Science: Ghosts, No Ghosts

No one who believes in spiritualism ever changes his opinion by reading arguments against it. Few who do not believe are won over by anything they read.

—Henry Clay McComasin Ghosts I Have Talked With.

Though firm believers in spiritualism and implacable non-believers may not be swayed by anything they read, for persons willing to hear from both camps two new books were at hand last week containing excellent statements pro & con. One author is a Baltimore-born Johns Hopkins psychologist who does his ghost-hunting with affability and scientific guile. The other is an elderly, dead-earnest, British-born spiritualist who has written some 70 books and papers on psychic phenomena, now heads the American Psychical Institute. All that the two books have in common is that both are readably written and each is dedicated to the author’s wife.

Pro. Spiritualist Hereward Carrington’s treatise is called Loaves & Fishes.* Mr. Carrington makes it clear that spiritualist philosophy needs no recourse to the supernatural. Everything that occurs must be a part of Nature. True, some weird things that happen are out of the ordinary; but these he prefers to call supernormal. They answer to “higher” psychic laws, would probably be objects of widespread scientific research if scientists were not afraid to confess how staggered they are by what goes on in seances. Mr. Carrington apparently accepts everything in the spiritualist showcases from crystal-gazing to astral projections and ghosts (which he prefers to call phantasms) on what he deems an overwhelming weight of sound evidence and reliable testimony.

Mr. Carrington brings into court the lifting of objects and human bodies without physical contact, telepathy, clairvoyance, premonitions, materialized phantasms which can snuff candles, transmission from the Other World of information to which the mediums could not possibly be privy, a mass of other phenomena.

As to the miracles narrated in the four Gospels, Mr. Carrington thinks some are coincidences (e. g., quieting the storm, the heavy catch of fish) while others are simply parables (e. g., feeding the multitude, finding the coin in the fish’s mouth). Changing water to wine may have been mass hypnotism. Most of the others, especially the healing miracles, he considers to be demonstrations of Jesus Christ’s extraordinary psychic power—but within the frame of Nature. Some of the disorders represented as blindness, dumbness, leprosy, demoniacal possession may have been hysterical in character and thus curable by powerful suggestion. Tissue actually diseased may have been made healthy by dematerialization and rematerialization. Lazarus and the other dead who were raised were probably only in cataleptic trances, since in two cases Jesus explicitly said they were not dead but “sleeping.”

The Resurrection was “the greatest psychic event in all history.” The appearance of Christ to his disciples after the Crucifixion was either a phantasm—a mental projection of the personality—or an actual psychic materialization, since Thomas was invited to thrust his fingers into the wounds.

Con. In Ghosts I Have Talked With,† Psychologist McComas tells how he started investigating spiritualism good-naturedly a decade ago, learned wariness and wiliness as he went along. On one of his early researches, wearing plus-fours and a gay demeanor, he went to see a slate-writer. The slate-writer informed him coldly that conditions were not right that morning, hinted that he need not return any other morning. After that Dr. McComas wore sombre clothes and a solemn face when dealing with psychic practitioners.

Dr. McComas has visited all sorts of mediums, remarkably good and ludicrously bad, and he does not believe in ghosts or ghostly manifestations for the reason that he has been shown nothing he cannot fathom, either by his own observation and experiment or through suggestions from others. He was acquainted with the late famed Harry Houdini, inexorable foe of mediums. He learned that if a face were painted on a sheet with colorless anthracine and invisible ultraviolet light were played on the sheet in darkness, the face would emerge in ghastly luminescence.

The ablest medium that Dr. McComas ever encountered was a small, shy Pennsylvania Dutchman named Cartheuser. A onetime automobile mechanic, Cartheuser had a harelip, presumably a cleft palate, a pronounced speech defect. He gave seances in Dr. McComas’ own study, where there were no trick gadgets. A dim, shaded light was hung almost to the floor, so that sitters and medium were ordinarily invisible. A trumpet banded with luminous paint stood on the floor. The trumpet would rise, swing toward the medium’s chair, sail around the room, tapping heads playfully here & there. It would sidle up to a sitter’s ear, whisper, “Hello, hello, hello.” Cartheuser had three “spirits”: a scholarly family doctor, an uproarious Indian, a little girl named Elsie whose personality as revealed in her talk was charming. None of these voices had the medium’s speech defect.

Dr. McComas caught the trickster first by persuading him to let a stenographer take notes behind a screen. After eyes grew used to the darkness enough light filtered through the screen for the psychologist to see the dim figure of the medium rise from his chair, pick up the trumpet, move it about, whisper in it, all without making the slightest untoward sound. Dr. McComas solved the voice problem by applying a stethoscope to Cartheuser’s throat. At first he was mystified to get no throat sounds when “Elsie” was talking, soon discovered that Cartheuser at such times was deftly pinching off the stethoscope tube. That the little man could produce three clear, different voices despite his mouth defects was a feat of super-ventriloquism. Cartheuser was a virtuoso of vocal cord control.

Not the ablest but the most celebrated of Dr. McComas’ mediums was “Margery” of Boston, vivacious, attractive wife of Dr. Le Roi Goddard Crandon. Connoisseurs of the ghostly art were so enthusiastic about her that they professed willingness to let their case rest on her alone. Dr. McComas was appointed to head a commission to investigate Margery for the American Society for Psychical Research. The other commissioners were two eminent Johns Hopkins scientists, Psychologist Knight Dunlap and Physicist Robert Williams Wood.

At one sitting the investigators were permitted to control Margery’s hands and feet while she was supposedly sprouting “ectoplasmic rods” from her thighs. Excerpts from their impressions, dictated to a stenographer during the séance:

McComas: Dr. McComas’ hand directed to the substance. . . . It seemed like a cylindrical substance about ¾ in. in diameter with a hard, bonelike centre or axis. . . . Psyche’s [Margery’s] voice said, “I feel bad here,” and pushed my hand up to the point on this cylindrical substance.

Dunlap: The “thing” [feels] cold and smooth and soft. . . .

McComas: During the time that the teleplasmic rod was striking at Dr. Dunlap’s head, Psyche’s ankles were in my lap.

McComas: Dr. McComas feeling Psyche from thigh to knee finds tights. This search made at Dr. Crandon’s suggestion.

Dunlap: Dr. Dunlap finds that Psyche has silk bloomers on.

When the sitting was over, someone suggested that Margery be examined at once. To this Margery had a magnificent answer. She leaned forward, gagged convulsively, seemed to be vomiting, rushed from the room, followed by her husband. The investigators then examined the floor with a flashlight to see if the vomiting was genuine. It was not.

In their report to the society, the commissioners observed that the “Psychic rods” seemed to be some animal intestine stuffed with cotton and stiffened with wire. They had no way of assuring themselves that these were not handled by a confederate. The medium claimed that the rods were extremely sensitive, but when a commissioner slyly squeezed one as hard as he could there was no complaint from Margery.

The mechanical tricks—luminous effects, voice effects, card-reading in the dark, mysterious bell ringing—were all matched by Dr. McComas in a séance of his own which impressed a group of seasoned Margery sitters.

* Scribner ($2).

† Williams & Wilkins ($2).