Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

by Richard Wiseman

  Sensing a business opportunity, Mumler promptly shut up his jewellery shop and started work as the world’s first spirit photographer. In session after session he worked hard to ensure that the spirits appeared on cue, and soon the sound of his magnesium flash pot was matched only by the noise from his till. But after a few highly successful years, trouble started. Several eagle-eyed customers noticed that some of the alleged ‘spirits’ on their photographs looked remarkably like people who had attended Mumler’s previous sittings. Other critics went further, accusing Mumler of breaking into houses, stealing photographs of the deceased and then using them to create his spirit images. The evidence stacked up and eventually Mumler was taken to court on charges of fraud. The trial proved a high-profile affair involving several well-known witnesses, including the famous showman Phineas Taylor ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ Barnum, who accused Mumler of taking advantage of the gullible (think ‘kettle’ and ‘black’). Though acquitted of fraud, Mumler’s reputation was ruined. Never recovering from the huge legal fees it had cost him to defend the case, he died in poverty in 1884.

  Ironically, the notion of spirit photography survived Mumler’s death. One eager proponent of the new fad was French researcher Dr Hyppolite Baraduc, who had a rather unusual take on the topic.4 Well aware that many of the alleged spirits bore a remarkable resemblance to the living, and eager not to dismiss the entire enterprise as bunkum, Baraduc believed that the sitters were producing the images using their psychic powers. Excited by this thought, he conducted a series of studies in which he had people hold undeveloped photographic plates and concentrate on an image. When several of the plates revealed strange blobs and shapes, Baraduc rushed to the Paris Académie de Médecine and announced his findings.

  Ignoring those who thought that his results were simply photographic artefacts, Baraduc forged ahead and started to experiment with other forms of supernatural photography. Although still sceptical of mainstream spirit photography, he wondered whether it might be possible to photograph the very recently deceased and capture the soul as it left the body. He was presented with his first opportunity to photograph the dead when his 19-year-old son Andre passed away from consumption in 1907. Just a few hours after Andre’s death Baraduc did what any loving father and dedicated scientist would have done – he snapped a picture of his son’s lifeless body lying in its coffin and examined the resulting image for evidence of the soul. He was astounded to discover that the photograph showed a ‘formless, misty, wave-like mass, radiating in all directions with considerable force’. Ignoring the possibility of this being some sort of photographic artefact, or indeed the result of him psychically projecting his own thoughts onto the image, Baraduc eagerly waited for another opportunity to test his hypothesis. He didn’t have to wait long.

  Just six months after the death of his son, Baraduc’s wife became seriously ill and clearly did not have long to live. Eager to make the most of the opportunity, Baraduc set up his photographic equipment at his wife’s bedside and patiently waited for her to shuffle off her mortal coil. His wife sighed three times as she passed away and Baraduc managed to take a photograph during one of her dying breaths. The image showed three luminous white ‘globes’ floating above Madame Baraduc. Elated, Baraduc took another photograph of his wife’s corpse 15 minutes later and a third roughly an hour after that. The three mysterious globes made another appearance in the first of these images and congregated into a single large globe in the second.

  Baraduc was certain that he had photographed the soul. Others were not so convinced. When assessing the images in his recent book Ghosts Caught On Film, Mel Willin notes that one professional photographer suggested that the effect could well have been caused by tiny pinholes in the bellows behind the lens of the camera.5

  Baraduc was not the only soul-searching scientist to work with the dying and dead. Just after the turn of the last century American physician Duncan MacDougall undertook a series of equally macabre, and now infamous studies in an attempt to discover the weight of the human soul.6 He visited his local consumptives’ home and identified six patients who were obviously very close to death (four from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes). When each patient looked like they were just about to pop their clogs MacDougall quickly wheeled their beds onto an industrial-sized scale and waited for them to pass away. MacDougall’s laboratory notes from one of the sessions provide a vivid description of the difficulties involved in the task:

  The patient . . . lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat. During all three hours and forty minutes I kept the beam end slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come. At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly, coincident with death, the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.

  After another five patients had met their maker MacDougall calculated the average drop in weight at the moment of death, and proudly announced that the human soul weighed 21 grams. His findings guaranteed him a place in history and, perhaps more importantly, provided the title for a 2003 Hollywood blockbuster staring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

  In a later study he dispatched 15 dogs on the scales and discovered no loss of weight, thus confirming his religious conviction that animals do not have souls.

  When MacDougall’s findings were published in the New York Times in 1907 fellow physician Augustus P. Clarke had a field day.7 Clarke noted that at the time of death there is a sudden rise in body temperature due to the lungs no longer cooling the blood, and the subsequent rise in sweating could easily account for MacDougall’s missing 21 grams. Clarke also pointed out that dogs do not have sweat glands (thus the endless panting) and so it is not surprising that their weight did not undergo a rapid change when they died. As a result, MacDougall’s findings were confined to the large pile of scientific curiosities labelled ‘almost certainly not true’.

