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cc >> Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. Where does science leave off and religion begin? Well, that was a major issue in the late 19th century in the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution and the ideas of others who were both before and after him. If mankind evolved, where did the soul fit into things, the soul that so many religions believe is there? And what kind of existence might people have after their material existence is over? If they did have an existence after life, was it possible to communicate with them somehow? All of these were really big, pressing questions in England and in this country in the late 19th century. Some of the greatest minds in both countries set themselves to a scientific approach to answering the question about life after death, and unseen powers. They have been called, at times, ghost hunters. In fact, that's the title of the book by Deborah Blum. She's my guest today for University Place Presents. Welcome. Welcome back. >> Thank you. It's great to be back. >> What a wonderful topic, a rich topic, which brings together so much. It must have been a challenge for you just to boil it down into one book. >> It was a challenge to boil it down. Because the questions are so big, you know, how do we define our world? Who defines it for us? >> Let's look at our cast of characters without further ado. Both sides of that Atlantic. We have them collaborating, however, before too long. Where do we start? Is it really a reaction to Darwin more than anything else, that sparked this major interest in spiritualism at that time? >> I think that was part of it. The theory of evolution was such a slap in the face to centuries, really, of the way that we defined the world, and to the power structure that defined the world for people. The way we thought about how things worked and what was right and what was wrong, how the world was built, how the universe was built, had all come down through centuries of religious teachings and philosophical thought. Now, I mean, it dates back, but right here in the mid-19th century, you see this upstart science saying, no, no, no, we're going to tell you how everything work. So there's this tension, this phenomenal tension between science and religion. You start seeing members of the scientific community, really high ranking members of the science community saying, look, could we bring the two together? What if there was a scientific way to bridge that gap. >> A scientific way to prove or disprove? >> One of the most fundamental things, is there life after death, right? One of the major teachings of all religions is some form of life that continues after death, which science, oh, no, no. Right? >> There is no such thing. It's all material. It's all organic. >> That's right. They put you in the ground and you decay. But what if science could prove it was more than that? So you see this push, this really phenomenal push of very smart and influential thinkers saying, you know, we're some of the best minds of the day. Why don't we try to take what we have and study this, and see if we can actually prove that there is life after death. You see these phenomenal, really amazing minds start to look at that. William James, who is famous in the history of science, he was a founder of the American Psychological Association. He evolved, as it were, into philosophy later. But at the time that he became involved with the sort of search for proof of life after death, he was laying the foundation of the science of psychology. He was at Harvard. He was a really important teacher in that field. >> A very important family, too. One of his brothers was the novelist Henry James. I gather the family was not entirely approving of William James' interest in this scientific approach to life after death. >> They were very split on that subject. Their father had been really into some of the quirkier aspects of spiritualism. People would talk about their house almost being haunted by ghosts. So Henry and his sister, Alice, and there were a couple of younger brothers, Bob, and I'm blanking on the other one. They were like, we're done, right, so what are you doing bringing this back into our lives. His sister in particular just hated it. Now, you saw that William and Henry, William influenced Henry. One of the most famous short novels that Henry James wrote. >> Turn of the Screw. >> Turn of the Screw. >> Very supernatural. >> And hugely influenced by the kind of work that William did. Henry, in fact, read some of William's scientific papers on supernatural events at meetings, so you know, they weren't all pushed away, I guess. >> William James then just makes this declaration unilaterally that he's going to approach this in some scientific way. But he needs a team of some kind. You can't do this alone. >> That's exactly right. So, what you have is you have scientists like William James saying, let's build a network. At that time, we'll talk about paranormal research today, at the time, it was psychical research, which almost sounds like cyclical, but it was psychical. So, in Britain, you have the British Society for Psychical Research. William James was one of the founding members of the American Society for Psychical Research, which is still headquartered in New York City. He was influential then in saying, well, we've got to have paid staffers. It can't be amateur hour with people like me doing this part-time. We need a good, smart, skeptical scientist who can run our organization. And the person who was the first, sort of executive director, was an Australian named Richard Hodgson who had trained at Oxford and done some wonderful work exposing mediums. Williams' friends in Britain said, you should have him. He can do the work of ten. He came over and ran the society. >> Would a prerequisite for being a member of the society, being an investigator, be that you're neither too skeptical nor too accepting? >> Yeah, I think that's a very good way to put it. These societies did a lot of debunking of mediums. If you look at the people who wholly believed, say members of the church or spiritualism, they were often at odds with the Societies for Psychical Research, because they really wanted to do this in a scientific way, to lay everything out, to say we have proved this, this has not been proven. They outed a lot of really bad mediums, really bad ones. And Hodgson was among the foremost in saying, my mind is open, but you know, one mistake and you shut it, basically. >> What kind of things were these mediums, the fakes that they exposed, what kind of things were they doing? >> Well, I think a lot of people at the time wanted tangible proof, right? So it's not just that I want to see a ghost floating through the room, but I want to see evidence that you have supernatural powers. At the time, there were actually catalogs that mediums could shop in, fake mediums, right? You could buy ectoplasm. I used to like, there was one catalog, it had shoes that a female medium could wear. >> Special foot tricks? >> Yeah, the ghost, they had like a ghost that almost inflate would rise out of the shoe. They had, you know, just all kinds of special little tricks, almost like professional magicians, some of them. >> There was an overlap, wasn't there? >> Yes, there was. One of the things Hodgson did before he came to the United States, is he and a friend of his set up a medium. He pretended that this guy was a medium. They did, you know, sort of the Bob and Richard Show, and his friend would do slate tricks. One of the things that mediums would do is that answers to audience's questions would magically appear on slates. This was just classic magician-like misdirection. >> Houdini did some of that. >> That's exactly right. >> And was up front that it was, as he said, pure hocus pocus. >> That's right. You just distract the audience, you'd write on the slate, and magic, here's the spirit answer. He did demonstrations of that and just enraged the mediums in Britain, which I think is one of the reasons he had to come to the United States.

