Supernatural America: A Cultural History

Supernatural America

Supernatural America A Cultural History

Lawrence R. Samuel

Copyright 2011 by Lawrence R. Samuel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Samuel, Lawrence R. Supernatural America : a cultural history / Lawrence R. Samuel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978–0–313–39899–5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–313–39900–8 (ebook) 1. Parapsychology—United States—History. 2. United States—Social life and customs. I. Title. BF1028.5.U6S26 2011 130.973—dc22 2011010319 ISBN: 978–0–313–39899–5 EISBN: 978–0–313–39900–8 15 14 13 12 11

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. —Hamlet (Act 1, scene 5, 159–67)

Contents

Introduction

ix

Chapter 1. The Master Key

1

Chapter 2. The Mind’s Eye

29

Chapter 3. The Sixth Sense

57

Chapter 4. The Consciousness Revolution

87

Chapter 5. The New Age

117

Chapter 6. The Other Side

147

Conclusion

177

Notes

179

Bibliography

197

Index

203

Introduction

Boo! Ghosts, psychics, and all other expressions of the supernatural are everywhere you look these days, in case you have been living in a cave recently. Supernatural America is the fullest history of the supernatural in America, tracing how the paranormal came to be such a pervasive part of our culture. This book shows how the supernatural—phenomena that cannot be explained by natural laws or understood in terms of scientific knowledge—has deeply affected the trajectory of everyday life in America, revealing key insights about who we are as a people. Despite our reputation as a people of uncommon common sense, Americans have in fact had a long love affair with the supernatural. (Polls and surveys have consistently shown that most Americans believe in the paranormal, and iconic figures like Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain were known to have spiritist “visions.”) The temptation to explore what lies beyond has been a powerful one, whether it is the ability to read people’s minds or have contact with those on “the other side.” The main goal of this book is to find some answers regarding why we are so interested in things that are not “real,” i.e., things we cannot see, hear, or touch. This world is apparently not enough for us, the history of the supernatural shows, and that is something that warrants further investigation. What does come through loud and clear by tracing the cultural history of the supernatural in America is that the paranormal has increased in both volume and importance over the years rather than diminished. Given the ascent of science and technology over this same period of time, this is surprising and intriguing, as all expectations were for the logic and rationalism of the twentieth century to crush the mystical and superstitious ways of the past.

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Instead, however, the supernatural has run on a parallel course with science and technology, the two seeming to feed off each other. The more we go down the scientific and technological rabbit hole, the more we appear to need the supernatural; in other words, the “primitiveness” and universality of the metaphysical seemingly satisfy some sort of basic human drive. Because it is inherently timeless and cross-cultural, I believe the supernatural may once again emerge as our dominant religion, our desire to explain the explainable getting only that more intense in the twenty-first century. Although this book focuses on the United States and the last century or so, the supernatural has been an enduring theme throughout history, a staple of most civilizations over thousands of years. The need to recognize the presence of a different and possibly higher plane of existence or consciousness is a universal dimension of the human experience, proof that the supernatural offers something of value to people and should be taken seriously. Belief in the supernatural obviously serves an important purpose, part of our never-ending quest to solve the mystery that is life itself. “Our minds are designed from the very start to think there are unseen patterns, forces, and essences inhabiting the world, and it is unlikely that any effort to get rid of supernatural beliefs, or the superstitious behaviors that accompany them, will be successful,” wrote Bruce Hood in his SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, believing “these common beliefs and sacred values are essential in binding us together as a society because they help us to see ourselves connected to each other at a deeper level.”1 Such beliefs and values may very well bind us together, but the history of the supernatural has been and continues to be divided into two basic camps: believers (or “sheep,” as researcher Gertrude Schmeidler called them in 1943) and nonbelievers (“goats”). Most Americans, like most other people around the world, are sheep, the numbers show, with some kind of supernaturalism thriving in this country since the famous Fox Sisters phenomenon of the 1840s. (Decades later, Margaret Fox confessed that their claimed clairvoyance was a hoax.) It is often a personal experience with the supernatural that is responsible for turning even the most stalwart goat into a devout sheep, the most extreme example being losing a child. Death, naturally, as in religion, has played a prominent role in determining one’s supernatural “quotient,” the inability or reluctance to completely lose a loved one making an individual much more likely to have an encounter with the other side. Western countries such as England and the United States have been very hospitable to the idea of ghosts, the absence of reincarnation in our spiritual tradition leaving a big hole for apparitions to walk right through. Interestingly, ghosts have reflected their time and place, changing their identity to suit the cultural mores of the day. Thoroughly modern in the 1920s and 1930s versus those of

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Shakespeare’s or Dickens’s day, ghosts became infused with the values of the self-help and New Age movements of the 1970s and 1980s, making them kinder, gentler dead people. Today spirits are viewed as close personal friends, helping to guide us through the trials and tribulations of life. Ghost busting too has changed with the times, morphing from an eccentric hobby in the late nineteenth century to a professional, gearintensive one in the early twenty-first. For the past twenty years, The Skeptics Society has served as a leading voice of goats by investigating what it considers “fringe science” and paranormal claims. A scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and “anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science,” as its website explains, the Society assists those seeking clarification and viewpoints on all things supernatural. Led by Michael Shermer, who has written extensively in the area, the Society’s ultimate goal is to promote critical thinking by applying reason to “any and all ideas” and by demanding “compelling evidence before we believe.” ESP has notably failed to meet the Society’s criteria when tested using the scientific method, this just one dimension of the supernatural it has concluded is not valid. Through its quarterly Skeptic (and Junior Skeptic) magazines, the Society has also explored pseudomedicine, evolutionary ethics, conspiracy theories, and a host of other topics it deems suspect, operating as a vigilant watchdog of claims made by sheep.2 While the tension between the sheep and the goats is one of the central threads of this story, Americans did not have to locate themselves on either side of the fence for the supernatural to play a part in their lives. “Whether we consider ourselves believers in psychic phenomena or not, many of us have had something happen to make us wonder about the subject,” Diane Hennacy Powell wrote in The ESP Enigma, the rare individual who has not on occasion felt interconnected with others in some extraordinary way. The sense that we have known things without knowing exactly how and the feeling that there is more to the universe than our five senses can detect are ways the supernatural has played out in everyday life among ordinary people. For me, the ambivalence of those straddling the supernatural fence is more important and interesting than the certainty of the devout believers and nonbelievers who have captured the headlines.3 The ideological gap between sheep and goats has sometimes been big enough to make it seem like they were indeed two different kinds of species. Goats have rejected the validity of the supernatural and paranormal on the grounds that whatever “data” has been produced is flawed or, more simply, that believers are gullible and have been deceived. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for “anomalous” phenomena, they say, the lack of

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definitive evidence in the field speaking for itself. For someone within the academic community, “coming out” as a sheep could sabotage a career, he or she viewed as lacking the requisite amount of skepticism. (“Suddenly I found that I was no longer welcome in certain professional conversations,” Stephen E. Braude recalled in his The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, his colleagues in philosophy now doubting his intellectual abilities.)4 Sheep have countered that breakthrough scientific findings throughout history were similarly rejected, implying that those who blazed the parapsychological trail were just too ahead of their time. Those most familiar with the many mysteries of the universe have pointed out that the conventional physical laws like time, space, and causation frequently do not apply, lending credence to paranormal phenomena. “Such a priori dismissal of psi [paranormal cognition and action] is not only premature but often based on a limited worldview,” Harris L. Friedman and Stanley Krippner argued in Mysterious Minds, “one misunderstood as a simple linear system of cause-effect.” Physical matter moving forward through time is not the only game in town, in other words, something that more scientists and people in general might keep in mind before rejecting wholesale the existence of things we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell.5 While it is clear that the supernatural shares many similarities with religion—the most profound being the belief in something beyond the boundaries of this world—it is equally clear that the two are in some ways as different as night and day. The supernatural has served as the ne’er-do-well cousin of religion, the black sheep of the metaphysical family who is looked at as rather unsavory and shady. The roots of the supernatural in mysticism and the occult still haunt the supernatural, one might say, the field viewed as somehow dangerous and perhaps even evil. Religion, on the other hand, is the golden child, its direct ties to God making it largely immune from the suspicion and distrust surrounding the supernatural. Great pressure has been put on the supernatural to prove itself through the objectivity of science, while religion has not had to endure this striving for legitimacy. This is odd; because if one of these fields is more “real,” it is the supernatural, with thousands of experiments showing the presence of a “sixth sense,” while religion is accepted as a complete leap of faith. It is important to note that while the names of supernaturalism have changed over the years, the concept has remained essentially the same. Whether called spiritism, paranormalism, or parapsychology, the supernatural is something that defies or does not obey the physical laws of nature, i.e., a metaphysical event. The supernatural has consistently flourished during “interesting times,” i.e., periods of economic, social, or political turmoil. Wars have been very good for the supernatural, as have the years immediately following them as people struggle to come to terms

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with collective and individual loss and grief. Depressions too have propelled supernaturalism, as folks turn to greater forces for psychic relief from their economic woes and emotional stress. For centuries it has been believed that marginalized groups, specifically those deemed intellectually inferior—women, children, the handicapped, and dark-skinned people— have superior supernatural abilities, a counterpart to the white man’s province of logic and reason. Animals also have been seen as supernaturally gifted, like less cognitively developed humans more connected with primal, mysterious forces. Research into the supernatural represents a big part of the story of supernaturalism and a big part of this book. How can we account for premonitions, the sense or feeling that something is going to happen in the future? Most of us have experienced them (some more than others), demanding a biological or cosmological explanation. For many of those pursuing research in the field, especially those brave (and foolhardy, I believe) few who devoted much of their careers and lives to it, the supernatural was much more than an interesting job certain to make an impression at a cocktail party. Proving the existence of mind-to-mind or living-to-dead (and vice versa) communication was a great adventure into the unknown, a scientific expedition not unlike that of Copernicus, Galileo, or Darwin. (Freud’s exploration of the mind was viewed remarkably similarly.) The discovery of a sixth sense could very well be the next stage in human evolution, a higher level of consciousness (or unconsciousness) that would have huge biological, social, and cultural implications. Just as man had conquered nature and then the machine, the earthly constraints of time and space too would be conquered, these scientists believed, their mission of locating a third or even fourth dimension an important and noble one. The leap in parapsychological research in the 1970s thus was not coincidental, our landing on the moon demanding that a new frontier be established and ultimately triumphed over. It may have been a lot closer to home, but the mind was the real final frontier, researchers in the field convincingly pointed out. Beyond the realm of not just physics but “reality” as we knew it, the supernatural potentially represented a literal quantum leap in our understanding of the universe. We were quite possibly on the brink of a “new threshold of knowledge,” some suggested, as exciting an idea that could be imagined. It would be the new technological tools of the twentieth century that would enable scientists to first measure and then prove the existence of the supernatural, the ultimate form of intelligence finally within reach.

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No single individual believed this more than J. B. Rhine, an ex-botanist who spent decades at Duke University running thousands of tests and experiments on the supernatural staples of telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. By coining the terms “parapsychology” and “extrasensory perception,” Rhine was instrumental in shifting the perception of the supernatural from superstition to science, inspiring other researchers to get into the field. Importantly, Rhine and other top researchers held, solving the mystery of the supernatural could have practical uses, in both war and peace. If one could really move physical objects simply by thinking, the military applications could be enormous, something that did not go unnoticed by both superpower governments interested in avoiding a “mind gap” during the Cold War. Ideally, however, harnessing the power of the supernatural could make us better human beings by enabling us to achieve our full potential. Greater understanding between people could result from mind-to-mind communication, for example, the ability to intuit what others are thinking perhaps even leading to harmony between nations. Although the Fox Sisters sensation of the 1840s stirred up interest in the field, investigation into the paranormal officially began in the 1880s with the formation of the British Society for Psychical Research. The New York-based American Society for Psychical Research was founded a couple years later, its mission to explore extraordinary or as yet unexplained phenomena continuing to this very day. Over the decades, thousands of experiments were conducted by parapsychologists, and dozens, perhaps hundreds of theories were put forth to suggest what was behind supernatural phenomena, none of them sticking or withstanding scientific exploration. “The basic materialist assumption, that the physical world is a closed system, impervious to anything falling outside the domain of space-time events, has never been renounced,” John Beloff made clear in his 1993 Parapsychology: A Concise History, describing the battle between scientists and parapsychologists as “an uneasy stalemate.”6 With some interesting test results but no guiding theory, parapsychologists continued their work, reminding critics that even a century was not very long for a new science to establish itself. Meanwhile, committees of Very Smart Men would regularly get together, determined to settle the supernatural matter once and for all by weighing the evidence both for and against it. In retrospect, however, all this effort was largely for naught, rather silly intellectual exercises that resulted in little or no progress moving the supernatural needle one way or another. Although a few leading intellectuals like Aldous Huxley and Upton Sinclair risked their careers by coming out on the side of sheep, a variety of forces have worked against the field to keep it on the margins. Most scientists have not shared ordinary Americans’ overwhelming belief in paranormal

Introduction

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phenomena, relegating the field to “low” culture. Certainly not helping its cause have been the many frauds who have pervaded the supernatural business, making an already suspect field further dubious. Because of this, the supernatural has suffered from the tendency for some to lump it into the same category as fortune-telling and soothsaying, part of a carnival sideshow for amusement purposes only. Also dragging the supernatural down has been its relationship with the occult, the field seen in cahoots with magic, witchcraft, and a secret world that had best be left alone. And although it was inevitable and predictable, the attraction of those who have been called the “lunatic fringe” to the supernatural has been a major stumbling block for the field. Any subject believed to be hospitable to the likes of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, or the Loch Ness Monster is understandably not to be taken too seriously. It may be hard to believe, but magicians, displeased that the allegedly clairvoyant were giving deception a bad name, have despised the supernatural even more than the religious and scientists. Claiming illusion is real is simply abhorrent to professional illusionists, with a long line of magicians from Harry Houdini to Penn Jillette doing their best to expose those saying they have supernatural powers. Goats such as uberskeptic James Randi, a top magician who found a second career in battling parapsychology, have not been afraid to put their money where their mouths are, offering big bucks (now $1 million) to anyone who could prove the existence of any event that defies the laws of nature. (Sheep like Stephen Braude believe the prize to be a “sham,” and claim that Randi failed to pay up on a wager with physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff.)7 Sham or otherwise, thousands have tried to claim the prize but no one has done so, evidence that the supernatural is more a matter of faith than science. Stuck between the rock of science and the hard place of religion (not to mention hundreds of angry magicians), the supernatural was and is neither here nor there, located in an existential purgatory with no real home. Hugely popular yet marginalized, the supernatural remains in a strange, oxymoronic position, holding a unique and complex place in American culture. The history of the supernatural in America is indeed as strange and complex as any. Immediately following World War I, the supernatural became nothing short of a sensation, with key figures of the movement like Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) giving talks about “spiritism” at Carnegie Hall and other big halls across the country. Lodge and Doyle, both British, toured America to packed houses, the Rolling Stones of their day. With millions of loved ones recently dead from either the war or the 1918 influenza epidemic, their argument—that ghosts were among us—touched a collective nerve. The media and public quickly

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took sides, the line drawn in the sand between beliers and nonbelievers. Just as quickly, religious leaders attacked the supernatural, defending their turf by claiming their beliefs were the truly spiritual ones. The supernatural was labeled the enemy of organized Christianity, the modern equivalent of a false idol. After all, if ghosts really are among us, people do not truly leave this earth, meaning the idea of heaven and hell pretty much goes out the ecclesiastical window. The mainstream scientific community joined religious leaders as an enemy of the supernatural, their common cause the only reason for such an unlikely alliance. Like the religious, scientists had a big stake in the matter, as much of their thinking would also have to be overhauled if supernatural phenomena were real. Beginning in the mid-1970s, dismayed by how prevalent Americans’ belief in the supernatural had become and how big a role it was playing in popular culture, leading scientists formed a coalition to try to stem the rising tide. (Astrology, which was now more popular than it had been at the turn of the century, was a particularly painful thorn in scientists’ side, as was the book The Secret Life of Plants, in which the authors claimed that communication between humans was possible, not just with dogs and cats but with houseplants.) Rationalism itself was at stake, these eggheads argued, a return to the ignorance of the Dark Ages conceivable if half a millennium of scientific progress took a backseat to the likes of Chariots of the Gods, “ancient astronauts,” and “pyramid power.” (In his The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, Jason Colavito made the interesting argument that much of the belief of ancient extraterrestrial visitors could be traced back to the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, the early twentieth-century author’s “little joke” having major consequences on the public’s [lack of] knowledge about science.)8 Fearing it could perhaps be the end of civilization as we knew it, notables such as B. F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Jay Gould enlisted in the cause, challenging parapsychologists on all fronts by demanding scientific proof of any and all claims. For some critics, even “proof” would not be enough however, the idea of there being forces outside the laws of nature simply beyond the limits of the imagination. “Science can answer many questions, but when faced with death and other ultimate problems of meaning, the scientific world view either responds with silence or suggests skepticism,” wrote David J. Hess in the preface to his Science in the New Age, thinking that was why both supernaturalism and religion remained such powerful forces in contemporary society.9 Mary Roach could not agree more that it was inevitable that most scientists would remain skeptics even if faced with firm evidence of paranormal phenomena. “Proof is an elusive quarry, and all the more so when you are trying to prove an intangible,” she wrote in

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her Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, believing that “the more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.”10 While the sheep and the goats battled it out, the cultural voice of the supernatural got louder and louder over the years, reflecting its growing popularity and market appeal. Always a provocative part of American pop culture (the “Topper” series of films and Noel Coward’s Broadway hit Blithe Spirit, most memorably), the supernatural drew its biggest audience with the TV show Bewitched in the mid-1960s. This was small potatoes compared to what lurked just around the bend, however, as the supernatural found a happy home within the outside-the-box values of the counterculture. With faith in both science and religion on the rocks, there was a window of opportunity for the supernatural to go to another level in popularity, which is exactly what happened. Horrific movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Amityville Horror poured out of Hollywood, and equally horrific books out of Stephen King, comprising a new (and very profitable) genre of entertainment grounded in scaring the heck out of viewers and readers. Now, in our post-X-Files era, every other show on television seems to be about some aspect of the supernatural, with both fictional and nonfictional mediums, psychics, and ghost hunters offering glimpses of the other side to millions of curious viewers. The tipping point of the supernatural in the 1970s could be seen well beyond pop culture. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s report that he had a “peak experience” while in space certainly got people’s attention, as did Uri Geller’s apparent ability to bend spoons with his mind (despite failing to do so on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show). Helped in great part by a strong vote of confidence by anthropologist Margaret Mead, parapsychology was accepted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969, official recognition that the fledgling field was legitimate. (Some members, notably physicist John A. Wheeler, later argued that the field was pseudoscientific and should not be affiliated with the prestigious organization.) Researchers began calling paranormal phenomena “anomalies,” this more scientific term another attempt to get rid of the kookiness associated with the field. Universities began teaching courses in the paranormal, finding young minds quite interested in the subject and open to its possibilities. Buoyed by its elevation in status, funding in the field increased, a long shot for investors but one that would pay huge dividends if researchers hit pay dirt by discovering real-world applications for parapsychology. Psychic detectives were a perfect example of how the power of the supernatural could be tapped, the ability for some to locate missing people suggesting that they could possibly locate other things, like oil or precious gems and metals. Other investors were

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now using psychics and astrologers to play the stock market, thinking such folks had some truly insider information that could reap big returns. Ghosts, historically something to be frightened of, were fast becoming a popular tourist attraction, the beginning of our now all-the-rage “most haunted houses” entertainment concept. International interest in parapsychology too was on the rise, especially in the Soviet Union, not surprising given that country’s long tradition of belief in the supernatural. Like the counterculture, the New Age movement of the 1980s proved to be a powerful force for the supernatural to be aligned with. The supernatural went upscale in the eighties, recast as a trendy activity as much Wall Street as Main Street. With thinking different the order of the day by tapping into the intuitive, inductive, and creative parts of our brain, the supernatural was now swimming with the cultural tide rather than against it. The specious pastime of communicating with the dead was rebranded as channeling, offering millions of the spiritually disenchanted a direct, personal way to connect with a higher power. That the principal face of the movement—Shirley MacLaine—was smart, attractive, successful, and talented certainly did not hurt. The actress’s self-deprecating sense of humor about her past lives and contact with aliens was also refreshing, as was the revelation that otherwise conservative First Lady Nancy Reagan dabbled in astrology. Soon yuppies were having their astrological charts done, visiting psychics, and carrying crystals in their Coach bags, their “you never know” attitude bringing more sheep into the flock of believers. In the late eighties, however, the supernatural skies got decidedly darker as paranoia and conspiracy crept into the equation. With the Cold War over, the enemy was now within, the U.S. government the last institution in the world to be trusted. And rather than the rather harmless phenomenon they were in the 1970s, unidentified flying objects (UFOs) became more sinister, part of a massive government cover-up, with alien abductions a particularly concerning paranormal “anomaly.” Defying all logic, the last couple of decades have proved to be fruitful ones for the supernatural. The “entertainment society” of the 1990s laid the foundation for the supernatural to become a mainstay of popular culture, its inherent edginess offering lots of creative elbow room in a media environment getting harder and harder to capture viewers’ and readers’ attention. As well, the supernatural has benefited from “the Oprah effect,” a heavily therapeutic aura now hovering over attempts to communicate with loved ones on the other side. Of course, the explosion of the online universe has exponentially advanced the ability for the supernaturally inclined to find each other, with the Internet host to hundreds of subcultures dedicated to some aspect of it. (Check out ghostsamongus.net or thewhitenoiseforum.com just for kicks.) The crossing over into a new

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century and new millennium has made recent years only that much more supernaturally friendly, the twenty-first century looking like it will be a very good one for the field. I believe that as traditional religions continue to decline, interest in supernatural phenomena will further accelerate, our spiritual landscape to look quite different in a few decades. Supernatural America tells its story chronologically, beginning at the end of World War I and going right up to today, when interest in the paranormal is arguably greater than ever. The book focuses on two different kinds of supernatural expressions: (1) psychic phenomena, i.e., efforts to read (or control) other people’s minds through telepathy, clairvoyance, or ESP (extrasensory perception) and to communicate with the dead; and (2) the sighting and tracking of ghosts. More than big enough to fill a (haunted) house, even the supernatural needs to be contained. Outside the realm of the supernatural for my purposes are “miracles,” superstitions (witches, charms, magic, etc.), prophecy, and hypnosis. The recent vampire and zombie phenomena are certainly fascinating but deserve studies of their own. While I discuss the relationship of the supernatural to religion in a number of places in the book, subjects such as the belief in God, the saints, holy water, and faith healings fall outside the boundaries of this work. A full analysis of theosophy, a doctrine of religious philosophy and mysticism, also does not really belong here, I believe, and is better left to specialists in that field. Likewise, science, philosophy, and psychology are huge subjects unto their own and, while I regularly brush up with all of them in relation to the history of the supernatural in America, those especially interested in any of those three areas should seek out the thousands of resources dedicated to each. Regarding sources, the spine of Supernatural America relies on contemporary, popular magazines and newspapers. Hundreds of different sources, many of them forgotten, are used, drawing from journalists’ writing of “the first draft of history.” Books and journal articles are used to frame the story and provide valuable context. The supernatural has of course played a recurring role in books, movies, and television, this too serving as prime fodder in the book. Secondary sources were prioritized not only because this is a work of cultural history (making it difficult to interview people active in the field a half century or more ago) but for their greater degree of objectivity and more balanced perspective. Both goats and sheep tend to be highly biased in their views (as anyone who has ever met one well knows), while published accounts have typically been filtered, vetted, and fact-checked. The first chapter, “The Master Key,” looks at the 1920s, when the supernatural collided head-on with modernity, while Chapter 2, “The Mind’s Eye,” covers the Depression and World War II years when

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the supernatural came under strong attack by the scientific community. Chapter 3, “The Sixth Sense,” examines the postwar years, when the supernatural crept through the superficial tranquility of the times, while Chapter 4, “The Consciousness Revolution,” discusses the counterculture era when the supernatural crossed over into mainstream pop culture. Chapter 5, “The New Age,” tracks the supernatural though the 1980s and early 1990s, when the supernatural morphed into a social movement, while the final chapter, “The Other Side,” takes readers up to today, when the supernatural is bigger than ever. The Conclusion considers the future of the supernatural in America, which I believe to be a very promising one. Enjoy the ride.

Chapter 1

The Master Key

The existence of a liar is more probable than the existence of a ghost. —George Bernard Shaw

In April 1925, Herbert Lyman found himself in a Connecticut courtroom, the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Harlan G. Hills, the administrator of the estate of the recently deceased Phoebe Simons. Lyman had worked on Mrs. Simons’s farm for nineteen years, and believed that the woman intended to leave the farm to him upon her death. Lyman knew this because he had been in contact with Mrs. Simon several times since her death, he told the judge, his story backed up by a dozen witnesses who had attended these conversations with the dead woman and were eager to take the stand to tell the jury as much. Communicating with the dead had in fact become a popular pastime across the United States, making it perhaps seem that testimony from a ghost was just as valid as that from anyone among the living. At the opening of the case, however, “the subject of ghosts and spirits was ruled out,” as the New York Times reported the story, the judge deciding that Lyman could not present such hearsay to the jury, especially since the source was from the great beyond.1 Mr. Lyman may have had a bad day in court, but ghosts were having a very good day in both the United States and Europe. The 1920s were great days for all kinds of supernatural phenomena in this country, capturing Americans’ imagination just as we were becoming a thoroughly modern society. Immediately after World War I, what was often called spiritism

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Supernatural America

(or spiritualism) became all the rage, a reaction against the logic and rationalism of the Machine Age and response to the failure of science to solve all the riddles of the universe. Religion was on the decline in America, this too serving as encouragement to look to alternative places to find answers to some of the big questions of life. One theory at the time was that the war had driven many people insane, this perhaps accounting for the rather sudden attraction to the occult. There was no doubt that many of those who had lost loved ones in the war were trying to find them in the next world, the mass revival of the supernatural a direct result of the millions of deaths that had occurred in a relatively short period of time. Interest in mind reading also was high, however, implying that something bigger was afoot. Were we “imprisoned in the five senses,” as one journalist asked, our increasing focus on the real and known limiting our understanding of life (and death)? By “listening in on the universe,” as another writer wondered, could we possibly enter an invisible world that went far beyond the physical one? Most important, perhaps, could this new, modern form of spiritism be a sign of our continually escalating intelligence, the next logical stage in evolution of humankind? A good number of people answered yes to all these questions, believing the supernatural could very possibly be “the master key” that would unlock the secrets of the universe. THE CULT OF SPIRITISM Regardless of how one felt about the supernatural, it was almost impossible to ignore it as America headed into the 1920s. “It is evident the cult of spiritism has been galvanized,” wrote Janet Henderson for Overland Monthly in 1920, crediting the revival of public interest in communicating with the dead to the desolation of the Great War. Held in disrepute over the last generation because of rampant fraud on the part of mediums (most notably the famous American “conjurer,” Slade), engaging with spirits was, rather suddenly, back in vogue. The war had “created a yearning for the emotional consolation of messages from the dead,” Henderson wrote, with relatives and friends of those who had perished not completely ready to part with their loved ones. The existence of a future life too was comforting to many, especially to those Christians who had lost faith in their religion after experiencing personal tragedy.2 Others took note of the craze sweeping the nation and Europe. “The growth of Spiritualism is one of the themes of the season,” observed Joseph McCabe of The Living Age a couple months later, he too believing the war had much to do with waking the subject up from a two-decade or so nap.3

The Master Key

3

More than the war seemed to behind the revitalized supernatural movement, however, as another journalist, Winifred Kirkland of Outlook, suggested upon observing the surge of interest in the psychic realm: Among the many new ideas that assail us no body of present-day doctrine attracts our attention more insistently than psychic research. It invades us from the lecture platform and from book lists that a decade ago would have seemed unbelievable. . . . Writers whose sanity we had thought unimpeachable fill pages of popular magazines with spiritist experiences. Ouija consumes hours of attention. One’s closest friends engage in automatic writing. No open-minded person can fail to be amazed by some of the phenomena indisputably proved.4

Despite the supernatural frenzy, Kirkland had to wonder what it was all about. If the dead were really speaking to us, she felt, it was incumbent upon us to listen, as common sense suggested that what they had to say was probably pretty important or they would not go to such trouble. More likely, however, what Kirkland called “this new book of the dead” could be explained by looking internally rather than externally, our primal instincts at the root of it all. It was easier to appeal to the spiritual world for solutions to our problems or for advice regarding which direction to take in life than tackle such weighty challenges on our own, this something that we should try to resist. “When we call upon the dead to help us in our earthly struggle, we are false to our own high destiny of battling bravely in the dark,” she argued, thinking that it was vital “we depend not on ghosts, but on ourselves.”5 Given the tendency for the supernatural to flourish in tough times, it was not surprising that interest in another world was high in other countries devastated by the war, particularly Germany. “Days like these, which upset all the established habits and practices of society, . . . make men grope blindly toward the mysterious and unknown,” wrote an anonymous journalist for a German publication in 1920 as citizens of that country struggled to pick up the pieces of their lives. “Life in this world has become so hard and difficult that interest in the next world has been wondrously revived,” the writer wrote, suggesting that “people are filled with a longing for things which are not of the visible world—things which we can not see, but whose power we feel.” Even the supernatural had yet to be of much help, however. “Our spirits are wandering as in a fog, seeking to discover a light,” the German journalist concluded, the search for answers still elusive.6 As in the United States, however, many Europeans were determined to find the light that would lead them out of the fog of reality. The Psychological Society of Berlin was hard at work testing various occult

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phenomena, for example, giving all residents of that city experiencing clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, or materializations the opportunity to be examined by “men of science.”7 The Viennese were equally interested in exploring occult research but the Austrian government banned it, not wanting its citizens to prescribe to a set of laws outside its own.8 The Czech government felt similarly (sending twenty spiritists to the lunatic asylum in Olumitz) but was not able to stop fifty thousand residents of Prague to form a society to study the occult.9 Meanwhile, an “aggravated form of mysticism [was] sweeping” Russia, the New York Times reported, with “weeping” and “bleeding” icons still widely believed to have miraculous powers despite (or because of) the government’s official antireligious policy.10 For some, however, spiritism just was not what it used to be. “The ghosts of today are different,” wrote Walter Littlefield of the New York Times in 1920, contemporary poltergeists not just more independent but “irresponsible” in their opposition to both science and religion. Like Americans, ghosts had rather suddenly become modern, disregarding or dismissive of traditional customs.11 “Where are the ghosts of yesteryear?” asked L. Cope Cornford in The Living Age that same year, he too not happy that ghostly rituals, such as frightening children with scary stories told in front of the fireplace on Christmas Eve, appeared to be gone. To find out what had happened to that particular delightful gathering, Cornford advised, “You must ask Madam Science, that austere and spectacled maiden aunt,” she now telling the ghost stories. The Dickensian ghosts of Christmas Past had recently been turned into scientific phenomena, with audiences sitting up straight on hard chairs, notebooks in hand, listening to some expert read a paper about such things as “telesthesia” and “metethereal environments.” Mysterious sightings and mischievous acts in the middle of the night were now telepathic events, with written evidence from eyewitnesses demanded to prove their validity. Simple belief in such things was no longer enough, replaced by neatly classified, labeled, and defined natural phenomena. Cornford also resented how mediums had usurped the power of ghosts, as if only they, acting as chaperones, could make them appear or disappear. In short, all the romance and magic of ghosts and the pleasure to be gained from them had evaporated as “fact” trumped fiction. A phantom as imagined by Sir Walter Scott or the master of the game, William Shakespeare, was likely to never to appear again, for Cornford and others a real shame.12

THE SAME OLD WORLD A different kind of ghost was not the only thing some found disturbing about the postwar supernatural movement. “We have heard a great deal

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of that ‘spiritual awakening’ which was to follow the war,” a writer for Current Opinion observed in 1920, surprised and disappointed that the awakening that had emerged was more spiritual than religious. “The ouija-board is displacing the Bible, and the dark-room se´ance, rather than the church, is attracting votaries,” the magazine told readers, an unexpected turn of events that posed major implications for the future of Western society. As with most cultural movements, charismatic figures were leading the charge, in this case two Europeans, Maurice Maeterlinck and Sir Oliver Lodge. Maeterlinck, a notable Belgian writer, distanced himself from the budding movement despite the fact that everything he had recently published was positively strewn with spiritualist ideas and language. Lodge, a famous English physicist, was unapologetic about his crusade to promote spiritualism, the death of his son, Raymond, only furthering his belief in an alternative faith. Lodge had in fact recently written a book called Raymond in which he documented alleged conversations with his soldier son who had been killed in France in 1915.13 While deeply personal, Lodge’s mission took on a much greater purpose. “I bethink myself of the great Darwin, when he was evolving his ‘Origin of Species,’ ” he rather immodestly proclaimed, his grand theory of life and death something that would irrevocably change the way people viewed the world.14 Lodge’s extreme confidence had much to do with his dead son reportedly being quite pleased to hear that his dad was planning a trip to America to spread the spiritualist gospel. Raymond “thought I should do some good here,” Lodge told reporters covering his lecture tour, passing on the news from his son that the next world was very much like this one. Lodge’s series of lectures at Carnegie Hall in 1920 was a tour de force on the nature of life and death, the man wisely choosing to present his own views on the subject rather than try to convert nonbelievers. As well, it was standing room only when he spoke at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, his talk (titled “The Question of the Reality of the Unseen”) comforting listeners with his proposition that “those over the border are not far from us.”15 There was no heaven or hell waiting, Lodge informed his audiences, having learned from spirits that the afterlife consisted of simply seeing this life (“the same old world,” he called it) from another point of view. More specifically, Lodge’s theory revolved around the existence of “ether” that, unlike matter, permeated everything, was not sensory, and never wore out. “The ether part continues after we leave the material part behind in seventy odd years,” he claimed, this the mechanism for survival for spirits in the afterlife. Two other distinguished British physicists, Sir William Crookes and Sir William Barrett, also subscribed to occult phenomena, showing how entrenched spiritualism was within the established scientific community across the pond.16

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For Maeterlinck, however, it was something different—“Odic effluvia,” to be exact—that held the key to life and death. A couple of months after Lodge spoke at Carnegie Hall, Maeterlinck informed a rapt audience at the same venue about Austrian scientists’ work in the area of ode, “the magnetic fluid which emanates in uninterrupted waves from bodies.” One such scientist, Hans Reichenbach (founder of the Berlin Circle), was the first to discover that “sensitive” people could detect the material in the dark, Maeterlinck continued, this explaining mediums’ powers. Odic effluvia (which was bluish on the right side and yellowish red on the left) was present in animals, plants, and minerals and could be photographed, he went on, the stuff responsible for a host of psychic phenomena such as “table turning.” When asked if he was familiar with odic effluvia, Lodge was diplomatic, not wanting to offend his colleague even though he was the competition. “I have never gathered a test-tube of that divine liquid,” he admitted, “but we are none of us in a position to deny the slightest evidence which may be offered at this momentous time.”17 Although he had no magic potion to explain the workings of the universe, Lodge was nothing short of a sensation as he delivered his own lectures on the ways of the supernatural. Packed houses almost always greeted him, with members of the clergy, typically armed with challenging questions, often in attendance. The press was divided on Lodge, some journalists impressed with the man and his ideas and others clearly not so. The New York Evening Post, for example, was of the former opinion, telling its readers that “the labors of men like Lodge are a sincere effort to widen human knowledge; we should be glad that, if the field is to be entered, it should invite such trained minds.” The New York Times, however, dismissed both Lodge and Maeterlinck as just sophisticated phonies. “There is probably no feat of the ‘spirit’ control that cannot be duplicated in the records of the merely psychologic researcher,” a writer for the paper sniffed, summarizing the efforts of the two men as “mediumistic rubbish.” The Chicago Evening Post suggested that spiritualism was not merely rubbish but a dodgy enterprise, better left alone. Religious newspapers, not surprisingly, also were quick to label spiritualism as a bad idea. “It is inconceivable that in his grief any Catholic should be led from the altar of God to altars set up by Spiritism,” warned the Roman Catholic American, with the Philadelphia Presbyterian chiming in that “the whole thing is serious and dangerous, and those that are deceived thereby are not wise.”18 Seeing America’s most recent obsession with the supernatural as a direct threat to their own belief system, religious leaders were quick to attack the theories of people like Lodge and Maeterlinck. Reverend William T. Manning of New York’s Trinity Church was a particularly

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outspoken opponent of trying to communicate with the dead, believing that such a pursuit adding nothing meaningful to Christianity. The nation becoming addicted to “wizards, mediums, and ouija boards” was a deplorable notion, Manning told his flock in 1920, with no need for such foolish things since Christians should already know that the departed were still alive in their own way. Although there was no formal rule against it in Christianity, Jews were forbidden to try to communicate with the dead, according to the Old Testament, this good enough for Manning. “The darkened room, the tapping of tables, the mystery, the mediums, which may prove to be fraudulent, do not seem in harmony with a high and holy purpose,” he preached, adding that it was “difficult to think of a ouija board as a fitting communication with those who are now in Paradise.”19 The Reverend Charles de Heredia, a professor at Holy Cross College, was another loud critic of spiritism, not only delivering sermons against it but using demonstrations to illustrate his point. At the Catholic Club in New York in 1920, for example, De Heredia held a mock se´ance for five hundred people, entertaining them with levitating tables, “rappings” from the astral world, and spirit photographs. “If it were not for his own cloth Father De Heredia could direct his own vaudeville booking,” the New York Times wrote of his performance, as impressed as the audience with the priest’s so-called supernatural skills. By showing how easily one could be fooled by such tricks, De Heredia wanted to show his audience how they could just as easily lose faith in God by believing in this false faith, a convincing argument by all accounts. De Heredia even summoned Lodge’s dead son to the hall, with Raymond indicating his presence with three faint raps. As coup de grace, the talented priest asked Raymond whether cigars and whiskey were available in the other world, with three more raps heard, very happily for some.20 Two years later, De Heredia was up to his same old tricks, so to speak, returning to the Catholic Club for an encore performance. This time he lifted a piece of paper off the ground without touching it (via static electricity) and somehow made a chair first rise by having the audience sing, “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and then “shimmy” (dance back and forth) to ragtime played on a piano. De Heredia’s topper this time was having the chair reel about in the air as if intoxicated while the pianist played “How Dry I Am.”21 De Heredia’s hijinks belied the seriousness with which church officials viewed encroaching spiritism. Father John Quinn of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral perhaps said it best, labeling interest in the field and, especially, se´ances as “dabbling in spiritual TNT.”22 Many were indeed viewing the supernatural as a modern religion that could very well replace Christianity, which, after the horror of the world war, some thought was either dying or already dead. Leaders of the church were quick to point

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out, however, that for spiritists life in the next world was a lot like this life, their faux faith therefore petty, trivial, and shallow. The proposition of an eternal soul, not interested in returning to this flawed world, was simply more compelling than anything to be found in the supernatural, the devout held, hoping those flirting with its various strains would agree.

THE FRAILTY OF THE TEMPERAMENTAL Given the bold claims being made by Lodge, Maetterlink, and others, it was not surprising that someone soon directly challenged them. Just days after Lodge’s celebrated lecture at Carnegie Hall, Joseph P. Rinn, one of the foremost debunkers of alleged psychic phenomena, threw the gauntlet down, offering Lodge or any other comers $5,000 (a lot of money in 1920) if they could produce “the slightest tenable evidence of communication with the spirit world or supernatural feats of any kind.” Having recently exposed (Eusapia) “Palladino,” a famous psychic from Italy whom Lodge and others had endorsed, Rinn was on a roll, eager to show that these eminent men were also, in his words, “easy dupes . . . for clever fakes.” Rinn also proposed that Lodge or James H. Hyslop, secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, select a medium of his choice who would publicly demonstrate her supernatural abilities, the catch being that it would all be done under “scientific conditions.” Rinn was so confident that he would be proved right (or, more likely, there would be no takers) that he gave an exhibition of mediums’ standard routine at a Manhattan cafe´ the night he issued the challenge, impressing the audience with his array of “psychic” skills. “It is a money-getting device, pure and simple, practiced only by scamps,” he told the amazed crowd after five hours of mind reading, slate writing, and other feats, no doubt having won over the most skeptical of skeptics.23 Such seeing-is-not-believing efforts were required as many in the general public, including quite a few very smart people, were at least partly convinced that mediums’ triumphs were legitimate. If mediums were indeed frauds, they must be brilliant or very gifted themselves, many assumed, since they were able to fool some of the best minds of the day. Those more familiar with certain dimensions of human behavior had a different perspective, however, fully aware that most people inclined to believing something typically saw things that did not occur, saw things that did occur but in a different sequence, or did not see things that did indeed occur. As in the case of traffic accidents, say, where witnesses’ accounts of a particular incident often differed dramatically, observations made by people taking part in supernatural activities were highly

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unreliable. In fact, only one person in hundreds could detect a respectable medium’s sleight of hand, this explaining how they were able to fool so many people so much of the time. Sealed envelopes containing written messages were routinely opened despite evidence to the contrary, and prepared slips with answers to questions normally asked (“Is my dear husband happy in the other world?”) substituted for the actual ones, these just a couple tricks of the trade.24 Interestingly, a contingent working on a completely different side of the metaphysical fence was in complete agreement with religious leaders when it came to trying to stop spiritism in its tracks. Top American psychologists, led by Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin, viewed claims of the supernatural as “totally unscientific and misleading,” no doubt concerned that the skepticism surrounding the field could rub off on his own discipline, which was struggling to be considered scientific. Jastrow was backed up by prominent colleagues from other universities including Columbia, Penn, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins, these men in unanimous consent that Lodge and Maeterlinck were merely intellectual tricksters. It was not only in the name of sound science but, according to Jastrow, “in the interests of social sanity” that psychologists “and all others who have a concern for the logic of right thinking” reject spiritualism and those who espoused it.25 Even more so than others, Jastrow looked to the war to explain the most recent revival of spiritism. “Warfare entails a reversion to primitive elemental reactions and passions,” he wrote in a long essay for the Forum in 1920, the subtitle, “A Psychological Interpretation of Human Gullibility,” saying it all. “The belief in the reality of ghosts and in the communication of departed spirits is among the oldest and most universal of such convictions,” he continued, aligning the movement with less credible but equally popular pursuits of the past such as Oriental mysticism, palmistry, astrology, and phrenology. It was “the widespread bereavement which has fallen upon a saddened world” that accounted for the surge in interest in the supernatural, he argued, “the natural longing to seek consolation from the cruel inevitability of deep sorrow” driving many people to try to explain the unexplainable.26 Going further, Jastrow was not surprised that a certain element of the population believed in spirits, requiring very little evidence to do so, but questioned why more impartial, cautious, and rational people were joining the cause. Dating the beginning of the modern spiritualist movement to the American revival of 1848 (and, more specifically, the celebrated stunts of the Fox Sisters), Jastrow made the case that those preceding and following that one were grounded in the same kind of psychological gullibility. What was different about more recent ones, especially the

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current movement, however, was the application of science and technology in order to establish evidence. Jastrow argued that the era of scientific spiritualism began in 1892 with the famous case of “Palladino” who, it appeared, could levitate tables. It turned out that Eusapia Palladino’s foot deftly placed under one leg of the table was responsible for the feat, this setting a precedent for subsequent efforts to “scientifically” prove or disprove supernatural activity over the next few decades.27 How could top scientists of the day fall for such blatant trickery? Besides the obvious effect of postwar and/or personal trauma, a prejudice of belief blinded great minds to the facts, Jastrow maintained, these men as susceptible to what he called “the free play of emotion” as anyone. “They act in these reserved areas of their minds just like common folk,” he was convinced, “even with the crude credulity of the uninformed, following the clue of their emotional prepossessions.” Intellectual blind spots, not unlike the fixed ideas or delusions of the mentally ill, were at fault, these functioning as a sort of safety valve or release from otherwise extremely reasonable minds. “There seems to be a craving for some outlet in which one may believe freely, warmly, without the compunction of logic or conscience,” Jastrow proposed, men of science quite capable of being professionally critical and personally receptive at the same time. It was “the frailty of the temperamental” that was responsible for otherwise sensible intellectuals to get duped, the larger problem being that their endorsement of the supernatural raised the field’s prestige.28 One of the major lines in the sand between spiritualists and scientists of all stripes revolved around a law originally proposed by a French chemist more than a century earlier. The sum of matter that fills the universe is unchangeable, Antoine Lavoisier argued in 1789, what became known as the law of substance allowing no possibility for any matter to be either created or destroyed. Matter could of course be converted into another form—a solid to gas or a fluid to solid, for example—but it could not disappear altogether or be constructed from scratch. Building on this law, scientists subsequently asserted that the total amount of force and energy in the universe remained the same, and that there could be no energy or force without matter and vice versa. While one could argue that this law supported spiritists’ position, i.e., that a solid human body was theoretically converted into a gaseous entity upon death, with no addition or substitution of matter, energy, or force to the universe, the supernaturally inclined flatly denied its validity when applied to their field. There were, they insisted, spiritual forces of nature that were not subject to the laws of substance or any other laws, for that matter, the supernatural realm literally beyond the constraints of the physical universe. When it came to the spiritual world, in other words, the rules of this world simply did not apply.29

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Early on, however, leaders of the movement recognized that the supernatural would never be recognized as a legitimate field in America until it was blessed by science. Definitive fact of the “other” world was needed, said Hyslop, this the only thing that would remove the taint of charlatanism that so pervaded the realm of psychic phenomena. Years, perhaps centuries of research were required, he told the New York Times in 1920, the challenge so great that only the best minds of the day working in the best laboratories would do. Over time, Hyslop felt, the question of a future life would be resolved, this a scientific pursuit equal to any other in history.30 Because there was “a borderland of classified knowledge, a twilight zone of marvelous and alluring phenomena,” an editor for the newspaper agreed, a research lab focusing on the supernatural was a very good idea. For Hyslop and other sheep, this represented the only real way to learn what might reside within. Would the supernatural become the next physics, chemistry, or biology, offering an equal or even greater contribution to mankind?31

AN INEXPLICABLE BIOLOGY If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had his way, the answer to that question would be a resounding yes. Doyle was of course best known for creating the character Sherlock Holmes, but the man’s real passion by the 1920s resided in communicating with the spirits and describing the next world in vivid detail. (Like Lodge, Doyle had lost a son, giving him personal incentive to make contact with the dead.) “I am sure of what I will find in the next existence than I would be if I were carried to the middle of Africa and Asia and set down there,” he said in 1922, his novelist way of thinking informing his views on the supernatural.32 In his own lecture at Carnegie Hall in May of that year, Doyle showed his spirit photographs, the most sensational purportedly being of W. T. Stead, a famous British writer who had gone down on the Titanic a decade earlier. Stead not only had appeared from the dead in a photograph, Doyle claimed, but had sent a written message as well, a double “penetration of the veil.” His alleged final words before boarding the ship, “I will try to keep you posted,” surrounded the picture, further evidence that it was the man. Stead had been one of the foremost spiritualists of his day, giving his last words special meaning.33 Like many other experts in the field, Doyle focused on “ectoplasm,” defining the luminous stuff as “combinations of matter and ether beaten together . . . [with] a viscous substance of putty.” Ectoplasm was known to rise through the bodies of mediums during se´ances, these get-togethers of

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the dearly departed something with which Doyle was quite familiar. At a recent one in London, Doyle, his wife, a professional medium, and a number of guests gathered at the request of Filson Young, a writer for the Saturday Review. Young told Doyle he was sympathetic to spiritualism but not totally convinced, with a se´ance the perfect way to put the thing to the test. Young soon found himself sitting in a circle in the dark, with a trumpet, gramophone, and musical box nearby to provide the “vibration” needed to produce spirits’ voices. After eyes were shut, a prayer said, and some music played, voices could be heard coming through the trumpet that was, Young later recalled, floating in the air. Young was immediately suspect, however, as the three voices he heard all sounded alike and were never spoken together, leading him to think someone present was responsible for them. Young discreetly picked up the trumpet and the voices suddenly stopped, only adding to his feeling the whole thing was a fake. The next day, Young wrote a letter to Doyle expressing his belief that “no manifestation of supernatural forces” had occurred at the se´ance, prompting an angry Doyle to publicly respond to Young. “Even mental want of harmony can retard or spoil a se´ance, and when on the top of this is added levity, deceit and actual physical interference there was no possibility of reestablishing those delicate conditions which are essential to success,” went part of Doyle’s letter, which was published in the Saturday Review. Young, however, was still of the opinion that the goings on were pure hokum.34 Other nonbelievers thought the supernaturally inclined were more misguided than fraudulent. A close friend of Doyle’s, Hamlin Garland (a wellknown writer who had introduced Doyle at Carnegie Hall, the first stop on his American lecture tour), had personal experience with all kinds of unexplainable phenomena but thought it was a mistake to assume that the dead were responsible. Instead, Garland considered apparitions, ectoplasm, and disembodied voices as part of “an inexplicable biology,” these messages quite possibly coming from the living versus the dead. “Forces originating in the body of the psychic or the sitter, or some one else, may be at work,” Garland suggested, the activity very much real but more human than spiritual. Death was likely a great, unsolvable mystery, he concluded, but through Doyle’s and others’ efforts, “we may discover many wonderful things about life.”35 If Doyle was trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, perhaps thinking he was as clever as his famous fictional sleuth, he pushed his luck a bit too far in 1922. Before an audience of professional magicians, of all people, Doyle showed motion pictures of what appeared to be real dinosaurs, describing the creatures in the film as “psychic” and “preternatural.” In showing the film, Doyle was characteristically serious, making it seem that he was giving the magicians “a private view of some novelties of the fourth dimensional universe,” as the New York Times reported the

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story. Was it a hoax, some reasonably wondered? If so, were Doyle’s spirit photographs and entire supernatural oeuvre also a big fake? Or was the Englishman playing a rare joke, perhaps to lend some levity to the highly charged debate in play? The magicians themselves were puzzled, this, as it turned out, exactly what Doyle had set out to achieve. Doyle explained his reason for the stunt in a letter to Harry Houdini, who was president of the organization. “The purpose was, simply, to provide a little mystification to those who have so often and so successfully mystified others,” he wrote to “My Dear Houdini,” not able to resist asking the great magician “how you got out of that trunk.” The dinosaurs turned out to be models intended to be used in a forthcoming feature film called The Lost World, which happened to be the name of a novel Doyle had published in 1912 (predating Michael Crichton’s book of the same name by eighty-three years).36 Doyle’s choice of audience to play his little stunt was, of course, no accident. Magicians, and particularly Houdini, were famously antisupernaturalists, fully aware of the tricks that could be played to fool the public. (Feeling the need to reciprocate in some way, about a year later the group of magicians claimed that they could reproduce Doyle’s “puzzling phenomena,” this demonstrating to the public that it was mediums who were the real tricksters of the world.)37 Houdini, in fact, was as interested in exposing trickery as producing it. It was impossible for the natural laws of the universe to be violated, Houdini often asserted, meaning that science and, if necessary, a little clever psychology was behind the work of all so-called mediums and mind readers. To prove it, he was known to perform his own “psychic” feats, only to then reveal how he pulled them off with perfectly ordinary deception. Houdini had been instrumental in exposing one of the top “mental-readers” of his day, the Spaniard Joaquin Argamasilla (who claimed he could see through metal with his “X-ray” vision), further humiliating the man by incorporating the trick into his own magic act. Tricks not performed as entertainment were exploitive and therefore evil, he vociferously argued, his campaign against pseudooccultists one of the things for which he was best known. Like other arduous skeptics past and present, Houdini offered to pay hard cash to anyone who could produce any supernatural phenomenon that he could not duplicate through his own brand of magic. “I want it to be my mission in life to expose fraud,” he once said, thinking “preying fakers, fortunetellers, diabolists and spirit-mongers” were “worse than patent medicines.”38 Despite Houdini’s wishes for how he wanted to be remembered, at least one person was determined to change the way the public thought about the man after he died in 1926. Houdini was the greatest psychic medium of modern times, Doyle wrote in a pulp called Mystery Stories the

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following year, the former’s famously antispiritist reputation just another illusion. In private, Doyle claimed, Houdini was “a sympathetic inquirer who needed but a little more to be convinced,” impressed by evidence of the supernatural that others shared with him. The great magician had even shown Doyle a spirit photograph he himself had taken, believing it to be the only genuine one in the world. Naturally, Doyle had received a number of messages he believed were from the late Houdini but “none of them contained the conclusive proofs upon which I insist,” he wrote.39 Ironically, quite a few other “diabolists” were determined to communicate with Houdini’s spirit immediately after the man died, maintaining that he achieved his amazing feats not through magic at all but rather via his own, unsurpassed supernatural powers.40 Before he passed away, Houdini reportedly told some friends that, if there was any truth to spiritualism, he would figure out a way to escape death and return to this life to settle the matter once and for all. Within a couple of years of his death, hundreds of mediums came forth to announce they had successfully contacted Houdini’s spirit but none of these claims really stuck. Seeing an opportunity to make some extra cash, the managers of a theater in Manhattan rented out the space to the Reverend A. M. Freeman, a prominent African American medium, to see if she could summon the spirit of Houdini and, while she was at it, a few other famous dead. “He’s coming through!,” Freeman cried in the darkened room, the ghost not only visible but talking to her. “I is here, I is glad to see everybody,” Houdini’s spirit told the medium, it not exactly clear why the man was now speaking in dialect. Spooked, so to speak, by the crowd, Houdini’s spirit soon disappeared but, fortunately, others, including those belonging to the recently dead Victor Herbert and Woodrow Wilson, allegedly arrived. Hearing or seeing nothing themselves, however, the audience was not convinced, keeping the mystery surrounding Houdini and all other supposed spirits very much alive.41

A RAINBOW BUSINESS Psychic phenomena were of course not limited to conjuring up spirits from another world. Communicating on some other, higher plane could have much more practical benefits, like winning a game of bridge. At times, many would agree, it seemed as if one player could “will” his or her partner to play a certain card, especially when the game was on the line. With all things supernatural in the air in the early twenties, it was not surprising that some started to think there were greater forces at work than mere coincidence when such things occurred. The possibility that

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one player could indeed communicate thoughts without words to another and suggest which card to play (or not play) raised a number of questions about ethics and etiquette. Was it permissible for a player to will his or her partner to play a particular card to gain an advantage? Likewise, was it acceptable for someone equipped with the ability to transfer thoughts (those with a strong or dominant personality, it was agreed) to force his or her opponent to play a wrong card? Not anticipating mind reading to be an issue, even the wise writers of the game’s official rulebook had nothing to say on the matter, leaving the issue up to debate (at least to those who believed such a thing was within the realm of possibility). The will factor in card playing was not as farfetched as it perhaps seemed. It was not uncommon for close friends or spouses to share some kind of understanding that transcended the ordinary dynamics of the game, the best partnerships in fact those in which the players had an uncanny ability to essentially read each other’s hands. “Auto-suggestion” was not that far a leap from this kind of mental connection, many believed, offering a more palatable version of the supernatural for those straddling the fence.42 And if people could not read minds, some thought, spirits could, their literally unearthly powers exceeding that of any human. Getting spirits to describe a passage in a certain book located in a distant place was a perfect example of such powers, according to some in the early 1920s, so much so that the American Society for Psychical Research offered a “simple household test of spiritualism” for interested parties to see for themselves. Edwin E. Slosson, a writer for The Independent and the Weekly Review and self-described “pragmatist,” took the Society up on its offer, and was impressed by the results. Via a medium named “Feda,” one Colonel Beadon, quite dead, told his widow about a particular passage in a particular book that was in Slosson’s library some three thousand miles away. “Imagine, then, Mrs. Beadon’s amazement when she went to her room and found in the book and on the page indicated a passage that could fully be construed as previously described by the medium,” Slosson wrote, concluding that the test was “proof enough for anything.”43 Again, however, some were less convinced, especially when it came to communicating with the dead. “What is called Spiritualism is chiefly, if not wholly, an attempt to escape from the normal duties and responsibilities of life by recourse to counsel and direction from the dark,” suggested Outlook in 1922, these alleged powerful outside forces a poor substitute for one’s own will and character. Spiritualism was not a scientific phenomenon but a religious one, the effort to make some connection with higher powers an attempt to correct what believers felt was a sense of wrongness when their loved ones were taken away. What was most concerning was that, unlike religion, spiritualism carried no particular

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message, and offered no set of guidelines on how to live a good life. As an empty faith, devoid of any kind of ethical principles or standards, spiritualism was a distressing sign of the times. “No one can observe thoughtfully this phenomenon without wondering how far it is a symptom of spiritual and moral health,” the magazine fretted, wondering, “how far it is a symptom of a breakdown in spirit, morals, or mind.”44 Thomas Edison distanced himself from the movement that year, making it clear that, despite rumors to the contrary, he was not working on a device for people to communicate with spirits. “I don’t believe in spirits,” he told the New York Times, unhappy that he had been misunderstood when it came to what he considered a “rainbow business.”45 Undaunted, Arthur Conan Doyle continued his transcontinental lecturing in 1923, his mission of spiritism now more of a crusade. Large crowds continued to greet him, although it seemed that by now Doyle was simply preaching to the choir, his enthusiastic audiences made up almost entirely of people who needed no convincing of the truth of his claims. Critics, such as one from the Wall Street Journal, were typically not very impressed. “In general his proceedings are almost as dramatic as a teacher of geometry showing his pupils how to cross the bridge of asses” [Euclid’s fifth proposition in the first book of his Elements], a theater reviewer for the newspaper wrote after attending one of Doyle’s talks, his spirit photographs “not worth the powder to blow them.”46 After reading such reviews, Doyle decided to take on his many skeptics, making a $1,000 bet that the highly objective magazine Scientific American would judge psychic phenomena to be genuine. “The idea of spiritualism has been repeatedly assailed by unbelievers in all parts of the world,” Doyle said in Los Angeles in 1923 before his first lecture there, “and I issue this open challenge as a means of testing for the benefit of these doubters.”47 As what was probably the most ambitious attempt to date at psychic research, the Scientific American challenge was a formidable one. J. Malcolm Bird, associate editor of the magazine (and formerly a professor at Columbia University), was put in charge of the effort, with others in the media carefully watching the outcome. Bird did yeoman’s duty, taking part in many “test se´ances” including those led by some of the top mediums in the country such as Ada Bessinet in Toledo, Ohio, George Valentine in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Josie Stewart in Cleveland, Ohio. Bird also visited the leading mediums in England, France, and Germany, and ultimately penned a book about his experience, My Psychic Adventures, which was published by the magazine. After months of exhaustive research, Bird and the magazine reported the much-anticipated findings. There was no evidence that communication between the living and dead exists, Bird wrote, but enough support to make the case that telepathy did, making

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Doyle’s challenge essentially a draw. As usual, the facts surrounding the supernatural remained elusive, with no clear answers to the many questions inherent to the field.48 SINCERE, BUT SELF-DELUDED Also seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the passion surrounding spirit communication, Forum magazine set up a literary debate between leaders of the opposing sides of the movement the following year. Walter Franklin Prince, principal research officer of the American Society for Psychical Research, went head to head with Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin, each man given an opportunity to make his best case for or against. Prince was in some ways a curious choice to represent the “for” side, he best known to the public as a merciless exposer of psychic frauds, especially those involving spirit photographs, ectoplasms, and slate writings (as well as most of Doyle’s potpourri of metaphysical beliefs). Most famously, Prince had accepted an invitation by officials in Nova Scotia in 1922 to get to the bottom of a ghost scare sweeping the island. One family had been driven from their home because of “supernatural agencies,” and a number of children reported seeing unexplainable phenomena in the dark. After some houses mysteriously caught fire, Prince was brought in, with a pack of American newspapermen following close behind to try to get a scoop. Prince found nothing to suggest supernatural powers were at work, however, this putting the nervous Nova Scotians much more at ease.49 For Prince, this was nothing new. It took eighteen years of study and experimentation before Prince had what he called his first “affirmative conclusion regarding the supernormal,” in fact, this finally tipping him to the believer-with-major-reservations side of the equation.50 In his essay in Forum, Prince took a two-pronged approach, citing a number of case histories of both communication with spirits and telepathy. With regard to the latter, Prince discussed experiments made by Gilbert Murray, a distinguished Greek scholar at Oxford University, who had claimed to be able to recount with stunning accuracy fictitious situations described by an “agent” in a low voice in another room of a house. One example: Agent: Mr. S. playing Badminton at the Badminton Club at Bogota. Lord Murray watching, and ladies watching, one with a fan. Professor Murray: This is something to do with your voyage to Panama—it’s South American—it’s people in white playing a game—it’s your villain S—he’s playing a game—the word Bogota is coming to my mind—I think it is at a games-club.

