The Scole Experiment
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| Robin Foy |
The Scole experiment which took place at the end of the 20th Century, set out to see if mediumistic information was due to fraud or genuinely came from spirits. It was carried out by senior members of the Society for Psychical Research in England, who studied a group of four people and two mediums, known as Robin Foy’s group, at the Scole farmhouse. Every possible precaution was taken. Their controls were numerous, and lights were attached to the mediums to prove that they did not move during the séance. The ‘spirits’ could ‘write’ on unexposed film , produced light in the room of the séance and information that only the sitters could know. The Scole report concluded that there was sufficient experimental evidence to suggest the continuation of life after death. (Keen et al., 1999)
Doris Stokes was one of the best known and well-regarded clairaudient mediums of the 20th century. She would always openly admit if she lost contact with the spirit voices, or received no messages from them, and was so successful that it is not surprising that she received hostile criticism from the most vocal sceptics of the time. A friend of ours, Pauline, who lived in America, went to see her on impulse one day when she was visiting London. The accuracy of most of the statements made by Doris Stokes in this session, about the life of someone from a different continent who she had never met before, was such that it is beyond the bounds of probability that it was achieved by guesswork or fakery.
1. “Barbara and Sheila say hello.” This, the first statement Doris made, is telepathy and not after death communication. These were the friends Pauline was living with in New York.
2. “There’s a man here, Charles, who wants to talk to you.” Pauline’s recently dead father was called Charles. The voice and rhythm of his speech were his, though his cockney accent did not come through.
3. “Fred and Alice are here too.” These were Pauline’ grandparents.
4. “And Paddy came just after me” Pauline’s uncle who had died soon after her father did.
5. “And your brother Peter’s here.”
This was a puzzle. Pauline had never, as far as she knew, had a brother called Peter. But because the rest of the information was so accurate, she went over to see her mother in Ireland. When she questioned her mother she was told, rather reluctantly, about the abortion, back in Ireland at a time when such things were neither legal nor socially acceptable. The baby would have been a brother for Pauline. And they had chosen a name for him: Peter. (Personal Communication).
The evidence that mediums can contact dead spirits is now incontrovertible, and examination of mediums' brains during a séance shows that the brain state is significantly different from both the control state and imagination (Peres et al., 2012).
Materialization and the Kluski gloves
In the early part of the 20th century materializations were very much in vogue and ectoplasm was often created in séances. The most convincing of these experiments was carried out with Franek Kluski, a Polish medium. A bowl of paraffin wax was melted over a bath of warm water. Kluski materialized an ectoplasm hand and asked the spirit to dip this hand into the wax and slowly withdraw it. When the wax had cooled this was repeated a number of times until, at the end of the séance, the medium dematerialized the hand and a perfect cast of it was left in the wax. Seven moulds of child-sized hands with the markings of adult hands, one of a foot and one of a lower face were produced in this way (Geley, 1923).
The Institut Métapsychique International conducted a detailed examination of this experiment to see if the results could have been fraudulently produced, either by sleight of hand during the séances, or moulds prepared in advance and surreptitiously smuggled into the laboratory (Varvoglis, 1999). Both seemed implausible because the experiment was so well controlled and they concluded that “...the Kluski wax gloves are genuinely paranormal, constituting evidence for an extraordinarily developed form of psychokinesis.”
Table levitation and psychokinesis
“To abandon these spiritual phenomena to credulity, is to commit a treason against human reason. Nevertheless, we see them always rejected and always reappearing. They date not their advent from yesterday.” – Victor Hugo. (cited in Brackett, 1885)
Psychokinesis – movement of physical objects without apparent human intervention – is one more phenomenon which seems to defy our scientific norms. Batcheldor (1966) describes sessions of table levitation by groups of sitters in which one six pound table levitated six feet, beyond the reach of the group, and another weighing forty pounds produced “brisk movements and levitations.”
An interesting experiment to see whether table levitation might be a human-generated phenomenon is described by Leslie Kean, in her book Surviving Death (Kean, 2017). Leslie was part of a team invited by Stephen Braude to examine table levitation facilitated by Kai Muegge, a German medium. Five of them sat with Kai around a plastic garden table. (Braude, 2016)
During the sessions Leslie and Steve sat on either side of Kai, holding his hands and touching his legs so that he could not physically move the table.
“We experienced a lot of table tilting and erratic circular movement. But it was the longer more relaxed levitations that really stood out. One of them lasted about fifteen seconds. The table rose at least two and a half feet straight up...swayed and dipped as if rocking on wave in what seemed like a swimming motion. It was as if it had suddenly become light and fluid, floating effortlessly, almost ‘alive’. (Kean, 2017)
They were also aware of other odd physical phenomena - raps as if someone was knocking on the wall, and the ringing of a bell which was hanging from the ceiling – which occurred spontaneously while they were all still sitting round the table. Leslie Kean (2017) and Stephen Braude (2016) also draw attention to a paper comparing the waveforms of paranormal rapping sounds with those of human-produced sounds. (Colvin, 2010). The sound amplitude of a human knocking on a wall is strongest the moment the sound begins and then quickly decays, whereas in a paranormal rap the sound starts quietly, builds to a maximum and then decays. See diagram in p.278 of (Kean, 2017).
The investigation of spirits has now gone a stage further, by using modern technology. Anabela Cardoso, was founder and editor of the ITC Journal Instrumental Transcommunication, which includes EVP (electronic voice phenomena) and DRV (direct radio voices). She has been able to show that spirit voices came from either the white background noise of a radio, or of a radio that was not working. A television camera pointed at itself or looking into a mirror has produced a lot of random moving dots. Sometimes these dots weave themselves into an image and have been claimed to be a form of spirit communication (Cardoso, 2017).
The evidence for an afterlife is strong (Tymn, 2021). For a few days after their death there seems to be an interim period when people may be able to communicate with those who were close to them in life. And even when separation from this life is complete, communication between the living and the dead seems possible through Mediums.
“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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