Super-Psi & some notes from Braude's Immortal Remains

That said, I would agree this does provide a better argument for the possibility of Super Psi than we've seen before. However Gauld also references some more cases re: Leonard's mediumship that challenge Super Psi. Will get into those next.

One of the cases Gauld believes challenges the notion of Super-Psi is as follows (note the book is in public domain and can be found here):

Many proxy cases went on for several sittings, and it is hard to convey the ‘feel’ of them adequately in a brief summary. For instance one of Drayton Thomas’s most remarkable cases, the ‘Bobbie Newlove’ case (157e), extended over eleven sittings. Bobbie was a boy of ten who had died of diphtheria. He proved a fluent communicator, and through Feda made unmistakable references to such matters as a dog-shaped salt-cellar he had owned, a ‘Jack of Hearts’ costume he had once worn, visits to a chemical laboratory with his grandfather, gymnastic apparatus which he had set up in his room and exercises carried out therewith, a girl skater of whom he was fond, an injury to his nose, and the topography of his home town (including place-names). Most curious of all, he repeatedly insisted that some weeks before his death his constitution had been undermined by contact with poisonous ‘pipes’, and that this had lowered his resistance to the diphtheria. In connection with the pipes he talked of cattle, a sort of barn, and running water. This meant nothing to his family, but upon investigation some water pipes round which he had played with a friend were discovered. The locality answered the description given and it is possible that Bobbie had drunk bad water there.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.(The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Of which Gauld says:

In the Bobbie Newlove case some of the relevant information (about the pipes and their location) was not known to any member of the communicator’s family. We are forced to attribute its production either to telepathy between Mrs Leonard and one of Bobbie’s friends (the one who played with him around the pipes), or to clairvoyant scanning of the neighbourhood plus skilful guessing about Bobbie’s likely habits, or to a clairvoyant monitoring prior to Bobbie’s death of his pastimes and activities, and a subsequent storing up of a record of them in the medium’s unconscious mind. (This last possibility, implying as it does continual monitoring of the lives of an indefinitely large number of potential communicators who are as yet still living, seems to me more fantastic than any version of the survival hypothesis.) For both of these cases, therefore, we would on the ESP (or super-ESP) hypothesis have to postulate that Mrs Leonard located (telepathically or clairvoyantly) two separate sources of information, tapped them, and collated and synthesized the results.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Another case we've yet to discuss is as follows:

At a Leonard sitting on 28 October 1938, Drayton Thomas’s regular communicators (his father and his sister) enquired if he had recently received from a middle-aged man a letter about his son. He had not yet received such a letter, and the communicators proceeded to give some further particulars of its contents. The letter would concern an accident to do with a motor car. In this accident the young man was killed outright, or nearly so. There was a connection with ‘Morton’ or a like-sounding name. The father once lived near where Drayton Thomas lived. Finally another name, sounding like ‘Char’, was given.

The anticipated letter duly arrived. It was dated eleven days after the sitting, and was from Mr Lionel G. Aitken, a member of the SPR. Mr Aitken told Drayton Thomas that he first thought of writing after hearing him speak at a Queen’s Hall meeting on 9 October, i.e. three weeks before the sitting and nearer five before he actually wrote. A sentence of the letter reads, ‘Not very long ago I lost my son, a splendid young man, full of the joy of life and success.’

After reference to certain London mediums, it continues, ‘I think on the whole that we have been most fortunate in the evidential nature of the messages received.’ Finally Thomas’s advice was asked about other mediums, but there was no word to suggest that he might possibly obtain a message for him through Mrs Leonard. Drayton Thomas entered into correspondence with Mr Aitken. From this correspondence certain facts emerged concerning the statements made at the sitting of 28 October. In this quotation (157g, pp. 103–104) Drayton Thomas places these facts for comparison beside the items given at the sitting.

1. I am to expect a letter from a father about his son … On my enquiring when Mr Aitken had first thought of writing he replied, ‘I don’t think I had thought of mentioning my case to you and asking for advice until I actually wrote the letter. I merely intended to thank you for your address. It appears that you had news of something I was going to write before I wrote it or had consciously thought of it.’

2. The father is middle aged. This is correct.

3. An accident case. This is also correct.

4. Connected with a motor car. Mr Aitken writes, ‘Not a motor car accident exactly.’

5. The young man was killed outright or very nearly so. He was killed outright.

6. Morton or a like-sounding name; this father once lived near where you lived. In correspondence about this statement I learnt that Mr Aitken had resided at the village of Norton and that his son was born there and had been familiar with all the neighbourhood. Norton is but one and a half miles from Baldock where I lived with my parents in 1876–8. Is it too much to suppose that Feda’s ‘Morton’ was misheard by her for Norton? 7. Another name like Char – is given. This was unsatisfactory, just possibly an attempt for Charles, the Christian name of Mr Aitken’s friend killed at Gallipoli.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Gauld then makes the following assessment for this portion of the case:

Drayton Thomas was entirely convinced that something more than chance was at work here. Several of the items, however, are either commonplace or wrong. The case rests largely on: (a) the coincidence in time between the prediction of a letter that a man would write about his son, and the fulfilment of that prediction, and (b) the fairly clear indication of a particular locality. The former is somewhat hard to assess in the absence of detailed knowledge about the sort of letters Drayton Thomas habitually received; (b) is, however, not easy to discount. Thomas uses the apparent precognition displayed by his communicators to knock the super-ESP hypothesis. He says (p. 104):

Those who incline to the universal telepathy hypothesis will suggest that the messages originated with Mr Aitken. But this would imply that the medium tapped the Aitken memory before either she or I were aware of his existence and, more incredibly still, that she divined a purpose of which he remained entirely unaware until he was in the act of writing to thank me for remarks he heard me make in public.

Drayton Thomas’s criticism of the ‘universal telepathy hypothesis’ is no doubt entirely justified. One suspects, however, that he wishes to pass from the shortcomings of that hypothesis directly to the validity of the survivalist position. The principle seems to be – and it is, unfortunately, a principle enthusiastically applied in this field by partisans of all persuasions – that if your chief competitors are bankrupt, your own business must be on a sound footing. Many hopeful theorists have tried to persuade themselves of the latter by proving the former to their own satisfaction. But of course the present problem – that of the apparent precognition of Mr Aitken’s letter – is not solved simply by attributing the precognition to discarnate spirits. Such a move would be entirely regressive.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

However he then adds this second part of the case:

The most remarkable aspect of this case, however, still remains to be told. At four later Leonard sittings, for which Drayton Thomas was sitter, and at which Mr Aitken was not present, a good deal of material ostensibly relating to Mr Aitken’s son was received. Mr Aitken regarded much of this matter as highly evidential. There were however some passages which he could make little of, but which his other son recognized at once as a message concerning a common friend of his and his brother’s, a friend of whom Mr Aitken had never heard. It transpired that the living son had (in thought) deliberately asked his dead brother to try to send a message concerning this friend through some medium. I give now Mr Aitken’s own corroborations of Feda’s statements (157g, pp. 122–123):

In Mr Drayton Thomas’s sitting of 20 January 1939, Feda says: ‘There was somebody else he was very interested in, that perhaps you don’t know … a name that starts with the letter B, and I think there is an R in it … it’s not a long name – very much linked with him … it might be a Mr BRICK … I feel this is something you could use for building, and is a name much connected with this boy and his interests.’

