Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Page 12

  Nor is it true that, as Harry Price suggested, human ruminants possess bovine-style multiple stomachs. This was a stubborn rumor fueled by two seventeenth-century cases of ruminating men with horns—one a unicorned Paduan nobleman and the other a bicorned monk. Autopsies of ruminants—whose stomachs were normal—put a stop to the rumor, as did a paper by a physician named Sachs, who reviewed one hundred cases of men with rudimentary horns and found only one ruminant among them.†

  So Harry Price was wrong to surmise that Helen Duncan was ruminating ectoplasm that she stored in an auxiliary stomach. Duncan’s was more likely a case of masterful regurgitation. Regurgitation acts were a sideshow mainstay in Price’s and Duncan’s day. In his book Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship, Price describes regurgitators of live goldfish and snakes, light bulbs, razors, pocket watches, bayonets, two eighteen-pound dumbbells, and a rolled umbrella. Colleague Harry Houdini watched a frog-swallower in Warsaw swallow thirty or forty glasses of beer and an unspecified number of half-grown frogs, which he would then bring up alive. I’m unclear on whether the beer helped with the process or with the man’s state of mind, or possibly that of the frogs.

  Thus it is within the realm of possibility that Helen Duncan was swallowing and regurgitating sizable rolls of cheesecloth. To demonstrate the convenient compactibility of this fabric, Price bought a six-foot by thirty-inch swath, rolled it up tight, and photographed his secretary Ethel with the fabric sticking from her mouth like a Mafia gag.

  Far more damning than the Ethel photo was Mrs. Duncan’s tantrum in response to a request, on May 28, 1931, that she submit to a post-séance X-ray. Price wanted to find out if she had an extra “pseudo-stomach,” and/or what was in her stomach(s). He was aware that the chances of getting a clear image through “the depths of the medium” were slim (early X-ray technology being what it was); but she was not. As the equipment was readied, Mrs. Duncan suddenly leapt from the settee, bowled over Dr. Brown, pushed aside Mrs. A. Peel Goldney, and lumbered screaming into the street. Her husband (and long-suspected accomplice) ran after her, and the two were gone for ten minutes, during which time—Price and his team suspected—she regurgitated the fabric and passed it off to him. And what a sight that must have been for genteel passersby—a panting, hysterical woman in a clown suit, throwing up a roll of cheesecloth.

  Upon their return to the lab, Helen, visibly calmed, agreed to—nay, insisted upon—the X-ray. Price, no fool, took Mr. Duncan aside and asked him if he would object to being searched. Mr. Duncan did object, “murmuring something about his underclothing.” It always comes down to underpants with these guys.

  More support for the regurgitation theory comes from the research department of the London Spiritualist Alliance, which conducted some of its own investigatory séances with Mrs. Duncan. On June 12 of that same summer, Helen was asked to swallow a pill containing methylene blue, so that anything regurgitated would be marked by the dye. No cheesecloth appeared that night (though the medium at one point attempted to pass off her tongue as ectoplasm).

  Two weeks after the last Duncan séance, the council of the NLPR called Mr. Duncan in to a meeting and confided their suspicions. They were well armed. Price had with him a detailed and damning eleven-page lab report of a chemical analysis of a cutting of Duncan ectoplasm, which Mrs. Duncan’s spirit guide Albert agreed to make available. (Price describes this séance as resembling a sewing bee, with its seated circle of men and women, all poised with scissors, awaiting Albert’s go-ahead.) The council then showed Duncan a photograph of his wife draped in her ectoplasm side by side with a photo of Price’s ever-game secretary Ethel similarly posed and draped with a length of Woolworth’s cheesecloth. Duncan was unable to tell the difference. Finally, at a “heart-to-heart” on June 22, Mr. Duncan concurred that it was likely that the ectoplasm was produced by regurgitation, though he insisted that it was “subconscious regurgitation.”

  “We pointed out,” writes Price, “that…in that case she would have to…buy the cheese cloth subconsciously…and swallow the bag subconsciously.” The aptly named Dr. Price offered Mr. Duncan one hundred pounds to convince his wife to be filmed in the act. Duncan promised to do what he could, but the couple lit out for Scotland the following morning.

  The ectoplasm in the box at my feet is dated 1939, so Helen got up to her tricks at least once more. It’s possible the sample is one of the last of its species. It had been three years since Margery had been coaxed out of retirement for the dispirited rabbit-hutch sitting. Kathleen Goligher had long since disappeared from the scene. There hadn’t been an article about ectoplasm in the New York Times for twelve years. For all I know, this is the last sample ever produced, ectoplasm’s Ishi.

  Inside the box is an envelope tied with a length of pink bias tape. I take it out and place it on the table. I pull one end of the pink ribbon, slowly and with drama, like a man uncorseting his lover. Rather than the more typical and compactible cheesecloth or chiffon, it is some kind of cotton with a satiny finish. The stains are faint and brown, the smell manageable but detectable. I unfold it to get a rough idea of size—I’d say ten feet by three feet. It’s huge. It’s as though the Keeper of Manuscripts and Archives came in drunk one day and got the Shroud of Turin mixed up with Helen Duncan’s ectoplasm. The Hebrew reader glances up, then returns to her work without comment.

  I don’t care how many children marched down the Duncan birth canal; I have a hard time believing any woman could “secret” this much fabric through that size opening. Barring a visit to the surgical practice of Boston gynecologist Dr. Crandon, my guess is that Mr. Duncan—who insisted on being seated next to his wife at séances—slipped it to her undetected.

  Despite his travails with the Duncans, Harry Price did not give up hope that some mediums were possessed of genuine powers. Price’s book concludes with an optimistic pronouncement about the authenticity of the medium Rudi Schneider, known for ejaculating during particularly heady séances. (To my surprise and his credit, Schneider did not try to pass off the ejaculate as ectoplasm.) I don’t have the full story on Schneider, nor am I going to go dig it up, because I want to get back to the present. Fast-forward to the NLPR of 2004: The University of Arizona Human Energy Systems Laboratory, where they test modern-day mediums.

  I put the ectoplasm back in its envelope, tie the pretty pink ribbon, and return the box to its keeper. By 8 p.m., I’m back in London, at a Pakistani restaurant down the street from my hotel. In honor of Margery Crandon, I order lamb.

  6

  The Large Claims of the Medium

  Reaching out to the dead in a University of Arizona lab

  GARY SCHWARTZ is an uncommon hash of academe and spirituality. He has a Phi Beta Kappa key from Cornell and a previous tenure at Yale, but he is best known for his laboratory tests of mediums (the subject of his book The Afterlife Experiments). He is a psychology professor at the University of Arizona,* as well as the founder of the university’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory. Waiting for him in my hotel lobby, I did not know whether to be looking for a man in a tweed jacket or a man in drawstring trousers or—help me—a man in both. Schwartz further muddied the waters by showing up in a double-breasted suit, with a white Jaguar parked in the lot. Whatever the heck he’s up to, he’s doing well with it.

  Schwartz’s experimental data have led him to the conclusion that there are people—rare and gifted mediums—who can communicate with people who have died. Unlike researchers I have met at the University of Virginia, the other American university currently hosting research on the paranormal, Schwartz will comfortably and without reservation voice his conclusions regarding the hereafter. He tells me, as we drive along Tucson’s glarey, succulent-accessorized streets, that he is working on a paper for American Psychologist called “Reexamining the Death Hypothesis.” As in, no one has actually proved that the death of a human body is the end of the trail for the personality that lived in it. It’s just a hypothesis.

  Like the medium researchers of
the early 1900s, Schwartz brings to his laboratory only the most talked-about mediums. John Edwards (of Crossing Over), for example, was one of his “dream team” of mediums tested in the Afterlife Experiments work. His most recent discovery is Allison DuBois (the medium upon whose life NBC’s Medium is based).

  Perhaps because I’d been reading a biography of the slovenly and bellicose Helen Duncan on the plane to Tucson, it did not cross my mind that a medium could look like a beauty pageant winner. DuBois has long, obedient rust-red hair that turns up just so on the ends and complements her coppery lipstick. Her blush and foundation could have been applied by airbrush, so perfect is the blending. She manages to look made-up at the same time as she looks completely natural and beautiful without device. I can no more understand how a woman does this than I can understand how a woman communicates with dead people. DuBois is paranormally good-looking.

  Before she became a medium, Allison DuBois was on a career track to the Maricopa County prosecutor’s office as a criminal prosecutor. In April 2000, someone got in her way. Well, more than that. “I went downstairs to get the laundry, and a man walked through me,” she told me at lunch. She was mounting an enthusiastic attack on an apple tart as large as her foot, which isn’t large as feet go, but very large as apple tarts go. DuBois’s delicate frame belies a robust enthusiasm for food, which seems to run over into her readings, which often include food preferences of the “discarnate,” as they say in these parts. The discarnate man in the laundry room being no exception: “I knew that he loved clam chowder, and that he’d had a heart attack.” She ran upstairs and told her husband Joe, who is an aerospace engineer. Joe blinked at her, as one might when abruptly confronted by one’s spouse’s possible mental disintegration, and then he said, “That’s my grandfather.”

  After a few months of running into dead people, DuBois saw a Dateline segment about Gary Schwartz’s medium research. “I thought, ‘I’m going to go see him. I’m going to prove to myself that I’m not really doing this, and then I’m going to get on with my career.’” DuBois impressed Schwartz as having genuine talent. The prosecutor’s office would have to wait.

  DuBois is one of four mediums taking part in a research project called the Asking Questions Study. I love this study, because it addresses one of my main beefs with medium-brokered encounters with the dead. Dead people never seem to address the obvious—the things you’d think they’d be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What’s it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I’m on the toilet? Would you cut that out? If the dead come through at all, they come through in cryptic little impressions: a stout woman with gray hair, a small black dog, the date May 23. It’s a maddening way to communicate. Schwartz and his mediums would reply that that’s the best the dead can manage, that they can’t speak sentences into the medium’s head. Impressions come through, and that’s all.

  Julie Beischel, the researcher behind the Asking Questions Study, wondered whether perhaps it was the case that the dead never provide this kind of information because no one ever bothers to ask them. Beischel is a University of Arizona psychology postdoctorate who, like DuBois, contacted Schwartz after seeing him on TV. Beischel was a pharmacology student whose interest in the paranormal was sparked after losing her mother. (This is a common theme among people involved in paranormal research. As she puts it, “Everyone doing this has lost somebody.” Certainly this was the case with some of spiritualism’s less likely converts: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and physicist Sir Oliver Lodge both lost sons during World War I.)

  Beischel assembled a list of thirty-two questions about the afterlife, which are being posed to two discarnates, via four mediums. (Each medium takes a turn with each of the two dead folks.) Beischel hadn’t analyzed the data at this point, but she gave me printouts of the answers she had collected. With both discarnates, the answers to a given question usually differed with each different medium. “Do you eat?” for example, garnered an even split of yes’s and no’s. I asked Beischel how she interpreted this. She said, very straightforwardly, as is her manner: “My interpretation is that the mediums are just guessing, or the answer is biased by the medium’s own ideas of what the afterlife is like, or the questions don’t have enough emotional interest for the discarnate to give a strong answer.” Which more or less covers all the bases. In case the answers are in fact coming from the Beyond, I’ve culled some highlights for you, from various mediums. We’ll start with the good news:

  Q . What do you do every day?

  A . She’s showing herself at the table eating.

  Q . What type of “body” do you have?

  A . She says fat people are thin here. . . .

  Q . How is the weather?

  A . It’s Florida without the humidity.

  And now, some less good news:

  Q . Is there music?

  A . Yes. She whips out a xylophone and goes, bum, bum, bum bum bum. And I also get the Carpenters.

  Q . Are there angels?

  A . Yeah . . . but they’ve got their own clique going. They’ve got their own little deal going on.

  Q . Do you engage in sexual behavior?

  A . I don’t know if, like, she can and she chooses not to or what the deal is, but it’s like, no, not really.

  And a point of interest for aspiring writers…

  He’s showing me writing. [Experimenter: He’s writing a book?] I don’t know. I mean, understanding the fact that there are no, you know, physical constraints, so what the hell, why not, you know? Get your story placed somewhere. I don’t know where the hell it would be placed, but somewhere….

  To the formal study data, I feel I must add one last statement about the afterlife, passed along to me by Allison DuBois, who received it from an unnamed discarnate during a private sitting: “I can wear pleated pants now.”

  Though Beischel is the first to have addressed these issues in the purview of a modern university-based research study, afterlife investigators and spiritualists have, on occasion over the years, posed these sorts of questions to the dead. Matla and Zaalberg van Zelst, the Dutch physicists who appeared in Chapter 4 with their soul-proving cylinder-in-a-box gizmo, grilled the occasional homme-force, as they termed it, via a medium, about conditions on the other side. The hommes-force were, like their interviewers, scientifically minded and tended to provide answers that, while marvelously detailed, did not always get at the things we live humans are itching to know. They’d natter on about the density and specific gravity of an homme-force, for instance, or the fact that when they need to move briskly, they assume a spiral form thirty-five centimeters in length and with fourteen turnings, which resembles in shape and hopefully nothing else the type of bacteria found in “les matières fécales.” You have to wade to the end of the book to find the good stuff, which is nothing short of alarming: Although nearsighted, they can see through our clothing and sometimes even through our skin. If the room is quiet, they can read our thoughts.

  In the end, I couldn’t decide if being an homme-force represented an improvement over life on earth. On the one hand, there are no ailments, no need to work or secure lodgings. You own nothing, and you have no cares or obligations. One of Matla’s respondents confessed that the life of an homme-force, despite the novel joys of eavesdropping on thoughts and peering through ladies’ undergarments, soon loses its luster. Because they depend entirely on us for their “distractions,” it said, they grow bored during the night while we sleep. And, alas, “il n’a pas de sexe.” There is no sex.

  This vision of the afterlife as DMV waiting room differs widely from that of spiritualism bigwig Arthur Findlay, who, over the course of three séances with a medium named Sloane, posed fifty-three questions about the afterlife. Various discarnates chimed in with replies. Following is the transcript of a reply to “Will you tell me something about your world?” taken from Findlay’s 1955 autobiography Looking Back. Ba
sically, everything that exists here on earth exists in the Beyond, except possibly composting:

  We can sit down together and enjoy each other’s company…. We have books and we can read them…. Wecan have a long walk in the country…. We all smell the same aroma of the flowers and the fields as you do. We gather the flowers as you do…. Here we have no decay in flower or field as you have. Vegetable life just stops growing and disappears.

  Myself, I am hoping that neither Matla nor Findlay is correct, and that the vision of Reverend Dr. G. Owen represents our true future. In a February 5, 1923, New York Times article (“Owen Says Heaven Needs Active Men: Sailing One of Pastimes”), Owen laid out the details:

  Big business men are needed in heaven, according to Rev. Dr. G. Owen, an Anglican clergyman who lectured on spirits yesterday afternoon at the Broadhurst Theatre.

  The vigilant eye of the expert accountant and the driving energy of the strong executive have ample opportunity for exercise, the speaker said, although everything is on an altruistic basis…. Doctors are not needed to treat spirit patients, because diseases do not exist, and they are immediately engaged in different specialties and lines of research….

  Spirits walk, but some ride about in chariots…. “We don’t really need them, but sometimes we find them convenient,” Dr. Owen said he was told. The clergyman…told of placid lakes, rivers and seas and of the inhabitants going about in boats of all kinds, including sailboats. Aerial navigation requires attentive skippership, the clergyman explained, because the spirit body cuts through the attenuated atmosphere at high speed and is steered purely by thought.