Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

by Richard Wiseman

  A large amount of research has revealed the same finding time and again. We all like to think that we are reliable eyewitnesses. However, the truth of the matter is that, without realizing it, we tend to misremember what has happened right in front of our eyes and frequently omit the most important details.

  Your brain is constantly making assumptions about which parts of your surroundings are most deserving of attention and the best way of perceiving what is there. Most of the time these assumptions are correct, and so you are able to accurately perceive the world in a highly efficient and effective way. However, once in a while you will encounter something that trips up this finely honed system. In the same way that a good optical illusion completely fools your eyes, so those claiming psychokinetic abilities perform the simplest of magic tricks but fool you into thinking that you have witnessed a miracle. They subtly discourage you from considering the possibility of deception, use sneaky methods that you would never consider, and ensure that any possible evidence of trickery is quickly airbrushed out of your memory. Seen in this way, rotating pencils and bending spoons are not proof of the impossible, but are instead vivid reminders of just how sophisticated your eyes and brain really are. The people performing these demonstrations do indeed have remarkable powers, but their skills are psychological, not supernatural.

  4. TALKING WITH THE DEAD

  In which we meet two young girls who created a

  new religion, discover what happened when the world’s

  greatest scientist confronted the Devil, learn how to

  commune with non-existent spirits and unleash

  the power of our unconscious minds.

  It is 10 p.m. and we are just about to start the session. Ten unsuspecting members of the public and I are sitting around a wooden table in the front room of a house in London’s East End. The room is in near darkness, illuminated only by a couple of candles on the mantelpiece. I ask everyone to lean forward and place their fingertips lightly on the tabletop, take a deep breath and call upon the spirits to join us. Nothing happens. I tell everyone not to become dispirited and to suspend any scepticism that they might have. Once again I speak into the darkness and ask the spirits to make their presence known by moving the table. After a short time the table gives a small, but real, shudder. It is a good sign, and I have a hunch that we are all in for an interesting night.

  Over the course of the next 30 minutes the table shudders several more times. A man in the group then says that he is going to have to nip to the toilet. As he stands up, the tabletop emits a tremendous creaking sound and suddenly tips up on two legs. It is a dramatic movement, and it feels as if someone has kicked the table from below. Several people in the group scream and the man decides that perhaps his trip to the toilet isn’t that important after all. All four legs of the table return to the ground and the table starts to skid from one side of the room to the other, sometimes pinning members of the group to the wall. After about an hour the movements suddenly cease and we solemnly thank the spirits for making their presence known. The candles are blown out, the lights are turned on, everyone discusses the strange events that they have just experienced, and the man finally gets to go to the toilet.

  I have staged many such séances over the years and the results are always the same. Regardless of whether the group consists of believers or sceptics, the table always moves. Even if everyone takes turns removing their fingers from the table-top, the table continues to tip and shake.

  Table-tipping was first practised in Victorian parlours throughout Britain, and the phenomenon is as puzzling to the modern-day mind as it was to those living then. But when it comes to talking with the dead, table-tipping is just the tip of the iceberg. In other types of séance, the Victorians asked the deceased to spell out messages by moving an upturned glass towards alphabet cards and even to scribble words directly onto pieces of paper. Investigations into these curious phenomena yielded surprising insights into the power of the unconscious mind, the fundamental nature of free will, and how to be a better golfer.

  This remarkable story starts with two sisters who managed to fool the world.

  Clever Like a Fox

  Around the turn of the last century Thomas Hardy wrote a poem in which he described witnessing God’s funeral. Hardy’s verses vividly express the sadness experienced by the religious if they come to doubt the existence of a divine creator.

  Throughout the nineteenth century more and more people came to experience the painful feelings described by Hardy as established religion came under a serious and sustained attack. The great Scottish thinker David Hume set the ball rolling by criticizing the then sacrosanct idea that alleged evidence of design in nature constituted compelling proof of God, with Hume eventually publishing his ideas in a blasphemous book entitled Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, originally considered so controversial that it was published anonymously and didn’t even carry the publisher’s name. Hot on his heels was the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who argued that the public were a fairly rational bunch, and so should be allowed to choose their religious beliefs, or not, without any interference from the state. And then along came Charles Darwin with his dangerous idea that men and beasts may not be quite so different after all.

  Organized religion began to feel the pinch. For centuries priests and clergymen had fought the Devil, but now found themselves facing a new and far more daunting enemy – congregations that dared to demand evidence for their God. They proved a tough crowd. The Victorians were enjoying the benefits of unprecedented scientific advances, from steam engines to sewing machines, photography to petrol, telephones to tarmac, phonographs to paperclips, and jelly babies to ice cream. Suddenly, age-old stories about a man who could feed 5,000 people with just five loaves of bread and two small fish simply failed to cut the mustard. To many it seemed that the church had little to offer but blind faith and somewhere warm to sit on Sundays.