In Mr Drayton Thomas’s sitting of 3 February 1939, Feda says: ‘A name starting with BR – rather an important name with him … Somebody he was linked up with shortly before his passing … there is a link between this BR … and the boy’s passing. I also want to know if there is anything to do with him like a little ship … or a little model of a ship – something he had on earth and was very fond of. He is showing me something like a toy ship – a fancy ship, not a plain one – ‘laborate, rather ‘laborate – with a good deal of detail shown in it – it seemed to be connected with his earth life – but some time before he passed over, rather early in his earth life, but I think it is something that his people have still got …’

A name beginning with BR – like the name Feda says ‘might be Mr BRICK’ – had been mentioned by other mediums, but we had been unable to place it, nor was the reference to a ‘model ship’ understood; but my son, on seeing the Leonard script, recognised its meaning.

He and his deceased brother had been friends at an RAF Station with a young officer called BRIDGEN – whom we had not heard of – and who had been killed about a year after my son. This young man, before joining the RAF, had worked for a firm which made scale models of ships for shipping companies, and he had shown my son a photograph of one of these models which he had made himself and which he said his people still had at home. My son had felt sure that this matter of the model ship would be given as a sign if they were unable to get the name through correctly.

These corroborations were accompanied by the following letter from Mr Aitken’s surviving son:

The Editor, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Dear Sir, I have read my father’s account of the ‘Leonard-Aitken’ proxy sittings, and I testify to its correctness.

I was the only living member of the family who knew of ‘Bridgen’, and I had never had any communication with Mr Drayton Thomas or Mrs Leonard.

My ‘thought-message’ was not directed to Mr Drayton Thomas or to Mrs Leonard – but to my ‘dead’ brother – and to me, the reply was unmistakable.

Yours sincerely, LIONEL AITKEN, Flying-Officer, RAF 14 November 1939

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Gauld then furthers his critiques of Super-Psi:

An obvious underlying problem which successful proxy sittings present for the ESP hypothesis is of course that of how the medium manages to locate (telepathically or clairvoyantly) sources of information appropriate to the case in hand. These sources are, in a number of different senses, remote from the sitting and the sitter, to whom the very existence of some of them is likely to be unknown. We might propose that the medium learns from the sitter’s mind the identity of his principal (i.e. of the person for whom he is acting as proxy), and that this somehow enables her to home in on the mind of the principal; from the mind of the principal further clues to other sources of information may be obtained; and so on. One has only to ask oneself in detail what would be involved here to see that the proposed process is grotesquely implausible. Proper names, addresses, dates, and so forth – details which identify a person uniquely – are notoriously among the most difficult of all items for sensitives to obtain; and yet such uniquely identifying details (or their equivalents) would have to be obtained in a proxy case before the medium could pinpoint the right source of information to tap; and in some cases they would have to be obtained from several sources as the medium’s mind so to speak moved along the chain of clues. It must be added, of course, that the survivalist theory too must cope with the problem of how Feda managed to locate Bobby Newlove, F. W. Macaulay, etc., on the ‘other side’ in order to extract evidential messages from them. Did she do it by ESP? Certainly she often speaks as though her awareness of communicators were of a fluctuating and uncertain kind. However, if there is ‘another world’ to which our spirits pass at death, it is perhaps reasonable to suppose that it contains some form of established communication network or heavenly post office directory...

...Finally it should be noted that in some proxy cases the principals have felt the messages received contained not just correct information, but hints of the personal characteristics (humour, interests, turns of phrase, and so forth) of the ostensible communicators. If they are correct in this, we have additionally to attribute to the medium the power to glean the relevant facts and then, instead of presenting them in statement form (’he had a dry sense of humour’), so to speak to enact them in dramatic form by reproducing the communicator’s characteristic dry humour (or whatever it may be). Certainly, the more numerous the unusual gifts we have to attribute to mediums in order to support the super-ESP hypothesis, the more cumbersome that hypothesis becomes.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

I think Gauld - if he's seriously talking about a heavenly postal service - is making a mistake in believing the next life has to conform to something akin to the physics of this reality. In fact varied accounts of spiritual realms suggest distance is partially if not completely determined by emotional and mental connections, something perhaps worth getting into down the line in this thread...

Next up is the trance mediumship of Lorena Piper.

In the last post I mentioned Leorna Piper's mediumship is next...but as it is going to come up when discussing the varied controls of Piper want to preface with this summary of Fisher's The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts.

These 'guides', Fisher now decided, were merely the denizens of the 'lower astral planes' that insinuate their way into the minds of weak humans and, by manipulating them, vicariously experience the sense of physical existence which they crave. They are the [pretas] or 'hungry ghosts' of Tibetan tradition. And it could apply across the board. He investigated the spirit personalities of other mediums and found that they too were lying. However helpful they might prove to be, in providing healing, for instance, they were not who they claimed to be. He then recalled Swedenborg's insistence on the brilliant yet delusive nature of many communicating entities, and his urgent warnings not to believe a word they say.

Having rejected his parents' Christian fundamentalism in order to pursue his New Age inclinations Fisher had, in a sense, come full circle. His disillusion now extended to the whole New Age channelling craze: even personalities like Jane Roberts's Seth were suspect. Spirit communication was by definition evil, as good spirits don't communicate; only demons do, just as his mother had always insisted. Why on earth, he wondered, would people voluntarily open themselves up to this sort of malign occult influence?

Note that healing spirit being a liar...that doesn't exactly come across as something Fisher proved. He's referring to the spirit of Dr. Lang channeled by George Chapman. In my own reading of that particular part of Fisher's book Lang seems as befuddled as many spirits do in medium communication, and does acknowledge manipulative spirits, but Fisher at that point seems quite convinced all spirits who speak through mediums are evil. Taking the cures at face value - haven't read up on the cases myself - I'd be more willing to think Lang was a subpersonality than a malevolent entity...at worst the doctor seems guilty of not being wholly ready to pass on.

While Fisher was obviously the victim of something - whether spirits or multiple personalities in the "channeler" - too many communications are mundane or have personalities that no one would trust as great spiritual guides.

Fisher also brings up the possibility that these hungry ghosts are using Super Psi to impersonate the deceased, even if they are likely undead wraiths themselves. As with Super-Psi itself, this is a "Are you actually in the Matrix?" possibility that cannot be proven to be false... but again the mundane nature of many of the communications makes this hard to believe. Why would any hungry ghost impersonate a belligerent drop-in communicator demanding the sitting circle find his leg bone? If they were really pretas, why wouldn't dead children continually demand their parents communicate with them as they are lost in darkness?

All that said I do think there's some reason to think controls are spirits of some sort, though there are also reasons to think that controls are sub-personalities using Psi...which of course invites the question of Super-Psi...and of course one could decide all of this is false...

[Laird]

Just a quick note to say:

This thread is super, Sci.

Just a quick note to say:

This thread is super, Sci.

Heheheh thanks! It is one of those topics that as you dig you find yourself having to consider all sorts of details in the cases. While I still strongly doubt the Super Psi Hypothesis in the best cases you do get the feeling some Psi by disassociated personalities is involved. (Note as I've said before one can argue these subpersonalities might be spirits of a sort themselves.)

