Category: General

I wanted to quickly post about a new book by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne called Consciousness and the Source of Reality. From Dean Radin, author of The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds:

“Princeton University’s PEAR Lab, definitively documented in Jahn and Dunne’s masterful book, has consistently challenged one of science’s most stubbornly held assumptions—that objective reality is completely independent of consciousness. Their experimental evidence is persuasive, tantalizing, and ultimately staggering in its implications. Orthodox thinkers will protest, but the scientific revolution is charging ahead and this book blazes the trail.”

Also, if you’re going to be in Virginia on June 10, Carlos Alvarado is giving a lecture that night from 7-9pm at Atlantic University titled: The Spirit in Out-of-Body Experiences. The address for Atlantic University is 215 67th Street, Virginia Beach. It’s $25 in advance or $35 at the door. To register call (757) 428-3588, or email info@atlanticuniv.edu.

These pictures are from a March 28, 1956 New York Journal-American article titled Mysteries of the Mind. The caption for this picture to the left reads:

VICTIM … Here is a portrait of Irene Lee, 6, who dreamed that she was being run down by a truck. Several days later the child was struck and killed.

Next to that picture was this one of her parents.

This caption reads:

PARENTS BLAMED FATE … Mr. and Mrs. Earl Lee of Miami, kneel beside the grave of their daughter, Irene, 6, who was the victim of an auto accident in November, 1938.

And that’s it. There’s isn’t another word about Irene or her family. It isn’t clear if the picture of her parents is from 1938 or 1956. They’re probably long gone. I wonder if they had any other children.

Another child is mentioned in the article, Ilga Kirps, “a 12-year-old shepherdess, who lived with her mother and young brother and sister in Ilzene, Latvia, in the 1930’s … A feeble-minded child, she was unable to read a book, but was supposed to be able to read other people’s minds. So fantastic were her telepathic powers, that Prof. Ferdinand von Neureiter, noted European psychologist, put her through stiff tests, which, he decided, eliminated all possibilities of fraud.”

I don’t know why I even mention any of this. A child has a bad dream, is tragically killed, and for the rest of their lives her parents somehow think destiny was against them. Or the Journal-American exaggerated.

I was just talking about this today, though. Losing a child is something many people never recover from. Some people are destroyed a little, some a lot, no one is ever the same. I think that’s why when I was going through some of the papers I copied while at Duke University, deciding which to post about, this one stood out. I hope they had other children. I hope they were able to recover some happiness out of life.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.”