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Agent: What is the game? Professor Murray: I think I am only guessing. I think the game is Badminton, and the Master of Elibank [Lord Murray] is there.51

Professor Murray conducted no less than 505 such experiments and, after discarding 68 in which he picked up no message at all, reported he was “successful” 38 percent of the time, “partially successful” 32 percent of the time, and “failed” 30 percent of the time.52 After citing another equally impressive case of mind reading (by a “Mrs. West,” who, upon asked a series of questions, seemed to know things about Prince no one else, including his wife and daughter, did), he described a case of spirit communication between a “Mrs. Spencer” and her dead husband. The medium, who did not know the couple or anything about them, was able to tell the woman a lot about her relationship with her husband while he was alive, the most remarkable thing perhaps the assortment of pet names that she called him. These were, in no particular order, Minnie-cat, Kewpie, Pixie, Pinchie, Little Fox, Lamb, Turtle, Little Boy Blue, Baboy (pronounced Bay-boy), Dadie (pronounced Day-dy), Chicken, and, last but not least, Squunchie. “It must be admitted that most of these terms are not common,” Prince understatedly wrote, scoring quite a few points for the supernatural if it was at all true.53 In his own essay in Forum, Jastrow came down on Prince like a ton of bricks, accusing him of being naı¨ve and not applying the same level of skepticism and criticism he did towards other psychic phenomena. Regarding the litany of pet names the medium produced for “Mrs. Spencer,” Jastrow wondered why the medium was not able to provide a similar list of affectionate names that her husband used to call her, something that “Mrs. Spencer” was actually hoping for. Prince himself had admitted in his piece that this appeared to be “avoidance” of some kind and, even more damning, was “contrary to the law as we know it in experimental telepathy.” For Jastrow, the proposition that there were any “laws” of experimental telepathy at all was pure conjecture, not to say presumptuous. “One could accumulate all sorts of suspicious and suggestive items to corroborate one or another explanation,” Jastrow wrote of this incident, not bothering to spend any time proposing any of the range of possibilities.54 Jastrow had a similar opinion of Prince’s other case histories. “It becomes impossible to anticipate what dubious steps may be taken to acquire impressive revelations,” Jastrow wrote of the alleged powers of “Mrs. West,” the test far more convincing if Prince had asked the questions rather than her. Not surprisingly, Jastrow was equally dismissive of Gilbert Murray’s mind-reading feats. “I am more than ready to say that

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I don’t know how the information [was] conveyed,” admitted Jastrow, but “this ignorance does not in the least incline me to believe that it involve[d] any supernormal powers.” For the psychologist Jastrow, it was “the will to believe” that led Prince and others astray and, on a grander scale, was responsible for keeping speculation in the occult alive through the centuries. Those with such a will possessed “not a crude or ignorant or obstinate bias, but a most delicate, subtly intrusive, subconscious, temperamental deviation of logical processes away from the straight, narrow, and often dull path of pure logic,” he proposed, this remnant of human’s “primitive mind” still rearing its ugly head.55 Prince and Jastrow’s debate triggered a multitude of letters to pour into the offices of Forum, the issue obviously striking a cultural nerve. So many were received in fact that the editor of the magazine felt compelled to sort them into six different categories: “The Skeptics,” “Discriminating Spirits,” “Sincere, but Self-Deluded,” “The Believers,” “Belief on Religious Grounds,” and “One Who Knows.” Among “The Skeptics” was Major General A. W. Greely (best known for his 1880s Arctic expedition), the now eighty-year-old man feeling that that if there was any truth at all to supernatural intelligence, he surely would have experienced it by now. Other skeptics dismissed spiritualism through their faith in either religion or science, either one capable of explaining anything that could possibly occur in life. Among the “Discriminating Spirits” was a dean at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, who wrote to say that if it was intended for us to communicate with the dead “it would have been arranged . . . as to leave the matter beyond . . . doubt,” a more than fair observation. Alice French, an author from Davenport, Iowa, was a doubting Thomas but remained open minded, thinking that if the nineteenth century was an age of triumphs in the physical world, equivalent conquests could very well be made in the spiritual world in the twentieth, an interesting prediction. Another discriminating spirit, Wilbur L. Cross, editor of The Yale Review, revealed he had attended a number of se´ances over the years but never seemed to recognize the spirits who contacted him, making mediums quickly move on to better subjects.56 “Sincere but Self-Deluded” comprised the largest number of letter writers who responded to Forum’s debate. This group of people did not demand real proof of the supernatural because they were, according to the editor, “beguiled by their own faith” in such matters. J. B. McDonald, a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army, admitted to being such a person, his self-professed “consuming desire to hear from spirits dear to me” greater than the need for firm evidence. Another member of this group, an anonymous woman, felt that the idea of an unseen life was just too thrilling to let rational thought get in the way, the prospect of eternity a

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tempting carrot to dangle in front of anyone with the slightest inclination to believe in another world. Other sincere but self-delusional letter writers simply took the word of people like Lodge and Doyle, thinking such reputable men were incapable of deception. “The Believers,” on the other hand, did not need the word of distinguished men to be convinced of the reality of spiritualism. Most of this group had personal experience with the supernatural, a few even gifted with some special ability to access another world. Marguerite L. Glentworth, an author from New York City, for example, claimed she had a “sixth sense” since she was a child, her “inner consciousness” frequently allowing her to foretell events-to-be and know the contents of sealed letters. Glentworth also had the occasional apparitional visitor, her great-grandmother and the father of a close friend just two ghosts who manifested themselves to her.57 Those having “Belief on Religious Grounds” did not need any kind of personal experience to be equally confident that the lines between this world and another one overlapped. W. J. Maxwell, a retired naval officer, pointed to the Scriptures for absolute proof of spirit communication, this an essential part of God’s Divine Plan, a view echoed by H. B. Hearn, president of the Shreveport Railways Company and an Episcopalian. Paul Bakewell, dean of the St. Louis University of Law and a Catholic, went even further. “I believe that angels are pure spirits,” he wrote, reminding those less familiar with the Bible that angels were known to appear to mortals, this the literal truth for those who believed every word of the Good Book. Even those claiming that communication with spirits was part of God’s Divine Plan were trumped by the “One Who Knows,” however. S. Adolphus Knopf, MD, identified himself as “not a believer, but one who feels that he knows,” taking the supernatural just as seriously as medicine. Besides being an expert in tuberculosis, Knopf published the occasional paper in The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and believed that any investigator of psychic phenomena should “approach the subject with profound reverence, deep earnestness, and with an ardent desire to be of service.” Although it was unclear exactly how Knopf could be so certain of the existence of spirits, he demonstrated how polarizing the Prince versus Jastrow debate was for many ordinary Americans trying to determine their own level of belief or disbelief.58

THE MENTAL RADIO The idea that a lot of people were “sincere, but self-deluded” when it came to the supernatural was confirmed by the famous “Margery” case of 1925. Trying to offer definitive proof one way or another, a committee

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composed mostly of Harvard University faculty members invited Margery Crandon, a prominent Boston medium, along with her husband (a wealthy surgeon) to hold a series of se´ances with them. After no less than eight such “sittings,” as they were neutrally called, this committee too proclaimed a draw, reporting that neither any supernatural activity nor any fraud had taken place. “Neither the methods nor the phenomena are evidence of a supernatural or a supernormal force at work,” the committee’s official report read, but “the observers do not question the good faith of Dr. or Mrs. Crandon, or the sincerity of their belief in the genuineness of the mediumship and the supernormal origin of the phenomena.”59 Given some of the strange incidents that had occurred over the course of the sittings, it was hardly a given that the esteemed scientists putting Margery’s feats to the test would conclude she had no supernatural powers. On one occasion, one of the professors reported feeling a cool, clammy, and boneless hand grasp his own, the “teleplastic” thing presumably belonging to “Walter,” Margery’s dead brother who acted as her “spirit control.” Other faculty members reported that their hair was being pulled, this too attributed to Walter, and one scientist claimed that he played a game of checkers with the dead man (who also “spoke” through Margery while she was in a trance). Thinking some kind of acrobatics or sleight of hand must be at work, the committee redoubled its efforts to prevent any tricks, including strip-searching Margery before and after each sitting, escorting her by hand to the room, and stationing two guards outside the room. To more easily visually track her movements, they also placed elastic bands covered with luminescent paint on her wrists and ankles and dabbed the same substance on her forehead, but this did nothing to stop the unexplainable activity. Dr. Crandon was similarly searched, with no apparatus discovered, leaving the committee to conclude that the phenomena witnessed were “produced by normal means,” meaning no funny business was being performed. What accounted for the things that went bump in the Boston night? The phenomena were “the product of an automatism built up by direct and auto-suggestion in a way of which Dr. and Mrs. Crandon were unconscious,” the official report read, the conditions of the se´ance producing “a high degree of suggestibility.” Both Margery and members of the committee were essentially hypnotized, in other words, with Walter’s voice a “hypnotic impersonation” rather than a “secondary or dissociated personality.”60 Whether one personally believed in spirits or not, it was by the mid1920s difficult to completely disregard the supernatural movement and, perhaps, to dismiss the whole thing as utterly ridiculous. Too many prominent people—writers, artists, clergymen, and, most important, scientists—were publicly on one side of the fence or the other, something

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that had been the case in this country since the Fox Sisters phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century. And because not a single piece of absolute proof of any kind of supernatural activity had ever been produced, the field remained a battleground for those trying to establish the metaphysical as fact and others equally determined to define it as fiction. Entering the fray invited a plethora of questions that were challenging, to say the least, to provide answers to. Did spirits “live” forever or could they “die”? What about animals (or plants, for that matter); i.e., did they too have souls that continued on after their physical “shell” decayed? Anthropologists could provide innumerable answers to such questions based on the beliefs of different cultures past and present, suggesting that a definitive theory of life and death was ultimately an elusive pursuit. Taking a similar tack, Charlotte Perkins Gilman raised questions about the physical appearance of spirits, wondering why in death they always seemed to look just like they looked in life. “Even if you are disposed to believe in spirits, how can you account for the clothes they wear when they appear before your startled vision?” she reasonably asked readers of Forum in 1926, ghosts’ fashion sense perhaps shedding some light on the bigger issue of credibility. Were spirits confined to wearing the same outfit in which they died? Was a new set of clothes matching the old ones made for and issued to spirits? What about laundries and barbershops to keep grandmother and grandfather looking as good as, well, old? With regard to the question of dress in general, Arthur Conan Doyle had an answer (“Of course they are clothed,” he had once written, the dead being as modest as the living), but others were not so sure. At some point, ghosts’ traditional attire—a sheet or shroud—had become the dress of their particular day, a curious thing for Gilman. “It would be more inspiring to conceive of free spirits, if they must have bodies and clothes upon them, devising something more beautiful and seemly than our fluctuating fashions,” she wryly observed, the image of one’s ancestors parading around in all kinds of historical costumes not a particularly appealing one. Spirits’ age too was a matter of puzzlement for Gilman (were they always the age at which they died or did they perhaps revert back or speed forward to the prime of life, say age thirty?), this unanswered question also revealing some possible cracks in the foundation of the supernatural.61 Previously thought of simply as a parlor trick or vaudeville act, mind reading was being taken much seriously both here and in England by the mid-twenties, elevated to the more scientific field of telepathy. Newspaper articles about experiments in sending telepathic messages, such as those conducted by the Earl of Balfour (a leader of the metaphysics movement in England) and Gilbert Murray in London in 1925, were picked up by the American press, creating a flurry of transatlantic interest in the supernatural.

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After the Manchester Guardian published an article about the pair’s somewhat successful tests in communicating messages spoken very quietly between rooms of a large house, editors of American newspapers and magazines spread the word, knowing a good story when they saw one. Two New York papers, the Evening Journal and the World, covered the story (each asking Prince to weigh in), and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tracked down Lodge for commentary. Although there could be some biological explanation for the mystery (“hyperaesthesia,” or extreme sensitivity to sound, was one theory), telepathy was presented to the American public as a legitimate possibility. “Are we to see the development of a ‘sixth sense,’ whose functioning will permit us to ‘tune in’ with minds in harmonious vibration with our own? Will the mental radio supercede other, cruder methods of communication?,” asked Current Opinion, no doubt tantalizing readers with how people might exchange thoughts and feelings in the future.62 The Continent was also a hotbed of psychic research in the mid-1920s. Like most Europeans, the French were fascinated by “metaphysique,” as psychic phenomena were called in that country. Charles Richet, the famous physiologist (now retired from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris), was very interested in the subject but was by no means a true spiritist, taking a purely investigative approach to the field. Interestingly, Richet’s views mirrored that of the Scientific American findings; there was little or no evidence to believe communication with spirits was possible, he held, but plenty of reasons to suggest telepathy was. Stepping back and seeing the big picture, something that many if not most people could do because of their bias one way or the other, Richet proposed two different paths to take when it came to metaphysique. “We must admit the existence of spirits, of angelic powers that intervene in human affairs,” he suggested to the New York Times in 1926, “or we must consider that human intelligence, soul and body, is capable of producing not only material manifestations but also subjective phenomena that amaze us.” Richet’s humanistic, even agnostic, perspective was refreshing, the Frenchman not afraid to admit that even the best scientists of the day, including himself, had limited knowledge when it came to psychic phenomena. “There are other routes to the knowledge of reality than the normal sensory ones,” he felt comfortable saying, confident that future scientists would have a much greater grasp of the subject than anyone could at the time.63

THE MORASS OF RELIGION The question of whether or not research into psychic phenomena was truly scientific was paramount to both believers and nonbelievers. Science

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was of course ascendant in the 1920s, putting pressure on suspect fields like metaphysics and psychoanalysis to prove they were not just interesting theories. Those investigating psychic phenomena generally sorted them into two categories; mental phenomena included telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, premonitions, trances, automatic writing and speaking, and dreams, while physical phenomena encompassed raps, the moving of objects without contact, materializations, radiations from the human body, and thought-photographs. (As in the case of the very popular ouija board, these two categories occasionally overlapped.) Both of these categories built on “modern” research beginning in the late nineteenth century, notably Frederic Myers’s papers on the “subliminal consciousness,” Edmund Gurney’s experiments in hypnotism, and a host of other studies addressing everything from multiple personalities to crystal ball gazing. A variety of devices and instruments—scales, thermometers, cameras, electroscopes, galvanometers, and microscopes, to name just a handful—were used to explore things like “vital radiations,” “vibratory actions,” “magnetic centers,” and “ionizations.” The American Society for Psychic Research, an organization founded in 1885 (and still around today as the American Society for Psychical Research), was responsible for considerable investigation into the supernatural, including exposing the many frauds and charlatans in the field. Some felt that even if there was a small chance of achieving the Holy Grail of the supernatural—communicating with the deceased—it would be the discovery of the age, making the many number of dead ends, so to speak, of psychic research well worth the effort.64 Just as psychic research was typically viewed as second-rate at best compared to that of other, “real” sciences,” the supernatural was usually looked at as religion’s ne’er-do-well relative, the former lacking both the organization and traditions of the latter. Interestingly, the supernatural’s association with science seemed to hurt it more than help it, the pure abstraction and piety of religion freeing it from demands for factual evidence of the existence of God. Supernaturalism in its modern incarnation had, more than anything else, bad timing, emerging during what was a golden age of science. The field was thus stuck between a rock and a hard place, lacking the discipline of science and the reverence of religion, this accounting for the skepticism or ambivalence many felt towards it. Neither a true branch of philosophy or psychology as well, supernaturalism was left with a shaky intellectual footing, dependent on those who had had some kind of metaphysical experience to persuade others it was legitimate. As one such person, Sir Oliver Lodge felt in 1925 the need to establish a creed for “spiritualism,” part of which went as follows:

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Death, far from being an end, is not even an interruption of continuity [but rather] an episode in continuous existence, an adventure through which every individual has to pass. The body is not the man, but his instrument, a mechanism [by] which his own real self [is] constructed and more and more inhabited during the period of its incarnation in matter. When set free from the flesh, his more unhampered, more real, more wakeful, more intelligent, more hopeful existence begins.65

Lodge’s creed begged the question of whether science was the best way or qualified at all to judge supernatural activities. Scientists certainly thought so, of course, but some others believed that “supernormal” phenomena, as they were also sometimes called, fell outside the closed, mechanistic system of science. No scientific laws were applied to religion, after all, that particular belief system excused from having to provide empirical proof of any kind. Because it often involved matter and movement rather than just faith or dogma, however, the supernatural was held to a higher standard to be accepted as truth, this perhaps justified and perhaps not, depending on one’s personal view.66 However, one could also make the case that supernaturalism (ironically) benefited from the many radical advances in science in the early twentieth century, especially in astrophysics. Einstein’s relativity theory, Planck’s quantum theory, and Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle shattered the rather cocksure view of nineteenth-century scientists that they had definitively solved all the “riddles of the universe.” Although some leading philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell and George Santayana, managed to salvage a kind of mechanistic materialism in the wake of these new discoveries, many other thinkers felt that modern science’s sudden sense of uncertainty and indeterminacy allowed for the resurgence of formerly outmoded religious and spiritualistic beliefs. What were formerly taken to be definitive scientific “facts” were now reduced to statistical probabilities, in other words, opening a window of opportunity for adherents to the supernatural.67 In addition, as James Turner has demonstrated in Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, more orthodox religions of this period weakened themselves by an attempt to justify their creeds by appeal to scientific and philosophical logic. The radical advances in astrophysics and other fields effectively forced these religions into this tactic as science became the chief or sole arbiter of truth. At the same time, “higher criticism,” the method of literary analysis investigating the origins of a text, was showing the Bible to be a disparate collection of human documents rather than something dictated by God. In part because of

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these events, orthodox religion was losing adherents rapidly by the early twentieth century, this too helping the cause of supernaturalism. The 1925 Scopes Trial in 1925, and subsequent devastating humiliation of Christian fundamentalism, further weakened the foundation of religion in America while bolstering that of parapsychology.68 Just as it had welcomed Freud and his then marginal theories almost twenty years earlier, Clark University was one of the few institutions of higher education to invite leaders of the supernatural movement to present their controversial ideas. In late 1926, the school held an elevenday symposium on spiritism, with the organizer of the event, Carl Murchison, head of the school’s psychology department, unapologetic that his main aim was to gather material for a book. An all-star cast of supernaturalism came to Clark, with both sheep and goats given an opportunity to express their views. Even Dr. Crandon, husband of the famous Boston medium, had a chance to speak, he arriving with some of his wife’s spirit photographs. Murchison was not sure if actual spirits would be invoked at the meeting but was perfectly open to holding a few se´ances if they were inclined to show up in Worchester, Massachusetts, in late November and early December.69 The range of opinions presented at Clark not surprisingly reflected the divisiveness of the field. No doubt delighted to have a scholarly platform on which to speak his mind rather than the raucous music halls he was used to playing, Doyle made an urgent plea for his brand of faith, contrasting spiritism to what he called “the morass of religion”: The ultimate aim of the whole movement is to afford earnest minds in this age of doubt and stress some method of gaining a knowledge of our duties and our destiny which shall be disassociated from outworn observances and conflicting faith. . . . The ultimate result will be the union of science and religion and such an increase of inspired knowledge as will lift humanity to a higher plane and send it reassured and comforted upon its further journey into the unknown.70

While typically didactic, Doyle actually had an interesting point. The hodgepodge of religions, with their conflicting beliefs, separated people while spiritism, with its foundation of a universal intelligence, offered the possibility of uniting them. The great thinkers of the eighteenth century— Hume, Voltaire, and many others—had too easily dismissed supernaturalism in their eagerness to destroy medieval superstition, Doyle argued, another compelling idea. And despite their efforts, the unseen and inexplicable remained a powerful force simmering beneath the cool, calm surface of rationalism, this the thing that was now bubbling up with such energy all across the Western world.71

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Joseph Jastrow, of course, saw things quite differently, relentlessly attacking Doyle and his version of intellectual history. After tracing the development of modern spiritism and linking it to previous articulations of the occult such as astrology and divination, the University of Wisconsin professor proposed that ignoring the lack of logic surrounding psychic phenomena was, plain and simple, “disgusting to the scientific mind.” Just as “facts” were once attributed to witchcraft, Jastrow continued, so was science being misapplied to the supernatural, implying that for some people in the room, Worcester was not very far from Salem, Massachusetts, metaphorically speaking. If anything deserved study, Jastrow could not help but throw in, it was those who believed in the supernormal rather than the supernormal itself, these folks sharing a remarkable similarity to those with “a certain type of paranoic mind.”72 Staying out of the Worcester war were a number of speakers including William McDougall of Harvard and Walter Prince, each of these men simply calling for more psychic research. “This is no field for the casual amateur,” McDougall said, thinking nothing short of the highest degree of scientific training was needed to methodically and systematically investigate what was presently just a collection of curious experiences. Prince felt similarly, he thinking a true psychic science would someday develop just as astronomy had from astrology and chemistry from alchemy.73 F. C. Schiller, a professor at Oxford, however, thought psychical research was already well on the way to becoming an authentic science. In fact, the field was now at least as good as Einstein’s original theory of relativity and some other theories of modern physics, Schiller felt, quite the bold statement. Speaking in a chilly hall that even a few ghosts might have second thoughts about entering, the professor made the case that despite the impressive amount of research done to date, no other field currently offered the kind of opportunities for further experimentation. Not only were the phenomena associated with spiritism still vague and poorly defined but so were the hypotheses supporting them, meaning it was open season for future researchers in the field. Schiller had himself pursued psychical research for over four decades, having founded the Phasmatological Society, an organization dedicated to the investigation and chasing of ghosts, at Oxford when he was a student there in the early 1880s. He and his fellow members of the society did not find too many poltergeists but they certainly had a good time looking for them, the professor admitted to his colleagues, a somehow fitting way to close the symposium.74 As what had been a wild decade for the supernatural wound down, another fitting event took place an ocean away from Worcester, Massachusetts. In February 1929, Sir Oliver Lodge’s wife died in London, lending an additional personal note to the man’s already intense mission of

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spiritism. “I have little doubt we shall be able to establish communication,” Lodge said the day after she passed away, confident that his wife would in death go to the same effort of providing evidence of spiritism that she did in life. Having by now lost a son and daughter, Lodge explained, Lady Lodge was quite ready to go to the other side, she having looked forward to reuniting with her children. Death was like birth, Lodge told a reporter, a new existence or adventure that all of us would eventually go through. “She will be well looked after and cared for where she is,” he said, deciding it would be best to wait a month or two before attempting to contact her.75 Contact her he would, just one instance of a myriad of attempts to engage the supernatural in its equally odd next chapter of history.

Chapter 2

The Mind’s Eye

There was the Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I might not see. —Omar Khayyam

In June 1932, on a German mountaintop, a group of eminent scientists from that country and from England gathered to see if they could turn a goat into a man. The psychic investigators, led by Harry Price, director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in London, were following an ancient rite detailed in the High German Black Book, a handwritten volume of magical formulae from medieval days. As scientifically trained researchers, the team followed the formula with precision, first anointing the billy goat with blood, honey, and the scrapings of church bells. The group then formed a circle of the exact size specified in the book next to a pine fire and uttered each of the stipulated Latin incantations, all of this in a swirling mist under a full moon. Last but certainly not least, “a maiden pure of heart” was produced, one Gloria Gordon brought all the way from England. (It was not clear if there was a shortage of such maidens in Germany in the early 1930s.) After leading the goat into the magic circle by a silver cord and throwing a white sheet over it, Price counted slowly to ten. A hundred or so spectators who had also come to the summit of Brocken, a place of legend and witches made famous by Goethe in Faust, looked on in breathless silence. At “10,” the pure maiden whisked the sheet off the goat. “And there stood a billygoat [sic],” as a reporter

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from the New York Times described the scene, both the investigators and spectators seemingly satisfied with the results of the experiment.1 A silly waste of time, one might think, but ridding the supernatural from its superstitious roots was critical for the field to become a credible one. The supernatural and science would increasingly confront each other in the 1930s and early 1940s, these two powerful forces struggling to see if they were compatible fields or else strange bedfellows destined to follow their own separate paths. Those exploring the common ground between the two fields believed they were on the brink of something big, with nothing short of the course of human history hanging in the balance. And consistent with the tendency for the supernatural to flourish in tough times, psychic phenomena were an inescapable presence during the Depression and war years as Americans became increasingly receptive towards the existence of things beyond the physical world or what one writer called “the mind’s eye.” Turning a goat into a man may have been out of the question, but many other exciting possibilities loomed as we pushed further into the great unknown. A COMPLETELY NEW THRESHOLD OF KNOWLEDGE Although much of what had been considered the occult was now being called psychic phenomena, the term was really just a fancy way to describe what many if not most people have experienced: the weird feeling of intuition or foresight that turns out to come true or a confrontation with something that seemed to defy the physical laws of nature. In fact, a mid-1930s survey of ten thousand people listed in Who’s Who in America revealed that one in four admitted to personally having some kind of psychical experience, suggesting that the subject was not limited to just kooks. (If one in four admitted it, it is almost certain a lot more of the Who’s Who had at least one such experience but were reluctant to say so. As well, such iconic Americans as Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln reportedly had “visions” during their lifetime, putting the Who’s Who in some very good company.) The range of phenomena that could be interpreted as “psychic” was truly staggering, based on common anecdotal evidence: having knowledge of an event occurring at that exact moment actually taking place many miles away; running into someone from one’s distant past right after thinking or dreaming about him or her; being able to describe a place that one had never been in vivid detail; having a near-death experience or, as one journalist recently described his, “seven minutes in eternity”; seeing, hearing, or creepily feeling the presence of someone more dead than alive; and many, many more.2

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Whether any or all of these were truly psychic or supernatural events, merely coincidences, or something else remained the question, of course, the answer likely defining one’s position on the entire subject. The possible explanations were almost as varied as the experiences themselves. Given the hundreds or thousands of things each of us thinks of every day, should we be surprised that every once in a while we guessed right, the skeptic reasonably asked? Were such events just a brain hiccup, as the biologically inclined would argue, a misfiring in our gray matter analogous to the heart missing a beat? Could there be such a thing as latent memory, our minds filled with the cognitive sediment of our ancestors? Was there a window into another world (the “fourth dimension,” in which both time and space did not exist) that, only rarely, we could peek into even if we had not intended to, others wondered? Or were all things supernatural simply hallucinations or, perhaps, the effect of too many gimlets? With the workings of the human mind almost virgin land some three-quarters of a century ago, it was generally agreed that it would be rash to discard any of these theories in this most peculiar field. Wherever one stood on the matter, however, the determination to explain the unexplainable was intensifying as the march of science clashed with the mystery of the supernatural.3 One big chunk of supernaturalism, mental telepathy or “mind-tomind” communication, was grounded in the idea that there existed a subliminal or subconscious threshold of consciousness in which thoughts and emotions could be transmitted. Taking this notion one step further, spiritualists claimed that this same kind of consciousness existed independently of the physical body and survived death, making it possible to communicate between the two worlds. Fragments of the same message from the other side “appeared” to different people, psychic researchers had reportedly found, this the most compelling evidence of communication from the beyond. The survival of the subconscious after this life was thus a primary focus for both British and American supernaturalists, this mysterious region of the mind the wellspring for all kinds of unexplainable phenomena. Proof of such not only was needed to turn supernatural theory into fact but would stamp out for good the field’s lingering halo of superstition and association with Black Magic, something that still haunted, it might be said, current practitioners.4 It is impossible now to fully appreciate the heady excitement many felt in the 1930s when it appeared that supernatural phenomena could finally be, after thousands of years of conjecture, scientifically tested. “We are approaching a completely new threshold of knowledge,” suggested Gerald Heard in 1932 in The Listener (the BBC’s weekly magazine), the rapid change the West was going through offering quantum leaps in our

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understanding of the universe. Using the methods and tools of science— controlled conditions, measurement via instruments of precision, etc.— facts could be gathered, organized into laws, and interpreted, a giant step for any field of study. Encouragingly, technologies only recently invented might reveal the real truths behind the metaphysical, making the twentieth century the time in which the secrets to life and death would be exposed. For example, a new kind of burglar alarm with an electric eye (called an “invisible ray” at the time) could possibly have applications in the field, some were thinking, its ability to detect movement even in the dark a way to determine if objects (or ghosts) were stirring, as mediums leading se´ances claimed they were. Rigging a camera to automatically take a picture of things going bump in the night was the next logical step, this perhaps offering definitive evidence, one way or another, of the existence of so-called “sensitives.”5 Another new device becoming popularly known as the “lie detector” was also being used to help determine if mediums were actually channeling spirits or should consider heading to Hollywood to star in the talkies because of their great acting abilities. In 1933, Hereward Carrington, director of the American Psychical Institute, hooked one up to a notable English medium of the day, Eileen Garrett, measuring her “emotional pulse” after reading a list of one hundred “stimulus words.” Carrington, who had been investigating spirit manifestations for thirty years, also used a stopwatch to time Garret’s responses, something psychiatrists did to reveal an individual’s “psychic fingerprint.” Through what Garrett said, how she said it, and how quickly or slowly, Carrington was confident he could distinguish her personality from any other possible entities who were using her body as a vessel to speak while she was in a trance. “No two mentalities set up the same record,” he insisted, absolutely confident he had developed a fraud-proof test.6 The results? “I can say now that our experiments seem to have shown the existence of mental entities independent of the control of the medium through whom they were summoned,” he wrote in his report, a roundabout way of saying that he had the closest thing so far to scientific proof of life after death. Garrett had produced not just one spirit but six different ones, Carrington claimed, the families of whom confirming that it was indeed their loved ones who were speaking through the medium. That the entities were multiple personalities of Garrett’s was impossible, he made clear, as “recognizable leakage from one to another” would have shown up in the psychological tests he used.7 With such stories making newspaper headlines in the early thirties, it was not surprising for mediums and their trade to become a rich source of creative inspiration in American pop culture. The aptly titled play Sucker Money ran on Broadway for

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a while, for example, a thinly veiled fictional version of the very real fortune-telling craze that was sweeping the country. Sucker Money “dramatize[d] the activities of the racketeers of the occult, those helpful artists of the psychic who, for a fee, will allow the relatives of departed ones a tantalizing glimpse into the beyond,” wrote the theater reviewer for the New York Times in 1933. The play featured a character named “Swami Yomurda” who uses his powers on a naı¨ve but rich banker from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, visiting New York.8 Many theatergoers no doubt squirmed in their seats while watching the play, embarrassed that they and the suckers on stage bore an uncanny resemblance when it came to their mutual interest in psychic matters.

GHOSTS I HAVE TALKED WITH If one was not convinced that the supernatural had become one of America’s leading pastimes, all he or she had to do was walk by the local movie theater and look up at the marquee. The 1930s were a golden age of horror films, of course, a parade of Frankensteins, Draculas, Mummies, and Invisible Men streaming out of Hollywood and appealing to Americans’ seemingly insatiable appetite to be scared out of their wits. Although we better remember these not quite alive, not quite dead monsters (and their simian cousin, King Kong) as populating the silver screen during these years, the decade was also an out-and-out ghost fest. “Supernatural stars are very much in demand right now,“ the New York Times observed on Christmas Day 1938, adding that “a favorite Hollywood formula seems to be boymeets-ghoul.” A plethora of movies with “Ghost,” “Phantom,” “Spirit,” or “Spook” in their title had indeed recently come out, and the “Topper” series of films was adding a much needed sense of humor to the genre.9 Supernaturalism had for millennia been a staple of popular culture, of course, but the field seemed to be that much more intriguing (and marketable) when contrasted with the rationalism of modern times. That at least a portion of us survived death was, to put it mildly, a compelling proposition, but it held special resonance when viewed within the context of the Machine Age. Supernaturalism more easily meshed with both religion and philosophy, after all, putting the field into high relief against the backdrop of science. With the decline of both of these ways to view the world over the last couple of centuries as the Enlightenment morphed into the Industrial Revolution, it was now incumbent upon science to examine the possibility of life after death. This is indeed what took place beginning in the 1880s, when British researchers such as Frederic Myers, Oliver Lodge, Richard Hodgson, and William James applied their

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scientific backgrounds to the psychic realm, using “Mrs. Piper,” a famous medium of the era, as their favorite subject. (Studies in hypnotism during the 1870s and 1880s also led to interest in “thought transference.”) A new generation of scholars investigated supernaturalism in the early years of the twentieth century followed by yet another group of researchers after World War I, the methods of testing telepathy and clairvoyance considered widely improved. By the mid-1930s, about forty experimental studies (many of them involving playing cards) had been devoted to psychic research over the course of some fifty years, with decidedly mixed results. No definitive proof of anything had been established, but general agreement was that things had taken place in studies that the physical laws of the universe could not explain, implying the existence of the supernormal. Everyone agreed that more research was needed, with the continued march of science being counted on to eventually provide some real answers.10 Although scientific methods developed only in the last few decades were now being used in the field, the idea of a human personality or soul that detached itself from the body, whether in life or death, was one that crossed thousands of years and many different civilizations. The ancient Egyptians, for example, believed in no less than three components of the personality (the Ka, or ego, the Sabu, or astral double, and the Khaibt, or radiation) that could defy the physical limitations of the human body and exist in another dimension of space. The Greek philosopher and teacher Apollonius of Tyana who probably lived around the time of Jesus claimed he could leave his body, the same skill that mediums of the twentieth century claimed to possess. (The name “medium” originated from the “sensitive” person’s ability to mediate between two worlds.) Entering a trance state allowed other forms of intelligence to occupy one’s body, mediums and their followers said, the no-man’s-land between the physical and mental (or spiritual) territory deserving full exploration. A number of different writings on the subject—J. W. Dunne’s book An Experiment with Time and essay “The Serial Universe,” as well as a recent story by William Gerhardi in the London Daily Express called “The Man Who Walked out of His Body”—created quite the sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, cause enough for some to theorize what was behind the profound interest in the occult. There is “a drowning urge to grasp at any straw floating on the noisy sea of present-day life,” argued Sax Rohmer in Forum and Century in 1935, thinking the time was now for believers such as himself to conduct experiments in what he called “this perilous midworld” with full vigor.11 Two other books published in 1935—Carrington’s Loaves and Fishes and Henry Clay McComas’s Ghosts I Have Talked With, illustrated how

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wide the divide was between believers and nonbelievers in the supernatural. In his book, Carrington first cited a litany of contemporary psychic phenomena and then literarily read the Bible through a supernormal lens, seeing it as, well, a bible of metaphysics. While some of the miracles mentioned in the four Gospels were mere coincidences and others simply parables, most of them, especially those having to do with healing, were demonstrations of Jesus Christ’s extraordinary psychic power, he held. The Resurrection, however, was “the greatest psychic event in all history,” according to Carrington, the appearance of Christ to his disciples after the Crucifixion either a “phantasm” (a mental projection) or a psychic materialization. Although he did not mention him in Ghosts I Have Talked With, McComas no doubt would have said that even Jesus Christ would have been unable to produce an actual psychic event. A psychologist at Johns Hopkins, McComas made the medium rounds for a decade (including a much publicized investigation of “Margery”) and then wrote his sarcastically titled book, providing a much-needed counterbalance to the flood of psychic phenomena being reported far and wide.12 Having talked with or listened to some ghosts of their own, however, the hundreds of people who gathered at the annual convention of the General Assembly of Spiritualists in New York in 1935 shrugged off skeptics like McComas. Mediums from across the country and their loyal minions filled the Park Central Hotel in what had to be one of the more interesting conventions in town. A flock of newspaper reporters came out to see and hear the spiritualists, knowing that a large of audience of readers were curious about anything that had to do with the supernatural. Stealing the show perhaps was A. J. Tyndall, a top spiritualist who put on a private demonstration for reporters in one of the hotel rooms. Wearing not just one but two blindfolds, Tyndall, who had been a friend of Doyle’s, got off to a rough start by taking a full ten minutes to find a rose hidden under the mattress of a bed. He soon warmed up, however, naming the color of a series of objects—a handkerchief, wallet, compact, and the tie a reporter was wearing—with “uncanny speed and accuracy,” as the New York Times captured the scene. The crowd of reporters now firmly in the palm of his hand, Tyndall went on to say that he was “stoutly convinced” that Bruno Hauptmann, who had been arrested for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, was innocent. “Of course that impression is psychic,” he explained, offering to prove the man’s innocence through his spiritualistic powers.13 Tyndall’s and many other spiritualists’ willingness to use their alleged powers for the social good was not uncommon, suggesting their motives were not always financial. (Psychics came out in droves to try to find the Lindbergh baby.) Much of the antagonism directed to mediums was indeed well deserved, but both their mission and vision could be

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considered quite noble upon closer inspection. Like most religiously devout, for example, spiritualists preached that not just immortality but a better world was waiting after one’s time on this mortal plane had expired, this providing comfort to many. As well, no money was needed, mediums typically advised, with the necessities of this world—food, clothing, shelter—there for the taking if they were so desired, this too an appealing proposition. And with no war or poverty, mediums’ version of the afterlife looked a lot like the heaven most of us were familiar with and believed in, making them not the monsters some cast them as. (One writer neatly described their description of heaven as an “etherealized socialistic state.”) Still, many people visiting mediums viewed them exclusively as a resource for this world, a way to get the very things that would be unnecessary or solve the problems that would not exist in the next one. Mediums were in fact very frustrated by some customers’ habit of treating them like a glorified lost-and-found, their psychic powers just a way to locate valuable things they had lost or that had been stolen. Were mediums really the problem or were our earthly desires the larger issue?14

THE GREATEST FIELD OF HIGH ADVENTURE It was Joseph Banks Rhine, an American botanist turned psychologist, who was most determined to find the answers to such questions. After hearing a lecture on spiritism by Doyle in Chicago in 1922, Rhine and his wife, Louisa, were hooked, each giving up their careers in botany for what they would soon call “parapsychology.” J. B. Rhine led paranormal research in America in the 1930s, with news of his experiments at Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory crossing over into the mainstream media. Rhine, who inherited the job from William McDougall who created the lab in 1930, had an unusual ability to articulate the possibility that humans had the inherent capacity to acquire knowledge without using their five senses. By appealing to ordinary people’s interest in some of the more common aspects of the supernatural like intuition, hunches, and dreams, Rhine was able gain a certain following that extremists like Lodge and Doyle could not. And by lending a certain respectability to telepathy and clairvoyance, Rhine separated himself from Charles Richet and a long line of subsequent scientists of the last fifty years who also had used cards to test those with alleged special powers. As well, by using the term “parapsychology” rather than psychic research, Rhine helped to lift the field from superstition to science, marking what could be considered the beginning of a new era in modern supernaturalism following the first one lasting a half century.15

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The birth of parapsychology, which officially took place with the launch of Duke University’s Journal of Parapsychology in 1937, did not go unnoticed by newspaper and magazine reporters and, ultimately, the general public. “We seem to breathe the bracing air of the laboratory rather than the sticky incense of darkened rooms in which frauds hold forth,” wrote an editor for the New York Times, impressed with Rhine’s and his colleagues’ renaming of the field. By defining the supernatural in terms of controlled experimental study, the Journal of Parapsychology was a “very necessary addition to the periodical literature,” the Times thought, promising “to make man and his mind more comprehensible.”16 Even more impressive, perhaps, Rhine also came up or at least popularized the term “extrasensory perception,” what quickly became known as “ESP” a subcategory of or specialty within clairvoyance (or what some called “eyeless seeing”). Also unlike Lodge and Doyle, nothing short of hard evidence would do for Rhine, as he made clear in one of a continuing series of essays on the subject in The Forum. “It must be entirely a matter of evidence, and crucially discriminative evidence,” he wrote in 1934, with “neither the current materialistic beliefs about nature nor the faith of our fathers” allowed to get in the way of future research.17 Rhine was not joking when it came to paranormal research being “a matter of evidence.” The team at Duke claimed to have performed more than one hundred thousand trials by 1934, all of them designed to determine if there was any truth to telepathy and clairvoyance and, if so, how they were achieved. “Either delusion is the explanation of our results or else we have found proof that the mind of man does indeed have an extra-sensory way of perceiving,” Rhine later wrote, referring to both “pure telepathy” (perceiving symbols, in this case on a special pack of cards, that another person is thinking about) and clairvoyance (perceiving the order of the twenty-five-card pack).18 Rhine’s cards had on their face either a circle, rectangle, star, cross, or set of wavy lines, making it a onein-five chance that a subject would name the correct design. Rather than batting .200, however, many subjects hit .300, .400, .500, or even higher, the odds of doing so reaching into the millions, billions, and trillions. After obtaining these kinds of results from thousands of tests, Rhine and his colleagues stopped doing them, feeling they had all the proof they needed of both telepathy and clairvoyance. “The objective in these tests was to pile the evidence mountain high and then to go on toward the explanatory phase,” he explained, this much more difficult part consisting of figuring out how common ESP was, if and to what degree it could be cultivated, and most important, how it worked.19 To answer these questions, Rhine took some extraordinary steps that would likely today be considered ethically questionable, such as occasionally

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giving his subjects sodium amytal (a depressant) or caffeine (a stimulant) to see if either affected their extrasensory perceptions. (Each did, the former for the worse and the latter for the better, leading Rhine to conclude that “the nervous system is definitely involved in some essential way.”) Alertness was key, in fact, with scores dropping like a rock if a subject was distracted, worried, or tired. Much more work had to be done of course but, based on the findings up to that point, Rhine felt that most people were probably “parapsychically sensitive” and that all of us could possibly be, quite an exciting scenario. Just as other physicists and chemists of the 1930s were hard at work on tough challenges like gravitation and cohesion, Rhine was set on demystifying humans’ innate psychic ability through science. “The human mind is the greatest field of high adventure now left for thrill-seeking men,” he exclaimed, the exciting journey of discovery just begun.20 Even if it was discovered that humans were telepathic and clairvoyant, however, how and why did it matter? It was certainly interesting, but was it practical in any way, Rhine and others asked? Those who had reported psychic experiences and took action to avert tragic consequences, such as a parent who had a vision or dream of her child being in some sort of danger, or someone sensing that his house was on fire, would no doubt say that the ability was a useful and valuable one. (Kant had famously intuitively described a great fire in Stockholm, giving a detailed account of its progress to his friends while it actually took place.) These were just the more dramatic ways in which ESP could be used, however, some proposed, assuming it could be reliably harnessed. Solving crimes was one of the more obvious possible applications of psychic powers (something now actually being done, of course), but exciting opportunities beckoned for industry as well. Geologists could perhaps locate mineral or oil deposits and military engineers find water hidden underground, Rhine suggested, humans’ perceptual skills better than the scientific ones of the day for such things.21 The tentacles of ESP would go much further if it was definitively demonstrated to exist, however. For example, a number of scientific fields such as physics and biology would have to be rethought if there was indeed a different kind of energy that was independent of space and related to how organisms communicated. Psychology also would be transformed as the perceived relationship between the mind and body was totally overhauled. Even religion faced some major issues to consider should ESP be proved beyond a shadow of doubt. Was praying really telepathic communication, a scientific explanation for what was assumed to be a spiritual pursuit? These and many other big questions loomed as Rhine and others embarked on what they considered an adventure of epic proportions. “Here is still an Everest to scale, a jungle to explore, Poles of

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human personality to discover,” he buoyantly exclaimed, he of the opinion that throughout the long history of science there had been “no quest so thrilling.”22 Even more thrilling than ESP’s reinvention of the sciences, psychology, and religion were the possibilities within the realm of human relationships, both professional and personal. A kind of “superempathy” could be the result of a higher level of sympathetic understanding and greater intuitive insight, Rhine believed, this of immense value for society at large. Judges, doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, and teachers would be better ones if they were exponentially more empathetic, it could reasonably be assumed, as would parents, husbands, and wives. “An added margin of capacity for extra-sensory insight into the deeper feelings and unexpressed thoughts of another must make for greatly enhanced influence,” Rhine wrote in 1935, wisely elevating the field from a peculiar art to a potential social asset. Some possible danger also existed, he admitted, the temptation to rely too heavily on extrasensory perception in place of ordinary perception a powerful and possibly hazardous one, given the former’s uncertainty and transience. “The thought that part of my mind may at any moment be receiving from other, perhaps unknown, people news and views and notions and moods without my being aware of the leakage is surely extremely upsetting to all our notions of privacy and personal independence,” worried Gerald Heard, no doubt reflecting the concern of many.23 Because it was unlikely that telepathy and clairvoyance would never be as reliable as the good old five senses, however, Rhine thought we should not fret too much about how ESP could be abused, at least not yet.24

CONFESSIONS OF A GHOST HUNTER For any investigator of psychic phenomena, however, danger lurked around every corner, with a wide range of things capable of leading even an experienced researcher astray. Assuming an incident was legitimate when it was just coincidence or a chance occurrence was a common pitfall, making a familiarity with math and specifically statistics a desired aptitude. Another one, self-deception, was a virtual minefield in psychic research, coming in many forms. Exaggeration was the simplest, the temptation to tell a supernatural fish story too great for many eager to impress or entertain. Poor observation and faulty memory were other problems, as was the unreliability of many a subject or witness. Finding evidence for something one was already predisposed towards believing happened frequently, especially in the darkness of a se´ance room (a dim red light was also sometimes used). All of these were classic errors

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associated with any kind of scientific experimentation, but psychic research had its own set of special challenges because of the very nature of the subject. Hallucinations, whether induced by hypnotic suggestion or self-imposed, occurred more often than one might think, with people seeing or hearing things or “spirits” that were not real. Holding imaginary conversations and believing that one had visited far-off places (especially heaven) were staple experiences of psychic investigation, leading researchers to assume that thirty-five to forty percent of findings could be immediately written off as totally bogus.25 In many (or all, depending on your view) cases, in fact, events purported to be of supernatural origin were not intended to be fraudulent. Instances of automatism, for example, such as when a table with just one hand under it supposedly walked around the room by itself, were found to be human powered, often unconsciously. The ouija board was the most famous example of alleged automatism, with those touching it unaware they were moving their hands in a particular direction. Others mysteriously wrote messages delivered from some unknown entity, fully believing that they were not the authors. After receiving information channeled through their own writing hand (usually from a dead friend or “Indian guide”), some would follow the advice they had been privy to by investing money in a certain way, betting on a particular horse, or choosing a certain doctor.26 Then, of course, there were cases of downright fraud, these also coming in a variety of shades. Professional fraud was considered the worst of the lot by psychic researchers because it did so much damage to the field, making it appear that the whole business was, well, just a business. Committing psychic fraud for the fame to be gained was also problematic, with many a charlatan willing to do whatever it took to get his or her name in the paper. Sometimes fraud was well intentioned, as when a son or daughter, seeing his or her mother or father in such distress after losing their spouse, hired a medium to make contact with their loved one. Others did it to play a practical joke on someone while some wives, desperate to make themselves appear interesting to or just get the intention of their husbands, would become mediums with no calling for it whatsoever. “Deception as a possibility must be supposed at every step and must be eliminated by the conditions themselves in any crucial experiment,” advised Rhine, considering this pursuit “a scientist’s job.”27 Many professional magicians felt that they could be of considerable help in exposing the blatant deception being committed by mediums, however. In their latest effort to prove that “psychic” phenomena was an illusion not unlike the kind they created, the Society of American Magicians put on a show in 1932 rivaling the performance of your average

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medium. Over four nights at the Hotel McAlpin in New York, ghosts and disembodied hands floated through the large room, not the best representation of the supernatural ever presented. “It looks like a garment bag taking a constitutional,” said one lady upon seeing the magicians’ apparition, but it was convincing enough to prove the group’s point.28 The kind of fraud that the magicians objected to was not just making a few old ladies think their husbands were happy (but lonely) in heaven. Besides milking people out of their money, the more predatory “mentalists,” as they preferred to be called, had no qualms about giving advice willy-nilly, regardless of the consequences. Loss of jobs, marital difficulties, and even suicides were said to result from bad guidance provided by these shady types, the damage being done cutting across class and racial lines.29 Still, business was business, and selling psychic information was a timetested way to make money. To boost ratings (and advertising revenue), radio stations would occasionally give so-called psychics their own shows that would reach thousands, perhaps millions, of listeners. For the stars of the show, the opportunity to work one’s magic before such a mass audience virtually guaranteed a bonanza. After doing one show on WNEW in Newark and WICC in Bridgeport, for example, Joseph Price, a twenty-fouryear-old “Reverend,” received three thousand letters, all of them containing $1 bills. In exchange for their dollars listeners received “The Life Guide,” a pamphlet about “the law of passing time,” and much more important, the opportunity to ask Price three questions to which he would provide answers. One person responding to the on-air offer was a federal agent, however, who told Price in his letter that he was an orphan and asked him, “When will I see my father?” Upon Price’s response (“Within a year,” he wrote back), a New York City police officer with a postal inspector in tow arrested the Reverend at his Manhattan apartment on the charge of mail fraud. It was not a crime for Price to talk on the radio about the occult but offering to answer questions to induce people to buy his pamphlet was, this one of the few ways the feds could crack down on the rampant fraud going on. It turned out that Price had to date made $16,000 from his gimmick and received so much mail that he employed five secretaries to help him handle it all.30 With this kind of publicity, it was hardly surprising that the established scientific community took the field less than seriously in the 1930s (something that has not changed very much). Mainstream scientists positively despised psychic research, the young field with its unsavory history and gullible followers fumbling in the dark (sometimes literally so) considered an inferior, ugly stepchild. Physicists certainly did not want to adopt the supernatural because it ignored the laws of nature, nor did psychologists, their own field already viewed with considerable suspicion. With often

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biased researchers making frequent errors using unproven techniques, it would be hard to argue with established scientists’ opinion. The field was also poorly funded and no doubt filled with at least some charlatans, these obstacles only adding to the uphill battle that was psychic research. “But its method is the method of science, and if we are ever to know the reality of death it must be through the findings of the psychic researchers,” wrote Miriam Allen De Ford in 1935, a sentiment many believers in the supernatural shared.31 One of them, Harry Price, was doing more than his share in this endeavor. Price, who had led the “goat” experiment on the German mountaintop, was England’s top investigator of psychic phenomena in the 1930s, having spent the last thirty years both trying to prove and disprove “supernormal” activity. (He, like many others in the field, disliked the term “supernatural,” believing the activity they studied was entirely natural but not very normal.) Price, fifty-five years old in 1936, had inherited a small fortune, and was spending $5,000 a year on research and on his library consisting of thousands of books covering every aspect of the psychic world imaginable (including talking animals). Price was a big fan of Rhine’s, trying to duplicate the Duke professor’s experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance (with little success), and spent a lot of time sleeping in people’s houses that were said to be haunted. His most recent book, Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter, was a compendium of his impressive array of experiences and equally interesting theories, but Price was not done by a long shot. Having recently exposed a medium who claimed to be in touch with inhabitants of Mars (she knew the Martian alphabet and sang a Martian song), Price made his own, much more logical plans to contact residents of the Red Planet, should there be any. Price’s idea was to shine a powerful beam of light on the planet, and had found a firm that said it could construct a 15-billion-candlepower arc lamp that might do the trick. Price had even picked out what he thought was the perfect spot to put it, the Jungfrau region in Switzerland. Price’s dream was for London University to name him a professor of psychic research, offering the school his library and equipment and a yearly endowment of $2,500 to sweeten the deal.32 Although the school had yet to take Price up on his offer, it was not outrageous for a university, and a top one at that, to have a professor of psychic research on its faculty. Duke University had Rhine, of course, and the late Thomas Welton Stanford had endowed a chair in the field at the school his brother Leland had founded in Palo Alto. A firm believer in the supernatural, Stanford fully intended the professors who occupied the chair to demonstrate evidence of psychic phenomena in order to raise the academic status of the field. Unfortunately for Stanford (and perhaps

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his ghost), the first occupant of the chair, John Edgar Coover, a distinguished psychologist, used the dead man’s money to expose the field as malarkey, as did the second occupant, who happened to be named John Kennedy. Kennedy’s main target was, not surprisingly, J. B. Rhine, challenging the man’s claims of ESP based on his card experiments by doing a few tests of his own. Kennedy theorized that “unconscious whispering” or “mental shouting” was at the root of Rhine’s positive results, and found that the percentage of correct guesses went down precipitously when audible and visual cues were taken out of the equation. Other critics were challenging Rhine on a number of other fronts including overly favorable conditions, clerical mistakes, bad math, withholding results, and possible collusion. Would the Duke professor’s claims soon tumble like a house of cards, many anxiously wondered?33

NEW FRONTIERS OF THE MIND One person closely watching the battle was British writer Aldous Huxley. A few years after publishing Brave New World in 1932, Huxley mused over the subject of the supernatural, this not too surprising given his particular knowledge of where science might be headed. One thing he pondered was if psychic abilities were a gift or talent like that of music or mathematics, as research was showing them to be, why had they not been equally exploited? Why were they, in other words, at such a rudimentary level compared with our traditional five senses if they too were a basic part of human physiology or biology? One answer to his own good question was that without any real traditions in the field, such skills had yet to be trained, making them diamonds in the rough still waiting to be mined. Huxley had other theories, however, one being that humans had unconsciously resisted the development of such skills because they would be a handicap rather than an advantage. “A society of highly trained telepathists would be a society in which no mental privacy was possible,” he suggested, such a scenario radically altering the concept of the individual as we recognized it. Another theory he had about why the psychic part of the mind remained in such a raw state was that modern civilization both demanded and rewarded logical analysis, this giving priority to the development of the conscious part of the mind throughout our evolutionary process.34 Gerald Heard thought similarly, likening the state of psychic research to that of civilization six thousand years ago when we were a preagrarian species, simply gathering food that one could find. But now, he felt, we were at a critical juncture, ready to embark on an entirely new era in

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our evolution. For Heard, it was the collapsing of the mind and body into a single unit that sparked this seismic shift, an overturning of thousands of years of Western thought. “Researchers can no longer go on talking of mind and body as two separate things,” he wrote in 1936, the advent of a “physico-physiological” perspective paving the way for major advancements in the field. Eastern societies had of course subscribed to this idea for millennia, the West finally prepared to concede that its dualistic point of view may not have been right. “Through psycho-physical exercises the mind can have extranormal power over the body and the body can release and empower the mind so that it can exercise mental powers which today are so rare and freakish that almost all who have not witnessed them deny them,” he prophesized, this to be achieved by adding “a completely new and unsuspected instrument to our apparatus of discovery.”35 It was psychic researchers, more than anyone else, who understood what this new instrument of discovery could possibly lead to. In a golden age of science, death was not necessarily the end of life but rather a problem that could be solved, putting them in the catbird’s seat of unraveling the ultimate riddle. With their ethereal musings, religion and philosophy were bad ways to approach the problem, they thought, only the painstaking task of fact gathering able to lead to real conclusions on the matter. Interestingly, the possibility of reincarnation was hardly considered by Western supernaturalists and, when it was, was dismissed as a highly unsatisfactory scenario of the afterlife. Westerners, and Americans in particular, wanted to remain themselves in some form after they died, not become another person or, even worse, an animal or plant. After all, if one came back as a new human being (or a bird or rhododendron), one would not recognize one’s family or friends and they would not recognize you, making the whole affair seem like a complete waste of time and effort. Whether it was plain and simple practicality or gross ignorance, most Americans much preferred being a ghost of themselves rather than someone or something else when they left this world.36 Such existential musings aside, Rhine’s experiments at Duke were being taken very seriously by the late 1930s, his book New Frontiers of the Mind a target of scrutiny by supporters and critics alike. Renowned psychologist B. F. Skinner had serious doubts (“He is torn between his desire for rigor and his patent belief that stories of psychic phenomena contain a measure of truth,” he wrote in his review for The Saturday Review), but the book was the October 1937 choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, an indication of its wide appeal.37 If ESP really existed, as Rhine claimed it did, it affected the universe not just of the supernatural but of the entire mind, meaning virtually every field of study had to be rethought. Telepathy and clairvoyance were not separate skills but were linked together, he

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argued, an interwoven part of this still largely unexplored terrain of the mind. Most controversially, perhaps, Rhine suggested that not just a special few with a genetic disposition for such had these mental powers but, at some level, likely all of us, this challenging traditional thought about the supernatural. (Besides running in certain families, children and animals were popularly believed to often have preternatural powers, their instincts or intuition supposedly dominant over rationalism and logic.) The idea that everyone was psychic—something we just had not been aware of—was no doubt threatening to some, as who knew how such powers could be used?38 Rhine’s work also challenged traditional thinking about the supernatural and gender. Although the techniques of psychic research had been modernized, old stereotypes were slow to go away, especially when it came to women. Women were typically believed to be more “parapsychically sensitive” than men, this just the latest articulation of the centuriesold mythology that females had some kind of special connection with the supernatural. “Woman does not understand the disturbance of her psychic equilibrium caused by the play of powerful occult forces, but she yields perforce to their compulsion,” wrote Claude Bragdon in Forum and Century in 1934, the medium of the twentieth century a contemporary version of the female Delphic oracle of ancient Greece. Assumed to be irrational and intuitive (as well as secretive), women could access the spiritualistic world in ways that men simply could not, general sentiment remained, putting them in the driver’s seat when it came to producing occult or mystical phenomena. It was true that most mediums were women, making many wonder if they truly did have some special gift (or affliction) or if they were just taking advantage of one of the few career opportunities in which women had an advantage over men. Women’s clubs dedicated to the occult were another way in which the supernatural was a distinctly female domain, except of course when it came to the science of it all.39 Rhine argued, however, that men and women possessed equal ESP abilities, a direct challenge to thousands of years of history. Contesting the accepted supposition that men were rational and women were emotional, giving the latter greater psychic powers, was nothing short of revolutionary, the implications of such going far beyond the realm of the supernatural. Other key findings—that intelligence was not correlated with telepathic or clairvoyant skills, age was not a factor, and practice did not make perfect— were also compelling ideas that could have relevance in many different areas of life. Despite all his exciting findings, Rhine had yet to propose a firm theory about the source of ESP, that is, how people could do it. Because telepathy defied time and space, he rejected the “mental radio” theory, i.e.,

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that the human mind sends out thought waves that another mind receives like a radio (the electronic medium of the day, of course). This was a popular idea, endorsed by Upton Sinclair (he even wrote a book about it) and by researchers at Harvard. Hereward Carrington also did not like the radio analogy, however, his view being that “one mind can affect another at considerable distances, and seemingly instantaneously,” making humans much more than a living, breathing Zenith or RCA floor model.40 That telepathy and clairvoyance were based on radiant energy that traveled from object to brain also was not satisfactory for Rhine. Things just did not emit short-wave signals, he correctly believed, meaning that a different kind of energy or consciousness must be the explanation. From this perspective, another major revelation became clear: ESP was not supernatural but perfectly natural, just another dimension of the human experience. This notion in particular made orthodox scientists squirm uneasily as it challenged existing beliefs about what the human mind was and was not capable of.41 The war would do little to slow Rhine down, he continuing to be a pebble in the shoe of the established scientific community. In 1943, for example, he had research showing that when dice throwers wished hard for certain numbers to turn up they did more frequently than the law of probabilities stated, suggesting it was indeed worth it to yell, “Come seven, come eleven,” when playing craps. If gamblers could benefit by tuning up their clairvoyant skills, who else might take advantage of the system by mastering this kind of superconsciousness?42 Despite Rhine’s and Carrington’s dismissal of the “mental radio” analogy, others persisted in using a technological model to describe how mediums were able to communicate with the dead. Denis Conan Doyle (Arthur’s eldest son) subscribed to the analogy but preferred the term “spiritual wireless,” with an entranced medium dialing up someone in the next world as if he or she were a radio station located in another country. The telephone and telegraph were equally good ways to visualize the process for Doyle the junior, especially when signals from the great beyond did not come in very clearly. “Distorted messages are somewhat similar to inaccurate telegrams or cables which reach the recipient in slightly different form from that in which they left the sender’s mind,” he wrote in 1937, this accounting for medium’s less than perfect performance. Doyle’s use of current technology to explain an abstract concept may have been a bit oversimplistic, but he made a good point when it came to the relationship between radio and the supernatural. Had someone suggested just twenty-five years earlier that just about everyone would own (and some even be able to build) a device that received messages from around the world by pushing a button, that person would likely be ridiculed or perhaps considered insane, just like many supernaturalists

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were because of their own claims. What was impossible was now entirely possible, however, suggesting that critics might pause before rejecting wholesale the notion of a different kind of long-distance communication.43 Doyle also wanted to pass on news of his father, who had died in 1930. Sir Arthur had been in communication with different members of his family on many occasions, his son happily reported, each time making it clear it was definitely him rather than some other spirit. Arthur kept up on family matters, it was equally apparent, even providing advice to his son on several occasions (which always proved to be good counsel). And like Lodge’s son, Raymond, Arthur had a lot of valuable information about the afterlife to deliver, some of those laws proving to be quite useful in this world, the younger Doyle explained. For example, about five years earlier, Doyle was torn between buying a red and blue sports car, choosing the former when the latter became unavailable. “Then I received an unexpected message from my father, through his own special source of communication,” Doyle revealed, his father having some inside information about the red automobile that the dealer had not mentioned. “Do not buy the red car. There is an unsuspected weakness on the left side of the cylinder block,” Sir Arthur told Denis, the son wisely following his dad’s advice, which turned out to true upon further inspection. Even more amazingly, Doyle the senior knew that the owner of the blue car had “a sudden and unexpected change in his own plans,” and that the automobile was now once again available. Sure enough, the owner of the blue car had to leave for America on short notice, and the automobile was soon Denis’s.44

COSMIC SCIENCE Rhine’s and others’ ambitious efforts to define psychic research as a science was particularly important to separate it from the flood of metaphysical nonsense that was pervasive in both America and England in the 1930s and early 1940s. Even though they were far lower on the supernatural food chain than mediums, professional mind readers were a popular form of entertainment at movie theaters and in night clubs, with many an audience member requesting a private session after the show. Fortune-tellers and other “oracles” and “seers” also were doing quite the business, with nothing like a good Depression and world war to make people look in all kinds of places for answers about what the future might hold for them. John Mulholland, a well-known professional magician, estimated there were eighty thousand full-time fortune-tellers in the United States in 1943, with Americans spending about $200 million a year

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on these “soothsayers,” according to the Better Business Bureau. Astrologers, palmists, tea leaf readers, and Hindu swamis could be found plying their trade in any large American city despite the fact that the practice was usually illegal.45 Soothsaying appeared to be equally popular across the pond. With 2,500 spiritualist societies in England in 1940 and at least 250,000 members attending their Sunday night meetings, Brits seemed to be every bit as smitten with the supernatural as Yanks.46 Like virtually every field, the supernatural had its share of superstars. In New York, Mary Talley ruled the fortune-telling roost during the war, the “contemporary Cassandra” so respected that even other seers secretly visited her. Talley held court at Cerutti’s, a popular restaurant on Madison Avenue, eschewing the usual props like tarot cards or a crystal ball. “I just get the vibrations in my head, like an intuition, and I write it down on a pad as it comes to me,” she told the Saturday Evening Post, that magazine considering her “the supernatural talk of the town.” 47 “Polgar” was another top telepathist and hypnotist, his specialty putting people to sleep or having them suck their thumb like a child—just a couple of his impressive tricks. Polgar also could somehow find any object in the room in which he was performing, once locating something in the mouth of an audience member.48 It was, however, Joseph Dunninger who, as his honorary title suggested, reigned as “The Master Mentalist.” Dunninger’s Sunday afternoon radio show on the Blue Network was a masterpiece of what appeared to be genuine telepathic or mind reading, the program one of the most popular on the air. Dunninger claimed to have discovered his telepathic powers as a child, his ability to correctly guess the answers on a math test far better than his actual skills in figuring the problems out. His parents were understandably startled when the boy would announce who was calling when the telephone rang or who was at the door when the bell rang. Dunninger soon learned magic and turned professional at sixteen, eventually become one of the best in the business. (He was famous for sawing a woman in eight pieces, quadrupling the standard trick of the trade, and for making the occasional elephant disappear, beating Doug Henning to the punch by a half century.) Like other magicians, Dunninger (who was a close friend of Houdini’s) spent considerable time and effort exposing mediums and offered $10,000 to one who could produce a spiritualistic phenomenon that he could not reproduce or explain. “Through all these long years, I have sought good honest ghosts, phantoms, spirits, astral beings, banshees, fays, wee folk, apparitions, fetches—the whole pack and passel of the unsubstantial world—and I have always been able to prove them frauds,” Dunninger said in 1936 after making the cash offer, adding that “it would be worth $10,000 to meet a real ghost.” 49

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No one was able to claim the prize, although he admittedly could not duplicate the rapping sounds one medium made by cracking her toe joints under a table.50 Dunninger was so famous as a debunker of mediums in the 1930s that he was occasionally asked by judges to help prosecute them. In one case in 1935, for example, Dunninger sat in on a se´ance led by Emerson Gilbert, with his testimony as an expert witness to be used in court. No ghosts were raised in the se´ance, everyone agreed, but Gilbert claimed this was only because Dunninger created “hostile vibrations,” which made the spooks reluctant to appear. Dunninger’s opinion, however, was that the “ghosts” Gilbert had previously raised were actually phosphoroustreated cheesecloth with the medium himself inside, just the kind of evidence the judge needed to lock the faker up.51 That same year, Dunninger challenged none other than Margery, the famous Boston medium, to produce something truly supernatural, personally extending $10,000 to her if she could. Margery had recently suffered a setback when Harold Cummins, a Tulane University dermatologist, reported that after investigation a supposed ectoplasmic thumbprint of “Walter,” her dead brother and “control,” was actually from someone very much alive. (He turned out to be a Boston dentist with the alias “Dr. Kerwin,” who was not happy to learn that his thumbs were known worldwide as those of a ghost.) Cummins’s report was also having a larger effect, dividing members of the New York-based American Society for Psychical Research (who still had faith in Margery) from those belonging to the Boston Society for Psychic Research (who were rapidly coming to believe she was as phony as a $3 bill).52 Dunninger’s next target was firewalkers, specifically Kuda Bux, a thirtyyear-old Indian whose ability to painlessly walk across hot coals befuddled Western scientists. In 1935, at Harry Price’s invitation, Bux demonstrated firewalking in London for the very first time, inspiring some locals to try to duplicate the feat, all of whom promptly got singed in the process. Price said it was a combination of Bux’s faith, courage, and placement of feet, but Dunninger had a much more logical explanation for how he and other firewalkers pulled it off. Timing was everything, he made clear, the “miracle” just an old Japanese trick called “hai-wattari” that Shinto priests used to do to demonstrate their own supernatural powers. Charcoal cooled down rapidly and by walking quickly on it (rather than through flames, importantly) one could avoid getting burned, Dunninger revealed, the practice quite safe if one knew what he or she was doing.53 Dunninger’s rational explanation did little to slow the Brits’ interest in Indian “magic” of all kinds including the rope trick, the growing mango tree, snake charming, and lying on a bed of nails, however. Although these

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had long been exposed as mechanical illusions, the Eastern equivalent to Western magic tricks, some still believed Indians’ asceticism gave them supernatural powers of the mind over the body, a myth that survives to this day.54 Appealing to home-front Americans seeking escapist entertainment, Dunninger would shock studio audiences and those listening on their radios by accurately guessing the names of people in the room (as well as those of their goldfish and parrots). He correctly named telephone numbers audience members were thinking of or came quite close, never claiming to be more than 90 percent accurate. Some of his more memorable feats were quoting lines from books handpicked from a library by Robert E. Merton, a professor at Columbia, writing the same bar of music that bandleader Paul Whiteman had done earlier in secret, and reporting headlines from newspapers that had yet to published. How had he done such amazing things? “Anybody can do it—with practice,” he explained, insisting his telepathic abilities were not supernatural but rather a skill he had learned over the course of decades. Despite offering another $10,000 prize to anyone who could prove he had “confederates, employees, or stooges,” not a single person came forth to say he or she was in cahoots with the man.55 With this kind of spectacular entertainment, Dunninger’s weekly radio show was not surprisingly a huge hit, with listeners dumbfounded over the man’s admitted trickery. Hosts of other radio shows and scientists were particularly interested in trying to figure out how the man did what he did. After Waldemar Kaemffert, science editor of the New York Times, went on record to say there was collusion involved, Dunninger took great offense, spending much of his next show disproving the article. The Master Mentalist delivered a whirlwind display of telepathy, after which those members of the studio audience whose minds were read unanimously denied they had ever met Dunninger before (and maintained that nobody in the world knew what he had guessed). As an encore, Dunninger correctly guessed three words (“Thanksgiving,” unanimous,” and “consent”) that William A. Rowan, a congressman in Washington, had chosen from the Congressional Record. “Very unusual. Very amazing. Quite uncanny,” Rowan said later of Dunninger’s feat,” he too apparently not a confederate, employee, or stooge of the man. 56 Still, skeptics remained. The editor for The Saturday Review, who had actually served as one of the judges on Dunninger’s radio show, was one of them. “I have never understood why an honest-to-goodness mind reader didn’t go down to Wall Street, put the bee on a couple of tycoons and professional market riggers, and make enough in a month to retire for life,” he observed after watching Dunninger’s performance, an interesting point.57

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When not on the radio, Dunninger could often be found working in hospitals as a hypnotist, asked by doctors to help out on special cases, something he readily agreed to. He also worked the fading vaudeville circuit and performed at private parties, making as much as $1,500 a night. His book, What’s on Your Mind? (the name of his radio show), sold one hundred thousand copies in less than a month after it was published in 1944. Barbara Hutton, the heiress, was a fan, as were the Duke of Windsor and Thomas Edison, who collaborated with the mentalist on some experiments. Edison had in fact left a code with Dunninger should he be able to contact him after he died, but the great inventor had yet to be heard from in the dozen years since his death in 1931. (Houdini, Doyle, and Lodge had also left codes with Dunninger, these dead men also silent as of 1943.) President Roosevelt invited Dunninger to the White House on a couple of occasions, the mentalist one time correctly guessing what FDR was thinking (whether Hamilton Fish or Huey Long would be elected as the next president). Dunninger then told Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau the serial number of the $5 bill he had in his pocket and, as coup de grace, informed Secretary of State Cordell Hull what was literally on his mind. “You are thinking, ‘I wish I could read the mind of my wife like this,’ ” Dunninger said to Hull, this precisely right, much to the man’s great embarrassment. Eleanor Roosevelt was admittedly unnerved by Dunninger (“He’s so remarkable that some people wouldn’t like to have him around all the time,” she said), a sentiment Calvin Coolidge surely would have seconded. When Dunninger visited Coolidge at the White House, the Master Mentalist quoted verbatim from a private letter the president had written earlier that day. Dunninger was never invited back by Silent Cal.58

THERE IS A RIVER The wartime fascination with the supernatural went far beyond amusing entertainment. Just as spiritism had flourished after the First World War because of the millions of those in mourning not quite ready to say goodbye to their lost loved ones, so did it spike during the Second World War for the very same reason. “The spirit mediums are in town again— your town and my town—trading on the gullibility of bereaved and lonely souls,” observed Dorothy Walworth in The American Mercury in 1943, with “forlorn widows, restless wives, and mothers with boys overseas” the best customers. When asked, mediums were vague about when the war would end (sometime in the next four years, they would often say), and were reluctant to reveal the location of particular soldiers because that

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would be giving away “military information.” The big question— “Will my son or husband survive the war?”—was always answered in the vaguely affirmative, the boy or man to come back “as you want him to return,” letting the customer’s imagination fill in the gaps.59 With many states now having laws banning fortune-telling, mediums had adopted a new tactic, calling themselves ministers of churches with names like “Cosmic Science” and “Spiritualist Church of River Styx.” Such “churches” were most likely to be found in a hotel room, office building, or parlor of the medium’s apartment, a “diploma” often on the wall as evidence that she or he had been “ordained.” True to form, the sessions were termed “message services,” each soul typically charged 50¢ for a dose of spiritual guidance. Regardless of which church one went to, the service was typically the same. Upon entering, the congregant was given a pad and pencil, asked to write three questions, and then place the piece of paper into a basket along with the “contribution.” After the medium made it clear that she or he was only a vessel and thus any failure in communicating with the spirits was the customer’s fault, the service began, often with organ music playing on a Victrola. (The hymn “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” was a particular favorite to set the appropriate sacred mood.) Frequently, the medium asked customers to hold something of theirs, jewelry or eyeglasses, say, this both for effect and to pick up potentially valuable clues. From there it was a steady stream of ambiguous phrases that could be interpreted by virtually anyone as eerily accurate. The customer was, inevitably, “contemplating a change,” “on a threshold,” or “involved with money,” these especially a sure bet for anyone taking the time and effort to seek professional advice. For the medium, the more troubled the customer seemed the better, the chance of nailing a problem that much greater. A happy customer, on the other hand, was a medium’s worst nightmare, she or he not knowing what buttons to push. It would be hard to go wrong with the big three—work, love, or health—however, as even the cheerful were apt to be facing a challenging situation in at least one of these universals of everyday life.60 When it came to health, mediums were, as in all other areas, unusually optimistic. Fatal diseases were never diagnosed, the ailing customer simply advised to “take a little lemon juice,” “don’t worry,” or “change doctors.” Blood pressure was often the cause of health problems, sometimes too high, sometimes too low, sometimes both. In one of Walworth’s visits, she was told her blood was “foaming and bubbling,” but even this frightening medical condition was no reason to rush to the emergency room. Problems in love were equally solvable, with the most common— straying husbands—nipped in the bud when he inevitably came to his senses. Interestingly, while they were living rather unorthodox lives,

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mediums were decidedly conservative when it came to matters of the heart, warning young women to avoid men with sex on their brains and telling women having an affair with a married man to break it off. Of course, it was communication with dead loved ones that was most sought after by customers, with even the slightest, most garbled message deemed well worth the half buck. Here too vagueness was key, but even the most general messages—“I am happy here,” “I think of you,” “Don’t mourn for me”—likely to bring tears of comfort and joy. Mediums would also deliver very trivial information from relatives in the great beyond in order to make the connection appear that much more personal and real. “Watch out for the things on your fire escape” and “Empty your wastebasket” were a couple of pieces of advice Walworth heard in her research, these less than supreme moments of communication from Infinity, everyone would agree.61 While the private or public reading was mediums’ bread and butter, many had other sources of income. Some would cure physical ailments long distance by communicating with spirits if one forwarded a list of symptoms, saving the customer the trip. Teaching others how to be mediums was another way to make money, with ten lessons at $1 each usually doing the trick. (Wealthy students typically required extra lessons.) In her adventures in fortune-telling during the war, Walworth found that some mediums acknowledged they were absolute fakes, some admitted to faking most of the time but felt they could communicate with spirits, and some believed they were always able to make contact with those in another world. Their psychic powers at best uncertain and unpredictable, however, mediums were preying on those with below-average intelligence, the emotionally immature, or, worse, the lonely and bereft, she concluded, doing much more harm than good.62 One person of note made it abundantly clear during the war that supernaturalism was a big waste of time and money. In 1943, seventeen years after her husband died, Beatrice Houdini finally gave up the ghost, one might say, resigned that Harry would not appear in this world before she joined him in the next one. Every year on Halloween night, the anniversary of Houdini’s death, oddly enough, his widow had sat in a dark room with a candle burning near his picture, an open invitation for Harry to outdo even his famous trunk escape. Now in a Hollywood rest home and suffering from a heart ailment, however, Mrs. Houdini was retiring the ritual, confident that he would have appeared by now if he could. “If he can’t slip through a message to me from heaven then the whole deal is off,” she told a group of reporters, making it clear that “nothing ever happened.” Other people had claimed they heard from the man from beyond the grave but Mrs. Houdini had not, making her more convinced

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than ever that the great magician’s opinion about all things supernatural was 100 percent right.63 Skeptics like Mrs. Houdini barely made a dent in these supernatural boom times, however. Even the tight-knit art world was not impervious to the supernatural during the war, a means of setting one’s work off from all-the-rage modernism. One artist, for example, Mrs. Irving T. Bush, occasionally used her psychic powers to paint, and successfully so. Bush’s one-woman show in New York in 1943 featured a series of large blackand-white paintings whose creation very much resembled automatic writing, a staple of classic supernaturalism. “After I get the canvas on the easel, They [capitalization hers] move my hand up and down and onward across and sideways in all directions,” Bush wrote in the catalog for the show, “They” clearly referring to forces from the spiritual world. “Sometimes They will do this until my arm aches,” she continued, and “then all at once, They make a rudimentary sketch or perhaps They begin to paint with any sketch or outline at all.”64 Bush (who was completely untaught in art) and “They” went back quite a ways. In 1922, she allegedly predicted the Second World War, this just one of many prophecies she had made that came true. Bush also traveled in psychic circles, and was well respected by some of the field’s leaders. “She represents very unusual and remarkable phenomena, at least part of which is quite beyond explanation by our present science,” said Walter Franklin Prince of her, the ex-head of the American Society for Psychical Research thinking she was quite a “perplexing case.” Upon seeing the works cocreated by “They,” an art critic for the New York Times was indeed perplexed, but probably not in the way Prince intended. “I should be inclined to refer to her work in this field as that of a primitive mystic,” Edward Alden Jewell wrote, not at all sure that the paintings “should be judged primarily as ‘art’.”65 The death of Edgar Cayce in 1945 was somehow a fitting way for this era of the supernatural to end. Cayce, nicknamed “The Sleeping Prophet” and “The Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” was a psychic and intuitive healer who between 1901 and 1944 delivered thousands of discourses and “readings” while in a trance. Rather amazingly, over fourteen thousand of these were documented, leaving a huge legacy of holistic medical advice and treatises on spiritual growth, dream interpretation, reincarnation, and many other topics that still resonate today for many. Cayce anticipated the New Age movement of the 1980s by a good half century, seeing links among the mind, body, and spirit in a way that few if any Americans before him had.66 Cayce was best known for his ability to diagnose patients who were not physically present, this all the more impressive given that he had no

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knowledge of medicine while he was awake. In 1943, an article featuring Cayce appeared in Coronet, a popular magazine at the time, which finally brought him some national fame. Cayce remained a mystery to most, however, his psychic alchemy simply too peculiar for the average man or woman. Although it made a bit of a sensation, a biography of Cayce that was published a year before his death, There Is a River, received mixed reviews, reflecting the general confusion surrounding him and his work. “Will be popular with health faddists and devotees of the occult, but is not of sufficient interest to warrant purchase by average library,” sniffed the Library Journal in its review, an opinion that over time would be proved quite wrong.67 Cayce is today a cottage industry unto its own, his books widely read and his philosophy taught at over twenty-five Edgar Cayce Centers scattered around the world. The postwar years would set the stage for this and for a host of new supernaturalists to make their mark, as Americans’ interest in the unexplainable reached a new plateau.

Chapter 3

The Sixth Sense

Are scientists on the brink of unraveling the mechanics of Nature’s next great mystery? —Science Digest (August 1950, speaking of telepathy)

A woman, spending a weekend with friends, is suddenly seized with an uncontrollable desire to return to her home. When she arrives, she finds her house filled with smoke, her husband passed out in the living room. She is able to revive him and put out the fire, saving his life and their house. A man, reading Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, bursts into tears when he comes upon the part about the old man dying. He had cried only once before as an adult—when he learned his mother died. The following day the man receives a telegram telling him his father had died, the time of death precisely the same as when he was reading the section of the book that he found so emotionally upsetting.1 Each of these stories, said to be true, were examples of a “clear, waking and conscious apprehension of an event occurring beyond the reach and out of the ken of human sensory apparatus,” according to the teller, J. B. Rhine, the most dedicated explorer of supernatural phenomena in the world. Knowing there were many other such stories of what would increasingly be described as a “sixth sense,” Rhine appealed to readers of The American Magazine to send them to him. “They may give us new glimpses of how the mind works and what it really is,” he wrote in 1949,

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his ultimate goal to determine “whether or not the powers we call psychic are evidence of a transcendent self that is not entirely mortal.”2 The postwar years would prove to be a fecund period for the supernatural in America as many of its seeds scattered during the Depression and war bore fruit. Ghosts remained an (in)visible presence, but it was telepathy that really got people’s attention as the supernatural bumped into the paranoia of the Cold War. With enough evidence now to make even many skeptics think humans had capabilities that went beyond the known five senses, how to harness the power of the mind became the top priority for researchers in the field. Whether they would succeed or not remained a mystery, of course, but a mystery whose solving offered rewards of cosmic dimensions.

THE DEAD DO NOT TALK No one was more determined to solve that mystery than Duke University’s J. B. Rhine. Rhine’s interest in the possibility of a transcendent self had been triggered in his youth when he heard an allegedly true story about a woman who had a dream of her brother shooting himself in a barn. Immediately after waking up, the woman drove out to the barn and found her brother’s body; she even knew where the gun lay under a pile of straw. It is unclear whether Rhine was familiar with the work of Henri Brugmans, a professor of psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, whose experiments in telepathy (as well as his successful results) beginning in 1919 were not unlike those of his own. What was clear was that Rhine took research in telepathy and its supernatural siblings, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, to an entirely new level of depth and popularity, the first scientist to make the field the stuff of dinner table conversation.3 Another thing people were talking about over dinner in both America and England in the years following World War II were, in a word, ghosts. While Americans were generally fascinated by ghosts, in England they were a national institution, a result of hundreds of years of writing about them, reading about them, and, most of all, seeing them. “To say that the British believe in ghosts is an understatement,” wrote Noel F. Busch in Life magazine in 1947, thinking a more accurate way to express it was that the British simply had ghosts. Since the end of the war, ghosts had been pervasive in Britain, both individually and collectively. The ghost of Herne the Hunter (who, legend had it, hung himself from an oak in Windsor Forest during the reign of Henry VIII) had recently been sighted, for example, and the spirits of a whole group of monks were spotted in Acton by the local pastor. Ghosts had a long literary history in England,

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of course, pervasive in Shakespeare’s time and again in the late eighteenth century when Gothic romances became extremely popular. Works by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens kept ghosts on the public’s mind, culminating perhaps with the founding of the Ghost Club in 1862, which had recently been revived. 4 In the three-quarters of a century that the members of the Ghost Club had been convening, the Borley Rectory in Essex was considered the most haunted house in England, the creepy Victorian building home to a number of rowdy spirits determined to make their presence known to any brave visitor. Ghost hunter deluxe Harry Price even wrote a whole book about Borley Rectory (subtitled The Most Haunted House in England) in which he documented its history and his own decade-long investigation into the many odd occurrences still taking place there, this despite a fire that gutted the building.5 Although the Borley Rectory was the most spirit-infested place in the country, the most famous ghost was the one occupying Glamis Castle, the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth I (and fictional residence of Macbeth). Often taking the form of a giant with a shock of bright red hair, it was hard to beat the Glamis Castle ghost for sheer effect, but for dependability the ghost of Catherine Howard took the honors (routinely seen and heard running down a corridor at Hampton Court Palace). The ghost of the Drury Lane Theater, said to be that of an eighteenth-century actor, was as well known as any current thespians, unusual in that he was strictly diurnal and had no interest in frightening anybody (although he did make the occasional wisecrack during plays). Thousands of people had reported seeing this friendly ghost including, on one occasion, a packed matinee audience. The ghost of Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson, was the most beautiful in all England, but there were more famous ones, including the Black Prince (Hall Place, near Bexley), Sir Francis Drake (in a coach in Dartmoor), and Dick (“The Highwayman”) Turpin (Trap’s Hill, near Loughton). So many ghosts were turning up in England that home owners having a known one on the premises had begun asking that their taxes be reduced because it lowered the value of the house. Mentioning in a publication that a ghost was present in someone’s house constituted libel in which damages could be awarded, in fact, showing how seriously the Brits took the supernatural after the war. “The current upswing of the British ghost industry proves conclusively that, whatever else they may be, the British have not yet become cynical or disillusioned,” Busch asserted, their firm belief in spirits suggesting they thought of themselves as, ultimately, indestructible.6 Julien J. Proskauer, a leading American ghost hunter and author of The Dead Do Not Talk, had logical explanations for all the houses he was brought in to de-hex. Weeping willows, with their droopy boughs that

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dropped only at night when the sun went down, accounted for a large number of “haunted” houses, with creaking floor boards and groaning joints explaining many others. “Whistling ghosts” were actually currents of warm air escaping through tiny holes in the wall and into the cold outside air, Proskauer routinely found. Poltergeists—impish or malicious entities—were a special problem, their habit of crashing dishes, throwing things, and starting fires causing much distress to home owners. Children were frequently the sources of such disturbances, Proskauer determined, their misbehavior a successful attempt to get their parents’ attention. Teenagers too were often discovered to be responsible for the naughty acts blamed on poltergeists, everyone knowing that your average adolescent loved a good prank or practical joke. After owning what they believed to be a haunted house, however, many insisted on building a new one from scratch, not about to take the chance that their next residence had occupants who refused to leave.7 Others agreed with Proskauer that the postwar interest in ghosts was much ado about nothing. “The run-of-the-mill ghost is usually annihilated by a little carpentry on a loose door or the repair of a faulty chimney flue,” declared Ira M. Freeman, an associate professor of physics at Rutgers. When an old house was not the source, it could very well be one’s own pair of eyes that was responsible for summoning up so-called spooks. Some psychologists believed that the nocturnal apparitions many saw were actually “after-images,” an optical effect resulting from looking at a bright light. If they were right, it was this natural physiological reaction (nicknamed “Swindle’s Ghost” after American psychologist P. F. Swindle who first described the phenomenon around 1918) that accounted for many a ghost story, a much less exciting but more reasonable explanation.8

AN ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS Reasonable explanations for other aspects of the supernatural were also being posed by the more skeptical after the war. William T. Heron, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, felt all experiments “proving” telepathy were somehow flawed, in fact, and set out to show it. Working with one of his graduate students in the late 1940s, Heron devised a machine to take the human element out of testing telepathy and invited anyone thinking he or she had the ability to read people’s minds to have a go on it. Professional mind readers (including Joseph Dunninger) all passed on the offer, claiming that any kind of mechanical device “spoiled the atmosphere,” this itself suggesting that ESP may indeed be a product of deliberate trickery, wishful thinking, or a creative

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application of our normal five senses. Bad data gathering or senders unconsciously giving subjects hints were behind the extraordinary findings of Rhine and others, Heron was convinced, challenging the many scientists treading the telepathic waters to come to Minneapolis to prove him wrong.9 For every scientist trying to debunk extrasensory perception, however, there was at least one making a strong case for it. In his 1946 Thought Transference, British author Whately Carington (no relation to the American writer Hereward Carrington) posited that “mind-stuff” (composed of “psychons,” or ideas) was analogous to but completely distinct from matter in the physical world. Although their cognitive equivalent had yet to be discovered, dimensions of the physical world—time and space—did not apply to the mind, Carington argued, meaning people’s mental processes could overlap. While our conscious minds were isolated units, our subconscious minds were not, he theorized, making an “association of ideas” possible between people who were acquainted with each other and, better yet, had common interests.10 Two individuals separated spatially or even temporally could, in other words, be closely linked psychologically, this something most people trained to obey the laws of physics had trouble understanding and, even more so, believing.11 By accepting that telepathy and clairvoyance were real, Rhine also was opening up a giant can of worms, these basic psychic powers allowing for the possibility of even greater ones. Psychokinesis, the ability of the mind to alter the course of physical events, and precognition, the gift of prophecy, were next on Rhine’s plate. These concepts were the subject of his 1947 book The Reach of the Mind, the fullest argument for parapsychology to date. If clairvoyance involved successful card guessing, and telepathy correctly guessing the mental image of cards in another person’s mind, precognition was a matter of accurately guessing the sequence of cards at a particular time in the future, the next logical leap in psychic research. As if evidence to support that was not enough, Rhine set his sights on exploring whether subjects were influencing the shuffling of cards and the rolls of dice through thought, this too judged to be entirely within the realm of possibility. After studying all four of these related avenues of parapsychology, Rhine could make some reasonable conclusions about supernormal activity in general. One, they operated independently of the natural world; two, they operated unconsciously; three, they were common to people in general; four, they were apparent but not consistent; and five, they were a long way from having any practical value. Despite Rhine’s now having what was the most substantial body of knowledge on the subject ever collected, most still felt his research was a long way from being recognized as scientific. “Unless he can find a person

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who can demonstrate these phenomena consistently and under all conditions including the presence of hostile, skeptical observers, he will be a long time battering down science’s conservative doors,” wrote Lucien Warner, research director for Life magazine, this quite a tall order.12 The war between Rhine and B. F. Skinner (which began in 1937 with the eminent psychologist’s review of New Frontiers of the Mind) got more heated with his review of Rhine’s new book (“a thought-provoking record of experiments across the borders of orthodox psychology,” as the author described it). 13 After Skinner not only called The Reach of the Mind “propaganda” but questioned the author’s “maturity,” Rhine dashed off an angry letter to the editor of the New York Times book review editor. “When a reviewer avoids the basic issues of a book and resorts to ridicule and misrepresentation of its author he is, I think, revealing his inability to make a more coldly logical attack,” Rhine began his note, wondering why Skinner did not go even further with his smear by calling him a Communist. Rather than trying to pass himself off as a competent authority on parapsychology, Rhine suggested, the self-proclaimed “radical behaviorist” should have just admitted “I do not pretend to know anything about this business, but I’m agin’ it,” this at least an honest criticism of his work.14 Skinner would have definitely been “agin’ ” the work Rhine would pursue over the next couple of years. After focusing on communication from one mind to another without the aid of the traditional five senses for well over a decade, Rhine and his colleagues at Duke turned their attention to “veridicals,” or psychic experiences that foretold reality. The lab had for years received letters from people reporting such experiences, this pile of raw material just ripe for analysis. The stories were a fascinating collection of dreams coming true, far-away relatives appearing at the moment of their death, and strange compulsions to do things or go places that would turn out to be meaningful in some way. Were these just coincidences, Rhine wondered, or something more significant that served as additional evidence of human’s extrasensory perception? Rhine was determined to find out, this material perfect to explore whether the unconscious mind could somehow inform the conscious mind of its apprehensions.15 With “veridicals” considered where the action was in the supernatural at mid-century, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) also turned its attention to supposed “truth-tellings.” About seven hundred members from forty states and nineteen countries belonged to the Society, with quite a few doctors, psychiatrists, and professors in the bunch. The Society published its most interesting cases in its journal (The Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research), with subscribers including the libraries at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. (The U.S. Army also received a copy, as did the Soviets.) Cases reported by respected and

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responsible individuals—members of the armed forces were considered ideal candidates—were most likely to get published by the ASPR journal, your usual ghost story not standing a ghost of a chance to make it into the dignified publication. Examining its own set of hundreds of “welldocumented” cases of inexplicable events, the organization grilled those coming forth with their personal stories. Are you unusually “aware”? Do you dream often? Do you have premonitions? Did your parents frequently have psychic experiences? Could you simply have been asleep when you had your experience? Anyone claiming to have a veridical, especially an apparition announcing death, was subject to such questions, the only way to separate truth from folklore. For now, researchers believed that a loved one appearing in phantom form to break the bad news that he or she had died was a hallucination created telepathically, as good an explanation as any until proven otherwise.16 A wide variety of theories about how telepathy possibly worked continued to bubble up around mid-century. In his 1948 Telepathy and Medical Psychology, for example, Czech psychiatrist Jan Ehrenwald made the case that telepathy was a vestige from our evolutionary past that was activated to compensate for some kind of deficiency (hence its supposedly high incidence in children, the “feeble-minded,” and “primitive” cultures). Ehrenwald pushed this theory as far as it would go (too far in fact), suggesting that paranoia could be a result of “unconscious aggressive tendencies” telepathically transmitted to a weak mind by another person. Rene Warcollier, a French chemical engineer, had a different idea, which he first presented as a lecture at the Sorbonne and then turned into a book. Based on research and his personal experience (Warcollier claimed he himself was telepathic), information was unconsciously transmitted symbolically versus literally, meaning the stimuli were more likely to arrive in fragments rather than in entirety. “Some of these elements are received and are recombined into a new molecular structure,” he wrote in Mind to Mind, also published in 1948, his work focusing on the telepathic transmission of drawings and pictures instead of thoughts. Was there anything to mind-to-mind communication or had a good number of scientists and a much larger number of people claiming to have experienced it lost their own minds?17

ADVENTURES IN THE SUPERNORMAL Regardless of the answer to that question, more theories about how telepathy possibly worked continued to pour forth around mid-century. The focus of the field had in a generation shifted from communication

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between a dead person and a living one to that between two people very much alive, a function of the intensified efforts to establish scientific proof of ESP. It was, after all, more plausible that “aware” people picked up information or acquired abilities they did not allegedly possess (such as speaking foreign languages) from the living rather than the dead, making telepathy the answer to the larger supernatural riddle. In his research, Nandor Fodor found evidence suggesting that telepathic forces were at work not necessarily when we were awake but while we slept, an interesting twist. Writing in The Psychiatric Quarterly (the official journal of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene) in 1947, Fodor found four pairs of “telepathic dreams” among the ones he studied, these occurring between people with close emotional ties (even if they were hundreds miles apart). In one case, two such persons dreamed of skiing although neither had interest in the sport, and in another a pair of connected people dreamt of a person neither had thought of for years. Another pair of dreams between a different couple shared many similarities, all this leading Fodor to believe that some kind of communication took place within the mutual unconscious of the emotionally attached. With his theory, Fodor was in some very good psychiatric company. “Psychoanalysis has prepared the way for the acceptance of such processes as telepathy,” Sigmund Freud had written decades earlier, his extensive research into dreams a potential goldmine to explain what was behind extrasensory perception.18 In her 1949 Adventures in the Supernormal, Eileen Garrett presented her own take on telepathy and, while she was at it, some thoughts on clairvoyance, ghosts, poltergeists, and, last but not least, “the meaning of death.” Garrett had quite a story to tell, her years in school as a girl in Ireland not happy ones because of her special abilities. Garrett saw more words on the page and heard more notes in the scale than were literally there, this not endearing her to teachers or classmates. Someone who was very happy to meet her as an adult in London, however, was Hewat McKenzie of the British College of Psychic Science. Fascinated by her ESP abilities, McKenzie considered Garrett his favorite subject, while she soaked up his theories of supernormal cognition like a sponge.19 In 1951, Garrett established the Parapsychology Foundation in New York, its mission not only to shed more light on ESP through science but to promote the moral and spiritual value of the field. Although based in the United States, Garrett’s foundation was a truly international enterprise, supporting parapsychological work being done in France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, and England.20 Garrett would prove to be a, perhaps the, leading force of the supernatural during the postwar years, her foundation giving the field a much

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needed center of gravity. One of Garrett’s more ambitious goals was to bring together scholars working in parapsychology from all over the world, something she actually pulled off in 1953. Billed as “the first concerted scientific attempt at evaluating and exchanging information and research methods in what used to be called ‘psychic research,’ ” the International Parapsychology Conference at Utrecht University in the Netherlands was indeed a diverse affair. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the meeting was that absolutely none of the sixty delegates— psychologists, psychoanalysts, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, ethnographers, and philosophers from twelve countries—claimed to have any extrasensory powers at all.21 Instead, people like Gardner Murphy, director of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka and chairman of the conference, came to exchange ideas with others on the fringes of the field (defined as “the existence, investigation and explanation of phenomena beyond the range of generally accepted psychology”). The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel was there, as was Hans Bender, a professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, each of them believing the field’s first order of business was to get more people, especially scientists, to take it seriously. The most curious attendee had to be Frances P. Bolton, vice president and cofounder of the Parapsychological Foundation who also happened to be a congresswoman from Ohio. Bolton envisioned widespread “searching for knowledge and truth in realms beyond those on which science had set its seal of approval,” praising those who had the courage to “go out beyond the recognized boundaries.”22 Two years later, Garrett outdid herself by again convening some of those with the courage to go beyond recognized boundaries, this time at no less dignified an institution than Cambridge University. The Conference on Spontaneous Phenomena, as it was originally called (renamed the much drier International Conference on Psychic Research by the time it opened), focused on telepathy, apparitions, hauntings, and poltergeists, making it perhaps the first scholarly summit on ghosts ever held. “The psychologists who will be in attendance will demand trustworthy accounts of telepathic and similar happenings that occur in everyday life,” wrote the New York Times in anticipation of the event, meaning discussion of unprompted instances of “spontaneous phenomena” would be given precedence over staged laboratory investigations of such.23 The theme of the conference reflected another shift that was taking place in the field. Quantitative research, such as Rhine’s card tests, were on the way out, while qualitative research—real investigations of phantoms and their kindred spirits, so to speak—were on the way in. All the data in the world would not convince most scientists that parapsychology was a legitimate pursuit, leaders of the field were coming to realize, but perhaps actual evidence would.24

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In fact, part of the reason Britain was chosen as the site for the conference was its reputation for being strewn with ghosts, the country recognized as having more spirits per capita than anywhere else in the world. Between talks, attendees (which included Rhine) visited local ancient castles, moated granges, mansions, and ecclesiastical buildings, seeing if they could turn up any live (or dead) ones. Borley Rectory near Sudbury was of course included in the field trip, the most haunted house in England long famous for its unexplainable ringing bells, whispering voices, and a ghostly cast that included a couple of nuns who had been murdered in the building.25 While the interactive component of the conference was a nice touch, the hit of the six-day event (closed to the press because of possible “gross misinterpretation”) was a talk given by a colleague of Rhine’s at Duke, Hornell Hart. Based on a review of 165 cases of alleged sightings from all over the world, Hart’s paper on the “group characteristics of ghosts” had to be the most thorough analysis of apparitions ever completed. After sifting through the pile of anecdotal evidence, Hart identified no less than forty-six characteristics of spirits, some of them being transparency, solidity, luminosity, the capacity to sink through floors or glide through walls, and, a little paradoxically, “traits like those of ordinary people.” “Apparitions of the dead are essentially similar to conscious apparitions of the living,” Hart told his colleagues, meaning ghosts were a lot like us besides their seeming ability to get around the house a lot more easily.26

COUNTERFEIT DEALERS IN THE OCCULT The recasting of supernatural stalwarts like ghosts was just one aspect of the shape shifting of the field. By the mid-fifties, most of the impressive feats of mentalists like Dunninger had been figured out, their profession gradually becoming a thing of the past. Dunninger’s ability to “read” the headline of another city’s newspaper to be published the following day was a rather simple trick magicians referred to as the “nail writer,” for example, in which the performer kept a tiny pencil and pad of paper in his pocket. Upon hearing the headline on the phone from someone from the newspaper, the mentalist quickly and secretly wrote it down, tore the paper from the pad, folded and exchanged it with the original, and voila`!—the audience oohed and aahed in amazement. Information about studio audience members—telephone numbers, names of relatives, street numbers of houses, the kind of work one’s husband did—could all be traced back to the list of people who had written to the radio or television station requesting tickets to the broadcast. The mentalist would select a couple of dozen people from the list, hire a trusted investigator to get

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information about each of them, and, wonder of wonders, proceed to reveal all to the stunned listeners and viewers.27 Dunninger, who successfully transferred his act from radio to television and performed into the 1960s, was the latest of a long line of stage telepathists whose performances befuddled nearly everyone. Chevalier Pinetti, a nineteenth-century conjurer, is widely recognized as the first great modern mentalist, using his beautiful wife as his “medium.” Pinetti employed a code system with his wife, sending a message to her via the letters with which he started a series of sentences. “Please give me your attention. Everything ready? Now concentrate.” would mean the object to be identified was a pen, for example, his wife then promptly finding one in the crowd. The next great mentalist, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, improved on this by using a hidden mechanical device to communicate with his medium, this in turn later replaced by a small microphone placed under the lapel of the master of ceremonies working the crowd. Julius and Agnes Zancig, a husband and wife team billed as “Two Minds with But a Single Thought,” were quite a sensation in turn-of-the-century London with their thought transference act, their system so elaborate and complex it earned its own name, the Zancig Code.28 In the 1930s, London mathematician S. G. Soal investigated an equally skillful showman who went by the name Kraus, concluding that his uncanny ability to find small objects hidden in an audience was not truly telepathic but rather the unconscious picking up of clues delivered by the spectators, also unconsciously. Given the ways in which the pioneers of the field had worked their magic, however, it was perhaps more likely that Kraus had a trick or two up his sleeve that fooled even professional critics like Soal.29 A stage and large audience was not required for psychics to feel compelled to get a little extra help. Unscrupulous mediums would typically do their homework in advance of a se´ance, getting information from grave markers, directories, ex-servants, and even other mediums who kept useful biographic data on wealthier clients on the psychic circuit. (Getting one’s hands on a photo album or family Bible by paying off a member of the client’s staff was a sure way to appear as if one had supernormal powers.) Psychic investigators would, in turn, hire private detectives to trail mediums to see if they or people they had hired were doing background checks on clients, quite an interesting game of cat and mouse. To avoid this type of psychic fraud, some clients were also known to travel to foreign countries for a sitting, there being no chance that the medium there could have inside information.30 Rose Mackenberg, a longtime professional investigator of mediums, estimated there were 150,000 spiritualists in the United States in 1951, with that number to go up dramatically if the Korean War continued.

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Mackenberg, who had worked for Houdini for a few years, had a curious job, exposing mediums on behalf of insurance companies, law firms, prospective heirs, family members worried about one of their own, and people seeking to break wills because of alleged “undue influence,” that influence being a greedy spiritualist. In her work, Mackenberg pretended to be a “shut-eye,” a pejorative term dishonest mediums applied to their naı¨ve clients. Her typical approach was to pose as a widow, jealous wife, neurotic schoolteacher, factory hand, or the wife or mother of a soldier fighting in a foreign land. She sometimes attended as many as fifteen or twenty se´ances a day, each one on them filled with some thirty or forty other “shut-eyes.” Mackenberg had no quarrel with those who found solace by contacting those in the afterworld but went after mediums who deceived trusting people (almost always in some kind of trouble or grieving) like a hawk. Now, with another overseas war heating up, business was again beginning to boom, as friends and relatives of dead, wounded, or missing servicemen flocked to whom she called “these counterfeit dealers in the occult” in search of answers.31 Although Mackenberg remained open to the idea that someone could actually call up spirits of the dead and put them in contact with the living, she certainly had not met one yet. In fact, of the well over one thousand mediums she had investigated who claimed to have this power, every single one was a fraud, she had determined, making her understandably skeptical of the possibility of receiving messages from the beyond. Reading sealed messages, producing ectoplasm, materializing spirits, or making things float in the air were all trickery and sleight of hand replicable by a good magician, she was convinced, something that her famous exboss had demonstrated decades earlier. Even worse, Mackenberg had never come across a medium who hesitated about forwarding a message from the “spirit land” even though the person in question was either mythical or still taking up residence on Earth, for her this the real tragedy. For effect, Mackenberg would sometimes have the “dead” person to be contacted sit right beside her in a se´ance, this proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the medium was a fake. Even though she had never married, Mackenberg had over the years been informed she had roughly fifteen hundred husbands, three thousand children, and innumerable grandchildren, as well as enough other relatives “to populate a fair-sized town.”32 Although any magician worth his or her salt could duplicate mediums’ grab bag of tricks, they were very impressive to those inclined to believe they were not hocus-pocus. “Ectoplasm” was fine gauze dipped in luminous paint that shut-eyes were warned not to touch lest it result in the medium’s immediate death. Questions written on paper and sealed in

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an envelope could be made legible with a sponge soaked in alcohol, the liquid drying quickly to avoid detection. Using such tricks, most mediums were basically third-rate magicians who had found a much easier and more profitable way to use their limited skills, Mackenberg concluded, although some were better than others. The best (meaning the most deceptive) ones were ventriloquists, able to throw their voice so that it seemed like the sound was coming out of an object, often a trumpet suspended in midair. This also gave the effect of distance, a nice touch given how far away the spirits were, geographically or cosmologically. The trick to the floating trumpet was that it was collapsible, meaning the medium or an affiliate could unsuspectingly hold onto and talk through the base of it in the dark. (The telescoping trumpet was available for purchase at any magic store.) That speaking through a horn made one’s voice sound foreign was an added plus, making mediums’ claims they had a guide (often East Indian or Native American) seem more credible. Language like “Me get,” “heap many,” and “paleface” were a standard feature of a session, Mackenberg reported, although any actual Native American could tell you that those kind of phrases could be heard only in the movies. Just for kicks, Mackenberg would occasionally ask if her dog “Spunky” was in heaven (yes) and then if he could bark for her, forcing the medium to make a sound she would rather not.33 While Houdini spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket to expose fraudulent mediums, the latter were actually big fans of the former, frequently attending his shows in hopes to pick up a tip or two from the master of the game. Well aware of this, during his performances Houdini would often call out by name a medium Mackenberg had visited and inform the unlucky spiritist that she was no ordinary “shut-eye.” The medium would then inevitably deny that Mackenberg had ever attended one of her se´ances, at which point she would learn that the “widow” or “neurotic secretary” had left a handkerchief with her initials under a seat cushion and had written “R. M.” on the back of the “diploma” hanging on the wall. A committee of people Houdini had at the ready would then march over to the medium’s place of business and report back during the same performance, although the spiritist was rarely there to hear the embarrassing news.34 Mackenberg had other ways to make mediums wish they had perhaps chosen another line of work. Bringing a reporter or two and maybe a photographer with a concealed camera with a flash was one of her own tricks, with nothing like a story in a newspaper or magazine with a picture revealing some very Earthlike phenomena to make a medium stay out of sight for a while or perhaps relocate. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly at all given how gullible and desperate “shut-eyes” were, even an expose´ in a

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widely read publication was not enough to put a medium out of business. “No number of exposures, in fact, seems to shake the faith of believers,” Mackenberg wrote in The Saturday Evening Post in 1951, the desire to communicate with a lost loved one overpowering all else.35 Much worse were the rare occasions in which mediums used their position to swindle shut-eyes. Instructions to donate money to spiritists’ churches were at times included in messages from the dearly departed, especially when it was learned that the congregant had just inherited a bundle. Widows with loose cash could be easy pickings for mediums more than happy to recommend a particular company in which to invest, these businesses always turning out to be not much more than a checking account despite the fancy stock certificates with the pretty gold seals. Mackenberg eagerly participated in sting operations to put these psychic predators in jail, these folks the bottom of an already pretty rotten barrel. Mackenberg was amazed that not just ordinary dupes got taken by more entrepreneurial mediums but also, sometimes, successful businesspeople, the urge to follow the supposed wishes of someone on the other side obscuring any and all common sense. Cases in which family members tried to get back money or property handed over to mediums or their churches popped up once in a while, as did lawsuits filed by legitimate heirs attempting to break wills in which large sums of money had been bequeathed to these same shady beneficiaries. A bill in Congress to curb mediums’ activities had been proposed but failed, the implementation of such a thing on a national level no doubt making the lawmakers move on to more practical matters.36 Besides getting fleeced, more vulnerable widows visiting disreputable mediums were sometimes taken advantage of sexually. Sleeping with male spiritists would encourage “purification,” “healing,” or “getting the proper vibrations,” Mackenberg heard repeatedly on her investigations, something that other women fell for. If that did not work, male mediums would sometimes use force, Mackenberg herself having a few close calls in locked se´ance rooms. Once informed of this, Houdini advised her to carry a gun, but the strong woman from New York City was always able to get out of the scary situation through some physical force of her own. “It is all cruel, heartless and shameless,” Mackenberg summed up, worried that with this new war her services would be increasingly required.37 CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN Mackenberg’s fears would be realized as both mediums and fortunetellers flourished not only during the Korean War but through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Fortune-telling, whether done through a crystal

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ball, tarot cards, astrology, ouija boards, palm (and feet) reading, or phrenology, showed no signs of slowing down, the prospect of knowing the future through these ancient methods compelling even in the Space Age. Kurt Seligman, an artist and author of The Mirror of Magic, a history of the occult, believed that fortune-telling was as popular as it ever was in America, in fact, this despite the rocketlike ascent of science and technology over the past few decades. In New York, gypsy fortune-tellers were a visible presence, four hundred to five hundred of them operating out of storefronts and a large, unknown number conducting business on sidewalks throughout the city. Many gypsies, or Roma, had learned to speak Spanish, their new language skills coming in quite handy for Puerto Rican clientele. A good number of gypsy fortune-tellers had set up shop in Harlem, their businesses so profitable there that they had become the proud owners of Cadillacs and television sets. Although they could presumably have anything they wanted since they knew the future, the gypsies seemed perfectly content with the standard material trappings of the American Dream.38 The demographics of the occult remind us that the 1950s were not particularly happy days for everyone in America. Nearly 80 percent of fortune-tellers’ customers were women, their concerns most often revolving around love, marriage, health, and wealth (in that order). Leading questions among unmarried women were “When am I going to get married?,” “Is this man out to get my money?,” and “Where can I find a good man?,” their $2 almost always guaranteeing that a dark, handsome, and honest man would soon appear in their lives. (To the last question, one fortune-teller quipped, “If I knew where I could find a good man, I’d go for him myself and maybe I’d get married.”) Men’s primary interest was money, with love coming in a distant second. The higher end of the occult business also was thriving in large American cities during the Eisenhower years. Florida and California were happy hunting grounds for mediums, with many retired people in those states having enough time on and money in their hands to invest in the process. In New York City, there were an estimated five hundred mediums performing se´ances, a group sizable enough to have three categories from which customers could choose: semitrance, trance, and deep trance. Most mediums lived on the Upper West Side, the neighborhood then (and, to a lesser extent, now) filled with quirky intellectuals ripe for the pickings.39 Gay Talese, then a New York Times staff writer, made the occult rounds in the late fifties, his consultations with many a fortune-teller and medium providing a wealth of insights into what was a very popular pastime in exciting postwar Gotham. Like Mackenberg, Talese focused on the crime angle, spending lots of time with a policewoman, Claire Faulhaber,

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who covered the occult beat. Faulhaber came across many victims of fortune-teller con games, their tendency to remember predictions that came true and forget ones that did not making them fat pigeons to be preyed upon. An oldie but goodie was the one in which fortune-tellers would convince the customer that her money was “evil” and that she should bring it in to be “blessed.” The fortune-teller would give the wrapped package back to the customer, saying that twenty-four hours were needed for the blessing to take, plenty of time for the thief to disappear while the sucker realized her bundle consisted of yesterday’s newspaper. Faulhaber and other members of New York’s finest would pose as naı¨ve, lovesick women to bust fortune-tellers, but getting a conviction was a tricky business. Stealing money was obviously a crime (as was predicting the future, oddly, the charge being disorderly conduct), but simple “character readings” were not, making Faulhaber’s job, in her own words, “great sport.”40 To make it more sporting, fortune-tellers were known to clip pictures of policewomen out of newspapers and magazines, make copies, and distribute them to their colleagues, making some aptitude in disguises an essential part of cops’ job. Dressing up as a prostitute was appropriate for a visit to a tearoom in Harlem, for example, while a house dress and flat shoes were just the thing for a session with a fortune-teller on frumpy Houston Street. For a trip to Orchard Street in the slummy Lower East Side, nothing but dressing as sloppily as possible would do, while one to the Upper East Side demanded a proper hat and gloves. Looking like a local was a must for neighborhoody Hell’s Kitchen, meaning cops should bring along a bag of groceries and, preferably, a borrowed child. For a visit to the family-oriented Upper West Side, Faulhaber would sometimes throw on a maternity dress, her tummy bulging with the belt and holster containing her .32 caliber pistol. Despite her uncommon fashion sense, Faulhaber would often leave a fortune-teller’s reading or medium’s se´ance without making an arrest, each perfectly legal unless the future (or a neatly wrapped bundle of cash) was involved.41 With group se´ances often advertised in newspapers’ religious pages on Saturday, it was not hard for cops to find mediums who might be breaking the law. Fortune-tellers would also occasionally tip off the police about those in the business who were scamming customers to maintain professional standards in the industry and, not incidentally, keep the competition down. Making Manhattan as free as possible from the dregs of the occult keg—crystal ball gazers—was also important for the image of the trade, although these undesirables thankfully largely limited themselves to Coney Island. Trying to stamp out “development classes” took up a lot of Faulhaber’s time, the training of new mediums by veterans still

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a lucrative business, as Mackenberg had found a decade or so earlier. “Mediums sometimes compete in this business with the vigor of Macy’s and Gimbels,” Talese observed, a price war breaking out once in a while in which one retailer of the occult would offer a course for just $5 instead of the usual $10. Business was, after all, business.42 Given Americans’ fervent desire to acquire answers to their most personal questions, it was not surprising that some clever entrepreneur invented a do-it-yourself fortune-teller. The ouija (from the French oui and German ja, each meaning yes) board had been around for some time, of course, its popularity fading somewhat in the 1930s after becoming an icon of supernaturalism in the 1920s. Ouija made a strong comeback during the war (Macy’s sold four hundred in one day during 1944), however, most of the boards bought by women wanting to know when the war would end and if their husbands or lovers would come back in one piece. No one really knew how the planchette (a small piece of wood) moved across the board when participants lightly rested their hands on it (involuntary muscle action was presumed by nonbelievers), but sales of ouija remained steady in the postwar years, a sure hit at social gatherings (especially when martinis and Manhattans were served).43 The Space Age version of the ouija board was the Magic 8-Ball, the black plastic globe with the little glass opening offering no less than twenty possible answers to the shaker’s question. Its predecessor was the Syko-Seer, a tube-shaped item introduced in 1945 that also offered answers (such as “Very Doubtful,” “Cannot Predict Now,” and “Concentrate and Ask Again”) for the curious. Despite the fact that they were basically toys, Cincinnati-based Alabe Crafts, the maker of both products, regularly received letters from purchasers revealing how seriously they took the answers that popped up. Were the products accurate and reliable?, they wondered, apparently making important life decisions based on the pithy, often enigmatic responses. One customer learning the hard way they were not was a soldier in Korea who had been told by his Syko-Seer that “No,” he would never see his wife again, much to his delight. When this turned out to be untrue, the GI wrote an angry letter to Alabe Crafts, blaming the product for his misfortune.44 A UNIVERSAL POWER OF THE MIND Even if do-it-yourself (or for-hire) fortune-tellers could not predict the future, one had to be impressed by the strides the supernatural had made over the last half century, whether one believed in it or not. “One-half of hypnotism and clairvoyance is imposture and the rest bad observation,” said the great physicist Lord Kelvin around the turn of the century, words

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he might not have uttered in 1950. Although there were no firm numbers, some estimated belief in telepathy among scientists to be running about fifty-fifty, roughly the same as the general public in the United States. (The ratio was probably much more skewed towards believers in England.) The scientific community was especially drawn to the possibility of telepathy among humans because of its apparent existence among animals, the concept of “group memory” playing an important role in evolution just too compelling to ignore. Going head-on with science rather than around it was proving to be a relatively successful strategy, the sheer odds of some experiments speaking for themselves. Some seventy years after the term was coined (by Frederic Myers, in 1882), telepathy was coming into its own.45 As a steady stream of scientific and technological breakthroughs appeared on the scene following the war, telepathy increasingly became seen not as a relic of our superstitious past but rather as a potentially powerful tool for the future. “For the first time, there are scientists who boldly assert that telepathy may be a universal power of the mind that man has forgotten to use,” wrote Norman and Madelyn Carlisle for Coronet in 1952, the prospect of the human brain bridging time and space too seductive to ignore. At the peak of the Cold War, all forms of extrasensory perception served as a big juicy carrot dangling in front of both superpowers, a means to get a competitive edge of unlimited scope.46 In this kind of highly charged climate, new theories regarding extrasensory perception were eagerly entertained, almost nothing too farfetched given the stakes involved. Strange stories of people speaking in languages they claimed to not know or young children’s ability to read advanced texts fluently made perfect sense by embracing the concept of ESP, the transfer of thought from someone else the only reasonable explanation. Not just humans but animals could have ESP, some were thinking, the phenomenon an innate evolutionary tool that scientists had overlooked or arrogantly dismissed. A. C. Hardy, a well-known English biologist, had recently proposed the idea that telepathy could be an essential way advanced organisms adopted improvements, one creature communicating a better way of doing something to others of the same species. Birds’ rather sudden ability to open milk bottles left on doorsteps in the 1920s was a perfect example, this theory went, some local tits passing on this useful bit of information to sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and robins all over England. Interspecies telepathy too was a possibility, with some legendary mysteries like horses’ apparent aptitude to read or do math problems neatly solved by the process of human-mind-to-equine-mind communication.47 The lost sense of telepathy—which existed before we developed our other five, this line of thinking went—was the skeleton key that could

