Category: People in Parapsychology

It was scary sending my book out to the scientists who actually lived the story I did my best to tell. But I got a letter from Dr. Elizabeth McMahan:

“… I find that your factual history of Parapsychology is just what I’d hoped it would be. Unbelievable gives a comprehensive and very interesting account of the scientific studies in Parapsychology. In your research, you have dug out details of the Duke Lab’s history (many of them almost forgotten by me) that I find fascinating.”

“I am convinced that no one could have done a better job of keeping the facts straight while making the story such an interesting one.”

 
Thank you, BettyMac. (The nickname she was known by at the lab.)

This is a picture of the medium Eileen Garrett. She helped secure the initial funding that established the Parapsychology Laboratory (from Francis Bolton, who I will post about later). Garrett also put herself at the lab’s disposal for any tests they wished.  

I liked collecting her descriptions of her trance state.  She was smart and articulate, and they give an interesting peek into the process.

“I conceive of yesterday, today, and tomorrow as a single curve … time loses reality and the past and present and future are present in one instant.”  Then she writes how either thoughts, images or sounds come to her, and while she calls the process indefinite, it’s “almost electric in its reception.  One knows.”

In an article in Tomorrow magazine, where she’s talking about ghosts, she says they don’t always appear as spectres, “but often as warm, living breathing people.  Where are they?”  And that’s where it got really interesting to me, because she didn’t just see ghostly people, but also buildings and places and woods that were no longer there.  “… into the purple, more intense than all, I see rare plants and all kinds of growth, and then I am unable to find any words that could translate this experience …” 

It’s always frustrating how ghosts never really have anything substantive to say.  But Garrett said that “much of importance is transmitted,” but we neither understand what is seen or have the ability to translate it.  I had trouble penetrating some of the messages she communicated, but I would love to get someone like the Dalai Lama, or, more realistically, a similarly educated Tibetan monk, to take a look at them.  

Garrett was open to all possible explanations for her visions.  Were they discarnate beings?  Or was she crazy?  At least she had a sense of humor about it.  She once quipped, “on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I think that they are actually what they claim to be … on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I think they are multiple personality split-offs I have invented to make my work easier … on Sunday I try not to think about the problem.”

“Rats can become fascinating—a handful of cottony, fluffy, clean-as-silk little baby ratlets, pink and white symphonies in innocence, with clean little soft paws that cling to your fingers so timidly, and tiny soft ever-inquiring little pink noses touching your skin so lightly that you know, only thus, how faeries feel.”  

That was from a letter from J.B. Rhine (the man who ran the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory) to his sister-in-law.  It really warmed me towards him.  Who can resist someone with such tender feelings towards those small, helpless creatures?  Rhine had conducted years of experiments based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theories of evolution. This is not an area I know a lot about, but I do know that Darwin’s theories have ruled the day and Lamarck’s ideas have been generally rejected.  But according to this Scientific American article, some neuroscientists at Tufts University (my alma mater) are taking another look at Lamarck’s ideas.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Rhine.

“I quite agree with you that once we are in possession of all facts science will look very peculiar indeed.” — Carl Jung to J. B. Rhine, November 5, 1942.  Oh yeah.  I didn’t write a lot about Rhine and Jung, there’s already a lot out there about their relationship, but I enjoyed reading their letters.

They first met over lunch in New York in October, 1937.  They had the same publisher, who arranged the meeting, and it was described by their mutual editor, William Sloane.  “It was exciting to watch him [Jung] and Rhine together … Jung the cosmopolite, the man of enormous erudition,” and Rhine, “a man whom only America could have produced—quiet, low-spoken, intense, with that slow-burning fuse of humor innate in his speech, gravely deferential to Jung, putting his problems before Jung without any plea for help, any servility, any expectation of praise, with the obvious feeling that the problem of man and his nature was so sacrosanct and vital a one that Jung was obliged to help him, as he was to tell Jung what he knew.”

Before she died though, Rhea White told me that she left the lab because she was interested in Jung, and Rhine had said that when it came to parapsychology, Jung “was not helpful.”  Which seemed odd to me since Jung was very open about parapsychology, but Rhea said it was a just a difference in approach.  Rhine was more focused on lab experiments.  I found out about a video interview of Jung where he talks about Rhine, and I’m trying to get a hold of it.  In the meantime, here’s a YouTube video of Jung talking about the extra-physical aspects of the psyche.