Adventures in Psychical Research

I

I DO not pretend to be an expert in Psychical Research. About two years ago, indeed, the S.P.R. did me the honor of appointing me their annual president; but this, I believe, was because I was known to take an interest in the subject; certainly not because I had, or was ever likely to have, an experience comparable to that of Sir Oliver Lodge, or Professor Hyslop, or any other of the well-known men and women who have devoted years to the study of the phenomena. My experience is limited and incomplete. But so far as it has gone, it seems to me significant, and the lessons I have drawn from it may conceivably be of some use to others.

Until a year ago my own studies in the subject had been confined to its literature, to the published reports of investigators, and to the various theories and speculations to which the phenomena had given rise. Though profoundly interested, and entirely respectful to the claims of Psychical Research as a branch of scientific investigation, I was unwilling to become, as people say, ‘mixed up in séances and that sort of thing.’ For one reason, I foresaw the likelihood that it would involve a tax on my time and energies, which were otherwise fully engaged. For another, I dreaded the effect it might have upon my mind, or rather upon the atmosphere of my mind. I am one of that large class of persons who are easily intoxicated by novel and startling experiences, and for whom wisdom consists in keeping to the trodden highways of life. It seemed to me that the sudden feeling, experienced for the first time, of being actually in communication with a departed friend, was precisely the sort of thing to overexcite a mind such as my own, and that I should be well advised not to challenge danger in that form. My own trouble in life has not come from my inability to have visions, but from my tendency to have more of them than was good for me. Many of them have turned out to be chimeras, and some, I must confess, have grossly deceived me and led me, unconsciously, I hope, to state as fact what afterwards turned out to be something else. Such a person has need to think twice before placing himself in direct contact with psychic phenomena.

However, I began to feel that it was not fair to occupy the position I did, and to write occasionally on the subject, without getting a nearer view of the facts. I often found myself at a great disadvantage in discussing these matters with those who had the experience I lacked. Moreover, two or three of my friends, in whose condition I had some right to be concerned, were clearly losing their heads. They were constantly assuring me that survival had been ‘scientifically proved’; but when I pointed out that the reasons they gave were not scientific, the answer was that, if only I had had their ‘experiences,’ I should think differently. Their attitude resembled that of the mystic who, when his statements are challenged, silences opposition by declaring, ‘I have felt; I have seen.’ It was perhaps a vain thing to hope that I might save them from losing their heads; but the hope was there, and it led me to run the risk of losing my own.

Three sittings, with long intervals between, were arranged with one of the best-attested mediums in England. Stringent precautions were taken to ensure my anonymity, and for reasons which are exceptionally cogent, I am convinced that at the first two sittings the medium had no knowledge, and no means of getting knowledge, of who I was. Between the second and third sittings, however, my identity was revealed to her through the sudden indiscretion of a friend. Incidentally, this served a good purpose, by giving new grounds to believe in the medium’s honesty. On learning who I was, she communicated her discovery without a moment’s delay to those who were arranging the third sitting on my behalf. Moreover, when the sitting took place, there was nothing to suggest that she had made any use of the knowledge she had gained. There had been ample time to compile my personal dossier: to get up my family history, to bribe my servants for domestic information, and to prime herself in the many ways that are open to fraudulent mediums when practising on the credulity of a sitter. There were no signs whatever that this had been done. The sitting followed the same tracks as its predecessors, and while it showed no knowledge of facts concerning me which could easily have been found out, it hit the truth at several points which were virtually inaccessible to inquiry.

For these and a good many other reasons I dismiss the hypothesis of fraud as inapplicable to the sittings in question. Fraud is unquestionably practised by some professional mediums, but this must not be held to the prejudice of what has the marks of being genuine, any more than the frauds practised in the Christian or any other religion, the amount of which has been enormous, can be adduced to prove that all clergymen are rogues. Nevertheless, even in the case of a medium as genuine as the one with whom I have had to do, I cannot resist the conviction that a professional element is present, which takes the form of ‘shoppy’ patter about ‘astral bodies,’ ‘planes of existence,’ and other such-like vernacular, and which seems to be used largely for the purpose of filling up gaps when nothing is doing. This patter, I confess, made me suspicious at several points, and the more so because it often took a form into which an excited sitter could read meanings to suit his fancy, his desires, and his expectations. On the other hand, the presence of this meaningless and unsatisfactory element serves only to make the phenomena the more remarkable when, as happened in the present instance, they suddenly change their character and become intelligible and to the point.

