In his recently-released book, Life After Death:  Some of the Best Evidence, Dr. Jan W.  Vandersande goes where few people with his credentials dare to venture - into the world of physical mediumship. While most of the book is historical, discussing some of the best evidence of yesteryear involving both the materialization and direct-voice phenomena,  Vandersande mentions his own experiences with mediums, including seeing ectoplasm, observing flying trumpets, and hearing spirit voices through the trumpet.

 "Those experiences changed my life in at least two ways," Vandersande, who holds a doctorate in physics and served professorships at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and at Cornell University, tells the reader. "Firstly, it gave me the conviction that there is life after death. Secondly, it made it possible for me to be able to critically read much of the literature about psychic and paranormal phenomena."

While many of the early psychical researchers, such as Sir William Crookes, Sir William Barrett, and Sir Oliver Lodge - men knighted for their discoveries in more orthodox science - spoke freely of their findings in psychical research, their scientific colleagues, arrogantly scoffed and sneered at their reports.  Thus, future generations of scientists were discouraged from engaging in psychical research or, if they did, they feared making public any findings which seemed to be contrary to natural law. 

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Vandersande on the phone and to exchange e-mail with him.  He said he had no difficulty reconciling his interest and belief in spirits with his scientific training. "My training as a physicist taught me to investigate the laws of nature," he said.  "So investigating psychic phenomena, specifically what happens when we die, was just a natural extension of the research I was doing."  

But Vandersande, who now works for a high-tech company and lives in California, admits that he often gets perplexed looks from his colleagues when he discusses his interest in the paranormal, and, concomitantly, in life after death.  "I just don't get it," he said. "Here is a subject that should be much more important to them than anything else they are involved with and it doesn't seen to interest them at all."  Most of his scientific friends and colleagues have listened to him politely, but they tell him they'd have to see it to believe it. 

It was in 1970, while he was living in Johannesburg, South Africa and studying the thermal properties of diamonds that Vandersande and his wife, Marlene, met Mickey and Sara Wolf, both direct-voice mediums.  They sat with them regularly for eight years.  "In our first sitting with Mickey and Sara we experienced trance mediumship, direct voice and trumpets flying around the dark room," Vandersande told me.  "Every time we sat with them, their main guide (control), Brian, would speak through either Sara, who was in trance, or through the direct voice. His characteristic voice was always the same and easily recognizable. Also, the trumpet, with luminous spots on it, flew around the totally dark room quite rapidly, up to the ceiling then to the walls and then slow down and gently touch each of the sitters (usually between four and eight) on the knee or on the head."  They also had Christmas sittings in which ectoplasmic spirit children played musical toys placed in the center of the circle. 

Vandersande has a clear memory of witnessing ectoplasm flowing from the nose of medium Kitty Gordon, who was in a trance. It began to form a gauze-like sheet.  "One of the sitters was then told to pick up the end of the ectoplasm on the floor, hold it high (about 5-6 feet) while it was still attached to Kitty's nose," he recalled.  "It was truly spectacular to see. The ectoplasm was slightly transparent. The person holding the ectoplasm was then told to drop the ectoplasm. It fell to the ground and disappeared (quite fast, within seconds) back into Kitty's nose. Besides the very clear sight of ectoplasm there was also a very noticeable smell; I would call it a smell very much like a perspiration smell. It was a truly amazing experience and I have absolutely no doubt that it was ectoplasm we had just seen."

Vandersande did not witness any materializations of spirit people, but his friend, Jack Allen, a professor of anatomy at the University of Witwatersrand, did and photographed the materialized spirit.  One of those photographs appears on the cover of Vandersande's book.  Vandersande admits that the beard looks phony, but is confident that Allen was not duped.  "If the materializations were frauds and the beards thus false, then there would be no reason for them to be black," he explained, going on to point out that the black color indicates that the light from the red lamps is totally absorbed and thus not reflected back into the camera and onto the film. "Any false beard, whatever it is made out of, would reflect some light and appear any color but black," he added.  "The beards are unlikely to be ectoplasm, as the rest of the body is, since it is black and nothing else is."

I discussed the thought-transference idea, a subject of this blog last month (see entry of June 10), i.e., that the materializing spirit had to project his image into the ectoplasm and simply imagined himself with a very black beard, with Vandersande and he saw that as a possible explanation.

