After attending a séance, William Crookes became so fascinated by mediumship that he moved Florrie Cook into his house for a period of months. In due time, Crookes pronounced Florrie genuine.
But it seemed obvious to most people that Florrie Cook and Katie King were the same person. Crookes claimed on two occasions to have seen both Florrie Cook and Katie King appear simultaneously, but his own objectivity was considered compromised, and in any case he was famous for his bad eyesight.
Eventually the controversial ghost Katie King ceased to appear, and Florrie Cook materialized a new ghost named Marie. One night Sir George Sitwell grabbed Marie, who screamed and ran from the room. The sitters opened the locked cabinet and found it empty, with Florrie Cook’s clothes lying on the floor. Fraud was finally confirmed.
The episode of William Crookes and Florrie Cook seems an object lesson in the gullibility of a scientist. Yet Conan Doyle behaved much like Crookes; all his life he evinced a surprising willingness to accept all sorts of unlikely events. Although he said “the unmasking of false mediums is our urgent duty,” and although he exposed several instances of fraud himself, he was generally trusting to an extraordinary degree. This culminated in the episode of the fairy photographs, which bears all the characteristics of an incautious Conan Doyle adventure into the spiritual world.
In 1920 two Yorkshire children, Elsie and Frances Wright, claimed they had photographed fairies in a country garden. The girls’ father was an amateur photographer who kept his own darkroom. For this and for other reasons, the photographs immediately aroused suspicion. A spokesman for Eastman Kodak claimed they were “visibly fake.” An expert for the New York Herald Tribune said the fairies were dolls. Many people asked why the fairies were dressed in contemporary Paris fashions.
Conan Doyle sent a friend to interview the girls—he himself never met them. Then he examined the photographs, and published, in The Coming of the Fairies, his belief that the pictures of little winged people were genuine and proved fairies were real.
This was my concern: that an otherwise sensible physician-turned-author could go so far as to persuade himself, by degrees, of the existence of fairies. I had in the past strongly identified with Conan Doyle, and now I appeared to be following in his footsteps rather closely. I determined to proceed with caution.
It seemed as if the first thing was to get a sense of whether “psychic” behavior really occurred at all. Because I certainly knew, from my own medical experience, that you could learn an enormous amount just by observing somebody. And I had once spent a memorable hour watching a pair of Turkish street vendors in the Istanbul bazaar accost passing customers in a dozen different languages, always correctly. Plenty of ordinary, nonpsychic insight was possible, and I wanted to minimize that. So I set the following rules for myself:
1. I never gave my own name.
2. I never gave verbal cues during the reading. In practice, this meant I tried to say nothing at all, so that the psychic wouldn’t even know if I was English or not. If I was pressed to speak, I would make a nondescript murmur like “Ummm” or “Hmmm.” However I first said this murmur, I would try to repeat it exactly the same way, with no change in inflection, for the rest of the interview. If the psychic pushed me to speak, I would say “Maybe” or “I’m not sure.” And then stick to that phrase throughout the reading.
3. I never gave visual cues during the reading. No extraneous body movements, no shifting in the chair as the reading was given. Take a position and hold it.
4. I tried to keep my mind blank. Just in case somebody could read my mind. You never know.
5. I tried to keep track of everything said, the hits and misses. There is a tendency to be impressed by the hits in psychic readings and to ignore the misses. I wanted to retain the balance. I took constant notes.
I was satisfied with this plan, but I knew it would be extremely difficult to carry out in practice. Although it was my intention not to give the psychics anything to “read” about me through ordinary channels, the fact is that we all present a huge amount of information to one another—clothing, posture, skin tone, body position, body movement, body smell, breathing rates, and so on—all the time. There isn’t any way to prevent that except by doing an interview by phone. Our physical presence is inescapably informative.
And although I did not intend to permit any body movements or voice inflections that would give feedback, I felt it unlikely that I would be able to follow my plan as perfectly as I would have liked. Nevertheless, I intended to make it as tough as possible.
As luck would have it, the first psychic I saw was wonderfully suited to my plans. She was past sixty, and nearly blind. She couldn’t hear very well, either, because she thought I was from London. I didn’t disagree with her. I just sat there. To make my mind blank, I concentrated on her swollen ankles.
She talked about this and that, making a few psychological comments, but nothing particularly specific. After about half an hour of rambling, she suddenly said, “What on earth do you do for work?,” with a sort of alarm in her voice.
Immediately she said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. It’s just that I can’t put it together. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Then she told me what she was seeing.
She saw me working in a room like a laundry, with huge white baskets, and there were black snakes coiling in the baskets, except that they weren’t snakes. And she heard this terrible sound, repeated over and over again, a kind of Whaaaa-whoooo, whoooo-whaaaa, and she saw pictures going forward and backward, forward and backward. And something about hats, or high hats, or old-style fashion.
