Ghosts From Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively: The Study of the Paranormal
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Control: A spectral entity that acts as a spirit guide to the other side. Some mediums claim to speak with controls, that in turn locate other spirits that have not crossed over yet. Sometimes the spirit guide relays messages back and forth; sometimes the spirit guide drags them into our world, kicking and screaming. Whether or not controls actually have this ability is very much in question—they could be paranormal pranksters, pretending to pass messages back and forth. They could also be wholesale inventions on the part of mediums.
Direct voice phenomena (DVP): While many spirits possess mediums and speak through them, some ghosts speak without the aid of human vocal cords. Their voices seem to come from nowhere. During séances, mediums sometimes provide spirits with trumpets or horns to amplify their vocalizations, though this seems unnecessary (unless you’re communicating with the ghost of Louis Armstrong).
Direct writing: Similar to automatic writing, although it appears without the use of the medium’s hand. There are a few cases where direct writing has even appeared in the complete absence of a writing instrument!
Ectoplasm: An ethereal substance used by spirits to take physical shape during séances. Ectoplasm may also be responsible for phenomena such as DVP and direct writing, essentially allowing spirits to interact physically with this world. Ectoplasm will be discussed further in Chapter 6.
Xenoglossy: The act of writing or speaking in a language unknown to the practitioner; in paranormal circles, occurs when parapercipients are possessed by spirits.
Present Day
Few mediums exist today. Those who do are looked upon with suspicion. The same could also be said for anyone who has a paranormal experience these days, as Erin can attest to. Even though a majority of Americans believe in ghosts, good luck trying to get any of them to admit that in front of their coworkers or neighbors. Talking to an anonymous pollster is one thing; talking about ghosts in “polite society” is another. How ironic that the prudish Victorians were much more open to the paranormal!
Ghosts haven’t gone anywhere. According to the latest Gallup survey, one in five people claims to have had a paranormal experience. Of course, the majority of “ghost sightings” are anything but. We readily acknowledge that. Even after adjusting the numbers to weed out alternative explanations for phenomena, however, the ratio of alleged paranormal incidents in society still shows a slight uptick from the spiritualist era (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2.
Rising Worldwide Incidence of Paranormal Phenomena
The statistics don’t lie: We are living in the most haunted period in recorded world history (due to factors we will explore in full in Chapter 12). Despite the ridicule that comes along with being associated with the paranormal, it would seem there’s no other better time to be a metaphysical examiner. Sadly, as we’ve discovered firsthand, few parapercipients are willing to open their doors to investigators. Much of the paranormal activity taking place remains unexamined.
Not that that’s anything new. Every generation of ghost hunters has faced resistance. From skittish parapercipients to academic snobbery, the life of a metaphysical examiner has never been an easy one. In the next chapter, you’ll meet the brave souls who paved the way for our present understanding of the spirit world. But first, we need to visit the ladies’ room. Let’s fill and then empty the chamber pots and meet back here in five.
Chapter 5
Paranormal Investigators
A Look Back
As you prepare to work in any scientific field, it is important to know the names of those who came before you—something Professor Alderman drilled into us day in and day out. In this chapter, we’ll introduce you to the fearless men and women who have dedicated their lives to further our collective understanding of the paranormal. These are the supernatural scientists who preceded us—the spectral warriors who marched through the darkness, flashlights and notebooks in hand, to investigate the unknown.
The Ghost Club
Although ghosts have been with us for thousands of years, it wasn’t until the Enlightenment that scientifically minded intellectuals turned their attention to spirits of the dead. Paranormal investigation as we know it began in 1862 with London’s Ghost Club. The Ghost Club’s revolving roster was a virtual parapsychology Who’s Who. Early members included Arthur Conan Doyle, computer pioneer Charles Babbage, and poet W. B. Yeats.
Although they professed to be paranormal investigators, the men in the Ghost Club actually investigated very few paranormal claims. Even during the spiritualist era, nobody wanted to open their doors to a bunch of spook hunters!
The early days of the Ghost Club more closely resembled a book club, with men just sitting around smoking cigars and drinking hot toddies. (That’s what goes on at an all-male book club, right?) For whatever reason, the fine fellows in the Ghost Club didn’t think women were equipped to handle the arduous task of discussing the paranormal. Full-torso apparitions didn’t scare them. But cooties? Board up the windows!
Women were excluded from many such opportunities back in the 1800s, and had to make do with clubs such as the Ladies’ Dining Society at the University of Cambridge. Would we rather sit around discussing ghosts, or go out to eat? Why not both? We don’t have access to the Xerox right now, so Abby has drawn the original Ghost Club logo here (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1.
Offensive, right?
Other ghost-hunting organizations soon popped up in England, including the London Dialectical Society and the Phasmatological Society. The most scientifically minded of the groups to form in this era was the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), cofounded by noted British intellectual Henry Sidgwick (Figure 5.2).
