Author: Stacy Horn

Ghost Stories / Letters to the Lab

Exorcist To-Do

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In one of the chapters in Unbelievable, I talk about the actual case that inspired the book and movie The Exorcist. I had intended to try to track down Dr. Mabel Ross, the child psychiatrist who examined the boy at the center of this case.  

Dr. Ross had two interviews with the child, and there was supposed to have been a third, but the family never brought him back. Dr. Ross, if still alive, would be in her eighties now, at least.  I see that she is depicted in a 1997 movie about this called In the Grip of Evil.

Rev. Luther Schulze, the clergyman who contacted the Parapsychology Laboratory, didn’t think this was a case of possession and neither did J. B. Rhine, the head of the lab. (This is a picture of Father Walter Halloran, by the way, who assisted at the exorcism. I don’t have a picture of Rev. Luther Schulze.)  

Rhine and Schulze were skeptical about the cause.  Schulze, for instance, wrote Rhine about the words that were purported to have appeared on the boy’s body.  “My physician and I saw no words,” Schulze wrote, “but we did see nerve reaction rashes which had the appearance of scratches.”  

Schulze did witness some very bizarre events involving the boy, which he couldn’t explain, but he didn’t think the answer was possession.  They thought perhaps it might be psychokinesis or a poltergiest, but they also thought it was also just as likely that there would be a psychological explanation.

Letters to the Lab

Sad Letters

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I’ve written before about the thousands of letters received at the lab. Many of them were so sad. People sometimes wrote for help the lab couldn’t give, like finding missing children or for assurance that the voices they heard were ghosts and not mental illness. The lab always answered as compassionately as they could and did their best to direct the writers to where real help could be found.

A sample of the letters received follows after this picture of the lab staff at their evening staff meeting, where they would go over their current projects and experiments and the daily mail.

“About five years ago I started hearing someone or something thinking to me, I say thinking because it is not like a voice or a whisper. It is more like my own thoughts, but I know it isn’t … I have adopted a very bright healthy boy and once in the beginning of this, this thought train said I had to choose between my son and my parakeet …”  1958.

“Since September 13, 1962, Diane Y., age seven, and her brother, Mark Y., age two and one-half, have been missing from their home … At first it was thought they may have been taken by a gypsy woman, now many believe they have been murdered. Please advise me …”  1963.

“My brain is two-in-one, uncomplete. New cells are even now in the process of completion, whose function it will be to benefit mankind. Already I have a flexible gristle-type growth within my inner ear and lower part of my brain. With this I receive telepathic messages of earth and spatial origin … you will probably be receiving letters from the Dept. of Defense, and various other sources about me. So be it.”  1959.

Parapsychology and Popular Culture

More Parapsychology and Popular Culture

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In 1946, Gian-Carlo Menotti’s full-length opera, The Medium, premiered in New York at Columbia University. Actually, does opera count as popular culture?  Sometimes it does, right?  Definitely in this case I think.  Anyway, The Medium told the story of a deaf mute medium who started out as a fraud, but then developed genuine abilities which destroyed her.

From the May 9, 1946 New York Times review:  “Gian-Carlo Menotti’s two-act chamber opera, “The Medium,” given its premiere last night by Columbia University in Brander Matthews Hall, begins so badly that it seems hopeless. But by the end of the second act it has gripped the audience by means of its realistic musical theatre.”

I’ve got it on my Amazon wish list.

Hoaxes

Medium Busting

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This is a picture I found at the Rhine Research Center.  There was no caption or explanation with it, but it looks like a picture debunking a medium or psychic. They’ve clearly caught someone raising a small table which the medium may have claimed was being raised by a spirit.  Tables were so crucial last century (table rising, rapping, etc.).