While I was initially inspired by his tales in my offering that cases seemingly involving Super Psi could be mischevious spirits, revisiting the Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts the case of Joe Fisher and his false spirit guides seems like a potential case of Psi by multiples...assuming one even believes Joe's stories of the guides (or just the medium) using Psi. My decision to go back was based on this comment on the above Paranormalia link:

How can one rule out that what was being communicated by the medium/s was nothing but 'chatter' from the subconscious in combination with the collective unconscious? Probably more than the subconscious of the mediums and sitters, even a collective memory/memory reservoir, and paranormal knowledge is certainly involved. This would explain the deceptions and as importantly their very bizarre evolving nature, more so than the rather odd and tenuous psychoanalysis of the minds of ghosts that Fisher indulges in! Man is the self-deceiving animal, it's what defines us. It's so obvious that Fisher and the other sitters were being told what they wanted to hear, even if not consciously; and who/what tells us what we so desperately want to hear in convoluted ways that necessarily bypass conscious filters more than anything else, but our hidden selves, the subconscious? Why bring ghosts or astral this and that into it? Is it really necessary?

It all does line up well with the Super-Psi hypothesis, much better than the actual cases investigated by the SPR we've looked at so far. Even Fisher's supposed parasitic spirits' claims to be guides was in line with the New Age beliefs Fisher and associates were into, and his claims about the medium's supposed intense skepticism of the very entities speaking through her feels like the selling of a grift by a con-woman or more charitably someone who has pushed openness toward the supernatural onto a sub-personality. Fisher falling for one of the guides, his supposed lover across lifetimes, now reads like a bad romantic comedy or perhaps bad horror film. When he breaks up with his girlfriend to commit himself more fully to the spirit of "Filippa", his "raven haired" Greek lover from another life, you can't help but feel some second-hand embarrassment.

I feel bad saying this, as Fisher did seem to believe he was tormented by evil spirits to the point of suicide, but it can't be denied his supposedly clever deceptive spirits readily gave him an incredible amount of false information regarding their past lives that they urged for him to check out. I give him credit for traveling to Europe to try and verify the details, but there was no advanced detective work to pull apart their stories. That was the 80s, nowadays we could tear apart these stories within a day or so as the "guides" openly provided the information necessary to show themselves to be liars. This is despite Fisher's claims that hungry ghosts can reference all sorts of information via astral records to impersonate any deceased individual..if so why did his guides prove to be such failures in this department?

OTOH the best medium cases have spirits give verifiable information despite never claiming to be spirit guides meant to help certain elect souls with the journey toward God/Enlightenment. 

Even the cases of evil curses by these supposed pretas toward people in the circle don't seem beyond the bounds of a multiple coupled with the victims' own psychosomatic reactions. For example they convince one person - Sanford - to continual channel healing energy into the medium, who has cancer. Sanford even gives the medium a job, and the entities - through this same medium - convince him to separate from his wife. They also tell him the medium is meant to be his lover. Eventually the medium and Sanford fight, she quits, and he feels better & reconnects with his wife. I don't recall Sanford ever displaying physical, verifiable signs of ailment.

Fisher did have, after leaving the medium group, an infection of the navel that almost killed him. Apparently this infection usually happens to newborns when their cords are cut. While in the hospital - which he went to as an emergency and told no one about yet - he does receive an eerie phone call from another medium he'd entangled himself with who says the entity "Dr. Pinkerton" - another spirit whose background was obviously false - told her he was there.

Did the evil entity cause the infection? But if "Dr. Pinkerton" has that kind of power why is he not starting a whole religion rather than channeling through some medium? Why did he also readily provide a lot of information that was easily proven to be false? It just makes more sense these are multiples that at best used the medium's latent Psi abilities.

OTOH the template Fisher gives does match the issues with controls and whether they are spirits or multiples. Gauld notes the following regarding controls:

It is possible to pile up arguments on both sides of this question. Thus in favour of the multiple personality theory we may say:

1. It is possible to construct a whole series of intermediate cases which so to speak bridge the gap between, say, Mrs Piper’s and Mrs Leonard’s most realistic controls and instances of undoubted multiple personality. (See for instance 110a, I, pp. 34–70, 298–368.)

2. There are obvious similarities between the somewhat childish guides of certain mediums (Mrs Leonard’s Feda for example – see 161, pp. 348–359) and the rather mischievous and capricious secondary personalities which have emerged in some cases of hysterical multiple personality.

3. In at least one case (Doris Fischer – see 71b; 125a; 125b; 125f) the subject of a classic case of multiple personality afterwards developed into a versatile medium. (However it must be added that this happened after she had been relieved of hysterical symptoms, and had become for the time being apparently a normal person.)

Against the multiple personality theory we can advance the following considerations.

1. The number of distinct personalities which may control a trance medium during the course of her career greatly exceeds anything for which the annals of multiple personality provide a parallel; nor do I know of a complete parallel for the simultaneous and apparently quite full manifestation of two personalities (one through the hand and one through the voice), which occurred quite commonly during one period of Mrs Piper’s mediumship.

2. There does not seem to have been anything disturbed about the normal personalities of Mrs Piper, Mrs Leonard, and other leading trance mediums. (In Chapter Five I made a similar point about the shamans and witchdoctors who fulfil analogous roles in other societies.)

3. The comings and goings of most mediumistic controls, unlike those of secondary personalities, are strictly circumscribed.

Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

Fisher claims the guides could not be sub-personalities or a single personality imitating multiple spirits but his reasoning is that multiples never claim to be entities from past lives. I think Fisher was just too humiliated - bad enough to be deceived by an evil spirit, how much worse to fall for a multiple personality making up nonsense born of subconscious desire?

It is of interest that Fisher's medium who channeled the spirit guides also - AFAIK - never displayed signs of having multiple personalities outside of the sitting group sessions. However, she was also at least initially hypnotized into these sessions where eventually the guides revealed themselves, with the original purpose of those hypnosis sessions to offer alleviation from the pain caused by cancer and possibly to encourage her subconscious to heal the body.

Now as I said there is some reason to think sub-personalities generally are spirits unto themselves, perhaps sharing in or encouraging certain subconscious desires. But if I had to pick a case of Psi (not necessarily Super) by subconsciously existing multiples pretending to be dead people I'd sadly now pick the Hungry Ghost cases that caused Fisher so much suffering.

Now as I said there is some reason to think sub-personalities generally are spirits unto themselves, perhaps sharing in or encouraging certain subconscious desires. But if I had to pick a case of Psi (not necessarily Super) by subconsciously existing multiples pretending to be dead people I'd sadly now pick the Hungry Ghost cases that caused Fisher so much suffering.

Having discussed the issue of supposed Hungry Ghosts above, here is Gauld on medium control personalities (just want to note again this book is in the public domain):

Mrs Sidgwick discusses in considerable detail what the Piper controls and communicators say about themselves, their situations, and the process of communication. Much of this is in line with the general traditions of Western Spiritualism. They one and all represent themselves as autonomous beings quite separate from the medium. They have bodies of a substance more subtle than that of our earthly ones, so that they can change shape and size and transport themselves great distances very rapidly. They say that to them the medium appears as, or surrounded by, a ball of light, to which they are attracted. They have to ‘enter the light’ in order to communicate. The light seems to be regarded as a sort of energy or power which makes communication possible. Sometimes it seems to be thought of in terms of the notion of a luminiferous ether which was utilized in the physics of the day, at other times we get such absurd suggestions as that the light is made of ‘air, light and hydrogen’ or of ‘vacium’ (sic).

When a spirit enters the light he is able, by means that are not made altogether clear, to operate the medium’s organism more or less effectively, and to become aware of the sitter and the medium’s surroundings through her sense organs, especially her ears (her eyes being usually shut). Sometimes, however, controls speak as if they could directly see the seance room, or for that matter other and more distant earth scenes; and they regularly speak as if they could both see and hear and so transmit messages from other deceased persons in the hereafter. An obvious question that arises at this point is that of what happens to Mrs Piper, or to the spirit of Mrs Piper, when her body is being operated by deceased persons. The story told by her controls is that as a spirit moves into her organism, she herself moves out of it, and into the spirit world. She is frequently said to remain connected to her body by a slender cord, perhaps made of the mysterious ‘light’ referred to above. If this cord were broken, she would not be able to return to her body and it would die. The cord is sometimes assigned other functions. Controls are occasionally represented as sliding down it in order to enter the medium’s organism, and it is also more than once said to function as a sort of telphone line by which non-controlling communicators can speak to controls occupying the body.

Mrs Piper herself, on awakening from her trance, would sometimes for a short while retain an apparent memory of what had befallen her in the spirit world, and even seem to have some lingering awareness of that world. In this ‘waking stage’ she would sometimes repeat (correct) names given to her while ‘in’ the spirit world, and on a number of occasions she was able to pick out from photographs deceased persons whom she had ostensibly met there.

Mrs Piper’s controls thus apparently regard themselves as entities completely separate from the medium, and in support of their contention they present a detailed picture of their own activities whilst controlling and communicating. Can we accept their own estimate of themselves? Mrs Sidgwick argues that we can not. There are many points which weigh against it.

To begin with, there are a number of controls who are quite certainly fictitious. Phinuit is one. Chlorine is another. Among others are, for instance, a Julius Caezar (sic) and a Sir Walter Scott so totally unlike the originals that one can hardly even regard them as impersonations. The ‘Imperator’ band of controls also belong in this group. They claimed identity with the controls of the same pseudonyms who had manifested through the famous British medium, W. Stainton Moses (see 160). They were never able to establish this identity, but hazarded all kinds of incorrect and contradictory guesses at their own ‘real’ names. Even the most life-like and realistic controls, such as GP, show signs of being impersonations (not deliberate ones). They break down at just the point where Mrs Piper’s own stock of knowledge runs out, viz. when they are required to talk coherently of science, philosophy and literature (which the living GP could readily have done).

Mrs Piper’s controls sometimes excuse their shortcomings on the grounds that coming into the medium’s ‘light’ has a confusing effect upon them, or that they cannot manipulate her organism in ways to which it is not accustomed. These excuses are, however, not adequate. The confusion which obliterates the controls’ grasp of science and philosophy does not prevent them from spouting reams of pompous nonsense upon religious and philosophical topics and presenting it as profoundest truth, sometimes in the teeth of the sitters’ queries; so that we have to attribute to them not just confusion but downright tale-spinning, which was certainly not a habit of the purported communicators in life, nor yet of the normal Mrs Piper.

Similar tale-spinning tendencies are manifested in the way in which controls cover up their mistakes. Controls will, generally speaking, not admit their blunders. They will rationalize, explain away, concoct any excuse, however tenuous and childish. All other considerations seem subordinated to an overwhelming urge to keep the drama flowing without pause or hiccup.

That the trance drama of communication with the departed really is only a piece of play-acting by the medium (not a deliberate piece of play-acting – call it rather the enactment of a dream) is strongly suggested by the following further consideration. Some controls, like GP, or Bennie Junot, are very life-like, and in fact convinced many people of their authenticity. Others, however, like Julius Caezar, Sir Walter Scott, and the George Eliot who claimed she had met Adam Bede in the next world, are so implausible, and so stilted and stylized in their diction and sentiments, that no one could possibly regard them as anything other than fictions. Yet the most plausible communicators will in the firmest tones guarantee the authenticity of the least plausible ones, so that the authenticity of the former is inextricably and disadvantageously tied up with the authenticity of the latter, and it becomes abundantly clear that the maintenance of the drama is all-important and that every one of the controls, from GP down to Julius Caezar, is part and parcel of the playwright’s creative fantasy.

If further proof were wanted that the controls and communicators are simply aspects of Mrs Piper herself, it can perhaps be found in features of the diction and wording of the communications. It may be found for instance in the waxing and waning of the use by the Imperator Band and others of archaic forms of speech. Although members of the Band claimed to be (behind their pseudonyms) Homer and Ulysses, Mrs Piper (a New England Protestant) would naturally have expected religious leaders to use Old Testament forms of speech, and the mistakes made in the handling of the archaic diction would have been in accordance with her somewhat limited education.

Again, there was evidence that the various ostensibly separate controls possessed a common stock of associations, which could hardly have been the case if they had really been separate personalities. Thus Imperator once called Lodge ‘Captain’, which was Phinuit’s nickname for him; yet Phinuit never overlapped with the Imperator regime. Several communicators showed a somewhat marked interest in clothes and hats, which would not have been characteristic of them in life, but was characteristic of Mrs Piper. For my part I do not see how it is possible to dissent from Mrs Sidgwick’s conclusion that the Piper controls were one and all aspects of Mrs Piper’s own personality.

Mrs Piper was without doubt one of the most remarkable and the most successful mental mediums of all time, and it seems highly likely that if Mrs Sidgwick’s conclusions about the status of the Piper-controls are correct, they will also hold true of the controls of other trance mediums. Unfortunately we do not have any investigation of the status of Mrs Leonard’s controls comparable in scope and detail to Mrs Sidgwick’s massive study of the Piper controls. A number of papers on the modus operandi of trance communication through Mrs Leonard, together with relevant observations from other papers, are summarized and critically discussed in a valuable chapter of C. D. Broad’s Lectures on Psychical Research (1962). Mrs Leonard’s controls seem to have been fewer in number than Mrs Piper’s (Feda stuck to her post throughout Mrs Leonard’s career), and I have the impression that they were rather less prone to engage in fishing, covering up mistakes, giving each other spurious testimonials, and the other sorts of activities which, carried out by the Piper controls, encouraged Mrs Sidgwick to regard them as stage characters in a drama created by the medium. The Leonard controls also give a somewhat more coherent account of the process of communication, though I can by no means reconcile with each other, or fully make sense of, their various statements as to how they operate the medium’s organism. None the less there are certain hints that in the Leonard mediumship, as in that of Mrs Piper, a dramatic construct is being built around events which, whatever their real nature, are not as they are made to appear. For instance, Feda often talks as though she can directly see and hear the communicators from whom she relays messages. But there is much to show that these claims cannot be taken at face value. Thus Mrs W. H. Salter says (138b, pp. 309, 312) of a series of statements made by Feda concerning a communicator subsequently said to be her mother (Mrs Verrall), ‘Many of these statements … are true; they contain, however, an admixture of such errors as could hardly have arisen had Feda’s knowledge been derived from any clearly apprehended image or series of images.’ And again, ‘The general inference which I should draw … is that a certain amount of veridical information about my mother was woven by Feda into an imaginary picture of an elderly widow, based on preconceived ideas of the appearance such a picture might be expected to present.’

Gauld then naturally comes to the question anyone would naturally ask ->

It would seem, therefore, that we have to abandon the idea that the controls of trance mediums are the spirits of deceased persons temporarily controlling a living body. Are we then forced to adopt some form of the super-ESP hypothesis, to suppose that Mrs Piper and Mrs Leonard were able to inject into their dramatic representations of various deceased persons correct and appropriate information obtained telepathically from the minds of living persons or clairvoyantly from existing records? Mrs Sidgwick did not think so. She eventually came to believe that behind Mrs Piper’s dramatic rendering of communication from the dead, overshadowing it and somehow directing its course, there might sometimes lie those same deceased persons who figure as characters in the drama. The medium writes many of the speeches, and ensures continuity in the plot; but some of the lines (perhaps the most important ones) are filled in by outside authors. Let us call this theory the theory of ‘overshadowing’. It seems to be a version of it towards which William James moves at the end of his report on Mrs Piper’s Hodgson-control (74, p. 117):

Extraneous ‘wills to communicate’ may contribute to the results as well as a ‘will to personate’, and the two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, though capable of helping each other out. The will to communicate, in our present instance, would be, on the prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson’s surviving spirit, and a natural way of representing the process would be to suppose the spirit to have found that by pressing, so to speak, against ‘the light’, it can make fragmentary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say mix with the rubbish of the trance-talk on this side. The wills might thus strike up a sort of partnership and reinforce each other. It might even be that the ‘will to personate’ would be comparatively inert unless it were aroused to activity by the other will.


Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.

A little bit more on this question of controls and how they could be subpersonalities as well as spirit entities ->

Some more stuff from Prescott as spirits influencing human personality or seemingly existing as subpersonalities/multiples that can be banished:

Spooks run wild

Fiore, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, became interested in addressing her patients' problems via hypnosis, which eventually led to past-life regressions and what she calls "depossessions" – the removal of harassing spirits. She distinguishes depossessions from exorcisms, which involve possession by a nonhuman demonic entity. In the cases she recounts, she believes that the possessing entity is a deceased human being who has become earthbound and attached himself to a living host. She takes pains to say that spirits are only a working hypothesis which she uses because it has proven therapeutically effective, and that she is not sure spirits actually exist. This occasional caveat, though, is undermined by the bulk of the book, especially the later chapters offering advice on personal protection against spirit possession.

I'm not 100% sure these are actual ghosts, for example the first example case seems like pushing off "bad taste" into a stereotyped version of someone in a lower economic class:

One of Fiore's patients, Peter, had a serious drinking problem that sometimes got him into barroom brawls. Though of upper-middle-class background, he frequented "the rougher sorts of establishments" favored by workingmen. A hypnosis session apparently summoned up a spirit who'd been a construction worker. Even when asked to leave, this spirit hung on, leading to this dialogue in a subsequent session:

Fiore: You're still here. What's your name?
Patient: Lou, I think.
Fiore: But why are you still here with Peter?
Patient: He lets me drink. He can be fun, and I can get him to go to my kind of places.
Fiore: What kind of places?
Patient: You know, a place that's got real men in it who know how to drink – not a bunch of stuffed shirts.

Yet Fiore does have success in talking to these personalities and asking them to leave. So are these entities perhaps confused deceased persons clinging to some aspect of earthly life, or alters created akin to the way the Idealist Kastrup suggests  we're all alter personalities of Mind@Large?

The other entities Prescott talks about in another post also seem to exist in this greyspace of subpersonalities and spirits:

Who's there?

In the early years of the 20th century, a few pioneering Spiritualist psychiatrists attempted to cure acute mental illness via mediumship. Probably the most famous of these is Carl Wickland, whose 1924 book Thirty Years Among the Dead recounts his experiences in treating–and curing–a variety of psychoses in institutionalized patients. In these sessions, the obsessing or possessing spirit that was purportedly responsible for the patient's psychosis would communicate through Dr. Wickland's wife Anna while she was entranced. (A PDF of Wickland's book can be downloaded here.) Wickland would address the spirit as an equal, convincing the entity to accept the fact that he or she was dead and to move on to a higher plane.

The article, "Living With Voices," by T.M. Luhrmann, begins with this striking paragraph:

Hans used to be overwhelmed by the voices. He heard them for hours, yelling at him, cursing him, telling him he should be dragged off into the forest and tortured and left to die. The most difficult thing to grasp about the voices people with psychotic illness hear are how loud and insistent they are, and how hard it is to function in a world where no one else can hear them. It's not like wearing an iPod. It's like being surrounded by a gang of bullies. You feel horrible, crazy, because the voices are real to no one else, yet also strangely special, and they wrap you like a cocoon. Hans found it impossible to concentrate on everyday things. He sat in his room and hid. But then the voices went away for good.

How did the voices go away? Luhrmann reports that "recently a new grassroots movement has emerged. It argues that if patients learn to address their voices directly and appropriately, as if each voice had intention and agency, the voices will become less hostile and eventually go away. From the perspective of modern psychiatry, this assertion is radical, even dangerous. But it is being taken seriously by an increasing number of patients and psychiatrists."

Now these are very acute examples of personalities influencing hosts. However this idea of someone else overshadowing your personality or spirits sharing your body are ideas that the Ancients had long considered. For example the Greeks believing the gods coming over you in moments of extreme emotion, or the Egyptian belief in multiple souls said to dwell in the body.

There's also the long standing idea of the Daimon, the spirit that is both muse and drive and possibly a kind of Guardian Angel.

Some more stuff on this ->

Adam Crabtree surveys various models of the mind:

Long discovered that Huna believes there are three spirits or selves in each person. They are called the Low Self, the Middle Self and the High Self, and Long concluded that they correspond roughly to the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious...

....The Low Self is the source of psychic abilities, like mind reading, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and astral travel. The Low Self brings about healing that involves application of vital force and suggestion. It also makes contact with the spirits of the dead. Very importantly, it is the Low Self that contacts the High Self.

The Middle Self is the ordinary conscious mind. It is what we think ourselves to be most of the time. It possesses a strong reasoning faculty and powerful will. The Middle Self can hypnotize Low Selves, including its own, and convey effective suggestions, while being itself impervious to suggestion...

...Puységur set forth the basic characteristics of the hitherto undefined condition he had observed in Victor, which he called 'magnetic somnambulism' or 'magnetic sleep': a sleep-waking kind of consciousness, a 'rapport' or special connection with the magnetizer, suggestibility, and amnesia in the waking state for events in the magnetized state. He also described a notable alteration in personality: "When [Victor] is in a magnetized state, he is no longer a naive peasant who can barely speak a sentence. He is someone whom I do not know how to name” (p. 35) He also noted that Victor had certain paranormal experiences: mental communication and clairvoyance.

Another thing that Puységur noticed was that although the individual, when returning to his ordinary state, could never remember what occurred during the state of magnetic sleep, the person’s somnambulistic consciousness was aware of all that happened to the person when in his or her waking state--the amnesia barrier went only one way. The result is two distinct memory chains, one belonging to the waking person, another to the somnambulistic consciousness. This gave the impression that one was dealing not with one person, but with two...

Eric Weiss suggests that we are continually inhabiting with varied subpersonalities (this is the public domain version of the book Long Trajectory)

...our self, our basic dominant personality—the one we usually engage the world with—our “ego.” Technically, it is a personally ordered sequence of actual occasions expressing our personality from moment to moment.

