Paranormal Pioneers and Other Strange Phenomena

John Dee (1527-1609)

During the reign of Henry VIII, a man named John Dee appeared. Dee was the son of a minor official at the English court. He was a noted English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. When Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, Dee became her trusted advisor on astrological and scientific matters, choosing Elizabeth's coronation date himself. From the 1550s through the 1570s, he served as an advisor to England's voyages of discovery, providing technical assistance in navigation and ideological backing in the creation of a "British Empire", a term that some people believe he was the first to use. Simultaneously with these efforts, Dee became fascinated with the worlds of magic, astrology, and Hermetic philosophy.

He devoted much time and effort in the last thirty years or so of his life to attempting to commune with angels to learn the universal language of creation and bring about the pre-apocalyptic unity of mankind

Dee was influenced by Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy; he was excited and stirred by Agrippa's belief that magic and alchemy were not merely diabolic meditations, but practical aids in the mystical approach to God.

In 1552 Dee met occultist Jerome Cardan. Cardan’s influence on Dee was immediate and significant. Dee was now charged with the idea that spirits thrived just beyond the human realm and might be contacted to aid mankind.

In the early 1580s, Dee sought to contact angels through the use of a "scryer" who would act as a medium. (A scryer is someone who sees things psychically through a crystal or a mirror.)

In 1582, he met Edward Kelley, a convicted English criminal and self-proclaimed medium, who impressed Dee greatly with his abilities. Dee took Kelley into his service and began to devote all his energies to his supernatural pursuits. Although Kelley was thought of as a superb medium, Dee's first attempts to contact the dead were not satisfactory.

Besides the professed ability to summon spirits on a crystal ball, Kelley also claimed to be an alchemist, possess the secret of transmuting base metals into gold. As far as we know, he wasn’t successful in doing that either.

About ten years after Dee's death, the antiquarian Robert Cotton purchased land around Dee's house and began digging in search of papers and artifacts. He discovered several manuscripts which described Dee's supposed communication with the angels. Cotton's son gave these manuscripts to Méric Casaubon, who published them in 1659, together with a long introduction critical of their author. As the first public revelation of Dee's spiritual conferences, the book was extremely popular and sold quickly. Casaubon, who believed in the reality of spirits, argued in his introduction that while Dee believed he was communicating with angels was actually an unsuspecting tool of evil spirits. This book is largely responsible for the image of Dee as a dupe and deluded fanatic which prevailed for the following two and a half centuries.

Dee’s character and his significance in the field of spirit communication, including the role of magic in the Renaissance and the development of modern science, was revisited in the 20th century, As a result of this re-evaluation, which took place largely as a result of the work of the historian Frances Yates, Dee is now viewed as a serious scholar and appreciated as one of the most learned men of his day

Dowsing

Dowsing is a type of divination used to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, gravesites, and many other objects and materials, as well as so-called currents of earth radiation, without the use of scientific apparatus.

Dowsing appears to have begun in the context of Renaissance magic in Germany, and it remains popular even today, although there is no accepted scientific rationale behind the concept and no scientific evidence that it is effective. As early as 1518 Martin Luther listed dowsing for metals as an act that broke the first commandment. In 1662 dowsing was declared to be "superstitious, or rather satanic" by a Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, though he later noted that he wasn't sure that the devil was always responsible for the movement of the rod.

The use of dowsing rods was a popular aspect of folk magic in early 19th century New England. The traditional dowsing rod is a forked (Y-shaped) branch from a tree or bush. The type of tree or bush is entirely up to the user. Some dowsers prefer branches from particular trees, and some prefer the branches to be freshly cut. The two ends on the forked side are held one in each hand with the third (the stem of the "Y") pointing straight ahead. The dowser then walks slowly over the places where he suspects the target is located and the dowsing rod supposedly dips down when a discovery is made.

Many dowsers today use a pair of simple L-shaped metal rods. One rod is held in each hand, with the short arm of the L held upright, and the long arm pointing forward. When something is found, the rods cross over one another making an "X" over the object. Again, the type of metal used to make the rod is a personal choice.

Skeptics and some supporters believe that dowsing apparatus has no power of its own but merely amplifies slight movements of the hands because people's subconscious minds may influence their bodies without their consciously deciding to act. This would make the dowsing rods a channel for the diviner's subconscious knowledge or perception.

Numerous experiments have taken place to determine the validity of dowsing. For example, a 1948 study tested 58 dowsers' ability to detect water. None of them was more reliable than chance. A 1979 review examined many controlled studies of dowsing for water and found that none of them showed better than chance results. Later studies showed essentially the same results. In a study in Munich 1987-1988 by Hans-Dieter Betz and other scientists, 43 of the ‘best’ dowsers were selected out of a pool of 500 candidates. Water was pumped through a pipe on the ground floor of a two-story barn. Before each test, the pipe was moved to a different location and a different angle. On the upper floor each dowser was asked to determine the position of the pipe. Over two years the dowsers performed 843 such tests. Of the 43 pre-selected and extensively tested candidates at least 37 showed no dowsing ability at all. The results from the remaining 6 were said to be better than chance. Six out of 43 isn’t very impressive.

So, does it really work? If you have an urge to try it yourself, here’s how to make dowsing rods from ordinary coat hangers.

1. Straighten two wire coat hangars

2. Bend each wire about 5 inches from one end (the short end will be the handle)

Create handles from either a 1-inch dowel rod with a hole down the center. Some people use several empty thread spools glued end to end. The idea is to have something so the wires will move freely without touching the dowser’s hand.

As an aside, This, author used dousing rods for the first time while in Gettysburg, PA, and was rather skeptical whether they would work. I took them in my hands and immediately felt a low kind of current going through my hands and arms. It was quite startling, and I have no explanation as to why it happened or what it was. I only know, I clearly felt it.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1858-1930)

In 1893 Conan Doyle joined the British Society for Psychical Research. In 1894, a Colonel Elmore asked the organization to investigate mysterious sounds emanating from his home in Dorset. At night Elmore, his wife and adult daughter could hear chains being dragged across a wooden floor and moaning that sounded like a soul in torment. The family dog refused to enter certain parts of the home and most of Elmore's staff had left. Conan Doyle was part of the investigative team.

One night the investigators were disturbed by a "fearsome uproar" but no damage or cause for the noise could be discovered. The investigation results were inconclusive.

Conan Doyle left the Dorset home unsure if it was genuinely haunted or if the haunting had been a hoax. However, when later the body of a child, approximately ten years old, was discovered buried in the garden. Conan Doyle became convinced that he really had witnessed psychic phenomena that were caused by the spirit of the dead child.

After the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, and the death of his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law and his two nephews shortly after World War I, Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave.

During October of 1917, he gave his first public lecture on Spiritualism to present the facts, as he knew them, for the benefit of mankind. Even though he knew his reputation and career would suffer he became an outspoken proponent for the movement.

Conan Doyle's already damaged reputation took a new blow in late 1920. The December issue of The Strand magazine featured an article written by Conan Doyle about two young ladies in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley who took photographs of things they had seen surrounding their country home. The photos were of fairies.

The London representatives of Kodak stated that no one had tampered with the negatives, but they could produce similar photos and therefore they could not say the photos were genuine pictures of fairies. Still, Conan Doyle declared the photos to be genuine. His reasoning was a chivalrous view; two, young ladies would not lie about such a matter and that led him to believe that the photos were authentic photos of fairies.

Conan Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini, who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently attempted to expose them as frauds), Conan Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers, a view expressed in Conan Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply magic tricks, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two.

Conan Doyle died of a heart attack on July 7, 1930 in the family garden at "Windlesham", Crowborough at age 71 and is buried in the Church Yard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, England. A few days before his death in 1930 Conan Doyle wrote, "The reader will judge that I have had many adventures. The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now."

Harry Price, who made a reputation for himself by exposing false mediums, had this to say about Conan Doyle, "Setting aside for the moment his extraordinary and most loveable personal qualities, the chief qualification that he possessed for the role of investigator was his crusading zeal. Among all the notable persons attracted to Spiritualism, he was perhaps the most uncritical. His extreme credulity, indeed, was the despair of his colleagues, all of whom, however, held him in the highest respect for his complete honesty. Poor, dear, lovable, credulous Doyle! He was a giant in stature with the heart of a child."

Ectoplasm

Ectoplasm is a term coined by Charles Richet to denote a substance given off by physical mediums. Ectoplasm is said to be associated with the formation of ghosts, and an enabling factor in psychokinesis. It is said to be produced by physical mediums while in a trance state. This material is excreted as a gauze-like substance from openings on the medium's body and spiritual entities are said to drape it over their nonphysical body, enabling them to interact in our physical universe. And in case you are wondering what happens to it after the séance is over, it’s said that the ectoplasm is re-absorbed into the same bodily orifice as it was extruded. A very swift re-absorption may be induced by sudden illumination of the scene, for example turning on the light or photo flash, if the extrusion occurred in a totally darkened chamber. And not surprisingly as the medium was probably caught by surprise and had to quickly ‘reabsorb’ the ectoplasm before anyone noticed the fraud.

Although the term is widespread in popular culture, the physical existence of ectoplasm is not accepted by mainstream science. Some tested samples purported to be ectoplasm have been found to be other substances, including chiffon and flakes of human skin. Other researchers have duplicated, with non-supernatural materials, the photographic effects sometimes said to prove the existence of ectoplasm.

Back in the heyday of spiritualism, many mediums produced ectoplasm. One such medium was Helen Duncan. She persuaded thousands of people that the dead could return in various forms, but most often through ectoplasm. In reality, Helen’s “ectoplasm” was found to be nothing more than a mixture of paper, cloth, egg white and surgical gauze. After swallowing all sorts of things before the séance, she was able to regurgitate the substances on demand

Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio and in 1854, his family moved to the city of Port Huron, Michigan. At age seven - after spending 12 weeks in a one-room schoolhouse with 38 other students of various ages, his teacher finally lost his patience with the child's unrelenting questioning and apparently self-centered behavior. Seeing that young Edison’s forehead was unusually wide, and his head was a bit larger than average, his teacher decided that the energetic youngster's brains were "addled" or scrambled. (In fact, if modern psychology had existed back then, Edison would have probably been deemed to have ADHD and pumped full of Ritalin.) However, his mother decided his unusual behavior and physical appearance were simply signs of his extraordinary intelligence.

At age 11, Edison’s parents tried to soothe his gluttonous appetite for knowledge by teaching him how to use the materials of the local library. Beginning with the last book on the bottom shelf, he decided to read every book in the stacks. However, his parents quickly guided him into being more selective and by age 12, he had completed Gibbon's Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Sears' History Of The World, and Burton's Anatomy Of Melancholy, The World Dictionary of Science and a number of works on Practical Chemistry. Despite their efforts, Edison’s parents found themselves unable to deal with his escalating interest in the Sciences.

The Spiritualist movement had begun its revival shortly after World War I, and in 1920 communication with the spirits became an obsession Edison.

Edison claimed that when a person died, the body decayed, but the intelligence that it possessed lived on. He took these beliefs one step further by announcing that he planned to invent a piece of equipment to be used as a means of communication with the spirit world.

In October of 1920, an article appeared in American Magazine entitled "Edison Working to Communicate with the Next World". This was one of the many magazines who were trying to confirm that Edison was indeed attempting to communicate with the dead. Edison is quoted as saying:

"I don't claim that our personalities pass onto another existence. I don't claim anything, because I don't know anything.... for that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence who wish to get in touch with us... this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity."

According to his journals and papers, Edison began working on the device and supposedly continued working on the machine until his death in October 1931. As an aside, it is reported that at the precise moment of his death, clocks all over his house and workshop stopped working.

After his death, the plans for the device could not be located. Many people have searched extensively for the components, the prototype or even the plans to the machine but have never found them

There is another story, however.....

In 1941, ten years after Edison's death, the inventor reportedly made contact at a séance that was held in New York. The spirit claimed that the plans for the machine were with three of Edison’s assistants.

According to the story, the machine was finally built but it didn’t work. Edison came through at another séance and suggested a few changes to the device. One of the members of the séance circle was J. Gilbert Wright, the inventor of putty. Wright claimed to have made the changes and then contacted the spirit of inventor Charles Steinmetz, who suggested further improvements. Wright reportedly continued to work on the machine until his death in 1959 when the machine vanished.

