LIFE Mysteries of the Unknown

By The Editors of LIFE

LIFE Magazine presents Mysteries of the Unknown for LIFE Mysteries of the Unknown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Oct 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781547852802

Book preview

Coast.

CHAPTER 1

Matters of the Mind

Nineteenth-century spiritualist beliefs gave rise to psychics, mediums, séances, paranormal Cold War tactics, and, of course, skeptics

OTHERWORLDLY CONTACT Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, center, conducted a séance in the home of astronomer Camille Flammarion in 1898.

The wooden cottage in Hydesville, New York, had a single bedroom shared by blacksmith John Fox, his wife Margaret, and two of their daughters, Maggie, 14, and Kate, 11. Not the kind of place you would imagine as the birthplace of an international spiritual movement, yet in the spring of 1848, the Foxes summoned a neighbor to the family’s candlelit sleeping quarters to witness a curious phenomenon that, the young women claimed at the time, they were at a loss to explain.

Every night, the Fox girls heard strange sounds in the house—knocking noises that seemed to embody an intelligence unlike any other they had encountered. As Maggie and Kate sat on their bed, their mother demonstrated the mystery to the neighbor: Now count five, she commanded. Five raps were heard. Count 15, she continued. Fifteen knocks followed one after the other, making a feeling of tremulous motion more than a sudden jar, as Margaret later reported. Next she asked the unseen presence to state the neighbor’s age, and 33 raps sounded. If you are an injured spirit, manifest it with three raps, Margaret implored. Then: rap, rap, rap.

Over the next few years, those mysterious bumps in the night in upstate New York, now referred to in books about supernatural events as a poltergeist disturbance, echoed all over the country and across the Atlantic. It wasn’t the first time that such strange things had been reported, but the newly powerful mass media carried sensational descriptions of the Fox sisters and their apparent ability to communicate with spirits, and flocks of curious visitors showed up outside the cottage in Hydesville. Eventually, the family moved out, with Maggie, Kate, and a third older sister, Leah, settling in a rented room at the Barnum Hotel in New York City, which just happened to be run by a relative of one of the greatest show people on Earth, P.T. Barnum.

And what a show the Fox sisters put on: Their occult demonstrations and spirit conjuring attracted luminaries of the day, such as author James Fenimore Cooper and Horace Greely, the editor of the New York Tribune. Greely was so impressed when spirits summoned by the sisters were able, via raps and knocks, to correctly answer questions about his deceased children that he invited the youngest sibling to move in with his family. Maggie, Kate, and Leah were soon among the modern world’s first professional mediums, charging $1 admission to séances held in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Before long, spiritualism was the rage. Ordinary citizens of the Victorian era opened their parlors to mediums and mystics, séances, demonstrations of table tipping, automatic writing, hypnotism, spirit photography, and other manners of communication with the beyond. Skeptics abounded, to be sure, but so did devout Christians and highly regarded scientists who joined the spiritualist movement, which, after all, affirmed life after death and the indomitable nature of the human soul. At the White House, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who had been emotionally strained by the loss of two of her four sons, organized séances to contact them. More than once, President Abraham Lincoln also attended.

Of course, the idea of voices calling out from another realm was not exactly new. The Bible is peopled with both angels and demons who embody the souls of the no longer living, and cultures from ancient Greece to indigenous peoples on every continent have revered shamans, oracles, and others with the power to bridge the gap between the here and now and the beyond. But the modern era of interest in psychic phenomena, which continues to today, opened on particularly fertile ground in 19th-century America and Europe—a time when radical advances in science, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, upset traditional thinking about life and death and the horrible mechanics of modern warfare led generations to an early grave.

During the bloody years of the Civil War, millions of Americans joined the spiritualist movement, wrote Emma Hardinge Britten, one of its prominent leaders, and interest swelled again during World War I. A half-century later, amid Cold War tensions, U.S. military researchers attempted to harness suspected paranormal powers of the mind for tactical use against the country’s adversaries.

During the Cold War, U.S. military researchers attempted to harness suspected paranormal powers to use against adversaries.

Reaction to mediums and other purveyors of telepathy, premonitions, telekinesis (moving objects with the mind), pyrokinesis (fire starting), trances, and extra sensory perception (ESP) was—and remains—passionate. As it still does, the Roman Catholic Church forbid the faithful from communicating with the dead, otherwise known as witchcraft. And generations of ghostbusters set about exposing fraud and trickery. One of the most successful debunkers was Harry Houdini, the world-famous Hungarian-America illusionist and escape artist at the turn of the 20th century. Houdini was outraged that false mystics were profiting from the grieving families of soldiers lost on the battlefield and launched a campaign to expose their methods, offering $10,000 to anybody with psychic skills he could not personally re-create, often on the same theatrical bill with his escapes from a tank filled with water or from padlocked iron shackles.

Yet some of modern times’ greatest thinkers have embraced spiritualism—scientists such as Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose groundbreaking theories about personality and the mind seamlessly mixed elements of Western philosophy and psychic phenomena. Jung studied both astrology and the ancient Chinese divination system known as I Ching. Institutes dedicated to the study of paranormal behavior opened on the campuses of major American and European universities, including Princeton and Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory in Durham, North Carolina. There, botanist J.B. Rhine put ESP to rigorous testing in the 1930s, producing what he considered proof that some individuals possess powers of perception beyond sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Criticism of Rhine’s methods led Duke University to break ties with the lab in the 1960s, but the lab continues to explore parapsychology under private management today.

Are paranormal powers legitimate, or are they the wishful thinking of people desperate to establish contact with those who have gone before them? The question has been posed since the day the Fox sisters sprang onto the scene more than a century and a half ago. In 1888, Maggie Fox appeared on the stage of New York City’s Academy of Music and delivered a disarming confession. Forty years earlier, at the dawn of spiritualism, she and her sisters were very mischievous children and sought merely to terrify our dear mother when they created the knocking sounds in the night by covertly lowering an apple on a string until it hit the floor with a thud. She pronounced spiritualism a fraud of the worst description.

But just one year later, Maggie recanted her admission, saying that she had felt pressure to denounce her heartfelt beliefs in the beyond from Catholics and other opponents of spiritualism. Hydesville, the movement’s birthplace in upstate New York, may no longer even be on the map, but psychics, mediums, Ouija boards, and séances were here to stay.

RISE OF A MOVEMENT An engraving of Maggie and Kate Fox showed the sisters levitating a table in Rochester, New York, in 1850. The Foxes were credited with helping launch spiritualism.

PHOTOSHOPPED Spirit photography, popular in the late 1800s, purported to capture images of ghosts next to loved ones who lived on. Here, a couple was shown with a figure, perhaps a daughter, in 1870.

AN ENTERTAINER’S VIEW

HARRY HOUDINI: VICTORIAN GHOSTBUSTER

Throughout his life, the famous escape artist was fascinated by spiritualism and the afterlife. Then came his debunking period

CHAIN REACTION As an escape artist, Harry Houdini, here circa 1899, progressed from handcuffs to locked, water-filled tanks, but he also campaigned against fraudulent mediums.

It might seem that early-20th-century escape artist Harry Houdini shared a certain ethos with the period’s mediums. After all, Houdini convinced audiences that he could squirm out of handcuffs and swallow 100 needles at a sitting, while mediums claimed to have an equally preposterous ability to communicate with the dead.

But for the famous illusionist, who had been fascinated with the afterlife since childhood, the comparison didn’t hold up. In his mind, he was an entertainer able to execute the impossible through skill, trickery, and illusion. The mediums, instead, were phonies who claimed to be able to pass messages to the dead. They were exploiting society’s most gullible.

As the popularity of mediums grew—fueled by the public’s enthusiasm for spiritualism—so did Houdini’s frustration. Eventually he set about debunking famous mediums in séance-sting operations. His qualifications? "It takes