Researchers into the Mystery of Spirit Contact

Delving Deeper. The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained. Editor: Brad Steiger & Sherry Hanson Steiger. Volume 1, Gale, 2003.

To the uninformed layperson, psychical researchers who investigate individuals who claim to be able to make contact with the spirits of the departed are sometimes thought of as gullible men or women who go to seances in order to converse with the ghost of their late Uncle Henry. To be certain, mediums and their paranormal abilities are studied and tested, but not in an attitude of open acceptance. Such investigations are conducted in all earnestness and seriousness and under the strictest laboratory conditions possible. And rather than being gullible, the researchers are more likely to be skeptical and cautious observers, ever on the watch for trickery and evidence of charlatanism.

Many of those who research spirit contact believe that the difference between the genuine medium or channel and the great majority of humankind lies in the fact that the medium’s threshold of consciousness may be set lower than that of others. In other words, the medium has access to levels of awareness that lie beyond the normal “reach” of the subconscious. The spirit medium usually works in trance, and while in this state of consciousness, he or she claims to be under the direction of a spirit guide or spirit control. Spiritualists believe in the reality of the guide as a spiritual entity apart from the medium. Psychical researchers theorize that the control personality is but a secondary personality of the medium that is able to dip into the psychic abilities residing in the subconscious.

The physical phenomena of mediumship are among the strangest and most dramatic of all occurrences studied by psychical researchers. Under laboratory conditions, serious reports have been made of the materialization of human heads, hands, and even complete bodies from a cloudy substance, known as ectoplasm, which somehow appears to issue from the medium’s physical body. Mediums have been seen to levitate into the air, manifest stigmata on their bodies, and cause mysterious apports (arrivals) of flowers, medallions, and items of jewelry.

Some of the world’s best minds have been vitally concerned with the mystery of survival, life after death, and whether or not it is possible to speak with the dead. The British statesman William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), who most of his life was an avowed skeptic of spirit contact and all paranormal occurrences, finally concluded that psychical research “is the most important work in the world today—by far the most important.”

The famous statesman was not alone in his declaration of the importance of psychical research. Pierre Curie (1859-1906), who with his wife, Marie, discovered radium, stated shortly before his death that in his opinion psychical research had more importance for humankind than any other. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), generally accepted as the “father of psychoanalysis,” belonged to both the British and the American Societies for Psychical Research and once commented that he wished he had devoted more time to such study when he was younger. His colleague and sometimes rival, Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), remained actively interested in psychical experiments until his death.

Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), a British physicist, conducted many exhaustive studies of spirit contact and mediums. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) insisted that psychical research explored the most important aspects of human experience and that it was the obligation of every scientist to learn more about them. Julian Huxley (1887-1975), the biologist; Sir James Jeans (1877-1946), the astronomer; Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), the historian; Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), the philosopher—all of these great thinkers urged that their fellow scientists seriously approach psychical research.

In spite of the attention of such commanding intellects and the painstaking research of such individuals as Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), Dr. Gardner Murphy (1895-1979), Hereward Carrington (1880-1958). J. B. Rhine (1895-1980), G. N. M. Tyrell (1879-1973), Dr. Karlis Osis (1917-1997), Dr. Stanley Krippner (1932- ), and Dr. Harold Puthoff (1930- ), psychical researchers are still regarded by a large section of the scientific community as being “spook chasers” and as outright rebels and heretics to the bodies of established knowledge. The basic reason for such disdain on the part of orthodox scientists is the understandable reluctance of the scientific establishment to grant a hearing to a body of knowledge that might very well reshape or revise many of the premises on which its entire structure is based.

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), noted novelist and journalist, told of his visit with a leading mathematical logician and philosopher. Koestler expressed his interest in recent statistical work in psychical research. The logician loudly scoffed at such studies until Koestler, irritated by the man’s closed mind, provided him with the name of the world-famous statistician who had checked the statistics. Upon hearing the statistician’s name, the logician seemed completely nonplussed. After a few moments he said, “If that is true, it is terrible, terrible. It would mean that I would have to scrap everything and start from the beginning.”

Orthodox scientists in the more conventional disciplines are not about to “scrap everything,” and many of them feel that the best method of avoiding the research statistics compiled by psychical researchers is to insist upon the requirements demanded of all conventional sciences: (1) that they produce controlled and repeatable experiments; (2) that they develop a hypothesis comprehensive enough to include all psychic phenomena—from telepathy to poltergeists, from water dowsing to spirit contact.

The difficulties in fulfilling these requirements can be immediately grasped when one considers how impossible it would be to repeat, for example, the apparition of a man’s father as it appeared to him at the moment of his father’s death. This sort of crisis apparition occurs only at death, and the man’s father is going to die only once. The great majority of psychic phenomena are almost completely spontaneous in nature, and ungovernable elements of mood and emotion obviously play enormously important roles in any type of paranormal experience. As G. N. M. Tyrell pointed out, people are never aware of a telepathic, clairvoyant, or precognitive process at work within them. They are only aware of the product of that process. In fact, it seems apparent from laboratory work that conscious effort at determining any psychic process at work within oneself will either completely destroy it or greatly diminish its effectiveness.

Those men and women who devote themselves to researching the possibility of life beyond death and spirit contact insist that science must not continue to ignore that which is not directly perceivable. By the same token, it falls upon the psychical researchers to exercise the greatest caution and the strictest controls when conducting tests with those who claim to be able to contact the dead.