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open many locked doors, some scientists were beginning to believe. Overly dependent on our physical abilities to see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, we let our telepathic skills go dormant, but they were there nonetheless, just waiting to be woken up. Seemingly incredulous stories such as that of a man who could purportedly see with his fingers were less bizarre if we had six senses rather than five, all of them working together to maximize the chances of survival. Telepathy offered a solution to much publicized riddles such as the case of Mrs. Pearl Curran, a St. Louis housewife who between the years 1913 and 1937 was somehow able to produce thousands of pages of philosophically deep and historically accurate literature under the name Patience Worth despite having just a high school education.48 Reported instances of people making objects move without touching them also got a big boost if telepathy was real, the power of mind over matter the ultimate application of this fundamental biological trait that resided within all of us.49 Those believing that the physical laws of the universe were immutable and nonnegotiable of course considered all this quite silly. Pascual Jordan, a German nuclear physicist, argued that most efforts to explain or understand extrasensory perception were doomed to fail because they were using “reality” as a measure, this the very problem. By drawing a distinction between, say, a table that we dream about and one that we can see while awake, we were missing the whole point, as both telepathy and clairvoyance ignored such a distinction. Just as Freud had argued that the conscious and unconscious were inextricably linked, in other words, so did psychic phenomena cross the boundaries of the mind, making physics a bad way to study them. From this perspective, the possibilities of extrasensory perception—one person’s dreams shaping those of another, for example—made perfect sense, our habit of sorting everything into what was real and unreal the stumbling block. “The physical world is only a bordering zone of the world as a whole just as our conscious mind is only a bordering surface of the deep ocean of our psychic life,” Jordan wrote in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1952, this perhaps explaining why psychic research had always been so problematic and its findings so ambiguous.50 Apparently recognizing this fundamental problem, Rhine abandoned his usual pile of data and detailed analysis supporting the existence of extrasensory perception in the latest of his string of books, New World of the Mind. Instead, Rhine related parapsychology (or “psi,” for short) to peripheral fields like physics, biology, and psychology, a wise attempt to broaden its intellectual base. Philosophy and religion also overlapped with parapsychology, of course, making it important to bring some of those in these two fields into the fold as well (this despite the fact that both Catholics and Jews were forbidden to try to develop or use psychic skills except for

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religious purposes). This was, Rhine admitted, an uphill battle, not for a lack of evidence—there was an abundance of that originating not just from Duke’s lab but from many other sources—but rather because of the perception of parapsychology in the general public’s mind. “If it were on any other problem, one tenth of the evidence would satisfy me,” said one skeptic, but “as it is, ten times the amount would not be enough.” Given that kind of mountain to climb, there was virtually no chance at all of converting devout nonbelievers.51 Scientists’ rejection of the supernatural was perfectly understandable for other reasons. Psychic phenomena were difficult to translate into terms with which scientists were familiar, for one thing, and extending the concepts of matter and energy to include such activity was unlikely to happen. As well, psychic researchers’ experiments were usually not repeatable, this putting the field further outside the comfort zone of the mainstream scientific community. Most important, however, it was the disregard for the laws of space, time, and causation that located the supernatural in a kind of purgatory or no-man’s-land, stuck somewhere between science and spirituality. After centuries of struggle to free their own fields from superstition and magic by establishing these principles, there was no chance that scientists’ would go back to the bad old days. “Science must be open-minded to new ideas, but it also has a responsibility to guard itself against violations of its long-tested assumptions,” thought Edmund Sinnot, a professor of botany at Yale, this the issue that was keeping the supernatural out of the hallowed halls of ivy-covered buildings.52 In fact, it was only because the supernatural offered potential solutions to pesky scientific problems that it was even entertained by people like Sinnot. Physics, for example, had gone through a radical transformation over the past half century, the rise of particle physics shifting the field from “natural laws” to “statistical probability” as a measure of proof. This made some scientists see the paranormal as possibly another useful tool in their evolving tool kit, and one that would help reconcile recent developments with ideas of the past.53 Biologists could certainly use the notion of “extraphysical” phenomena to help explain such toughies as homing, migration, and other perplexing aspects of animal behavior, not to mention help contribute to the organization of a master plan for the field. Although scientists’ common sense ruled, the supernatural remained a tempting proposition for them, this keeping the field from being completely thrown out as total nonsense.54 Knowing that even many hard-line scientists would continue to flirt with the possibility of extrasensory perception because it might pay off dividends down the road, true believers pushed their case. Taking a step back, asked one of the latter, was ESP really any more bizarre than such

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complex cognitive functions as perception or memory? It was certainly less common, Aldous Huxley argued in 1954, but not much more was known at the time about how specific chemical or electrical activity in the brain allowed us to observe what something looked, smelled, or tasted like. How the mind recalled events from the past was equally unclear, making the ability to know someone had died or anticipate a particular occurrence perhaps not much more inexplicable. Hypnotism had certainly shown that the human mind was capable of some extraordinary things, so why were parapsychologists considered part of the lunatic fringe not only of the scientific community but in society at large?55 Being lumped into the lunatic category was especially maddening, one might say, when some great thinkers of their day had offered interesting theories about how paranormal activity possibly worked. William James, the eminent Harvard psychologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, suggested that all of us exist within a “continuum of cosmic consciousness,” a little bit of which seeps into each of our minds. Similarly, French philosopher Henri Bergson posited that the human mind was all-knowing, transcending both time and space, but “edited” out almost all of this information for the sake of biological efficiency. Either of these compelling ideas allowed for the possibility of extrasensory perception, our brains simply accessing a bit more of a “world mind” than normal. Whether we could control it was an entirely different matter, of course, this the task that the most ambitious parapsychologists had set out to achieve.56 After S. G. Soal, the University of London mathematician, reported findings in ESP similar to those of Rhine’s (which he detailed in his book Modern Experiments in Telepathy), however, one scientist decided to fight back. In a 1955 article in Science, George R. Price, a research associate at the University of Minnesota (presumably not related to either Joseph or Harry), blasted not only Soal and Rhine but his scientific colleagues for being sympathetic to their misguided cause. That many scientific journals were filled with articles written by the likes of Rhine and Soal amazed Price, he of the opinion that reports of humans’ ability to communicate with each other (and the occasional dead person) in some mysterious way were not just greatly exaggerated but blatantly false. Psychokinesis, the controlling of physical events by thought, was just impossible according to basic scientific laws, Price argued, making him wonder why notions like purposefully rolling a seven-come-eleven kept rearing their ugly heads in the literature.57 ESP was not much different than magic, he implied, how the tricks were being done unclear but tricks nonetheless. And because parapsychologists themselves could not explain how the tricks worked, what they were doing was much closer to magic than

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science, even more reason to just ignore them in hopes they would go away.58 Price was not done, however. Very few articles criticizing the work of parapsychologists were being published, he pointed out, perhaps because of the reluctance of most scientists to accuse colleagues of fraud, whether it was intentional or otherwise. But fraud it was, like it or not, or else much of science was simply wrong. Price simply had enough, and called on the ESP faithful to either produce a truly controlled experiment (involving witnesses and using motion-picture cameras) that supported their claims or stop wasting everybody’s time. One reader of Price’s article was J. B. Rhine, surprised to see that one of the top journals in the field had published what he called a “slanderous diatribe.” “If this is the way that scientific workers are to have their good faith impugned—even though they are workers in a still unpopular field—then it would appear that McCarthyism has come to American science,” Rhine told the New York Times, thinking that the thousands of tests by hundreds of professionals spoke for themselves.59 A few months later, seeing a good fight on its hands, Science invited both Rhine and Soal to respond more formally to Prince’s charges. Soal clarified his position, making it clear that few people had extrasensory perception (children living in “backward communities” were most likely to have it, he thought), while Rhine fully admitted that findings like his were incompatible with much of science. In fact, that was the very point, Rhine insisted, although the more narrow-minded refused to accept the possibility that the supernatural could reside outside the boundaries of accepted scientific laws. The problem was not ESP but rather our ignorance of what the human mind was capable, meaning skeptics like Price should praise trailblazers like he and Soal rather than admonish them. Dael Wolfle, acting editor of the magazine, wisely refused to take sides, but predicted that the heated debate over ESP would continue to simmer. “What appears improbable on the basis of one body of evidence may prove to be quite probable when fresh evidence is discovered,” he wrote, not tipping his hand about which side he thought would produce new research to discredit the other side.60 A NEW AND FRIGHTENING WEAPON The testy exchange in Science reflected the trouble ESP was causing in some intellectual circles. “Studies of so-called ‘extra-sensory perception’ appear to have confronted science with an awkward dilemma,” observed Robert K. Plumb of the New York Times in 1956, the tough choices being

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either that a major breakthrough in biology had occurred or that there seemed to be some holes in the scientific method. Those two scenarios, neither one particularly palatable to the scientific community, were the topic of discussion at yet another international forum on ESP held the previous year in London. Regardless of who was right, attendees agreed, modern science was facing a legitimate challenge, the real possibility that something was amuck in some aspect of physiology, psychology, or statistics. Alan S. Parks, who chaired the ESP symposium, felt some sort of compromise was in order, suggesting that “extraordinary sensory perception” might be a better way to define the phenomenon given all the current unknowns.61 Whatever it was called, it was becoming increasingly clear that some variation of ESP could be a very dangerous thing if America’s enemies were somehow able to harness its power. Fears of exactly that happening emerged in the mid-1950s, foreshadowing the alarm raised by Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate followed by the 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra. “A new and frightening weapon to enslave the minds of the free world is being tested by Soviet Russia and Communist China,” warned Tris Coffin in Coronet in 1955, just one of many reports of the development of “brain rays” that could tip the balance of the Cold War. One-half ancient mysticism and one-half modern science, “tele-control” was a hot priority at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Coffin warned patriotic Americans, with “the evil use of both hypnotism and telepathy” capable of driving men to commit acts they would find abhorrent if they had not been brainwashed. And rather than the stuff of a pulp novel or B-movie, these techniques had already been used, according to the State and Defense Departments, tested on prisoners of war, missionaries, and key officials. 62 Alan Little, the State Department’s expert on Soviet psychology, made the implications perfectly clear in an official, chilling statement released to the public: It is the duty of the Soviet scientist to explore techniques of conditioning . . . and perfect them to such a point that any focus of resistance in the individual can be overwhelmed within his nerve cells. When, and if, the Soviets discover such techniques of control, they can test them in the territories under Communist domination, perfecting methods of application in preparation for further conquests. Thus, spiritual control would follow readily upon subversion and political control of an area.63

According to Coffin, the United States first heard of the possibilities of “spiritual control” in 1949, when President Truman received a letter from a German refugee claiming that he and his colleagues had discovered a

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way to hypnotize people long-distance, forcing them to obey commands. Right out of a spy novel or Hitchcock movie, the Russians had kidnapped two of the German scientists, the letter continued, the terrible weapon now in the hands of the Reds. Truman reportedly turned the matter over to the newly formed CIA, it dismissing the story as much better fiction than fact. Very soon, however, it became apparent that Soviet scientists were indeed actively working in the area of mind control under direct orders from Stalin himself. “There is a great deal to be done to apply the methods of conditioned reflexes to solve large-scale problems of higher nervous and psychic activity,” said one leading scientist at a 1950 session of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, another urging more research be done in order to “explore the conditions under which a constant stream of stimuli is sent into man’s brain, evoking speech reactions and other responses.” Two earlier Russian scientists, Ivan Pavlov (of salivating dog fame) and Vladimir Bechterev (a neurophysiologist specializing in telepathy), were inspiration for the Academy, their work laying the foundation for this new field that could prove even more important than their own.64 The CIA would soon take rumors of Communist mind control a lot more seriously. In early 1951, the agency’s radio-monitoring service in South Korea picked up what were clearly American voices on Communist propaganda broadcasts, these military personnel seemingly brainwashed to say whatever their captors desired. By 1955, there was plenty of evidence to conclude that the brainwashing was very real, although it was not clear whether it was being done through posthypnotic suggestion, “telepathic coercion,” or both. Experts in psychic behavior, including J. B. Rhine and S. G. Soal, were brought in by the government to offer their opinions, their marginalized field now considered integral to national security.65 Although Rhine’s lab at Duke was still ground zero for physic research, other prominent institutions—Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, to name a few—had also gotten into the game. Telepathic coercion, or long-range hypnotism, was one of the areas being explored, the transfer of thought from one mind to another over hundreds or thousands of miles elevated from a potential form of communication to a possible means of persuasion. Receivers suddenly and inexplicably felt an uncontrollable compulsion to think or do something, some tests were reportedly showing, findings that if true fully deserved the attention of top government officials on both sides of the ideological fence.66 Not only was “tele-control” being used by the Communists, the government had come to believe, but they were using at least two different kinds of it. One kind was making a receiver feel a specific fear via telepathy, the fear growing into a psychosomatic illness through the power of

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suggestion. Another kind was when the receiver was given a posthypnotic command, with a given word or signal (which could be relayed by telepathy) making him react in a designated way. This latter type of tele-control could very well have been the cause of the defection of Otto John, director of Internal Security for West Germany, officials thought. After John met a few times with Baron Wolfgang von und zu Politz, a Soviet agent, he started to act strangely, according to his friends, seeming to be in a trance in which he behaved “automatically.” A bit farfetched, perhaps, but John D. Hayes, a missionary who had been arrested by the Chinese for spying for the FBI in 1951, confirmed that the Communists were using longdistance thought transference. “One morning, I awoke with a series of detailed thoughts,” he claimed, with images and language related to spying planted in his mind to make him confess that he was working for the U.S. government. With such evidence, did “brain rays” really exist, many wondered, and, if so, could they turn us all into avid Communists?67

HIDDEN CHANNELS OF THE MIND Now aligned with national defense, parapsychology had, rather suddenly and unintentionally, reached a new plateau of public awareness. Parapsychology was “already pointing to new frontiers in science which promise more startling revelations than spaceships and Sputniks,” thought John G. Fuller, editor of The Saturday Review, this in 1958 when exploring the final frontier was pretty hot stuff. Fuller had just visited the offices of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York and, while there, had a long conversation with Karlis Osis, who had recently arrived after spending five years working under Rhine at Duke. “There is so much more to know about how man functions, what he is, so that we can enlarge his scope, and throw more light into the unknown,” Osis told Fuller, a nice way of defining the field more typically thought of as the exclusive province of the lunatic fringe.68 “Just as chemistry was preceded by alchemy, astronomy by astrology, and mathematics by a mystic numerology, we may have in the psychic and parapsychological fields elements that will eventually find scientific underpinnings,” agreed Siegfried Mandel, writing in the same publication a few months later. He too was of the belief that future research into the supernatural could add to our understanding of what it meant to be human.69 Seeing an opportunity to leverage the public profile of parapsychology, Rhine and his colleagues at Duke ventured into the field to promote their work in the late fifties. Rhine appeared on the television show Night Beat and the radio show This Is New York in October 1957, for example, giving

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New Yorkers some insight into what was still considered a mysterious field. J. Gaither Pratt, assistant director of Duke’s parapsychology lab, also left the comfortable confines of Durham once in a while in order to generate some publicity. A few months after Rhine’s media mini-tour, Pratt went to Seaford, Long Island, to investigate some odd occurrences at the home of Mr. and Mrs. James Herrmann. (Osis also went out there to investigate.) For the past few weeks, various objects had reportedly been inexplicably flying through the Herrmann’s home, understandably making the suburban couple want to discover why some of their possessions had suddenly become aerodynamic. On one occasion, a cap flew off a bottle of laundry bleach and, a few days after that, a globe flew fifteen feet across the room, cause enough for the Herrmanns to seek outside help. After a ten-pound phonograph in the basement traveled ten feet through the air and crashed into a shelf, Pratt was called in to try to figure it all out. Foreshadowing the parade of ghost hunters and adventurers who would populate the televisual airwaves a half century later, Pratt set up a mobile direction finder outside the home to determine if any radio waves might be involved. Nothing unusual was found, however, but Pratt told reporters covering the story that he expected to remain with the family “indefinitely “ to solve the mystery.70 As it turned out, Pratt would not be the only one to take up residence in the Herrmann’s home. Within a period of five weeks, no fewer than sixty-seven “disturbances” occurred, the Herrmanns claimed, the story now attracting the attention of a wide variety of interested parties thinking they could solve the problem. Over the next six months, squads of detectives, building inspectors, electricians, firemen, plumbers, television repairmen, and water diviners invaded the house, so many people in fact that Mr. Herrmann was starting to regret he had called Pratt in the first place. After Pratt and his team asked Herrmann to take a lie-detector test, the not-so-happy home owner reached his boiling point, saying he would prefer to live with the poltergeist “until it made up its mind to go away” to the intruders disrupting his life. For what it was worth, Pratt, who had been in the house when some of the Herrmanns’ belongings had taken flight, ruled out trickery, magic, or a hoax cooked up by the family to get their fifteen minutes (or six months, in this case) of fame. Group hallucination also was not the answer, his formal report on the matter concluded, leaving the situation, like all similar ones, a mystery that remained to be solved.71 Pratt, president of the Parapsychological Association in 1960, was even willing to sit down with a writer for the The New Yorker to get some press even though that publication had always treated the field with bemused condescendence. Pratt was one of only about a dozen full-time parapsychologists

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in the world, he told the reporter at the third annual meeting of the association in New York, his current research focusing on extrasensory perception in animals. How did dogs find their masters hundreds or thousands of miles away, Pratt wondered, and how did cats similarly trail their previous owners over such distances without traditional sensory clues to guide them? Answers to these questions could help lead to a better understanding of human ESP, Pratt thought, wondering if perhaps we too have some kind of internal homing device that could be put to good use.72 Going out into the field offered learnings impossible in the lab, of course, something that Rhine’s wife knew better than anyone. In 1961, Louisa Rhine published Hidden Channels of the Mind, a book that was in some ways the qualitative version of her husband’s quantitative work. In her book, Rhine sorted and cataloged the many accounts of extrasensory experiences sent to Duke’s lab by people from all over the world, these stories of claimed telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition making quite an impression on at least one reviewer. “For some time after putting down this book the reader, unless he is not at all susceptible to suggestion, is going to find himself wondering whether or not a stray thought is telepathic or simply a stray thought,” wrote Cowl Rider of the Wall Street Journal, this despite the author’s scientific detachment (she, like her husband, had a PhD in botany) and liberal use of qualifiers like “appears,” “seems,” and “can be.”73 Another reviewer, Gerald Heard for the New York Times, felt that the real value of the book was that its collection of stories allowed general readers to see if there was an overall pattern to real-world psychic phenomena, something that data originating from labs was not really designed to do. “While the zoologist can find out little about the caged animals, the field naturalist, waiting concealed in their actual habitat, can discover unsuspected richness and spontaneity in the behavior patterns of creatures when they emerge and play,” Heard wrote, thinking Rhine’s anthropologically inspired approach was just what the field needed to gain further respect.74 Returning to real life, personal experiences were for parapsychology a case of de´ja` vu, very fittingly. The roots of parapsychology, like those of psychoanalysis, were, after all, grounded in case histories, with attempts to analyze them scientifically coming only later. Experimental research over the past thirty years had indeed shown there to be some scientific support for parapsychology but, as skeptics pointed out, it was unlikely that those tests that indicated no evidence of supernormal activity would be written about or, even less likely, published. If all the research on the subject was published, these critics argued, the positive findings would be just a drop in the bucket, making parapsychology not the powerful unexplainable force some considered it. That a single individual—J. B. Rhine—was

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responsible for publishing many of the success stories of telepathy and clairvoyance did not help the cause of parapsychology, lending an extra helping of suspicion to the field. The lack of a general guiding theory was another big problem, a more or less random collection of fleeting experiences and batch of largely unrepeatable experiments simply not enough to cut the scientific mustard.75 At least one person working in the field was brave enough to put forth a grand hypothesis about parapsychological activity and, even better, connect it to human biology. It was our “reticulo-endothelial” system that could on occasion function as a “sixth sense,” H. G. Heine proposed in her 1960 book called The Vital Sense, our brains picking up information from the environment through an internal chemical communication network. Through experience, she suggested, our body chemistry produced an unconscious physical capacity to pick up stimuli even if they were not recognized by our normal five senses. A particular odor could unconsciously trigger a series of visual images, for example, this explaining why those having such mysterious experiences often attributed them to clairvoyance or another dimension of the supernatural. Heine’s theory was a bit out there but was, nonetheless, a noble effort to lend some rationalism to a largely irrational subject.76 It would not be an elaborate scientific theory but, rather incongruously, a simple television show that would make many Americans intimately familiar with the concept of parapsychology. On September 17, 1964, a new show debuted on ABC featuring, as Jack Gould of the New York Times called the protagonist, “a fetching suburban housewitch.” Although it traveled along a path already laid by television shows like Topper and My Favorite Martian, Bewitched projected the supernatural into a new orbit of popularity, truly bewitching viewers with its humorous take on psychic powers. Right from the start, it was clear that the show would turn the occult on its head by making it fun and even romantic, a world apart from its dark and mysterious image. In the first episode, Samantha, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, has to somehow explain to her brandnew husband Darren, played by Dick York, that she is not exactly the girl next door he thought she was. Moving ashtrays across tables without touching them went a long way in achieving that, and Samantha’s naughty treatment of one of Darren’s ex-girlfriends sealed the deal. Agnes Moorehead, playing Samantha’s mother, added to the show’s charm, the opportunity to present a mother-in-law in a sitcom as a literal witch just too good to pass up. “Bewitched promises to be a bright niche of popular TV,” Gould wrote, thinking that, “if [Samantha] exercises her powers with discretion, she should be a winning spirit for the American Broadcasting Company.”77

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Gould would be proved right. Despite the never explained enigma of the two Darrens, Bewitched ran for eight seasons (254 episodes) on ABC and continues to run in syndication around the world to this day, one of the most popular supernaturally themed TV shows in history. More important, Bewitched would help usher in a new era for the supernatural, the cultural climate of the late sixties and seventies accepting if not encouraging ideas and things that went beyond the straight and narrow. With the countercultural winds behind its back, the supernatural was about to take off in some very interesting directions.

Chapter 4

The Consciousness Revolution

Psychic research in the next few decades may be destined to have an impact comparable to the impact a few centuries ago of Galileo and Copernicus. —Willis Harman (of the Stanford Research Institute, 1977)

In August 1969, John Mihalasky, a professor at Newark College of Engineering, made the rather startling announcement that ESP, not science, ruled decision making in the world of business. Mihalasky, who taught management engineering at the school, was hardly the kind of person one thought of when envisioning avid proponents of the supernatural. Through his own research, however, the professor had come to the conclusion that it was executives’ intuition and creativity versus cold, rational logic that led to the right business decisions, finding a clear correlation between superior management skills and extrasensory perception. More specifically, it was one version of ESP—precognition, or the direct obtaining of information of the future—that determined whether one would be a great manager, the relative ability to anticipate events yet to be a critical factor in the amount of money a company could make or save. And rather than being some sort of mystical quality, Mihalasky considered ESP to be a true science, the only real difference between it and others is that it operated in the unconscious rather than the conscious part of the mind.1 That extrasensory perception was being embraced by the likes of a professor of management engineering indicated how mainstream the

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supernatural had become by the late 1960s. Only forty years earlier dominated by ghost sighters like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge, the supernatural was now the stuff of organizational behavior—quite a leap. The late 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for what was now often called parapsychology, as the cultural climate encouraged any and all kinds of mind expansion. Jeane Dixon’s nomination as “psychic star of the year” in 1965 foretold, so to speak, the full crossing over of the occult into mainstream American popular culture. By the mid-1970s, suburban housewives were holding se´ances as a fun way to entertain guests, some of them using Ladies’ Home Journal’s guide to occult party games. Everybody seemed to be reading William Blatty’s The Exorcist, with the most adventurous “psychenauts,” as Harper called them in 1974, taking the Silva Mind Control Course. Parapsychology was “an idea whose time has come,” declared Psychology Today in 1973, with Newsweek considering it “the uncanny science” the following year. Saturday Review’s 1975 proclamation of a “consciousness revolution” was the most profound recognition of the role of the supernatural in everyday life, however, as ordinary Americans peered into the nooks and crannies of the mind for some answers to the big questions of life.

ON A CLEAR DAY Instrumental in bringing about the “consciousness revolution” was the full embrace of parapsychology by American popular culture. Whether or not they had an ounce of truth to them, published stories like those of “Sam Benson,” the owner of a hardware store in a small town, must have made many Americans think extrasensory perception was not pure fantasy. Benson first realized he had ESP when he was seven, an article about him in The Reader’s Digest in 1965 explained, accurately telling his mother that father was late because he had been in a trolley accident. Only recently, Benson had woken up from a deep sleep, thinking his house was on fire because he smelled smoke. Finding no fire in his house, Benson realized the smoke he psychically smelled was in his mother-in-law’s house, which turned out to be true. Benson also frequently knew what customers wanted to buy at his store before they said a word, even able to correct them when they were wrong and remind them of things they had forgotten to ask for. Rather than be thankful for his unusual gifts, however, Benson found them more of a curse than a blessing, and wished they would disappear. Those close to him who knew about them found them frightening, this a typical reaction, which made many of those with psychic ability want to keep it a secret.2

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Not at all a secret were the abilities of the most famous psychic in America and probably the world, Jeane Dixon. Although, as a supposed seer, she was on the fringes of parapsychology, Dixon brought much attention to the field, for both better and worse. Credited with foretelling the communization of China, the launching of the first Sputnik, and, most famously, the assassination of President Kennedy, Dixon was still on a roll, with Ruth Montgomery’s 1965 biography, A Gift of Prophecy, making her only that much more of a sensation. Like Benson, Dixon’s “sixth sense” became apparent as a child, predicting things like the death of her grandfather in Germany and that her father would bring a blackand-white dog home from a business trip. “This child is blessed with the gift of prophecy,” said a gypsy woman of Dixon when she was eight, legend had it, giving her a crystal ball to make full use of her rare abilities. That she did, her ball and unsought visions bringing both fame and fortune over the next forty years and, on a grander level, raising the awareness of precognition and supernaturalism in general.3 Broadway was another place Americans could find the supernatural in the mid-1960s. With music by Burton Lane and a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (which was loosely based on the 1929 play Berkeley Square) opened on Broadway in October 1965 and ran for 280 performances before it closed in June 1966. Although its reviews were mixed (the show had a change in composers and leading man as well as four directors), audiences found the story, about a woman who not only has ESP but has been reincarnated, bizarre yet fascinating. In Act I, very briefly, Daisy Gamble was presented as a not very remarkable person save for her abilities to predict when a telephone would ring or someone would stop by, uncannily know where a lost object is, and make plants grow like kudzu. Trying to break her smoking habit to preserve her relationship with her fiance´, she goes to a psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Bruckner, who, after hypnotizing her, discovers that she believes she lived a previous life in eighteenth-century England as “Melinda Wells.” The shrink keeps this information to himself, but tells her she should not be ashamed of her ESP abilities. After another session of hypnosis, Bruckner begins to think Daisy really is the reincarnated Melinda, and starts to fall in love with the dead woman. Act II of the play was, believe it or not, even stranger. Bruckner tells his psychiatric colleagues about the curious case, and is ridiculed for taking the reincarnation story seriously. A Greek shipping magnate soon learns of the case, however, and he offers to finance a study of “Melinda” so that he can discover whom he will be in his next life, this allowing him to leave his fortune to his future self. (In the show that character sings a song called, “When I’m Being Born Again.”) When Daisy discovers she is being

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used as a guinea pig and that Bruckner prefers the dead woman to her, she is understandably angry, and prepares to return home on a plane. Fortunately, Daisy foresees that the plane she planned to take will crash, this finally making her realize she is a special person. She leaves her boring fiance´ for Dr. Bruckner, the love story an unusual one, to say the least. At least as interesting as the show itself, however, was its backstory. “Everything that happens in the show has been recorded in the field of parapsychology,” Lerner told the New York Times about a year before the show opened, the lyricist of hits like My Fair Lady and Camelot claiming that, “I have been doing research in ESP since I was 11 years old.” As a student at Harvard, Lerner had taken courses in hypnosis and, later, read many books on psychic research and ghosts, this adding to his extensive knowledge of the subject. (This actually was not the first time Lerner had used the supernatural as a conceit for a show; in Brigadoon, for example, a town came to life every one hundred years and, in The Day Before Spring, Voltaire, Freud, and Plato came to life to advise the leading lady on what she should do with her life.) While Lerner was still on the fence when it came to ESP (“Though I’m a skeptic, I’m fascinated by it,” he made clear), the forty-seven-year-old man’s obvious interest in the supernatural coursed through the show, this explaining much of its popularity. “The weight of evidence is that we all have a vast latent extrasensory perception,” the showman said, his informed perspective something that audiences passionately responded to.4 As soon as On a Clear Day opened, in fact, Lerner received many letters from people who took his book and lyrics very seriously, more seriously than he probably intended. “Dear Mr. Lerner,” a man from Chicago wrote, “My wife and I talked to flowers—and they grew and prospered,” his experience mirroring one of Daisy’s unusual skills. Another letter to Lerner mentioned that, “last night I spoke to Edgar Cayce,” this unusual in the fact that the famous psychic had died twenty years earlier. Hugh Cayce, Edgar’s son (and managing director of the Virginia-based Association for Research and Enlightenment), was so impressed with the show that he was recommending it to members of his group as a “carefully researched study of E.S.P. gifts, telepathy, precognition, accelerated plant growth, clairvoyance and reincarnation.” This was quite an endorsement given that it was, first and foremost, simply a Broadway musical. Even J. B. Rhine sent Lerner books on the subject, the situation a very odd case of life imitating art. Perhaps what was most amazing about the phenomenon was that, three months into the show’s run, Lerner had not received a single letter critical of its controversial subject matter.5 A few years later, the supernatural reached another milestone when what was probably the first young person’s book about psychic phenomena was

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published. Written for ten- to fourteen-year-olds, Larry Kettelkamp’s Sixth Sense did not pull any punches, its ninety-five pages chock-filled with stories and illustrations of de´ja` vu, out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and the different types of ESP, i.e., telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and precognition. Kettelkamp also discussed mediums, sensibly advising young readers to watch out for frauds, and even provided some tips on how to conduct simple psychic experiments. “This is a serious and worthwhile book which adults as well as younger readers will enjoy,” Randolph Hogan of the New York Times wrote in his 1971 review, recommending tongue in cheek that nobody spend time with it “very late at night.”6

A GREAT MASSIVE LIGHT Although the dawning of the Age of Aquarius would soon bring with it a much different kind of supernaturalism, traditional spiritism was not yet extinct. A classic case of prewar-style parapsychology was that of Bishop James Pike, who claimed his clocks in Cambridge, England, had stopped at 8:19, the same time his son James Jr. had shot himself in New York City two weeks earlier. The 1966 case was made all the more intriguing by Pike’s additional claims that his books had been moved around in his apartment and, even more mysteriously, a bunch of safety pins appeared, as he described it, “all open to the position that the hands of a clock are in 8:19.” Pike, who was at Cambridge University on a sabbatical from his diocese in California, was confident all this was his dead son’s doing, and embarked on a major effort to communicate with him.7 Over the next year and a half, in fact, the Bishop contacted James Jr. six different times, he told reporters, the most sensational encounter taking place during a televised se´ance in Toronto in September 1967. As thousands of viewers watched, the Reverend Arthur A. Ford, a well-known minister and medium from Philadelphia, contacted a variety of Pike’s acquaintances from the past, all of them no longer of this Earth. One spirit emerging from “a great massive light” was Pike’s predecessor as Bishop of California, Karl Block, who used his limited time to explain not complex religious issues but rather some of the common pitfalls in buying church property. A conversation with British theologian Donald MacKinnon was equally pedestrian, the man more interested in talking about his two cats than, say, the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. Ford, speaking through a spirit control named “Fletcher,” finally put the Bishop in touch with his son, who made it clear that his tragic death was in no way the fault of his family. “I want you to realize that I enjoyed the time I was with you,” James Jr. told his dad through Ford, the Bishop taking this as a sure sign there was life after death.8

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In much part because of the televised se´ance—the first one of its kind— the case of Bishop Pike was a media sensation, raising the public’s awareness of the kind of research being done in the field. In 1967, the Saturday Evening Post did a feature story on the American Society for Psychical Research and its most ambitious experiment to date—sending someone around the world to see if he could transfer his thoughts to individuals in the United States. After going through a complex mathematical formula to ensure randomness, a man named Fred Rindge had the unenviable task of laying one hundred postcards (twenty each of five different images) on the floor of his hotel rooms in New York, Paris, Sydney, and New Delhi and then staring at them for the next five hours. Back in the United States, sixty “sensitives” scattered around the country (who did not know Rindge or his whereabouts) tried to “feel into” the postcards and list their sequence, the probability of getting a hit 20 percent. If the number of hits was significantly higher than that, it would be fair to assume that some kind of long-distance extrasensory perception, specifically clairvoyance, had taken place, the Society believed, this kind of research being what was needed to demonstrate scientifically that ESP was real.9 Also working hard in the late 1960s to bring more credibility to ESP, readers of the same issue learned, was Thelma Moss, a Broadway actress turned psychologist. When not spending time at her day job at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, Moss was exploring the effects of emotion on telepathy, intrigued by the numerous reports of “spontaneous” mind-to-mind communication. (Louisa Rhine had recently published more such cases in her latest book, ESP, in Life and Lab.) In a typical experiment, Moss would have a receiver located in a separate room try to feel a sender’s reactions to a combination of images and music likely to elicit strong emotions, her hypothesis being that there would be a successful transfer among people with ESP. This was the case in most of her trials, as she reported in a paper at the tenth annual convention of the Parapsychological Association, her prestigious position reflective of the kind of people now attending the organization’s conferences. Also at the convention was J. Gaither Pratt, who had moved from Duke’s lab to the University of Virginia where he was an assistant professor of psychiatry. Pratt’s paper addressed the clairvoyant skills of Pavel Stepanek, a Czech librarian who was reported to have extraordinary ability in seeing things beyond the range of normal vision. Hearing about the man, Pratt flew to Prague to administer some tests and was impressed enough to bring Stepanek back to the university for more experiments, the librarian correctly guessing the color of hidden cards better than statistics would suggest.10

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Also typical of parapsychology past was a talk at the convention by William G. Roll, head of the Psychical Research Foundation. Roll’s paper involved the case of poltergeists plaguing Tropication Arts, a souvenir company in Miami. After beer mugs, glasses, ashtrays, and various other bric-abrac kept mysteriously falling off his warehouse shelves, the owner, Alvin Laubheim, called the police, but to no avail. Laubheim then consulted a number of local mediums but they too could not locate the source of the problem. Roll, who used to work for Rhine at Duke, got news of the situation and hastily made his way to Miami to investigate. After a week, Roll had his answer. All of the unexplainable activity occurred in the presence of a nineteen-year-old shipping clerk, Julio Vasquez, who was, according to Roll, unconsciously applying psychokinesis as an outlet for his “strong repressed aggression against parental authority.” Roll went further by testing the young man for “PK,” determining that he did indeed have psychic powers. After some additional investigation of their own, however, the Miami police had a much different explanation for the wreckage. After being arrested for stealing a ring, Vasquez admitted he had been the poltergeist, using a concealed thread to pull the stuff down from the shelves. “He is a sick boy who wants attention,” said Sgt. James Haddad, “and to get it he became a ghost.” Despite Vasquez’s confession, Roll was sticking by his guns, telling the conference attendees that the incident had been “the best poltergeist case I ever witnessed.”11 Roll’s insistence that an event was supernatural, despite strong evidence to the contrary, was just the kind of thing that made scientists treat the field as an unwelcome guest who refused to leave their party. Besides the fact that no testable theory explaining paranormal phenomena had been produced in almost a century of psychic research and that extrasensory perception had yet to be shown to be consistently reproducible, serious doubts about the reliability of data gathering in experiments remained. As well, bringing precognition into the supernatural fold was especially problematic for more linear thinkers, the idea that all events were predetermined implying that both chance and free will were simply inventions. Hard-core parapsychologists, meanwhile, viewed well-educated goats as more fearful than anything else, worried that the existence of a channel of communication beyond the five senses would turn their solid-as-a-rock, mechanistic view of reality into mush. “We now believe everybody has ESP to some degree, and we’re studying it through group experiments as a property that belongs to mankind,” said J. B. Rhine in 1968, the seventy-two-year-old man undeterred by the skepticism and suspicion that still surrounded the field.12 By the end of the sixties, Rhine’s simple card and dice experiments of the 1930s had blossomed into a legitimate, international cottage industry,

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with researchers gradually attracting the attention of those with deep pockets willing to take a flyer on parapsychology. Blue-chip institutions including Harvard University and Boeing were now funding parapsychological research, the former backing physicist Charles Buffler (who was exploring dousing, a type of divination to locate ground water, of all things), the latter bankrolling another physicist, Helmut Schmidt, who was keen on ESP. Mathematician S. G. Soal was still doing his own ESP work in England and, across the channel, a French biologist going by the pseudonym “Andrew Robinson” had recently uncovered evidence suggesting humans and mice could communicate telepathically. (“Robinson” did not want to use his real name lest some of his colleagues not appreciate this revelation of mice and men.) In Russia, University of Leningrad professor Leonid Vasiliev’s Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche was a bestseller, while in the United States those interested in the subject were reading Parapsychology Today, its twenty-two essays edited by J. B. Rhine clearly illustrating how scientific the field had become. Whether one was a sheep or a goat, one had to acknowledge the sheer resiliency of the supernatural. “Strange as it seems in the space age, the supposed reality of psychic phenomena continues to fascinate modern men,” Time magazine wrote in 1969, the second half of the twentieth century turning out to be, against all odds, salad days for the supernatural.13

AN ALTERCATION IN CONSCIOUSNESS One modern man quite literally in the space age who was fascinated by psychic phenomena was the astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Even in the often strange universe of the supernatural, the case of Mitchell, the lunar module commander of Apollo 14 and sixth human being to walk on the moon, was an unusual one. While in space in February 1971, Mitchell had what he called a “peak experience,” a sudden feeling of euphoria mixed with immense fatigue or, in his own words, “a sense of being totally insignificant yet highly significant, an insight into the great pattern of control and divinity in the universe.” Mitchell (who was born in Roswell, New Mexico, and to this day claims UFOs have landed on Earth) decided then and there that merging Western science with our “untapped intuitive and psychic forces” could make a great contribution to society, a way in fact to improve the chances of the Blue Planet’s survival. Soon after he rather suddenly retired from NASA the following year, Mitchell founded a center for parapsychology, The Institute for Noetic Sciences (after nous, mind or consciousness in Greek). With his Palo Alto–based institute, Mitchell’s goal was to fuse “the objective, pragmatic modality of Western

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science and the subjective, intuitive approach of the great spiritual and religious doctrines,” an idea that was either crazy or way ahead of its time.14 Mitchell’s interest in psychic phenomena had begun about five years earlier, after realizing that both religion and philosophy could not provide the kind of answers he was looking for in his search for the meaning of life. Not only was the Navy captain impressed with the quality of psychic research but he found its scientific foundation surprisingly rational and substantial in explaining why humans had always viewed the physical world through a spiritual lens. “Death may simply be an altercation in consciousness, a transition for continued life in nonmaterial form,” he wrote in 1974, with psychic research showing that the mind could quite possibly operate independently of the body.15 During the Apollo flight, NASA allowed Mitchell to conduct an unsanctioned ESP test with four persons back on Earth and so, during his scheduled rest periods, he indulged his personal interest in telepathy. Using Rhine’s special deck of twenty-five cards, Mitchell sent a thought message to the unidentified people (one was determined to be Olof Jonsson, a Swedish-born, Chicago-area drafting engineer and self-professed psychic), getting what was considered “extra chance performance” with two of the Earthlings and a dud with the other two. Not only did Jonsson receive clear images of most of the cards, he claimed, but he felt some of the emotions of the astronauts in space, this perhaps the bigger story.16 Excited about the results, Mitchell made his way to Durham to visit Rhine a few months later, convinced that ESP could one day be used somehow to make this world a better place.17 Mitchell was hardly the only one in the mid-1970s taking parapsychology very seriously. The subject was in fact being taught at about a hundred educational institutions in the United States (including Yale), and studied by PhDs in various disciplines at research centers scattered across the country. Psychiatrists were using electroencephalographs to analyze telepathic dreams, biologists were exploring precognition in animals via radioactive generators, and physicists were studying clairvoyance with the most sophisticated computers of the day. Even more impressive, perhaps, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had officially recognized parapsychology in 1969, a huge step for any field struggling for respect.18 Crucial to the organization’s decision to admit the Parapsychological Association into the AAAS was a passionate plea by legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead, an enthusiastic proponent of parapsychology for many years. “The whole history of scientific advance is full of scientists investigating phenomena that the Establishment did not believe were there,” she told the group, urging them to “vote

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in favor of this association’s work.” With Mead’s help, the vote turned out to be a landslide victory, six to one in favor.19 Right alongside these big steps forward, however, the field remained a hospitable host for the “lunatic fringe.” In fact, just as parapsychology got more scientific, so did it get less so, enough elbow room in the subject to accommodate both ends of the spectrum. Psychics claiming they could prevent airplane hijackings, pet owners believing that Rover or Fluffy had been possessed by evil spirits, and an army of UFO sighters and so-called healers had recently invaded the field. The times’ ethos of “different strokes for different folks,” as a popular song went, had allowed pretty much any idea to be at least entertained. There was “more deception, kookiness, showmanship, gullibility, and Messianism than any other discipline claiming to scientific rigor,” declared Francine du Plessix Gray of the New York Times in 1974, the challenge to separate the wheat from the chaff a difficult one.20 “The psychic-phenomena boom may contain more charlatans and conjurers, more naifs and gullibles than can be found on the stage and in the audience of ten Ringling Brothers circuses,” echoed Time magazine in its cover story of that same year, “Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier.”21 Some pet owners in the early 1970s, obviously influenced by the poppsychology trend, did indeed begin to believe their dogs and cats were much more than unenlightened quadrupeds. Pets were a lot like people, experts like Michael Fox claimed, displaying an array of emotions that could be understood if one only knew how to read the signs. Just like us, dogs had body language, suffered from psychosomatic ailments, and showed signs of sibling rivalry, their smiles or frowns useful signals to know what they were thinking and feeling. Fox, a professor of psychology at Washington University and associate director for research at the St. Louis Zoo, foreshadowed “The Dog Whisperer” by a few decades, the title of his most recent book, Understanding Your Dog: Everything You Want to Know About Your Dog but Haven’t Been Able to Ask Him, saying it all. Most interesting, dogs have not only human qualities like a sense of humor and “hang ups,” Fox believed, but psychic abilities like telepathy and clairvoyance. “Some dogs have ESP just the way some people do,” Fox said in 1972, howling when their masters died many miles away or traveling long distances to find their owners in some kind of distress.22 This was just the beginning of the psychic-dog craze of the seventies, however. In 1976, another “expert” came forward to say that based on her research, dogs had ESP, the mutts able to communicate telepathically with their owners and vice versa. “Dogs have a supersensory awareness much more acute than a human, and I’m certain there is some kind of thought transference between a person and his dog,” pronounced Sylvia

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Fisher of Staunton, Virginia, who just happened to be enrolled in a parapsychology program at a local community college. Fisher was conducting experiments not just on her Labrador retriever, Trooper, but had asked dozens of other dog owners to conduct observation tests on their pets to see if they too could read human minds. One of Fisher’s tests involved letting Trooper fall asleep in the bathroom (actually the bathtub) at the opposite end of her house, turning off all the lights, and raising the volume of her TV to eliminate any visual and audible cues. Then she would close her eyes and concentrate, giving a mental thought command for Trooper to come to her. About half the time he would, this significant enough for her to expand her research. In the “scratch test,” for example, Fisher would tell Trooper (now in the same room as her) to close his eyes and imagine fleas crawling up his neck. “Oh how much they itch!,” she exclaimed while visualizing him scratching, the process helped by her imagining what the sensation was like for the dog. Fisher achieved an even higher success rate (75 %) with this test, although she admitted that in some cases, as the New York Times reported the story, “the dog may have scratched naturally.”23 With these kinds of findings, Fisher became a bit of a sensation, at least within canine circles, invited to speak at dog-fancier clubs around the country. The following year, for example, she spoke before such a group at the Statler Hilton in New York, now posing the possibility that dogs could have not just a sixth sense but a seventh or eighth. Fisher was careful to make a distinction between ESP and supersensory awareness, however, the latter just a genetic or instinctual trait common to all dogs. “So often people are so excited about their dog’s having had an ESP experience, they don’t realize the dog’s own sensory abilities,” she made clear, the critical measures being time and distance. “You have to be sure the dog’s response is actually to telepathic command rather than routine habit,” Fisher explained to the canine lovers, good research demanding that the two test participants be unable to see or hear each other. Interestingly, Fisher believed that mindto-mind communication between a dog and a human could work either way, that is, that each could be sender and receiver. Fisher had begun to hook Trooper up to a cardiogram and an electroencephalogram, monitoring her dog’s physical reactions to ensure strict laboratory conditions while they communicated with each other. Still, it was real-life experiences that offered the most compelling evidence of dog ESP, as she told the group of fanciers. While recently boarding and training a Vizsla (a hunting dog), she went out for a short time but sensed something was wrong, having “a feeling of panic and a choking sensation.” Fisher rushed home to find the Vizsla’s collar had become caught in his crate, her telepathic connection with the dog thankfully saving him from choking. Having no doubt that

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ESP between biped and quadruped was possible, Fisher was now beginning to explore what happened to dogs after they died. Dogs, like humans, were reincarnated, she believed, this opening another chapter in the parapsychology of man’s best friend.24

SELL YOUR HONEYWELL, HONEY Reading one’s dog’s mind, or having him read yours, was positively humdrum compared to some other paranormal goings-on during the counterculture years. Interest in the occult—hidden knowledge or secrets arts—was sweeping across college campuses in the late sixties, part of the revival of pre-Christian religions among a certain segment of youth culture. Witches and warlocks were popping up like daisies in university towns, the decidedly preindustrial, nonscientific, and antiorganizational nature of sorcery and magic appealing to those looking for an alternative, truly sacred belief system. Right off Harvard Square, in fact, a bookstore called The Sphinx-Occult Books was doing quite the business, even the intellectual elite curious about what the supernatural and its nonrational ways had to offer. “I’d sooner feel that my future was being shaped by the stars or by the turn of the [tarot] cards because these would represent powers that would be more concerned about me than would either my draft board or the Pentagon,” said one undergraduate in 1969, the Vietnam War the catalyst for his existential crisis. On the West Coast, groups like the California Druids were looking to a great earth mother goddess for spiritual comfort, the patriarchy, structure, and imperialism of Judeo-Christian faiths symbolic of the major bummer that was the American establishment. Feeling dissatisfied and alienated by any and all kinds of large institutions, some young people were finding community and intimate relationships in the occult, something that academic, governmental, and even religious bureaucracies just could not do.25 By the early 1970s, the occult craze had spread beyond disaffected students to middle America. “A wave of fascination with the occult is noticeable throughout the country,” observed Time magazine in 1972, uncovering a group of Satanists in Louisville, a coven of witches in Oakland, and a gathering of The Temple of the Pagan Way in Chicago. A San Francisco bookshop, the Metaphysical Center, was a one-stop shop of the occult, offering classes in everything from palmistry to numerology to the cabala, and even the Scribner Book Store on New York City’s Fifth Avenue had devoted a whole counter to the subject. Pan Am, the airline, was offering a “Psychic Tour” of Great Britain, its $629 package including a visit to a healing center, a se´ance, and, most exciting, a day at Stonehenge

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with the head of the country’s Most Ancient Order of Druids. As a bonus, every tourist received his or her own astro-numerology chart, with flight dates carefully plotted to be favorable for safe flying. For the more serious, a course called “Witchcraft, Magic and Astrology” was being taught at New York University, just one of many colleges around the country starting to offer classes in the occult. The quest for power and control was at the root of occultism, both subscribers to it and critics agreed, the desire to become somehow godlike an attractive proposition that Christianity just did not offer. There was little doubt that the failure of science and technology to make the world a perfect or perhaps even better place was also behind occultism, the movement just one of the more extreme expressions of antimodernity sentiment in the early 1970s. Finally, the occult was fun, practitioners would tell you, an iconoclastic, slightly dangerous activity like many others thriving during the adventurous times.26 The outside-the-box nature of the occult could even be a powerful capitalist tool, some realized. A number of investors in Wall Street were drawn to the hidden knowledge of the occult, the anemic stock market of the early seventies enough of an incentive to consider “irrational” ways to pick winners and avoid losers. This was not entirely new, J. P. Morgan having regularly consulted an astrologer and Cornelius Vanderbilt ghosts to get financial advice. But a coven of witches using their powers to make money in the market certainly was, with Manhattan’s Upper East Side the perfect place for investing to happily intersect with mysticism. “The idea of the stock spreads out from our coven and nudges thousands of other people’s minds,” a high priestess named Elizabeth (whose day job was with Chase Manhattan Bank) told Esquire magazine in 1973, each member of the alternative investment club concentrating very hard on the security to make the price go up. Of every three stocks the York Avenue witches selected, two reportedly went up, a track record that matched that of the best analysts in the business.27 Other secret arts were being used to separate the bulls from the bears in the early 1970s, the mystical and paranormal realms increasingly seen as a kind of insider information. Madeleine Monnet wrote an astrology column that was syndicated in about fifty newspapers, using her celestial readings to predict the direction of the stock and individual stocks. Mrs. “Doralee H.,” a wealthy widow, relied on her stockbroker husband who appeared to her in dreams to make investment decisions. “The only times I buy or sell are when I have those dreams and he tells me what to do,” she explained, the instructions coming about once a month. Whether the advice was general (“The Dow Jones Industrial Average will drop below 700 in May 1970,” her husband had advised), or specific (“Sell your Honeywell, honey”), the dead man was almost always right. ESP too was being

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used by those who had it to make money in the market, the fancy term now applied to what used to be considered plain old hunches.28 One such person was T. O. Tulley, an eighty-year-old New Yorker who, with his clairvoyance, had gotten rich by knowing which way the market would go, as he told Esquire: The market is the sum total of millions of thoughts. My head seems to be a kind of receiving station for all those thoughts. I know when people are feeling good and when they’re worried, and I know how good or how worried. So I can always see the market’s short-term future.29

A $4 BILL With Americans from all strata of society drawn to the occult and paranormal, it was an ideal time for opportunists to strike while the iron was hot. Although a couple of Russian women, Ninel Kulagina (who claimed she could cause objects to float in midair) and Rosa Kuleshova (who could allegedly read with her fingertips while blindfolded), were worthy contenders, the undisputed parapsychological champion of the world in the 1970s was without a doubt Uri Geller.30 Geller, a former Israeli paratrooper, had been performing an amazing array of seemingly psychokinetic feats since 1971, breaking keys, spoons, metal pipes, and, to boot, Werner von Braun’s wedding ring by just staring at them. He had also allegedly erased tapes and stopped cable cars though intense concentration, his telepathic and clairvoyant skills unsurpassed by anyone in the business.31 Performing in private homes and nightclubs as well as for soldiers in Israel, Geller’s luck ran out when a team at Hebrew University duplicated all his feats and exposed him as a fraud. Geller had always (and refreshingly) admitted he occasionally used trickery when his psychic skills were not working but, with his cover completely blown, it was time to set up shop in a more receptive climate.32 Geller’s meteoric rise in the United States, not just in parapsychological circles but in American popular culture, was jump-started by one Andrija Puharich, a New York doctor and longtime dabbler in parapsychology. (Puharich’s claim to fame was writing a book in which he revealed that eating the Amanita muscaria mushroom was a great way to experience extrasensory perception, something that any Deadhead could probably have told you.) After meeting Geller in Israel in 1971, Puharich was so taken with the twenty-three-year-old and his powers that he would describe the man in Messianic terms. More than just a particularly gifted psychic, Geller was an ambassador sent by extraterrestrials (from a spaceship called Spectra located some fifty-three thousand light years away) to prepare Earthlings

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for the conquest of their planet, Puharich wrote in a new book called Uri, the author getting inspiration from “my editor in the sky.”33 Even with this kind of buildup (seemingly inspired by the magic mushrooms), Geller was not a letdown when he arrived in the United States. The tall, dark, and handsome Israeli soon gained many fans in the parapsychological community, one of them being Edgar Mitchell, who was eager to test his powers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the huge think tank in California. There Geller reportedly passed an ESP test with flying colors, consistently correctly guessing the roll of a die, picking the one can out of ten that contained an object, and reproducing drawings telepathically sent to him by researchers from a quarter mile away. After considerable debate, editors of the British journal Nature decided to publish SRI’s findings (with the very serious title “Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding”). This caused quite a stir in the scientific community and, after the story was picked up by the New York Times, the general public. (“The editors of Nature have taken an important step to stimulate scientific discourse,” observed an editor for the Times, with anyone inclined to believe in parapsychology positively giddy that the prestigious journal had acknowledged their field.) 34 Hearing about his apparently superhuman skills (some of his feats beat a million-to-one odds), wonks at the Department of Defense became intrigued, thinking its Advanced Research Projects Agency could make good use of a fellow like Geller. Licking their chops at the thought of Geller turning the Communists’ computers into scrap metal, the feds sent a team of experts to Menlo Park to investigate.35 The observers were more appalled, however, than impressed. The SRI staffers (physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, who specialized in lasers) “already believed in E.S.P., and therefore their goal was to make Geller as comfortable as possible in order to make him produce it,” said one of the independent experts, Ray Hyman. Hyman, a University of Oregon psychologist (and amateur magician), added that the think tank’s work was “incredibly sloppy.” Geller was not psychic but a very gifted conjurer, Hyman concluded, employing classic mentalists’ tricks that would and should have been exposed by more objective methods. Over the course of his six-week stint at SRI (for which he was paid $100 a day and all expenses), Geller had not even been searched for magnets, something that any good researcher would have known to do to instantly identify a fake. A magnet taped to one’s leg could make a Geiger counter click wildly, this a feat Geller had performed before researchers at the University of London who had been hoodwinked by the man.36 Rather than be ashamed or embarrassed by the government’s scathing report, however, Geller relished the controversy that surrounded him.

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Geller had famously failed to work his magic in front of a national audience on The Tonight Show, but this too did not faze the man a bit, thinking Johnny’s skepticism had a lot to do with his twenty-minute bomb. (Carson was a very respectable amateur magician, and also consulted with the professional magician James “The Amazing” Randi before the show to make sure Geller could not pull any funny business.) Geller did not even seem to mind that Randi had built a second career around exposing him as a fraud, like most entertainers believing that any publicity was good publicity. Any key could be discreetly bent with some pressure against a hard surface, Randi and other magicians showed over and over again, however, the bending of a teaspoon or even moving the hands of a watch also easily done with a little practice. Telepathically drawing was achieved by knowing which objects were most likely to be chosen (houses, planes, boats) and by carefully watching hand and elbow movements, Randi also explained to anyone and everyone who would listen.37 Others soon came forward to show how Geller did his tricks. Part of his act was to make it appear as if he could make a broken watch work again, this achieved just by holding it a few minutes and then giving it a little shake. Two New Zealand psychologists explained that many “broken” watches stop only because the oil inside gets gummy, as any jeweler could tell you, the heat of one’s hand warm enough to get it ticking again. Getting wise, SRI decided to hire another notable magician, Milbourne Christopher, as a consultant after its findings were disputed, one of the smartest organizations in the world realizing they could learn a thing or two from a professional trickster. “Unless an expert in deception is present while such tests are being conducted, these experiments are as valid as a four-dollar bill,” Christopher wrote in his book Mediums, Mystics & the Occult, funny money that even some of the world’s best and brightest apparently would accept at face value.38

A CLEAN HOUSE Magicians certainly did not like them, but serious parapsychological researchers were even more peeved by the likes of a Geller (or Puharich). The field was making real progress, but a highly visible fake pretending to be real could do a lot of damage by convincing the public that the whole business was one big funhouse mirror. Still, a host of factors were working in the field’s favor. The new, hi-tech tools used to measure and analyze phenomena in the lab were bringing parapsychology closer to science, for one thing, and the current “anything goes” state of physics allowed for the possibility of almost any paranormal event. (Time running both

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forward and backward was just one of the many interesting theories residing within quantum physics.) Anthropology too was offering a window of opportunity for parapsychology, its new mantra that culture was constructed allowing for alternative, non-Western concepts of time, space, causality, and the relationship between mind and body. Larger cultural movements such as environmentalism and antimaterialism, not to mention the general interest in altered states of consciousness and Easternism, also were putting a happy face on parapsychology in the 1970s, the Me Decade turning out to be a very good one for the field.39 Although much had changed in the field over the past few decades, the world capital of parapsychological research remained Durham, North Carolina. Duke’s lab had shut down when Rhine retired in 1965, the university’s psychology department deciding thirty-eight years had been more than enough. (“We were sick and tired of hearing our colleagues say when we met them at some symposium, ‘Oh, yes, Duke, they hunt ghosts there, don’t they?’ ” said one faculty member.) Shortly before he retired, however, Rhine had started up a new organization, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (later renamed the Institute for Parapsychology), to continue his work in the field. As at Duke, researchers at his Foundation were investigating humans’ psychokinetic and predictive powers, this time around using the most random means possible to avoid charges of bad data gathering. (Some critics considered ESP to be an acronym for Error Some Place, due much in part to the fuzzy math Rhine was said to use in his early experiments.) “Picking horses through ESP is entirely possible, in view of what we’ve found in other cases,” Rhine told the New York Times in 1974, eager as ever to publicize the potential applications of parapsychology.40 Down the road in Durham was the Psychical Research Foundation, which had split off from Duke in 1960. There the focus was out-of-body experiences among subjects whose conscious selves left their physical bodies for a spell. Most of these folks could do this whenever they liked, their imaginary trips to distant locations every bit as real as their normal conscious states. Could OOBEs (also referred to “astral voyages” by the more freethinking and “remote viewing” by the less so) be useful in some way, researchers there were trying to learn, or were they merely a way for a select group of people to save time and money when traveling?41 And with a two-year, $52,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (the first major federal grant awarded for parapsychological research), work in ESP was progressing nicely at the Maimonides Medical Center’s “dream lab” in Brooklyn. Since the early sixties, researchers at the hospital’s Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics (DPP) had been investigating the possibility of telepathic dreams, with “agents” attempting

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to transmit images to sleepers. Six subjects per week were recruited and paid $50 to have their dreams monitored while they slept in the basement of the hospital for five nights, with about half passing the screening test for having some degree of ESP. Some subjects at the DPP, like Felicia Parise, who happened to work at the hospital, appeared to have remarkable extrasensory abilities. On July 20, 1973, Parise dreamed that she saw a coworker looking at a picture of a collapsed building on the front page of the Daily News. On August 3, just two weeks later, a nearly identical picture to the one Parise described appeared on the front page of the newspaper after the Broadway Central Hotel collapsed, for researchers at the DPP a classic case of precognition. Parise was also proficient in long-distance telepathy, receiving in her dreams an image of the Crucifixion sent to her by another star subject who was in London. With such stories likely to be judged unbelievable by most, DPP staffers were careful to use outside, independent psychologists to evaluate the reports, just one of various measures to maintain as much scientific integrity as possible.42 By the following year, the DPP had expanded its scope of research to ESP in internal and experiential states of consciousness other than sleep. Focusing on which situations and individuals were most often linked with ESP, the DPP took research in the field to a level that was way beyond Rhine’s rather crude card tests. Researchers there were particularly fond of a sensory deprivation technique called Ganzfeld (“clear field”) to elicit ESP in subjects, the theory being that outside visual stimuli and noise interfered with the process. With halves of Ping Pong balls put over their eyes and white noise piped into their ears from headphones, subjects were encouraged to free associate and allow any images at all to pop into their minds during the forty-five-minute session. The kicker was that a distant “sender,” looking at a randomly chosen set of images, was trying to influence the images that appeared, all this recorded by the subject verbally describing his or her sequence of thoughts into a tape machine. The “projected” slides were then compared with the verbal transcripts, seeing if there were any direct hits. Quite often there were, the “dream lab” hoping such evidence would warrant continued funding from its sugar daddy.43 Just when it appeared to be firing on all cylinders, despite the Geller and occult sideshows, parapsychology suffered a major setback. Experiments at Rhine’s Institute of Parapsychology suggesting that rats had psychokinetic abilities were as phony as one of Milbourne Christopher’s $4 bills, it was learned in 1974, the scandal a black mark for the entire field. Jay Levy, the twenty-six-year-old director of the Institute, had falsified the data, it was revealed, the news coming as quite a shock and letdown for those believing the tests offered significant support for if not proof of psychic phenomena among animals and, perhaps, humans. Levy

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had begun working part-time at the Institute in 1969 when he was a student at the Medical College of Georgia, and was hired by Rhine as a fulltime researcher in 1973 after he graduated. Levy was soon promoted to director, his fall from grace a devastating blow for Rhine, who now had to accept his young prote´ge´’s resignation. Under great pressure to reproduce positive results from earlier tests, Levy explained, he misreported the findings, an unforgivable sin in the scientific community.44 “Professional parapsychologists maintain a clean house,” said another colleague, James Davis, one of the Institute’s technicians who suspected that Levy was fudging the data and notified Rhine. The incident was an ugly one for the field, pushing it further away from legitimate, reputable science and closer to the popular but often ridiculed flood of allegedly paranormal phenomena.45

THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER Falling into the bad crowd of the pop paranormal was the last thing parapsychology needed at a crucial juncture in its history. “Ancient astronauts,” “pyramid power,” and “lost continents” were just a few examples of what was sometimes called fringe or borderline science, the magazine and paperback bookracks filled with the bizarre stuff.46 The Secret Life of Plants, written by two journalists, was a huge success, the notion that flora reacted to humans’ thoughts and feelings a reasonable and appealing one for many readers. One researcher from England reported that young plants grew faster if their “mothers” were kept alive, for example, while another from Japan discovered that his cactus could count and add up to twenty. Yet another researcher from New Jersey mentioned in the book claimed that his plants reacted wildly (according to the tone oscillators he hooked up to them) when he had sex with his girlfriend eighty miles away (jealousy, perhaps?). Kirlian photography, which had first been developed in Russia in the late 1930s by Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, was considered equally intriguing by more sheepish sheep, the technique supposedly revealing a living organism’s “energy flow” or “aura.” With talk in new physics of such things as black holes, antimatter, quasars, and particles that travel faster than the speed of light, however, was a plant that could count that much more bizarre?47 Some goats certainly thought so. Knowing that a certain percentage of the public would always believe in such things, especially during periods of economic uncertainty and political instability like the early 1970s, most scientists realized it was not worth spending time and energy debunking pop paranormalism, doing so also considered beneath their dignity.

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But with “parascience” clearly out of control by America’s Bicentennial, however, some of the nation’s best thinkers decided to band together to try to nip the movement in the bud. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, as the few dozen scientists, philosophers, and others called themselves (part of the American Humanist Association), were concerned about how easily the public accepted parascientific, pseudoscientific, and just plain nonscientific beliefs and theories. “Beliefs that sophisticated people would not have entertained 10 years ago are now being entertained,” said Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at State University of New York–Buffalo and cochair of the committee, truly worried that the movement was dumbing down American society. “Perhaps we ought not to assume that the scientific enlightenment will continue indefinitely; for all we know, like the Hellenic civilization, it may be overwhelmed by irrationalism, subjectivism, and obscurantism,” Kurtz wrote in announcing the formation of the committee, which included intellectual heavyweights like Isaac Asimov, B. F. Skinner, and Carl Sagan as well as, not surprisingly, James Randi.48 It was an article about astrology, of all things, that set Kurtz and his colleagues off on their mission to stamp out Americans’ belief in the paranormal. Kurtz was rather amazed that many readers responded negatively to an article critical of astrology in the Association’s journal, The Humanist, making him realize the problem was much bigger than he originally thought. Astrology had become a historical curiosity by 1900 but now, three-quarters of a century later, it had become widely popular, a troubling trend. Kurtz rallied his best troops, their sights set on debunking everything from psychokinesis to faith healing to reincarnation to UFOs to poltergeists (and everyone from Uri Geller to Jeane Dixon to Edgar Cayce). Attacking the paranormal or superstitious trend of the moment seemed to make the most sense for Kurtz, with astrology recently eclipsing exorcism in popularity. (The hit movie The Exorcist had been released in 1973.) Now in 1976, immortality was coming on strong, a result of a flurry of reports of near-death experiences. “This may be the big new thing,” he mused, ready to take on the fools who believed in life after death.49 A year later, Kurtz’s group took on even more powerful force—the American media—going so far as to file a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. NBC had recently aired paranormally themed shows such as The Bermuda Triangle, In Search of Noah’s Ark, and The UFO Incident, the appearance that they were factual documentaries misleading and potentially dangerous to Kurtz. NBC explained that the shows were simply entertainment rather than news but Kurtz was not done with Big Business’s appropriation of the

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paranormal. New York Telephone’s “Horoscopes by Phone” was his next target, this too part of a red tide of irrationality sweeping the country. “There is no guarantee that a society so infected by unreason will be resistant to even the most virulent programs of dangerous sects,” he announced at a 1977 press conference, urging producers of television and radio shows about the paranormal to first consult scientific authorities to present a more balanced view. Kurtz was also mad at The Reader’s Digest, alleging its editors were publishing stories about psychic phenomena as factual when they were speculative at best. It could not be denied that the magazine was encouraging readers to come forward with their personal stories of the paranormal. In 1976, the magazine offered $3,000 for 2,500-word “chronicles of striking, hitherto unpublished psychic experiences that could be verified through witnesses or appropriate documentation,” incentive enough for lots of readers to write down their stories, mail them in, and hope they would be picked for publication.50 At least one of Kurtz’s cohorts soon realized there might be better things to do with their time, however. Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist at Eastern Michigan University who had cochaired Kurtz’s committee, defected from the group the following year, seeing little danger in the rising popularity of the paranormal. In fact, the greater interest in the paranormal was a good thing, he felt, a sign that people were seeking answers to unexplainable phenomena. “I think this is only healthy,” Truzzi said, believing Kurtz had strayed from the committee’s original mission to investigate the paranormal to simply denounce it. Indeed, the journal the committee created to publish its findings was originally called The Zetetic (seeking, proceeding by inquiry) but was quickly renamed The Skeptical Inquirer, an indication of the group’s bias against the paranormal. Truzzi had no doubt that “99 percent of occultation is empirically false,” but still thought work by such people as J. B. Rhine (ESP), J. Allen Hynek (UFOs), and Michel Gauquelin (astrology) should be examined before they were condemned. “The committee is tarring everybody with the same brush,” Truzzi argued, the risk that the paranormal may not be “just a bunch of kooks but what I would call a proto-science.”51 Truzzi had even created a “taxonomy of occultism” to differentiate between the various levels of belief and make sure the scientific was not being confused with the mystical. Proto-science (e.g., parapsychology) was at the top of the heap, followed by quasi-science (e.g., astrology) and then pragmatic occultism (e.g., magic). Shared and solitary occultism brought up the rear in Truzzi’s view, with phenomena like messages from spirits having no chance of empirical validation.52 Some others in academia left the window open for virtually any kind of psychic phenomenon to one day be validated, however. More colleges,

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including the University of Southern California and Iowa State, were offering courses in parapsychology in the late seventies, no doubt catering to students’ interest in the field. Despite (or because of) their popularity, the parapsychology courses at Iowa State, taught by David Wertha, an associate professor in the family environment department, whatever that was, were not without controversy. Wertha, who used to teach music, began dabbling in the subject in 1970 and was soon bringing local psychics to his classes, not your usual college experience. After being elected president of the Iowa Federation of Astrologers in 1975, Wertha got permission from a faculty committee to teach parapsychology, his courses covering a wide range of psychic phenomena including astrology, astral projections, ESP, auras, and psychokinesis. One of his most popular courses was University Studies 313G, “Your Former Lives,” its purpose, according to the college catalog, “to explore the meaning of life through the reincarnation theory.” Wertha was well qualified to teach the class, believing he may very well have been in previous incarnations an eleventhcentury monk and an Indian boy who died in 1825 at age nine.53 Wertha’s credentials were not the issue in the dust-up that took place in Ames in 1978, however. After the campus newspaper, the Iowa State Daily, published an article about Wertha’s alleged ability to see auras (“the visible field of color around people,” as he defined them), another faculty member, John Patterson, took exception to the man’s claims, and wrote a letter to the paper. Patterson, who taught materials science and engineering, challenged Wertha to put his aura-detecting abilities where his mouth was by taking part in a scientifically rigorous test. Wertha refused, but Patterson would not give up the fight, appealing to the faculty, university administration, and the student body to confront the man’s claims. Wertha saw Patterson’s objections less of an intellectual nature and more of a personality issue, noting that the man was fortytwo (the start of “the seven-year Saturn cycle, when male menopause hits”) and a Pisces, who “tend to polarize one way or another.”54 Wertha’s astrological reading notwithstanding, the brouhaha was not over, moving from the pages of the Daily to faculty discussions, the Des Moines Register, and, finally, the state legislature. Wertha “seems to be teaching a pagan religion,” said State Senator Bass Van Gilst, and “to me, it’s not the duty of land-grant colleges to pursue these things.” Even James Randi got involved, offering Wertha his standard $10,000 if he could prove any of his claims. The administration refused to get involved, however, making Patterson try a different tactic. Students at Iowa State soon had the opportunity to take a much different seminar, “Critical Judgment in the Age of Aquarius,” taught by none other than Professor Patterson.55

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A UNIVERSAL UNITY Given the frequent sightings of things like unidentified flying objects and “prehistoric” creatures in the late seventies, Patterson might have been thankful that Wertha was not going as far as he could have in his parapsychology courses. The phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was fueling UFO fever, with anything and everything in the sky (including the occasional Frisbee and dinner plate) possibly filled with or sent by those from a distant world. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster were also having their respective days in the sun, with books about and sightings of the elusive critters up. Perhaps the most curious example of late seventies supernaturalism was birthdate-determined biorhythms, however, in which people believed that when they were born dictated their physical, emotional, and intellectual performance. Were you a twenty-three-day, twenty-eight-day, or thirtythree-day cycle person? A handy-dandy biorhythm calculator advertised on late-night TV could tell you, an offer many consumers just could not refuse.56 Although ghosts were not what they used to be in the 1970s, having receded into the shadows of the supernatural as the psychic universe turned inward, they still occasionally made their presence known. One ghost wanting some attention was a five-foot, three-inch, Jacksonian-era soldier who appeared in a barrack at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 1972. Several cadets there swore they saw the nineteenth-century officer in full uniform complete with musket, something West Pointers were not likely to do simply as a prank. The apparition did not stay long, quickly emerging from and disappearing into a wall (which then reportedly got ice-cold), but lingered long enough for the cadets to be able to identify him from the school’s records. Not surprisingly, given the history of the place, this was not the first spirit to call West Point home. The superintendent’s mansion was said to be haunted by the ghost of an Irish cook named Molly and, a half century earlier, a priest had to be called to a house on Professor’s Row to exorcise a spirit that had terrified two servant girls so much they ran outside naked as jaybirds.57 With the supernatural generating millions of dollars by the late seventies, however, ghosts were not just things that went bump in the night but a potential business opportunity. By 1977, the United States seemed to be catching up to England in number of ghosts, perhaps because the country had recently reached the ripe old age of two hundred years. Whatever the reason, America was apparently spirit infested enough for the United States Travel Service to put out a tourism guide called “The

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Supernatural—Haunted Houses and Legendary Ghosts,” the eight-page booklet covering twenty-nine sites in eight states. With ten sites each, Louisiana and Virginia were far and away the leaders of the ghostly pack, the District of Columbia, California, and Maine coming in with two apiece and Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware accounting for just a single restless spirit.58 Like their older English kin, American ghosts appeared to be drawn to places with a strong emotional past. American ghosts were especially partial to Louisiana plantations, according to the guide, with a French governess occasionally making an appearance at The Myrtles in St. Francisville, a girl occupying the Parlange house in New Roads, and a bunch of spirits at St. Maurice who loudly made their presence known in the huge mansion by turning the pages of a calendar. Virginia was home to the most ghosts in one place, with at least ten ex-soldiers still guarding Fort Monroe in Hampton. That state was also host to the ghost of General Robert E. Lee, who was said to occupy his boyhood home in Alexandria as, interestingly, a child. Although “Aunt Pratt,” who made noises when her portrait at the Shirley Plantation in Charles City County, Virginia, was not hung quite right was a viable candidate for the most irksome ghost in America, most would probably give the award to the anonymous one who continually emptied liquor decanters at the Governor’s Mansion in Dover, Delaware.59 And while the ghost of Abraham Lincoln paced the halls of the White House in Washington when things were not going so well for the country, a few blocks away Pierre L’Enfant, the Frenchman who designed the city, marched around the Capitol Building, still waiting for Congress to pay him.60 The downgrading of ghosts from major spiritual force in the first half of the twentieth century to lighthearted tourism fodder in the second half was a reflection of how scientific the supernatural had become. As parapsychology closed in on a century of scientific study in the late seventies, some viewed the field as facing a kind of resistance that was similar to that of other great historical achievements. Copernicus’s concept of the universe, William Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation, even the Wright brothers’ first air flight were viewed as unlikely if not impossible in their time (the New York Times did not even initially cover the latter story out of disbelief). It was conceivable that psychic ability would perhaps one day be put in the same illustrious category. The resistance to parapsychology was also evident by comparing contemporary developments that did not face the same kind of scrutiny and criticism. Acupuncture, for example, was becoming widely accepted as therapeutic although Western science did not know how it worked, a similar leap of faith not enjoyed by parapsychology. Why was this so? “One of the basic difficulties in

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understanding parapsychology is that its claims are a distinct challenge to our contemporary world-view,” suggested Robert Ornstein in 1977, the possibility that people could know things before they actually took place or could communicate with others simply by thinking just too much for most of us to deal with. Until definitive proof of such phenomena were produced, and even then maybe not so, skeptics’ myopia, preconceptions, or outright prejudice would prevent parapsychology from being considered real science. “This is the kind of thing I wouldn’t believe in even if it were true,” wrote an anonymous reviewer in The Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineers of parapsychology, absolutely no amount of scientific data enough to convince him that the field was not hokum.61 Those who did accept the claims of parapsychology, however, were nothing short of giddy when they thought of the possibilities of extrasensory perception. “Today some scientists tell us that Psi is our new frontier,” wrote Laile Bartlett, a visiting scholar at University of California– Berkeley in 1977, the people she spoke with gushing with optimism during a not particularly optimistic time in America. “They see a future world where we can be in instant touch with others around the globe, hurdle time and space with a leap of the mind, know the future and past as well as the present, and cure our own ills through the power of the mind,” she continued, there being no doubt that “we are now in the midst of a great Psi explosion.” One person still gung-ho on psi was Louisa Rhine, who had by now compiled fifteen thousand “validated” cases of precognition. “Premonition registries” had been set up in New York and California, Bartlett had found, places where those with hunches about the future could formally document them. A couple of reported hits were the Chappaquiddick incident and Martin Luther King’s assassination, events that could possibly have been avoided if there was a practical way to make use of premonition.62 A long shot at best, perhaps, but other avenues of extrasensory perception were being successfully applied in the real world. In Toronto, a major retailer had hired a man with precognitive abilities to identify people about to shoplift, a real-life example of the story in Philip Dick’s Minority Report. The man had reportedly picked out thousands of people preparing to commit a future theft, although it was not clear how the company was using this incredible information. Long used for detective work, psychics were increasingly being brought in to solve or, even better, prevent crimes, with locating missing people their special forte. Psychics were also now being used to locate water, minerals, and archeological treasures, their clairvoyant skills able to detect what lay buried deep underground. One such psychic was Aron Abrahamsen, who helped an archeologist find human remains in Flagstaff, Arizona, that were over one hundred

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thousand years old, his fifty-one out of fifty-eight hit rate better than any other geologist tool. Psychic healings too were on the rise as holistic medicine emerged in the late seventies, with a rising acceptance among Western physicians that consciousness and “energy flow” influenced the body. “Treating disease through the mind is the coming thing in medicine,” said osteopath Irving Oyle, one of a growing number of American doctors beginning to ask, as he did, “If you can think yourself sick, why not think yourself well?”63 Because its results were readily apparent (and its cause humanitarian), psychic detective work was considered a great example of how parapsychology could be of practical use in the future. Families would typically bring in psychics after first the police and then a private detective failed to turn up anything. A man named Gerard Croiset in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was making headlines around the world with his psychic detective work, while in the United States a woman named Dorothy Allison was considered one of the go-to people to locate missing persons. Allison had helped dozens of police departments through the 1970s, also coming to the aid of many families looking for a loved one. The New Jersey housewife, who accepted no money for her services, explained her ability as seeing a series of “pictures” in her mind, as if a television set was blinking on and off. She could then describe what she saw, often in vivid detail—a neighborhood, the color of a house, its street name and number, and the names of people the missing person was with all appearing to her. Although Allison, like most psychics, recognized her abilities as a child, her first detective case took place in 1967 when she awoke from a dream, seeing a young boy who had drowned in a nearby river. The boy’s body had not yet been recovered but Allison knew where it was, convincing the skeptical police she was psychic by precisely describing what he was wearing (and informing them that his shoes were on the wrong feet). Because she also had precognition, Allison could not tell if an image of a missing person she saw in her mind applied to the past, present, or future, as odd a phenomenon as could be imagined.64 Locating missing people, catching crooks, finding relics, and healing the sick through extrasensory perception were certainly nice, but it was the potential spiritual implications of psi that held the most power. “Psi presents us with hints of a universal unity,” Bartlett wrote, with individual consciousness quite possibly “part of a consciousness we all share.” Psychics’ sense that we are all connected, our selves woven together into a larger whole, spoke to the deep mystical or religious foundation of the supernatural that was perhaps most responsible for its enduring belief and popularity. Interestingly, physicists were coming to this same conclusion, the new quantum laws of nature dependent on viewing the physical

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universe as an interconnected organism. It was this commonality between the psychic and the scientific that allowed Edgar Mitchell to have his “peak experience” while in space, or what he would later call the merging of “the boundaries of the self with the cosmos.” “We can’t all go the moon but perhaps the deeper awareness of Psi processes can provide the same perspective,” the ex-astronaut proposed, this the ultimate reason why parapsychological research was worth pursuing.65

SPECIAL DEPARTMENT NO. 8 Merging the boundaries of the self with the cosmos was indeed a noble aim, but there were more immediate concerns about parapsychology. Even as the Cold War cooled down in the late seventies, the fear that the Soviets were making advances in parapsychology that could be used against us persisted. These fears spiked in 1977 when a Soviet e´ migre´ physicist named August Stern told the press that his ex-countrymen were doing secret work in the field, specifically in the area of psychic energy (or “psi particles”). Now living in Paris, Stern admitted he had been one of sixty researchers working in a secret Siberian lab known as “Special Department No. 8” in the late 1960s, with the KGB occasionally stopping in to check on the scientists’ progress. Stern’s work there involved trying to map out energy the way that Dimitry Mendeleyev had done in chemistry with his periodic table of elements, his theory being that psi particles could be the missing pieces in the energy puzzle. (Mendeleyev’s table originally had blank spaces that were eventually filled in.) Stern found nothing to support this, but was compelled to go public with a full description of the lab’s work that covered a wide variety of parapsychological phenomena.66 The buzz surrounding Stern’s revelation (the story appeared on page one of the New York Times) was compounded by some Cold War action right out of Robert Ludlum. The very same week that Stern came clean, Robert C. Toth, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was picked up by the KGB in Moscow, accused of receiving state secrets about parapsychology. Toth had just been handed a twenty-five-page document on Soviet’s work in parapsychology on the street by an alleged Russian scientist when the agents swooped in, making American government officials believe it was a classic case of entrapment. Toth was released (actually deported) five days later, but the battle between the superpowers for the mind was not over. American scientists had better learn as much as possible about parapsychology before the Russians got the edge in thought control or psychological warfare, the Menninger Foundation had recently warned,

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prompted perhaps by something Leonid Brezhnev had said a couple years back. In 1975, Brezhnev urged that his country and the United States agree to halt research into weapons “more terrible” than anything that had yet to be developed, what that meant not exactly clear. American intelligence concluded that the premier had “some kind of rays” in mind, the Soviet Union’s on again/off again efforts in parapsychology no doubt informing their view.67 While many American scientists working in the field had serious doubts that the Russians were way ahead of us in the “mind race” (“from some of the approaches they’re taking, I don’t think they have a good grasp of the essence of the phenomenon,” said R. A. McConnell, a professor of biophysics at the University of Pittsburgh and cofounder of the Parapsychological Association), the matter remained concerning nonetheless.68 In fact, a document recently declassified by the CIA reported that not only did a number of Russians allegedly have psychokinetic powers but also psychic energy that could be stored in a “psychotronic” generator. With such capabilities, the Soviets could perhaps one day be able to paranormally “read” our top-secret documents, influence the thoughts of our leaders, disable military equipment and spacecraft, and even cause the death of an important official, the agency warned, making parapsychological espionage a priority. Charles Tart, a parapsychologist at University of California–Davis, estimated that about a half million dollars were annually being spent on research in the field in the United States while the Russians were spending the equivalent of $50 million a year, putting us at a severe disadvantage.69 Now not just a plaything for the lunatic fringe but quite possibly a key component of our national security and the military-industrial complex, parapsychology was moving into the big leagues. “Slowly but steadily, parapsychology is edging toward scientific respectability after years of lurking on the fringes,” observed U.S. News & World Report in 1978, thinking that this “stepchild of science” was “start[ing] to win friends.” With new, better research by the government, military, medicine, and academia in extrasensory perception leading to real-world applications in not just defense and law enforcement but areas like archeology and energy, the field was now being treated as an unusual but potentially lucrative investment opportunity. Parapsychology could be equal to atomic energy as a discovery, its most avid supporters were saying, assuming we were able to break through the rock hard wall of Western thinking and allow our subconscious to run the show. Most people had and unconsciously used psychic abilities but they were repressed by our overdependence on our five perceived senses, some theorists were again saying, emphasizing the “psychology” of parapsychology.70

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Ordinary Americans needed little convincing that parapsychology could be the next big thing. While the 1970s were an extraordinarily cynical time, a full half of Americans believed in ESP, according to a 1978 Gallup Poll, and even more (64%) among those with some college education. Amazingly, more than one-third (37%) of adults said they believed in precognition, meaning for them the future could be and was predicted. In a nutshell, the inverted bell curve of parapsychology—sheep overly predisposed towards believing in the supernatural and goats overly predisposed towards not believing in it—was flattening out as the subject became more mainstream. Helping to fuel this trend was “Psi Search,” a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit about the history of scientific investigation of psychic phenomena. Between 1976 and 1978, more than 2 million Americans saw the exhibit, which was based on the book of the same name, helping to separate fact from fiction regarding extrasensory perception.71 The flattening of the curve of parapsychology was a symbolic reminder that the late 1960s and 1970s had been the best of times and the worst of times for the supernatural. The counterculture era, with its tolerance for and even encouragement of mind expansion and altered states of consciousness, had served as an ideal climate for the supernatural to flourish. Significant strides in research were made, bringing the field closer to science. At the same time, however, the supernatural had spun off into some pretty odd directions, this understandably attracting a new, professional kind of skeptic. As the consciousness revolution wound down, it was not exactly clear where the supernatural would go next, but it was clear that the field was on the brink of something big. A new age for the supernatural indeed beckoned, as more and more Americans looked to the unexplainable for meaning and purpose in their lives.

Chapter 5

The New Age

You are God. —Ramtha (a thirty-five-thousand-year-old Sumerian warrior speaking through channeler J. Z. Knight)

In May 1988, one hundred women gathered at the YWCA in White Plains, the upscale suburb of New York City, for a seminar called “Decision Making, Astrology and Parapsychology.” The group, many of whom worked for Fortune 500 companies like Merrill Lynch, IBM, and Texaco, were eager to hear speakers like Kandra Orr, an authority on reincarnation. “Many people are beginning a journey toward enlightenment,” Orr told the members of the Women’s Network, informing them of the benefits of having past lives. Next up was Craig Junjulas, author of Psychic Tarot, who had the women channel energy into their heads so there was “enough room in the body for the higher self.” Last was Kim Donnell, an astrologer, who, while taking the women through the complexities of the Zodiac, explained that, “every moment has an essence to it.”1 The meeting of the Westchester Women’s Network revealed how central what was often referred to as “New Age” thinking had become among middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans by the late 1980s. One part Eastern philosophy, one part human potential movement, and one part not quite identifiable (as in UFOs and crypto zoology), New Age grew to become a powerful social movement, swallowing much of the supernatural in the process. With people like Nancy Reagan and Shirley MacLaine serving as inspiration, belief in the supernatural had

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become not only mainstream but a kind of status symbol, a sign that one was indeed on a “journey toward enlightenment.” Many Americans were interested in taking part in this journey, the destination offering not just a higher level of consciousness but, perhaps, a radical transformation of society.

MAGIC OR MIRACLE Even before the New Age began to snowball in the mid-1980s, belief in the supernatural was as strong as ever in the United States, according to polls. Sheep were outnumbering goats not only in the general population but, amazingly, within the scientific community. The goatlike editors of the Zetetic Scholar were more than a bit surprised when they received the results of their poll asking American scientists if they believed in extrasensory perception, with 9 percent of more than a thousand professors saying they viewed ESP as an “established fact” and 45 percent “a likely possibility.” These were numbers that one would not expect for straitlaced biologists, chemists, and physicists, a sign that parapsychological research was making significant progress. The attitude of the man responsible for the poll, Mahlon Wagner, a psychologist at State University of New York–Oswego, seemed to reflect that of the people he surveyed. “I used to be a total skeptic but I’ve become a little more accepting because there are good, honest scholars in the field,” Wagner told the New York Times in 1980, the new money being poured into parapsychology no doubt playing a role in scientists’ open-mindedness. At Princeton, for example, Robert Jahn, dean of engineering and applied science, was using private money to fund his psychic research, with preliminary results indicating that telepathy could change a thermometer reading and the distance between two objects. And at Washington University, physicist Peter Phillips had landed a half-million-dollar grant from McDonnell Douglas for psychic research, one of the biggest ever awarded in the field.2 Another sign of scientists’ increasing tolerance for parapsychology was giving the subject its own special session at the recent annual meeting of the American Physical Society, the first time that ever happened. Most of the five hundred scientists attending the session listened with a very big grain of salt but listen they did, that itself a victory for the field. The star of the session was Helmut Schmidt, now of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, an institution backed by a Texas oil millionaire. Schmidt, a physicist, was finding that the natural process of radioactive decay could be influenced by mental concentration, something that a lot of scientists at the conference thought was utterly ridiculous (especially

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because it appeared the effect could work backwards in time, meaning that things happened not only in the present but also in the past). “That is an outrageous idea from a conventional standpoint,” Schmidt admitted, “but it may be that some quantum effects not yet understood will account for just such an outcome.”3 Schmidt was not the only scientist who was tampering with the laws of nature, however. Brian Josephson, a Cambridge University scientist who had won the Nobel prize in physics in 1973, was also finding that parapsychology might follow its own set of rules. “Physical law itself may have to be redefined in terms of some new principles,” Josephson said, seeing direct parallels between his work in quantum mechanics and psychic phenomena like psychokinesis and remote viewing.4 Harold Puthoff of SRI agreed that remote viewing, which he defined as “accurately describing locations or objects blocked from ordinary perception,” presented some serious challenges to the time-space continuum. How this occurred remained unclear, but Puthoff’s explanation—“Our understanding of our relationship with both space and time is incomplete”—could be said of many scientific mysteries.5 Regardless of the science behind it, remote viewing was continuing to find some practical uses in the real world. Growing numbers of police forces around the country were using psychics to locate missing persons, for example, what had been just a last ditch, what-can-it-hurt effort now more of a legitimate investigative tool. Many psychics had offered tips to Chicago police in the 1982 Tylenol tampering case (although none panned out), and the FBI was teaching police how to effectively use such folks at its academy in Washington. “We take the words of informants, so why can’t we accept the work of someone with a God-given gift?,” asked Lieutenant Jerry Harmon of the Cook County Police Department, a psychic having proved valuable in fifteen of the twenty-five cases in which he consulted her. An organization, Professional Psychics United, had been formed as a sort of clearinghouse for those willing to volunteer their services and, because one had to prove one’s ability to join, to weed out the fair number of fakers who just wanted to play cops and robbers. Even the best psychics working with police forces like Texas-based John Catchings and his mother Bertie never said they were 100 percent accurate, claiming to be dead-on just 20 percent of the time, of some value 60 percent of the time, and off the track the remaining 20 percent. “If I can convince them of psychic phenomena, I can convince anyone,” Catchings told McCall’s in 1983, South Texas policemen not especially known for solving crimes by vibrations.6 Catchings was wrong, however, with one group of people making even South Texas policemen seem like gullible chumps. Through its journal

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The Skeptical Inquirer, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) took on all supernatural comers, including crime-fighting psychics. The journal, which had ten thousand subscribers in 1983, was happy to report that every one of the psychics who offered tips on the recent string of murders in Atlanta were wrong (including Dorothy Allison, whose forty-two names of suspects were all off the mark). As a self-proclaimed “spokesman for rationality,” The Skeptical Inquirer documented every major gaffe made by Jeane Dixon (“the unsinkable rubber duck of prophecy”) and took special pleasure debunking SRI’s Geller experiments. “Some of these reports would be exciting—if only they were true,” said the journal’s editor Kendrick Frazier, an unlikely scenario given the contributors’ decidedly goatlike leanings.7 CSICOP’s campaign against parapsychology escalated through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the group not above doing things like pressuring universities to cancel courses being offered in the subject. Some members like Ray Hyman and Marcello Truzzi thought the organization was going too far, however, the former seeing in its members a “frightening fundamentalism” with a “witch-hunting” mind-set, the latter describing the group as an “inquisitional body.” 8 (Another founding member, astronomer Dennis Rawlins, had defected in 1980 after coming to the conclusion that CSICOP researchers had used bad science in their attempt to debunk French statistician Michel Gauquelin’s claim that athleticism was linked to astrology. The sTARBABY controversy, as it became known, permanently cast doubt on the organization’s own motives and methods.) Although Paul Kurtz, the founder of the group, gave him a run for his money, the most skeptical of CSICOP’s skeptical inquirers had to be the magician “The Amazing Randi.” As the most famous goat in America and probably the world, Randi spent much more of his time challenging the claims of parapsychologists, psychics, seers, and mediums than sawing women in half or wriggling free from a straitjacket while dangling over Niagara Falls (his most celebrated stunt). Randi’s simple, well-articulated position was that logic should prevail in a rational world, a premise that everything about the supernatural broke in spades. By 1981, some three hundred dowsers, ouija boardists, and other assorted believers had already tried to claim the $10,000 he offered to anyone who could definitely demonstrate evidence of a paranormal event, the money still sitting safely in Randi’s bank account.9 Randi’s path to debunker extraordinaire was filled with interesting twists and turns. As a boy genius in Toronto, Randall Zwinge immersed himself in the world of psychics, eventually joining a local church in which se´ances and precognition were part of the services. One fateful day when he was fifteen, Zwinge detected that the pastor was using magic

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tricks, and leapt onstage to expose the fake. The teenager soon found himself in jail, the traumatic experience making him vow that one day he would have the power to take on such charlatans. After spending some time as a professional mentalist (going by the names “The Great Randall, Telepath” and, even better, “Prince Ibis”), Randi switched to magic, eventually becoming as or nearly as good as his hero, Houdini, and teacher, Blackstone. Recently, Randi had been giving out “Uri Awards” to promoters of paranormalism every April Fools’ Day, the bent spoon mounted on a transparent base a fitting tribute. “Do you really need all that stuff to have a beautiful, wonderful life?,” Randi asked sheep, the real magic of this world more than sufficient to waste time with supernatural nonsense.10 With all of Randi’s efforts to squash parapsychology and its supernatural cousins like a bug going to naught, however, the magician decided to take his mission to the next level. Hoping to discredit the work going on at Washington University funded by the McDonnell Foundation, Randi arranged for two teenage magicians to meet with the researchers in St. Louis and tell them they had paranormal powers. Using their skills, the tricksters then fooled the research team into believing they were indeed psychic, exactly as Randi intended. Randi considered what he called “Project Alpha” a clear win, and called a press conference in January 1983 to toot his horn. The Washington University researchers were “far too confident of their abilities to detect fraud, and refused outside assistance because those who offered it lacked academic credentials,” Randi told the media at the press conference sponsored by Discover magazine, also boasting of his victory over the “classic fatheads” on an NBC television special, “Magic or Miracle.”11 Randi’s hoax backfired, however, as even some other critics of the paranormal cried foul. Truzzi, the editor of the Zetetic Scholar, felt Randi’s “outside policeman thing” was making enemies out of psychic researchers and magicians, this not helping anybody. Even worse, the stunt was ethically questionable, and would have been cause for possible censure had Randi been a psychologist because damage to the field had been done. Hyman, like Randi a member of CSICOP, argued that such tactics did more harm than good, with those under attack more likely to ignore critics rather than hear them out. Challenging parapsychologists to come up with the goods was one thing, most agreed, but Randi’s throwing a monkey wrench into honest inquiry was quite another and, in short, crossed the line.12 More useful criticism of the supernatural and its believers came from people like David F. Marks, a New Zealand psychologist. Marks argued in Nature that pervasive paranormalism had much to do with our cultural traditions that were steeped in religion and magic, with scientific thinking a relatively new arrival on the scene that had yet to erode these

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entrenched ideas. Psychology also played a major role in the enduring power of the paranormal, Marks argued, with fantasies and hallucinations a staple of human thinking, especially when in some kind of altered state of consciousness. Finally, information that is unexpected or ambiguous was often misinterpreted or selectively perceived to support preexisting beliefs, our culturally based mind-set making us prone to illusion, error, and fraud.13 Based on this broader, more rational critical perspective, psychic phenomena were increasingly referred to as “anomalies” in the 1980s, the term a more objective way to describe things or events that did not fit within or contradicted accepted science. A psychic experience, encounter with a ghost, UFO sighting, or run-in with Big Foot were all now considered prime examples of anomalies, their very reality the issue that was in question.14

WHO YA GONNA CALL? With anomalies of all kinds on Americans’ minds, Hollywood eagerly turned them into boffo box office business. Although much scarier ghosts could be found in other movies in the 1980s (The Shining, Beetlejuice, the three Poltergeist films, and the five (!) Nightmare on Elm Streets), arguably none could match Ghostbusters and its sequel for generating awareness of supernatural phenomena. Released in June 1984, Ghostbusters took America by storm, the #1 movie at the box office for seven consecutive weeks (when it was bumped to second place by Prince’s Purple Rain). In the film, Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), and Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) are unemployed parapsychology professors who, desperate for work, go into the ghost investigation and removal business. Using a former fire station as their office, the Ghostbusters struggle initially. After capturing a ghost with their nuclear-powered “proton packs” and advertising on local television, however, the trio hit pay dirt when they learn a demonic creature named Zuul is haunting the Central Park West apartment of Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver). The Ghostbusters have to deal with not only Zuul but also the Environmental Protection Agency and the mayor, who think they pose a danger and put them in jail. Soon, however, the much more powerful Gozer the Gozarian enters the scene, and the team (joined by Winston Zeddmore played by Ernie Hudson) engages in a battle with the ancient Sumerian entity and his doglike beast Gytrash with nothing less than the survival of the world at stake.

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Ghostbusters was not just a hit movie but, with its radio-friendly theme song, catchphrase (“Who ya gonna call?”), and “No Ghosts” logo, a cultural phenomenon. Besides being the most lucrative movie Columbia Pictures had ever made, many of the film’s elements were quickly knocked off. The suffix “busters” was applied to a plethora of political candidates and sports teams, for example, and an episode of the television show Different Strokes had Gary Coleman and friend bust a ghost, ectoplasmic slime and all. A Ghostbusters fan club too had been formed by the fall of 1984, each member receiving not just an official identification card and quarterly magazine but an insurance policy protecting him or her against “sliming” and a certificate of “anti-paranormal proficiency.”15 Although the movie was of course fictional, Aykroyd, the originator of the Ghostbusters concept, was quite a supernaturalist. Besides collecting ghost stories and knowing the hot spots for spooks in New York City (like St. Mark’s Church and Apartment 77 of the Dakota), Aykroyd was a member of the ASPR and could occasionally be found reading up on the subject at the Society’s library on West 73rd Street. Meeting George H. W. Bush at one of his movie screenings, he told the president-elect to “call me if there was any trouble at the White House with the ghost of Mary Todd Lincoln,” another indication he knew his supernatural stuff. In the 1988 sequel, the Ghostbusters find themselves bankrupt, having been sued by the city for the mess they created (including the gooey remains of the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man). Spengler has regained his job as a Columbia University professor, while Stantz is running an occult bookstore and Venkman is the host of a talk show called World of the Psychic. A federal restraining order forbids the team to bust any more ghosts but, after one snatches Barrett’s baby, the men and their “Ecto-1,” a tricked-out 1959 Cadillac ambulance, are back in action.16 Ghost busting in real life was a lot less exciting. With no Ghostbusters armed with Proton Packs to be found, New Jerseyans often called A. J. Rauber of North Brunswick should they suspect a restless spirit was occupying their house. Rauber, whose day job was in air conditioning and refrigeration (ideal experience to detect the icy chill of a ghost, one would think), investigated paranormal activity as part of his broader interest in historical buildings, especially their architecture. Rauber got the paranormal bug as a teenage when he read Hans Holzer’s Ghost Hunter, one of the seminal books on hauntings. While working for the Somerset County Historical Society, Rauber would hear many a tale of haunted houses, not too surprising given that a fair number of buildings in the area dated back to the 1700s. Rauber’s investigations included the Spye House in Port Monmouth (believed to be the first residence in the state), the Old Dutch Parsonage in Somerville, and the Metlar House in Piscataway,

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these places exhibiting the classic signs of paranormal activity—repeated sightings of unidentifiable figures and the sounds of footsteps, furniture being moved, and muffled conversations.17 Rauber, who preferred the term “earthbound spirit” or “entity” to “ghost,” was every bit as professional as the Hollywood version if a lot less hilarious and reckless. Rauber’s first order of business was classifying the event, with “crisis apparitions” (where one appears in a climate of emotional stress) different from “purpose hauntings” (where a spirit is trying to tell someone something). Determining if the house had recently been structurally altered was also important (the dead apparently found major remodeling as stressful as the living), as was learning if domestic problems were afoot (divorce was hard on everybody). Despite popular belief, ghosts had not all died tragically, according to Rauber, nor did they exist only in old houses although they were more likely to be found there simply because more people had occupied the buildings.18 Rauber had other thoughts on the matter that would have made the Ghostbusters proud. It was important to make a distinction between hauntings and “psychic impressions,” the latter, in Rauber’s words, “events from the past that imprint themselves into the atmosphere and replay themselves for any unsuspecting person who happens to be at the right place at the right time.” A strong sense that one was being watched meant that one perhaps was, with the powerful odor of pipe tobacco, cologne, or perfume additional cause to suspect there was a spirit nearby. Weird behavior by normally tranquil pets also suggested an invisible presence, animals believed to be very sensitive to paranormal activity. Finally, Rauber usually brought along a psychic or two to each investigation, their ability to “transcend this level of consciousness and connect with the level of consciousness of the spirit or event” key to the process.19 Other ghost busters were bringing along things like Geiger counters and cameras loaded with infrared film to their paranormal investigations, with a half dozen or so technology equipped research groups in the country when Ghostbusters 2 was released.20 One notable tech-savvy ghost buster in the early 1990s was Peter Aykroyd, the younger brother of Dan, who was a member of the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. Like the other three hundred members of the Los Angeles–based organization, Aykroyd went off to investigations with a host of gadgets including night-vision goggles, radiation sensors, toxic-chemical indicators, a microwave imaging system, and high-frequency sound detectors. One of Aykroyd’s assignments was the famous, century-old Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where windows were opening and closing on their own, doorknobs were hot to the touch, and a not-quite-human figure kept being seen in the hallway outside Room 3502. It was not surprising that both Peter and Dan became keenly

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interested in the supernatural given that their parents’ definition of good fun was to tell their children stories of family se´ances. As well, psychic research journals could often be found in their Ottawa home, and the family did not doubt for a second that the message great-great-uncle Andrew had left to them in their summer lake cabin was written posthumously.21 Real-life ghost busters across the pond were also keeping quite busy as Britain maintained its reputation as the most haunted place in the world. The several hundred members of the Ghost Club Society were still meeting regularly to swap stories of sightings, and the thousand-member British Society for Psychical Research also was very much alive and kicking in the early nineties, more than a century after its founding. Peter Underwood, who had headed the Ghost Club for more than three decades, had recently published a new book, The Ghost Hunter’s Almanac, a guide to the scores of haunted houses in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. “Maybe as an island race we’re more attuned to that element of perception, or maybe we’re just more gullible,” Underwood said, trying to account for why “there are more sightings here than anywhere else on earth.” Like his colleagues, Underwood dismissed about 98 percent of reported sightings as nonghostly, the remaining 2 percent that defied logical explanation the interesting part. A flurry of reports had in fact recently come in to both organizations, one at the Naval and Military Club in London where the night porter came face-to-face with a spirit later identified as that of Major William “Perky” Braddell, who had been killed in a German air raid in Kensington in 1940. So many ghosts were being seen in Dorchester that the football team there was considering calling in an exorcist. It was the custom of players who died to have their ashes scattered on the local pitch, a custom the team was considering changing given the spirits’ reluctance to leave town.22

THE MIND RACE England may have still been the world leader in ghosts but it was the Soviet Union that would probably win the award of the most supernatural country on the planet. The Soviet’s most recent example of their longtime fascination with parapsychology involved Dzhuna Davitashvili, a former waitress from Georgia who was said to have great healing powers. Dzhuna, as she was known, reportedly had healed hundreds of people with the “biological force” of her hands, treating the ill at her Moscow apartment and at a state clinic. Dzhuna’s most famous patient was rumored to be President Brezhnev, who had recently gone on vacation looking quite sickly. But when the seventy-three-year-old leader returned a

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few months later he appeared fit as a fiddle, his remarkable transformation widely credited to Dzhuna. It was believed she was also treating the Minister of Planning and the Minister of Health, making her sort of an unofficial court physician. Adding to Dzhuna’s credibility was a story in the Communist newspaper for young people, Komsomolskaya Pravda, written by a reporter who, after visiting her in 1980, became convinced of her powers. Dzhuna could tell that the reporter, Lev Kolodnyi, had a headache just by looking at his aura (which was yellow and blue), the woman instantly healing him with a quick wave of her hands. Her next feats were even more amazing, passing her hands over a bowl of nearly dead roses to make them spring back to life and then making a pack of cigarettes rise in the air. “You may believe me or not, as you wish,” Kolodnyi wrote, many Russian readers no doubt choosing the former.23 Dzhuna’s brand of psychic healing (which she soon started to call “Effect D,” after her name) was just a drop in Russia’s very big, centuries-old supernatural bucket. Besides folk medicine, fortune-telling, and all kinds of mysticism, astrology was ubiquitous in the country in the 1980s, every bit as popular as in the United States. It was not yet clear whether Raisa Gorbachev would use the Zodiac to influence affairs of the state, as Nancy Reagan was said to do, but most everyone else in the Soviet Union seemed to be checking their horoscope daily. Rich Muscovites were comparing signs at fancy dinner parties, computer nerds were running astrological programs for themselves and their friends, and others were having their charts done at the big public market in the city. The only person not keen on classic astrology appeared to be Dzhuna, who had by the late eighties become as big a celebrity in her country as the most famous uni-named person in America, Cher (who she happened to resemble). Having determined the earth’s orbit was off kilter, Dzhuna had developed her own system of reading the stars, this only augmenting her place as the reigning queen of the occult.24 As in the United States, the Soviet Union’s fascination with the paranormal spilled over into matters of national defense. Things began to get interesting, psychically speaking, in December 1980, when a cover story titled “The New Mental Battlefield” appeared in the U.S. Army journal Military Review, a rare instance of someone from the armed forces publicly admitting that ESP was part of our defense program. The author, Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander, wrote that, “there are weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has already been demonstrated,” this kind of claim understandably making a lot of people’s ears perk up. The rumors that both the United States and the Soviet Union were pursuing psychic research reached a crescendo in 1984 when no less than three books on the subject were published. In The Mind

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Race, Russell Targ and Keith Harary summarized the decade-long program at SRI funded by the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. Most of the work there had to do with remote viewing, the authors revealed, whereby those with the gift (or curse) were asked to describe far-away places, happenings, and things. In one 1976 test, for example, a “viewer” in California attempted to locate Targ, the site selected just minutes before. The viewer saw a dry fountain with pigeons circling around it, a dead-on description of Washington Square Park in Manhattan where Targ happened to be.25 Targ would not spill all the beans for security reasons but did state that “I know the Government’s involved” in psychic research, Targ said, absolutely sure because “I did the work.”26 Others were equally confident the United States was exploring the possibility of a mental battlefield. In his book Mind Wars, Ronald McRae (a goat) made the case that the government’s involvement with psychic research went back three decades, with seemingly everyone in a uniform or plain black suit in Washington—the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marines, CIA, NASA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency— in the game. With that many different players over that long of a time, it was understandable that the research was all over the map, sometimes quite literally. One project McRae described was an MX missile “shellgame,” in which psychics tried to guess which bunkers actually contained the weapons that were shuffled around to make them a moving target. The psychics often could pick them out, making the military rethink its whack-a-mole strategy. McRae, who used to work for the columnist Jack Anderson, also asserted that the Navy had employed at least thirty-four psychics, making the sailors very possibly the most frequent customers of paranormal services in the world. One psychic appeared to be the Navy’s favorite, however, an official with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist repeatedly visiting “Madame Zodiac” in Washington over the course of almost a year. Based on the top-secret photographs and charts he shared with her, could she predict the position of Soviet submarines off the East Coast? The Navy of course would not say, denying in fact all involvement with psychics or anyone else who could supposedly spot a Russian sub below the surface of thousands of miles of ocean.27 If the material in Mind Wars was true, the Pentagon’s interest in programs like “Novel Biological Information Transfer Systems” (militaryspeak for ESP) had taken some interesting turns. McRae described a secret meeting in 1976 between president-elect Jimmy Carter and Uri Geller, a get-together in which one would have loved to be a fly on the wall. Carter was reportedly concerned about the Soviets’ psychic capabilities and pumped Geller for information. (While the American government was interested but skeptical about ESP, the Soviets were said to take thought

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transference as a reality, a legacy perhaps of their prerevolution history with mysticism of all sorts.) The Russians had an ambitious “psycho-warfare” program, Geller told the man from Plains, which included screening all children for paranormal powers. Carter apparently believed Geller, commissioning a full study of Soviet psychic research the following year as president. Although the study indicated that the Russians were indeed exploring the field, Geller’s claims were more than a bit exaggerated, it turned out. It was the Soviets’ parapsychology program that Martin Ebon focused on in his book Psychic Warfare, its biggest surprise perhaps the contention that the Russians were reacting to Americans’ psychic research rather than vice versa. Since 1960, when the Soviets (mistakenly) believed the U.S. Navy was attempting to telepathically communicate with the nuclear-powered submarine the Nautilus (which was under the Arctic icecap), both the Russian military and the KGB had been trying to figure out how they too could make use of ESP and psychokinesis.28 Were the superpowers truly engaged in psychic warfare and a “mind race” as these authors contended? Some, like Representative Charlie Rose (D-NC), thought so, warning his colleagues on the House Select Committee on Intelligence that eventually the government may have to pursue the psychic equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Others thought not, believing that most of the reports on both sides were “disinformation” to divert attention and resources from more practical defense programs. Whatever the case, there was no doubt that Uncle Sam was at least weighing the possibilities of psychic espionage and war in the early 1980s. In December 1983, records showed, dozens of government officials met with some of the top psychic researchers in America at a private conference with the mysterious title “Applications of Anomalous Phenomena.” At least one senator, many congressional aides, and a bunch of other people from various branches of the government and military eagerly listened to speakers like Targ, Jahn, and nine other experts at the gathering sponsored by Kaman Tempo, an industrial research organization based in Alexandria, Virginia. Was the next Manhattan Project already in the works?29 Probably not, a good thing given that the United States would soon win the Cold War without having to employ the telepathic equivalent of an atomic bomb. With glasnost, some Soviet journalists were apparently using the National Enquirer as a model to follow in the late 1980s, with a rash of reports in the media of such things as three-eyed space creatures, Abominable Snowmen, and “thought bacteria” transmitted by extraterrestrials. On Soviet television, a Ukrainian hypnotist named Anatoli Kashpirovsky was holding “healing se´ances,” the man gaining the adoration of thousands by treating everything from broken limbs to blindness. Another rising star was Alan Chumak, the psychic-in-residence of 120

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Minutes, the Soviet version of the Today show. Chumak could supposedly cure viewers not just on live television but on videotape, quite a feat. Some even placed glasses of water or jars of cold cream near their sets to absorb his telepathic medicine, the man rivaling Dzhuna in popularity.30 Other supernatural entrepreneurs emerged in the former Soviet Union as the New Age movement exploded there in the early nineties. Leading the charge was Alexsandra Yakovleva, who had created a mini-empire under the brand Put k Sebe, or Inward Path. A typical issue of her Inward Path magazine might include articles on everything from faith healing to auto-suggestion to white magic, appealing to readers’ built-up interest in all things spiritual after the fall of Communism. Yakovleva’s Inward Path television series featured segments on topics like how to use positive thinking to combat diseases, while her Inward Path Center in Moscow sold New Age books, tapes, and paraphernalia like candles, incense, and crystals. “You find ways that Russian people can change their lives by changing their consciousness,” she said in 1992, finding that spiritualism and capitalism to go together very nicely.31 LOVE, MONEY, POWER Just as during previous eras, when belief in the supernatural seamlessly crossed socioeconomic strata, its globalization in the 1980s defied boundaries of class and education level. Anthony Brandt, a New York freelance writer, nicely captured why highbrows were attracted to the supernatural, especially astrology, even though it was sometimes socially embarrassing to show it. “Admitting to an interest in astrology is the intellectual equivalent of admitting that you still wet your pants,” Brandt wrote in Esquire in 1984, confessing that he himself was incontinent in this respect. Brandt, who was partial to the monthly horoscope on the back page of Town & Country, became a believer about a decade earlier when he went to an astrologer to have his chart done. Going in as a truth-loving skeptic, Brandt quickly changed his tune when the astrologer not only reeled off his psychological profile but his past lives, karma, and task in life. “Like almost everybody else, I was looking, without knowing it, for something to believe in, some system, some explanation outside myself, something I could submit to that would tell me how to live my life, solve my problems, and be happy ever after,” this the enduring appeal of astrology. Brandt also used the I Ching as a guide, finding the ancient Chinese text equally helpful in making decisions and giving him hope for the future. With its premise that there was order, balance, and justice in life, the I Ching was, in a word, comforting, a constant reminder that things happened for good reasons and that the universe made sense. “I find it hard not to believe that a spiritual system

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of some sort invests the world,” Brandt insisted, science just not enough to explain everything.32 Brandt was not the only one to think that science could not provide all the answers to the big questions of life. U.S. News & World Report called the occult (which included everything related to the supernatural and paranormal) a “billion-dollar-a-year” industry in 1983, the tentacles of the business spreading to entertainment (movies, books, magazines, tapes), education (conventions, lectures), tourism, and psychic readings. Revenues not surprisingly peaked around Halloween, when most Americans took part in what was in effect an unofficial celebration of the supernatural. Six hundred thousand Americans practiced some form of the occult, the magazine estimated, their areas of expertise ranging from astrology to witchcraft. Astrology alone was a huge business, with some 30 million Americans regularly reading their horoscope in daily newspapers and about ten thousand stargazers charging anywhere between $50 and $300 for a custom reading. At least one financial advisor, Arch Crawford, was using astrology to predict stock market trends, finding plenty of investors seeing dollar signs in the heavenly bodies.33 Psychic advice also was being aggressively marketed in the early eighties to inquiring minds who wanted to know. Shirley Ann Tabatnek, director of the Psychic Fair Network, was staging about one hundred such events in suburban shopping malls around the country, with three hundred psychics at the ready to provide a fifteen-minute session in between trips to J. C. Penney and Sears. Busloads of modern day pilgrims were heading to spiritualist camps like Lily Dale near Jamestown, New York, for psychic healings and se´ances, others watching the New Jersey cable television show Mind Probe to hopefully get answers to their questions. Perhaps the best marketer of the occult in America was Laurie Cabot, however, the official Witch of Salem a tourism bonanza for the Massachusetts town. Wearing a hooded black robe, the member of the local chamber of commerce offered witchcraft classes and personal counseling, also happy to cast a good spell for a corporation (or perhaps put a hex on a competitor).34 One did not have to travel too far to find someone eager, willing, and able to provide expert supernatural advice, however. Storefront psychics could still be found in big cities like New York in the 1980s, but the business had changed quite a bit since its glory days of decades past. Rather than mostly housewives or Miss Lonely Heartses, young professionals were now the primary customers of psychics, these corporate types more interested in career or investment advice than if and when Mr. or Ms. Right might come along. Having grown up during the “consciousness revolution” of the late 1960s and 1970s, many twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-olds were now in high-stress jobs, finding psychics to be a valuable source of

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information unavailable anywhere else. One popular place was the Gypsy Tea Kettle in midtown Manhattan (which served no tea and employed no gypsies), where every weekday men and women in business suits could be found during lunchtime or after work waiting for their fifteen-minute reading. Intuition could be just as valuable as logic, these stockbrokers and bankers believed, not ashamed to seek another expert’s opinion with multimillion-dollar deals on the line, especially when it cost just eight bucks.35 Theories abounded about why hordes of young urban professionals were going to tarot, palm, and mind readers in the 1980s, an experience readily available not just along the street but at adult education courses, psychic fairs and seminars, and even some Mideastern restaurants. Karlis Osis, now of the American Society for Psychical Research, attributed it to “a desire for more—not just income, but knowledge of the deeper dimensions of life,” while Patricia Barnes, a Manhattan tarot reader, explained it as the desire for “love, money, power,” and not necessarily in that order. Marilyn Male, a vice president at Shearson Lehman Brothers and board member of the ASPR, saw it simply as a means to improve the chances to “get rich quick,” the whopping cost of a condo in the city at the root of yuppies’ interest in “reader-advisors,” as their store windows described them. Part of the shift in the demographics of the psychic business certainly had to do with the recasting of ESP as “intuition” and “inductive reasoning,” these brainier, more practical terms offering if not encouraging the exploration of creative modes of thinking. Others considered the advice they got from psychics just as good if not better than that which they received from their shrinks, and for a lot less money. And then there was the sheer entertainment value of readings, a visit to a psychic viewed as not that different as one to an art gallery or concert in terms of pure fun.36 If one was hesitant to venture into a “reader-advisor” shop or sign up for a course, there was always a psychic business cruise. One hundred and twenty young professionals from New York City took such a threehour trip along the East River in October 1987, which not coincidentally happened to be one of the worst months in stock market history. Employees from companies including Bankers Trust, Kidder Peabody, Salomon Brothers, and Goldman Sachs were aboard, each suit paying $30 to learn which way the financial winds might blow. “Psychics pick up on the vibrations and energy levels coming from Wall Street,” explained William Flanagan, a senior editor at Forbes magazine and a host of the cruise, those emanations definitely jittery as “the eighties” ended with a literal crash. None of the five psychics, astrologer, and clairvoyant on the boat were bullish, with the latter (Wendy, who had her own cable television show)

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predicting “economic turbulence and financial conservatism” for the next couple of years. Wendy’s forecast would turn out to be accurate, adding to an impressive list of correct predictions that included, according to her promotional brochure, Joan Collins’s secret facial surgery, Tom Cruise’s elopement, and, last but not least, Joan Rivers’s downfall.37 New York City yuppies were not the only ones looking for a bit of a psychic edge in making important business decisions in the wheeling and dealing 1980s. John DeLorean, the carmaker, regularly consulted a spiritualist named Sonja before making a move, following in the footsteps perhaps of the late H. L. Hunt, who brought in Jeane Dixon when he was not sure where to drill for oil. (Given what lay ahead for each of them, the men might have been better off without their advice.) Still, both psychics and astrologers were much sought after in these greed-is-good times, their perceived ability to know which stocks would go up, which oil well would be a gusher, and which mine would yield a rich vein of gold or silver well worth the relatively small investment. Most psychics in the mid-eighties charged $80 to $100 for a consultation but doubled or tripled their fees for corporate clients, a smart whatever-the-market-will-bear pricing strategy. Astrologers’ fees were slightly less, their typical deliverable a “birth chart” that forecast what was likely to occur during a given time frame (based of course on the position of the stars and planets and the day the client was born). Some Wall Streeters had taken to charting sunspot activity, this too believed to perhaps be a predictor of human behavior and, more important, the Dow Jones.38 If that did not work, there was the Psychic Forecaster, a monthly publication that relied on a panel of twelve psychics to forecast the direction of the economy and stock market (versus Crawford’s astrology-based newsletter). Nearly six thousand people were paying $58 a year in 1990 to learn whether the price of commodities like precious metals and pork bellies would rise or fall, the publisher ensuring subscribers that the psychics used were “authentic” rather than “National Enquirer people.”39 A number of politicians in Washington were also interested in psychics and how their insights could possibly be of public service. The May 1987 revelation that Nancy Reagan often consulted with a San Francisco astrologer (former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, who let the cat out of the bag, called the First Lady’s frequent sessions a “floating se´ance”) seemed to allow others to come out of the closet. Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D-TX) confessed that he and his wife Betty had gone to a couple of lectures by a local psychic, thinking he could perhaps develop his own intuitive and prophetic powers by picking up a few tips from a professional. Charlie Rose, the eight-term representative from North Carolina, was still making the case that it was in the nation’s best

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interests to harness psychic power, now thinking however that we should work with the Soviets and Chinese rather than use it against them.40 It was Senator Clairborne Pell (D-RI) who was now the most enthusiastic supporter of psychic research, however, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee not embarrassed to admit he had been to a medium or two to communicate with dead relatives. Pell even had a full-time aid whose job was to monitor “consciousness” research, and proudly kept in his Capitol office a spoon bent by Uri Geller from a 1986 meeting in London.41 The following year, Pell invited Geller to a Soviet arms negotiation session in Geneva, the spoon bender there officially as an entertainer but, unofficially, to beam messages of peace into the Communists’ unconscious. When Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to remove medium-range missiles in Europe the day after the meeting, Geller took some credit for the victory, claiming he had had a psychic connection with Yuli Vorontsov, one of the Soviet negotiators. Rather than the ultimate agent of war, was ESP the ultimate agent of peace?42

THE PERFECT YUPPIE RELIGION ESP and other “anomalies” may have played a weighty role in business and politics during the 1980s, but the supernatural was about to run into an even bigger cultural force. By 1986, it was clear that the supernatural was to a large extent being co-opted by the New Age movement, what had been the tail now wagging the dog. The two main pillars of supernaturalism—psychics and spirits—were increasingly seen as part of something larger, a holistic mish-mash of Eastern mysticism and Western occultism that was fast seeping into every nook and cranny of American life. Running parallel with this was the rise of psychological self-help and “human potential” groups like Forum, Insight, Actualizations, Silva Mind Control, and Lifespring, these post-EST (Erhard Seminars Training) programs also trading on Asian religions and New Age dogma. Disillusioned with and lacking confidence in conventional Western thought and action, many Americans were looking for something different, with no shortage of places to find it.43 What was perhaps most surprising about the New Age movement was its appeal to normally conservative Corporate America. The notion of individual empowerment within a context of universal unity was a compelling proposition, however, leading big companies like IBM, AT&T, and General Motors to look into ways that close relatives of supernaturalism, such as metaphysics, Hindu mysticism, and the occult, could possibly help make them more globally competitive. Other organizations were trying out

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firewalking on retreats and adopting New Age–inspired advertising slogans like “Master the Possibilities” (Mastercard) and “Be All You Can Be” (the U.S. Army), these also grounded in the idea of some kind of powerful guiding energy that could be tapped into. Like the counterculture, from which it had sprung, New Age offered the possibility of an evolutionary leap of consciousness, another Renaissance perhaps right around the corner. The force really could be with us, its proponents believed, the unlimited potential of the mind capable of leading to a radical transformation of society.44 The heart and soul, so to speak, of New Age was the channeler. Just like mediums, channelers, in New Age parlance, claimed the ability to communicate with the dead, a spirit entity taking over their bodies when they entered a trance. Although hundreds, perhaps thousands of channelers could be found coast to coast in the late eighties, the best known was J. Z. Knight, the forty-year-old Washington State woman made famous in Shirley MacLaine’s bestseller, Dancing in the Light. Knight’s entity was Ramtha, a thirty-five-thousand-year-old warrior who channeled his wisdom and prophecy through her. Knight quickly capitalized on her sudden fame after MacLaine’s book was published in 1986, giving $400 seminars and selling $100 videos to thousands of people. Hundreds of people moved to the Pacific Northwest to live near her (and to avoid the natural disasters that would strike other parts of the country, according to Ramtha), the phenomenon taking on the trappings of a religious awakening.45 A Knight seminar too was a kind of religious experience, with many in the audience (80% women) weeping, laughing, or both as they emotionally responded to affirmations like “You will receive what you want” and “You are the masters of your destiny.” That Ramtha believed there was no right or wrong was especially compelling to those coming from judgmental, hierarchical Judeo-Christian backgrounds, as was the news that everyone was his or her own god, each EST-meets-Zen Buddhism tidbit a juicy morsel of self-confidence.46 Not surprisingly, with this kind of money being made, other channelers soon appeared on the scene. California-based Jack Pursel channeled a spirit named Lazaris, he too raking in the big bucks though seminars and tapes. Penny Torres, a Santa Barbara woman, was working with her entity, Mafu, to also attract large crowds, her ancient spirit speaking in a remarkable similar manner and offering an eerily consistent philosophy as Knight’s Ramtha. Seeing the movement she had helped spark, MacLaine herself was soon leading pricey weekend “Higher-Self” seminars on channeling, reincarnation, meditation, and other New Age topics.47 MacLaine’s seminars were “part cosmic pep rally, part se´ance-in-a-circus-tent,” declared Newsweek, the sold-out events opportunities to learn how to do things like “adjust with your own wave form so that you can access your galactic energy.”

