MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

Lacking vocal cords, ghosts are at an enormous disadvantage in terms of access to language and its modes of expression. For this reason the Supreme Court granted ghosts "the inalienable right to emit psychophonies." Nevertheless, psychophonies are emitted with the mind and, lacking mind, ghosts ... Anyway, this time the Supreme Court dismissed the complaint. But ghosts were reluctant to give up their right to express their discontent with their living conditions. So they developed a way to produce psychophonies without the intervention of the mind. It’s what is known as the "Pishnuk method". Arnold Pishnuk is the inventor of this method consisting of the random emission of human-like sounds by rubbing the head against a wooden surface. The Pishnuk method encompasses a wide range of sounds. However, since it’s not a mental process, the messages uttered by this method do not carry any meaning at all. Some popular examples of psychophonies are: "Giiiiiiiiiiiii...

In the thirties, due to the economic depression, paradoxically the show business moved higher. People needed to get away from their everyday worries. The less privileged went to the movie theaters. Wealthy people filled Broadway shows. The lights of Broadway at dusk were already a spectacle in itself. But in 1937 it was scheduled a show titled "I’ve got a stain in my pants" that drove the agency ENIGMA CONSULTANTS S. L. nuts. George Firstein, the show’s producer, contacted Michael and Jacob because of a strange phenomenon that happened at the end of each performance. It turned out that while the audience was leaving the theater, Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” sounded. And what was so strange about this?, someone might ask. Plainly and simply, the strangeness lay in the fact that the orchestra had already stopped playing. The pit was empty and yet not only did the music sound but it sounded so loud that many spectators threw themselves to the ground thinking that the naz...

The bohemian Green Fairy was very playful and she loved to create confusion among the artists who were under her influence. In his memoirs, Marcel Rochechouart recounts several curious episodes in this regard. It seems that the Green Fairy drove Manet and Monet nuts taking advantage of the similarity of their names. When the two painters were present in any of the places where the bohème met, there was often a psychophony consisting of the suggestive pronunciation of one of their names. I say “one of their names” because the psychophony was ambiguous enough for both to feel alluded to, and as a result they both rushed to meet the owner of that sexy female voice that called them. Of course, the voice lacked an owner or at least it was an invisible one. However, they never stopped falling into the trap, which motivated the funny comments of their colleagues, all of whom had a very strong sense of humor and did not mind laughing even at themselves. This enviable sense of humor was also sh...

Oh, the psychophonies! At the end of the 19th century, people was enthusiastic about psychophonies. If they had been given a choice, many would have preferred a psychophony to a symphony. People lined up outside the door of the houses where it was rumored that psychophonies were being produced. Most of the time they were false alarms: the meow of a cat that had been accidentally locked in the pantry, a creak of old wood, the spasmodic snores of a husband whose wife had forgotten he existed ... However, there remained a small percentage of cases for which the SPR had not found any explanation. One of these unresolved cases is the one I am going to refer to now. It was William James, who was then residing in New York, who spoke for the first time of this case to his friend William F. Barret, who in 1884 had traveled to New York from London to found the American Society for Psychical Research. When a downtown Broadway office building was deserted at night, you could hear Trickitrickitric...