Karyn

12 Possible Reasons why Thomas Edison Failed to Communicate After Death

A recent television program dealing with mysteries of the unknown featured a story about the great inventor Thomas Edison (below) giving the famous mentalist Joseph Dunninger 10 words that he would attempt to communicate to him through a medium after his death, as evidence that he had survived death. As I did not anticipate writing about the story I neglected to record the details, the name of the program, or even the network. A week or so later, a very skeptical friend mentioned having seen the same program and saw it as evidence that the whole idea of spirit communication is just so much bunk.

Thomas Edison

The gist of the story, as my friend and I recalled, is that sometime after Edison’s death in 1931, Dunninger, (below) who had a reputation as a debunker of mediums, arranged for a sitting with a female medium named Warner (or Werner) near the top of the Empire State Building with several other people in attendance. The location was chosen as it was “closer to heaven.” There were all kinds of raps and racket coming through initially, but eventually only one word came though the medium. It had something to do with location of Edison’s laboratory, but it was not, according to Dunninger, one of the 10 test words. Moreover, Dunninger later determined that all the noise resulted from plumbers working on some pipes floors below the séance. Thus, he supposedly ruled out “spirit raps.” I don’t recall it being stated how many of the 10 words the medium had to get through for the experiment to be a success, but I suspect that Dunninger would have deemed it a failure if only nine of the 10 words came through.

 Dunninger

There might have been more information that we don’t remember and there is likely much more to the story that the television producers did not mention. I made a cursory attempt to search for more details on the internet and in my library, but I could find nothing about the story. The television commentator reported that Dunninger clearly proved that the medium was a fake and it might have otherwise been inferred by the viewer that Edison had not survived death. My friend asked for my thoughts on the matter and I replied with 12 possibilities:

1. Actual Fraud: Dunninger may have been right – the “medium” was a fraud. However, that does not mean that all mediums are charlatans or that Edison did not survive death. No information was given as to how the medium was chosen or how successful she had been under test conditions by objective researchers, if she had been studied by any.

2. Prearranged Failure: Having a reputation as a debunker of mediums, Dunninger may have seen success in the experiment as damaging his reputation. Therefore, he could have arranged it to fail or could have falsely reported any success. There was no indication by the TV commentator as to what others in attendance had to say about the sitting or if others confirmed the presence of plumbers causing the raps. 

3. Hostility: It has often been reported by researchers and mediums that a hostile or negative attitude prevents effective communication and that harmonious conditions provide the best results. Even if Dunninger did not set up the experiment for failure, his hostile attitude toward mediumship may have blocked Edison from making contact. In his 1901 book, The Law of Psychic Phenomena, Thomson Jay Hudson, Ph.D., LL.D., discussed this.  “Exhibitions of the phenomena of spiritism are constantly liable to utter failure in the presence of avowed sceptics,” he wrote. “Everyone who has attended a ‘spiritual’ séance is aware of the strict regard paid to securing ‘harmonious conditions,’ and all know how dismal is the failure when such conditions cannot be obtained.”

4.Telepathy: Dunninger had a reputation as a mind-reader.  If he actually had telepathic abilities, he still rejected the idea of spirits and spirit communication. Thus, if the medium had been successful in communicating some or all of the 10 words, Dunninger might have seen it as resulting from reading his mind. Rather than suggest that the medium had abilities equal to his, he opted to call her a fraud. 

5. No Sympathetic Link: The “medium” may have had mediumistic abilities, but she was unable to establish a “sympathetic link” to the spirit of Edison for the desired communication for reasons other than Dunninger’s hostility. Such is the case in many mediumistic efforts. Even the best of mediums fail completely in some sittings, partially in others. “We are persistently told at circles that mutual confidence is essential – confidence of the medium in the sitters, and confidence of the sitters in the medium,” researcher Dr. Isaac Funk wrote. “There must be a receptive conditions in the circle. The requisites are serenity of mind, confidence in the integrity of each other, and calm desire.”

6. Symbolic Language: Research indicates that many mediums must interpret messages that come through symbolically from the spirit world. Thus, if Edison had communicated, the words might have been synonyms for the actual words given to Dunninger. “The easiest things to lay hold of are what we may call ideas,” Sir William Barrett communicated after his death. “A detached word, a proper name, has no link with a train of thought except in a detached sense; that is far more difficult than any other feat of memory or association of ideas.” Barrett added that he could remember a name on his side when he had a “complete mind,” but that when he came back to the earth realm to communicate, he was forced to separate the conscious from the subconscious, thereby forgetting much. “I cannot come with my whole self, I cannot,” he told his widow. When Lady Barrett asked him to elaborate, Sir William pointed out that he has a fourth dimensional self which cannot make its fourth dimension exactly the same as the third. “It’s like measuring a third dimension by its square feet instead of by its cubic feet,” he continued, “and there is no doubt about it I have left something of myself outside which rejoins me directly I put myself into the condition in which I readjust myself.”

7. Unawakened: Indications are that most spirits are slow to awaken to the larger life, some not even realizing they are dead. Intelligence does not necessarily convert to consciousness in the spirit world, and it may be that the spirit of Edison had not yet gained the necessary consciousness to be able to communicate. I don’t recall any mention of how long after Edison’s death the Empire State Building experiment took place. After Dr. Richard Hodgson, another researcher, died in 1905, he began communicating through the mediumship of Leonora Piper, the Boston medium he had studied for 18 years, apparently then not fully awakened to the celestial life. “I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat,” the surviving consciousness of Hodgson told Professor William Newbold in a July 23, 1906 sitting. “And I am not wholly conscious of my own utterances because they come out automatically, impressed upon the machine (Piper’s body)…I impress my thoughts on the machine which registers them at random, and which are at times doubtless difficult to understand. I understand so much better the modus operandi than I did when I was in your world.”

8. Limited Memory: Many spirit communicators have stated that their memory of their past earth life is very limited and that forgetting code words is no different than humans forgetting computer passwords or having so many computer passwords that the critical one cannon be recalled. It appears that names are no easier to remember in the spirit life than they are in the earth life. “Tell them I am more stupid than some of those I deal with,” Frederic W. H. Myers communicated as he struggled to remember the last time he had seen Sir Oliver Lodge. He mentioned that he could not remember many things, not even his mother’s name. He went on to say that he felt like he was looking at a misty picture and that he could hear himself using the medium’s voice but that he didn’t feel as if he were actually speaking. “It is funny to hear myself talking when it is not myself talking,” he went on. “It is not my whole self talking. When I am awake (i.e., not communicating through a medium),I known where I am.”

9. Advanced Insight: Edison may have had the ability to communicate through a medium, but from his new perspective was able to see Dunninger’s devious motive to debunk the medium and therefore saw no point in attempting communication and playing Dunninger’s game.

10. Lacking Ability: Research suggests that only a small percentage of spirits have the ability to communicate with the physical world. In his attempts to communicate with Anne Manning Robbins though the mediumship of Leonora Piper, Augustus P. Morgan, the former mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, explained that several other spirits trained him for many months in earth time in how to communicate. “They have held me up and showed me the Light, and said, ‘do this and do that, and see this and see that,” and shown me the details, and the ins and outs and the whys and wherefores, and why shouldn’t I learn something after having it hammered into me all the time.”

11. Too Advanced: Spirit communicators also state that it is easier for lower-level spirits to communicate than more advanced spirits, as the lower-level spirits are closer to the earth frequency than those higher. The higher spirits often require lower-level spirits to relay their messages to humans and indications are that it is difficult to find reliable lower-level spirits to cooperate in such an endeavor. Edison may have found himself at too high a frequency to effectively communicate and unable to find a reliable go-between, the existence of which are apparently rare. 

12. Necessary Doubt: Edison may have settled in with an advanced soul group that believes that “doubt” is a necessary part of life’s experience and that such proof of his survival would be detrimental to human progress. Moreover, Judge John Edmonds, one of the earliest researchers, was informed that there is in the spirit world much opposition to intercourse with the physical world, “and that a combination has been formed to interrupt and, if possible, to overthrow it, and one mode is by visiting circles and individuals, exciting their suspicions of spirits, and bad thoughts as to their good faith and purity of purpose.”

My friend wasn’t buying many of my 12 reasons because they were based on spirit messages, not on “science.” Again, there might be much more to this story recorded somewhere, possibly in one of Dunninger’s books, but, considering Dunninger’s reputation as a debunker, I would expect a biased report. One thing I did come across on the internet is how Dunninger was able to make paraffin hands, thereby supposedly demonstrating that the researches carried out by esteemed scientists in Europe in which paraffin hands were materialized were nothing more than tricks by the medium. The fact that the European researchers held the hands of the medium behind locked doors while the paraffin hand molds were being produced and otherwise controlled the conditions does not seem to have been factored into Dunninger’s analysis. It was enough that they could be made. (See blog of July 25, 2011 for more about the paraffin hands experiments.)

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.
 

"Be patient with those that are lax, but be positive always. Keep your own counsel often, and counsel often with others. Be sure each gives of themselves in the lessons from week to week, for in this is the hope of the lessons becoming the light to many in many a place, many a land."



ECRL 262-9

A More Comprehensive Look at Trance Medium, Leonora Piper

In my 2013 book, Resurrecting Leonora Piper, I attempted to make a case for the spirit and survival hypothesis, i.e., that consciousness survives death in another realm of existence sometimes called the spirit world, by offering some of the best “hits” coming through the trance-mediumship of Leonora Piper, (below) while pretty much ignoring the “misses,” what Professor William James called the “bosh” material. I assumed that most readers would recognize that “her” hits went well beyond chance guessing, coincidence, or deception of some kind. As stated in the book’s introduction, I tried to approach it as a lawyer making a case for his or her client in a courtroom.  As I also mentioned, if I were to make a case for Babe Ruth being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, baseball player ever, I would focus on his game-winning hits, not his many strikeouts and other “outs.” The fact is that Ruth’s “misses” far outnumbered his hits, just as Piper’s did.

Piper

As I saw it then, the researchers were not offering their reports in layperson’s language and that was the primary reason their findings were not better known and appreciated.  Some of their paragraphs extended to two pages and their attempts to remain scientifically objective often obscured their reports. As a journalist of sorts, I saw a challenge in attempting to convert academic writing to something the layperson might better understand.

Dr. Alan Gauld, no doubt the dean of psychical research worldwide, then and now, and most likely the world’s foremost authority on Mrs. Piper’s mediumship, gave my book a mostly positive review in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. He pointed out that I was not trying to write a biography or a scientific treatise,  and, quoting my own words, said that the book “is simply an attempt to explain the dynamics of [Mrs. Piper’s] mediumship, including the difficulties associated with it, and to offer some of the best evidence for survival after death that came from it.”  But Gauld went on to conclude that I was too enthusiastic in endorsing the spirit and survival hypothesis and that I approached the issues from a position at or near that of a “whole-hearted Spiritualist.”

Two of Dr. Gauld’s earlier books were among the references in my book. Before the book was published, I exchanged several emails with him. The only thing I now recall from those references is that he saw the “controls” of Mrs. Piper (Phinuit, George Pellew, Imperator,  etc.) more likely as “secondary personalities” of the medium rather than as spirits of dead and said something to the effect that most researchers agree with that position.  I inferred from that, as well as from his books, that he was a fence-sitter relative to the survival hypothesis, even though a belief that the controls were secondary personalities does not necessarily mean the person has rejected the survivalist view.  I was not then (and am not now) qualified to debate with him, but I do recall noting in our exchanges that the four researchers who spent the most time with Mrs. Piper – Dr. Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Dr. James Hyslop – all appeared to accept both the spirit and survival hypotheses while also rejecting the secondary personality aspect of the medium’s control.    “…if you assume the control is a spirit, as is more evidently the case for all who have intelligently investigated the problem, you have another mind beside that of the medium with which to deal in the problem,” Hyslop wrote.

In his recently released book, The Heyday of Mental Mediumship: 1880s – 1930s, published by White Crow Books, Dr. Gauld offers a much more balanced account of the Piper mediumship than I did in my book.  He discusses many of Piper’s misses, and there is considerably more detail about several of the key cases, including many facts about some of the sitters with Mrs. Piper that I did not encounter in my research of her. He uses the actual names of the sitters rather than the pseudonyms used in the initial reports by the researchers and in my book.  However, saying that Gauld’s account is “more balanced” is not to suggest that he debunks Mrs. Piper.  In fact, she survives his analyses as a genuine medium and seemingly remains as renowned in the field of mediumship as Babe Ruth does in the baseball arena. 

One of the more interesting chapters of Gauld’s book has to do with Tom and Lilla Perry, referred to as Jim and Mary Howard in Hodgson’s initial reports and in my book.  George Pellew (G.P.), before his death in 1892, had been close friends with the Perrys.  Tom had been one of his instructors at Harvard and the two men formed a close bond. In fact, Pellew lived with the Perrys between 1880 and 1883 and apparently was very attached to Lilla, who, 11-years-older, seems to have been like a big sister to him. Indications are that Tom was well aware of the attachment and did not see it as a threat to his marriage. 

Gauld provides quite a bit of background information on the Perrys. Besides teaching English at Harvard, Tom tutored in French and German and “was reckoned the best-read man of his time.”  Lilla, the daughter of Dr. Samuel Cabot and a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, was an accomplished musician and linguist. She published several books on poetry and became a world-famous painter, regarded as a pioneer in bringing impressionist influences to the United States. 

Gauld adds to the mystery of Pellew’s death at age 32.  The first account I read many years ago was that he fell off a horse.  Then, a subsequent report had him falling down a flight of stairs at his apartment house early in the morning. A third report had him tripping over a step or two at the entry way to his Manhattan apartment. Gauld states that his body was found in evening dress, lying in the areaway of 70 West 35th Street in the early morning of February 18, 1892, indicating that he had fallen from the area steps, breaking his neck. However, his brother, Charles, is said have identified the body in front of a cigar store that was in fact a gambling establishment. The suspicion seems to be that his parents, very prominent in New York, tried to make his death a respectable one. Whatever the cause of death, a photo of Lilla Perry was found on Pellew’s body.

John Heard (given the pseudonym John Hart in the records), was a friend of both Pellew and the Perrys.  He sat with Piper on March 22, 1892, a little over a month after Pellew’s (below) death.  Phinuit, then Piper’s control, correctly identified Heard’s father and uncle by name (both named George) as well as the nickname of another uncle named Albert, then asked, “Who is Thom-s…Thomas…Tom?” Heard replied that he is Tom Perry, who is not dead.  Phinuit responded, “There is another George who wants to speak to you. How many Georges are there about you anyway?”

Pellow

Heard placed the photo of Lilla Perry taken from Pellew’s body in Mrs. Piper’s hand.  Phinuit then spelled out “ILA, EILA, LILA, LILLA,” then PELLIN and PELLEW, before Pellew broke in, saying “I want to see her awfully.  Tell her I am not dead.” (It is not clear, but apparently Pellew spoke directly to Heard using Mrs. Piper’s voice mechanism, not finding it necessary to use Phinuit as a go-between.) Either Phinuit or Pellew spelled out TOM and THOMAS again and also asked about “Mucer” which was changed to “Mercer.” Pellew mentioned that he had lent a book to Mercer.
 
After some muddled messages, Pellew said, “I want to see Lilla – That’s where the music is. John, if that is you, speak to me! Tell Tom I want to see him. He will hardly believe me…I want him to know where I am – O good fellow!” 

Pellew went on to say that another friend, Howells, has a book of his and he wanted Lilla Perry to have it.  It was a book of poems by Pellew that he had given to Howells for publication.  “I want him to give it to Lilla. I will it to her. Sing. She’ll play for me. She’ll play…” (Lilla was a talented pianist.)  The demand was again made at subsequent sittings. 

A pair of studs was placed in Piper’s hand and Heard asked who gave them to him. Phinuit, replying for Pellew, said they were his and that he gave them to Heard. However, he corrected himself and said that his mother had given them to Heard, then, again corrected himself and said it was his father who gave them to Heard,.  He changed again and said it was his father and mother together that gave the studs to Heard as a keepsake.  It was determined that Pellew’s stepmother took the studs from Pellew’s body and his father had sent them to Heard as a keepsake.

Near the end of the sitting, Pellew said (again through Piper’s voice mechanism), “My love to Lilla. What’s Marguerite? Tell her: she’ll know. I will solve the problems, Margaret.”  Marguerite/Margaret (referred to as Katharine in the transcript) was the Perry’s eldest daughter with whom Pellew had had frequent talks about philosophical matters.  Upon hearing from Heard about the sitting, Tom Perry was much impressed and mentioned that Pellew had once told Margaret that he would “solve the problems” and let her know. After hearing from Heard of his experience with Mrs. Piper, Tom and Lilla arranged for a sitting with her. The first of many took place on April 11, 1892.

In that first sitting, Phinuit opened, but the French accent faded away as Pellew took over and spoke directly, at times writing through Piper’s hand. Pellew asked if Howells had given Lilla the book of poems yet.  Lilla replied that Pellew’s father and his brother, Charlie, did not want her to have it. “Strange they should say that,” Pellew said. “That is one of the things we can’t understand here.”

Pellew went on to mention friends Welling and Opdycke, adding that Opdycke was always very fond of him, “though he understood me least of all my friends.”  Gauld states that Hodgson confirmed all the references by Pellew to persons, incidents, characters, etc.  There is considerably more about the Perrys and Pellew reported by Gauld, much of it veridical, including a sitting in which Lilla brought a lamp to the sitting so that she could better take notes.  Pellew apparently recognized it as a lamp he had given Lilla as a gift.  In another sitting, Edith Perry, another daughter, was present when Pellew mentioned a book he had given to her in which he had written her name and also commented that she was weak in mathematics.  Both were confirmed as fact. 

Gauld states that it is clear “that both Perrys – not just the emotionally involved Lilla, but also Tom, whose mind-set had long been that of an eighteenth-century rationalist – were soon disposed to accept the identity of the G.P. communicator with the George they had known.”

Gauld, now 90, devotes about two-thirds of his 324-page book to the study of Mrs. Piper,  including, as stated above, many of her misses.  I was reminded of much and learned much.  I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read the last one-third of the book, but I look forward to it. It includes discussions of “Mrs. Smead,” “Mrs. Soule,” Gladys Osborne Leonard, and other credible mediums of the 1880-1930 period.

The impression I got from reading Dr. Gauld’s earlier books and reports was that he was securely perched on the fence, his more materialistic hand holding tight to that fence while he was looking partly yonder in the spiritualistic direction.  After reading what he has to say in this book, I now see him partly dismounted from the fence, one leg still hooked over it and the other leg touching down on the survivalist side while more enthusiastically looking yonder in the survivalist direction.  He concludes the book with a comment that he agrees with fellow researcher Stephen Braude that with some cases it “would be not just very difficult but perhaps (in some sense hard to define) illogical to reject the survivalist hypothesis out of hand or at least to fail to give it due consideration.”  He adds that a survivalist could justifiably ask an opponent, “What more do you want, what more can you sensibly ask for?”

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

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"For that you think, that the mind dwells upon, that you do become."



ECRL 262-84

Life After Life Blog Digest

 August 2022 

Every month we seek out the best research, stories, and other thought-provoking writing to enlighten, inspire, and entertain. We hope you LOVE this month's selections as much as we do!

                                                                                                                                            Exciting News and Steve Taylor Interview

We’re Thrilled To Announce The Upcoming Relaunch Of The Life After Life Website! 

Later this summer we will be switching to a brand new look and adding exciting new content. Our existing blogs and offerings will be coming with us, but you’ll find a lot more to love with new features, expanded resources on life after death, near-dear and shared-death experiences, new courses being added over the next year (including the highly anticipated psychomanteum workshop) and much more!

Jeremy Narby Interview Preview Here are a few brief excerpts from Lisa Smartt and Paul Perry’s interview with Jeremy Narby. He talks about his experiences with Ayahuasca, which he first consumed during his anthropological research in the Amazon many years ago, as well as knowledge indigenous people say they gained through its use, our understanding of the world, the discoveries still awaiting us in the realm of the mind, and much more.

  READ MORE

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NEW BOOKS OF INTEREST

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n his new book, Dr. Raymond Moody looks at God and how his personal understanding of the Creator has changed over the course of his life and research into near-death experiences.  

Dr. Moody organizes his insights about God into 12 simple but profound ideas and walks us through them using stories and examples from his own life and from accounts of encounters with God in the hereafter. 

He looks at our society's beliefs about God, how religion can both help and hinder our relationships with the Divine, and how we can bring Source into our lives with a new understanding that transcends all limits. 

God Is Bigger Than the Bible is available on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback formats. For more information, click HERE.

The Balance Problem in Weighing the Afterlife Evidence

August 2022

Over the years, I have posted 20 biographies and articles about various psychic phenomena at the PSI Encyclopedia website, which is sponsored by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). They include bios of Sir Oliver Lodge, Leonora Piper, Professor James Hyslop, and William T. Stead, along with essays on the Glastonbury Scripts, the Buried Crosses, and the mysterious Patience Worth.  Nearly all of them have been edited to some extent to overcome my bias toward accepting the credibility of the person or the genuineness of the phenomenon.  In other words, I rarely give as much weight to the debunker’s side of the story, as I do to that of the dedicated researchers. After all, the researchers had already debunked the debunkers. Nevertheless, if the debunking side is not given equal attention, it is not seen as a “balanced” report and the editor finds it necessary to rework my submission by deleting some of the testimony in favor of the genuineness of the person or the phenomenon or to add some information (or misinformation) that supposedly counters the evidence in favor of the person or the phenomenon. 

My most recent submission, the most edited of all, is on the controversial direct-voice medium, Mina Crandon, (below) better remembered as “Margery,” whose mediumship was extensively studied by scholars and scientists during the 1920s. Historians and pseudo historians have not treated her well. The “know-nothings” are certain she was a fraud.  The debunking theories extend to the possibility that her husband, Dr. LeRoi Crandon, a prominent Boston surgeon and instructor of medicine at Harvard University, enlarged her “female storehouse” so that animal lungs could be hidden there and later exuded and passed off as ectoplasm.  This “anatomical concealment” included reabsorption at the end of the séance as well as the need for a refrigeration unit of some kind.

Mina  

Most of the phenomena were physical, including levitations of a table, apports (objects floating around the room), unusual lights and breezes, the materialization of hands and arms, paraffin gloves purportedly produced by spirits, the ringing of a bell not within reach of the medium, a scale in which the weighted side went up as the unweighted side went down, and other strange happenings.  However, the main attraction was the “master of ceremonies,” said to be Walter Stinson, Margery’s older brother, who had been killed in a railroad yard accident in 1911. Walter would speak through his entranced sister and also independently of her in a masculine voice.  He would carry on conversations with the sitters, joke with them, curse at them, whistle tunes, and do automatic writing through Margery. She is said to have produced writing in nine different languages, including Greek and Chinese. 

On the surface, the story seems trite, even laughable, involving no more than homespun vaudeville, but a verdict for Margery would have meant an indictment of mechanistic science and the philosophy of materialism.  The story made front-page news in the New York Times and other newspapers.  It included character assassinations, revenge, sexual innuendos, threatened lawsuits, the aforementioned anatomical storage, and bizarre phenomena, even a table chasing a guest around the Crandon house and down a staircase. 

My submission was melded with that of another writer and the editor’s own research and many revisions, so that I recognize very little of it being from my original paper. What bothers me most is that the key to understanding what some researchers considered “tricks” by Margery is explained in my paper, but none of that survived in the published piece.   

From earlier discussions, I gather that the editor is under pressure to provide a neutral account so as not to offend the members who prefer a materialistic explanation. Once an article becomes biased in either direction, it is no longer “scientific” and is considered “propaganda.” At that point, the materialists do not renew their memberships and the organization faces insolvency.  I understand this concern and appreciate the dilemma of the editor, but at the same time I struggle to understand how an organization or publication can have an unending quest to straddle the fence.  Shouldn’t it at some point be able to move off its perch?  If it does show some unbalance toward accepting a spiritualistic view, has it abandoned science?  It seems so stultifying and senseless for an organization to be perched on the fence for 140 years. In all fairness, I know that some of the editors at the SPR have permitted articles that lean in the direction of spiritual causes. Dr. Leo Ruickbie, whose essay earned him third place in last year’s Bigelow Institute Consciousness Studies contest, is one example.       

As I recall, William Stainton Moses, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vice-Admiral W. Usborne Moore and Dennis Bradley all had the same concern and resigned from the organization.     

I justify my bias by saying that I am only interested in writing about people or phenomena who have, or which have, been judged authentic by researchers.  If the research pointed to the person being a charlatan or the phenomenon being fraudulent, it doesn’t interest me enough to write about it. I guess that makes me a propagandist in the dictionary sense of the word, i.e., someone who promotes an idea with zeal, even if modern-day politics has given a negative slant to the word. 

In the introduction to my book, Resurrecting Leonora Piper, I explain that I am presenting the case for Piper as a lawyer might present a case for his client in a court of law.  I focused on her many “hits,” and mentioned only a few of her “misses.”  I assumed that the intelligent reader would see that her hits went far beyond chance guessing, coincidence, or advance research by Mrs. Piper and tried to point out that mediums are not infallible living saints.  If I were writing a book about Babe Ruth, I’d focus on his 714 home runs, not his 1,330 strikeouts. However, the problem there is that most people don’t know how difficult it is to hit a 90-100 mph fastball or a breaking ball.  It looks much easier than it is.   

It’s not just the SPR.  I recall being asked by a college professor putting together an encyclopedia on psychic matters to write 5,000 words on levitations.  I did so, but it was unacceptable to him because I didn’t have enough information in the essay on the debunker’s view of it all.  He asked me to revise the submission by adding more research opposed to levitations.  Since I was asked to keep it at 5,000 words, that meant deleting 2,000 or more words supporting levitation and adding the research opposed to it.  However, I was unable to find any research opposed to it, only comments by fundamentalists of science saying it defies the laws of gravity and is not possible, or they offer theories on how the “trick” could have been carried out.  It didn’t amount to much more than 100 words, and so I gave up on that project. I do wonder how a researcher goes about proving that levitation is not possible.

About 20 years ago, I interviewed Dr. Gary Schwartz, a research professor at the University of Arizona and author of the 2002 book, The Afterlife Experiments.  He mentioned that when he was asked to appear on television for interviews to discuss his research, the program producers would always call in a paid skeptic to present the other side, suggesting that Schwartz was on the side of the mediums he had studied because he validated them. Schwartz should have been interviewed as the judge in the case, not as an advocate for the medium.  He had already dealt with the arguments of the paid skeptic. And so it should have been with all the researchers cited in my essay on levitations. 

My essay on Margery included prior research with other mediums, namely Eusapia Palladino. Kathleen Goligher, and Rudi Schneider, which if understood and accepted, would have pulled the carpet out from under the naysayers in the Margery case.  However, that was all deleted from the final product. 

The research with Palladino was some two decades before Margery came on the scene and included reports on movements well away from her reach.  That is, her fingers, hands, and feet seemed to be moving in harmony with activity distant from her, something of a puppet effect resulting from invisible ectoplasmic “strings” between the medium and the object. “When [Professor Oscar] Scarpa held Palladino’s feet in his hands, he always felt her legs moving in synchrony with ongoing displacements of the table or chair,” reported Professor Filippo Bottazi, who referred to the action as “‘synchrony.”

Adding to that is research by Dr. Karl Gruber, as reported in my blog here of March 14.  Gruber, a German physician, biologist, and zoologist, explained that, in his research involving more than 100 experiments with Rudi Schneider, he observed “synchronous movements” between the medium and objects out of his reach.  “This fact has been repeatedly misunderstood by the skeptical, who have seen in it the unmasking of a frightened medium,” he wrote in the May 1926 issues of the Journal of The American Society for Psychical Research.

Gruber cited the reports 0f Dr. William Crawford, a mechanical engineer who carried out 87 experiments with Irish medium Kathleen Goligher and reported on objects out of Goligher’s reach being moved by “psychic rods,” which apparently were made of what others called “ectoplasm.”  They originated with what Crawford referred to as “operators,” which he took to be discarnate human beings. “These particular mechanical reactions cause her to make slight involuntary motions with her feet, motions which a careless observer would set down as imposture,” Crawford wrote.

It was just such movement that contributed significantly to some researchers, as well as Houdini, the magician, condemning Margery, but there is no mention of any of this research in the PSI Encyclopedia on Margery.  Also cut from my submission were most of my comments about Dr. Mark W. Richardson, a professor of medicine at Harvard who is credited with developing a vaccine for typhus.  Although I was unable to determine how many of Margery’s sittings Richardson attended, indications are that he attended nearly all of them, probably well over one-hundred, maybe as many as two-hundred. He also carried out various tests with her to confirm that the “voice” of her deceased brother, Walter, was not coming from Margery’s body.  Even though Richardson was said to be a good friend of Dr. Crandon’s, it is difficult to believe that he could have been fooled so many times or would have collaborated with Crandon in a hoax of this magnitude for years.  If he knew that Margery was a trickster, didn’t he have better things to do?  In concluding his report on the series of sittings in which Margery produced Chinese script, Richardson wrote:

“… there comes a point at which this hypothesis of universal confederacy must stop; or if not this, that the entire present report may be dismissed off-hand as a deliberate fabrication in the interests of false mediumship. I respectfully submit that no critic who hesitates at this logical climax may by any means escape the hypothesis of validity. If the present paper is worthy of and if it receives the slightest degree of respectful attention, the facts which it chronicles must constitute proof of the existence of Margery’s supernormal faculties, and the strongest sort of evidence that these work through the agency of her deceased brother Walter.”

Mark  

Dr. Mark Richardson testing Margery’s voice

Margery emerges as an attractive blue-eyed blonde, charming, giddy, outgoing to the extent of being flirtatious, and otherwise fitting the “flapper”’ stereotype of the era. She was definitely not the saintly type. When called a charlatan, she reacted with indignation at times, but laughed it off at other times. Although debatable, as so much of the story is, Margery’s flippant attitude may have extended to suggesting that if Walter, her deceased brother, was unable to produce phenomena on a particular night, which was sometimes the case, that one of her friends should go ahead and produce something fraudulent to please those in attendance.  Even if that story is true, it suggests that Margery produced genuine phenomena some, or most, of the time. 

The encyclopedic entry ends with a comment about a “negative” verdict by a committee of five.  To me, a negative verdict is one that judged Margery a fraud.  The verdict was “inconclusive,” not negative.  One of the five committee members voted in favor of Margery and one (Houdini) against her.  The other three said further investigation was necessary.  In effect, it was a “hung jury.”

The words of the renowned Italian researcher Ernesto Bozzano were not included in my submission, as I came upon them later.  He wrote, “It is true that amongst private mediums one occasionally finds persons so imbued with the spirit of sacrifice in the cause of science that they will undergo any kind of humiliation which may be inflicted on them. Such people deserve an honoured place among the saints and martyrs of a future metapsychic calendar, and in saying this, I have in mind that American lady – ‘Margery’ (Mrs. Crandon) – and her worthy husband Dr. L. Crandon.  They submitted themselves to all kinds of tests and endured untold dignity in order to convince the men of science who attended their seances. Such a spirit of sacrifice is indeed worthy of admiration, but one cannot reasonably demand that private mediums should be aspirants to the crown of martyrdom.” 

The bottom line here is that to find spirits, one has to recognize the possible existence of spirits.  Since science does not recognize that possibility, anything involving spirits of the dead must be considered fraud.  It is a Catch 22 situation and so the researcher is forever glued to the fence. 

All that said, I very much appreciate the efforts of the editor of the PSI Encyclopedia, who is faced with producing something that those stuck in the muck and mire of materialism will understand and deem “scientific.”

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

My pleasure Christine, sharing is what we are all about and we encourage all our members to share. 

"Practice makes perfect; and as one practices, puts in use, in word, in deed, day by day, so does one grow in grace, in knowledge, in understanding..."



ECRL 262-2

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

—Leo Buscaglia.

 This week's Friday Afterlife Report is now online at https://www.victorzammit.com/August5th2022/

In this short video Anabela demonstrates how easily random sounds may be interpreted as words or even sentences with meaning when recording for EVP or ITC contacts. The video clip was recorded near the sea in a very calm, solitary corner with soft, almost imperceptibly sounding waves. Anabela explains how she heard the sentence “sou a tuaavó, portuguesa” (in English: I am your grandmother, Portuguese) the first time she listened to the recording after coming home. She plays the original audio and a slightly edited version of it, in which the supposed sentence is more audible. She advises her viewers and prospectiveITC/EVP operators, to pay much attention to the possibility of linguistic delusion (or pareidolia) when listening to their recordings. She avows, nevertheless, that the message “sou a tuaavó, portuguesa” might indeed be contained in the random sound of the waves but also that it might not… Thus, she advises EVP operators that, unless the voices are totally clear, recordings like the present one should be discarded and the work should proceed on a firmer ground always aiming at more precise messages that nobody would question. References: Pareidolia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia Cardoso, A. (2021). Glimpses of Another World, Impressions and Reflections of an EVP Operator, A Handbook of EVP pp., 147-214. England, White Crow Books.

In this video Anabela Cardoso calls the viewers’ attention to the fact that most of the supposed ITC images published in the Net are nothing of the sort. They are pure pareidolia, i.e., the capacity of the brain to project meaning into random, chaotic background noise, either audio or visual. In this video, Anabela recommended the software Filmora to view the visual ITC work frame by frame.There are many video editors which allow the analysis of the videos frame by frame, and this is the most important and indispensable point to take into consideration. In Seminar 4, Transimages II, she emphasizes the need to examine the images carefully frame by frame as indicated in the software. The process can take a long time since each second of recording comprises 30 frames. A recording of no more than 3 to 4 minutes is recommended exactly because of the time it takes to inspect the frames and the fatigue it causes, which may obliterate self-criticism and induce a‘pareidolic’assessment of the results. Indeed, self-criticism should be the guiding light of ITC operators.