In his Psychic Science and Survival (1947) Hereward Carrington, who devoted a lifetime to psychical research, listed the following requirements of an ideal researcher:

A thorough knowledge of the literature of the subject;
A good grounding in normal and abnormal psychology, in physics, chemistry, biology, and photography;
Keen powers of observation and an ability to judge human nature and its motives;
Training in magic and sleight of hand;
Shrewdness, quickness of thought and action, patience, resourcefulness, sympathy, and a sense of humor;
Freedom from superstition;
The strength to stand out against bigotry, scientific as well as theological.

Hereward Carrington (1880-1958)

Hereward Carrington spent his childhood years in Jersey, one of Britain’s Channel Islands, and received his early schooling in London. Although he would one day write over one hundred books in the field of psychical research, as a teenager, he was far more interested in becoming a stage magician than exploring the spirit world. If it weren’t for a fascination with certain well-documented cases of the paranormal, such as those recorded by Fredric W. H. Myers (1843-1901) and other serious psychical researchers, his only interest in mediums would have been to seek to expose them in the manner of Harry Houdini (1874-1926).

Carrington moved to Boston when he was 20 and remained in the United States for the rest of his life. While at first he earned his living as a journalist, he began to spend more and more time continuing to research the unexplained, and in 1905, he joined the staff of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) as an investigator.

In addition to such famous mediums as Margery Crandon (1888-1941), Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), and Eileen Garrett (1893-1970), Carrington had a number of impressive sittings with William Cartheuser. Cartheuser appeared to have been representative of some of the many paradoxes with which serious researchers may find themselves confronted in paranormal investigations. The medium had a harelip and a cleft palate which caused a severe impediment in his speaking voice, yet at no time did any of the spirit voices produced by him give any evidence of unclear or unintelligible speech—although most of the visiting entities did speak in whispers. The female voices from beyond seemed obviously to be those of a male speaking in a falsetto. Many of the communicating spirits reflected the same opinions and temperament of the medium, but now and then Carrington felt that the alleged entities did make reference to information and the names of individuals that could only have been gained in some paranormal manner.

In assessing the mediumship of William Cartheuser, Carrington could only theorize that the alleged spirit controls upon which the medium relied to summon the departed were nothing other than the medium speaking in a number of different voices. On occasion, however, Cartheuser’s simulated spirit guides enabled him, perhaps by the power of suggestion and a state of light trance, to come up with information that he could only have acquired through an unknown power of mind or through a surviving personality—and to relay those messages in voices free of his usual speech impediments.

Carrington devoted an entire book to his examination of the famous medium Eileen Garrett. In The Case for Psychic Survival (1957) he concluded that even though there existed only slight evidence for the genuinely spiritistic character of spirit guides, the alleged spirit personalities “…nevertheless succeed in bringing through a vast mass of supernormal information which could not be obtained in their absence.” The mechanism of believing in a spirit control somehow seemed to act as some sort of psychic catalyst to bring about information acquired through paranormal means.

The psychical researcher went on to theorize that the function of a medium’s regular spirit guide seems to be that of an intermediary; and whether the entity is truly a spirit or is a dramatic personification of the medium’s subconscious, it is only through the cooperation of the guide that accurate and truthful messages are obtained. In Carrington’s opinion, the essential difference between the kind of secondary personality in pathological cases and the spirit control personality in mediumistic cases is that in those instances of multiple personalities, the secondary selves acquire no supernormal information, while in the case of a medium’s spirit control it does. “In the pathological cases,” he said, “we seem to have a mere splitting of the mind, while in the mediumistic cases we have to deal with a (perhaps fictitious) personality which is nevertheless in touch or contact, in some mysterious way, with another (spiritual) world, from which it derives information, and through which genuine messages often come.”

In his conversations with Uvani, Eileen Garrett’s spirit control, Carrington learned that the entity claimed to have no control over the medium’s conscious mind, nor would he feel that he would have the right to interfere with her normal thinking processes. During the trance state, however, Uvani said that he could work Garrett’s subconscious like playing notes on a piano. When Carrington asked why a personality who claimed to have lived a life as an Asian could speak such excellent English through the medium, Uvani answered that he could not speak English, but as a spirit he had the ability to impress his thoughts upon his “instrument,” Eileen Garrett, who thereby relayed the communication.

Carrington concluded, as a result of extensive analysis of mediumship techniques, that an intelligently influenced mechanism was somehow involved in producing the physical phenomena of spirit contact in the seance room. In an essay written in 1946, Carrington said that there appears to be a form of “unknown energy” that issues from the body of the medium, “capable of affecting and molding matter in its immediate environment. At times this is invisible; at other times it takes forms and becomes more or less solid, when we have instances of the formation of so-called ectoplasm. It is this semi-material substance which moves matter and even shapes it into different forms.”

According to Carrington’s observations, this ectoplasm issues from various parts of the medium’s body—from the fingertips, the solar plexus, and the genitals. “It represents a psychic force,” he claimed, “as yet unknown to science, but now being studied by scientific men as part and parcel of supernormal biology.” Carrington was certain that this energy had a biological basis and was dependent upon the physical body of the medium for its production, regardless of whether it was directed by the subconscious mind of the medium or by the mind of an unseen, disembodied personality.

Although few psychical researchers had as much firsthand experience investigating instances of spirit contact and hauntings as Hereward Carrington, there were times when even he found himself dealing with something that affected him in a very primal, frightening way. It was on the night of August 13, 1937, that Carrington, his wife, Marie Sweet Smith, and a party of five others obtained permission to spend a night in a haunted house located some 50 miles from New York City. As he referred to the incident in his Essays in the Occult (1958), the summer tenant had been forced to move back to the city in the middle of July because neither he nor his wife could sleep uninterrupted and their servants had all left their employ because of the haunting.

