Mediumship: Psychic Rods, Alleged Trickery and Psychic Stuff (2024)

Posted on 14 March 2022, 9:23

Perhaps the most damning evidence against the mediumship of Mina Crandon, also known as “Margery,” came from Dr. Joseph B. Rhine (below), then a young botanist turned psychologist and later one of the founders of the field called parapsychology. “We were disgusted to find that at the bottom of all this controversy and investigation lay such a simple system of trickery as we witnessed at the séance,” Rhine reported of his one sitting with Margery on July 1, 1926. “We are amateurs, and we do not possess any skill or training in trickery, and we were looking for true psychic productions, but in spite of our greenness and our deep interest, we could not help but see the falseness of it all.” One thing that stood out in Rhine’s report is movement of her feet at the time psychokinetic action was taking place.

Several other investigators, including the famous magician Houdini, agreed with Rhine. He was sitting next to her, holding an arm and a leg, to rule out fraud. He said that he felt movement in her leg when a bell rang some distance from them. Others were convinced that Margery was a genuine medium and still others sat on the fence and weren’t sure what to believe. Those with the most experience in such research and with the most experiments with Margery found in her favor. Compared with Rhine’s one sitting with Margery, Dr. Mark Richardson, a distinguished Harvard professor of medicine, had more than a hundred sittings with her, including a number of individual experiments, and was certain that there was no fraud involved.

“There comes a point at which this hypothesis of universal confederacy must stop; or if not this, that the entire present report may be dismissed off-hand as a deliberate fabrication in the interests of false mediumship,” Richardson wrote. “I respectfully submit that no critic who hesitates at this logical climax may by any means escape the hypothesis of validity. If the present paper is worthy of and if it receives the slightest degree of respectful attention, the facts which it chronicles must constitute proof of the existence of Margery’s supernormal faculties, and the strongest sort of evidence that these work through the agency of her deceased brother Walter.”

Present with Dr. Rhine in that one sitting with Margery was Dr. Louisa W. Rhine, his wife. It was noted that Louisa Rhine did not recognize the “tricks,” but that she accepted her husband’s explanation of them. Ironically, Louisa Rhine served as a translator for a two-part article by Professor Dr. Karl Gruber of Munich, Germany appearing in the May and June 1926 issues (two months before their sittings) of The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research dealing with the problems of understanding such mediumship. No mention was made of Margery in the article, but the concerns were the same.

Gruber was a German physician, biologist, and zoologist who had conducted or participated in numerous studies of other physical mediums, including German mediums Willi and Rudi Schneider. He observed “synchronous movements” between the medium and objects out of the medium’s reach. “If this connection is broken by movements of the hand or other object across the field of activity, or if it is roughly torn away, either temporary or lasting bodily injury to the medium results,” Gruber explained, noting that his research involved more than one-hundred experiments. “This fact has been repeatedly misunderstood by the skeptical, who have seen in it the unmasking of a frightened medium.”

Gruber cited the reports of Dr. William J Crawford, an Irish mechanical engineer. Between 1914 and 1917, Crawford carried out 87 experiments with Irish medium Kathleen Goligher and concluded that the movement of some table or other object out of Goligher’s reach resulted from invisible “psychic rods” extending from the medium to the object being moved. These psychic rods were made of what others called “ectoplasm” or “teleplasm,” though Crawford referred to it as “psychic stuff.” They originated with what Crawford called “operators,” which he took to be discarnate human beings. “These particular mechanical reactions cause her to make slight involuntary motions with her feet, motions which a careless observer would set down as imposture,” Crawford explained. “The starting point of the rod then seems to be much higher up her body, for the reactionary movements are then visible on the trunk.”