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>> Word got out. >> Yes. But he was great, really great. >> Who else did we have on our committee? >> Well, in England, one of the founders was another philosopher named Henry Sidgwick. Sidgwick was, in the tradition of utilitarian philosophy. He had begun by looking at sort of the practical ways that people think about things. Then, because he was a philosopher, and because he really did want to bridge this sort of gap between the rising utilitarian science and religious philosophy, he started looking at ways that we might do it. One of the things that he really pushed people to do is study telepathy. Some of the best telepathy experiments of the 19th century were done through him, or with colleagues of his. >> So we actually have to enumerate some of the things that they were looking for or coming across. There is the life after death; ghosts, or whatever you want to call them; there was telepathy, which would be a form of, well, mind reading. >> Mind-to-mind communication. One of the ideas was, you know, if you were going to imagine, the mind of the dead is communicating with the mind of the living, how do you prove this. Well, let's start simple. Let's just first prove that minds can communicate at all. >> Between living. >> Right, so that if I could sit right here and know that you were really thinking about what to have for dinner, right, which I'm positive you're not, Norm. But if you were, then that would be an example of telepathy. They ran those kinds of experiments, what am I thinking? Send me this image. >> All right, and what did they find? >> They found some really interesting, very inconsistent things. Sometimes, you would get information, someone would pick up on an image, say, and you'd think, how in the world could they have known that, right? >> Yes. >> I might be sitting here and I might be thinking of flowers, and an image of roses would come into your head. And in fact, roses are what I was thinking of, and you think well how did you know that she was thinking of roses. Well, they got some of that, but not in any consistent way. It was all sort of hint and sparkle. >> The people that they tested, did they know each other, or were these strangers? I mean, because if you and I were very well acquainted and and we had just been walking through a rose garden. >> Right. >> What are you thinking about? Well. >> Surprise, roses. Some of them, like some of the sketchier, or experiments that turned out to be more problematic later, there was an Irish physicist, William Barrett, who studies sisters. The sisters later talked about the code that they had developed to fake it. But Sidgwick and his friends developed these very strict kind of protocols. They only worked with strangers. They couldn't see each other. To give you an example of an experiment they might do, they would have someone behind a room and they would have them suck on a lemon. Then they would say to a person three rooms away, I want you to see if you can pick up, what are you tasting? What are you tasting? We've got someone two rooms away who's tasting something, what is it? They would do those kinds of experiments. They were interesting. >> They would statistically pick up on anything? >> They weren't big enough. I think that was part of the problem with those telepathy experiments. They were small and intimate experiments, so you'd get these surprise kind of, you know, someone in one room gargling with some alcoholic thing, and you'd have someone in another room, I taste bourbon. >> Yeah. >> So you go, oh, that's really interesting. But it was a sample of two people. Frankly, they never had the funding to get bigger. I don't know if it wouldn't have been any less erratic, because every telepathy experiment that I've ever seen has just that kind of inconsistency in it. >> I suppose, to be on the more accepting side, you'd have to say, well, if you were communicating via let's say, audio, from a couple of rooms away, you might not hear every word right anyway. You might miss a few things. >> That's exactly right. I mean, it's very interesting. I actually did, at one point, I was home, my father was sick. I said, let's do a telepathy experiment. I will draw on this tablet, and you all draw what I'm drawing. Right? It was me, my mother, my father, and one of my sisters. I drew a boat. There was four of us in the room and two other people drew the boat. Not the exact boat I drew, but a boat. I was completely weirded out by this, but after we did this just a few more times, no one ever drew anything I drew, right? That was the problem with almost all of these experiments. You'd say wow, everyone drew the boat. Then they never got the flower right, or the banana, or the monkey, or anything. So what was that about? That problem plagued that from the beginning. >> So what would be a theory behind telepathy and the fact that people could communicate either with the living or the dead in that way? >> The idea was, and you have to remember one of the other things that I think really drove this period in searching for communication with the dead was that you were in the time that people became aware. There were these invisible force fields. JJ Thompson elucidated the electron. Oliver Lodge who was one of the researchers in this group did some of the pioneering work on radio communication. So people knew that there these invisible energy forces by which you could communicate. So the theory behind telepathy, it's certainly the one, I think, that underlies that still today, is that there's some kind of energy, invisible field, or brain waves, or something that we've never found, that allows us to communicate mind-to-mind. That's really what they thought. They felt that if they could observationally demonstrate that we have this clear sort of mirroring of ideas, with no verbal communication, that that would be evidence of that, and then they would go out and find that field. I mean, if I move us way out of that time period, the big problem is we've never found