Category: People in Parapsychology

This is a picture of medium Mina Crandon with her husband Dr. Le Roi G. Crandon on the right. I don’t know who the ghost floating above was supposed to have been. When Mina became famous, I was told, she’d stay at home while Crandon would lecture around the country, carrying a picture of her without her dressing gown on, which he’d pull it out at every opportunity.

After his death due to a fall, one of Rhine correspondents told Rhine about the rumors that were circulating about Margery. He said that Crandon no longer believed in Mina’s abilities and people were saying that his death may have been “an unconscious suicide following the terrific shock which the loss of faith in his wife must have caused him.” Word was the pair were having troubles and naturally the troubles were Mina’s fault. But Mina’s husband had fallen on a sidewalk and fractured his pelvis. While confined to his bed he developed pneumonia and died.

The photograph is courtesy of the The Libbet Crandon de Malamud Collection.

Ghost hunter Hans Holzer died last Sunday, on April 26, 2009. He didn’t like being called that so I apologize, but that’s how everyone thought of him. He’s in my book a little bit, but I ended up cutting most of him out, just because he’s so far afield from what they were doing at Duke. I kept him in mostly to contrast their experiments with the more 19th century seance thing he was into.

I interviewed Holzer when he was clearly at the end of his life. He had trouble getting around, and remembering things, and he wasn’t happy at my shock when we started watching an old tape of his and I said something stupid like, “Look at you all dapper and young.” I meant it as a compliment, but he looked stricken and asked if he looked all that different and I immediately felt like an ass. I liked the guy. His cat was with us the whole time, which I enjoyed. At one point he said, “Life is better with a cat,” and it is. Nothing wrong with a guy who knows that.

I have fond memories of reading his books when I was an adolescent, and just learning that there were people who believe in ghosts. Thank you for the memories, Hans. Here is the section I removed from the book.

Ghost investigator Hans Holzer sees the spirits who linger in places like the Morris Jumel Mansion as trapped souls, and he believes it’s both his job and moral responsibility to help these poor souls move on.  This is accomplished by using a trance medium like Ethel Johnson Meyers.  “A trance medium is somebody who can slip out of their physical body,” Holzer explains, “and let the spirit or the ghost slip in and use them to talk.”  When this happens Holzer becomes something like a therapist for the dead.  He gently tells the ghost that they have passed on and they must call on loved ones who have already died to help them move on to the other side.  It may be that for many, getting to the other side is not an unpleasant trip.  Ernest Hemingway had an out-of-body experience once when he was wounded in World War I.  He wrote that it “was as if a silk handkerchief had been gently pulled from a pocket by a corner.”  J. B. Rhine kept a file on Hans Holzer, and occasionally added articles about his exploits.  But Holzer’s work of helping people move on was pretty much as far from Rhine’s parapsychological world as one could get.   No one at the Lab considered Holzer a scientist. [I’m sorry, Hans.]  

For Hans Holzer, the survival question is not even a question.  Life goes on, and on the other side there’s a well organized society with a strictly defined caste system which has been outlined to him by those who are already there.  “The first level is a very dark place,” Holzer explains.  “This is where the bad guys go.  They need to be educated and shown the error of their ways in order to rise to go to next level.  This is what religion calls Hell, but there are no devils or fire.  

“Most people are on the second level.  This is where everybody goes.  They have a timeless existence and if they are happy there, if they don’t want to be a baby and be reborn, they can stay there.  They have a normal life.  

“The people on the third level have special skills that could be used further for the benefit of humanity.  Engineers, technicians.  They will help someone in the same category over here, if they need help.  

“The fourth level is where groups form, like groups of doctors who work together in unison, to heal.  They are spirit healers.

“The fifth level is where the leaders are.  Jesus, Buddha.  The great spiritual leaders.  

“The sixth level is where the government exists.  They are the angels.  The government runs the whole show.”  Holzer questioned the entity who was explaining the different levels via a trance medium about the final two levels. 

“How many are you?”

“There are nine of us.  There used to be ten, but one has left.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“My name is Michael.” 

“What do you call yourselves?”  

“We are called the beings of light.  We don’t like to be called angels.”  (“They don’t like the term angels because they are not messengers,” Holzer adds.)

“What’s on the seventh level?  Is that supposed to be God?”  

“All we can see is an enormous power source, an enormous light.  That’s all we know.”

Nobody knows, not even the angels (or beings of light) who or what is at the very top.  When asked if he believes in God, Holzer answers, “I don’t say I don’t accept the existence of a higher power, but the higher power is not just one person, it is an energy field.  I’m still working on that.  I want to know more about the nature of this seventh level.”

[The photograph is from the New York Times obituary.]

