"I Was Familiar With the Spirits"

"Oh stay away from this its very dark I can feel it."

Anonymous poster on the comments section of "The Incident" website.

I first discovered Danish artist Balder Olrik's website "The Incident" while perusing links at an Art Bell fansite. This was back around the early Two Thousands, although I'm not sure of the date exactly. I found the website intriguing, haunting even. It purported to be seven pages from a mysterious book called The Incident, which Olrik claimed to have found in a bookshop and picked up out of curiosity because it featured his name on it.

The book, or so the webmaster claimed, was a series of bizarre photographs of what seems to be a seance or series of psychical experiments. They were exceedingly eerie and shocking. Unlike the staid, conservative seance photos of Victorian times, they were full of energy, and action; these participants were really moving about, trying to avoid flying chairs and levitating men, who were often surrounded by what looked like bolts of energy or ectoplasm. Some of the participants had frightened looks on their faces. It was evocative, chilling stuff.

Even better were the cryptic captions, such as:

At the Third Beograd Tribunal, Mr. Klein was doubting the powers of the New World Order and look how he was taught a lesson! The young man fainting in the middle of the picture, is an American student of whom The Great Leader has said 'Mr. Oswald will fire the first shot of a new era for us'.

Or this lovely and disturbing caption:

Semper's girlfriend, Miss Ardens, was a very popular media, this particular evening 4 demons were fighting over her delicate body . After "The Incident " she went to live in America, assuming a new identity.

Here is Olrik's own summation of his "story":

The pictures that you are going to see now, come from a book I found in a secondhand bookstore.

in Berlin November 1997. The book had my family name on the cover and caught my interest, of course. I asked the owner of the bookstore where he had the book from and he told me that he had bought it from the estate of a deceased American officer.

As I opened the book it was clear that it had nothing to do with the history of my family, there was another book inside the cover! The real title was "The Incident". I closed the book immediately and bought it because if the bookstore owner had seen what was inside, he would probably have put up the price. .

I came back to the hotel had a quick look in the book and read some pages, it really scared the hell out of me. Not only the pictures scared me, but the text was almost hypnotizing, I got dizzy by reading it. .

First of all, the book had to read from right to left as where the final page usually is, instead I found the first page. It started with a Latin quotation that I translated to something like "The First is the last to die ". And instead of chapters were used the terms "Levels of Initiation" and "Archive I ,II, III ", each Archive containing 7 levels. .

I brought the book back home to Copenhagen, made some copies of a few pages and mailed them to a friend. These copies are all I have left of the book now because 3 days after my return, somebody broke into my flat and stole the book. The strangest thing is that it was the only thing taken.

I feel very insecure now and is full of questions , so if you can help me to solve the mystery of "The Incident ", I will be happy to hear from you.

Best Regards. [1]

It was later claimed by an anonymous person posting in the comments section as "H.Z." that the book had been identical to one he or she had seen going for an exorbitant price at an auction. This book had eventually sold to a "nervous" American lady who had paid a huge sum for it. A veritable Necronomicon perhaps? (Another commentator suggested that "The Incident" referred to the "Xenu" creation myth at the OT Three Level of Scientology; keep in mind it would only be a few short years before L. Ron Hubbard was out n the desert with rocket scientist Jack Parsons, trying to summon up "Babylon" via black magic.)

Of course, you eventually read the website disclaimer, scrubbing the whole thing as a "hoax." But, life imitates art, or an evocation of such weird cryptic power, still has the capacity to haunt, to give birth to a new form of "life" as it were; the very foundation, this is, of "magick." Something is brought into existence by a representation of that thing. Buddhist thought teaches that objects in physical space are merely mental representations of what is there, but "mocked up" (to use a Scientology phrase) to become what we perceive in three dimensions color, width, depth, etc. Otherwise, "reality" exists only in the MIND (solipsism) and is a malleable thing, wherein the possibility of all things resides in a sort of embryonic or larval state (or maybe I'm not understanding it correctly).

H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional tome, The Necronomicon, has passed into human consciousness in such an amazing fashion that there are a number of books all claiming to be the actual Necronomicon--and many people don't know any better. (There is an incredible little book, Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon (HarperCollins, 2006) by "Simon" (presumably author Peter Levenda, who is in the book) which details the weird, synchronistic publication of the "Simon Edition" of the Necronomicon, which includes Eastern Orthodox priests, a cocaine-addict publisher who thought he had an alter-ego as an extraterrestrial, suicides, anti-communist agents, and a chance encounter with William S. Burroughs that led to Burroughs writing the introduction to the Simon Necronomicon. As Ian Holm said in the film version of Naked Lunch, "There are no accidents." And Burroughs, I'm sure, would agree.) [2]

Life imitates art. But, even better, art evokes and calls forth some things best left behind the comforting shadow-show of our frenzied thoughts and buried fears. A work of fiction, a hoax even, can be born and exude its own peculiar power, weave its own undeniable spell. This is the thinking behind "representational" magic, or symbolic magic; making dolls or the "intellectual decompression chamber " of ritualization, as Anton LaVey called it; making the fantasy form YOUR "reality."

