Birthmarks and wounds: Taylor excerpt #19

Greg Taylor writes: In the course of his work collecting reports of past-life memories over several decades, Dr. Stevenson had also noted – and investigated, but not published – a curiously large subset of the cases: those in which the person reporting past-life memories was born with birthmarks or defects that matched wounds on the body of the claimed previous personality. In 1997, he published a 2268-page-long, two-volume collection detailing more than 200 of these cases, titled Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (along with a shorter, more accessible synopsis, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect).

As such cases provided corroborating physical evidence to back up the testimony of the children regarding their past-life memories, Stevenson went to great lengths to verify their details. He obtained autopsy reports, medical or police reports, and eyewitness testimony about the wounds on the past-life personality, and in his book included numerous pictures substantiating the similarities between the birthmarks/defects and the wounds. Some notable cases include a young girl with malformed fingers who remembered a previous life as a man whose fingers were chopped off; another girl with a pale, scar-like birthmark that encircled her head who remembered the life of a man who had skull surgery; and a boy with a malformed right side of his face and ear who had past-life memories of being a man who died as a result of a shotgun blast to the right side of his face.

Furthermore, a number of the cases involved double birthmarks, and were tied to deaths of the previous personality by gunshot. In most, the size and shape of the birthmarks on the children also corresponded with the entry and exit wounds of the bullet: a small, neat mark where the bullet entered the body of the previous personality, and a larger, more irregularly shaped mark matching the location of the bullet’s exit.

For example, a three-year-old boy in Thailand named Chanai Choomalaiwong began saying he had been a schoolteacher named Bua Kai, and that he had been shot and killed on his way to school. He also provided the names of his parents, his wife, and his children. When Chanai was taken back to the town where he said he lived, he led the way to his house, which was discovered to be the home of an elderly couple whose son, Bua Kai Lawnak, had been a teacher. He had been murdered eight years previous (five years before Chanai was born), shot in the head as he rode his bicycle to school. The elderly couple tested Chanai, who recognized Bua Kai’s belongings and one of his children (insisting that they call him ‘Father’).

Dr. Stevenson spoke with several of Bua Kai’s family, including his widow, who remembered that the doctor who examined her husband’s body had said he must have been shot from behind, because he had a small wound on the back of his head and a larger wound on his forehead. Bua Kai’s wounds matched two birthmarks on Chanai’s head, a small one on the back of his head, and a bigger one on the front. Overall, Dr. Stevenson published eighteen cases that involved double birthmarks matching wounds on the body of the previous personality.

Many children also exhibit behaviors that seem connected to their memories and become emotional when discussing events and people from their previous life. For instance:

A little girl in India named Sukla Gupta was under the age of two when she began cradling a block of wood or a pillow and calling it ‘Minu’. She gave a number of details about a past life, such as the name and section of a village eleven miles away. A woman there, the mother of an infant named Minu, had died six years before Sukla was born. When Sukla was five and Minu eleven, she met Minu and cried. Sukla acted maternal toward the older girl, and when Minu later fell ill, Sukla became distraught upon hearing the news and demanded to be taken to her.

A large number of children also have phobias that are linked to the manner of death of the previous personality. Of the 52 cases that DOPS has on file where the previous personality drowned, 43 of the children were scared of water. Dr. Stevenson examined a series of 387 cases and found that 36% of the children exhibited such fears, usually from an extremely young age, sometimes manifesting even before they had begun making claims about past life memories. They also sometimes, rather disconcertingly, acted out the way in which the previous person died, such as one child who re-enacted the suicide of the previous personality by putting a stick under his chin and pretending it was a rifle.

Many also display play behaviors consistent with their previous life, such as a young boy who spent much of his time pretending to be a shopkeeper of biscuits and soda water, which was the occupation of the previous personality. In a series of 278 cases, Dr. Stevenson found that almost a quarter of the children engaged in play related to their memories of a past life, despite it not being a part of their current life and surroundings.

 

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.

Memories of past lives: Taylor excerpt #18

Greg Taylor writes: If consciousness can survive physical death – as the evidence we have so far reviewed strongly suggests – does that mean it can continue on in a new body? Incredibly, the answer to that question appears to be ‘yes’, based on the convincing evidence collected by researchers over the course of the past six decades.

