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Inside the Supernatural
Jean Ritchie
Out of body? Out of mind? Reality or unreality?All of us have experienced the inexplicable, have known elements of the unknown. but is there really anybody out there? What is the evidence to support the theory of life after death, telepathy or psychokinesis? Do scientists believe in crisis visions, ghosts and mediums? Is there a rational explanation for even the most mysterious of ghostly apparitions?INSIDE THE SUPERNATURAL takes nothing for granted, neither believes nor disbelieves; it is quite simply the most comprehensive and readable analysis of the evidence for and against. containing a riveting account of the latest scientific evidence and research – and the latest case histories – it is compelling reading for anyone with an interest in the supernatural.
Copyright (#ulink_f976b6de-0b8d-5689-8a91-cec0ec313ded)
Fourth Estate
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A Fontana Original 1992
Copyright © Jean Ritchie 1992
Jean Ritchie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006378099
Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008192082
Version: 2016-05-12
Contents
Cover (#u25900454-ef92-5b8c-ab29-e3d85851398d)
Title Page (#ub48bae7f-18f8-56de-89f8-5328ab30edf0)
Copyright (#ulink_160e6482-1797-5999-868e-9f51a75e3f78)
Introduction (#ulink_13f3ba01-31d3-54bb-b5dc-07a833dc14c4)
1 The Search Begins (#ulink_9e76a35f-6686-5153-8097-27551e752797)
2 Things That Go Bump in the Night (#ulink_f0c94028-3772-5351-9a53-74889fa6612c)
3 Examining the Evidence (#litres_trial_promo)
4 Out of Body, Out of Mind (#litres_trial_promo)
5 The Undiscovered Country (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Quantum Leap (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Unbelievers (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Pay-offs (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_eb8744f0-43ff-555c-8dc6-53af173ecbb0)
Tell anyone that you are researching a book about the paranormal and they will tell you an anecdote from their own life or one from the experiences of their family and friends. It may be something fairly insignificant: a dream that came true; a strange feeling of a ghostly presence; a clock that, in the words of the song ‘stopped, dead, never to go again, when the old man died’. Or it may be a full-scale haunting with clanking chains, footsteps and headless nuns; a disruptive poltergeist that hurled objects around; a vision of a dying relative many miles away.
The majority of people believe in the supernatural. Sixty per cent believe it is possible to communicate telepathically; fifty-nine per cent believe that some houses are haunted; fifty-nine per cent believe it is possible to dream the future; forty-five per cent believe in reincarnation and thirty per cent believe that we can receive messages from the dead (statistics from a poll carried out for Channel Four in 1987). The word ‘believe’ implies that they have faith in the fact that these things are possible. What this book attempts to do is find out what factual basis there is for their belief.
An anecdotal story, the sort everyone seems to be able to tell about things that go bump in the night, has no scientific worth. It cannot be investigated, bottled, analysed or dissected. It’s like Samuel Goldwyn’s verbal contract: not worth the paper it’s written on. Yet over the many months I was researching this book I came to realize that the sum of all this experience has to be worth something. If every family has within its culture a story of this kind, the sheer volume and universality of the material must amount to a matter of substance. Sure, the sceptics will say that man has demonstrated his need for mystery and that supernatural stories cater for this need. But there are easier ways to inject mystery into life: religion, for a start. The paranormal is a subject that invites scorn: many of the people who have confided their personal experiences to me have done so diffidently, and in confidence: ‘I’ve never told anyone this before in case they thought I was mad,’ is a fairly common fear.
This is not a book about the assorted unconfirmed experiences of all these people. But it is a book for them because it is a book which attempts to explain, in lay person’s language, just what is happening in the serious pursuit of the paranormal.
Are we any nearer today to understanding what ghosts are? What causes poltergeists? Why some people come back from mediums feeling that they have been in close commune with their dead loved ones – and others feel that they have been ripped off? Is there such a thing as telepathy – and, if so, why can’t we harness it and use it?
