Beyond the Occult (23 page)

Lethbridge observed that the site of such an occurrence is usually damp and concluded that the ‘recording medium’ may simply be the electrical field of water.
He suggested that ghosts are nothing more than ‘tape-recordings’ which for some reason become suddenly visible to human beings.

This explanation seems to be favoured by Joan Forman.
One of her correspondents had visited the Long Gallery at Hampton Court and experienced an ‘agony of distress’ at the door leading to the antechamber of the royal pew, and then again in the pew itself.
Catherine Howard, the wife of Henry VIII, had been arrested at Hampton Court in 1541 and charged with misconduct: she had escaped from the guards and rushed screaming along the gallery to try to see the king, who was in his pew in the chapel; but the door was closed.
Joan Forman, who had herself experienced a feeling of ‘utter misery and extreme physical coldness’ in the gallery, suggests that the two ‘recordings’ are, respectively, those of Catherine Howard and those of Henry VIII, who heard her screams.
But Catherine was executed in the following year, and Henry VIII lived on for another six years.
So it seems unlikely that their ‘ghosts’ haunt the spot.
According to Joan Forman, a sudden tragic intensity of emotion is all that remains of the event: a permanent ‘tape-recording’ that can be ‘picked up’ by those who are sensitive enough.

The first person to stumble on this notion of ‘recordings’ was an American professor, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, who
has already been introduced in the opening chapter.
When Buchanan first began experimenting with his students, handing them various chemicals wrapped up in brown paper packages and asking them to try and ‘sense’ what was inside them, he believed that our bodies are surrounded with a ‘nerve aura’ which has exactly the same kind of sensitivity as our tongues.
So his students were really identifying the chemicals as they might have identified the taste of salt or sugar in their mouths.
And when some of his ‘sensitives’ were able to hold sealed letters and describe the people who wrote them, Buchanan simply extended his theory and concluded that the personality of the writer had somehow ‘imprinted’ itself on the letter.
His sensitives were in effect psychic bloodhounds who were able to distinguish between one ‘smell’ and another.
However this pleasingly simple and logical theory soon ran into difficulties.
The sensitives were able to produce equally precise descriptions if he handed them a photograph sealed in an envelope (photography was a recent discovery in the 1840s).
At first that seemed reasonable enough — after all, most photographs have been in contact with their subjects and must have picked up something of their ‘smells’.
Then Buchanan discovered that it worked just as well with newspaper photographs.
And that was absurd.
The ‘nerve aura’ theory had to be abandoned — or at least modified.
Buchanan had to fall back on the notion of ‘clairvoyance’, and this undoubtedly helped to destroy his reputation with his scientific colleagues.
By the 1860s few people still took him seriously.

But by this time his disciple William Denton, a professor of geology at Boston, was producing even more remarkable results with geological specimens wrapped in thick paper.
His chief sensitives were his wife, his sister-in-law Mrs Cridge and, later on, his son Sherman.
Denton’s book
The Soul of Things
remains one of the most fascinatingly readable books in the whole field of paranormal research.
He arrived at the conviction that every object in the world carries its own history hidden inside it and that most people can develop the ability to ‘read’ this history simply by holding it
in their hands.
A fragment of volcanic rock produced visions of an exploding volcano with a river of lava pouring into the ocean.
Mrs Cridge even ‘saw’ ships on the ocean.
In fact the lava was from the eruption in 1840 of the volcano of Kilauea on Hawaii, when the United States fleet had been visiting the island.
A meteorite brought visions of empty space, with the stars looking abnormally large and bright.
A fragment of dinosaur bone summoned a vision of aquatic dinosaurs on a prehistoric beach.
And when Denton tried the same fragment on Mrs Cridge a month later (without telling her what was in the parcel) she also saw water and bird-like creatures with membranous wings — probably pterodactyls.
A piece of a mastodon’s tooth produced an image of a monstrous creature with heavy legs, an unwieldy head and a very large body.
A pebble from a glacier produced a feeling of being buried for a long time in a depth of ice.
A pebble from Niagara brought an impression of the sound of a torrent and a deep hole full of something like steam (she thought it might be a hot spring).
A piece of hornstone from the Mount of Olives brought an image so accurate that Denton’s wife deduced she was looking at Jerusalem.

Denton’s theory was astonishing enough, yet in another sense quite logical.
For every object
does
carry its history imprinted in it.
To begin with light falling on the surface of a stone must destroy some of its outermost molecules, producing a kind of blurred photograph.
(E.
T.
Bell’s science-fiction novel
Before the Dawn
was based on the idea of a machine that could ‘unscramble’ these pictures and so read the history of ancient rocks.) If strong human emotions can be ‘imprinted’ on scenery, then presumably so can other kinds of energy.
Denton was merely suggesting that the human mind possesses its own powers of ‘decoding’ these ancient recordings.

However when Thomson Jay Hudson came to write
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
in the early 1890s he dismissed Denton’s claim that we all possess a natural ‘telescope into the past’.
He felt that Denton’s results could all be explained by the extraordinary powers of the subjective mind.
As an example he cited the case of a piece of Roman mosaic
pavement which Denton knew to be from the villa of the orator Cicero.
Denton’s wife decribed a Roman villa, a squad of Roman soldiers and a fleshy man in a toga with a commanding presence.
In order to guard against any cheating — even unconscious cheating — Denton went through an elaborate double-blind procedure before he handed over the Roman fragment.
He first of all wrapped it in brown paper then mixed it up with many other specimens in identical wrapping, so that he himself had no idea which was which.
This was in case he gave his wife some unconscious hint or even transmitted information to her telepathically.
(The word telepathy was invented by Frederick Myers in the early 1880s but the idea of ‘thought transference’ was familiar long before that.)

That sounded convincing enough, but Hudson was unimpressed.
He pointed out that the memory of the subjective mind seems to be practically limitless.
So it would know precisely what each parcel contained even if Denton mixed them with his eyes closed.
Denton’s own historical knowledge would provide the ‘pictures’ from the past, and his wife would have no difficulty picking them up from him by means of telepathy … .
So that disposed of Denton’s belief that every event is ‘recorded’ on its surroundings.

As it turned out Hudson could not have chosen a worse example.
Denton had himself been puzzled by the fact that his wife had not seen Cicero: the man she had seen was fleshy, but Cicero had been tall and thin.
It was when Denton came to republish the book fifteen years later, in 1888, that he revealed a discovery he had made in the meantime.
Cicero’s villa had previously been owned by the dictator Sulla, and Sulla corresponded very accurately to Mrs Denton’s image of a broad, fleshy man with an aloof, majestic air, yet whose face also revealed ‘a good deal of geniality’.
Hudson might still object, of course, that Denton already knew that Sulla had owned the villa before Cicero and had simply forgotten.
But if we accept Denton’s word that he learned about it for the first time after the 1873 edition of
The Soul of Things
, then Hudson’s objections collapse and the ‘recording’ theory remains unshaken.

Since the 1880s psychometry — as Buchanan christened the
‘recording’ theory — has been generally ignored by science.
Even ‘psychical researchers’ seem to find it embarrassing and prefer not to mention it.
Yet it is probably the best authenticated of all ‘psychic faculties’ and there are hundreds of impressive examples in the history of psychical research.
In 1921 a sceptical French novelist named Pascal Forthuny discovered — to his amazement and embarrassment — that he was an excellent psychometrist.
He was present at the Metapsychic Institute in Paris when Dr Gustav Geley, a leading French investigator, was about to test a clairvoyant.
Someone asked for a letter to be passed across the room to the clairvoyant: Forthuny grabbed it on the way, clapped it against his forehead, and began a mocking improvization: ‘I see a crime … a murder… .’
When he was finished he was told that the letter was from the French ‘Bluebeard’ murderer Landru.
Forthuny was equally accurate with two more objects, a fan and an officer’s cane, describing their history in striking detail.
He was later subjected to a series of scientific tests by Geley’s assistant, Dr Eugene Osty, whose book on the subject leaves no doubt of the genuineness of Forthuny’s remarkable powers.

Forthuny seems to demonstrate that objects can ‘record’ the emotional history of their owners — illnesses, personal tragedies and so on.
But what of Denton’s belief that
everything
records its own life history, including rocks and meteorites?
It sounds scientifically indefensible, yet another series of tests a few years earlier suggest that Denton may have been correct after all.

Just before the First World War Dr Gustav Pagenstecher, a German doctor who had settled in Mexico City, was treating an insomniac patient named Maria Reyes de Zierold.
Drugs were useless but hypnosis seemed to work.
And one day, under hypnosis, she told him that her daughter was listening outside the door.
He opened the door and found this was true.
Of course the explanation might have been simply that Maria’s senses were exceptionally acute under hypnosis.
But Pagenstecher also observed that baffling phenomenon first observed in the nineteenth century by Alfred Russel
Wallace, ‘community of sensation’.
Maria could see, hear and taste through Pagenstecher’s senses.
She could see him and describe what he was doing even when he was behind her or in the next room.
He also discovered that she had remarkable powers of psychometry: a meteorite produced a detailed description of falling through space; a seashell led her to describe an underwater scene.
One of her most convincing demonstrations concerned a sea bean picked up on the beach by Dr Walter Franklin Prince, who was sent to investigate by the American Society for Psychical Research.
Maria described a tropical forest with a river nearby.
Prince was convinced she was wrong, but Pagenstecher said he would prefer to believe Maria.
When they took the sea bean to an expert, they learned that it was actually a nut from a tree that grew in tropical forests and that it had been carried down to the beach by a river … .

Maria de Zierold offers us an interesting glimpse of her procedure.
As she held the object she ‘identified’ with it, exactly as she had earlier identified with Pagenstecher: if it was moistened with alcohol, she tasted the alcohol; if a lighted match was held underneath it, she felt the burning sensation.
And once she had ‘entered into’ the object she became aware of its life history.

This has some exciting implications.
Bergson had said that we have two ways of knowing an object: by analysis, which means grasping it from
outside
, and by intuition, which means going
inside
it.
The latter sounds nonsensical, since we cannot really ‘enter into’ an object.
Yet if Maria’s evidence is to be accepted, this is not true.
When she ‘shared’ Pagenstecher’s consciousness she felt that she was connected to him by a kind of ‘luminous cord’ with some ‘electric’ quality.
When she ‘entered into’ an object it became connected to her by the same kind of cord.
If Maria de Zierold’s descriptions are to be taken seriously, it would seem that Bergson was correct and we
can
‘enter into’ objects.

But how about ‘reading’ the life history of the object?
Again this sounds absurd, since an object is not alive.
A possible explanation could lie in the suggestion of Bergson’s
contemporary philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
He argued that
everything
in the universe is, in some sense, alive and capable of ‘feeling’.
The universe should be regarded as a single living organism.
(Whitehead’s philosophy is known as the philosophy of organism.) Both Whitehead and Bergson insisted that the underlying reality of the universe is
an underlying web of connections
.
But in order to survive human beings have to focus upon one thing at a time, so we have learned to ‘screen out’ the connections.
Moreover our survival depends upon our sense of individuality — feeling ourselves to be quite separate from the rest of the universe — and so, once again, man has learned to ‘screen out’ the sense of one-ness with Nature and to become intensely aware of himself in isolation.
Both mysticism and paranormal research strongly support the view of Bergson and Whitehead that this isolation is an illusion.