Absent from all the observations and opinions of the esteemed scientists and other ‘experts’ studying Margery is evidence that might have given the doubters and deniers second thoughts before claiming fraud. That is, the researchers expressed their opinions strictly from a mechanistic/materialistic point of view. There is no mention of the research twenty to thirty years earlier with Eusapia Palladino, an illiterate Neapolitan medium who was studied by many leading scientists. Some of the those studying Palladino suggested that her “third arm,” an ectoplasmic extension molded by her spirit control, known as “John King,” was carrying out the activity which they saw as fraud. Moreover, some of the investigators reported on “rhythmic actions” of her fingers, arms and legs that were in accord with activity taking place some distance from her, apparently through the invisible or mostly invisible ectoplasmic rods extending from her limbs to the point of activity, as if she, or the spirit controlling her, had become puppet masters of sorts. “When [Professor Oscar] Scarpa held Palladino’s feet in his hands (for control purposes), he always felt her legs moving in synchrony with ongoing displacements of the table or chair,” reported Professor Filippo Bottazi, who referred to the action as “synchrony.”

The fundamental problem in all such analyses, as I see it, is that the spirit hypothesis is completely disregarded, as it is “unscientific.” Bottazi, who rejected the spirit hypothesis, mentioned that they would refer to John King to appease Palladino, who was certain he was a spirit guide, but they apparently laughed at the whole idea when they were not in her presence. “Spirits, ha, ha, preposterous humbug,” they likely reacted while clinging to the idea that it all originated in Palladino’s subconscious in ways that science did not yet understand.

Sir Oliver Lodge, a distinguished British physicist, also suspected fraud with Palladino. When he accused her of a trick, she went into a rage and explained that when she was in a trance John King was in control. “She wanted us to understand that it was not conscious deception, but that her control took whatever means available, and, if he found an easy way of doing a thing, thus would it be done,” Lodge reported. “I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, so far as the morals of deception are concerned, for she was a kindly soul, with many of the instincts of a peasant, and extraordinarily charitable.”

Present with Lodge in those experiments with Palladino was Dr. Charles Richet, later a Nobel-Prize winner in medicine. He stated that he had nearly 200 séances with Palladino and was certain that she was not a cheat. However, he was reluctant to accept John King as the spirit of a dead person, as that would be a very unscientific approach, but he concluded that the semi-unconsciousness of the medium takes away much of her moral responsibility. “Trance turns them into automata that have but a very slight control over their muscular movements,” he explained. “… It is also quite easy to understand that when exhausted by a long and fruitless séance, and surrounded by a number of sitters eager to see something, a medium whose consciousness is still partly in abeyance may give the push that [she] hopes will start the phenomena.”

Lodge reported on a test involving a spring dynamometer, which, when squeezed, measured hand grip strength. It was Richet’s idea that all the energy used at a sitting had to come from the medium or some of the sitters. Thus, he recorded the grip strength of Eusapia and each sitter before and after the two-hour sitting. In the before reading, Lodge, a big man at 6-foot-4, scored the highest, followed by Richet, Frederic Myers, and Julian Ochorowicz, with Eusapia’s being much weaker than the four men. But after the sitting, Eusapia was giving a feeble clutch when she suddenly shouted, “Oh, John, you’re hurting!” and the men observed the needle go far beyond what any of them could exert. “She wrung her fingers afterwards, and said John (King) had put his great hand around hers, and squeezed the machine up to an abnormal figure,” Lodge explained, noting that “John King” occasionally showed his hand, “a big, five-fingered, ill-formed thing it looked in the dusk.”

As with John King, most of the researchers spoke with Margery’s “Walter” personality, which claimed to be Margery’s deceased brother, as if he was a real spirit, even though they refused to accept the idea of spirits. As they saw it, the “third arm” extending from Margery could not have been that of a spirit entity, because science says that spirit entities don’t exist. It had to be a trick by Margery, even though it went beyond any scientific laws then known. One of the exceptions was Dr. T. Glen Hamilton, a Canadian physician and psychical researcher .

“… I was privileged to take part in a tête-à-tête with Dr. Richardson’s justly famous voice cut-out machine, and found it to be absolutely fraud-proof and 100 percent effective in proving the independence of the “Walter” voice,” Hamilton wrote. “I witnessed as well a number of other successful tests with this machine. At one of these sittings, I witnessed also one of the most arresting incidents in my research experiences: a trance so profound that the medium’s respirations were reduced to six to the minute…Undoubtedly this affords a very strong additional proof of the genuineness of the Margery mediumship.”