Research into the paranormal is regarded with some suspicion by the scientific establishment. One eminent American parapsychologist recently estimated that there are no more than fifty scientists worldwide involved in investigating the supernatural on a full-time basis. Fortunately, to counterbalance this, there are some brilliant part-time investigators (several of them, coincidentally, highly-regarded scientists in their own fields) who give their free time and energy to the subject.
Serious psychical research began here in Britain more than a hundred years ago. Although America hhas thrown more money at the subject over the past fifty years, international researchers still look to Britain for good examples of ghost stories: this is the most haunted country in the world.
It is shortsighted of the scientific community to turn its back on psychical research. In terms of world history, it is not long since we all believed that the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth and condemned as lunatics people who talked of stones falling from the heavens (meteorites). We have learned that these beliefs were wrong.
It takes only the quickest glimpse (which is what this book gives you) into the astonishing discoveries of the ‘new’ physics to realize that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. If you can get your brain around ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics – which are now scientifically accepted and verified – how very much easier to foresee the day when extra sensory perception is fully and completely explained. We are no more qualified to reject the possibility of that day coming than we were qualified 500 hundred years ago to call the man who was hit on the head by a meteorite a lunatic.
I have a confession to make. I started research on this book as a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic. I did not believe in the paranormal. I finished writing the book from a different personal perspective. I still maintain a very healthy scepticism about a great deal of so-called ‘evidence’, but I am now convinced that there are many unexplained and fascinating happenings that do not fit into the regular framework of human life, events that can only be encompassed within the definition of paranormal.
I have been greatly helped in researching this book by many experts, whose brains I have picked unashamedly, and to whom the finished product will no doubt appear superficial. To them I quote Oscar Wilde: ‘To be intelligible is to be found out.’ I didn’t set out to further their expertise; I set out to explain to beginners, like myself, just what a vast and fascinating subject this is. I am more concerned with being intelligible than with being found out.
To give you a taste of what the paranormal is all about, let me quote just one of the stories I was told by an acquaintance when she discovered I was writing a book on the subject.
* * *
Dr Betty Cay is an intelligent, well-educated and eminently sensible grandmother, the widow of a GP, and a retired historical geographer in her seventies. As well as spending her days looking after her two grandchildren while her daughter works, she researches and writes local history books, concentrating on areas of her home town, Edinburgh.
Early in 1991 she was trying to put together a book on Saughton, in south-west Edinburgh, and she was running up against a big brick wall. She could not find any information on one crucial small area. She knew that a certain house, known as Sauchton Cottage, was the key to this area. The house, not an impressive manse but an artisan’s dwelling, had been the first to be built in the area, at some time during the eighteenth century. The history of the house and the land that originally surrounded it was fundamental to the history of the development of the area.
‘Because I was looking after the children and running a home for the family, I measured the amount of time I had for research in the odd couple of hours I could squeeze in each day. I was very keen to get on with the book, but I was completely held up by the lack of information I had about this house.
‘I could trace its history back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, but I knew that it went back another hundred years or more and I had no clue as to who had owned it or what land was entailed to it then. If it had been a big, important house, no doubt records would have been kept. But I could find nothing on it.
‘The present occupant of the house was as helpful as possible, and arranged for me to visit his solicitor to see the deeds of the property. But I was told by both him and the solicitor that the paperwork only went back to the start of the twentieth century and I had already got most of that information from other sources.
‘Nevertheless, I went along. The lawyer gave me an empty room to work in and presented me with a typical bundle of legal documents, tied around with red ribbon. On the top was an inventory of all the documents in the pile. I started to work my way through them, taking notes as I went. The papers were in chronological order.
‘Astonishingly, as I progressed, I turned over a document and found underneath it one that dated back to the very beginning of the house in the eighteenth century. It gave the name of the owner of the house and details of his two wives. (He had apparently remarried after his first wife died.) It also gave the name of another woman, who I took to be his third wife.’
The document Dr Cay saw, and from which she made notes, was a ‘memorandum on a feu charter’: a feu charter being an old Scottish term for a conveyancing deed. Dr Cay was able to get all the details she needed about the early days of the house from the document. With it was another eighteenth-century document that was not relevant and did not help her at all.