However, this conscious ego is not all of who we are. We also have (mostly unconscious) subpersonalities of various kinds. For example, when we lose our temper a different sub-personality is expressed—and later on we may declare: “Oh, that wasn’t me, I didn’t mean it.” We all know what that is like.Anyone who has trained in this aspect of psychology can watch people shifting in and out of different personalities as their mood changes. In a bad mood people act one way; in a good mood they act another way. Each one of these systems of behavior constitutes a subpersonality.

In some forms of psychotherapy, therapists disentangle the sub-personalities, give them names, and help them to communicate with each other. When successful, it leads to personality integration. Some of our subpersonalities are well integrated, we are comfortable with them. Others we resist and suppress, and these form our “shadows,” the parts of ourselves we don’t like.

Our everyday self is a collection of these subpersonalities. Each truly is a personality in the sense that each is a sequence of actual occasions organized with personal order. These are actual, enduring entities in the mental level of the transphysical world.These subpersonalities have their own lives in the vital and mental worlds—and sometimes even in the waking world.

This becomes really clear in cases of dissociative identity disorder [DID] in which one sub-personality (or, perhaps, several sub-personalities working together) takes control of the waking self. The everyday ego becomes just one among multiple subpersonalities, and loses its dominant place. Any of these different subpersonalties can take over, and each has its own quite different memory stream. Sometimes, different subpersonalities in the same body don’t remember each other. Or they might remember one, but not another personality. Dissociative identity disorder is intricate and complex, but it shows us that, in fact, these personalities are separable. I am suggesting that they all have the ontological status of enduring societies of actual occasions in the mental world.

It is interesting to note that some DID patients describe the mind as a place in which they dwell in some sort of area with the other personalities.

All of these examples might help us understand controls as entities that are in some way spirit individuals but also bound to the conscious self.

So before finally getting into Piper's mediumship one bit of commentary from the (seeming?) spirit Seth differentiating himself from a medium's control:

I also want to add that I am not a control, as mediums speak of having a control. I am not as I believe I have mentioned a secondary or split personality of Ruburt's. For example, I am not a conglomeration of male tendencies that have collected themselves into a subsidiary personality that struggles for recognition or release. I am certainly not a conglomeration of vaguely-defined creative aspects of Ruburt's personality that struggle for release. Ruburt's own array of writings, published and unpublished, should testify that he need no added creative outlet. We operate on a cooperative basis, and will continue to do so. . . . I am an energy personality essence, since that is what I am. There is no invasion of Ruburt's mind or subconscious on my part. He allows me to communicate. My name for him is Ruburt, which happens to be a male name simply because the name is the closest translation, in your terms, for the name of the whole self or entity, of which he is now a self-conscious part. There is no danger of either so-called (in quotes) "unhealthy or evil or demon, or uncontrolled spirits," (end of quote), finding access to the door in the subconscious which Ruburt has opened. Such demons, as a rule when they seem to suddenly burst forth, have long been hiding in the personal subconscious, and are indeed unfortunate creations of a psychotic mind. There are none of these in Ruburt's subconscious mind. . . . It will be shown that personalities continue to exist after physical death, and then it will not seem so strange that those such as myself can communicate. . . I am not some creepy spirit, to wiggle my ears at the first suggestion for applause, for parties or for your pleasure . . . I am not a spirit in those sentimental terms spoken by some well-meaning but poorly balanced mentalities. I am an energy personality essence.

=-=-=

Gauld, in the public domain work Mediumship and Survival, offers a summary of Leonora Piper's mediumship:

Mrs Leonora E. Piper (1857–1950) is important in the history of psychical research for at least three reasons. Of the mental mediums subjected to study by members of the SPR and the ASPR she was the first to provide substantial evidence for the possession of some paranormal faculty; the records of her case are still unsurpassed in quantity and detail – if the papers on her published in the Proceedings of the British and American SPRs were collected together they would fill a good few volumes; and she is one of the very few mediums whose trance speech and writings have been subjected to a serious and extensive pyschological analysis. The most comprehensive general account of her mediumship is that contained in Holt (67); see also Sage (136) and Piper (121).

Mrs Piper lived in Boston, Massachusetts, where her husband was employed in a large store. Her career as a medium began more or less accidentally. In 1884 she consulted a blind healing medium named J. R. Cocke. At her second visit to him she passed into a trance, and wrote down a message for another of the sitters, Judge Frost, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The message purported to come from Judge Frost’s deceased son, and it impressed him more than any other which he had received during an extensive investigation into Spiritualism.

Mrs Piper then set up a ‘home circle’. Her first spirit guide is said to have been a red indian girl named ‘Chlorine’. Among other communicators were Bach, Mrs Siddons, Longfellow and Commodore Vanderbilt. These less than convincing dramatis personae retired from the scene the following year with the arrival of a new control who rapidly became predominant. This was a soi-disant French doctor who gave the name of ‘Dr Phinuit’. In some ways Phinuit was quite as implausible as his predecessors. No trace of him could be found in French medical records, and his knowledge of the French language was scanty indeed. In fact it seemed likely that he was an unconscious plagiarism from Cocke, who possessed an Irish guide named ‘Finney’. But whatever his ultimate status, he was a ‘character’, and more important he was, as we shall see, a success.

Under Phinuit’s regime the general procedure at a sitting would be this. Mrs Piper would pass into a trance. The onset of the trance was in these early days often accompanied by unpleasant spasmodic movements, grinding of the teeth, etc. There was never the least doubt that the trance-state was in some sense, ‘genuine’ – in it Mrs Piper could be cut, blistered, pricked and even have a bottle of strong ammonia held under her nose without being disturbed. After a few minutes, Mrs Piper would begin to speak with the voice of Phinuit, which was gruff and male and made use of Frenchisms, and also of slang and swearwords, in a manner quite unlike that of the waking Mrs Piper. Phinuit would give sitters accounts of the appearances and activities of deceased (and sometimes also of living) friends and relations, and would transmit messages from them, often with appropriate gestures.

Mrs Piper was ‘discovered’ for psychical research by William James, of Harvard University, arguably the greatest psychologist of that, perhaps of any, time. James was sufficiently impressed by his sittings to send some twenty-five other persons to her under pseudonyms. In the spring of 1886 he wrote an account of the results in which he stated (111, p. 653), ‘I am persuaded of the medium’s honesty, and of the genuineness of her trance; and although at first disposed to think that the ‘hits’ she made were either lucky coincidence, or the result of knowledge on her part of who the sitter was, and of his or her family affairs, I now believe her to be in possession of a power as yet unexplained.’

‘Lucky coincidence’ was not, I think, an explanation ever seriously considered by anyone who had extensive firsthand acquaintance with Mrs Piper’s performances. It was true that on an off-day, Phinuit would ramble and flounder hopelessly, would fish for information, and if given any, would blatantly serve it up again as though it had been his own discovery. But when he was on form he could, with hardly any hesitation or fishing, relay copious communications from the deceased friends and relatives of sitters, communications which would turn out to be very accurate even in tiny details, and far too accurate for the hypothesis of chance or of guesswork from the appearance of the sitters to seem in the remotest degree plausible.

