{"id":350,"date":"2009-04-12T09:21:07","date_gmt":"2009-04-12T13:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stacyhorn.com\/unbelievable\/?p=350"},"modified":"2009-05-11T08:12:41","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T12:12:41","slug":"more-mina-crandon-aka-margery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/?p=350","title":{"rendered":"More Mina Crandon aka Margery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A 1926 visit to the famous medium Margery introduced the world to J. B. and Louisa Rhine. \u00a0I 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&#8217;t get naked this time (Mina Crandon was her real name). \u00a0The Rhines thought they were there to conduct\u00a0a scientific investigation and were instead offered glasses of champagne.\u00a0This picture shows Mina with the ectoplasmic hand of her dead brother Walter laying on her stomach.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/margery2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-352\" title=\"margery2\" src=\"http:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/margery2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"261\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0Margery been denounced before, but not like this. \u00a0The outcry from people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a champion of Margery&#8217;s, brought the Rhines overnight fame and eventually led them to Duke University.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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. \u00a0McDougall 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. \u00a0I 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!!). \u00a0About Mina and the ectoplasmic hand, McDougall said, \u201cThe more interesting question is\u2014How did it come to be within the anatomy?\u201d \u00a0Mina never permitted the kind of inspection required to try to answer that question.<\/p>\n<p>I actually felt a lot of sympathy for Mina, and I go into that in the book.<\/p>\n<p>[The picture came from the catalogue for the 2005 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled, &#8220;The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.&#8221;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A 1926 visit to the famous medium Margery introduced the world to J. B. and Louisa Rhine. \u00a0I tried to imagine what it was like &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piV6u-5E","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.echonyc.com\/~horn\/unbelievable\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}