by Mary Roach
The most famous Kirlian photograph is of a leaf with a missing tip, taken by Russian parapsychologists circa 1970 and presented as evidence of a sort of astral body made up of “bioplasma substance.” A glowing outline of the entire leaf, including missing tip, appears in the photo. I’m too undone by the concept of trees having astral bodies to register much of an opinion on the Russians’ work, though I can tell you that at the time Krauss’s book went to press, no one claimed to have reliably reproduced the phenomenon.
You will not be surprised to learn that Hereward Carrington did some aura research of his own. (This was the 1920s, long before the Kirlians had brought photography to bear on the subject.) In The Story of Psychic Science, he mentions that his “experiments with Negroes” seemed to suggest that the aura was either a subjective impression or an optical effect. I could find no details of Carrington’s aura experiments, and that is probably for the best.
And then came ectoplasm—Macdougall’s soul substance at last revealed. Ectoplasm debuted in 1914, in a series of bizarre photographs in an equally bizarre but briskly selling book called Phenomena of Materialization. By 1922, it was the stuff of major newspaper headlines. I can say with the steely confidence of someone who has reported on Vienna sausage emanations that no stranger episode ever beset the march of science.
*Anecdotal data on this matter comes from a former nurses’ aide named Juli Pankow, who e-mailed me regarding her observation of what she took to be the soul of a dying nursing home patient. The room was dark. She had just heard the woman’s death rattle. “There was a greenish-purple very very faint cloud or haze right above the chest.” From a Google search, I learned that exploded barium can appear as a greenish-purple cloud, though the cloud in question was linked to a NASA project, not post-barium-enema gas, so who knows.
*In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain, because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull—an image that circulated widely in 1896—was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines.
*To those who find humor in this poor man’s name, I have this to say: His full name was Homer Clyde Snook.
*I’m trying to work out how this makes sense as a noun meaning “the product of a bowel movement.” This is not Dawson’s personal euphemistic misstep; the usage persists in medical writing today. Should you have had the misfortune of visiting a web page called the Constipation Page, you will have seen the phrase, “the motion or stool is very dry or hard.” Perhaps this is why the term “motion pictures” was replaced by “movies.” Now that I see it on the page, “movie” would have been a far better BM euphemism than “motion.” I’d love to chat, but I need to make a movie.
5
Hard to Swallow
The giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm
THE LIBRARY AT Cambridge University has its very own admissions office. This is where you are sent should you be so daft as to try to walk in without a Cambridge ID. I’m waiting in the hallway outside, to apply for one-day admittance. Specifically, I’m trying to get into the hallowed Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room, overseen by the Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives, whom I picture standing guard at the door in ankle-length robes with a massive key on a chain around his neck. I’m actually nervous about getting in.
While I wait, I read about the sacred texts on exhibit in the lobby. Amongst the many Buddhist works in the Cambridge University Library is this very important Sanskrit palm leaf manuscript, about 1,000 years old…. Cambridge University has one of the most important collections of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the world.
Meanwhile, yours truly is here for archive item SPR 197.1.6: Alleged Ectoplasm.
Ectoplasm lived during the table-tipping, spirit-communing, strange-goings-on-in-the-dark heyday of spiritualism. It was claimed to be a physical manifestation of spirit energy, something that certain mediums—called “materializing” mediums—exuded in a state of trance. “This stuff seems to diffuse through the tissues of the [medium] like a gas, and emerges through the orifices because it passes more freely through the mucus membrane than through the skin,” wrote Arthur Findlay, founder of the Arthur Findlay College for mediumship and other spiritualist pursuits. The spiritualists described ectoplasm as a link between life and afterlife, a mixture of matter and ether, physical and yet spiritual, a “swirling, shining substance” that unfortunately photographed very much like cheesecloth.