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) and Eleanor Sidgwick (1845–1936)
Henry was headmaster at Newnham, a women’s college at Cambridge, when he met Eleanor Balfour at a séance. Born to a wealthy British family, Eleanor had received a formal education at home which rivaled that of any public or private institution of the day. She had an analytical mind and was particularly fond of mathematics. The couple married in 1876, and Henry brought Mrs. Sidgwick (Figure 5.3) aboard at Newnham as vice principal.
Figure 5.2.
Henry Sidgwick
Figure 5.3.
Eleanor Sidgwick
Their shared interest in the paranormal led to their involvement with the Society for Psychical Research. Henry became the group’s first president. Eleanor, who would garner a reputation for being the more skeptical of the two, assisted with the publication of the SPR’s official journal, Phantasms of the Living.
Together, the Sidgwicks approached the paranormal with a scientific view. This disappointed the spiritualists, who were, in Eleanor’s words, “theological, not scientific.” Eleanor sifted through thousands of ghost stories and paranormal experiences for her work with the SPR. She ultimately decided that most were complete bunk. She took no thrill in “pouring cold water over nine-tenths of our ghost stories,” as she put it in the biography of her husband some years later.
Their fieldwork took them around the globe but yielded little in the way of empirical evidence. Still, the couple soldiered on. “I’m going to a haunted house,” Henry once unenthusiastically wrote to a friend, “where I shall see no ghosts.”
After Henry’s premature death from cancer, Eleanor was elected president of the SPR. Henry’s bearded ghost is said to haunt the halls of Newnham to this day. Eleanor, who passed away thirty-six years later, is presumably resting in peace.
William James (1842–1910)
With ghost-hunting clubs flourishing in England, Americans were keen to get in on the game as well. One of the earliest American paranormal investigators was the father of American psychology himself, William James (Figure 5.4). Similar to the Sidgwicks, James was a lifelong academic with a penchant for the paranormal. His accolades were impeccable: He was a professor of psychology at Harvard, as well as the author of the fledgling field’s primar
y text, The Principles of Psychology.
Figure 5.4.
William James
While James considered himself a skeptic, he was open-minded about exploring the unknown. In 1884, he cofounded the American Society for Psychical Research. He envisioned the ASPR taking a middle road between “sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing ignorance on the other.”
It would only take one airtight case to prove the existence of the paranormal, James reasoned. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white,” he said in a speech later transcribed in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. “My own white crow is Ms. Piper.”
“Ms. Piper” was one Leonora Piper (real name: Leonora Evelina Simonds), a famous American medium. Unlike others in her field, Piper was utterly without pretense. She didn’t mess around with theatricality during her séances; she didn’t even charge a fee for sitters (at least not early on in her career). In fact, she seemed quite astonished by her own abilities, which included contact with spirit guides that assumed control over her body. While James was skeptical of her at first, he came to believe that Piper’s ability to communicate with ghosts (including the spirit of Abraham Lincoln) was genuine.
Despite his professed belief in Piper, neither James nor any of his colleagues could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the white crow. Without ectoplasm or other physical evidence of para-transferral embodiment, there could be no real proof the medium was being possessed by paranormal entities. Before James’s death, he penned an essay for The American Magazine detailing his experiences as a paranormal investigator. “For twenty-five years I have . . . spent a good many hours (though far fewer than I ought to have spent) in witnessing (or trying to witness) phenomena,” he wrote. “Yet I am theoretically no ‘further’ than I was at the beginning.”
Twenty-five years of organized, scientifically backed investigations weren’t long enough, he argued. What he needed—what the world needed—was more time. “We must expect to mark progress not by quarter-centuries but by half-centuries or whole centuries,” James said.
Duncan MacDougall (1866–1920)
Toward the end of the first quarter-century of coordinated paranormal investigation, Dr. Duncan MacDougall conducted one of the most ostentatious experiments in scientific history.
In 1901, he placed six terminal tuberculosis patients onto an industrial scale and waited for them to die, clipboard in hand. As each patient expired, MacDougall recorded their weight. When the sixth and final patient passed away, a broad smile stretched across the doctor’s face.
How could he not be excited? His hypothesis had been that if the human soul did, in fact, exist, then the loss of its mass should be observant upon the moment of death. According to his observations, four of his six patients exhibited a drop in weight at the exact moment of death. Dr. MacDougall calculated that the soul weighed approximately twenty-one grams (less than one-twentieth of a pound).
The New York Times broke the story in an exclusive. SOUL HAS WEIGHT, PHYSICIAN THINKS, the headline belted. No matter what you called the dissipating energy—soul or spirit—the doctor’s experiment was a potentially huge step in our understanding of the metaphysical world. Up until MacDougall’s controlled experiment, no one had proven the existence of spirit energy. His findings were hailed as the empirical evidence that paranormal investigators had been searching for.
Unfortunately, subsequent researchers called MacDougall’s methods into question. They suggested the weight loss could have been from moisture loss through either pores or the final exhalation of breath. Disappointingly, his results were never repeated. It’s probably for the best, too: There are much less drastic ways to drop one-twentieth of a pound.
Marie Curie (1867–1934) and Pierre Curie (1859–1906)
Besides James and MacDougall, a few other brave scientists decided to risk their academic careers tangling with the paranormal. Sir J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron, joined the Society for Psychical Research. If electrons were floating around in the air all around us, he reasoned, what else was out there beyond the reach of current scientific technology? Chemist William Crookes gave paranormal investigation a spin, although his skeptically minded colleagues attributed his interest in ghosts to mental illness brought on by repeated exposure to the chemical element he discovered, thallium. And Nobel Prize–winning French physiologist Charles Richet wasn’t just an SPR member—he served as president. Even Marie and Pierre Curie (Figure 5.5) stepped their toes into the world of paranormal investigation.
Figure 5.5.
Pierre (left) and Marie Curie (right)
Hot on the heels of their shared win of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the husband-and-wife researchers participated in a series of séances put on by the SPR, featuring noted medium Eusapia Palladino in Paris in 1905. “It was very interesting, and really the phenomena that we saw appeared inexplicable as trickery—tables raised from all four legs, movement of objects from a distance, hands that pinch or caress you, luminous apparitions,” Pierre wrote.
While Pierre went on to state that such tricks could be performed by magicians, the Curies also saw enough during their sessions to convince them that further investigation was needed. They hoped to link the worlds of the physical and the psychical, perhaps explaining the paranormal through radioactivity—or vice versa. “There is here, in my opinion, a whole domain of entirely new facts and physical states in space of which we have no conception,” Pierre wrote to his friend, Louis Georges Gouy, in the spring of 1906. “These phenomena really exist and it is no longer possible for me to doubt it.”
Tragically, Pierre was killed in a street accident less than a week after posting the letter. “I lost my beloved Pierre, and with him all hope and all support for the rest of my life,” Marie later recalled. They were more than husband and wife; they were partners in the lab. Without him, she was lost. She picked herself up, however, taking over Pierre’s chair at the University of Paris to become the first female professor at the university. In 1911, she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
Marie Curie never followed up on her late husband’s grandiose plans to methodically investigate the paranormal. Given the many ways mediums of the day were capable of tricking sitters, it was a wise decision. To catch a trickster, you had to be one yourself.
Enter the Great Houdini.
Harry Houdini (1874–1926)
Besides being one of the twentieth century’s greatest illusionists, Houdini was also an avid metaphysical examiner who publicly investigated paranormal claims. Although he started out with an open mind about the paranormal, the number of fraudulent mediums he encountered led him to sour on the idea of ghosts being real.
Figure 5.6.
Arthur Conan Doyle (left) and Harry Houdini (right)
Many of the mediums he investigated were using the same sorts of tricks magicians used to entertain audiences. Houdini took this as a personal insult. Magicians entertained, rather than deceived, their audiences. Toward the end of his life, Houdini embarked on a nationwide crusade to bust fake mediums. “Tell the people that all I am trying to do is to save them from being tricked in their grief and sorrows,” he wrote in The Christian Register.
Houdini’s on-again, off-again friend Arthur Conan Doyle (Figure 5.6) doubted the magician had any genuine interest in proving the existence of the paranormal, outside of the publicity his debunking work brought him. “His theoretical knowledge of the subject was limited,” Doyle wrote after Houdini passed away. “For though he possessed an excellent library, it was, when I inspected it, neither catalogued nor arranged.” Sick burn, Doyle.
Just because Houdini was dead didn’t mean he couldn’t hear the shot his old frenemy had fired. Though Houdini remained a skeptic to the end of his life, he had prepared for the possibilit
y that he would return as a ghost. He left a secret code with his wife—that way, she would know if she was being deceived by a medium claiming to speak on his behalf.
For ten straight years following his death, Bess Houdini held an annual séance on Halloween, attempting to reach out to him. Her husband never answered her calls. When Newsweek asked why she finally gave up on his spirit, Bess replied, “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man.”
Harry Price (1881–1948) and Kathleen M. Goldney (1895–1992)
During the early part of the twentieth century, the public began to give up on the long wait for proof of the paranormal as well. Still, while interest in the paranormal was on the decline, investigators and researchers continued their work on both sides of the pond. Harry Price (Figure 5.7) joined the SPR in 1922 and quickly made a name for himself as a self-styled “ghost hunter.”
Figure 5.7.
Harry Price
In contrast to many of his peers at the SPR, Price had no higher-level educational background to draw upon—like Houdini, he was a gifted magician with a flair for the flamboyant. Unlike Houdini, he wasn’t such a hardline skeptic. Or maybe he was. Price’s views on the paranormal flip-flopped so often, it is impossible to say what he truly thought. “There is no scientific proof of survival,” he admitted in his bestselling memoir, Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter, before going on to recount ghost story after ghost story. According to his critics, his theories were the worst kind of popular tripe, his methods were sloppy, and his conclusions highly questionable.