The Science of Ghosts

by Joe Nickell

  I had long wished to visit Camp Chesterfield, especially after reading Keene's memoir, and in the summer of 2001 I was able to do so. Because mediums at Chesterfield were alert to anyone who might expose their frauds, and because I had recently appeared on Dateline NBC to help reveal the deceptions of “psychic medium” John Edward (see chapter 30), I determined to go undercover. I shaved my mustache and otherwise changed my appearance, entering the spiritualist village in the person of “Jim Collins,” after the name of Houdini's assistant. “Jim” limped with a cane as he strolled the grounds, sharing, with anyone who would listen, his grief over the recent death of his mother.

  Among several bogus practices I would subsequently expose in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer—spirit card writing, dark-room spirit trumpet “vocalizations,” productions of “apports” (supposedly materialized objects), and so on—there were sessions of “billet reading.” In one of these, held in a chapel, I was given a slip of paper on which to list the names of loved ones who had supposedly crossed over, together with a question and my name. I was instructed to fold the paper in half, warned that to fold it otherwise would result in the medium not reading it. This would make it easy for the medium to surreptitiously flip it open with the thumb of one hand under cover of the lectern, while he held someone else's slip to his forehead. The trick would only work if all the slips looked identical by being folded the same. I penned the names, wrote the question (“Mother, will you be with me always?”), and dropped the folded slip into the basket that was passed around.

  Soon the medium was drawing out the folded billets, one by one, divining their contents, and giving replies to questions supposedly from the sitters’ deceased family members or friends. Some who received messages were crying in response, when the medium announced that he was “getting the Collins family.” After I identified myself sitting in the back row, the medium divined each name I had listed and then said, “Your mother wants you to know she'll always be there for you.” I was moved almost to tears, but then I remembered that my mother was still living and was not, in fact, named Mrs. Collins! And I felt much better—having caught another spiritualist trickster (Nickell 2004, 31–45).

  CLUELESS MEDIUM

  Spiritualist Phil Jordan was, he says, “raised on dreams.” He claims to have experienced clairvoyant visions since he was about six years old, and he has worked as a so-called police psychic (he claims to have located a missing boy utilizing his psychic powers, although the facts in the case tell a much more mundane story [Nickell 2007, 231–35]). His fame as a psychic seemingly in decline, in 2001 he purchased the old Gould Hotel in Seneca Falls, New York. There he offered a show, “The Spirit Connection,” which his promotional literature characterized as “a show similar to The John Edwards [sic] Show on TV” (“Phil Jordan” 2003). (Apparently Jordan did not foresee the ultimate failure of his business venture.)

  To investigate Jordan's alleged spiritualistic ability, I signed up for a show. On August 9, 2003, I disguised myself as a homely old yokel sporting slicked-back hair and nerdy horn rims. As “Johnny Adams” I took my seat at a small table bearing a nameplate lettered with a red marker, “Adams 1.” Jordan soon began to give readings, attempting to provide one for each of the four dozen sitters. He employed a standard “cold-reading” technique, artfully fishing for information and making vague statements that he hoped the credulous sitter would accept, interpret, and validate. Even so, Jordan provoked a blank look from several audience members.

  He did not fare so well with me. He saw a woman, he said, possibly my mother, who had swollen legs before she passed over. I scored that a miss. He also envisioned a man who had “raised hogs,” which could describe my grandfather Nickell—a farmer and once member of the Kentucky state legislature—except that he was nothing like the plainspoken matter-of-fact type Jordan characterized. Other offerings were no better. And he utterly failed to have mentioned such powerful issues as my mother's Alzheimer's or the life-transforming news that came shortly thereafter: the revelation that I had a daughter, along with two grandsons, I had not known about!

  And couldn't the alleged medium's spirit guides have given him my true identity? Couldn't he have gotten intimations of an impostor, or at least have sensed the overwhelmingly negative vibrations emanating from the person of “Johnny Adams?” Instead, Jordan obligingly inscribed a copy of his self-published book to “Johnny” and posed happily for a photo. I afterward dubbed him the “psychic sleuth without a clue” (Nickell 2007, 231–35).

  MY SPIRIT GUIDE?

  At Lily Dale, the spiritualist camp in western New York, a medium named Patricia Bartlett used to offer amateurish pastel drawings of sitters’ “spirit guides,” those supposed entities—typically Native Americans—who provide assistance from “the Other Side.” Bartlett seemed a sweet little old lady, as I showed up at her cottage one off-season day in 2000, not many years before her death.

  As she was setting out her crayons and getting her drawing board ready, I casually remarked, “You know ma'am, I think I saw my spirit guide once.” She perked up, and I went on to tell her how, during a troubled time in my life, I had awakened one night to see an American Indian, who wore “three yellow feathers,” standing at the foot of my bed. He said, “Everything will be all right my son,” and then I must have gone back to sleep, I told her.

  “That's your spirit guide!” Bartlett agreed. “We are permitted to give him a name,” she went on to say, and she suggested “Yellow Bird,” for the three yellow feathers he wore. “Would you like me to see if I can picture Yellow Bird?” she asked, and of course I nodded enthusiastically.