The instigator of this modern research was Dr. Ian Stevenson, a respected psychiatrist with some 60 publications in the medical and psychiatric literature when he took on the position of Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia in 1957. As an extensive reader, Stevenson had become intrigued by a number of strange reports of individuals who appeared to have memories of a previous life and thought the topic worthy of further investigation. He collected and analyzed 44 of them in a paper that was published in 1960, noting later that once he had pulled the cases together as a group and viewed the similarities – most notably, that “they predominantly featured young children,” that “it just seemed inescapable to me that there must be something there...I couldn’t see how they could all be faked or they could all be deception.” Stevenson subsequently traveled to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to investigate reports in person and uncovered 32 more cases during these trips alone.

As Stevenson found, a typical case of past-life memories involves a young child about two to three years old who begins telling parents or siblings about a life they led in another time and place, and usually stops around age seven when most seem to lose the memories (which is also the age when children typically begin losing their memories of being an infant). These memories arise spontaneously – hypnotic regression is not involved – and the child usually describes their ‘previous personality’ as being an ordinary person of no particular note, rather than a well-known historical figure. What often does set their lives apart – in some 70% of the reported cases – is that they died an unnatural, often traumatic, death.

As Dr. Stevenson explained:

The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of that life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognizes places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence.

Stevenson’s work attracted the attention of Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, and with Carlson’s financial support in 1967 he established the Division of Personality Studies (now the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS) at the University of Virginia as a dedicated research center. He was thus able to dedicate the bulk of his time over the next four decades to investigating cases of past-life memories, until his passing in 2007. In that time, he wrote and published several books that documented his meticulously researched cases. The first of his books, published in 1966, was Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. It showcased his careful research, determining exactly what children reporting past-life memories had said about their previous life, before painstakingly attempting to verify whether those statements were correct and had not been embellished or informed through some mundane information channel. Stevenson knew that such a controversial topic had to be approached in a very careful manner, so he sought evidence that was difficult to dispute. For example, he considered any statements made by subjects after they had met or been in communication with their ‘past-life’ families to be tainted; instead, his priority was to examine statements made before any contact was established. The American Journal of Psychiatry, in reviewing his research, was impressed enough to remark that the cases were “recorded in such full detail as to persuade the open mind that reincarnation is a tenable hypothesis to explain them.”

However, it should be noted that Stevenson consistently stated he wasn’t attempting to prove any particular hypothesis or religious doctrine, but instead was simply documenting and examining a mystery and remained open to all explanations. Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, who traveled with Stevenson on some of his research trips and documented his experience in the book Old Souls: Compelling evidence from children who remember past lives, said it was this aspect that attracted him to Stevenson’s work in the first place: “He has never said anything like ‘Believe this because I believe it.’ What he is saying is, ‘Look at what I’ve found. Examine it any way you want to examine it. Think of your own questions, find tests of truth that have escaped me, and if you can imagine a more reasonable explanation for all this, please let me know.”

After the publication of his first book, Stevenson continued traveling the world investigating hundreds more claims of past-life memories across a number of countries and cultures. He intermittently reported cases in journal papers, but from 1975 to 1983 also published four volumes of a book series titled Cases of the Reincarnation Type, which documented in detail the large number of cases he had collected from India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Turkey, and Thailand and Burma, respectively. Once again, scientific reviews of his research were exemplary; the book editor of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) wrote of the first volume that “he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in India in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds... He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”

Other researchers were inspired by Stevenson’s work to do their own research on the topic, investigating and publishing reports on other cases of past-life memories. In 1994 a study, based on 123 cases across five cultures collected by three independent researchers, replicated his results, concluding – like Dr. Stevenson – that “some children identify themselves with a person about whom they have no normal way of knowing. In these cases, the children apparently exhibit knowledge and behavior appropriate to that person.” By the late 1990s, the body of scientific evidence for memories of a previous life had become so substantial that even Carl Sagan, the famous scientist and skeptic, said that he thought it was a claim that merited serious study.

 

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.

Robert Crookall's research: Taylor excerpt #17

Greg Taylor writes: There is one more aspect of research into mediumship that helps to establish that it is indeed interconnected with those other areas: accounts of the dying experience, as related by the dead themselves.

More than a decade before the publication of Life After Life – the 1975 book that started the public fascination with near-death experiences – another researcher, Dr. Robert Crookall, investigated the phenomenon and wrote about it in a pair of relatively obscure books: The Supreme Adventure (1961) and Intimations of Immortality (1965). Crookall cited numerous examples of what he called “pseudo-death,” noting the archetypal elements that Raymond Moody would later bring to the public’s attention as the NDE. What’s more, however, he also compared these ‘pseudo-death’ stories with accounts of the dying process as related by those who claimed to have already gone through it: deceased communicators speaking through mediums. Intriguingly, Crookall found a number of the same recurring elements, despite the fact that they were recorded well before the details of NDEs became well-known.

For example, Crookall noted that, according to the deceased communicators, the newly-dead are usually met by other deceased loved ones, just as has been related by those who have undergone NDEs and ELEs. This of course may not be considered a surprising thing for a medium to say – it’s probably what most people would hope for after dying. But the common elements continue and include some of the more idiosyncratic features of the NDE. For instance, Crookall noted that communicators often declare that “in the early stages of transition, they experienced a panoramic review of their past lives” – it’s worth emphasizing that the words used, “panoramic review,” are the exact same as used by a number of NDErs (and see also Moody’s archetypal NDE description mentioned earlier). In one case the communicator recounted that shortly after death “the scenes of the past life” are revealed; another said that upon ‘waking’ his “entire life unreeled itself.” Another said that after dying his thoughts “raced over the record of a whole long lifetime,” while another communicator said he saw “the events of my past life pass, in a long procession, before me.” One account sounds almost exactly like a typical NDE, with the dead communicator first having an out-of- body experience where he looked down upon his body and those gathered around him, before:

...the scenes of my whole life seemed to move before me like a panorama; every act seemed as though it were drawn in life size and was really present: it was all there, down to the closing scenes.

Crookall’s research also found that, just as in the case above, communicators regularly made note of the OBE component. For example, one communicator noted that he “seemed to rise up out of my body.” According to another, “I was not lying in the bed, but floating in the air, a little above it. I saw the body, stretched out straight.”

And communicators also described one other familiar element of the NDE: traveling through a tunnel and emerging into another realm full of light. “I saw in front of me a dark tunnel,” said one, before traveling through it and then stepping “out of the tunnel into a new world.” Another communicator noted that they remembered “a curious opening, as if one had passed through subterranean passages and found oneself near the mouth of a cave... The light was much stronger outside.”

The common elements are compelling. For anyone familiar with the literature, these reports through mediums are startlingly similar to the accounts of NDErs – and yet Crookall collected them years before the archetype of the NDE became common knowledge. In having one anomalistic phenomenon seemingly confirm another, we might see a parallel to the ‘impossible’ anomaly of stones falling from the sky being confirmed by combining reports from two different sources – for example, eye-witness testimony of a fireball, and the subsequent discovery by others of strange rocks in the same locality. 

 

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.

 

 

Living-agent Psi? Taylor excerpt #16

Greg Taylor writes: Given the careful, in-depth research on mediums by highly qualified scientists over almost 150 years, we can now say there is an abundance of evidence in favor of the conclusion that mediums truly do communicate with the consciousness of deceased individuals. However, there is one other possible explanation: the ‘super-psi’ theory (also known as ‘living-agent psi’). This refers to the possibility that the information being communicated by mediums is not being sent from deceased persons but is instead received by the medium via telepathy from the minds of the living, or via other paranormal means, such as clairvoyance, or precognition.

Some might suggest that super-psi is somewhat of a deux ex machina for those trying to avoid accepting the evidence for what it appears to be at face value: proof of the survival of consciousness. It begs a number of questions: Why would the medium extract information about a deceased person from the mind of the sitter? How do minds ‘read’ each other? And, extending that, if minds can do these amazing things, then perhaps mind is made of a thing beyond the physical, and is not restricted to life in a physical body? When we begin exploring the idea of super-psi, we often end up in the same neighborhood as the survival of consciousness hypothesis anyhow.