  A few years later American researcher Dr R. A. Watters conducted several remarkable experiments involving five grasshoppers, three frogs and two mice.8 In 1894, Scottish physicist Charles Wilson was working on the summit of Ben Nevis when he experienced a ‘Brocken spectre’. This striking optical effect occurs when the sun shines behind a climber and into a mist-filled ridge. In addition to creating a large shadow of the climber, the sunlight often diffracts through the water droplets in the mist, resulting in the giant figure being surrounded by coloured rings of light. The experience set off a chain of thought in Wilson that eventually resulted in him creating a device for detecting ionizing radiation known as a cloud chamber. Wilson’s chamber consisted of a sealed glass container filled with water vapour. When an alpha or beta particle interacts with the vapour, they ionize it, resulting in visible trails that allow researchers to track the path of the particles.

  It was the potential of the cloud chamber that enthralled Watters. In the early 1930s he speculated that the soul may have an ‘intra-atomic quality’ which might become visible if a living organism was exterminated inside Wilson’s device. Watters didn’t adopt Baraduc’s ‘keep it in the family’ approach to research, or share MacDougall’s scepticism about soulless animals, and so administered lethal doses of anaesthetic to various small creatures (including grasshoppers, frogs and mice), then quickly placed them into a modified cloud chamber. The resulting photographs of the dying animals did show cloud-like forms hovering above the victims’ bodies. Even more impressive to Watters was the fact that the forms frequently seemed to resemble the animals themselves. Not only had he proved the existence of a spirit form, but he had also shown that frogs’ souls, remarkably, are frog-shaped. His surviving photographs, now stored in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge, are less than convincing. Although the images do show large blobs of white mist,
the shapes of the blobs would only resemble animals to those with the most vivid of imaginations. Once again, it is a case of the human mind seeing what it wants to see.

  The ambiguous nature of the blobs proved the least of Watters’ problems. Several critics complained that it was impossible to properly assess his spectacular claims because he had not described his apparatus in sufficient detail. Others argued that the images could have been due to him failing to remove dust particles from the chamber. The final nail in Watters’ coffin came when a physics schoolteacher named Mr B. J. Hopper killed several animals in his own specially constructed cloud chamber and failed to observe any spiritual doubles.

  The search for physical evidence of the soul proved less than impressive. Baraduc’s mysterious white globes could well have been due to tiny holes in the bellows of his camera, MacDougall’s loss of 21 grams at the moment of death was probably the result of idiosyncrasies in blood cooling, and Watters’ photographs of animal spirits can be explained away as a combination of dust and wishful thinking. Given this spectacular series of failures it isn’t surprising that scientists rapidly retreated from the photographing and weighing of dying humans and animals. However, reluctant to simply abandon the quest for the soul, they adopted an altogether different approach to the problem.

  Anyone for tennis?

  The Strange Case of the Spiritual Sneakers

  Open nearly any New Age book about out-of-body and near-death experiences and you will soon read about Maria and the worn-out tennis shoe.

  In April 1977 a migrant worker named Maria from Washington State suffered a severe heart attack and was rushed into Harborview Medical Centre. After three days in hospital Maria went into cardiac arrest, but was quickly resuscitated. Later that day she met with her social worker, Kimberly Clark, and explained that something deeply strange had happened during the second heart attack.9

  Maria had undergone a classic out-of-body experience. As the medical staff worked to save her life, she found herself floating out of her body and looking down on the scene seeing a paper chart spewing out from a machine monitoring her vital signs. A few moments later she found herself outside the hospital looking at the surrounding roads, car parks and the outside of the building.

  Maria told Clark that she had seen information that she could not have known from her bed, providing descriptions of the entrance to the emergency ward and the road around the hospital building. Although the information was correct, Clark was initially sceptical, assuming that Maria had unconsciously picked up the information when she had been admitted to the hospital. However, it was Maria’s next revelation that made Clark question her own scepticism.

  Maria said that at one point on her ethereal journey she had drifted over to the north side of the building, and that an unusual object on the outside of a third floor window ledge had caught her attention. Using her mind power to zoom in, Maria saw that the object was actually a tennis shoe, and a little more zooming revealed that the shoe was well worn and the laces were tucked under the heel. Maria asked Clark if she would mind seeing if the tennis shoe actually existed.

  Clark walked outside the building and looked around, but couldn’t spot anything unusual. Then she went up to the rooms in the north wing of the building and looked out of the windows. Apparently this was easier said than done, with the narrow windows meaning that she had to press her face against the glass to see onto the ledges. After much face pushing Clark was amazed to see that there was indeed an old tennis shoe sitting on one of the ledges.

  ‘Fifteen-love’ to the believers.

