Paranormalia

Why Did You Do It? (Part II)

'Spiritualist jailed for killing wife' is not a headline you see every day. Spiritualist minister David Chenery-Wickens apparently did away with his trusting spouse after she confronted him with his serial bi-sexual philandering. He sounds like a pretty unpleasant character. The thought that came to my mind when he was first arrested, (Why Did You Do It?, Feb 3 2008), was that if he really was a spirit medium, after the grisly deed had been done the two of them could have had a little talk about it - a post-mortem, so to speak. I wonder if she haunts him.

Of course if he's the 'predatory charlatan' in the news reports, then he's probably just pretending to be in touch with spirits, in which case these potential problems would never have occurred to him.  It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone else, possibly because few people these days even know what spiritualism is, or what spiritualist ministers claim to do. They might not automatically see anything at all religious about being in touch with the dead.  For those who do, I suppose this sort of thing simply underlines the fact that religious folk are as fallible as the rest of us, and some of them apparently a good deal more so.

Two Books About Home

Peter Lamont's recent book on Daniel Home, The First Psychic, has been sitting on my bookshelf for the past year, and I've just got round to it. I bought it to keep up with what's being said about psychical research in public, but put off reading it, because I couldn't face the condescending treatment that writers often adopt when talking about psychics ('look at me, being very daring and talking about THE PARANORMAL, of course it's all nonsense, but no harm in just having a quick look at these funny people and their clever tricks, etc.'

In the event I was pleasantly surprised. The text is clear and readable: it looks as though Lamont's really taken trouble over it, and he's got a good grip on the sources. He makes the necessary qualification right at the start - 'Daniel Home was the world's first psychic. Perhaps he was a charlatan, but that makes him no less mysterious...' - and the 'perhaps he was a charlatan' line is repeated throughout. But he quickly establishes that he takes Home seriously and that conjuring is no good explanation for at least some of the things that hundreds of people said they saw happen during Home's séances. The militant scoffers like David Brewster, Charles Dickens and Robert Browning come off rather badly, and the debunkers don't get much support.

They get their say in another recent book, Knock, Knock, Knock! Who's There?  by Patrick Waddington, which by chance is reviewed in the current SPR Journal by Zofia Weaver (I could find no details about the book online, but it's a New Zealand publisher, Whirinaki Press, 2007). Waddington follows the line that the only possible explanations for Home's feats are conjuring or delusion, since they are impossible in nature, and comes up with creative 'solutions' apparently without caring much for plausibility. A lot of it's just innuendo: if Home complains of being ill, he is 'playing the card of poor health' or 'remembering to be ill'; a mugging incident must have been staged by Home himself, and so on. Weaver also remarks on Waddington's curiously old-fashioned exhortations, reminiscent of Victorian tracts: 'Men and women of good sense need to resist [spiritualism], now as always, by appealing against its absurdity'.

Like may debunkers, Waddington can't make the distinction between psi and survival. Referring to Home's séances at the Tsar's court in Russia he approvingly quotes hostile comments by a courtier named Anna Tyutcheva, who, he says, rejected any supernaturalist interpretation of what she saw. Actually, Weaver says, she rejected the spiritualist interpretation - not at all the same thing.  She provides a translation of Tyutcheva's diary entry, as follows:

The table, on which we rested our hands but only lightly, rose up from the ground to a significant height, tilting to the left and to the right, while neither the lamp, nor the pencil, nor any of the other objects lying on the table, moved at all from their places, even the flame of the lamp did not sway. The table answered with blows; one meant - no, two times - perhaps, three times - yes; five times meant that the table wants the alphabet, and then it indicates the letters with knocks. I received answers to my questions by means of blows under my stool; as my stool was a wicker one, I felt the blows as much as I heard them. I first asked the table whether it was a spirit. The table answered that it was the spirit of a dead man and demanded the alphabet, but refused to write for anybody  apart from Prince Suvorov, and for him it wrote the name Friedrich...

