…write in German. The letters were separate, unlike Dolores’s usual cursive handwriting. Figure 1: Gretchen’s German writing, and the normal handwriting of Dolores Jay Fig. 1: Gretchen’s German script, and a sample of Dolores Jay’s handwriting made during her normal waking state.4Reproduced in Stevenson (1984), 43. Criticism and Controversy Stevenson…
…serious study of Hernani Guimãraes Andrade, who founded the Brazilian Institute for Psycho-Biophysical Research (IBPP) in 1963. Despite initial scepticism, Playfair became increasingly intrigued by the phenomena he investigated and was eventually persuaded of their genuineness. He researched a number of cases of ‘psychic surgery, automatic writing, materializations and poltergeist…
…automatically reliable nor automatically worthless, but as evidence whose force depends on context, convergence and the nature of the claim. Stephen Braude argues that appeals to general human bias cannot by themselves explain away every strong case, because some reports contain features that are difficult to assimilate to ordinary perceptual…
…founded or ran several newspapers and journals before turning serious attention to psychology and séance phenomena. Held that mediumistic effects were real yet produced by an automatic force generated within the human organism rather than by spirits. Worked with William Crookes on mediumistic investigations, later breaking with him over the…
…(1925). and the views expressed there were developed further as his career progressed, most notably in another monumental book, Lectures on Psychical Research.2Broad (1962). Broad’s writing on parapsychology was confined primarily to the topics of ESP and postmortem survival. Psychokinesis, on the other hand, was a topic he dismissed more…
…investigate spontaneous cases with Edmund Gurney and FWH Myers for Phantasms of the Living (1886). His later writings increasingly explained mediumship and poltergeist claims through fraud, conjuring and witness error. Survival evidence he could not explain away he believed could be accounted for by ESP. Life and Career Podmore was…
…is peculiarly her own, and consists in writing with her finger, and leaving behind marks as of a lead pencil, while no such article is in her possession or even in the room. She will also take hold of the hand of the sitters, and cause the same phenomenon of…
…to reach cases early enough so that he or a colleague could record a child’s statements in writing or on tape before assessing the accuracy of the memories, but it proved difficult to do this in the Asian countries in which he concentrated his research. As Stevenson built up a…
…writing, a rough bottle drawing and the package’s coloured envelopes. Life and Career Stefan Ossowiecki was born in 1877 in Moscow. His father was a wealthy chemical manufacturer who in his youth had been assistant to Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the Periodic Table of elements. Both parents’ families were landed…