that. >> Is the premise for spiritualism that the medium is a person who is, to put it in those terms, particularly sensitive in receiving those waves. >> That's exactly right. If you might imagine a William James, and some of his colleagues played around with this idea of people being very sensitive receptors. The sort of working theory of that, which I actually find really fun to play around with is that there are all these forms of non-verbal communication expressed in ways we don't understand. Imagine that we were all bombarded by these non-verbal communications floating through the air, or cosmically imprinted on the universe, you know, who could even function. We'd be like constant leaky radio receivers, right? Most of us are completely buffered. We just don't get them, or we're sort of built in defenses. People who become mediums or telepaths, or you know, all of the other definitions of that are people that, you know, were unlucky enough not to be defended, so that they do get all of these messages or receive these signals. >> Also, how do they sort through them? >> That is one of the reasons that makes them so difficult in interpreting that. They're in this chatter of information. So when you actually look at, so if you were going to say, yes, this is very convincing, well these mediums are, you know, talking in these weird little bits and pieces. This staticy kind of conversation in which half of it doesn't make sense, they go, yeah, well, of course. >> Picking up the wrong signal. >> Yeah, they're in this sort of mix of stuff, and the signal is fading in and out. Then the idea was occasionally maybe for some big emotional reason, that message really blasts, and you, defended as you are, are going to get some of it so that our occasional, you know, I pick up on your thought is just that. >> This sounds a little bit like a collective subconscious, where everybody's thoughts and emotions are in this collective stew that sometimes a medium can tap into. >> That's right. It's interesting, because one of James' theories, over the course of this study, James became more and more frustrated as it became harder and became evident that they were not going to be able to line up these ducks in a nice little row. But one of his arguments was that emotions, the power of emotions imprints. He would argue that we leave a kind of imprint on the cosmic background, as it were, so that it's not so much a ghost. It's sort of the echo of who we were. That idea that energy leaves an imprint, almost a physical, tangible imprint, you'll see that in other forms of this psychical research. There's a skill, for lack of a better word, that is called psychometry. Someone hit you, I'm always using you. You're the victim in all my stories, sorry. >> I'll get back to you when I communicate.

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>> You know, this rock is used to bash a victim over the head. We find the body and then, you know, we go out and search later and your medium picks up the rock. The rock is resonating with homicidal energy and pain. The person who can pick up these messages can read it. So, you'll see this sometimes when mediums consult with the police, which they occasionally still do today. They'll bring them, either the t-shirt or something, the last thing the person touched, or something that was found with them, and that's the idea, right, this object holds that emotional pulse, and that the right person can read the signal. >> It opens up wealth of possibilities, doesn't it? >> Endless possibilities. >> A teddy bear or a Barbie doll is not just a teddy bear or a Barbie doll. >> That's right. >> It's invested with this emotional residue. >> It's broadcasting, yeah. Which, you can see what a fascinating-- You can see how people held onto and kind of cherished these fascinating ideas. >> When we talk about this collective idea, I'm thinking of Frederick Meyers. Was he one of the subscribers to that idea? He was on this team. >> That's right. Frederick Meyers was one of the other founders of the British Society for Psychical Research. And one of the supporters of sending Hodgson over. Meyers wrote this fantastic book. I think it was published in the 1890s. It was called Phantasms of the Living. He was interested in what he called the subliminal mind. >> That's a lot of territory. >> It was, and in fact Sigmund Freud studied him, his ideas of unconscious communication where far more spiritual than Freud had in mind, but he was one of the people that, when Freud first came to England he met with Meyers. He thought his idea that minds communicated this invisible way was so interesting. He translated it into some of these ideas that went beyond telepathy between the living to the dead. Just to give you a quick example of that, one of his ideas was that, I'm going to send you an image of me. It's just energy. >> You mean telepathically. >> Right, yeah. I'm saying to you, call up an image of me in your mind, which is easy because I'm sitting right here. That doesn't count as an experiment. Say I was somewhere else and I'm sending you this image and you pick it up. Well, I'm just sending you energy. I'm not sending you-- And it's my energy. My clothes don't have energy, right? >> Oh, now we're going to get into that a little later. >> Are we? The metaphysics of the way people communicate. Meyers was really good at saying, let's pick apart images or let's pick apart communication, and let's look at what the sender brings and what the receiver brings. And to leave Meyers behind for a minute, I did a telepathy experiment when I was at the American Society for Psychical Research working on this book, which was really interesting. I was talking to them about them later and they were talking about the difficulty in their studies. It's so fun to listen to people who do this talk about it. They said one of the hardest colors to send is the color red. >> They wouldn't have any idea of why that would be. >> Not a clue in the world. But all of their experiments showed that when they were trying to send