Welcome to the PEEP Podcast. I’m your host Nicolle Morock, and on this episode, we’re continuing our review the history of parapsychology with part 3. If you haven’t listened to Episodes 13 and 15 yet, I recommend you do since they are the first two parts of this series. However, it’s not necessary for understanding tonight’s episode.

But first, if you’re listening to this on the day it releases – June 23^rd 2021 – you have just one day left to participate in Episode 17’s “What do you hear?” EVP experiment. That form closes for answers at the end of June 24^th! I’ll reveal the results of the experiment and the stories behind those EVP captures in Episode 20.

Once again, I’d like to start by crediting my main source for this topic, a book called Parapsychology: A Concise History by John Beloff. When I quote or paraphrase other sources, I’ll let you know.

Considering we have a few centuries of parapsychology to cover, I’m breaking the subject into several episodes, and using them to fill in spaces between guests. I’m always thankful for the researchers and story-sharers who come on the show, and I’m happy to work around their schedules, so when the calendar shows a lull between interviews, we’ll return to this topic.

By the way, if you’re interested in sharing your personal stories of paranormal investigations with a scientific mindset, near-death experiences, premonitions, after-death communication, or other paranormal and parapsychological topics, I’d love to have you on. You can be as anonymous as you’d like. And if you have a tip for research that I could highlight or an idea for a show topic that can be scientifically studied, fill out the form at peeppodcast.com. I promise not to spam you or sell your info. It’s strictly to make getting in touch with me easy.

Now back to the history of parapsychology. Tonight, we’ll briefly look at the era of Spiritualism as it took shape in the mid-1800s.

On page 38 of Parapsychology: A Concise History, Beloff opens Chapter 2 with this observation:

The importance of spiritualism in the history of parapsychology is twofold. First, it revived the age-old question of a life after death in an empirically testable form. Secondly, from the séance-room there issued a steady stream of puzzling phenomena, much of it of a physical nature, which, irrespective of its implications for the survival problem, cried out for impartial investigation.

While there has always been the nagging question of what happens to us after we die and whether our consciousness somehow survives the body, Spiritualism seemed to give a pretty matter-of-fact answer. Not only does it survive separation from the body, but it can also continue to communicate with the living. The idea may bring comfort to those of us in mourning, but it also creates a plethora of possible problems including the ire of popular organized religions, the rise of opportunistic fraudsters, and a great number of deeper questions which may be impossible to empirically answer even today.

But then, nothing stays impossible forever. Well, almost nothing.

Whether you’re reading Beloff’s book, listening to Season 2 of Aaron Mahnke’s Unobscured podcast, which does a wonderfully deep dive into the whole history of spiritualism, or just perusing the internet – like Wikipedia, SmithsonianMag.com, and more – most sources credit the Fox sisters as the first people to take an alleged poltergeist episode and turn it into events that later became termed as seances.

Kate and Maggie Fox lived with their parents in a farmhouse in Hydesville, NY, when the knocking started in the spring of 1848. The girls were initially frightened by the raps on the walls and the furniture, but eventually they and their parents started asking the unseen hand questions, and it seemed to answer them. The girls told a neighbor who came over to bear witness to the strange occurrences, and from there, the news spread. Their parents believed the girls were communicating with the spirit of a deceased individual, and eventually, the family moved.

Maggie and Kate went to live with their older sister Leah in Rochester, and Leah saw opportunity in the unfortunate events. To make a long story short, the sisters became famous for their supposed ability to communicate with the dead, devising a way to interpret the knocks into answers to questions. They first performed in private settings, but it wasn’t long before they were showing off in theaters across the northeast. Believers and skeptics alike gathered to witness the phenomena. Believers saw it as proof of life after death and skeptics looked for ways the girls could be duping gullible audiences out of their hard-earned money.

Decades later, after a lifetime of seances, struggles, and interpersonal turmoil, Maggie Fox publicly admitted the girls had been faking the raps all along. But then, just a year later, she recanted that confession – leaving their legacy in doubt and scandal.

Another famous medium from the same era actually got started on his journey before the Fox sisters but took longer to gather a following. In fact, he contacted the Fox sisters not long after they first started their public appearances. His name was Andrew Jackson Davis.

According to an article on smithsonianmag.com, The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism, Davis would become known as “The John the Baptist of Modern Spiritualism.” He combined the ideas of an 18^th century Swedish philosopher and mystic named Emmanuel Swedenborg who believed there were three heavens, three hells, and the world of spirits – an interim destination similar to earth – and he believed he’d communicated with spirits of all those realms – with the ideas of Anton Mesmer, whom we covered in Episode 15.

The article states that Davis claimed, “that Swedenborg’s spirit spoke to him during a series of mesmeric trances,” and goes on to say:

Davis recorded the content of these messages and in 1847 published them in a voluminous tome titled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. “It is a truth,” he asserted, predicting the rise of Spiritualism, “that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres…all the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communication will be established.”

When he heard about the Fox sisters, Davis believed his work was just getting started. He connected with the Fox sisters and their fame increased his clout – in a rising tide lifts all boats sort of way.

There are two types of mediums: mental and physical. Mental mediums claim to communicate with the dead through an internal knowing, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, etc. They don’t need devices such as rapping, Ouija boards, and automatic writing. Physical mediums use those devices and some claim to be able to make spirits appear – visibly – or they are channels for other physical manifestations like ectoplasm, music, and voices – things that the observer can sense with his own five senses.

During the rise of spiritualism, scientists, skeptics, and other interested intellectuals had difficulty studying mediums, and after Maggie’s initial confession to fraud, it was easier for skeptics to dismiss them group out of hand. Physical mediums were just a bit easier to study because by definition, there should be physical evidence of the phenomena and not just the experiencer’s word.

I should point out that no matter how important the question of the survival of consciousness after bodily death is, early parapsychologists were more focused on the ways in which mediums were receiving the messages that were purported to answer that question. Later, parapsychologists would focus on the messages and whether they provided evidence of survival.

Let’s look at two of the more famous mediums that were studied during the late 1800s and early 1900s and the investigators who studied them.

Daniel Home, also known as D.D. Home lived from 1833 to 1866. According to Beloff, Home was born in Edinburgh but reared in American and became one of the most well-known mediums of his time. His mediumship was of the physical variety, and observers recounted musical instruments being played by invisible hands, large, heavy tables being lifted high off the floor, and materializations and dematerializations of items such as hands and arms up to the elbow!

Skeptics accused him of being a great illusionist, but none could explain how he did what he did. His abilities – whether real or trickery – earned him a place in high society in America and Europe. He performed in private homes and hotels most often, and usually on short-notice, so there wasn’t a lot of time to prepare the room he used. Beloff points to that fact as cutting down on the potential for elaborate hoaxes.

The first scientist of repute to investigate Home was Robert Hare, a professor of chemistry at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. Hare had denounced spiritualism and was intent on proving mediums frauds, but he was at least intellectually honest enough to openly investigate the claims before outright dismissing them out of close-mindedness.

Hare designed an apparatus called a “spiritscope” (Beloff, p45) that “consisted of a disc about a foot in diameter on which were placed the letters of the alphabet in random order.” When the table at one of Home’s seances was tipped, the letters would randomly change position and through a system of springs and pulleys, land under a pointer. Hare devised the tests so only he could read the letters that were pointed at, and often those letters spelled out messages that were both coherent and verifiable. So much so, that he converted and wrote a book in 1855 called Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations Demonstrating the Existence of Spirits and Their Communion with Mortals. Not long after that, he was laughed out of the scientific community and resigned his chair. He paid dearly for his empirical evidence.

In the meantime, in Europe, science-minded people were doing their own investigations of table-tipping using balances to test the upward and downward pressures on the dancing tables. They also became convinced there was something to it. However, they stopped short of blaming spirits and introduced the idea of the psychode – a hypothetical substance “whereby the mind might act on material objects.”

In May 1871, William Crookes began his investigation of Daniel Home. A fellow of the Royal Society, honored for his discovery of the element thallium in 1861, Crookes was regarded as an outstanding physical scientist. Crookes had Home do a series of seances at his own home – as close to a laboratory as you could get then and used a type of balance to measure the force exerted on the tipped table. Crookes eventually submitted a report about the experiments to the Royal Society, and both he and the report were snubbed. So much for being a celebrated physical scientist.

Home was not the only physical medium Crookes investigated, but I’ll leave you to read Beloff’s book for more information. It should be sufficient to say that at some point, all the physical mediums he studied were accused of or confessed to fraud. For this reason, the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) turned their attention to mental mediums.

Leonora Piper was an American mental medium who seemed to be the real thing – so much so that the SPR paid her a retainer to devote herself strictly to the scientific study of her skills. Their hope was to use her to ascertain whether there could be real evidence of the survival of the spirit after death. To do this, they were looking for information that could only be given by someone in the know – but that Piper did not know – and that could be verified as true.

In 1887, Richard Hodgson arrived in Boston to take charge of the American branch of the SPR. He was a ruthless skeptic at first – having Piper tailed by detectives, going through her mail, and even having her sitters come into the room after she went into a trance and sit behind her so she could not see them. Despite his efforts, she was often accurate in her readings and eventually won him over.

In fact, Hodgson and a friend of his, George Pellew made a pact that whichever man died first, he would return to speak through a medium and convey messages from the other side. Pellew died at the young age of 32 from a fall, and soon after appeared to be sending messages through Leonora Piper. He greeted people he had known in life as they sat with Piper and did not greet those he didn’t know. His messages were so convincing to Hodgson, that he came to believe in the spiritual aspect of mediumship.

Then, Hodgson himself died from a heart attack at the age of 50. Psychologist William James, a friend of Hodgson’s and well-known in his own right, took over and reported that Hodgson seemed to be acting as a spirit control for Piper after his death. James, too, became convinced that Piper was the real deal, but stopped short of saying it proved the continued existence of Hodgson after his death. Since Piper had known Hodgson pretty well before his death, it stood to reason that she could easily pass him off as a communicating spirit afterward.

On page 60 of his book, Beloff wrote,

The discovery of Mrs. Piper inaugurated an era in which a good many outstanding mediums, many of them amateurs, put their services at the disposal of researchers instead of cultivating a clientele. At the same time, most of the leading figures, both in America and England, gave high priority to survival as a research problem. The supreme achievement of this era, and the high point in the history of survival research was an episode known to all students of psychical research as the “cross-correspondences.”

By the Second World War, most psychical researchers were described as survivalists – people who adopted survival as a plausible hypothesis for the events they were investigating. That did not make them spiritualists, though. Spiritualists accepted survival as an ultimate truth not to be argued. Amazingly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle joined the SPR with an interest in psychical research. By the time he resigned, he was a committed spiritualist.

That, dear listener, is all I have for you this episode.

Thank you for listening! If you’ve enjoyed this third in the series of the history of parapsychology, I recommend finding a copy of Parapsychology: A Concise History. It goes much deeper into these topics than I can and is full of fascinating stories and documentation. What I covered tonight barely got us to Chapter 3!