Did Edison's machine exist? In the years that have followed Edison's death, neither the machine nor the plans to build it, have ever been found, making his "Machine to Communicate with the Dead" one of the greatest mysteries of Edison's complex and interesting life.

Electronic Voice Phenomena

The definition of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP, is a sound or noise picked up on a recording device which was not audible at the time of the recording.

Because of the plethora of paranormal television shows that have been on the air, we tend to think of EVP as a method of communication only contemporary ghost hunters employ. But this is not the case. EVP have been recorded since the early 1940s.

Atilla von Szalay, an American photographer and medium, was among the first record what he believed to be voices of the dead. He began his attempts in 1941 using a 78-rpm record, but it wasn't until 1956, after switching to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, that he believed he was successful.

Von Szalay conducted several recording sessions with a custom-made apparatus, consisting of a microphone in an insulated cabinet connected to an external recording device and speaker. He reported finding many sounds on the tape that could not be heard on the speaker at the time of recording, some of which were recorded when there was no one in the cabinet.

Among the first recordings believed to be spirit voices were such messages as "This is G!“ and "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all". More recent ones say things like "Help me", or "Get out". One even sounded like a teenage boy saying "You wanna hear a fart?" and a young child giggling afterward.

Von Szalay’s work was published in 1959 by the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

The Raudive Voices - Konstantin Raudive, (1906–1974) was born in Latvia but studied extensively abroad and later became a student of Carl Jung. In exile following the Soviet re-conquest of Latvia in World War II, he taught at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

Raudive studied parapsychology all his life and was especially interested in the possibility of life after death. He and German parapsychologist Hans Bender investigated Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). Raudive published a book on EVP, Breakthrough, in 1971.

In 1964, Raudive read Friedrich Jürgenson's book, Voices from Space, and was so impressed by it that he arranged to meet Jürgenson in 1965. He then worked with Jürgenson to make some EVP recordings, but their first efforts produced very little, although they believed that they could hear very weak, muddled voices.

According to Raudive however, one night, as he listened to a recording, he clearly heard a few voices. When he played the tape over and over, he came to believe he understood all of them. Working with Jurgenson, Raudive recorded over 100,000 voices.

He believed the clarity of the voices implied they could not be explained by normal means. Some of these recordings were conducted in a laboratory and contained words Raudive said were identifiable.

Raudive developed several different approaches to recording EVP:

1. Microphone voices: one simply leaves the tape recorder running, with no one talking; he indicated that one can even disconnect the microphone.

2. Radio voices: one records the white noise from a radio that is not tuned to any station.

3. Diode voices: one records from what is essentially a crystal set not tuned to a station.

Raudive defined several characteristics of the voices, (as laid out in Breakthrough):

1. "The voice entities speak very rapidly, in a mixture of languages, sometimes as many as five or six in one sentence."

2. "They speak in a definite rhythm, which seems forced on them."

3. "The rhythmic mode imposes a shortened, telegram-style phrase or sentence."

4. Probably because of this, "… grammatical rules are frequently abandoned, and neologisms abound."

Contemporary EVP Recordings

In 1982 Sarah Estep founded the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP) in Severna Park, Maryland.

The AA-EVP is a nonprofit organization with the purpose of increasing awareness of EVP, and of teaching standardized methods for capturing it.

Estep began her exploration of EVP in 1976, and says she’s made hundreds of recordings of messages from deceased friends, relatives, and other individuals, including Konstantin Raudive, Beethoven and a lamplighter from 18th century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Classes of EVP

Electronic Voice Phenomena can be categorized into three classes:

Class A are voices that can be heard and understood by most people.

Class B can be heard over a speaker, but not everyone will agree as to what is said.

Class C can be heard but it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make out what is being said.

The interpretation of EVP depends almost entirely on the person listening to it. For example, what sounds like “Hi” to one person may sound like “Fire” to another, and yet a third person may not hear anything at all resembling a word. The majority of EVP fall into Class B, so most people will hear something, but they may not agree on exactly what it is.