At Hamilton’s first sitting in Winnipeg, Margery disrobed in front of Mrs. Hamilton and put on a bathrobe that was supplied for her. It took between three and four minutes for Margery to go into a trance, after which Walter spoke in what was described as a “hoarse stage-whisper.” He joked, teased, and even preached as Hamilton closely observed Margery, being controlled by two other physicians, to rule out fraud. “I have now witnessed the Margery phenomena eleven times: eight times in the Lime Street séance room under conditions of careful control; twice in my own experimental room, also under positive control; and once in the home of an acquaintance under arrangements entirely impromptu – and in each instance typical Margery phenomena occurred…I have no hesitancy in again stating that I am quite convinced that the Margery phenomena are not only genuine but are also among the most brilliant yet recorded in the history of metapsychic science.”

Hamilton concluded that the “trance-intelligences” of the mediums he had studied, existed apart from the mediums. “Assuming the reality of other-world energy-forms, how then do they come to be fleetingly represented (or mirrored) in our world?” he asked. He concluded that teleplasm (or ectoplasm) provides the answer. “Basing my assumption on a study of the sixty-odd masses which we have photographed during the past five years (1928-1934), I regard teleplasm as a highly sensitive substance, responsive to other-world energies and at the same time visible to us in the physical world. It therefore constitutes an intervening substance by means of which transcendental intelligences are enabled, by ideoplastic or other unknown processes to transmit their conception of certain energy forms which appear objective to them, into the terms of our world and our understanding.”

And, yet, most scientists and historians still cling to the fraud hypothesis. My guess is that the spirit world gave up in trying to prove themselves.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

Next blog post: March 28

That foot of Margery that changed the course of psychic research

We are used to saying that if the nose of the queen of ancient Egypt Cleopatra had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed.
According to the same formula, if the foot of the American medium “Margery” (1889-1941) had been less nimble, there is no doubt that all of parapsychology - this new science which claims to study human paranormal capacities - would not be what it is today. For good or for bad ? That is the question.

The key-episode takes place in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1926. Margery rages there, attracting the entire intelligentsia of the city for spiritualistic seances called physical mediumship under the leadership of her husband, Doctor Leroy Crandon, a local surgeon from fame; “Margery” is the “cabinet” name of his wife Mina, 36, who he raves about for her fabulous abilities.
On that day, July 1, among a dozen assistants, the presence of a foreigner was accepted. This is the famous J. B. Rhine (1895-1980) accompanied by his wife Louisa. Determined to abandon his specialty – botany – he wants to devote himself to the study of human psychic faculties, but which ones? As a inquisitive man, he comes to attend a session which mst show him a sample of certain spectacular phenomena very fashionable at the time - we speak of “macroscopic” spiritualistic manifestations - where Margery excels, according to her old husband and many witnesses.
In an account published in 1927, Rhine describes what he witnessed after the medium, clad only in a dressing gown (she is naked underneath and attendants often act as voyeurs regarding the ectoplasm sometimes comes out of the vagin*!), of her stockings and slippers, has been immobilized on her seat at the wrists and ankles; they are: the hoarse voice of “control”, Walter, knocking noises against various objects, the fall of a wastepaper basket, a bell being rung, the action at a distance on the pans of a scale, objects all sensible out of range of the medium (more than two meters). All of this happens in complete darkness, of course, “so that the power can operate”.
But Rhine coldly exposes how he acquired the formal proof of a fraudulent action: he saw silhouetted the foot of the medium stretching the bonds to strike the megaphone and create the shocks. Consequently, he explains the rest by a normal action (by Margery and her accomplice husband) ; he is so disappointed so much that he will definitively give up confronting this kind of exhibition. He also suspects the use of an extendable wand…

J. B. Rhine will therefore apply to highlight the existence of paranormal faculties less spectacular but easier to control, these acting in full light: psychokinesis on thrown dice, divination of cards etc. The effect being much less obvious, he invented the statistical method to quantify the deviations from the laws of chance. Thus, he will expel mediumship out of his Barnum side but he will sanitize the metapsychic with the concept of ESP (extrasensory perception). He certainly did pioneering work there, but should we regret this unfortunate session – did Margery lack power that day? – without which we would perhaps know more today about this famous physical mediumship taking refuge today in spiritualist cabinets where it is resistant to any serious study?