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Boxes of tissues were liberally scattered throughout the hotel ballrooms, a sign of how emotional the experience could be. Color “frequencies” were a big part of MacLaine’s lectures, with certain parts of the body karmically associated with certain hues, e.g., yellow for the abdomen and orange for the genitals. While MacLaine had attendees at a seminar in Orlando imagine they were climbing into a crystal tank filled with a golden liquid (one of a number of exercises to access that galactic energy, presumably), a woman who had not had an orgasm in nine years claimed to have one, this perhaps alone worth the $300 ticket.48 What was behind channeling-mania? Critics weighed in, some of the most vocal from organized religion who called the practice at best a faux form of spirituality more about profits than prophets and at worst a dangerous cult. Others thought that anything that met the spiritual needs of those disaffected with conventional Christianity and Judaism was fine. “Increasingly, we are finding people who are disenchanted with traditional religions or have no real religious roots in their backgrounds,” remarked Ronald Enroth, a professor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, channeling being an ideal outlet for these kind of folks. Truzzi was even keener on channeling, considering it to be “the perfect yuppie religion.” Democratic versus hierarchical, not interested in the bogeymen of guilt and hell, and based in the belief that God is a part of each and every human rather than a distinct, not very accessible being, channeling indeed had a lot to offer Americans looking for a spiritual home.49 To her credit, MacLaine was not above poking gentle fun at herself and her firm belief that she had lived past lives and had had conversations with extraterrestrials. At the 1987 Academy Awards show, for example, MacLaine descended from the top of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in a mock spaceship to present the Oscar for best screenplay. “To you, this may seem like special effects,” she told the amused crowd through a plume of stage smoke, but “to me, it’s basic transportation!” Continuing the joke (while promoting her books and seminars to a huge audience), MacLaine then ably filled in for the winner, the absent Woody Allen. “I accept this for him twice,” she quipped, “once for his body, which is playing clarinet in New York City, and once for his spirit, which is here now.” This was not the first time MacLaine’s spiritual odyssey for her “Higher Self,” which she began documenting in her 1983 bestseller Out on a Limb, became the stuff of award show humor. “Welcome to the 1986 Emmy Awards, which is being broadcast all over the world as we speak, except to Shirley MacLaine, to whom it’s being broadcast in the next century,” David Letterman opened the show, this too getting big laughs.50 MacLaine not only was okay with her name now instantly eliciting chuckles but saw it as a good thing, a sign that the movement she had

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helped create had become an identifiable part of the culture. The exhonorary Rat Packer showed no indications of letting up, putting together a network television presentation of Out on a Limb in early 1987 and then publishing a new book, It’s All in the Playing, later that year. Unlike most of her colleagues (and competitors), MacLaine had no interest in being perceived as a guru, finding herself in the seminar business only after receiving a ton of mail from people who read her books or saw her television show and wanted to know more. The recent death of her father, who had a doctorate in philosophy and psychology, also had a lot to do with MacLaine launching her “Higher-Self” tour, the man passing on to her his deep interest in metaphysics. “It was becoming clear to me that the bridge between the unseen and the seen was getting shorter and shorter,” she told Ladies Home Journal in 1987, seeing herself in a unique position to help others cross that shrinking bridge.51 Some, however, viewed MacLaine’s bridge as going in the wrong direction. “MacLaine is a long-in-the-tooth yuppie priestess/pixie who has simply updated Norman Vincent Peale (Werner Ehrhardt also comes to mind),” wrote Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in Ms. that same year, finding the woman’s meta-message of self-love not just trite but irresponsible. Jettisoning the concepts of good and evil for karma and destiny was a dangerous thing, Harrison thought, such pithy statements as “there is a reason for everything” grossly ignorant of the terrible things that regularly happened in the real world. Others found her philosophy that “to know oneself is the only thing worth knowing” more annoying than anything else. “I was actually forever grateful when she won [her 1983 Oscar for Terms of Endearment] because I thought that would shut her up for a while,” said the actress Debra Winger, so “imagine my dismay when she just kept doing interviews and having fiftieth birthdays.”52 Terry Runte of Omni also could not resist poking not-so-gentle fun at MacLaine and the channeling phenomenon in the magazine’s “Last Word” page reserved for humor. Runte’s subject was “Shelley McFaine,” she too a charismatic figure doling out New Age wisdom to the masses. Unlike MacLaine and her empathetic, share-the-love ilk, however, McFaine advised her faithful followers to vent their built-up anger and pain towards one another. “Reach over to your neighbor and knock the bitch over!,” McFaine urged the crowd of seventeen hundred who had paid $800 for such advice at the imaginary seminar. The purpose of McFaine’s “Lower Self” tour was to help people get in touch with their “negative waveforms for Maximum Nasty Potentiality” and to “put the screws to those pathetic little wussies and ream them for every cent they have,” all this inspired by her latest bestseller, Raping the Cosmos. McFaine’s ultimate objective was world domination, Runte informed

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readers, some of them undoubtedly not very amused to see one of their heroines reduced to such sardonic fodder.53 Although a lot less high profile about it, Michael Crichton, the physicianturned-author, was every bit as interested in the supernatural as MacLaine. In his 1988 memoir Travels, Crichton recalled various personal encounters with the field. In 1978, for example, Crichton took full advantage of London’s “psychic smorgasbord” while directing the film version of his book The Great Train Robbery. Every day he would stop in at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain to get a consultation for the equivalent of just $10, quite a bargain, he thought. The psychics there used a wide variety of things—wristwatches, tea leaves, tarot cards, flowers, and even sand—to “read” Crichton, often with startling accuracy and sometimes with equally startling inaccuracy. Crichton’s life took a major turn in 1984 when he visited “Gary,” a trance medium in Los Angeles who did readings in the manner of Edgar Cayce. By looking into the Akashic Record, Gary told Crichton, he had access to any knowledge in the world, whether that be past, present, or future. After a few such channeling sessions, Crichton decided to learn from Gary how to give Akashic readings to others, something he would do every chance he got until the novelty wore off just a few weeks later.54 Still fascinated by all things paranormal, however, Crichton continued to work with Gary on his magical mystery tour. The next stop was guided imagery followed by past-life recollection and then, more ambitiously, astral travel. Crichton had had OOBEs as a child (he was able to look down himself from the ceiling and snoop on others in the house or backyard), making this sometimes scary experience quite agreeable as an adult. While in the astral plane (“a yellow, misty place,” he described it), Crichton saw his dead grandmother and then his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship while he was alive. Nervous about what would happen, Crichton’s father suddenly embraced his son, an incredibly profound and wonderful experience that only served to push him further into the deep unknown.55 Clearly hooked, Crichton soon became interested in auras, and in 1985 went off on a two-week retreat with eight other like-minded people in the California desert. Frustrated that everybody but he could see the energy emanating from a human body or anything else natural, Crichton was about to quit when he suddenly saw an aura (“a shimmering white cloud”) as clear as day. He then saw a second and, infatuated by his new toy, did a walkabout in the desert, seeing the auras of trees and a mountain. Last but not least on Crichton’s long, strange trip of the supernatural was an exorcism—his own exorcism. In 1986, Gary sensed a dark force attached to Crichton, the evil entity a “discarnate” or “tramp” soul that

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was not good to have around. With Crichton agreeing to get it removed, Gary brought in Ellen, a specialist who would help facilitate the process. Gary first induced both Crichton and Ellen into a deep altered state, each of them visualizing their bodies completely surrounded by light so that anything dark would stand out. Both Crichton and Ellen soon saw the same three entities—a large, cartoonlike demon figure, an insect, and a little man—the psychoanalytic explanation of which was equal in bizarreness to Salvador Dali’s dream sequence in Spellbound. After three and a half hours, the demon was indeed exorcised and the two came out of their trance, Crichton’s ultimate supernatural experience over. What did it all mean? Crichton still did not know but did not mind at all, believing (like Einstein) that theories often got in the way by shaping experiences rather than just explain them.56

THE COSMOS HAS ANSWERED For those interested in the supernatural but not quite ready to embark on Crichton’s kind of journey, there was a simple solution—crystals. Crystals were the most visible symbol of the New Age movement, the rocks believed by many to be much more than hexagonal formations of silicon dioxide. Their applications were diverse, to put it mildly. One Philadelphia woman was using quartz crystals to get rid of her headache, help her plants grow, and make her air conditioner run more efficiently, while a Texas rancher used them to keep flies away from his cattle. Some Wall Streeters, like many others, had taken to carrying crystals and other gemstones said to bring good fortune in their bags and briefcases, and one New York business executive kept an amethyst that cost $10,000 on his desk to keep him calm. (Knowing that one paid $10,000 for a rock would make many others anything but calm.) Lots of people were sticking them in a glass of water to purify them, the power of the rocks seemingly infinite. Could quartz crystals filter out “bad vibrations” or “negative energy” and, if so, how? No one knew for sure but “crystal consciousness in various forms and degrees is spreading across this country like an epidemic,” Omni observed in 1987, the phenomenon fueled by celebrities wearing and chatting them up on talk shows. Prices of minerals had doubled annually the last five years and still some stores were not able to keep them in stock, an ironic situation given that quartz was the most common mineral on Earth.57 Despite their alleged ability to make both human bodies and electric appliances run more smoothly, the science behind crystals was shaky at best, even by New Age standards. It was true that tapping a piece of quartz

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produced an electrical charge on its opposite side, the electric field of a human being also capable of causing this “piezoelectric effect,” according to true believers. The result was a restoration of harmony and balance for those in the vicinity of the rocks, even truer believers held, endowing crystals with special healing powers. Crystals thus had lifelike qualities or were actually alive, some thought, making them particularly useful for cleaning chakras, the key energy centers in the body, according to ancient Hindu healing practices. “They serve to merge the two worlds of the spiritual and the physical, of pure light and matter,” said Katrina Raphaell, author of Crystal Enlightenment and founder of the Taos-based Crystal Academy of Advanced Healing Arts. Those with more of a scientific background, however, thought crystals were, well, dumb as a rock. “Crystal healing is fine if you don’t have very much wrong with you,” said Robert Becker, a physician and author of The Body Electric, the things having “almost zero current.” George Harlow, curator of gems and minerals at the American Museum of Natural History, was even more dismissive. “There is simply no evidence that there is any measurable effect from crystal to human, or as any kind of healing,” Harlow made clear, thinking an ordinary cup of coffee was a much more effective way to elevate one’s mood.58 Such negativism fell largely on deaf ears, however, as Americans continued to put their faith in unseen forces. Another earthy idea—dowsing, the finding of water or pretty much anything else underground by using a rod, wand, or pendulum—was also part of New Age dogma, like crystals (literally) grounded in the idea that there was an alternative kind of intelligence that could be tapped into. Dowsing was “a method of locating tangible and non-tangible things through the use of various simple devices via contact and direction with universal knowledge, God or higher powers,” according to Joan Eastman Bennett, a New Jersey dowser and teacher of the ancient art. Called questing in Canada, biophysical locating in the former Soviet Union, and witching in centuries past (the Egyptians, Chinese, and Babylonians all practiced it thousands of years ago), dowsing was enjoying renewed popularity at the end of the twenty-first century as Americans looked to old ways to solve new problems like finding buried water pipes or gas lines in one’s yard. Some dowsers believed that the process could be explained by an electromagnetic field between the object and the diviner’s tool but others, like Bennett, were sure more mystical forces were at work.59 New Agers were not just looking down to the ground for rocks and water but up to the sky to affirm their belief in the supernatural. Given that there had not been a significant sighting of a UFO since the 1970s, one might think that interest in them would have faded over the past decade. Instead, UFOs were as popular as ever in the late 1980s as they rode

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the New Age wave. As with the government’s involvement with the paranormal a few years back, three new books were helping to stir up belief (and disbelief) in unidentified flying objects and their passengers. Whitley Strieber’s bestseller Communion, Budd Hopkins’s Intruders, and Gary Kinder’s Light Years were each about not just UFOs but visits by and encounters with aliens, that the major difference in the subject versus the flying-saucer-friendly 1950s. UFO clubs, newsletters, movies, and lectures were also prevalent, these too focusing on people’s experience with extraterrestrials rather than just the vehicles that got them here.60 Although it purportedly happened forty years earlier, the 1947 “Roswell Incident” was still making headlines, due much in part to a supposedly newly discovered government document dated November 18, 1952. The top-secret briefing paper allegedly sent to president-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower by the director of the CIA described the secret operation to recover the wreckage of the craft near Roswell, New Mexico, and, according to the document, “four small human-like beings,” all dead and badly decomposed after a week in the desert. The wreck was that of “a misguided weather research balloon,” civilian and military witnesses and news reporters were told, while the government took what was left of the spaceship to several locations for scientific study.61 While the document was considered an obvious hoax by skeptics and government officials, others thought it was real, especially those in the UFO lecture and book-writing business. Most important, however, the secret memo was one more piece of evidence for believers, the government cover-up explaining why no definitive proof of UFOs had yet to be established despite thousands of reported sightings over the years. “Some sort of things have been flying around for decades and they aren’t ours,” said Bruce Maccabee, a physicist in the Navy and part-time UFO researcher, thinking “people who haven’t paying attention to this stuff are in for a shock.” Was the fascination with UFOs a function of our political and economic instability? Was it related to feelings of helplessness or a loss of trust in “reality”? Or was it a search for new gods or, possibly, a comforting reminder that we were not alone in the universe? No one could say for sure, but many people were not going to stop looking up anytime soon.62 Encounters with UFOS, like other supernatural experiences, affected different aspects of everyday life for those who had them and for others. Therapists were in a quandary when it came to UFOs, for example, especially when patients told them they had been kidnapped by the visitors from outer space. Rather than simply conclude they were delusional, some decided to suspend their judgment on the matter, more interested in the patient’s condition than the event that had supposedly caused it. “It’s not my job to be either a believer or skeptic,” said New York

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psychiatrist Rima Laibow, the founder and director of Treatment and Research on Experienced Anomalous Trauma (TREAT), a program dedicated to helping those having mental health problems as a result of an alleged encounter with aliens, ghosts, or psychic visions. Many such patients, understandably feeling they would be ridiculed, usually kept their secret to themselves. Now, however, support was available from some therapists, who viewed the trauma as similar in nature to that which often followed a natural disaster, plane crash, or rape. Other psychologists thought TREAT was as nutty as the notion of alien abduction itself, of the firm opinion that a paranoid, schizophrenic, or psychotic person should be treated as such. But given how many Americans claimed they had some kind of anomalous experience or at least believed they occurred, the program seemed to fit a particular and neglected need, a product of the supernatural times.63 Supernatural times they were, based not just on anecdotal evidence but on research that even the Amazing Randi could not dispute. According to a national public opinion poll commissioned by Parents magazine in 1989, “Americans are a nation of believers in supernatural phenomena,” the magazine flatly stated, its numbers of sheep even higher than those of the 1978 Gallup Poll. Sixty-five percent of those polled subscribed to at least one of nine beliefs regarding the paranormal ranging from the ability to consistently predict the future (34%) to the notion that quartz and other crystals could increase one’s mental and physical abilities (8%). Most impressive, a full third of Americans believed that there were spirits or ghosts that made their presence known to people, and a fourth that certain people had mental or psychic powers to bend spoons and make objects move. “The common denominator of paranormal beliefs is that they offer the possibility of transformation, the promise of going beyond the current situation,” explained Hyman of the high numbers, something that James Randi and Paul Kurtz seemed to have difficulty understanding.64 As one of the top researchers in the field, Robert Jahn had a firm grasp of why most Americans found the supernatural to be so credible. After personally having a remote viewing experience in the late 1970s (envisioning a colleague sitting at a cafe´ in Paris), Jahn, who at the time was the dean of engineering at Princeton, founded the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab in a basement of one of the university’s buildings. Jahn preferred the phrase “engineering anomalies” to terms like “psi,” “ESP,” “telepathy,” “clairvoyance,” and “psychokinesis,” thinking it better captured the science that was behind the phenomenon. Ten years later, Jahn emerged from his basement lab with Margins of Reality, the 1989 book (coauthored by lab manager Brenda Dunne) stating flatly that

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psychic phenomena exist in small but measurable quantities. People could not only gather information in ways that are beyond the capabilities of the five senses, he argued, but also influence the behavior of objects through their minds. After the book was published, Jahn (whose expertise was in electric propulsion, and was working with NASA to try to figure out the best way to send a spaceship to Mars) received the same kind of criticism that had been directed at Rhine, accusing him of conscious or unconscious bias, flawed methodology, and misinterpretation of data. (Upon offering a paper to a major scientific journal on his work, the publisher said, “Unless Dr. Jahn can telepathically communicate his article on anomalous phenomena to my editors and me, I am afraid there is little interest in it here.”)65 Jahn was undeterred, however. “We have asked the cosmos a question,” he told Omni in 1990, “and the cosmos has answered.”66

A RESURGENCE OF THE IRRATIONAL The cosmos, like many people, also wanted to be in show business, it appeared. Old-style mentalists like The Amazing Kreskin were still around in the 1980s, their acts given new life by Americans’ growing fascination with the unexplainable. By 1984, Kreskin had become a fixture on the talk show circuit (having done almost three hundred guest spots with Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, and Merv Griffin), the Amazing one also performing before live audiences at Broadway’s Majestic Theater. Much like the long line of mentalists before him, Kreskin would often ask audiences to hide something and then leave the stage, miraculously finding the object upon his return. His twist, however, was that the missing object was his paycheck for the show, meaning he would not get paid if the trick did not work. Like Dunninger, Kreskin (who the comedienne Phyllis Diller jokingly called “a male witch [who] should be burned at the stake”) claimed his psychic abilities resided not in magic but rather intense concentration. Anybody could do amazing things if they applied their minds to it, he told a reporter for The New Yorker, proving his point by having four chorus girls from the show 42nd Street lift the star, Jerry Orbach, off his chair with just two fingers apiece.67 Amazing things could also be found on television that, with the advent of cable, was turning out to be an ideal medium for, well, mediums. Since 1978, hundreds or perhaps thousands of New Yorkers lucky enough to get Channel 17 on their sets watched Tele-Psychic, the show airing every Sunday night at 7 p.m. (opposite 60 Minutes). Channel 17 was in fact a televisual feast of the supernatural, featuring shows by DePrince, a Haitian

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voodoo priest (Tuesday evenings at nine), Kwaku, a psychic projectionist (Wednesdays at ten), and the Mystic Man, a numerologist (Thursdays at nine). Tele-Psychic had its own special appeal, however, due much in part to the congenial host, Morris Fonte. Fonte typically started each show with a string of predictions, many of them about sports. (In 1989, Fonte predicted Mike Tyson would knock out Frank Bruno in the fourth round, a forecast that turned out to be off by one round due to the differential between, in his words, “spiritual time and earth time.”) Then it was on to the main event, in which Fonte picked up callers’ vibrations that revealed insights related to their love, health, and wealth. Will my finances get any better? How about my social life? What about those ten or twenty extra pounds I am carrying around? Fonte had answers to all of the above, developing a loyal following among those who called in regularly to learn their fate. Fonte’s popularity was impressive given that he had been a fulltime psychic only the last couple of years, having worked most of the time as a window cleaner. But now, buoyed by the success of his show, Fonte’s calendar was full with private consultations, especially since he had begun taking credit cards. Fonte offered a full menu of services, with an hour session costing $95, a half hour $65, a fifteen-minute “mini-reading” $35 (also available by phone), and a three-questions-for-$25 special.68 Much larger audiences were consuming mass quantities of entertainment steeped in the supernatural, however. “For whatever social and psychological reasons, the supernatural as an entertainment commodity is more in evidence than ever nowadays,” wrote John J. O’Connor of the New York Times in 1991, citing the bestselling books of Stephen King, the movie Ghost (the top moneymaker of 1990), and a recent airing of an actual exorcism on ABC’s 20/20 as some of the more popular examples.69 Novels by King such as Firestarter, Pet Sematary, and Christine did indeed present an array of supernatural forces (pyrokinesis, resurrection, and a very strange 1958 Plymouth Fury, respectively), while the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (featuring the ghost of a serial child murderer) was a tour de force of the occult. If nothing else, the popularity of the National Enquirer suggested that hordes of Americans loved reading about what it might be like to wake up in the middle of the night to see the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant snacking on a piece of cake in one’s kitchen. (Maureen Reagan’s sighting of Abraham Lincoln’s ghost in the White House in 1987 made such stories a little less crazy than they seemed.) Three years later, the supernatural had become an even bigger force in American popular culture, the same writer a little surprised that television was getting even weirder. “Take the supernatural and paranormal, sprinkle liberally with paranoia, and you have a substantial chunk of what

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increasingly seems to be television’s entertainment agenda for the 1990s,” O’Connor observed, thinking that “the electronic hills are alive with the ominous sound of the inexplicable.” Given the televisual landscape of the early nineties, it would have been hard to argue with the man. Fox’s Encounters: The Hidden Truth magazine show investigated mysteries like UFO sightings, alien abductions, crop circles, hauntings, and other unexplained events, for example, all of them seemingly covered up by the government. (The show was similar to the earlier Unsolved Mysteries, which also often dealt with the paranormal but without the paranoia factor.) Angels too were “floating all over the place,” O’Connor thought, with a new CBS show Touched by an Angel, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, Sophy Burnham’s bestseller A Book of Angels, and a recent NBC documentary narrated by Patty Duke, “Angels: The Mysterious Messengers,” examples of how, as Ms. Duke put it, our lives were “enriched by spirits from another plane.” Angels had indeed become many Americans’ best friends, the heavenly entities making sure their charges were following their true path. And on The Other Side, a daytime talk show about the paranormal, host Will Miller interviewed psychics, UFO abductees, people who had been romantically involved with ghosts, and others who had seemingly crossed over to an alternative universe.70 It was another television show, however, Fox’s The X-Files, that most convinced O’Connor that something big was going on. In the hit drama series “inspired by actual documented accounts,” two FBI agents investigated unsolved or unexplained cases, most of them involving paranormal phenomena. Any given week, Mulder and Scully could be found looking into anything from extraterrestrials to secret gene-altering experiments, again the government not to be trusted. “What’s going on here?,” O’Connor asked himself, wondering what was driving what he considered “a resurgence of the irrational.” Movies and television shows steeped in the supernatural or occult were nothing new, of course, but this brand of entertainment was a lot different from Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, or even The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. “In the past, the line between fantasy and reality was clearly delineated [but] today that line gets fuzzier and fuzzier,” O’Connor observed, a very good point. O’Connor was not sure what social or psychological reasons could explain the phenomenon—widespread turmoil around the world, the continued spread of AIDS, the New Age movement, or just millennial jitters, possibly—but he was sure it would not end anytime soon.71 Television was also proving to be an ideal medium for psychics to reach a mass audience. At any time of day, the singer Dionne Warwick could be found on television, she and her psychic friends offering advice on love, money, success, or anything else anyone with a telephone was curious

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about. (One million people a year dialed her hotline every year in the early nineties.) For clients like big-time lawyers, bankers, and CEOs, however, some top psychics, astrologers, and clairvoyants were now charging up to $250 an hour, their direct, black-and-white advice considered a refreshing alternative to the wishy-washy, hedge-your-bets type of counsel bosses usually received. Rather than tell them what they wanted to hear, in other words, “soothsayers” told the rich and powerful the truth, or at least a truthful scenario. This was much like how soothsayers were used by royalty hundreds and thousands of years ago, when a good, bluntly honest seer or astrologer was considered worth his weight in gold. As well, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had all been practicing astrologers, their art accepted as a legitimate science until “reason” crushed everything else in its path during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.72 By 1994, however, the New Age juggernaut of the last decade had lost much of its novelty, now more of a lifestyle than a cultural movement. Nothing suggested this more than the Whole Life Expo, a trade show dedicated to the mind, body, and spirit. The Whole Life Expo had its beginnings in the early 1980s but, by the mid-1990s, had moved from the fringes to become not much more than an opportunity for a particular industry to promote its products and services. “We’re talking middle-ground, middle-class, mainstream America,” said Paul Andrews, the founder and producer of the event described its current attendees, seeing them as essentially “the Oprah Winfrey audience.” Andrews had gotten into the business literally accidentally, having a near-death experience in 1976 after a car crash. His spirit hovering his body before willing itself to return, Andrews knew then and there he was more than a physical being, leading him to immerse himself in the metaphysical and create a trade show for the field. Visitors to the 1994 Whole Life Expo in New York certainly got their $18 worth, with New Age workshops (Native American vision quests, the teachings of the Dalai Lama) and merchandise (sacred wind flutes, “head pyramids,” herbal remedies for cats) galore. Visions Travel, a Los Angeles– based tour company, was also there, offering trips to “power places” such as Stonehenge and the Pyramids, where one was most likely to have a past-life experience.73 The New Age may have become old news, but a new century and millennium were fast approaching to offer Americans exciting opportunities to immerse themselves in the supernatural.

Chapter 6

The Other Side

When the history of consciousness in the twentieth century is written, it will be the studies at these laboratories that mark the turning point. —Larry Dossey, MD (author of Prayer Is Good Medicine, speaking of parapsychological research)

In March 2009, a revival of Blithe Spirit opened at the Shubert Theater on Broadway. In the comedy written by Noel Coward (over six days) in 1941, Angela Lansbury was perfectly cast as Madame Arcati, a medium who literally vibrates when she receives vibrations from the spirit world. Sniffing the air for ectoplasm, Lansbury was the very model of a major medium, her character fully believing that she has mystical powers. 1 During a se´ance she holds for a writer (Charles) and his wife (Ruth), the ghost of Charles’s late first spouse (Elvira) is conjured up, the twist being that only he can see her. High jinks naturally ensue, with Charles committing what Ruth calls “astral bigamy.” In Coward’s self-described “improbable farce,” tables knock, pillows rise, windows crash, chandeliers drop, and bookshelves tumble, this paranormal activity much like that reported by those who have experienced what they felt were real blithe (or not so blithe) spirits.2 And in a strange meeting of life and art, actual psychics and mediums had been invited to audition at Sardi’s for the show, the producers hoping to conjure up the spirit of Coward.3 Besides being just good fun, the revival of Blithe Spirit showed that when it comes to the supernatural, the more things change the more they remain the same. Despite being a time of amazing scientific and technological

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advances—the sequencing of the human genome, cloning, the rise of the Internet, to name just a few—the unexplained and mysterious appears to be just as relevant and appealing in the early twenty-first century as it did forty, seventy, or a hundred years earlier. In fact, the supernatural grew in both volume and popularity as we headed towards and crossed over into a new century and millennium, a backlash against the unrelenting march of progress and “left-brain” thinking. “Never in living memory has a fascination with the paranormal been so epidemic,” wrote Life magazine in 1998, observing that “this upsurge surely derives momentum from the New Age movement with its shifting search for esoteric antidotes to premillennial anxieties.”4 Whatever the reasons, the supernatural remains as compelling as ever, our desire to have a peek into “the other side” proving to be irresistible.

THE BRUSH OF ANGEL WINGS Things did not go well for First Lady Hillary Clinton when she got caught peeking into the other side, however. Clinton was not happy that her visits with Jean Houston, which were first reported in detail by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post in June 1996 (as an excerpt from his new book, The Choice), were described as “se´ances,” the First Lady seeing them as more intellectual than spiritual in nature. The tabloids and talk shows had a field day with the story, however, with Houston (nicknamed “Hillary’s Guru”) reportedly moderating an imaginary conversation between Clinton and another First Lady who faced considerable challenges, Eleanor Roosevelt. “It was a brainstorming session for my book—not a spiritual event,” Clinton made clear, not wanting to be lumped into the same category as astrology devotee Nancy Reagan or have people think she had abandoned her Methodist faith for the occult. (Other First Ladies, including the wives of Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Tyler, Wilson, and Harding tried to communicate with the dead, it should be noted.)5 For what it was worth, Houston described herself as less of an intellectual than a “sacred psychologist” and “global midwife,” her specialty unarguably being psychic experience and mind expansion (including summoning up advice from historic figures).6 “The brush of angel wings stirs our souls as some long-forgotten paradisiacal memory of the future,” she wrote in one of her books, a completely unintelligible sentence but one that made it clear she was not your average writing coach.7 “Guru-gate,” as it became known, soon spread to the president as well. Houston was not only guiding Hillary to the other side but working with Bill to “deepen the elder in himself,” as the “guru” told the media, she and

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her famous clients apparently not on the same page. Rumors were circulating in England that Houston was running the White House, from a spiritual sense at least, the situation clearly out of hand. With the story not going away (now Mahatma Gandhi was reported to part of the imaginary conversations), Hillary decided that humor might be the better strategy to defuse the situation. “Shortly before I arrived, I had one of my conversations with Mrs. Roosevelt and she thinks this is a terrific idea as well,” she told a group in Nashville in July 1996, the self-deprecating joke doing little to stop the media’s snickering. Houston, also referred to as a “New Age Svengali” in the media, was not the only guru the Clintons had consulted with, it turned out. Over New Year’s 1994 at Camp David, the couple met with not just Houston but an all-star cast of New Age selfhelp personalities including motivation expert Anthony Robbins, the preacher Marianne Williamson, and the author Stephen Covey. But it was Houston with whom Hillary most connected, and soon she and her associate, Mary Bateson, were spending lots of time at the White House helping the First Lady flesh out ideas for her book, It Takes a Village, with a little help from a man and woman who had been dead fifty and thirty years, respectively.8 Recognizing that she too had become prime fodder for Leno and Letterman, Houston went on the offensive to convince the media and Americans that her work with Hillary was less kooky than it was made out to be. Projective techniques like hers were used by actors, writers, and even businesspeople, she explained, a creative exercise designed to spark new ideas. “There was no se´ance! There were no spooks!,” she told People magazine when they came to visit her on her four-acre spread in Pomona, New York, the role-playing game involving the spirits of Roosevelt and Gandhi more of a brainstorming technique than an occultlike ritual. Houston also appeared on Larry King Live to set the record straight, while there putting the host in contact with a dead hero of his, radio and television star Arthur Godfrey.9 Houston’s defense that the kind of visualization methods she used with the Clintons were common in Corporate America was actually quite true. Atlantic Richfield, for example, had been host to Deepak Chopra for a number of years, the New Age philosopher helping employees “explore their inner space to achieve a sense of ‘bliss,’ ” as Newsweek reported it. And at Stanford University’s business school, Professor Michael Ray was known for using tarot cards and chants to release the students’ “deeper selves,” another indication of the corporate world’s embrace of the concept of “personal transformation.”10 The flack that Hillary Clinton got for working with Houston was all the more unfair given how mainstream interest in the supernatural in general had become. By the fall of 1996, Betty J. Eadie’s Embraced by the Light had

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been on the bestseller list for ninety-three weeks, for instance, and Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters, in which the psychiatrist touted the benefits of past-life therapy, printed in seventeen languages. Sixty-nine percent of Americans believed in angels, according to a Gallup Poll (with half saying they had their own guardian cherub), and the governor of New Mexico had recently renamed State Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway for all the UFOs that were said to be in the area. Perhaps most telling, the Magic 8-Ball was more popular than ever, with sales of the prophetic orbs reaching 1 million a year.11 Why were so many Americans flirting with the supernatural? Who was this new “vast middle-class of credulous neospiritualists,” as Newsweek described them in a recent cover story on the phenomenon? Jill Neimark of Psychology Today had some theories, one being that because it transcended time and space, the supernatural simply offered a greater range of possibilities than the here and now. Explaining the unexplainable also helped provide order out of rampant disorder, she suggested, and offered individuals a narrative to their lives that was difficult to find in the material world. Stuart Kaufmann, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute and author of At Home in the Universe, argued that “paradise has been lost, not to sin but to science,” the paranormal functioning as a way to reassert our humanity in an increasingly technological age. Roger Walsh, a professor of psychiatry and philosophy at University of California– Irvine, felt similarly, thinking that the thirst for direct spiritual experiences and magical views of reality was a reaction against seeing ourselves as “meaningless blobs of protoplasm adrift on a little speck of dust in some uncharted galaxy.” The end of the millennium had to be playing a role in all these theories, everyone agreed, the turning of a major page in history fueling a mass identity crisis.12 Seeing an opportunity to help Americans solve their identity crisis were people like the psychic Laura Day. Having achieved two of the three steps toward big-time success—celebrity clients (including Demi Moore) and an appearance on Oprah—Day was trying to complete the trifecta with a bestselling book. In her 1996 Practical Intuition, Day offered an array of training exercises to bring out the psychic within, her no-nonsense approach—get centered, sift through the clutter for themes, letters, and colors, and then make connections—a refreshing alternative to the usually heavy paranormal fare. While trying to rebrand psychic ability as practical intuition was no doubt a brilliant idea, the simple fact was that many if not most devotees of the supernatural were attracted to the mystery and mild danger of it all, preferring to get answers about the Great Unknown from those seemingly ordained with special powers. Fortunately for them, there was no shortage of people Americans could choose from to get their questions answered.13

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COSMIC COMFORT One such person was James Van Praagh, the man nothing short of a sensation after appearing on the NBC show The Other Side in 1996. For a few years before that, Van Praagh had worked with a number of Hollywood types like Audrey Meadows, who was delighted by his ability to put her in contact with dead acquaintances (including her televisual husband, Jackie Gleason). Exposed to a national audience, Van Praagh soon had a major book contract and was packing them in at auditoriums for $25– $45 each, amazing people with his aptitude for “ADCs” (after-death conversations). “My mission is to present this information,” he told People magazine while on tour to promote his #1 New York Times bestseller, Talking to Heaven: A Medium’s Message of Life after Death, his message so popular he was asked to appear on CNN’s Larry King Live twice in just three weeks. As he explained in his book, Van Praagh could tune in to what many mediums, psychics, and ghost hunters described as the higher, faster vibrating frequency of the spirit world, his heightened sensitivity something he had since he was a child. Van Praagh’s view of the afterlife as a happy place certainly did not hurt his popularity, telling those in this mortal realm what they wanted to hear. (Not only were there “forests and trees” in heaven but “beautiful house and mansions,” he said, making the place not unlike a well-landscaped gated community.) Skeptics like famous magician Penn Jillette scoffed, thinking the “Barnum effect” (the tendency for people to agree with what they have been told) was in play, but it was clear that Van Praagh had tapped into a strong undercurrent of the fin de sie´cle cultural zeitgeist.14 Van Praagh’s wild success clearly demonstrated how accepted the supernatural had become in America at the end of the twentieth century. Not only had the medium appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show—a key measuring stick in terms of popularity—but the fact that a nonfiction book about contacting the dead was Americans’ favorite spoke volumes about current attitudes and interests. And unlike other well-known mediums and psychics who saw no contradiction with their special ability and their religious faith, Van Praagh openly rejected his Catholic upbringing, an important distinction. “Leaders of religions are more interested in gaining power here on earth than preparing their flocks for salvation,” he wrote in his book, considering himself freed from his “outdated” Catholic “mythology.” Obviously shaped by New Ageism, Van Praagh held that there was a spiritual energy in everyone and everything, challenging a few thousand years of Judeo-Christian philosophy. “I believe we are all God,” he stated, sounding a lot like the last great charismatic figure of supernaturalism, Shirley MacLaine. And unlike the old God

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who just wanted to be worshipped, Van Praagh’s God was a lot more helpful, a kind of super life coach guiding us in the right direction.15 “There is a great spiritual hunger in America, and the media are rushing to fill it,” observed Newsweek in 1998, citing Praagh’s book and Neale Donald Walsch’s bestseller Conversations with God as prime examples of the new, user-friendly kind of religion sweeping the nation.16 As in any field, having celebrity clients separated the medium men from the boys (or women from the girls), and Van Praagh had his fair share. Although Van Praagh had stopped giving private readings when he hit it big, he was willing to make an exception for people like Cher who, not surprisingly, wanted to contact her late husband, Sonny Bono. (Sonny let Cher know that he was pleased with his funeral but did not like where he was buried, the cemetery near Palm Springs apparently a bit too dull for his tastes.) Van Praagh also made time to see Cindy Williams of past Laverne and Shirley fame, she actually getting into a heated argument with her mother even though the latter was dead. (The complexity of motherdaughter relationships transcended cosmic boundaries, it seemed.) “More people are accepting it and buying into it,” Van Praagh told People in 1999, something that critics who believed his motive was mostly money would certainly have agreed with.17 Longtime skeptic Ray Hyman had another idea why psychics like Van Praagh had become so popular. “The brain is a meaning-seeking device that finds patterns in the world whether or not they are there,” he explained, our fascination with the paranormal more of a biological response than anything else.18 George Anderson was less famous than Van Praagh or Sylvia Browne, author of the bestseller The Other Side and Back, but was proving that you did not have to be a superstar to make a nice living as a professional medium. Anderson did in fact have a book out (George Anderson’s Lessons from the Light: Extraordinary Messages of Comfort and Hope from the Other Side) and occasionally appeared on television shows like Unsolved Mysteries but was more of a working man’s medium, doing sessions for $400 per couple. Through his “discernments” (the term “se´ance” was now considered as old as grandpa’s whiskers), Anderson specialized in putting bereaved couples in touch with their dead children, an obviously highly emotional experience. Although mediums had been around for a very long time, many credited the 1999 film The Sixth Sense for the recent success of pros like Anderson, the #1 film at the box office for five weeks seemingly prodding people to hire someone purportedly able to receive messages from the dead and pass them on to the living. “For millions of Americans, mediums are the message they can’t get enough of,” wrote People magazine that year, observing that the movie “reflects a resurgence of fascination with things otherworldly.”19

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Old-timers like Kenny Kingston were also benefiting from America’s fascination with the otherworldly. Kingston had been talking with spirits since he was a child in San Francisco, he recounted in his memoir I Still Talk to. . . ., the ghost of his grandfather helping him study for exams. The fledgling medium made his way to Hollywood where he met Mae West, whose many gifts included knowing how to help him hone his clairaudient (able to hear in a paranormal manner, as opposed to paranormal seeing or clairvoyance) listening skills. Soon Kingston was the medium of choice for many celebrities including Greta Garbo, Harry Truman (!), and a good chunk of Britain’s royal family. (He was reportedly the only medium Marilyn Monroe ever consulted.) Although most of his bigname clients were no longer on “Earthplane,” as he called it, Kingston was still making the rounds in 1999, a fixture on the paranormal lecture circuit and doing private readings for $300. The original “psychic to the stars” could also frequently be heard on talk radio and seen on television, a recent appearance on The Howie Mandel Show reportedly generating fifty thousand viewer letters. What was most appealing about Kingston, however, was his alleged ability to spot and communicate with Hollywood legends. Kingston was on good terms with a host of longdead stars like Errol Flynn, Lionel Barrymore, Charles Laughton, Carole Lombard, Peter Lorre, and Jean Harlow, all these icons of the silver screen still hanging out at Musso & Frank Grill, the popular Hollywood haunt of yesteryear. Now the restaurant was a literal haunt, with Kingston happy to inform visitors which ghost of Hollywood past happened to be in the house on any given night.20 Kingston had some younger whippersnappers challenging him for the much-desired title of “psychic to the stars,” however. Los Angeles was, like it always had been, chock filled with psychics in the early 2000s, not too surprising given the town’s being the world capital of imagination and illusion. Justine Kenzer, aka Psychic Girl, was one such up-andcomer passing along the wisdom of the dead to clients, most of them actors wanting to know if they would get the roles they had recently auditioned for. Psychic Girl’s readings and healings were available by both e-mail and, if in a real hurry, instant message, her fees starting at $100. Larry Montz was the man people like Drew Carey and Jim Belushi called to get rid of ghosts, the Los Angeles parapsychologist highly regarded for being able to determine not just if a place was haunted but how many spirits were there, what their names were, how they died, and why they would not go away. Montz had reportedly identified the ghosts of both Rudolph Valentino and Jim Morrison, in fact, this equivalent to having an Oscar in Tinseltown. Another heavy hitter in Los Angeles was Peter Michael Ulikhanov, a spiritual healer and naturopathic doctor whose

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patients included celebrities like Goldie Hawn. After scanning a patient’s body with his eyes like an X-ray machine, Ulikhanov made a diagnosis and then called upon spirits to help him transmit healing energy, this the kind of thing sure to impress even other Hollywood A-listers.21 For those who could not afford psychics or healers to the stars, a trip to a spiritualist camp might do the trick. There had been more than a million practicing spiritualists (or “freethinkers,” as they were sometimes called) in the country in the mid-1800s but now, a century and a half later, it was little towns where one was most likely to find one. About halfway between Disney World and Daytona Beach was Cassadaga, for example, a community of about two hundred people offering a much different kind of tourist attraction. For the past century, in fact, people had been coming to Cassadaga for spiritual readings and to connect with lost loved ones through the camp’s few dozen mediums and healers. Cassadaga had definitely benefited from the New Age movement, with more people heading there in search of what Bret Carroll, a history professor at the University of Texas, called “cosmic comfort.” Spiritualist camps had been quite common at the turn of the century but Cassadaga was one of the few still around, its guiding principle of continuous life as compelling as ever. By channeling the wisdom of spirits, mediums helped clients get through tough situations, the mere realization that one was immortal typically changing one’s perspective on everything.22 Fifteen hundred or so miles north remained its Yankee counterpart, Lily Dale, its thirty or so spiritualist mediums also offering cosmic comfort to the roughly twenty-five thousand people who visited the quaint village every summer. (All were certified “competent and upright” by the Lily Dale Assembly, the 250-person community’s governing body.) Here too death was viewed as just a transformation from the material to the spiritual world with communication between the two entirely possible.23 Although their movement was as old as dirt, spiritualists’ philosophy was au courant, its message that the other side was not that far away a welcome one for many.

CRAMMED AND SLAMMED Also welcoming spiritually peripatetic Americans to the other side were the many psychic hotlines popping up in the mid-1990s. The Psychic Friends Network was one of the most popular, its infomercial urging late-night TV viewers to call a 900 number to have their fortunes read for $3.99 a minute. The infomercial “starring” Dionne Warwick was in fact the most successful of all time, thought industry experts, based on how much revenue it generated. In 1995, $150 million worth of calls came

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in, according to those who tracked the infomercial business, a lot of money by any standards.24 The Psychic Friends Network went belly-up in 1998 but the Psychic Readers Network was there to pick up the crystal ball, charging callers $4.99 a minute to supposedly answer questions and help solve problems. Workers (I’m hesitant to call them psychics) there were trained to talk very s-l-o-w-l-y and keep callers on the line as long as possible, a sad thing given that most people who used the service were poor. (In 2000, a cleaning woman, using her employer’s telephone and credit card number, spent $6,131 on psychic hotlines like Eclipse Psychic and Voice of Astrology, making one wonder if the tele-seers predicted she would soon be in the clink.)25 Winning Lotto numbers were in fact often requested, begging the question why any real clairvoyant would prefer to work for $10 an hour in a call center rather than claim the multimilliondollar prizes herself.26 Although ads for the Psychic Readers Network carried a (required) disclaimer that the service was for entertainment purposes only, most callers were of course seeking real solutions to their real, often serious problems, the whole business a sorry affair. To make matters worse, callers were routinely “crammed and slammed,” as the practice was known, their phone bills padded with extra, hidden charges and their long-distance carrier switched to another without permission.27 Another heavily advertised psychic hotline featuring “Miss Cleo” was shut down in 2002 after two years of cramming and slamming, its spokeswoman supposedly hailing from the Caribbean actually born in Los Angeles.28 Some felt that with all their many faults, tele-seers still had their place, however. Daniel Akst of the New York Times argued that psychic hotlines performed a valuable public service, for example, serving as “a fiber optic lifeline of sorts for people nobody else wants to pay attention to.” For those who could not afford a therapist, telephone psychics were one of the precious few ways to get “professional” advice, the services perhaps even saving a life on occasion.29 Inevitably, psychics moved online in the late 1990s, able to reach a global audience without having to fork out good money for running infomercials. Most web psychics offered traditional phone appointments and personal readings via e-mail, with customers completing an online form asking for their birth date and the questions they wanted answered. Another advantage of online readings was that it was more anonymous, allowing some who would never walk into a storefront psychic or even call a hotline to get their questions answered. E-psychics were not cheap, however, typically charging about $35 for a two-hundred-word reading to $175 for an eighteen-hundred-word one, a bad deal considering one could get a full reading for about the same price from one in the flesh.30

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As usual in tough times, psychics, both real and virtual, were doing gangbusters business on the West Coast in 2001 as the dot-com bubble burst. At least one website, GotMarketing.com, was getting lots of hits, however, mostly because it was offering free business advice from a psychic named Imara. Although she had an MBA from Northwestern University and some solid corporate experience, Imara chucked the nine-to-five world to become what she called a “business intuitive,” seeing an opportunity for such a service. “In some cases, companies don’t have time to do market research studies, which can take months,” she told U.S. News & World Report, but “I can give them that feedback in an hour.” When she was not on GotMarketing.com, Imara was helping a couple of dozen technology companies make deals and investments, the uncertain economic climate proving to be very good for her own business.31 Like a bad economy, major tragedies such as wars drove Americans to psychics and mediums, and 9/11 was no exception. After the attacks, those who had lost loved ones at the World Trade Center frequently approached mediums and psychics in New York to try to contact them, this reminiscent of the spike in spiritism during and immediately following World Wars I and II. “Anytime there’s something in the public consciousness that doesn’t make sense, like the aftermath of 9/11 for example, or anything really traumatic, people out of desperation reach to things they would not necessarily have looked at before,” said Lisette Coly, executive director of the Eileen J. Garrett Library of the Parapsychology Foundation in Greenport, Long Island.32 Well-known mediums too offered their services to the grief-stricken, but not without controversy. A couple of months after the attacks, for example, William Morris, the big talent agency, invited a group of firefighters’ widows to a free session with one of its clients, the British medium and bestselling author Rosemary Altea. The widows appeared to appreciate the session, but some critics reasonably thought that William Morris had exploited the tragedy by using it to generate publicity for Altea. Likewise, John Edward’s plans to reunite victims of 9/11 with their relatives on his popular show Crossing Over were canceled after some advertisers and television execs raised objections about the medium’s motives. Was it fair for clergy people, therapists, friends, and neighbors to try to comfort mourners but not those claiming they could actually put them in touch with the dead?33 Although their field was inherently fraught with controversy even in normal times, psychics continued to become media superstars in the early 2000s as they surfed the tidal wave of supernaturalism. Even in the often odd world of the supernatural, it would be hard to make up the story of Ronald Bard, one of the most popular psychics working overseas. After being homeless as a teenager and doing a stint in the army, Bard reunited

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with his mother, Yolana, who had become a wealthy fortune-teller, working with clients like designer Diane von Furstenberg and Akio Morita, the cofounder of Sony. Bard soon followed in his mother’s fortune-telling footsteps, doing a show on Manhattan cable television that attracted the attention of executives from Asahi TV, a major network in Japan. Both Bard and his mom were whisked off to Tokyo to host a show, these unlikely Americans recognized as having super paranormal powers. His career launched, Bard was soon charging high-profile Japanese $5,000 an hour as a parapsychological consultant, his specialty being the financial industry. “They come to me to talk about their personal lives but after eight minutes they’re asking me about the markets,” he told Forbes in 2003, using personal items like photographs or business cards to foretell the future. Based on Bard’s prediction that a “telephone computer” would be a good investment, Satoru Ohyama, a managing director at Merrill Lynch Japan, was all set when i-mode mobile phones boomed, this just one of the psychic’s success stories. Bard himself had big plans, envisioning the Channel Channel, an American television network completely dedicated to the paranormal.34 Given how trendy psychics had become back in the United States, the Channel Channel actually was not too bad of an idea. “Psychics are today what therapists were in the ’90s,” said Lara Shriftman, a public relations executive, believing “it’s not just a trend [but] a phenomenon.” Besides using her psychic as a business resource, Shriftman gave away sessions with her to friends as Christmas gifts, this now considered a very cool thing to do among young urban professionals. Lauren du Pont, another member of the “creative class,” was equally enamored with her psychic, considering her nothing less than part of the family. “My inner network is my husband, my mom, my dad, and my psychic,” the senior design director at Polo Ralph Lauren told Harper’s Bazaar in 2002, the woman even doing readings for du Pont’s twenty-month-old daughter. “The trend is rampant, especially in A-list circles,” reported the magazine, citing Calista Flockhart, Courtney Love, and Milla Jovovich as a few psychically endowed celebrities who were recommending them to others.35 Why had including a psychic within one’s inner circle rather suddenly become so hip? Alexandra Bellak, a real estate agent at Manhattan’s Corcoran Group, also believed 9/11 had a lot to do with it. “Meeting with someone who can help me make sense of the future makes me feel more stable,” she said, thinking that since the attacks “everything is unsure in the world.” Like others before her, Bellak compared psychics to therapists, feeling the talking process of the latter just took too long. “With a psychic, you get instant gratification,” she explained, the benefit being that “you immediately know what to do.” Lynne White, coanchor of the WB11

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Morning News in New York, agreed that psychics were somehow able to create order out of chaos. “It’s comforting to understand that there are forces out there greater than yourself,” she said, these “forces that make the world go round.” Karen Thorne, a Boston-based psychic, confirmed that she and her colleagues tried to help put their clients “on track,” an invaluable service given the inevitable ups and downs of life. Psychics were believed to know when and where their clients should do things or, in the parlance of the trade, which times and places had the “right energy.” As these things go, however, having two psychics rather than just one was soon considered the better way of getting through crises and dealing with the mundane (not to mention the better odds of finding one awake at 3 a.m. to take a call). Psychics were also starting to pay more attention to members of the family whose energy needs had been largely neglected—dogs and cats. “Perhaps we’re onto the next trend—psychics for pets,” Harper’s Bazaar predicted only half seriously.36 The next trend was soon reality, however. Seeing the success of Sonya Fitzpatrick, a pet psychic with a show on Animal Planet, other “sensitives” decided they too could talk with the animals (and, even more important, get the animals to talk with them). Shira Plotzker, who had a nice business doing readings for humans in the Rockland County area (a suburb of New York known for its many psychics), successfully transferred her abilities to the animal kingdom, for example, landing new clients wanting to know what their dogs, cats, horses, fish, snakes, and yes, bearded dragon lizards were thinking. By tapping into their frequencies, Shira, as she was known, channeled the critters, receiving telepathic messages and then relaying them to their owners eager to hear what their animal companions had on their minds. Not surprisingly, dogs were a lot chattier than cats, Shira had learned, the former happy to talk about pretty much anything while the latter were, in her words, “mostly into themselves.”37 Christine Agro had also adapted her clairvoyant skills from bipeds to quadrupeds, earning the much-prized title of “pet psychic to the stars.” Agro helped boldface names like the fashion photographer Bruce Weber, the actress Joan Allen, and the artist/director Julian Schnabel better understand or locate their missing dogs and cats, her $100-per-half-hour fee considered well worth the price. In 2008, Agro was developing another business catering to those unable to voice their thoughts, Psychic Mom, ready to claim the distinction of becoming the “baby and toddler psychic to the stars.”38 Given that one of their areas of specialty is steeped in one of the two certainties in life (death), we should not be surprised that psychics and mediums remain a visible presence on our cultural landscape today. Carrying on the supernatural tradition are people like Concetta Bertoldi, the

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New Jersey psychic and medium making a very respectable living from her consultations and books. Besides being the author of the bestseller Do Dead People Watch You Shower? and Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs?, Bertoldi was booked solid in 2009 for the next couple of years, connecting people with their dead relatives and loved ones. With her positive take on the dead (the living were far more dangerous, she wisely observed), Bertoldi has fans all over the world, including celebrities like Sarah Ferguson and the actresses Edie Falco and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.39 When it comes to the supernatural, at least, the brave new world of the twenty-first century is turning out to be not all that different from the ghostly days of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge.