Dr. Beischel and her fellow researchers have, however, provided somewhat of a counter to the super-psi problem. During their experiments, some mediums described to them how there were two entirely different ‘feels’ to performing mediumship readings versus performing psychic readings for the living. In response to this information, the researchers set up a study in which mediums were provided with the first name of a target person at the start of a reading, some of whom were living while the others were deceased, though the medium and the experimenter were blinded to this knowledge. The medium then went on to answer questions about the target personality and completed a standardized questionnaire about his/her experiences during the reading. When these were analyzed, Julie Beischel says, “a statistically significant difference was found for blinded readings for living targets versus blinded readings for deceased targets.” This gives credence to some mediums’ opinion that they are not using telepathy or other ‘psi’ talents to acquire information about the deceased target. In short, Beischel says, “they know what psi feels like and mediumship feels different even under blinded conditions.” The data from her experiments, she believes, effectively refute both the idea that mediums use normal, sensory means to find out information about the deceased, as well as the more controversial super-psi theory. “This leaves only communication with the deceased as a plausible explanation for the source of their information,” Beischel concludes.

The S.P.R.’s researchers also confronted the super-psi problem, although the technique they ended up using to address it was somewhat of an ironic invention, as it was, apparently, devised by a dead person and communicated through a medium! The basic premise of what became known as the cross-correspondences was outlined very simply by one of the communicators: “Record the bits and when fitted they will make the whole.” The plan was for a communicator on ‘the other side’ to begin with a coherent idea, which would then be divided into pieces – like a jigsaw puzzle – and distributed to a number of mediums scattered around the world. The pieces on their own would not make sense to each medium, or those sitting with them, but once they had been recognized as pieces of the puzzle and reassembled, the overall picture would become apparent. Also, as further proof this revealed ‘picture’ would be seen to relate to the personality of the deceased communicator in some way.

Frederick Myers               

The main communicators in the cross correspondences claimed to be the afterlife incarnations of two of the co-founders of the S.P.R., Frederic Myers and Henry Sidgwick, and another important member of the society, Edmund Gurney. The cross correspondences were collected for some 31 years, between 1901 and 1932, and the ‘puzzle pieces’ often involved literary themes related to their academic interests. In total, over 50 papers were written analyzing the cross correspondences, many of those book-length, with complex analyses of how the literary puzzle pieces fit together. It’s therefore almost impossible for a lay-person to grasp the intricacies of the entire body of evidence – and indeed, some experts believe that complexity makes them virtually unusable as easily accessible evidence for survival of consciousness. But, as researcher and author Alan Gauld notes in his authoritative study Mediumship and Survival: A century of investigations, “the super-ESP hypothesis has great difficulty in accounting for cases of the ‘cross-correspondence’ kind.” 

And finally, it is extremely important to remember that mediumship research findings do not stand alone when it comes to evidence supporting the survival of consciousness – they are instead part of a greater set that includes, as we have already seen, other convincing evidence from areas including NDEs and ELEs. When viewed in this full context, survival of consciousness seems a far more parsimonious explanation for mediumship than the “crippling complexity” of the super-psi theory, which requires multiple modes of paranormal information transfer.

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.

Anomalous information reception: Taylor excerpt #15

Greg Taylor writes: Dr. Julie Beischel – who has been investigating mediums on a full-time basis since 2003, first at the University of Arizona and subsequently at the Windbridge Institute – understands the necessity of accounting for dazzle shots when scientifically evaluating mediumship. As such, in her experimental set-up participants choose which of several readings they think is the one that is most meaningful to them. That way, she says, “if one reading contains true dazzle shots but not a lot of other correct information, that may be reflected in the raters' choices.”

Dr. Beischel’s experience in researching mediumship has informed numerous other aspects of her experimental process. She realized that, in order to optimize the chances of uncovering concrete evidence of the survival of consciousness, she should be testing only the best mediums. “If we wanted to study the phenomenon of high jumping, we would find some good high jumpers,” Dr. Beischel points out. “We wouldn’t invite some people off the street into the lab and tell them, ‘go jump over that bar’. In mediumship research, we would select participants with a track (and field) record of reporting accurate information about the deceased.”

As such, Dr. Beischel and her research team have employed an extensive screening, training, and certification procedure that consists of eight steps, during which prospective mediums are firstly interviewed, and then tested to see if they can achieve a certain level of accuracy with their readings. Those that pass the testing stage are then put through a training schedule and, once they have completed all the necessary steps, they are then inducted as a ‘Windbridge Certified Research Medium’ (WCRM). Contrary to the widely held perception of mediums as money-hungry fraudsters, there is no payment involved for either the certified status, or for the medium’s time in taking part in experiments. They give their time freely for the experiments, and Dr. Beischel makes clear that they are willing, for the purposes of science, “to attempt experimental protocols that go well beyond their comfort zones...they have a genuine and personal interest in our research questions and are willing to volunteer their time to assist in answering them.”