The original ectoplasmic medium was Eva C., whose emanations drew the attentions of French surgeon and medical researcher Charles Richet. Richet was the discoverer of human thermoregulation and cutaneous transpiration, a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylactic shock, and the author of Gastric Juice in Man and Animals (can’t have a slam dunk every time). That a man of his stature spoke for the authenticity of ectoplasm made it difficult to dismiss. As did spiritualism’s roster of scientists, statesmen, and literary luminaries: William James, William Butler Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, chemist Sir William Crookes (inventor of the vacuum tube and sufferer of ridicule for his pronouncement that the luminous green gas inside his invention was ectoplasm), two prime ministers, and Queen Victoria.
Spiritualism, in a nutshell, is a religious movement devoted to communicating (via mediums) with those who have died and to proving to others, via séances and other mediumistic demonstrations, that it is possible to do so. Death is viewed not as an end to life, but merely a different phase, a changing of address and scenery. Heaven—or Summerland, as the spiritualists used to call it—was no longer an abstract but a place you could put a call in to. Spiritualism was founded in 1848, by the elder sister of two bored preteens, Margaret and Kate Fox, who took to soliciting mysterious spirit “rappings” at their farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. The noises stirred the imaginations of local townsfolk and the entrepreneurial spirit of their sister, who was soon inviting strangers to the house to observe the proceedings for a modest fee. Within months the three sisters were on a nationwide tour, and spiritualism was off and running. It spread steadily and traveled overseas, peaking in the aftermath of World War I, which left millions of American and European families grieving for lost sons and sadly vulnerable to the promise of contacting them in the afterlife. Though spiritualism’s ranks have dwindled since, it retains a presence in the United States and, more prominently, England.
In 1989, possibly to its great embarrassment, Cambridge University acquired the archives of the Society for Psychical Research,* the preeminent investigators of the early mediums’ claims and feats. Should you wish to view, say, the file labeled “Merton, Mrs.: Investigation of ‘The Flying Armchair’” or “Gramophone Records—Alleged Trance Speech of Banta,” a young, madonna-skinned Manuscripts Room page will find it and place it in front of you with the same reverence and respect he accords items of the Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives or the seed specimens of Sir Charles Darwin.
Unlike the flying armchair, which officers of the SPR swiftly dismissed as hokum, ectoplasm was the subject of elaborate and stone-serious scientific inquiry for more than two decades. Scientific American sponsored an investigation of materializing mediums that was covered in four consecutive issues during 1924. In 1922, the elite Sorbonne University in Paris assigned a team of scientists to sit in on fifteen séances with Eva C., with the specific goal of testing the authenticity of her ectoplasm. (It flunked.) The September 1921 Popular Science Monthly observed that ectoplasm “can assume the shape of a hand or a face or even a whole figure” and is “curiously like human skin in cellular structure.” In 1922, Harvard University graduate student S. F. Damon was featured in the New York Times for his belief that ectoplasm was the elusive “first matter” of the ancient alchemists. The Times index for the years 1920 to 1925 includes more than a dozen entries under “ectoplasm,” ranging from straight-faced coverage of research to more farcical forays, suc
h as “Man Bites a Ghost and Upsets Seance” (“Gallagher actually got a mouthful of ectoplasm….”). Yet you look at any one of the hundreds of photographs of ectoplasm “materializing” from a medium, and it’s clear it was bunk. And not even well-executed bunk. As ghost-biter Gallagher so eloquently put it: “That there stuff is just gauze!” What was going on? What happened to the minds of science that they would, even for a moment, buy into this?
The admissions office lady calls me in and asks for my ID and an “academical letter of introduction.” I hand her a printout of an e-mail from the Keeper of the SPR Archives (Dear Madam, … The Alleged Ectoplasm is not a pleasant object, I should warn you!). And that’s it. I’m in.
The reading room is on the third floor. It has ceilings all the way up in heaven and enormous multipane windows with benedictive shafts of light angling down onto the students. The woman across the table is hunched over a notebook, translating and transcribing from an ancient bundle of brittle blue airmail letters penned in Hebrew. The youth to my left is sacrificing his vision and social life to medieval land transfers. A page arrives with my requested materials: six files, a photo album, and a box containing the Alleged Ectoplasm. The box is made of decoratively patterned cardboard and tied up with a piece of string, like something brought home from a pastry shop. It is larger and showier than I expected. I set it on the floor before anyone can ask what’s inside. The plan is to open it later, when my tablemates have left for lunch.
The top file is labeled “Goligher, Kathleen.” This file goes with the photo album, which contains photographs of Miss Goligher and her visible ectoplasms, dated 1920–1921. Goligher was the inspiration for the theories and experiments of Dr. W. J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Queen’s University of Belfast. The Golighers were a family of spiritualists—all four daughters worked as mediums—known for their lively séances, held in a tattily wallpapered Belfast sitting room. The sittings unfolded in the typical manner of the spiritualist séance. The medium would disappear behind a curtain or inside a medium cabinet. The lights would be put out—mediums claimed light compromised their abilities and damaged the ectoplasm—and a round of hymns and prayers begun. The medium would fall into a trance and begin producing “demonstrations,” as they are still called today by spiritualists, of the presence and power of whatever spirits he or she had drawn to the room. Most commonly, the spirits would show their stuff by making a table at the center of the séance circle tilt or rise. Since everyone was holding hands, the table appeared to be levitating* without the help of anyone seated in the circle.
While most spiritualists were satisfied with the explanation that it was the energy of their spirit friends that was causing the table to rock and rise, Crawford wanted to know exactly how, and by what scientific principles, the dead were accomplishing this. Following a series of experiments involving scales and pressure sensors, he came up with a theory of bendable ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, which he set forth in embarrassing detail in the 1920 E. P. Dutton hardcovers The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle and Experiments in Psychical Science. (Such was the gullibility of the day that Dutton published five of Crawford’s books without a modicum of queasiness. A 1919 letter in the Dutton archives describes Crawford’s discoveries as being “of such enormous importance to physics that it is not too much to suppose that they may shew the way to a complete upsetting of present ideas and the building of a new theory on the constitution of matter.”†)
Applying laws of physics and engineering, Crawford calculated that for tables up to thirty pounds, an unsupported or “true” cantilever was employed. The ectoplasmic rod issues “from the torso” (more about this euphemism to come) of the medium, travels parallel to the floor until it reaches the center point of the table, and then changes direction, rising up in a column of four-inch diameter to meet the underside of the tabletop, where it grips the surface by means of a suction-based grasping organ. (He claimed to be able to hear the suckers”—never a good word choice for W. J. Crawford—“gripping and sliding over the wood.”) If the table weighed more than thirty pounds, Crawford concluded, a supported cantilever was employed by the spirits: It angled down and met the floor, which it used for support, before bending and rising to meet the table.
Crawford attempted to prove the existence of the two types of ectoplasmic cantilevers by setting a pressure-recording apparatus under the séance table. This consisted of two pieces of wood that, when pressed together, would complete a circuit, causing a bell to ring. Crawford describes telling Goligher’s spirit helpers—or “operators”—to begin a series of levitations, first with a true ectoplasmic cantilever and then a supported ectoplasmic cantilever. As he predicted, the bell rang only when the supported cantilever was in use.
Crawford didn’t stop there. He wanted more proof. He wanted the sort of proof he could carry out of the séance room and show to his colleagues. Which brings us to Experiment 4—“Impression on modeler’s clay of bottom of cantilever column”—and to the beginning of Crawford’s tragic demise. Here is Crawford describing the experiment:
I brought a little box filled with soft clay to the séance room, and said to the operators, “You remember some time ago when we were investigating the methods by which you levitate the table, I found that if necessary you could levitate it by putting the bottom end of the columnar part of the cantilever on the floor immediately under the table, so that it forms a kind of prop?” … Answer—“Yes.” “Well, I am going to place this box of soft clay under the table and I want you to levitate the table by this method.” … In a very short time, the table levitated immediately above the clay…. At its conclusion I examined the clay. There was a large irregularly shaped impression on it, the length one way being about 3 inches and the other 2½ inches.