We saw the accordion, held by Home, play by an invisible hand some very moving church chants. It also played when held by Mrs Maltseva and Princess Dolgurukaya. We heard the rustle of a hand on the silk dress of Princes Dolgorukaya, and in this way answers consisting of "yes" or "no" were given. I was firmly grasped by the knees. All the time I and all those present felt ice-cold breezes on our hands and legs. As far as I am concerned, I was quite stupefied and, moreover, was fighting off sleep, even though I was very interested in what was going on. (That night I slept eight hours straight through, although I had been suffering from insomnia because of headache and toothache.)

One of my first questions to the spirit was whether he can manifest in stools as well as tables, and all the time I felt small blows on my stool... all the blows were taking place with unbelievable speed, there is no way in which the actions of a person, or even a number of people, could keep lifting a big and heavy table with such speed. This must be either a magnetic phenomenon, not observed until now, or it is supernatural. But in the latter case you ask yourself, why are these manifestations so stupid...

The most curious thing, in my view, is that the large clock with the playing monkeys, which I have already described and which after Home's last séance at Tsarskoye [Selo] woke me up in the night when the mechanisms started working by itself without being wound - the very same clock, which has been moved here and put on top of the wardrobe, and which had not been wound and had not played since then, started working against this morning, although it has not been touched; all the monkeys started moving and the noise was tremendous. But this mechanism is very difficult to wind, requiring a thick key, and only then will all the three monkeys start playing their instruments. I must say that this incident made me feel uneasy. During the séance itself, on the contrary, I did not feel frightened at all, and felt more like enjoying it and laughing; as soon as I felt a touch I would involuntarily cry out.

Weaver comments that when one reads the relevant diary entries in full it is clear that the various ad hoc sittings precluded any chances of setting up a conjuring apparatus. Intriguingly, she points out also that present at the séance was the Tsar's chief of the secret police, the real power behind the throne, who would certainly have had Home's possessions and activities thoroughly examined without his knowledge, not necessarily because of his mediumistic abilities, but because of his influential connections with a family of anti-Russian Poles exiled to France.

I realise that some people find it easier deal with these sorts of claims by manufacturing conjuring scenarios - that Home had levers attached to his feet, that he should have been tied up, that he'd pressed the family's children into acting as his accomplices, and so on. But I'm with those who get worn down by the sheer amount of description of this kind, and the variety and impressiveness of the effects. If the conjuring scenarios worked, that would be OK, but they don't.  That seems to be Lamont's position too - himself a magician, and a former chairman of the Edinburgh Magic Circle - although in his book it's more implied than insisted on.

But what does Lamont make of it? In a final 'postscript' he puts forward the idea of The Trickster, found in the mythology of many cultures, and since myths can be read in many ways, we are free to make what sense of it we can. 'Perhaps we need to be reminded that uncertainty is real and certainty an illusion,' he suggests. 'After all, is there anything of which we can be truly certain?' Reality is what we observe, our idea of it, never the thing itself, which may be unknowable. Whatever explanation we feel comfortable with - that it's 'a trick without an explanation, an unknown force without a theory, or perhaps the work of spirits' - are just ways of categorizing it, but don't tell us anything.

So we have a choice of boxes, but if none of them is adequate, we might simply decline to use any of them. We could instead recognize that we do not always know what is going on, that perhaps we never know for certain. ... When faced with an anomaly, we can see it as a problem, as a source of confusion that upsets our comfortable world-view. Or we might use it to remind ourselves that reality is not so comfortable after all, that behind the boxes we have built lies a more complex universe, and therefore a sense of mystery that may never be removed.

So in that sense, Lamont concludes, Home was a Trickster, who upset the Victorians, forcing them to question their comfortable world-view, and making them wonder what they really knew what was going on.

All this seems very wise, and I agree with it - as far as it goes. Anyone with ambitions to write about the paranormal for a mainstream audience has to perform a delicate balancing act. It's risky to push your own point of view: you have to sketch out different ideas and responses so that people can take their pick. Lamont is a lecturer at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, and if there's one thing these guys have to know how to do, it's get people interested in psychical phenomena without scaring them off. There's a lot of subtlety and sensitivity in this.

Yet for me all this is just a way of talking. It's what happens when one worldview hits the buffers, and another is struggling to be born. The Trickster is a great image for uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion, but that's all it is. I don't believe that humans collectively are fated always to view psychics and psychism as a bizarre anomaly, or as a cause for anxiety.  For many of us individually psi is in a certain sense coherent and meaningful, and points to a quite different way of looking at the world, one that can even help determine how we live this life. It's just that that view is just never going to get aired in a mainstream biography. 

