An Extraordinary Journey: The Memoirs of a Physical Medium

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Massimo Polidoro. (2001). Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle. Prometheus Books. pp. 71–73. ISBN 978-1-57392-896-0 In the 1930s Harry Price (director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research) had investigated the medium Helen Duncan and had her perform a number of test séances. She was suspected of swallowing cheesecloth which was then regurgitated as "ectoplasm". [150] Price had proven through analysis of a sample of ectoplasm produced by Duncan, that it was made of cheesecloth. [151] Helen Duncan would also use a doll made of a painted papier-mâché mask draped in an old sheet which she pretended to her sitters was a spirit. [152] The photographs taken by Thomas Glendenning Hamilton in the 1930s of ectoplasm reveal the substance to be made of tissue paper and magazine cut-outs of people. The famous photograph taken by Hamilton of the medium Mary Ann Marshall depicts tissue paper with a cut out of Arthur Conan Doyle's head from a newspaper. Skeptics have suspected that Hamilton may have been behind the hoax. [153] The Truth about Medium by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph. D., with William L. Simon, Hampton Books, 2005, p. 119 Often with channelling, there is little or no change to the medium's appearance or voice. More contemporary mediums are now working at the channelling level. Channelling is the level most often used for automatic writing, where a degree of physical control is required to move the pen, but no other physical changes are needed.

Ian Rowland. (1998). The full facts book of cold reading. London, England: Ian Roland. ISBN 978-0-9558476-0-8 a b c Gerbic, Susan (February 21, 2019). "Operation Pizza Roll- Thomas John". Archived from the original on February 24, 2019 . Retrieved February 23, 2019. Joseph McCabe. (1920). Spiritualism: A Popular History from 1847. Dodd, Mead and Company. pp. 110–12. A Mr. Merrifield was present at one of the sittings. Home's usual phenomena were messages, the moving of objects (presumably at a distance), and the playing of an accordion which he held with one hand under the shadow of the table. But from an early date in America he had been accustomed occasionally to "materialise" hands (as it was afterwards called). The sitters would, in the darkness, faintly see a ghostly hand and arm, or they might feel the touch of an icy limb. Mr. Merrifield and the other sitters saw a "spirit-hand" stretch across the faintly lit space of the window. But Mr. Merrifield says that Home sat, or crouched, low in a low chair, and that the "spirit-hand" was a false limb on the end of Home's arm. At other times, he says, he saw that Home was using his foot."

Investigative Files: John Edward: Hustling the Bereaved". CSI. Nov–Dec 2001 . Retrieved 2011-05-12. Messages are usually delivered through speaking or writing and with support from physical divination tools, such as oracle cards. #2 Physical Mediumship Janet Oppenheim. (1985). The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge University Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-521-26505-8 Jones, Kelvin I. (1989). Conan Doyle and the Spirits: The Spiritualist Career of Arthur Conan Doyle. Aquarian Press.

Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania, The Seybert Commission, 1887. 1 April 2004. These changes are not to be confused with transfiguration, which is a form of physical mediumship popular in Victorian spiritualism and uses ectoplasm to create a mask. Ectoplasm is a viscous substance said to exude from the body of a medium for the material manifestation of spirit. The physicist Kristian Birkeland exposed the fraud of the direct voice medium Etta Wriedt. Birkeland turned on the lights during a séance, snatched her trumpets and discovered that the "spirit" noises were caused by chemical explosions induced by potassium and water and in other cases by lycopodium powder. [161] The British medium Isa Northage claimed to materialize the spirit of a surgeon known as Dr. Reynolds. When photographs taken of Reynolds were analyzed by researchers they discovered that Northage looked like Reynolds with a glued stage beard. [92] M. Lamar Keene. (1997). The Psychic Mafia. Prometheus Books. p 122. ISBN 978-1-57392-161-9 "A medium still riding high in England is Leslie Flint, famed as an exponent of direct voice. William Rauscher and Allen Spraggett, who attended a sitting Flint held in 1970 in New York, said that it was the most abysmal flop of any seance they had endured. All the spirit voices sounded exactly like the medium and displayed an incredible ignorance of nearly everything pertaining to the sitters. The "mediumship " was second-rate ventriloquism."Clairalience or "clear smelling" is the ability to smell a spirit. For example, a medium may smell the pipe tobacco of a person who smoked during life. Nandor Fodor. (1960). The Haunted Mind: A Psychoanalyst Looks at the Supernatural. Helix Press. p. 100-22