As a result of James’s report, a leading member of the British SPR, Richard Hodgson (1855–1905), came out to Boston in 1887 and assumed charge of the investigation (66a). He was looked upon as an expert in the unmasking of fraud. He arranged for the careful recording of all sittings, and took the most extensive precautions against trickery. Sitters were introduced anonymously or pseudony-mously, and were drawn from as wide a range of persons as possible. Especial notice was taken of first sittings. For some weeks Mrs Piper was shadowed by detectives to ascertain whether she made enquiries into the affairs of possible sitters, or employed agents so to do. She was brought to England where she knew no one and could have had no established agents. During her stay there in the winter of 1889–90, all her sittings were arranged and supervised by leading members of the SPR. Sitters were for the most part introduced anonymously, and comprehensive records were kept (111). And still Mrs Piper continued to get results.

Dr Phinuit remained Mrs Piper’s chief control until the spring of 1892. Thereafter he was gradually superseded by a control who, whatever his ultimate nature, was at least not fictitious. This was George Pellew (’GP’), a young man of literary and philosophical interests who had been killed in New York a few weeks previously. He was known to Hodgson, and five years previously had had, under a pseudonym, one and only one sitting with Mrs Piper. He first manifested at a sitting to which Hodgson brought a close friend of his (Pellew’s). Then and thereafter the GP communicator showed a most detailed acquaintance with the affairs of the living Pellew. Out of 150 sitters who were introduced to him, GP recognized twenty-nine of the thirty who had been known to the living Pellew (the thirtieth, whom he recognized after an initial failure, was a person who had ‘grown up’ in the interval). He conversed with each of them in an appropriate manner, and showed an intimate knowledge of their concerns, and of his own supposed past relationships with them. Only rarely did GP slip up badly, as he sometimes did when discussing, for instance, the philosophical questions which had so much interested Pellew in life. During the period of GP’s ascendency, Hodgson became convinced (he had not previously been so) that Mrs Piper’s controls and communicators were, at least in many cases, what they claimed to be, namely the surviving spirits of formerly incarnate human beings (66b).

GP, like Phinuit, would pass on messages from other deceased persons who wished to communicate; but now it apparently became easier for other deceased persons to ‘communicate’ directly by speaking or writing through Mrs Piper’s organism. Writing in trance became much commoner, and ultimately predominant, and sometimes two different spirits would communicate simultaneously, one by the hand and one by the voice.

The later history of Mrs Piper’s mediumship requires only a brief account. GP remained the principal communicator until early in 1897 (during this period Hodgson had almost complete charge of her sittings, and very full records were kept). Thereafter for some years her principal controls were a band of spirits of the mighty dead who disguised their illustrious identities under such appropriately solemn sobriquets as ‘Imperator’, ‘Doctor’, ‘Rector’, ‘Prudens’, etc. Evidence figured somewhat less in the proceedings, and elevated teachings somewhat more, than they had previously done. In 1905 Hodgson died, and, predictably, became himself one of Mrs Piper’s controls. The purported communications from him were discussed in an interesting paper by William James (74). Later on Mrs Piper played a part in the famous ‘cross-correspondences’ (which are discussed later). Her trance mediumship ended in 1911, perhaps in consequence of the harsh treatment which she received at the hands of two American psychologists, Professor G. Stanley Hall, and Dr Amy Tanner (156). However she continued to do automatic writing.

We'll get to the Cross-Correspondence cases, which Carter finds very impressive while Braude feels pretty much the opposite. One thing I do think is interesting, regarding this question of controls and Super-Psi, is how the subconscious has to be both idiotic and ingenious for the hypothesis to hold.

As the Feda control was rather constant through most of Leonard's mediumship career this is harder to see, even if there's some reason to be suspicious of Feda herself being the spirit of an Indian girl who died in childbirth. However with Piper's mediumship we'll see cases where the same subconscious that would pretend to be a confused child and do some investigative sleuthing for information in order to impersonate the dead also is dumb enough to cast doubt by claiming that the spirit of a Native American girl was named "Chlorine".

Just something to keep in mind as we go through some of Piper's cases.

The whole subconscious wish fulfillment thing has been something I've been worried about for myself ever since teh paranormal shoved its way into my life. Most notably when scarlet first started showing up, claiming that  the purely fictional story that'd been going through my mind for my entire life up to that point was in fact my own past life memories and that as a result she and I were in a relationship, at least we were in the past as she's not exactly incarnated now as far as I know. I rejected all of this outright for a good year and a half despite her, yellow and other not leaving me alone about it and other legitimately paranormal stuff happeniong around the time. I assumed that it was clearly some sort of psychological coping mechanism to deal with stress, especially the stress of the poltergest stuff and similar happening at the time. I demanded evidence over and over and rejected pretty much everything they tried providing and scoffed at any excuse they gave about why they couldn't do certain things to prove their existence or story. Goaded them and other self proclaimed spirits to just show up physically and do something real. Over time though bits of not so easily handwaved evidence trickled in. After the year and a half or so I decided I'd try more or less roleplaying what they were telling me, acting like it was true but not really believing it. I figured I'd try and see what happened. And that progressed for awhile as more things happened and more bits of evidence came in, I met Teal, we found we had large and highly specific overlaps in our respective "stories" including the specific first and last names of certain individuals and their roles in certain organizations. At this point I can't deny that the general story is more than likely true simply because of the sheer amount of evidence from many diffferent areas that you'd need to try explaining away if you argued it wasn't true.

However, during all this there were also many definitive cases of false information as well as a couple contradictions or puzzling choices that very much fit the self delusion narrative. Namely, if the memories are correct, then Scarlet in particular, as well as everyone else in the group in general, should be more than capable of straight up travelling here at will any time they wanted. As in, not just showing up as apparitions, visible or invisible, but just showing up as straight up as physical people like everyone else. However, other than a few apparitions, they have refused to do this. They've demonstrated the ability to affect the physical world directly but only sparingly do so during specific types of "emergencies". Though their stated reasons aren't technically wrong or incoherent, it still seems odd that they've been so restrained for so long. They've stated they aren't going to save me from life threatening circumstances unless said circumstances involve a magical entity. The reasoning being because death doesn't really matter, but if something with magic tries killing me they has potential to try kidnapping my soul, so they would want to intervene to prevent that. That reasoning is fine, it makes sense from their perspective. Though a much better way to ensure safety would be to just come grab me and leave. Their reasoning for not just showing up boils down to there being, supposedly, some sort of dimensional "distortion field" around the planet. The mechanics of which would be hard to explain but sufficed to say by its nature, assuming it's there at all, you would not be able to detect it with any technology currently avaliable because teh field doesn't actually exist in physical reality, it's sort of... around it. Although they say they could, technically, pierce through it if they needed to, doing so supposedly carries a degree of ecological risk. As they claim there's a chance that punching through it might cause a reaction sort of like popping a balloon, and that this reaction has a higher chance of happening with them specifically because they are coming in from outside of the system, and thus their energy could potentially have a sort of friction reaction with the field. I do have some reason to believe that there may in fact be some sort of field like they describe based on certain things I've heard from other people who've done astral projection and OBE's, and that it may very well function the way they say, and that there may in fact be the risk they describe. But its far from solid evidence. However if my memories are right then it seems ludicrous to me that such a field would cause them the amount of hesitancy that it supposedly does. And supposedly the minor apparition stuff that they've done isn't strong enough to upset the field, it would only be a problem if a much higher concentration of foreign energy, such as their physical bodies, tried passing through. The other reason they state is that they have basically been told that they aren't allowed to have anymore direct interaction with me, I.E apparitions and poltergeists like they used to do, by what I call  the "local spirits", the ones claiming to be trying to help humanity grow through what amounts to reverse psychology, as our group are outside of their system and viewed with some suspicion. And so to keep the peace they are agreeing to this. again, I don't see how this would prevent them from just telling said spirits to go fuck themselves and grabbing me and leaving if they so wanted or flet that maybe there was some potential danger on my end. It wouldn't exactly be the first time they've done something like that. The last reason being that they are taking this opportunity to help me deal with some emotional issues and so aren't going to intervene or even interact much with me unless they have to for an indeterminate amount of time. Because there doesn't seem to be anything hostile around anymore, all the political drama has been more or less worked out between all of us, and so there's no reason not to. I've talked about some of that elsewhere.

