or predictably to confinement in a laboratory. Just as it is difficult to quantify genius in a standardized test, so it is difficult to isolate unmistakable, repeatable psychic phenomena under standardized laboratory conditions - because the mentality most conducive to the development and exercise of these abilities is antithetical to that of the researchers designing the tests.

None of this means that scientific examination of psychic phenomena is useless. Despite the difficulties, considerable evidence has been collected. But much of this evidence is rendered less persuasive because of the test subjects' bizarre claims or erratic behavior. This is frustrating, but it may also be inevitable. If you work with a genius, you have to expect tantrums, moodiness, and other expressions of the creative temperament. And if you work with a psychic, you may have to expect - and accept - off-the-wall claims, childish trickery, and general monkey business. Except in rare cases, you probably can’t get one without the other.

 

Sources

Stephen E. Braude, The Limits of Influence (1991)

Richard S. Broughton, Parapsychology: the Controversial Science (1991)

Everard Feilding, Sittings with Eusapia Palladino and Other Studies (1963)

Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural (1977), and Science and Parascience (1984)

 

Essay: Getting a Rise out of Ectoplasm

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. This essay, originally posted in 2008, is an adaptation of three blog posts - "A Moldy Tale" and its sequel, and "Getting a Rise out of Ectoplasm." It also incorporates material that came up in the comments threads.

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Getting a rise out of ectoplasm

In his book After Death -- What? Researches in Hypnotic and Spiritualistic Phenomena (1909; Aquarian Press edition 1988), turn-of-the-century scientist Cesare Lombroso recounts the experiments that led him from a strictly materialist worldview to a belief in spirits and life after death. One of the most striking chapters is Lombroso's account of "seventeen séances held in Milan in 1892 ... séances in which the most marked precautions were taken, such as searching the medium, changing her garments, binding her and holding her hands and feet, and adjusting the electric light on the table so as to be able to turn it off and on at will." (pp. 40-41)

The subject of these experiments was the controversial Sicilian medium Eusapia Palladino, who was said to be able to levitate tables, make musical instruments play themselves, produce cold winds in a sealed room, and materialize hands and faces. Eusapia was an eccentric character known for her propensity to cheat when she thought she could get away with it, a tendency that discredited her in the eyes of many researchers. (The fact that she was a coarse, uneducated, and flirtatious peasant woman also factored into the disrepute in which she was held in genteel circles.) Nevertheless, when properly controlled and observed, she produced some remarkable phenomena, which are difficult if not impossible to explain by any normal means. Indeed, the premier magician of the day, Howard Thurston, witnessed one of Eusapia's séances and stated publicly that her phenomena could not be duplicated by any trickery known to him.

It's also worth noting that Lombroso was a serious and careful researcher, not in the least naive when it came to Eusapia. Here's what he said about her:

Many are the crafty tricks she plays, both in the state of trance (unconsciously) and out of it - for example, freeing one of her two hands, held by the controllers, for the sake of moving objects near her; making touches; slowly lifting the legs of the table by means of one of her knees and one of her feet, and feigning to adjust her hair and then slyly pulling out one hair and putting it over the little balance tray of a letter-weigher in order to lower it. She was seen by Faifofer, before her séances, furtively gathering flowers in a garden, that she might feign them to be 'apports' by availing herself of the shrouding dark of the room.

What follows are a few excerpts from Lombroso's treatment of the Eusapia sittings. It should be noted that the table used in the experiments was not Eusapia's; it was "made expressly for the purpose" by the researchers. (p. 41)

After recounting some partial levitations of the table Lombroso writes:

It was natural to conclude that if the table, in apparent contradiction with the law of gravitation, was able to rise on one side, it would be able to rise completely. In fact, that is what happened, and these levitations are among those of most frequent occurrence in experiments with Eusapia. They were usually produced under the following conditions: The persons seated around a table place their hands on it and form the chain there. Each hand of the medium is held by the adjacent hand of the neighbor on each side; each of her feet is under the foot of her neighbor; these furthermore press against her knees with theirs. As usual, she is seated at one of the short sides (end) of the table, -- the position least favorable for mechanical levitation. After a few minutes the table makes a lateral movement, rises now to the right and now to the left, and finally is lifted wholly off its four feet into the air, horizontally, as if afloat in a liquid, and ordinarily to a height of from 10 to 20 centimetres (sometimes, exceptionally, as high as 60 or 70), then falls back on all four feet at once. Sometimes it stays in the air for several seconds, and even makes fluctuating motions there, during which the position of the feet under it can be thoroughly inspected. During the levitation the right hand of the medium frequently leaves the table with that of her neighbor and remains suspended above it. Throughout the experiment the face of the medium is convulsed, her hands contract, she groans and seems to be suffering.

In order better to observe the matter in hand we gradually retired the experimenters from the table, having noticed that the chain of several persons was not at all necessary, either in this or in other phenomena. In the end we left only a single person besides the medium, and placed on her left. This person rested her feet on the two feet of Eusapia, and one of her hands on the latter's knees. With her other hand she held the left hand of the medium, whose right lay on the table in full view of all, or was even lifted into the air during the levitation.

Inasmuch as the table remained in the air for several seconds, it was possible to secure several photographs of performance. [Two of these are included in the book.]

A little before the levitation it was observed that the folds of the skirt of Eusapia were blown out on the left side so far as to touch the neighboring leg of the table. When one of us endeavored to hinder this contact, the table was unable to rise as before, and was only enabled so to do when the observer purposely allowed to contact to occur. It will be noticed that the hand of the medium was at the same time placed on the upper surface of the table on the same side, so that the leg of the table there was under her influence, as much in the lower portion by means of the skirt as in the superior portion through the avenue of the hand. No verification was made as to the degree of pressure exerted upon the table at that moment by the hand of the medium, nor were we able to find out, owing to the brevity of the levitation, what particular part was in contact with the garment, which seemed to move wholly in a lateral direction and to support the weight of the table.

In order to avoid this contact it was proposed to have the levitation take place while the medium and her coadjutors stood on their feet, but it did not succeed. It was also proposed to place the medium at one of the longer sides of the table. But she opposed this, saying that it was impossible. So we are obliged to declare that we did not succeed in obtaining a complete levitation of the table of all four of its legs absolutely free from any contact whatever, and there is reason to fear that a similar difficulty would have been met in the levitation of the two legs that stood on the side next the medium. [pp. 43-46]

While performing some experiments with a balance, the same "blowing out" of the medium's garment was observed.

In this experiment of the balance, also, it was noticed by some of us that success seemed to depend on contact of the garments of the medium with the floor upon which the balance was directly placed. The truth of this was established by a special experiment on the 9th of October. The medium having been seated on the balance, that one of our number who had taken upon himself to watch her feet soon saw the lower folds of her dress swelling out and projecting in such a way as to hang down from the platform of the balance. As long as the attempt was made to hinder this movement of the dress (which was certainly not produced by the feet of the medium), the levitation did not take place. But as soon as the lower extremity of the dress was allowed to touch the floor, repeated and very evident levitations took place, which were designated in very fine curves on the disk that registered the variations of weight. [pp. 47-48]

The movement of the dress naturally gives rise to suspicion that some sort of fancy footwork, so to speak, was at play. But the researchers swore that Eusapia's feet were not responsible for the movement. If there is any reality to ectoplasm, then it may be the case that some sort of invisible ectoplasmic protuberance was causing the dress to move, and that contact between this ectoplasmic rod and the floor or table was necessary in order to achieve results.

In any case, the preceding observations pale in comparison to a phenomenon that Lombroso titles "The Levitation of the Medium to the Top of the Table."

Among the most important and significant of the occurrences we put this levitation. It took place twice, -- that is to say, on the 28th of September and the 3rd of October. The medium, who was seated near one end of the table, was lifted up in her chair bodily, amid groans and lamentations on her part, and placed (still seated) on the table, then returned to the same position as before, with her hands continually held, her movements being accompanied by the persons next her.

On the evening of the 28th of September, while her hands were held by MM. Richet and Lombroso, she complained of hands which were grasping her under the arms; then, while in trance, with the changed voice characteristic of this state, she said, "Now I lift my medium up on the table." After two or three seconds the chair with Eusapia in it was not violently dashed, but lifted without hitting anything, on to the top of the table, and M. Richet and I are sure that we did not even assist the levitation by our own force. After some talk in the trance state the medium announced her descent, and (M. Finzi having been substituted for me) was deposited on the floor with the same security and precision, while MM. Richet and Finzi followed the movements of her hands and body without at all assisting them, and kept asking each other questions about the positions of the hands.

Moreover, during the descent both gentlemen repeatedly felt a hand touch them on the head.

On the evening of October 3 the thing was repeated in quite similar circumstances, MM. Du Prel and Finzi being one on each side of Eusapia. [pp. 49-50]

The researchers' impression of being touched by "a hand" during this levitation is particularly interesting, and perhaps adds weight to the hypothesis of ectoplasmic extensions at at work.

Now, I'm well aware that there are ways of tilting a table and making it appear to levitate, though it would seem that the researchers' precautions were sufficient to prevent fraud in these particular tests. But even if Eusapia managed to fool them with regard to the table, how in the world could she simulate the levitation of herself and the chair she was sitting on -- transporting it from the floor to the table itself, and then back again, while closely observed?

Since several witnesses were present, a skeptic would have to posit a collective hallucination that persisted for a fairly extended period of time. I suppose mass hysteria could account for such a thing, but there is no reason to think that these investigators were hysterical.

What if the investigators simply misremenbered the event? It seems absurd. Such a dramatic development would make a strong - perhaps indelible - impression. Besides, researchers in these situations typically write up their notes immediately after the event. And all of the researchers would have to suffer the same memory lapse.

Could the researchers have lied? This is probably the only non-paranormal explanation that makes any sense. But there is no reason to suspect the researchers of dishonesty. They had nothing to gain by promoting Eusapia; quite the opposite - their endorsement of her abilities hurt their reputations and careers. At least two of them (Lombroso, Richet) were skeptical materialists by training and predisposition, who came to a belief in the paranormal only reluctantly. Lombroso's report reads like a sober record of facts, with Eusapia's occasional failures and attempts at deception plainly noted. Besides, other researchers reported similar phenomena from Eusapia on other occasions, so they must have been lying, too.

Skepticism of physical phenomena in the seance room is often warranted, as the long history of fraud in this area makes clear. But when a case is as well observed and carefully reported as this one - with the effects occurring in good light over a period of several minutes - I don't think any skeptical explanation holds up.

Eusapia Palladino was by no means the only medium to produce inexplicable effects of a "physical" (as opposed to mental) nature. Another example is Franek Kluski, who first came to my attention via Arthur Conan Doyle's History of Spiritualism. This well-known book, in two volumes (complete text available online: Vol. I and Vol. II), makes rewarding reading for anyone interested in the early years of parapsychology.

That's not to say there aren't problems with the book. Doyle's dogged commitment to the reality of psi phenomena, especially as pertaining to life after death, led him to endorse some questionable characters. In Volume I, he goes to some lengths to establish the Davenport Brothers as legitimate, even though most observers then and later have made then out to be clever frauds. He endorses such dubious activities as slate-writing and spirit photography, and seems genuinely peeved at the efforts of the Society for Psychical Research to tighten up the experimental controls on mediums.

Despite these caveats, the two volumes contain many fascinating anecdotes, and a good deal of seemingly solid evidence is presented. Doyle's smooth, lucid prose style makes the pages turn quickly.

In a chapter in Volume II titled "Voice Mediumship and  Moulds," Doyle discusses the practice of producing paraffin molds of spirit forms - faces and hands, usually - in the séance room. Skeptics dismiss such claims, saying that the medium or an accomplice made the impressions surreptitiously, or that pre-made molds were smuggled into the room and substituted in the dark. This is undoubtedly true in some cases; one instance often cited is the infamous case of "Margery" (Mina Crandon), who produced a spirit thumbprint that turned out to belong to her all-too-living dentist. People argue to this day about Margery's mediumship, and the case may not be as clear-cut as it appears. Still, that exposure and others like it have made researchers understandably cautious.

But consider the case of Franek Kluski. It seems that every reasonable precaution against fraud was taken, yet positive results were obtained. According to Doyle, the following series of tests was reported in the magazine Revue Metapsychique in June, 1921: 

Dr. [Gustave] Geley carried out with Kluski a number of remarkable experiments in the formation of wax moulds of materialized hands. He has recorded the results of a series of eleven successful sittings for this purpose. In a dim light the medium's right hand was held by Professor Richet and his left hand by Count Potocki. A trough containing wax, kept at melting-point by warm water, was placed two feet in front of Kluski, and for the purpose of a test the wax was impregnated (unknown to the medium) with the chemical cholesterin, this to prevent the possibility of substitution. Dr. Geley writes:

The feeble light did not admit of the phenomena being actually seen; we were aware of the moment of dipping, by the sound of splashing in the liquid. The operation involved two or three immersions. The hand that was acting was plunged in the trough, was withdrawn, and, covered with warm paraffin, touched the hands of the controllers of the experiments, and then was plunged again into the wax. After the operation the glove of paraffin, still warm but solidified, was placed against the hand of one of the controllers.

In this way nine moulds were taken: seven of hands, one of a foot, and one of a chin and lips. The wax of which they were composed on being tested gave the characteristic reaction of cholesterin. Dr. Geley shows twenty-three photographs of the moulds and of plaster casts made from them. It may be mentioned that the moulds exhibit the folds of the skin, the nails and the veins, and these markings in nowise resemble those of the medium. Efforts to make similar moulds from the hands of human beings were only partially successful, and the difference from those obtained at the sittings was obvious. Sculptors and moulders of repute have declared that they know of no method of producing wax moulds such as those obtained at the séances with Kluski.

Geley sums up the result thus:

"We will now enumerate the proofs which we have given of the authenticity of the moulds of materialized limbs in our experiments in Paris and Warsaw.

"We have shown that quite apart from the control of the medium, whose two hands were held by us, all fraud was impossible.

"1. The theory of fraud by a rubber glove is inadmissible, for such an attempt gives crude and absurd results which can be seen at a glance to be imitations.

"2. It is not possible to produce such gloves of wax by using a rigid mould already prepared. A trial of this shows at once how impossible it is.

"3. The use of a prepared mould in some fusible and soluble substance, covered with a film of paraffin during the séance and then dissolved out in a pail of water, will not fit in with the actual procedure. We had no pail of water.

"4. The theory that a living hand was used (that of the medium or of an assistant) is inadmissible. This could not have been done, for several reasons, one being that gloves thus obtained are thick and solid, while ours are fine and delicate, also that the position of the fingers in our moulds makes it impossible that they could be withdrawn without breaking the glove. Also that the gloves have been compared with the hands of the medium and of the assistants, and that they are not alike. This is shown also by anthropological measurements.

"Finally, there is the hypothesis that the gloves were brought by the medium. This is disproved by the fact that we secretly introduced chemicals into the melted wax, and that these were found in the gloves.

"The report of the expert modellers on the point is categorical and final."

Nothing is evidence to those who are so filled with prejudice that they have no room for reason, but it is inconceivable that any normally endowed man could read all the above, and doubt the possibility of taking moulds from ectoplasmic figures.

A rebuttal of Geley's work was presented by Italian researcher Massimo Polidoro, who, with colleague Luigi Garlaschelli, cast doubt on some of his claims. In particular, they showed that thin molds could be obtained rather easily, and that it was possible for a person to twist his hand free of the paraffin without breaking the mold. Their work is important and interesting, but it does not address the most significant claims made by Geley - namely, that the medium's hands were controlled throughout the séance, and that the paraffin had been pretreated with a certain chemical (without the medium's knowledge) to expose any attempted substitution.

If substitution is eliminated as a possibility, and if the medium's hands were properly controlled, then the only remaining non-paranormal explanation is the action of an accomplice, who would make a mold of his own hand. Could Geley have been careless enough to allow a potential accomplice into the séance room, and would this person's actions pass unnoticed in the dim red light? It seems doubtful.

Skeptics will probably say Kluski fooled the experimenters into believing they had control of both his hands, when actually they were controlling only one. But remember that one of the molds was of a foot, and another was of a partial face ("chin and lips"). Maybe, just maybe, Kluski could have lowered his face into the paraffin, though it seems likely that this action would have been observed, and that some traces of the paraffin would cling to his face afterward.

More important, how would he get his bare foot onto the table and into the trough of paraffin?

After I wrote up this part of the story, a reader named Renaud Evrard pointed me to an excellent article by Mario Varvoglis on the Kluski materializations. This piece goes into more detail about the experiments and clearly shows the weaknesses of Polidoro and Garlaschelli's skeptical explanation. It appears that in presenting their case, they left unmentioned a number of crucial points.

Polidoro writes,

Strictly following Geley's instructions, we prepared two basins (each had a diameter of 10 inches): one with hot water (approximately 5 litres at 55ºC), in which we poured a layer of molten paraffin (approx. 1 kg, previously melted in a pan with boiling water on a kitchen stove), and the other with cold water (5 litres), which we later used to immerse our hands and allow the paraffin to solidify. In turn, we immersed our hands first in the basin filled with paraffin and then in the one containing water.

But this is quite misleading, as Varvoglis' article makes clear. In the Kluski tests, there was no basin of cold water. Varvoglis:

Rather than using a second bowl for cooling, the IMI [Institut Metapsychique International]researchers preferred to allow the wax moulds to rigidify on their own, this being, as we shall see, a precaution against fraud.

The unnaturally rapid rate of cooling of Kluski's paraffin molds was itself a sign that something unusual was going on. Without any cold water available, the molds still cooled and set within one or two minutes - much faster than should have been possible. Kluski's hands (controlled throughout) were observed to get quite cold at times, as if he could produce a change in temperature at will.

The two skeptics, Polidoro and Garlaschelli, continue:

In all of these cases, we were able rather easily to make some fairly thin moulds (a few millimeters thick) just by immersing the hands a couple of times in the basin with the paraffin. But our most significant result was that in every instance we managed to remove our hands from the solidified paraffin glove without breaking it.

This sounds persuasive until we realize that molds "a few millimeters thick" are still significantly thicker than those produced in the Kluski tests, as Varvoglis observes:

Finally, it should be mentioned that the wax moulds were less than a millimeter thick (thinner than a sheet of paper).

And again:

the wax moulds were exceptionally delicate: at most a millimeter thick.

The thinness and fragility of the Kluski molds would have greatly complicated efforts to extricate the hand from the mold without having the mold fall to pieces - something the skeptics fail to mention.

Another fact creating difficulty for the skeptics is that Kluski's molds were much smaller than his own hands. The molded hands were child-sized; no one in the séance room had hands so small. In addition, the fingerprints of the molded hands were not those of Kluski. (It is a tribute to the thoroughness of the researchers that they actually checked this detail with the help of the police.)

Polidoro and Garlaschelli try to address this point:

It would not be difficult to conclude ... that particularly complex moulds could have been shaped with extreme care, before a séance took place, by the medium himself or his accomplices and, during the séance, jumbled up with other moulds forged at the moment of performing the spiritualist occurrence.

This won't do. The séance room was locked; only the investigators and Kluski were present. Who, then, was the accomplice? More important, there could have been no substitutions in at least three of the cases, when the investigators secretly treated the paraffin wax with telltale chemicals.

Here is one such case, per Varvoglis:   

Just prior to beginning, Richet and Geley had secretly added a bluish coloring agent to the paraffin. Control of the medium was considered excellent, with controllers regularly checking and verbally reporting ‘I am holding the right hand’, ‘I am holding the left hand’. Splashing sounds were heard about twenty minutes into the session, and one to two minutes later two warm paraffin gloves were deposited next to the controllers. Both wax moulds had precisely the same bluish tint as that of the tank, strongly suggesting that these were indeed created during the séance, and not smuggled in by the medium. An additional control was the weighing of all substance. Prior to the experiment, the paraffin was 3.920 grams, while at the end of the session it weighed 3.800 grams. The two moulds weighed 50 grams, and there was considerable wax scattered near the medium (around 15 grams), on his clothing, and on the floor 3.5 meters away from him (about 25 grams). Insofar as the sum of these weights correspond very closely to the initial weight, this further establishes that the wax gloves were produced during the session.

Moreover, Kluski's hands were held at all times throughout the sessions by investigators who were well aware of the old "substitution of hands" ploy used by fake mediums. The red light in the room, though dim, was sufficient to allow the sitters to see the outlines of the people at the table. Any gross movements occurring right in front of their faces would have been seen.

Why, then, did the researchers not see the spirit hands entering the paraffin bath? On at least one occasion, they apparently did. Varvoglis writes:

Finally, in one session the researchers actually saw the production of the wax moulds. In other words, they witnessed a continuity between the visual apparitions of luminous hands and the creation of the moulds. As Geley describes it:

We had the great pleasure of seeing the hands dipping into the paraffin. They were luminous, bearing points of light at the finger-tips. They passed slowly before our eyes, dipped into the wax, moved in it for a few seconds, came out, still luminous, and deposited the glove against the hand of one of us.

Varvoglis' complete article is well worth reading. In total, it makes a compelling case for the reality of the Kluski phenomena, and points up the extreme deficiencies of the skeptics' counterargument.

In the case of both Palladino and Kluski, multiple, trained observers using every reasonable precaution witnessed phenomena that have no credible non-paranormal explanation. There are other such cases - whole books full of them. Yet we continue to hear that there is "no evidence" for such phenomena, and that only gullible idiots believe in such things.

 

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

 

Essay: The Two Faces of Margery

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 the essays. — January 24, 2024

 

The Two Faces of Margery

 

Her name was Mina Crandon, but the world knew her as Margery - a pseudonym adopted to protect her from publicity. She lived with her husband, the successful surgeon LeRoi Goddard Crandon, on Boston's affluent Beacon Hill. It was there, in their house on Lime Street, in 1923, that she purportedly discovered she had psychic powers - specifically, the ability to levitate objects, generate occult noises, and materialize "spirit" forms. These phenomena were controlled, she said, by the spirit of her deceased brother, Walter, who would speak through Mina in a gruff, decidedly unspiritual manner, his no-nonsense comments liberally laced with profanities. Before long, Mina's talents came to the attention of researchers, and she was closely studied, on and off, for the ensuing ten years. A thorough examination of the claims and counterclaims of the various researchers would require a book-length essay. I'm not that ambitious. Instead, what I'd like to do is compare and contrast the accounts of the initial investigations, as presented in two influential books: Science and Parascience, by Brian Inglis (1984), and Mediums, Mystics, and the Occult, by Milbourne Christopher (1975), with only occasional forays into other sources, when necessary. In the process we may not learn anything conclusive about Margery, but we will learn something about the hazards and frustrations of studying the paranormal.

Each author no doubt strives for factual accuracy and relative impartiality, but people's preconceived opinions always interfere with their quest for objectivity to some extent. Inglis admits as much in the postscript to his book: "In trying to clear away the debris of misconceptions and misinterpretations I have found it difficult not to slip into the role of counsel for the defence, and for that reason my own interpretation must be treated with reserve; but the records are there, for anybody who cares to check on them." Inglis, then, is sympathetic to the claims of researchers and their subjects, whom he sees as embattled underdogs oppressed by a hostile, closed-minded establishment. Christopher, an accomplished professional magician, brings a very different perspective. He regards claims of psychic phenomena with a skeptical eye and sees mediums and psychics as frauds playing tricks on the gullible. "Scientists who are convinced that human beings have extrasensory powers rarely take the proper precautions to rule out the possibility of trickery," he writes. "Indeed, unless they are experts in the subtle techniques used by magicians and mentalists, or have someone who is to assist them during their experiments, it is almost impossible for them to detect ingenious deceptions." The battle lines are drawn - Inglis, the counsel for the defense; Christopher, the prosecuting attorney.

Inglis begins his case by indicting the competence of Margery's investigators. "Few of the researchers had any experience in this field ... Those who were experienced, too, tended to bring their preconceptions and prejudices along with them." He then makes a preliminary argument for the genuineness of the phenomena. "The Crandons were not the kind of people whom it was easy to suspect of trickery ... They allowed precautions to be taken: investigators were encouraged to search the rooms in which the séances took place. Mina also allowed herself to be searched, before she put on a kimono, silk stockings and slippers, and made her appearance. Her 'cabinet' [a standard accessory for many mediums - an enclosed space in which Mina would sit] was open at the front, and large enough for an investigator who wanted to check on her to sit beside her ... And although the seances were normally held in darkness, apart from an occasional flash of 'red light,' the outline of Mina's body was picked out by luminous pins stuck into her kimono, and luminous bands round her wrists and ankles. Or, sometimes, her wrists and ankles were attached to the cabinet with picture wire." Christopher makes no mention of picture wire or of luminous pins. He mentions the luminous bands only in connection with later séances, indicating that this method was not used during the earlier sessions.

Both Christopher and Inglis point out that Mina was "controlled" (held) on her right side by her husband, who could have been in cahoots with her. Inglis mitigates this damaging admission by adding, "The fact that Crandon was sitting beside her, and was himself controlled on the other side, meant that he could not be held responsible for the distant raps, the music, the luminosities and the movements and levitations of objects rendered visible with luminous paint, which continually featured - unless the Crandons were using some gadget such as a telescopic 'arm,' with a 'hand' and 'fingers,' and no such elaborate contraption was ever found." Inglis might have added that in some séances, an investigator "circled with one of his hands the fingers of both the medium and her husband" (Harry Houdini, "Margery" the Medium Exposed), although it seems that this "control" was not maintained perfectly throughout a séance.

There were a few other debating points Inglis might have used, but didn't. For instance, Walter's voice was said to manifest even when Mina's mouth was filled with water or marbles (John Beloff, Parapsychology: A Concise History, 1997), or even when everyone at the séance table, including her husband, filled his or her mouth with water (Theodore Besterman, Some Modern Mediums, 1930). Some reports claimed that the voice did not come from Mina's direction at all (Daniel Stashower, "The Medium and the Magician," American History magazine, August 1999).

A more complex argument in Mina's favor is made by Nandor Fodor in his Encyclopedia of Psychic Science (1933). He describes a so-called "Voice Control Machine, designed by Dr. Mark Richardson, of Boston, for use in the Margery séances." This device "consists of a U-shaped tube in which small luminous floats were placed on the surface of the water. By means of a flexible tube which had a specially constructed mouthpiece the medium blew into the tube and caused, by the pressure of air, the second column of water to rise. This position was retained as long as the mouthpiece was tightly held by the medium's lips and tongue. The collapse of the column of water could be immediately detected in the dark by means of the luminous floats." Thus, Richardson was allegedly able to ascertain that Mina was not speaking when Walter's voice was heard. Whether Dr. Crandon was in the room is not mentioned.

Fodor continues, "Yet an even more satisfactory control was devised by B. K. Thorogood; a cubical box, made of layers of seven different materials, completely soundproof, closed and padlocked, containing a large, very sensitive microphone, connected by two wires emerging from the box to a distant loudspeaker. While sitters in the séance room heard nothing the voice of Walter issued from the loudspeaker in the distant room, proving that the voice had its origin through the 'mike' in the box. Under such conditions the independence of the voices in the Margery séances was completely proved."

Finally, Inglis could have observed that the Crandons were able to produce their phenomena even when they were far from home, in an environment that presumably they could not have rigged for special-effects tricks. Here is part of a letter written by psychic investigator T. Glen Hamilton in 1927:

"During three days' stay in Winnipeg, Mrs. Crandon kindly gave three sittings at all of which brilliant phenomena were observed by over forty well-known people of this city. As these phenomena took place under entirely new surroundings, I think they should be carefully reported ... I am prepared to state most emphatically that the 'Margery' phenomena are absolutely genuine; and a number of other medical men who were privileged to be present at the 'Margery' sittings have reached the same conclusion. Furthermore, I know of none who witnessed the phenomena here who have been able to suggest any worthwhile criticism. In a word, they are astounded at the simplicity of conditions under which these amazing phenomena occur." ("Introduction to the Second Edition" of Dr. T. Glen Hamilton's Intention and Survival, 1942)

Hamilton, a medical doctor, examined Mina during some of her séances and was impressed to find that her respiratory rate could fall to only five or six breaths a minute (Intention and Survival, Chapter 3). It is certainly possible to induce such slow respiration via breath control exercises or meditation (l've done it myself), but it might be difficult to maintain such control while pulling off elaborate sleight-of-hand and sleight-of-foot tricks, as Mina's detractors alleged.

Interestingly, Mina's brother Walter supposedly served as a spirit control for two other mediums tested by Hamilton in Winnipeg. This purported Walter seemed to know intimate details of the Margery seances in Boston, including the peculiar and little-known claim made by one investigator that Mina fraudulently produced Walter's voice by speaking "with her ears" instead of her mouth (Margaret Lillian Hamilton, "An Introduction to the Researches of Dr. T. Glen Hamilton," in Is Survival a Fact?, 1969). Some sense of the lengths to which skeptical researchers were driven to explain the voice phenomena may be suggested by this unlikely hypothesis.

I include these points, even though Brian Inglis does not, because I want to make the best possible case for Mina Crandon (who will come under some heavy fire later), and because I want to show that Inglis does not overstate his facts. It may be worth mentioning that Milbourne Christopher makes no mention of any of the above details, either.

As word of Mina's séances spread, Harvard psychologist William McDougall obtained the Crandons' permission to investigate the phenomena. In discussing McDougall's initial investigation, Inglis tells this story: "When McDougall elected to sit in the cabinet with the entranced 'Margery,' the better to watch her, the cabinet was quietly dismantled around them, the screws being removed and put in a heap outside the circle."

Christopher does not mention this event, but he does describe a memorable episode witnessed by McDougall and his student Harry Helson. "[One night] the most exciting manifestation occurred on the ground floor. [In near darkness] a piano stool ... glided down the hall; it stopped abruptly about seven feet away from the men. They leaped up and examined the stool. They were able to see well enough to tell that no mechanical device was attached to its base." This phenomenon was later repeated. Helson "thought he knew how the trick was done. It had glided toward a register [i.e., a grill-like device allowing heated air into a room] in the floor of the corridor. This grillwork was a remnant of an old hot-air heating system that had been replaced by steam radiators throughout the house. He reasoned that if a string were attached to the base of the stool, with the free end extending down the hall and through one of the small openings in the register, someone in the cellar by pulling on the string could tug the stool toward the register."

Helson and McDougall later found a short length of string and accused Mina of trickery, but the string was satisfactorily explained as piece of the fringe from a rug. Christopher accepts this explanation but comments, "There is another possible explanation for the mysterious moving stool. If someone had passed one end of a long strong thread up through the register, along the hall, around one leg of the stool, back down the corridor, and through the register, this secret operator could have drawn the stool down the hall by hiding in the cellar and pulling on both ends of the thread. Whenever he wished the stool to stop, he could have released one end and rapidly hauled in the other. By the time an observer reached the stool, the motivating force would be in the cellar."

Now see how Inglis describes the same events: "Eventually, following a séance in which a piano stool danced to music, moving several feet in the process, Helson found an eight-inch piece of string on the floor. McDougall summoned Mina to his office, and told her they had caught her out at last: the movement of objects in the séances, they now knew, had been contrived by attaching string to them, which an accomplice could tug at through the ventilator in the wall. By her own account Mina left him in a fit of the giggles. Even if so obvious a device had not been detected in careful searches which the investigators had invariably made of the room, she knew that the ventilator had been blocked up years before."

Soon other investigators became involved, in connection with a much-publicized prize of $2500 offered by the magazine Scientific American for any "visible psychic manifestation" (as opposed to exhibitions of mental telepathy, say). As this was the kind of thing at which Mina Crandon excelled, the magazine's investigating committee was promptly invited to the Crandons' house. Inglis writes, "To show that she bore McDougall no grudge, too, [Mina] raised no objection to his being one of the Scientific American's team." Christopher differs mildly: "The Crandons regarded Professor McDougall as an antagonist after the string episode."

Inglis describes one member of the investigating team, Hereward Carrington, as having an "encyclopedic" knowledge of the tricks used by mediums. Carrington was a believer in psychic phenomena and eventually endorsed Mina as genuine. To Christopher, his credentials are suspect. "Widely read in both occultism and conjuring, [Carrington] has been called an expert magician. This is not quite true. Though he studied the standard texts and subscribed to conjuring periodicals, he rarely performed and then usually for friends." Christopher casts additional doubt on Carrington by writing, "Carrington found the medium to be a fascinating woman. In later years he reminisced with old friends about his amorous adventures with her." Inglis makes no mention of any amorous adventures. Further, Christopher says Carrington later admitted to a friend that he had only pretended to believe in Mina's powers: "He hoped to get Crandon's financial backing for a psychical research foundation." There is no mention of this in Inglis's book, and the alleged admission, like the one about romantic episodes, seems to be purely anecdotal. (Christopher doesn't mention it, but Stashower's American History article, cited above, includes the further claim that one of the investigators had actually borrowed money from Crandon - another report that cannot be verified, as far as I know.)

Just as they disagree in evaluating Carrington, the authors offer contradictory estimations of the more skeptical members of the team. In Christopher's treatment, Walter Franklin Prince comes off as a brilliant and intrepid investigator, deftly exposing one ruse after another. Inglis is less kind: "Prince attended few sittings; in any case, he should not have accepted the role of referee because he was very deaf, and as the séances would be largely in darkness, he would be deprived of the use of two senses." Elsewhere, paraphrasing a later report favorable to Mina, he says, "Prince was so deaf that he could not hear [a] bell ... ringing even when it was ringing in his lap."

The investigators sat through a number of séances. According to Inglis, "The sitters witnessed phosphorescent lights and movements of objects at a distance from the medium, as well as feeling touches from invisible hands while both Crandon and 'Margery' were under their control." Christopher only briefly mentions the lights, but does not discuss any touches of spirit hands when the Crandons' locations were accounted for. Inglis: "In addition, 'Walter' made good his boast that he could manipulate a pair of scales which [physicist Daniel] Comstock had brought along as a contribution to the tests, in light just good enough to show that nobody was touching them." Or did he? Christopher: "Periodically Walter attempted to tip [the scales]. They were broken one night when the table on which they rested was overturned in the dark, and this testing device was discarded."

Inglis: "Scores of times, too, 'Walter' managed to ring an electric bell in a box designed by the investigators, so that it sounded only when the telegraph-type key was pressed down, the key being out of the Crandons' reach - sometimes when sitters were actually holding the box in their hands." Christopher mentions the electric bell box but does not report that it was out of the Crandons' reach or that it would ring when sitters were holding it. Inglis: "And when [Scientific American associate editor James Malcolm] Bird decided to satisfy himself that Margery could not be responsible for the effects, by sitting in the 'cabinet' alongside her, 'Walter' laid on an impressive demonstration for his benefit by ripping off a whole wing of the cabinet on the side where Bird was sitting, and then dragging the remains around the room, carrying the two of them in it." Christopher does not mention this episode.

Inglis: "Eventually 'Margery' began producing a pseudopod which felt like an extended arm, with a hand and fingers capable of touching and gripping objects ... It emerged while her hands were controlled - and could be seen to be controlled, from the luminous bands round her wrists." Christopher has still not mentioned the luminous bands at this point. If one were to judge by his account, the bands were not used until later. (I can't say when they were first used.) But he does devote a good deal of space to a test that Inglis does not mention — an attempt to get "Walter" to manipulate some items inside a sealed bottle. The attempt was a failure.

It appears that at least some members of the Scientific American committee were impressed. It was at this stage that the committee's most famous member, the great stage magician Harry Houdini, became involved. Inglis writes, "Houdini's commitments prevented him from attending the early sittings." Christopher presents a different version: "Until Houdini ... received a letter from Bird in June - three months after the preliminary investigation started - the magician had not been informed that one was under way." Christopher's version seems to accord with the facts as presented in Houdini's own pamphlet on the subject. The pamphlet includes the above-mentioned letter from Bird indicating that Houdini had not been informed of the Margery research.

In any case, Houdini was a late arrival to the investigation. Even so, he quickly took charge - and sowed the seeds of further controversy. To this day, the famed magician's degree of impartiality remains a hotly contested topic, and predictably Inglis and Christopher differ in their interpretation. Christopher presents Houdini as a model of investigative rigor and rectitude, while Inglis says Houdini "could be unscrupulous in twisting evidence" and "was by this time incapable of separating fact from invention."

Houdini, according to Inglis, "by 1924... had ceased even to pretend to himself that he could conduct a dispassionate investigation ... He had been on a lecture tour of the United States as advance publicity for his book [condemning spiritualism], and on it he had vehemently announced spiritualism as the cause of distress, madness and suicide." He allegedly told the publisher of Scientific American: "I will forfeit a thousand dollars if I do not detect her if she resorts to trickery." Christopher says nothing about the thousand-dollar challenge. If he had mentioned it, he might have noted that Houdini, according to his self-published pamphlet, added immediately, "Of course if she is genuine there is nothing to expose." By omitting this part of the quote, Inglis gives the impression that Houdini was more biased than his own account would suggest.

Christopher, who authored a well-reviewed biography of Houdini, celebrates the magician as the person who unmasked Mina. Inglis, on the other hand, says that upon Houdini's arrival, "the investigation began to fall apart." Both accounts agree that during their first séance together, Houdini sat to the left of Mina, holding her left hand and pressing his leg against hers to act as her control on that side. The bell box, placed on the floor between Houdini's feet, rang more than once. A megaphone was picked up in the darkness and hurled to the floor. The table was tilted upward. The cabinet behind Margery fell over.

Christopher goes on to recount Houdini's explanations. Houdini had felt Margery's leg slide down his as she reached behind his chair to press the button on the bell box with her foot. She had slipped the megaphone on her head during a moment when control was lax and then had tossed it with a shake of her head. She had eased her head under the table to push it upward while her hands and feet were held. She had slipped a foot under the lightweight cabinet and pulled it down. Inglis finds fault with these explanations: "[Houdini's] argument took no account of the possibility that the motive force might be supplied by pseudopods."

Pseudopods or not, the committee as a whole had not been persuaded that Margery was a fake, so Houdini designed a special box in which Mina would be kept during the séance. Only her hands and head would protrude from the box, obviously limiting the extent of any shenanigans she could perform. Christopher reports that Dr. Crandon objected to this device on the ground that it might prevent the pseudopods from emerging. Nevertheless, Mina consented to the experiment.

There is now an important discrepancy between the accounts of Inglis and Christopher. Inglis says that for this test Houdini and Prince acted as Mina's controls on the left and right sides. But Christopher says that Dr. Crandon continued to act as his wife's control on the right side until a later session, when Prince took over. Christopher: "The test session ended abruptly after the hinged front of the box clattered down in the dark. Crandon said Walter must have forced it open; Houdini claimed the medium had used her shoulders to loosen the narrow brass strips that held the panels closed." Inglis: "Houdini's explanation ... invited the question how she could have used such force without Houdini and Prince noticing any change in the tension of her hands." But of course, if it was Houdini and Crandon - as opposed to Houdini and Prince - exercising control over Mina, then it would have been considerably easier for her to move her shoulders, or at least the shoulder on her right side (the side controlled by her husband).

The box was re-secured, and another controversy ensued. Inglis: "'Walter' came through and denounced Houdini in unprintable terms for interfering with the bell-box. Examining it, Comstock found that a small rubber eraser had been wedged into it to make it harder to ring. Houdini disclaimed responsibility; but as he had been responsible for checking it, Margery had clearly won the first round." Christopher reports things differently. After the lid had opened, "the committee left the room, and the Crandons [and some friends] returned for [a] private session. Only they know what was said while the magazine's investigators were closed off in another room. This much is certain: when the members of the committee again entered the room and the seance resumed, Walter went on the attack [against Houdini] ... Eventually Walter told Comstock to examine carefully the bell box under a light. Comstock did, and found a small round eraser ... wedged under the lid ... Houdini made a statement for the record that he had not put the eraser there."

So was Houdini the last one to have checked the bell box? Or was there ample opportunity for the Crandons and their friends to insert the eraser themselves?

A larger controversy was to follow. The next time Margery was enclosed in the now-reinforced box, Walter accused Houdini of putting a ruler inside the box with her. Inglis: "The [box] was opened, and there was a rule which, if her hands and been released, 'Margery' might in theory have been able to convey to her mouth and use to ring the bell in the box, and perhaps play other tricks. Again, Houdini denied that either he or [his assistant James] Collins was responsible; but as only they had had access to the [box], he was reduced to blaming the woman he had employed to search Mina before the séance." Christopher has a somewhat different take: "Soon Walter spoke up and implied Houdini had put a ruler under the cushion on which the medium's feet rested. While the magician had not been in the room prior to the sitting, Walter said Houdini's assistant had been ... when the box was unlocked, a new carpenter's ruler, a two-foot length folded in four six-inch sections, was discovered under the pillow. Comstock suggested that it might have been left behind when the box was being strengthened ... Collins said his ruler was still in his pocket. He took it out and showed it." Houdini swore an oath that he knew nothing of the ruler, and made his assistant do the same.

There is a famous postscript to this story. Some years later, after Houdini's death, James Collins allegedly confessed that he did indeed plant the ruler on Houdini's orders. "I chucked it in the box myself. The boss told me to do it." Christopher argues that Collin's alleged confession was concocted by a former friend of Houdini with an axe to grind. He adds, "I knew Collins, too. He idolized Houdini, and would have been the last person on earth to implicate him even if there had been some sort of a plot to set up Margery. Thus, the story falls of its own weight." Inglis, addressing Christopher's arguments for the only time in his account, writes, "Milbourne Christopher, himself a magician - and a sceptic - has since dismissed the story [as sheer fiction] on the ground that it had been reported by somebody who felt he had been disparaged by Houdini." Inglis then goes on offense, reporting that Christopher himself admitted that Houdini withheld a photo of Mina from publication because it appeared to show a blurred halo around her head. Inglis's point is that if Houdini was so implacably hostile to Mina as to be unwilling to disclose any evidence that might bolster Mina's case, then he may have been willing to frame her with a planted ruler, as well.

Tacitly dismissing Collins' alleged confession, Inglis writes, "Houdini would have been rash to entrust the rule to his assistant. The more probable explanation ... is that he himself, certain that she was 'a fake' but impressed by her skill, had put the rule into the [box] as a form of insurance, so that even if she did succeed in impressing Prince and Comstock during the séance, he would have a let-out." Such were the tensions between the Crandons and Houdini that Walter pronounced the magician's doom. Christopher: "Walter had predicted during a Margery séance the previous December that the magician would die in less than a year. He failed to oblige and continued to denounce the medium and duplicate her tricks during his performances." What Christopher doesn't mention is that while Houdini outlived the prediction, he didn't outlive it by very long. He died on October 31, 1926 - within two years (not one) of Walter's pronouncement.

Whatever the truth of the ruler episode may have been, the controversy surrounding the ruler brought an end to the investigation. Margery did not get the Scientific American prize (nor did anyone else), but she continued to be the subject of other investigations, which became the focus of new disputes too arcane to be explored here.

Another curious postscript to the early investigations involves an accusation published by Scientific American's James Malcolm Bird in 1930. Rather unexpectedly, given his earlier support of Mina, he now claimed that she had tried to gain his cooperation in fooling Houdini. "She sought a private interview with me and tried to get me to agree, in the event that phenomena did not occur, that I would ring the bell-box myself, or produce something else that might pass as activity by 'Walter.'" He also said he'd found Mina cheating on some occasions in 1924, although he thought some of the phenomena were genuine. Inglis focuses on the damage this admission did to Bird's own credibility: "If he had noticed cheating, why had he not said so that time? For propagating this heresy, Bird was sacked from his job as [a parapsychology society's] research officer [and] faded from the scene." Christopher does not mention any damage to Bird's own career, instead focusing on the accusation itself: "Even Bird, in his book 'Margery' the Medium, admitted she could deceive investigators, if she wished. No other medium, Bird said, was more alert or could 'get more fun' from doing this. Even so, he insisted that she produced genuine phenomena."

Inglis doesn't explain why Bird changed his mind, but Christopher presents a theory. "Thomas Tietze in his biography Margery ... says that an allegedly true account of how this came about is in the files of the [American Society for Psychical Research]. Bird, who had been drinking heavily, arrived at the Crandon house with a woman, whose presence the surgeon and his wife would not tolerate. Bird, infuriated, retaliated with a few barbed comments charging Crandon and Margery with bizarre sexual interests." This argument turned Bird against the Crandons, Christopher suggests. Of course there is no way to verify this anecdote, and even if it is true, it would not prove that Bird's allegations about the Crandons were factual.

Bird's revelations, whatever their truthfulness, were overshadowed by a new development which was said to have discredited Mina Crandon once and for all. Mina had developed the technique of impressing ghostly thumbprints in wax during her séances, these prints allegedly belonging to her dead brother and spirit control, Walter. But in 1934, it was proved that one of the thumbprints was actually identical with that of Mina's dentist. "All except the most rabid Crandon supporters," Christopher writes in obvious satisfaction, "eventually admitted that ... Mina had stamped with a die the dentist's prints on hot wax ... Time and truth were on the side of" Mina's critics.

Inglis puts the best possible spin on the embarrassing developmenta: "This discovery brought Margery's career to an end, for investigative purposes. Yet ... it did not in itself discredit her mediumship... Discoveries about the identity of the thumbprint did nothing to explain how [this and many other prints] had been imprinted on the wax at a time when Margery was supposed to be firmly controlled ... It was not easy to see how Margery escaped from control time after time to produce [thumbprints] without ever being detected."

Inglis then proceeds to his summation. "What has tended to be forgotten is that during ten years of séances, night after night, week after week, the Crandons were never actually detected in fraud. On the few occasions when individuals claimed to have seen how the tricks were done ... they claimed only to have seen her do what ... might be done by a pseudopod, if such psychic limbs existed. In any case, the kind of trickery which Houdini ... claimed [he] had witnessed could not begin to account for the staggering range of phenomena which 'Margery' or 'Walter' produced; a range which can only be appreciated by a study of the transcripts ... objects moved at a distance, tables turned somersaults, apports [materializations] came and went, and 'Walter's' voice boomed out from different directions - even when, as Comstock testified, he had his hands over the mouths of both Crandons."

And he questions motive. "If [the Crandons] were prestidigitators, cunning enough to have won Houdini's admiration, why should they have gone on giving private séances, as they were to do even after they had ceased to be involved in the investigations? There was no money in them; and if fame was what they were after, they could have had it far more easily ... by performing as conjurers." Christopher offers a rebuttal suggested by Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife Louisa, who were to become the two most prominent parapsychologists of the second half of the 20th century. After sitting in on one of Mina's seances, the Rhines were convinced she and Dr. Crandon were conniving at fraud. But why? They "investigated the surgeon's background, and ... offered a possible explanation for his sponsorship of Margery as a medium. He had suffered 'a decided loss of position and prestige before he turned into the study of psychic phenomena. Knowing that he was a materialist and dreaded dying, his wife deceived him during the early table-tilting experiments with sleight of foot and hand. When he found she was cheating, he cooperated with her, enjoying his new prominence as a 'martyr to the cause of science' and an authority on modern mediumship." It should perhaps be pointed out that the Rhines, despite their credentials as psychologists, had no special claim to understanding the Crandons' psyches. They had never treated the Crandons as patients and, as far as I know, were hardly acquainted with the couple. Further, J.B. Rhine later showed himself to be somewhat hostile to the very idea of scientific investigation of life after death, regarding it as a useless field of endeavor. Discrediting Mina Crandon had the effect of diverting attention from mediumship and focusing it instead on ESP - which was, providentially, the Rhines' own area of study.

Christopher ends his account on a somber note: "In 1939, Dr. Crandon slipped and fell down the stairs that led to the séance room; he died several weeks later on December 27. By then the medium, whose sensuous appeal once excited the men who sat with her in the dark, was drinking excessively ... On November 1st, 1941, the ravages of alcoholism took their toll. Margery, the most versatile psychic in history, died as she slept in the house on Lime Street, where eighteen years before, to please her husband, she became a medium." The impression he conveys is that grim justice was finally served. The Crandons paid for their deception, or so he implies.

In Inglis's account there is no mention of Mina's alleged alcoholism or of the circumstances of either Crandon's death. Instead there is a final expression of indignation at the researchers. "The responsibility for their failure must rest chiefly with the investigators themselves; Prince in particular ... He should never, in view of his deafness and his incurable antipathy to the physical phenomena, have allowed himself to become involved in the actual investigations ... Unluckily the physical phenomena were his blind spot - as they were McDougall's - at the very time when unprejudiced investigation was needed."

I cannot resist adding another strange postscript, this time from 1994, when, at a seance, Walter was allegedly summoned up. Sixty years after the thumbprint debacle, Walter explained what had really happened, saying that Dr. Crandon "himself in desperation to gain credibility for my sister's mediumship resorted to what you call fraud." Mina's prolonged exposure to the hostile skepticism of various researchers had drained her powers, and Crandon had been driven to his "foolish" trick  (Ark Review, July-August 1998, citing Psychic News, 5 January 1994). Of course there is no way to verify this, and since it was Mina, not her husband, who obtained her dentist's thumbprint, the explanation doesn't seem very satisfactory.

