by Colin Wilson
The answer to the problem came to him when he was gravely ill and thought he was dying. He seemed to be at the entrance of a tunnel of light. But as he moved towards it, he saw his grandfather standing at the other end, and making a gesture as if the say no. At the same time, he seemed to hear his grandfather tell him: “Go back. It’s not your time yet.” After that, he began to recover. The experience made him realise that if he could only learn to show the earth-bound spirits the tunnel of light, it would be far easier than simply talking to them. What he had to do was to try to conjure up his own vision of the “tunnel,” then turn himself into a kind of television transmitter to make the “earth bound” see it too. When that happened, the spirit would plunge into it like a stranded fish diving into water.
Sometimes, when he had to deal with more than one spirit at a time —as an one occasion on an American Civil War battlefield that was still full of earth-bound spirits—he would conjure up the image of a staircase extending between the two worlds. This method proved to be so successful that he now teaches it to all his students.
To return to Sir William Barrett: this great investigator never achieved the celebrity of friends like Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge. But, for reasons I shall now explain, all that could be about to change. When he was a young schoolmaster in Ireland, Barrett went to stay with a friend in County Westmeath, and the two of them began discussing the subject of hypnotism, which was then widely discredited—in fact, regarded as almost a joke. Nevertheless, Barrett and his friend began testing children at the local school and soon found a girl who was an excellent hypnotic subject. Although sitting with her back to him, she smiled when he tasted sugar, and pulled a face when he tasted salt. When he pricked himself with a needle she winced, and when he held his hand above the flame of a lamp, she snatched hers away. When he placed a playing card in a book, she was able to hold it against her head, and say that it contained something with red spots on it. She even got the number right. (It was the five of diamonds.)
So Barrett had proved beyond all doubt that human beings possess powers that science cannot understand. As a result of his studies of hypnotism, science began to take it seriously again. But his really great achievement was to suggest to various distinguished friends that they should form a society to study such mysteries as hypnotism, ghosts, and dowsing. The reason was simple: that since the mid-1840s (when Barrett was born), science had been confronted by a new and baffling problem an event that I sometimes like to call “the invasion of the spirit people.” This started on March 31, 1848, in a log-built house in Hydesville, New York, when the family of a farmer named John Fox realised they had an uninvited guest. The story will be found at the beginning of this book, so I shall not repeat it.
The Fox case started a flood of psychic activity, so sudden and widespread that it might indeed be labelled “the invasion of the spirit people.” All over America, people discovered that if they held hands around a table in the dark, “spirits” would make rapping noises, and even lift the table. The new craze quickly crossed the Atlantic, and soon Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were trying it at Osborne, and the Tsar of Russia in St. Petersburg. While back in New York state, a new religion called Spiritualism was launched in 1851, and quickly spread all over the world.
Scientists were disgusted and denounced it as a return to mediaeval superstition. And when some of their own number, like Sir William Crookes and Lord Rayleigh dared to investigate it, they were reviled as traitors to science. A few serious thinkers refused to be shamed into silence. These included William Barrett, who persuaded some of his friends—including the two Cambridge philosophers Henry Sidgwick and Frederic Myers—to join with him in launching a “Society for Psychical Research.” Soon they were joined by eminent Victorians like Gladstone, Tennyson and Ruskin. Even the author of Alice in Wonderland joined the new Society, soon known simply as the SPR, although Lewis Carroll thought the answer might lie in some unknown electrical force. But as hundreds of carefully checked accounts of hauntings poured in, it was soon obvious that he must be wrong, and that ghosts really existed.
Even the humourist Mark Twain joined. Twain had once had a dream in which he saw his brother in a metal coffin with a red rose on his breast, and a week later saw him in the same metal coffin with a red rose after he had died in a steamboat explosion. Now he wanted to know if his brother might still be alive.
In those early days, most level-headed people treated spirit phenomena as a new fad that would probably go away, exactly as the World War II
generation felt about the flying saucer craze that started in the late 1940s. However, it did not go away. Like the UFO phenomenon, it has kept on developing and changing. And today, a few parapsychologists are just beginning to see where it is all leading to, and finding it awesome. Briefly, it looks as if the “spirit people” are making the most determined effort so far to reduce the gap between their “dimension” and ours. Already, they have made some almost unbelievable advances—for example, how many people realise that on January 15, 1983, Radio Luxembourg broadcast a live programme in which the voices of the dead spoke through loudspeakers to a studio audience, and answered questions in clear, audible voices?
The SPR also spent much of its time investigating people that Myers called “mediums,” who seemed to have a natural talent for seeing “spirits” and talking to them. Most mediums had “guides,” or people who were already dead, and who came from cultures that took the existence of spirits for granted; many of these said they had been shamans or priests while they were alive, and seemed quite comfortable moving freely between two worlds. What was needed, obviously, was some way of proving beyond all doubt that people survived their deaths. Which is why many members of the SPR swore that when they died, they would come back and demonstrate they were still alive.
