The Search for Bridey Murphy (35 page)

Other investigators, too, were encountering perfect scores. One such case was that of Lillian, a nine-year-old girl who was tested by researcher Margaret Pegram. A prize of fifty cents had been offered for a perfect score of twenty-five, while candy would be given for other less perfect scores. Serious little Lillian, though, had her heart set on the half dollar, not the candy. She made it clear that she was determined to win the money. Then she said, “Don’t say anything; I’m going to try something.” Turning her back, she stood for a moment with her eyes closed. When she turned again, her lips were moving, and she continued to move her lips all through the test, as though she were speaking to herself. When she was asked what she had been saying, she answered, “I was wishing all the time that I could get twenty-five.” And she did. This is one of many indications that the more emotional the background and the more keyed up the subject, the greater the possibility for a high score.

If ESP is purely physical—if the mind is strictly mechanistic—then the factor of distance (space) should have some measurable, lawful effect upon its occurrence. The next step, therefore, was to ascertain whether the mind truly transcended space—to determine, that is, whether distance has any systematic effect upon telepathic and clair
voyant perception. Long before the controlled laboratory experiments were inaugurated, the possibility that mind transcends space had at least been suggested by myriad spontaneous occurrences.

There had been, for instance, such cases as the one concerning Dr. Emanuel Swedenborg. This renowned Swedish scientist and philosopher while in Göteborg (in 1759) one day described a fire blazing in Stockholm, three hundred miles distant. Rendering a detailed account of the fire to city authorities and naming the owner of the burned house, he even stated the time when the fire was put out. The accuracy of his clairvoyant vision was confirmed several days later by royal messenger.

Another account, involving a span of about six thousand miles, was sent to me by an actress who had always been fascinated by her mother’s extrasensory talents: “I remember very well that day that my mother and sister and myself sat at breakfast. Mother had had a particularly vivid dream the night before. In the dream she passed through a great deal of black space and found herself entering the parlor of her home in Verbacz, a small town formerly in Hungary and now in Yugoslavia. The parlor was filled with mourners sitting around a coffin, and my mother suddenly knew who was in the coffin, and crying, ‘Mama, Mama!’ rushed forward. The dream was so vivid that it still disturbed her as she told us about it, and before we left for school she had already sat down to write to her sister, Lisl, about it. It would take several weeks to get a reply to the letter, as there was no air mail to Europe at that time, and Pueblo, Colorado, is quite a long way from Verbacz. The weeks passed, and the answer came. On the date of my mother’s dream my grandmother had died. She had been in perfect health, without a day’s illness, had done the baking and a washing, and died quite suddenly. Due to the time difference, she had undoubtedly been laid out and the first mourners had arrived at the time my mother had the dream. Whether the dream was a dream or an actual passage through time and space, I don’t know. I know my mother has the letter substantiating her unique dream, and quite possibly Aunt Lisl still has the post-marked letter from my mother. Perhaps my mother would correct several of these details, but this is substantially the story of what happened. I’m sure every family has its own stories of this nature, but I’m rather glad we have it documented at any rate.”

An interesting dual case, which concerned one person at sea and another on land, was featured in
Coronet
magazine.
¹
A British lieutenant aboard a submarine dreamed that he saw his sister sleeping at a desk in a munitions factory where she worked. And then he saw in his
dream that a fire was starting, so he tried desperately to awaken his sister. Suddenly there was a terrible explosion, and the lieutenant awakened abruptly from his nightmare. To his surprise, he found the watchkeeper and the others near asphyxiation from escaping gas. But he finally managed to rouse them in time to avoid disaster. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

When the lieutenant reached port, there was a letter from his sister—a letter which described a calamitous explosion, which took place the same day as the lieutenant’s asphyxiation episode, in the factory where she worked. She wrote:

I escaped without a scratch. I had dozed off at a desk in another building and was having a terrifying dream about you. I saw you and your crew lying motionless in your submarine.

I tried to awaken you but I simply couldn’t. The munitions explosion shattered my dream and woke me. Had I not fallen asleep where I was, I, too, would have been blown to pieces. The explosion occurred at 10 in the morning….

As interesting as the many spontaneous cases may be, they are still not sufficient to decide an issue of such consequence. The question of whether ESP was independent of space had to be submitted to the laboratory. But here, too, it was found that distance did not limit the success of the ESP experiments in any measurable way. From North Carolina to Yugoslavia—in fact, one series of controlled experiments was actually conducted between Dr. Marchesi of Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and collaborators at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina—numerous researchers handed down the same verdict: Distance has shown no effect whatsoever upon ESP performance. And since no known physical energy remains unaffected by distance, it would seem to indicate that extrasensory perception must be non-physical.

So far, the scientific method has demonstrated that the mind can perceive the thoughts of another person and that it can also perceive objects or events without the use of the senses. The laboratory has further established that these facts, telepathy and clairvoyance, are capable of snubbing the physical properties of space and time—the mind can reach across space and forward into time. But there is
still another facet to be explored: What about this business of “mind over matter”?

During a conversation many years ago with a corporation executive, after the topic had drifted from steel production to the lack of knowledge about human mental processes, I listened to a statement that startled me. “If we really knew how to utilize the power of the human mind.” the tycoon stated as he pointed to an ash tray on his desk, “we could probably move that ash tray across the desk just by skillfully employing the force of the mind.”

To me, this statement seemed wild enough in itself. But coming from a conservative corporation official, it was sheer heresy. He observed my puzzled glance, but he didn’t back up. Instead, he reminded me that literature, from the most ancient writings to the magazine of last week, was studded with records of mind over matter.

On thinking it over, I had to admit that there is no scarcity of indications that the mind can influence matter. There are, for one thing, the countless religious miracles, and these are by no means confined to biblical references. And even when we turn our attention to fields other than the religious, the incidents keep right on piling up. There are many accounts of “suspended animation” which involve the defiance of physical laws while the subject either remained under water or was “buried alive” for incredibly extended periods of time… the charming away of warts and other growths without physical means from the skins of animals… the fantastic effects of voodooism, as related by anthropologists, including the lévitation of objects, the hurling of stones by unseen hands, and magical rain-making.

A made-to-order thunderstorm is described by Geoffrey Gorer in his book,
Africa Dances
:

It was a particularly fine and cloudless afternoon when we visited the convent of the worshippers of Heviosso, the thunder fetish. After the usual sacrifice, three men went into a trance inside the hut, while we stood in what shade we could find in the courtyard. Suddenly against the blue sky there was a flash of lightning followed shortly by a loud peal of thunder, the flashes and thunder got more frequent and louder, till they seemed simultaneous and the thunder gave that peculiarly unpleasant crack which it does in the tropics when the storm is nearly directly overhead. Gradually the thunder and lightning got fainter and finally died in a rumble. It had been exactly like a quick tropical thunderstorm, except that there had been no rain and no clouds; the sun was shining ail the time.

There are still more: The curious circumstances of hauntings; the stopping of clocks and the splitting of steel upon the death of a person;
the influence of direct hypnotic suggestion upon the pulse and blood pressure; the uncanny performance of excited gamblers who “will” their dice to run up an astonishing sequence of sevens.

This dice matter—the fact that many people feel certain that they can mentally influence dice—gave inspiration to the researchers of the Duke University parapsychology department: Why not expose the dice-throwing procedure to laboratory tests in order to determine whether psychokinesis is a reality—whether there really is scientific foundation for the principle of mind over matter. This would be an ideal method; it was interesting and challenging, easy to control, and easy to tabulate and appraise.

What a picture this must have been! Dignified Dr. Rhine leading his grave group of scientists while they converged, armed with statistics and scoring pads, on their latest object of research—the crap shooter!

But the parapsychology laboratory was hardly a gambling casino. The dice throwers found themselves subjected to a number of unusual restraints. The first innovation made it necessary to throw the dice from cups rather than by hand. Then the cups were fitted with roughened interiors, and special dice tables were built. Finally, decisively to confound any “gamblers” who might somehow be skillfully influencing the dice by other than purely mental means, completely mechanical methods of dice throwing were introduced, cameras were used to record the scores, and special precautions were taken against the possibility of defective dice.

But even under these extraordinary circumstances, a total of 21,600 dice readings (900 runs), so significant were the results that the odds against obtaining such a score by chance could be expressed only by a number of approximately twenty digits!

Try it yourself. Two sevens can be expected from pure chance, on the average, in a run of twelve throws. Just be certain to make a determined mental effort—” will” those sevens to turn up.

Oddly enough, very strong evidence in favor of psychokinesis (mind over matter) also turned up from a phase of the dice tests which had been altogether overlooked for several years. Not only at Duke, but with other investigators as well, it had been noticed that the dice thrower’s ability to score fell off rather sharply from one run to the next. At first this was regarded as a mere nuisance, but it was later observed that these declines in scoring followed a definite pattern and far exceeded anything that could be expected from chance. The odds, in fact, were better than a million to one. The falling dice, in short, were worked on by something more than the machines which threw
them. The indication here, then, was that the mind does indeed control a force which can act on matter.

Yet it remained to be shown whether the force which acted on the dice was physical energy emanating from the brain, or whether a nonphysical mental process was responsible for the effect. If it could be demonstrated that the scoring rate would not vary with the changes in physical conditions, it could be safely concluded that such energy would not fit the picture of anything we know as physical. And that is exactly what was proved next—mass, number, and form were not determining factors in the psychokinesis tests. As Dr. Rhine summarized: “There can scarcely be any doubt that PK [psychokinesis] is non-physical.”

Only faint traces of the paranormal powers of the mind have so far been demonstrated. But every new force, from steam to atomic power, in its beginning has been feeble and undependable. Each of these, in its time, must have induced speculation as to why serious men were “fooling around” with such toys. And much of the suspicion, oddly enough, has usually been generated within the ranks of the very profession that discovered the “toy.”

Probably, however, the parapsychologists rally behind the knowledge that this force, of which they have already proved the reality, will in time revolutionize our universe to an extent beyond the wildest imagination.

We have already observed something of the “history of impossibility.” Now let’s glance over at the “history of acceptance of new evidence,” touching on a few random examples. Keep in mind that we are dealing in these cases with evidence which had
already
been established, ideas which had
already
been demonstrated. Remember, too, that these were the judgments of
experts
, not ignorant amateurs. Take the words, for instance, of Professor Erasmus Wilson in 1878:

Despite the thousands of successful applications of hypnosis and the evidence set forth by the most eminent and respected physicians, a British publication arrived at this verdict: