This obscure musical genre reached its peak on April 3, 1939, when London’s Balham Psychic Research Society held a séance inside the studios of the Decca Record Company. Presaging the current vogue of single-name recording artists, our singing spirit guide was billed simply as Reuben. Reuben, performing via the vocal cords of medium Jack Webber, entertained séance guests with baritone renderings of “Lead Kindly Light” and “There’s a Land,” an anthem made famous by renowned English contralto Madame Clara Butt.*
Whether the spirits sang or simply spoke, the new recording technologies expanded the medium’s options for income. In addition to holding séances, he or she could also sell tapes or records. The largest “direct voice”—meaning no spirit guide was employed; the deceased spoke directly through the medium’s voice—recording enterprise was that of British medium Leslie Flint. Flint, who died in 1994, managed to attract a highbrow crowd of discarnates to his séances. If you run a web search on him, you’ll find sites where you can hear lengthy postmortem recordings of Gandhi, Oscar Wilde, Chopin (who has, we learn, resumed composing following a brief stint decomposing), the Archbishop of Canterbury, and renowned Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry. (More on Dame Ellen later.)
As was the custom, Flint carried out his séances in darkness. He insisted that the voices came not from his own voice box but from one built up, to quote one website, “from ectoplasm drawn from the medium and the sitters.” The site displays a circa 1960 photograph of Flint, seated calmly in a chair, wearing suit, tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and what appears to be the aftermath of a cafeteria food fight. The caption says, “Flint with ectoplasm resting on his shoulder.” I don’t know what Gandhi or Chopin sounded like while alive, so I can’t comment on the verisimilitude of the recordings. But I can comment that Leslie Flint said he discovered his gift one evening at the cinema, upon hearing—as one will at cinemas—“voices whisper in the dark.”
It was not only the mediums who were fond of gadgetry, but the paranormal researchers who put them through their paces. Initially, technology was recruited to prevent fraud or, more often, to document or quantify the mediums’ powers. With few exceptions, the devices were christened in the syllabically overwrought vernacular of the Serious Laboratory Device. Microscopes now had to share the lab bench with Dynamoscopes and Telekinetoscopes. The staid and stately Ometer family, heretofore limited to Thermo, Baro, Speedo, and Sphygno, was asked to take in the Sthenometer, the Biometer, the Suggestometer, the Magnetometer, and the Galvanometer.* I tried to track down even one of these machines, but, oddly and disappointingly, no museum or private collection seems to exist. “The psychical organizations didn’t approach these things from a historian’s perspective,” says Grady Hendrix, former office manager of the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City. “These gadgets weren’t something that more modern parapsychologists would have deemed worthy of saving. It’s not an era they’re proud of.”
As the reputations of mediums continued to erode, paranormal researchers turned their attention toward devising some sort of direct spirit communication device, something that would remove the medium from the process entirely. F.R. Melton’s Psychic Telephone managed to get the medium out of the room, but not entirely out of the picture. The “telephone” consisted of an inflatable rubber bladder attached to a transmitter, attached, in turn, to a pair of headphones. The bladder was said to contain “psychic air” full of spirit voices that could be amplified and transmitted into the headphones. How do you fill a balloon with psychic air? You have a medium blow it up. Magician-cum-paranormalist Harry Price tested the device in his National Laboratory for Psychical Research and found it to be, literally and figuratively, so much hot air.
THE LURE OF the gizmo remains strong among modern-day paranormal hobbyists. This is evident here this morning in Assembly Room A of the Golden Phoenix Hotel, where our group has gathered for Dave Oester’s morning lecture. It is a standard hotel conference room, with long folding tables and a wooden speaker’s pulpit and the blenderized teals and mauves of institutional carpeting. While they wait for Dave and sip at cups of coffee, my fellow enrollees trade tips about their kit, which they have spread out in front of them on the tables: meters, compasses, cameras, recorders. Spirits rarely register on human sensory systems, but, the thinking goes, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
People in ghost-busting groups posit that the reason humans can’t normally see or hear the dead is that they exist in and communicate via the far extremes of the visual and auditory spectrums: light waves we can’t see and sound waves we can’t hear. This is why ghost-hunting groups use cameras with film that is sensitive to infrared rays, and why Dave Oester used to carry around a bat detector. He reasons that perhaps the dead, like bats, emit sounds in the ultrasound range. When I got home, I called Bill Gerosa, the president of the company that makes a device called the Belfry Bat Detector. I told him that ghost-hunters say his device can be used to detect spirit communications. “I can neither support nor refute that statement,” said Bill after a few moments of quiet. He went on to say that not just bats, but rodents, insects, TV sets, and car brakes emit ultrasound, so there’s a distinct possibility that the entities communicating via bat detectors are katydids or Chevrolets.
