Category: Mental mediumship
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One of the most convincing and best-documented cases of mediumship involves the death of a 25-year-old part-time barmaid named Jacqueline Poole on February 11, 1983, in the West London suburb of Ruislip. Murdered on Friday evening, Jacqui Poole was found dead in her apartment on Sunday, February 13, by the father of her boyfriend, who…
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Rereading a little more of Chris Carter's book Science and the Afterlife Experience, I came across a quotation from Geraldine Cummins' The Road to Immortality, which allegedly channels F.W.H. Myers. Myers is talking about "the cruel man" and his immediate fate after death. At first, such a person is in a state of confusion, a…
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Recently I came across some comments on a skeptics' message board impugning the mediumship of Leonora Piper. Some of these comments, I felt, showed a lack of familiarity with the details of the case. One point in particular stuck in my craw. A skeptic pointed out that an investigator had asked Mrs. Piper, while she…
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A few links of possible interest on a Sunday afternoon. ==== Dean Radin, noted parapsychologist and author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds, has a new book out called Supernormal. Here's the publisher's description: Can yoga and meditation unleash our inherent supernormal mental powers, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition? Is it really possible…
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To gain a little more insight into the Dean Bridgman Conner case discussed in the previous two posts, I reread Chapter 5 of Michael Tymn’s Resurrecting Leonora Piper, the book whose review, by Alan Gauld, got the ball rolling in the first place. The chapter shed some additional light on the question of Mrs. Piper’s…
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I ended up reading the Philpott book about Dean Bridgman Conner right away. (A link to the complete text is found in the comments thread of the last post.) It’s a good, quick read and sheds valuable light on Mrs. Piper’s mediumship. Philpott establishes convincingly that Piper’s spirit controls produced a raft of false information…
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The current edition (Vol.77, No. 912) of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research includes a generally positive review of Michael Tymn's book Resurrecting Leonora Piper – a book I liked a lot. The reviewer, Alan Gauld, is best known for his meticulous study Mediumship and Survival, which takes a close look at some…
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Michael Tymn is probably today's foremost authority on European and North American mediumship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a subject matter that he covers in a blog and in several books, including his most recent: Resurrecting Leonora Piper. As the title indicates, the book's purpose is to rekindle interest in Mrs.…
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I'm reading an advance copy of Michael Tymn's new book Resurrecting Leonora Piper, which I'm enjoying quite a lot. (I'll post a review when I've finished it. By the way, although the official publication date is January 14, it looks like Amazon is selling the book now, in both print and Kindle editions.) The book is…
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I just finished reading the well-known book by Dr. Carl A. Wickland, 30 Years among the Dead, originally published in 1924. The book recounts Dr. Wickland's efforts to cure his psychiatric patients by spiritualist methods. His wife Anna was a powerful medium, and Wickland became convinced that some of the incurable patients institutionalized at his…