Carrington insisted that he be told nothing of the history of the house until he had first had an opportunity to explore the place from cellar to attic. The house was lighted from top to bottom, and the party began its safari into the unknown. On the second floor, two or three of the group commented that they had sensed “something strange” in one of the middle bedrooms, especially in the area next to an old bureau. The tenant, whom Carrington identified only as “Mr. X,” told the party that he and his wife had heard noises coming from that particular bedroom.

The group proceeded down a hallway until they came to the door that led to the servants’ quarters. Carrington opened the door, glanced up, and saw that the top floor was brightly illuminated and that a steep flight of stairs lay just ahead of the investigators. With Carrington in the lead, the party ascended the stairs until they found themselves confronted by a series of small rooms. Carrington made a sharp turn to the right, and the moment he did so, he felt as though a sudden blow that been delivered to his solar plexus. His forehead broke out into profuse perspiration, his head swam, and he had difficulty swallowing. “It was an extraordinary sensation,” he said, “definitely physiological, and unlike anything I had ever experienced before.”

The veteran investigator was gripped by terror and panic and only through a firm exercise of will was he able to stop himself from fleeing in horror. His wife, who was only a step or two behind him, had just finished commenting on the “cute little rooms,” when she suddenly uttered a frightened cry, turned, and ran down the stairs. Two unemotional, hard-nosed psychical researchers, completely accustomed to psychic manifestations of all kinds, had experienced “distinctly a bodily and emotional reaction—accompanied…by a momentary mental panic and sensation of terror” such as neither of them had ever known before.

Carrington saw to his wife, whom he found outside on the porch, breathing deeply of the fresh air; then he returned to the remainder of the group. Each of them had experienced identical sensations and had retreated to the lower floor, where they sat sprawled in chairs or leaned against walls, tears streaming down their cheeks.

Carrington made special note of the fact that two highly skeptical friends of the tenant had accompanied the group to the house out of boredom. Both of these skeptics experienced the same sensations as the other members of the group—a difficulty in swallowing, tears streaming from the eyes, and cold perspiration on the forehead.

A dog, belonging to a member of the party, resisted all manner of coaxing designed to lure it upstairs. It growled, planted its feet stubbornly, and the hair raised on its back. In short, Carrington commented, the dog behaved “very much as dogs are supposed to behave in the presence of ghostly phenomena.”

Much later that evening, Carrington led another expedition up the stairs to the servants’ quarters. This time, the atmosphere seemed to have purged itself of the poisonous influence, and no member of the party experienced any sensations similar to their previous excursion. The dog bounded up the stairs, poked its nose into all the corners, and behaved as if prowling around such a house were the most natural thing in the world. Carrington later sought to return to the house with a spirit medium and special apparatus for recording and testing sounds and atmosphere. He was denied permission to continue his investigation, because one of the friends of the tenant had given the story to the papers, and the owner of the house did not wish additional publicity about his haunted house.

Carrington broke with the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) over a disagreement concerning the mediumship of Mina “Margery” Stinson Crandon (1888-1941), and he formed his American Psychical Institute in 1933. His wife served as the institute’s secretary, and their principal research area focused upon the testing of such spirit mediums as Eileen Garrett. Sometime in 1938, the Carringtons moved the institute to Southern California, where they continued to investigate claims of hauntings and spirit contact. Among his many books are such titles as The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (1907); Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them (1920); and Psychic Science and Survival (1947). Hereward Carrington died on December 26, 1958, in Los Angeles.

Sir William Crookes (1832-1919)

Sir William Crookes, a physicist and chemist of international reputation, was a professor at the University of London, editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science, president of the British Chemical Society, discoverer of the element thallium, and inventor of the radiometer and the Crookes tube, which made the later development of X-rays possible. In addition to these accomplishments, Crookes was one of the most thorough and exacting scientific investigators of spirit contact. After many years of painstaking research and experimentation with dozens of well-known mediums, he became convinced that a great deal of spiritistic phenomena was real and indicated proof of an afterlife.

Born in London on June 17, 1832, Crookes was one of 16 children of a well-known and prosperous tailor and his second wife. William also had five stepbrothers and stepsisters from his father’s first wife. Although the young man had little formal education, his keen mind and natural abilities allowed him to enroll in the Royal College of Chemistry when he was only 16. Upon graduation in 1854, Crookes became superintendent of the Meteorological Department at Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford. A year later, he gained a post at the College of Science in Chester, Cheshire.

In 1856, when he was 24, he married Ellen Humphrey, and because of the large fortune he had inherited from his father, Crookes was able to establish a private laboratory and devote himself entirely to scientific work of his own choosing. Three years later, in 1861, Crookes discovered the element thallium and the correct measurement of its atomic weight. In 1863, when he was only 31, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Just when it seemed Crookes faced only a life of one triumph after another, he was grief-stricken when his youngest brother, Phillip, died in 1867. Cromwell Varley, a close friend and fellow physicist who was also a practicing Spiritualist, convinced William and Ellen to attend a seance and attempt to communicate with Phillip. Whatever spirit messages Crookes and his wife received during a series of seances in 1867, it appears that they were convincing enough to inspire the brilliant physicist to turn his genius toward the exploration of spiritistic phenomena.

Some scholars of the psychic field have declared the series of experiments that Crookes conducted with the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) to be the first strictly scientific tests of mediumistic ability. Of one such test, Crookes stated that Home went to the fireplace and after stirring the hot coals around with his bare hands, took out a red-hot piece nearly as large as an orange, and “putting it on his right hand, so as to almost completely enclose it, he then blew into the small furnace” he had made of his hand “until the lump of charcoal was nearly white hot,” and then drew Crookes’s attention to the flame that was “flickering over the coal and licking round his fingers.” A number of witnesses to the experiment were also able to handle the hot coal without burning themselves after Home had transferred his “power” to them. Those who handled the coal without the transference of energy from Home “received bad blisters at the attempt.”