People in Parapsychology

Jackie Gleason

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Jackie Gleason was a serious student of the paranormal, it turns out.  J. B. Rhine and Eileen Garrett, while being charmed by him, had mixed feelings about his involvement.  Gleason was wooing Rhine about doing a show about ESP.  “It will be a show consisting of a panel of experts such as yourself with a scientific background to discuss intelligently the pros and cons of psychic phenomena and extra-sensory perception …”

Rhine was friendly, but cautious, and he didn’t jump on the opportunity Gleason offered.  Gleason reached out to Garrett. She conducted a sitting with him, but it wasn’t productive.  “He hasn’t called since,” she wrote Rhine, but “Mr Gleason did speak of you warmly and told me rather emphatically that he hoped to produce a radio show for ESP in the spring.”  (This was 1954.)  “‘In this,’ said he, ‘I will of course be guided by Dr. Rhine,’ but he made the remark with gentleness and dignity.  I think Mr. Gleason, however he loves publicity, is in his heart a child who needs the glitter and make-up for something that he doesn’t possess which may be peace of mind.”

A very curious assessment of Gleason.  Nothing ever came of it in the end. “The last I heard about Jackie Gleason,” Rhine wrote a friend, “he was on his way to Rome to visit the Pope.  I haven’t heard anything more about his ESP program for a long time.  I think he probably found out that it was pretty complicated.”

Hey, I just noticed in another letter discussing Gleason Rhine mentions that Carl Betz stopped by the lab.  Betz was an actor who played the father in The Donna Reed Show. “He is still chasing around the occult centers,” Rhine writes about Betz.  “He brought with him an Indian professor who is interested in our field.”

I grew up watching these shows.  It’s just funny.  You see another side to these people. What a fun place the lab must have been though, with drop-ins like this.

ESP and other Phenomena

Dogs and ESP

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I think this post might be partly an excuse to post a picture of these adorable puppies. I got it from the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a picture of dogs who are being trained to detect land mines. In 1951, the Army and J. B. Rhine conducted an ESP test using dogs to detect land mines.

It was following WWII and by the time land mines were made with plastic and plastic explosives and the Army’s metal detectors were useless. “The guys in the field were reduced to physically probing for the mines under the surface by using their bayonets to see if they would hit a solid object,” Dick Lowrie emailed me. He was a member of the Army’s Engineer and Research Development Center at the time and they were investigating the problem. “This was deadly to the guy that makes the slightest mistake,” he explained. They had another potentially lethal method which involved a metal detector mounted in a fiberglass box on the top of a jeep. “No one was eager to drive those jeeps.”

Nothing they tried was working and they were desperate to find something, anything, that would do the job. Lowrie’s section chief was the first one to bring up ESP. Lowrie had always shown an interest in the subject so he was made the project engineer. Lowrie wrote a small contract for $50,000, (small for the Army, not so small for the Lab) and he and Rhine went to work on a test to see if dogs could detect land mines using ESP.

They placed twenty mines at random locations along a smooth and breath-taking stretch of beach in Monterey. “The handlers took the dogs along the line of the beach where the mines had been planted and the dogs would sit when they sensed a mine and were given a reward if correct.” The dogs actually did better than chance, but it wasn’t reliable enough for the field where errors meant the difference between life and death. They needed a lot better than above chance.

(The picture was taken by Vinh Dao.)

Letters to the Lab

H. L. Mencken

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From time to time I would come across these scathing, blistering, mean (but sometimes funny) assessments of J. B. Rhine which were written by essayist, journalist, critic, etc., H. L. Mencken. Mencken apparently couldn’t stand Rhine, although he was fine with Louisa Rhine and wrote favorably of her.

So I was very surprised when I came across a 1938 letter from Mencken to Rhine which said, “As you probably know, I am still in grave doubt about your results, but they certainly interest me greatly and I have one or two suggestions that may possible be of some use.”

Even Mencken, who really loathed the guy, and his good friend Upton Sinclair, was intrigued.  For some reason I didn’t see fit to copy the whole letter while I was down at Duke.  What was wrong with me that day??  There was so much material and I kept having to draw a line, but still.  I really should grab it the next time I’m down there.