It is to a world of eternal progress that Northcliffe welcomes one by one his former colleagues – yes, and all journalists as they pass into the realms to which he went before them.
“Another has joined my band,” he says, whenever this happens. He is still “the Chief.”
In that world, one day, your friends will greet you. And in it you will enter a sphere for which your attainments, your character and your degree of self-development have suited you. This is as inevitable as the law of gravity, which, without a mediator or a judge, sends a stone to the bottom of a pond, lets a piece of heavy wood go somewhere near the surface and decrees that a cork shall float on top of the water.
SPIRITS SPEAK FOR THE RECORD
By John Gay Stevens
Stevens was an American newspaper reporter and advertising agency copywriter who later became a producer-writer of local and regional radio and television shows in Los Angeles. With a life-long interest in the supernatural, he joined the American Society for Psychic Research and was involved in a number of major investigations for over thirty years. Here he describes one of the strangest phenomena he ever encountered in 1933 for Fate magazine.
Because it is customary these days to refer all phenomena, psychic, psychological and physical, to the “Scientific Establishment” for evaluation those of us interested in parapsychology face a frustrating dilemma. Science has no organized program for the investigation of this type of phenomena and its opinion, therefore, must be classed as armchair expertise.
On the other hand, the reality of psychic phenomena always has been clouded by the question of the credibility of its witnesses and investigators. But if you happen to have credentials acceptable in the scientific community you can investigate and report on this sort of thing only at your peril.
However, the critical issue is the matter of immediacy. The average man, faced with the threat of instant global demolition, is getting anxious to learn the answers to life and survival now.
And so, while we wait for science to become scientific (to investigate without prejudice) it has been reassuring to me to have had a personal experience that has done a great deal to convince me of the reality of discarnate entities and of survival.
On April 23, 1933, in New York City, a group of us from the American Society for Psychic Research, of which I was a member, recorded a spirit voice séance that left all of us, including four erstwhile cynical sound engineers, convinced of the reality of the spirit voices we recorded.
This was before the work of the Society became limited to the study of statistical, or quantitative research into man’s extrasensory powers. At that time, and for the previous half-century, both British and American Societies of Psychical Research had maintained a continuing study of mediumship and spontaneous phenomena.
Mrs Helen T. Bigelow, then secretary of the Society, Mr Bigelow, Dr Hereward Carrington, lifelong psychic investigator2, Chester Grady, Louis Anspacher, and myself were members assigned to investigate and report on mediums producing this type of phenomena. All seances were held at the headquarters of the Society, on lower Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan.
Recording a “voice” séance was not part of our scheduled activities for that year but Dr Frank Black, one of the owners of World Broadcasting Company (now Decca Records), a leading producer-director of many top musical shows in radio at the time, and later musical director of NBC, having an intelligent layman’s interest in psychic phenomena, offered to record a voice séance at the World Broadcasting Studios, providing it was supervised by the Society. He then planned to donate the records to the Society for reference and study. The idea was not received with enthusiasm by the Society. All mediumistic phenomena staged in an environment not controlled by trained investigators may be thought to lack evidential value. It was finally decided that the thing was worth doing, however, simply because it never had been done before. This was years before the advent of the wire or tape recorder.
The whole affair was planned by the Society with about as much scientific care as a dinner party. As it turned out, the recording engineers at World Broadcasting Company, led by Charles Lauda, now head recording engineer for Decca Records, took care of the scientific side of the project. They did so well, in fact, that this recording session produced some of the most convincing evidence of the reality of spirit voices we ever had.
Naturally, proving the genuineness of the voices was not their intention. They asked if there was any objection to trying to prove that any purported spirit voices were fraudulent. We welcomed the idea. To a man these engineers were certain there was no such thing as a spirit voice and they regarded this as a heaven-sent chance to prove it all in their own studio under their own recording conditions.
At the time, the Western Electric Company, through its ERPI Division (Electrical Research Products Institute), were installing their latest sound recording equipment at World Broadcasting Company. When they heard of this proposed recording of ghost voices some of these Western Electric engineers joined the World engineers to help unmask the voice makers. Collectively they probably made up the most formidable array of sound engineering talent ever organized to debunk a spirit voice.
We (there were perhaps a dozen of us from the Society) engaged the medium, William Cartheuser, for the occasion as we were satisfied he had produced direct or disembodied voices in our own investigations, working under our controls at our headquarters.
The recording studio at 50 West 57th Street was a big, 40-foot-long, windowless, sound-proofed room, two stories high. A dozen chairs were arranged in a circle around a stand microphone in the middle of the floor. Two additional mikes hung close to the ceiling in diagonally opposite corners of the room.
