Inside the Supernatural

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). 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.

This kind of experimentation went on the back burner, though, for nearly twenty years until Professor Gilbert Murray, a Professor of Greek at Oxford University, revived interest. He played a parlour game with his family in which he would go out of the room and then try to ‘guess’ targets that they set for him. Murray fared better when the target set was a scene containing some action and some emotion than when it was a simple object or word. His experience has since been corroborated by recent experiments by parapsychologists like Charles Honorton doing ganzfeld work (see chapter 3). Murray was also unusual in that the whole family, friends and witnesses would try to ‘send’ the picture to him – most telepathy experiments involve only one sender.

Some of his results were remarkable. When the target was ‘Jane Eyre at school, standing on a chair and being called a liar by Mr Brocklehurst’, Murray came up with: ‘My mother being at a French school … I reject that. But a sense of obloquy. Girl standing up on a form in a school … a thing in a book, certainly. I think they are calling her a liar.’

When the subject was the sinking of the Lusitania he got it straight off. ‘I’ve got this violently. I’ve got an awful impression of naval disaster. I should think it was the torpedoing of the Lusitania.’

For a time even Murray himself thought that he might be getting clues to his targets through his extremely good hearing, but he was not consciously aware of hearing the targets being discussed. He certainly fared better when they had been discussed than when a target was simply written down, although this did not completely hamper him. Sometimes he picked up things that were in the minds of the senders, but which they had neither spoken nor committed to paper. For example, when his daughter set him a target of a scene from a Russian book in which some children were being taken to see their grandparents, he came up with the information that they were taken across the River Volga. He had never read the book, nor was the river mentioned when the target was discussed, but in fact he was correct: the book did describe the children being taken across the Volga.

In the 1920s, more and more research time was given over to laboratory-type experiments, with tests for clairvoyance and telepathy through guessing cards. But, by then, this type of research was taken more seriously in America, where universities were getting in on the action and academics were being given funding to study the paranormal full-time (unlike the SPR volunteers).

In the 1930s the work of J.B. Rhine, the founding father of modern parapsychology, firmly established academic interest in the subject. It was Rhine who coined the word ‘parapsychology’ and also ‘ESP’, or extra sensory perception, an umbrella term covering telepathy, clairvoyance and all other forms of paranormal communication.

Rhine was first attracted to the subject after hearing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a dedicated spiritualist, give a talk in Chicago. It sparked an interest in him and his wife Louisa – another great contributor to psychic research – that would last a lifetime. But after an unhappy encounter with a celebrated medium, who they both deemed to be a fraud, the Rhines were convinced that the way forward was through systematic and academically credible research. While working at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rhine professionalized the subject by introducing statistics. Although earlier work had been done with ‘guinea pigs’ who claimed no specific psi abilities, most research had centred on people who claimed or appeared to have specific talents. It was Rhine who initiated large-scale testing of ordinary individuals, and made sure that all his results were compared with those he might have expected to obtain by chance: a protocol that has been adhered to by parapsychologists ever since.

Rhine refined the standard card-guessing games by having a colleague, Karl Zener, devise a new set of five cards, each featuring a simple symbol: star, plus-sign, circle, rectangle, wavy line. These cards, made into packs of twenty-five with five of each, are known as Zener cards. The idea behind them was to get away from the emotive connotations of playing cards, and also to give very clearly individual symbols for ‘guinea pigs’ to try to ‘pick up’.

Testing students at random, Rhine soon found several individuals who demonstrated unusual psi abilities. He was able to test them and find consistent patterns: they performed less well when they were tired, they performed less well on certain drugs. He and his fellow researchers devised experiments that distinguished between telepathy and clairvoyance.

It was the publication of Rhine’s book, Extra Sensory Perception, in 1934, that put parapsychology on the map. By and large, Rhine’s methodical approach and statistical rectitude confounded them. The book and its sequel became popular with mass-circulation newspapers and magazines and national radio stations queuing to interview Rhine. The orthodox psychologists (themselves still pioneering a new discipline) gave grudging approval to Rhine’s work.

He was not entirely above criticism although (luckily for the growing band of parapsychologists encouraged by the acceptance of his work) none of the research with which he was associated was seriously discredited until 1978. Even then, it was not Rhine himself who was accused of distorting statistics, but a British mathematician, S.G. Soal, who had tested a great deal of people with a card-guessing experiment in the 1940s. Only when he looked at their results for ‘temporal displacement’ did he find two of them were scoring well above chance. Temporal displacement means that although they were not necessarily getting the right card each time, they were accurately predicting the following card or a preceding card. (In the case of Soal’s examples they were both guessing the card to come, but that need not have been the case.)

