Inside the Supernatural. Jean Ritchie

Palladino, gave the early researchers their best opportunity to study a medium who could produce physical effects similar to those produced by D.D. Home. Palladino appeared to be able to levitate tables, move objects around, nudge or pinch sitters who were outside her arms’ reach. Sitters claimed they could actually see her developing extra arms and limbs during seances. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were among the many scientists who, over a thirty-year period, were astonished by her apparent abilities.

      Palladino did not shy away from investigation, and she was prepared to work in good light so that those who were watching her could clearly record what went on. Although one early report from the SPR accused her of fraud, a later and more detailed one found that she was capable of producing astonishing phenomena. There is no doubt that she cheated from time to time, but her defenders say that when she was in a trance she had no control of herself and it was up to the investigators to hold tight to her hands and legs to prevent her movement. On one occasion, she even cried out to them to hold her more tightly or she would cheat.

      As she grew older and her powers waned she resorted to cheating more. It is hard to condemn a simple peasant who had been catapulted to international celebrity for wanting to perpetuate her failing skills, but unfortunately her predilection for cheating cast a cloud over all her other achievements.

      Some researchers believe that anyone who has been caught in any fraud should automatically be discounted from serious research for ever. Others believe (with some evidence from modern laboratory parapsychology to support them) that cheating can facilitate real phenomena, almost as though the mediums have to get themselves in the mood by practising artificially what they want to happen by paranormal means.

      Perhaps the greatest of the early mental mediums (as distinct from a physical medium like Palladino) was Mrs Gladys Osborne Leonard, who was the best in the field in the years between the Wars. A Londoner, she first came to the attention of the SPR when she ‘communicated’ with Sir Oliver Lodge’s son Raymond, who was killed in the First World War. She, too, seems to have been beyond suspicion of fraud. The SPR again assigned a private detective to investigate her life, without finding anything that suggested she was researching information. She put herself at the disposal of the SPR for investigation and was paid a retainer by them to be always available for testing. To eliminate the possibility of telepathy, many of her sittings were attended by ‘proxies’, people standing in for those for whom she was asked to get information from the spirit world. Often the proxies knew nothing more than the name of the person they represented, so there was no possibility of Mrs Leonard being able to extract clues from them by telepathy.

      The SPR was not concerned only with investigating mediums. In the early days the literary committee took on the formidable task of collecting and publishing a massive chronicle of spontaneous paranormal experiences which they gathered by appealing in the press. They checked out all the cases they published (before telephones were commonplace and when travelling around Britain took days, this in itself was a formidable achievement) and in 1886 published Phantasms of the Living, 701 cases of apparitions and crisis visions. Eight years later they brought out the Census of Hallucinations, another massive tome. Both books are still quoted as reliable source material.

      These records were, inevitably, largely anecdotal and subjective, although the SPR did check each case for corroboration. Some Society members were already aware of the need for controlled experiments that could be monitored, verified and repeated, a need that has bedevilled psychical research ever since. As early as 1889, telepathy tests were carried out under stringent conditions, the results obtained measured against those they would expect to find by chance. Consistent with subsequent experience, they found some people who could score above chance, and many others who could not.

      This kind of experimentation went on the back burner, though, for nearly twenty years until Professor Gilbert Murray, a Professor of Greek at Oxford University, revived interest. He played a parlour game with his family in which he would go out of the room and then try to ‘guess’ targets that they set for him. Murray fared better when the target set was a scene containing some action and some emotion than when it was a simple object or word. His experience has since been corroborated by recent experiments by parapsychologists like Charles Honorton doing ganzfeld work (see chapter 3). Murray was also unusual in that the whole family, friends and witnesses would try to ‘send’ the picture to him – most telepathy experiments involve only one sender.

      Some of his results were remarkable. When the target was ‘Jane Eyre at school, standing on a chair and being called a liar by Mr Brocklehurst’, Murray came up with: ‘My mother being at a French school … I reject that. But a sense of obloquy. Girl standing up on a form in a school … a thing in a book, certainly. I think they are calling her a liar.’

      When the subject was the sinking of the Lusitania he got it straight off. ‘I’ve got this violently. I’ve got an awful impression of naval disaster. I should think it was the torpedoing of the Lusitania.’

      For a time even Murray himself thought that he might be getting clues to his targets through his extremely good hearing, but he was not consciously aware of hearing the targets being discussed. He certainly fared better when they had been discussed than when a target was simply written down, although this did not completely hamper him. Sometimes he picked up things that were in the minds of the senders, but which they had neither spoken nor committed to paper. For example, when his daughter set him a target of a scene from a Russian book in which some children were being taken to see their grandparents, he came up with the information that they were taken across the River Volga. He had never read the book, nor was the river mentioned when the target was discussed, but in fact he was correct: the book did describe the children being taken across the Volga.

      In the 1920s, more and more research time was given over to laboratory-type experiments, with tests for clairvoyance and telepathy through guessing cards. But, by then, this type of research was taken more seriously in America, where universities were getting in on the action and academics were being given funding to study the paranormal full-time (unlike the SPR volunteers).

      In the 1930s the work of J.B. Rhine, the founding father of modern parapsychology, firmly established academic interest in the subject. It was Rhine who coined the word ‘parapsychology’ and also ‘ESP’, or extra sensory perception, an umbrella term covering telepathy, clairvoyance and all other forms of paranormal communication.

      Rhine was first attracted to the subject after hearing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a dedicated spiritualist, give a talk in Chicago. It sparked an interest in him and his wife Louisa – another great contributor to psychic research – that would last a lifetime. But after an unhappy encounter with a celebrated medium, who they both deemed to be a fraud, the Rhines were convinced that the way forward was through systematic and academically credible research. While working at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rhine professionalized the subject by introducing statistics. Although earlier work had been done with ‘guinea pigs’ who claimed no specific psi abilities, most research had centred on people who claimed or appeared to have specific talents. It was Rhine who initiated large-scale testing of ordinary individuals, and made sure that all his results were compared with those he might have expected to obtain by chance: a protocol that has been adhered to by parapsychologists ever since.

      Rhine refined the standard card-guessing games by having a colleague, Karl Zener, devise a new set of five cards, each featuring a simple symbol: star, plus-sign, circle, rectangle, wavy line. These cards, made into packs of twenty-five with five of each, are known as Zener cards. The idea behind them was to get away from the emotive connotations of playing cards, and also to give very clearly individual symbols for ‘guinea pigs’ to try to ‘pick up’.

      Testing students at random, Rhine soon found several individuals who demonstrated unusual psi abilities. He was able to test them and find consistent patterns: they performed less well when they were tired, they performed less well on certain drugs. He and his fellow researchers devised experiments that distinguished between telepathy and clairvoyance.

      It was the publication of Rhine’s book, Extra Sensory Perception, in 1934, that