Formed in 1925 after conflict within the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) over the medium ‘Margery’, the Boston Society for Psychic Research sought to uphold rigorous standards in psychical investigation. Under Walter Franklin Prince and colleagues, it produced influential bulletins and monographs before reuniting with the ASPR in 1941.
- The Boston Society split from the ASPR after disputes over research standards and organisational direction.
- Walter Franklin Prince led much of its work and edited its respected bulletins and monographs.
- Its publications included important early studies of telepathy, mediumship, psychic experiences and sceptical responses to psi claims.
History
The Boston Society for Psychic Research was an important parapsychological organization that split off from the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in 1925 and reunited with it in 1941.
The ASPR had been created in Boston, Massachusetts, at the end of 1884, but by 1925 was headquartered in New York City under the direction of James Hervey Hyslop. Following Hyslop’s death in 1920, William McDougall, then recently arrived from the UK to take up a post at Harvard University, was named President. McDougall and Walter Franklin Prince, the ASPR’s Research Officer, sought to maintain the high standards of earlier years, but this did not sit well with a populist faction of the ASPR’s membership and Board of Trustees. McDougall was forced out in December 1923 and replaced by Frederick Edwards, a Spiritualist. Prince remained at the ASPR, hoping to influence its direction from within, but in May 1925 finally had had enough and left New York for Boston.1Berger (1988); Matlock (2019); Prince (1925).
The Boston Society for Psychic Research was formed when Prince agreed to relocate, in part at the behest of Elwood Worcester, rector of Boston’s Emmanual Church. Worcester, who had received a PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1889 and was ordained in 1891, was among the ASPR members unhappy with the society’s new direction. He served as President of the Boston Society from its inception until his death in 1940.2Berger & Berger (1991c); Pleasants (1964). McDougall supported the initiative, although he was shortly to leave Boston to head the new Department of Psychology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. A young Gardner Murphy, then a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, was involved as well. Worcester recruited him and Francis Strickland of Boston University to the Boston Society’s governing Council. William Newbold was an advisor.3Berger (1988), 93.
In 1926, JB Rhine and Louisa Rhine visited Boston in hopes of undertaking a study of ‘Margery’ (Mina Stinson Crandon), about whose mediumship they had been reading in ASPR publications. In the end, the Rhines had but a single sitting with Margery, at which JB observed what were for him clear signs of fraud. He published a paper describing these in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology4Rhine & Rhine (1927)., despite signals from the ASPR that it would be accepted by their journal. Rhine’s actions with his Margery report undercut the efforts of George Hyslop, son of James Hyslop, to redirect the ASPR away from Margery and permit a reunion with the Boston Society, delaying that for many years.5Matlock (1987).
Despite its provincial name, the Boston Society aspired to be a national and international organization analogous to the ASPR and the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR). However, although it was highly regarded within parapsychology, because it did not seek to build a membership base, it never attained the public recognition its sister societies enjoyed.6Guiley (1992). Insofar as it embodied the ASPR’s original principles, it was ‘in effect the ASPR in exile’7Playfair (2014). and probably had no intention of becoming more than that. George Hyslop finally gave up his efforts to bring about reconciliation and joined Prince at the Boston Society in 1933, the year before Prince died. The societies were not reunited until the Spring of 1941, after the death of LeRoi Crandon, Mina Stinson’s husband, (in 1939) and shortly before the death of Mina herself (in November 1941).8Matlock (1987, 2019).
Prince was assisted in running the Boston Society by Lydia W Allison, who served as its Secretary.9Berger & Berger (1991a).
Research
Much of the research conducted by the Boston Society was work done by Prince and reported in the society’s publications, as described below. Its small local membership was involved in a 1929 clairvoyance experiment using cards, modeled after the work then being done by Rhine at Duke but under the jurisdiction of SG Soal, Theodore Besterman and Ina Jephson in the UK, attempting to replicate an experiment by Jephson.10Jephson (1928). Prince recruited 95 Boston Society members to participate in trying to identify playing cards in sealed envelopes but the results were nonsignificant.11Berger (1988), 94.
Publications
Prince served as Editor and Lydia Allison as production manager for the Boston Society’s highly regarded publications, 23 irregular, variable-length softcover ‘bulletins’ and nine hardcover monographs issued between 1925 and 1941. Prince authored several, with the remainder contributed by Allison, JB Rhine, JG Pratt, René Warcollier and others, including psychologist George Estabrooks. The significance of many of these productions is demonstrated by their having been reprinted and made available in new editions over the years since their first appearance.
Bulletins
Among the more important bulletins were:
- A Contribution to Experimental Telepathy by GH Estabrooks (Bulletin 5, 1927). Estabrooks, then a graduate student at Harvard, made one of the most sophisticated early series of experimental tests of telepathy. He was ahead of his time in trying to understand the role of participants’ mindsets in relation to their performance.
- Human Experiences: Being A Report on the Results of a Questionnaire and a Discussion of Them by WF Prince (Bulletin 14, 1931, with a supplement published in Bulletin 20, April 1933). This was the first large-scale survey of psychic experiences in the United States. Prince both quoted narratives and supplied descriptive statistics, making this a valuable mixed methods study.
- The Sinclair Experiments Demonstrating Telepathy by WF Prince (Bulletin 16, April 1932). This examination of the experiments described by Upton Sinclair in Mental Radio12Sinclair (1930). provides a detailed account of the tests conducted by Sinclair, along with Prince’s analysis of them.
- Finger Print Demonstrations by EE Dudley, A Goadby and H Carrington (Bulletin 18, October 1932). This was the first of two bulletins to raise questions about thumb prints purported to be made by Margery’s deceased cousin Walter, a major claim in the Margery mediumship. Up until this point, the Boston Society had been silent on Margery.