Nevertheless, Dr. Beischel and her team still take extensive measures to protect against the possibility of fraud and unintended assistance, partitioning off every person involved in the experiment from being able to relay information about the sitter, the deceased person they wish to be in contact with (‘discarnate’), and which is the correct reading:

We need to eliminate all the normal explanations for how the information the medium reports could be accurate. To rule out fraud, we have to make sure the medium can’t look up information about the sitter or the deceased person online or in any other way. We also need to account for cold reading... To prevent that from happening, the medium will be what’s called masked or blinded to the sitter. The medium won’t be able to see, hear, smell, etc., the sitter during the reading: but, as stated above, the sitter should be involved somehow in order to optimize the environment, so we’ll just make sure his intention is that his discarnate communicates with the medium.

Now if I as the experimenter know things about the sitter or the discarnate during a reading, I could also cue the medium... So in our design, let’s also blind me to the information about the sitter and the discarnate... That just leaves the sitter. When a person reflects on the accuracy of a mediumship reading that he knows was intended for him, his personality and psychology affect how he rates the statements.

A person who is more laid-back and forgiving may score more of the items as accurate whereas someone more cynical and strict may only score a few as right. That phenomenon is called rater bias... To maintain blinding, the sitter won’t be able to tell which reading is which... So, to account for fraud, cold reading, experimenter cueing, general statements, and rater bias, we...design an experiment in which the setting is similar to a normal mediumship reading but where the medium, the sitter, and the experimenter are all blinded.

The results of these tightly controlled experiments were highly evidential, Dr. Beischel and her fellow researchers concluded, of “the phenomenon of anomalous information reception (AIR), the reporting of accurate and specific information about discarnates without prior knowledge about the discarnates or sitters, in the absence of any sensory feedback, and without using deceptive means.” Or, in more simple terms, as Dr. Beischel puts it: “When I applied the scientific method to the phenomenon of mediumship using optimal environments, maximum controls, and skilled participants, I was able to definitively conclude that certain mediums are able to report accurate and specific information about discarnates (the deceased) without using any normal means to acquire that information.” 

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.

Scientific study of mediums: Taylor excerpt #14

Dr. Emily Kelly

Greg Taylor writes: Other modern researchers have dared to take on the yoke of investigating mediumship within a scientific framework. Dr. Emily Kelly of the University of Virginia and former hospice chaplain Dianne Arcangel undertook a study of the information given by mediums to recently bereaved persons, the results of which were published in early 2011 in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. Kelly and Arcangel’s findings also offer evidence for the validity of mediumship.

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.

Society for Psychical Research: Taylor excerpt #13

Greg Taylor writes: One group that conducted detailed, skeptical investigation of mediums – for many decades, starting in the late 19th century – was the Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R.), who as we have already seen also carried out research into ‘crisis apparitions’ at the time of death. The S.P.R. has included in its ranks some of the finest scientists, academics and public figures of their time, along with plenty of skilled investigators who in many instances had an understanding of magic tricks and the techniques of fake mediums.

While, through their skills, they certainly outed their share of frauds, the S.P.R.’s investigators also uncovered a number of mediums who consistently communicated information that was highly suggestive to them of the survival of consciousness. One of those mediums is now considered as perhaps the most tested of all time, and possibly offers the most substantial collection of evidence for the survival of consciousness collected thus far: Leonora Piper.

The prodigious talents of Leonora Piper were first uncovered by Professor William James of Harvard University, one of the most highly regarded thinkers of the 19th century (his texts Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience are classics in their respective fields). James had an interest – if a rather skeptical one – in the claims made by Spiritualists of communication with the dead, so when his wife’s family told him about an extraordinary trance medium they had visited in Boston, he thought it might be worthwhile to investigate further.