The mixture of sense and nonsense, of reality and play-acting (if such it be), seems to me to be one of the most interesting features of the case. It may be regarded in two ways. One may treat the sense as discredited by the nonsense which precedes or follows it; or, on the other hand, one may find the sense all the more significant by reason of the contrast with the nonsense out of which it emerges so unexpectedly and so inconsequently. My own preference is for the latter point of view. The very fact that the stream of nonsense, or professional play-acting, or whatever it may be, is suddenly broken and arrested seems to me to suggest the presence of some intelligence, or intelligences, sufficiently powerful to break and arrest it. Certainly the contrast between the two things is most remarkable and not a little puzzling. It suggests an analogy with the phenomena of dreams, in which a similar thing frequently occurs — first a confused jumble of absurd images and impossible situations, then a sudden episode of order and rationality, followed in turn by an equally sudden relapse into the realm of nonsense — the mere babble of the mind, in which the dream began.

With regard to the hypothesis of fraud there are two forms of credulity against which one has to be on one’s guard. The first is represented by the sitter who, when a ‘spirit’ with a long beard and a benevolent expression is announced, at once jumps to the conclusion that this is a departed uncle, and unconsciously gives the medium a lead which, if he is fraudulent, he will cleverly follow up until the sitter is intoxicated with the certainty that the departed uncle is ‘ present.’

The second form of credulity is represented by the equally common type which pushes the hypothesis of fraud beyond all reasonable limit, the skeptical sharpness which inevitably overreaches itself. For example, I was recently explaining to one of these skeptics the extreme precautions that were taken to secure my anonymity at the sittings to which I have alluded, and I mentioned the names of some well-known persons who had assisted me in making these precautions complete. His answer was a veiled hint that ‘we were all in the game,’ and that possibly the Society of Psychical Research was a kind of conspiracy. Again, I have heard it solemnly maintained that there exists a secret syndicate of mediums, a great organization with a central office, an elaborate system of underground and overhead communications, ‘wires’ everywhere, and with innumerable spies, informers, and detectives all over the country; so that a medium belonging to the syndicate can be supplied at short notice with a complete dossier of the private life of any sitter he may chance to be expecting. Probably there is some slender basis of fact for this delightful myth. But anyone who believes it in its developed form, which has now attained considerable currency, may be justly classed with the ‘innocents.’ The fact is that the hypothesis of fraud, if pressed hard enough, can be made to cover anything. The very precautions taken against fraud can be readily interpreted in terms of fraud, as they were in the case I have just mentioned; and the honorable men who have taken part in this work are easily disposed of as only a more astute type of rascal than the rest. Why not? So far as I can see there is nothing left for these gentlemen but to challenge their traducers to a duel; and one almost regrets for their sakes that dueling has gone out of fashion.

It is impossible to lay down any general rules as to the point beyond which the hypothesis of fraud can no longer be reasonably entertained. Certainly the dangers of pressing it too hard are as great as the dangers of not pressing it hard enough. There is credulity at both ends of the line, and each man must be left to his own common sense to find the just mean between the two. The point varies with almost every case that comes under observation.

II

Coming now to the actual phenomena of the sittings, which on the whole were remarkably good, the first point to which I would call attention is that the communications took a decisive start on the track of my literary interests, and not on the more usual track of personal affections. None of my bloodrelations, the deceased persons whom I should have supposed most anxious to communicate with me, appeared upon the scene. The ' spirits ' who did appear (through the voice of the medium), or who appeared most persistently, were those who, if I had been consulted beforehand, I should have said were little likely to want to communicate with me in this manner. In one instance the appearance of the individual in question caused me great surprise: he was almost the last person among my acquaintances whom I should have expected in such a connection.

The chief manifesting spirits were four in number, all of them well known to me in life. Two were men of letters with whom I had been connected in literary work; the third was a public character with whom my connection was slighter, but about whom, as it happened, I had privately consented, the day before, to write an obituary notice; the fourth was the person whose appearance caused me so much surprise — a man who had been recently killed in the war. All four gave quite unmistakable proofs of their identity. Their names were given with some difficulty, but correctly; their ages and personal appearance were truly described, and with some amount of characteristic detail; common friends were mentioned; and out-of-the-way places, with peculiar names, with which one or other of them had been connected, were well and easily indicated. In two instances the voice of the deceased person was reproduced, breaking with quite startling effect into the babbling tones which the medium commonly uses. This happened both before and after the medium had discovered who I was; but even if we suppose that after the discovery she had been foraging in my personal record, it is unthinkable that in the few days she had for the purpose she should have learned to imitate the voice of an obscure person whom I had not seen half a dozen times in the course of his life.

As I have said, the start was made in the track of my literary interests; the spirits introduced were, with the exception of the fourth, persons who might be supposed to have had some share in those interests; and these characteristics were maintained throughout, with one or two breaks-away into matters of more individual concern. At the first sitting the intelligence at work — alleged by the control to be the ‘spirit’ of a departed friend — showed clear acquaintance with an article I had published some months previously in the Atlantic Monthly. The motif and keyword of the article were correctly given; and what the ‘spirit’ said in general terms corresponded with my own thoughts about the article and with my own intentions in writing it. This, no doubt, the skeptic will explain on the ground that the medium had primed herself in the Atlantic Monthly, which by that time had reached England; an argument which I can only meet by repeating the assurance that, when this happened, the medium had not the faintest notion who I was.

However that may be, the skeptic must find another explanation for what happened at the next sitting, which also preceded the disclosure of my identity by the indiscreet friend mentioned above. At this sitting the ‘spirit’ who had shown his acquaintance with the published Atlantic article, got on the track of another article of mine which was then lying unpublished in one of my study drawers, and the contents of which were known to no living person save myself. Here the characterization was even more precise than on the previous occasion. The ‘spirit’ showed a quite intelligent grasp of the scope of my argument in the article, and especially of its ethical motives, and actually repeated more than once a highly peculiar key-phrase of the article, though, I must confess, with a little ‘boggling’ at that point, in which I had to help him out. However, having got the phrase, which I venture to say would have been quite unintelligible to the medium in her normal condition, the ‘spirit’ made an entirely right use of it, developed its meaning, and even showed a measure of prescience quite in keeping with the educated and penetrating person he claimed to represent.

Another remarkable phenomenon was the introduction of the gentleman, recently dead, whose obituary notice I had agreed to write only the day before the sitting took place. I have every reason to believe that this fact was known to two living persons only — myself and a relative of the deceased who had asked me to write the notice. Yet the ‘spirit’ himself seemed to know all about it; he knew the plan on which I had proposed to myself to write about him, and which I had communicated to nobody; he knew that, owing to certain circumstances, the notice would have to be written in two separate installments or parts — a very unusual occurrence in this kind of writing. He also indicated certain wishes of his own with regard to the mode of publication — eminently reasonable wishes which appeared to be based on knowledge of what was going on in the world. Very remarkable, too, was the way his personality came and went. At moments he stood out clearly defined, and I had no manner of doubt as to who he was; and then again he seemed to fade away or get entangled with some one of the other spirits who were said to be present, so that I had some difficulty in making out which of them was trying to communicate with me.

This leads me to call attention to a curious circumstance which, while it seems to me to rule out, decisively, the hypothesis of fraud, renders it, at the same time, very difficult to explain the facts either by ‘survival’ or by ‘telepathy.’ To grasp the point, I must beg the reader to keep a few facts clearly in his mind; for there is a knot to be disentangled.

There were, as I have said, four chief communicating spirits whom I will call A, B, C, D. At the first sitting B held the field. At the second A appeared simultaneously with B, and the two manifested alternately. At the third, A, B, C, D were all present, either together or in succession.

The point to which I now call attention is the tendency shown in the second and third sittings, especially in the third, for these ‘spirits’ to get mixed up or entangled with one another, and not only with one another, but possibly with other ‘spirits’ not belonging to the four — certainly with one other whom I will presently indicate.

The simplest of these ‘mix-ups’ is that of A and D. A was one of the literary authors to whom I have referred; D was the man killed in the war whose appearance took me so much by surprise. Now it so happened that these two men, of whom A was much older than D, had the same surname, a not uncommon one. For reasons which will presently become apparent, I will call it Scott, and distinguish them as ‘Old Scott’ and ‘Young Scott.’ Old Scott and Young Scott were known to one another in life, and both, of course, were known to me, Old Scott quite intimately.

At the third sitting Old Scott appeared the instant the medium was in trance, and began by mentioning certain objects to which I knew he had attached great value when in life. His communications proceeded quite intelligibly for some time, and I was able to recognize the characteristic relevance of all that he said. Suddenly his talk turned to another subject, which, so far as I know, had no connection with him, and which seemed altogether out of keeping with his personality. The situation became confused and unintelligible, and in my bewilderment I said to the control, ‘This cannot be Scott who is talking to me now — who is it? ’ The answer came (in effect), ‘Yes, it is Young Scott.’ For a moment I could not think who Young Scott (who had not appeared before) might be. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that I had known a Young Scott who had been killed in the war, and remembering the communications which had just passed, I recognized that, while out of keeping with the elder man, they were all in keeping with the younger. What had happened was therefore that Old Scott — who had played his part admirably— had suddenly changed into Young Scott, a totally different person, without the controlling intelligence being aware of the change until I called its attention to the fact: the two personalities had coalesced through the identity of their surnames. From that point all was clear for some time. Young Scott placed his identity beyond question by a quantity of striking evidence, of which the sudden reproduction of his voice was perhaps the most impressive. But later on the two Scotts again became mixed up, the communications being partly in the character of the one and partly in that of the other.

At the second sitting, at which Old Scott was much in evidence, a still more inexplicable mix-up had taken place. Old Scott had made his identity clear, reminded me of his home, mentioned his children by name, alluded to his writings, his friends, his favorite pursuits. For some time heand I understood one another; and when I questioned him, the answers were to the point. Then, quite suddenly, his conversation left the track, and he began to talk of things I could not connect with him. He mentioned certain countries where I knew he had never been, and declared that he ‘passed over’ from a place a thousand miles from the actual place of his death, and many other things altogether out of Old Scott’s environment. I now began to realize that it was no longer the Scott I knew with whom I was talking, and asked the spirit, ‘Who are you?’ And then, to my infinite surprise, the answer came, ‘ I am Sir Walter Scott, the novelist.’

In all this I have somewhat exaggerated the facts and made them more distinct than they really were. What happened was that two eminent men bearing the same surname, one of whom I knew well and the other not at all, became mixed up in the controlling intelligence, misled no doubt by the identity of name. There was no earthly reason why the spirit I have called Sir Walter Scott should want to communicate with me. But the evidence seems pretty clear that the controlling intelligence, having started rightly with my friend Old Scott, did after a certain time lose its way, and became entangled with another personality (the assumed Sir Walter), and that without being aware of what had taken place. This I submit is incompatible with fraud — no fraudulent medium would play the game quite so stupidly as that. But what, in heaven’s name, is it compatible with? With survival — hardly. With telepathy — hardly.

III

If the reader asks me what I make of all this, the answer is, frankly, that I don’t know what to make of it. Confining myself to the evidence in the three sittings, a fragment only of which has been given above, it seems to me that the statement now so often made that ‘survival is scientifically proved’ goes far beyond what my own experience warrants. I can imagine half a dozen hypotheses, including survival among them, any one of which covers a part of the facts, but none of which covers them completely. I am inclined to think that we are only at the beginning of these investigations, and that the haste which many are showing to force ‘survival’ as the only possible explanation, damages the inquiry by arousing a degree of skepticism which is, indeed, unwarranted, but is quite natural in the circumstances. Under the most favorable conditions the difficulties of the investigation are immense, and it is to be regretted that we often make them greater by forcing the pace in a manner which cautious science will never tolerate.

In my own case, and I have no doubt in that of many others, one of the chief difficulties arises from the emotional stress at the moment when these things are happening. Say what we will, the desire to believe that our departed friends are still alive is immensely powerful with most of us; and when we first come into contact with signs which seem to indicate that they are actually near us, the emotional reaction is apt to be such as almost to overpower the exercise of reason. Were I to abandon myself to the feelings I had at certain passages of these sittings, I should assert without hesitation the survival of my friends. It did seem as if I was actually communicating with them. But reviewing the matter in calmer moments, I cannot but remember that there were other passages when this feeling was rudely broken into by feelings to the contrary. If the hits were impressive, the misses were equally disconcerting. If the spirits played their parts well at some points, they played them remarkably ill at others. Often the hits would be so startling as almost to carry one off his feet; but again, some frightful miss or hopeless muddle would go far to undo the previous effect. The impression left upon me is, on the whole, deeply confused. I mean, it is confusion one has to do with; but confusion, be it noted, with clear intervals. Yet the clearness is not always that of truth. It is sometimes the clearness of manifest error. One is in a realm analogous to that of dreams.

A difficulty of another kind arises from the constant danger of reasoning in a circle. The problem of evidence, complicated enough even in ordinary practice, is here immensely more complicated by the fact that the existence of the witnesses, which in most other cases is taken for granted, is now the very point in question. The witnesses are the ‘spirits’; but the ‘spirits’ are the beings whose existence has to be proved. If I say that Old Scott proved his existence by giving the name of his country cottage, I am clearly begging the question, which consists precisely in proving that it was Old Scott and not the subconscious activities of the medium, or some other agency among minds on earth, which there and then delivered this particular piece of information.

A third and peculiar difficulty, which has not been sufficiently noticed, arises from the reluctance of persons who have jumped to conclusions about these things to admit, on subsequent proof, that they were wrong. To declare your belief in ‘spirits,’ and then to be confronted with a proof that you were the victim of a mistake, is a particularly odious way of being made to look a fool. People exposed to this danger will fight to the last ditch — fight till every vestige of regard for truth has long been thrown to the winds. Recently I had an experience of this in investigating a haunted house, a remarkably wellattested case. After two or three of the most trying nights of my life, I succeeded in satisfying myself that the ghost was due to natural causes, though I was more than once on the point of seeing him myself, so great was the nervous tension caused by watching and waiting for his appearance. But when I presented my explanation to those who were already committed to belief in the ghost, and whose reputations for common sense wore in a manner dependent on their stories being verified, I encountered the darkest of looks. My explanations were not accepted. I do not wonder at this, and I cannot deny the possibility that, if I had stayed in the house another night, I might either have seen the ghost or come to believe that others had seen him. I should undoubtedly have saved myself a great deal of trouble and some unpleasantness if I had come down from the haunted chamber with a circumstantial story that I had seen the apparition — a story which I could easily have invented and maintained without anybody being able to prove that I was lying. Indeed, I must confess that the temptation to do this did once or twice furtively suggest itself to my mind; and although I managed to resist the voice of the tempter, — who promised me much amusement and réclame, — I could not help thinking that many ghost stories have had their origin in precisely this temptation — to which, by the grace of God, I had turned a deaf ear. At all events, I learned that belief in spirits, or in ghosts, when once it has been expressed, is apt to become a vested interest of a kind which people will not give up without a struggle. The moral is that one should refrain from expressing such a belief until he is absolutely sure of his ground.

Here, too, the emotional stress was very great, and it was none the less trying because the predominant emotion happened to be that of fear. Like Fontenelle, one need not believe in ghosts to be terribly afraid of them. I certainly did not believe in this particular ghost; I suspected from the outset that an idée fixe had got possession of the witnesses; but when, after watching for hours in a dark and silent corridor, I saw a column of light slowly form itself at the farther end, it was nothing short of the courage of madness that caused me to rush toward the ‘apparition’ — only to discover that it was caused by the suddenly unclouded moon shining through a skylight and reflected from the surface of a highly polished floor. I wonder even now why I did not rush in the opposite direction, away from the terrifying object instead of toward it, calling out to all and sundry that I had seen the ghost.

Under these peculiar conditions one’s normal psychology is apt to be dislocated, and the mind can play the strangest tricks upon itself. The boundaries between truth and falsehood become blurred, our very conscience gets out of hand, and we may tell the most egregious lies almost without consciousness that we are lying.

Such certainly has been my own condition, more than once, when in actual contact with these phenomena. It is only by an effort that I can avoid yielding to the excitement of my first impressions and bring myself to tell the sober truth about them. If the reader, after hearing my confession, turns the tables on me by refusing credit to my testimony, I should hardly be disposed to quarrel with him. I would only beg him to try his own hand and see if he can do better. He will not find it easy to tell the truth.