Crookes no doubt created quite a stir among his more orthodox scientific colleagues when he told them that he had walked with a ghost, talked with a ghost, and taken more than 40 flashlight photographs of the specter. And when he went on to describe the spirit as a “perfect beauty” with a “brilliant purity of complexion that photography could not hope to capture,” tongues began to wag that the great scientist had lost all form of objectivity and had grown much too attached to the spirit that he was supposed to be investigating. When such a man of stature as Crookes announced that he had judged medium Florence Cook’s (1856-1904) materializations of the spirit Katie King to be genuine, it was bound to spark controversy. Whether or not the “perfect beauty” with whom Sir William chatted and strolled about the seance room was a ghost or a hoax is a question that is still being debated to this day.

Florence Cook, the medium through whom Katie King materialized, first met the spirit in seances which she conducted when she was only 15. Katie promised to be Florence’s spirit control for a period of three years and assist her in producing many types of remarkable phenomena. In April of 1872, Katie appeared only as a deathlike face between the gauze curtains of a seance cabinet, but as her control of the medium became more advanced, she could at last step out of the cabinet and show herself in full body to those sitters assembled for Cook’s seances.

It has been said that the spirit of Katie King became almost as if she were a full-time boarder at the Cook household. When Florence Cook married, her husband complained that it was like being married to two women. Katie began to materialize at unexpected moments, and some nights she even went to bed with the medium and her long-suffering spouse.

Many people became thoroughly convinced of the validity of Katie King’s existence because of Crookes’ testimony. Others whispered scandal and made much of the many hours the physicist had spent alone with Florence Cook and her alleged spirit friend. Crookes, however, stood firm in his convictions that he had not been duped and summed up his investigations by stating that it was unimaginable to suggest that “an innocent schoolgirl of fifteen” should be able to devise and to carry out such a “gigantic imposture” so successfully for a period of three years. Crookes pointed out to his critics that in those same three years the fact that she submitted to any test that might be imposed upon her, was willing to be searched at any time, either before or after a seance, and visited his laboratory for the express object of submitting to the strictest scientific tests, certainly demonstrated her integrity. To insist further that the spirit Katie King was the result of deceit did more “violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms.”

William Crookes’s experiments in psychical research did little to prevent his receiving the Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1875 or from being knighted in 1897. He supported the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) when it was founded in 1882 and even served as its president in 1886, but he conducted no tests of mediumship or any other paranormal phenomena after 1875. As a kind of summation of his views on the subject, Crookes once said: “The phenomena I am prepared to attest to are extraordinary and so directly oppose the most firmly rooted articles of scientific belief—amongst others, the ubiquity and invariable action of the force of gravitation—that even now, on recalling the details of what I witnessed, there is an antagonism in my mind between reason which pronounces it to be scientifically impossible, and the consciousness of my senses, both of touch and sight.…It is absolutely true that connections have been set up between this world and the next!”

After Lady Crookes died in 1916, Sir William immediately began attempts to communicate with her. According to some sources, he did receive messages from her spirit that he felt constituted proof of contact with the other side. Others say that an alleged spirit photograph of Lady Crookes appeared to have been manipulated in the developing process. Crookes died on April 4, 1919, survived by four of his eight children.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

Although Harry Houdini died in 1926, his name remains synonymous with incredible demonstrations of stage magic and daredevil escapes. For Spiritualists and mediums, however, his name is also synonymous with the devil at worst, the Grand Inquisitor at the least. Houdini developed a strange kind of ambivalence, a love-hate attitude, toward the spirit world that, according to many of his biographers, developed after he failed to contact the spirit of his deceased mother through a medium. Others have commented that Houdini, known as a notorious self-promoter, initiated the highly publicized attempts to expose fraudulent mediums only because of the attention that such exploits would receive in the press.

Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, on March 24, 1874, and he was only 13 weeks old when his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. He was only a boy when he read the memoirs of the great French conjuror Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), who is today known as the “Father of Modern Magic.” Ehrich became so impressed with the life and the talent of Robert-Houdin that he resolved to become a magician, and when he was 17, he added an “i” to his idol’s name and became “Houdini.”

Houdini practiced long hours with a childhood friend who also aspired to become a master conjuror. When his friend’s interests drifted elsewhere, Houdini began playing carnivals and amusement parks with his brother, Theodore, billing themselves as the Houdini Brothers. Houdini also added the first name Harry, which was an adaptation of his family nickname, “Ehrie.”

The Houdini Brothers’ first major booking was at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, and Houdini found great audience response to their act when he spontaneously added a handcuff escape during an evening performance. After the fair ended, he billed himself in a solo act as the “Handcuff King” and played a successful run at the Kohl and Middleton Dime Museum in Chicago. When that engagement came to a close, he rejoined Theodore in their double-act and played various high schools and social events. It was when the Houdini Brothers were performing at a girls’ school that Houdini met Beatrice (Bess) Rahner, who would soon become his wife. After they were married, the newlyweds began playing the theatrical circuit as “The Houdinis,” and Theodore went solo under his new stage name, “Hardeen.”

