Every year the world over, countless people attempt to get in touch with the dead through the services of a medium. Is there any proof that they succeed?
Six months after the death of her husband, Brenda Richardson went to see a medium. She had heard that her local Spiritualist Church held weekly 'meetings' during which a medium would relay messages from the spirits of the dead to their friends and relatives in the audience.
Brenda went along with a friend 'just for a laugh', but was caught completely off her guard when, within minutes of the meeting beginning, the medium asked if anyone in the audience had recently 'lost' someone by the name of Charles. Tentatively, Brenda revealed that her late husband had been called Charles.
The medium then proceeded to tell her that she had Charles with her and that he was telling her that Brenda should lay her financial worries to rest. Hanging from her dining room wall, the message continued, was a painting of a horse that Charles had bought a few years before his death.
At the time, he told his wife that he had bought the painting cheaply on an impulse, but he was now claiming that the purchase was intended as an investment. Unbeknown to Brenda, the artist was a little-known but highly regarded early 19th century painter called W. H. Davies. Brenda was astonished. The message appeared to be accurate in many details - including her current financial crisis. But what was she to make about the revelations about the painting?
Proof of a Spirit World?
Her head in a spin, Brenda rushed back to her house after the meeting, and checked the painting. There, in the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas - in the faintest of scripts - was the artists signature: W. H. Davies. A valuation at Sotheby's - the internationally renowned art auctioneers - the following week confirmed that the painting was indeed valuable.
Brenda Richardson's story is just one of thousands involving mediums who make startlingly accurate revelations about personal or family secrets. o many, Brenda's experience provides cast-iron proof of Spiritualism's central tenet: that a part of the human personality - which mediums refer to as the spirit - survives physical death and can communicate with the living through specially gifted people.
Maurice Barbanell, one-time editor of Psychic News and a reputable medium in his day, explained the process involved in his book This is Spiritualism: "Mediumship is... the ability to register... frequencies that cannot be captured by any of the five senses... The medium, as the name implies, is a go-between, an intermediary - in effect a human radio or television set... able to tune in to a world of activity that to the rest of mankind is invisible and inaudible."
Sceptics of the 'life after death' hypothesis, however, are convinced that there is nothing paranormal about mediumship. Professional magician and psychic investigator James Randi believes that, far from communing with the dead, the medium and the sitter (the term used for the person receiving the message from the spirit world) are involved in an unconscious game of mutual self-deception.
Unconscious Collusion?
Randi put his theory to the test when, in 1991, he took part in a number of intriguing programmes on the paranormal for Granada Television's Open Media series. In one programme, the psychic abilities of Maureen Flynn - described as one of Britain's most highly respected mediums - were scrutinized in front of a studio audience.
Randi chose to analyse the contents of a one-to-one session that had been recorded earlier that day in order to remove the risk of the medium simply striking lucky among a large audience. Randi, who had already listened to the 30 minute tape, proceeded to ask the sitter in front of the audience various questions about the reading. Just as Randi had expected, the sitters recollection of what had happened proved to be inaccurate.
The sitter, who described himself as a 'very satisfied customer', mentioned, for instance, that Flynn had proffered only six names and that all had meaning for him. The tape revealed, however, that the medium had actually offered no fewer than 37 names in total. She had also asked him to relate particularly to names beginning with 'N' or 'L', which he failed to do. Most revealing, perhaps, was the fact that it was the spirits of the sitter's mother and aunt who were supposedly providing the names to the medium, yet their names were not among the 37 given. The discrepancies were undeniable. At one point in the session, Flynn claimed to be in contact with the spirit of a woman who said that the sitter had three children, whereas he only had two. The conversation was then promptly redirected, as indeed it appeared to be at other points in the recorded session when names or situations mooted by Flynn did not appear to fit.
The fact that the sitter repeatedly expressed satisfaction with the session also suggested to Randi that there was some sort of unconscious collusion between the sitter and the medium. On the sitter's part, his ability to asses the information dispassionately was impaired by a desperate urge for the medium to succeed and put him in touch with his dead relatives. In return, the medium received false confirmation that her psychic powers were genuine.
However, critics of Randi claim that his theory of unconscious collusion gives a distorted view of mediumship. In particular, it ignores cases like Brenda Richardson's, where the medium gives accurate information without any input from the sitter. As a result, some researchers have conceded that genuine mediums may acquire their insights paranormally, through extrasensory perception (ESP). According to this idea, mediums are not in touch with the spirits of the dead, but are gifted mind-readers or, perhaps, memory-readers.
Telepathic Link?
By tuning into the sitter telepathically, a medium can retrieve intimate details about the lives and characteristics of the sitter's deceased friends and relatives. This can apparently happen even though the sitter may not be conscious of thinking about these people at the time.
One of the clearest examples of medium-induced ESP is when messages are relayed from spirits of people who are still alive. In a well-documented case, psychic investigator Rosalyn Heywood visited a medium to discover the fate of a German friend, who she had last seen in 1938. Her fears that her friend had been killed in the war appeared to be confirmed when, during the session, he presented himself to the medium. After exchanging reminiscences with Heywood of their times together, the friend revealed that he dah died in the war in circumstances he could not discuss.
Fictitious Spirit.
After the session, Heywood decided to check whether this account was true. A lengthy search ended when she found out that her friend had in fact escaped the war. Moreover, he had settled down and was married and was very much alive and well. At first, Heywood was tempted to dismiss the medium as a fraud. But the notes from the session contained personal information about her relationship with her friend, which the medium could not possibly have invented. It then dawned on Heywood that the medium must have unwittingly tapped into her subconscious memories about her friend, as well as her concern for his fate.
Although ESP appears to account for Rosalyn Heywood's experience, it fails to explain how a medium acquires information that is not known to the sitter at the time it is given. In Brenda Richardson's case, for instance, telepathy could not have been involved, because Brenda had no knowledge of the painting's true value.
Some investigators, however, would argue that Brenda's memory may have been faulty. She could have known the full story behind the painting, but subsequently forgotten it until the medium recovered the details telepathically from her subconscious memory. The only other possible explanation, of course, is that the information originated from the spirit of her dead husband.
What, then, is to be made of the claims of mediums as to their powers? Even if most so-called mediumship can be explained as deliberate fraud or unconscious deception, there is an impressive body of evidence to suggest that genuine mediums may acquire their information by paranormal means.
Whether this is through ESP or contact with the spirit world is impossible to say. No one has yet managed to prove the existence of an afterlife by scientific methods. And in the opinion of British psychologist Stan Gooch - who believes that mediumship is an authentic phenomenon - most mainstream scientists are unlikely to risk their reputations by becoming embroiled in this highly controversial area of the paranormal. As Gooch puts it: 'So long as mediums claim to be in contact with departed spirits, orthodox science and academic psychology will continue to have an excuse to dismiss all the phenomena involved as nonsense.'
Public Demand.
What is certain, however, is that many people claim to have found solace as a result of consulting a medium - and their belief in an afterlife and a reunion with lost loved ones reaffirmed. So long as there is an ever-ready public waiting for contact from 'the other side', mediums will continue to fulfil this need.