images that were colored in red that people just didn't pick up on the color. They had an experienced sender. You know, if you are completely skeptical then this is a story that I think induces skepticism. This is gonna sound very whoo, whoo. They had a sender who was experienced and knew that there was a problem. He had to send the color red. So he decided that instead of thinking, red, red, red, he would send an image of fire, red flames. The person who was receiving it thought his pants were on fire. He leapt up and ran out of the room, clapping his rear pocket. They said, now that's not what he was trying to send. That's an example of the receiver/sender problem which always makes me laugh. >> Some translation required sometimes. >> Yeah. That's exactly right. >> You mentioned wireless, which of course was in its very earliest stages in the late 19th century. But I think Oliver Lodge was one of the people who really researched into that extensively, and developed wireless communication. I gather that would be a natural bridge for his interest in this. >> And it probably explains part of the reason that Lodge was also involved in the British Society for Psychical Research. He really pre-dated Marconi. When people think, oh, early wireless communication, Marconi. But before Marconi did his work, Lodge was actually running these experiments that showed that you could send communication via radio wave. He was very ahead of his time, actually. >> Where any of these men-- This is late in the life of Charles Darwin. I think he died in 1882, which is just the time when the society was founded, come to think of it. >> That's right. >> Where any of these founders of it in touch directly with Darwin? >> They talked to him some, but another early member of the group, who eventually became kind of disenchanted with them, was very close to Darwin. That was Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace is famous because he actually came up with the theory of natural selection very close to the time Darwin did. Of course, the story is that Wallace was off in tropical parts developing this theory, wrote to Darwin, and Darwin had been working on this theory for well over a decade. He got the letter from Wallace and hastily-- >> Got it out. >> Got it out first. But Wallace was right there in some of the fundamental ideas. But Wallace, yeah, became very involved with this. He stumbled over the idea that evolution could create the whole of the human consciousness. He just couldn't get there. He could see all of the sort of mechanistic parts. Later in this life he was sort of feeling around with the idea, almost. We were developed by evolution from the neck down but our brain belongs to a higher power. It just made Darwin insane. And Darwin, you can find these letters from Darwin to Wallace. Wallace is off experimenting with mediums and showering flowers from the ceiling and all these weird things. He's saying, knock it off. You're doing so much harm to what we're doing. I consider you a college and I just-- Wallace made him nuts. Wallace was making Darwin nuts. And Darwin made Wallace nuts, because he thought he was close-minded. >> They just couldn't reconcile. Some of these researchers, did they prove gullible? >> You know, I thought some of the experiments that Wallace actually sort of glorified were ridiculous. So the short answer is, yes. They would go, and some of these mediums were phenomenally adept. We're so cynical about professional magicians as we age, but when you're a child and you go to a magic show, it looks like magic, right? >> Absolutely. >> There was this sort of childlike approach, and wish to believe, I think, and you saw this. Wallace and other scientists, and some very smart people got suckered. >> One of them was Charles Robert Richet. That's a fairly notorious case, I guess, of being gullible. >> Yes, and you know Richet-- It's one of the things that's so interesting to me about this time period. You had so many brilliant people involved. Richet won the Nobel Prize for his work with anaphylactic shock. One of the other presidents of the British Society for Psychical Research was John Strutt Lord Rayleigh who won the Nobel Prize for his work in atmospheric chemistry. James wrote the Introduction to Psychology. Lodge was a pioneer of radio communication. These guys are really smart, but yeah. You look at it and you think, was it just that you wanted this to be true, that you wanted to be the person? Richet got involved with a couple of mediums. One of them became really notorious. You go back and you look at the performance and you can almost roll you eyes 120 years later. What where you thinking? >> Let's look at some of the more famous, or notorious, of the mediums. There was one group of sisters, the Fox sisters. >> The Fox sisters. >> They had everyone guessing. >> They're early in the history of American Spiritualism. They were three sisters from upstate New York. One of the things, and you know, you'll see this all the time in stories about communication with the dead. I don't know why, but for some reason the dead like to knock. Knock, knock, right? So you had this spirit knocking thing. They can't talk but they can bang around. >> It's not Morse code either, they're just banging. >> No, there was just one for yes, and two for no. The Fox sisters lived in this house where they started claiming to hear this knocking patterns. What was really interesting about them, and it was exactly that, yes

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They would talk to the spirits in the house and they became famous because they swore there was a body in the basement. As they would do this knocking game more and more information about the body in the basement would come out through the knocks. He was a peddler who had disappeared. This was, you know, how he had died. He had been buried in the basement. >> 50 years before. >> 50 years before. No one in the little town even remembered this guy. It was a well covered up murder. When they actually went and excavated the basement they found the body. That launched these kids into fame. PT Barnum had them at his museum in New York. They exemplified the innocence of children. They couldn't possibly be fake. They're just little kids. They became major performers. They ended up exemplifying all the things that people found suspect about mediums of the time. They performed for money. >> Of course, that's a bit of a problem right away. On the one hand you can't blame the medium for trying to make a living, but on the other, the higher the price the more you're likely to suspect the medium of being a fraud. >> The higher the price the more spectacular effect that you want. Pretty soon knocks are a big nothing. I'm paying a lot of money, I want to see flowers floating around the room and stuff. They'd kind of fall down that rabbit hole. >> The Fox sisters, how did they, no pun intended, tap into these others spirits outside of the house though. >> The idea was that-- You know we were talking before about people who were receivers. They had this unique ability to communicate with the dead. >> Once they got out of the house-- >> That didn't go away. They took themselves and their amazing powers with them wherever they went. Which, if it was legitimate, you would expect. If I actually have a gift and I'm able to communicate with the dead, I ought to be able to do it out of my own back yard. They went to New York, they toured. >> How did they prove convincing though? With just a yes or a no answer how do you get in touch with somebody and how would you verify that what you're getting is information that is true? >> This was the big thing that both investigators would do, and skeptical visitors. You would come in with something that the medium couldn't know. You would come in, you would give them a false name. You don't know who I am. You can't have researched me. And if you were really good about this you haven't been standing in line chatting to the ticket taker about your entire life story. You go in and you'd ask-- And if you're really good about it you ask the kind of question that you can't fish around for and that is not open ended. If you go in and you say, is Uncle George there.

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Yes. Then you're setting yourself up. Some people did that. They were easy targets. But if you go in and say, I'm wondering what my third cousin thought about where I buried the gold. Either you know that or you don't. Either your third cousin is there rapping away about the gold or he isn't. If I'm investigating it, it's that kind of thing I'm trying to get at. >> Did the Fox sisters pull that off? >> They did occasionally pull that off. But one of the things, when you go back and look at these kinds of mediums, is they'll do a lot of, well, they were fishing. Well, you know-- >> Losing so much in translation, doesn't it? >> Yeah. So that's one of the reasons that it's interesting to write about because the periods where you can say, how could they have pulled that off? You're not there while they're fishing. You can get these first person accounts. I mean, there was a wonderful story of someone who came in holding a ring. This was not with the Fox sisters, but to give you an example of one where you go, huh? He comes in, he's holding a ring. His mother had just died and he had given her this ring. He had had a special inscription put in it. She had given him a ring that she had inscribed, but he had lost that ring. He goes in, he's got this ring in his hand, like this. She can't see the ring. He says to the medium, what's in my mother's ring? He's waiting for her to somehow see the inscription in his hand. She tells him what's in the ring that he lost. Then you go, okay. And you do, you read some of these and you're like, how could that have happened? >> If you take everybody at face value how could it have happened? >> Yeah. This was a guy actually who was a facility member at Harvard and a friend of James. He wrote, I scheduled the appointment. I didn't give my real name. I can't remember all the other concealing things. I went in and that was the only question I asked. Then he said, the way we all do, and I have no idea what happened. I think a lot of people who go, I can't explain that. It's just some weird, flukey coincidence. Or, she could actually read my mind. Or, this was of course what they were hoping to prove, my dead mother-- I don't mean to say that quite so mockingly. What they would hope was, my dead mother was in there telling her what was in the missing ring. >> Yes, but it's still inconclusive, unless you know something only the dead person could know, which would be a little hard to come up with. >> Right, and this was not something-- Later they tried those kind of experiments. Only the dead person would know this. But man, that's a hard one to do. >> Yes, I can imagine. >> It's those kinds of little weirdnesses that you found with almost all the mediums at different points. And they were able to play it out because you can rescue yourself by getting it completely right every once in a while and overcome all the fumbles and the slips. >> This is true. But in the case of the Fox sisters they eventually-- >> Eventually they couldn't rescue themselves, right. They were right at the top of the game. What really happened to them was, I think-- You know these were like little, uneducated girls from upstate New York. They never were educated. Everything about how they made a living was that they were able to talk to the dead. As that became sketchier to people they got less and less money. And they drank. They were poor, they were uneducated. They were living on kind of the fringes of the medium movement. Almost all three of them, I think, became alcoholics. You see them sliding down this hill of fumbling through not doing any of it very well. >> Did they admit to fakery? >> They sold that story. It was very interesting when you look at the end of their lives. They're in desperate shape. There were three of them and I think almost all of them just drank