- The “Walter” – “Kerwin” Thumb Prints by H Cummins, EE Dudley, H Carrington, A Goadby, and WF Prince (Bulletin 22, April 1934). This second bulletin on the supposed Walter thumb prints went further in showing them to have been fraudulently produced.
- Towards a Method of Evaluating Mediumistic Material by JG Pratt (Bulletin 23, 1936). Pratt worked in Rhine’s Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. In this bulletin, he sought to bring the structured methodology and statistical approaches to analysis that had become standard in ESP testing to the assessment of trance utterances, spirit communications, or other purported psychic phenomena.
Monographs
The Boston Society released nine notable hardcover books.
- The Psychic in the House by WF Prince (1926). When he was at the ASPR, Prince wrote several papers describing the dissociated identity disorder of his adopted daughter, for whom he used the name Doris Fischer. The Psychic in the House picks up the story and describes the process of Doris’s integration and apparent healing, as well loud raps, shaken beds, mysterious footsteps and other poltergeist phenomena associated with her.
- The Case of Patience Worth: A Critical Study of Certain Unusual Phenomena by WF Prince (1927). This is one of the basic works of assessment of the ‘Patience Worth’ writings of Pearl Curran, analyzed by Stephen Braude for the Psi Encyclopedia. Prince presents answers from Curran to his questions, as well as from his interviews with people who knew Curran well.
- Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences by WF Prince (1928). In this work, Prince analyses responses to a questionnaire he mailed to people listed in Who’s Who in America, asking whether they had experienced psi phenomena. Along with the responses, he supplies biographical data on the respondents, with the idea that their notability lent their reports extra credibility.
- Leonard and Soule Experiments in Psychical Research, also Experiments with Sanders, Brittain, Peters and Dowden by LE Allison (1929). In this volume, Allison reports on studies of Gladys Osborne Leonard and other British mediums, as well as with the Boston-area medium Minnie Soule, attending not only to séance communications but to visions and other anomalous experiences of the sensitives.
- Case Studies Bearing upon Survival by JF Thomas (1929). John F Thomas was a graduate student under McDougall at Harvard. While in Boston, he enlisted JB and Louisa Rhine as research assistants in the appraisal of the mediumistic communications he was studying for his doctorate. When McDougall went to Duke University, Thomas followed, taking the Rhines with him. At Duke, the Rhines continued contributing to the analysis of séance phenomena described here.
- The Enchanted Boundary, being a Survey of Negative Reactions to Claims of Psychic Phenomena 1820 to 1930 by WF Prince (1930). This book provides a comprehensive overview of sceptical attitudes toward psi experiences over a ninety-year period in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, Prince provides his own insights and draws his own conclusions about the evidence for paranormal claims.
- Extra-Sensory Perception by JB Rhine (1934). At Duke, McDougall brought Rhine into his Department of Psychology, under which auspices Rhine set up a Parapsychology Laboratory. In this classic book, published by Bruce Humphrey for the Boston Society, Rhine describes his first years of card-guessing experiments on telepathy and clairvoyance. Rhine went on to refine his methodology over the next decades, in the process reshaping parapsychology as a scientific discipline.
- Experimental Telepathy by R Warcollier (1938). This collection of papers by René Warcollier from the French Revue Métapsychique and other places was assembled by Gardner Murphy. The original Boston Society volume13Warcollier (1938a). was shortly thereafter reissued as Experiments in Telepathy 14Warcollier (1938b). and has since then been reprinted as Mind to Mind.15Warcollier (2001).
- Beyond Normal Cognition: An Evaluative and Methodological Study of the Mental Content of Certain Trance Phenomena by JF Thomas (1939). This book is based on the dissertation Thomas completed under McDougall at Duke. It is an early, and for the time, comprehensive, examination of psi in relation to hypnosis, meditation, drug-induced altered states, and mediumistic trance.
James G Matlock
Works Cited
Berger, A.S. (1988). Walter Franklin Prince: A portrait. In Lives and Letters in American Parapsychology: A Biographical History, 1850–1987, 75-108. Jefferson, North Carolina, USA: McFarland.
Berger, A.S., & Berger, J. (1991a). Allison, Lydia Winterhalter, 1880–1959. In The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research, 5. New York: Paragon House.
Berger, A.S., & Berger, J. (1991b). Boston Society for Psychic Research. In The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research, 46. New York: Paragon House.
Berger, A.S., & Berger, J. (1991c). Worcester, Elwood, 1862–1940. In The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research, 468. New York: Paragon House.
Guiley, R.E. (1992). The Boston Society for Psychic Research. In The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 49-50. New York: Facts on File.
Jephson, I. (1928). Evidence for clairvoyance in card-guessing: A report of some recent experiments. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 38, 223-71.
Matlock, J.G. (1987). Cat’s paw: Margery and the Rhines, 1926. Journal of Parapsychology 51, 229-47. [Full text.]
Matlock, J.G. (2019). American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). Psi Encyclopedia. [Web page.]
Playfair, G.L. (2014). An American institution in low spirits. Fortean Times, Issue 320 (November), 52-53.
Pleasants, H. (1964). Worcester, Elwood. In Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology, 362-63. New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Prince, W.F. (1925). Declaration of principles: Inaugural address. Bulletin 1 of the Boston Society for Psychic Research.
Rhine, J.B., & Rhine, L.E. (1927). One evening’s observation on the Margery mediumship. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 21, 401-21.
Sinclair, U. (1930). Mental Radio. Springfield, Illinois, USA: Charles C Thomas.
Warcollier, R. (1938a). Experimental Telepathy. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Boston Society for Psychic Research.
Warcollier, R. (1938b). Experiments in Telepathy. New York: Harper.
