Leonora Piper. William James brought the Boston medium Leonora Piper to the psychical research community’s attention. She became one of the most researched mental mediums in history.
James’ colleague Richard Hodgson had established his skeptical credentials earlier by debunking Madame Blavatsky, a Theosophical Society founder. Hodgson studied over 500 sittings with Piper. He concluded that a man named George Pellew (1859-1892), who produced automatic writing through Piper as her control spirit, was an authentic, discarnate individual.
Hodgson wrote a report detailing the correct and intimate details the deceased George Pellew communicated through Leonora Piper. Of 150 sitters who came to see Piper in sessions where the discarnate George Pellew manifested, thirty were individuals who had known Pellew in life. In 29 of these sessions, the deceased Pellew recognized them and addressed them by name. The only sitter the discarnate Pellew didn’t identify was a woman whom he hadn’t seen in life since she was a little girl.
These detailed and intimate communications convinced Hodgson – who had been skeptical until then – that he was dealing with a formerly incarnate human being.
Hodgson also noted the discarnate Pellew didn’t recognize the other 120 sitters, people attending Piper’s séances, whom he had never known in life. He saw this as evidence counting against the hypothesis the medium Leonora Piper or her communicator George Pellew were getting information by telepathically reading the individual sitters’ minds.
After working with Piper for years, Hodgson himself died unexpectedly in 1905. Subsequently, he appeared as a communicator in sittings with Piper. The prominent psychologist William James analyzed these sessions. He remarked that, because Hodgson had worked for so long with Piper, the conditions were far from ideal. Still, Richard Hodgson’s spirit communicating through Piper provided many intimate and accurate details concerning Hodgson’s life that Piper did not know.
When viewed in the light of his wider knowledge of mental mediums (and Piper in particular), James acknowledged he believed Hodgson’s ostensible spirit provided information that was paranormal. It wasn’t likely to be attributed to Piper’s telepathic abilities:
... the total effect in the way of dramatic probability of the whole mass of similar phenomena on my mind, is to make me believe that a “will to communicate” [meaning via a spirit entity] is in some shape there.
Therefore, he speculated that if the discarnate Hodgson wasn’t communicating through Piper – perhaps it was a spirit entity, with access to a cosmic reservoir of all knowledge, masquerading as Hodgson. James hoped, within the next hundred years, psychical research would resolve this potential confusion.
Frederic Myers’ return. The major case of a deceased entity starting and taking part in psychical research is that of Frederic Myers. In 1902, the discarnate Myers started an experiment lasting for over three decades. It resulted in over 3,600 documents, referred to as the cross-correspondences. Near the end of this series, Myers dictated two books about the afterlife through Geraldine Cummins’ automatic writing mediumship.
Frederic Myers was, without question, a stellar figure in the founding and early investigations of the Society for Psychical Research. He was coauthor, with Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, of Phantasms of the Living. Over a century after its posthumous publication in 1903, Myers’ book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, remains a classic.
Myers introduced the term telepathy and preceded Freud in discussing the subconscious mind, which he called the subliminal mind. Myers expected that communicators from the other side were planning experiments:
... there are probably experiments of a complexity and difficulty which surpass our imagination; but they are made from the other side of the gulf by the efforts of spirits who discern pathways and personalities which for us are impenetrably dark.
The discarnate Myers laid out a plan for the cross-correspondences in messages transmitted via automatic writing through Margaret Verrall in Cambridge, a classical scholar, and Myers’ friend:
Record the bits and when fitted they will make the whole.... I will give the words between you neither alone can read but together they will give the clue he wants.
Thus began a project that ran, at least, until 1936 and included scripts from nine different automatic writers receiving messages from Myers and other deceased researchers from the Society. The overall project is too complex to be summarized adequately here. This complexity has led some critics to dismiss the entire matter as hopelessly obscure – requiring Greek and Latin knowledge, and an understanding of poetic allusions from Wordsworth and others.
It took several years before Society for Psychical Research investigators detected Myers’ project and wrote about it. This first occurred when Alice Johnson, the Society’s secretary, published a lengthy article concerning the automatic writing of Mrs. Holland in India – a pseudonym for Alice Fleming, the famous poet Rudyard Kipling’s married sister. Fleming’s family disapproved of her remarkable “uncanniness.”
Nevertheless, Alice Fleming persisted in her experiments with automatic writing. Transcripts show discarnates Myers and Edmund Gurney (another of the Society’s deceased founders) both coached her in this discipline. However, as she had been reading Myers’ classic book, it is reasonable to assume her subconscious mind was, at least, helping them along.
At one point, she wrote the address, 5 Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge, along with a message that Fleming should contact Margaret Verrall, the first automatic writer to receive messages dictated by Myers. Fleming had never been to Cambridge and had never met Verrall – although she knew of her from Myers’ book. She had no way of knowing Verrall’s address (which it was). Fleming, however, didn’t contact Verrall directly. Instead, she reached out to Alice Johnson.
Johnson, in that lengthy article, describes the cross-correspondence process:
What we get is a fragmentary utterance in one script, which seems to have no particular point or meaning, and another fragmentary utterance in the other, of an equally pointless character; but when we put the two together, we see that they supplement one another and that there is apparently one coherent idea underlying both, but only partially expressed in each.
These
cross-correspondences are complicated, with many overlapping meanings. It took
Johnson 226 pages to describe the early instances. Despite its obscurity,
the cross-correspondences present substantial evidence for survival.
Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”
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