Until they decided to try their luck in England in July 1900, the Houdinis barely managed to survive in show business. There had been brief stints with a circus, a burlesque show, a traveling medicine show, and an illfated attempt to begin a school of magic. Houdini was featuring escapes more and more in their act, but even the publicity gained from such risky ventures as freeing himself from a prison cell under the watchful eye of law enforcement officers didn’t bring customers to the theaters. Utilizing his bold personality to the utmost degree, Houdini managed to secure a contract with the Alhambra Theatre, one of the largest music halls in London. By July 1901, Houdini and his daring escapes were receiving top billing all over Europe—and it wasn’t long before accounts of his dangling from tall buildings wrapped in chains, freeing himself from casks, kegs, and trunks submerged in rivers, and escaping from coffins, giant milk cans, and huge mail bags were creating a stir back in the States, where audiences had once been unmoved by the Great Houdini.

It is difficult to ascertain exactly when or why Houdini became the great nemesis of Spiritualist mediums—or even if he really did, in fact, set about instituting any sort of vendetta against them. Some writers and researchers believe that Houdini truly did believe in survival of the spirit after physical death, and his supposed vicious attacks against spirit mediums were but an expression of his great disappointment that he never really found any whom he felt had truly provided him with actual proof of his mother’s afterlife existence. Others maintain that he only set out to expose mediums as a means of keeping himself in the headlines.

Houdini’s friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the creator of Sherlock Holmes and an avid supporter of Spiritualism, suggests his sincerity in seeking to pierce the veil of death. During the Doyles’ lecture tour of the United States in June 1922, Houdini and Beatrice joined Sir Arthur and Lady Doyle for a brief vacation in Atlantic City. On June 17, Houdini’s mother’s birthday, Lady Doyle said that she felt she could establish contact with her. Houdini later claimed that he had kept an open mind regarding the alleged communication, but he publicly renounced the messages that Lady Doyle had produced through automatic writing. Houdini doubted that his mother would have begun writing the message by making a cross, since she had been Jewish. And since she spoke only broken English and couldn’t write the language at all, he was skeptical of the answers that she had written so perfectly. Doyle was outraged at what he felt was his friend’s betrayal of trust and the belittling of a spirit communication. Their friendship ceased after Houdini’s statement.

Houdini’s attacks on Spiritualist mediums also draws a parallel in many researchers’ minds to his strange vitriolic assault on his childhood hero, Robert-Houdin, who provided the source of young Ehrich Weiss’s inspiration to be a magician as well as the origin of his professional name. As he was beginning his own rise to fame, Houdini wrote a book about Robert-Houdin in which he not only ceased praising him, but ruthlessly sought to destroy the great conjuror’s reputation. In The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (1908), Houdini twisted facts and fictionalized others in order to fit the accusations that he had contrived. Houdini’s critics point out that this kind of underhanded procedure was what he appeared to do with so many mediums. While Houdini’s admirers state that he exposed some of the most famous mediums of the day as being fraudulent, his critics protest that he resorted to trickery, then loudly claimed that he had caught them in deceit when it was truly he who was the deceiver.

Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, head of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) at the time of Houdini’s campaign against mediums, stated that the magician showed “considerable bias by his selection of mediums and phenomena.” According to Prince, Houdini “only chose to investigate those [mediums] already deemed spurious or very dubious by careful researchers in America and Britain, and ignored psychics and phenomena generally treated with respect by the same people.”

Houdini’s most publicized encounter with a medium was his alleged exposure of the famous Boston medium Mina “Margery” Crandon (1888-1941) in 1924. The investigating committee, sponsored by Scientific American magazine, had sought Houdini’s expertise as a magician, but many of the members soon became irate over his attempts to employ trickery against the medium. Although Houdini claimed that he had caught Crandon in fraudulent actions, certain committee members felt that the medium’s spirit guide, Walter, had been the one who had exposed Houdini and the tricks that he used in his attempts to confuse Crandon.

The great magician’s crusade against fraudulent mediums, as well as his career as a conjuror and escape artist, was cut short on October 22, 1926, when a student who was visiting backstage at a Montreal theater wished to test Houdini’s much vaunted muscle control, and caught him off guard with a punch to the stomach that ruptured his appendix. Houdini died nine days later on Halloween.

The controversy over whether or not the Houdini after-death code was broken will no doubt continue to rage on for many years. Houdini pledged to his wife, Bess, that if at all possible he would communicate with her after his death, and in order to prove his identity beyond all doubt and to eliminate the possibility of deception, the magician’s prearranged message was a secret known only to Bess. To add to the mystique, Houdini, the master showman, stated that a seance should be held each anniversary of his death in an attempt for him to transmit the code words to a medium.

The Reverend Arthur Ford (1896-1971), formerly an orthodox clergyman, had become a trance medium and had gained an international reputation for the accuracy of his spirit communication, receiving accolades from such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who called him one of the most amazing mental mediums of all times. In 1929, Reverend Ford received a message that he believed to have originated from Houdini and conveyed it to Bess Houdini’s attention. Immediately a storm of fierce arguments pro and con erupted in the media. Perhaps betraying their own personal prejudices, some feature writers championed the authenticity of Reverend Ford’s relayed communication from Houdini, while others quoted the magician’s widow as saying that the message was incorrect.

On February 9, 1929, however, Beatrice Houdini wrote Reverend Ford to state with finality: “Regardless of any statement made to the contrary: I wish to declare that the message, in its entirety, and in the agreed upon sequence, given to me by Arthur Ford, is the correct message prearranged between Mr. Houdini and myself.”

Critics of the paranormal downplay Ford’s having received the code from the spirit of Houdini. They insist that Bess Houdini had inadvertently revealed the code to several reporters the year before when she explained that the message her late husband would pass on from the world beyond was based on their old vaudeville routine that utilized a secret spelling code that would pass information from her to Houdini. The various words in the code spelled out Harry’s and Bess’s secret message: “Roseabelle, believe.”