OUR DEEP CONNECTEDNESS As the success of American import Ronald Bard showed, Asians loved the supernatural as much as anyone. Asia has a long tradition of belief in the supernatural, of course, with fortune-telling, feng shui, and lucky (and unlucky) numbers, names, and colors thoroughly woven into everyday life. (Ghosts too are accepted as entirely real in some Asian countries such as Cambodia, where they are believed to inhabit tall trees and the bodies of dogs as well as protect important buildings.)40 East was increasingly meeting West in the mid-1990s, however, as researchers in Japan applied modern methods to try to harness the power of the supernatural. The Sony Corporation was running an “esper” (extrasensory perception and excitation research) lab, for example, its four staffers exploring telepathy and “ki,” the Japanese term for the Asian concept of the fundamental life force. “Our ultimate goal is to discover the mind or consciousness that all humanity, and the whole of creation, must possess—to pursue the spirit or soul that exists in our universe,” the prospectus for the lab stated, the practical benefit being healthier and more productive employees. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry also had a committee looking at ki, hoping researchers could produce it artificially to make sick people better.41 Here in the United States, however, parapsychological research could have used some “ki,” as the military-industrial complex began to pull the plug on projects it had been sponsoring. In 1995, the Defense Intelligence Agency shut down its “Star Gate” program, for example, having spent a reported $20 million over the past decade on psychics to provide military intelligence. In its study of the effectiveness of the secret Pentagon project ordered by Congress, the CIA determined that only about 25 percent of the psychics’ predictions were correct, this viewed as not nearly

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enough to justify continued funding. The three full-time psychics still working at Fort Meade, Maryland, were soon sent packing, much to the regret of Senators Daniel Inouye and Robert Byrd of the Appropriations Committee, who had been big supporters of the Star Gate program. (As the biggest devotee of the supernatural in Washington, Senator Clairborne Pell was not surprisingly crushed by the announcement.) Although the program was a disappointment, there had been some successes in the spying area. The Pentagon’s psychics (code named “The Naturals”) were credited with creating accurate pictures of Soviet submarine construction, for instance, and they correctly drew tunnels being built in North Korea near the demilitarized zone. But when it came to locating Colonel Muammar Gaddafi before the United States attacked Libya in 1986 or finding a pile of money that a double agent had stashed away, the psychics came up empty. “Sometimes it seems that these people are right on, but nobody knows when those times come,” explained one contributor to the CIA study, the government not comfortable with the idea that psychics could not produce specific information on demand.42 Some career parapsychologists like Dean Radin ignored the irony that financial support for his field was dwindling just as the public’s interest in it was growing. Radin was one of about forty parapsychologists doing research in the world in 1996, he now directing the Consciousness Research Lab at University of Nevada–Las Vegas after stints at PEAR and SRI. Like his colleagues, Radin saw himself challenging accepted scientific theories much like Copernicus or Galileo did in their view that the Earth revolved around the sun, fervently believing that one day the existence of psychic phenomena would also be taken as fact. “There are gaps in the way we know the world,” Radin told a New York Times reporter, with the overwhelming majority of scientists choosing to look the other way when it came to those gaps that brushed up against religion, faith, or mysticism. Radin threw himself into those very gaps, working on projects like a switch that could be turned on and off just by the mind. Besides the practical uses of inventing such a thing, Radin envisioned his work revealing what he called “our deep connectedness.” Like Edgar Mitchell, Radin believed there was a deeper reality and underlying unity beneath the surface of everyday life, and was determined to prove it. “The emerging view of complex ecosystems suggests that everything is constantly affecting everything else,” he said, with parapsychology on the brink of showing that we were all bound together.43 Radin did yeoman’s work by compiling the results of some seven decades of parapsychological research in his 1997 The Conscious Universe, the book making as strong a scientific case for psychic phenomena as any previously published.44

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Because he was able to propose what was perhaps the closest thing to a grand theory of paranormalism, Radin, unlike many other researchers, was able to find funding to pursue his concept of a conscious universe. Much of his work over the next few years involved intuitive hunches, i.e., how people were able to anticipate a future event, especially a bad one. Everyone had heard true stories of tragedies averted by those who somehow felt they would happen, the person who did not get on an airplane because he or she sensed trouble one of the more popular examples of this idea. Radin admitted that most hunches had perfectly reasonable explanations, but his research showed evidence of what he called “presentiment,” an unconscious form of perception. Many people got a literal gut feeling before something bad happens, he believed, our bodies capable of responding to a future emotion. Probably as a survival mechanism, people had the ability to physically recognize danger even when their conscious minds had yet to pick up the message, in other words, this a perfect example of humans’ “sixth sense.”45 The sixth sense also continued to be the focus of the Rhine Research Center in Durham. Researchers at the oldest institution of its kind were still exploring psychic phenomena much like J. B. Rhine did seventy years earlier, with four scientists working there in 1998 doing Ganzfield and remote-viewing experiments.46 Also still going strong a half century after it was established by Eileen Garrett (and endowed by Frances Bolton) was the Parapsychology Foundation in New York. Inside the Upper East Side brownstone were more than ten thousands volumes on all things parapsychology as well as a periodicals room for anyone wanting to read up on the subject (the library was and is open to the public). It was the lectures at the Foundation that pulled in most visitors, however, with a core group of regulars and a few strays gathering every month to hear what someone had to say on the subject. One month it might be OOBEs, the next “discernments,” and the next remote viewing, a paranormal potpourri for the supernaturally inclined. With parapsychology still viewed by many as weird and a bit unsavory despite the fact that most Americans believed in some aspect of it, the Foundation was a safe haven for sheep to feel perfectly at home. “Some people would burn us at the stake,” said one visitor in 2000, another part of the draw the chance to rub elbows with supernatural superstars like Hans Holzer (who as an octogenarian was still churning out ghost-hunting books) and Martin Ebon, the author of Psychic Warfare.47 One person who would like to have burned at the stake those responsible for propagating paranormalism, or at least their research, was Henri Broch, a physics professor at the University of Nice. “In France, paranormal beliefs are thriving and the situation is becoming alarming,” said

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Broch, concluding that belief in paranormal phenomena had become more widespread in his country after studying surveys done over the last decade and a half. Broch’s latest evidence was that seven of ten students at his school considered mind-induced spoon bending to be a “scientific fact,” such findings abhorrent to the Frenchman. Because actual reports of psi had remained relatively constant over this same period of time, Broch thought the rise of electronic media had a lot to do with the disturbing trend, with bad information (like good information) now able to get around much faster. More broadly, Broch also believed that emotion was trumping reason in society, with communication increasingly visual and symbolic to quickly elicit a response. Ideas heavily reliant on the written word and substantive analysis were losing out to sound bites, in other words, an ideal climate for sensational subjects like the paranormal to flourish. Broch was doing his part to try to stem the rising tide of what he considered pseudoscience, however, teaching a course called “Paranormal Phenomena and Scientific Methodology” in which students did tests to determine whether, say, extraterrestrials really could have put those huge statues on Easter Island. Ninety percent of the fifteen hundred students who had taken the class said they now looked at all claims with a critical eye, giving the Frenchman hope that one day reason would again prevail.48

MORPHIC RESONANCE Just a Chunnel ride away, however, was another parapsychological researcher, Rupert Sheldrake, who was making the case that the paranormal was entirely reasonable. Having previously held prestigious academic posts with the Royal Society and Cambridge and Harvard Universities, Sheldrake, a biologist, was working solo in 2000, his theory of “morphic resonance” alienating him from just about everyone in the scientific community. Sheldrake argued that there were invisible but pervasive “morphic fields” that were responsible for the shape and behavior of all things and were broadcast across time and space. An orange thus grows into an orange because it is directed to do so by the cumulative morphic resonance of all previous oranges. Beavers build dams because they are similarly guided by the morphic resonance of previous beaver dams. Newspaper crossword puzzles were easier to solve later in the day because of the morphic resonance broadcast by previous solvers. Sheldrake also held that there was a social morphic field that served as a bond between animals of the same species and even between those of different species. Owners of dogs and cats were thus transcendentally connected, he thought,

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this explaining how some pets hundreds of miles away were able to find their way home. Sheldrake’s latest book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, explained his theory in considerable detail, an idea many nonscientists found compelling given that seventy-five thousand copies of the book had been sold in the United States alone in the year since it was published.49 The fact that most biologists considered Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance hogwash did not deter the man from doing research that showed how the concept played out in everyday life. The popular idea that someone could “feel” someone else staring at him or her fit nicely into his theory positing that perceptible fields bound all entities to each other and that the mind had abilities beyond the five senses. Sheldrake conducted a series of experiments with blindfolded people who were asked to click a clicker when they felt they were being stared at by another subject and, amazingly, the findings (which were published in Biology Forum) showed that people could indeed sense when they were being looked at. Animals’ ability to know when another animal was eyeing them was a survival advantage, Sheldrake hypothesized, so “evolution may have favored the development of this sensitivity in many species,” he explained. Other scientists questioned Sheldrake’s research, not surprisingly, leaving the “cold start” that some were said to feel on the backs of their necks when they were being stared at to mystery novels.50 The mainstream scientific community similarly ostracized all researchers working in the field of parapsychology in the early 2000s, in fact. “There’s really strong pressure not to allow these things to be talked about in a positive way,” said Brian Josephson, the Cambridge University physicist and Nobel Prize winner another one of the few world-class scientists pursuing work in the field. Josephson was now heading up the Cambridge-based Mind-Matter Unification Project, continuing the psychokinetic trail blazed by J. B. Rhine. Despite all the obstacles, a number of papers on the power of prayer and meditation had been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, with studies showing that each could have a positive effect on not just the one doing the praying or meditating but on others. Hard-liners, however, continued to have their doubts. “If you can do things with your mind, then the universe is paying attention to you,” said Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and the author of Voodoo Science, that the reason for the large flock of sheep in America.51 The hardest hard-liner of them all remained James Randi, his twenty years of debunking all things paranormal having earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant and recognition as the leading hoax buster in the world. After the deaths of other top skeptics like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Jay Gould, Randi’s role had become that much more important,

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the other members of CSICOP just not having the sheer showmanship of the Amazing one. Seventy-four years old in 2002, however, Randi was wondering how much longer he could continue exposing spoon benders like Uri Geller, faith healers like Peter Popoff, and thousands of other less-well-known people claiming to have supernatural abilities. Randi, who never married and had no children, had been sued several times, quite understandable given his habit of calling what chiropractors did “quackery” and what John Edward did a “scam.” But no one had yet claimed the “million-dollar challenge” offered by his foundation to anyone who could offer scientific proof of his or her paranormal powers, his legacy in the history of the supernatural assured.52 Randi’s successor appeared to be Joe Nickell, who The New Yorker considered “the country’s most accomplished investigator of the paranormal.” Like those who he exposed as fakes, Nickell had appeared on shows like Oprah, 20/20, and Larry King Live, his expertise in the forensic analysis of historical documents serving him well in determining what was not kosher in other fields. “If they’ve crossed to the other side, why don’t they have anything meaningful to say?,” Nickell reasonably wondered, the dead not known for brilliant conversation when their spirits were mustered up. Nickell had been a skilled magician as a boy like Randi, his monikers (Janus the Magician, Mendell the Mentalist, and Mister Twister the Magic Clown) every bit as creative as the patriarch of skeptics. Also like Randi, Nickell soon became more interested in exposing deception than creating it. Nickell was a member of CSICOP (the organization’s only full-time investigator, in fact) and wrote a column for The Skeptical Inquirer, the sixteen books he had authored a virtual library of debunking. Nickell was not just interested in demystifying contemporary paranormalism (way too easy, he thought) but iconic wonders of the past like the Miracle of San Gennaro and the Shroud of Turin. (He created a similar image of the latter made with powdered pigments called the “Shroud of Bing Crosby.”) Interestingly, while he had total contempt for frauds, he empathized with true believers of the paranormal, his mother’s deep religious faith affording him insight into the ways of the devout.53 Naturally, Nickell felt right at home at the World Skeptics Conference, the fourth one of its kind, held in Burbank, California, in 2002. With sessions on topics like creationism, urban legends, fringe psychotherapies, and firewalking, the conference was a skeptic’s dream come true. Still, the five hundred attendees felt like they were just an iota of reason in the big scheme of things, with your average Star Trek convention, say, bringing in ten times the number of people. Skeptics from around the world understood they were clearly overmatched, especially as the supernatural tide continued to rise. In Russia, for example, the media had

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convinced many citizens that brain control could be achieved through “torsion fields,” while in Mexico government officials were taking seminars on how to harness the power of angels. Peru was riddled with psychics, France with aromatherapists, and the Netherlands with fad diseases (the frequently inclement weather there apparently not conducive for the paranormal staple of UFOs). Thousands of men in India were claiming to be Gods, this too a depressing thing for secular humanists in that country.54 Skeptics had a small victory in 2007, however, when Robert Jahn’s PEAR lab called it quits, the end of an amazing twenty-eight-year run surpassed only by Rhine’s three-and-a-half-decade stretch at Duke. Its money running out and its equipment dating back to the Reagan administration, it was clearly time for the controversial lab at Princeton to close its doors. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will,” said Jahn, the seventy-six-year old expert in jet propulsion content with what he and his small staff had achieved while wondering what could have been. Funded not by university money or government grants, PEAR had survived on private donations, a tough way to make much of an impact. Even more challenging was the resistance the lab faced from the scientific community, its papers on ESP and telekinesis consistently rejected by peer-reviewed journals. “How do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?,” asked PEAR’s longtime manager, Brenda Dunne, the fact that none of Princeton’s other seven hundred professors had joined Jahn’s team a telling sign of how marginalized the lab was. Still, PEAR had documented many of its studies in its own journal, and notable figures like the pianist Keith Jarrett and philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller had visited the lab, intrigued by the possibilities of the human mind. And while virtually everyone else did not want to get near the lab in the basement of the engineering department, fearing they too would be mocked, many (including science faculty members) discreetly joined the PEAR Tree, a sort of secret society of paranormal devotees. “It’s time for a new era, for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture,” said Jahn, hoping the Robert Jahn or J. B. Rhine of the next generation was out there somewhere.55

GOING INTO THE LIGHT Definitely out there somewhere, much to skeptics’ dismay, were plenty of ghosts, at least if one believed the growing number of professionals in the antihaunting business. Hauntings came in different forms, according to Dennis William Hauck, one such investigator of paranormal phenomena

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and the author of Haunted Places. Revenants (also called residuals), for example, were ghosts that kept returning to a particular place, having had some attachment there while she or he was alive. Then there were recognizable, intelligent ghosts, i.e., family members or famous people who could converse with the living, not to be confused with apparitions, which were vaporous and mutable spirits that could take the shape of a human or even an animal. Poltergeists were energy forces that moved objects around a room, their restlessness a product of strong emotions pervading the house. Of all these different materializations, only 10 percent were malevolent, Hauck believed, the remainder either benevolent or neutral.56 Although just a small fraction of spirits were surly, the classic signs that a ghost was present—cold spots, a troubling feeling, or mysterious noises— made some feel uncomfortable or downright distraught. That is when people like Jane Doherty got the call, most of them in the spring and fall, when spirit activity was said to peak. Like Hauck, Doherty believed that most ghosts were friendly, meaning having one around the house could be a positive experience by serving as a warm presence. Simply telling a chillier one to leave usually did the trick, the New Jersey woman found, a process she called “going into the light.” Other more persistent ones required a bit more effort, with meditation and compassion more effective than force.57 Those hearing strange sounds, seeing weird shadows, or smelling odd odors were also calling the Warwick, Rhode Island–based Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS). Years before they got famous on SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunters, TAPS (headed by Jason Hawes, a plumber by trade) plumbed spirits free of charge. “How can you charge for something that can’t be proven to exist?,” he asked, finding three-fourths of all cases easily explained. Sparks flew when the team encountered inhuman hauntings, these demons, incubuses, succubi, nature spirits, or angels not to be trusted.58 Dominick Villelle, founder of Paranormal Investigation of NYC, was also happy to check out reports of the unexplainable gratis, his team similarly equipped with electromagnetic-field detectors, temperature gauges, infrared cameras, and a variety of recording devices. (Ghost buster emeritus Hans Holzer considered taking along such gear completely unnecessary. “Don’t take any equipment with you like Geiger counters,” he advised in 2004, declaring, “it’s all bullshit.”)59 Villelle estimated 99 percent of the calls his team made were nonparanormal (lonely people just wanting some company represented a fair share) but, like the others doing such unusual work, the remaining 1 percent made it all worth it.60 The answer to how to get rid of a ghost, should such experts determine there to be one, differed according to whom you listened to. Some “cleansers,” as such specialists were known, recommended sprinkling holy water or fragrant oils, spreading salt, or burning sage or white candles in the house

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and around its perimeter, the theory being that spirits found such things distasteful and would thus move on to more pleasant surroundings. Others felt, however, that such an approach was merely cosmetic, and more direct action was required. Although they were dead, ghosts were still people, this faction argued, meaning that communicating with spirits was the way to get them to leave. As with unwanted houseguests, sympathetic but firm words were said to work best, reminding the ex-renters or -homeowners that they no longer lived there being particularly effective. Still others held that guiding spirits out of a house was the best way to get the job done, with those trained in Eastern relaxation techniques such as Reiki ideally suited for this kinder, gentler approach. Universal consent was that using a ouija board to purge one’s home of spirits was the worst thing one could do, the thing a virtual ghost magnet.61 Any paranormal investigator worth his or her salt (or holy water) would also agree that the first order of business was making sure any unusual goings-on did not have a more earthly explanation. A toilet flushing by itself in the middle of the night could be the result of a leaky flapper rather than dead Uncle Fred, for example, exactly what TAPS determined after their investigation. In the case of somebody seeing apparitions, finding out if the ghost reporter was on medication was a good idea, TAPS also advised, certain drugs sometimes known to cause hallucinations. Likewise, lights going on and off was probably the result of just bad wiring, an electrician far better equipped than a ghost cleanser to take care of the problem. Noises in the attic were much more likely to be squirrels than a poltergeist, and the former a lot easier to get rid of than the latter.62 Michael Persinger, a professor of psychology at Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, had a much different explanation for why people thought they saw or felt the presence of ghosts, however. People with sensitive temporal lobes—the area of the brain that is responsible for regulating emotions—were particularly prone to ghostly encounters, his research showed, especially when combined with strong magnetic fields created by ordinary household electronics. “In our increasingly electronically charged world, it would seem that midnight apparitions are really just clock radios rather than ghosts,” as Darcy Lockman of Psychology Today summarized Persinger’s findings, the man’s biological explanation taking all the fun out of things that went bump in the night.63 THIS FAR-OUT STUFF Much more fun could be found in the plethora of pop culture devoted to the supernatural. The 1996 blockbuster Independence Day in particular made people take notice of the trend. “Pop culture has already been

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captivated by all things paranormal, from psychic hot lines to out-of-body experiences,” wrote Rick Marin of Newsweek, wondering, “How did this far-out stuff get so mainstream?” Of course, this far-out stuff had got so mainstream because the paranormal was mainstream. The magazine’s own poll showed, for example, that 48 percent of Americans believed UFOs were real and 29 percent thought we had already made contact with aliens. (Another 48% thought the government was part of a conspiracy to cover it up.) Alien mania in the1990s was as big as that of the 1970s, rivaling the “Chariots of the Gods” sensation made hugely popular by Erich von Daniken a generation earlier. Besides Independence Day, movies like Contact, Mars Attacks!, and Starship Troopers were populated by little green men, and Disney World had recently added an attraction called ExtraTERRORestrial Encounter to Tomorrowland. Earth, apparently, was no longer enough for Earthlings.64 It was not just UFOs and aliens that were invading American pop culture with a vengeance but a wide variety of other “far-out stuff.” OOBEs could be found in books like The Celestine Prophecy, telekinesis in films like Phenomenon, and shamanic journeying (or “soul-traveling”) in lots of places in the Southwest, these just a few servings of a very large paranormal smorgasbord. The web was fast becoming a hotbed of supernaturalism, with sites like The Alien Exploratorium and America Online’s Para-Scope attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. “If the paranormal is a new kind of religion, the Net is where its gospels are being written and spread to an ever widening body of the faithful,” wrote Marin, this new medium perfect for underground populations to find each other. Who was taking part in this feeding frenzy of the paranormal? Anyone and everyone, thought Marin, but for different reasons. Baby boomers hitting or approaching fifty were searching for meaning in their lives, while cynical Gen Xers were naturally predisposed toward believing in anything smacking of conspiracy. As usual, those not religious or dissatisfied with the one they had were particularly receptive to the supernatural, the belief in an alternative kind of unexplainable somehow filling their spiritual needs.65 It was an old medium—radio—that perhaps served as the loudest voice of America’s love of far-out stuff, however. Every night for five, often strange hours between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Eastern time, more than 10 million listeners tuned in to Coast to Coast AM and Dreamland, the two talk radio shows hosted by Art Bell and carried by 335 stations across the country in 1997. Callers dialed in with their personal tales of the supernatural, with alien abductions, poltergeists, UFO encounters, remote viewing, and ESP the standard paranormal fare. Rather fittingly, Bell’s show was beamed up from his trailer home in the Nevada desert fifty

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miles outside Las Vegas, a short hop from Area 51, the mysterious military base where some of the remnants of the 1947 Roswell crash were said to have been brought. Bell rarely doubted the veracity of callers’ claims, more interested in providing provocative entertainment than a forum for debate. Although it would be hard to pick a clear winner as the most entertaining call, more memorable ones included a Bigfoot-meets-UFO story, a 1957 Chevrolet that “just fell out of the sky” in Long Beach, California, and a farmer who threw dead cows into a hole on his property, the curious thing being that the carcasses “never hit bottom.” Definitely memorable was a call made by Courtney Brown, a professor at Emory University. After Brown reported on Coast to Coast that a spaceship was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, the thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves, believing that the event was the signal for them to go to “the next level.” Bell was roundly criticized for his role in the matter, but it was clear he was just the medium, not the message. “I have an open mind,” he told Time. “I’ll listen to anybody.”66 Bell’s radio shows were a true media phenomenon, making some wonder how he was pulling it off with such a simple format based out of a trailer in the Nevada desert. By 1999, Bell had added one hundred and fifty more stations to his syndicated network, proof enough that he was doing something right. Besides his 9 million listeners a week (fourth behind Rush Limbaugh, Laura Schlessinger, and Howard Stern), Bell’s website (artbell.com) was getting a couple million hits a month, no wonder given there were “confirming” photos of extraterrestrials to view. “It may be a crock but it’s often great radio,” said Jeffrey Ressner in Time, seeing Bell as a throwback to earlier broadcasters like Orson Welles and Arch Oboler who were known to scare the heck out of listeners. Bell astutely capitalized on Y2K jitters early on, turning up the doomsday volume beginning in early 1998. At the end of the century and millennium, routine political scandals and celebrity peccadilloes were seen as too small and international conflicts too big, it seemed, with the supernatural just right.67 The supernatural appeared to be equally at home on another old medium, television. With its “objective look at psychic phenomena, esp, ghosts, alternative healing and more,” for example, the NBC talk show The Other Side was getting high ratings despite or because of the fact that its choice of subjects seemed to be ripped from the headlines of supermarket tabloids. Judging by a few episodes of 1995—“My Co-Worker Is a Ghost,” “Psychic Peeping Toms,” and “A Dead Celebrity Is Taking Over My Life”—it was clear that no topic was too out-there for the show’s host, Will Miller, to tackle. In addition to The Other Side, Fox’s Encounters, and NBC’s long-running Unsolved Mysteries, there were the weekly syndicated programs Sightings and The Extraordinary, each of these also televisual

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journeys into the paranormal. “There’s a seeker born every minute,” quipped Bradley Anderson, producer of Encounters, suggesting that viewers watched his and similar shows because they were “looking for something to believe in.” “Experts” who made guest appearances, notably Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, lent credibility to these shows, he believing that patients who came to him with stories of alien abduction were telling the truth. Medium deluxe James Van Praagh was another frequent guest who added an aura of objectivity, he typically brought in to comfort bereaved parents by delivering messages from their children on the other side. One running theme to all these shows was that all big and powerful institutions were not to be trusted, the government and “science” being engaged in vast cover-ups.68 The X-Files was the master of the game in that idea, the show blurring the lines between fact and fiction via its mantra that “the truth is out there” and to “trust no one.” By 1998, the show had doubled its ratings over its five seasons and counting seasons, with almost 20 million households tuning in each week. As impressive as the show’s popularity were the more than one thousand websites dedicated to The X-Files, many of them filled with the same sort of paranoia and anxiety that permeated the series. 69 The X-Files did not have just a guiding story line but a “mythology,” much of it steeped in what was perhaps the paranormal conceit of the moment, alien colonization. When rumors about the X-Files movie started to fly that year, the Internet was abuzz about what creator Chris Carter might have in store. An imminent Armageddon and interplanetary conspiracy was almost a sure thing “X-philes,” as they called themselves, (correctly) assumed, with computer hacking and deadly viruses also believed to be part of the plot. As in The Matrix trilogy of films, emotion and style often took precedence over logic and continuity in The X-Files, something with which fans of the series were perfectly fine. Until the movie came out, X-philes contented themselves with the brand-new video game based on the series, in which aliens took over the bodies of humans.70 Media critics could not help but take note of the supernaturalizing of the airwaves. “As the world slouches toward the millennium, television’s selling of otherworldly phenomena accelerates,” wrote John J. O’Connor in 1996, with extraterrestrials frequent visitors on shows like The X-Files and Dark Skies and paranormal the main ingredient of Millennium and Profiler. In reviewing a new, not very good CBS show about poltergeists called The Uninvited (not to be confused with Showtime’s Poltergeist: The Legacy), O’Connor dreaded what was likely to come. “Getting to and beyond the millennium is going to be a trying time for television audiences everywhere,” he worried, seeing a spaceship load of paranormal shows on the horizon.71 O’Connor would be proved right. Soon the WB

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was churning out a string of supernaturally theme shows including Charmed (four sisters whose prophesied destiny is to battle against evil beings), Roswell (four teenage alien-human mutants who survived the 1947 crash still living in the New Mexico town), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a sixteen-year-old girl battling vampires, demons, and other forces of darkness), and Angel (a Buffy spin-off focusing a vampire whose human soul was stored to him by gypsies). Crossing over into the new millennium did not seem to slow down the spate of supernatural television shows, however. In fact, one of the new shows on the Sci-Fi Channel was called Crossing Over, in which medium/ host John Edward communicated with the congenial spirits of audience members’ deceased relatives. (The show was advertised as “The really, really long-distance call.”) After “seeing” symbols and messages from those who had “crossed over,” Edward would try to interpret these “validations,” typically with considerable success (as all the flops were edited out, critics were quick to point out). Critics also griped that Edward used both the “cold reading” technique (asking leading questions to get the right answers) as well as the “hot reading” technique (getting advanced information) common to mentalists, but the show was an unequivocal hit.72 “As a result [of the success of Crossing Over], every mind-reader with an agent and a few dead grandmas in the wings now has a show in development,” observed Chris Ballard of the New York Times in 2001, not exaggerating by too much.73 Indeed, the fledgling PAX network was giving a shot at Twice in a Lifetime and Mysterious Ways, each show about some nice dead people coming back to this world for good or just a pleasant visit. “The departed are no longer taking death lying down,” punned James Poniewozik of Time, the friendly ghosts on television part of a new take on the afterlife that seemed to have been informed by talk therapy. Rather than be demonic or angelic, ghosts were interested in helping the living work out their issues, Poniewozik proposed, a sort of “Oprah-meets-Orpheus.”74 What was also good about ghosts on television was that, unlike living actors, they did not have to be paid. That fact seemed to be behind shows like ABC’s Contact, a one-hour special in which medium George Anderson helped celebrities like Vanna White speak with the dead, and Living with the Dead, a four-hour miniseries on CBS in which Ted Danson played a psychic who solves crimes by communicating with dead murder victims. The latter (which costarred Queen Latifah) was based on the life of Van Praagh, who remained a visible presence on television. In October 2001, in fact, just a month after the 9/11 attacks, Praagh could be seen on television contacting a woman who had perished aboard United Airlines Flight 175 when it plowed into the World Trade Center. “She says she’s safe, that she’s okay, but I’m also hearing the phrase ‘hidden governments,’ ”

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Praagh told the woman’s husband, some television producers unable to resist taking advantage of the tragedy.75 The paranormal parade on television in the early 2000s showed no signs of letting up. The X-Files ended its run in 2002, but new supernaturally themed shows like ABC’s Miracles and Veritas: The Quest quickly popped up (each unable to capture a smidgeon of the magic of the Fox show). After a false start with a pilot called Oracles (in which a panel of five psychics gave readings to a live audience), Paramount decided to create Medium, a drama series based on Allison DuBois, a real-life medium who had been serving as a consultant to the studio. In the NBC show (produced by Frazier’s Kelsey Grammer), Patricia Arquette played a psychic still coming to terms with her special ability, trying to strike a balance between her roles as a housewife and someone who could see dead people and read minds. 76 Upon seeing Arquette’s character help cops find bodies, uncover evidence, and solve crimes, some actual police departments who had yet to work with psychics decided to do so, thinking there really might be something to it.77 (Seeing the trend in law enforcement, Court TV soon added a “psychic spokeswoman,” Carla Baron, to its show.) Ghost Whisperer also was about a psychic, its star (Jennifer Love Hewitt) like Arquette looking nothing like your typical Madame Zodiac, something that partly explained the two shows’ high ratings.78 Just because a television show was about the paranormal did not mean it would be successful, however. Fox’s FreakyLinks, for example, in which the protagonist ran a website that investigated unexplained phenomena (“seeking out the dark and forbidden truths behind the seemingly paranormal”), was thankfully short-lived (thirteen episodes, fittingly). ABC’s huge success with Lost, a show about plane crash survivors on a haunted island, made the other networks work that much harder to create hit shows about unexplained phenomena, with expectedly bad results. CBS vainly tried with Threshold, which, shades of The X-Files, concerned itself with a secret government project investigating the first contact with an extraterrestrial species. NBC’s gone-before-you-knew-it Surface involved strange things happening in the world’s oceans. ABC tried to strike lightning twice with Invasion, a series about extraterrestrial biological entities, but it was the WB’s Supernatural that got viewers’ attention. 79 In the show, two brothers battle “dark and unearthly forces” as they search for their missing father, its tongue-in-cheek approach and good-looking stars a perfect formula to attract Generation Y viewers. And rather than look to past television shows for inspiration, Supernatural traded upon movies like The Grudge, The Ring, and the remake of The Amityville Horror, another smart choice given how beloved such scary films were to many American teenagers.80

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Ghosts were a visible (or invisible) presence in American popular culture in the late 1990s and 2000s, not surprising given that one in three believed they were real (up from one in four in 1990), according to a 2005 Gallup survey. “What is it with the dearly departed?,” asked People magazine in 2005, noting that it “seems they’re everywhere lately.”81 Indeed, hugely popular novelists like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice were going to town with ghosts, their versions a lot scarier than the ones we thought might be in our own attics. Movies too were infested with spirits, with restless dead boyfriends a genre unto its own. City of Angels, for example, was “a film that wants desperately to outdo Ghost and Titanic in the love-from-beyond-the-grave movie sweepstakes,” wrote Stephen Holden of the New York Times, the 1997 melodrama mining our obsession with the other side for all it was worth.82 The Sixth Sense of 1999 was a smash hit (“gaggingly mawkish supernatural kitsch,” wrote the same reviewer), its bigger influence propelling the careers of mediums famous and nonfamous alike. In the film, a nine-year-old famously sees “dead people,” the twist ending making it the stuff of water cooler talk for some time.83 Pulling out what remained of their hair were staunch goats like Paul Kurtz. At it now for thirty-five years, Kurtz and his CSICOP group were still objecting to all things paranormal in 2002, keeping quite busy given the flood of films and television shows trading upon some aspect of it. It was not just mediums like Edward, Van Praagh, and Anderson who got Kurtz’s goat, so to speak, when they appeared on television, but fictional shows and movies that used the paranormal as a conceit. Too many scenes in soap operas were set in heaven, for example, this violation of reality something they seriously believed posed real danger to society. “We are the heroic defenders of science and reason,” said Kurtz, his mission to debunk not just the paranormal but organized religions as well. To Kurtz, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were no different than sects like Satanism and Scientology or, for that matter, belief in astrology or UFOs, all of it contrary to his philosophy of humanism and pragmatic skepticism.84

WHY WE BELIEVE Although they got an A for effort, it was clear that Kurtz and his heroic colleagues did not have much of a chance of stopping or even slowing the supernatural express. “As we travel through life, we are all seekers after something larger than ourselves,” Jerry Adler of Newsweek observed in 2007, this neatly explaining why so many of us rely on those seeming to have psychic powers or are at least emotionally invested in the supernatural.

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In her 2005 book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (completed just before her death), Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a clinical psychologist at University of California– Berkeley, embarked on this very journey by talking to a disparate collection of professionals in the field. Mayer personally became intrigued with the supernatural in 1991 when she hired a psychic named Harold McCoy to locate a valuable harp that had been stolen from her daughter in Oakland. Using just a street map of that city and a photo of the harp, McCoy provided Mayer with the precise address where the instrument could be found, this even more amazing given that the psychic never left his home in Arkansas. “As a scientist, I don’t believe the story but as a human being I want to believe it,” wrote eminent physicist Freeman Dyson in the book’s foreword, capturing the ambivalence many of us feel towards the supernatural.85 Bruce Hood, a University of Bristol psychology professor, offers the most cogent explanation for this ambivalence that scientists and nonscientists alike feel towards the supernatural. As he detailed in his 2009 book SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, faith in the supernatural is anything but extraordinary, part and parcel of how the normal mind works. Basing his theory on research conducted by cognitive scientists like himself (and borrowing earlier ideas from both believers like Sheldrake and nonbelievers like Hyman), Hood argues that subscribing to phenomena that cannot be explained by laws of physics or biology derives from the same mental processes that are responsible for basic reasoning and perception. From early childhood, the brain is programmed to fill in the blanks and identify patterns in random data, he suggests, routinely translating sketchy or scattered information into coherent terms. This hardwiring is how and why we attach meaning to the unexplainable, his treatise goes, accounting for the pervasive belief in the paranormal or supernatural. Thinking that thing that kind of looked or sounded like a ghost is a ghost is just your mind doing its job, Hood makes clear, but it surely did not mean there was one actually there.86 In her 2008 essay for Newsweek, “Why We Believe,” Sharon Begley expanded on Hood’s argument, reinforcing the idea that, as she put it, “belief in the paranormal reflects normal brain activity carried to an extreme.” Feeling a ghostly presence, thinking you were the reincarnation of Cleopatra, hearing loved ones speak to you after they died, or knowing that someone from your distant past would be rounding the next corner was the perfectly normal workings of the human mind, she explained, with more and more scientists coming to this conclusion. Religious faith, a nearly human universal, is also part of this process, research is showing, biology perhaps accounting for why 90 percent of American adults dismiss the fact that there is no empirical evidence of God. “The idea that

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the brain constructs reality from the bottom up, starting with perceptions, is woefully wrong, new research shows,” Begley wrote, the power of hope a particularly strong factor in shaping what we think we see and hear. “The brain’s sensory regions, including vision, are at the mercy of higher-order systems, such as those that run attention and emotions,” she continued, with people prone to effectively blinding themselves in situations where they do not really want to see something.87 Anthropologists also have good reasons “why we believe.” Evolution has conditioned us to believe things are alive when we are not quite sure, some suggest, it being a far better survival strategy to assume that that big brown formation over yonder is a hungry bear than just a rock. Thinking that the thing that just went bump in the night is a ghost instead of rusty pipes could thus very well be instinctual, one more reason it should not be surprising that the supernatural is often accepted as truth. Control too, or more accurately the lack of it, is responsible for much of our supernatural ways, anthropologists argue. “In the absence of perceived control, people become susceptible to detecting patterns in an effort to regain some sense of organization,” said Hood, a fancy way of saying that the mind actively looks for explanations. Anxiety or economic distress make people that much more interested in feeling a sense of control, this perfectly in synch with the consistent spike in paranormalism experienced during tough times or social/political turmoil. “Perceptually, the world is chronically ambiguous and requires an interpretation,” summed up Stewart Guthrie, professor emeritus of anthropology at Fordham University and author of Faces in the Clouds, this accounting for everything from the Virgin-Maryin-the-burrito phenomenon to Edgar Mitchell’s “peak experience.”88 Finally, the notion that the dead have not really left us or that angels are looking over us is obviously comforting, making the supernatural a valuable—perhaps essential—part of the human experience. Interestingly, as science continually offers rational explanations for phenomena once considered supernatural (e.g., thunder and lightning), other, newer phenomena (e.g., Bigfoot, crystals, or alien abductions) seem to take their place, this too suggesting that “supersense” is a fundamental part of our DNA. “The universal human need to find meaning and purpose in life is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic or objective reality,” concluded Begley, convinced that “we are more irrational than we are rational.”89 Need I say more?

Conclusion

Powerful, meaningful, and legitimately spiritual, the supernatural has served as an important part of many Americans’ lives over the past century, hardly the silly subject or pastime that some have considered it. There is not a shred of definitive evidence that any paranormal phenomenon has ever occurred, yet belief in the supernatural is as high as it has ever been over the last one hundred years. The idea that we are all connected on some deeper, unconscious level is very appealing, a reminder that we are more the same than we are different. Remarkably, the ascent of science and technology has not killed off belief in the supernatural; in fact, science and the supernatural appear to be symbiotically connected, opposing forces that somehow work to each other’s advantage. If one thing is sure, it is that science is clearly not enough, the supernatural offering us the mystery and wonder that is an essential part of the human experience. Our brains seem to crave everything that science and technology are not, even the magic of decoding the human genome or wandering through the digital universe unable to deliver the magic to be found in the supernatural. Trained to search for evidence, the grist of science’s mill, it is perfectly understandable how parapsychologists like J. B. Rhine or Robert Jahn spent much of their careers and lives attempting to prove the validity of paranormal phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and remote viewing. It was a mistake for researchers to try to turn the supernatural into a science, however, this a futile task that only made the field appear to be that much more of a faith. Funding for parapsychological research is down, not surprisingly, in part because investors have reached this same conclusion. Still, current and future researchers will no doubt continue on this

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path, convinced that the scientific and technological tools of the twenty-first century will allow them to achieve the breakthrough that will persuade the biggest skeptic that “anomalies” are part of our natural laws. I wish them the best of luck, but it is unlikely to happen. The ghost of Darwin himself could sit down at the dinner table of some scientists, ask to please pass the salt, and they still would not believe in the supernatural, I’m afraid, even “proof” insufficient to change their minds. Despite this, signs are promising that the supernatural will continue to gain cultural currency. The supernatural and religion still appear to be going in different directions, for one thing, the former continuing to gain adherents as the latter loses them. For some, psychics have replaced clergymen (and shrinks) as their primary emotional ally, the beginning perhaps of a much larger shift in whom to put one’s trust. For many others, the supernatural is viewed as deeper, richer, and more intriguing than religion, the rigidity and mustiness of conventional faiths simply not offering those spiritually hungry what they desire or need. Religion is like how many teenagers view (or used to view!) their parents—predictable, containing, and, most of all, uncool—while the supernatural is how they look at their grandparents—quirky, liberating, and extremely cool. While actually older than organized religion, the supernatural is perceived as fresher, hipper, and more authentic and “real” than highly crafted Christianity or Judaism. Raw, earthy, and primal, the supernatural is a 1970s Alfa Romeo to religion’s finished, polished, and pretty 2012 Lexus, its “purity” offering a more visceral and palpable spiritual experience for growing numbers of people. Will the supernatural bubble burst, we have to ask? After all, how many more television shows about crime-solving psychics can we bear? Hopefully not too many more, but history tells us that the supernatural will ooze out in some other form once one well runs dry. Unlike a trend, the supernatural is an enduring dimension of the human experience, part of who we are as a species. Recent research that suggests we are hardwired to believe in the supernatural, that it is woven into our very biology, virtually guarantees that we will continue to have encounters with our “sixth sense” and with the great beyond. As baby boomers, the biggest generation in history, begin heading into their senior years in droves over the next few decades, death will become a more significant and visible component of everyday life. Completely unprepared to deal with the Grim Reaper, especially on such a large, unprecedented scale, Americans may be on the brink of a spiritual awakening of biblical proportions, something that bodes well for a field heavily steeped in the idea of life after death. We could perhaps be entering a post–New Age (Newer Age?) era, with the supernatural to take us to places we can only imagine.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Bruce M. Hood, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable (New York: HarperOne, 2009). 2. www.skeptic.com. 3. Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (New York: Walker, 2009), 1. 4. Stephen E. Braude, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xv. For a relatively fair and balanced academic examination of psi, see Critical Reflections on the Paranormal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), edited by Michael Stoeber and Hugo Anthony Meynell. 5. Harris L. Friedman and Stanley Krippner, eds., Mysterious Minds: The Neurobiology of Psychics, Mediums, and Other Extraordinary People (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), ii. 6. John Beloff, Parapsychology: A Concise History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 15. 7. Stephen E. Braude, The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Books, 1986). 8. Jason Colavito, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 2005). 9. David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), ix. 10. Mary Roach, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (New York: Norton, 2005), 18.

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CHAPTER 1 1. “Bar Ghosts at Lyman Trial,” New York Times, April 22, 1925, 25. 2. Janet Henderson, “Spooks!,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, April 1920, 317. 3. Joseph McCabe, “Scientific Men and Spiritualism: A Skeptic’s Analysis,” The Living Age, June 12, 1920, 652. 4. Winifred Kirkland, “Sense and the Psychic,” Outlook, December 1, 1920, 588. 5. Ibid. 6. “The Cult of the Super-Natural,” The Living Age, March 5, 1921, 582. 7. “To Investigate Occultism,” New York Times, October 2, 1921, 142. 8. “Austria Bans Spiritism,” New York Times, August 12, 1925, 5. 9. “Spiritism Grips Czechs,” New York Times, April 27, 1929, 6. 10. Elias Tobenkin, “Wave of Mysticism Sways Russia,” New York Times, May 17, 1925, SM1. 11. Walter Littlefield, “Sir Oliver and Palladino,” New York Times, March 21, 1920, XXX9. 12. L. Cope Cornford, “The Scientific Ghost,” The Living Age, January 10, 1920, 94. 13. “Sir Oliver Lodge and Maeterlinck as Heralds of a Spiritualistic Revival,” Current Opinion, March 1920, 367. 14. “Sir Oliver Now Accepts Miracles,” New York Times, January 25, 1920, 25. 15. “Lodge Tells of Spiritism,” New York Times, January 20, 1920, 3. 16. “Sir Oliver Lodge and Maeterlinck.” 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. “Dr. Manning Sees Harm in Spiritism,” New York Times, March 18, 1920. 20. “Priest Exposes Spiritism,” New York Times, October 18, 1920, 16. 21. “Priest Duplicates Tricks of Mediums,” New York Times, December 4, 1922, 9. 22. “Se´ances Denounced as Spiritual TNT,” New York Times, February 8, 1926, 22. 23. “Offers $5,000 Gift for a Real Spirit,” New York Times, January 28, 1920, 4. 24. “Is It Easy for a Humbug to Be a Medium?,” Current Opinion, October 1921, 489. 25. “Sir Oliver Lodge and Maeterlinck.” 26. Joseph Jastrow, “Do the Dead Come Back?,” Forum, February 1920, 145. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Henderson, “Fallacies of Spiritism,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, June 1920, 20. 30. “Asks Psychic Test of ‘Other’ World,” New York Times, January 26, 1920, 3. Hyslop offered an additional reason for such an effort; people considered

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insane could finally be treated and cured, he argued, with research showing that their consciousness had actually been invaded by spirits. 31. “Dr. Hyslop’s Laboratory,” New York Times, January 27, 1920, 14. 32. “Two Skeptics Tell Why They Cannot Agree with Conan Doyle,” Current Opinion, June 1922, 780. 33. “Devils, Too, in Other World, Says Doyle,” New York Times, May 8, 1922, 18. 34. “Two Skeptics Tell Why.” 35. Ibid. 36. “His Dinosaur Film a Hoax, Says Doyle,” New York Times, June 4, 1922, 18. 37. “Send Challenge to Conan Doyle,” New York Times, April 8, 1923, 22. 38. John B. Kennedy, “Houdini Made Himself the Master Magician,” New York Times, November 7, 1926, XX10. 39. “Conan Doyle Asserts Houdini Was Medium,” New York Times, November 15, 1927, 20. 40. “Spiritists to Seek Sign from Houdini,” New York Times, November 7, 1926, 12. 41. “Mr. Houdini Fails to Materialize,” New York Times, June 7, 1928, 21. 42. “Willing a Person to Play a Certain Card,” Current Opinion, September 1, 1922, 383. 43. Edwin E. Slosson, “A Simple Household Test of Spiritualism,” The Independent and the Weekly Review, January 21, 1922, 58. 44. “Familiar Spirits,” Outlook, May 3, 1922, 13. 45. “Edison at 75 Still a Two-Shift Man,” New York Times, February 12, 1922, 25. 46. “The Theatre,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1923, 3. 47. “Doyle Challenges Skeptics on Spiritism,” New York Times, May 25, 1923, 29. 48. “Bird Finds No Bond with Spirit World,” New York Times, October 30, 1923, 6. 49. “Nova Scotia Ghost Scare,” New York Times, February 28, 1922, 2. 50. Walter Franklin Prince, “Spirit Communication—A Debate,” Forum, February 1924, 147. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Joseph Jastrow, “The Animus of Psychical Research,” Forum, February 1924, 155. 55. Ibid. 56. “Spiritualism—For and Against,” Forum, March 1924, 405. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. “ ‘Margery’s’ Feats Not ‘Supernatural,’ ” New York Times, October 21, 1925, 25. 60. Ibid. 61. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “These Too, Too Solid Ghosts,” Forum, February 1926, 238. “The clothing of ghosts” was discussed by Ambrose Bierce in a 1902 essay of that name.

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62. “Sending Telepathic Messages,” Current Opinion, February 1, 1925, 212. 63. “French Scientist Does Not Accept or Reject Spiritism,” New York Times, September 5, 1926, X11. 64. Hereward Carrington, “Is ‘Psychical Research’ a Science?,” Forum, January 1925, 73. 65. Sir Oliver Lodge, “Spiritualism and Religion,” Forum, August 1925, 184. 66. William McDougall, “A Plea for Psychical Research,” Forum, April 1926, 532. 67. See, on this subject, Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), which was originally published in English in 1900. Thanks to an anonymous reader for clarification on this point. 68. See, for example, Harry Elmer Barnes’s The Twilight of Christianity (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929) and James Turner Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Again, thanks to the same anonymous reader. 69. “Doyle Sees Religion as Spiritism’s Core,” New York Times, November 30, 1926, 31. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. “Ghosts Do Exist, M’Dougall Admits,” New York Times, December 4, 1926, 19. 74. “Likens Spiritism to Einstein Theory,” New York Times, December 5, 1926, E1. 75. “Lodge Says His Wife Rests in the Beyond,” New York Times, February 22, 1929, 5.

CHAPTER 2 1. “Goat Is Still Goat Despite Magic Rite,” New York Times, June 18, 1932, 15. 2. Ernest Hunter Wright, “The Nature of Telepathy,” Reader’s Digest, January 1937, 53–57. 3. Arthur Train, “Are You ‘Psychic’?,” The Reader’s Digest, May 1936, 14–16. 4. “Letters and the Arts,” The Living Age, October 1932, 178. 5. Gerald Heard, “Spritualism Put to Proof,” The Living Age, November 1932, 258. 6. “Personality Test ‘Identifies’ Spirit,” New York Times, July 17, 1933, 15. 7. Ibid. 8. “Crooked Crystal Gazers,” New York Times, April 7, 1933, 22. 9. “Spooks, Pixies and Such,” New York Times, December 25, 1938, 106. 10. J. B. Rhine, “After Death—What?,” Forum and Century, February 1935, 114. 11. Sax Rohmer, “A Journey in Space,” Forum and Century, November 1935, 316. 12. “Ghosts, No Ghosts,” Time, October 28, 1935, 32+. 13. “Psychic Survives a Blindfold Test,” New York Times, June 22, 1935, 16.

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14. “Spiritualist Fails to Bare Mysteries,” New York Times, June 13, 1935, 25. For much more on psychics, see Fred M. Frohock’s fine Lives of the Psychics: The Shared Worlds of Science and Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 15. Rhine, “Are We ‘Psychic’ Beings?,” Forum and Century, December 1934, 369. 16. “Parapsychology,” New York Times, April 12, 1937, 16. 17. Rhine, “Are We ‘Psychic’ Beings?” 18. William Moulton Marston, “Problems in Living,” Forum and Century, May 1938, 286. 19. Wright, “The Nature of Telepathy.” 20. Rhine, “Are We ‘Psychic” Beings?” 21. Rhine, “The Practical Side of Psychism,” Forum and Century, January 1935, 51. 22. Ibid. 23. Heard, “Spritualism Put to Proof.” 24. Rhine, “The Practical Side of Psychism.” 25. Rhine, “Don’t Fool Yourself,” Forum and Century, September 1935, 187. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. “Magicians Evoke a ‘Ghost’ at Show,” New York Times, April 26, 1932, 9. 29. George B. Anderson, “The ‘Mentalist’ Rackets,” Forum and Century, December 1938, 280. 30. “Radio Occultist Accused of Fraud,” New York Times, September 8, 1934, 18. 31. Miriam Allen De Ford, “Do We Survive?,” Forum and Century, October 1935, 250. 32. “Ghost-Hunter,” Time, October 5, 1936, 22+. 33. “Unconscious Whispering,” Time, August 8, 1938, 20. 34. Aldous Huxley, “Science Views the Supernatural—II,” Forum and Century, May 1935, 308. 35. Heard, “The New Epoch in Psychical Research,” Forum and Century, July 1936, 25. 36. De Ford, “Do We Survive?” 37. B. F. Skinner, “Is Sense Necessary?,” The Saturday Review, October 9, 1937, 5–6. 38. Marston, “Problems in Living.” 39. Claude Bragdon, “Delphic Woman,” Forum and Century, August 1934, 114. 40. “Telepathy Tests Told,” New York Times, April 10, 1935, 25. 41. Marston, “Problems in Living.” 42. “ ‘Come Seven, Come Eleven’ Invites New Controversy,” New York Times, September 19, 1943, E9. 43. Denis Conan Doyle, “Life after Death,” Forum and Century, September 1937, 110. 44. Ibid.

184

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45. Maurice Zolotow, “The Soothsayer Comes Back,” Saturday Evening Post, April 17, 1943, 16–17, 65–66. 46. “Suppressed Spirits,” Time, February 12, 1940, 56. 47. Zolotow, “The Soothsayer Comes Back.” 48. Pence James, “What’s on Your Mind? Polgar Knows!,” Saturday Evening Post, October 30, 1943, 24–25, 41. 49. “Banshee Turns Up in 86th St. Flat,” New York Times, July 28, 1936, 21. 50. Earl Sparling, “Dunninger, Radio’s Master Mind Reader,” The Reader’s Digest, January 1944, 83–87. 51. “Deadlock Reached on Court’s Se´ance,” New York Times, March 12, 1935, 19. 52. “Dunninger Enters Psychics’ Dispute,” New York Times, May 14, 1935, 3. 53. “Firewalker Trick Bared by Expert,” New York Times, September 19, 1935, 27. 54. Clair Price, “Indian Magic Again Puzzles Scientists,” New York Times, October 20, 1935, SM9. 55. Sparling, “Dunninger, Radio’s Master Mind Reader.” 56. “Trick or Triumph,” Newsweek, December 13, 1943, 86. 57. “Trade Winds,” The Saturday Review, September 30, 1944, 20. 58. Sparling, “Dunninger, Radio’s Master Mind Reader.” 59. Dorothy Walworth, “Calling All Spirits!,” The American Mercury, April 1943, 79–83. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. “No Message from Harry,” Newsweek, February 15, 1943, 68+. At one time, however, Houdini’s widow did indeed believe that her husband had successfully contacted her from the grave. Arthur Ford had apparently discovered Houdini’s code back in 1929 but apparently got it from Houdini’s alleged mistress, Daisy White, or some other source rather than from Houdini himself who had been dead two years. It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intent to use Ford “to get the Houdini message through and validate the Spiritualist agenda and, at the same time, hijack Houdini’s legacy,” according to William Kalush and Larry Sloman in their excellent The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero (545). Ford tells a different story in his Unknown but Known-My Adventure Into The Meditative Dimension. “Reports Message of Houdini Decoded,” New York Times, January 9, 1929, 5; “Says Woman Bared Secret Houdini Code,” New York Times, January 15, 1929, 12. 64. Edward Alden Jewell, “Mrs. Irving T. Bush to Open Exhibition,” New York Times, May 19, 1943, 28. 65. Ibid. 66. Mark Thurston, ed., The Essential Edgar Cayce (New York: Tarcher/ Penguin, 2004), 1–5.

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67. D. R. Starie, “There Is a River,” Library Journal, March 1, 1943, 210. See K. Paul Johnson’s Edgar Cayce in Context: The Readings: Truth and Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) for more on the man.

CHAPTER 3 1. Rhine, “Things I Can’t Explain,” The Reader’s Digest, March 1949, 124–26. 2. Ibid. 3. Clifford Troke, “Something Big in Telepathy,” Science Digest, August 1950, 18–23. 4. Noel F. Busch, “A Who’s Who of English Ghosts,” The Reader’s Digest, December 1947, 31–33. 5. Henry Lee, “England’s Most Haunted House,” Coronet, December 1948, 129–34. 6. Busch, “A Who’s Who of English Ghosts.” 7. Julien J. Proskauer, “De-Hexing Haunted Houses,” Science Digest, January 1947, 88–92. 8. Ira M. Freeman, “Experiments with a Ghost,” Science Digest, January 1953, 21–23. 9. Cyril J. Smith, “Telepathy: Fact or Fancy,” Science Digest, October 1947, 14–17. 10. S. G. Soal, “Telepathy: Man’s Sixth Sense?,” New York Times, June 11, 1950, 155. 11. Rhine, “The Case for Telepathy,” The Saturday Review, June 22, 1946, 32. 12. Lucien Warner, “Jungle of Miracles,” The Saturday Review, November 8, 1947, 27–28. 13. Rhine, “The Reach of the Mind,” The Reader’s Digest, February 1948, 129–42. 14. Rhine, “Letter to the Editor 2—No Title,” New York Times, December 28, 1947, BR14. 15. Rhine, “Things I Can’t Explain.” 16. Robert M. Yoder, “Tales of the Supernatural,” The Reader’s Digest, October 1952, 98–102. 17. Signe Toksvig, “Documenting Extra-Sensory Perception,” The Saturday Review, April 24, 1948, 27–28. 18. “Telepathic Dreams?,” Science Digest, December 1947, 29. 19. Thomas Sugrue, “Supernormal Cognition,” New York Times, October 23, 1949, BR51. 20. W. K., “Notes on Science,” New York Times, November 23, 1952, E9. 21. W. K., “Notes on Science,” New York Times, July 5, 1953, E7. 22. “Utrecht Sessions Test New ‘Reams,’ ” New York Times, July 31, 1953, 9.

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23. “Psychic Phenomena,” New York Times, May 15, 1955, E9. 24. John Hillaby, “Proof of Ghosts Sifted in Britain,” New York Times, July 12, 1955, 27. 25. Hillaby, “Proof of Ghosts”; “The Ghosts of Borley,” Time, February 13, 1956, 24. 26. “Studies Pin Down ‘Traits’ of Ghosts,” New York Times, July 14, 1955, 25. 27. Robert W. Marks, “Be a Mind Reader,” Coronet, April 1954, 20–24. 28. Ibid. 29. Troke, “Something Big in Telepathy.” 30. Murray Teigh Bloom, “The Housewife Who Confounded Two Countries,” The Reader’s Digest, May 1950, 53–57. 31. Rose Mackenberg, “I’ve Unmasked a Thousand Frauds,” The Saturday Evening Post, March 3, 1951, 26–27, 103–105. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Gay Talese, “The Occult Cult Flourishes,” New York Times, October 12, 1958, SM41. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Soal, “Telepathy: Man’s Sixth Sense?” 46. Norman Carlisle and Madelyn Carlisle, “What Is Telepathy?,” Coronet, June 1952, 96–100. 47. Ibid. 48. Louis Wolfe, “Who Was Patience Worth?,” Coronet, January 1954, 36–40. 49. Carlisle and Carlisle, “What Is Telepathy?” 50. W. K., “Psychic Phenomena Beyond Physics,” New York Times, January 13, 1952, E1. 51. Edmund W. Sinnot, “The Psi Phenomena,” New York Times, December 27, 1953, BR6. 52. Ibid. 53. Heard, “Enchanted Frontier,” New York Times, October 22, 1961, BR22. 54. Sinnot, “The Psi Phenomena.” 55. Huxley, “A Case for Psi,” The Reader’s Digest, April 1954, 75–78. 56. Sinnot, “A Case for Psi.”

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57. Robert K. Plumb, “Extrasensory Tests Stir Science Dispute,” New York Times, August 27, 1955, 1. 58. Waldermar Kaempffert, “Science in Review,” New York Times, July 22, 1956, E9. 59. Plumb, “Extrasensory Tests Stir Science Dispute.” 60. “Scientists Debate 6th Sense of Man,” New York Times, January 8, 1956, 53. 61. Plumb, “Science in Doubt about Telepathy,” New York Times, July 14, 1956, 17. 62. Tris Coffin, “Brain Rays: Russia’s Secret Weapon?,” Coronet, June 1955, 120–25. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. John G. Fuller, “Trade Winds,” The Saturday Review of Literature, May 10, 1958, 4–6. 69. Siegfried Mandel, “His Man Fletcher,” The Saturday Review of Literature, July 12, 1958, 18–19, 32. 70. “Professor Seeks L. I. Mystery Key,” New York Times, February 27, 1958, 29. 71. “L. I. ‘Poltergeist’ Stumps Duke Men,” New York Times, August 10, 1958, 68. 72. “Psi,” The New Yorker, September 17, 1960, 33–34. 73. “Reading for Pleasure,” Wall Street Journal, November 9, 1961, 18. 74. Heard, “Enchanted Frontier,” New York Times, October 22, 1961, BR22. 75. Christopher Jencks, “Beyond the Five Senses,” The New Republic, January 2, 1961, 18–20. 76. Ibid. 77. Jack Gould, “TV Review,” New York Times, September 18, 1964, 71.

CHAPTER 4 1. Robert A. Wright, “E.S.P., Not Science, Rules Decisions, Professor Says,” New York Times, August 31, 1969, F1. 2. Jhan Robbins and June Robbins, “The Psychic Powers of Sam Benson,” The Reader’s Digest, January 1965, 119–22. 3. Ruth Montgomery, “The Crystal Ball,” The Reader’s Digest, July 1965, 236–60. 4. Louis Calta, “Lerner and Lane Work on Musical,” New York Times, November 21, 1964, 33. 5. Milton Esterow, “E.S.P. Mail Floods ‘Clear Day,’ ” New York Times, January 27, 1966, 29. 6. Randolph Hogan, “Sixth Sense,” New York Times, February 21, 1971, BR22.

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7. “Messages through the Medium,” Time, October 6, 1967, 55. 8. Ibid. 9. John Kobler, “ESP,” Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1968, 65–69. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. “Mind over Matter—Maybe,” Time, January 24, 1969, 52. 14. Francine du Plessix Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond,” New York Times, August 11, 1974, SM12. 15. Edgar D. Mitchell, “Ex-Astronaut on E.S.P.,” New York Times, January 9, 1974, 35. 16. “Space Experiment in ESP Is Described,” New York Times, February 23, 1971, 40. 17. “Astronaut Tells of E.S.P. Tests,” New York Times, June 22, 1971, 22. 18. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 19. “Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier,” Time, March 4, 1974, 65–72. 20. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 21. “Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier.” 22. Joan Cook, “Look at Your Dog . . . Is He Smiling?,” New York Times, March 2, 1972, 46. 23. Walter R. Fletcher, “Fancier Claims Success with ESP Test on Dogs,” New York Times, April 8, 1976, 50. 24. Pat Gleeson, “Findings on Canine ESP Shared by Researcher,” New York Times, May 12, 1977, 100. 25. Andrew M. Greeley, “There’s a New-Time Religion on Campus,” New York Times, June 1, 1969, SM14. 26. “The Occult: A Substitute Faith,” Time, June 19, 1972, 62–68. 27. Max Gunther, “An Occult Guide to the Stock Market,” Esquire, April 1973, 63–64. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. “Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier.” 31. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 32. “The Magician and the Think Tank,” Time, March 12, 1973, 110. 33. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 34. “Paranormal Science,” New York Times, November 6, 1974, 44. Largely ignored was an editorial in Nature that accompanied the article, criticizing the paper and suggesting readers refer to an article in a concurrent issue of New Scientist that panned Geller and SRI’s research. 35. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 36. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” John G. Taylor, a mathematician at King’s College, was one such erudite Brit who was taken in by Geller. Taylor

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praised Geller in his 1975 book Superminds but later recanted, publishing two papers in Nature that retracted his endorsement. 37. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” See James Randi’s Flim-Flam!: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982). 38. Boyce Rensberger, “Magicians Term Israeli ‘Psychic’ a Fraud,” New York Times, December 13, 1975, 59. 39. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 40. Steve Cady, “Do ESP Horseplayers Have Future?,” New York Times, August 2, 1974, 19. 41. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 42. Gordon T. Thompson, “Federal Grant Supports ESP Dream Research at Maimonides,” New York Times, November 25, 1973, 79. 43. Gray, “Parapsychology and Beyond.” 44. “The Psychic Scandal,” Time, August 26, 1974, 74. 45. Rensberger, “False Tests Peril Psychic Research,” New York Times, August 20, 1974, 16. 46. Kendrick Frazier, “Science and the Parascience Cults,” Science News, May 29, 1976, 346–50. 47. “Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier.” 48. Rensberger, “Paranormal Phenomena Facing Scientific Study,” New York Times, May 1, 1976, 19. 49. Ibid. 50. Rensberger, “Panel Fears Vogue for the Paranormal,” New York Times, August 10, 1977, 11. 51. Rensberger, “Skeptics Are Scored on Paranormal Issue,” New York Times, 21. 52. Frazier, “Science and the Parascience Cults.” 53. “Reincarnation Furor in Iowa,” Time, March 27, 1978, 87. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Frazier, “UFOs! Horoscopes! (and Other Nonsense),” The Reader’s Digest, July 1978, 141–44. 57. “Phantom of the Point,” Time, December 4, 1972, 12. 58. “U.S. Booklet Guides the Tourist to Ghosts and Houses They Haunt,” New York Times, January 15, 1978, 43. 59. Ibid. 60. Robert J. Dunphy, “Notes: Who’s Whoooo on the Ghost Circuit,” New York Times, July 17, 1977, 253. 61. Robert Ornstein, “A Case for Parapsychology,” New York Times, March 13, 1977, 255. 62. Laile E. Bartlett, “What Do We Really Know about Psychic Phenomena?,” The Reader’s Digest, August 1977, 82–87.