  As Clark reached out onto the ledge and retrieved the shoe she noticed that it was indeed well worn and that the laces were tucked under the heel.

  ‘Thirty-love’.

  Moreover, Clark noticed that the position of the laces would only have been apparent to someone viewing the tennis shoe from outside the building.

  ‘Forty-love’.

  Clark published Maria’s remarkable story in 1985 and since then the case has been cited in endless books, magazine articles and websites as watertight evidence that the spirit can leave the body.

  In 1996 sceptic scientists Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan and Barry Beyerstein from Simon Fraser University in Canada decided to investigate the story.10 Two of the trio visited Harborview Medical Centre, interviewed Clark and located the window ledge that Maria had apparently seen all of those years before. They placed one of their own running shoes on the ledge, closed the window and stood back. Contrary to Clark’s comments, they did not need to push their faces against the glass to see the shoe. In fact, the shoe was easily visible from within the room and could even have been spotted by a patient lying in a bed.

  ‘Forty-fifteen’.

  Next, the sceptics wandered outside the building and noticed that their experimental running shoe was surprisingly easy to spot from the hospital grounds. In fact, when they returned to the hospital one week later the shoe had been removed, further undermining the notion that it was difficult to spot.

  ‘Forty-thirty’.

  Ebbern, Mulligan and Beyerstein believe that Maria may have overheard a comment about the shoe while sedated or half-asleep during her three days in hospital, and then incorporated this information into her out-of-body experience. They also point out that Clark didn’t publish her description of the incident until seven years after it happened, and thus there was plenty of time for it to have become exaggerated in the telling and retelling. Given that key aspects of the story were highly questionable, the trio thought that there was little reason to believe other aspects of the case, such as Maria saying that the shoe was well-worn prior to its discovery, and the lace being trapped under its heel.

  ‘Deuce’.

  Just a few hours at the hospital revealed that the report of Maria’s infamous experience was not all that it was cracked up to be. Despite this, the story has been endlessly repeated by writers who either couldn’t be bothered to check the facts, or were unwilling to present their readers with the more sceptical side of the story. Those who believed in the existence of the soul were going to have to come up with more compelling and water-tight evidence.

  ‘New balls please.’

  A QUICK VISUALIZATION EXERCISE

  It is time for a simple two-part exercise. Both parts will require you to write in this book. You might be somewhat reluctant to do this, but it is important for three reasons. First, you will need to refer to the numbers later in this chapter and so it is helpful to have a permanent record of them. Second, if you are in a bookshop you will be morally obliged to buy the book. Third, if you have already bought the book, the chances of getting a decent resale price on eBay will be greatly diminished. OK, let's start.

  Part One

  Take a look at your surroundings. Perhaps you are in your home, lying in the park or sitting on the bus. Wherever, just have a look around. Now imagine how your surroundings would look if you were floating out of your body, about six feet above where you actually are, and looking down on yourself. Hold that image in your mind's eye. How clear is the image? If you had to assign it a number from one (where there is almost no image at all) to seven (a very clear and detailed image), what number would you give it? Now write down the number, in indelible blue or black ink, on the line below:

  Your rating:_____

  Now look around and see where you actually are, and then again imagine floating high above your body. Next, switch back to your actual location and then back to seeing the world from above your head. Now rate the ease with which you could switch between the two locations by coming up with a number between one ('Boy that was tricky') to seven ('Soooo easy'). Once again, write down the number below:

  Your rating:_____

  Part Two

  Please rate the degree to which the following statements describe you by assigning each a number between one ('Absolutely not') and five ('Wow, it is like you have known me for years').11

  RATING

  1.

  W
hile watching a film I feel as if I am taking part in it.

  2.

  I can remember past events in my life with such clarity that it is like living them again.

  3.

  I can get so absorbed in listening to music that I don't notice anything else.

  4.

  I believe that stoats work too hard.

  5.

  I like to look at the clouds and try to see shapes and faces in them.

  6.

  I often become absorbed in a good book and lose track of time.

  Many thanks for completing the exercises. More about them later.

  How to Feel Like a Desk

  The infamous case of the tennis shoe on the ledge provides less than compelling evidence for the notion that people are able to float away from their bodies. Worse still, several researchers invested a considerable amount of time and effort conducting more rigorous tests of the notion and also drew a blank. For example, parapsychologist Karlis Osis tested over a hundred people who claimed that they could induce an OBE at will, asking each to leave their body, travel to a distant room and identify the randomly selected picture that had been placed there.12 The vast majority of his participants were confident that they had made the trip but as a group they scored no better than chance. Similarly, researcher John Palmer and his colleagues from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville used a variety of relaxation-based techniques to train people to have OBEs and then asked them to use their new-found ability to discover the identity of a distant target.13 In a series of studies involving over 150 participants, the experimenters failed to detect any reliable evidence of extrasensory perception.