The Infinite Boundary

 

PREFACE

Can mental illness be complicated by purely psychic or paranormal factors? For years, many psychiatrists and parapsychologists have felt that within the bizarre hallucinations and delusions of the mentally disturbed there might lurk some level of paranormal perception—some way of apprehending reality that goes far beyond the normal perception of the five senses. For instance, what if a mental patient’s delusions that he is being persecuted by the spirit of a dead person contained verifiable information about that individual? Can “insanity” result in some cases because these patients really are being victimized by the dead?

This is the topic of The Infinite Boundary. This book will include cases of several people who have been seemingly influenced by the dead to develop remarkable skills or artistic talents. These talents corresponded to the skills and talents possessed by the donor personalities during their terrestrial lives. But these people also exhibited pathological behavior as a result of these interactions. This book also describes remarkable experiments in which psychics were brought in to help diagnose such patients and even cure them!

The Infinite Boundary is essentially a history book. The story begins in the early 1900s, when well-known philosopher and psychic investigator Prof. James H. Hyslop confronted the strange case of Frederic Thompson of New Bedford, Massachussets. Thompson was a craftsman who suddenly began painting oils and drawing sketches in the style of a recently deceased artist, even though he claimed he had no formal artistic training. Hyslop gradually came across similar cases while still fighting belief in the obsession hypothesis. Finally, shortly before his death in 1920, he realized that obsession by the dead could indeed pass for insanity and that it constituted a hitherto unrecognized factor in mental illness. After his death, his views were elaborated and researched by the eminent New York neurologist Dr. Titus Bull; by the famous psychical investigator Dr. W. Franklin Prince; by noted clergyman Dr. Elwood Worcester (who founded the Emmanuel Movement in Boston); and by the highly unorthodox Dr. Carl Wickland. All their work is chronologized for the first time in this volume.

To bring the information up to date, reports from other researchers engaged in similar work today are included, such as the work of Dr. Ralph Allison, one of this country’s leading authorities on the strange phenomenon of multiple personality. Dr. Allison believes that many cases of this rare disorder are actually genuine cases of spirit obsession.

The current status of this continuing search for evidence will keep the historical chapters relevant to the interests of the contemporary reader.

Although no responsible psychologist or parapsychologist would suggest that all—or even many—cases of insanity are cases of “psychic control,” the evidence suggests that sometimes what is diagnosed as mental illness is really possession—some sort of invasion from without, not from within.

It makes little difference just how you approach this book. It can be read as a study in parapsychology, as a report on the evidence for life after death, or simply as a curious chapter in the history of American psychiatry. My goal in writing this book has been solely to remind today’s public of the essentials of a forgotten search—a search undertaken by some genuinely brilliant minds who implicitly believed in the important work they were doing. It is more than revealing that several explorers of the unknown are still engaged in this work today. It seems that the spiritistic theory of mental illness is a concept that will not die; and perhaps in these confused times it is time to look at the lives and work of those researchers who championed it and those who still support it.

D. Scott Rogo
**
So it seems to me that there is plenty of reason to consider all sorts of seemingly bizarre theories about the nature of human behavior. The rest of this book will consider the possibility that some cases of deviant behavior are not due simply to the dysfunction of the brain or mind, but that certain unseen influences might be a complicating factor. Since John’s cure by exorcism was psychiatrically inexplicable, would it be too outrageous to suggest that perhaps some sort of foreign influence had been responsible for the youth’s feminine behavior? We can at least explain his cure by adopting this provisional view.

For several years, some enlightened psychiatrists and psychologists have believed that within the bizarre hallucinations and delusions of the mentally disturbed, there might lurk some level of paranormal perception. For instance, take a patient who believes he is being persecuted by spirits of the dead. What if that patient started coming up with obscure and verifiable information about real people whom he never knew and who died years before—the very people he claimed were persecuting him? Such a case would suggest that the patient’s delusions were based on some glimmer of reality. In fact, there are several such cases buried within the literature on the paranormal. During the course of the next several chapters, we will take a detailed look at these cases— and at what they have to teach us about the nature of the mind and life itself.
**

But even though Frank Stockton didn’t manifest that morning, Miss De Camp seemed to receive a psychic message from him the following evening. While resting in her room at the hotel, she felt some sott of presence trying to reach her. She mentally requested the entity to leave her alone, and she especially didn’t want to produce any psychic writing. But she suddenly received an extrasensory message from the presence that instructed her to sit less closely behind the psychic. Miss De Camp instantly realized that her physical proximity to the psychic was probably interfering with Mrs. Soule’s receptions from the spirit world, thereby causing the earlier failure.

Miss De Camp told this strange story to Hyslop while they drove to Mrs. Soule’s residence the following morning. Hyslop felt that the suggestion was reasonable enough, and so they followed the advice.

This sitting (which was held on the morning of February 28) began with a surprise. When Prof. Hyslop first entered the séance room, Mrs. Soule was already picking up the purported communicator’s presence. She told the professor that the name “Frank” had been popping into her mind that morning, and she felt that the name was being sent to her by her spirit guides. It certainly looked as if the session would be promising, but when the psychic finally entered trance, the subliminal stage was exceedingly long. By voice the Boston psychic referred to the communicator as a story writer who wore a ring—which was true enough, as Hyslop was to learn later. Luckily, though, it didn’t take long before the Stockton personality commenced writing directly through Mrs. Soule’s pencil—and he offered a message directly pertinent to De Camp, who was sitting silently behind the psychic.

“We are working for more than the present effect,” the communicator began. “We are working for posterity and for the joy of working.

It is great and wholesome as well. Do not let any one say I am overdoing it or that I will hurt her [the sitter]. I will not and I will supply whatever energy I use. I mean the one through whom I write my manuscripts . . . not the hand I am using now.” The communicator then proceeded to discuss the circumstances under which he had come to work through Etta De Camp, directly saying that he had been “brought” to her by other discarnate entities.

This was certainly correct and corresponded with the report Miss De Camp had previously given to Hyslop in 1909. (See page 77.)

“I could have come before,” the presence explained further, “but I was not sure that you wanted me and there are others around who helped me to do the work. I did not make her a medium, she was one and the people were already there and it was easy for me to work because the organized plan for work was already established.” The communicator then expounded in great detail concerning the procedures he was using to write his stories through his psychic scribe. He then chided Hyslop for making him write through a different channel!

“I know that I am able to write through my little friend’s hand,” the communicator wrote through Mrs. Soule’s pencil, “and she knows it and that is quite enough for me at present. I hope you will not think I am not cordial to your work or that I do not appreciate your courtesy but this is so much more difficult for me than my work with her.” Hyslop politely responded by explaining that he was trying to help the communicator prove his identity to the world, but the communicator wasn’t impressed by the professor’s speech. He replied cordially that such evidence had previously been channeled through his regular scribe.

When Hyslop restated his argument, explaining that the skeptics would probably be unimpressed by his post-mortem writings, the communicator responded in a truly Stocktonesque manner.

“What do I care about the skeptics?” wrote the purported Stockton.

“Probably nothing,” concurred Hyslop.

“They are a bad lot and I am not trying to save them. . . . I do my work in my own way and I know and she knows and that is enough.” The communicator kept up this humorous train of thought as the sitting progressed.

“It [is] a funny thing,” the writing through Mrs. Soule continued, “if a man can have no rest in heaven but must go on repeating for the sake of a lot of idiots that his name is John Smith or whatsoever it may be. I really have a desire to do a certain kind of work but deliver me from the class who cut up their relatives to see how their corpuscles match up.”

The discarnate entity then referred back to his dissatisfaction with the experiments Hyslop was conducting through Minnie Soule.
“I think I won’t do for your business, but personally I have no fight with you,” the entity explained. “You can go on and save all the critics you can but don’t send them to me when they die.” The communicator then began reminiscing about his previous life and work and started to fade, but not before signing his name to the preceding scripts. Mrs. Soule’s hand fumbled through several false starts but ended by writing “Frank” and then “Stockton.” Once these calling cards were written, Mrs. Soule’s hand began to falter again and the pencil finally fell from her grasp. The Stockton personality had obviously left the sitting, and the séance came to a rapid conclusion.

Reading the transcript of this experiment today, what should the reader think?

This séance was in my opinion truly extraordinary for a number of reasons. Although it is true that the Stockton personality offered no verifiable information about himself, the scripts channeled through Mrs. Soule were filled with evidential information. Remember that the Boston psychic knew nothing about her sitter, who lived 235 miles away in New York. Even though every precaution had been taken to ensure the secrecy of Miss De Camp’s identity, the spirit presence writing through Mrs. Soule seemed to know and realized why the sitting was being conducted. The purported discarnate explained in detail the reason for and manner in which he was creating stories through the sitter, and he even claimed to be the exact person Hyslop was secretly hoping to contact.

But another aspect of this sitting should strike the reader as even more evidential. Reading the transcripts of this séance even today, some seventy years later, Stockton’s presence seems to literally jump right from the pages. His presence comes by virtue of the communicator’s wit, cynical humor, and contemptuous flippancy.

This personal blueprint pervades the Soule/Stockton sittings, and its impact becomes even more obvious to anybody who has read Frank Stockton’s books and short stories. His stories especially were filled with a specific style of humor. Capping the humor was the writer’s wonderfully grotesque attitude toward his characters and their plights. Note that the same characteristics permeate the Soule sittings, during which the Stockton personality is often capricious and delightfully obnoxious. His total disdain for the situation in which he found himself while communicating with Hyslop would have been characteristic of the real Frank Stockton.
It is also remarkable how personally distinct the Stockton personality seems to be. The persona seems to be a living (!) personality, a personality totally independent of the psychic’s own mind.

This was an important phenomenon that Hyslop liked to emphasize in his writings on the phenomenon of post-mortem contact. Each of the personalities that he contacted during his dozens of experiments with Minnie Soule seemed to be different. For example, just compare the Stockton personality with that of Robert Swain Gifford, who regularly communicated through Soule during the summer of 1908. The Gifford presence was serious and somber. Not even a suggestion of leyity pervaded the sittings Hyslop undertook to establish contact with the painter. The Gifford personality seemed to pursue his work with Thompson and his communications through Mrs. Soule with a religious zeal. This sense of importance and urgency virtually infected each and every message communicated from him to the researchers. But this was certainly not the case with the Stockton personality, who was perpetually filled with whimsy and cynicism. His literal “go f— yourself” demeanor toward Hyslop and Minnie Soule stands in stark contrast to the (excuse the pun) deadly seriousness of Robert Swain Gifford.

It is therefore easy to sympathize with Hyslop’s refusal to believe that such distinct personalities could be springing from the psychic’s subconscious.

Hyslop conducted three more sittings with Mrs. Soule in order to establish contact with the departed Frank Stockton. These sittings weren’t quite so lively, although considerable evidential information was imparted by the Stockton personality. The only surprise came during the last sitting, on the morning of March 6, when the deceased George Duysters placed a final vraisamblance by writing his full name through Soule. The personality seemed to be laboring to write, and the information he communicated wasn’t extremely evidential.

But the fact that a name so significant to James Hyslop and Etta De Camp was correctly communicated by the Boston sensitive was impressive enough.

Hyslop’s investigation of the De Camp/Stockton case ended with this sitting, and whatever became of Miss De Camp and her mediumship isn’t a matter of public record. The stories she wrote with the purported guidance of the deceased Frank Stockton were eventually published in 1913 when Miss De Camp’s own book on the case was issued.

The Return of Frank R. Stockton includes most of the stories written through her hand. The original records were filed with the American Society for Psychical Research. Miss De Camp later married and lived the rest of her life in relative obscurity.
**
Despite the relatively benign outcome of these complex incidents, however, another important issue began to preoccupy Hyslop’s mind.

Each of his previous cases looked like instances of psychopathology— either simple dissociation, secondary personality, or dementia praecox (the 19th-century term for what we call schizophrenia today). Frederic Thompson, Etta De Camp, and Ida Rogers seemed to be going insane, and only Hyslop’s intervention and experiments may have saved them from a complete loss of reason.

Frederic Thompson had even been formally diagnosed as a case of incipient paranoia or dementia, but Hyslop’s psychic diagnosis of his problem through the mediumship of Minnie Soule had thrown new light on his inner world.

Because of these studies, Hyslop began formulating a radical theory in order to explain some cases of insanity. The Spiritualists in the United States, England, and France had long maintained that possession and spirit influence were the true causes of some psychotic states and phobias. Of course, this interesting theory predated the rise of the Spiritualist movement by several centuries. Similar theories had been popular during the Enlightenment. They had been most vocally supported by the theological writer Johann Weyer (1515-88) in his famous book De Praestigiis Daemonum. Weyer championed the demonic theory of insanity even though he was the most enlightened and vocal critic of the European witch craze, which was rife during his lifetime.

The Spiritualists were, however, going beyond theory and theology and were trying to cure cases of insanity by conducting exorcisms as part of their seances. By the turn of the century, such “rescue work” was being conducted by both private and public Spiritualist groups and churches throughout the country.

Even though Hyslop never considered himself a Spiritualist, he grew increasingly sympathetic to their views on insanity during the 1910s.

He was not positing that each and every case of insanity was due to spirit influence or possession, but he felt that the possibility should be kept in mind. He also realized that his era’s medical community was in no position to evaluate whether psychic factors were playing a role in their patients’ illnesses.

This theoretical framework might strike the reader as nothing short of far-fetched, but Hyslop was not proposing a radically novel conceptual model for the problem of insanity. Many psychical researchers had come to believe in life after death by this time, and some of them were probably silently sympathetic to the theories Hyslop was promoting. Even during the months when he was grappling with the Thompson/Gifford case, William James was seeing the implications of his own research into the phenomenon of mediumship. As early as 1909, James was willing to write in a report to the SPR:

The refusal of modern “enlightenment” to treat “possession” as a hypothesis to be spoken of as even possible, in spite of the massive human tradition based on concrete experience in its favour, has always seemed to me a curious example of fashion in things scientific. That the demon theory (not necessarily a devil-theory) will have its innings again is to my mind absolutely certain. One has to be “scientific” indeed to be blind and ignorant enough to suspect no such possibility.
6

Hyslop’s research between 1907 and 1914 was leading in the same direction, but there was an important difference between their views. William James had been speaking purely theoretically, while Hyslop was speaking more and more from personal experience. He was pleased to see that Frederic Thompson’s and Etta De Camp’s psychological dispositions had improved after their sittings with Minnie Soule.

He would later write of his investigations and discoveries in his book Life after Death that

“the chief interest in such cases is their revolutionary effect in the field of medicine. It is probable that thousands of cases diagnosed as ‘paranoia’ would yield to this sort of [psychic] investigation and treatment: It is high time for the medical world to wake up and learn some- thing.”

It is important again to note that Hyslop was not suggesting possession and spirit obsession as the sole causes of insanity. He felt either that the syndrome explained some such cases or that the general process of psychological disintegration might somehow attract misguided or obsessing discarnates. He pointed to this possibility several times in his writings and would later state this concept in his Contact with the Other World.

It is important to remark at the onset of the exploration of obsession that I do not mean this idea to be a substitute for hysteria, dementia praecox, paranoia or other maladies, nor is it a rival explanation. . . hence that we are not to set aside organic and functional trouble in body and mind when acknowledging that obsession by spirits is an accompaniment of the trouble. It is quite conceivable that any disturbance to healthy functions, bodily or mental, might create conditions in which accidental connections with the discarnate would be established and would open the way to all sorts of voluntary and involuntary invasions.

It must be thoroughly understood that we are not controverting psychological or psychiatric explanation. The only revolution that we wish to introduce into medicine is the denial of the limits ordinarily assigned to causes of disease and methods of treatment. The terms hysteria, dementia praecox, paranoia, manic depressive insanity, and epilepsy are largely descriptive; the causes are revealed only by autopsy and other such methods. Obsession does not displace other causes, but adds to them another factor.

By acknowledging such a possibility, exciting new avenues for future experimentation opened for the researcher. Could some people suffering from insanity be cured by going to gifted psychics? Does exorcism really work? Hyslop believed that these issues should be explored.

Warren Farrell and Men Today

 

A founding father of the men’s movement speaks on the status and challenges of men today


No one can deny the importance of Dr Warren Farrell and his seminal book, The Myth of Male Power, to the movement for men’s equality. So it is an event when he is interviewed by Paul Elam, an eminent voice of that movement today.

Yet my response to this interview was, frankly, disappointment. In fact, I was flabbergasted. Does Dr Farrell really believe that the massive corruption of family law and the horrifying injustices it inflicts on men (confiscating their children, incarceration without trial, plunder, penury, homelessness, and more) can be ameliorated by more therapists or teaching men better “communication” skills? Does he really see #MeToo, a movement dedicated to violating constitutional rights by inflicting knowingly false criminal accusations against legally innocent people, is morally equivalent to men voicing their views and grievances on the internet? I was pleased to see Elam remind him that, in the age of MGTOW, exploding male incarceration, mass male suicide, and now Lindsay Clancy, something more serious threatens men and their families (and all of us) than hurt “feelings”.

I was equally troubled that few men responded in the chat by pointing out any of this. Instead they found his prescriptions appropriate and apparently adequate. I fear this reflects a credulous acceptance of therapy culture by too many men and failure to distinguish what is incidental from what is truly serious.

Dr Farrell has a PhD in political science, and yet Paul (a therapist) had to remind him of the political dimension to all this. In fact, for all his brilliance, Warren Farrell has never criticized the mass abuse of government power in family court and elsewhere in the law. This has helped him get a hearing from mainstream media and from opportunists like Jordon Peterson and other establishment figures. Yet it never translates into pushing the matter any further along, like exploring and exposing the most serious threats to men and children (and again, all of us). He also seems to have a lingering soft spot for the feminism he once served. (I would like to have heard his response to Janice Fiamengo’s new book, The Goddess That Failed, which documents her insistence that feminism did not go astray and cannot be reformed. It was hate-filled from the start and must be “destroyed root and branch”.) If I did not know better, I would also be tempted to suggest that Warren’s influence may play some role in why the state’s abuses of power against men and fathers never abates but only worsens.

Warren Farrell would be doing an enormous service, and perhaps earn a place in history, rather than disappearing into obscurity like so many others, if he were to use the profile and influence he has built up over the years to confront the political class and establishment media with the full force of what men must endure today and what may soon be the fate of all of us.

**
Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men, joins “The Mansplainers” for a wide-ranging discussion about masculinity, fatherhood, male solidarity and the many forms it can take: friendship, sports, gangs, military service, churches, workplaces, men’s clubs, secret societies, revolutionary movements, and more.

Why are boys and young men so naturally drawn to gangs, crews, teams, clubs, and other male groups? Can the same impulses toward brotherhood, loyalty, strength, risk, and belonging be directed toward both constructive and destructive ends? And what happens when men lack meaningful relationships and associations with other men?

