Mediumship evidence: Sommer excerpt #10

James made this argument in a skirmish with a contemporary Skeptic, fellow psychologist James McKeen Cattell, concerning tests of veridical statements made by a supposed spirit medium. The medium in question was Leonora Piper, who was discovered by James in 1885, and who became the most thoroughly investigated medium of all time. An ordinary Boston housewife, Piper seems to have started her career somewhat reluctantly, when she spontaneously fell into a trance. Moreover, unlike most other mediums, she never actually claimed to channel spirits, and although the SPR arranged generous compensation for her services as a test medium, it seems the wish to have her states explained by competent researchers also motivated her consent to be scrutinized for almost three decades.

James’s allusion to Mrs. Piper as his ‘white crow’ to express his belief in her psychic abilities is relatively well known. More obscure is an earlier reference in the Principles of Psychology, where James gave a brief account of experiences with her and stated that “a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology”. However, James’s discovery of Piper by no means marked the first time he investigated a medium. And like his colleagues at the English SPR, James was not exactly squeamish when it came to making sure he wasn’t fooled.

To test if Piper feigned her trance state, for example, James pricked her arm, tongue and lips with a pin in his early experiments, but reported that he found them to be “absolutely anesthetic”. Richard Hodgson, who became Piper’s principal investigator after leaving England for Boston in 1887, also put Piper’s trance to the test on several occasions, by holding a bottle of ammonia under her nose, putting a spoonful of salt in her mouth, severely pinching her, and holding a lit match to her forearm. When physicist Oliver Lodge hosted Mrs. Piper during the first series of experiments in England in late 1889, he pushed a needle into her hand, which, according to Lodge, elicited “not the slightest flinching”.

Like his colleagues in England, Hodgson in Boston strictly flew his supervision of Piper experiments under the radar of the press, and only selected test sitters who were strangers to her and her family. As an additional safeguard, for several weeks the Piper family was shadowed by detectives, who failed to discover indications that Piper or members of her household may be part of a network of fraudulent mediums supplying each other with information about sitters. Similar precautions were taken when Piper visited England for experiments arranged by the SPR in Liverpool, London and Cambridge. Piper’s host in Liverpool, Oliver Lodge, for example, used the occasion to employ new servants unaware of his unorthodox research interests; upon Piper’s arrival he searched her luggage; he locked rooms and hid photographs and documents a trickster would search for information presented in fake seances; he read nearly all her letters; and like Hodgson and other investigators, he introduced all sitters anonymously.

Lodge was the first investigator to express in 1890 his suspicion that some of Piper’s trance phenomena suggested the intervention by certain departed individuals. And when in 1898 Richard Hodgson announced the verdict of his 11 years of research with Mrs. Piper, it came quite as a shock to those who knew him as a zealous debunker of psychic frauds: At least one of Piper’s trance personalities, Hodgson declared, had indeed furnished undisputable evidence for its identity with a deceased person, an acquaintance of Hodgson’s named George Pellew.

Hodgson’s conviction was not shared by everybody in the SPR, although all key researchers agreed that Piper’s often strikingly specific veridical performances were not explicable by chance coincidence let alone fraud. Many continued to stick to what Hodgson had regarded a more parsimonious interpretation himself before accepting the ‘spirit hypothesis’: Piper’s mediumship was a case of a benign multiple personality, telepathically mining the minds of the living to construct persuasive impersonations of the dead. Odd as this view may sound, we shall unpack it below and see why it needs to be considered as a possible counter-explanation for survival.

Skeptics will of course tell you the Piper case collapsed shortly after William James’s death in 1910, when psychologist Amy Tanner published a book detailing her and G. Stanley Hall’s really scientific experiments with the medium, which showed that absolutely nothing paranormal was going on. But as an historian with no discernible sympathies for psychical research put it: “Hall and Tanner proved little with their tests except that they could do physical damage to Mrs. Piper”. This refers to procedures they performed on Piper, which – unlike the also rather invasive tests of Piper’s trance by James, Hodgson and Lodge two decades earlier – seemed to have little purpose other than to cause Piper discomfort, and left her with badly blistered lips and a scar. Based on just six sittings, Hall and Tanner’s main finding, touted as their own discovery, was hardly original: Mrs. Piper, they concluded, was a case of multiple personality.

Piper continued to sit for tests despite her widely publicized ‘exposure’ by Hall and Tanner. But around the time of James’s death in 1910, she would be just one of several mediums investigated by the SPR, who together became involved in the famous ‘cross-correspondences’, which we will briefly look at in the next section.

Meanwhile, James Hyslop, professor of logic at Columbia University and a former pupil of Hall’s, had re-founded the American SPR in 1907. One of Piper’s American main investigators, Hyslop was the author of the most extensive Piper report, and one of a growing number of investigators who shared Hodgson’s conviction that Piper occasionally channelled spirits of the dead. Hyslop discovered several promising new mediums in the US, and continued to publish extremely detailed reports of his experiments with ‘Mrs. Smead’ (pseudonym for Mrs. Willis M. Cleveland), ‘Mr. Chenoweth’ (pseudonym for Minnie Soule) and others until his death in 1920.

In England, the medium most thoroughly tested by the SPR after Mrs. Piper was Gladys Osborn Leonard. Among Mrs. Leonard’s specialties was the production of highly specific veridical information in so-called ‘proxy-sittings’: There, sitters who hadn’t known the deceased person supposedly channelled by a medium attended séances on behalf of others who had. Proxy sittings sought to rule out ‘cold readings’ – fraudulent mediums’ use of subtle unconscious clues given by sitters to construct a convincing but fake spirit impersonation –, but also an immediate telepathic ‘contamination’ of trance statements by sitters in the know.

Hyslop’s mediums and Mrs. Leonard were by no means the last to provide an overall striking mass of evidence in the twentieth century. Initial tests of a young medium named Eileen Garrett in the 1930s provided further interesting results. Like Mrs. Piper before her, Garrett was unconvinced of the ‘spirit hypothesis’, and after she became wealthy through marriage, from 1951 she would actively sponsor research of phenomena suggestive of survival by founding the still existing Parapsychology Foundation in New York.

Later, it was again psychiatrist Ian Stevenson who continued to publish methodologically rigorous research on mediumship suggestive of survival, often in collaboration with the Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson. And while experiments with mediums are still occasionally published in mainstream scientific journals today, to me it seems that few are of the same quality as these earlier studies by the SPR, William James, Hyslop, Haraldsson and Stevenson.

 

 

Andreas Sommer, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death? Submitted to the Bigelow Institute 2021 contest on this topic. The paper with all notes and bibliography is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/Winning_Essays/12_Andreas_Sommer.pdf.