The Science of Ghosts

by Joe Nickell

  Note the biblical echoes—“reaping, as you have sown” (cf. Galatians 6:7) and “the mansions far above” (cf. John 14:2)—which seem unlikely to have come from the atheist orator.

  Although the questioned text has a somewhat literary and even oratorical quality, it is ultimately unconvincing as the voice of Robert G. Ingersoll. Its long sentences are actually too long, and the percentage of polysyllabic words is too high (more than three times as much as in a comparative sample). That is to say, the style is superficially overblown. There are distinctively “wordy” passages, yet none reach the eloquence of Ingersoll. Another difference in the writings is shown by a method of literary analysis called stylometry (Nickell 1987, 95–97). Such an analysis includes common features like the frequency of the words the, of, and and—the most-used words in the English language—as a percentage of the text. In the sample, Ingersoll's use of the, for example, was almost four times that of the “automatically” generated “Ingersoll.”1

  While interesting, such statistical differences can fluctuate from passage to passage and may not ultimately prove dependable. Therefore, I looked at other, more revealing features.

  Notably, the “Ingersoll” automatic writing has a number of grammatical errors that are missing from the authentic Robert G. Ingersoll composition. They include noun-pronoun agreement errors (“the guide…their,” “one…they,” “my remains…it,” and “no mortal…their” [pp. 3, 7, 8, and 13]); faulty verb-subject agreement (“information and…inventions…is” and “There seems to be elements” [pp. 17 and 21]); run-on sentences (pp. 6, 9, 10); numerous instances of faulty punctuation, and at least one misspelling (“lead” for led [p. 12]). There is faulty parallelism (“Heaven is not ruled by forms and creeds, but [by] true love and God Almighty's laws” [p. 18]), and other writing faults as well.

  TRUE AUTHORSHIP

  The stylistic evidence does not support the claim that Robert G. Ingersoll posthumously wrote the spirit text attributed to him. Instead, it appears to be no more than an imitation produced by the automatic writer—however unconsciously or consciously.

  The “message” pamphlet gave only the person's initials (“M. E. M.”), and she was unidentifiable by standard bibliographic sources. Librarian Binga, however, finally discovered her name. It had been recorded on the Library of Congress's old catalog card as Mary E. Matter. We know little about her except that she described herself as a “Philadelphia Psychic,” but we can infer something more.

  Matter obviously exhibited several characteristics of what is termed fantasy proneness. Persons exhibiting a fantasy-prone personality are essentially sane and normal individuals who nevertheless exhibit such traits as being easily hypnotized (including falling into self-induced “trances”), claiming psychic abilities, allegedly being in touch with magical entities (e.g., spirits, alien beings, guardian angels, or the like), exhibiting automatic writing, and other traits. This personality type was characterized in a pioneering study that suggested that “individuals manifesting the fantasy-prone syndrome may have been over-represented among famous mediums, psychics, and religious visionaries of the past” (Wilson and Barber 1983, 371).

  It seems curious that if Robert G. Ingersoll did indeed communicate through an automatic writer, he did not choose either to continue to do so or to find a way to provide better evidence of the reality of the “other side.” His silence is revealing.

  As the Allied Forces prepared for D-day toward the climax of World War II, Britain's highest criminal court was trying celebrity spiritualist Helen Duncan as a mediumistic fraud under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Some thought she really was channeling spirits from the Beyond. But was the trial even about her questioned powers, or was it an attempt to silence her visionary revelations of top-secret naval events?

  The case is treated in depth elsewhere (e.g., Shandler 2006), yet these treatments maintain an essential mystery of the affair: the precise nature of Duncan's séance materializations are left unexplained. Do clues remain that may help solve this very cold case?

  “HELLISH NELL”

  Today it is easy to see Helen “Nell” Duncan (1897–1956) as a successor to both the biblical Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:7–20) and a pair of nineteenth-century schoolgirls, Maggie and Katie Fox, who launched modern spiritualism in 1848. However, forty years later the sisters confessed that their otherworldly communications had no more substance than the alleged spirits themselves (Nickell 2001, 194). In the 1940s, spiritualists still produced “materializations” (appearances of spirits in the near-dark of séances), although these were repeatedly exposed as fraudulent.

  Born Victoria Helen MacFarlane, the controversial medium had been a schoolgirl with “psychic” tendencies, earning her the sobriquet “Hellish Nell.” She progressed from adolescent mill worker to unwed mother to wife of Henry Duncan, who would father seven more children with her while allowing her to support their family with her séances.

  Today, Helen Duncan would be recognized as having a fantasy-prone personality (given her imaginary ghost friends, claimed magical powers such as clairvoyance, “trance” communications with higher entities, and so on [see Wilson and Barber 1983]). However, being fantasy prone does not preclude also being fraudulent if one wishes to convince others that one really does have special powers—which brings us to ectoplasm.

  MATERIALIZATIONS

  Ectoplasm is an imagined substance supposedly emanating from a medium in a trance state. Repeated exposés have revealed that ectoplasm is typically simulated with chiffon or cheesecloth. Easily compressible, these light fabrics are ideal for hiding and could—by inviting imagination in the near dark—simulate the spirit of a baby in a dress or, unfolded farther, a person in a transparent shroud.

  Originally, spirit conjurers, such as the Davenport Brothers, would be tied up in a special “spirit cabinet” in which were placed musical instruments. After “spirits” were glimpsed outside the cabinet and music was heard playing, theater lights would eventually come on, and the brothers would be found still securely tied, “proving” no trickery was involved (Nickell 2001, 18–27).

  Helen Duncan's cabinet consisted of a pair of black velvet curtains that hung from the ceiling and framed an armchair. The scene was dimly lit with a red light that produced an “unearthly glow” (Keene and Spraggett 1997, 101). The medium was first strip-searched by women in an anteroom, then confined in a large cloth sack that was closed at the neck with a drawstring, and finally bound to the chair with the knots sealed with wax.

  Soon, Duncan was in an apparent trance, seemingly evidenced by her loud snoring. In time, “ectoplasm” might be seen creeping from the cabinet. Then Duncan's “spirit guide,” one “Albert Stewart,” would take over, engaging in banter with the sitters. An ectoplasmic blob might appear and be regarded as a baby's head; a shrouded figure, then another, might appear. At times, a sitter would be permitted to touch the ectoplasm. It would often be described as feeling like soft cloth. One witness complained that the spirits were “fat and clammy, undoubtedly human,” perhaps like Duncan draped in muslin.

  At the end of the séance, Duncan might wander out from behind the curtain, “Albert” having been kind enough to free her from the tied sack. Yet the sack would be undamaged and the knots intact and still sealed. It was as if Duncan had been dematerialized to pass through the sack (Shandler 2006, 91–92).

  SECRETS

  Duncan was arrested on the evening of January 19, 1944. Well into the séance, bright lights came on. Although spiritualists claimed light could be fatal to a medium in the entranced state, Duncan was only dazed. She, her assistant, and the couple who ran the spiritualist church in Portsmouth were charged under the Witchcraft Act, which stated: “If any person shall pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or configuration, or undertake to tell fortunes, every person so offending shall suffer imprisonment by the space of one whole year without bail” (quoted in Shandler 2006, 102).

  The charges against Dunca
n really resulted from belated assertions that she was giving away wartime secrets: twice, it was said, she revealed the sinking of a warship—on May 24, 1941, the great battleship HMS Hood and on November 25 of that year, HMS Barham. (A rumor claimed she materialized the spirit of a sailor whose cap bore the latter ship's name [Shandler 2006, 40].) Some officials were concerned by these violations of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's order to keep all naval losses secret. Were Duncan's revelations merely the lucky result of after-the-fact matching of pronouncements and events? Or was she a true medium? Or perhaps a spy? (Surely, if the last were true, she was an especially foolhardy one!)

  Whatever the case, officials seemed to be unwilling to take chances with D-day approaching. Duncan was jailed, tried, and convicted; she lost her appeal and served out her sentence at Holloway Prison. She failed to foresee a rocket strike on the prison in the summer of 1944, but she did escape injury (Shandler 2006, 206, 270).

