Author: Stacy Horn

Another one of J. B. Rhine’s correspondents that I came to like was writer and ESP researcher Harold Sherman. He came across as such a sweet, sweet guy in his letters. The scientists at the lab gave a lot of thought to how ESP worked, what was behind it, and Harold Sherman’s take was similar to Eileen Garrett’s, a medium who helped fund the lab and who worked with Rhine from time to time.

Harold wrote that feeling “generates the power behind thought, and whatever effects you emotionally, you broadcast, automatically, with greater feeling intensity. This explains why men and women get more impressions of tragic happenings from the minds of friends and loved ones, because they carry more ‘feeling impact’ behind them.”

Harold Sherman appears in a chapter about psychics trying to help a California family find a missing boy in 1960.  The father of the child wrote Rhine asking him to refer him to psychics. Rhine didn’t like to give out the names of psychics because “We do not know enough about the abilities we are studying to be able to apply them reliably … The worst part of it is that there is no adequate assurance that the impressions that come to the mind are due to ESP and are reliable even when they actually are.”

But the boy had been missing for months and Rhine didn’t want to take away what this father felt was his only hope.  So Rhine gave him the names of three psychics, and one of them was Harold Sherman.  I think this is my favorite chapter in the book, but it was also painful and sad to research.  Not because of Harold, though. Harold was the only psychic in this case to show enormous compassion for the family, and he was also the only one to get anything right. Unfortunately what he saw was not what the family wanted to hear and so they didn’t listen to him.  They went with the other psychic who had a prettier vision.  Which made a horrible situation worse.

Harold actually got it even righter than I thought when this book went to press. Information came out too late to include in the book, but witness descriptions of the man who was last seen with the boy fit Sherman’s description pretty much exactly.  I hope to get that into the paperback!

My book comes out next month, so I’m gearing up!  

Below is a picture of a few of the scientists from the Lab:  Bill Davidson, Betty McMahan and Betty Humphrey, aka “the Bettys.”  I love this shot.  It’s so atmospheric. I was able to interview Betty McMahan, (called BettyMac to distinguish her from Betty Humphrey).

I came to love the Bettys.  There was over 700 boxes of archives at the Special Collections Library at Duke, and the ones dealing directly with the experiments often went over my head. So I focused on the correspondence instead, where the scientists wrote about what they were doing.  The Bettys were the best letter writers.  The guys were just so formal, and the Bettys were more fun and human, and long with descriptions of how their work was going they talked about what was going on with the people in the lab.  Thank you, Bettys!