themselves to death. They, all three, died young. But at one point one of them sold a story saying it was all fake. Then she sold another story saying, no, she'd made that up. That the end of their lives they weren't saying anything you could believe. Now, my researchers studied something that they call the decline effect. Which is that, and this was, again, the theory. I'm a leaky radio receiver, right? I'm getting bombarded by all these signals, and after awhile my circuits fry. And so I'm just not going to be able to pick up these signals in the same way. One of the charitable arguments-- Let's make this charitable argument, this is the real deal. These kids when they were little, man, spirits were knocking them everywhere. It burns them out. >> That is sort of a standard idea, that children have these special powers that wear off. If you get into, for example, the reincarnation ideas, that children can supposedly have some of this remarkable recollection of a past life. But them they lose it after they get a little older. >> So you think, that's an interesting idea. Maybe, maybe. This is like a whole area that lives on maybe, maybe. >> In some cases, I gather, it lives on a big no. Madam Blavatsky being one of those. >> If we're going to pick somebody who really crashes and burns much faster and in a much more spectacular way than the Fox sisters. Helena Blavatsky was a self-professed-- Sort of like she almost positioned herself as a goddess of this philosophical religion that she had invented. It was called Theosophy. She could talk to the dead. The dead were very handy and direct with her. They would write little notes, from somewhere. You never saw the dead, but she had this cabinet for instance. Someone would come to visit her and she'd ask the dead to answer the question. A drawer would open up and the letter from the dead would pop out. I mean, this is kind of thing where you almost can't hardly stop from rolling your eyes. >> Beware of dark rooms and cabinets. >> Yes, that's exactly right, really creepy cabinets. But apparently she was very charismatic and people were very charmed by her. She had a big following. She did these presentations. She didn't always lurk around her cabinet. I picked the cabinet because the cabinet was basically her downfall. The Society for Psychical Research decided that they would make a case study of her. That was usually the kiss of death for medium. There were exceptions, but often the kiss of death. >> It's amazing how often they agreed. >> Yeah. She had been performing in New York. She was in Philadelphia, she was in New York, she was in England. She went to sort of commune with the mystics of India. They sent Richard Hodgson who later went over to run the ASPR in the United States to India to hunt her down and find out if she was legitimate or not. Which is what he did. I think she tried to have him killed while he was there. I mean, it was a very dicey situation. But he eventually was able to take apart her fake cabinet and show that the drawers slid in both direction. And that she had servants on one side popping in the letters from the dead and all this stuff. >> I gather that one of her maids was friends with somebody else's maid or something like that, some networking behind the scenes. >> That's right. That was one of the things you would do. You'd do your very best to find out secrets about your clients. Servants talk, you know. She had this fabulous network of information. After Hodgson made the sliding drawer discovery her cabinet and the house it was in burned to the ground mysteriously. >> Imagine that. >> Yeah, surprise, surprise. So the evidence was gone, but she never recovered from that. She disappeared off into Russia or somewhere and never returned. >> But there were a couple of mediums that really resisted exposure, or-- >> To this day. Probably the most famous of those, a certainly the one that William James focused on the most, was a Boston-based medium named Leonora Piper. There's a very famous saying by William James about Leonora Piper, which is that, if you want to prove that all crows are not black, you need only find one white crow. And he said, and Leonora Piper is my white crow. His mother-in-law had gone to see her after one of his, I think it was his youngest, son had died. He went very reluctantly to see her, under a fake name, etc. She was able to not only name the son, but tell things about the son that they just hadn't shared. He started studying her. When you look at some of the things that she did. She was the medium involved in that ring story I was telling you about earlier. You start to say, okay, she's really creeping me out. I will tell you that I had that feeling sometimes when I was reading some of Leonora Pipers sittings. I'd go, okay, this is really weirding me out. Hodgson, when he came to the United States, had her followed by detectives. He was absolutely sure she was faking it. >> He wanted to break her. >> Yeah. He hired private detectives without telling anyone, including William James, to follow her around and see where she was getting her information from. They couldn't find anything. >> She had this way of somehow getting the information and nobody ever found out whether it was earth-bound or anything else. It just seemed to defy explanation. >> She did at least throughout the 19th century. As she got older, and you can look at later sittings in her life. She eventually just said, I'm not doing this anymore. You start going, that got a little sketchy toward the end. Right? But in her earlier years they did extraordinary things to prove she was a fake. She would go into a trance and Hodgson would light a match and hold it on her arm to try to prove it was a fake trance. He dropped acid in her mouth once to see if he could bring her out of the trance that way. They did all these horrible things to her. At one point they actually moved her to England. She went into Oliver Lodge's house. He fired all of his servants, which is really unfair. >> For science. >> Yeah, for science, all these