Soal was accused of falsifying his results, and Rhine was implicated because his Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University checked and approved some of Soal’s research. Thirty years later a computer expert scrutinized Soal’s research and confirmed that ‘the sad and inescapable conclusion remains that all the experimental series in card-guessing carried out by Dr Soal must, as the evidence stands, be discredited’. Rhine, though not colluding, had been economical with the truth when publishing conclusions that seemed to authenticate Soal’s work.

The Soal scandal is one of relatively few accusations of straightforward cheating that have been levelled at psychical researchers and parapsychologists, although they have regularly been accused of being duped or of misinterpreting data (see chapter 7). In general, the early members of the Society for Psychical Research and the pioneers of laboratory work inspired by Rhine set high standards for those who came after them.

2

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Pete the Polt is an obliging sort of ghost who believes in paying his way: he materializes five-pound notes for the people he is haunting. Crumpled fivers arrive out of thin air. They turn up pinned to the ceiling; wedged between the blades of machinery; one even appeared in the open air and fluttered to the ground at the feet of the man of whom Pete seems to be particularly fond. This man also found a ten-pound note on the window of his car. Altogether, about ninety pounds have appeared, as well as several one-pound coins and handfuls of pennies.

Pete the Poltergeist has been making his presence felt for the last six years – not always in such a benign way. His ‘home’ is a small lawnmower repair workshop, with a hardware shop in front, in the Cathays district of Cardiff.

The business is owned by John Matthews and his wife, Pat. They are helped out by Pat’s brother, Fred Cook, and his wife, Gerry. Fred seems to be Pete’s particular favourite, but all four of them have seen plenty of evidence of Pete’s existence. So, too, have several other people: neighbouring shopkeepers, salesmen visiting the business, customers and other staff who have worked there over the years.

Most impressively, Dr David Fontana, a lecturer in educational psychology at Cardiff University, who was deputed by the Society for Psychical Research to investigate Pete, has been able to witness phenomena occurring. On one occasion, he was accompanied by a colleague from the university when Pete was demonstrating his prowess as a stone thrower.

It was stone throwing that first alerted John Matthews to his uninvited guest. The business was then being run from a single-storey building in the yard at the back of the shop and workshop. At that time, John had a partner, Graham, and both men were constantly irritated by the sound of stones hitting the corrugated roof. They assumed it was vandals and reported it to the police more than once. The police investigated and found nothing.

When the business transferred to the bigger premises, the stone throwing increased – but this time it was inside. As John, Graham and a young lad who worked for them, Richard, were busy repairing lawnmowers, they would hear small stones striking the walls all around them and dropping to the workbenches and the floor. Originally, they suspected each other.

‘So one afternoon after we’d locked the shop and there was nobody else around, we all put our hands on the counter so that none of us could cheat. And the stone throwing continued,’ said John, a down-to-earth Welshman in his fifties who had never even heard the word poltergeist at this stage.

‘After a bit, Richard said we ought to write down what was happening. As soon as he spoke a pen plopped down on the counter. So then he started asking for things. He said, “Bring us a plug. Bring us the big end off a mower.” All sorts of things. As he asked for them, they arrived. I couldn’t have found them that fast myself in the workshop. That’s when we knew it was something intelligent.’

Since then, both Graham and Richard have left, though not because of Pete. Pat has started to work more in the shop and her brother and sister-in-law, Fred and Gerry, are also both there most days. There have been other part-time employees, all of whom have seen and heard Pete.

‘At first Richard seemed to be his favourite, but now it is Fred,’ said John. ‘It does more for Fred than anyone. It was when Fred said, “Why don’t you bring us something useful, Pete,” that the money started coming.’

But the money is a relatively recent development, and has coincided with Pete getting altogether quieter. For a long time, John, his colleagues, and anyone else who was there – including Dr Fontana – were able to have throwing games with Pete, aiming small stones into the most active corner of the workshop (the area where most of Pete’s phenomena occurred) and having stones thrown back instantaneously. By marking the ones they threw they could check that they were not getting the same ones back and, after experimenting with rebounds and different trajectories, David Fontana was satisfied that there was no natural explanation for the stones.