Unbelievable

Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory

Stacy Horn

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061971433
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

"Author Stacy Horn dissects all the things that go bump in the night—ghosts, poltergeists, your ex-boyfriend Klaus—in [her] macabre book."
— Marie Claire

A fascinating, eye-opening collection of "Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, " Unbelievable by Stacy Horn explores science's remarkable first attempts to prove—or disprove—the existence of the paranormal. A featured contributor on the popular NPR program "All Things Considered, " Horn has been praised by Mary Roach, bestselling author of Spook, for her "awe-fueled curiosity [and] top-flight reporting skills." Horn attacks a most controversial subject with Unbelievable —a book that will appeal to armchair scientists as well as fans of TV's Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, and Crossing Over with John Edward.

ONE

Before a small, unknown Methodist college was transformed into Duke University in the late 1920s, the city of Durham had been a backwater, known mostly for minor league baseball and cigarettes. The outskirts were bleak, and the sickly sweet smell of tobacco leaves being cured in warehouses was everywhere, wafting down the streets and on past the run-down shacks that housed the factory workers. Duke University’s campus, however, was a lush, green, magnolia-scented paradise. An infusion of millions of tobacco dollars had created a rebirth, coinciding with the arrival of J. B. and Louisa Rhine, who’d been searching the country for just such an academic haven. Duke was the clean slate where they could begin their scientific pursuit of the paranormal away from the darkened parlors of charlatan mediums and under the guidance of an enthusiastic and protective mentor, Dr. William McDougall, the head of Duke’s nascent psychology department. In the midst of all the building and revitalization that surrounded them, J. B. Rhine and Dr. McDougall talked mostly of death.

Rhine had spent the past six months studying the desperate and repeated attempts of a public school administrator named John Thomas to communicate with his recently deceased wife through mediums. The results were thrilling—the mediums were frequently able to provide facts known only to Thomas. They inspired a suspension of Rhine’s hypercritical disbelief, but after all his efforts, Rhine was at an impasse. He’d done everything he could to verify the facts contained in the mediums’ messages, even traveling hundreds of miles to a small centuries-old cemetery in upstate New York to confirm a few obscure séance-transmitted details. The information the mediums were communicating was almost always correct. But the number of verifiable facts, however staggering, did not prove that the mediums were getting their information from beyond the grave. While he had eliminated the possibility of fraud or a few good guesses, Rhine knew there could be another explanation. Telepathy is the ability of one mind to communicate directly with another without the use of any of the known senses. The mediums could have gotten their facts from the man’s dead wife, but they could also have gotten them from the mind of someone living, like the husband himself.

So which was it, dead wife or telepathy? There was no way to answer the question scientifically—Rhine obviously couldn’t get the dead wife into a laboratory, and while there had been some work toward substantiating telepathy in the past, the current “status of experimental telepathy” was nowhere near the point of explaining the mediums’ results. But McDougall disagreed. The evidence for telepathy was “astonishingly good,” he insisted. The problem was, a consistently reliable experiment under controlled settings hadn’t been found. The two men decided that before he did anything else, Rhine had to design just such an experiment. McDougall, it turned out, was in a unique position to help make that happen. The study of the paranormal and life after death was as much a passion of his as Rhine’s, and he’d left a prestigious position at Harvard for the promise of funding and support for psychical research from the president of Duke University himself. McDougall would do everything in his power to further Rhine’s search for proof of life beyond death. Before a decade was up Durham was no longer just a tobacco town. By 1934 Duke University and Rhine’s amazing experiments in what would come to be known as ESP, extrasensory perception, would captivate a nation. “The success of Rhine’s E.S.P. work,” McDougall proclaimed, “is about the only bright spot in a dark world.” It was the first hard evidence that the elusive proof of life after death might be out there.

 

The journey to Duke had started in a dimly lit parlor in Boston, Massachusetts, with a beautiful woman who claimed she could talk to the dead. It was 1926, and mediums were all the rage, but Boston’s Mina Crandon, the wife of the respected surgeon Le Roi G. Crandon, had every medium in America beat. In séances conducted in a fourth-floor parlor in fashionable, relentlessly respectable Beacon Hill, the captivating Mina, who went by the pseudonym Margery, held out this promise: You will never die, never disappear forever, and now, come close and hold my hands, and my feet, just to reassure yourself that this is all real, it’s not a trick, and death is not the end. Mina often wore only slippers, stockings, and a dressing gown, which her husband would part so her guests could stare, in the name of science and discovery, to see the ectoplasmic emissions that sometimes came from her mouth, her ear, and from between her legs. Sex and immortality. What could be more irresistible? Some didn’t know how to react. But then Dr. Crandon would invite them to reach out and touch her. At very special sittings, held in near total darkness, Crandon would flash a red light, and from between the spread legs of a now naked Mina would emerge what was described as a frightening “flaccid,” “tongue-like projection.” The Crandons proclaimed it the ectoplasmic emission of the hand of Mina’s brother Walter, who had died in a railroad accident in 1911. It was horrifying. According to an account written by Thomas R. Tietze, one witness said the end “was broken up irregularly like amputated fingers.” But no one looked away. Do you want to touch it, Dr. Crandon would ask. Many recoiled, although one sitter said it felt like a woman’s breast. Others said it felt like cold, raw beef or wet rubber. These were very effluent times, and the paranormal was frequently wet, dripping, and organic. Other mediums would expel goose fat–lubricated cheesecloth. Harvard professors later concluded that Mina’s “hand” was constructed from the lung tissue of an animal. Professor McDougall, then still at Harvard, was the first to state the obvious. “The more interesting question is—How did it come to be within the anatomy?” Mina never permitted the kind of inspection needed to answer the question, but she did once ask Hereward Carrington, a researcher on the committee from Scientific American, “Wouldn’t you like to kiss me?” The magazine had offered twenty-five hundred dollars to anyone who could prove they had psychical abilities, and Carrington was there to investigate her claims. “What was I to do? She was there in my arms,” Carrington later pleaded for understanding. “She was making advances to every man in sight,” another visitor confirmed. Carrington would sit with Mina forty times.

During these sittings Mina would rest her feet on his knees and hold his hands. Carrington was the only one on that particular committee, which included Harry Houdini and avoid McDougall, to vote in her favor. Ultimately, the Scientific American committee remained neutral, neither pronouncing her genuine nor fake, but their investigation created a controversy that only made Mina more famous than ever. Other groups would insist she was authentic and defend her forcefully and passionately. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even presented Mina with a silver cup that read, “in recognition of your heroic struggle for truth.”

And so with her husband in the same room, men continued to flock to the Boston parlor to gaze at Mina’s breasts and vagina, and bind her, touch her, kiss her, and make her smile, all with Dr. Crandon’s approval, and all the while pretending that there was absolutely no sexual context.

Into that overheated, erotically charged townhouse walked Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine. Known as J.B., and Banks to his friends, the thirty-year-old Rhine was accompanied by his wife, Dr. Louisa Rhine, whom everyone called Louie. Rhine had started out intending to become a minister, but knowledge had replaced faith while he was in college, and he renounced religion. Since academia didn’t yet have an answer about life after death, Rhine started looking for other ways to approach the problem. J.B. and Louie had heard about spirit photography and other popular vehicles to reach beyond the grave. They listened to the experts of the day, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, who was absolutely certain that he had communicated with his dead son. His conviction was impressive, and his suggestion that psychic phenomena could be subjected to scientific investigation reinforced the Rhines’ growing interest. The work Rhine had been pursuing in botany and biology no longer seemed real or vital enough to fill an entire lifetime. By the end of the year J.B. and Louie had resigned their positions at West Virginia University, sold all their furniture, and come to Boston, where some of the most exciting work in psychical research, as it was then called, was being conducted, and to Harvard University and the distinguished British psychologist Dr. William McDougall, who, like them, believed psychical research was a suitable subject for university study.

The Rhines first sat with a medium named Mrs. Minnie Soule, but the results were disappointing, and so they turned to the famous Mina Crandon, who had impressed so many of their new Boston colleagues. When the Rhines climbed the stairs of the Crandons’ townhouse at 10 Lime Street on a Friday evening in midsummer, July 1, 1926, their expectations were enormous.

Things went wrong from the start. The Rhines were told that they were going to get the “standard” sitting, which was meant for newcomers and not scientists. The standard sitting began with dinner and drinks—adding alcohol to the already heady mix of sex and the promise of life everlasting. On that particular night, Dr. Crandon offered a glass of champagne to teetotaler Rhine, who declined. When the meal was completed, Mrs. Crandon left the room to change into her dressing gown and slippers.