guys loose their jobs, so that no one had any history of him. He read her mail in advance. They do all this stuff where they kind of seal her into a box. Then they bring in people from England that she could not know under fake names, and she tells them stories about themselves and their family. You just start going, I have no idea what this is. It was really interesting. >> We have also the one question that you touched on earlier, having to do with the spirit appearances. This whole question of, now wait a minutes, what about clothes on ghosts? How does that happen? Does the clothing also have this emotional value to it that somehow lives on after life? >> Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of the whole theory of, you know, what do we see? People talked about this a lot in terms of crisis apparitions. >> Right. >> This is the most common, so-called, super-natural experience. Someone you know, you're related to, dies unexpectedly and you have some kind of a-- You hear their voice. >> You might see them. >> You see them. >> We certainly have plenty of accounts of that. You see them without knowing they're dead. >> They touch you on the hand. It was something that these researchers compiled thousands of cases of this. People still study them today. Let's just say, for instance, that some relative dies. In that theory we were talking about earlier the blast of energy, they want to send you one last goodbye. That last of energy penetrates all your defenses and you see them. They're wearing-- You see them in their favorite red sweater. Well, yeah, but the sweater doesn't send you a blast of energy. They weren't wearing that favorite red sweater necessarily when they died. Why are you seeing them in the darn red sweater? Meyers was like, what, are we gonna do metaphysics of trousers here? The energy blast of the clothes from the past. But their point was this, if I go back to my rose analogy and say, I'm thinking of roses. You might imagine a rose garden and I'm thinking of a vase of roses in my living room. Your mind supplies the details. >> It gets the general idea. >> And your mind, if you are receiving an image from me, would dress me up. You supply the clothes. That was really the idea, that our own minds mess with whatever this is too. It's not just static from one side. >> As the receiver, you're coloring it. >> That's exactly right. And that makes perfect sense. >> So many other things seem to work that way. >> We add out own experience. That was one of the things that people would say, why would ghosts-- And ghosts are a different topic. You see a ghost, they're an energy. They're essentially some paranormal energy from the past. Why are they wearing clothes? That's you. You're putting on the clothes. >> We hope. >> Either that or there's a lot of really X-rated spirits running around. It's really an interesting idea. >> Please, something in a size nine before I can appear. I want to get in a lot more so we're going to do some sort of scampering through some of these images that you provided. This is just a-- Would you call it a cartoon of a medium? >> Yes, and so when we were talking about-- Again, so Leonora Piper just did this channeling the dead kind of stuff, But there were other mediums, as I said, who did more physical manifestations. One of those was what they used to call these talking tables. Everyone would sit. Boy, I wish we could do this too. We'd have our fingers on the table like this and it would rise. This counter would just rise. That was a talking table. That table is talking. The dead are communicating. They, of course, would build special tables that would rise, or the table would rock. It was talking. Michael Faraday, who was a quite famous British scientist, actually did some experiments involving people's hands on things that rolled, showing that you're not even aware sometimes that-- >> You're pushing. >> Moving it along. >> When we get to those planchettes in a little while we'll get to that idea. How about a case where the table actually-- >> Levitates off the floor? >> Yes, we're talking inches if not feet. >> Yeah! Some of these, as I said, had all kinds of fancy devices that allowed them to do that. There were hidden wires in the rooms and things like that. Some of them were just great mysteries, Norm. You could like at images with these tables and you don't see anything. The people who are in the room are not seeing anything. It's just like, uh-huh. >> One of the masters of that, I gather, was D. D. Home. >> Yes, and D. D. Home-- I won't say that he didn't have all kinds of if-y issues about him, but even years later D. D. Home was one of these professional mediums who just kind of walked in a cloud of mystical power. One of the things that he would famously do is he would just float to the ceiling. People would be running around trying to feel. >> He would just float to the ceiling. >> He would just float to the ceiling. There's actually this phenomenally-- I mean, I found it kind of hilarious because it's couched in a very Victorian-- At one point apparently he floated right out the window of the building and then floated back in. You read that and you think, man, that guy had a lot of wires set up around the room or something. But he pulled this off beautifully, because he was such a performer, just cloaked in mystery. He was legendary in his time. Without finding him in the least believable, he was legendary. >> Now the spirit photography was something that really seemed you could fake pretty easily. >> Yes. And that same way that we want physical proof, show my that that ghost is here. You're telling me my dear, departed husband is in the room with me. Prove it. So people would go to see special spirit photographers. In the day of Photoshop, today we all know you could fake almost anything. But you could do that as well then. You could overlap plates. You could draw on plates. >> I never thought this one was very convincing. It doesn't even look that much like Lincoln to me. >> No, but Mary Todd Lincoln really- >> She bought