One of the engineers pointed out that the mike on the floor, about head high when we sat down, was mike No. 1. All voices in the circle would be recorded on that mike, he said. The two mikes at the ceiling corners were No. 2 and No. 3. These ceiling mikes, he explained, had such a short range of sensitivity they would not record any voices from the floor. He indicated the control room window that had been covered to keep the light in the control room out of the studio and said he would be talking to us over the speaker recessed in the wall directly over the window. As an afterthought he added they had stationed an engineer at the only exit door to see that no one left or entered the studio.
With so little information we didn’t understand the “test”. Evidently they had no plan to put controls on the medium so he could not move or speak, a procedure we frequently used. We had no way of knowing that the engineers, after a week or so of conferring, had hit on a very simple plan that covered all possibilities. They concluded that, no matter what tricks the voice maker used, he had to work on the floor. If the voices were authentic spirit voices then they need have no such limitation in space. They should be able to speak from anywhere in the room – not only at floor level.
The answer was simple. They would hang mikes at the ceiling where they would not register voices from the floor. If voices could manage to speak close enough to a ceiling mike to be recorded over that mike those voices would have to be supernatural or spirit voices.
By the same token, if the voices only could be heard on mike No. 1 on the floor they must be suspect as normal and fraudulent.
Their test, therefore, was an open and shut matter, based strictly on position-in-space considerations, without regard to the nature of the voices or the content of any messages. They had decided they were not qualified to judge evidence in any field other than their own, and had based their entire case on the placement of those ceiling mikes – 20 feet away from the sitters and 20 feet in the air.
Regardless of the skill of the medium in vocal deception, regardless of his dexterity in eluding controls in the dark, he had to stay on the floor. They had removed all extra chairs, piano and bench, music stands, draperies, etc. No voice could be recorded on either of those high mikes unless the speaker was within 12 inches or so of the mike face. Furthermore, the mikes w
ere of the old-fashioned carbon type that were not only very limited in range but also highly directional. And both of them had been carefully turned at right angles to the circle of sitters.
Each mike had been rigged with its own line into the control room. All lines converged at the cutting head of the recording machine. The line from mike No. 1 on the floor went through the monitoring console as usual. But the lines from mikes No. 2 and 3 at the ceiling bypassed the console and were set up with their own DB dial, speaker and power amplifier. The lines from mikes No. 2 and 3 were set at zero and could not be monitored. This means the engineers could tell precisely which mike was bringing in each voice by listening to the individual speaker and by watching the individual dial on each of the three separate lines.
In the studio, since we had no special instruction from the engineers, we went ahead as if at a conventional direct voice setting. In the dark, waiting for the psychic power to build up, we carried on a casual conversation and we wondered what those fellows in the control room were up to. Finally, someone said, “The trumpet is up.”
The trumpet, a familiar accessory of voice mediums, is a slim, elongated, collapsible version of a megaphone. It was made of light aluminum and carried a band of luminous paint so it could be seen in the dark. Discarnate personalities are supposed to use it when they are not able to make themselves heard without it. It had been resting on the floor in the middle of our circle of sitters ever since we gathered around the floor mike.
Now the phosphorescent ring of the trumpet was clearly visible a couple of feet above our heads circling the group. It tapped each sitter lightly on the head as if in greeting.
We called roll to see that everyone was in his or her chair and that the hands of all sitters were held by the person on either side to be sure that no one – particularly the medium – left his seat.
Voices gradually built up through the trumpet. These voices identified themselves as some late relative or close friend. Sometimes they were recognized, sometimes not. Now and then we suggested to a voice that it speak into the mike in front of us on the floor – No. 1. It never occurred to us to send them to the ceiling mikes since we had no idea of their significance. After we had sent several trumpet voices to the floor mike the speaker from the control room sounded. “Are these what you call ‘spirit’ voices?” the engineer asked. There were overtones of cynicism in the question.
The circling trumpet finally clattered to the floor in the middle of the circle. Several minutes of oppressive silence followed. Then the full-blown resonant voice of a man seemed to pop out of space in front of us, directly above mike No. 1. This time the phosphorescent ring of the trumpet was still visible on the floor at our feet. This new voice was brisk and businesslike; we recognized it instantly as a “direct” voice – a voice coming, literally, out of thin air.
After a greeting it said, “We are very interested in the experiment you people are putting on tonight and we would like to help.”
We asked, “What experiment is that?”
“I’m talking about your friends the engineers there in the back room,” he explained. “We think they have worked out a very interesting testing procedure for us on their equipment.”
This new voice brought a query from the control room. “Who is that speaking – the one talking about our test.”
“We don’t know,” we answered. “It’s just a voice.”
The personality behind the new voice moved in close to mike No. 1. “I’m the one you heard talking to these people in here,” he said. “I speak to you directly without the use of any intermediaries or equipment of any kind.
“I’m an engineer over here on this side and, with a couple of my colleagues, would like to collaborate with you in making this test recording. We think what you are doing is important.
“We have a definite plan in mind for your tests. We are perfectly willing to meet any conditions you set up, or make any demonstration you have in mind . . . if it is within our power. Just let us know what you would like to have me do.”
“Just a moment,” the control room speaker said. There was a pause while the group apparently went into a huddle. Finally the engineer spoke again, “Do you think you could speak to us over one of those microphones located up at the ceiling?”
Instantly, right on the heels of the last syllable of his words, the engineer in the control room heard the voice come into the room over mike No. 2 at the ceiling. “How’s this?” it asked. “Does it make any difference to you which microphone I use up here?”
Nothing could have made much difference to those control room engineers at that particular moment. They later admitted they had sat stunned, staring at the No. 2 speaker.
“Is this all right?” the voice insisted from No. 2. This time it was as loud as a bull-horn.
This sparked the control room into action; the man at the console finally found his voice. “Yes . . . yes. That’s fine. Would you mind lowering your voice a little? We have no volume control on that line.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice replied. “I assume this is a test to satisfy yourselves that we are what we claim to be by proving that we can speak to you from any point in space.” The voice was now at a normal speaking level.
As the engineers watched intently the needle in the dial face on the line to mike No. 2 flickered in perfect coordination with the sound of the voice from the speaker on that line. There was no doubt they agreed, that voice was speaking within inches of mike No. 2. Moreover, they were almost as much impressed by the speed of the voice’s switch from mike No. 1 on the floor to mike No. 2 at the ceiling as they were by the fact that it actually spoke at the ceiling mike.
The engineer now asked, “Would you try that other mike at the ceiling, there across the room from you?”
Again, before the engineer could complete his request, the voice was answering from within inches of mike No. 3. It had traveled through space in a matter of a second.
There was a brief exchange between the two engineers, the one Here and the one There. This was followed by a long pause. Our control room engineers had nothing more to say.
Those of us in the studio had been listening to all of this in puzzled silence. Finally we spoke up. “Are you ready with your experiment?”
The speaker on the wall said, “It’s all over – as far as we’re concerned.”
We all started talking at once. But the voice broke in, now down at mike No. 1, and still addressing the control room, “If you don’t have any other tests we have a demonstration or two we would like to show you.”
Without waiting for an answer the voice explained that he was going to make a complete circuit of all three mikes while making a short simple statement about what he was doing. He warned the engineers to keep a sharp eye on their dials and a sharp ear on the speakers so they could follow his fast moves from mike to mike. “When you are ready,” he said, “give me a signal.”
After an interval of only seconds the control room barked, “Go!”
Speaking at a normal conversational pace the voice said, “I am now making a complete circuit of all three microphones and am now back at No. 1.” That voice, speaking without a break, had zoomed up, circled the ceiling and dived back down to mike No. 1 like a toy airplane.
The control room engineers reported they had followed its progress around the speakers and dials. As revealed by the records later, that voice had moved at such incredible speed between mikes it sounded as if it had been recorded on one mike.
At this point the voice introduced a colleague whom he described as a “one-time eminent research engineer in the science of sound when he was back there with you.”
The new voice came in on No. 1 mike. He began in a contemplative voice, “We think we have given you some clear evidence. At least you should know by now that our voices are not human voices . . . as you originally thought. We are what we claim to be, surviving personalities speaking to you from another dimension – and not impersonations. We have given
you this evidence on your own terms and on your own equipment.”
This obviously was meant for the engineering group in the control room.
Then, as if turning to us, he continued, “In those demonstrations it was our intent to prove to you the super-physical nature of our voices by showing you what one of our voices can do in terms of time and motion. Now I am going to show you what one of our voices can do in terms of vocal production – a vocal sound performance that is impossible for the human voice. This should be of particular interest to your recording engineers, since I will produce my voice throughout the entire range of sound audible to the human ear.”
None of us had heard of such a thing before and Cartheuser, when questioned later, could not remember anything like this.
The voice said, “I am now speaking to you at the normal level of the human male voice . . . around 300 cycles. If you listen carefully you will notice that I am slowly moving my voice up the scale of sound frequencies in an unbroken flow of sound.”
We were fascinated by the sound of that voice gliding smoothly up in perfect pitch like the glissando of a musical instrument, from a resonant baritone to a bright tenor, to a soprano. Through it all he never stopped talking.
“My voice is now at the 1100 cycle point,” he said. “This is approximately at the highest point where the human speaking voice can articulate – frame words – that are understandable to you there. From this point I will increase the cycle frequency of my voice until it is beyond the range of your hearing and, you will note, I can articulate clearly and understandably until it disappears.”
Even as he spoke, giving frequency levels, 3,000, 5,000, and relevant comments, his voice climbed to the twittering of a small bird, yet every word could be understood. Finally the words become only a fine thread of sound like an incredibly distant radio signal . . . then there was silence.
We sat immobile. There was not the slightest doubt among us that such a thing could be done only by a discarnate entity. The speaker on the wall broke the silence, “We know that none of you could have done that,” the control room said.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 40
