Inside the Supernatural. Jean Ritchie

for scientific reasons, a rather narrower remit than the SPR, though it is more rigorously academic. However, the British SPR remains the most distinguished body of lay people involved in psychic research, even though this research is no longer fashionable, nor as likely to attract as many mainstream scientists as it did in its early years.

      After its inception in 1882 the Society divided itself into six different committees, each with a specific area to investigate: thought transference (we call it telepathy today, a word coined in the first year of the Society’s existence by one of its founder members, F.W.H. Myers); mesmerism (hypnotism); Reichenbach phenomena (Baron Carl von Reichenbach, the chemist who discovered creosote and paraffin, believed he had also discovered auras of light created magnetically and given off by all organic matter including human beings); apparitions and haunted houses; physical phenomena; and a literary committee to review and research already-published information about psychic phenomena.

      The members were an enthusiastic and hardworking bunch. All the committees (with the exception of the one investigating physical phenomena, which found mediums like Home who could create physical effects in the seance room rather thin on the ground) produced lengthy and detailed reports, and threw themselves with great energy into the time-consuming business of carrying out investigations.

      Although it is possible today to snipe at some of the Society’s early investigative efforts, it is important to remember they were breaking new ground and their techniques improved with practice. It took time to come up with all the controls necessary, to work out all (or even most) of the possible sources of fraud, and to even begin to understand the ways in which they themselves might have been unintentionally influenced to see what was not really there.

      Yet they were certainly not easily convinced, and they were more than ready to denounce trickery whenever they found it. There was a serious financial motive for mediums and others to be fraudulent just as there still is today a substantial market in bringing ‘messages from the spirit world’ to the bereaved. Then, there was also the possibility of stage fame, and even rich patronage.

      One of the most notable exposés in the SPR’s early days was the famous Madame Blavatsky. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a New York immigrant who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, riding the crest of the wave of interest in spiritualism and attracting as many as one hundred thousand members. Madame Blavatsky claimed to get spirit guidance from a group of ‘Mahatmas’ in Tibet and that letters from them were ‘teleported’ to her. When she visited London the SPR set up a committee to investigate her. They tackled the job thoroughly, interviewing witnesses who had seen her physical phenomena and even sending a member to India, to the headquarters of her flourishing movement. Their conclusion, published in 1885, was that ‘she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history’. The Theosophical Society went into decline.

      One of the most vigilant and dedicated of researchers was Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick, wife of the first president of the Society, Sir Henry Sidgwick. She denounced a very popular and acclaimed medium, William Eglinton, who produced spirit messages by slate writing. This was a fashionable method of spiritual communication at the end of the last century, and involved holding a slate on the underside of a table. Scratching noises were heard while the ‘spirit’ wrote on the slate, and then the message was produced for all to see. To this day, there are those who believe that Eglinton was genuine: but Mrs Sidgwick described his work as ‘clever conjuring’.

      Eglinton inspired researchers to approach their problem from a different angle by perfecting the methods that are used by the fraudsters in an attempt to see how people can be deceived (a tradition carried on today by the professional sceptics as well as by many parapsychologists). One member of the SPR taught himself to produce slate writing as convincingly as Eglinton and then put his conjuring skills to the test by trying it out on witnesses who were told that he was a medium. Nobody detected his tricks, despite the fact that they were not scrupulously hidden, opening up a whole area of research into how and why our eyes deceive us into seeing what we want to believe. The Society’s researchers were so tough that some members felt they went too far. The poet W.B. Yeats commented: ‘It’s my belief that if you psychical researchers had been about when God Almighty was creating the world, He couldn’t have done the job.’

      Of course, the researchers’ enthusiasm didn’t mean they were guaranteed to spot fraud. In the early days of the Society, for example, the Creery sisters were believed to be a first-class example of telepathy. Four sisters and a maidservant from their household were able to detect playing cards, names or objects that had been chosen by independent observers while they were out of the room. Their success rate was remarkably high, and Sir William Barrett, an eminent physicist, was very impressed. But they were later caught out cheating, sending messages to each other in code. They admitted it, and claimed that they had done it before, but only rarely. Whether this admission negated everything that they had previously done, or whether, like many mediums or clairvoyants, they found their powers waning and yet felt compelled to produce results, is arguable and is a moot point with other psychics.

      Although scepticism was a prized characteristic of these pioneering psychic researchers, they found plenty to reinforce the original enthusiasm that had led to them setting up the SPR. Richard Hodgson (the man who investigated and exposed Madame Blavatsky) emigrated to America, and there encountered a medium called Mrs Leonora Piper. Mrs Piper would go into a trance and then be taken over by her ‘control’, Dr Phinuit, who she claimed had been a French physician. In the trance she was able to give information about those sitting with her. Hodgson, sceptical, assigned a private detective to watch her and her husband to find out how they were researching the information, which she was passing off as obtained from the spirits of the dead. He reluctantly accepted that there was no ‘normal’ way in which Mrs Piper could know many of the things she did. No trace was ever found of Dr Phinuit’s existence in historical records, nor could he speak any French. This is not unusual with mediums, whose ‘controls’ are thought to be secondary personalities of their own rather than real historical people (see chapter 5). However, after one of Hodgson’s own friends, George Pelham, died, he took over as Mrs Piper’s control and Hodgson was provided with a large amount of bafflingly accurate information from his own life. Mrs Piper described a young woman who had died in Australia and to whom Hodgson had been very close – including a description of a birthmark which was a strange spot of blue colour in an otherwise brown eye. On one occasion Hodgson brought a friend with him whom ‘Pelham’ seemed not to recognize, but when told the woman’s name ‘Pelham’ replied that she was ‘the little girl, now grown up’ which was accurate because Pelham had known her as a child.

      Although Hodgson scrupulously recorded the details at the time, we can never be sure a century later how much of the ‘proof’ for a medium like Mrs Piper is merely anecdotal and subjective. However, Hodgson was certainly not the only cynical researcher to be impressed by Mrs Piper. When she visited England she was investigated by a distinguished group, including F.W.H. Myers, a leading member of the SPR, and Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist. They took extreme precautions to make sure that she did not meet any of the people who would attend her seances beforehand, and she gave them permission to intercept and monitor all her letters. They, too, were finally unable to explain how she obtained her information unless it was by paranormal abilities. What was not clear – then or now – was whether she was, as she claimed, in touch with the spirits of the dead, or whether she was using highly-developed telepathy to garner knowledge from the individuals who sat with her. She continued to practise as a medium for twenty-five years, and was never discovered acting fraudulently.

      Mrs Piper became a celebrated public figure and this encouraged other women to test their own mediumistic abilities. Mrs Margaret Verrall, a Cambridge scholar, showed that she, too, had some exceptional talents. So did a medium who called herself ‘Mrs Holland’, but who was really Mrs Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling. Interestingly, comparisons of the automatic writing of these women (in a trance they would appear to take dictation from their control) revealed quite a few cross-correspondences in the information they gave, as though one was confirming the messages of another, even though it was impossible for them to be in collusion: Mrs Verrall lived in Cambridge and Mrs Fleming in India.

      An