Author: Stacy Horn

General / People in Parapsychology / Scientists Comment on Paranormal

George R. Price

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Sally Rhine Feather mentioned this book to me, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Oren Harman.

George Price was a scientist who wrote an article in 1955 for Science attacking parapsychology and accusing Rhine and others of cheating (Science and the Supernatural, August 26, 1955). He then got into a nasty exchange with Rhine, and Price was so particularly, shockingly hostile that a book with “kindness” in the title along with his name was so jarring it got my attention. I read the first few pages and was immediately sucked in.

I skipped to the section about Rhine and got even more sucked in. There are just so many interesting revelations. It turns out that Price went after Rhine because he thought the purpose of Rhine’s experiments were to promote Rhine’s Christian beliefs. But Rhine was not religious, he was something between agnostic and atheist. Price apologized years later, both publicly in a letter to the editor in Science (January 28, 1972) and in a letter to Rhine. They started writing each other again, and it was friendly at first, but apparently Price lost it again. He had since converted to religion and was now attacking Rhine for his lack of belief.
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Price had actually grown up believing in ESP and even wrote Rhine when he was an instructor at Harvard in the 1940’s. But at some point he decided instead that Rhine was cheating. Also, Price’s mother regularly communicated with the dead (she believed) and it looks like Price wasn’t any kinder to her then he was with Rhine. After the Science article came out in 1955, at least one New York journalist got a letter from her saying that she was psychic and knew her son was wrong. (That wasn’t in the book, that I got from the Parapsychology Lab archives at Duke.)

Price never comes off like a very nice guy, but after his religious conversion he dedicated his life to helping the homeless and he killed himself by slashing his throat with a pair of nail scissors on January 6, 1975, because he couldn’t help the homeless enough! Christ. Nail scissors are tiny. The only people at his funeral were five homeless men who he’d been kind to.
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Due to various deadlines I haven’t been able to get to reading the entire book, but I wanted to mention it because it’s so well written and looks like such an incredible story.

Price’s article caused a flurry of responses for a while. The following is from a letter from Rhine to his daughter Sally, when she asked him about the scientific method. “I have always thought of scientific method as simply the best developed way mankind has found as yet of finding the most satisfactory answer to questions about nature …” I also have letters between Price and Upton Sinclair, discussing Mental Radio, Sinclair’s book about his wife’s telepathy experiments. Price is pompous, Sinclair is patient.

General

Kindle Edition of Adventures in the Supernormal

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Eileen Garrett’s fascinating memoir about her life and her abilities is available in a Kindle edition (I checked, it’s not yet available as a Google ebook).

I always loved reading what Garrett wrote. It was just more accessible and human than a lot of what I needed to read for my research about the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. She once wrote J. B. Rhine, (the head of the lab) that she was sure the best seances happened immediately after someone who was loved died. When someone undertakes a single minded search to reconnect they find a way. “Emotion and love are terrific forces of strength, and I do believe that dedicated people do get results that lead them to believe communication is possible.”

“Results cannot be achieved three times a day … One has to be in a state of animated anticipation, desiring without desire.” Later in life she said she only worked for those who were sick or in desperate need.

I like how someone at Amazon (or someone gave Amazon) a scan of an old cover. It looks like it’s from the 50’s.

General

Daryl Bem and Feeling the Future

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I was hoping to see more of a response from my favorite parapsychology blogs to Daryl Bem’s paper Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect (due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). In it Bem says his experiments found evidence for precognition.

There was an article about it in The New York Times, but so far the only ones to address it from the non-skeptical angle are Dean Radin on his blog Entangled Minds, and
Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D, the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, who wrote a piece about it for the Huffington Post. (She also discusses it more on her blog on the Institute’s website.)

She also addresses Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker article, The Truth Wears Out. And Jonah Lehrer wrote about Bem’s work in November for WIRED. I should say there’s probably a lot more out there, I’m just talking about the blogs I check into regularly.

Here is a picture of J. B. Rhine is his office at Duke University. I can’t quite read his expression, but he definitely looks like his mind is a million miles away.

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General

The Site of a Former Haunted House

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In all honesty, this post is more of a side trip from parapsychology. I could title it “Fun with Research.”

The other day I was browsing a collection of digitized images that the Museum of the City of New York recently made available online. Thinking of this blog, I did a search on the word “haunted.” That always has interesting results.

The first photograph to come up was this one. The caption read:

Arch under the first rear tenement at 55 Baxter Street leading to the second rear, with stairs up which Vincenzo Nino went to murder his wife in 1895. House believed to be haunted.

I searched through The New York Times archives and learned that Vincenzo Nino was an unemployed barber who killed his wife Marie with a razor blade on February 19, 1895. He made no attempt to get away afterwards and when the police arrived he was dressing his two children, a nine year old boy and a six year old girl. The caption for the next photograph read:

The rear room in the top floor of 55 Baxter Street in which Mrs. Nino was murdered—since deserted. On May 23, the splash of blood on floor and walls was there yet.

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Nino pleaded insanity and was sentenced to the electric chair, but the the Court of Appeals reversed the judgement and said he had to be re-tried. When reporters asked the warden at Sing Sing if Nino had been told yet he laughed and said, “It don’t make much difference whether I tell him or not.” He thought Nino was crazy and the prison physician thought so too.

Nino and his wife had immigrated here from Italy ten years before, and she supported the family by picking rags. The article said the Gerry Society took the children (the Gerry Society would become the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ). I wonder what happened to them.

If 55 Baxter Street was haunted it wasn’t haunted for long. All the buildings on that side of the block are gone today and in their place is a park and basketball courts (on the other side of the street is the Criminal Court building).

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General

ESPRIT: Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections

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Where was this book when I was doing my research??

The people who have essays in this book (or were interviewed) are a who’s who in parapsychology:  Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab, Bernard Grad.

“ESPRIT: Men and Women of Parapsychology, Personal Reflections, Volume 1″ is a collection of autobiographical essays by a group of esteemed 20th century psi researchers, giving us a glimpse of why these gifted, astute individuals devoted much, if not most, of their life’s work to this fascinating but monetarily unrewarding field. In the process, Jule Eisenbud, Eileen Coly, Gertrude Schmeidler, Karlis Osis, and eight others advise a younger generation on what pitfalls to expect and what they felt were the most important areas of investigation.”

General / Letters to the Lab / People in Parapsychology / Science Experiments

The Medium Who Committed Suicide

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I had intended to write about Ted Serios, the man who was said to be able to take pictures with his mind. But while reading through some 1962 letters about Serios between Dr. J. B. Rhine and Pauline Oehler, who had written an article about Serios for Fate Magazine that year, I got side-tracked by a reference to a medium who killed herself in 1911, and the man who had conducted experiments with her the year before, Dr. Tomokichi Fukurai.

Thank heaven for Google and the internet! The medium was a young woman named Chizuko Mifune and Fukurai wrote about the experiments (and others) in a 1931 book titled Clairvoyance and Thoughtography. I didn’t read the whole book, but they were basically ESP card experiments. Could Chizuko tell what characters were on the cards without seeing them? Fukurai reported that she could at first, but then her abilities declined. There was talk of cheating and scientists became skeptical about all her results. At around this time her sister developed abilities. On January 18th Chizuko killed by taking poison. She was only 24 years old.

Kyohei Iseri, her former school principle and the one who introduced Chizuko to Dr. Fukurai, wrote to Fukurai afterwards. He mentioned that Chizuko’s sister had become clairvoyant, hinting that this was an issue, and that Chizuko’s reaction was, ‘I have now become of no use of the world.’

“She looked very pitiful and I solaced her with all my heart. She confessed: ‘I feel it already hard to read a card in a single envelope …’”

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Fukurai talks about her death in the book, and says it could be due in part to “family affairs,” without explaining what those were, and the fact that she was losing her abilities. He also writes a little about her psychological history, saying she was sensitive and temperamental, had trouble sleeping, and perhaps she had an eating disorder, but he downplays one symptom that I found very interesting.

“She began to hear singing in the ears since about twelve years of age, and this became continuous.  She was, however, fond of music by nature, and, especially after the clairvoyant force appeared, she began to enjoy herself by playing the koto, a Japanese instrument.  She did not find it so difficult to hear music as to hear others talking.”

I’m currently researching a book about singing and the composer Robert Schumann had a similar disorder and it worsened. It drove him crazy and he ultimately tried to kill himself as well, but he didn’t succeed and he was committed voluntarily to an asylum which he never left.

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Chizuko Mifune’s story is a sad one. But apparently she has captured the imagination of the Japanese public. According to Wikipedia, “Chizuko Mifune has recently grabbed the attention of Japanese horror filmmakers and has in some way been acknowledged in such films as Yogen and Ringu.” She has also been the inspiration for various Japanese novels and anime, I’ve read.

In 1919, as a result of his work, Fukurai was forced to resign from the Imperial University of Tokyo, but he continued to study psychic phenomena, and he died in 1953.

“Yes, it is too bad about Professor Fukurai,” Rhine wrote in one of the letters to Oehler. “The poor man was not very careful. I have had several inquiries made about him and what he left. Friends have visited his institute. Had he been more of a scientist he might have made great headway for parapsychology in the Japanese culture, which is much more favorable than ours. But then, too, he might not have found what he claims to have found had he been more careful. Who can tell?”

General

Columbia University Panel on Spirituality and Healing

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I can’t believe I have to miss this incredible panel at Columbia on Friday, November 19th from 4 – 6pm, titled: Spirituality and Healing: A Revolution of Consciousness. And it’s FREE.

From the website description: Distinguished panelists include: • Larry Dossey, M.D.: Author of Healing Words & The Power of Premonitions; Editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing • Amit Goswami, Ph.D.: Author of The Self-Aware Universe, Physics with a Soul, & Spiritual Activism • Robert G. Jahn, Ph.D.: Dean Emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Princeton University; Author with Brenda Dunne of Margins of Reality & Consciousness and the Source of Reality • Wayne B. Jonas, M.D.: Former Director of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health • Lisa Miller, Ph.D.: Editor, Oxford University Press Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, Columbia University, Teachers College.

If you’re in New York on that day you really should try to go. Location:

Teacher’s College, Columbia University
525 West 120th Street (Milbank Chapel)