She continued with her note-taking, moving on to the much more recent documents which covered the early years of this century. Eventually, constrained by lack of time, she re-bundled the documents in the order in which she had found them, noting from the inventory on the front that her eighteenth-century documents were listed, out of chronology, at the end of all the others. She told the solicitor that she would like to return again the following day to do some more research, and the bundle of papers was left out on the desk for her to resume her research.
The next day she was shocked to find that the eighteenth-century documents were no longer in the pile. What’s more, they were not included on the inventory. Upset, Dr Cay called the lawyer, who was in another office. The lawyer insisted that there had never been any eighteenth-century paperwork in the bundle, that there were no papers missing, and that, as Dr Cay had originally been told, it was only possible to trace back ownership of the house through the deeds to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Perplexed, Dr Cay was inclined to wonder whether she had hallucinated the existence of the documents. But she knew she had handled them and read them and she had the evidence of her own notebook in which she had copied out details from them.
Taking the names of the owner and his wives that she had copied from the document, she was able to trace them at Edinburgh’s Register House in the official births, marriages and deaths registers. (Scotland was more efficient than England at starting and keeping good records.) Without the initial input of the names from the ‘non-existent’ document, she would have had no way of knowing where to start. She was able ultimately to find out that the woman she thought was the original owner’s third wife was, in fact, the woman to whom he sold the house.
‘Eventually, everything slotted into place and I was able to trace the early years of the property. Yet the document I used did not exist! Without having seen it, I could have spent years floundering through records and still never have come up with the information I needed.’
Dr Cay has no explanation to offer for her experience. She believes she may have hallucinated when she saw the documents listed on the inventory, but she is certain that the documents themselves were real enough.
Were they hallucinations? Did she already have the information buried somewhere in her subconscious mind (this is highly unlikely, considering the particular and precise nature of the information involved)? Was her mind in some way tuning in to another source of the material? Was her need (she was desperately short of time for her research) a factor in helping her ‘find’ the information? If so, why was there also another, irrelevant, document among the bundle?
There are no easy answers to these question or to most of those posed by the paranormal. But there is no shortage of questions. While this book cannot attempt to ask them all, it looks at some of the main ones, and the work that is going on to try to come up with some of the answers.
1 (#ulink_b2dec81e-5ac4-550e-bce5-0c3c07a30dc2)
The Search Begins (#ulink_b2dec81e-5ac4-550e-bce5-0c3c07a30dc2)
What have Prime Minister Gladstone, Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley got in common? The answer is that they were all members of the Society for Psychical Research, a pioneering and highly-respected body set up in London in 1882 with the aim of investigating paranormal phenomena ‘without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated’.
The Society was born out of the general disquiet at the end of the nineteenth century about the nature of the universe. This was before science had taken its quantum leap into the twentieth century, and the prevailing wisdom was that we lived in a mechanical world in which everything – every action and reaction – could be scientifically explained. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had only added to the feeling of being very tiny cogs in a huge well-oiled machine. But the idea that human beings were not the specially-designed central focus of all creation and were simply highly-evolved monkeys, the ‘animals with the big brain’, took a lot of getting used to. There was an undercurrent of belief that this could not be all.
Religion offered some solutions, but the intellectuals of the age did not want to reject the discoveries of the modern scientific world in favour of blind faith. They wanted proof which would demonstrate that man was more than just a sophisticated machine and which would measure up to the new scientific standards. The raw material for that proof seemed to exist: there was no shortage of ghost stories; the ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead – accepted from time immemorial in some cultures – had gone from being a popular craze in the middle of the nineteenth century to being the basis for the Spiritualist religion. ‘Mesmerism’, known today as hypnotism, was beginning to be explored and experiments with telepathy – the linking of two minds without any ostensible means of communication – were being carried out in France.