But, not here. The seance photos photoshopped by Balder Olrik, you see, were real. He didn't have to change that much. They are taken from the old, obscure Danish book by photographer and researcher Sven Türck. The book in Danish is called: Jeg Var Dus Med Aanderne, or translated "I Was Familiar With the Spirits." It is exceedingly rare I take it, and I don't know how one would obtain a copy. However, be that as it may, many of its most famous pictures still survive.

Sven Türck

Sven Türck (1897-1954) was a popular Danish photographer working during the war years (approx 1940-1945) to try and document not only the mundane but also the very extraordinary. His fascination with daily Danish life is born out in his photographs, all save for a very few. For Sven Türck had a second avocation as a photographer, another call. His calling was to document the work of physical mediums such as Børge Michaelsen and to either prove or disprove the legitimacy of their claims to psychic abilities. [3]

Hence, sometime between the years 1940-45, as stated previously, he conducted a series of seances with noted physical mediums (i.e. mediums that can levitate objects, manifest physical "apports" or items that seemingly, mysteriously, come from nowhere, and even manifest full-blown "materializations" of spirits in physical form, via "ectoplasm," or the mystic substance of the spiritual realm).

To that end, he equipped his studio laboratory" with three infrared cameras, one to record from above, one from below, and one to the side. And he insisted the sitting had to be in TOTAL darkness, to eliminate the possibility of trickery. If you look closely at the resultant photographs, you can see participants wearing illuminating headbands, and that the legs of tables and chairs are wrapped in further illuminating bands. Merely so that the objects can be "seen" in the cavern-like darkness.

Unlike other seance pictures, the photos themselves are full of action, full of movement. Tables levitate at fingertips, chairs lift from the floor and sail through the air. One can well see why the participants had to wear illuminating strips, and why tables and chairs had to be so adorned too: they are often seen to duck out of the way of dangerous flying objects! A man (presumably popular physical medium Michaelsen) seems to dance, light as a feather, atop the table. Then it seems as if he levitates upward. There is a confusing image of what seems a woman atop the table, her arms bent uncomfortably behind her.

The sitters are able to lift, using only their fingertips, a table, with others simply having their arms thrust out as if sending "power" to the table. A chair goes flying through the air. There is no motion blur to suggest it was thrown, as has been pointed out. It looks like it was just very slowly and leisurely floating by. And all of this in total darkness.

We do not know, of course (except save for Michaelsson) who these people were. They are assumed to be psychic mediums or sensitives. The pictures themselves have an eerie power to compel. They are unlike any of the old seance photos I have ever seen and have a "haunting" (no pun) quality about them as if they were photo snapshots from a macabre, bizarre dinner party in a parallel dimension.

The photos have the capacity to open a doorway into our mind, as we search for an explanation of them. The director of the Danish Photographic Institute (Theodore Andresen) examined them and said that he believed, personally, that, under the conditions in which they were shot, he could say that any sort of trickery was highly unlikely. The other mediums' names were given variously as "Jonnson", "Anna Melloni Rasmussen," and "Emil Carlson."

(Apparently, the spirits' ectoplasmic fingers are described, based on the rambling, poorly translated or written account on one website [4] as feeling like "sausages, sausages." Michaelsen was unhappy when one of these sausages slipped into a rather sensitive area of his body. We'll leave it at that.)

The pictures themselves have been released into the public domain by the Danish government. Here is a short gallery, culled from various sources, below.

There are strange cul-de-sacs of wonder and fear, weird portals and slipstreams from our reality to one greater, stranger, but hidden from the workaday world by seeming invisible alleyways. But, turn a corner and find yourself in the "Twilight Zone," a place where you can no longer discern which way is up, and which down. I feel that, from being introduced to these photos via Balder Olrik's very effective (if not unintentionally psychically empowered) website, "The Incident", to writing this article, I have come full circle. Something is complete now. In my education. In my journey.

However, I still couldn't tell you where the hell Beograd was on a map. [5]

Notes.

1. Olrik, Balder. "The Incident". https://web.archive.org/web/20040405213544/http://netsummary.dk/incident/intro.html. Accessed 14 June 2023.

2. I read this excellent small book many, many years ago, and can highly recommend it to those interested in both the history of the occult as one particular strange and forgotten history of the publication of an infamous book and the weird circumstances and synchronicities and "tragedies" surrounding it.

3. "AnomalyInfo." http://anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1940-1945-ca-sven-turck-experiments. Accessed 14 June

4. "Sven Turck" The Light of Spirit. https://www.lightofspirit.info/mediums-of-the-past/t-z/sven-turck/ . Accessed 14 June

5. It is apparently the capital of Serbia and its largest city. It translates as the "White City."

Although I'm planning a long-form video, here is a YouTube short I made about the Sven Türck seance photos.