The Rhines were not allowed to look around the parlor before the séance began, but they were given the various contraptions that would be used later in the evening to examine, like the “voice machine.” This was basically a tube and a mouthpiece that was inserted into Mina’s mouth, making it impossible for her to speak and thereby proving it was the dead talking and not Mina. The Rhines also examined Mina’s trumpet, something common to mediums of the day. Trumpets were used to project the voices of the dead and were essentially glorified megaphones. The Rhines looked everything over and could find no obvious trickery in any of Mina’s devices.

Mina entered the room. Wires were attached to her wrists and ankles as she sat in a chair in a cabinet, her hands coming through the sides, resting on shelves. A leather collar was fixed around her neck and fastened to the back wall. Once again, if they’d been asked, everyone at the séance would have insisted that these measures were taken to prove that it was not fraud. (It had nothing to do with seeing a beautiful woman in bondage.) The front door to Mina’s cabinet was open, and the guests formed a semicircle around her. Rhine sat at her immediate right.

The lights went out. From then on they would sit in darkness except when Dr. Crandon turned on his red light so they could see a particular effect. When Mina fell into a trance, the spirit of her brother Walter assumed command. Walter would keep up a friendly banter throughout the trance portion of the evening.

Rhine would later describe the séance as a performance with seven acts. The details seem quaint now. A basket floated above Mina’s head in one act. In another, the guests were asked to volunteer personal items that Mina would identify in the dark. The voice machine was brought out, and once the mouthpiece was positioned, Walter recited the Lord’s Prayer in German. Mina’s trumpet appeared and was heard bumping around inside of the cabinet for a bit before it was held up by unseen forces and thrown into the room. At one point Rhine saw Mina use her foot to kick the trumpet closer when it had temporarily gotten away from her. There was also so much play in the wires that tied Mina’s hands that Rhine could hear the tug of the wire whenever “Walter” was said to have thrown something.

Two weeks later Rhine wrote to the American Society of Psychical Research’s board of trustees. The Rhines were members, and the society’s support of Mina was part of the reason for their initial enthusiasm. “I am disgusted, not only with the case but with the attitude our Journal has taken on it, sponsoring it before the scientific world. The whole case is sure to crash some of these days and where will our reputations be then? We will be the laughing stock of the world for years to come.”

J.B. and Louie submitted a scathing account of the sitting to the society’s journal. The society sat on it a little too long for the Rhines, and so they decided to try the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology at the same time. Although simultaneous submissions are considered bad form, Rhine wanted to secure a professional reputation as a serious scientist, and the American Society of Psychical Research was beginning to lose its reputation for doing serious scientific research. Their report was accepted by the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Rhine resigned his membership in the American Society of Psychical Research, and in the beginning of 1927 their paper was published.

Their report described the event in damning detail. Where the Rhines couldn’t exactly explain Mina’s deception they offered, “The sister art of magic offers ready-made so many instruments and methods that it is foolish for us to ponder long over the question of ‘just how she did it.’” And then the Rhines make an argument that would be turned against them for the rest of their lives: “If we can never know to a relative certainty that there was no trickery possible, no inconsistencies present, and no normal action occurring, we can never have a science and never really know anything about psychic phenomena.”

There is a note of cruelty at the end of the Rhines’ report. Mina did this, they wrote, to create a bond between herself and her husband, who had been married twice already and who might one day start looking for the next Mrs. Crandon. Mina knew her husband had a morbid fear of death and an intense interest in psychic affairs, and this was her way of holding on to him. In an academic journal the Rhines’ allegations seem jarring and out of place—it reads like gossip and is far from the sober, scientific tone of the rest of the report. Still, this was J. B. Rhine’s first salvo in a lifelong battle to bring the paranormal out from the darkness of the sexually infused parlor and into the bright and unemotional light of the laboratory—and he pulled no punches.

Things were never the same after that for Mina. Later, in 1939, what Mina had feared the most happened: Her husband died and she was alone. After that, she gained weight, lost her looks, and started drinking. She was so depressed she once tried to throw herself off the roof at Lime Street in the middle of a séance. “I attended about 5 nights during the week,” a friend of Rhine’s wrote to him, “and Mina was drunk every night…Only on one occasion (Saturday morning) was she sober.” Poor Mina. She was never out to exploit anyone’s grief and she always refused to contact dead relatives. She was just a scared, uneducated farm girl doing the only thing she could think of to survive. The boozy and tragic sideshow finally came to an end when Mina died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1941. She was only fifty-two.

