Category: People in Parapsychology

I originally had a lot more in the book about one of the lab’s contributors, a retired history teacher from Cleveland, Ohio, named Charles Ozanne.

For a long time Ozanne was glad to give money to the lab. He was looking for a purpose in life and he was drawn to parapsychology and the survival question. Like Rhine and John Thomas before him, Ozanne had sittings with the medium Mrs. Soule. Ozanne had been close with his mother and the sittings with Mrs. Soule were in order to communicate with her. But he often wrote Rhine about how the medium only got in the way of his connection to her. “Those who communicate, communicate enveloped, as it were, in the atmosphere of the medium’s personality.” How frustrated the dead must feel, Ozanne believed, at not being able to communicate more directly. One day, however, when Mrs. Soule was coming out of her trance, “there burst through with almost explosive emotion, the words, ‘My boy!’” Ozanne wrote Rhine. It was because his mother’s need to speak to him directly was so strong, he believed, that for a second she came through. “… just as when electric voltage gets high enough the electric spark leaps over the intervening distance, so the direct emotion broke through the usual mechanisms and expressed itself in that outburst.”

Ozanne was excited by the papers they’d started publishing in the forties about psychokinesis (aka PK). His mother had once communicated to him through a medium that it was “easy to influence the mind, but hard to move the hand.” In other words, PK was hard. Ozanne thought Thomas Edison’s attempt at building a machine to communicate with the dead indicated that Edison agreed with his dead mother. According to Ozanne, Edison thought that if spirits existed, they “could exercise some slight power over matter, but very slight indeed; so he devoted himself to construction of a machine that could be moved with an almost incredibly small expenditure of energy. That is exactly in line with your PK effect.”

Then, in 1952 Charles Ozanne moved to Durham to be closer to their work. The last remaining relative that he was close to had died, and he was now 85 years old. At loose ends at the twilight of his life, Ozanne came to live out his last years where he felt his contributions were making a difference. “The giving that you make possible for me I consider and opportunity and a privilege,” he wrote. The problem was he wanted that contribution applied much more directly to finding proof of life after death. Moving to Durham only brought nearer the conflict that had always dogged his relationship with Rhine.  (More below …)

Two years after moving to Durham Ozanne made a list of every contribution he had ever made to the Lab since 1936 and confronted J. B. Rhine. He’d given them just under $47,000.00, which would be worth $324,000.00 in 2005. And for what, he asked. Survival “is the very core of my life and the one supreme thing that I am working on with every power of my being,” he wrote. “Yet so far as I can see, at no time did you make any serious effort to understand it.”

All Ozanne wanted was some shred of proof that the messages he believed were from his dead mother were, in fact, real. “You want science to come to the aid of this belief,” Rhine responded, arguing that Ozanne’s difference was not “with me, but with the scientific standards to which I, along with thousands of others, are devoted.” But Ozanne became convinced that only Rhine’s stubbornness stood between him and his ability to fully embrace immortality. He wrote back in anguish, “You stand with your armed guard beside the Pearly Gates to see that nobody gets in without the proper scientific uniform on!”

Rhine invited him and anyone else to “go over the record of the past twenty-five years and see what great thing there was which we ought to have seen how to do and ought to have done which we did not do.” And “to come forth with a just appraisal of our efforts to find evidence of the spirit world you firmly believe exists and show wherein we have been neglecting our opportunities to discover and record important evidence.” On another occasion he said, “We are not addicted or limited to experiment, or statistics, we are searching for new ways, or old ones we had forgotten,” but they weren’t having much luck. Rhine repeatedly suggested that Ozanne might be happier if he contributed his money elsewhere, but as frustrated as Ozanne was with Rhine he had the most faith and trust in him and the Parapsychology Lab.

But the complaints continued and eventually Rhine just couldn’t continue to take Ozanne’s money when he wanted it spent so differently. He wrote Ozanne and listed a half a dozen capable people Ozanne could give his money to instead. He also suggested setting up an endowed survival research project within the university, and recognizing Ozanne’s disappointment with him over the survival issue, Rhine said it was best to leave him out of it.

On New Year’s Eve, 1959, Ozanne arranged to have the funds he had given to Duke moved into the newly established Psychical Research Foundation, Inc. in order to support the Survival Research Project (the Foundation would be formally established the following summer). Duke University was now disinclined to be involved with a project that was so unambiguously about life after death, and so the Foundation and the project were run independently of the university. (Although later they became “a sponsored program” within the Duke Department of Electrical Engineering, because of their work with Electrical Engineering professors John Artley and William Joines, and the interest in psi by the Electrical Engineering Dean at the time, Dr. Alexander Vesic.) Bill Roll was made the project director, and Gaither Pratt was appointed as the head the board of directors.

Ozanne, who would be turning 95 in 1960, finally had what he always wanted. Every last cent of his money would be devoted to research on post-mortem survival and nothing else. They’d investigate mediums, families of mediums, hypnotism, reincarnation, and poltergeists. The pearly gates between life and death were open to everything he always thought was possible. Ozanne was exhilarated and Rhine was relieved. “If any more potential donors appear over the horizon, I’m about ready to pop them off with a shotgun before they get near the Lab,” Louie wrote that year.

Charles Ozanne died on April, 5, at 95 years old, just a few months after establishing the Psychical Research Foundation. He must have felt that his dreams of answering the survival question were finally within reach, and then he was gone.

(The first picture is of Charles Ozanne, the second is Rhine conducting a PK test with dice.)

 
I only just heard that Gertrude Schmeidler, a well known psychologist and parapsychologist, died on March 9, 2009.  She was 96 years old!  We talked a number of times while I was researching my book, although she preferred email.   It frustrated her if she couldn’t couldn’t think and respond quickly, although I never noticed a delay.

So sad.  Towards the end of my research I looked into an interesting experiment that Gertrude had tried in the seventies.  She started bringing a control group to hauntings along with mediums.  She was doing this in order to use statistics to analyze the medium’s findings.  She’d put together a list of things that were reported in the initial hauntings.  She’d then compare what the control group sensed and felt to what the mediums sensed and felt.  Did the medium’s impressions fit more than the control group’s?

But she’s probably most famous for what are referred to as her sheep/goat experiments.  From the Parapsychological Association website.  “Repeatedly, average ESP scores of subjects who rejected any possibility of ESP success (whom I called goats) were lower than average ESP scores of all other subjects (whom I called sheep). This was inexplicable by the physical laws we knew; it implied unexplored processes in the universe, an exciting new field for research. From then on, naturally, my primary research interest was parapsychology.”

Most of my questions were about Parapsychology Lab and the people who worked there.  These were the people I was writing about and most have them had passed on.  She knew them, and her descriptions were so personal and colorful. 

I asked her about her first contact with J. B. Rhine, who headed up the Lab.  

“That first contact I had with the Parapsy Lab was a pleasant surprise to me: a letter from Dr. Rhine, whom I’d never seen, saying nice things about my work.  I don’t remember what year, but it came soon after I began publishing in parapsychology.  Early-ish in World War II.”

Did she ever work at the Lab?

“No, I never had any formal connection to Dr. Rhine’s lab.  It took my husband and me about five minutes of serious consideration to decide it wasn’t what we wanted—about the same length of time as to decline a similar invitation to him from the military.  But I gladly accepted – and very much enjoyed – Dr. Rhine’s invitations to visit for a weekend.”

I found a letter where Rhine described her visit.  Everyone loved her of course, and Rhine noted that she seemed to get along with Charlie Stuart and Betty Humphrey best.  I had asked Gertrude to describe Betty, and her description, like all her descriptions, gave such an evocative glimpse!

“When I first met her she was a tall, rather gawky young woman, strong and well built, with a face that the French might call belle laide—not conventionally pretty but attractive because she was such a thoroughly nice person that it came through in the way she looked. She had a friendly, hearty manner; outgoing.  And not only was she bright, and a good experimentalist who was sensitive to people’s needs, but she also was interested in the deeper theoretical questions that her research couldn’t directly address.”

I asked her why she didn’t accept Rhine’s overtures about working at the Lab.  Most of the reasons had to do with her husband’s professional needs and interests, and Gertrude’s interest in teaching psychology, and family concerns, but she also said this.  

“ …. here’s an anecdote to show the second major reason: my preferring not to be in an authoritarian society.  On one of my delightful, friendly visits to the parapsy lab, always full of good will, I attended a seminar. The staff and visitors sat around a table, with Dr. Rhine at the head.  He’d bring up a problem – for instance a request that had to be granted or denied.  Anyone who had an idea spoke up, one way or the other.  When all had had their say, heads turned to Rhine and there was silence.  Then he spoke, telling us the decision … There was no pretense of being first among equals; Dr. Rhine was First.”

Two days later she wrote me, concerned that she had been unfair to J. B., which shows what a decent person she was.

“I told you only a badly incomplete, one-sided impression of J.B.  The very same characteristic that made it impossible for me to work contentedly with or under him was a characteristic that made him an important, useful figure in the world.  There’s a place for alpha males!  In fact, it’s impressed me that most of the (admittedly few) Nobel laureates I’ve known were tall, muscular, powerful men, insistent on achieving their immediate goals and careless about brushing other people out of their way.”

I found a 1952 letter Gertrude had written to Gaither Pratt, another scientist at the Lab, after Rhine had fired Betty Humphrey and Frasier Nicol (that’s a whole other story).

“Betty has written me something – only a little- of what’s been happening at the Laboratory, and told me that she and Frasier left. I’m sorry – even though I don’t know enough about it, to know what to be sorry about. But your Laboratory was such a wonderful place when everyone was friendly and bubbling with ideas and full of new projects that I can’t help wishing those times never had to change.”

Gertrude did get to teach psychology, as she had wanted, at City College.  But her archives are not there!  They’re at Duke I see, you can read an overview of the collection here.

Wow.  It’s so extensive and varied.  Sy Mauskopf interviewed her in 1976 for his book The Elusive Science, and there’s a tape of that interview at Special Collections Library at Duke, in the Seymour H. Mauskopf Papers, 1972 – 1985.