This was what she couldn’t put together. And she found it unpleasant, these sounds and snakes and things. She said, “You are the most peculiar person.”
I, of course, knew exactly what she was seeing. She was seeing the place I had been virtually living in for the last two weeks, the editing room where we ran the film back and forth to the accompaniment of those hideous sounds. The film was The Great Train Robbery and the actors all wore high hats.
There was absolutely no way this little blind lady with swollen ankles could have known about that.
I left the interview feeling odd. All my careful plans now seemed irrelevant. No matter how I might have failed to control my body movement, my verbalizations and grunts, no matter how much she might have feigned blindness as she did a “cold reading” on me, I knew damned well I couldn’t have conveyed to her images of what an editing room looked like—images she would misconstrue as a laundry with snakes. I hadn’t tipped her off about that. It wasn’t possible. And not many people in the world had ever seen an editing room: it wasn’t common knowledge.
So where had she gotten the information?
I could think of two possibilities. One was that she had been informed. I had made my appointment by phone under a different name, but when I walked in the building, I might conceivably have been recognized by someone at the desk, and this person might have somehow told the woman who I was, that I had something to do with movies. There wasn’t any phone in the psychic’s room that I could see, but you never knew. Being informed would explain everything.
The other possibility was that she was psychic, and the phenomenon was real.
I returned to the Spiritualist Association a couple of days later. This time I saw a small, precise man with a snippy manner. He held out his hand, snapped his fingers, and said, “Well? Give me something.”
“Like what?”
“Your watch will do.”
I gave him my watch.
“Don’t worry, I’ll give it back. Sit down over there.”
He held the watch in his hand, rubbed it between his fingers, toyed with it. He sat in a rocking chair. I was starting to get a headache. I didn’t like being around him.
“Do you believe in spiritualism?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Was your grandfather a soldier?”
“I don’t know.”
> “I see, you’re one of those who say the same thing all the time, are you? Don’t want to give me any help, is that it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I was following my plan, but it seemed stupid.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Please yourself. I see your grandfather riding on a horse; he looks like a soldier. I see your grandfather working with stone. I see chips of stone on the ground; he works with stone.”
My grandfather died in the army, in the influenza epidemic of 1919, before my father was born. My grandfather had worked as a gravestone cutter. I had seen photographs.
“Your father is dead,” the psychic said. “Recently passed over?”
My father had died eight months before. “Yes,” I said.
“He’s all right. Your mother is grieving too much. You should tell her that your father is all right and he wants her to stop grieving so much. Will you tell your mother that?”
“Yes.” Thinking, Oh brother, sure. I’m going to call my mother up and say, Some obnoxious little creep held my watch and said that Dad is on the Other Side and everything is fine, Mom. Sure I am.
And also thinking this was a stock situation. Once this guy had guessed that my father had recently died, then he could say, without much fear of contradiction, that my mother was grieving too much and that I should tell her Dad was okay. It was a stock situation and it didn’t mean anything.
The man rubbed the watch in his hands.
“Your father did some good things and some bad things.”
Another stock comment. Applicable to any dead person. I was unimpressed.
“Your father feels bad about what he did to you.”
I said nothing.
“Your father did the best he could with you, but you see, he had no father of his own to teach him.”
That was true. And not easy to guess.
“Your father didn’t know how to behave around you, and you of course intimidated him. So you and he had difficulties. But he knows he injured you, and now he feels bad about it. He wants you to know that. He wants to help you now.”
I said nothing.
“Often at night you walk in the city. At those times your father is close to you, and he wishes to help you.”
In London, I had been seeing a woman who lived near my hotel. I would often walk home at night, enjoying the cool air and the light London fog, and during those times I would think of my father.
“I get that your sister is a lawyer,” he said suddenly. “But she is American. Why is she in England?”
My sister and her husband were at that moment on vacation in England. Somewhere—I hadn’t seen them yet, and wouldn’t until they arrived in London at the end of the month.
And so it went, for the rest of the hour. The little man might be annoying, but he was pretty accurate.
I was back a couple of days later. I saw a middle-aged woman who wore a Scottish tweed suit and who looked like a tall version of Miss Marple. In tones of great authority, she informed me that I was from Malta, that I was an only child, and that I was in a business that had to do with food or restaurants and I had better watch out, because I was being cheated.
I left stunned. This woman had been entirely wrong. It had seemed that by chance alone she would stumble onto something about me that was true. But this reading had been wrong in every detail.
Because I was directing a movie, I had a car and a driver. My driver, John King, became interested in why I was going so often to this association.
“What is it they do there exactly, Michael?”
“Well, they have people who do readings, psychic readings.”
“They tell you the future?”
“Sometimes. Or sometimes they just tell about you, what kind of person you are.”
“You don’t already know what kind of person you are?” John had this practical side.
“Well, it’s interesting if someone who doesn’t know you tells you.”
“And they’re right?”
“Usually, yes.”
John was silent for a while. Then he said, “You believe a person can tell the future?”
“I think something is happening here,” I said.
That was as far as I had gotten at that point. It would have been absurd to insist that all of my readings could be explained in some ordinary way. One psychic had told me the names of my friends in California. Another had described my house and the modifications I had made to it. A third had recalled a traumatic incident in the third grade when I had released Miss Fromkin’s pet canary and the bird had flown into the ceiling air vent and hadn’t come back for an hour.
A network of the most diligent informants couldn’t explain that one. Nor had I inadvertently conveyed the information to the psychic by any normal channel. I couldn’t have “leaked” anything about Miss Fromkin’s canary. I hadn’t even remembered the incident until I was reminded of it.
I was quite clear about all that. I was clear about what hadn’t happened.
But I was less clear about what had happened, and what it all meant. In particular, I was reluctant to jump from accepting these accurate depictions of my past to the idea that somebody could see the future. Seeing the future appeared quite a different proposition from seeing the past.
For one thing, we can all communicate the past. I can tell you about my life and you will know something about it. There’s nothing mysterious about this. The ability of somebody to do the same thing without speaking, the ability to “read my mind” without words, could be seen as merely a refinement of a pre-existing skill, just as a jet plane is a refinement of a biplane. I didn’t have any real problem with it, even though I didn’t understand how it was done.
On the other hand, I felt there were theoretical objections to seeing the future. Similar to the theoretical objections to traveling faster than the speed of light. I couldn’t really understand how it might be done, and that interfered with my ability to consider whether it was being done. After all, the past existed, in the sense that the past was a prior present, now retired. But the future did not yet exist. So how could it be perceived?
Anyway, I wasn’t sure how much future information I was actually getting. As far as I could tell, I was being told accurate information about the past and the present. Not much about the future.
These thoughts made me hesitant as I talked to John.
“What do you like about it,” John asked, “going to see these people?”
“Just … I don’t know. I’m interested.” That was the best explanation I could give. In a way, it still is.
Then, because he still looked puzzled, I said, “Tell you what. The next time I go, I’ll make an appointment for you, too.”
I came out from my next session to find him already in the car. He was pale and frightened.
“Cor, that bloke. Know what he said to me?”
“No. What?”
But John didn’t say. “How do they know those things, then?”
“What things?”
“Oh, I couldn’t believe it, how he knew those things. Gives me shivers up and down me spine.”
“What did he say, John?”
“Oh. Well. I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t care for that. Never going back there, I don’t mind telling you.”
He would only talk about his responses to the experience, not the experience itself.
“I don’t know why you like it,” he said later. “I don’t know why you like going there.”
“I don’t know why you don’t,” I said.
I couldn’t work out his reaction. I could understand skepticism, or indifference. But fear?
Days later he gave me a clue. We were driving out to the studio and he said, “To tell the truth, I don’t want to know that much about myself. And I don’t want somebody else knowing.”
So that was the fear. A fear of exposure. A fear of invasion of privacy. A fear of secrets or weaknesses that will be discovered. A fear of what the future holds.
I could understand that. I remembered the first time I had ever seen an actual psychiatrist. He was the father of a girl I knew in college, and I was seated next to him at dinner. I didn’t want to open my mouth all night, because I thought, If I say anything at all he will see through me, and he will realize I am a shallow, sex-crazed, deeply disturbed fraud of a young man. So I kept my mouth shut.
After a while this psychiatrist said to me, “You’re very quiet.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
He asked me some questions about what I was studying in college, to draw me out. I answered tersely; I wouldn’t be drawn out.
Finally he said, “Do I make you nervous?”
“A little,” I said. And then I told him my fear, that he would be able to analyze me from my chance comments.
He laughed. “I’m off duty,” he said. “You learn to turn it off.”
But that wasn’t really satisfying. I guess he knew it, because he said, “You know, psychiatry isn’t all that powerful. If you don’t want me to know something, I doubt I’ll find out over a dinner conversation.”
That was more like it. I relaxed a little. And eventually we had a pleasant conversation.
But I still remembered the unreasoning fear of another person’s power, and the terrifying feeling of the unexplored psyche. Who knows what was in there? Better not look. Better not let anyone else look, either. You could be in for a nasty shock.
Fear wasn’t a problem for me any more, and in London I pursued my psychics enthusiastically. As time went on, I began to notice patterns in the way the psychics behaved.
For example, the psychics tended to circle around things. They were like blind people touching a statue on all sides, trying to figure out what it represented. They got bits and pieces of the whole. And they tended to repeat themselves. Just as if they were going around and around something, trying to feel it, to give their impressions.