by J H Brennan
The Davenports, clad in black … walked on to the stage amid enormous applause and sat down. They were bound hand and foot to their bench … townsmen assisting in the tying and thoroughly examining all the knots; the skeleton wardrobe was wheeled on to the stage and examined; and the musical instruments placed in position. Then the lights were turned out. Almost immediately bells began to ring, music was played, hands were seen apparently floating about the wardrobe.4
Maskelyne, however, arranged for a friend to draw aside a window blind and in the sudden shaft of afternoon sunlight “clearly saw Ira Davenport throwing the instruments out of the wardrobe.” It was neither the first nor the last time the Davenports were exposed, but “they just moved on, in dignified sorrow, going to as many English towns as they could while the going was good.”5 In essence, the Davenports were escapologists, masquerading as mediums, and in 1910 Ira demonstrated some of his techniques to Harry Houdini.6 In the latter half of his career, Houdini devoted much time and energy to exposing fraudulent mediumistic practice and frequently gave stage demonstrations of how their supposed powers could be produced by mechanical means. John Gordon Melton comments: “The exposure of widespread fraud within the spiritualist movement severely damaged its reputation and pushed it to the fringes of society in the United States.”7 How widespread the fraud became is illustrated by the fact that it was possible to purchase “séance kits” with all the equipment necessary to fake spirit phenomena. Today, such kits are still available and have grown, if anything, more sophisticated. The Box of Delights Séance Kit, for example, includes gimmicked bottles that can be made to move around and topple as if controlled by invisible hands.8
But the fact that mediumistic and other spirit phenomena can be—and frequently has been—duplicated by trickery does not constitute proof of universal fraud, which is why scientific investigation is of such importance. There are, of course, some who would argue that such investigation has been under way since 1882 when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London to “conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models.”9 In the century since then, the society has indeed reported that some apparent spirit phenomena were the result of trickery, deception, lies, misrepresentation, natural causes, misinterpretation, and fraud. But it has also reported others that appeared to be genuine. It is this latter category that has attracted the attention of the Skeptical movement, members of which are concerned that supposedly scientific investigations may not have been carried out properly. In a great many cases, the skeptics have conducted investigations of their own, often on phenomena declared genuine following earlier examinations. In no case so far10 publicized by the Skeptical movement has any paranormal phenomenon been found genuine. The result has been a general debunking of the work of those scientists and academics who have taken a practical interest in psychical research.
Harry Houdini, the escapologist and stage magician, who spent the latter part of his career exposing fraudulent mediums
One important example of debunking, frequently mentioned in skeptical literature, is the confession of fraud made by Margaret Fox in 1888. An entry in Randi’s encyclopedia on the Fox sisters, whose experiences were the foundation of modern Spiritualism, points out that they confessed to faking the raps by cracking their toe joints and bouncing an apple on the floor. The entry concludes:
The public confessions had done nothing to dampen the belief in the Fox sisters or the movement they had started. The believers expressed their regret at the fact that the sisters had been forced into lying, and spiritualism continued as if the confessions of the Fox sisters had never happened.11
There is a small error in this entry, which gives the impression that more than one Fox sister confessed—an error unfortunately repeated in much of the skeptical literature. The context of the confession is as follows:
Following the outbreak of raps in their home at Hydesville, the two younger Fox sisters, Kate and Margaret, persuaded their older sister, Leah, that the phenomena were genuine. Almost immediately, Kate and Margaret embarked on a career as mediums, with Leah as their manager. For a time, the two younger girls were extraordinarily successful and their séances were attended by the rich and famous, but both developed serious drinking problems. In later years, they quarreled bitterly with Leah, continued to drink heavily, experienced severe personal problems, and watched their careers—and their income—dwindle. Margaret began to contemplate suicide.
In 1888, Margaret walked onstage at the New York Academy of Music to announce that she and Kate had produced the raps at Hydesville by cracking their toe joints, after which Leah had forced them into a career of mediumship. According to contemporary press reports, she vigorously denounced the whole Spiritualist movement, calling it an “absolute falsehood from beginning to end … the flimsiest of superstitions [and] the most wicked blasphemy known to the world.” She demonstrated toe cracking while under observation by doctors called out of the audience and the noises were sufficiently audible to be heard “throughout the theater.” Her sister Kate sat in a box overlooking the stage throughout the performance. Kate’s silence has been taken by skeptics as an affirmation of agreement with her sister’s words, hence the mistaken idea that both confessed. The error—if it was an error—was a small one. For the skeptics, Margaret’s solitary confession was enough to mark the case closed on the Fox sisters and the whole Spiritualist movement.
