A blog about the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.
A ghost story I’d head about as a kid is what ultimately led me to the former Duke Parapsychology Laboratory and writing this book. I include the story at the end of Unbelievable, mostly to contrast the kind of research that was going on at Duke with, well, everyone’s love of a good ghost story. I went up to the Morris-Jumel Mansion recently and made a short movie about the ghost of Eliza Jumel. I apologize for the noise, it was a very windy day.
I always felt bad for John Thomas, the Detroit public school administrator who brought the Rhines to Duke University and got the whole parapsychology-at-Duke ball rolling.
His goal was to use science to find evidence of life after death, but that was all in order to communicate with his beloved dead wife Ethel. When the Rhines decided to focus on ESP instead of mediums it seemed to push that hope and Ethel further and further away. Thomas died without any real answer, but just before he died a medium said she got this message from Ethel about him: “My position to him is altered. I am nearer to him. I am nearer to him than I have ever been before.”
I’ve been on the lookout for a picture of John Thomas, and Sally Rhine Feather spotted this one when I was scanning pictures at the Rhine Research Center last month. That’s John Thomas on the left, Professor William McDougall in the center and an unidentified woman on the right (I love her outfit and hat).
A few years before she died Mary Craig Sinclair, wife of Upton Sinclair, wrote J. B. Rhine about growing old and losing so many friends who had died. “I look out across the world and it is peopled with strangers!” Mary Craig had conducted experiments in telepathy which further galvanized Dr. William McDougall’s support of J. B. Rhine. She made an important contribution to parapsychology. But she had such a horrible end.
I pieced together the last year of her life based on letters, articles, Upton Sinclair’s autobiography, and a most excellent Upton Sinclair biography called Radical Innocent by Anthony Arthur.
The Sinclairs were living in near-seclusion towards the end. Western Union telegrams had to be thrown over a high fence that Sinclair had constructed in order to provide a “serene, undisturbed atmosphere” for Mary Craig, who had a heart condition. A rare visitor said “deeply shrouded electric lamps, with bowls of pink camellias, stood in every corner of the room, while his wife, who was scarcely able to move, so frail her heart was, sat in the semi-darkness like a heroine of Poe.” At one point Upton described cooking over 3,000 pots of rice for Craig as part of a special diet. He was looking after her and reading to her “almost constantly,” he so desperately didn’t want her to leave him and did everything he could to keep her alive.
It was just downright painful reading about her final days. “I do not have any relief from constant and most uncomfortable fibrillation,” she wrote Rhine. Upton described it as a distressing and “endless quivering of the heart” that made it impossible for her to sleep. Craig asked Rhine to suggest hypnotists who could give her “curative suggestions,” but Rhine knew few hypnotists, and none in her area. Mary Craig died a little over a month after writing Rhine, and she was terrified right up until the end. “Her fears dominate her whole being,” Upton wrote his son. In a particularly harrowing chapter in his autobiography, Sinclair described her in her last days as a “hideously tormented human being.” He begged the doctors to end her suffering, but they refused. “It was life. It is our human fate. It happened to me and it could happen to you. The universe is a mystery to me. How beauty, kindness, goodness should have such an end visited upon it will keep me in agony of spirit for the rest of my days on this planet … why she should have died in such untellable horror is a question I ask God in vain.”
She died on April 26, 1961.
A 1926 visit to the famous medium Margery introduced the world to J. B. and Louisa Rhine. I tried to imagine what it was like for the very serious and relatively conservative J. B. Rhine to walk into a scene like the one depicted below, although Mina didn’t get naked this time (Mina Crandon was her real name). The Rhines thought they were there to conduct a scientific investigation and were instead offered glasses of champagne. This picture shows Mina with the ectoplasmic hand of her dead brother Walter laying on her stomach.
The Rhines wrote a scathing report of their visit which was first published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and then picked up by newspapers everywhere. Margery been denounced before, but not like this. The outcry from people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a champion of Margery’s, brought the Rhines overnight fame and eventually led them to Duke University.
