Supernatural (20 page)

And what of those pioneers of the paranormal, Joseph Rodes Buchanan and William Denton?
Sadly, it must be recorded that neither of them achieved the place in intellectual history that they undoubtedly deserve.
Denton, the younger of the two, died in 1883, at the age of sixty, and was thereafter virtually forgotten.
Buchanan fared slightly better.
His
Manual of Psychometry
came out in 1885, and gained him new readers and followers.
But by that time, his original ‘nerve aura’ theory of psychometry had been expanded to a point that most serious investigators found totally unacceptable.

The experiment that placed him beyond the limits of science was suggested by his interest in the new art of photography (for we are now retracing our steps to the 1850s).
He tried handing photographs—suitably covered—to the psychometer, to see what impressions they produced.
And with good psychometers like his wife he received convincing and accurate descriptions of the sitter.
But this experiment ought
not
to have worked, since a photograph is mechanically produced, and therefore—unless its subject happened to have held it in his hands—should carry no personal ‘vibrations’.
Yet it
did
work.
Buchanan concluded that ‘there was not, in such cases, any emanation from the person described, and the picture was merely the presentation of an idea to be grasped
by the intuitive perception which is independent of vision’.
[My italics].

Clearly, this innocent-sounding statement either conceals a total breakdown of logic, or represents a revolutionary new theory of the nature of psychometry.
According to Buchanan, it was a new theory.
‘Hence’, he declares, ‘it became apparent that the object for psychometry was in such cases merely an index [he means an indication] leading the mind to the object represented, and need not be a picture, a relic, or anything associated in any way with the person or thing to be explored.’

If this ‘intuitive perception which is independent of vision’ could work on a photograph, it ought to work just as well on a mere name.
Buchanan tried it ‘I wrote the name of a friend and placed it in the hands of a good psychometer, who had no difficulty, notwithstanding her doubts of so novel a proceeding .
.
.
in giving as good a description of Dr N.
as if he had made the description from an autograph.’

Buchanan was carried away by wild enthusiasm.
‘Psychometry’, he declared, ‘is the earthly IRRADIATION OF OMNISCIENCE and it will be known hereafter to penetrate all things.’
And he went on to ask his sensitives to psychometrize the names of all kinds of famous people: Homer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jesus, Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha and St Paul.
A later volume called
Primitive Christianity
even contains a re-edited version of the Gospel of St John.

And if a psychometrist can gather information from the past, then why not from the future?
By 1884, the whole world was talking about the Moslem revolt in the Sudan, led by a religious fanatic called the Mahdi.
General Gordon had been sent to try to subdue him.
Buchanan wrote the name ‘Mahdi’ on a sheet of paper, and asked a number of his students to try their powers on it.
They produced impressions of a tropical country, a bloody war, men in Arab dress, and a leader of deep religious convictions—all of which might have been expected if they were unconsciously reading Buchanan’s mind.
What is rather more surprising is that many of their predictions for the future were accurate.
Buchanan admired the Mahdi and disliked the British, so any predictions based on his subconscious hopes would involve victory for the Mahdi and defeat for the British.
In fact, most of his students predicted that the Mahdi would ultimately be unsuccessful.
When Buchanan asked ‘Is he about to capture a city?’
(meaning Khartoum) the reply was: ‘He is preparing for an attack, but will be repulsed.’
In fact, the Mahdi
did
attack Khartoum, and was repulsed.
Later, Buchanan again asked his wife about the war, and she predicted another attack with terrible bloodshed; within two days, the Mahdi had stormed Khartoum and murdered all the defenders, including Gordon.
She went on to prophesy that the war would not continue in the summer, and that the British would withdraw their troops; both things happened as she had said.
The prediction that ‘the war will be disastrous’ for the Mahdi was also fulfilled; success made him fat and lazy; after the fall of Khartoum he withdrew into his harem for a prolonged debauch and died a few months later.

None of this surprised Buchanan; if, after all, psychometry was the ‘irradiation of omniscience’, the future should present no more problems than the past.
Buchanan pointed out, reasonably, that there have been many well-authenticated cases of precognition—he devotes a whole appendix of his
Manual
to the remarkable story of the French author Jacques Cazotte who, at a dinner party just before the French Revolution, accurately foretold the fate of almost everyone sitting at the table: Chamfort would open his veins with a razor, Condorcet would take poison to avoid the guillotine, and a notorious atheist named La Harpe would become a Christian.
La Harpe was so derisive that he went home and wrote it all down.
But in due course, it all happened exactly as Cazotte had said—even to La Harpe becoming a monk.
I shall discuss this more fully in
Chapter 13
.

As far as contemporary science was concerned, all this was enough to place Buchanan beyond the pale.
Even the American Society for Psychical Research—formed in the same year that the
Manual
was published—found nothing of interest in Buchanan’s latest theories.
Yet it is worth remarking, in passing, that some of Buchanan’s own prophecies were surprisingly accurate.
In 1859, he published in the
Louisville Journal
a prediction that America would experience six years of calamity; the Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865.
In 1885, he predicted a ‘period of calamity thirty years hence’—twenty-nine years before the Great War.
He also remarked that there would probably be an ‘elemental convulsion’ on the Pacific side of America, and that ‘I would prefer not to reside in San Francisco at that time’.
At the time Buchanan was writing, the only Californian earthquake in which there had been fatalities (40 dead) had occurred in 1868, and it involved six major cities.
Buchanan had been dead six years when the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed 28,000 houses and killed 700 people.

He also had a prophecy concerning himself: that in the coming century he would be remembered as the ‘herald of the coming illumination’, and that a statue would be erected to him.
This prophecy has not so far been fulfilled; but there is still time.

1.
For a longer account of both cases see chapters
4
and
7
.

1.
Dream and Reality,
Chapter 7
.

1.
See Antisocial or Criminal Acts and Hypnosis
by Paul J.
Reiter; also my own
Written in Blood
(1990).

The Coming of the Spirits

T
HE ECLIPSE OF
Buchanan, Denton and Hudson cannot be blamed entirely on Sigmund Freud.
Equally decisive was the rise of the movement called Spiritualism, which swept across Europe and America in the 1850s, even reaching the most far-flung outposts of the Russian empire.
This had its starting point in a series of extraordinary events that occurred in the home of the Fox family, in Hydesville, New York, which we shall examine in a moment.
But long before anyone outside New York had heard of the Fox family, a book about ‘spirits’ was creating a sensation on the other side of the Atlantic.
It was called
The Night Side of Nature,
and its authoress was an Edinburgh housewife named Catherine Crowe, who had already achieved a modest success with novels like
Susan Hopley
and
Lily Dawson. The Night Side of Nature
—subtitled ‘Ghosts and Ghost Seers’—made her a celebrity, and went on to become one of the most influential books of the 19th century.

Regrettably, Mrs Crowe did not enjoy her success for long.
In 1859, she produced a treatise called ‘Spiritualism and the Age We Live In’—which, according to the
Dictionary of National Biography,
evinced ‘a morbid and despondent turn of mind’, and soon after this she went insane—a fate her contemporaries must have felt she had invited by her interest in such macabre subjects.
She recovered, but wrote little between then and her death in 1876.
The Night Side of Nature
remained as popular as ever, and was still on sale on railway bookstalls (price two shillings) at the turn of the century.

The author of the piece in the
Dictionary of National Biography
was clearly not a believer in ghosts and ghost seers; for while he admits that the book is ‘one of the best collections of supernatural stories in our language’, he then attacks Mrs Crowe for being ‘extremely credulous and uncritical’.
The reproach is unfair; the book would not have become so influential if it had been merely a collection of ghost stories.
What the Victorians liked about it was its air of sturdy commonsense, and its attempts to treat the phenomena with detachment.
It would be more than thirty years before scientific investigators approached the supernatural in a spirit of systematic research.
But Mrs Crowe did her best, citing letters and documents and offering names of witnesses and dates.

The book that inspired
The Night Side of Nature
was another nineteenth-century bestseller called
The Seeress of Prevorst.
It was written by Dr Justinus A.C.
Kerner, a rich and eccentric doctor who was also a well-known poet and song-writer.
In 1826, the 40-year-old Kerner was practising in Weinsberg, near Heilbronn, when he was consulted by the relatives of a woman called Friederike Hauffe, who was dying of a wasting disease.
She had lost all her teeth and looked like a walking skeleton.

It seemed that marriage was responsible for her sad condition.
Ever since childhood she had fallen into trances, seen visions, and conversed with invisible spirits.
She could also accurately predict the future.
When she was nineteen, she had married a cousin, and gone into depression; at twenty, her first child was born, and she began to develop hysterical symptoms.
Every evening, she fell into a trance in which she saw spirits of the dead.

Kerner was at first inclined to be sceptical about her visions and spirits—he put them down to hysteria.
Yet he found Friederike Hauffe a fascinating case for study.
She claimed to be able to see into the human body, and certainly had a remarkably precise knowledge of the nervous system.
She could read with her stomach—Kerner tested her by making her lie down with her eyes closed, and laid documents on her bare midriff; she read them perfectly.
She could make geometrical drawings at great speed, even in the dark, and could draw perfect circles that looked as if they had been drawn by compasses.
She claimed that her spirit often left her body and hovered above it.

Kerner tried ordinary medicines on her, but they had no effect.
Friederike told him that if he placed her in a ‘magnetic trance’ the spirits would instruct him on how to treat her, but he was reluctant to accept this advice.
Eventually, he decided that he might as well try the effects of mesmerism.

Friederike reacted well to ‘magnetism’, passing easily into a trance.
But Kerner remained sceptical about the things she said in this condition.
Then, one day, a remarkable experience changed his mind.
Friederike declared that she was being haunted by an unpleasant man with a squint.
From her description, Kerner recognised him as a man who had died a few years earlier.
It seemed, according to Friederike, that the man was suffering from a guilty conscience.
He had been involved in embezzlement and, after his death, another man had been blamed.
Now he wanted to clear the man’s name, for the sake of his widow.
This could be done by means of a certain document, which would be found in a chest.
The spirit ‘showed’ Friederike the room where the document was to be found, and a man who was working there.
Her description was so good that Kerner was able to identify him as a certain Judge Heyd.
In her ‘vision’, Friederike had seen Judge Heyd sitting in a certain place in this room, and the chest containing the document on the table.
The document was apparently not in its proper numerical order, which is why it had not been found.

When Kerner told him about his patient’s vision, Judge Heyd was astounded; he
had
been sitting in the position described on that particular day (Christmas Day), and the chest, contrary to regulations, had been left open on the table.
When they searched, the document turned up where Friederike had said it would.
The widow of the man who had been wrongly accused was able to obtain redress.

From now on, Kerner believed in Friederike’s supernatural powers, and took whatever she said seriously.
She told him that we are surrounded by spirits all the time, and that she was able to see them.
These spirits often try to attract our attention in various ways: knocking, movement of objects, throwing of sand.
And by way of convincing him, Friederike persuaded one of the spirits to make rapping noises, to make gravel and ash fall from the air, and to make a stool float up into the air.
Kerner watched with amazement as the stool rose gently, then floated down again.

Friederike provided him with further proof of the accuracy of her visions when she succeeded in putting an end to a haunting.
Kerner heard about a house where the ghost of an old man was frightening the inhabitants.
He brought one of them, a woman, along to see Friederike; the seeress went into a trance and explained that the ghost was that of a man called Bellon, who was an ‘earth-bound spirit’ as a result of defrauding two orphans.
Kerner made enquiries, but no one had ever heard of a man called Bellon.
But since the ghost claimed that he had been Burgomeister, it seemed probable that some record existed.
He claimed he had been Burgomeister in the year 1700, and had died at the age of 79 Armed with this information, Kerner asked the present mayor to check the legal documents; they soon found that in the year 1700, a man called Bellon
had
been Burgomeister and director of the local orphanage.
He had died in 1740 at the age of 79.
After ‘confessing’, the spirit took its departure.