_1_
If you were born as long as fifty years ago, you can remember a time
when the test of a sound, common-sense mind was refusing to fool with
“new-fangled notions.” Without exactly putting it into a formula, people
took it for granted that truth was known and familiar, and anything that
was not known and familiar was nonsense. In my boyhood, the funniest
joke in the world was a “flying machine man”; and when my mother took up
a notion about “germs” getting into you and making you sick, my father
made it a theme for no end of domestic wit. Even as late as twenty years
ago, when I wanted to write a play based on the idea that men might some
day be able to make a human voice audible to groups of people all over
America, my friends assured me that I could not interest the public in
such a fantastic notion.
Among the objects of scorn, in my boyhood, was what we called
“superstition”; and we made the term include, not merely the notion that
the number thirteen brought you bad luck, not merely a belief in
witches, ghosts and goblins, but also a belief in any strange phenomena
of the mind which we did not understand. We knew about hypnotism,
because we had seen stage performances, and were in the midst of reading
a naughty book called _Trilby_; but such things as trance mediumship,
automatic writing, table-tapping, telekinesis, telepathy and
clairvoyance—we didn’t know these long names, but if such ideas were
explained to us, we knew right away that it was “all nonsense.”
In my youth I had the experience of meeting a scholarly Unitarian
clergyman, the Rev. Minot J. Savage of New York, who assured me quite
seriously that he had seen and talked with ghosts. He didn’t convince
me, but he sowed the seed of curiosity in my mind, and I began reading
books on psychic research. From first to last, I have read hundreds of
volumes; always interested, and always uncertain—an uncomfortable mental
state. The evidence in support of telepathy came to seem to me
conclusive, yet it never quite became real to me. The consequences of
belief would be so tremendous, the changes it would make in my view of
the universe so revolutionary, that I didn’t believe, even when I said I
did.
But for thirty years the subject has been among the things I hoped to
know about; and, as it happened, fate was planning to favor me. It sent
me a wife who became interested, and who not merely investigated
telepathy, but learned to practice it. For three years I watched and
assisted in this work, day by day and night by night, in our home. So I
could say that I was no longer guessing. Now I really know. I am going
to tell you about it, and hope to convince you; but regardless of what
anybody can say, there will never again be a doubt about it in my mind.
I KNOW!
_2_
Telepathy, or mind-reading: that is to say, can one human mind
communicate with another human mind, except by the sense channels
ordinarily known and used—seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and
touching? Can a thought or image in one mind be sent directly to another
mind and there reproduced and recognized? If this can be done, how is it
done? Is it some kind of vibration, going out from the brain, like radio
broadcasting? Or is it some contact with a deeper level of mind, as
bubbles on a stream have contact with the water of the stream? And if
this power exists, can it be developed and used? Is it something that
manifests itself now and then, like a lightning flash, over which we
have no control? Or can we make the energy and store it, and use it
regularly, as we have learned to do with the lightning which Franklin
brought from the clouds?
These are the questions; and the answers, as well as I can summarize
them, are as follows: Telepathy is real; it does happen. Whatever may be
the nature of the force, it has nothing to do with distance, for it
works exactly as well over forty miles as over a few feet. And while it
may be spontaneous and may depend upon a special endowment, it can be
cultivated and used deliberately, as any other object of study, in
physics and chemistry. The essential in this training is an art of
mental concentration and auto-suggestion, which can be learned. I am
going to tell you not merely what you can do, but how you can do it, so
that if you have patience and real interest, you can make your own
contribution to knowledge.
Starting the subject, I am like the wandering book-agent or peddler who
taps on your door and gets you to open it, and has to speak quickly and
persuasively, putting his best goods foremost. