If you still don’t have any plans for Halloween night, I have a suggestion: meet your friends, discover a ghost and chat with him. No, I haven’t lost my mind. What I propose was already done in the 70s by a group of scientists at the Toronto Parapsychological Research Group. Basically, they wanted to test whether the events that usually occur during spiritualism sessions are due to external factors or something related to the people involved in them. To study this, they discovered a ghost they named Philip. Everything was going well until one day Philip started contacting them.
Philip Aylesford. To give their experiments more reality, these scientists invented their own ghost stories. It was a man named Philip Aylesford, Lord of Diddington Manor in the 17th century. Although the name of his manor sounds like a joke, it is a real place in England. In the story, poor Philip married a woman he didn’t love for political reasons, so he fell in love with another woman who, when his wife found out, accused him of being a witch. Philip committed suicide by jumping off the wall after seeing his lover executed. In the séances performed by the scientists, they limited themselves to simply trying to talk to him without any technique. To no one’s surprise, the ghost did not contact them. But then something changed.
Victorian Spiritualism. To add a touch of realism to their experiment, these scientists decided to simulate the conditions in which meetings were held in Victorian times. This period was very much marked by spiritualism. High society people often employ mediums to add a different touch to their parties, and many people claim to speak to their dead loved ones (and not so loved ones).
In this case there was no one to act as a medium, but songs, jokes, related conversations were imitated… Little by little, the table began to vibrate and slide, sometimes it seemed to be excited, and Philip communicated with them: one knock for “yes”, two for “no”.
Possible explanations. None of the scientists expected what happened, so they all began to make their guesses. One of them, George Wayne, noted that this experiment proved that psychokinesis could be learned if one was able to concentrate mental energy. On the other hand, the rest thought it was a case of ideomotor effects.
Ideowhat? Ideomotor influence was one of the hypotheses introduced in the Victorian era to explain the multiple occurrences of contact with the dead in spiritism séances. Almost all of them agreed that the table had movement, wobbles or bangs. Just what Philip did to communicate. According to scientists of the time, such as Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter, certain thoughts, ideas, or expectations could cause involuntary muscle movements. Therefore, recommended people would be those who can move the glass on the Ouija board or shake the table, for example.
The power of suggestion. The suggestion is much more powerful than it seems. The scientific literature is full of examples of mysterious epidemics that turned into cases of “mass hysteria”, such as the Tanganyika laughing epidemic of 1962. 95 female students from the same boarding school experienced this curious condition, which was characterized by uncontrollable laughter that lasted an average of a few hours to 16 days. Over the months, it spread to more schools in the area, infecting hundreds of people.
Mass hysteria, also known as mass psychogenic illness, occurs when multiple symptoms occur in large numbers of people for no apparent reason, simply by pure suggestion. It is usually associated with stress and anxiety, something that can happen when you are trying to talk to the deceased. When this is combined with ideomotor effects, the result can be overwhelming. This explains what happened to those scientists in the 70s. At least, thanks to that, poor Philip had some new friends to talk to.
Picture | Colton Sturgeon (Unsplash)
Xataka | In the 19th century, London’s wealthy had a favorite “zoo”: the Bethlehem mental hospital that had a fairground for patients.
