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.