Psi and the Law

Psychics in the UK are getting hot and bothered about the change of legislation governing what they do. The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 is being scrapped, and they will in future come under the new Consumer Protection Regulations.  Like any other scam artist they can be prosecuted for knowingly selling someone a duff service, and if convicted face heavy fines or two years in prison.

Will it make any difference? To judge by all the hand wringing some people seem to think so. The Spiritual Workers Association complains that it  is 'turning spiritualism the religion into a consumer product, which it is not,' and that mediums will be more vulnerable to prosecution.

It's a bit hard to tell from the press reports just what the legal implications are. The law wasn't drafted with psychics in mind, so it's unclear how it will affect them. Their worry is that while the old rules obliged prosecutors to prove bad intent, the burden is now on them to prove they did not deliberately intend to mislead. To be on the safe side, mediums in spiritualist churches have taken to prefacing their readings with little disclaimers that this is 'not science, just an experiment'.

On the other hand the College of Psychic Studies, where mediums offer paid services, thinks that tightening standards is a good idea. The Office of Fair Trading itself says that individual psychics or mediums are not in the firing line - the aim is more to deal with foreign mass mailshot fraudsters extracting large sums of money. It says more than 170,000 consumers fall victim to clairvoyant scams every year, losing around £40 million. One psychic scammer sent messages demanding money saying 'you have to trust me ....BECAUSE YOUR FUTURE AND YOUR HAPPINESS DEPEND ON IT'. Another told people that 'there is, in your home, in the very place where you are living, a zone which has been booby trapped by negative waves' and again demanded cash to sort the problem.

If the law can discriminate between the 'bogus' and the 'genuine' then it's got to be a good idea. It's astonishing how brazen the scammers can be, trying to frighten people by claiming that have psychically seen a person is suffering an illness, and claiming to cure it. Then there are the 'psychic hotlines'. When a bunch of press reporters tried out Cilla Black's new pysychic hotline (£1.50 per minute) they said they were given costly advice on a series of non-existent worries, and at great length to keep them on the line.

But how does the law discriminate between good and bad, when science says they are both equally bogus? And will someone make the effort to find out? Sceptics are full of righteous fury at 'cold readers', and it's not impossible that some up-and-coming Randi could try to make a name for him or herself by pushing for a prosecution. It wouldn't be for some obvious fraudster, which would hardly count as a victory, but with a high-profile medium with a reputation to protect, like Colin Fry or Derek Acorah.

A test case would require institutional backing. Any takers? The British Humanist Association is excited at the prospect of 'real changes' to the current situation where psychics are able to make 'completely unsubstantiated claims' and take money for it. Logically, I suppose, that means they hope that anyone who works as a psychic will soon be liable to prosecution. As Richard Wiseman commented for a BBC report: "Anecdotal evidence on their abilities is impressive, but if you put it under more scientific conditions, their claims tend to crumble. [Now] they will need to be able to justify the claims they are making."

This is just Wiseman in rent-a-quote mode - I don't think he has a specific agenda. But of course the threat is implicit. How do mediums justify the claim that they can speak to the dead, if science does not accept that such a thing is remotely possible? If you go to a medium and she says, 'I've got your dead mum here', and you think, 'oh no you haven't', can you call the police and get her arrested? Who judges the quality of the 'evidence' in legal terms, and by what criteria?

The law does occasionally get involved in psychic and spiritualist controversies, and it's not a pretty sight. One of the earliest cases was when Henry Slade, the nineteenth century medium was taken to court by a sceptical sitter. He conducted a stout defence, but was probably done for from the outset, since the judge considered his claimed feats contracted the 'well-known course of nature', and he had to flee abroad to avoid jail (this tragi-comic tale gets an airing in Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics). Another famous court case was the materialising medium Helen Duncan, whose claims were so fantastic she never stood a chance - she actually did do time in prison.

