Paranormal Pioneers and Other Strange Phenomena

Glossolalia or “Speaking in Tongues”

Glossolalia, often understood among Protestant Christians as speaking in tongues, is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any readily comprehended meaning, in some cases as part of religious practice. Some consider it as a part of a sacred language. It is a common practice amongst Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.

There are five places in the New Testament where speaking in tongue is referred to explicitly:

• Mark 16:17, which records the instructions of Christ to the apostles, including his description that "they will speak with new tongues" as a sign that would follow "them that believe" in him.

• Acts 2, which describes an occurrence of speaking in tongues in Jerusalem at Pentecost, though with various interpretations. Specifically, "every man heard them speak in his own language" and wondered "how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?"

• Acts 10:46, when the household of Cornelius in Caesarea spoke in tongues, and those present compared it to the speaking in tongues that occurred at Pentecost.

• Acts 19:6, when a group of approximately a dozen men spoke in tongues in Ephesus as they received the Holy Spirit while the apostle Paul laid his hands upon them.

• 1 Cor 12, 13, 14, where Paul discusses speaking in "various kinds of tongues" as part of his wider discussion of the gifts of the Spirit; his remarks shed some light on his own speaking in tongues as well as how the gift of speaking in tongues was to be used in the church.

In Christianity, a supernatural explanation for glossolalia is advocated by some and rejected by others. Glossolalists believe that it is a miraculous charism or spiritual gift. They claim that these tongues can be both real, unlearned languages, as well as a "language of the spirit", a "heavenly language", or perhaps the language of angels. Cessationists believe that all the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased to occur early in Christian history, and therefore that the speaking in tongues practiced today is simply the utterance of meaningless syllables. It is not miraculous, but rather learned behavior, possibly self-induced.

Other religious groups have been observed to practice some form of glossolalia. It is perhaps most commonly in Paganism, Shamanism, and other mediumistic religious practices. In Japan, the God Light Association used to practice glossolalia to cause adherents to recall past lives. Glossolalia has even been postulated as an explanation for the Voynich manuscript.

Certain Gnostic texts from the Roman period have written on them meaningless syllables such as "t t t t n n n n d d d d d..." etc. It is speculated that these may be transliterations of the sorts of sounds made during glossolalia.

Glossolalia has also been observed in the Voodoo religion of Haiti, as well as in the Hindu Gurus and Fakirs of India.

There are also others who say that the “tongues” referred to simply means the ability to learn new languages easier than the average person.

Edmond Gurney (1847-1888)

Edmund Gurney was born near Walton-on-Thames and educated at Blackheath and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a high place in the classical tripos (A tripos is an examination for the B.A. degree with honors) and received a fellowship. His work for the tripos was finished in the intervals of his study of piano. Unhappy with his own skill as a musician, he wrote The Power of Sound (1880), an essay on the philosophy of music.

He then studied medicine with no intention of practicing, devoting himself to physics, chemistry and physiology. With regard to Psychical Research, he wanted to know whether there was an unexplored region of human mind which transcended the normal limitations of sensible knowledge. Gurney's purpose was to approach the subject by observation and experiment, especially in the field of hypnotism. He wanted to examine the continuance of the conscious human personality after the death of the body.

Gurney began at what he later saw was the wrong end by studying the séances of professed spiritualistic mediums. Little came of this except the detection of frauds and in 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research was founded, paid mediums were discarded, and experiments were made in thought-transference and hypnotism.

Evidence for telepathy was supposed to be established by the experiments chronicled in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and it was said that similar experiences occurred spontaneously, for example, in the many recorded instances of deathbed spirits. Gurney's hypnotic experiments were undertaken in the years 1885 to 1888. In Frederick W.H. Myers opinion, their tendency was to prove that in the induction of hypnotic phenomena, there could be some agency at work which is neither ordinary nervous stimulation, nor suggestion conveyed by any common channel to the subject's mind. These results, if accepted, would corroborate the idea of telepathy.

Gurney's research into psychic matters was respected by contemporaries. However, in Trevor Hall’s study of Gurney’s death "by misadventure" entitled The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney, it has since then been argued that his research was deeply flawed. As a student of the work of the Society for Psychical Research, Hall discovered that Gurney used the assistance of George Albert Smith, a theatrical producer. Smith was the one handling the actual experiments into telepathy, hypnotism, and the rest - Gurney trusted him and fully accepted his results. According to Hall, in the spring of 1888 Gurney discovered that Smith had used his knowledge of theatrical trickery and stage illusion to fake tests and results making the value of the tests (with which Gurney was building up his reputation) worthless.

Gurney died at Brighton on 23 June 1888, from the effects of an overdose of a narcotic medicine and it has been rumored that his death was from suicide.

Hans Holzer (1920 - 2009)

Born in 1920 in Vienna, Austria, Holzer became fascinated with the supernatural from a young age. His Uncle Henry had many interests in the field of the paranormal, and he certainly left an impression on young Hans, and almost got him thrown out of kindergarten. One day he began telling ‘ghost stories’ to his fellow classmates. The only trouble was that they told their parents at home. When asked whether he had gotten into trouble Holzer said:

“The next thing that happened was the mothers came in and said, ‘What kind of a kindergarten are we running here?’ And so, my mother was brought in, and the teacher said, ‘Look, either he goes or I go.’ At that point, I stopped telling ghost stories.”

After completing his early education, Holzer went on to study Archaeology, Ancient History and Numismatics at the University of Vienna. But in 1938, 18-year-old Holzer saw a very big war coming to his region. Knowing that being that close to Nazi Germany while a World War was brewing could be dangerous, he and his brother came to New York.

In New York he entered Columbia University where for three years he studied Japanese and Journalism. However, his main interest at the time was in musical theatre and he wrote a short-lived revue called “Safari”, and the book and music for “Hotel Excelsior”, a minor musical about a group of young Americans in Paris. He also wrote theatre reviews for The London Sporting Review

To complete his education Holzer studied at the London College of Applied Science from where he received a Master’s degree in Comparative Religion and a Doctorate degree in Philosophy. A year later he was offered a professorship at the New York Institute of Technology where he specialized in Biblical Archaeology and Parapsychology.

When asked about the term “supernatural”, Dr. Holzer replied that he doesn’t like the term at all:

“I use the term because it is the one that people use. But nothing in my scientific view does not have an explanation. The question is, sooner we get it or later we get it, but there has to be an explanation. You can’t say nobody knows. I don’t accept that. And the paranormal is part of our experience – we just don’t always understand it as such.”

When it comes to people having personal paranormal experiences or claiming a place is haunted, Holzer wants witnesses – several of them preferably. He said:

“That’s why I want to know my witness. “I ask them, ‘Who are you? What do you do for a living?’ I interview the witnesses. If there is a crazy in front of me, I’ll know it”.

Holzer defined the terms we use for ghosts. What we call a residual haunting, he called a memory implant and what we call an intelligent haunting he called interactive. But he also coined a third category: The Stay Behinds. He explains is like this:

“Somebody dies, and then they’re really surprised that all of a sudden they’re not dead. They’re alive like they were. They don’t understand it because they weren’t prepared for it. So, they go back to what they knew most – their chair, their room, and they just sit there. Next, they want to let people know that they’re still ‘alive.’ So, they’ll do little things like moving things, appear to relatives, pushing objects, and so on.”

What does he think about modern-day paranormal investigators? While he agrees that the investigations need to be well-controlled, his methods of investigating differ from what other groups would do. For example:

“We are living in a technological age, and they [paranormal investigators] think, or at least some of them that I’ve met, in all sincerity, that running around with geiger counters and cameras and instruments that can measure cold spots will be the way to investigate a haunting or a ghost. That’s &%#@*. Because if you really are an investigator of the paranormal, and you’re dealing with ghosts or hauntings, you’re dealing with a human being – nothing more, nothing less. Therefore, you should have with you a good trance medium who can lend her body or his body temporarily for that entity to speak through so you can find out what the trouble is. That’s the way it works – not a geiger counter.”

The one piece of equipment Holzer doesn’t completely dismiss is the camera.

Does he believe in ghosts? In answer to that question Dr. Holzer says:

“I don’t believe in anything. Belief is the uncritical acceptance of something you can’t prove. I work on evidence; I either know or I don’t know. There are three dirty words in my vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. They don’t exist. There’s no ‘supernatural world.’ Everything that exists is natural.”

Over the course of his career, he transformed parapsychology from something people thought of as ‘strange’ to almost a household word. He’s an amazing man and truly one of the paranormal investigation pioneers.

Dr. Holzer ‘crossed over’ on April 26, 2009 at the ripe old age of 89. He’s on his greatest adventure!

I knew Hans very well. He was an amazing man and I miss him.

Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886)

Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced 'Hume') was a Scottish Spiritualist, famous as a physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will.

The one-year-old Home was supposed to be a delicate child, having a "nervous temperament", and was passed to his mother’s childless sister, Mary Cook. She lived with her husband in the coastal town of Portobello, 3 miles east of Edinburgh. It is claimed that at the Cook's house Home's cradle rocked by itself, and the infant had a vision of the death of a cousin who lived in Linlithgow, to the west of Edinburgh.

When Home was young, he moved with his aunt and uncle from Scotland to America, where they lived in Connecticut. Home attended school in Greeneville, where he was known as "Scotchy" by the other students. The 13-years-old Home did not join in sports and games with other boys, preferring to take walks in the local woods with a friend called Edwin. The two boys read books together, told stories, and made a pact stating that if one or the other were to die, they would try and make contact after death. Home and his aunt soon moved to Troy, NY. Home lost contact with Edwin until one night when Home claims he saw a brightly lit vision of him (Edwin) standing at the foot of the bed, which gave Home the feeling that his friend was dead. Edwin made three circles in the air before disappearing, and three days later a letter arrived stating that Edwin had died of malignant dysentery.

A few years later Home and his aunt returned to Greeneville, and Elizabeth Home (Daniel’s mother) emigrated from Scotland to America with the surviving members of the family. Home and his mother's reunion was short-lived, as Elizabeth foretold her own death in 1850. This was also confirmed by Home, as he saw his mother in a vision saying, "Dan, twelve o'clock", which was the time of her death.

After his mother’s death Home turned to religion. His aunt was a Presbyterian, and held the Calvinist view that one's fate has been decided, so Home embraced the Wesleyan faith, which believed that every soul can be saved.

Their house was then disturbed by rapping and knocking similar to those that occurred two years earlier at the home of the Fox sisters. Ministers were called to the Cook's house: a Baptist, a Congregationalist, and even a Wesleyan minister, who all believed that Home was possessed by the Devil, although Home believed it was a gift from God. The knocking did not stop however, and a table started to move by itself, even though Home's aunt put a bible on it and then placed her full body weight on it. As the noises did not stop, and were attracting the unwanted attention of Cook's neighbors, Home was told to leave the house.

Home, who was only eighteen years old, held his first séance in March 1851, which was reported in a Hartford newspaper managed by W. R. Hayden, who wrote that the table moved without anyone touching it, and kept moving when Hayden physically tried to stop it.

After becoming well-known he traveled to England in 1855, and conducted hundreds of séances, which were attended by many of the best-known names of the Victorian period. Home also had close ties to Russia since he helped to introduce spiritualism into Russia. He was one of many mediums invited to hold séances at the court of Alexander II. Home further strengthened his ties to Russia by marrying Count Kushelev-Bezborodko’s sister-in-law, Alexandrina de Kroll, and spent a good part of each year there.

Home's fame grew, fueled by his feats of levitation. It is claimed that on more than 50 occasions Home levitated at least five to seven feet above the floor. Homes' feats were recorded by Frank Podmore, an author and writer on psychic matters:

"We all saw him rise from the ground slowly to a height of about six inches, remain there for about ten seconds, and then slowly descend.“

In 1868, in front of three witnesses, Home was said to have levitated out of the third story window of one room, and back in through the window of the adjoining room. However, not everyone was convinced of Home’s abilities.

After attending a séance in which Home was the medium, Robert Browning, the poet, gave his opinion by writing the poem “Mr. Sludge”, in which he indirectly accuses Home of being a fraud.

“Now, don’t, sir! Don’t expose me! Just this once! This was the first and only time, I’ll swear,—”

At the age of 38, Home retired, as his health was bad – the tuberculosis, from which he had suffered for most of his life, was advancing –and his powers, he claimed, were failing.

Home died on 21 June 1886 and was buried in a cemetery in Paris.

Harry Houdini (1874-1926)

No introduction to Harry Houdini is necessary; everyone knows of his illustrious career in magic.