Some people think that Margery’s foot had a beneficial effect. Not me!

Dear Amos,

Thank you. In the past, I have received the blogs by the simplest of those routes you detail - direct from White Crow Books. Today, I got at the blog via an email Mike sent to me. So long as I can get at them each time it seems OK. I hope they will now come reliably via White Crow Books, the quickest and easiest way, as they have done in the past.

By any route, they are excellent blogs, to be procured by any honest means even if at great cost of trouble.

Eric Franklin

Eric,
I can tell you how I access these blogs.

First: I search for the blog using a Chrome browser by typing ‘Michael Tymn Blog’ and selecting it from the many choices that come up for ‘Michael Tymn’.

Second: I receive an automatic email from “Michael” and an email from “White Crow Books” which I can click on to bring up the newest blog article when it is posted

Third: When I post a comment, if I put a check mark in the little box at the end of each article which is directly under the left end of the box to write comments, I then will receive a notification from “simon@simonjenkins.com” in my email that says “someone just responded to your comment” whenever anyone writes another comment to that blog article. (Maybe I have to make a comment for that to work but the response is rarely to my comment,) If I click on that in my email it will take me directly to the new comment.

-AOD

Dear all,

First, thank you, Amos, for expressing 100% agreement with my latest comment. Thank you! Much appreciated.

Next, thank you, Keith (Parsons), for reminding me of the wooden rings passing through each other, which I had forgotten, some years after reading it somewhere. This event is empirical evidence for the correctness of my ‘pet’ theory (as you called it yourself) showing how two universes can intermingle without communication between them, which I base on the simplest of mathematical necessities that is inherent in Einsteinian Relativity, and depends on the (very high but) finite velocity of light. Almost all its readers fail to see the mathematical PROOF of the possibility of such multiple universes “”“in one place”“” (though a world-known Cambridge mathematician thought it well argued when HE read it).

And thirdly, I STILL am not receiving Mike’s excellent blogs from White Crow Books, but this one came only BY MEANS OF A LINK MIKE HIMSELF PROVIDED YESTERDAY, DIRECT TO ME BY EMAIL. (Aloha!, and thank you again and again, Mike. I would not like to be without your blogs.) I am not currently getting notifications of Mike’s blogs via White Crow Books, and have no idea why.

Best regards to all

Eric Franklin

Mike,

Another good one. I still believe Eusapia deliberately cheated at times, but she also did genuine paranormal PK. Now at 79, I’m ready to hang up my psychic investigator cleats and let a new generation continue the investigation. 😎🍷

Eric,
I agree 100% with your comment. Rhine reveals more about himself than he does about “Margery” and it throws into question the quality of the rest of his investigations. - AOD

Dear all,

What Rhine did in rejecting the phenomena as fraud at ONE sitting did not merely show neglect of the first scientific principle of research and theory. He showed ignorance of HIS OWN subject. Every rookie psychology student knows that what happens in the mind is often reflected in unconscious, autonomic bodily movement. Reich was not the only one, even back in the 1920s to 1930s who recognised that. Disgrace to Rhine. Enough to reject HIM on just one instance. How would he have liked that?

Eric Franklin

Michael, a great article, thanks. You are phenomenally well-read. With regard to Margery, I agree with you that there is strong evidence that she was genuine and not a fraud, despite all the controversy surrounding her. For those interested, I made a doc on Youtube entitled ‘Houdini versus Margery, Immortality on Trial’ which contains startling material. You can see it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxvXXLYsIU&list=PLLB-82YMhiPFPKSm2Ke69aK0DKTftpvo0&index=31&t=1405s

For me the strongest evidence in her favour consists of the experiment in which she (or do I mean her control, Walter) passed matter through matter in 1934 - two wooden rings, like curtain rings, made of different woods. There are photographs available of these, both before and afterwards.