Donovan discusses: his famous idea that “the way of men is the way of the gang”; why men need other men to help establish standards and arbitrate honor; the importance of fathers modeling male friendship for their sons; physical strength and martial arts: and the difference between healthy male solidarity and online communities built around perpetual anger.

Bradley also reflects on his childhood fascination with New York City’s gang and graffiti culture and asks how society can provide boys and men with constructive alternatives that preserve brotherhood, identity, challenge, earned status, and the feeling of having someone at your back.

The conversation also explores why independent associations of men have historically been viewed with suspicion, the role of virtue and honor in male groups, and Donovan’s warning against men becoming addicted to outrage and “practicing unhappiness.”

Finally, Jack offers practical advice for men looking for a tribe of their own: consider where a group is leading its members, whether its values correspond with the life you actually want, and whether loyalty and commitment are genuinely reciprocal.

We also discuss what happens when men need association with other men and are denied it.

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A Popular History of Witchcraft

 INTRODUCTION

 During the eleven years which have passed since I published my History of Witchcraft and Demonology a second edition has repeatedly been asked for, and— wisely or no—I have as often delayed this and deferred. The fact is that throughout this time owing to my further researches into an immense subject— as old as the world and as wide as the world—and perhaps more especially owing to the interest and kindness of correspondents from every continent I found that I had accumulated so vast a quantity of new material that in order to include a tithe, and yet keep my work within a reasonable compass, there would have to be frequent excisions from the original pages together with a certain amount of compression. At first I began upon these lines, but I soon recognized that again and again I was at a loss how to abbreviate without in some way impairing the structure and sequence of the chapters, and thus it was a matter of no little difficulty to avail myself to any extent of many recent and extraordinarily interesting narratives and investigations whilst not essentially altering and even recasting the whole. 

 A considerable amount of time also was taken up in closely examining and discussing cases and incidents which were brought under my notice. Not a few persons were, quite naturally, at first reluctant to give details. The majority shrank from furnishing their names, dates, and the exact localities, such precise information as might bring them into a notice they were far from desiring or indeed would for a moment allow. This, an entirely reasonable and prudent point of view, must often hinder and obstruct the student of these dark and riddling mysteries. Yet he has no right whatsoever to complain or show himself embarrassed by the discretion of a reticence which is perfectly justifiable and fair. It was necessary to poise delicate questions and to probe with great tact in order to obtain knowledge together with the confirmation of knowledge which not unseldom was only supplied on condition that it was not publicly utilized, or, if so employed, disguised in such a way that the informant could not be identified. Persons who have been brought in contact with, and it may be who have hardly escaped from the clutches of, the Satanists are loath that their experiences, however valuable to others, should be published. They are afraid too of the vengeance and pursuit of the witches. This is quite understandable, nor are they to be blamed who lack courage to expose and confront those infernal gangs whose weapons are poisons, black magic, and evil spells. 

 As time went on and I was even more frequently being requested to issue a second edition of my book it became increasingly difficult satisfactorily to myself to find a happy issue from the impasse. In the view of so much that was new and vitally important I did not wish to send it from the press without certain added matter. I was, too, perpetually being urged by those whose opinion carries no little weight that I would bring the subject right up to the very day of writing, that I would emphasize the oneness of witchcraft throughout the world, the unchangeableness of the church of Satan throughout the centuries, and thus expose the horrid activities and propaganda of the society of devil-worshippers in our midst. 

 Such arguments were scarcely to be resisted, and I decided that in order to accomplish what was required more efficiently it would be better, rather than to attempt any modification of my first work, to write a new study; and this I have called A Popular History of Witchcraft. 

 My aim throughout my new work has been to show how the profession and practice of witchcraft are the same always and in all places, be it in some remote English village, in a quiet cathedral city, in the sweltering hinterland of Jamaica, or in savage Africa. In the course of the present study I have concentrated upon England and English witchcraft, although I have freely cited parallel circumstances as revealed in foreign trials. 

 Since A Popular History of Witchcraft is designed for the general reader rather than for the specialist I have been advised not to burden the text with a multiplicity of notes. A reader, unless it be the scholar at his desk, pen in hand, is harassed by, or else ignores, a parade of commentary, the details of which he has no intention, even if he had the opportunity, of verifying by making reference to the original source. In quotations, for the same reason, I have given the newer forms of words rather than strictly adhering to the old spelling, which so many find cumbersome and a nuisance, although I have been scrupulously careful neither to alter nor modify. My citations of texts are from the Authorized Version of the Bible, but these have been checked in each instance by the Douai. 

 The last chapter, English witchcraft, is necessarily in the nature of a survey, designed to show the continuity of the thing rather than to enter into details of cases, many of which, however important, I have been obliged to pass without mention. For these particulars I must refer the reader to my Geography of Witchcraft. 

 The present work is designed to awaken the general reader to a sense of the dangers with which he is encompassed and beset. Although A Popular History of Witchcraft is entirely new I have not hesitated to make use of apposite passages from my previously published works, and even to incorporate one or two sentences, the gist of which I felt I was not able better or more forcibly to express. 

 Since I published The History of Witchcraft and Demonology there has been little or nothing, I believe, which covers the same ground. Professor Lynn Thorndike’s work, for example, encyclopaedic in extent, was scarcely designed to touch upon the field I review. The Short Title-Catalogue of my friend Mr. Harry Price will, of course, be in the hands of, and constantly referred to by, every student of occultism, for whom the Proceedings of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research must be an ever ready guide-book, his veritable Baedeker. 

 During the past decade in various journals and magazines there have been published one or two articles of great value. Such are Lieut.-Colonel Spain’s “The Witches of Riding Mill, 1673”, which appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, March, 1929, and Mr. S. Everard’s “Oliver Cromwell and Black Magic”, Occult Review’, April, 1936. Mr. W. Branch Johnson has written a good book in The Age of Arsenic, 1931. Two studies by the Rev. Joseph J. Williams, S.J., Voodoos and Obeahs and Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica are of the first importance, whilst W. B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) is very illuminating in reference to Voodoo in Haiti. 

 With reference to witches in England there have (so far as I am aware) only been three books worthy of note published during the last ten years: Mr. George Lyman Kittredge’s Witchcraft in Old and New England (1928), Mr. G. L’Estrange Ewen’s Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (1929), and Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933). If I may venture a criticism Mr. Kittredge’s book, exhaustive in references and annotation, suffers from presenting a series of unconnected essays, unconnected that is save in so far as they one and all relate to various phases of the same subject. Thus some of the chapters were, I am given to understand, originally published in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 1907, the American Historical Review, 1917, and in other ephemerides. Mr. L’Estrange’s works, of the most painstaking scholarship, are indispensable to any student of witchcraft, to whom they supply the amplest and most essential material. 

 There have been translations of the Malleus Maleficarum, of Boguet, Remy, Guazzo, Taillepied, and others. Again, such a reprint as The Trial of the Lancaster Witches, 1612, with an introduction by Dr. G. B. Harrison (1929), is a notable piece of no slight value. 

 I am grateful to many friends and correspondents for their warmly appreciative letters and so widespread an interest that is taken in my work. Since she is no longer with us it will not (I am sure) be invidious to particularize Mrs. Violet Tweedale, whose psychic gifts were so truly remarkable, and whose writings on the occult are so justly admired. 

 I have to thank Messrs. Maggs for their generous courtesy in granting me permission to quote from their Catalogue of Books on Medicine, Alchemy, Astrology, etc. (No. 520; 1929), details concerning the interesting and important MS. Book of Black Magic and Conjurations therein described. I am further indebted to their kindness for the reproduction thence of the drawing of the Demon King Maymon. 

 In conclusion I would say that the present study aims at presenting a clear view of the Practice and Profession of Witchcraft, as it was carried on in former centuries and now prevails amongst us. I am convinced that it is most necessary to realize that this is no mere historical question, but a definite factor in politics of to-day, as well as in social life and the progress of humanity. 

 The Black International of Satan—that is the canker which is corrupting and destroying the world. 

IN FESTO TRANS. ALMÆ DOMUS LAURETANæ. 

 1936.

(...)

During the reign of Louis XIV a veritable epidemic  of sacrilege seemed to rage through Paris, and indeed the investigations conducted by the Lieutenant of Police, Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie, let loose such an avalanche of scandal and crime implicating not only persons of low degree but the highest and most powerful names in France that at the last the King in his absolute authority was of necessity compelled to quash the whole business. Poisons had been brewed, Black Masses said, necromancy practised, abortions procured, murders contrived, plots laid for the death of court favourite and political foe, and all these abominations seemed to centre round two figures of the blackest underworld of Paris, the abbé Guibourg and La Voisin. 

 Catherine Montvoisin—La Voisin as she was commonly called—had long been known to the criminal and the curious as midwife, poisoner, bawd and witch. There was no infamy which might not be purchased in the secret chambers of her house, No. 25 Rue Beauregard. She was assisted in the many branches of her mysterious and obscene profession by numerous satellites and lovers, chief amongst whom Romani, a handsome young Italian boy and an actor of great talent, filled many a curious rôle. The two executioners of Paris, M. Guillaume and M. Larivière, contended for her favours, gallants who could bring her fine presents of the limbs and fat of murderers who had swung on the gibbet or been broken on the wheel, whence she made tall black tapers for her secret ceremonies. A wanton hermaphrodite, exotic and perverse, La Trianon dwelt in that awful house, to which also daily resorted some curious old women, whose calling no one rightly knew, La Gallet,  La Lepfère, La Joly, La Filastre, La Bosse, La Thomas. As a matter of fact they were one and all, and a score beside, adepts in the art of poisoning and abortionists of no mean skill and practice. A wit called 25 Rue Beauregard “the centre of the city”, and it is no exaggeration to say that all Paris from duchess to drab, from marshal to muckman, crowded La Voisin’s doors. 