So ... was Mina Crandon a fraud, acting in collusion with her husband to fool gullible investigators? Or did she have genuine paranormal abilities, and was she framed by Houdini, the archenemy of all professed mediums? If you read only Christopher's account, you will come to one conclusion. If you read only Inglis's account, you will reach the opposite verdict. Christopher lionizes the more skeptical researchers. The others, those who were convinced of Margery's genuineness, were lovesick fools or amateurish bunglers. Inglis admires the researchers who fought to convince the public that Margery had psychic gifts. To him, the skeptics were prejudiced, narrow-minded, unscrupulous. In Christopher's book, if a researcher accepts the existence of psychic phenomena, he is branded as credulous. In Inglis's book, if a researcher rejects the existence of psychic phenomena, he is branded as reactionary. Houdini, the most famous debunker of mediums in history, is a stalwart hero in Christopher's version and a duplicitous egomaniac in Inglis's account.

And here we have the big problem for anyone who wants to seriously research these long-ago events. Most writers in this field have an agenda, either pro or con. Like skillful lawyers, they pick out those pieces of evidence most useful to their case, while ignoring or dismissing inconvenient facts and unhelpful allegations. Anyone seeking to reach an impartial conclusion will be hampered by the biases exhibited on both sides. At this late date, seventy years or more after Mina Crandon's heyday, it may well be impossible to reconstruct what really took place. Different authors, reviewing the same essential facts, come to mutually exclusive conclusions. Objective certainty remains forever elusive.

William Blake stated the problem more poetically:

Both read the Bible day and night

But thou read'st black where I read white.

Magic time

For a few years I've had a book sitting on my shelf called If This Be Magic: The Forgotten Power of Hypnotism, by Guy Lyon Playfair. Originally published in 1985, it was reissued by White Crow Books in 2011, and I probably bought it around that time. But somehow I never quite got around to reading it, possibly because I was a little put off by the prospect of plowing through a fairly long, rather dense book on hypnotism.

Recently, however, I did pick up the book at last, and I found it to be one of the more intriguing items in my parapsychological library. The subtitle notwithstanding, it's not really all about hypnotism. Perhaps a more accurate subtitle would be "The Forgotten Power of the Unconscious Mind." The book concerns itself with the still-unknown extent of psi abilities and their mediation by the right hemisphere of the brain — or, more accurately, the mental states loosely associated with the right cerebral hemisphere.

If This Be Magic does begin with a discussion of hypnotism and the related practice of mesmerism, tracing work in this area from its beginnings to modern times. Along the way, we learn that the (logical) left hemisphere of the brain seems to inhibit hypnotism, while the (intuitive) right hemisphere readily accepts it. Dr. David Pederson, president of the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis, puts it succinctly: “When we hypnotize a patient, what we are doing is altering their mode of consciousness to the right hemisphere by inhibition of the left.”

Many examples of remarkable experiments and even medical cures are provided, including remission of supposedly untreatable cancers and significant improvement in a case of ichthyosis, a disfiguring skin disease that had resisted all conventional treatment. And there were other experiments, such as one carried out in 1975 by Dr. Léon Chertok, a French psychiatrist. Playfair writes*:

Chertok showed that wounds can not only be healed by suggestion, but also caused by it. He managed to produce a handsome blister on the arm of patient by placing a coin on it and suggesting that it was very hot, which it was not. An intriguing detail was that the patient reported feeling no sensation of heat at all, and yet her skin reacted as if something extremely hot had indeed come into contact with it – on the exact spot where the coin had been placed.… Chertok saw this as “irrefutable proof of the influence of the mind on physiological processes,” and wondered why this was still not fully acknowledged “in spite of the accumulation of data.” [p. 18]

One reason, among others, why the establishment has resisted this conclusion is that the results obtained by experimenters have been inconsistent and unpredictable. The technique may work brilliantly on one occasion and fail utterly on another occasion, for no obvious reason. How can this be? Here we get to the core of the book – the nature of the mental attitude necessary for positive results. The attitude is essentially one of faith, though this word is not quite adequate and has some misleading connotations:

If we believe something, the effect on us is the same whether it is really true or not. As Paracelsus put it in the 16th century: “It is all one whether you believe in something real or something false. They will have the same effect on you. It is always the faith that works the miracle, and whether the faith is aroused by something real or something false, its miraculous power is the same.”

Faith has been cynically defined as a belief in something you know to be untrue. This is only a slight exaggeration; William Sargant defines it as “a profound and non-rational conviction of the truth of propositions to which the unaided intellect can at best accord only a temperate allegiance.” We need another word for this feeling, but until we have one Sargant’s “profound and non-rational conviction” will serve as a description of it; and it is a very good description of what seems to be one of the crucial factors of successful hypnosis.

In all the cases I have mentioned so far, the one common feature is a total and uncritical acceptance by the subject of the hypnotist’s suggestion. This in turn was given with conviction, and whether the conviction was rational or non-rational did not matter. [pp. 43–44]

What appears to happen in the successful cases is that the sheer conviction felt by the hypnotist, and sometimes also by his subject, is enough to bring about extraordinary results. But if the hypnotist's conviction falters for any reason, or if there is some other mitigating factor creating an atmosphere of doubt or disbelief, then positive results are much less likely.

As you might expect, this situation creates a serious problem in the scientific investigation of hypnotism.

The hypnotist, [Ronald] Shor says, faces a … dilemma. A good scientist, in the generally accepted sense, will be careful, well disciplined, methodical and objective, or what I would call highly left-minded. Unfortunately these are not the qualities that make a successful hypnotist, who needs to be adventurous, risk-taking, and above all subjective. Shor defines the [twin pitfalls] of hypnotism as “insufficient caution” and “insufficient conviction.” “The more the scientist-hypnotist tries to avoid one of the two dangers,” he says, “the more likely it becomes that he will succumb to the other.” [pp. 54—55]

The line dividing hypnosis from psi phenomena is pretty thin. Consider experiments performed in the Soviet Union in which a test subject was hypnotically put to sleep by hypnotic suggestions telepathically communicated over a distance of more than 1,000 miles.

Ivanova [the subject, in a laboratory in Leningrad] was kept under observation by a man who did not know what kind of experiment was being carried out. [Ivanova also did not know the purpose of the experiment.] Alone on the promenade at Sebastopol, Tomashevsky began transmitting at 10:10 PM. Ivanova was seen to enter a hypnotic trance one minute later. At 10:40, Tomashevksy sent the “wake” signal, and at precisely that time according to the observer whose watch, like Tomashevky’s, had been synchronized with Radio Moscow she woke up. [p. 145]

Having made the case that hypnosis overlaps psi, and that mental attitude is critical to each, Playfair sums up:

It must be clear by now that what made the Russians so successful in this kind of experiment (and, in my opinion, still does) was their intuitive understanding of the experimenter effect, whereby experimenters [become] part of the experiment, the outcome of which largely depends on how they play their part in it. This applies to all experiments in which a human mind is involved, from sending people to sleep and transmitting images to curing diseases like ichthyosis by suggestion. An experimenter who is not totally committed to success will probably not succeed. This is hard for scientists trained in objective step-by-step procedures to accept, but as I see it, spontaneous phenomena of any kind should be studied with a view to finding out under what circumstances they happen naturally. Expecting them to happen to order under conditions imposed by the “objective” experimenter is a complete waste of time. [p. 143]

For me, the most the richest part of the book is an interview conducted by Playfair with longtime PK investigator Kenneth Batcheldor. Batchelder's observations are so important, they are worth quoting at length. I can't quote everything, though, and I encourage you to buy the book and get the whole story.

“There is an awkward antagonism between the scientific, skeptical state of mind, and the state required for the production of PK,” [Batcheldor] told me. “To achieve a PK effect, you have got to believe one hundred per cent that it’s going to happen, whereas the characteristic attitude of the scientist is to doubt, and to say 'Let’s test this thing and see if it really is what it claims to be.' But for PK, you must not think 'Is it?' You have to think 'It is.' You’ve got to suspend your scientific attitude if you want it to occur. You can be as critical as you like after you’ve got it, but not while you’re doing it.”

This was not easy for scientists to accept, he admitted, but it was the approach he had found to work, and to make sense. “If the phenomena are shaped by thought,” he said, “then doubtful thoughts will obviously create only doubtful phenomena, or maybe none at all.” [p. 181]

But how to produce the necessary attitude of faith? It's not something that can just be willed into existence. There is, however, a backdoor approach that works remarkably well – something that has long been known to shamans and has been re-learned by modern investigators.

“It is almost impossible to acquire sufficient faith by deliberate mental effort,” [Batcheldor said]. “For instance, it would be useless to place your hands on the table and say to yourself 'I believe this table is going to levitate.' However hard you tried, you wouldn’t succeed because you’d be bound to experience an element of doubt. An adept might succeed, but most people aren’t adepts.

“Fortunately,” he went on, “there’s something about table-tipping that enables a group of ordinary people to succeed in generating PK without even trying, provided they are reasonably open-minded. It is this: in most cases, the table will start to move due to UMA [unconscious muscular action]. This can give an amazing illusion that the table is moving of its own accord as if animated by some mysterious force. You get the impression you are already succeeding in generating paranormal movements.

“This has precisely the same impact on you as real success would have. It sweeps your doubts aside and produces total faith or at least moments of total faith. This happens automatically, involuntarily and without any mental effort on your part. So you get moments of total faith in which you are able to generate real PK. For a while, these are superimposed on the UMA movements, but later they can occur without them. The table movements gradually become stronger and more varied, and in time may lead to movement without contact and levitation.” [p. 182]

In other words, it may be necessary to help the process along with some initial trickery – whether intentional or unconscious – in order to wear down the left brain's resistance to the very idea of PK. Batcheldor calls this technique "induction by artifact."

“All you need [Batchelder said] is for some set of normal events artifacts to be mistaken for paranormal events. This creates sufficiently intense faith to enable you to generate the real thing. Such artifacts can be either accidental or deliberate. In table-tipping, for instance, movements due to UMA arise quite accidentally. But if somebody gives the table a deliberate push, and keeps quiet about it, this will probably have the same effect.

“You mean that cheating can lead to real PK?” I asked. I felt he was adding yet another booby-trap to an already overcrowded minefield.

“Well,” he replied, “deliberate artifact-induction is equivalent to cheating, yes. But the development of PK in a group can and should take place entirely on the basis of artifacts of the accidental kind. Cheating would only lead to confusion even if theoretically it should work. And of course shamans have known for centuries that it does work.” [pp. 182–183]

This isn't just armchair theorizing. The hypothesis has been tested.

[Colin] Brookes-Smith designed and built a number of special tables … wired up in such a way that any normal mechanical force exerted by sitters’ hands could be recorded and printed out on chart paper. He then had his sitters draw lots before session to see who would be “joker”. The joker was allowed to cheat now and then, and the study of the recording would later reveal exactly when he had….

“The interesting thing [wrote Allan Barham, a participant in the experiments] was that this method of deliberately stimulating an upward force did help to induce a genuine paranormal effect.” The chart recording, he said, showed when the joker had done his joking, and it also showed the table continued to levitate after he had stopped it. “Our unjustified belief that something paranormal might be taking place released the PK force, which always tended to be repressed by our conscious or unconscious doubts.”…

Batcheldor reckons that almost anybody can produce PK who really believes and decides that it is possible. Anybody can also inhibited by believing consciously or subconsciously that it is not possible. [p. 185]

The role of the unconscious mind may also account, at least in part, for phenomena associated with what I've called the dark side of the paranormal. The Ouija board, for instance, is often noted for seemingly malicious and destructive communications.

“As soon as it spells something a bit strange, you get frightened, and then you’re in trouble,” Batcheldor explained. “The main danger of dabbling with psychic forces is that if you get frightened of them, you shape them into some frightening event – you create what you’re frightened of. If you know this, and exercise some control over not getting unduly frightened, by constantly reminding yourself that you’re creating this stuff by PK, and it’s going to do what you believe, you can keep things under control. I don’t allow my sitters to talk about apparitions of the devil or anything like that. We don’t know what we might create if we start thinking along those lines.”

As for poltergeist cases, he believes that in some cases the incidents that start them off can be seen as artifacts that arise accidentally. “I don’t go along with the idea that poltergeist outbreaks are the expression of repressed tension and aggression. Mental hospitals are full of people who have tremendous repressed aggression, but they don’t explode into poltergeist phenomena. It’s a bit naïve to think that aggression gets so strong when it’s repressed that it bursts out by throwing cups by PK. I prefer to think that if you have a tense family that interprets an accidental event like a cup falling off the shelf by accident as ghostly, then they can use it for the expression of some of their psychological needs. If you believe there’s going to be hostility, then you probably create it.” [p. 183]

What about the well-known difficulty of getting macro-PK effects recorded on video? Even passive infrared systems that operate in darkness rarely obtain results. Playfair notes that "audio tape, however, has no inhibiting effect at all."

This has reinforced Batcheldor’s belief that it is not light that inhibits PK, but sight, or the full awareness of the observer.…

“In darkness,” he told me, “the mind can be calm, because you are not witnessing paranormality in a clear-cut form. Also, certain kinds of spontaneous artifacts needed to stimulate belief tend to be prevented in light.” He believes that at some deep level we need a “loophole” in the evidence, to reassure ourselves that PK might not be taking place after all. An audio tape provides such a loophole, because it only contains part of the record – the sound. A videotape contains a more complete record, and while seeing may be believing, hearing without seeing is not.

“PK seems to cover its tracks whenever it can,” he added, “even to the extent of sabotaging cameras or video recorders to destroy the evidence, or of making sure that there is a scapegoat on hand to whom apparently paranormal activity can be attributed.” [p. 186]

In short, Batcheldor has come up with a sophisticated, meticulously thought-out explanatory system that covers much of the phenomena associated with PK and, by extension, hypnosis, mesmerism, and ESP.

And what of life after death? Playfair recounts a case of apparent spirit communication in response to spoken questions, and writes:

It is very tempting on such occasions to assume that you are in the presence of the spirits … The impression of an independent intelligence at work is very strong … And it has led me to feel justified in regarding PK-agents as independent entities. Some would call these spirits, and assume that they are driven by the intelligence of somebody who has died.

However, there is excellent evidence against the traditional spirit hypothesis. The Philip group in Toronto certainly conjured up a spirit, but it was one they had invented themselves, complete with portrait and detailed curriculum vitae. Philip had a life of his own, but it was a wholly imaginary one. The fact that this made it no less real in some respects has led some to speculate that reality as we perceive it may to some extent be the result of our imaginations. [pp. 200–201]

The Philip experiments are among the most interesting ever carried out in parapsychology, and they certainly show that it is possible for a group of sitters to "conjure up" a ghost with a distinctive personality and an apparently independent existence, who is nevertheless completely fictitious. How far we should carry the implications of these experiments is an open question, one that I've considered elsewhere.

Then there's the experience of the Rev. C. Hare Townsend, who performed many experiments in mesmerism. As quoted in If This Be Magic, Townsend wrote:

When I first began to mesmerize, I used to consult my sleepwalkers on dark and dubious points, with something of the blind faith of a novice in a new and wondrous science. Their answers to such inquiries were calculated to bewilder me by the pure influence of astonishment; for the simple had become theorists; the uneducated were turned into philosophers. At length I was awakened from my dream of somnambulic knowledge by finding that my patients’ ideas shifted so visibly with my own, and were so plainly the echo of my own thoughts, that not to have perceived the source whence they originated, would had been pertinacious blindness indeed. I was but taking back my own, and receiving coin issued from my own treasury. [p. 211]

There are possible implications here for the work of hypnotherapists who engage in so-called past-life regressions and between-lives regressions. Even if the hypnotist is not intentionally or overtly leading his entranced patient, it is conceivable that hypnosis itself allows the patient to read the hypnotist's mind and tell him what he expects to hear.

Incidentally, very young children are known to be more susceptible to suggestion than adults, and probably find it easier to exercise psi, a fact that perhaps should be taken into consideration when evaluating accounts of spontaneous and veridical past-life memories in children.

Playfair concludes his book by zeroing in on the fundamental attitude that underlies successful production of a variety of hypnotic, mesmeric, and paranormal phenomena:

The only hypothesis that seems to fit all the facts is that somebody must have faith in something. It can be the patient, the healer or hypnotist, or even a third party. The faith can be in God, Jesus, the Great Spirit – almost anything imaginable. It can even be simply in the doctor and his pills and nothing else. Miracles, it seems, can be worked by nothing more than a firm belief in their imminent occurrence. When such a belief is implanted in the right mind of a patient, by whatever method, even by deception, outright lying, or as in Dr. Mason’s classic case [of curing ichthyosis], by mistake, the suggested miracle fulfills itself automatically.

It begins to seem, in fact, that the mere act of acknowledging the existence of some power greater than ourselves, or even just assuming this, is enough to activate it. [p. 255]

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*All quotations from If This Be Magic have had their spelling and punctuation altered from British to American standards. The reason is simple: I used a voice-recognition program to dictate this material to my computer, and the program recognized it as American English.

Read the whole thing

Though it's been mentioned in the comments, I'd like to call additional attention to Stephen E. Braude's reply to Tom Butler's criticism of his work with Kai Mügge. His detailed response can be read here. (It has been posted via Dropbox, but you do not need to have a Dropbox account to read it or download it.)

In contemporary parapsychology, Braude is one of the very few serious researchers into physical and materialization mediumship, areas that have historically been plagued with fraud and ambiguity. For several decades the Society for Psychical Research largely refused to conduct any investigations into such claims, having found that virtually all cases they did examine proved fraudulent. The credibility of mediumship in general was severely undermined by public exposures of fake mediums of the physical/materialization type, carried out both by enterprising newspapermen and by Harry Houdini. The decline of widespread public interest in Spiritualism dates to this period.

Accordingly, it's only common sense to approach the subject with a degree of skepticism (healthy skepticism, not dogmatic Skepticism). And it's essential to be honest and open about any findings, even if they might be harmful to the medium or to some larger agenda. At the same time, owing to the tricksterish nature of these phenomena, it's necessary to avoid jumping to conclusions or painting with too broad a brush.

This is a difficult balancing act, but Dr. Braude has managed it throughout his career. His ongoing investigation of Kai, whatever its controversies, is one more important contribution to this perplexing field.

Dancing in the dark

A new website has been set up to display infrared videos, presumably taken surreptitiously, that show what goes on behind the scenes at one physical/materialization medium's seances. His name is Gary Mannion. (No, I'd never heard of him, but apparently he has a following in the UK.) 

It's interesting stuff, and a reminder that books like The Psychic Mafia tell an important part of the story. 

More disturbing than the videos themselves is the likelihood that a not-insignificant portion of Mannion's clientele will accept whatever explanation he comes up with — probably that a malevolent spirit possessed him and made him cheat, just this one time. 

Miscellaneous meandering musings of middling merit

Roger Knights informs me that The Witch of Napili, Michael Schmicker's fictionalized account of Eusapia Palladino's mediumship, is now available for free as a Kindle ebook. 

~~~

Stephen E. Braude has published a follow-up report on the Felix physical mediumship circle. The credibility of medium "Kai" (a pseudonym) took a hard hit when it was revealed that he had cheated in some earlier sessions. Braude discusses the cheating in detail, but also explains his reasons for thinking that Kai was still worth studying. Unfortunately the new investigation was inconclusive, and the hoped-for infrared video of table levitations was not obtained. Braude's balanced, scrupulously fair report is well worth reading (as is everything he writes). 

Update: Actually I meant to say that clear, unambiguous IR video of a table levitation was not obtained. There was video of a purported levitation, but it was not the iron-clad evidence the researchers were hoping for. 