As Vandersande says, there are many things concerned with both materializations and the direct-voice that we do not understand.   He discusses the direct-voice phenomenon in detail, explaining how the ectoplasm is drawn from the medium and made into a replica of the physical vocal organs.   The voice is then amplified through the trumpet. 

Often the spirit voice sounds very much like the voice the spirit had when in the flesh.  Other times it doesn't.   Coincidentally, this issue was dealt with by lawyer Victor Zammit at his web site recently in connection with the purported voice of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, coming through the mediumship of Andrew Russell-Davis. (http://victorzammit.com/)   Zammit quotes a communication coming from one Ellen Terry in 1965 through the direct-voice mediumship of Leslie Flint.  "When on Earth you have your own particular body, and your own vocal organs...We are having to do all these things artificially. We stand in front of the 'voice box'. We concentrate our whole personality as best we can, and our thoughts."   When asked about the difference in his voice, another spirit, claiming to be Bishop Cosmo Lang when alive in the flesh said, "I doubt very much if anyone coming from this side can identically reproduce their voice. After all, what is a voice? A reproduction of thought by sound waves, Do not forget, my friends, that we who are outside your world, no longer having the same physical body, no longer able to speak to you in a normal sense as you understand it, transmitting thought as we do by the power of an instrument or medium, can hardly be expected to reproduce identically, or even remember what the sound of our voice would have been like. ...In any case my voice, like many other voices, no doubt changed from age to age. My voice in my latter years was not like my voice when I was twenty. And the change of word here and there is of little import. I speak to you as I am- remember this. Not as I was. Remember that I have changed-thank God I have."

Thus, it would appear that the reproduction of the voice involves much the same problem as the reproduction of the person's image.

But back to the seemingly-fake beard.   In her 1892 book, There is No Death, Florence Marryat, a popular writer of that era, tells of a sitting with medium Rosie Showers in which an old family friend, John Powles, communicated but initially declined to materialize.  Peter, Showers' spirit control, explained that "he doesn't want to show himself because he's not a bit like what he used to be."  However, when Marryat persuaded him to show himself, she saw only a face that didn't resemble her old friend in the slightest.  She wrote that it was "hard, stiff, and unlifelike."  Powles then told her to sit with Showers again and he would try to do better the next time.

For the next sitting, Marryat brought along a necktie that had belonged to Powles, keeping it in her pocket and telling no one about it.  Soon after the séance began, Peter told her to hand over the necktie and put it on Powles' neck.  "The face of John Powles appeared, very different from the time before, as he had his own features and complexion, but his hair and beard (which were auburn during life) appeared phosphoric, as though made of living fire," Marryat wrote, adding that she then mounted a chair, put the tie around his neck and asked if she could kiss him.  Powles shook his head, but Peter then told her to give him her hand. "I did so, and as he kissed it his moustaches burned me," Marryat wrote.  "I cannot account for it.  I can only relate the fact.  After which he disappeared with the necktie, which I have never seen since, though we searched the little room for it thoroughly." 

The debunkers and skeptics can laugh in all their ignorance, but for anyone willing to dig into the subject, there is clearly something there.  Vandersande has done the digging and offers much food for thought.

As Tom Harrison remembers it, Saturday nights were sacrosanct from April 6, 1946, just after the end of World War II, to 1958, when his mother, Minnie Harrison, transitioned to the spirit world.   It was on those Saturday evenings that Tom and a small circle of family and friends met at the home of Sydney and Gladys Shipman in Middlesbrough, northern England, to reunite and converse with their friends in spirit through the mediumship of his mother.

The phenomena included trance voice, direct voice, telekinesis, apports, spirit lights, spirit writing, and full materializations with voice.  "The most remarkable means of communication is when the ectoplasmic materializations of the Spirit person stands before us and converses with us, face to face," Tom Harrison wrote in his 2004 book, Life After Death - Living Proof.   "This is indeed the most exciting and wonderful of all forms of phenomena."

Harrison, who served as an officer in the Royal Army Ordinance Corps, had just been demobilized the month before the Saturday Night Club gathered for its first home circle. Minnie Harrison, then 51, had been clairvoyant and clairaudient since her teenage years and had developed into a deep trance medium, controlled by a North American Red Indian named Sunrise.  The other regular members were Tom's wife (Doris, who passed over in 1976) his father ("Tosher"), the Shipmans, Florence Hildred, and William Brittain Jones.  Jones was a senior surgeon and superintendent of Middlesbrough General Hospital. 
  

According to Harrison, who served as manager at the Arthur Findlay College of Psychic Science from 1966 until 1969, there was never any intent that it be a scientific research circle, because  that would have involved putting his mother through the discomfort and indignity of tying her to the chair and taping her mouth shut.  He asks what possible motive his mother could have had to try and trick her husband, her son, and close friends week after week, year after year.  All the while, trickery would have involved phenomena requiring her to have had the assistance of confederates, requiring access to the Shipman's home and avoiding detection in the red light that was permitted by the spirits after the first eight months of sittings.  

Harrison kept detailed notes.  In that very first sitting in 1946, the group was thrilled to hear from "Aunt Agg" (his mother's sister, Agnes Abbott), who had passed over in 1942, at age 57.   Aunt Agg had been a prominent medium with the Marylebone Spiritualist Association in London when alive.  She informed them that they could facilitate things by using a trumpet (a light-weight megaphone).  Until that time, they did not suspect that Minnie Harrison was capable of the "direct-voice" phenomenon.  

In their 13^th meeting, two of Minnie Harrison's deceased sisters sang a duet through the trumpet and the sitters observed materialized fingertips for the first time.  By the 17^th sitting, on August 24, the spirit visitors managed to produce two materialized ectoplasmic hands and spirit signatures were produced. 

It was not until their 32^nd meeting, on Dec. 7, 1946, that they were privileged to witness a full spirit materialization.  "On this particular evening we sat in the red light with my mother in full view of everyone in the room, sitting on her usual dining chair at the end of the semi-circle of sitters around the fireplace," Harrison explains in the book.  He goes on to say that they sat for at least 30 minutes with nothing happening before they saw a white disc, about two feet in diameter, on the floor between his mother and himself.   The column grew to about five feet of solid ectoplasm  "Then, as I was watching it, the top of it twisted towards me and I could just see there was the semblance of a face in it," Harrison recalled, but it was not distinct enough to tell who it was.  He saw two hands and arms covered by ectoplasmic robes emerge from the spirit form standing in front of him.   He was given four carnation apports before the hands and arms went back into the column and shrunk slowly towards the floor, as the ectoplasm returned to his mother.  He later learned that it was Aunt Agg who had incompletely materialized.

 In their 33^rd meeting, Florence Hildred's husband, Sam, materialized and handed his widow an orchid.  Jones' mother materialized and called him "Brittain, my boy," just as she had when alive in the flesh.   Aunt Agg also materialized and went around the circle greeting everyone and shaking hands.    In meeting 34, Jones took Aunt Agg's pulse, which suggested that she was a solid ectoplasmic person and not just a phantom.  Moreover, Aunt Agg stood directly under the red light so that those who knew her could clearly recognize her.

 The group was told that some 20 spirit scientists were working to help build the ectoplasmic materializations.  All in all, the circle witnessed some 1,500 spirit materializations over the years the Saturday Night Club met.   Harrison mentions that as the ectoplasmic forms moved around the room, they were always connected to his mother by means of an ectoplasmic cord emanating from her body. 

 One of the visitors to the circle during 1948 was Roy Dixon-Smith, a lieutenant-colonel in the army.  In his book, New Light on Survival, Dixon-Smith tells of his deceased wife Betty materializing at the Saturday Night Club.  He saw a tall, slim figure emerge from behind the materialization curtain.  "I rose from my chair and walked up to the figure, taking the extended hand in mine," he wrote, going on to mention that he examined the hand and it was just like Betty's.  "I stared into the face, and recognized my wife.  We spoke to each other, though what we said I cannot remember, for I was deeply stirred and so was she and her voice was incoherent with emotion."

 A member of the circle then asked if Dixon-Smith could kiss her and Betty responded in the affirmative.  "I then kissed her on the lips which were warm, soft, and natural," Dixon-Smith continued the story.  "Thereupon she bent her head and commenced to weep, and in a moment she sank. I watched her form right down to the level of the floor at my feet where it dissolved, the last wisp of it being drawn within the cabinet."

 Dixon-Smith mentioned that five other spirits materialized that night and their faces were clearly seen, as the room was brightly illuminated by the red light.  "They smiled, laughed, and chatted to me and the others; all their features, complexions, and expressions being perfectly clear in that ample light," he wrote, adding that he had been a complete stranger to the group before the sitting and that any suggestion of fraud was "preposterous."

Next post:  August 3, an interview with Tom Harrison, soon to turn 90 and now living in Spain