 The Abbé Guibourg, known among the witches as M. le Prieur, the illegitimate son of Henri de Montmorency, was a man of some seventy years, who is described as tall and heavy-limbed with a malign and sensual face. “He can be compared with no one else,” wrote de la Reynie, “for the tale of his poisonings, and his traffic in drugs and witchcraft. He is familiar with every form of villainy, guilty of a large number of horrible crimes and suspected of complicity in many more.” It was M. le Prieur who celebrated innumerable Satanic Masses at the instance of Madame de Montespan in order to secure for her supreme power and the eternal fidelity of the King. Even before Louis had separated from de La Valltère the vicar of St.-Séverin, the Abbé Mariette, had been reciting erotic charms over the hearts of two pigeons consecrated during Mass in the names of Louis de Bourbon and Athénais de Montespan, and apparently the spell had succeeded. But Louis was fickle and apt to be promiscuous in his amours, so his love must be fixed on her alone and the aid of the Abbé Guibourg was requested. In the chapel of the Château de Villebousin near Montlhéry, at Saint-Denis, a long black velvet pall was spread over the altar, and upon this the royal mistress laid herself in a state of perfect nudity. Six black candles were lit, the celebrant robed himself in  a chasuble thickly embroidered with esoteric characters wrought in silver, the gold paten and chalice were placed upon the naked belly of the living altar to whose warm flesh the horrible old priest pressed his bloated lips each time the rubrics directed him to kiss the place of sacrifice. All was hushed save for the low monotonous murmur of the blasphemous liturgy. The Host was consecrated, and then the Precious Blood. An assistant crept forward bearing an infant in her arms. The child was held over the altar, a sharp swift gash across the neck, a stifled cry, and warm red drops fell into the chalice whilst the full tide streamed upon the white figure beneath. The corpse was handed to La Voisin, who flung it callously into an oven fashioned for that purpose, which glowed white-hot. 

 It was proved that a regular traffic had been carried on for years with beggar-women and the lowest prostitutes, who sold their children for this purpose. At her trial La Voisin confessed that no less than 2,500 babies had been disposed of in this manner, for the Black Mass was continually being celebrated not only by Guibourg but by other priests. The figures are so startling that some incredulity has been expressed by those who do not know the Paris of Louis XIV, but there appears no reason to doubt the sum. We may bear in mind that a whole pack of venal and utterly unscrupulous midwives was actively at work; that when the impostume of filth and crime was ripe to bursting no less than 319 warrants were issued, whilst there were very many more whose names were suppressed so deeply did they implicate the highest in the land, nay, the very Throne itself; that six and thirty witches, poisoners and abortionists  were executed; that 147, Guibourg, Lesage, Romani, De Vanens, and others were sentenced to close confinement in the remotest fortresses; that many, such as the magician Blessis, went to the galleys for life; and many, again, were conducted by the police over the frontier, condemned to perpetual exile. Several persons died in prison, and others again (of noble and unblemished lineage) committed suicide in agonies of shame lest they should be involved, however remotely, or even as witnesses, in such scandalous and abominable proceedings. 

 Perhaps the most sad circumstance that came to light during the investigation of these orgies of witchcraft was the large number of priests concerned. Not to mention the mere panders and poisoners—and Éliphas Lévi says that Black Magic is “above all the science of poisoning”—amongst those who habitually celebrated the Black Mass were the Abbé Brigallier, almoner to Mlle de Montpensier, who married the Duc de Lauzun; the Abbé Cotton who offered in sacrifice to Satan a child baptized with Holy Oils used in the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, and then strangled, and whose speciality was “La Messe du Saint Esprit”, which is said over a piece of goat’s skin sprinkled with holy water and which is intended to cure certain illnesses, to induce love or hate, even to conjure up the demon, all of which Dr. Jean-Baptiste Thiers in his great work denounces as a most pestilent superstition, nay, more, he roundly condemns this practice as a “Witch’s Mass”, and profane in the highest degree; the Abbé Davot, assistant priest at Notre Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle only a few doors from La Voisin’s house, whose custom it was to lay under  the corporal at Mass a piece of paper inscribed with the name of the person who should be brought to love, or if hated, damned to die, a practice eagerly pursued to-day—if a priest may be found; the Abbé Deshayes, who demanded exorbitant fees for his Black Masses and who was also a most skilful coiner; Father Gabriel, a Capuchin, who with the Abbé Seysson, was wont to say Masses at La Voisin’s house over women’s afterbirths and children’s cauls to confect charms of particular potency; the Abbé Lepreux, a schoolmaster, deep in the most shameful court secrets, who dedicated infants to the demon, and consecrated snakes and toads to mingle with poisons for their greater efficacy; the Abbé Mabile, who celebrated the sacrifice of the Death’s Head; the Abbé Maléscot, who had entered into a sort of partnership with the witch and abortionist, La Gallet, for whom he touted with very considerable success; the Abbé Mariette, who whilst still young had been banished from Paris for his sorceries (it is clear that he was only saved from the stake owing to family interest, for he was of a wealthy and good house), but who returned almost openly to place himself at the service of Madame de Montespan; the Abbé Olivier, who consecrated an altar for Black Masses in a brothel; the Abbé Rebours, who said Black Masses on the body of his mistress; the Abbé Tournet, who said Masses in order to kill the child in the womb, and who was in great request among the evil sisterhood. This catalogue of a dozen wizard-priests drawn from the archives of the Bastille could easily be multiplied four or five times. There was also Jean-Baptiste Sébault, of the diocese of Bourges, who whilst lodging in Paris at the house of a doctor, named  Charmillon, seduced Marianne Charmillon, a girl of twenty-two, his host’s daughter, and continually brought her to the Black Mass. The Abbé Guignard celebrated a Satanic Mass in a cellar over her body, and was served by Sébault in a state of complete nudity. An aphrodisiac was brewed at this orgy. The Abbé Lemaignan sacrificed young children, and possessed whole sets of rich vestments in which to celebrate the eucharist of hell. 

 It is only too much to be feared that the evil science of Guibourg and his company was handed down throughout the eighteenth century. The Duc de Richelieu, who was born in 1696 and died at the age of ninety-two in 1788, was much suspected of studying goety and the worst kinds of occult science. It was said that whilst quite a young man he had formed too close an intimacy with an Austrian noble whose tastes lay in the same direction, and whose wealth enabled him to purchase the secrets of those who had known the Abbé Guibourg and had been instructed by him in every dark secret of magic. Two Capuchins, who were his chaplains, celebrated Black Masses, at which the devotees assisted, in the old deserted chapel of a lone country-house. After this the Duke and his friend defiled the Hosts, in the hope that thereon Satan would appear to crown and reward their blasphemy. 

 Under the Regency, necromancers and wizards and traffickers in Satanic eucharists abounded, for Philippe d’Orléans was notoriously addicted to occultism of every kind. As might be expected there are revolting pictures of the Black Mass in the lewd pages of de Sade. In Justine such a Mass celebrated in a cloister is  described in filthy detail. When Juliette is initiated into the “Society of the Friends of Grime” the Host and Crucifix are desecrated. Again, a little later, two Satanic orgies are exhibited, when the High Altar is the scene of every defilement. There are other and even more obscene descriptions of the Black Mass in the work, but these it is unnecessary to particularize. 

 Upon the night of the execution of King Louis XVI, 21st January, 1793, a number of French devil-worshippers formed themselves into a definite society to foster revolution and propagate their cult of evil. The third chief of this organization died at Florence about 1905. He was believed to be nearly a hundred years old. This particular Society of Satanists spread very rapidly into Italy and soon penetrated Germany. A little later it had established itself very secretly in England, and there can be no question that it has proved one of the most potent forces for evil since its very inception. It has developed and flourished exceedingly and flung out its poisonous tentacles in all directions. It would be no exaggeration to say that much of the world’s misery and unrest is due to this foul conspiracy against God and humanity. 

 Nowhere in France during the first half of the nineteenth century was religious life more fervent and more zealous than throughout the diocese of Agen. Under such saintly Bishops as de Bonnac (the first to refuse the constitutional oath of 1792), and Jean Aimé de Levezon de Vezins pious associations, communities and confraternities were warmly encouraged, not the least of these devout fellowships being the Children of Mary founded by Adèle de Trenquelléon and the widow of a physician, Madame Belloc. This latter  lady employed a housekeeper, Virginie (whose surname curiously has not been recorded), and to her horror this woman one day revealed to her pious mistress that she was a Satanist of long continuance, the member of an infernal society which had its headquarters under the very shadow of St. Caprasius, the pro-cathedral. Virginie stated that when about twelve years old she had been taken to a house in the city were was an altar dedicated to the devil, at which an aged priest celebrated a Mass of blasphemy during which there occurred a fearful manifestation of corporeal evil. Moreover she was taught that each Communion she must retain the Host in her mouth, and then eject it secretly so that she might bring it to the midnight Sabbats to be horribly profaned by the impious crew, whose necromancies and conjurations were of the vilest and most abominable description. Madame Belloc hastened to call in the assistance of the Abbé Degans, to whom Virginie confessed that she would sometimes attend as many as five or six early Masses in different churches to obtain the Host. Upon her resolution to repent she fell a prey to an unclean spirit which the Abbé Degans expelled with difficulty and after many exorcisms. One curious feature of the case was the continual apports of Hosts, many of which were marked with bloody characters. Much scandal ensued, and an ecclesiastical inquiry followed. Many suspicious circumstances came to light concerning Virginie when she formed a connexion with the pseudo-prophet Eugéne Vintras and his followers, in whose private chapel at Tilly-sur-Seulles (as one of the sect, Gozzoli, quite unequivocally testified) the most horrible  obscenities were practised during the celebration of sacrilegious eucharists. It is significant that in 1845 Vintras came to England and established himself in London as the Master of a dark and evil cult which has never died.

Transsexual cured by an exorcism?

In fact, there is a growing belief among some critics of the psychological establishment that psychoanalysis and contemporary psychology have failed. In his book The Psychological Society, for example, Martin L. Gross—one of psychology’s most acerbic critics—complains that “the psychological revolution has damaged the psychic fiber of individual man and woman” and has brainwashed us into thinking that we are sick and deluded. He posits that psychoanalysis is a religion more than a science. Gross came to this conclusion after making a detailed study of whether psychiatry and psychology have really helped improve the quality of our daily lives. He is far from alone in his views and was interviewed sympathetically in Human Behavior magazine after his book came out.

The following case is an example of the failure of psychiatry, a failure later corrected in a totally bizarre manner.

Dr. David H. Barlow and Dr. Gene G. Abel first met the patient whom they identify only as “John” in 1969. John was a clear case of lifelong gender dysphoria, even by the most conservative criteria. They were counseling him for sexual reassignment surgery at the time of his strange cure.

Gender dysphoria is the psychiatric term for what is commonly called transsexualism, the obsession that one has been born as the wrong sex. This behavioral disorder often leads to conduct that isn’t too socially acceptable, such as cross-dressing (transvestism) and seeking change-of-sex surgery. Surgery is, however, the only treatment that seems to resolve the conflicts that plague transsexuals. But even this treatment is not always successful; for some transsexuals are so confused about their identities that they will go back to role-playing their original gender, even though their surgery is irreversible. Psychotherapeutic forms of treatment seem useless, and there is only a single case in the literature that reports the cure of a transsexual. That cure consisted of months of work with the patient using behavior modification.

What causes gender dysphoria isn’t known, and theoretical explanations for the condition range from psychological causes to possible biological reasons. Extreme gender confusion in early childhood has been suggested as a cause, but an unidentified hormonal disorder could conceivably be a contributing factor also. (For example, girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasm—a disorder in the adrenal glands—will grow up exhibiting masculine behavior.) Whatever the case, transsexualism is a long-lived problem that is resistent to change. For this reason the two psychiatrists at the University of Tennessee Medical School were stunned when John suddenly showed up one day completely cured— not by psychiatry or medicine but as the result of an exorcism!

The strange story began in 1952 when the patient was born. From early childhood John considered himself to be a girl. His gender confusion was probably the result of family problems. His mother and father, who raised their family in Tennessee, were thirty-two and forty-five years old respectively, and they didn’t get along very well. They finally separated when the boy was eight, by which time John’s transsexualism was already fairly ingrained. The couple were already the parents of two other children (a boy and a girl) before John came along, so he was the baby of the family. He was a pampered child, too, for his mother was very protective and wouldn’t let him engage in any rough-and-tumble boys’ play. She instead kept him at home, where he occupied his time—with his mother’s encouragement—cleaning and performing other household work.

When he was four years old, John began to imitate his mother openly by putting on makeup and dressing in his sister’s clothes. This behavior continued even after he started school, and he often made excuses to stay home to indulge his feminine fantasies. The only physical trauma John suffered during these early years came when he broke his leg when he was six. The broken leg didn’t bother him very much, but the cast he was forced to wear prevented him from cross-dressing, which he found a constant source of frustration.

John’s feminine traits and identification soon pervaded his entire life. He refused to participate in gym while at grammar school, while his growing effeminacy caused the other boys at school to make life miserable for him. His older brother often had to come to his defense.

John’s greatest personal satisfaction came when his mother took a job and he took over full responsibility as family housekeeper, a role he enjoyed immensely.

The next phase in John’s ever-increasing gender dysphoria came during adolescence. By this time he was going to high school, but was doing only passably well. His main preoccupation was still his family’s home, where he could engage in his favorite pastime, domestic work.

But when he was fifteen, something happened that permanently changed his life. He read a magazine article about transsexualism, learned about sexual reassignment surgery, and began corresponding with experts at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Surgery seemed to be the obvious course of action for him, so he began to prepare for it. To achieve this goal, the teenager dropped out of school and began studying the literature on transsexualism. He became so versed on the subject that he successfully conned a physician into giving him estrogen by claiming that he needed it to treat a previously diagnosed endocrine disorder. His real purpose, of course, was to prepare himself physically for the change-of-sex surgery.

Soon the oral doses and injections took effect, and his body hair began to thin while his breasts enlarged. The estrogen also affected him psychologically, and he later reported that it made him feel more tranquil than he had ever felt before.
It is impossible to determine how far the young man would have gone with this self-therapy were it not for an automobile accident that disrupted his life in 1969. He was then sixteen. His use of estrogen was discovered by the doctors who treated him after the accident, and they informed his family about the situation. They were shocked by the revelation, as might be expected.

The disruption these revelations caused within John’s family can’t be overestimated, and seemed to exacerbate his previously disturbed relationship with his mother. She resolutely insisted that he seek psychiatric treatment, and she even threatened suicide should he refuse. John eventually gave in to his mother’s histrionics and committed himself to a state hospital, but there was nothing the therapists could do for him.

Since he was well in touch with reality and was not psychotic, he was merely formally diagnosed as a transsexual and discharged. This conveniently allowed John to go to work at a fast-food restaurant and once again plan for change-of-sex surgery. The hospital psychiatrists felt, however, that their patient could benefit from psychotherapy, and they encouraged him to see Dr. David H. Barlow at the University of Tennessee Medical School. (Dr. Barlow would later help bring the case to public attention. He is a renowned pioneer in the use of behavior modification techniques for the treatment of sexual disturbances.) This course of action didn’t strike John as unreasonable. He began taking estrogen again, but this time under the supervision of a private psychiatrist. He also went back to cross-dressing.

While personally satisfied with the way his life was going, the only teal problem still facing him was his mother’s possessiveness. He complained that she continually tried to smother him while at the same time she fercely rejected his transsexualism. To escape the situation, the young man—with his psychiatrist’s blessing—joined the Navy in 1972, but he was rejected for psychiatric reasons. His mother tried to take advantage of the circumstances and even tried to move into his apartment with him, much to his annoyance. The situation between John and his mother became so intolerable that finally he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on his medication.

This unsuccessful suicide attempt brought him back to the hospital and back to the attention of Dr. Barlow and his colleague Dr. Gene G. Abel, who had also previously worked extensively with transsexuals. They counseled the patient, agreed with him that surgery would probably resolve his gender dysphoria and began preparing him. This entailed giving him full therapeutic dosages of estrogen and electrolysis and subjecting him to a complete psychiatric examination for gender identity, gender role behavior, and sexual arousal patterns. These standard objective psychological tests, which are always given before change-of-sex surgery is seriously considered, were conducted by Drs. Barlow and Abel.

The results of every one of the tests were consistent with a diagnosis of transsexualism. Even the way John moved and walked was typically feminine, according to a test that the researchers used to check for masculine and feminine motor behavior. For all practical purposes, John was really a woman trapped in a man’s body. For this reason the therapists did not hesitate to continue recommending a change-of-sex operation.

The process leading up to this radical surgery is very slow, however. For two years the researchers kept continual tabs on John, repeatedly giving him tests for gender identity and masculine versus feminine motor behavior. The results consistently came up feminine, which constituted further evidence that change-of-sex surgery was warranted in his ease.

By this time John was living openly as a woman and was going by the name Judy. He successfully adapted to his new lifestyle, and no one who casually knew him realized he was a pre-op transsexual. His therapists even stated when they wrote up the case that he “was successfully wearing a bikini having progressed to bra size 38B.”

By the summer of 1973, John was ready for his change-of-sex operation, to which he was looking forward eagerly. Both of his therapists agreed that his adjustment would probably be successful and that he wouldn’t suffer later conflicts over his decision. They suggested that he have the surgery at a medical center in a nearby state, and he duly checked in.
Then came the shock. The therapists never received word back about the surgery, and several silent months passed before they heard from John again. When he resurfaced the following fall, he had been remarkably transformed.

“One day in late fall,” report Drs. Barlow and Abel, “a research assistant who had worked with the case came back from a half-finished lunch of fried chicken and shouted, ‘Judy is back at the restaurant, but she’s not Judy anymore, she’s John!’ Other reports quickly confirmed the report, and John was invited back to our offices for a session which occurred in early January of 1974. He entered the office in a three- piece business suit with polished shoes, neatly cut short hair, clipped fingernails, and consistently masculine motor behaviors.

Even to trained eyes, the only sign of his former feminine role was the almost complete absence of facial hair, which in view of his light complexion and in the context of his total masculinity would normally go unnoticed.” The story he told was as remarkable as his transformation. While he was working at the fast-food restaurant, he had grown very attached to his employer, who was a Christian fundamentalist. She refused to be judgmental about her employee’s transsexualism, but she did ask that he consult with a physician she knew in town before undergoing the final surgery. This physician was also a fundamentalist. Although John considered himself a Southern Baptist, neither he nor anyone else in his family was religious. But he went to see the doctor anyway as a favor to his boss. The doctor examined him and spoke with him for some time and even agreed that his change-of-sex adjustment would probably be good. He then told John that his real problem was possession by evil spirits! John was astounded by this announcement, even more when the physician asked if he could perform an exorcism. For some reason John agreed.
The exorcism lasted from two to three hours, and it involved prayer, the laying-on-of-hands, and exhortations against the evil spirits possessing the patient. John later explained to his therapists that he fainted several times during the ritual, but when the ordeal was over, the physician assured him that twenty-two spirits had been driven from his body.

(The physician later explained to Dr. Barlow that one of these entities had been female and was the cause of John’s problem.) The result of the exorcism was nothing short of amazing. When the ritual was over, John announced that it had worked! Now, for the first time in twenty years, he perceived himself as a man. His desire to cross-dress ceased instantly and he immediately went to a barbershop to have his hair cut short. This conversion to a totally masculine identity lasted for two weeks, during which time he lived back with his mother.

But then he began to feel his old tendencies returning, so he and his employer visited a fundamentalist faith healer at a public meeting in town. They were able to talk with her and she agreed to pray over John.

Once again he fainted dead away. He fainted again after regaining consciousness for a few moments, which ended the treatment. It was at this point that John realized that another miracle had transpired. While leaving the public platform where he had been treated, he saw that his breasts— fully formed from the estrogen treatment—had returned to normal. He had now fully returned to his male gender, although the effects of estrogen are long-lasting and his claim medically impossible. (While checking into the story, Dr. Barlow received confirmation of the “miracle” from the young man’s employer.) Even though they could plainly see that their former patient’s feminine characteristics had completely and mysteriously disappeared, Dr. Barlow and his colleagues were incredulous about their patient’s story and spent considerable effort in verifying it. The story consistently checked out. But to be sure of their personal observations, the therapists asked John to retake the same battery of psychological tests that they had used to diagnose him a transsexual. This time the test results all came out consistent with a masculine identity . . . which was a total reversal of the prior results he had given while being monitored over the previous two years. Even his gait and body movements were now firmly masculine, possibly for the first time in his life.

The two therapists followed John’s life for the next two and a half years to see if the cure would be permanent. It certainly seemed to be, for John’s transsexual tendencies never returned. By 1975 he was dating women but had not engaged in premarital sex because of his new-found religious beliefs. They learned that he still occasionally felt fleeting homosexual urges, but their former patient assured them that he was perfectly capable of banishing these from his mind when they arose. His adjustment to his masculine life seemed as perfect as it was inexplicable.

What is a psychiatrist to make of such a bizarre case? Does it prove the existence of spirit possession, or could the exorcism have produced some sort of psychological miracle akin to hypnotic suggestion?

It is clear from their report that neither Dr. Barlow nor Dr. Abel feels competent to explain why and how this unexpected cure came about. Writing in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 1977, they noted that “what is important in this case is that no psychotherapeutic procedure of any kind with whatever element of suggestion or persuasion, has been effective for transsexualism, with the possible exception of behavior modification in one case. But even the most facile operant conditioner would be hard pressed to explain the sudden and massive behavioral change observed and objectively measured in this case.” They add that the one reported case of a patient cured through behavior modifi- cation responded only after months of treatment. That patient only learned to behave “masculinely” by practicing new behavioral strategies for walking and acting. The patient had to be carefully taught these strategies, while John’s cure had been instantaneous.

“What cannot be denied,” the two researchers conclude, “. . . is that a patient who was very clearly a transsexual, by the most conservative criteria, assumed a long-lasting masculine gender identity in a remarkably short time following an apparent exorcism.” Dr. Barlow was in a position to know, too, since he has personally specialized in the “cure” of gender dysphoria. He had invariably found that the process takes an extremely long time to complete.

No matter how one chooses to interpret this case, the fact remains that conventional psychiatry cannot explain why John grew up with the internal feelings that he was a woman and not a man, why counseling and therapy accomplished nothing by way of a cure, or how the young man accomplished a 100 percent change in behavior almost instantaneously.

THE INFINITE BOUNDARY A Psychic Look at Spirit Possession, Madness, and Multiple Personality
D. Scott Rogo

Paranormal fire and spontaneous human combustion

 INTRODUCTION

The hero of this book is a former police detective sergeant, now a bus driver. His testimony determined me to write it. He wrote to tell me that he was being visited nocturnally by various incubi and a succubus. A succubus is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a female demon who makes love to men during the hours of darkness. An incubus is a demon who bears down upon people during their sleep, choking and suffocating them, but who also performs the sex act with women.

The significant point about his letter, the synchronistic point perhaps, was that I myself had recently begun receiving visits from a succubus.

Then, only a short time later, a well-known actress wrote to me asking for help. When I visited her she told me she had recently been attacked at night by an entity, an experience which had left her, apart from fearful, with a mouthful of dried blood. Two very interesting facts to emerge about her are that she is left-handed and has an extra nipple. These, of course, are the traditional marks of the medieval witch.

Other material came rapidly to hand. The film The Entity, for example, is based on an actual case reported by a psychiatrist. Here a woman was raped on several occasions by an entity or force, which left her with severe bruising and a damaged mind. In Italy, in 1983, a Scottish girl, Carol Compton, was denounced and tried as a witch. Objects are said to have moved in her presence without being touched, and in particular she was accused of starting three fires paranormally, when she herself was not physically present, in a child’s bedroom.

The question of paranormal fire leads on to a recent case of what is called spontaneous human combustion. According to a Chicago police report, a woman burst spontaneously into flames while walking down a city street, in full view of many witnesses. Incidentally, the bizarre and so far inexplicable occurrence of human beings bursting into flames, in which the flesh of the victim is totally consumed while adjacent objects and sometimes even the victim’s clothing remain unharmed, is one that otherwise skeptical scientists accept as factual. They have to. How can they reject the findings of coroners’ inquests?

The surge of paranormal visitations described in this book is perhaps remarkable for its occurrence at a time when orthodox science has never been stronger, when Western academic opinion in general has never been more ready to pour scorn on what it considers to be the superstitious hysteria of fools. Yet, as this book shows, a growing number of doctors, scientists, and psychiatrists around the world are quietly reporting on aspects of the phenomena under discussion. Increasingly, too, their reports are appearing in the orthodox medical and scientific press.

The investigation of the remarkable events of a succubus–incubus visitation—and of such other allied phenomena as poltergeist attacks—leads us in fact not into some cuckooland of human gullibility and credulity, but into a still more remarkable and altogether real area, the human unconscious mind. In the professional literature we find much relevant documentation not only from “historical” sources such as Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and their associates, but from modern, practicing psychiatrists like Morton Schatzman, Mary Williams, Lorna Selfe, Hervey Cleckley, R. L. Moody, and many others. We find, for instance, a poltergeist–incubus attack occurring in a doctor’s consulting room, a woman whose hallucinations became visible to others, and cases of multiple personality where the alternative, displacing personae exhibit not simply psychological characteristics different from those of the “real” occupant of the body but also different brain waves and other autonomic physiological responses. By no criteria whatsoever can we consider these alternative, usurping personae to be any less actual, any less genuine than the “normal” owner of consciousness—that is, than the “real” you who sits reading this book. So what, then, really is a human personality, and what are not so much the limits of its powers, as the full, unrealized extent of them? The answers to these questions prove to be far more daunting than any alleged world of spirits (the “explanation” usually put forward by occultists and paranormalists); they are so daunting, in fact, that the implications of the wholly authentic instances detailed here are currently totally excluded from “informed” modern Western consciousness. We shall as a passing exercise be documenting a deliberate (although perhaps not fully conscious) policy of total non-discussion of these matters by mainstream Western academic psychology and psychiatry in particular and by Western science in general.

Is it the growing acceptance of supernormal phenomena by the public at large that is leading both to a renaissance of these dramatic events and, above all, to a willingness to stand up and be counted? Or is it the denial and repression by mainstream academic opinion of the forces involved (whatever they may prove to be) which increases the strength of those forces, so that what might otherwise be controlled and channeled bursts out in uncontrolled violence?

The point has certainly been reached where the phenomena in question must be made fully public. As the one-time detective sergeant put it: “This area doesn’t just need investigating. It needs a bloody great searchlight.”

I hope this book is his bloody great searchlight.

**

(...)

In Toronto in 1972 a group of people interested in paranormal phenomena decided to invent a ghost and then see if they could raise a phantom of him.22 Accordingly, they gave the would-be ghost a name, Philip, and invented a history for him. He was a seventeenth-century British aristocrat whose mistress, a gypsy girl, was burned at the stake for witchcraft, whereupon Philip committed suicide by jumping from the battlements of his castle. For over a year the group of eight (which included the wife of a Professor Owen) met and talked about Philip in order to feel they really knew him. Afterwards they sat in meditation in an attempt to raise him. Their efforts produced nothing. Then they read the two reports that are described below and changed their techniques accordingly. Within four weeks they produced rapping sounds from the table around which they were sitting with their hands placed upon it, and the table began sliding around the floor. They began asking the table questions about Philip, to which the table rapped correct answers in a simple code. Philip was talking to them. In due course Philip switched lights on and off at command and produced cool breezes.

In 1975 the group was invited to Kent State University in America for a series of tests by William Franklin, Professor of Physics. For two days raps and movements of the table were produced to order under test conditions, and the sessions were videotaped. One sequence shows Professor Franklin sitting on a floating table. Philip also again went through his paces on a Toronto television program.23Several other groups have since successfully repeated the Philip experiment. (What more proof, one wonders, does the scientific community want?) The two British experiments that set the Toronto group on the right track were as follows.

In 1966 K. J. Batcheldor published his “Report on a Case of Table Levitation Associated Phenomena.”24 The writer and two others (all friends) met a total of two hundred times between April 1964 and December 1965. At these meetings, which lasted two hours with a half-hour break, the three sat, at first in complete darkness but later with a red light, with their hands on a table, concentrating on producing phenomena. Results were fairly rapid. In the eleventh session the table rose clear from the floor. The group was now also producing regular taps, scrapings, and soft thuds on chairs, on the floor, and on the walls. Batcheldor describes some of the later sittings.

The simple table motions of sliding and tilting were capable of enormous variation: the table could glide slowly and silently as if on candle grease, or make a rapid and noisy excursion of six feet or more, causing the sitters to leave their seats and stumble after it . . . it could beat an enormous tattoo, quite disturbing to the neighbours when the table weighed 40 lb! Sometimes it would rotate about its centre, either slowly or so nearly instantaneously as to take the breath away. . . . As the sitting proceeded the movements of the table usually increased in power and extent. Under these circumstances it was often impossible to remain seated, and chairs were pushed back and we continued standing. Sometimes we had to go at a brisk pace from one end of the room to the other . . .25Other phenomena that occurred in various sessions were breezes, intense cold, touchings, pulling back of the chairs, movements of objects in the room, and the “glueing” of the table to the floor so that it could not be moved. There were also two apports: a stone was thrown across the room and matches from the kitchen were sprinkled about.

The author of this paper was at that time a graduate psychologist. Today he is a principal clinical psychologist.

C. Brookes-Smith, D. W. Hunt, and two of their friends took matters a stage farther at the end of the 1960s, as reported in their paper “Some Experiments in Psychokinesis,” published in 1970.26 The four participants were, professionally, an electrical engineer, a photographer, a secretary, and a dental surgeon.

This group worked in full normal light and with a remote-controlled camera. With their hands resting on the table they carried on a normal cheerful conversation. Paranormal effects were obtained in the very first session.

Results were in fact rapidly produced: knocks and raps were heard, apparently from the table, at the first meeting. Tilting of the table occurred at the second meeting and, after a few sessions, the phenomena had developed into violent table movements over which no exact control seemed possible, and which indeed caused anxiety due to the possibility of injury.

These movements . . . included the rising of the table some five or six feet clear of the floor, its movement over the whole of the room whilst in the air, and a peculiar oscillating descent to the floor, sometimes quite gently, sometimes violently.27Subsequently the group caused a lamp to switch itself on and off and produced breezes. They were also able to cause the table to “hop” in a given direction on command and to “dance” to played music.

Distressingly, it is reported that many of these successful experimental groups disband because they grow tired of producing the phenomena and cannot think of anything to do with the energy involved. What an indictment of their imagination. They could, for example, have attempted to produce mutations in seeds or to hasten the growth in plants. They could have attempted to cure individuals with terminal disease—for there is good circumstantial evidence that the poltergeist power is the same energy as is used in psychic healing. At the very least the groups could have issued standing invitations to skeptical scientists and to the staff of scientific magazines, usually completely obtuse in respect of paranormal phenomena. Demonstrations to the general public would also have been of value, to encourage personal experimentation in this area. The more phenomena we have the better.

Poltergeist phenomena, then, exist. What we require is not further proof of them but an explanation of how they work and of their precise relationship to the human personality.

A further link between the poltergeist and the incubus–succubus is possibly provided by an experience of my own. The visits of my own succubus had for a time been interrupted by drastic changes in the house in which I live. The rooms below my flat, formerly occupied by peaceful elderly lecturers, were now taken over by students, with the result that the previous early morning silence was gone—the time when I entertained my paranormal visitor. However, one night I awakened from sleep to find a heavy pressure bearing down on my right leg. I was delighted at the presence of what I knew to be an incubus, and mentally I invited it to do something else. Suddenly the room seemed filled with a fierce breeze, in which the bedclothes appeared to flutter. I say “seemed” and “appeared to” because no one else was present to say whether my experience was merely subjective or genuinely objective. At any rate, this event, if objective, recalls the puckering and rippling bedclothes observed in more than one poltergeist case.

 4 PARANORMAL FIRE

The London Daily Telegraph of 6 August 1982 carried the news that “a woman walking down a street in Chicago burst into flames for no apparent reason and was burned to death yesterday.” The Chicago police logged the event as a case of spontaneous human combustion, adding it to the “several hundred”1 cases recorded in recent centuries.

In spontaneous human combustion “a person’s body is reduced, sometimes within minutes, to a heap of cinders . . . unusual features are the speed and intensity of the process . . . and the way that it is selectively directed, for example, leaving the extremities of the body unharmed and sometimes not even damaging the clothes encasing the body.”2Unlike most of the phenomena discussed in this book, spontaneous human combustion is (albeit grudgingly) accepted by modern science. Science could hardly do otherwise than accept, in view of the police and medical photographic evidence presented at coroners’ inquests (see, for instances of photographs, M. Harrison3 and F. Hitching4). Dr. Gavin Thurston, a London coroner and editor of the Medico-Legal Journal, writes (in 1961) that “there are undisputed instances where the body was burned in its own substance, without external fuel, and in which there has been a remarkable absence of damage to surrounding inflammable objects.”5

Science has no explanation at all to offer for the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. On the paranormal side, fortunately, there are cases where we can, at least cautiously, link the phenomenon with poltergeist activity in general and with poltergeist fires in particular. There are therefore some grounds for considering spontaneous combustion to be an “inner poltergeist”—an uncontrollable burst of emotional energy that cannot escape from the mind out into the environment and which in consequence destroys the human being producing it. Interestingly, we have no record whatsoever of spontaneous combustion generated by animals, just as we have no evidence of animal poltergeist activity. Here then are strong grounds for regarding these phenomena as by-products of the highly evolved, complex human mind.

Eyewitness accounts of spontaneous human combustion—we come to some detailed accounts in a moment—speak of “bluish flames” that can not only not be extinguished by water but are increased by it. There is, further, the remarkable fact that the amazingly intense heat generated tends not to ignite or damage adjacent objects, nor to spread into any general conflagration. In scientific terms, we might consider that what occurs in paranormal human combustion is that body water (H2O), which makes up 70 percent of our physical structure, is electrolyzed into its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen, both highly flammable gases, which are somehow self-ignited. The water sometimes thrown over the victim is, it seems, drawn into the process, so adding fuel to instead of extinguishing the blaze. What exactly causes this possible electrolysis to commence remains a complete mystery. Nevertheless, electrolysis is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and so the reason for the fire’s containment or localization might be the body’s own electromagnetic field. Before examining one or two cases in detail, we should perhaps once more emphasize the quite extraordinarily intense heat that is generated in the process of paranormal combustion.

Mrs. Reeser was the widow of a doctor and the mother of a doctor. On the evening of 1 July 1951 she was sixty-seven years of age, in apparent good health, and living in Florida, a few hundred yards from her doctor son. Her son left her at 8:30 that evening, and her landlady Mrs. Carpenter looked in on her at 9 p.m. Mrs. Reeser was then seated in an easy chair, undressed ready for bed. At 5 a.m. Mrs. Carpenter was roused by the smell of burning. She found the doorknob of Mrs. Reeser’s bedroom to be hot, frighteningly hot. When the door was subsequently opened, a blast of heated air rushed out. Mrs. Reeser was, apparently, not in the apartment, and the bed had not been slept in, but closer examination revealed the truth.

Within a blackened circle about four feet in diameter were a number of coiled seat springs, and the remains of a human body. The remains consisted of a charred liver attached to a piece of backbone, a skull shrunk to the size of a baseball, a foot encased in a black satin slipper but burned down to just above the ankle, and a small pile of blackened ashes.6

Commenting on the case, Dr. W. M. Krogman, Professor of Physical Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that only at the very high temperature of 3000° F do bones even begin to fuse or melt, let alone disappear altogether. He tells how he has observed a body burn for eight hours in a crematorium at over 2000° F, “yet at the end of that time there was scarcely a bone that was not present and completely recognizable as a human bone . . . they were not ashes and powder as in the case of Mrs. Reeser and numerous other deaths by spontaneous combustion.” He goes on:

Never have I seen a human skull shrunk by intense heat. The opposite has always been true. The skulls either have been abnormally swollen or have virtually exploded into many pieces. . . . I have experimented, using cadaver heads, and have never known an exception to this rule.7

Dr. Gavin Thurston wholly supports these views:

To burn a body at an execution, for example, as much as two cart-loads of wood are required: and attempts by criminals to dispose of a body by fire are notoriously unsuccessful . . . this is a well-recognized medico-legal fact.8As Krogman hints, old-fashioned crematoria have to employ someone whose job it is to grind remaining bones to powder after a cremation. Even following industrial fires, let alone house fires, the remains of victims, though terribly charred, are still recognizable as human beings.

In another typical case, nineteen-year-old Maybelle Andrews was dancing with her boyfriend Billy Clifford

. . . when flames suddenly burst from her back, chest and shoulders, igniting her hair. She died on the way to hospital. Her boyfriend, who was badly burnt trying to put her out, explained that “there were no open flames in the room—the flames seemed to come from the girl herself.”9In December 1966, in Pennsylvania, a local physician, Dr. John Bentley—or what was left of him—was found by a meter reader, who had his own key to the house. Leaning over a small blackened hole in the bathroom floor was the doctor’s walking aid. “Alongside it was the sole, macabre remains of Dr. Bentley: the lower part of his right leg, browned by the heat, the shoe still intact.” In the room below the hole was a small cone of fine ash, about 13 inches high.10

In London, in 1922, Mrs. Euphemia Johnson had returned from shopping on a fine summer’s afternoon. She made herself a pot of tea and had consumed half a cup before she was overwhelmed. Her “calcinated bones” were all that was found lying within her unburned clothes. The varnish of the chair in which she had been sitting was slightly bubbled, and the linoleum beneath the remains was slightly charred: yet the heat generated in the consuming of the body must have been that of a furnace.11

The reality and strangeness of this particular phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion are therefore undoubted. They must dispose us not to dismiss lightly the evidence for other kinds of paranormal fire. Before we move on, however, two points should be made. One is that, as all authorities agree, more women than men are the subjects of spontaneous combustion. To obtain a more precise estimate of the proportions involved, all the cases mentioned by Michael Harrison in his book Fire From Heaven were counted. We may assume that the cases were chosen not on any chauvinist or sexist basis, but on the grounds of their interest. Of a total of 35 cases cited, 12 involved males and 23 involved females. As it happens, this ratio of almost two to one favoring women is the same ratio as that found by A. R. G. Owen in respect of poltergeist activity.12 A similar bias toward the female as originator of phenomena will be found in respect of all types of events bar one described in the present book.

The other point is the abrupt suddenness of the onset of spontaneous combustion; this is an aspect we shall have further occasion to return to.

The starting of paranormal fires during poltergeist activity is a subject already touched on in chapter 3. Probably the classic case that links this fire-raising activity with the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion is that concerning the village of Binbrook in Lincolnshire, England.13 The events in question took place at the turn of the year 1904–5 and were widely reported in the press of the day. They were also summarized by the Rev. A. C. Constance of Binbrook Rectory and a Colonel Taylor for the records of the Society for Psychical Research.

The events began at the rectory itself, and comprised objects hurling themselves about and, on three occasions, items near a “not very good, or big fire” bursting into flames. We must remember that in earlier times, in winter, most rooms in all houses had open coal or wood fires. While a skeptic might feel that open fires were the cause of alleged paranormal blazes within a house, such objection is altogether ruled out in the more modern cases and we may reasonably assume that at least some cases of paranormal fire in former times were not so caused. Indeed, in the present case, a householder in Binbrook, a school teacher, reported to the Liverpool Echo that she had found a blanket blazing in a room which had no fireplace. The focus of events next shifted to Binbrook Farmhouse. Objects fell from shelves and were moved around the house (much as in Matthew Manning’s home). The farmer himself reported that he felt a strong sense of psychological pressure in the vicinity of the house.

Then the farmer discovered the servant girl, who was sweeping the kitchen, with the back of her dress on fire. She was at the other end of the room from the kitchen fire at the time, which was in any case protected by a fireguard (as open fires habitually were) so that no one could approach within two or three feet of it by accident. The farmer grabbed the girl and smothered the flames. Thus far there is nothing paranormal in the narrative.

However, the girl was in fact “terribly burned” and in “terrible pain.” The hospital, approached by a local newspaper, confirmed that the girl was indeed extensively burned on the back and was in a critical condition. They agreed that the girl insisted she was not near the fire at the time of the occurrence.

Such severe burns are not readily consonant with the igniting of a dress which was in any case soon smothered. We need not feel over hesitant in taking the servant girl’s experience as a case of partial self-combustion (for which there are several precedents in the literature). Moreover, not only have other female victims been observed to self-combust from the back—“some who, like the . . . New Hampshire doctor, see the flames beginning to sprout from between the shoulder blades of kneeling women”14—but the servant girl was the typically “lost” and emotionally damaged person (like Carlotta in chapter 2) that we find in many kinds of extreme parapsychological events (see also chapters 10 and 14): “Our servant girl, whom we had taken from the workhouse, and who had neither kin nor friend in the world that she knows of. . . .” She was no doubt the source of all the strange events described.

Sometimes the paranormal fire is outside the producing individual’s own body. Since his twelfth birthday a boy in Budapest, in 1921, had been producing paranormal fires all around him. Irate neighbors finally drove the boy and his mother from their home. It was said that when the boy slept flames flickered around him, singeing the pillow, but not harming him in any way.

A similar case was reported in the New York Times in 1929. Flames were observed to play over a negro girl, Lily White, when she walked in the street. When at home her clothes were said regularly to burst into flames, as did her bedclothes when she was in bed. She herself, however, was not harmed.15 This self-protective aspect also appears in the following case.

In North Carolina in 1932 a Mrs. C. H. Williams’s dress suddenly flared up. She had not been standing near any fire, closed or open, nor any source of flame. Her husband and daughter were able to tear off the dress before Mrs. Williams was burned—or perhaps she was in some way protecting herself from the effects of the flames. Subsequently various other articles in the home burst into flames—a pair of trousers belonging to Mr. Williams and hanging in a closed wardrobe, a bed, curtains in an unoccupied room, and so on. On a number of occasions the flames broke out in full view of witnesses.16

Jennie Bramwell, in 1891, was a fourteen-year-old orphan adopted by a Mr. and Mrs. Dawson of Ontario. The child developed meningitis and while recovering from the illness would drift into trancelike states. In one of these she suddenly pointed to the ceiling and shouted: “Look at that!” The ceiling above the bed was on fire.17This fire was followed by several hundred others, which broke out in full view of the rest of the Dawson family. Fifty fires occurred in the space of one day. While they were dealing with one outbreak at one end of the house, another would start up at the other. Even the cat caught fire while Mr. Dawson sat looking at it. The family insisted that the heat generated by the fires was much more intense than that of ordinary fires (an interesting parallel, perhaps, with the abnormal heat of spontaneous human combustion). A wood-paneled wall, for example, was instantly charred to a depth of half an inch, and the other side of the wall immediately became too hot to touch. At last Jennie was sent back to the orphanage, and the fires ceased forthwith.

Willie Brough, aged twelve, of California was said, in 1886, to start fires merely by looking. His family, convinced that he was possessed by the devil, callously threw him out of the home to fend for himself. He was taken in by a local farmer, who sent him to school. There, as the San Francisco Bulletin reported, five fires broke out on his first day: one in the center of the ceiling, one in the teacher’s desk, one in her wardrobe, and two on the wall. The boy appeared terrified by the incidents. He was expelled from the school that same evening.18These last two stories date from the end of the last century, yet it is hard to doubt them. Let us, however, return to the present day and to the question of general poltergeist activity associated with paranormal fire.

In the previous chapter much evidence of Matthew Manning’s poltergeist-raising was presented. Here it is relevant to mention his ability to generate patches of very high temperature. In considering these events, which date from the 1970s, it is important to remember that they were witnessed and testified to by several of Manning’s school fellows and the school matron.19

On one occasion Manning, another boy, and the matron witnessed, late at night, a patch of light glowing on an interior wall. This was warm to the touch, although the room itself was unusually cold. This light was self-generated—that is, none of the three could establish any normal source for it.

On another, more impressive, occasion Manning was wakened by a prefect and taken along to the junior dormitory, where they were having trouble. (By now, of course, the whole school was “used to,” if that is the right expression, the numerous outbreaks of paranormal events that Matthew was continually producing.) Manning relates:

When I arrived the room was darkened and several people were in there, mostly prefects and boys who had woken up. The room was exceptionally cold and there on the wall was a pool of very bright light, which on touching was too hot for me to keep my hand on. . . . Another small junior dormitory adjoined the one we were in, and we went into it to see if anything was happening in there. Nothing could be seen immediately; the matron put her hand up against the area of wall that backed where the patch of light was manifesting in the other dormitory. She found it to be warm, as I did, and we found it becoming warmer, indicating that the heat was spreading through the wall. . . . In the other room the area had by now become so heated that I switched on the main light, fearing that if some action were not soon taken, the wall would begin to smoulder or burn.20This incident, like the others, passed without actual fire being produced. The headmaster, however, understandably very worried by the threat of fire in a boarding school, determined not for the first time to ban Manning from the school, just as, long ago, Willie Brough had been banished for a similar offence. Ultimately, however, Manning’s headmaster decided to let him stay.

How exactly might paranormal fire come about? The answer seems to lie in a continuum of activity, from “simple” poltergeist activity upwards. If an individual can generate enough projected emotional or psychic energy physically to move objects, then he or she can also cause objects—or, conceivably, atoms—to vibrate vigorously enough to cause them to heat up. (Indeed, heat is nothing but the atoms of a substance vibrating faster and faster.) The vibration eventually reaches a point where combustion spontaneously and suddenly occurs.

Paranormal fire and spontaneous human combustion may well be basically the same phenomenon. We have some evidence that those people who produce the one can sometimes produce the other. An example is related in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Henne Fire.”21 It may seem strange to invoke a fictional story in support of a factual argument, but Singer is faithfully chronicling the legends of his, the Jewish, people; and writers of Singer’s stature are as addicted to the truth as any scientist. At any rate, in the story Henne both produces paranormal fire all around her, and finally, self-immolates. Singer’s account of the blackened skeleton sitting in a chair itself only marginally singed, and everything else in the room untouched, precisely parallels themany modern factual descriptions we have of human self-immolation.

Spontaneous human combustion, then, may be the result of an individual at some point failing to externalize a critical buildup of psychic or libidinal energy (which might otherwise manifest itself as general poltergeist activity) leading to self-immolation. The analogy of an electrical charge failing to discharge itself, relatively harmlessly, in the immediate environment may not be too far from the truth.

In any event, external paranormal fire and general poltergeist activity are quite clearly linked; and, as we shall see poltergeist phenomena are themselves not isolated from general mediumistic and psychological events, such as automatic writing, clairvoyance and the sighting of ghosts.

Stan Gooch

The Origins of Psychic Phenomena ...