Ever the skeptic, James was careful to ensure that Mrs. Piper did not know who he was when arranging the visit and was wary of assisting the medium through any cold reading attempts, taking “particular pains” to not give Piper’s ‘control’ personality any “help over his difficulties and to ask no leading questions.” And yet the entranced Mrs. Piper consistently produced extremely accurate private information that James found convincing. “My impression after this first visit,” James later noted, “was, that [Mrs. Piper] was either possessed of supernormal powers or knew the members of my wife’s family by sight and had by some lucky coincidence become acquainted with such a multitude of their domestic circumstances as to produce the startling impression which she did.” While his skeptical nature is obvious in the caveat in this initial summation, continued visits with Piper subsequently led him to “absolutely to reject the latter explanation, and to believe that she has supernormal powers”:

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.

On the basis of William James’ opinion of Leonora Piper, the S.P.R. assigned one of their toughest skeptical minds, Richard Hodgson, to the case. Hodgson had made his name with a high-profile debunking of the leader of the controversial Theosophical movement, Helena Blavatsky, as well as papers pointing out the poor observational ability and gullibility of sitters at séances. “Nearly all the professional mediums,” he had scowled in one report, “are a gang of vulgar tricksters who are more or less in league with one another.” Hodgson ended up investigating Leonora Piper for almost twenty years, using detectives to shadow her and her husband, arranging sittings for others anonymously, and taking numerous other precautions, while transcribing the information produced and checking it carefully. To test whether Piper was truly in a trance, Hodgson pinched her suddenly (“sometimes rather severely”), held a lit match to her forearm, and forced her to take several deep inhalations of ammonia (another researcher poked her with needles without warning). The entranced Piper showed absolutely no reaction to these tests – though, as Hodgson rather coldly noted, she “suffered somewhat after the trance was over.”

Hodgson collected thousands of pages of testimony and analysis, and reams of evidence suggesting that Leonora Piper had access to information beyond her normal senses. While it is impossible here to properly transmit the collective weight of the evidence produced during such a detailed, careful investigation over an incredibly long period of time, Hodgson’s official conclusion should at least offer some idea of its effect. The scrupulous investigator, who had started his research with unbridled skepticism, was now, he said, convinced “that the chief ‘communicators’...have survived the change we call death, and... have directly communicated with us...through Mrs. Piper’s entranced organism.”

The opinions of Richard Hodgson and William James on the mediumship of Leonora Piper were in no way outliers. Professor James Hyslop , another of the S.P.R.’s skeptical researchers who devoted a number of years to studying Piper, concluded that her mediumship provided evidence “that there is a future life and persistence of personal identity.” Frederic Myers, one of the founding members of the S.P.R., said of his own sittings that they “left little doubt – no doubt – that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”

Leonora Piper was hardly the only focus of the S.P.R., however. They investigated many other mediums, and outed some as frauds, but also found a significant number of cases of mediumship to be evidential of the survival of consciousness. For example, another trance medium who impressed the S.P.R. was Gladys Osborne Leonard. Like Leonora Piper, Leonard allowed herself to be studied by the S.P.R. for a large portion of her life, from just prior to the First World War until after the Second World War had come to an end. And as with Mrs. Piper, the S.P.R. applied a skeptical attitude to their investigation, to the point of having detectives shadow Mrs. Leonard to determine if she was researching sitters’ details.

Again, the conclusion of investigators was that Leonard possessed some sort of supernormal power. A skeptical researcher who asked for one particular set of sittings – classical scholar E.R. Dodds – was left with no rational explanation for the information received. In contemplating the summary of the sittings – of 124 pieces of information given, 95 were classified under ‘right/good/fair’, and only 29 as ‘poor/doubtful/wrong’ – he noted that “the hypotheses of fraud, rational influence from disclosed facts, telepathy from the sitter, and coincidence cannot either singly or in combination account for the results obtained.” The experiment, he said, seemed to present investigators with a choice between two conclusions that were equally paradigm-shattering: either Mrs. Leonard was reading the minds of living people and presenting the information so obtained, or she was passing on the thoughts of minds “other than that of a living person.” Dodds concluded that he could see no plausible explanation that would allow his skeptical mind to escape this “staggering dilemma.”

Looking back on the many decades of research done by the S.P.R. since the late 19th century, it is quite extraordinary to note that these positive findings by diligent, skeptical researchers – as mentioned already, some of the finest minds of their time, who undertook detailed, long- term investigations of mediumship – and their larger conclusion for what it means for the survival of our consciousness beyond physical death, have simply been ignored by mainstream science. 

 
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.