it? >> Oh, and she had seances in the White House before he died. She totally believed in Spiritualism. There was a quite famous American spirit photographer named Mumler. He created this image of something that sort of looked like her husband hovering. If I'm a clever spirit photographer I don't want an exact image anyway. >> Of course. >> I'm transformed by death, but I want that general kind of feel of something hovering. I mean, if it had been me I would never have gone to a known spirit photographer. I would have gone to an ordinary photographer and said, take a picture. I want to see if my husband is in the room. >> Here's another one. >> I love this one. This one is so solid you're thinking to yourself, man, why didn't she see that ghost? Anyone could have seen that ghost. But you can almost see the two overlapping photographic plates that were used to create that image. >> Now we mentioned also the planchette and the unconscious if not subconscious movement of it by the people. This would be used with a Ouija Board? >> No, they actually used them to write. The image that we're looking at here is of the planchette that pre-dated the Ouija Board. It was, you know, this kind of oval shaped wood. At one end of it you'll see a round hole. You would put a pen or a pencil through that hole. >> For the automatic writing. >> Then you would put it on a sheet of paper, put your hands on top of the planchette. >> This is the sort of thing you would get. >> The spirit would guide your hand. This one that we're looking at now if particularly interesting because this was from a medium in France who claimed that her hands were being controlled by the spirits of Martians. She couldn't write in English, so she-- >> Oh, is that it? >> Yes, that's Martian language. But you see this. Leonora Piper did automatic writing, pages and pages of these scrawls that were communications from dead people. Lots of mediums did it. The Ouija Board came later. The Ouija Board came, boy, it was about in the 1880s. It was actually mostly a creation of Sear Roebuck. The word Ouija-- I love this because I had a Ouija Board when I was a kid, right? >> Yes and no. >> Yeah, I was one of those people who just didn't even mess around. Push, push, push. It was boring. How long were you gonna sit there waiting for the thing to move? I was always shoving it. Ouija was actually just yes, yes. It's a yes, yes board. Oui from the French, ja from the German. Yes, yes. They put some mystical pictures on it. It sold like hotcakes. People called them talking boards, or spirit boards. But you had essentially a planchette without a pen that you pushed. >> Here's another example of a table turning party, in fact. >> Yeah, because people were so into this idea that even you, the Everyday Deborah, can channel the spirits. They would set up these little tables and invite their guests. People would stand around and, you know, essentially do the Michael Faraday experiment. The table would move. >> And now speaking of ghosts and I suppose ectoplasm, although I'm not sure how key of an ingredient that is in a ghost, this looks like a latter day picture, or at least a later one, of what's supposedly a ghost. Do you know the story behind this one? >> This is from a supposedly haunted house in England. It was not taken by a spirit photographer, but just a photographer. I think it was the cover of a magazine in the 1930s. It's later than our time. The story was that the photographer was in the hall of this house. The hall suddenly got very cold and he's snapping pictures. When he gets back to the darkroom he sees this slightly unformed image on the stairs. Actually, it's one of my favorite spirit photo images because it's just a little more translucent than some of the other ones. >> You can see that photography has advanced one way or the other. >> Much, much. >> Bottom line, of all this research that these distinguished scientists did, where did it go? >> It really didn't go that far. I mean, it's interesting when you look at it and you see William James later in his life saying, originally I thought we would answer all these questions in my lifetime. But now I'm not positive we'll answer them in my great grandchildren's lifetime. You have remnants of it. The American Society for Psychical Research, which you're looking at now, is still in New York. It's just off Central Park West. An heir to one of the Xerox family members left them the building. He had spent many years trying to channel his great grandfather or something. When he died-- >> Trying to get a Xerox copy of image. >> Right. You would think, of all people, he would get them. >> It would form right there. >> He left them this building I went there a number of times because they have letters from Hodgson and James. They have a phenomenal achieve for doing research. They're still there. I did a telepathy experiment there. I was a participant in one. They're still trying to answer these questions. But always think of this as this kind of golden window where socially everyone is trying to bridge this gap in a way that I don't think we try to do today quite so much. These major leading scientists can hunt for ghosts, and science itself is still building itself, still establishing its position as the dominate paradigm. Well, now it is a dominate paradigm. >> It can only lose in pursuing something like this. >> That's exactly right. That window closed. Even though you can go back and say, they found some interesting things and there's some unanswered questions that are kind of fascinating and some curious examples, we're never gonna bring time back again. It's like an artifact of our time, where we believed that we could walk through that door and find these answers. And then the door closed. >> Deborah Blum, thanks for coming through our door. >> It was a pleasure. >> Always a pleasure. Fascinating stuff. >> Thank you. >> I look forward to the next time. >> Me too. >> I'm Norman Gilliland. Thanks for joining us. I hope you can be with me next time around for University Place Presents.