But as any experienced police officer will confirm, a confession is not necessarily proof of guilt. The confessor may be an attention-seeker, or mentally unstable, or attempting to protect or hurt someone else. The confession may have been the result of coercion, torture, or bribery. It is also necessary to take into consideration any attempt made by the suspect to withdraw the confession at a later stage. (One estimate12 places the number of false confessions leading to criminal convictions in the United States as high as 25 percent.) More than one of these factors was present in the case of Margaret Fox. She was a lonely, suicidal alcoholic, who had spent a lifetime seeking attention as a medium. A New York City reporter had advanced her $1,500—a very substantial sum in the day—to give him an exclusive on a confession of fraud. The denunciation of Spiritualism generally might be expected to hurt Leah, who by this stage had made a small fortune from the movement. Furthermore, the silence of younger sister Kate did not appear to signify assent, as the skeptics insist. Her letters home following the confession expressed dismay and shock at the attack on Spiritualism. Margaret herself withdrew her confession, in writing, the year after she made it. Rather than tackling these factors, skeptical literature tends to dismiss some or all of them as “excuses.”13
Elements of the confession itself present their own difficulties. We know nothing of the “doctors” who appeared from the audience to supervise Margaret’s toe-cracking demonstration; and while she certainly managed to produce audible sounds, it is difficult to reconcile the cracking of a toe joint with William Crooke’s description of the séance room sounds produced by Kate Fox under test conditions:
These sounds are noticed with almost every medium … but for power and certainty I have met with no one who at all approached Miss Kate Fox. For several months I enjoyed almost unlimited opportunity of testing the various phenomena occurring in the presence of this lady, and I especially examined the phenomena of these sounds. With mediums, generally it is necessary to sit for a formal séance before anything is heard; but in the case of Miss Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree—on a sheet of glass—on a stretched iron wire—on a stretched membrane—a tambourine—on the roof of a cab—and on the floor of a theatre. Moreover, actual contact is not always necessary; I have had these sounds proceeding from the floor, walls, etc., when the medium’s hands and feet were held—when she was standing on a chair
—when she was suspended in a swing from the ceiling—when she was enclosed in a wire cage—and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa. I have heard them on a glass harmonicon—I have felt them on my own shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard them on a sheet of paper, held between the fingers by a piece of thread passed through one corner. With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means.14
A more subtle problem was unearthed by the academic Robert McLuhan, who took the trouble to examine the details of the confession itself. In it Margaret Fox claimed that when the raps began at Hydesville, she was eight years old, while her sister Kate was six and a half. This was simply untrue. A statement by the girls’ mother made just two weeks after the start of the disturbances in 1848 describes Margaret as fourteen years old and Kate as twelve. McLuhan found it implausible that Margaret could have misremembered her age—there is a huge emotional distance between an eight-year-old and a fourteen-year-old—and tried to work out why she might have lied about it. He came to the following conclusion:
What struck me about Maggie’s statement … is that she took great pains to persuade her audience that she and her sister were capable of fooling their mother. Mrs. Fox did not understand it, Maggie said, “and didn’t suspect us of being capable of a trick because we were so young … no one suspected us of any trick because we were such young children.”
Maggie also suggested that being so young they were supple enough to manage the necessary physical contortions: “Such perfect control is only possible when a child is taken at an early age and carefully and continually taught to practice the muscles which grow still in later years. A child of twelve is almost too old” … The fact that she was anxious about it suggests to me that she had not actually experienced the scenario she was referring to. In short, she was making it all up, and changing her and her sister’s ages was a ploy designed to make it sound plausible.15
One might also wonder why the skeptics who accepted Margaret’s confession so readily failed to question who it was who took the little girls at an early age and “continually taught them to practice the muscles which grow still in later years” in order to prepare them for a career faking ghostly noises.
McLuhan did not stop with the Fox confession when he decided to investigate paranormal phenomena. As a skeptic himself, he was naturally sympathetic toward the investigative work undertaken by the Skeptical movement and the criticisms it made of those scientists prepared to accept some phenomena as genuine. But closer examination led to disillusionment. His turning point came with the examination of an historical account of a poltergeist outbreak in 1772. The brief facts of the case, described in painstaking detail in a contemporary pamphlet signed by six witnesses, were these:
A Londoner by the name of Mrs. Golding was in her parlor on January 6 when she heard the sound of china breaking in the kitchen. Her maid, twenty-year-old Ann Robinson, came in to tell her plates were falling from a shelf. Mrs. Golding went to investigate and found herself in a veritable maelstrom of poltergeist activity: violent noises sounded all over the house, various objects were hurled about as if by invisible hands, a clock tumbled over and broke, as did an earthenware pan of salted beef. Mrs. Golding and Ann fled from the house to take refuge with a neighbor, but the violence followed them. They escaped it temporarily by going to the home of Mrs. Golding’s niece, but it started up again at eight o’clock that evening. Dishes fell from shelves and turned themselves upside down. When replaced, they fell off all over again. A cat was pelted with eggs. A pestle and mortar jumped six feet onto the floor. Buckets of liquid suddenly bubbled and frothed over. Various other items were flung about and Ann was struck on the foot by a teapot.