The Rhines’ report was the beginning of Mina’s downfall, but for others it became a call to arms. There’s a story that’s often repeated that just after the report came out, Bostonians opened their morning papers to this simple but blunt advertisement, which had been placed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: “J.B. Rhine is an ass.” When various newspapers broke the story of his skeptical report about Mina, Doyle and others rushed to her defense. Members of the two premier psychical research organizations at the time, the Boston Society of Psychic Research and the American Society for Psychical Research, shot off angry letters to the editors calling Rhine a knave and a fool and at best, immodest.

While there was something exciting about taking on the paranormal establishment, the winter of 1927 was not a good time for J. B. Rhine. Just as their account became public his mother died unexpectedly. She went fast, and for that Rhine was grateful, but it also made him desperate for comfort. “I must find a place for her, yes, must by all the laws or ways of thought. That, or turn my back upon her memories and forget her.” The question about life after death was even more important now, and Rhine was ready to battle the overly credulous Conan Doyles of the world to come up with a real and testable way to find the answer.

 

The same month the Rhines sat with Mina in Boston, the man who would bring J.B. and Louie to Duke was having an entirely different encounter with a medium. John Thomas had lost his wife, Ethel, two months before, when she’d gone into the hospital for what was supposed to be a simple operation but instead had died on the table. Thomas had such a hard time accepting her death that he began looking for her everywhere. The spirit, the essence of whom he loved, he believed, couldn’t just be gone. If she still existed somewhere in some way, then there was the possibility that he could reach her. Thomas, who directed the finances of all the public schools in Detroit, was a scientific man, and sitting with mediums was both an act of desperation and a serious investigation.

Thomas had better luck than the Rhines. When he sat with Minnie Soule, the first medium to disappoint the Rhines, the results were stunning. She didn’t just get a few details right about his deceased wife, she got sixty-two things right. Thomas kept meticulous notes of the sittings and the information the mediums communicated. Unlike the dark séances of Mina and others, the Soule séances were conducted in the light and were markedly more professional. What’s more, John Thomas recognized his wife’s personality in the communications. The jokes that were made were very much Ethel’s particular sense of humor. When Ethel said, “I am the most alive dead one you ever saw,” Thomas couldn’t help rejoicing. In December, when the Rhines were struggling to recover hope about psychical research, John Thomas was bursting with it.

Thomas contacted the psychology department at Harvard, which put him in touch with Rhine. Thomas wrote that he was leaving for England to sit with a medium who didn’t know him or anything about him. If the results he got with a medium there were as convincing, would J.B. and Louie be willing to work with him and help him? Without committing himself, Rhine nonetheless communicated his interest.

The results Thomas got from the British medium were again startling. It wasn’t so much the individual revelations, like identifying an unusual necklace that had been buried with his wife. It was the sheer number of facts, which would go up into the thousands by the time he was done. “He came back a different man,” Louie remembered. “He was the man who had lost his wife and now he found her again.” He was no longer alone. “It had an effect on us too,” Louie admitted. Maybe the results were genuine.

Through a British medium Ethel had urged her husband to see McDougall, who by this time had left Harvard for Duke. Thomas wrote McDougall that he had seven hundred fifty pages of material from all his visits with mediums and he wanted to do something with it. Thomas suggested that the Rhines come to Duke to work on his material in an advisory capacity, and then wrote J.B. to see what he’d do if McDougall approved. Rhine mulled this over and though he wrote back, “I am vacillating between a tremendous elation and a gloomy despair with regard to the whole field,” at the end of the summer when Thomas wired Rhine with the news that McDougall had given his approval, the Rhines started packing their bags.

The very next month, September 1927, J.B. and Louie were installed in Durham. Once again, J. B. Rhine had pulled up stakes to answer what was coming to be known as the survival question: Is there life after death? Rhine was excited about Thomas’s material, yet hesitant. The following spring, however, McDougall and Rhine had agreed telepathy was the most promising lead Thomas’s results offered, and the place to pursue it was not in the ever-expanding cemeteries strewn across the country, but inside a laboratory.

TWO

A few months later, on the other side of the country, in Long Beach, California, Mary Craig, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Letters Received at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Epilogue
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Other Books by Stacy Horn
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher