Paranormal Pioneers and Other Strange Phenomena

Bishop James Pike (1913 -1969)

An American Episcopal bishop, prolific writer, and one of the first mainstream religious figures to appear regularly on television, his outspoken views on many theological and social issues made him one of the most controversial public figures of his time.

In 1966, Pike's son Jim died in a New York City hotel room following a period of recreational drug use. Shortly after his son's death Pike began to experience poltergeist phenomena. Among other things, books vanished and reappeared; safety pins were found open and placed to indicate the hour of 8:19, the approximate hour of his son's death.

After these events began to happen, Pike led a public (and for the church, embarrassing) pursuit of various spiritualist and clairvoyant methods of contacting his deceased son. In September 1967, Pike participated in a televised séance with his dead son through the medium, Arthur Ford, who served at the time as a Disciples of Christ minister. Pike detailed these experiences in his book The Other Side.

In 1969 Pike and his wife drove into the Israeli desert. Their car broke down and became stuck; they separated in order to search for help. Although accounts differ, it is likely that Pike fell into a dry ravine to his death or else climbed in and subsequently died of exposure and thirst sometime between September 2nd and 9th. His body was recovered and buried (following his wishes and those of his family) in the Protestant cemetery in Jaffa, Israel.

Harry Price (1881-1948)

Harry Price was one of the most well-known psychical researchers of his time. In the 1930s and 40s, no article about a supposed case of the paranormal did not have some input by Price. He was a prolific writer, producing dozens of articles and several best-selling books. He was also a magician, photographer, engineer, numismatist, writer and composer. His career spanned over four decades and took him all over the world.

Price's first major success in psychical research came in 1922 when he exposed the 'spirit' photographer William Hope. During the same year, Price traveled to Germany together with Eric Dingwall and investigated Willie Schneider and to Mount Brocken in Germany to conduct a 'black magic' experiment in connection with the centenary of Goethe, involving the transformation of a goat into a young man.

The following year, Price made an offer to the University of London to equip and endow a Department of Psychical Research, and to loan the equipment of the National Laboratory and its library. The University of London Board of Studies in Psychology responded positively to this proposal and, in 1934, the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation was formed with Price as Honorary Secretary and Editor.

He carried out sittings with countless mediums and investigated all kinds of locations, amassing a collection of magical and occult literature, which is still consulted by students and researchers to this day.

A chance meeting with the young English nurse Dorothy Stella Cranshaw on a train enabled Price to carry out his own series of controlled séances, which marked the beginning of his establishment of the National Laboratory.

The first series of sittings were carried out in the office of the London Spiritualist Alliance and were an extraordinary success with phenomena being observed at the very first séance. At the most successful sitting on, April 12th, the medium had a vision of a page from a newspaper carrying a date for the following month. When the newspaper in question, the Daily Mail, was published thirty-seven days later, the image described by Stella appeared on its front page.

Price showed a real aptitude for the work at hand by developing specific pieces of equipment which were employed at these sittings and his book Stella C, which was published in 1925, was a complete record of the first session of séances completely under his control.

Price initially published the results in the Journal of the American S.P.R. the previous year. Stella Cranshaw later gave two further series of sittings and it was through his work with her that Price met another medium with whom he was later rewarded with one of the high points of his career in the séance room - the clairvoyant Eileen Garrett.

Price and the Borley Rectory

Of all the cases that Harry Price was involved in during the course of his eventful career, no other investigation caused more interest and aroused more controversy than that of the Borley rectory.

The rectory was built in 1863, on the site of an old Benedictine Monastery for the Reverend H.D.E Bull and his family. From around 1885 various apparitions have been seen on the grounds. Other activity has been poltergeist phenomena, glasses flying across room, writing appearing on walls when no one is around. One later owner said she was thrown from her bed.

Price’s involvement with Borley Rectory began in 1929 when he was asked by the editor of the London Daily Mirror to assist investigations being carried out at that time by the newspaper. Price visited the Rectory from time to time during the early 1930s and in the end rented the empty building for a year in 1937 during which time he attempted a continual on-site investigation of the house through a group of selected observers.

The case had occupied him on and off for the last nineteen years of his life, during which time he carried out excavation work in its ruined cellars and made Borley and its ghosts world famous. His account of the haunting was published and entitled 'The Most Haunted House in England'.

The rectory was demolished in 1944 and in its place now stands an apartment building.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation, literally "to be made flesh again", is the belief that the soul, after death of the body, comes back to earth in another body. According to one belief, a new personality is developed during each life in the physical world, but the soul remains constant throughout the successive lives.

Belief in reincarnation has ancient roots. This idea is a central belief in many Indian religious traditions and the idea was also entertained by some ancient Greek philosophers. The Buddhist concept of rebirth, although often referred to as reincarnation, differs quite a bit from the Hindu-based traditions and New Age movements in that there is no unchanging "soul" to reincarnate. Most of the mainstream Christian denominations, however, have rejected the notion of reincarnation and consider the idea to be incompatible with the teaching of Christ contained in the Bible.

Whatever your belief system, it’s hard to explain how some people just know things he or she should not know under normal circumstances. Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, (1918–2007) was a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, one of a small number of academic facilities around the world that study the paranormal. Stevenson was known for his study of reincarnation, which he termed the survival of the personality after death.

One avenue of research pursued by Stevenson consisted of comparing the reports of young children who claim to remember a past life with events that occurred during the previous life. Stevenson collected more than 2,500 reports over the course of his lifetime, publishing them in books such as Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.

According to his research, the memories normally occur between the ages of three and seven years, and fade after that. Evidence of past lives included birth marks or deformities on the child which occurred at the location of fatal wounds in the deceased, unusual behaviors such as phobias for the thing that killed the deceased, and in some cases the mother having a dream in which the deceased announces their intention to reincarnate in the child. Stevenson also compared the memories with reports of people known to the deceased, attempting to do so before any contact between the child and the deceased's family had occurred, as well as searching for other explanations for the reports aside from reincarnation

One objection to reincarnation is that there is no evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body, and researchers such as Stevenson recognize this limitation. Another fundamental objection is that most people simply do not remember previous lives, although it is possible that only some, but not all, people reincarnate, or that the conditions necessary for remembering a past life are specific enough to narrow the population which can do this.

Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980)

J.B. Rhine was one of the pioneers of parapsychological research.

In 1923 Rhine received his master's degree in botany and his Ph.D. in botany in 1925, both from the University of Chicago. He taught for a year at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, in Yonkers, N.Y. Afterwards, he enrolled in the psychology department at Harvard University and in 1927 he moved to Duke University. There, after he and his wife were impressed by a lecture given by Arthur Conan Doyle exulting the scientific proof of communication with the dead. Rhine later wrote, "This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years." Rhine began the studies that helped develop parapsychology into a branch of science, looking upon it primarily as a branch of "abnormal psychology".

In 1934 Rhine published the first edition of a book titled Extra Sensory Perception, which in various editions was widely read over the next decades.

Rhine's work had two aspects: one was lab experiments designed to probe the actuality or lack thereof of the theory of inherited characteristics in animals. The other was fieldwork that brought scrutiny, healthy skepticism, and rigor of data analysis to investigations of psychic mediums, because Rhine didn’t believe in ghosts. But he did believe that the human mind had more potential and power than standard psychology gave us credit for. In Rhine’s view, the so-called mediums did not channel the souls of the dead, but were forming a type of communication or “extra-sensory perception.” Likewise hauntings were not the work of the poltergeists but simply the telekinesis of homes’ inhabitants.

Rhine tested many students as volunteer subjects in his research project. His first exceptional subject in his ESP research was Adam Linzmayer, an economics undergraduate at Duke. In 1931, Linzmayer scored incredibly high in Zener-card tests that Rhine ran him through, scoring 100% correct on two nine-card series tests. Even in his first long test, a 300-card series, Linzmayer scored 39.6% correct, when chance would have been only 20%. However, over time, Linzmayer's scores began to drop, even if they did remain somewhat above average. Some claimed that boredom, distraction, and competing obligations, on Linzmayer’s part, were the reasons for the declining test results. Others said the experiments were not as tightly controlled and therefore, the results were not as high as they would be in a more controlled setting. However, Linzmayer's epic run of naming 21 out of 25 took place in Rhine's car, showing that these things don’t necessarily happen only in controlled settings.

Throughout the war years, Rhine carried on his experiments and gathered ‘spontaneous ESP reports’, meaning those outside of the lab. However, J. B. Rhine believed that good groundwork should be laid in the lab, so that the scientific community might take parapsychology seriously.

Rhine coined the term "parapsychology" (translating a German term introduced by Max Dessoir) and it’s sometimes said that Rhine almost single-handedly developed a methodology and concepts for parapsychology as a form of experimental psychology

In 1934, drawing upon several years of cautious and rigorous lab research and statistical analysis, Rhine published the first edition of a book titled Extra Sensory Perception, which in various editions was widely read over the following decades.

The Rhine legacy includes the establishment of the Journal of Parapsychology, the formation of the Parapsychological Association and also the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), a precursor to what is today known as the Rhine Research Center.

Many college students specifically went to Duke University because of J.B. Rhine’s Research Center, which continues to operate to this day as a separate entity on the grounds of the University.

Séances - The Tricks of the Trade

A séance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word is derived from the French word for "sitting," and in French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma" ("a movie session"). In English, however, the word came to be used specifically for a meeting of people who are gathered to receive messages from spirits or to listen to a spirit medium.

According to mediums during the heyday of the Spiritualist movement, séances were the most productive way to get in touch with spirit world.

A typical séance, which was presided over by a physical medium, could boast all sorts of strange activity, from the movement of objects, to eerie music, glowing lights, levitating furniture, the production of ectoplasm and even the materialization of spirits.

Each séance was conducted in a dark or nearly dark room. The mediums claimed that the sittings were held under such conditions because it made it easier for the spirits to manifest -- however critics charged that such conditions made it much easier to conceal the practice of fraud! However, even today, many paranormal investigation groups still insist that the best way to get in touch with ‘the other side’ is through séances and the use of mediums.

As technology progresses, more ways are developed for measuring and testing psychic phenomena. Up to now, no case has been shown to be verifiably authentic. Believers will always remain convinced of the truth while skeptics will continue to be convinced fraud exists. What it comes down to is no matter how careful and how honest an organization is, and no matter how carefully the séance is documented, ultimately there is no way to prove the medium is not faking. What he or she says are just stories unless it can be backed up with hard facts.