Perhaps the greatest impetus to investigation was D.D. Home. Today Home is still regarded by many as the most sensational physical medium of all time. Born in 1833 in Edinburgh, taken to America at the age of nine by an aunt, Daniel Dunglas Home was only thirteen when he announced that he was in communication with the spirits of the dead. He became a medium, and rappings and table levitations were common at his seances. Home even appeared to be able to levitate himself, in front of witnesses. He could make objects move around the room, make an accordion play music without touching it, put his head into a burning fire without being singed, and stretch his body, adding as much as six inches to his height while observers held on to him.
Mediums and seances were fashionable at the time, but what distinguished Home from the others – many of whom were undoubtedly frauds extracting easy money from gullible clients – was that he was prepared to work in bright well-lit conditions, and he invited the most sceptical of observers to attend his seances. (Many mediums use the excuse that a sceptic in their midst inhibits their powers.)
He was submitted to fairly rigorous testing. Sir William Crookes, a distinguished physicist and Fellow of the Royal Society, carried out stringent tests, often in the presence of other scientists. Obviously, in the nineteenth century various techniques used by conjurors and frauds today were not understood. None the less, Crookes was not gullible, nor were his peers, and it would be wrong to discredit the witnesses who vouched for Home simply because they belonged to another century. Home did have his critics, among them the poet Robert Browning who disliked the fact that his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a fan of Home. However, in all his long career as a medium, Home was never seriously accused of fraud, and was never caught cheating. Since his death in 1886 there have been many attempts to explain away his feats, the most popular suggestion being that he was an accomplished hypnotist who suggested to his audience that they had witnessed things that never actually happened.
Home lived so long ago, and the eyewitness accounts are so incomplete, that it is impossible to begin to assess the truth. What is certain is that he impressed some distinguished people who, like Crookes, felt that such things should be investigated scientifically and methodically. The Society for Psychical Research was founded by such people, and it attracted the support of some of the most respected scientists, philosophers, politicians and literary figures of the day. Instead of regarding psychical research as a rather suspect pseudo-science, as many people do today, they acclaimed it as an important and developing area. Gladstone said, ‘It is the most important work that is being done in the world – by far the most important.’
The SPR was not the first group to examine the paranormal. The history of Christianity is littered with attempts to appraise objectively miracles and miracle workers. Before the rise of spiritualism religious visions were the most common form of supernatural manifestation in Europe and the New World. Some religions are more comfortable with them than others and accept the existence of seers, shamans, wise ones, yogis.
In the secular world, long before the SPR was dreamed of, attempts had been made to test some areas of the paranormal scientifically. At the court of Queen Elizabeth I the mathematician John Dee tried to find hidden objects by using dowsing. Half a century later, Sir Francis Bacon devised some experiments to test the existence of second sight, as it was called, using cards. His controls were good and the experiments were well thought out: they did not differ greatly from those that were used three hundred years later when serious research began.
In France during the reign of Louis XVI, there was a lot of interest in mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnotism, which took its name from Franz Mesmer, a medical student who discovered he could induce trance states in volunteers. He believed the source of the power was magnetism. During the nineteenth century, experiments with hypnotism were carried out, and by the last quarter of the century its existence was accepted even by the most critical scientists.
Spiritualism took on the status of a religion in the 1840s. Spiritualist beliefs have been around since ancient civilization, but they were formalized into a religion after a whole rash of paranormal events made some people believe that they were in touch with the personalities of the dead. There was a fashionable craze for ‘table turning’, the forerunner of seances, when groups of people in homes all over Europe and America would sit around tables which tilted, turned and even in some instances floated in the air. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were among those who were confounded by the antics of a table. There was probably a great deal of faking going on, but the scientists who investigated the phenomena were unable to prove that it was all fraudulent. Michael Faraday, the physicist, took the line that ‘quasi involuntary’ muscle movements of the sitters were causing the effect without them knowing they were doing it, but many of those who were present when tables and chairs floated around rooms refused to accept this explanation. The fashion for table turning died out, though, mainly because, as with all psi, the phenomena are unpredictable. (Psi is a term now used to cover all paranormal experiences, although it was originally intended to link together ESP and PK.) For every exciting experience, there were many boring evenings passed sitting around tables which remained resolutely rooted to the ground. However, for some people the idea of communication with the dead became the foundation of their religious beliefs and Spiritualist churches sprang up across America and Britain.
The Fox sisters in America were credited with getting spiritualism properly off the ground. In 1848, Margaret and Kate Fox, aged fourteen and twelve, began to ‘communicate’ with the spirits of the dead by a series of rappings that they heard in their home in New York state. The house was reputed to be haunted, and the Fox family complained of strange banging noises. One night the girls tried snapping their fingers to imitate the noise; every time they did so, the rappings mimicked them. Eventually they started to ask questions and dictate a code to the unknown source of the noise, and they got replies that led them to believe they were in communication with the spirits of the dead.
The events in the Fox household were witnessed by many people, starting with neighbours and friends but eventually spreading to the public at large when the press latched on to them. Their stories were not accepted without questions: commissions were set up to investigate them, and they were paraded before panels of experts. The most common explanation offered for the rappings which the sisters seemed able to produce at will was that they were voluntarily able to dislocate their knee joints and make popping noises with them. If this was true, no one has been able to replicate these noises and nobody has explained how the sisters could fill large meeting halls with sound by this means.
The Fox sisters’ strange talents, whether psychic or physical, did not do them any favours. They were marketed by the famous showman, P.T. Barnum, and became nothing more than a music hall act; they were alcoholics, their marriages failed and eventually one of them confessed that they had been cheating all along. Later she denied this, saying that she had made the admission for money. (They were both living in reduced circumstances.) By then, whatever powers they had had waned. The sisters died amid controversy.
Despite this, the Fox sisters’ initial success (and no one has satisfactorily explained how, by knee-popping, they were able to answer so many of the questions put to them by believers and sceptics alike, unless they were able to accumulate information from some non-normal source) spawned a great interest in communication with the dead. Within a few years there were hundreds of mediums across America and Europe who claimed to be able to contact the spirit world.
There were other attempts to set up societies to bring together all those interested in research into the paranormal, and other countries have their own groups. The Parapsychological Association, an international body founded in 1951, is made up of professionals working in the field of parapsychology and has, for scientific reasons, a rather narrower remit than the SPR, though it is more rigorously academic. However, the British SPR remains the most distinguished body of lay people involved in psychic research, even though this research is no longer fashionable, nor as likely to attract as many mainstream scientists as it did in its early years.
After its inception in 1882 the Society divided itself into six different committees, each with a specific area to investigate: thought transference (we call it telepathy today, a word coined in the first year of the Society’s existence by one of its founder members, F.W.H. Myers); mesmerism (hypnotism); Reichenbach phenomena (Baron Carl von Reichenbach, the chemist who discovered creosote and paraffin, believed he had also discovered auras of light created magnetically and given off by all organic matter including human beings); apparitions and haunted houses; physical phenomena; and a literary committee to review and research already-published information about psychic phenomena.
The members were an enthusiastic and hardworking bunch. All the committees (with the exception of the one investigating physical phenomena, which found mediums like Home who could create physical effects in the seance room rather thin on the ground) produced lengthy and detailed reports, and threw themselves with great energy into the time-consuming business of carrying out investigations.
Although it is possible today to snipe at some of the Society’s early investigative efforts, it is important to remember they were breaking new ground and their techniques improved with practice. It took time to come up with all the controls necessary, to work out all (or even most) of the possible sources of fraud, and to even begin to understand the ways in which they themselves might have been unintentionally influenced to see what was not really there.
Yet they were certainly not easily convinced, and they were more than ready to denounce trickery whenever they found it. There was a serious financial motive for mediums and others to be fraudulent just as there still is today a substantial market in bringing ‘messages from the spirit world’ to the bereaved. Then, there was also the possibility of stage fame, and even rich patronage.
One of the most notable exposés in the SPR’s early days was the famous Madame Blavatsky. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a New York immigrant who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, riding the crest of the wave of interest in spiritualism and attracting as many as one hundred thousand members. Madame Blavatsky claimed to get spirit guidance from a group of ‘Mahatmas’ in Tibet and that letters from them were ‘teleported’ to her. When she visited London the SPR set up a committee to investigate her. They tackled the job thoroughly, interviewing witnesses who had seen her physical phenomena and even sending a member to India, to the headquarters of her flourishing movement. Their conclusion, published in 1885, was that ‘she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history’. The Theosophical Society went into decline.
One of the most vigilant and dedicated of researchers was Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick, wife of the first president of the Society, Sir Henry Sidgwick. She denounced a very popular and acclaimed medium, William Eglinton, who produced spirit messages by slate writing. This was a fashionable method of spiritual communication at the end of the last century, and involved holding a slate on the underside of a table. Scratching noises were heard while the ‘spirit’ wrote on the slate, and then the message was produced for all to see. To this day, there are those who believe that Eglinton was genuine: but Mrs Sidgwick described his work as ‘clever conjuring’.
Eglinton inspired researchers to approach their problem from a different angle by perfecting the methods that are used by the fraudsters in an attempt to see how people can be deceived (a tradition carried on today by the professional sceptics as well as by many parapsychologists). One member of the SPR taught himself to produce slate writing as convincingly as Eglinton and then put his conjuring skills to the test by trying it out on witnesses who were told that he was a medium. Nobody detected his tricks, despite the fact that they were not scrupulously hidden, opening up a whole area of research into how and why our eyes deceive us into seeing what we want to believe. The Society’s researchers were so tough that some members felt they went too far. The poet W.B. Yeats commented: ‘It’s my belief that if you psychical researchers had been about when God Almighty was creating the world, He couldn’t have done the job.’
Of course, the researchers’ enthusiasm didn’t mean they were guaranteed to spot fraud. In the early days of the Society, for example, the Creery sisters were believed to be a first-class example of telepathy. Four sisters and a maidservant from their household were able to detect playing cards, names or objects that had been chosen by independent observers while they were out of the room. Their success rate was remarkably high, and Sir William Barrett, an eminent physicist, was very impressed. But they were later caught out cheating, sending messages to each other in code. They admitted it, and claimed that they had done it before, but only rarely. Whether this admission negated everything that they had previously done, or whether, like many mediums or clairvoyants, they found their powers waning and yet felt compelled to produce results, is arguable and is a moot point with other psychics.
Although scepticism was a prized characteristic of these pioneering psychic researchers, they found plenty to reinforce the original enthusiasm that had led to them setting up the SPR. Richard Hodgson (the man who investigated and exposed Madame Blavatsky) emigrated to America, and there encountered a medium called Mrs Leonora Piper. Mrs Piper would go into a trance and then be taken over by her ‘control’, Dr Phinuit, who she claimed had been a French physician. In the trance she was able to give information about those sitting with her. Hodgson, sceptical, assigned a private detective to watch her and her husband to find out how they were researching the information, which she was passing off as obtained from the spirits of the dead. He reluctantly accepted that there was no ‘normal’ way in which Mrs Piper could know many of the things she did. No trace was ever found of Dr Phinuit’s existence in historical records, nor could he speak any French. This is not unusual with mediums, whose ‘controls’ are thought to be secondary personalities of their own rather than real historical people (see chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)). However, after one of Hodgson’s own friends, George Pelham, died, he took over as Mrs Piper’s control and Hodgson was provided with a large amount of bafflingly accurate information from his own life. Mrs Piper described a young woman who had died in Australia and to whom Hodgson had been very close – including a description of a birthmark which was a strange spot of blue colour in an otherwise brown eye. On one occasion Hodgson brought a friend with him whom ‘Pelham’ seemed not to recognize, but when told the woman’s name ‘Pelham’ replied that she was ‘the little girl, now grown up’ which was accurate because Pelham had known her as a child.
Although Hodgson scrupulously recorded the details at the time, we can never be sure a century later how much of the ‘proof’ for a medium like Mrs Piper is merely anecdotal and subjective. However, Hodgson was certainly not the only cynical researcher to be impressed by Mrs Piper. When she visited England she was investigated by a distinguished group, including F.W.H. Myers, a leading member of the SPR, and Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist. They took extreme precautions to make sure that she did not meet any of the people who would attend her seances beforehand, and she gave them permission to intercept and monitor all her letters. They, too, were finally unable to explain how she obtained her information unless it was by paranormal abilities. What was not clear – then or now – was whether she was, as she claimed, in touch with the spirits of the dead, or whether she was using highly-developed telepathy to garner knowledge from the individuals who sat with her. She continued to practise as a medium for twenty-five years, and was never discovered acting fraudulently.
