Spirit Symposium

People who believe in ghosts, and others who do not, assembled last week at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., for a symposium on psychical research, called by Dr. Carl Murchison, Clark psychology chief, for the express purpose of assembling all evidence pro and con on returned spirits and publishing an impartial record. Dr. Murchison first made it clear that he and his Clark colleagues were downright skeptics, then opened the conference with a paper by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This paper, while it contained nothing new, made a distinction, sharply sustained by later speakers, between psychic research and the spiritist movement. Psychic research was described by Sir Arthur as "a sort of super-materialism;" the spiritist movement as an effort "to support Faith by actual, provable fact." He, of course, was concerned chiefly with the movement. For his own claim upon public consideration the creator of "Sherlock Holmes" mentioned his medical training and the fact "that as a public man of affairs I have never shown myself to be wild or unreasonable." Then he traced spiritualism's history* with fitting reference to the Fox sisters/- and Abraham Lincoln.**

Dr. Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin replied, not sparing Sir Arthur in his absence. He put spiritism in a class with witchcraft, hysteria and paranoiac illusion, charging spiritualists, as distinct from psychic researchers, with "wishful thinking and logic-blindness." He was at pains, however, to appreciate the large significance of spiritualism's implications, whether they be baffling truth or "stupendous" error.

"Margery." Then came, in person, a great champion of ghosts, Dr. L. R. G. Crandon of Boston, Harvard graduate with three degrees and spiritualistically a layman until 1923 when it was accidentally discovered that his wife was a medium. It was of her, "Margery," that he told the symposium in long detail, showing 70 lantern slides of sittings under private conditions and conditions imposed by the Scientific American when Margery competed (unsuccessfully) for a $2,500 prize. He spoke, in a grave, low tone, of Ectoplasm. This substance, shown issuing in strings from Margery's body (usually her right ear) like thin steam, coiling and clumping into shapes sometimes recognizable as images of parts of the human body, he declared to be "the primordial substance of the world." It made its appearance upon the arrival, during seances, of Margery's late brother, Walter, her most frequent ghostly correspondent. When it vanished the ectoplasm oozed slowly back into Margery's body. As in the cases of other mediums, the stuff was invisible by ordinary light, having to be photographed (according to Dr. Crandon) with a fused quartz lens, flashlight and very fast shutter, in the dark or under red rays.* He claimed to have bottled a sample of ectoplasm and, upon analyzing it, found potassium, chlorine, red blood corpuscles and other substances in proportions the same as they are found in the human body. He said Walter had explained to him that ectoplasm was produced by the white cells of the medium's brain by "a vital process akin to the vital processes of the heart, brain and other organs which function in the dark. It is not unnatural then that ectoplasm must be produced in the darkness or in a red light and that it is soluble in a white light."/- In the Crandon exhibit were finger prints, obtained upon hot wax, which corresponded with those of none present at the seance where they were taken. The doctor related messages written by Margery in Latin, Greek, old Italian, anglicized Chinese, Danish and Icelandic Danish--though she knows only English. The Crandon conclusion and preachment: "Psychic research has as much to do with religion as God.. . . . Science is bankrupt at the edge of the grave; religion offers only a sleepy comfort. . . . It is not a return to superstition but the beginning of an effort to reach a lost sensitiveness."

Valentino, Houdini. Besieged by newsgatherers to comment on alleged spirit messages received from the late Rudolf Valentino, film sheik, by a onetime Mrs. Valentino, Dr. Crandon scouted their validity, "If we know anything at all," he said, "we know a person must be dead four or five years before he can communicate with us. . . Transformation is so strange and so complete. The spirit is helpless at first. He must get used to being without a body . . . learn technique . . . like a newborn babe. . . . We learned this from spirits with whom we have been in touch."

Dr. Crandon issued a similar warning against messages from the late Harry Houdini, arch-enemy of Margery (he sat, scornful, on the committee that investigated her), who before his death set a day and hour when he would speak from the dead, if possible, to friends. Last week the friends designated were excitedly awaiting this rendezvous.

MacDougall. Skeptical laymen were brought up short when Dr. Murchison read a paper contributed by Professor William MacDougall, Harvard psychologist, who sat on the Margery investigation committee. Dr. MacDougall was frank to say that ghosts, in his opinion, do exist. He lauded Clark University for agitating the question, urged other U. S. institutions to follow suit at once.

"There has been gathered," he wrote, "a very weighty mass of evidence indicating that human personality does not always at death cease to be a source of influence upon living. I am inclined to regard as part of this evidence occurrence of ghostly apparitions.

"I hold that a case has been made out for clairvoyance of such strength that further investigation is imperatively needed. I would say the same of many of the alleged supernormal physical phenomena of mediumship. I am not convinced of the supernormality ... but I do feel that evidence for them is such that the scientific world is not justified in pooh-poohing. . . . This is no field for the casual amateur."

* Abridging and paraphrasing his recent book, The History of Spiritualism (Doran, $7.50).

/- Margaretta, Kate, Maria and Leah, who came to public notice out of Hydesville, N. Y., in 1848, with strange knockings. Despite Margaretta's confession, late in life, that their knockings were accomplished by loudly cracking their double-jointed knees and toes, the Fox sisters were last year voted a monument, to be erected at Rochester, N. Y., by the International Spiritualist Congress at Paris.

** Who consulted one Nettie Colburn, medium, at the White House shortly before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, receiving an encouraging message, couched in solemn, forceful, seemingly masculine language, which he described as "very singular, very !"

* Dr. Walter Prince, head of the Boston Society for Psychic Research: "Cameras were used at sittings for 20 years before an ectoplasmic apparition appeared on one of them. The spirits present before that time [i. e. when ectoplasm was first photographed] evidently did not take." He also cited the fact that Britishers have taken "ectoplasm pictures" without special lenses and shutters. But Dr. Prince refuted for spiritualists the Jastrow charge of "wishful thinking," pointing out that a will to disbelieve is no more scientific than a will to believe.

/- Stewart Edward White, big game hunter and author, has described ectoplasmic emanations which were invisible even in the dark, which were felt as cold areas near the medium. If ectoplasm was pinched, the medium exclaimed and clasped herself.