Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (18 page)

I asked Graaff whether any of the Germans had interpreted their appliances’ words as dispatches from the Beyond. He told the tale of a farmer who owned the fields around the
mighty Elmshorn transmitting station where Graaff used to work, just north of Hamburg. “He’d been walking the fields, checking the fences, when all of a sudden he came running to the station manager, deadly pale, saying, ‘Sir, I heard the Holy Ghost speaking to me! It came from a piece of wire sticking out of the ground!’” The Ghost spoke in the same cryptic, truncated manner effected by Raudive’s and Jürgenson’s ghosts. Graaff and the manager followed the farmer out to the wire, which was whispering and hissing when they arrived, and every now and again issuing an intelligible phrase. The manager leaned down and pulled the wire from the earth, silencing the Holy Ghost and leaving the farmer to more pedestrian concerns, like the effects of two-hundred-thousand-watt radio towers on farm animals.

You can see and hear your own Holy Ghost if you visit the grounds of an exceptionally robust transmitter, such as the ones operated by Voice of America. Wander up to the metal fencing around the facility after dark, Graaff says, and you might be able to see pale glimmering sparks here and there along the metal. Lean in close and you may hear the sparks singing—or talking, depending on what’s being broadcast.

WILSON VAN DUSEN was the chief psychologist at the Mendocino State Hospital in northern California for many years. This was an inpatient facility for the severely mentally ill—chronic schizophrenics and alcoholics, the brain-damaged, the senile—so he spent a lot of time listening to his patients talk about their “others”: the voices in their heads who cussed at them and threatened them and needled and harassed them—or, very occasionally, encouraged and inspired them. At one
point, he decided to try to talk to the voices themselves. “I would question these other persons directly,” he wrote in a pamphlet entitled
The Presence of Spirits in Madness
, “and instructed the patient to give a word-for-word account of what the voices answered. In this way, I could hold long dialogues with a patient’s hallucinations.” At one point, he was administering Rorschach inkblot tests to the voices. I began to picture the hallucinations as actual inpatients, scowling men in ratty slippers, muttering in the corridors and disrupting bingo games. After interviewing twenty such patients, he decided that he agreed with the patients that their “others” were not hallucinations but inhabitants of a different order of beings.

Dr. Van Dusen is a Swedenborgian—a follower of the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century mining engineer/inventor/anatomist who began having religious visions in his forties. Swedenborg gained renown as a philosopher and wrote at length about the heaven of his visions, a dream realm inhabited by wingless angels and demons, which, he held, had once been mortal humans. Van Dusen began to notice that his patients’ “others” fell into similar camps of good and evil, with the evil well outnumbering the good, and that they shared numerous traits with Swedenborg’s opposing spirit entities.

You might be thinking, and I could not blame you, that it is more plausible that Emanuel Swedenborg was having schizophrenic episodes than that the schizophrenics were having Swedenborgian episodes. However, by all measures, Swedenborg was not psychotic. He maintained a productive existence as a statesman and theologian, and enough people took—and take—him seriously for the Swedenborgian Church to have become, and to remain, a thriving international denomination.

I was introduced to Van Dusen’s theories by an EVP
enthusiast who was thinking of investigating the possibility that the voices schizophrenics hear are the same voices that wind up on EVP tapes, i.e., voices of discarnate entities. I ran this by the folks at England’s Hearing Voices Network, a support organization for people with auditory hallucinations. My e-mail was answered by a helpful and forthcoming staffer and “voice-hearer” named Mickey who said that although it is network policy to accept all members’ explanations for their voices, and although he didn’t know much about EVP, it was his personal opinion that the notion was nonsense. However, he did know quite a few people whose voices seemed so real to them that they tried to tape-record them. The voice-hearers inhabit the opposite conundrum of the EVP people: The voices are audible (to them) at the time, but the tapes are always blank.

Thomas Watson, coinventor of the telephone, describes in his autobiography being contacted on several occasions by schizophrenics who believed that the words in their heads were being secretly broadcast from distant individuals. Most sought his advice on how to block the signals, but one enterprising psychotic offered—for a fee of fifteen dollars a week—to let Watson “take off the top of his skull and study the mechanism at work”: 

Mickey directed me to the research section of the Hearing Voices Network website, where it said that if a brain scan is done on a schizophrenic as he or she is hearing voices, the scan will show activity in the part of the brain involved in speech production. Meaning that the voices are the “inner speech” of the person who hears them.

BOTH JÜRGENSON AND Raudive have long since moved on to the other side of the tape recorder.
*
(David Ellis wrote Raudive’s obituary in the
Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research
, noting, in a classic JSPR moment, that the “strain of a conference on the parakeet voices … proved too much for him.”) Their deaths did not extinguish the worldwide enthusiasm for EVP, nor did David Ellis’s fellowship findings. In skimming the newsletters of EVP groups, I find the phenomenon treated ipso facto as communication with the dead. Why, given the negative findings of respectable, open-minded academics, are these folks so certain?

“It’s one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it’s a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists,” says Imants Baruss. Dean Radin, a former electrical engineer and the senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, agrees. “EVP researchers may be genuinely sincere, but insufficiently critical to assess their own results.” They’re convinced by what they’ve heard, and that is enough.

The sun is packing to leave when Dave Oester joins me on the walkway. I tell him I’m not getting anything. He asks me if I introduced myself to the entities before I started taping. “That’s important,” he says. “I always say, ‘I’m Dave Oester of the IGHS, and I’d like to document the existence of life after death. I’d like to get your permission.’ ”

I clear my throat. “
HI, I’M MARY ROACH
…” You can’t see where these guys are, so it’s hard to know how loud to talk. “
I’M WITH THE IGHS, THOUGH NOT ACTUALLYA MEMBER AS SUCH
.”

“You can say it to yourself, Mary. They read your thoughts.”

“They do?”

Dave nods his head. “Sure they do.”

Well, no wonder they’re ignoring me.

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, each new breakthrough in the science of communications is inevitably recruited by someone with a shining for things spiritual. As magicians like Houdini and Britain’s Harry Price began exposing the elaborate parlor tricks of the spiritualist mediums, promoters of the afterlife began incorporating gadgetry into their routines. Machines lent an air of scientific respectability to their claims. They promised a purer, seemingly less corruptible connection with the dead. You can’t trust a human not to fake ectoplasm out of sheep lungs, but you ought to be able to trust a machine.

So instead of a medium speaking in a trance, you had a medium operating a “psychic” typewriter or Morse code console or Vandermeulen Spirit Indicator. You hadn’t eliminated the middlemen, you’d simply outfitted them with impressive-looking
machines. Séances were more technically complicated, but fundamentally unchanged.

Recording devices proved immediately popular with the spiritualist mediums—not to pick up otherwise inaudible communications, but to bolster believability. For what is a recording but a means of capturing and preserving something otherwise fleeting and unprovable? I think Dr. Neville Whymant put it best. An eminent—and eminently corruptible—scholar of the Orient, Dr. Whymant had been called upon by his friend Judge Cannon to speak for the authenticity of a phonograph recording of Confucius, speaking through the voice of medium George Valiantine, at a séance in Cannon’s home in 1926. Valiantine was said by Whymant to be speaking in a (conveniently) “extinct” Chinese dialect. “I think you will agree,” observed Whymant, “that though it is possible that you might hallucinate people, you could not hallucinate a gramophone.”

Phonograph historian D. H. Mason spent weeks trying to track down a copy of the Confucius sessions. He did not succeed, though he did manage to find an itemized description of a boxed set of Valiantine recordings. Highlights included a war whoop by Valiantine’s main spirit guide Kokoan, and “a pathetic song” sung in a shrill falsetto by Bert Everett, another Valiantine guide.
*

Mason published a three-part article, including discography, on the topic of séance recording sessions. While the early efforts were merely recorded documents of the sittings—one particularly vigorous medium held forth sufficiently long to fill nine twelve-inch double-sided 78s—very soon the mediums took to singing while in trance, in the persona and voice of the spirit guide. Not surprisingly, given the preponderance of female mediums, the spirit guides (most of them male) tended to be tenors. It was an odd coupling: the high, sweet tones of the tenor register issuing from entities with hypermasculine handles like Power or Hotep. Perhaps this explains the appearance, in 1930, of an Italian spirit guide. Sabbatini, the Italian tenor, began turning up at the séances of prominent Cape Town medium Mrs. T. H. Butters. Mason quotes a description of a Sabbatini performance in a 1931 issue of
The Two Worlds
, the newspaper of the Spiritualists’ National Union: “While Mrs. Butters was under the control of the spirit, he delighted the sitters by singing Italian songs in a ringing tenor voice, and so powerful were the manifestations that in March this year the friends of Mrs. Butters decided to make a gramophone record of the voice.” The recording quality was diminished somewhat by Mrs. Butters’s tendency to stray from the microphone and move about the room “making operatic gestures,” but was otherwise deemed to be of excellent quality.

This obscure musical genre reached its peak on April 3, 1939, when London’s Balham Psychic Research Society held a séance
inside the studios of the Decca Record Company.
Presaging
the current vogue of single-name recording artists, our singing spirit guide was billed simply as Reuben. Reuben, performing via the vocal cords of medium Jack Webber, entertained séance guests with baritone renderings of “Lead Kindly Light” and “There’s a Land,” an anthem made famous by renowned English contralto Madame Clara Butt.
*

Whether the spirits sang or simply spoke, the new recording technologies expanded the medium’s options for income. In addition to holding séances, he or she could also sell tapes or records. The largest “direct voice”—meaning no spirit guide was employed; the deceased spoke directly through the medium’s voice—recording enterprise was that of British medium Leslie Flint. Flint, who died in 1994, managed to attract a highbrow crowd of discarnates to his séances. If you run a web search on him, you’ll find sites where you can hear lengthy postmortem recordings of Gandhi, Oscar Wilde, Chopin (who has, we learn, resumed composing following a brief stint decomposing), the Archbishop of Canterbury, and renowned Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry. (More on Dame Ellen later.)

As was the custom, Flint carried out his séances in darkness. He insisted that the voices came not from his own voice box but from one built up, to quote one website, “from ectoplasm drawn from the medium and the sitters.” The site displays a circa 1960 photograph of Flint, seated calmly in a chair, wearing suit, tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and what appears to be
the aftermath of a cafeteria food fight. The caption says, “Flint with ectoplasm resting on his shoulder.” I don’t know what Gandhi or Chopin sounded like while alive, so I can’t comment on the verisimilitude of the recordings. But I can comment that Leslie Flint said he discovered his gift one evening at the cinema, upon hearing—as one will at cinemas—“voices whisper in the dark.”

It was not only the mediums who were fond of gadgetry, but the paranormal researchers who put them through their paces. Initially, technology was recruited to prevent fraud or, more often, to document or quantify the mediums’ powers. With few exceptions, the devices were christened in the syllabically overwrought vernacular of the Serious Laboratory Device. Microscopes now had to share the lab bench with Dynamoscopes and Telekinetoscopes. The staid and stately Ometer family, heretofore limited to Thermo, Baro, Speedo, and Sphygno, was asked to take in the Sthenometer, the Biometer, the Suggestometer, the Magnetometer, and the Galvanometer.
*
I tried to track down even one of these machines, but, oddly and disappointingly, no museum or private collection seems to exist. “The psychical organizations didn’t approach these things from a historian’s perspective,”
says Grady Hendrix, former office manager of the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City. “These gadgets weren’t something that more modern parapsychologists would have deemed worthy of saving. It’s not an era they’re proud of.”

As the reputations of mediums continued to erode, paranormal researchers turned their attention toward devising some sort of direct spirit communication device, something that would remove the medium from the process entirely. F. R. Melton’s Psychic Telephone managed to get the medium out of the room, but not entirely out of the picture. The “telephone” consisted of an inflatable rubber bladder attached to a transmitter, attached, in turn, to a pair of headphones. The bladder was said to contain “psychic air” full of spirit voices that could be amplified and transmitted into the headphones. How do you fill a balloon with psychic air? You have a medium blow it up. Magician-cum-paranormalist Harry Price tested the device in his National Laboratory for Psychical Research and found it to be, literally and figuratively, so much hot air.