  Duncan's trial provoked a curt note from Churchill (1944) to the home secretary, wishing to know “why the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was used in a modern Court of Justice” and why officials “kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery.” It has been claimed that Duncan's was the last witchcraft trial in Britain, but there was one more conviction under the act before Parliament replaced it in 1951 with modern legislation in the form of the Fraudulent Mediums Act (Shandler 2006, 217).

  MORE SECRETS

  Not everything was made clear by Helen Duncan's trial. True, there was evidence enough of her trickery, including the results of a disastrous séance in 1933. Duncan was observed creating a “Little Miss Peggy” who peeped from a nearby sideboard and lisped a nursery rhyme. Duncan created the fake spirit child and could be observed kneeling behind a cupboard, manipulating what proved to be “a woman's stockinet undervest” as if it were a sock puppet. As Shandler (2006, 172) describes it, “A dutiful sitter aimed a beam from a handheld lamp at Duncan. Flooded with light, the medium doubled over, [and] stuffed Peggy up her skirts, presumably the shortest route back to the Other Side.”

  Still, at the séance that led to Duncan's arrest in 1944, no trace of white cloth had been discovered. Unfortunately, while the séance room was thoroughly combed, the detective in charge chose not to have the attendees searched—Duncan, her husband, her attendant, the couple who ran the affair, and the sitters. Other detectives tried to catch Duncan in flagrante delicto by capturing her ectoplasmic cloth. Psychical investigator Harry Price had a doctor probe her orifices, but when he planned to take X-rays, the medium ran away. Price (1931) wrote a book suggesting that Duncan swallowed and regurgitated the cloth. Later, however, watching a famous regurgitator, Kanichchka, the Human Ostrich, who gagged loudly and brought up only small materials, Price may have harbored doubts about the hypothesis (Shandler 2006, 165–66).

  And what about Duncan's escape from the bag she was confined in or, on occasion, from a specially designed séance suit? Recall that “Albert” freed her from the tied sack whose knots were still sealed. Once, in the early 1930s, psychical investigators placed her into a special suit that was stitched up the back; at the close of the séance, “Albert” pulled it off and flung it into the group of spectators, who found it intact while the medium shivered naked behind the curtains (Shandler 2006, 67–69).

  REVELATIONS

  Materializations are largely a thing of the past, although in recent times I have sat in dark-room séances including a “direct voice” scenario in which various voices—all sounding like versions of the medium's—speak through a supposedly levitating tin trumpet (Nickell 2004a, 42–43). As a magician and mentalist, I have studied séance magic for years, performing some feats myself and experimenting with many others (Nickell 2001, 267–75). Once, undercover, I was able to gain access to an out-of-the-way historic séance room at the spiritualist camp at Cassadaga, Florida, where séances like Duncan's had been held under the familiar red light (Nickell 2004b).

  I have researched the cold case of Helen Duncan's materializations and have turned up some clues. Since Duncan was actually caught and convicted of cheating, my hypothesis is that she was always cheating and that, like both honest and dishonest tricksters, she employed a variety of techniques. My friend William V. Rauscher (2006, 537), an Episcopal priest and magician who has exposed many spiritualistic deceptions, says that among materialization cabinet mediums Helen Duncan “stands out in the history of psychical research as ultra devious, and even disgusting.”

  It cannot be doubted that Duncan's ectoplasm (or teleplasm when used to effect mind-over-matter feats) was cheesecloth. As pointed out by V. J. Wooley in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1932), Harry Price's permitted flash photographs reveal that “the same holes and crease marks [in the cloth] appeared in the pictures evening after evening.” A materialized hand was obviously “a housemaid's rubber glove.” Moreover, “the only non-photographic material secured was a portion of alleged teleplasm removed from the medium's mouth [where she was obviously disposing of the evidence] at the last sitting. This proved on analysis to consist of several layers of cheap paper stuck together with white of egg.” Price (1933, 205) discovered from one photo that the spirit “Peggy” was “merely a picture of a girl's head cut from a magazine cover and stuck on the cheese-cloth.”

  If the fake medium did not introduce the cheesecloth by regurgitation—and Woolley (1932) reminded readers that “Mrs. Duncan was never seen to swallow or regurgitate anything, nor was any foreign substance found in her pharynx”—then she hid it somewhere, not necessarily inside her body.

  A very important clue, I believe, comes from the work she did to support her family before becoming a professional medium: she was a seamstress. Duncan went door-to-door by day—taking in sheets to be repaired, socks to be darned, collars and cuffs to be reversed—then worked into the night completing the tasks (Shandler 2006, 143). She could well have put her considerable sewing skills to clever use in perpetrating her spook-show deceptions.

  Consider, for instance, a séance Price attended. He reports, “The medium wore her own garments (a pair of black sateen knickers, a man's coat made of the same material, and a pair of black stockings).” Although Price says casually, “We examined them carefully,” he does not convince us the examiners turned the coat inside out, unstitched the lining, and looked for cheesecloth—although during the séance she was covered head to foot with seeming “yards” of it (Price 1933, 203).

  On other occasions, Duncan might have used the search of her person as a diversion, allowing a confederate (such as her assistant) to pass the cloth to her after she was searched. Confessed fraudulent medium M. Lamar Keene (1997, 100–104) notes that mediums often used this method, along with other techniques. A small kit of materials could even be hidden in the folds of the séance curtain beforehand or placed there by a confederate while the medium was being searched. (Houdini, who effected handcuff escapes from a curtained cabinet, hid his lockpicks and other tools in this manner [Gibson 1930, 26–27].)

  As to the sewn-up séance suit and the cloth sack in which she was tied up, Duncan might again have used her sewing skills. She could have opened a seam (say, at the bottom of the sack) to free herself. The coils of rope wound about the sack would have presented little difficulty. As Houdini knew (and I learned as a boy imitating him), a single rope wound willy-nilly leaves lots of slack; so does tying it over a coat or sack (Gibson and Young 1953, 40). Subsequently, while as “Albert” she was delivering a soliloquy, the freed medium could have used the time to quickly restitch the opened seam. (Interestingly, Houdini described various sack escapes—including “the Spirit Sack”—as early as 1921.)

  Duncan's feat would actually have been far more mysterious had she still been sealed in the bag, since it would have been nearly impossible for her to return to the tied position and re-sew the bag from inside. In brief, instead of being gratuitously released by “Albert” at the end of the séance, she probably accomplished her own escape at the beginning of the
performance. She then simulated the appearance of spirits and finally tried to disguise what really happened by pretending she had been supernaturally released. Her case is a study in audacity. A current movement to have her posthumously pardoned (Official Helen Duncan Website 2009) demonstrates her ability to continue fooling the gullible from the grave.

  I have made several undercover visits to paranormal sites, such as the “haunted” Van Horn Mansion in Burt, New York (chapter 10), where, for a time in 2000, a private spiritualist circle held séances. I had infiltrated the group with the help of a friend, Ginger Burg. I sat at one table-tipping session (wherein the table tipped once for yes, and twice for no, as well as tipping to indicate letters of the alphabet, which the medium ran through out loud). I received loving messages from an aunt and uncle who, however, were nonexistent, since I had made them up on the spur of the moment. Here are a few other instances of my going undercover among the spirits.

  AT CAMP CHESTERFIELD

  Camp Chesterfield, the notorious spiritualist enclave dubbed “the Coney Island of spiritualism,” is located in Chesterfield, Indiana. Among the many exposés it has suffered is a book-length revelation of séance trickery there by M. Lamar Keene (1976). Keene was a former Chesterfield medium who was persuaded by my friend, the Rev. William V. Rauscher, magician and psychical researcher, to confess his tricks to ghostwriter Allen Spraggett. The result was The Psychic Mafia (1976), a stunning chronicle of “materializations,” disembodied voices speaking through floating spirit trumpets, and other séance deceptions.