Houdini’s interest in spiritualism began after the death of his mother in the early 1920s and it was precisely his training in magic that gave him an advantage when trying to expose frauds that had successfully fooled many scientists and academics.

He was a member of the Scientific American committee that offered a cash prize to any medium who could successfully demonstrate paranormal abilities. However, because of the contributions and skepticism of Houdini and the other committee members, the prize was never collected. As his fame as a debunker grew, Houdini began to attend séances in disguise, usually accompanied by a reporter and police officer. Possibly the most famous medium that he proved a fraud was the Boston medium Mina Crandon, also known as "Margery". Houdini chronicled his activities in his book, A Magician Among the Spirits. (Available through Amazon.com)

On Halloween night in 1926, Harry Houdini died of peritonitis secondary to a ruptured appendix.

Fearing that spiritualists would exploit his legacy by pretending to contact him after his death, Houdini left his wife a secret code - ten words chosen at random - that he would use to contact her from the afterlife.

For ten years after Houdini’s death, Bess Houdini held séances every year on Halloween, but Houdini never appeared. In 1936, after a last unsuccessful séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel, she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a photograph of Houdini since his death, saying, "ten years is long enough to wait for any man."

The Holy Fire

The Holy Fire is described by Christians as a miracle that occurs every year at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday, the day before Orthodox Easter (Easter on the Orthodox and the Western Church’s calendar occur at different times). It is considered by many to be the longest-attested annual miracle in the Christian world and has been consecutively documented since 1106 A.D, previous references being sporadic.

On the appointed day at noon, the Greek Orthodox patriarch, followed by the Armenian archbishop with their respective clergy, process three times around the church. Once the procession has ended, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem or another Orthodox Archbishop says a specific prayer, removes his robes and enters alone into the sepulcher. It is important to note that before entering the Tomb of Christ, the patriarch is examined by Jewish Israeli authorities to prove that he does not carry technical means to light the fire. This investigation used to be carried out by Muslim Turkish Ottoman soldiers. The Armenian archbishops remain in the antechamber to the tomb. The congregants continuously chant Lord have mercy in their own languages until the Holy Fire spontaneously descends on the white candles held by the Patriarch. The Patriarch then comes out of the tomb chamber and says some prayers and then lights other candles and distributes them to the congregants. The fire is considered by believers to be the flame of the Resurrection power, as well as the fire of the Burning Bush of Mount Sinai.

Pilgrims claim the Holy Fire does not burn their hair, faces, clothes or anything else during the first 33 minutes of its appearance. One web site offers videos claiming to show worshipers having prolonged contact with the flames without discomfort or damage to skin or hair.

The Holy Fire is first mentioned in the documents dating from the 4th century. A detailed description of this event is contained in the travelogue of a Russian monk named Daniel who was present at the miracle in 1106 A.D. Daniel mentions a blue incandescence coming down from the dome of the Cathedral. Some claim to have witnessed this incandescence in modern times.

During the many centuries of this phenomenon's history, the holy fire is said not to have descended only on certain occasions. According to the tradition, in 1099, for example, the failure of Crusaders to acquire the fire led to riots in Jerusalem. It is also claimed that in 1579, the Armenian patriarch Hovhannes I of Constantinople, prayed day and night in order to obtain the holy fire, but when the fire came, it did not come to the Armenian Patriarch, but instead struck a column near the entrance and lit a candle held by the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius IV standing nearby. This column can still be seen and upon entering the Cathedral, Orthodox Christians embrace this column, which bears marks and a large crack that they attribute to the lightning bolt.

As with any other miracle there are skeptics who assume it is a fraud and nothing but a bunch of propaganda. They believe the Patriarch has a lighter concealed inside of the tomb or on his person. These critics, however, are confronted with a number of problems. First, matches and other means of ignition are recent inventions. Only a few hundred years ago lighting a fire was an activity that took much longer than just the few minutes during which the Patriarch is inside the tomb. One then could perhaps say, he had an oil lamp burning inside, from which he kindled the candles, but the local authorities confirmed that they had checked the tomb and found no light inside it. Secondly, the Patriarch could not be concealing anything on his person because he is searched before he enters the tomb, and not by those sympathetic to the miracle, but by those who might think they would gain something if it could prove that the miracle was a hoax and such people are usually extremely diligent in their job.