One of the most determined of these was Frederic Myers, who handed Sir Oliver Lodge a message in a sealed envelope, with instructions not to open it until some medium gave him a message from a spirit who identified himself as Myers. This happened not long after Myers’ death in 1901, when a medium passed on a message saying that the envelope contained a comment about Plato’s remark that love conquers death. Lodge quickly opened the envelope, and was disappointed to find no reference to Plato, only to a house called Hallstead in the Lake District. Then he remembered that Myers had written a little book about his cousin Annie, with whom he was in love, and who had lived in Hallstead before she committed suicide by drowning. And the book indeed proved to contain the quotation from Plato.
That seemed conclusive, and Myers or the spirit who called himself Myers went on to engage in one of the most complex and ambitious projects in the history of psychical research. He, and several dead friends, gave various messages to mediums, none of which made sense on their own, but which had to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. The final result of this attempt known as the “Cross Correspondences” is highly impressive, but also highly complicated and relentlessly highbrow. For example, one set of messages referred to tombs of two members of the Medici family in the church of San Lorenzo, in Florence, which Myers knew well, and to the Michelangelo sculptures on them. There are obscure bits of Medici family history, all communicated through half a dozen mediums who did not even know one another, and the messages included bits in Greek, Latin, and Italian. As a proof of life after death it is overwhelming, but (it must be admitted) far too elaborate to convince anybody who does not have time to read the great fat book about it.
In the early days of the SPR, it was quickly noticed that some people can see a ghost while others in the same room see nothing. Even odder, some people can both see and hear a ghost, while others can only see it. It is as if people “tune in” to a ghost just as you would tune in to a television station. Well, if your television set has no sound, you call in an engineer. Obviously, what was needed in psychical research was an engineer who could understand the problems of communication between two different dimensions.
Su
ch a person—the first of many—finally appeared in 1959. One June day, a Swedish birdwatcher named Friedrich Jurgenson recorded the voice of a chaffinch in his garden, and when he played it back, he was startled to hear his dead mother’s voice calling out his pet name “Friedel.” And soon he was recording the voices of many dead friends and relatives on tape by leaving the recorder switched on in an empty room. He labelled this the “electronic voice phenomenon,” or EVP for short. The voices were fragmentary and the messages brief, as if the communicators were having problems getting through.
Soon after, a Latvian psychologist named Konstantin Raudive read Jurgenson’s book Voices from Space, and began his own experiments. He and Jurgenson began to collaborate, and when Raudive wrote a book called Breakthrough, the “electronic voice phenomenon” became a sensation that was soon discussed all over the world. It looked as if the “spirit people” had were trying out new methods of communication.
It was in America that the great breakthrough came. George Meek was a businessman who had made his fortune from air-conditioning systems. At the age of forty, he began to find that business success was leaving him oddly unsatisfied. He fought off severe depression by taking an interest in psychic phenomena. This made him decide that as soon as he was sixty (in 1970), he would give up business and devote himself to studying psychic mysteries. And when he heard about the electronic voice phenomenon, he set up a communication network of electronic experts all over the world
One of these was a radio engineer named Bill O’Neil, who was also a gifted healer. He had been trying to develop a radio device to help deaf mutes to “hear.” And one day as he was tinkering with some unusual wavelengths, he was alarmed when a vague shape began to appear in a corner of his workshop, and a voice introduced itself as Doctor Nick. The doctor, it seemed, had been another radio enthusiast, and soon his shadowy form was appearing regularly and advising O’Neil about building a radio that would pick up voices of the dead. He was able to materialise, he explained, by taking advantage of the fact that O’Neil was a natural medium.
Soon Bill O’Neil had a second visitor. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to face a distinguished, well-dressed man who introduced himself as George Mueller, a professor who had worked for NASA, and died in 1967. Now, he looked like a normal human being, and told O’Neil he was willing to help him construct a radio through which the dead could communicate direct with the living. He called it Spiricom. O’Neil lost no time in phoning Meek, and Meek checked Mueller’s credentials and found them genuine. Mueller had been an associate professor of engineering and mathematics in California.
For three years, O’Neil and Professor Mueller worked on their invention. And on September 22, 1980, Mueller’s voice suddenly came out of the radio, and O’Neil recorded their conversation. At last, a dead person was talking direct to a living person. George Meek’s dream had finally come true. This breakthrough was announced to the world in April 1982 in Washington. A roomful of journalists listened to the tapes of Mueller and O’Neill, and were told that Meek was not going to patent Spiricom, but would allow anyone to build it.
In fact, others were already working on a radio for communicating with the dead, and developing their own version of Spiricom. One amazing result was that incredible broadcast of January 15, 1983, when Radio Luxembourg transmitted a programme in which spirit voices talked live on the radio to members of a studio audience and answered questions. The communication device had been built by an inventor named Otto Knig. True, the result was not exactly brilliant radio entertainment—the spirits obviously felt rather awkward about this new experience, and made stilted comments like “We hear your voice,” and “Otto Knig makes wireless with the dead.” But it was all loud and clear, not fragmentary and half-inaudible, like Raudive’s voices.
Ever since that amazing day, scientists have been working on new ways of connecting the two worlds electronically. A few days after George Meek’s wife died in 1990, he received an e-mail from her which, she told him, was being forwarded with the aid of a group of dead scientists who called themselves Timestream; it even contained a photograph of her in her new environment a landscape of mountains behind a lake. She told him she missed him and was looking forward to seeing him again, but emphasised that there was no hurry. Meek died nine years later, aged 89.
The next step, according to Timestream communicators, will be an attempt to create a television link between the two worlds. There seems to be no reason why not, since the difference between a radio link and a television link is only one of complexity. Meanwhile, other extraordinary developments seem to emphasise that the “invasion of the spirit people” is just getting into its stride. The most interesting of these harks back to the “Cross Correspondences” of a century ago.
For half a century, Monty Keen—of whom we have already spoken—was one of the leading investigators for the Society for Psychical Research. Perhaps his most important work concerned a small group who held seances in the cellar of a farmhouse at Scole, in Norfolk. They were obtaining some of the most convincing phenomena in the history of psychical research, so convincing that the possibility of fraud was
virtually nil.
Most seances are held in the dark. At Scole, “spirit lights” would wander round the room so everything could be seen. When one of the investigators, Professor David Fontana, had an irritating cough and was about to take a sip of water, the light popped into his glass, then drifted out again. When he drank the water, Fontana’s cough went away. The light then went inside his chest, wandered around inside him so he could feel it, then emerged through his ribs.
Objects often fell from the air—they are known as apports. One was a copy of the Daily Mail for April 1, 1944, with an account of the trial of a medium named Helen Duncan. It was in pristine condition, as if just off the press, yet when it was scientifically tested, the paper and ink proved to be of the right age. Rolls of new film, still sealed, were placed in a locked box, then taken out with photographs impressed on them.
Then, just as he had concluded his most convincing and impressive investigation, Monty died of a heart attack. Those who knew him well were pretty sure he would soon be back. And since he had often written about the “Cross Correspondences,” it also seemed likely that he would make contact through more than one medium. They were right. Within days of his death, his wife Veronica and his friends were being bombarded with messages, all clearly from Monty. One night, Veronica was reading in bed at two o’clock in the morning when the phone rang. A female Irish voice said: “You don’t know me. I’m an Irish medium, and I’ve got your husband here. He said it would be all right to ring you
because you were reading in bed.” She then delivered messages that could have been from no one but Monty.
One of his most impressive “reappearances” was at a seance with a “physical medium” named David Thompson, who is an airport baggage handler. Physical mediums have so much energy that spirits can use it to materialise in the room. While Thompson sat in a chair in a trance, with a gag in his mouth. Monty Keen not only materialised in the room, so he could touch and shake hands with people he knew, but went on to make a ten-minute speech about what it was like to be dead, and to explain his aims now he was in another world. Then he went across the room to one of his old friends, the psychical researcher Guy Playfair, and after asking him how he was, patted him on the shoulder.
I have listened to the tape made of that session. The voice making the speech is undoubtedly that of Monty Keen. According to Veronica Keen, Monty says he is part of a group of leading figures in psychical research, such as Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge, whose aim is to continue the work that began in the 1840s and to establish a bridgehead between the two worlds, so that communication will become as easy as picking up a telephone. Curiously enough, another member of the group is Thomas Edison, who played a central part in the history of the telephone, but was pipped at the post by Bell. Edison’s papers reveal that he also tried to build a devi
ce for direct communicating with the dead. It is an interesting thought that he should now be working on a device for connecting two dimensions instead of two continents.
Colin Wilson
Cornwall
January 2009
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Professor Lombroso Investigates
At the age of forty-seven Professor Cesare Lombroso was one of the most celebrated scientists in Italy. His book Criminal Man (L’Uomo Delinquente) had made him an object of discussion throughout the world. What made it so controversial was Lombroso’s theory that the criminal is a degenerate “throw-back” to our cave-man forebears—a kind of human ape. According to this view, a man born with these tendencies can no more help committing crime than a born cripple can help limping. It gave violent offense to the Catholic Church, which has always felt that “sin” is a matter of choice; but it also upset psychologists who liked to feel that man possesses at least an atom of free will. Lombroso regarded free will as something of a myth. In 1876, when Criminal Man was published, he looked upon himself as a thorough-going materialist.
Six years later, his skepticism received a severe setback. He was asked to investigate the case of a girl who had developed peculiar powers. In fact, it sounded too silly to be taken seriously. According to her parents, she could see through her ear and smell through her chin. When Lombroso went to see her, he expected to find some absurd deception.
