MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

In all seance worth its salt, there were usually more pairs of hands than guests. Floating hands could arise suddenly and from anywhere. You had to be careful not to have your wallet stolen! In the archives of the Society for Psychical Research there are many examples because most of the time spirits did not show full body, and the part of the body that appeared most often used to be the hands. Sometimes they went in pairs, but not always. There were solitary hands, and not because in life the deceased was one-handed. Simply, if with one hand the effect could be produced, why make two appear? However, other spirits were not so saver and showed three, four, five and even six hands, each independent of the other. Each hand did his own thing. There were hands that limited themselves to giving you an envelope with a message or a request from the deceased. There were dancing hands. Other hands could touch you. Others made magical passes over your head. Others played the strings of a lyre or...

It was his interest in sleepwalking that put the father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud in relation with the Society for Psychical Research. One night Sir William Barrett was walking on the sidewalk after leaving a pub in Soho when he crashed into a man who walked with his eyes closed and arms outstretched. The man woke up at that moment, and a few meters behind him Barret heard a voice grumbling and complaining. It was Freud, who was following one of his patients in order to discover where he went every night after leaving home in a state of somnambulism.   At the advice of Freud, the man’s wife did not dare to stop him. And precisely that night Freud had decided to find out where his patient was going every night. (Later it was discovered that his destination was the same tavern that Barret frequented and that sleepwalking was just a stratagem of the man to escape from home at night without his wife preventing him from doing so.) Barret apologized and offered Freud his card wit...

Misinformed people tend to believe that in the Society for Psychical Research everybody was very naïve and willing to believe in anything. That you could tell them that you were a vampire about to transform into a bat and they ran to close the windows for fear that you would fly away. And well, I will not deny that there was someone who was very credulous (talking about vampires, a certain member wore several strings of garlic as necklaces). But it was the exception. As a rule, they were eminent personalities from various fields of science with a high degree of skepticism. There were even one who carried his skepticism to the point of fanaticism, which caused him to end up very badly. I will omit his name for delicacy and call him Mr. Skeptic. When they tested the mediums with whom they collaborated, the members of the Society set traps to find out if they were being cheated. But Mr. Skeptic took this tactic to the extreme. At the end of the summer season of 1879, Mr. Skeptic returned ...

In our days, the word "rapping" automatically evokes the performance of rap music. But in the Victorian era, it had a very different meaning. At the end of the 19th century rappers were disembodied spirits and did not make music. They rapped in order to answer the questions a medium asked them. A medium was not a solvent either... Although there were mediums who dissolved marriages since the spirits did not always give the answer that a husband or a wife wanted to hear. In this regard, I will mention the record by Frederic W. H. Myers of a shocking seance that was the origin of a much talked-about scandal in the city of Derby. There was a seemingly happy and well-matched marriage in Derby. Out of respect for their privacy, I'll call them “The Cuckolded”. The Cuckolded were part of a select spiritualist group that met every Friday night at the home of a medium known as “The Medium”. The Medium had a privileged contact with one Phil Poile, aka “The Dead”, a dead man who, d...