~~~

A pair of neuroscientists tried to see if contemporary approaches to understanding the brain would allow them to successfully interpret a simple computer program — in this case, the vintage Donkey Kong game. They found that they were unable to learn much at all about the program, calling into question the efficacy of the current computer-based model for studying brain functions. 

~~~

Some years ago I used to argue with a Skeptic on the comments threads of this blog about the evidence for life after death. One point he liked to make was that evidence for UFOs was at least as good as evidence for an afterlife, so why would I believe in one but not the other? At the time I could only say that I hadn't studied UFOs and had no opinion on the subject, an answer he found unsatisfactory.

I still haven't studied UFOs in any depth, but I've read a little on the subject. My tentative conclusion now is that, while many of the reports are hoaxes or errors, some are probably valid. It doesn't follow that UFOs are physical spaceships that have crossed lightyears to visit us. Scott Rogo in his book The Haunted Universe makes the point that there are often close connections between psychic phenomena (premonitions, etc.) and UFO sightings; his suggestion is that UFOs are in some sense a psychic phenomenon in their own right. Carl Jung and Jacques Vallee seem to have had a similar notion. My best guess is that legitimate sightings of "flying saucers" could involve a glitch in the system, a sort of information leakage from one plane of reality to another, perhaps triggered by, or at least accompanied by changes in consciousness on the part of witnesses. This is vague, but it's the best I can do. They are "real," but maybe not physical, or only transiently physical. This would account for the known tendency of UFOs to behave unlike physical objects— to wink in and out of existence, for example. 

As for alien abductions, I would see them as out-of-b0dy experiences misinterpreted as events in the physical world. Many "abduction" experiences start out with a sense that the body is vibrating uncontrollably; then the body levitates off the bed and floats through the wall. This is identical to descriptions of OBEs. The only difference is that OBErs look down and see their physical body left behind, while "abductees" apparently do not. Both experiences also have much in common with shamanic vision quests and with drug-induced experiences involving ketamine and DMT. 

Incidentally, I don't think it's actually true that evidence for UFOs is as good as evidence for life after death. The advantage of afterlife studies is that some can be performed under controlled conditions (e.g., scientific tests of mediums) and others can be performed prospectively (e.g., hospital and hospice studies of deathbed visions and NDEs). UFOs can be studied only in the field and only after the fact, on the basis of eyewitness reports and occasional technological evidence such as videos or radar readings. 

Recycled review: On the Edge of the Etheric, by Arthur Findlay

As a palette cleanser after our political kerfuffle, here's a book review that I originally posted on June 21, 2008. Happily it is Trump-free, though trumpets do make an appearance. 

~~~~

Arthur Findlay's On the Edge of the Etheric was first published in 1931. The used edition I purchased came out in 1970; it was the 66th printing in the United Kingdom. The book has been translated into at least 19 languages as well as Braille. According to Amazon.com, the book remains in print to this day.

Clearly, On the Edge of the Etheric has found an audience. And it's easy enough to see why. Arthur Findlay provides a convincing portrait of an otherwise little-known British medium, John C. Sloan.

Sloan appears to have been a man of high moral scruples. He accepted no remuneration of any kind for the many séances he conducted, preferring to maintain a regular 9-to-5 job to pay his bills. He practiced trance mediumship as well as direct voice and produced various physical effects such as levitating trumpets. He supplied a great deal of accurate and detailed information without prompting, often addressing sitters who were strangers to him and whose names he had never been given. He cooperated with sensible tests carried out to preclude fraud. Findlay reports putting his ear against the medium's lips while direct voice communication was in progress. Though the voice continued, there was no sound emanating from Sloan's mouth. On another occasion, Findlay heard a slight hissing sound from Sloan while the voice emanated from the center of the room some distance away. Sometimes two or three voices would talk at once. Sitters were able to identify deceased loved ones by their distinctive voices and by the specific, personal information that was conveyed.

There seems to be no possibility that Sloan used an accomplice, since his lodgings were typically searched before each session. Moreover, it would be hard to imagine any motive for an elaborate deception lasting for many years, even decades, when there was no money or fame involved. Sloan sought no publicity and would probably not be remembered at all if not for Findlay's book, which was published some years after the séances took place.

Findlay gives examples of Sloan's readings, classifying them as A1 and A2 cases. The A1 cases are those in which Findlay feels that fraud, telepathy, cryptaesthesia, and other non-survival explanations can be ruled out. In the A2 cases the evidence is not quite as clear cut but still highly suggestive.

In one instance, Findlay seems to misclassify a case. This is the second case listed in chapter 8. Here, Findlay reports knowing some details about a painting owned by a friend. At a later séance, a different friend was addressed by the direct voice, which said, "Tell your friend Dr. Lamond, 18 Regent Terrace, Edinburgh, that I am much obliged to him for keeping his promise and placing my picture on his mantelpiece." The name and address given were correct, but the friend knew nothing about the painting. Findlay writes, "This is another fool-proof case ... it being quite free from any other explanation than that the personality of [the painter] was present, and spoke. Otherwise how could such a message have come?" Of course, there is another possible explanation -- telepathy. Since Findlay himself knew all the details of the painting, it is at least conceivable that the medium read his mind. It seems odd that Findlay overlooked this obvious objection, and it does cast some doubt on how accurately he categorized the cases in general.

Nevertheless, the evidence he gives is quite persuasive overall. There seems little doubt that John C. Sloan was an exceptionally talented trance and direct voice medium who was immune to the blandishments of fame and fortune.

A large part of the book is taken up with an explanation of how séances are conducted "on the other side." How exactly is the direct voice manifested? According to Findlay, who asked this question many times during the séances and received detailed answers, some vital force known as ectoplasm is elicited from the medium and the sitters, and is then collected in a kind of bowl. Using this ectoplasm, the communicator is able to materialize his hands, which he then uses to create a masklike form. He presses his face into this mask until it coats his mouth, tongue, and throat. With this coating in place, the communicator's etheric body takes on the "heaviness" necessary to produce sound vibrations in the physical world.

Of course the concept of ectoplasm is difficult for many of us to accept; it is too reminiscent of cheesy Hollywood movies and the pronouncements of fraudulent mediums. But if materializations are possible, then presumably some kind of quasi-physical substance is involved, and ectoplasm is probably as good a word for it as any.

Another large portion of the book concerns the allegedly scientific basis for materialization and direct voice mediumship. Unfortunately, Findlay's argument is based on the now-outdated notion of the ether, a substance once thought to pervade the cosmos and serve as the medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Findlay believed that the key to mediumship was understanding differences in the frequency of vibration of the ether. Indeed, many sources affirm that "vibrations" of some sort are critical in mediumistic communication. If there is no such thing as ether, then what is vibrating? As far as I know, there is no answer to this question (though The Unobstructed Universe, by Stewart Edward White, attempts to supply one -- as I recall, the book posits "vibrations of consciousness").

A minor impediment to accepting the phenomena Findlay describes is the nature of Sloan's spirit control, an American Indian named Whitefeather. As was all too common in séances of this period, Whitefeather spoke in broken English, using the cliché expressions of a B-movie Indian. It is hard to take this personality at face value, although Findlay does mention that, in life, Whitefeather knew no English and learned his English by participating in the séances. If true, this might suggest that the expectations of the sitters influenced the idioms used by the spirit control. In other words, perhaps Whitefeather spoke like an Indian in a penny-dreadful novel because that was how his audience expected him to speak.

Interestingly, another Indian communicator spoke flawless English. The explanation he provided was that he learned English in his earthly life.

Whatever the deficiencies of the spirit controls, the information that came through the séances is quite impressive. Findlay gives only a few cases out of the scores he witnessed, but these are highly convincing. Here is an abbreviated version of one of the best:

I took my brother with me to a séance shortly after he was demobilised from the Army in 1919. He knew no one present, and was not introduced. No one present, except myself, knew that he had been in the Army. No one present knew where he had been during his time in the Army. His health had not permitted him to go abroad, and he was stationed part of the time near Lowestoft at a small village called Kessingland, and part of the time at Lowestoft, training gunners ...

During the course of the sitting the trumpet was distinctly heard moving about the room, and various voices spoke through it. Suddenly it tapped my brother on the right knee, and a voice directly in front of him said, "Eric Saunders". My brother asked if the voice were addressing him, and it replied "Yes", whereupon he said that there must be some mistake, as he had never known anybody of that name....

[My brother] asked where he had met him. The answer was: "In the Army." My brother mentioned a number of places, such as Aldershot, Bisley, France, Palestine, etc., but carefully omitted Lowestoft, where he had been stationed for the greater part of his army life. The voice replied "No, none of those places. I knew you when you were near Lowestoft." My brother asked why he said "Near Lowestoft," and he replied: "You were not in Lowestoft then, but at Kessingland." ...

My brother then asked what company [Saunders] had been attached to, and, as he could not make out whether he said "B" or "C", my brother asked if he could remember the name of the Company Commander. The reply was "Macnamara." This was the name of the officer commanding "B" Company at that time. By way of a test, my brother pretended that he remembered the man, and said: "Oh yes, you were one of my Lewis gunners, were you not?" The reply was: "No, you had not the Lewis guns then, it was the Hotchkiss." This was quite correct, as the Lewis guns were taken from them in April 1917, and were replaced by Hotchkiss ....

[Saunders] told my brother he had been killed in France, and my brother asked him when he had gone out. He replied that he had gone with the "Big Draft in August 1917". My brother asked him why he called it the Big Draft, and he said: "Don't you remember the Big Draft, when the Colonel came on the parade ground and made a speech." This reference was to a particularly large draft sent out to France that month, and was the only occasion on which my brother remembered the Colonel ever personally saying good-bye to the men ....

About six months after the above incident my brother was in London, and met, by appointment, the corporal who had been his assistant with the light guns in his battalion at the time. My brother told him the above story, and asked if he remembered any man named "Eric Saunders"....

The corporal had brought with him an old pocket diary, in which he had been in the habit of keeping a full list of men under training, and other information. He pulled it out of his pocket, and together they looked back until they came to the records of "B" Company during 1917. Sure enough the name appear there, "Eric Saunders, f.q., August '17", with a red-ink line drawn through it; f.q. stood for fully qualified, and, though my brother knew the meaning of the red-ink line, he asked the corporal when it meant. He replied: "Don't you remember, Mr. Findlay, I always drew a line through the man's names when they went away. This shows that Saunders went out in August 1917."...

It is a remarkable case, as it is fraud proof, telepathy proof, and cryptaesthesia proof. Not only did no one present know my brother, but my brother did not know the speaker, and cannot even to-day recollect him, as he was passing hundreds of men through their training ... This case contains fourteen separate facts; each one was correct.