In the Goligher file on the table in front of me is a mounted black and white photograph of a similarly obtained “cantilever” impression. It was not made by Crawford, but by a contemporary of his, a psychic researcher named Henry Bremset, who attempted to replicate Crawford’s experiment at a different séance circle. He filled two shortbread tins with putty, placed them under the séance table, and explained to the medium what he hoped to achieve.
Tin Number 1 revealed, said Bremset in a letter to the SPR, “the perfect imprint of a woman’s shoe.” Tin Number 2 bore the imprint of a stockinged heel, “showing stitch marks of knitting.” The second photo in particular made Bremset feel a little ill. For he recalled that Crawford, in one of his papers, had described an impression that suggested that of “a gigantic thumb with skin, and lines similar to a human thumb [print].” Bremset sent his Tin Number 2 photo to Dr. Crawford, to see how he’d interpret it. The possibility that Bremset’s imprint had been made by a foot in a stocking appeared not to have entered Crawford’s mind. His reply stated that he hoped to prove that the impressions were made by psychic rods that carried the impressions of the area from which they emerged.
Perplexed and concerned, Bremset took a train to Belfast later that week. He describes his visit with Crawford in the SPR letter. “I had a long and earnest discussion with him about the interpretation of the facts as I saw them. He was obviously profoundly disturbed though still clinging to his new theory…. When I parted from him he looked a very worried man…. Not long afterward came his tragic death.”
Crawford drowned himself in the summer of 1920. Though his suicide note stated that his actions had nothing to do with “the work,” hearsay held that the motivating force for the suicide was a profound embarrassment upon realizing he’d been duped.
The real mystery, as far as I’m concerned, is that it took him so long to figure things out. In his book, he has included a photograph captioned “The cantilever method of levitation. A rough cantilever in position.” Yet it unequivocally depicts a strip of filmy white cloth—coming down from Goligher’s lap, dropping a foot or so, and then curving up to the bottom of a small desk. I don’t know anything about engineering, but it’s clear to m
e that that material isn’t “supporting” anything. It’s just hanging there limply. There’s nothing mysterious or suggestive about it. Crawford’s album contains photo after photo of Goligher with lengths of “the substance” lying on her lap, wadded on the floor at her feet, tied to the table legs, and in every case it’s impossible to mistake it for anything other than ordinary man-made cloth. One photo shows Kathleen Goligher with a pleated bunch of fabric near the neck of her white shirt, and I spent a good minute and a half trying to decide if it was fashion or ectoplasm. Many of the album photos are reproduced in Crawford’s books, but not photos 4F or 5E: Here is Goligher, her standard eyes-closed, medium-in-trance pose abandoned for the moment, openly laughing or grinning.
The other possibility is that W. J. Crawford was—to use the word choice of Harry Houdini, who saw the Goligher photographs and heard the engineer explain them over the course of a three-hour dinner—insane. Evidence for his rather weak grip on reality can be found among the captions in the SPR album I’ve been looking through today. Photograph 8E, for instance: “In this photograph are to be seen the white and grey substances. Dr. Crawford said that the grey substance left excreta marks.” On June 22, 1920, shortly before he died, Crawford wrote in his journal that he was considering the possibility that ectoplasm emerged from the medium’s rectum. He first arrived at this unorthodox notion upon finding “particles of excreta” in the white drawers that he asked the medium to put on before—and return after—the séance. It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford’s distinctive psychosis appeared to include a troublesome underwear fixation. In addition to the white drawers, we find the following “highly probable facts, resting on good authority” in a letter from a Mr. Besterman, in the SPR archives. Shortly before Crawford’s suicide, Besterman writes, Crawford “spent all his money (consequently leaving nothing) on a stack of woollen underwear for his family, sufficient to last for several years.”