  As religion rapidly lost ground to rationality, the endgame seemed inevitable. Indeed, some writers were happy to declare the battle already over, with perhaps the most unequivocal statement coming from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ Predictably, believers were somewhat more optimistic. Although well aware that their creator was on the critical list they hoped that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.

  Feeling increasingly under attack, the religious did what they had always done in difficult times. They put their heads down, placed their hands together and prayed for a miracle. On 31 March 1848 God appeared to answer their prayers.

  Hydesville is an unassuming hamlet about 20 miles east of Rochester, New York.1 In December 1847, John and Margaret Fox moved into a small house on the edge of the hamlet with their two daughters, 11-year-old Kate and 14-year-old Margaretta. Within a few months the Fox family life was disturbed by a series of odd events. Bedsteads and chairs started to shake, ghostly footsteps were heard moving through the house, and on occasion the entire floor of the property vibrated like a giant drum skin. After John and Margaret’s investigations failed to provide an explanation for these apparently supernatural happenings, they found themselves forced to conclude that their new home was haunted by an ‘unhappy restless spirit’.

  On 31 March 1848 the family had gone to bed early in an attempt to get a good night’s rest, without any ghostly shenanigans. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Within a few moments of them settling down, the disturbances started. Rather than simply enduring another night of endless shaking and knocking, young Kate decided to attempt to communicate with the spirit. Making the rather pessimistic assumption that their unwelcome guest might be the Devil himself, Kate spoke into the darkness and asked ‘Mr Splitfoot’, as she’d decided to name him, to copy her actions. She clapped her hands three times. A few seconds later three raps mysteriously emanated from the walls of the house. Contact had been made. Intrigued, Margaret Fox then nervously asked the entity to rap
out the ages of her children. 11 knocks were heard for Kate. Pause. Then 14 knocks for Margaretta. Pause. Then three knocks. Three knocks? The entity was well informed – Margaret had had a third child who had died several years before, aged three.

  The spiritual chit-chat continued long into the night, with the family eventually developing the now infamous ‘one rap for yes, two raps for no’ code, and then using it to establish that the entity was a 31-year-old man who had been murdered in the house a few years before their arrival, and whose remains were currently buried in their cellar. The following night, John Fox attempted to dig up the cellar floor in search of bones, but was forced to abandon the work when he reached the water level.

  Word of the strange happenings quickly spread to surrounding towns, resulting in hundreds of people coming to Hydesville to experience the raps for themselves. Many of them got to communicate with the spirit, which only served to further feed the ghostly gossip now rapidly moving across New York. Within a few months the constant stream of visitors and rapping took its toll, with Margaret Fox’s hair turning white through worry and her husband being unable to work. Eventually they decided that it was in everyone’s best interests to move their children away from the spirit-infested house. Kate was sent to nearby Auburn and Margaretta to Rochester. But the seeds had already been sown that would change the course of history.

  The various spirits conjured up by Kate and Margaretta followed the two young girls, with rapping breaking out in their new locations. In Rochester, a long-standing family friend and committed Quaker named Isaac Post had an idea. The rapping code was proving a rather time-consuming, and sometimes confusing, way of eliciting information from the spirit world. Would it be possible, Isaac wondered, to create a more accurate type of communication? One evening he invited Margaretta to his house and asked whether she would mind experimenting with a new system. He drew the letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper, and explained to the spirits that he would ask a question and then point to each piece of paper in turn. To communicate whatever was going through their discarnate mind, the spirits simply needed to rap when he was pointing to an appropriate letter. Isaac’s instant messaging with the dead proved a hit and soon resulted in the first fully-formed communication from beyond the grave. Not one for small talk, the spirits issued a firm and frank directive:

  Dear Friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era. You must not try to conceal it any longer. When you do your duty God will protect you and good spirits will watch over you.

  Convinced of the genuineness of the messages, Isaac enthusiastically embraced the new religion of ‘Spiritualism’ and set about converting his fellow Quakers.

  From a psychological perspective, the creation of Spiritualism was a stroke of genius. Whereas the established churches had tried to combat the rise in rationality by stressing the importance of faith, Spiritualism changed the very nature of religion. In an age that was obsessed with science and technology, Spiritualism not only offered proof of an afterlife but, on a good night, allowed people to apparently communicate with their deceased loved ones.2 Other religions promised the tantalizing possibility of life after death. Spiritualism delivered the goods. This combination of rational and emotional appeal proved overwhelming and within just a few months the new religion was sweeping across America.

  The Fox sisters quickly gained celebrity status and received invitations to demonstrate their amazing mediumistic abilities in public shows and private gatherings. They chatted with the spirits about any topic put to them, with newspaper reports describing how one moment they were being consulted on the weightiest of philosophical and religious issues while the next they were discussing railway stocks and love affairs.

  From the very start, Spiritualism shared many of the central tenets of Quakerism, including support for the abolition of slavery, the temperance movement and women’s rights. The new religion also adopted the Quakers’ non-hierarchical structure. Out went the idea of high priests and untouchable clergymen, and in came the notion of spiritual democracy, with followers being encouraged to gather together and experiment with different ways of talking to the dead. And gather they did. In parlours across America and Europe small groups of Spiritualists would meet up and try to make contact with their deceased loved ones (or indeed any other spirit who might be kind enough to drop in).

  When it proved difficult to replicate the raps produced in the presence of the Fox sisters, the groups started to experiment with more reliable forms of communication. By far the most popular technique to emerge was that of table-turning. In a typical session, people would sit around a small table, place their fingertips lightly on its surface, turn down the gaslight, sing a few hymns, and start to summon the spirits. After a while everyone would start to feel the wooden tabletop creak and shiver beneath their hands. A little more hymn singing and the table would suddenly start to tip and move, as if being pushed and pulled by spirits. According to reports from the time, on a good night the table appeared possessed, dancing around the room, climbing affectionately onto people’s laps, and sometimes even aggressively pinning them up against the wall. Table-turning spread like an epidemic and soon hundreds of thousands of people were passing their evenings transforming a common piece of household furniture into a conduit to the afterlife.

  ‘I was the First in the Field and I Have a Right to Expose it’

  With the rapid growth in the number of mediums, the pressure of trying to make ends meet in an increasingly crowded market place eventually took its toll on Kate and Margaretta Fox. The two of them gradually formed a somewhat different kind of bond with the spirit world and by the late 1880s both were drinking heavily. In October 1888 they decided that enough was enough and travelled to New York City to make a dramatic announcement.

  Selling her story to the New York World for an alleged $1,500, Margaretta came clean and confessed that the two of them had faked the entire affair.3 A new convert to the Catholic Church, she could take the guilt no longer. According to her, the strange noises initially experienced at Hydesville were actually due to nothing more than an apple, a piece of string and a naive belief in the honesty of children:

  When we went to bed at night we used to tie an apple to a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound. Mother listened to this for a time. She would not understand it and did not suspect us as being capable of a trick because we were so young.

  Margaretta went on to explain that the ‘apple on a string’ technique was only effective in darkness and so the sisters quickly devised a different way of creating raps in daylight:

  The rappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendons of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankle bones that is not commonly known . . . With control of the muscles of the foot, the toes may be brought down to the floor without any movement that is perceptible to the eye. The whole foot, in fact, can be made to give rappings by the use only of the muscles below the knee. This, then, is the simple explanation of the whole method of the knocks and raps.

  After reflecting on the stress that she had endured as a result of a life of deception, Margaretta provided an unequivocal statement about the nature of the new religion that she had helped create:

  Spiritualism is a fraud of the worst description . . . I want to see the day when it is entirely done away with. After my sister Katie and I expose it I hope Spiritualism will be given a death blow.

  Later that week Margaretta silenced those Spiritualists who had been sceptical about her confession by appearing before a packed auditorium at the New York Academy of Music and demonstrating her remarkable ability to produce raps at will. Did her dramatic confession have the desired effect? Did the estimated eight million Spiritualists in America alone throw up their hands in horror and desert their new-found faith? Sadly, the only real
impact of the confession was to distance the sisters from their supporters. The vast majority of Spiritualists were eager to cling to the comforting thought that they might survive bodily death, and they were not going to let a couple of rambling alcoholics stand in the way of immortality. But although Margaretta tried to retract her remarks shortly after confessing all, for the Fox sisters at least, the damage had been done. Increasingly distanced from the movement that they helped to create, both sisters died in poverty a few years later and were buried in pauper’s graves. Neither made contact from the spirit world.

  By now, the genie was out of the bottle. Tables were turning all across America and Britain. Even more impressively, some of them were starting to actually talk.

  Interview with historian Peter Lamont

  www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/PeterLamont.html

  The Devil’s Mouthpiece

  The idea was simple enough. If a table could be moved by spiritual energy, surely it could also be used as a way of actually getting a message from the other side? Initially people started asking questions during table-turning sessions and employing a variant on the Fox sisters’ code to interrogate the spirits – one tip for yes and two for no. When this proved somewhat time-consuming, people followed in the footsteps of Isaac Post, calling out the letters of the alphabet and asking the spirits to spell their message by tipping the table at appropriate points. Accounts suggest that these sessions could be highly emotionally charged affairs, as the following description from Edinburgh in 1871 shows:

  At a particular stage of the proceedings the table began to make strange undulatory movements, and gave out a curious accompaniment of creaking sounds. Presently my friend remarked that the movement and sound together reminded him of a ship in distress, with its timbers straining in a heavy sea. This conclusion being come to, the table proceeded to rap out: ‘It is David.’ Instantly a lady burst into tears, and cried wildly: ‘Oh, that must be my poor, dear brother, David, who was lost at sea some time since’.4