In this first seminar on-line, Anabela Cardoso explains the reasons why the previously announced seminars cannot be presential and recommends the psychological attitude which, in her opinion, is correct vis-à-vis the experiments. A serious and heartfelt motivation is the main requisite. She recommends that all people interested in experimenting in EVP must start by reading the books of the great pioneers. The only one of Friedrich Jürgenson’s books translated into English, Voice Transmissions with the Deceased, is available in a Pdf version and can be downloaded from the Internet free of charge: https://archive.org/stream/JurgensonV... The master work of Dr Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough, has been recently published by White Crow Books: http://whitecrowbooks.com/ebooks/page... The dates of the following seminars will be announced in due course.

ITC Gem 8: Reincarnation from Ethereal Eyes

ITC Gem 7: More About Planet Varid

ITC Gem 6: The Strangeness of Material “Reality”

ITC Gem 5: How Thoughts Create Reality

Terra 03 — Money Money Money: How It Mimics Life-Energy

At 2 a.m., in 17 metre seas in the Antarctic Ocean, Greg Keily was run over by a Navy Frigate and not only drowned but also came back suffering hypothermia. He will share the story of his NDEs and the changes in his life which led him to become a mental health hypnotherapy practitioner specialising in PTSD, depression and anxiety. Greg conducts a mental health hypnotherapy practice online and face-to-face in Southport Qld. Australia. You can contact Greg at https://howsyourheadspace.com.au/

Note: Wikapedia is not a valid reference site for most of the material on this page, they openly discriminate against anything of afterlife, mediums, spiritual, ITC etc etc

Please note this is not a definitive by any means.   Additions will continue overtime

Types of Reference Sites

There are generally two types of reference sites. The first consist of specialized Web sites maintained by subject experts, who will provide detailed and specific responses to your questions.

The second are run by generalists (often reference librarians) who don't necessarily answer your question but point you to the best resources for conducting your own search.

Which Kind Of Reference Site Is Best? 

Which type of these resources you choose depends on what your question is. If you're interested in a really complex or obscure topic—the history of the mullet, for example—your best bet is to ask an expert on that subject. If you're interested in a broader topic, or simply want a good overview of a subject, the generalists will usually provide you with better results.There are hundreds, if not thousands, of experts in specific subjects that will answer your questions on the Web.

Find and Ask An Expert Via Search Engines

To find your own expert in a specific category, try the following search string at Google or any other search engine:

"expert+subject" (substitute your own keyword for "subject")

Find a Librarian

One of your best sources for expert information is your local librarian. They're trained to find answers to obscure questions, they're friendly, and best of all, you can talk with them face to face. Librarians will often ask you questions that you might not have considered, leading to even better results.

You can get help from librarians online, too.

The Best Reference Sites for General Research

The Internet Public Library is primarily intended to get you started with some ideas and places to begin if you've got a big project. The IPL won't perform lengthy research for you—but they do provide some tools to assist your search, both online and at your local library. Their vast collection includes IPL Expert Guides that are "intended to help you get started doing research on a particular topic, both online and at your local library."

The Library of Congress enables you to not only ask a librarian but search catalogs of libraries from all over the world. This is truly a HUGE resource that should be on your Top Ten of best research sites. Anything from Academica Sinica (Taiwan) to Yale University (US) is here and ready to be searched.

Another useful service is Reference Desk's Ask An Expert Locator. This is an extremely useful site, and while the Reference Desk does not personally answer questions, you have an excellent chance of finding someone who will by using their searchable subject directory.

Answers.com is a free reference search service. Its results are particularly useful since Answers.com weeds out extraneous or superficial sites and gets their results straight from encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference tools.

FirstGov.gov is probably the best place to start when looking for specific government information. Make sure you check the Explore Topics collection to get an idea of what there is at this exhaustive resource.

Reference.com.  Extremely simple to use, very basically laid out.

Refdesk.com. Includes in-depth research links to breaking news, Word of the Day, reference  and Daily Pictures. A fun site with a ton of information.

Encyclopedia.com. As stated on their site, Encyclopedia.com provides users with more than 57,000 frequently updated articles from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.

Encyclopedia Brittanica. One of the world's oldest encyclopedias online.

Open Directory Reference. The Open Directory's guide to various reference sites.

WebReference.com. A great resource for webmasters and anyone else who wants to learn how to develop a webpage.

Purdue University Library Quick Reference. A very good site with tons of info; includes resources specific to Purdue University and surrounding areas in Indiana, USA.

Educator's Reference Desk. Probably the best reference site online for teachers. Includes thousands of informative links, lesson plans, and general reference information.

Physician Desk Reference. Look for detailed medical information here.

iTools.com. Excellent site; serves as a gateway references and research links.

LibrarySpot.com. An excellent site that has hundreds of reference and research sources indexed all in one site.

The Internet Public Library. An invaluable resource that will pretty much take care of all your reference needs.

FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing: extremely detailed computing dictionary; I don't think that there's a computing term out there that's not in FOLDOC.

Librarians Internet Index: One of my absolute favorite sites on the Web. You could spend hours here lost in the vast variety of information and resources.

For specific afterlife matter:
https://afterlifedata.com/

"The more you become aware of your relationships to the universe and those influences that control same, the greater your ability to help."



ECRL 5757-1