SPIRITUALISM
Spiritualism was the United States’ first great contribution to the world’s paranormal experience. It began in 1848 in Hydesville, New York, when two adolescent sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, began to communicate with a spirit in their home by asking the spirit a question and the spirit answering with a knock on the wooden floor or wall. While trying to communicate with the dead was obviously nothing new, the Fox sisters became extremely popular and launched an actual social movement, which gave cohesion to the varied belief systems that involved communication with spirits. The Fox sisters were studied by scientists and skeptics, lauded by the public, and paid well for their services by the wealthy. As Spiritualism grew and changed, the Fox sisters were replaced by mediums who could display even more astounding paranormal phenomena ranging from levitations to actual fully formed ghosts and even the oozing of “ectoplasm” from the medium’s body. While Spiritualism was largely a poor and middle-class phenomenon in the United States, in Europe it became a pastime of the wealthy aristocracy. Europe also produced some of the most talented and controversial mediums of the time. A successful medium could expect to be taken very well care of by wealthy persons with an interest in the spirit world, and therefore, the trade was rife with fraud. In fact, much of the phenomena and manifestations produced during the séances of the Spiritualist mediums have now been proven as hoaxes and trickery; at the time, however, scientists engaged in a bitter battle with Spiritualists on the validity of the phenomena.
Some prominent scientists were won over to believing in the mediums and Spiritualism, while others remained incredulous at the reported manifestations and even went on to form an entire group dedicated to investigating claims of the paranormal, the Society for Psychical Research. World War II all but ended the Spiritualist movements, though séances and beliefs do continue to present day. The movement, while on the whole fraudulent, did produce some mediums who defied explanation, and this paranormal movement will be examined in great detail in a later chapter.
The impact of Spiritualism in our culture is not to be underestimated. Spiritualism was the birthplace of séances, the Ouija board, psychics, mediums, and more recently psychic hotlines, psychic fairs, and John Edwards, a famous psychic and host of his own television show Crossing Over with John Edwards. Mediums are used extensively in paranormal television shows such as Most Haunted and Paranormal State to communicate with the spirits haunting a particular location.
Criticism and skepticism abound concerning Spiritualism, with some people going to great lengths to prove that it is all a hoax pulled off through some sleight of hand or trickery and, of course, the public’s willingness to believe. Harry Houdini, famous magician and escape artist, wanted very much to believe that man could communicate with the dead. He gave his wife a secret password that only he would know so that when he died, she would know if the medium was truly talking to his spirit. Following his death she tried in vain for the rest of her life to find a medium that could reveal the password to her. No one ever did.
Even in light of such setbacks and exposure of many, many hoaxers, the Spiritualist church does still exist. John Kachuba, in his book Ghosthunters, visited a Spiritualist church in Ohio. The service he describes is almost exactly out of an episode of Crossing Over with John Edwards. A medium paces in the front of the congregation and calls out names and images until someone in the audience hears something that is familiar. The medium then delivers his or her message to this individual. In his further investigations, John traveled to the Spiritualist Camp in Cassadaga, Florida, and received a reading of his own.
Vera told me that I had been “living out of suitcase,” which was true; I had been traveling a lot as I researched this book. She said I was “tired,” which insight did not require a Ph.D. in psychology. She talked about my three children, calling one “optimistic,” another “creative, but not yet successful,” and the third, “a late bloomer.” I didn’t find any of these observations to be particularly impressive, either. I also was not impressed by the fact that she answered her cell phone three times during my $50 session to schedule appointments for other clients.10
Spiritualism was the first, but not the last, great American contribution to the world of the paranormal. Indeed, the rise of Spiritualism formed the basis for nearly all paranormal belief, criticism, and entertainment in the modern United States and Europe. It invigorated the public to believe in the spirit world and changed the idea of ghosts from something frightening to be avoided to something to seek out and consult with. In essence, it counteracted the effects of the witch trials, as now witches and spiritualists were not being arrested and hung, but were rather making great wealth off the public’s need to summon the spirits. The Euro-American cultural history has long oscillated between the fear of ghosts and interest in ghosts, and the late 1800s marked the height of public interest in the paranormal.
WAR OF THE WORLDS
A classic story of the willingness of Americans to believe in the paranormal, and their willingness to act on that belief, comes from Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, a science fiction classic by H. G. Wells. In the story, alien invaders come to earth to destroy the human race and take over. During a theatrical presentation by Orson Welles on the radio, thousands of people from Pennsylvania to New Jersey came to believe that the radio broadcast was real and began to panic. There are differing reports on the number of people who were convinced that the earth was being invaded and also conflicting reports on the action taken by some, but a panic was indeed caused by the broadcast. This is an accurate example of how fictions can become realities through a given medium. According to The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior, the panic was the result of deep-seated American anxieties over invasion and the looming war brewing in Europe.
At the time of the broadcast, most Americans were heavily reliant on radio for news and entertainment. Political conditions were tense with Adolf Hitler, having recently annexed Austria, continuing his incursion in Czechoslovakia. With each passing day, Europe was slipping closer to a Second World War that would soon involve the United States. Listeners had grown accustomed to news bulletins interrupting regular programming with live reports from European war correspondents. It was within this context that the Welles drama, interspersed with a series of live field reports, would have appeared highly realistic.11
This incident has become a classic tale of Americana, but it illustrates the thin line between fiction and reality, and how that line can be crossed with a new, technologically based medium such as radio. Up until the invention of radio, the public relied on newspaper reports, and these were prone to have tales of “Airships from Space” and alien life forms on other planets. These reports were hoaxes put forth by editors, writers, and other tricksters (including Benjamin Franklin), but they still had an impact on a manipulated public. As radio gave way to television, Britain experienced its own paranormal panic when the television program Ghostwatch depicted a “real” haunting. The program resulted in a public panic and one suicide; it was pulled from the air and fined. The public is willing to believe and may even want to believe. The medium through which the world is experienced at any given point in history, whether it be newspaper, radio, television, or the Internet, can exploit this desire for the mysterious and paranormal and can, ultimately, form those beliefs into a reality such as the panic over War of the Worlds.
FLYING SAUCERS
“The modern era for UFOs began on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near the Cascade Mountains in Washington State and saw nine unidentified flying objects that he described flying ‘like a saucer skipping over water.’ The term flying saucer, and the public’s interest in the phenomenon, was born.”12 This was followed by the supposed UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico; an event that has become part of the American paranormal landscape and has inspired countless films, studies, and television programs. Today, Roswell is almost synonymous with alien visitors
. This phenomenon sparked public and government interest. In 1954 the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena was formed, and in the late sixties the Condon Committee was given the task of analyzing all UFO evidence to see if there was need for further government investigation. The committee concluded that there was no basis for belief that we were being visited by alien life forms.
Despite this, the forties, fifties, and sixties were a golden age for UFO phenomena, with sightings being reported all over the world and believers and skeptics battling once again as they had over ghosts in the 1800s. Naturally, pop culture picked up on the phenomenon, and films and television shows about aliens and UFOs became all the rage. Flying saucers were depicted in comic books, cartoons, film, and media, and it was during the fifties and sixties, immediately following the onset of the nuclear age, that flying saucers and aliens became culturally popular. In his book, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, Kendall Phillips examines the link between 1950s culture and the success and popularity of the films The Thing from Another Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still:
The Thing brought horror out of the Gothic past and placed it squarely into the continuous world of the near future. The monster was not some creature of lore and superstition, but one based, however loosely, on the possibilities afforded by science. By bringing the monster into the more realistic realm of the continuous world, the points of resonance between the elements in the film and broader cultural anxieties seem to become more acute. Wrapped up in the fantastic horror of The Thing were American fears of invasion, communism, Fordism, science, authority, expertise, and gender displacement…Throughout the fifties, American filmgoers faced an amazing onslaught of alien invaders.13
The emergence and popularity of UFO phenomena during this time in U.S. history is entangled with the cultural shifts taking place and anxieties experienced at all levels of society, from government to the blue-collar worker.
One uniquely American aspect of the UFO phenomenon has been UFO abductions of people. This phenomenon came to public attention during the 1960s when Betty and Barney Hill claimed they had been abducted by an alien spacecraft while traveling through New Hampshire. They claimed that they had lost two hours and had no memory of where they had been or what they had done during those two hours. They only remembered a strange light in the sky following their vehicle. It wasn’t until they were hypnotized that they revealed aliens had abducted and examined them and then placed them back in their vehicle, leaving them with no recollection of the events. Similar accounts of alien abduction gradually gained more fame and notoriety throughout the 1980s as more and more people claimed abduction by aliens. The experience was captured by Whitley Strieber’s book, Communion, which claimed to be a nonfiction account of his various alien abduction experiences.
This phenomenon inspired films, documentaries, television programs, and countless hoaxers, imitators, and skeptics. “Just plain old sightings were way too mundane to be very exciting anymore, what with people being abducted so frequently. Several books claimed that humans were being abducted by the tens of thousands and subjected to various invasive medical procedures.”14 Whatever it was that people had been seeing in the night sky, it had now invaded their nightmares, as people claimed to experience a floating sensation while awake in their beds and having visions and memories of creatures swarming around as they lay paralyzed on a bed. This, of course, was immediately picked up by popular culture, which rendered such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Fire in the Sky, both of which were successful.
Today, the belief in UFOs and alien abductions is still strong, with much television time being devoted to uncovering this mysterious phenomenon. The History Channel regularly airs marathons of its series UFO Files, which addresses the study of UFOs and the culture of belief, as does National Geographic’s Is It Real?, which takes a decidedly more scientific and skeptical approach to the subject. Either way, the idea of flying saucers and alien abductions has become engrained into modern culture. Whether mocked by comedians questioning why it seems that aliens always abduct the most uneducated backwoods bumpkin or officially reported by an air force pilot who thoroughly believes that he saw a UFO in the sky with him, aliens have abducted a part of the American social conscious, and it is resonating across generations.
BIGFOOT
Of course, UFOs weren’t the only paranormal phenomena making the papers during the fifties and sixties. During 1958 Ray Wallace, a contractor who was head of a construction site deep in the mountains of Northern California, began finding 16-inch, human-like footprints in the dirt and mud around the construction equipment. The site was so far removed from civilization and the prints so enormous that the finding immediately gained media attention and the creature, “Bigfoot,” was born. Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, as it is also known, was not without precedent. For years explorers and tribes in the Himalayas had been reporting giant human footprints in the snow that supposedly belonged to a giant, hairy ape-like creature that walked on two legs like a man, called the Yeti. The discovery of Bigfoot in the wilds of Northern California led many to believe that this was the same type of creature, and it started a wave of footprint findings and rumors of ape-like creatures in the forest as well as rumors of hoaxes. Ray Wallace eventually quit the contracting job and began to make a name for himself (though not in a particularly good way) by making fantastic claims about his interaction with the animal and claiming that it was guarding gold mines hidden deep in the mountains. After his passing, his family made the claim that the entire Bigfoot phenomenon was entirely a hoax dreamed up by Ray Wallace. They even produced a pair of 16-inch wooden “feet” that Wallace supposedly strapped on and used to stomp about the construction site and, apparently, all over the Pacific Northwest. However, under closer scrutiny by scientists and anthropologists interested in the possibility of a North American Sasquatch, Wallace’s stories and “feet” seemed to fall apart. Jeff Meldrum, a PhD in anthropology and professor at Idaho State University, writes in his book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science,
Another fundamental issue remains—how were such crude devices supposedly used to produce hoax footprints convincing to professional trackers and scientists? Could the Wallaces provide a compelling demonstration of how the carved feet were employed to make the tracks that were impressed sometimes an inch or more into firm wet sand? Apparently the media at large felt no obligation to require such a demonstration. The carved feet had simple leather straps attached to their backs and would be worn like primitive snowshoes. However, a snowshoe’s ability to reduce pressure on the ground was precisely the effect the enlarged feet would have on the tracks. They would hardly make an impression except in fine dust.15
The wooden feet are rather crude, and it is difficult to imagine how one man could be responsible for tracks found all over the Pacific Northwest and into Canada unless other hoaxers caught on to the idea and began producing their own.
The most famous piece of evidence for the existence of Bigfoot is the Patterson-Gimlin film16 of a giant, hairy creature walking upright through the woods of Northern California in 1964. This has become the quintessential footage of the paranormal and has been disputed back and forth between believers and skeptics since its release. To this day, no one can prove that this film is a hoax, and there are casts of the creature’s footprints that accompany the film. Some skeptics say that it is simply a man in a monkey suit; however, the film has been examined countless times, and it seems no one can find the zipper on the ape costume. The footage of this creature was examined and compared with footage of a normal human walking in the same area only to find that this creature was much larger than the average human. The History Channel’s MonsterQuest tried to replicate the stride and walk of the creature using professional athletes and could not match the ambulation of the creature in the film. And the footprint casts taken in the dirt indicate that something stepped on this piece of earth that weighed approximately 500 pounds. This footage is regularly used
in advertising television shows dealing with the paranormal.
The Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is actually nothing particularly new to the North American continent. Anthropologists have found references to the “hairy man” who lives in the woods in Native American folklore, and some scientists feel that this may be an evolutionary missing link, a descendent of Gigantopithicus, a giant ape that lived in Asia that could potentially have migrated across the Alaskan land bridge. Nevertheless, Bigfoot has become, probably more than any other paranormal phenomena, a part of the American mythology and culture and, really, what better creature to symbolize the United States’ quest for the mysterious? A gentle, giant, human-like creature that lives at peace in the natural world, shies away from civilization, and is revered by the native peoples. Bigfoot is the essence of American longing, and its presence links man to some kind of natural brother that still lives alone, stalking the deep, mountainous forests of the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Some hunters have claimed to have had a Sasquatch in the sights of their rifles and found themselves unable to fire the shot that would end the mystery surrounding this creature. Why? Because it looks too human.
Still today, there are various reports of giant, human-like footprints in the dirt and mud across the Northwest and Canada. There have even been sightings elsewhere in the United States. There is the Grassman in Ohio and the Swampman in Louisiana, and every year sightings are reported of some giant, man-like creature covered in hair that lives in the woods devoid of human contact and apparently not wanting any. Bigfoot is the subject of television shows, movies, symposiums, doctoral theses, and even cartoons. Bigfoot Presents is a cartoon show hosted by none other than Bigfoot himself and is quickly acquainting children with the idea of a Sasquatch that lives in the forest nearby. Bigfoot even has his own yearly festival during Labor Day weekend in Willow Creek, California, known as Big Foot Daze, which, according to Joshua Blu Buhs, represents part of the ironic commercialization of this mythical creature. “Bigfoot and Big Foot Daze were part of this new economy. They were advertising icons, commercials for local services and the area. Maps proclaimed the region ‘Bigfoot Country.’ In time, came Bigfoot burgers, Bigfoot Golf & Country Club, Bigfoot Lumber and Hardware, Sasquatch Second Hand, and the Bigfoot Curio Shop.”17 More recently, the Sasquatch Music Festival was a four-day event held in the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Washington, and featured some of the hottest musicians in the industry.
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