Richard Wiseman. (1997). Deception & Self-Deception: Investigating Psychics. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-57392-121-3 Joseph Dunninger. (1935). Inside the Medium's Cabinet. New York, D. Kemp and Company. Harry Houdini. (1924). A Magician Among the Spirits. Cambridge University Press. Joseph Rinn. (1950). Sixty Years Of Psychical Research: Houdini And I Among The Spiritualists. Truth Seeker.Alex Owen. (2004). The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-64205-5 With today’s Photoshop technology the original 80 year old photographs have been given a little more contrast for this publication but absolutely NO other changes have been made to them. (AH Publisher) A very large part is played by fraud in spiritualistic practices, both in the physical and psychical, or automatic, phenomena, but especially in the former. The frequency with which mediums have been convicted of fraud has, indeed, induced many people to abandon the study of psychical research, judging the whole bulk of the phenomena to be fraudulently produced. [58] Henry Slade In the later half of the 20th century, Western mediumship developed in two different ways. One type involves clairaudience, in which the medium claims to hear spirits and relay what they hear to their clients. The other is a form of channeling in which the channeler seemingly goes into a trance, and purports to leave their body allowing a spirit entity to borrow it and then speak through them. [30] When in a trance the medium appears to enter into a cataleptic state, [31] although modern channelers may not. [ citation needed] Some channelers open the eyes when channeling, and remain able to walk and behave normally. The rhythm and the intonation of the voice may also change completely. [31] Tony Cornell. (2002). Investigating the Paranormal. Helix Press New York. pp. 347–52. ISBN 978-0-912328-98-0

Find sources: "Mediumship"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( April 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Rodger Anderson. (2006). Psychics, Sensitives and Somnambules. McFarland & Company. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-7864-2770-3

Physical Mediumship Categories of Manifestations

In March 2017, medium Thomas John was targeted in a sting operation and caught doing a hot reading. The sting was planned and implemented by skeptical activist Susan Gerbic and mentalist Mark Edward. The unmarried couple attended John's show using aliases, and were "read" as a married couple Susanna and Mark Wilson by John. During the entire reading, John failed to determine the actual identities of Gerbic and Edward, or that they were being deceptive during his reading. All personal information he gave them matched what was on their falsified Facebook accounts, rather than being about their actual lives, and John pretended he was getting this information from Gerbic and Edward's supposedly dead—but actually nonexistent—relatives. [205] PM is a unique form of mediumship, entirely different from the much better known type of mediumship that offers messages from spirit communicators relayed through a medium who is fully conscious (albeit perhaps in a somewhat altered state) and is essentially acting as a telephone line for those who have moved on from this life to communicate with loved ones still on earth. Illusionists, such as Joseph Rinn have staged fake séances in which the sitters have claimed to have observed genuine supernatural phenomena. [45] Albert Moll studied the psychology of séance sitters. According to (Wolffram, 2012) "[Moll] argued that the hypnotic atmosphere of the darkened séance room and the suggestive effect of the experimenters' social and scientific prestige could be used to explain why seemingly rational people vouchsafed occult phenomena." [46] The psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones in their book Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking (1989) wrote that spirits controls are the "products of the medium's own psychological dynamics." [47] It is also common for changes to occur to the spoken voice, ranging from tone and depth of coice, dialect and accents to mannerisms and speech patterns. The difference between channelling and trance mediumship