Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?: The Evidence Given by Sir A.C. Doyle and Others Drastically ExaminedMcCabe, Joseph
Religion
Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?: The Evidence Given by Sir A.C. Doyle and Others Drastically Examined
McCabe, Joseph
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859-1930; Mediums -- Practice; Spiritualism
When the answers are given on paper a hundred other tricks are employed.
First the medium must learn the question you are putting to the spirits.
If you put it mentally, you will never get more than a lucky or unlucky
guess, unless you happen to be one of those sitters for whom the medium
was prepared. You need not fear telepathy. It must be admitted to-day
that the evidence for telepathy or thought-transference is in as parlous
a condition as the evidence for Spiritualism. After all the challenges
and discussions not a single serious claim lies before us. Sir A. C.
Doyle, it is true, tells (_Debate_, p. 28) quite confidently of Mr.
Lethem getting an answer to his unspoken questions. But Sir Arthur, as
usual, does not tell all the facts. The unspoken questions to which Mrs.
Lethem, as a medium, gave "correct answers" were precisely the two test
questions which Mr. Lethem had put to a medium some time before! We may
surely presume that he had confided that wonderful experience to the
wife of his bosom.
No, there is no clear case of telepathy, or answers to unspoken
questions, on record. The medium gets you to write your questions.
Spirits are supposed to be more at home in reading such spiritual things
as thoughts than in reading material scribbles; but your medium is not a
spirit, and you will get no answer unless he knows the question. If you
write your question on the pad which he kindly offers, it is easy.
There is a carbon paper underneath, which gives him a duplicate. In one
very elaborate case the carbon and duplicate were under the cloth, and
were drawn off, when you had finished writing, through a hollow leg of
the table into the next room. One medium developed the art of reading
what you wrote from the movements of the top of your pencil. Others,
like Foster, artfully stole your bit of paper and substituted dummies.
But I will quote from Mr. Carrington a last trick which will give the
reader a sufficiently large idea of the wonderful ingenuity which
mediums use in these spirit messages.
He tells in his _Personal Experiences of Spiritualism_ of a pair of
Chicago mediums--the same Misses Bangs who painted spirit pictures
before your eyes, as I have previously described--whose method was
extraordinarily difficult to detect. You wrote a letter to a deceased
person. You folded a blank sheet with this letter, and sealed them
yourself in an envelope. This letter you handed to Miss Bangs as she sat
at the table opposite you. After a long delay, but without her leaving
the room, she restored the envelope (which had lain on the table under a
blotter) to you intact, and you found a letter to you from your spirit
friend written on the blank sheet you had enclosed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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