The logical conclusion of a prosecution against a medium is that the claims for psychism and survival of death would themselves be on trial. If there was another Slade or Duncan court case, it would test modern attitudes to these things. Perhaps the defence would call an array of expert witnesses to describe just how much evidence there is, and the prosecution would line up Wiseman, Blackmore, Hyman et al to pick holes in it. We'd then see m'learned friends getting to grips with what is usually considered a philosophical, academic or scientific question. And why not? - this is pretty much what happened with the 2005 Kansas court case over the claims of intelligent design.

I'm intrigued by the idea of this sort of contest, having always thought that evidence for psychism and survival involves matters of logic and is best examined in open debate rather than in purely scientific terms, where all sorts of untested assumptions get in the way. Will it ever happen?  Probably not - a law intended to stop people being obviously ripped off could surely not be used to investigate the profoundest metaphysical mysteries.  But you never know.

Helen Duncan

Helen Duncan is back in the news, after petitioners asked the Scottish parliament to give her a posthumous pardon (an attempt to press her case in Westminster last year failed). The Aberdeen medium was one of the last people to be jailed under the 1735 Witchcraft Act and spent nine months in prison, dying in 1956. The plods came calling in 1944, three years after a 'dead sailor' showed up during a séance in Portsmouth, and in the process inadvertently revealing the recent sinking of his ship, the HMS Barham - the disaster was not disclosed by the authorities until some weeks afterwards. Proof of psychism for some, but of treason for the authorities, never mind fakery. Writing at some length in the Independent, Andy McSmith considers Duncan was a fraud who got her just desserts. But he's not particularly militant about it, adding 'If I am wrong, no doubt I shall be turned into a toad.' Yes indeed.

The media is naturally interested in the legal implications. The Witchcraft Act gave way to the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, which itself is about to be replaced, and the new formula's vagueness is getting professional psychics all hot and bothered. More on that another time. What interests me here is the serious weirdness of what Duncan was supposed to be doing. McSmith, and I should think the great majority of his readers, don't know the half of it.

Most mediums today are clairvoyant and/or clairaudient: they say they hear voices or see figures in their mind's eye. But when mediumship began in the mid nineteenth century it was a much more physical business - the spirits were supposed to communicate by tipping tables and rapping in the dark. That was controversial enough, but Duncan was one of an even more extreme kind, the materialising medium, said to exude 'ectoplasm'. This was a sort of sticky vapour which quickly coalesced into a fully functioning human, a temporary replica of a visiting dead person. He or she - or it - would converse with their relatives in the audience and then disappear back into the 'cabinet' in which the medium was concealed.

It's easy to see how this could be faked, especially as it all took place in pitch dark (the 'spirits' were sometimes said to illuminate their faces by holding up a tablet coated with luminous sulphur, but it would not have revealed much). And it would take a lot of chutzpah to insist that it wasn't. There are lots of exposes on record, where the lights were switched on and the medium was seen dancing around dressed in white drapery. At the same time, the testimony in its favour is more insistent than one would imagine.

The process was observed at close quarters by several scientists, of whom the best known are William Crookes, Charles Richet and Albert von Schrenck Notzing. Their claims can be rejected on the grounds that their experiments were inadequately controlled and reported, but it's extraordinary to think that mediums could have fooled them so often and so consistently.

What's interesting too is that they and others described the process of formation and dissolution. Mostly this happened out of sight in the cabinet, so you couldn't see if it was being faked. But sometimes the cabinet was open, allowing the build-up to be watched. Turning the light up at the end caused the form to dissolve into the floor, and this too could be closely observed. Here's a statement by a sitter who watched the departure of 'Katie King' (produced by Florence Cook):

Her features faded and became blotted out, appearing to turn one into another.  The eyes sank in their sockets, the nose disappeared, the frontal bone caved in. Her limbs appeared to give way under her, she sank lower and lower on to the carpet like a falling building. At last nothing but her head remained above the ground, then one or two light masses of drapery, which disappeared with extreme rapidity...and we were left standing under the light of the three gas burners, our eyes fixed on the spot which Katie King had occupied.  (Annals of Psychical Science, London: Caesar de Vesme, April 1906, pp. 201-205.) 

If these witnesses are not actually hallucinating the fraud clearly goes beyond people impersonating spirits. It also makes me wonder about the other chief line of attack, which is that mediums produced the ectoplasm by regurgitating cheese cloth from their stomachs. This was the only way that scientific investigators of Helen Duncan could account for the material exuding from her mouth, and disappearing back into it, but it doesn't have much to do with what other people said they saw.

Veteran psychical researcher Donald West wrote up Duncan's trial in 1946 in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1946). Here's an extract from the cross examination of a witness, a retired nurse, who claimed that Duncan literally reunited her for a brief moment with her husband.

Q. Tell my Lord and members of the jury what happened. . . .
A. . . . the spirit guide announced that there was a gentleman there, and he thought it was for me - an elderly gentleman - and he gave the description. I said, ' Is it you, Daddy ? ' meaning my husband, and he said, ' Yes '. I invited him out and said, ' Come out dear', and he came out.
Q. How far out of the cabinet did he come ? A. He came on the outside of the curtain. I immediately got up from my seat and went right up to him. I said, ' Kiss me, dear '.
Q. Did you recognize anybody ? A. Of course I recognized him.
Q. Do not say, ' Of course ', I want you to tell us. A. I did, sir.
Q. Who was it ? A. My husband.
Q. Had you any doubt about it being your husband ? A. No doubt whatsoever.
Q. How close up to him were you ? A. As close as I am to this. (Indicating the ledge of the witness-box.)
Q. Did he speak to you ? A. He spoke to me.
Q. Did you recognise his voice ? A. I did.
Q. Were you certain of his voice ?. A. I was perfectly certain.
Q. Did he say anything to you in particular that struck you as of importance ?
A. Just spoke about the family. He said that he was always with me, and that he would be on the other side waiting for me ; he would never leave me until I joined him.
The Recorder: It was flesh and blood, was it ? A. It was very cold, my Lord, but it was his hand.
Q. You could hold it, could you ? A. I held it firmly. I felt the knuckles. He suffered from rheumatism, my Lord, and I felt the nobbly knuckles.
Mr Loseby : We must face up to things, Nurse Rust. Are you quite sure that it was not Mrs Duncan ? A. Oh, perfectly certain, perfectly sure. My husband is not quite so big; he is not such a stout man.
Q. You said you asked your husband to kiss you. A. I did, sir.
Q. Did he kiss you ? A. He did, sir, right on the mouth." 
This witness went on to state that at the same séance her mother manifested and was recognised on close inspection by two moles, one in the hollow of her chin and one above her left eyebrow, which were reproduced true to life. Then an Aunt Mary came and spoke in Spanish, saying, " I am very pleased to see you. I wanted to come before, but they did not understand."

West is by no means a believer, but concedes this evidence is extraordinary. 'Granting its veracity, either the witness must have been hallucinated and deluded to an astonishing degree or else the phenomena were genuine. It is all the more puzzling, since Mrs Rust appeared to be a level-headed and honest narrator.' He adds that another witness, a senior doctor, said he had witnessed upwards of four hundred materialisations at Duncan séances, many of them in his own rooms at Glasgow. He had heard voices speak in a number of different dialects and languages and clearly recognized a dozen materialised relatives.

Food for thought.

Why Did You Do It?

I read in The Times that a spiritualist medium has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife. David Chenery-Wickens, 51, said he was the last person to see her alive, and she has been missing for a week. Apparently he acts as a minister at several spiritualist churches. Friends described him as someone with a ‘nice manner and a caring attitude’, and said he was often called away to visit hospital patients who are ‘passing over to the other side’.

I don’t know whether there is any actual evidence against him, and it’s pointless to speculate. But the idea of a medium committing murder did set off a train of thought.  We are used to seeing members of the clergy getting into trouble for sexual abuse, so it’s hard to think of them as being any less fallible than the rest of us. You would think that their sense of right and wrong would stop them committing crimes and hurting other people, but apparently in some cases it doesn’t.

For a medium to commit murder would be the same sort of paradox, but vastly magnified. It’s not just that as spiritualists they share Christian ethics; they are  supposed to see and communicate with the dead. For a homicidal medium, then, the victim is as alive after the terrible deed as he or she was before it. As I say, it’s just a thought, and one very much hopes that if something has happened to Mrs Chenery-Wickens, her husband had nothing to do with it. But supposing he did, I can’t help wondering what sort of conversation the two of them are having right now.