Even more difficult to imagine is what is must have been like for Dr. William McDougall, the man who approved the Rhines coming to Duke and later the creation of the Parapsychology Laboratory. McDougall had investigated Margery before the Rhines, while he was still at Harvard, and he was an older British gentleman who was even more conservative and serious than J. B. Rhine. I read this great description of McDougall, about how unnerved he was at first teaching classes at Duke because there were almost as many female faces staring up at him as male (go Duke!!). About Mina and the ectoplasmic hand, McDougall said, “The more interesting question is—How did it come to be within the anatomy?” Mina never permitted the kind of inspection required to try to answer that question.
I actually felt a lot of sympathy for Mina, and I go into that in the book.
[The picture came from the catalogue for the 2005 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled, “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.”]
In one of the chapters in Unbelievable, I talk about the actual case that inspired the book and movie The Exorcist. I had intended to try to track down Dr. Mabel Ross, the child psychiatrist who examined the boy at the center of this case.
Dr. Ross had two interviews with the child, and there was supposed to have been a third, but the family never brought him back. Dr. Ross, if still alive, would be in her eighties now, at least. I see that she is depicted in a 1997 movie about this called In the Grip of Evil.
Rev. Luther Schulze, the clergyman who contacted the Parapsychology Laboratory, didn’t think this was a case of possession and neither did J. B. Rhine, the head of the lab. (This is a picture of Father Walter Halloran, by the way, who assisted at the exorcism. I don’t have a picture of Rev. Luther Schulze.)
Rhine and Schulze were skeptical about the cause. Schulze, for instance, wrote Rhine about the words that were purported to have appeared on the boy’s body. “My physician and I saw no words,” Schulze wrote, “but we did see nerve reaction rashes which had the appearance of scratches.”
Schulze did witness some very bizarre events involving the boy, which he couldn’t explain, but he didn’t think the answer was possession. They thought perhaps it might be psychokinesis or a poltergiest, but they also thought it was also just as likely that there would be a psychological explanation.
I’ve written before about the thousands of letters received at the lab. Many of them were so sad. People sometimes wrote for help the lab couldn’t give, like finding missing children or for assurance that the voices they heard were ghosts and not mental illness. The lab always answered as compassionately as they could and did their best to direct the writers to where real help could be found.
A sample of the letters received follows after this picture of the lab staff at their evening staff meeting, where they would go over their current projects and experiments and the daily mail.
“About five years ago I started hearing someone or something thinking to me, I say thinking because it is not like a voice or a whisper. It is more like my own thoughts, but I know it isn’t … I have adopted a very bright healthy boy and once in the beginning of this, this thought train said I had to choose between my son and my parakeet …” 1958.
“Since September 13, 1962, Diane Y., age seven, and her brother, Mark Y., age two and one-half, have been missing from their home … At first it was thought they may have been taken by a gypsy woman, now many believe they have been murdered. Please advise me …” 1963.
“My brain is two-in-one, uncomplete. New cells are even now in the process of completion, whose function it will be to benefit mankind. Already I have a flexible gristle-type growth within my inner ear and lower part of my brain. With this I receive telepathic messages of earth and spatial origin … you will probably be receiving letters from the Dept. of Defense, and various other sources about me. So be it.” 1959.
In 1946, Gian-Carlo Menotti’s full-length opera, The Medium, premiered in New York at Columbia University. Actually, does opera count as popular culture? Sometimes it does, right? Definitely in this case I think. Anyway, The Medium told the story of a deaf mute medium who started out as a fraud, but then developed genuine abilities which destroyed her.
From the May 9, 1946 New York Times review: “Gian-Carlo Menotti’s two-act chamber opera, “The Medium,” given its premiere last night by Columbia University in Brander Matthews Hall, begins so badly that it seems hopeless. But by the end of the second act it has gripped the audience by means of its realistic musical theatre.”
I’ve got it on my Amazon wish list.