Mrs Piper became a celebrated public figure and this encouraged other women to test their own mediumistic abilities. Mrs Margaret Verrall, a Cambridge scholar, showed that she, too, had some exceptional talents. So did a medium who called herself ‘Mrs Holland’, but who was really Mrs Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling. Interestingly, comparisons of the automatic writing of these women (in a trance they would appear to take dictation from their control) revealed quite a few cross-correspondences in the information they gave, as though one was confirming the messages of another, even though it was impossible for them to be in collusion: Mrs Verrall lived in Cambridge and Mrs Fleming in India.
An Italian peasant woman, Eusapia Palladino, gave the early researchers their best opportunity to study a medium who could produce physical effects similar to those produced by D.D. Home. Palladino appeared to be able to levitate tables, move objects around, nudge or pinch sitters who were outside her arms’ reach. Sitters claimed they could actually see her developing extra arms and limbs during seances. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were among the many scientists who, over a thirty-year period, were astonished by her apparent abilities.
Palladino did not shy away from investigation, and she was prepared to work in good light so that those who were watching her could clearly record what went on. Although one early report from the SPR accused her of fraud, a later and more detailed one found that she was capable of producing astonishing phenomena. There is no doubt that she cheated from time to time, but her defenders say that when she was in a trance she had no control of herself and it was up to the investigators to hold tight to her hands and legs to prevent her movement. On one occasion, she even cried out to them to hold her more tightly or she would cheat.
As she grew older and her powers waned she resorted to cheating more. It is hard to condemn a simple peasant who had been catapulted to international celebrity for wanting to perpetuate her failing skills, but unfortunately her predilection for cheating cast a cloud over all her other achievements.
Some researchers believe that anyone who has been caught in any fraud should automatically be discounted from serious research for ever. Others believe (with some evidence from modern laboratory parapsychology to support them) that cheating can facilitate real phenomena, almost as though the mediums have to get themselves in the mood by practising artificially what they want to happen by paranormal means.
Perhaps the greatest of the early mental mediums (as distinct from a physical medium like Palladino) was Mrs Gladys Osborne Leonard, who was the best in the field in the years between the Wars. A Londoner, she first came to the attention of the SPR when she ‘communicated’ with Sir Oliver Lodge’s son Raymond, who was killed in the First World War. She, too, seems to have been beyond suspicion of fraud. The SPR again assigned a private detective to investigate her life, without finding anything that suggested she was researching information. She put herself at the disposal of the SPR for investigation and was paid a retainer by them to be always available for testing. To eliminate the possibility of telepathy, many of her sittings were attended by ‘proxies’, people standing in for those for whom she was asked to get information from the spirit world. Often the proxies knew nothing more than the name of the person they represented, so there was no possibility of Mrs Leonard being able to extract clues from them by telepathy.
The SPR was not concerned only with investigating mediums. In the early days the literary committee took on the formidable task of collecting and publishing a massive chronicle of spontaneous paranormal experiences which they gathered by appealing in the press. They checked out all the cases they published (before telephones were commonplace and when travelling around Britain took days, this in itself was a formidable achievement) and in 1886 published Phantasms of the Living, 701 cases of apparitions and crisis visions. Eight years later they brought out the Census of Hallucinations, another massive tome. Both books are still quoted as reliable source material.
These records were, inevitably, largely anecdotal and subjective, although the SPR did check each case for corroboration. Some Society members were already aware of the need for controlled experiments that could be monitored, verified and repeated, a need that has bedevilled psychical research ever since. As early as 1889, telepathy tests were carried out under stringent conditions, the results obtained measured against those they would expect to find by chance. Consistent with subsequent experience, they found some people who could score above chance, and many others who could not.