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63. Ibid. 64. Joseph P. Blank, “The Woman Who Sees through Psychic Eyes,” The Reader’s Digest, December 1978, 107–12. 65. Bartlett, “What Do We Really Know?” 66. Flora Lewis, “E´migre´ Tells of Research in Soviet in Parapsychology for Military Use,” New York Times, June 19, 1977, 1. 67. Lewis, “E´migre´ Tells of Research”; Rensberger, “Gains in ESP Studies by Soviet Doubted by American Specialists,” New York Times, June 19, 1977, 20. 68. Rensberger, “Gains in ESP Studies.” 69. “A Stepchild of Science Starts to Win Friends,” U.S. News & World Report, July 31, 1978, 41. Viktor Korchnoi blamed his loss to Anatoly Karpov in the 1978 chess championship on a KGB telepath who was sending negative thinking his way, another example of supposed Russian mind control. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5 1. Michael Winerip, “Imagine a Light on Your Head at the Y.W.C.A.,” New York Times, May 17, 1988, B1. 2. Malcolm W. Browne, “Arguing the Existence of ESP,” New York Times, January 29, 1980, C1. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Harold Puthoff, “Almost Everyone Has Psychic Abilities,” U.S. News & World Report, May 7, 1984, 73. 6. Jeannie Ralston, “Can Psychics See What Detectives Can’t?,” McCall’s, February 1983, 72–73. 7. Rona Maynard, “Putting Down the Psychics,” Maclean’s, February 7, 1983, 49. 8. Jerome Clark, “Censoring the Paranormal,” Omni, February 1987, 33. 9. Philip B. Taft Jr., “A Charlatan in Pursuit of Truth,” New York Times, July 5, 1981, NJ2. 10. Ibid. 11. William J. Broad, “Magician’s Effort to Debunk Scientists Raises Ethical Issues,” New York Times, February 15, 1983, C3. 12. Ibid. 13. David F. Marks, “Explaining the Paranormal,” World Press Review, May 1986, 53–54. 14. Clark, “Censoring the Paranormal.” 15. “Variations of ‘No Ghost’ Are Coming on Like Gangbusters,” New York Times, October 12, 1984, A12. 16. Jeannie Park, “Slime? Don’t Worry! The Ghostbusters Are Back,” New York Times, December 25, 1988, H9. A new Ghostbusters video game was released

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in 2009, priming the pump for a planned third film in the series, especially among a younger generation who were not even alive when #2 came out in 1988. 17. Fred T. Abdella, “On the Trail of the Paranormal,” New York Times, October 29, 1989, NJ3. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Tracy Cochran, “The Real Ghost Busters,” Omni, August 1988, 34. 21. “Spook Stalker,” People Weekly, September 20, 1993, 85–86. 22. John Darnton, “A Blessed Haunted Plot, This England,” New York Times, April 21, 1994, C8. 23. “A Soviet Healer Gains Support from the Press,” New York Times, August 18, 1980, A17. 24. Bill Keller, “The Russians, Too, Embrace ‘Secret Silliness’ of Astrology,” New York Times, May 14, 1988, 1. 25. William J. Broad, “Pentagon Is Said to Focus on ESP for Wartime Use,” New York Times, January 10, 1984, C1. 26. “An E.S.P. Gap,” Time, January 23, 1984, 17. 27. Broad, “Pentagon Is Said to Focus.” 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Howard G. Chua-Eoan, “Elvis Spotted in Estonia!,” Time, October 23, 1989, 52. 31. Liesl Schillinger, “Commonwealth, Heal Thyself,” New York Times, December 6, 1992, V3. 32. Anthony Brandt, “Looking for an Answer,” Esquire, January 1984, 18–20. 33. Cindy Skrzycki, “The Occult Blossoms into Big Business,” U.S. News & World Report, November 7, 1983, 83. 34. Ibid. 35. Sherry Sontag, “Psychics’ Clients in Business Suits,” New York Times, July 14, 1985, 41. 36. Georgia Dullea, “Soothsayers Find a New Market,” New York Times, October 6, 1986, B1. 37. Dullea, “Psychics Meet Wall Street,” New York Times, October 16, 1987, A26. 38. Joanne Kaufman, “What’s New in Parapsychology,” New York Times, November 3, 1985, F19. 39. “If Only Boesky Had Checked His Stars,” Newsweek, September 3, 1990, 56. 40. Art Levine and Charles Fenyvesi, “The Twilight Zone in Washington,” U.S. News & World Report, December 5, 1988, 24. 41. Ibid. 42. “Twilight Zone Defense?,” Newsweek, May 11, 1987, 5. 43. Robert Lindsey, “Spiritual Concepts Drawing a Different Breed of Adherent,” New York Times, September 29, 1986, A1. 44. Ibid.

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45. Robert Lindsey, “Spiritual Go-Betweens,” New York Times, May 12, 1987, A16. 46. Cristina Garcia, “And Now, the 35,000-Year-Old-Man,” Time, December 15, 1986, 36. For much more on MacLaine, Knight, and Ramtha, see Michael F. Brown’s The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 47. Lindsey, “Spiritual Go-Betweens.” 48. Barbara Kantrowitz, “Going Even Farther Out on That Limb,” Newsweek, July 27, 1987, 46–47. 49. Lindsey, “Spiritual Go-Betweens.” 50. Kim Garfield, “Good Heavens, Shirley!,” Ladies Home Journal, October 1987, 31, 36–37, 208–209. 51. Ibid. 52. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Spiritual Glitz,” Ms., July–August, 1987, 72– 74, 194. 53. Terry Runte, “Last Word,” Omni, June 1988, 138. 54. Michael Crichton, “Travels with My Karma,” Esquire, May 1988, 95–106. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Jake Page, “Supreme Quartz,” Omni, October 1987, 95–100. 58. Ibid. 59. Carlotta Gulvas Swarden, “Dowsing: A New, Ancient Way of Finding Almost Anything,” New York Times, June 21, 1992, NJ5. 60. William J. Broad, “ ‘Urge to Investigate and Believe’ Sparks New Interest in U.F.O.’s,” New York Times, June 16, 1987, C1. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Paul McCarthy, “Anti Matter: UFO Update,” Omni, March 1990, 81. 64. Ingrid Groller, “Do You Believe in the Supernatural?,” Parents, October 1989, 32. 65. Steve Fishman, “Questions for the Cosmos,” New York Times, November 26, 1989, SM50. 66. Fishman, “The Dean of Psi,” Omni, September 1990, 42. 67. “Amazing,” The New Yorker, September 17, 1984, 43. 68. “Nice Psychic,” The New Yorker, March 13, 1989, 27–28. 69. John J. O’Connor, “Confronting the Supernatural at Home and in the Past,” New York Times, May 6, 1991, C14. 70. O’Connor, “TV’s Infatuation with the Mystical,” New York Times, June 30, 1994, C20. 71. Ibid. 72. J. Peder Zane, “You Are Going to Go on a Long Trip . . . ,” New York Times, September 11, 1994, E2. 73. Douglas Martin, “Journeys of the Spirit, for $18 a Day Plus Faith,” New York Times, November 20, 1994, 52.

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CHAPTER 6 1. Ben Brantley, “The Medium as the Messenger,” New York Times, March 16, 2009, C1. 2. “Paranormal Activity in Spirit of Fooling,” New York Post, April 1, 2009, 16. 3. “Channeling Noel Coward,” New York Times, January 16, 2009, C2. 4. Kenneth Miller, “Science or Se´ance? A Reporter Visits the Twilight Zone,” Life, June 1998, 88–103. 5. Evan Thomas, “Hillary’s Other Side,” Newsweek, July 1, 1996, 20–23. 6. Francis X. Clines, “Mrs. Clinton Calls Sessions Intellectual, Not Spiritual,” New York Times, June 25, 1996, A13. 7. John Leo, “Exclusive!! Jean Houston Speaks,” U.S. News & World Report, July 8, 1996, 23. 8. Marcy McDonald, “Guru Trouble,” Maclean’s, July 8, 1996, 25. 9. Anne-Marie O’Neill, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, Margaret Nelson, and Margie Sellinger, “Rare ‘Medium,’ ” People Weekly, July 8, 1996, 40–42. 10. Kenneth L. Woodward, “Soul Searching,” Newsweek, July 8, 1996, 33–35. 11. Jill Neimark, “Do the Spirits Move You?,” Psychology Today, September/ October 1996, 48–54. 12. Ibid. 13. Kendall Hamilton, “ESP: It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3,” Newsweek, October 14, 1996, 82. 14. Peter Carlin and John Hannah, “Maximum Medium,” People Weekly, March 9, 1998, 95–96. 15. David Klinghoffer, “Ghost Story,” National Review, April 6, 1998, 32–33. 16. Jerry Adler, “Heaven’s Gatekeepers,” Newsweek, March 16, 1998, 64–65. 17. J. D. Reed, Ivory Clinton, Natasha Stoynoff, and Eric Francis, “Across the Great Divide,” People Weekly, October 25, 1999, 116–26. 18. Nancy K. Dess, “Weird Science,” Psychology Today, September/ October 2001, 34. 19. Reed et al., “Across the Great Divide.” 20. Joshua Tompkins, “Get an Afterlife,” Los Angeles Magazine, August 1999, 58–60. 21. “Ghost World,” InStyle, October 2002, 309. 22. Mireya Navarro, “A Beacon for Those Seeking Answers from Beyond the Grave,” New York Times, April 26, 1998, 18. 23. Bill Gilbert, “In Good Spirits,” Smithsonian, June 2001, 22–26. 24. David Barboza, “Advertising,” New York Times, December 7, 1995, D8. 25. Corey Kilgannon, “Stolen Calls to Psychics Land Cleaning Woman in Hot Water, Police Say,” New York Times, August 16, 2000, B5. 26. Nina Bernstein, “On Welfare and Not Psychic? New York Provides Training,” New York Times, January 28, 2000, P1. 27. Ibid.

194

Notes

28. Patrick Rogers, Siobhan Morrissey, Lyndon Stambler, and Amy Bonawitz, “Say It Ain’t So, Cleo,” People, March 3, 2003, 101–4. 29. Daniel Akst, “Forget What Psychics See. At Least They Listen,” New York Times, February 6, 2000, BU4. 30. David Kushner, “Harnessing the Energy of Psychics via Modem,” New York Times, August 20, 1998, G5. 31. Marci McDonald, “Psst! Want a Hot Tip! Try a Crystal Ball,” U.S. News & World Report, January 8, 2001, 34. 32. Ambrose Clancy, “Talking to Elvis, and Other Benefits of the LI Psychic Biz,” Long Island Business News, June 12, 2009. 33. Bob Morris, “Looking for Solace in a Spirit World,” New York Times, December 16, 2001, ST12. 34. Benjamin Fulford, “Simply Divined,” Forbes, April 1, 2002, 106. 35. Karen Robinovitz, “Forget Therapy, Get a Psychic?,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 2002, 274–76. 36. Ibid. 37. Peter Applebome, “Talking to Animals in Their Frequency, and Sniffing,” New York Times, January 18, 2006, B3. 38. Susan Dominus, “Psychic Tends to the Famous, and Their Pets,” New York Times, January 21, 2008, B1. 39. Robin Finn, “In Touch with the Dead and with Life,” New York Times, April 19, 2009, NJ3. 40. Rachel Louise Snyder, “My Mother’s Ghost,” Redbook, April 2007, 200. 41. Andrew Pollack, “Way Beyond the Balance Sheet,” New York Times, November 28, 1995, D1. 42. Douglas Waller, “The Vision Thing,” Time, December 11, 1995, 48. 43. Chip Brown, “They Laughed at Galileo Too,” New York Times, August 11, 1996, SM41. 44. Miller, “Science or Se´ance?” 45. Dean Radin, “Is There a Sixth Sense?,” Psychology Today, July/ August 2000, 44–51. 46. Miller, “Science or Se´ance?” 47. Lynda Richardson, “Gatherings Ponder Other Worlds,” New York Times, June 5, 2000, B6. 48. “Battling Pseudoscience,” The Futurist, November/December 2000, 12. 49. Brad Lemley, “Heresy,” Discover, August 2000, 60–65. 50. Ibid. 51. Kenneth Chang, “Do Paranormal Phenomena Exist?,” New York Times, November 11, 2003, F16. 52. Kim Clark, “Schooled Not to Be Fooled,” U.S. News & World Report, August 26, 2002, 76–77. 53. Burkhard Bilger, “Waiting for Ghosts,” The New Yorker, December 23, 2002, 86–100.

Notes

195

54. Ibid. 55. Benedict Carey, “After 28 Years, Princeton Loses ESP Lab, to the Relief of Some,” New York Times, February 10, 2007, A1. 56. George James, “Inspectors of Specters,” New York Times, October 26, 1997, NJ8. 57. Bill Kent, “Guiding Spirits,” New York Times, March 22, 1998, NJ4. 58. John Leland, “Don’t Say Ghostbuster, Say Spirit Plumber,” New York Times, October 31, 2002, F1. 59. Ben McGrath, “Ecoplasm!,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2004, 24–26. 60. Dan Barry, “That Noise? That Stuffed Ferret? Sounds Out of This World,” New York Times, November 1, 2006, B2. 61. Joyce Wadler, “Supernatural Cleaning Methods,” New York Times, October 30, 2008, D1. 62. Ibid. 63. Darcy Lockman, “Galvanizing Ghosts,” Psychology Today, May/June 2002, 27. 64. Rick Marin, “Alien Invasion!,” Newsweek, July 8, 1996, 48–55. 65. Ibid. 66. Leon Jaroff, “The Man Who Spread the Myth,” Time, April 14, 1997, 46. 67. Jeffrey Ressner, “The X Phones,” Time, August 9, 1999, 64–65. 68. Leon Jaroff, “Weird Science,” Time, May 15, 1995, 75–76. 69. Charles McGrath, “It Just Looks Paranoid,” New York Times, June 14, 1998, SM56. 70. John Cloud, “An X-phile Confesses,” Time, June 22, 1998, 70. 71. O’Connor, “Lesson: Avoid Graves,” New York Times, October 29, 1996, C1. 72. Jaroff, “Talking to the Dead,” Time, March 5, 2001, 52. 73. Chris Ballard, “Oprah of the Other Side,” New York Times, July 29, 2001, SM38. 74. James Poniewozik, “Ghosts in the Machine,” Time, August 28, 2000, 61. 75. Dirk Smillie, “Ouija TV,” Forbes, November 26, 2001, 58. 76. James Poniewozik, “Spirits of the Age,” Time, February 14, 2005, 55. 77. Alex Tresniowski, Natasha Stoynoff, and Rebecca Paley, “She Sees Dead People,” People, January 31, 2005, 81–82. 78. Anita Gates, “Searching for the Paranormal: These Could Be the ‘Y-Files’ and ‘Z-Files,’ ” New York Times, January 27, 2003, E7. 79. Alessandra Stanley, “Unexplained Phenomena Lurk Behind New Show,” New York Times, September 13, 2005, E1. 80. Kate Aurthur, “Things That Go Bump in Prime Time,” New York Times, January 22, 2006, A24. 81. “The See Dead People!,” People, November 7, 2005, 91–92. 82. Stephen Holden, “Heaven, He’s from Heaven, but His Heart Beats So . . . ,” New York Times, April 10, 1998, E12. 83. Holden, “A Boy Who Sees the Dead, and a Psychologist Determined Not to Fail Him,” New York Times, August 6, 1999, E14.

196

Notes

84. Dinitia Smith, “A Vigorous Skeptic of Everything but Fact,” New York Times, June 19, 2002, E1. 85. Jerry Adler, “Unlocking Minds,” Newsweek, March 19, 2007, 50. 86. Sharon Begley, “The Ghosts We Think We See,” Newsweek, November 5, 2007, 56. 87. Begley, “Why We Believe,” Newsweek, November 3, 2008, 56–60. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid.

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Index

Abominable Snowmen, 128 Accelerated plant growth, 90, 105 Acupuncture, 110 Afterlife: and Bishop James Pike, 91; and Cassadaga, 154; and CSICOP, 106; and Doyle, 47; “future life,” 2,11; heaven and hell, xvi, 5, 40, 69, 151, 173; interest in, 3, 33; James van Praagh on, 151; Lodge on, 5; and reincarnation, 44; scientific proof of, 32, 33–34; and supernatural, 178; on television, 171. See also Death; Eternity; Immortality Allen, Joan, 158 Altered states, 103, 115, 122, 138 American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR): and Aykroyd, 123; division with Boston Society for Psychic Research, 49; James H. Hyslop, 8; and Karlis Osis, 131; investigation of supernatural, 24; and Marilyn Male, 131; membership, 62; mission, xiv; postcard experiment, 92; The Journal of American Society for

Psychical Research, 20, 62–63; and Walter Franklin Prince, 17, 54 The Amityville Horror, xvii, 172 Ancient astronauts, 162, 168 Angels: A Book of Angels, 144; Angel, 171; Angels in America, 144; “Angels: The Mysterious Messengers,” 144; belief in, 150; Charles Richet on, 23; City of Angels, 173; as comforting, 175; and hauntings, 166; Jean Houston on, 148; in Mexico, 165; Paul Bakewell on, 20; Touched by an Angel, 144 Anomalies, xvii, 122, 128, 133, 141, 178 Anthropology, 103, 175 Apparitions: A. J. Rauber on, 123; announcing death, 63; definition, 166; Hamlin Garland on 12; and Hornell Hart, 66; and Marguerite L. Glentworth, 20; as mental phenomenon, 24; nocturnal, 60; and paranormal investigation, 167; and Society of American Magicians, 41; at West Point, 109. See also Ghosts; Hauntings

204

Index

Area 51, 169. See also Roswell (New Mexico) Aromatherapy, 165 Asimov, Isaac, xvi, 106, 163 Astral projection and travel, 103, 108, 137. See also Out-of-body experiences Astrology: Anthony Brandt on, 129; and Arch Crawford, 130, 132; and astronomy, 27, 81; astronumerology chart, 99; course at Iowa State, 108; and CSICOP, 106; and David Wertha, 108; fees and deliverables, 132, 145; as huge business, 130; and J. P. Morgan, 99; Joseph Jastrow on, 9; and Madeleine Monnet, 99; and Marcello Truzzi, 107; and Michel Gauquelin, 107, 120; Paul Kurtz on, 173; as stock market predictor, 130, 131, 132; and Nancy Reagan, xviii, 132, 148; NYU course, 99; popularity of, xvi, 48, 71, 106; as “quasi-science,” 107; in Soviet Union, 126; Voice of Astrology, 155; YWCA seminar, 117 Auras, 105, 108, 126, 137 Automatic writing, 3, 24, 54 Automatism, 21, 40 Auto-suggestion, 15, 21, 129 Aykroyd, Dan, 123–24 Aykroyd, Peter, 124 Beetlejuice, 122 Belushi, Jim, 153 The Bermuda Triangle, 106 Bewitched, xvii, 84–85 Bigfoot, xv, 109, 122, 169, 175 Biology: and discovery of “sixth sense,” xiii; and efficiency, 77; explanation for telepathy, 23; “extraphysical” phenomena, 76; and ghosts, 167; and H. G. Heine, 84; and Hamlin Garland, 12; and Huxley, 43; laws of, 174;

and “morphic resonance,” 162–63; paranormal as biological phenomenon, 152, 178; potential impact of ESP on, 38; precognition in animals, 95; and Rhine, 75; status of, 11 Biorhythms, 109 Blithe Spirit, xvii, 147 Boeing, 94 Boston Society for Psychic Research, 49 Brainwashing, 80 British Society for Psychical Research, xiv Cabala, 98 Cambridge University, 65 Carey, Drew, 153 Carson, Johnny, 102, 142 Carter, Jimmy, 127–28 Cassadaga, 154 Catholics, 75, 151 Cayce, Edgar, 54–55, 90, 106, 137 Chakras, 139 Channeling, xviii, 32, 40, 117, 134–36, 154, 157, 158 Chanting, 149 Charms, xix Chemistry, 11, 27 Cher, 126, 152 Chiropractic, 164 Chopra, Deepak, 149 CIA, 80, 114, 127, 140, 159–60 Clairaudience, 153 Clairvoyance: ASPR postcard experiment, 92; and Christine Agro, 158; and computers, 95; dogs, 96; experiments in, 34, 42; Eileen Garrett on, 64; fees and deliverables, 145; and gambling, 46; and Geller, 100; and H. G. Heine, 84; and Harry Price, 42; as investment tool, 100; and J. B. Rhine, 36–39, 44–46, 58, 61, 84; and Lord Kelvin, 73;

Index

and Louisa Rhine, 83; and magicians, xv; as mental phenomenon, 24; as occult phenomenon, 4; in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 89–90; Pascual Jordan on, 75; Pavel Stepanek, 92; as stock market predictor, 131; and psychic hotlines, 155; and Robert Jahn, 141; in Sixth Sense (book) 91. See also ESP, Mind reading; Telepathy Clinton, Bill, 148–49 Clinton, Hillary, 148–49 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 109 Cold War, xiv, xviii, 58, 74, 79, 113, 128 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 106, 120, 121, 164, 173 Communication with the dead (spirits): and Bishop James Pike, 91; and Cassadaga, 154; and channelers, 134; Charles Richet on, 23; and Christianity, 7, 20; and Concetta Bertoldi, 158–59; explanations for, 15, 46; as expression of the supernatural, xix; family members, 166; famous people, 166; and First Ladies, 148; and Forum magazine, 19; and George Anderson, 152, 171; and hauntings, 167; as Holy Grail of the supernatural, 24; J. Malcolm Bird on, 16; and James van Praagh, 151–52, 170; and Jews, 7; Joe Nickell on, 164; and John Edward, 156, 171; and Kenny Kingston, 153; and Lily Dale, 154; and mediums, 53, 68, 134; and 9/11, 156; opponents of, 7; as popular pastime, 1–2; Rose Mackenberg on, 68; and Senator Clairborne Pell, 133; Sharon Begley on, 174; and subconscious, 31; on television, 171;

205

Walter Franklin Prince on, 17; Winifred Kirkland on, 3 Coolidge, Calvin, 51 Creationism, 164 Crichton, Michael, 137–38 Crop circles, 144 Crypto zoology, 117 Crystal balls, 24, 48, 70–71, 72, 89, 155 Crystals, xviii, 129, 138–39, 141, 175 Dali, Salvador, 138 Death: and baby boomers, 178; Eileen Garrett on, 64; and Houdini; and belief in supernatural, x; James van Praagh on, 151; and Lily Dale, 154; from 1918 influenza epidemic, xv; Lodge on, 28; Miriam Allen De Ford on, 42; Mitchell on, 95; as solvable problem, 44; and science, xvi; on television, 171; and The Sixth Sense (movie), 173; as unsolvable mystery, 12; from World War I, xv, 2 Defense Intelligence Agency (U.S.), 127, 159 De´ja` vu, 91 DeLorean, John, 132 Depression (Great), xix, 30, 47, 58 Demons, 166, 171 Department of Defense (U.S.), 79, 101, 127 Dick, Philip, 111 Disembodied hands and voices, 12, 41 Divination and dousing, 27, 94, 120, 139 Dixon, Jeane, 88, 89, 106, 120, 132 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: and A. J. Tyndall, 35; as authority, 20; at Clark University, 26; on clothing of ghosts, 22; as extremist, 36, 37; as ghost sighter, 88; and Houdini, 184n; and Joseph Dunninger, 51; and Joseph Jastrow, 27; lectures, xv, 16–17, 36; and son Denis, 46–47;

206

Index

on supernatural, 11–14; and twenty-first century, 159 Dreams: and American Society for Psychical Research, 63; and Dorothy Allison, 112; “dream lab,” 103–4; and Edgar Cayce, 54; and Freud, 64; and Mrs. “Doralee H.,” 99; and Nandoor Fodor, 64; as psychic phenomenon, 24, 30, 38, 75, 95, 103–4; and Rhine, 36, 58, 62; and Spellbound, 138 Druids, 98, 99 Duke of Windsor, 51 Duke University: as ground zero for psychic research; 80; Hornell Hart, 66; J. Gaither Pratt, 82–83, 92; Parapsychology Laboratory, 36–37, 103; and J. B. Rhine, 36, 42, 43, 44, 58, 81, 103, 165; and Louisa Rhine, 83; William G. Roll, 93 Easter Island, xvi Easternism, 103, 117, 133 Ectoplasm, 11, 12, 17, 49, 68, 123, 147 Edison, Thomas, 16, 51 Energy: in advertising, 134; and August Stern, 113; and auras, 137; and chakras, 139, and channeling, 117; different kind of, 38; “flow,” 105, 112; galactic, 134–35; healing, 154; and law of substance, 10; negative, 138; and poltergeists, 166; as psychic phenomenon, 76; radiant, 46; “right,” 158; spiritual, 151; and Wall Street, 131 England: belief in telepathy, 74; birds, 74; Bishop James Pike, 91; British College of Psychic Science, 64; and ghost busting, 125; and ghosts, x, 58–59, 66; and Harry Price, 42, 49, 59; mediums, 16; and mind reading, 22; popularity of spiritualism, 5, 48; psychic research, 22–23, 33–34; “Psychic Tour,” 98; Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, 137

ESP: as agent of peace, 133; and Alan Jay Lerner, 90; Alan S. Parks on, 79; among animals, 74, 83, 96–98; Andrija Puharich on, 100; applications of, 112, 114; and Art Bell, 168; ASPR postcard experiment, 92; belief in, 115; in business and politics, 133; as cause of scientific dilemma, 78–79; during Cold War, 74; course at Iowa State, 108; Error Some Place, 103; ESP, in Life and Lab, 92; and Geller, 101; George R. Price on, 77; Henri Bergson on, 77; and Huxley, 77; as investment tool, 100; and J. Gaither Pratt, 83; and John Kennedy (of Stanford University), 43; and Maimonides Medical Center, 103–4; as managerial skill, 87; and Mitchell, 95; as not consistently reproducible, 93; in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 89–90; Pascual Jordan on, 75; possibilities of, 111; as potential weapon, 79; psychic phenomenon, xix; recasting as “intuition” and “inductive reasoning,” 131; as reinvention of the sciences, psychology, and religion, 39; and Rhine, 37–39, 43–46, 62, 77, 93; and Robert Jahn, 141, 165; and S. G. Soal, 77–78, 94; and “Sam Benson,” 88; scientific proof of, 64; in Sixth Sense (book) 91; and Sony, 159; scientists’ belief in, 118; on television, 169; The ESP Enigma, xi; and The Skeptics Society, xi; and Thelma Moss, 92; and U.S. Army, 126–27; Whately Carington on, 61; and William T. Heron, 60. See also Clairvoyance; Mind reading; Telepathy Eternity, 19, 30. See also Afterlife; Immortality Ether, 5, 11, 36

Index

Exorcism, 106, 109, 125, 137–38, 143 The Exorcist, xvii, 88, 106 Extraterrestrials (aliens): abductions, xviii, 140, 144, 168, 170, 175; ancient, xvi; and Art Bell, 169; belief in, 168; and colonization, 170; and Disney World, 168; and Easter Island, 162; encounters with, 140–41; and Geller, 100; and government cover-up, 168; and MacLaine, 135; in movies, 168; in New Mexico, 150; on television, 170–72; and The X-Files, 144, 170, 172; and “thought bacteria,” 128; videogame, 170; websites, 168 Eyeless seeing, 37 Faith healing, 106, 129, 164 Falco, Edie, 159 FBI, 81, 119 Feng shui, 159 Ferguson, Sarah, 159 Firewalking, 49, 134, 164 Flockhart, Calista, 157 Folk medicine, 126 Ford, the Reverend Arthur A., 91, 184n “Fourth dimension,” 31 Fortune-telling: in Asia, 159; and Claire Faulhaber, 71–72; con games, 71–72; customers of, 71; Dorothy Walworth on, 53; as fraudulent, xv; Houdini on, 13; as illegal, 52; in New York, 71–73; ouija board and Magic 8-Ball, 73; popularity of, 33, 47–48, 70–72; psychic hotlines, 154–55; in Russia, 126; Yolana, 157 Fox Sisters, x, xiv, 9, 22 France, 16, 23, 64, 161–62, 165 Frauds and fakes: as damaging to supernatural, xv, 40, 42, 102, 104; and Doyle, 12–13; and Geller, 100–102; and Houdini, 68–69; and Joe Nickell, 164; Joseph Dunninger

207

on, 48; and Joseph P. Rinn, 8; as practical joke, 40; psychic detectives, 119; and Randi, 121; and Rhine, 37, 40; and Rose Mackenberg, 67–70; trickery, 67–70; and Walter Franklin Prince, 17; as well intentioned, 40 Frequencies, 135, 158 Freud, Sigmund, xiii, 26, 64, 75, 90 Ganzfeld, 104, 161 Garbo, Greta, 153 Geller, Uri: and Carter, 127–28; and CSICOP, 106; and John G. Taylor, 188–89n; popularity of 100–101; and Randi, 121; and Senator Clairborne Pell, 133; and Soviets, 133; as spoon bender, xvii, 164; and SRI, 101, 188n; and The Skeptical Inquirer, 120; trickery, 101–2, 104 Germany, 16, 29, 42, 64, 65 Ghost, 143, 173 Ghostbusters, 122–23, 190–91n Ghosts (spirits): age, 22; and Alan Jay Lerner, 90; as “anomaly,” 122; Arthur Godfrey’s, 149; in Asia, 159; belief in, 1, 9, 141, 173; in Blithe Spirit, 147; Bruce Hood on, 174; Charles Laughton’s, 153; Carole Lombard’s, 153; Charles Darwin’s, 178; and “cleansers,” 166; downgrading of, 110; as drawn to places with strong emotional past, 110; Eileen Garrett on, 64; Eleanor Roosevelt’s, 148–49; in England, 58–59, 66; Errol Flynn’s, 153; and Hans Holzer, 123, 161, 166; and Harry Price, 42, 59; Henry Clay McComas on, 34–35; Hornell Hart on, 66; and Houdini, 14; and instinct, 175; intelligent, 166; International Conference on Psychic Research, 65; and J. Gaither Pratt, 82; Jackie Gleason’s, 151; Jean Harlow’s, 153; Jim Morrison’s, 153;

208

Index

and Julien J. Proskauer, 59–60; Lincoln’s, 110, 143; Lionel Barrymore’s, 153; Lodge and Doyle on, xv; Mahatma Gandhi’s, 148–49; and Marguerite C. Glentworth, 20; Mary Todd Lincoln’s, 123; and mental health problems, 141; Michael Persinger on, 167; modernization of, 4; in movies, 33, 122–23, 173; and New Age, 133; in novels, 173; and P. F. Swindle, 60; Peter Lorre’s, 153; Phasmatological Society, 27; Pierre L’Enfant’s, 110; physical appearance of, 22; as reflection of time and place, x–xi; and religion, xvi; revenants (residuals), 166; Robert E. Lee’s, 110; romantic involvement with, 144; Rudolph Valentino’s, 153; Sharon Begley on, 174; “busting” of, xi, xix, 32, 123–25, 151, 153, 161, 165–67; signs of, 166; Sonny Bono’s, 152; stories, 4; on television, xvii, 169, 171–72; as tourist attraction, xviii, 109–10; and Vanderbilt, 99; and Walter Franklin Prince, 17; at West Point, 109; and Western spiritual tradition, x. See also Apparitions; Hauntings; Poltergeists “Goats”: as biased, xix; at Clark University symposium, 26; definition, x; dependence on, 3; as fearful, 93; outnumbered by “goats,” 118; and Paul Kurtz, 173; and Randi, 120–21; and Ronald McRae, 127; and The Skeptical Inquirer, 120; and The Skeptics Society, xi; tension with “sheep,” xi, xii, xvii. See also CSICOP; James Randi Gould, Stephen Jay, xvi, 163 The Grudge, 172 Guided imagery, 137 Gypsies, 71, 89, 131, 171

Halloween, 130 Hallucinations, 31, 40, 63, 122, 167 Hauntings: angels, 166; and Britain, 125; demons, 166; Dennis William Hauck on, 165–66; and Encounters: The Hidden Truth, 144; as entertainment xviii; and Ghost Hunter, 123; and Harry Price, 42; incubuses, 166; and International Conference on Psychic Research, 65; and Julien J. Proskauer, 60; and Larry Montz, 153; Lost, 172; and Musso & Frank Grill, 153; nature spirits, 166; succubi, 166; and United States Travel Service, 110. See also Ghosts; Poltergeists Hawn, Goldie, 154 Healing and healers: at Cassadaga, 154; and Cayce, 54; and crystals, 139; Dzhuna Davitashvili, 125–26; and ESP, 112; and Hereward Carrington, 35; and mediums, 70; and the 1970s, 96; Peter Michael Ulikhanov, 153–54; Psychic Girl, 153; and “Psychic Tour,” 98; on television, 169 Horoscopes (and Zodiac), 107, 117, 126, 129. See also Astrology Horror films, 33 Houdini, Beatrice, 53–54 Houdini, Harry: death of, 53–54, 184n; as exposer of frauds, xv, 68–69; and Doyle, 13–14; and Joseph Dunninger, 48, 51; and Randi, 121; and Rose Mackenberg, 68, 70 Hull, Cordell, 51 Human potential movement, 117, 133 Hunt, H. L., 132 Hutton, Barbara, 51 Huxley, Aldous, xiv, 43, 77 Hypnosis: and Alan Jay Lerner, 90; and Anatoli Kashpirovsky, 128; and Edward Gurney, 24; and hallucinations, 40; and Huxley, 77; and Joseph Dunninger, 51; and

Index

Lord Kelvin, 73; Margery Crandon, 21; in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 89; and “Polgar,” 48; long-range, 79–81; and “thought transference,” 34 I Ching, 129 I Dream of Jeannie, 144 Immortality, 36, 106, 154. See also Afterlife; Eternity Indian guide, 40, 69 In Search of Noah’s Ark, 106 The Institute for Noetic Sciences, 94–95 Intuition (and “intuitives”): and Cayce, 54; children and animals, 45; and Dean Radin, 160–61; Imara, 156; and Jim Wright, 132; Laura Day on, 150; as managerial skill, 87; and Mary Talley, 48; Mitchell on, 94–95; Rhine on, 36; and stockbrokers and bankers, 131; and “superempathy,” 39 Jarrett, Keith, 165 Jews, 7, 75 Jillette, Penn, xv, 151 Journal of Parapsychology, 37, 75 Jovovich, Milla, 157 Ki, 159 King, Stephen, xvii, 143, 173 Kirlian photography, 105 Koontz, Dean, 173 Korean War, 67, 70, 73 Kreskin, 142 Latent memory, 31 Levitation, 7, 10 Lily Dale (spiritualist camp), 130, 154 Lincoln, Abraham, ix, 30 Lindbergh, Charles, 35 Loch Ness Monster, xv, 109 Lodge, Sir Oliver: as authority, 20, 23; creed for spiritualism, 24–25; death

209

of wife, 27–28; as extremist, 36, 37; as ghost sighter, 88; and Joseph Dunninger, 51; lectures, xv, 5–6, 8; as researcher, 33–34; and son Raymond, 5, 7, 11, 47; as trickster, 9; and twenty-first century, 159 Louis-Dreyfus, Julia, 159 Love, Courtney, 157 MacLaine, Shirley, xviii, 117, 134–37, 151 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 5–6, 8, 9 Magic: association with supernatural, xv, 177; Black Magic, 31; David F. Marks on, 121; High German Black Book, 29; Indian, 49–50; NYU course, 99; popularity of, 98; as “pragmatic occultism,” 107; and reality, 150; and scientists, 76; as superstition, xix; White Magic, 129 Magic 8-Ball, 73, 150 Magicians: the “Amazing” Randi, 102, 120–21; Blackstone, 121; and Carson, 102; as critics of supernatural, xv, 13; and Doyle, 12–13; as exposers of frauds, 40–41, 68; Jillette, 151; Joe Nickell, 164; John Mulholland, 47; Joseph Dunninger, 48, 66; and Milbourne Christopher, 102; Society of American Magicians, 40–41; tricks, 66, 68–69 Manifestations, 23, 32 Materializations, 4, 24, 35, 68, 166 Matter, 10, 11, 25, 61, 76 Mead, Margaret, xvii, 95 Meadows, Audrey, 151 Meditation, 134, 163, 166 Mediums: ability to communicate with dead, 134; Ada Bessinet, 16; A. J. Tyndall, 35; Allison DuBois, 172; at Cassadaga, 154; and celebrities, 152; competition, 73; Concetta Bertoldi, 158–59; and Delphic oracle, 45;

210

Index

and ectoplasm, 11; Eileen Garrett, 32; Emerson Gilbert, 49; “Feda,” 15; as frauds, 8–9, 13, 40–41, 42, 48–49; “Gary,” 137; General Assembly of Spiritualists, 35; George Anderson, 152, 171, 173; George Valentine, 16; as healers, 53; on health, 52; and Houdini, 13, 14; as inspiration for popular culture, 32–33; investigators of, 67–68, 71–73; James van Praagh, 151–52, 170, 173; John Edward, 156, 171, 173; Josie Stewart, 16; Kenny Kingston, 153; lawbreaking of, 70–73; at Lily Dale, 154; on love, 52–53; Madame Arcati, 147; Margery Crandon, 20–21, 26, 35, 49; as ministers, 52; mission and vision, 35–36; “Mrs. Piper,” 34; “Mrs. West,” 18; and 9/11, 156; number and location of, 67, 71; origin of term, 34; popularity of, 7; as predatory, 70; and Randi, 120; the Reverend A. M. Freeman, 14; the Reverend Arthur A. Ford, 91; Rosemary Altea, 156; and Senator Clairborne Pell, 133; Sixth Sense (book) 91; Slade, 2; source of powers, 6, 46; Sylvia Browne, 152; and Talese, 71–73; on television, xvii, 142, 171–72; and The Sixth Sense (movie), 173; trickery, 67–70; usurping power of ghosts, 4; vagueness of, 52–53; and World War II, 51–52 Mentalists: Chevalier Pinetti, 67; Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, 67; Julius and Agnes Zancig, 67; Joseph Dunninger, 48–51, 66; Kraus, 67; Kreskin, 142; Mendell the Mentalist, 164; as predatory, 41; Randi, 121; techniques, 171 Metaphysics: and Bible, 35; and Corporate America, 133; and Doyle, 17; event, xii; as fact or fiction, 22;

and MacLaine, 136; movement in England, 22; and Paul Andrews, 145; “primitiveness” and universality of, x; as suspect field, 24 Mind expansion, 115, 148 Mind over matter, 75, 163 Mind reading: and card playing, 15; and Crossing Over, 171; and dogs, 97; Harry Prince on 18; higher status of, 22; Houdini on, 13; Joseph Dunninger, 48–51, 60; Joseph P. Rinn on, 8; popularity of, 2, 47; on television, 172; and William T. Heron, 60; and yuppies, 131–32. See also Clairvoyance; ESP; Telepathy Minority Report, 111 Miracles, xix, 4, 35, 49, 121, 164, 172, 175 Mitchell, Edgar, xvii, 94–95, 101, 113, 160, 175 Monroe, Marilyn, 153 Monsters, 33 Moore, Demi, 150 Morgan, J. P., 99 Morgenthau, Henry, 51 Morita, Akio, 157 Multiple personalities, 24, 32 My Favorite Martian, 84 Mysticism: and Corporate America, 133; as foundation for supernatural, xii; and investing, 99; and Madame Arcati, 147; and Marcello Truzzi, 107, 112; and Mrs. Irving T. Bush, 54; and New Age; and numerology, 81; versus science, 160; in Soviet Union, 126, 128; and “tele-control,” 79; and women, 45 NASA, 94–95, 127, 142 National Enquirer, 143 Near-death experiences, 30, 106, 145 New Age: and Anthony Robbins, 149; and Cassadaga, 154; and Cayce, 54;

Index

and channelers, 134; and crystals, 138; decline, 145; and Deepak Chopra, 149; and dousing, 139; and James van Praagh, 151; and Jean Houston, 149; and MacLaine, 136; and Marianne Williamson, 149; “Newer Age,” 178; popularity of, 117–18; and resurgence of irrational, 144; as social movement, xviii, xx, 148; in Soviet Union, 129; and Stephen Covey, 149; supernatural co-opted by, 133 Nightmare on Elm Street, 122, 143 Numerology, 81, 98, 99, 143, 159 Occult: in popular culture, 88; as “billion-dollar-a-year” industry, 130; and Bewitched, 84; as capitalist tool, 99; classes in, 99; and Corporate America, 133; customers of, 71; and Dzhuna Davitashvili, 125–26, 129; explanation for, 19, 99; frauds, 33, 68; and Hillary Clinton, 148–49; interest in, 34, 98, 100; Joseph Jastrow on, 27; and Joseph Price, 41; Kurt Seligman on, 71; Marcello Truzzi on, 107; in movies, 143; and New Age, 133; number of practitioners, 130; as psychic phenomena, 30; relationship with supernatural, xv; research, 2–3; roots of supernatural in, xii; Sir William Crookes and Sir William Barrett on, 5; Talese on, 71–72; and women, 45 The Omen, xvii On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 89 Oracles, 47, 172 Ouija (board), 3, 5, 7, 24, 40, 71, 73, 120, 167 The Outer Limits, 144 Out-of-body experiences, 91, 103, 137, 161, 168. See also Astral projection and travel

211

Paganism, 98, 108 Palmistry, 9, 48, 71, 98, 131 Parapsychological Association, 82–83, 92, 95, 114 Parapsychology Foundation, 64, 81, 156, 161 Past-life experiences and therapy, 137, 145, 150 Phantasm, 35 Phantoms, 33, 63, 65 Philosophy: and death, 44; humanism, 173; Judeo-Christian, 151; logic, 25; and MacLaine, 136; and Mitchell, 95; and New Age, 117; and Pearl Curran (Patience Worth) 75; and spiritualists, 154; and supernaturalism, 24, 33 Phrenology, 9, 71 Physics: American Physical Society, 118; antimatter, 105; as bad way to study psychic phenomena, 75; black holes, 105; faster-than-speedof-light particles, 105; and F. C. Schiller, 27; laws of 41, 61, 174; Lord Kelvin, 73; potential impact of ESP on, 38; quantum, 102–3, 112, 119; quasars, 105; radical transformation of, 76; status of, 11; supernatural as beyond realm of, xiii Polls and surveys: general, ix, x; 1930s Who’s Who in America, 30; 1978 Gallup, 115; 1980 Zetetic Scholar, 118; 1989 Parents, 141; 1996 Gallup, 150; 1996 Newsweek, 168; 2005 Gallup, 173 Poltergeist, 122 Poltergeists: and Art Bell, 168; and CSICOP, 106; definition, 166; Eileen Garrett on, 64; at Herrmann house, 82; and International Conference on Psychic Research, 65; Julien J. Proskauer, 60; in movies, 122; and paranormal investigation, 167; the Phasmatological Society, 27; on television, 170;

212

Index

and William G. Roll, 93. See also Ghosts; Hauntings Prayer, 38, 163. See also Religion Precognition: in animals, 95; applications of, 111; belief in, 115; versus chance and free will, 93; and Dixon, 89; and Dorothy Allison, 112; and Felicia Parise, 104; and Hugh Cayce, 90; and J. B. Rhine, 61; and Louisa Rhine, 83, 111; as managerial skill, 87; and Randi, 120; and Sixth Sense (book) 91 Prediction: belief in, 115, 141; and Dixon, 89; fortune-tellers, 72; and Morris Fonte, 143; and Mrs. Irving T. Bush, 54; ouija board and Magic 8-Ball, 73; and psychic hotlines, 155; and Rhine, 103; and Wendy, 131–32 Prehistoric creatures, 109 Premonition, xiii, 24, 63, 111 Princeton University, 118, 141, 165 Projection, 143, 149 Prophecy, xix, 54, 61, 89, 120, 132, 134, 150 Psi, xii, 75, 111, 112, 113, 115, 141, 162 Psychic research: and Alan Jay Lerner, 90; and Aykroyd family, 125; challenges of, 39–41, 75; and Dean Radin, 160–61; in England and France, 22–23, 33–34; espionage and warfare, 126–29; 159–60, 161; and F. C. Schiller, 27; Gerald Heard on, 43–44; and Harry Price, 42; importance of, xiii; International Conference on Psychic Research, 65; International Parapsychology Conference, 65; as investment, xvii; James H. Hyslop on, 11; lack of testable theory, 93; Martin Ebon on, 128, 161; and Mitchell, 95, 113; as not repeatable, 76; and Peter Phillips, 118; progress, 118; Psychical Research Foundation, 93,

103; and Randi, 121; and Robert Jahn, 118, 165; as “second-rate,” 24; and Senator Clairborne Pell, 133; in Soviet Union, 126–28; and U.S. Army, 126–28; Winifred Kirkland on, 3; and women, 45. See also J. B. Rhine Psychics: advice, 131, 145; and airplane hijackings, 96; Alan Chumak, 128–29; Aron Abrahamsen, 111; and Blithe Spirit, 147; Cayce, 54–55, 90; on connectedness, 112; Christine Agro, 158; Concetta Bertoldi, 158–59; detection of things underground, 111; as detectives, xvii, 38, 111–12, 119, 172; and Dixon, 120; Dorothy Allison, 112, 120; as entertainment, 131; Eusapia Palladino, 8, 10; Gerard Croiset, 112; and ghost busting, 124; Harold McCoy, 174; healings, 112, 125–26, 130; hotlines, 154–55, 168; Imara, 156; at Iowa State, 108; and James van Praagh, 151, 171; Jean Houston, 148–49; John Catchings, 119; Justine Kenzer, aka Psychic Girl, 153; Karen Thorne, 158; Kenny Kingston, 153; Kwaku, 143; Laura Day, 150; at Lily Dale, 130; and “Madame Zodiac,” 127, 172; as media superstars, 156; “Miss Cleo,” 155; and Morris Fonte, 143; and New Age, 133; and 9/11, 156–57, 171; Olof Jonsson, 95; online, 155; in Peru, 165; for pets, 158; and politicians, 132–33; as predictors, xviii, 131–32; pricing strategy, 132; Professional Psychics United, 119; Psychic Fair Network, 130; Psychic Forecaster, 132; radio shows, 41; and Randi, 120; Ronald Bard, 156–57; Shira Plotzker, 158; Sonya Fitzpatrick, 158; Spiritualist Association of Great Britain, 137;

Index

and “Star Gate,” 159–60; storefront, 130, 155; on television, xvii, 142, 144, 169, 171–72, 178; versus therapists, 157, 178; as trendy, 157; and U.S. Air Force, 127; and U.S. Navy, 127; and yuppies, xviii, 130–32, 157 Psychoanalysis, 24, 64, 83, 138 Psychokinesis: Brian Josephson on, 119, 163; Iowa State course, 108; and CSICOP, 106; and Geller, 100; George R. Price on, 77; and Rhine, 58, 61, 103, 104, 163; and Robert Jahn, 141; and Russians, 114; and Sixth Sense (book) 91; and the Soviet Union, 128; and William G. Roll, 93 Psychology: and Carl Murchison, 26; David F. Marks on, 122; fringe psychotherapies, 164; and Henri Brugmans, 58; Houdini on, 13; impact if ESP existed, 38–39, 79; International Conference on Psychic Research, 65; International Parapsychology Conference, 65; and Joseph Jastrow, 9; opposition to supernatural, 41; and P. F. Swindle, 60; and Rhine, 75; supernatural as not a true branch of, 24; and warfare, 113; and Whately Carington, 61; and William James, 77; and William T. Heron, 60 Pyramid power, 162 The Pyramids, 145 Randi, James, xv, 102, 106, 108, 120–21, 141, 163–64 Rappings, 7, 24, 49 Reagan, Maureen, 143 Reagan, Nancy, xviii, 117, 126, 132, 148 Reiki, 167 Reincarnation: and CSICOP, 106; and David Wertha, 108; and dogs, 98;

213

and Edgar Cayce, 54; and Hugh Cayce, 90; and Kandra Orr, 117; and MacLaine, 134; in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 89; Sharon Begley on, 174; and Westerners, 44 Religion: Asian, 133; attacks on supernatural, xvi; 6–8; and biology, 174; and channeling, 135; David F. Marks on, 121; decline of, xvii, xix, 2, 25–26, 33, 178; and ESP, 38–39; as foundation for the supernatural, 112; Hereward Carrington on, 34–35; in India, 165; and J. Z. Knight, 134; and James van Praagh, 151–52; and Joe Nickell, 164; loss of faith, 2; and Mitchell, 95; Neale Donald Walsch on, 152; versus occult, 98, 99; Paul Kurtz on, 173; versus science, 25, 160; versus spiritism, 26; versus supernatural, xii, xix, 7–8, 15–16, 24, 75, 178; supernatural as form of, x, xix, 7, 168; usurped by supernatural, 5, 178 Remote viewing, 13, 119, 127, 141, 161, 168 Rhine, J. B: and Alan Jay Lerner, 90; appearances on radio and television, 81; and B. F. Skinner, 44, 62; card experiments, 36, 37, 43, 65, 93, 104; dice experiments, 46, 93; broadening parapsychology, 76; defining psychic research as science, xiv, 47, 177; and “extrasensory perception,” xiv, 37–39, 75, 93; focus on “success stories,” 83–84; and fuzzy math, 103; on gender, 45; and George R. Price, 78; and Harry Price, 42; and Henri Brugmans, 58; on horseracing, 103; Institute for Parapsychology, 103–5; International Conference on Psychic Research, 66; and John Kennedy (of Stanford University), 43;

214

Index

and Lucien Warner, 62; and Marcello Truzzi, 107; and Mitchell, 95; and “parapsychology,” xiv, 36, 61, 75; Parapsychology Today, 94; retirement, 103; and Rhine Research Center, 161; and Robert Jahn, 142, 165; and “sixth sense,” 57–58; and U.S. government, 80; and “veridicals,” 62; and William T. Heron, 60 Rhine, Louisa, 36, 83, 92, 111 Rice, Anne, 173 The Ring, 172 Roach, Mary, xvi Rockefeller, Laurance, 165 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 51, 148, 149 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 51 Rosemary’s Baby, xvii Roswell (New Mexico), 140, 169, 171. See also Area 51 Sagan, Carl, xvi, 106, 163 Salem (Massachusetts), 130 Sasquatch, xv Satanism, 98, 173 Schnabel, Julian, 158 Science: ambivalence towards supernatural, 174; ascent of, ix, 23–24, 31, 34, 71, 74, 177; association with supernatural, 24–25, 102; belief in ESP and telepathy, 74, 118; connection with supernatural, 177; and cover-up of paranormal, 170; CSICOP, 106; ESP as cause of dilemma, 78–79; effect on ghost stories, 4; failure of, 2, 99; “fringe,” x, 105; and Geller, 101; and life after death, 33–34; limitations of, 23, 160, 177; loss of faith in, xvii; opposition to supernatural, xvi, 9, 41–42, 46, 65, 76, 93, 105, 110–11, 163, 165; parallel course with supernatural, x, 30; versus paranormal, 150; paranormal as “proto-science,”

107; parapsychology as “stepchild of science,” 114; parapsychology as form of, xiv; parapsychology as contributor to, 81; and proof of supernatural, xii, xvi, 10–11, 31–32; pseudoscience, 17, 106, 162; versus religion, 25; and Rhine, 36; Scientific American, 16, 23; scientific method, xi, 32, 34, 79; versus spirituality, 130; as tool for the supernatural, 13; voodoo, 163 Scientology, 173 Se´ances: advertised, 72; and the Aykroyd family, 125; and Carl Murchison, 26; darkness of, 5, 39; “discernments,” 152, 161; and Doyle, 11–12; as form of entertainment, 88; healing, 128; and Hillary Clinton, 148–49; and J. Malcolm Bird, 16; and Joseph Dunninger, 49; at Lily Dale, 130; and MacLaine, 134; and Madame Arcati 147; and Margery Crandon, 21; part of “Psychic Tour,” 98; and Randi, 120; and Nancy Reagan, 132; and the Reverend Charles de Heredia, 7; and Rose Mackenberg, 68–70; televised, 91–92; types of trances, 71; trickery in, 67; and Wilbur L. Cross, 19. See also Mediums Seers, 47–48, 89, 120, 145, 155 Self-help, xi, 133, 149 Sensitivity and “sensitives,” 6, 32, 34, 38, 45, 92, 158, 167 Shamanic journeys (soul-traveling), 168 “Sheep”: as biased, xix; at Clark University symposium, 26; definition, x; outnumbering “goats,” 118, 141; and Parapsychology Foundation, 161; and Randi, 121; on rejection of supernatural, xii; result of “coming out,” xii, xiv; Robert L. Park on, 163;

Index

and science, 11; tension with “goats,” xi, xvii; and yuppies, xviii The Shining, 122 Shroud of Turin, 164 Sinclair, Upton, xiv, 46 Sixth sense: and biology, 178; Current Opinion on, 23; Dean Radin on, 161; and Dixon, 89, 120; dogs, 97; H. G. Heine on, 84; Marguerite L. Glentworth on, 20; as next stage in human evolution, xiii; Rhine on, 57; and Rhine Research Center, 161; telepathy as, 75; Sixth Sense (book), 91; The Sixth Sense (movie), 152, 173 The Sixth Sense (movie), 152, 173 The Skeptical Inquirer (Zetetic Scholar), 107, 118, 120, 121, 164 The Skeptics Society, xi Skinner, B. F., xvi, 44, 62, 106 Slate writing, 8, 17 Smithsonian Institution, 115 Soothsaying, xv, 48, 145 Sorcery, 98 Soul, 22, 23, 34, 137, 148, 159, 168, 171 Soviet Union (Russia): advances in parapsychology, 113–14; and brain control, 164–65; and Geller, 133; Kirlian photography, 105; Leonid Vasiliev, 94; and mysticism, 4; Ninel Kulagina and Rosa Kuleshova, 100; Representative Charlie Rose on, 133; and supernatural, xviii, 125–29; and “tele-control,” 79–81 Spellbound, 138 Spirit controls, 6, 21, 49, 91 Spiritism (spiritualism): and “Believers,” 20; and Clark University, 26; critics and skeptics of, 19; as dangerous, 6; and Doyle, xv, 16–17, 26; efforts to stop, 9; and Houdini, 14; household test for, 15; and Joseph Jastrow, 27;

215

and Lodge, xv, 5, 24–25; and Maeterlinck, 5; as metaphysical event, xii; modernization of, 4; as reaction against rationalism, 1–2; versus religion, 26; revival of, 9 Spirit photographs, 7, 11, 14, 16, 17, 26 Stalin, Joseph, 80 Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 101–2, 119, 120, 127, 160, 188n Stanford University, 42, 149 State Department (U.S.), 79 Stonehenge, 98, 145 Subconscious, 31, 61, 114. See also Unconscious Subliminal consciousness, 24, 31 Sunspots, 132 Superstition, xix, 30, 31, 36, 74, 76 Swamis, 33, 48 Table tapping, 7, 147 Table turning, 6 Talese, Gay, 71–73 Tarot cards, 48, 71, 98, 117, 131, 137, 149 Tea leaves, 48, 137 Telekinesis, 4, 165, 168 Telepathy: A. C. Hardy on, 74; Americans’ belief in, 74; among animals, 74, 162; with animals, 96–97, 158, 162–63; during Cold War, 58; dreams, 95; Eileen Garrett on, 64; experiments in, 17–18, 22–23, 34, 42; and Felicia Parise, 104; and Frederic Myers, 74; and Geller, 100–102; and Harry Price, 42; and Henri Brugmans, 58; Huxley on, 43; International Conference on Psychic Research, 65; interspecies, 42, 74; J. Malcolm Bird on, 16; and Jan Ehrenwald, 63; Joseph Dunninger, 48–51, 66–67; and Kraus, 67; as lost sense, 74–75; and Louisa Rhine, 83; as medicine, 129; as mental phenomenon, 24;

216

Index

as “mind-to-mind” communication, 31; and Mitchell, 95; Nandoor Fodor on, 64; as occult phenomenon, 4; in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 89–90; Pascual Jordan on, 75; and Pearl Curran (Patience Worth), 75; “Polgar,” 48; and prayer, 38; as psychic phenomenon, xix; and Randi, 121; and Rene Warcollier, 63; and Rhine, 36–39, 44–46, 61, 84; and Robert Jahn, 118, 141; and Sony, 159; and Soviet Union, 128; scientists’ belief in, 74; Freud on, 64; in Sixth Sense (book) 91; “tele-control,” 79–81; and Thelma Moss, 92; theories for, 63; and William T. Heron, 60–61. See also Clairvoyance; ESP; J. B. Rhine; Mind reading Theosophy, xix Thought control, 113 Thought-photographs, 24 Thought transference, 34, 67, 74, 80–81, 92, 96, 127–28. See also ESP Titanic, 173 The Tonight Show, 102 “Topper,” xvii, 33 Trances: categories of, 71; and Cayce, 54; channelers, 134; “Gary,” 137–38; and Eileen Garrett, 32; and Margery Crandon, 21; and mediums, 34; as mental phenomenon, 24; and Otto John, 81 Truman, Harry, 79–80, 153 Twain, Mark, ix, 30 The Twilight Zone, 144 UFOs: as “anomaly,” 122; and Art Bell, 168; belief in, 168; and Bigfoot, 169; Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 109; and CSICOP, 106, 109; and government cover-up, xviii, 140; and Heaven’s Gate, 169; and J. Allen Hymek, 107; and Marcello Truzzi, 107; and

Mitchell, 94; in movies, 168; and New Age, 117; in New Mexico, 150; Paul Kurtz on, 173; on television, 144; popularity of, 139–40; sightings of, 96, 140; The UFO Incident, 106; and weather, 165 Unconscious: and automatism, 21, 40; Dean Radin on, 161; and Freud, 75; and Geller, 133; Jan Ehrenwald on, 63; John Kennedy (of Stanford University) on, 43; Nandoor Fodor on, 64; and “presentiment,” 161; and psychic abilities, 114; Rhine on, 62; S. G. Soal on, 67; and “sixth sense,” xiii. See also Subconscious University of Nevada–Las Vegas, 160 Urban legends, 164 U.S. Air Force, 127 U.S. Army, 126–27 U.S. Congress, 70, 159 U.S. Marines, 127 U.S. Navy, 95, 127, 128 Utrecht University, 65 Vampires, xix, 171 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 99 Vibrations: and crystals, 138; harmonious, 23; “hostile,” 49; James van Praagh on, 151; Madame Arcati, 147; and Mary Talley, 48; measurement of, 24; mediums, 70; and Morris Fonte, 143; and psychic detectives, 119; and se´ances, 12 Vietnam War, 98 Vision quests, 145 Visions, 30, 38, 89, 141 von Furstenberg, Diane, 157 Voodoo, 143, 163 Warlocks, 98 Warwick, Dionne, 144, 154 Weber, Bruce, 158 Welles, Orson, 169 West, Mae, 153 White, Vanna, 171

Index

Whole Life Expo, 145 Williams, Cindy, 152 Winfrey, Oprah, xviii, 145, 150, 151, 164, 171 Witchcraft, xv, xix, 27, 98, 99, 130, 142 Wizards, 7 World Skeptics Conference, 164 World War I, xv, xix, 1–2, 7, 9, 34, 51, 156

217

World War II: and Mrs. Irving T. Bush, 54; and ouija board, 73; and Rhine, 46; and scientific attack on supernatural, xix–xx; spike in supernatural, 30, 47, 51, 58, 156 The X-Files, xvii, 144, 170 “X-ray” vision, 13 Zombies, xix

About the Author LAWRENCE R. SAMUEL is Founder of Culture Planning, a consultancy to Fortune 500 companies. He holds a PhD in American Studies, and was a Smithsonian Institution Fellow. His previous books include Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America (2010), Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture (2009), Future: A Recent History (2009), The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair (2007), Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream (2002), and Pledging Allegiance: American Identity and the Bond Drive of World War II (1997).