Paranormalia

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.