  “I'm getting a big strong man,” she suggested, eyeing me. “And his hair isn't…,” she said hesitantly, indicating with her fingers hair falling straight on either side of the face, and I responded by shaking my head. “I see it as pulled back,” she said, again gesturing, and as I agreed that that was Yellow Bird, she began drawing (figure 27.1). The process was a bit disconcerting, as, unlike a Coney Island sketch artist, she looked not at me but rather past me, as if seeing someone over my shoulder. At length, she showed me the picture. She stated that she also saw an aura around Yellow Bird and asked if I would like her to add that. I answered yes, and soon she exchanged the portrait (figure 27.2) for my fifty dollars.

  It was worth every penny for me to have a chance to investigate a spirit artist and experience the whole process myself. However, I never decided: Did she say to herself cynically that if I wanted a picture of an Indian guide she would merely give me what I wanted? Or was she sincere after all, simply imagining Yellow Bird from my word portrait and then drawing what her mind created? That is, was she a fake or a fantasizer? It was one or the other, because I had made up my story during the drive to the scenic little village.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, concerted terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, claimed nearly three thousand victims. They also resulted in America's largest criminal investigation, a war in Afghanistan, and endless controversy sparked by conspiracy theorists.

  Many of the family members and friends of the victims also began to convince themselves that there was a mystical aspect to the tragedy. Some claimed there had been intuitive foreshadowings of the event; others claimed that they had received certain signals from, or even experienced actual encounters with, their deceased loved ones. Now Bonnie McEneaney, whose husband, Eamon, was a 9/11 victim, has collected numerous such anecdotal accounts. Her book Messages: Signs, Visits, and Premonitions from Loved Ones Lost on 9/11 (McEneaney 2010), bears a jacket blurb from spiritualist medium James Van Praagh (whom I once debated on a radio program). The evidence is revealing—if not in the way McEneaney intended.

  BACKGROUND

  At a quarter of a mile high, only eighty-six feet shorter than the Sears Tower in Chicago, the twin towers of Manhattan's World Trade Center were the second- and third-tallest buildings in the United States. One steel tower
was crowned with a restaurant, the other with an observatory. Far below, beneath the multibuilding complex at the towers’ bases, was a giant basement containing a five-level garage capable of parking two thousand vehicles. The World Trade Center was a huge target for terrorists. Indeed, more than eight and a half years before the towers were brought down, the garage was the site of a massive bombing that rocked the towers, led to an intense investigation by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and culminated in the arrest and conviction of four terrorists, each of whom was sentenced to 240 years in the US penitentiary (Nickell and Fischer 1999, 237–45).

  The horrific events now known as “9/11” occurred on September 11, 2001. Nineteen terrorists commandeered four commercial airplanes, crashing one into each of the World Trade Center's twin towers and another into the Pentagon near Washington, DC; only the heroic actions of passengers and crew aboard a fourth hijacked plane prevented it from reaching another target—probably the US Capitol—and instead caused it to crash in a rural Pennsylvania field.

  The attacks prompted an immediate investigation by the FBI, which linked the strikes to the terrorist organization al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden (who initially denied involvement). On July 22, 2002, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States issued its report, which gave an account of the circumstances that surrounded the suicide attacks—including issues of preparedness and response.

  The United States Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted a technical investigation of the twin towers’ collapse, culminating in a ten-thousand-page report explaining that the crashed planes caused severe initial damage and that the subsequent fires weakened the floors’ support trusses, causing floors to sag and pull on the exterior steel columns, which then buckled and became unable to support the structures (Dunbar and Reagan 2006). As it happens, I was invited to lecture on critical thinking at NIST on June 28, 2007, and I was able to view some of the steel girders from the collapsed twin towers that had been analyzed by NIST experts (see figure 28.2). (In 2002, I had visited the “Ground Zero” site where the towers had stood.)

  In time, however, conspiracy theorists began to make outlandish claims—some based on “scientific” evidence—that the towers’ collapse was due not to airplane-crash damage and fire but to explosives previously installed in the buildings! Supposedly the US government intended to frame terrorists and so gain an excuse to launch the Iraq War (Griffin 2007, 2).

  Meanwhile, the United States has responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching the War on Terror, beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan (whose Taliban rulers had harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers) and enacting the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, which expanded both antiterrorism legislation and law-enforcement powers. Osama bin Laden has been caught and killed; an architect of the terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and other coconspirators have been apprehended; repair of the Pentagon has been completed; rebuilding has begun at the World Trade Center site; and various memorials to the dead have been created.

  SIGNS

  It is not surprising that controversies and irreparable damages remain, among them the effects of the loss of so many victims. Although surviving family members and friends have tried to get on with their lives, much grief and longing remains—and the lure of superstition is not far away. Hence the quest for “messages” from the dead and the likelihood of a book such as Bonnie McEneaney's Messages appearing.

  McEneaney gives a personal example of one of the myriad “signs” that supposedly indicates contact with victims. Seeking some such indicator regarding her husband, Eamon, she writes, “Everything around me was still—not a ripple in the air. Then all of [a] sudden, somewhere above me, I heard the beginning rush of a gust of new wind building up in intensity” (McEneaney 2010, 10). As she looked up, “I could see the wind! It created such a pattern through the leaves and the trees that it was easy to follow. It had the outline of a river.” She concludes, “I didn't know how to explain the river of wind I had just seen and felt…. Yet I knew absolutely it was connected to Eamon and that the sad message it brought was true and real.”

  This seems a classic case of wishful thinking and the power of expectation. McEneaney (2010, 11) reveals that her father had twice promised, before his own death in 1993, “You know, Bonnie, when I die, I'll speak to you through the wind.” Thus, she was predisposed to accept wind as a form of spirit communication, and when she witnessed a particular breeze after her husband's death, she interpreted it accordingly. Those looking for a sign are likely to find something they can interpret as such. Some pored over the things their loved ones left behind and selectively mined them for signs, engaging in a process of after-the-fact matching known as retrofitting.

  Many of the supposed signs catalogued by McEneaney seem truly mundane: finding a coin (2010, 25–32, 195), having an experience with a bird or a butterfly (25, 28, 158), seeing a rainbow over the place where the World Trade Center once stood (134), and so on. A color photo that graces the back cover of Messages was taken by a woman whose husband died in the South Tower on 9/11. It shows their daughter with a streak that she interprets as a “beam of light” (4) but is probably only an effect caused by the intrusion of her camera strap. (As is typical of photographic glitches, nothing was seen until the photo was processed.) Over and over, McEneaney and those whose stories she features emphasize that an occurrence is “something that we can't explain” (e.g., 117), as if therefore it is proof of the paranormal. This is a type of logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. (“We don't know what actually happened, so it must've been paranormal.” In other words, “we don't know; therefore we do know!”)

  VISITS

  Supposed visitations by the deceased 9/11 victims are among the most profound experiences described in Messages and are also among the most easily explained. Consider the seeming visit of victim Welles Crowther to a former roommate who stated: “I don't remember if it was one or two days after 9/11. I don't know if I fell asleep or not. But what I remember clearly is Welles standing in the doorway to my bedroom, saying, ‘Hey, man, everything's going to be all right.’ He was there just a second and then he said, ‘I've got to go now’” (McEneaney 2010, 97). Another seeming visitation was reported by Deborah Calandrillo, whose husband, Joe, had worked as an accountant in the North Tower. “He appeared suddenly in the bedroom they had shared,” writes McEneaney (51). “She was lying in bed. His arm was draped around her pillow. There was a solemn expression on his face. Deborah told me that she is positive she was awake when this happened.”

  That insistence on having been awake helps identify the experience as a common “waking dream,” which occurs in the interface between being awake and asleep. This is the explanation for many paranormal encounters through the ages: visits from demons, ghosts, aliens. Along with ordinary dreams, events that are surely waking dreams are reported frequently in Messages (McEneaney 2010, 56–59, 101).

  A rather typical waking dream was described by another friend of Welles Crowther, who—while lying on the sofa watching television (and having possibly drifted toward sleep)—heard footsteps and saw his late friend, who said, “Chuck, it's okay. I'm okay.” Like most people who experience a waking dream, he thought he was not dreaming:

  First of all I don't dream very much. When I do, my dreams aren't realistic. If this was in fact a dream, it was completely realistic. I was wearing exactly what I was wearing; the television was playing exactly what it was playing. Everything was exactly as it is, and there was no break between sleeping and waking…between what happened and what was going on around me. It was of a piece.

  He also said: “I don't remember what happened next. I don't remember if I blinked or if he just went away” (McEneaney 2010, 101). This case illustrates many of the characteristics of a waking dream, wherein, as t
he late psychologist Robert A. Baker noted, the experiencer “is unalterably convinced of the ‘reality’ of the entire experience.” Baker also called attention to the fact that after the supposed encounter, the percipient typically just goes back to sleep (Baker and Nickell 1992, 130–31, 226–27).

  Some percipients, like Lisa O'Brien, whose husband, Timmy, was a 9/11 casualty, appear to have had both dreams and waking dreams. “Lisa feels that Timmy is frequently in her bedroom,” states McEneaney, “communicating with her in the night, sometimes when she is asleep and dreaming and sometimes just as she drifts off” (2010, 67).1 Not surprisingly, Lisa's experiences have occurred only at night; “she has never actually seen Timmy when she is wide awake and moving about” (68). (When people claim to encounter spirits during waking activity, it is usually when they are tired, performing routine work, concentrating on some activity such as reading, or in an altered state of consciousness such as daydreaming [Nickell 2001].)

  Children also often have ghostly experiences just like adults. Lisa's little daughter Jacie once told her: “Daddy is here too. He comes in the middle of the night and sits at the bottom of the bed. Sometimes he pats your hair and kisses you” (McEneaney 2010, 69). Such experiences typically express the percipient's own hopes and fears: the desire for a comforting message from a deceased loved one or the fear of an encounter with an extraterrestrial.