William James (1842-1910)

William James is best known for his classic work on the mystical experience The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James had a career as a psychologist, a philosopher, and a teacher. His father, Henry James, Sr. (1811-1882), was a philosopher, a friend of the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), and an ardent follower of the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). William’s brother, Henry James (1843-1916), was the acclaimed novelist of such American classics as Daisy Miller (1879), The Europeans, and the psychological thriller The Turn of the Screw (1898). James studied both science and art before receiving a degree in medicine from Harvard University in 1869. Two years later, he began teaching courses at Harvard, first in physiology, then in psychology and philosophy.

James’s interest in mediumship and the afterlife was closely allied with his research in the psychology of altered states of consciousness. In 1882, while in London, he met Fredric W. H. Myers (1843-1901), Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), and other founding members of the newly formed British Society for Psychical Research (BSPR). James was impressed by Myers, a fellow psychologist, and his theory of the subliminal self, a secondary consciousness containing a number of higher-level mental processes which might be responsible for phenomena otherwise attributed to spirits. Returning to Boston, James, together with Sir William Barret and others, helped establish the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in 1885.

That same year, James was brought to the seance room of Leonora E. Piper (1857-1950), the medium whom many psychical researchers would later declare the greatest mental medium of all time. Taking such precautions as identifying himself with a false name, the psychologist came away from the sitting completely baffled as to how the medium’s spirit control had been able to provide accurate information on all the subjects about which he had queried. Although he was never greatly impressed by the phenomena produced by the physical mediums, James began a lengthy study of mental mediums, whom he hoped would be able to exhibit as much genuine phenomena as Piper.

James served as vice president of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) from 1890 to 1910 and as president from 1894 to 1895. Although he was a stalwart champion of the scientific research of paranormal phenomena, he never quite found the proof in survival after death which he had hoped to discover through the study of mediumship. William James died on August 26, 1910, at his summer home in Chocurua, New Hampshire.

Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940)

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was a world-renowned British physicist whose first experiences in psychical research date back to 1881, when Malcolm Guthrie, the owner of a drapery shop, invited him to join his investigations in thought transference in Liverpool. Lodge was quite amazed with the results, and he began to conduct his own tests. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).

In 1889, Lodge invited the famous Boston medium Leonora E. Piper (1857-1950) to England for tests and saw that she was made comfortable in his own home. Ever the exacting researcher, he took every conceivable precaution to eliminate any possibility of foreknowledge or fraud on Piper’s part. He went so far as to temporarily dismiss all of his servants and replace them with others who knew absolutely nothing about any member of the Lodge family or Piper. Although a guest in the Lodge home, the medium was kept incommunicado and was constantly watched by experienced professional detectives. With Piper’s permission, her private mail was opened and read. Every possibility of her communicating with others and receiving any type of information was completely eliminated, yet Piper’s spirit guides provided accurate communication in every test that Lodge devised, which helped convince the researcher that spiritistic phenomena were real.

“The messages received tend to render certain the existence of some outside intelligence or control,” he said. “My sittings convinced me of survival. I am as convinced of continued existence on the other side of death as I am of existence here…I say this on distinct scientific grounds. I say it because certain friends of mine who have died still exist, because I have talked with them.”

Five years later, in 1894, Lodge’s first encounters with physical mediumship took place when he and Fredric W. H. Myers (1843-1901) traveled to the summer home of the French psychical researcher Charles Richet (1850-1935) to investigate the extraordinary Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918). Although Palladino had to be observed carefully to prevent her from resorting to trickery, Lodge was impressed with what he had witnessed. “Things hitherto held impossible do actually occur,” the physicist concurred. “Certain phenomena usually considered abnormal do belong to the order of nature, and as a corollary from this, that these phenomena ought to be investigated and recorded by persons and societies interested in natural knowledge.”

Oliver Lodge was knighted in 1902 while he was serving as president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In 1913, he was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His fascination with Spiritualism did nothing to prevent him from accomplishing highly regarded work with electricity and with early forms of radio before Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937).

In August 1915, Lodge received what he considered proof of survival after death when, in Boston, Leonora Piper relayed what he considered to be convincing messages from Fredric Myers, who had died in 1901, and Edmund Gurney, who had passed on in 1888—two close friends and associates. Such dramatic assurances of life in the spirit world helped to prepare Lodge for the death of his son Raymond, who was killed on September 14, 1915, in his capacity as a medical officer of the Second South Lancers.

On September 25, Lady Lodge sat with medium Gladys Osborne Leonard (1882-1968), who described a photograph that had been taken of Raymond with a group of fellow officers. Lady Lodge knew of no such photograph. The medium said that Raymond’s spirit was insistent that he should tell Lady Lodge that in this particular photograph, Raymond was holding his walking stick under his arm. The Lodges had numerous photographs of their son, but they did not possess a single one depicting a group of medical officers in which Raymond would be included. Lodge was impressed with the emphasis that the medium had placed upon Raymond’s insistence that they should locate such a photograph.

Then, according to Sir Oliver’s report on the case (Proceedings, S.P.R. Vol. XXIX), on November 29, a letter was received from a Mrs. Cheves, who was a stranger to the Lodges, but who was the mother of a friend of Raymond’s. Cheves informed the Lodges that she had half a dozen photographs from a sitting by a group of medical officers in which Raymond and her son were present. Cheves inquired if the Lodges would like a copy of the photograph.

Although Lodge and his wife responded immediately and enthusiastically, the photograph did not arrive until the afternoon of December 7. In the interim, Lady Lodge had gone through Raymond’s diary, which had been returned from the front, and had found an entry dated August 24 which told of such a photo having been taken. In his report for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Lodge noted that the photograph had been taken 21 days before their son’s death. “Some days may have elapsed before [Raymond] saw a print, if he ever saw one,” he wrote. “He certainly never mentioned it in his letters. We were, therefore, in complete ignorance of it.”

While the Lodges were awaiting the photograph from Cheves, they visited another medium through whose spirit control Raymond gave them additional details concerning the group picture. Now, it seemed, Raymond was not so certain he held his walking stick, but he confirmed that there were a considerable number of men in the photograph, including two who were friends of his. These two men were prominently featured standing behind Raymond, one of whom annoyed him by leaning on his shoulder.

When the photograph was delivered to the Lodge home, Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge noticed at once that it offered a poor likeness of Raymond, but provided excellent evidence that their son had communicated to them from beyond the grave. The walking stick was there, though not under Raymond’s arm, as the first medium had said. The fellow officers Raymond had named through the second medium were in the photograph and the general arrangement of the men was as both mediums had described it.

“But by far the most striking piece of evidence is the fact that some one sitting behind Raymond is leaning or resting a hand on his shoulder,” commented Lodge in his report. “The photograph fortunately shows the actual occurrence and almost indicates that Raymond was rather annoyed with it, for his face is a little screwed up, and his head has been slightly bent to one side out of the way of the man’s arm. It is the only case in the photograph where one man is leaning or resting his hand on the shoulder of another.”

Lodge once again contacted Cheves and learned where he might obtain prints of other photographs that had been taken at the same time. Upon examination of all accessible prints, Lodge found that the basic group pose had been repeated with only slight variations for three different photographs. The Lodges felt the evidential value of the communication had been greatly enhanced by the fact that one medium had made a reference to the existence of Raymond’s last photograph, and another medium, unknown to the first, had supplied the details of the photograph in response to Lodge’s direct question. In his My Philosophy (1933), he wrote: “I am absolutely convinced not only of survival, but of demonstrated survival, demonstrated by occasional interaction with matter in such a way as to produce physical results.”

Among the books written by Sir Oliver Lodge are such titles as: Man and the Universe (1908); Science and Religion (1914); Raymond or Life and Death (1917); Raymond Revisited (1922); Science and Human Progress (1927); Why I Believe in Personal Immortality (1928); The Reality of a Spiritual World (1930); and My Philosophy (1933).

Fredric W. H. Myers (1843-1901)

Fredric William Henry Myers was born in 1843 in Keswick, Cumberland, England, into the family of a clergyman. He was educated at Cheltenham and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1865, he became a lecturer in the classics at Cambridge, but in 1872, he resigned that position to become a school inspector. Myers published several volumes of poetry, though it was as an essayist that he became known (Essays, Classical and Modern [1885]).

Intrigued by the possibility of ghosts, spirits, and the survival of the soul since he was very young, Myers began sitting with mediums in 1872, often in the company of his friends, Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and Edmund Gurney (1847-1888). In 1882, he was one of the original group, together with Sidgwick and Gurney, who founded the British Society for Psychical Research (BSPR) and remained until the end of his life one of its most active and productive members, serving as the society’s secretary from 1888 to 1899 and its president in 1900.

Although he was never a skeptic toward the paranormal, Myers deemed many of the manifestations of spirit mediums to be simplistic and puerile. In his opinion, the greatest evidence for survival of the human personality after death was to be found in what he called the “subliminal consciousness,” that mysterious realm that lies beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness wherein exist the faculties of telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and precognition. All the phenomena of mediumism and the seance room Myers attributed to the manifestations of the subliminal consciousness.

Myers investigated one of the most evidential cases suggestive of the survival of human personality beyond the death experience recorded in the early annals of psychical research. The report, which has come to be known as “The Case of the Scratch on the Cheek.”

In 1876 Mr. F. G., a traveling salesman, was sitting in a hotel room in St. Joseph, Missouri. It was high noon and he was smoking a cigar and writing out sales orders. Suddenly conscious of someone sitting on his left with one arm resting on the table, the salesman was startled to look up into the face of his dead sister, a young lady of 18 who had died of cholera in 1867. “So sure was I that it was she,” he wrote in an account to the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) (Proceedings, S.P.R., VI, 17), “that I sprang forward in delight, calling her by name.”

As he did so, the image of his sister vanished, and Mr. F. G. resumed his seat, stunned by the experience. The cigar was still in his mouth, the pen was still in his hand, and the ink was still moist on his order blank. He was satisfied that he had not been dreaming, but was wide awake. He had been near enough to touch her, “had it been a physical possibility.” He had noted her features, expression, and details of dress. “She appeared as if alive,” he stated. “Her eyes looked kindly and perfectly naturally into mine. Her skin was so lifelike that I could see the glow of moisture on its surface, and, on the whole, there was no change in her appearance.”

Mr. F. G. was so impressed by the experience that he took the next train home to tell his parents about the remarkable visitation. But his mother nearly fainted when he told them of “a bright red line or scratch on the right-hand side” of his sister’s face. With tears streaming down her face, his mother told him that he had most certainly seen his sister’s spirit since only she was aware of a scratch that she had accidentally made while doing some little act of kindness after the girl’s death. Feeling terrible over what had occurred, his mother had carefully “obliterated all traces of the slight scratch with the aid of powder” and had never mentioned the unfortunate occurrence to a single person from that day onward until F. G. had mentioned seeing it on the spirit form of his sister.

It seems a bit more than coincidence when the anonymous narrator, F. G., adds: “A few weeks later my mother died, happy in her belief that she would rejoin her favorite daughter in a better world.”

In discussing this case, Fredric W. H. Myers wrote that, in his opinion, the spirit of the daughter had perceived the approaching death of her mother and had appeared to the brother to force him into the role of message bearer. Also, by prompting F. G. to return home unexpectedly at that time, the spirit had enabled him to have a final visit with his mother. Myers was further intrigued by the fact that the spirit figure appeared not as a corpse, but as a girl full of health and happiness “with the symbolic red mark worn simply as a test of identity.” Myers discounted the theory that the spirit figure could have been a projection from the mother’s mind. “As to the spirit’s own knowledge of the fate of the body after death, other reported cases show that this specific form of post-mortem perception is not unusual,” he concluded. “This case is one of the best attested, and in itself one of the most remarkable that we possess…It certainly seems probable that recognition was intelligently aimed at.”

The Reverend Arthur Bellamy told Myers about the “lady” he saw one night sitting by the side of the bed where his wife lay sound asleep. Bellamy stared at the strange woman for several minutes, noting especially the elegant styling of her hair, before the lady vanished.

When Mrs. Bellamy awakened, the reverend described her mysterious caller. He was startled to learn that the description fit that of a schoolgirl friend of his wife’s with whom she had once made a pact that the first one to die should appear after her death to the survivor. The astonished clergyman then asked his wife if there was anything outstanding about her friend, so they might be certain it had been she. “Her hair,” she answered without hesitation. “We girls used to tease her at school for devoting so much time to the arrangement of her hair.” Later, Bellamy identified a photograph of his wife’s friend as being the likeness of the specter that had appeared at her bedside.

The results, speculations, and conclusions of Frederic W. H. Myers’s many years of research were published posthumously in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (coauthored with Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, 1903). Myers died in Rome in 1901 and was buried in Keswick.

Society for Psychical Research (SPR)

In 1882, a distinguished group of Cambridge scholars founded the British Society for Psychical Research (BSPR) for the purpose of examining allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased manner. The first president of the society was Professor Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), and the council numbered among its members Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), Frank Podmore (1856-1910), Fredric W. H. Myers (1843-1901), and Professor William Barrett (1844-1925). The initial major undertaking of the newly formed society, the first of its kind in the world, was to conduct a census of hallucinations by means of a circulated questionnaire that asked its respondents:

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?

The SPR received answers from 17,000 people, 1,684 of whom answered “yes.” From this, the committee which was conducting the census estimated that nearly 10 percent of the population had experienced some kind of visual or auditory “hallucination.” Those people who indicated that they had experienced some paranormal appearance or manifestation were sent forms requesting details.

The census of hallucinations enabled the researchers to arrive at a number of basic premises concerning ghosts and apparitions, which were strengthened by subsequent research. The committee was able to conclude, for example, that although apparitions are associated with other events besides death, they are more likely to be linked with death than anything else. Visual hallucinations were found to be the most common (1,087). This seemed especially important to note because psychologists have found that auditory experiences are most common among the mentally ill. Of the visual cases reported, 283 had been shared by more than one witness. This was also noted to be of great importance because critics of psychic phenomena have always argued that the appearance of a “ghost” is an entirely subjective experience. Those who answered the committee’s follow-up form indicated that they had not been ill when they had witnessed the phenomena they reported, and they insisted that the “hallucinations” were quite unlike the bizarre, nightmarish creatures which might appear during high fevers or high alcoholic consumption. Of the 493 reported auditory hallucinations, 94 had occurred when another person had been present. Therefore, about one-third of the cases were collective—that is, experienced by more than one witness at the same time.

After the findings of the census of hallucinations were made public, the SPR began to be flooded by personal accounts of spontaneous cases of ghosts and apparitions. In order to aid an appointed committee in the handling of such an influx of material, the SPR worked out a series of questions that could be applied to each case that came into their offices:

Is the account firsthand?
Was it written or told before the corresponding event was known?
Has the principal witness been corroborated?
Was the percipient awake at the time?
Was the percipient an educated person of good character?
Was the apparition recognized?
Was it seen out of doors?
Was the percipient anxious or in a state of expectancy?
Could relevant details have been read back into the narrative after the event?
Could the coincidence between the experience and the event be accounted for by chance?

Later, committee member J. Fraser Nichol established three points of critique that could be used by the investigator of spontaneous phenomena:

That the experience be veridical—that is, that it relate to an actual event that was occurring, had occurred, or would occur;
That there be an independent witness who testifies that the percipient related his experience to him before he came to know, by normal means, that the experience had been veridical; and
That no more than five years have passed between the experience and the written account of it.

The American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), first organized in 1885 with astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) as president, later became a branch of the British Society of Psychical Research (BSPR) and functioned in Boston under the guidance of Richard Hodgson (1855-1905), formerly of Cambridge University, until his death in 1905. The ASPR became independent of the BSPR and relocated to New York City in 1906 with James Hervey Hyslop (1854-1920), Professor of Logic and Ethics at Columbia University, as its secretary and treasurer. For the next 14 years, until his death in 1920, Hyslop expanded the scope of the society’s work.

At the ASPR all-day ESP forum held on November 20, 1965, in New York City, Dr. Gardner Murphy (1895-1979), president of the ASPR, told assembled parapsychologists and representatives from other scientific disciplines that “…Progress in parapsychology in the direction of science calls for major, sustained effort…devoted to the building of theories and systematic models. The primary need is not for lots and lots of further little experiments, but for bold and sound model building.”

Murphy concluded his address, “Advancement of Parapsychology as a Science,” by stating that the future of parapsychology as a science is going to depend on multidisciplinary cooperation between the psychical researcher and “…the medical man, the anthropologist, the sociologist, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist, and a great many other kinds of people working together within a broad perspective and giving each other mutual support.”