Research on trance medium Mrs. Lenora Piper

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Trance medium Leonora E. Piper (1857-1950) of Boston was studied so extensively that the few volumes of case records are still unsurpassed in quantity and detail. She is also one of the very few mediums whose trance speech and writings have been subjected to a serious and extensive psychological analysis.

 

“Mrs. Piper was ‘discovered’ for psychical research by William James of Harvard University, arguably the greatest psychologist of that or perhaps any time. James was sufficiently impressed by his sittings to send some twenty-five other persons to her under pseudonyms. In the spring of 1886, he wrote an account of the results and stated, ‘I am persuaded of the medium’s honesty, and of the genuineness of her trance. I now believe her to be in possession of a power as yet unexplained.’

 

“The general procedure at a sitting would be this: Mrs. Piper would pass into a trance. There was never the least doubt that the trance state was, in some sense, ‘genuine’—William James and G. Stanley Hall, another well-known American psychologist, demonstrated that Mrs. Piper could be cut, blistered, pricked, and undisturbed by a bottle of strong ammonia held under her nose. (The test were so stringent that Mrs. P. complained bitterly about their painful aftereffects.)

 

"After a few minutes, Mrs. Piper would begin to speak with the voice of her control, who gave the name of ‘Dr. Phinuit.’ A soi-distant French doctor with scanty knowledge of the French language, Phinuit spoke in a gruff, male voice and made use of Frenchisms, slang, and swearwords, in a manner quite unlike that of the awake Mrs. Piper. Phinuit would give sitters accounts of the appearances and activities of deceased (and sometimes also of living) friends and relations, and would transmit message from them, often with appropriate gestures.

 

"On an off day, Phinuit would ramble, flounder hopelessly, and fish for information, and if given any, would blatantly serve it up again as though it had been his own discovery. But when he was on form he could, with hardly any hesitation, relay copious communications from the deceased friends and relatives of sitters, communications that would turn out to be very accurate even in tiny details, and far too accurate for the hypothesis of chance or of guesswork based simply on the appearance of the unnamed sitters, to seem in the remotest degree plausible.

 

"As a result of a report by William James, a leading member of the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and an expert in the unmasking of fraud, Richard Hodgson (1855-1905), went to Boston in 1887 and assumed charge of the investigation of Mrs. Piper. He arranged for the careful recording of all sittings and took the most extensive precautions against trickery. Sitters were introduced anonymously or under false names and were drawn from as wide a range of persons as possible. For some weeks Mrs. Piper was shadowed by detectives to ascertain whether she made inquiries in the affairs of possible sitters, or employed agents to do so. She was brought to England where she knew no one and could have had no established agents; her sittings were arranged and supervised by leading members of the SPR. Sitters were for the most part introduced anonymously, and comprehensive records were kept. And still Mrs. Piper continued to get results.

 

"The thought of fraud was never far from Mrs. Piper’s early investigators. The case against it was powerfully summarized in 1889 by Frank Podmore, a highly skeptical writer, who points out that despite careful overseeing amounting at times to invasion of privacy, Mrs. Piper had never once been detected being dishonest. Yet successful communicators often addressed sitters in exactly the right tone and might unmistakably refer to trivialities of a wholly private significance. The charge of credulity, said Podmore, rested with those who, without consideration and without inquiry, could lightly attribute all the results to imposture."

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Communications (and presence?) of the dead?

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Jeffrey Kane is an academic vice president and has a PhD in the philosophy of science; he has written and edited scholarly books on the philosophy of knowledge and educational policy.

 

“Jeff’s oldest child, Gabriel, died in a car crash in June 2003, four days before his twenty-second birthday. In 2005 Jeff wrote Life as a Novice, a powerful book of meditative poems describing the journey of his deep grief, inspired by his son’s continuing presence in his life. A profound, gifted poet and a true contemplative, Jeff describes repeatedly waking up in the morning to ‘a hole torn in the side of the world where once you stood.’ Jeff’s connection to his son seems to be as strong as any human bond could possibly be.

 

‘Perhaps the shock and incomprehensible nature of the loss of a child leave the parents somehow more receptive to messages from the spiritual realm,’ Jeff told me. ‘We are often so confused that the comfortable realities of daily life no longer hold their solidity. The real becomes unreal; the sounds and sights of a familiar room seem as if they come from a foreign land. There is not so much pain as utter confusion about how a child you watched come into the world is no longer in it.’

 

"On Gabriel’s birthday just days after his death, Jeff and his wife, Janet, heard a crash inside the house somewhere but didn’t think much of it. When Jeff went into his walk-in closet before going to bed, all the shelves on the right side had collapsed onto the floor, so that everything slid off them to the center of the closet. There had not been any changes to the closet shelves, or the items on them, for years and there was no explanation for why all the shelves on one side would suddenly cave in. And there, on top of the pile of clothes, shoes, and photo albums lying in a heap on the floor, square in the middle with its front cover facing Jeff, was the album of Gabriel’s birth. None of the photo albums had been touched for seven years prior, yet on Gabriel’s birthday, his birth album lay there staring Jeff in the face. This was the first tangible event that occurred, and Jeff interpreted it as ‘either cruel fate or meaningful.’ It was at least enough to leave a question in his mind saying perhaps this was more than coincidence.

 

"Soon after, Janet had a reading with a medium, who told her Gabriel would leave dimes for them to show he was around. Jeff told his wife this was ‘absolute nonsense’: the medium had planted the notion in their minds to look for dimes so that it would become a circular and self-fulfilling prophecy. A few days later, Janet and their daughter Emily went to the beach, and while in the water swimming, Emily felt a dime float into the palm of her hand. How often does such a thing happen? Still, Jeff attributed that to an ‘amazing coincidence.

 

"Yet a few days later he questioned that interpretation. He was sleeping, woke up and in the dim light saw something that looked like a dime or a penny about seven or eight feet away on the floor. He mused cynically to himself, snidely dismissing the idea with sarcasm: ‘Oh, I wonder if that’s a dime from Gabriel!’ He turned away and then suddenly heard Gabriel’s voice. ‘I absolutely heard him, clearly, in English; it was loud and precise and unmistakably his voice,’ Jeff told me. The voice said, ‘Aha! Check the date. It’s a 1981!’ That was the year of Gabriel’s birth. Jeff picked up the coin—a penny—but couldn’t read the date on it, so he woke his wife. It was 1981. ‘He was telling me something I couldn’t possible have known,’ says Jeff.

 

“That summer, Jeff and Janet went on a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, and were driving in Acadia National Park. ‘I wish Gabriel could give us some kind of sign to let us know he’s around,’ Jeff said. At that moment, the car clock jumped one hour. They both saw it. Was this a sign from Gabriel? They drove around to see if somehow they had entered a different time zone, or had been affected by a nearby tower, trying to find a rational explanation—without success. Three days later, they were driving again and Jeff mentioned to Janet that, yes, the hour shift might have been a fluke caused by a malfunctioning cell tower or something. He added that if the clock changed by two hours, that explanation would not make sense and there had to be something else going on. Within two or three minutes, the clock changed by two hours."

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

A brilliant, loving light that appears near death

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “Light is a predominant feature of the NDE and plays a part in the dying process as well. It is seen not only at the time of death but in the days or even weeks before. In both situations, its qualities are described positively, as warm, loving, peaceful, compassionate; and people feel drawn toward it. After an ELE (end-of-life experience) involving the experience of light, the dying person describes it to others, just as the resuscitated person does after an NDE.

 

"Occasionally caregivers or relatives who are sitting with the dying see light at the moment of death, as though they are somehow sharing the same vision. They usually describe the light as bright and white and associated with strong feelings of love that at times permeate the whole room. It is often emanating from or surrounding the body, and it usually lasts over the time of the death process. It can be radiant glowing light or more like ‘spiritual’ globules of light. Three accounts are as follows:

 

“Suddenly there was the most brilliant light shining from my husband’s chest and as this light lifted upward there was the most beautiful music and singing voices, my own chest seemed filled with infinite joy and my hear felt as if it was lifting to join this light and music. Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder and a nurse said, ‘I’m sorry, love. He has just gone.’ I lost sight of the light and music, I felt so bereft at being left behind. (Wife’s account)

 

“Sometimes I’ve seen a light, which is in a corner, like candlelight, it’s a golden light. It’s not electric light and it’s not one of the hospice lights. It just appears sometimes. It goes when they die. They take their last breath, and everything settles down and the light goes out. (Hospice chaplain)

 

"When her mother was dying this amazing light appeared in the room. The whole room was filled with this amazing light and her mother died. (Pastoral caregiver in hospice)”

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

A prayer and a song for an Easter faith

To hear this click on https://christian-bible.com/songs/contemporary/abba-hallelujah.html

 

 

 

 

Back and forth: near-death and the other side

In Surviving Death Leslie Kean writes: “In the days before death some patients say they move in and out of an alternative reality, which they describe as an area full of love, light, and compassion. This alternative reality appears just as real to patients as being in the hospice. In our retrospective survey new realities were reported by 55 percent of the Dutch and 30 to 32 percent of the English caregivers, but in the prospective study they were found by 48 percent of caregivers in each group. In one Swiss study over 50 percent of the caregivers experienced this. Here are three reports:

 

“Sometimes people seem to oscillate between the two worlds for a bit, sometimes for hours. They seem at some points to be in this world and at others they’re not. I think for many people death is not just going through a doorway. You’ve sort of got a foot on the step and you stick your head in and you have a look . . . I’ve had people open their eyes and say, Oh, I’m still here then.

"In the last two to three days before she died, she was conscious of a dark roof over her head and a bright light. She moved into a waiting place where beings were talking to her, her grandfather among them. They were there to help her. Everything would be okay; it was not a dream. She moved in and out of this area. (Patient’s mother)

“Suddenly she looked up at the window and seemed to stare intently up at it. This lasted only minutes but it seemed ages. She suddenly turned to me and said, Please, Pauline, don’t ever be afraid of dying. I have seen the most beautiful light and I was going toward it. I wanted to go into that light. It was so peaceful. I really had to fight to come back.  Next day when it was time for me to go home, I said, Bye, Mum. See you tomorrow. She looked straight at me and said, I am not worried about tomorrow and you mustn’t be. Promise me. Sadly, she died the next morning . . . I knew she’d seen something that day which gave her comfort and peace when she only had hours to live. (Patient’s daughter)”

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Returning to life after being clearly medically dead

Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: “The point is often made that these ‘clinically dead’ people have not actually died, so maybe their experiences are different from those that occur during irreversible physical death. However, the experiencers are convinced that they journeyed to the same realm that they will return to when they die, and this is why they no longer fear death. David Fontana, author of Is There an Afterlife, who spent many decades studying evidence for survival raises a bigger question. ‘It is little use saying that if a person is revived after clinical death this means they were not dead,’ he wrote in 2005. ‘It may indeed be that the boundary between life and death can be crossed, albeit briefly, in both directions. Why not? What is to stop us at least accepting this as a working hypothesis, and then studying what people have to tell us about their NDEs in order to learn what they have to tell us about this shadowy boundary between the two states?’

"Dr. Sam Parnia, who specializes in resuscitation science, has learned more about that shadowy boundary in recent years. Now, with such advanced techniques as cooling down a body, a person who has been dead for hours can be brought back to life because the cells within the body take may hours to die. And we are talking about a motionless, stone-dead corpse—a body with no heartbeat, no respiration, and no brain activity. ‘Recent scientific advances have produced a seismic shift in our understanding of death. This has challenged our perceptions of death as being absolutely implacable and final,’ Parnia wrote in 2013.

 

"In June 2011, a thirty-year-old woman died in the forest following an overdose of medications. She had been dead for several hours before the ambulance arrived, so her body temperature had dropped to 68 degrees F. The ambulance team could not revive her. The emergency doctors went through many procedures to try to revive the woman, and after six hours of treatment, her heart restarted. ‘Although she had remained physically dead for at least five to ten hours overnight while undergoing lifesaving treatment, and then for a further six hours while undergoing lifesaving treatment in the hospital, the woman was able to recover and eventually walk out of the hospital without organ and brain damage three weeks later  . . . the woman had, in fact, died,’ Parnia reports.

 

“Two-year-old Gardell Martin fell into an icy Pennsylvania stream in March 2015. By the time the emergency rescuers arrived, he had been dead for at least thirty-five minutes with no heartbeat. He was taken to a hospital and then flown to a medical center, with no one able to revive him. Since he was so young and his body was cold, doctors continued trying to bring him back by continuous chest compression and the infusion of warm fluids into his veins and organs. This went on for an hour and a half. He was a ‘flaccid, cold corpse showing no signs of life,’ recalled Richard Lambert, a member of the critical care team. Then, a faint but steady heartbeat was detected. Gardell walked out of the hospital three and a half days later, after having been dead for 101 minutes.”

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).

Near-death experiences have a unique EEG

Journalist Leslie Kean writes in Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife: “Could NDEs be incorrect memories, or fantasies that are simply imagined? Seven scientists from the University of Liège, Belgium, have studied the characteristics of NDE memories as compared with both real and imagined event memories. In 2013, they found that NDE memories have more characteristics than either, which alludes to NDEs appearing more ‘real,’ as experiencers so often report. ‘The present study showed that NDE memories contained more characteristics than real event memories and coma memories. Thus, this suggests that they cannot be considered as imagined event memories. On the contrary, their physiological origins could lead them to be really perceived although not lived in reality,’ the scientists report.

“A lengthy 2014 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by nine scientists from the University of Padova, Italy, reports on the use of electroencephalography (EEG) ‘to investigate the characteristics of NDE memories and their neural markers compared to memories of both real and imagined events.’ This team reached the same conclusion as the Belgian one. ‘It is notable that the EEG pattern of correlations for NDE memory recall differed from the pattern for memories of imagined events,’ they state. ‘Our findings suggest that at a phenomenological level, NDE memories cannot be considered equivalent to imagined memories and at a neural level, NDE memories are stored as episodic memories of events experienced in a peculiar state of consciousness.’ These memories were very similar to memories of real events in terms of their richness and strong emotional content.

 

“Something actually happens during an NDE that we have yet to understand. Experiencers have no doubt that they crossed over into a wondrous afterlife realm to which they will someday return, and that death is merely a doorway into another world.”

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).