However, the best arguments against a fraud are not the testimonies of the Patriarchs. The biggest challenge confronting the critics are the thousands of independent testimonies by pilgrims whose candles were lit spontaneously in front of their eyes without any possible explanation.

The Testimony of the Patriarch Diodoros of Jerusalem describing the process of the coming down of the fire:

"I find my way through the darkness towards the inner chamber in which I fall on my knees. Here I say certain prayers that have been handed down to us through the centuries and, having said them, I wait. Sometimes I may wait a few minutes, but normally the miracle happens immediately after I have said the prayers. From the core of the very stone on which Jesus lay an indefinable light pours forth. It usually has a blue tint, but the color may change and take many different hues. It cannot be described in human terms. The light rises out of the stone as mist may rise out of a lake it almost looks as if the stone is covered by a moist cloud, but it is light. This light each year behaves differently. Sometimes it covers just the stone, while other times it gives light to the whole sepulcher, so that people who stand outside the tomb and look into it will see it filled with light. The light does not burn I have never had my beard burnt in all the sixteen years I have been Patriarch in Jerusalem and have received the Holy Fire. The light is of a different consistency than normal fire that burns in an oil lamp.

"At a certain point the light rises and forms a column in which the fire is of a different nature, so that I am able to light my candles from it. When I thus have received the flame on my candles, I go out and give the fire first to the Armenian Patriarch and then to the Coptic. Hereafter I give the flame to all people present in the Church."

William James (1842-1910)

William James was born in New York City in 1842 and was the first-born child of Mary and Henry James Sr. A favorite of his father from his youth, William grew up in a household sustained by inherited wealth and unorthodox spiritual ideas.

After completing his primary and high school studies, William began at Harvard as a student of chemistry, but after a year switched his studies to anatomy. In 1865 he signed up to study tropical life forms in the Brazilian Amazon and in 1867, he traveled to Germany to study the language and to seek treatment for his chronic and worsening backaches. It was in Germany, where mental processes were beginning to be studied from a physiological perspective, that he began to think seriously about psychology as an experimental science, and where he had his great revelation that it was in this field that he could make a significant contribution. He returned to Harvard and was appointed instructor in physiology for the spring 1873 term, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, endowed chair in psychology in 1889, return to philosophy in 1897, and emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907.

Commissioned in 1880 to write a textbook on the science of psychology, he labored at the task for 10 years while he continued his research. The two-volume Principles of Psychology he finally published in 1890 effectively redefined the field and established his international reputation as a contributor at the highest level. But by then, in his own mind, he had already begun to move on. There were other, personal motivations for his shift in focus as well. The death of their six-month-old son in 1885 had led both William and Alice to investigate spiritualism and the supernatural, an exploration which William had already embarked on to some degree when he founded the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research earlier that year.

William James taught his last class at Harvard on Tuesday, January 22, 1907. Following his January 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture, but was increasingly afflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on a philosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy) which relates the many experiments that he had with the medium Leonora Piper. His first commentary about Piper, however, was published in Science:

“In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.”

Though he was interested in the research, James found the séance worrying, later remarking that it was "a strange and in many ways disgusting experience, which I have conscientiously undertaken to sit out" His wife, Alice confirmed in a letter to Henry James that "William remained unmoved and unconvinced"

In 1909, James published A Pluralistic Universe and in the following September he published a sequel to his slandered Pragmatism. He hoped The Meaning of Truth would "keep the pot of public interest in the subject boiling." However, that did not happen. Instead, James was criticized by some, most notably the young American philosopher Boyd Henry Bode, who aired his objections to James in the Journal of Philosophy.

On July 8, James startled the scientific community by announcing that he had communicated with the spirit of his friend and Richard Hodgson. James wrote a 100-page account of this communication in the Proceedings of the American for Psychical Research, including verbatim records of the conversation. However, for James, survival after death remained unproven and now James was not well, and his health was deteriorating.

Early in the afternoon of August 26, his wife came into his bedroom with some milk, the only sustenance he had been able to take since he came home. At first, she thought he was asleep, but suddenly she realized that something had changed: he was unconscious. She cradled his head in her arms and just before 2:30, still lying in Alice's arms, he died. William James died of heart disease at his family's summer home in New Hampshire in 1910.

An excellent study of William James’ quest for knowledge in the area of psychical research and the opposition he encountered from all circles can be found in the book Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum. It’s well worth the read.