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| Dr. Emily Kelly |
In one experiment, Kelly and Arcangel employed nine mediums to offer readings for 40 individual sitters – two of the mediums doing six each, while the other seven mediums did four readings each (each sitter had just one reading done). The sittings were done without the actual sitter present (the researchers acted as a ‘proxy’ to sure a ‘blind’ protocol), and audio recordings of the mediums’ statements were later transcribed. Each sitter was then sent six readings – the correct reading, and five ‘decoy’ readings drawn from those given for others in the group – but were then asked to rate each overall reading on how applicable they thought it was to them, and comment on why they chose the highest rated reading. Thirty-eight of the forty participants returned their ratings – and, amazingly, 14 of the 38 readings were correctly chosen, a number significantly above what would be expected by chance. Additionally, seven other readings were ranked second, and altogether 30 of the 38 readings were ranked in the top half of the ratings. What’s more, one medium in particular stood out above the others: all six of this person’s readings were correctly ranked first by each sitter, at quite astronomical odds. Sitters, asked to explain why they chose the correct readings, often cited the specific, personal details that stood out. For example:
...the medium referred to “a lady that is very much, was influential in his [the deceased person’s] formative years. So, whether that is mother or whether that is grandmother... She can strangle a chicken.” The sitter commented that her grandmother (the deceased person’s mother) “killed chickens. It freaked me out the first time I saw her do this. I cried so hard that my parents had to take me home. So the chicken strangling is a big deal...In fact I often referred to my sweet grandmother as the chicken killer.”
Such exact hits on highly personal information by mediums are sometimes called ‘dazzle shots’. To use an example from popular culture, for those that know the movie Ghost, it is when Demi Moore’s character Molly is stopped in her tracks by the mention of one familiar word from Whoopi Goldberg’s Oda Mae: “He says ‘Ditto’.” It might be only one piece of information out of many that is specific enough to get the attention of the sitter, but it is so correct that it stands out above everything – and it is usually something so personal and idiosyncratic that no medium would likely have been able to guess it or uncover it through investigation.
Reports of dazzle shots like the one mentioned above abound in the research literature. Trevor Hamilton, who undertook his own investigation of mediums in the wake of his son Ralph’s death in a car accident, told of one such incident when sitting with a certain medium who for most part was not providing much evidential information. The medium all of a sudden noted that they were being given a mental picture of Trevor “agitated at a table, tapping on it with a penny, in the registry” – a seemingly random and obscure statement that was in fact spookily correct. “I had to sort out the legal matters to do with Ralph’s death,” Trevor notes. “I remember going to the registrar to prove probate and get the death certificate, and sitting outside her office staring at the little table in front of me, tapping aimlessly with a couple of pennies on the tabletop, confronted by the utter meaninglessness of it all.”
Another good example is from the mediumship of Gladys Osborne Leonard. Mary White was a distraught widow who wrote to the researchers of the S.P.R., requesting a sitting, when her husband Gwyther died from stomach cancer aged just 38. During a proxy sitting – where another person sat in on behalf of Mary White, to minimize the possibility of information leakage through cold reading and so on – that was full of evidential hits, the medium referred to a piano: “You know the piano, you tap on his teeth, the one with the big white teeth?” When Mary White read the transcript of this sitting, she was amazed. “Gwyther often called my piano ‘the animal with the big white teeth’,” she noted. In a subsequent sitting where Mary White was an anonymous guest (so that the medium was unaware of her identity), Leonard spelled out Gwyther’s pet name for his wife: ‘Biddy’. The convinced sitter noted that this particular name was very special, as it was only Gwyther that used it. He also mentioned “the house of sweet scents,” which was a specific phrase that he had invented to describe potpourri.
Leonora Piper provided Richard Hodgson with a dazzle shot during his initial sittings, when she provided highly specific personal information about a girl he knew in his home country of Australia – a lost love by the name of Jessie Tyler Dunn (discreetly referred to in Hodgson’s reports under the simple pseudonym of ‘Q’). Dunn had died in Melbourne some 8 years previous – and yet Piper correctly stated that “the second part of her first name is –sie.” Hodgson was then jolted by a description from Leonora Piper’s control personality ‘Phinuit’ that seemed to defy any rational explanation:
She then began to rub the right eye on the under-side, saying, “There’s a spot here. This eye (left) is brown, the other eye has a spot in it of a light colour, in the iris. This spot is straggly, of a bluish cast. It is a birth-mark. It looks as if it had been thrown on.”
‘Q’ had a splash of what I should call grey (rather than blue) in the right eye, occupying the position and having very nearly the shape assigned by Phinuit.
It is difficult to imagine how Leonora Piper could have accessed this stunning ‘hit’ through any normal means.
Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the
Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written
for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts
without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a
bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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