McLuhan discovered that, according to the skeptical stage magician Milbourne Christopher, a rational explanation was put forward some years later by a magazine editor named William Hone, who published an article claiming that the maid Robinson had confessed to faking the whole thing. She had thrown the eggs at the cat. She had hung joints of ham in such a way that they would fall down under their own weight. She had strung wire behind the plates so she could make them jump from the shelves. She had tied horsehairs to various objects so they could be made to move as if of their own accord. She had added chemicals to the liquid in the buckets to make it froth over.
McLuhan found all this difficult to accept but was initially persuaded by Christopher who, as a professional illusionist, stated that such tricks were by no means impossible. But doubts began to creep in.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. This business of attaching horsehairs to objects sounds rather difficult. Would the maid have wrapped the hairs right round and tied knots to keep them in place? Just how long were they? Or did she use glue? You’d think it would require some time and absolute privacy to prepare such things unobserved … Even if she had had the opportunity to prepare the disturbances at Mrs. Golding’s house, would she have had the same chance to do so at the neighbor’s house? And the niece’s house too?
It’s risky arguing with an expert, a point that the conjurer-sceptics themselves are keen to nurture. But Christopher is trading heavily on his privileged status: his scenario is unrealistic. Whole shelves of plates falling down, being replaced and falling down again, and other objects throughout the house coming alive at the same time, causing serious damage—this suggests not conjuring but somebody running amok.16
In rejecting the stage magician’s explanation, McLuhan felt he had crossed some sort of Rubicon but was unable to rid himself of the conviction that if anyone was being credulous here, it was the skeptic himself. Later, he discovered that a characteristic of most skeptical investigations was that “explanations of paranormal claims don’t have to be coherent … as long as they restore normality.”17 Says McLuhan:
The idea that a young servant girl might choose to spend her limited leisure time and meagre wages procuring a chemical that would make the liquid bubble in her employer’s bucket, along with all the other curious conjuring tricks, helps resolve an awkward problem but leaves appalling new ones in its wake. Why go to such lengths? How did she acquire the skills to do all this without being observed? In any other circumstances it’s hard to think that the girl would entertain such bizarre notions for a minute. Yet here it seems the alternative is so unthinkable that just about any idea will do, no matter how intrinsically implausible it may be in itself. How is it possible not to be sceptical about the sceptic’s view?18
To judge from the examples given in his book on the subject, skeptics claim that all paranormal phenomena and spirit communications are the result of fraud. Furthermore, the skeptical position frequently predicates two unspoken assumptions: (1) that a rational examination of “spirits” must necessarily involve examination of “spirit phenomena” and (2) that the concept of spirits must be susceptible to physical proof. Neither assumption is correct. Many apparent spirit communications generate no physical phenomena, nor are they capable of being proven or disproven in any way likely to satisfy a skeptical materialist.
Prior to the emergence of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century, much of humanity’s “spirit encounters” were like that—personal experiences that led to theories of postmortem survival or the existence of immaterial intelligences and entities. Even within Spiritualism itself, communications need have no accompanying paranormal activity: many, perhaps even most, involve only the spoken words of an entranced medium. Thus, many of the skeptical objections are irrelevant. In particular, the question has never been whether spirit encounters are “real”—they clearly are real as experiential phenomena—but whether the theories that purport to explain them are actually correct.
24. THE BICAMERAL THEORY
Julian Jaynes believed he could provide a convincing theory of spi
rits. As noted earlier, his researches led him to the conclusion that prior to about 1250 BCE, spirit contact with mankind was almost universal. But there came a point in human evolution when things began to change. The gods, for reasons that must have been incomprehensible at the time, began gradually to withdraw. Fewer and fewer of them walked visibly among humanity. They took to communicating from a distance so that only the divine voice could be heard. But even this voice faded with time. Jaynes charted these changes over an approximate thousand-year period by examining what happened to mankind’s oracles.
The first oracles, he believed, were no more than specific locations where anyone could go to listen to the voice of their gods. The surroundings might be impressive, perhaps a little frightening, and natural sounds like running water or whispering winds would be conducive to hearing voices. But there was no priest, no sibyl. If the gods declined to be present in the home, oracles were areas of holy ground where the deity might be persuaded to speak more freely.
But as time went on, the nature of these sacred places underwent a subtle change. Increasingly, the voices declined to converse with just anybody. Their words were reserved for priests or priestesses who attended at the locale. It was not that the spirits were reticent about giving advice—far from it. But their voices could only be heard by an elite who conveyed the gods’ instructions to the general public.