Category: Physical Mediumship
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In a previous comments thread, Amos Oliver Doyle linked to a lengthy article by William Crookes titled "Notes of Séances with D.D. Home." I've now had a chance to read this fascinating document, and I'd like to excerpt some of the more interesting material. What I've done is to classify the various occurrences under different…
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Because the topic of William Crookes' investigation of D. D. Home has come up in a recent comments thread, I thought I would repost this piece, which was originally published here in November of 2009. I've made a few minor alterations, mainly involving links that no longer work. —- I came across an interesting factoid…
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Roger Knights recommends this fictionalized account of Eusapia Palladino's mediumship. The book got a very positive review from Kirkus ("an enchanting, graceful narrative that will absorb readers from the first page") and many favorable reviews from Amazon customers, as well – including a five-star review from Michael Tymn, the well-known writer on mediumship, who also…
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In doing a little research today, I noticed that the Wikipedia pages for Charles Richet and Cesare Lombroso both include the same claim: that each man had a sexual affair with medium Eusapia Palladino. The source of this claim, in both cases, is the book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero,…
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White Crow Books has published a new edition of Neville Whymant's 1931 book Psychic Adventures in New York, edited by Michael Tymn (also available in a Kindle edition). The book is very short – I think I read it in about 40 minutes – but contains some highly interesting information about Whymant’s sittings with controversial medium…
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Recently we've been discussing the possibility that the heyday of Spiritualism constituted a "mania," in which normally sober observers found their judgment impaired by what Alan Greenspan would call "irrational enthusiasm." While the very best research from that period was well-designed and difficult to refute, there are undeniably problems with other claims, reports, and observations.…
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For a preliminary look at the possibility that reports of psychic phenomena can be influenced by emotional and psychological factors, I tracked down a paper co-authored by Richard Wiseman, Emma Greening, and Matthew Smith titled "Belief in the Paranormal and Suggestion in the Seance Room," published originally in the British Journal of Psychology, 94(3), 285-297. It…
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Recently, Michael Tymn sent me a copy of an interesting article of the May, 1911, issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. The article is titled "The Burton Case of Hysteria and Other Phenomena," by James H. Hyslop, and it concerns a medium identified only as Mrs. Burton, who practiced both…
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Recently I read a 1977 book by D. Scott Rogo called The Haunted Universe. Rogo, a longtime paranormal writer and researcher, is normally pretty cautious in his assessment of paranormal claims. But in The Haunted Universe he eschews his usual wariness to explore a range of purported phenomena that fall outside the purview of parapsychology.…
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One of the points Arthur Findlay makes in his book On the Edge of the Etheric is that, in John Sloan's séances, the "trumpet" (a conical device used as a megaphone) would tap sitters on command, responding precisely to their instructions, even though the room was pitch dark. In other words, if a sitter asked…