Personally I'm not a fan of some of that, it seems technically plausible, and even just re-reading it myself I find it hard to doubt. It seems coherent. But at the same time it still makes me wonder. I spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how to do shared projections and shared dreams specifically to try and find anything within those states that could be used as a predictor to tell me if there's a likelyhood that any particular one was real and shared before attempting to verify. I did find a subset of feelings and other things that were pretty reliable and because of that I know that pretty much every time I had a projection with Scarlet and co that had false information, it lacked the "real" qualities. Still, I'm forced to admit that although the general story seems likely to be true, I don't really know what specifics are true. and I'm forced to just say that I have no clue what's really going on or what's real with all of it.

The Psi Encyclopedia Entry on Piper

Some of this is already noted above, but a few important details:

The behaviour of the ‘Phinuit’ personality, whether this was real in some sense or merely a construct of Piper’s unconscious mind, was distasteful to the investigators and to visitors who experienced poor sittings. Although he was generally disposed, even eager, to be helpful, he also sometimes showed a certain low cunning in pretending to knowledge that he did not have, appearing to use methods now known as ‘cold reading’ (described as ‘fishing’ by the investigators).  For instance he would sometimes note if the sitter provided a piece of information, and then later casually produce it as if it was original knowledge of his own.

Walter Leaf wrote, ‘If he is not able to make a right statement, he is always ready with a guess of more or less ingenuity to conceal his ignorance, or at least with some ambiguity or subterfuge which should make a show of turning the difficulty.’12  This made a powerfully negative impact on certain observers, and today is widely taken out of context to portray Piper as a common charlatan.

On many occasions information was given that was only partly right, or completely wrong. Sitters who attended sittings in which ‘Phinuit’ produced only generalities and wrong information came away believing that there was nothing supernormal about Piper’s performance.

However, as the investigators concurred, in successful sittings, ‘Phinuit’ could pour out quantities of correct information – names, relationships, family circumstances, trivial incidents, pet names – without any hesitation or stumbling.

The ‘secondary personality’ argument was somewhat weakened with the appearance of the personality identifying himself as George Pellew (referred to in the literature as ‘Pelham’ or ‘GP’ -- see above), whose speech, mannerisms and interests were thought by Hodgson -- and by many of Pellew’s friends whom Hodgson invited to sit with Piper in the months and years following his death -- to match those of the living Pellew. ‘GP’ also showed none of ‘Phinuit’s’ ‘fishing’ tendencies.  In his 1897 report on the Pelham sittings, Hodgson revealed his new conviction of the survival of consciousness after death. 

Also tending to counter the ‘secondary controls’ interpretation, the controls were frequently replaced by other personalities who identified themselves as deceased friends and relatives of sitters, talking and behaving in ways that the sitters often found completely convincing.  These direct interactions tended to be brief, but were sometimes routine, as in the case of the communicator claiming to be James Hyslop’s deceased father. Another sitter described her frequent conversations with a communicator she believed to be a deceased friend, a church minister whose interests and mannerisms were distinct from both ‘Phinuit’ and Piper.15 (See below for further discussion)

This issue with controls would continue to haunt Piper even later in her career:

On this occasion the main communicating control was ‘Hodgson’.  Hall and Tanner concluded that the phenomenon was an unusual kind of secondary personality. They found no evidence of paranormality. The investigation is notable for the ‘Bessie Beals’ incident, in which Hall and Tanner asked ‘Hodgson’ to see if he could locate a (fictional) deceased aunt. Although the character was an invention, ‘Hodgson’ subsequently provided several messages from ‘Bessie Beals’.46

SPR researchers were critical of the Tanner report, which they regarded as poorly reasoned.47

That last footnote is worth a read in its entirety:

How Martin Gardner Bamboozled the Skeptics

This first part gets into the fictional Bessie Beals:

Both Gardner and Hall seem to place much importance on this ‘scam’, despite the fact that Hall had asked Mr. Dorr (Mrs. Piper’s SPR ‘manager’ of the time) whether the investigators had tried such a trick previously. Mr. Dorr’s answer was that “many have tried foolery and sometimes have succeeded splendidly, and other times have failed. Controls are very suggestible and very willing to take up any ideas presented by the sitters, so that they can be very easily taken in” [my emphasis]. Certainly, this suggestibility should give one pause when trusting the words of Mrs. Piper (or any other medium). But given that the original SPR researchers had noted this aspect – it wasn’t ignored or never tested, the researchers simply found that it couldn’t explain away the convincing ‘hits’ that Mrs. Piper managed regularly – it doesn’t seem quite as great a scam as Gardner would have us believe.

Gardner’s criticisms are more successful when he brings up particular instances that concerned the original researchers. He rightly points out that Phinuit seemed unable to provide the contents of letters and secret messages written by the dead communicators he was in contact with: “Three times Phinuit tried vainly to guess the contents of a sealed envelope in James’s possession, even though the doctor supposedly contacted the dead woman who wrote the letter.” This particular case is a major stumbling block to the idea that the communicators were truly who they claimed to be – surely they would remember their own writings? All the same, there are still interesting facets to the case that are suggestive of some paranormal faculty, which Gardner doesn’t mention. But this genuine criticism is an isolated instance in Gardner’s essay. If he was more conversant with the source material he certainly could have raised other concerns. One of William Newbold’s sittings provided minor evidence of Mrs. Piper possibly purloining phrases from dictionaries. And an odd mistake in a sitting with a Professor Bowditch could be an indication of prior research being done on the sitter. Gardner would have done better to concentrate on analysis of some of these isolated incidents, instead of broad criticisms that have previously been comprehensively rebutted.

There are other fascinating aspects for discussion in this case even on the assumption of deception. One of the more curious aspects of Mrs. Piper’s trance mediumship was that for a time (during the transition from communication via the voice, to communication via writing), three different ‘communicators’ could hold ‘conversations’ with three different sitters at the same time – one through voice, one writing with the right hand, and one writing with the left hand. Yet Gardner casually explains away this bizarre simultaneous three-way mediumship simply by saying Mrs. Piper was “strongly ambidextrous”. And there are other aspects that should give the curious mind pause before dismissing her as a fraud. Given her reputation after the first couple of years of investigation, Mrs. Piper could have left the service of the SPR and charged exorbitant amounts of money offering sittings for the rich and powerful, with much less chance of being caught. Instead, she remained on a compensatory wage under the skeptical eyes of investigators for a good portion of her lifetime. Further to that, if she was a fraudulent medium, why change ‘technique’ from voice mediumship when it was so successful, to developing simultaneous voice and writing (and at times communicating via mirror writing) for no additional reward or benefit? And how did she fool scientists and physicians that her trance was genuine, showing no reaction to pain sensitivity tests including surprise needle jabs, flames held to her skin, and long inhalations of ammonia?