People often had mixed feelings about J. B. Rhine, but as far as I could tell everyone loved Louisa, or Louie, as she was called.  I think I failed Louie in my book.  She doesn’t loom large enough.  She was a key figure in the struggle for parapsychology and frequently ahead of her time.  I point out several times in the book where some ideas generally accepted today actually originated with her (and I’m not just talking about ideas in the field of parapsychology).

This one always intrigued me:  “I thought that mind should be supreme in the universe and matter somehow an attribute or expression of it.”  She wrote that in the early 1980’s about her thinking before 1920.  I don’t know when this idea was first proposed, but I hear people say this more and more now, and always with the sense that they are saying something radical.

It seemed everything about her was brave and intellectually independent.  She got her Ph.D in 1923, which was extremely unusual for a woman at the time, and I gotta believe especially unusual for someone from her relatively rural background.

I always loved what Louie wrote her mother when her parents expressed their displeasure about her investigations into parapsychology.  

“You or Dad didn’t mind if I found sufficient proof to allow me to believe the electron theory of matter … if the same cold judgment of fact leads me to believe there is a possibility of definitely proving there is life beyond, instead of piously believing it all my life, or infidel-like disbelieving it, I should think you’d grant that it is at least a worthy task …” 

Look at what she said.  She’s pointing out that both sides were operating more on faith than fact.  But Louie always remained objective.  About seances, she wrote that “in them we found no evidence on which to feed our interest and only what seemed to us to be gullibility, suggestion, wishful thinking. We soon gave up the effort as unprofitable and a waste of time.”

Louie was a product of her time in that she always stood a little behind J. B.  Perhaps her accomplishments wouldn’t be all that different, I really don’t see much evidence that she was intellectually repressed either by J.B. or her time, but still I wonder how much further she might have gone if she had lived, well, now.

In 1963, Morey Bernstein had a visit from astronaut Alan Shepard.  Shepard was interested in parapsychology, “But these boys have a very tight tongue when it comes to talking about ESP effects in space,” Morey wrote J. B. Rhine. In 1971, Alan Shepard would walk on the moon with astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, who would try to “send” messages back to earth. Two years later Mitchell founded The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which he established in order to scientifically study paranormal phenomena.  By the way, Mitchell has been in the news this week for saying we’ve already been visited by aliens.

Shepard didn’t want to talk about ESP during this visit, and he didn’t want to talk about a 1956 Naval report that Bernstein had just read called The Break-Off Phenomenon: A Feeling of Separation from the Earth Experienced by Pilots at High Altitude. The study reported that 48 out of 137 Navy and Marine pilots questioned described having had an out of body experience while flying, although the authors didn’t call it that and were somewhat vague on the details. Shepard admitted to working with Captain Graybiel, one of the authors of the report, but he wouldn’t say anymore.  So Morey went to Pensacola and spoke to Dr. Harlow Aides, who had also worked with Graybiel. “It is clear from my personal interview,” he wrote Rhine, “that some of the pilots find themselves out of their body, looking back at their own physical bodies which are still efficiently flying the jet plane.” Other reports followed Graybiel’s. In one, a pilot said “that he was at high level when he suddenly had the feeling that he was outside the cockpit, sitting on the wing, and watching himself fly the aircraft.”  In others, the break-off phenomena was experienced as a relatively mild feeling of unreality and separation.

There’s been some recent research that might explain the out-of-body experience.  In 2006, one possible physical explanation for out-of-body experiences was found by Swiss neurologist Dr. Olaf Blanke. Blanke discovered that when electric current was applied to the angular gyrus at the temporo-parietal junction in the brain, an out of body experience occurred. Whether or not this explains the break-off phenomena remains to be seen, but behavioral neuroscientist Todd Murphy points out that Dr. Blanke created this experience with one patient only, and this instance does not address the cases where subjects have out-of-body experiences and come back with information that they could not have obtained given the location of their bodies at the time.

Blanke was also not the first. “In the 1950’s, the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield also succeeded in eliciting an out of body experience using electrical stimulation,” Murphy wrote in a commentary on Blanke’s results, “but he was stimulating a very different area of the brain, the sylvian fissure. Dr. Michael Persinger has elicited out of body experiences through stimulation of the temporal lobes using magnetic signals derived from the EEG signature of one of the structures deep in the temporal lobes. Clearly, there is not a single ‘brain center’ that supports out of body experiences but rather a widely-distributed set of pathways.” That said, Murphy does credit Blanke’s research. “The experiment goes a long way toward providing a scientific explanation for what some believe is a paranormal phenomenon, even if the study is based on only one patient.”

I believe there’s been even more recent research, but I haven’t looked into it since I was working on this section.  

The picture is of Dr. Ashton Graybiel, who went on to have a distinguised career. There’s an Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University today. “Dr. Ashton Graybiel, whose studies on the effects of weightlessness and acceleration on human balance, spatial orientation, physiology and performance helped prepare America’s astronauts for manned space flight …” From his New York Times obituary.