The woman seated beside me is fiddling with a handheld meter of some sort. She has the instruction manual open. A heading says, “ELF RESEARCH IN THE 90s.” I like this woman, and I don’t want to think the things I’m now forced to think about her. I ask her if she has ever seen an elf.
She stares at me suspiciously, like she doesn’t need a Belfry Bat Detector; she can just see them flying around in there. “Nooo-o…Why, have you?”
I squint at the copy. “You can’t see, smell, or touch them,” it says, “but they are present in your everyday life.” I am working on the phrasing of my next question when her boyfriend leans forward. “E-L-F,” he says. “Not ‘elf.’ It stands for Extremely Low Frequency.” As in background radiation. As in microwave ovens and overhead power lines.
Aha.
Nearly everyone in our group has brought along either an ELF meter or an EMF (for measuring electromagnetic fields) meter. The link between electricity and spirits is a tenacious one, and it dates back some hundred and fifty years. Standing on Oester’s sloping shoulders are no lesser dignitaries than Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and Bell’s partner Thomas Watson.
What you need to know is that the heyday of spiritualism—with its séances and spirit communications zinging through the ether—coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications—disembodied voices mysteriously traveling through space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant. (Bell and Watson’s claims for their telephone were initially greeted with more hooting skepticism than were the mediums’ séance shenanigans; like Edison,* they took to touring the country with their gizmos, doing public demonstrations.) Viewed in this context, the one unfathomable phenomenon must have seemed no more unbelievable than the other.
Electromagnetic impulses seemed to provide the missing explanation for—the absent science behind—mediumistic communication. If one accepted the workings of the radio and the telephone, spiritualism didn’t seem like such an enormous leap. These devices must have made it seem much more plausible that, as Gavin Weightman writes in Signor Marconi’s Magic Box, “individuals with special powers really could act as ‘receivers’ of invisible and inaudible signals.” Weightman adds that staunch spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would talk about how the greater distances traveled by nighttime telegraphic impulses were proof of “the mysterious ‘powers of darkness’ which spiritualist mediums exploited.”
Even the inventors themselves viewed the etheric and the electric with the same set of awe-fogged eyes. Electricity maverick Michael Faraday,
in writing about his experiments with electric eels, marveled that the work was “upon the threshold of what man is permitted to know of this world.” Thomas Watson, in his autobiography, referred to electricity as an occult force. Like a surprising number of his peers in the scientific community, Watson dabbled in spiritualism. He spent two years believing he had a halo.* At one point, when prototype telephones were failing to reliably deliver coherent sentences, Watson endeavored—via a medium and without telling Bell—to ask those age-old experts in breakthrough communications: the dead. (The suggestions, alas, were “rubbish.”) Watson was constitutionally prone to thinking outside the box—nay, several counties distant from the box. In fine-tuning the speech transmission qualities of the nascent telephone, he tried out diaphragms—the part that vibrates when a caller speaks—of varying shapes and materials, including a human eardrum and bones. Watson borrowed the item from Alexander Graham Bell (Al, lend me your ear!), an authority on the mechanics of human speech. Bell got the ear from the aurist Clarence Blake, who got it from one of his patients after, Watson is careful to point out, he “had finished with it.”
Watson’s spiritualist beliefs colored his views of science, and vice versa. He viewed mediums as people with special powers to transform bodily radiations into a mechanical force, much the way a telegraph transforms pulses of electricity into audible bursts of Morse code. The science of electromagnetic forces offered a logic for the highly illogical rappings and table tiltings of the séance circle. Andrew Cooke, a Royal College of Art student whose insightful master’s dissertation popped up in one of my web searches, wondered whether spiritualism inspired, rather than simply influenced, the minds of some of the great inventors. Of course the invention of the telegraph prompted mediums to begin taking Morse code dictations from spirits during séances. No surprise there. More intriguing is the inverse possibility: that the coded raps of early mediums like the Fox sisters sparked the idea for long-distance communication via Morse code.
Watson’s faith in mediums was unique among the great electricians. Edison, Tesla, and Bell believed that the soul survived death and traveled, like a wireless impulse, to some etheric realm, but they did not, in the end, buy into the mediums’ claims. (As Edison put it in his diary, “Why should personalities in another existence or sphere waste their time…play[ing] pranks with a table?”) If anyone was going to make reliable, intelligible contact with the dead, they believed, it was inventors like themselves. Bell and his brother signed a pact to the effect that whoever died first would attempt to make contact with the other through a more reliable channel than the séance medium.
Tesla was a special case. He was, by his own description, exceptionally sensitive. “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time piece,” he wrote in his journal. “A fly alighting on a table in the room causes a dull thud in my ear.” Around the time his mother died, Tesla, under the sway of his mentor Sir William Crookes—famous for making rarefied gas glow green in vacuum tubes and infamous for thinking it was ectoplasm—tried to turn his antennae toward the paranormal. One night when his mother was on her deathbed, he slept with “every fiber in my brain…strained in expectancy.” Early that morning she did indeed die. He recalled a dream of an angel with his mother’s features, though he ultimately decided that the dream face matched a painting he had recently studied and that that explained “everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts.” Despite a fascination with the mysteries of death, Tesla did not, as far as I know, try to build a device for postmortem communications.
But Thomas Edison did. He describes in his Diary and Sundry Observations being engaged in the design of an apparatus that would enable “personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Edison imagined living beings as temporary conglomerations—“swarms” was the word he used—of infinitesimally small “life units” that persisted after death in a kind of loitering, dispersed form, and eventually regrouped as someone or something else. He described his machine as a sort of megaphone. He reasoned that the “physical power possessed by those in the next life must be extremely slight,” and that, like the speck-sized Whos in Horton Hears a Who, they require a certain level of amplification to make themselves heard. Sadly, Edison himself departed for Whoville before completing the contraption.
Perhaps because of his amplifier project, Thomas Edison is often credited with the invention of something called the Psycho-Phone. Dave Oester says that the Psycho-Phone is the inspiration behind the ultrasonic transceiver he himself, along with an electrical engineer he knows, has been working on. Their device, which Oester hopes will facilitate two-way real-time communication with the dead, is called the TEC, short for Thomas Edison Communicator.
I looked into the Psycho-Phone, thinking perhaps Edison had a plan B. According to Tim Fabrizio’s and George Paul’s Discovering Antique Phonographs, the Psycho-Phone did indeed exist, but it wasn’t designed for paranormal communications. It was an early, phonographic precursor to the modern-day subliminal self-improvement tape. As with the tapes, the listener sets the device to go off while he or she slumbers, in the hope that he or she will, say, to use an actual Psycho-Phone example, “wake refreshed—invigorated—and enjoy a regular bowel movement.”
In 2003, a Psycho-Phone was put up for auction. There was a website posting written by the winning bidder, who believed that she had come into possession of one of Edison’s devices. The woman was understandably puzzled by a transcript of one of the subliminal messages, which she found in the box and took to be a letter from “someone that perhaps was a little deranged”:
I enjoy drinking clean water or clean water flavored with the juices of pure fruit. Every morning I will get up in time to do a series of exercises to strengthen my body. My scalp is getting healthier every day as the blood flows abundantly…. My hair is growing luxuriantly dark and beautiful. My scalp is glowing with health and new beautiful hair is growing thereon. I am a good mixer & have a wonderful memory.
These days, electricity, radio waves, and telephonics are the stuff of everyday life on earth. They’ve left the realm of the mysterious, and in their place we have ultrasound, infrared, cyberspace. Ultrasound was the mystery force du jour among paranormalists long before Dave Oester began tinkering with it. In the 1980s, an electronics buff named William O’Neil, who had a taste for the paranormal and a lab full of oscillators and ultrasonic receivers, developed Spiricom, a device for spirit communication. He claimed to be having lengthy two-way conversations with the dead, or anyway one of them: a former NASA physicist named George Mueller. O’Neil and fellow paranormalist George Meek published hundreds of pages of transcripts of the Spiricom conversations, including lots and lots of shop talk:
(Dead guy) Mueller: By the way, did you get that multifaceted crystal?
O’Neil: No, I got that five-faceted one from Edmund’s.
Mueller: Edmunds? Who is Edmunds?
O’Neil: Edmund’s is a company. Edmund’s Scientific.
Mueller: Oh, I see. Well, very good.
The dead are surprisingly poor conversationalists, given all the novel and mind-blowing things going on in their lives. They’re like ham radio operators. I once stumbled onto a long series of ham radio transcripts on the web. Here you’d have these two men, say, a Minnesotan and a Vanuatan, speaking to each other from what may as well be different planets, and they can’t think of anything to talk about but their equipment. “What are you using there, a KW-50?” “Oh, no, I like a Hammarlund. Got the Q multiplier built right in.”
Dull as their man was, the concept of a chat with a dead man was pretty darn exciting, and Meek made the highly questionable decision to go public. In 1982, he booked the National Press Club ballroom in Washington, D.C., and sent out a press release announcing “electronic proof that the mind, memory banks and personality survive death.” A Chicago Sun-Times reporter expressed disappointment that, owing to technical difficulties, no “live” demonstration was possib
le. To make up for it, Meek played a tape of what he claimed were the astral voices—presumably obtained via Spiricom—of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and…the great Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry.
Unlike Mr. Flint, Meek and O’Neil had no apparent plans to profit from their project. They let someone else write the book, and they handed out blueprints for the device at the press conference, encouraging others to try to replicate what they’d done. (No one succeeded.) If it was a hoax, it was a perplexing one. Way too much work for questionable payoff. If it wasn’t a hoax, it was…what? Real? There seemed to be no possible middle ground. I asked Dean Radin what he thought about it. “The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking,” he offered, “is unconscious delusion.”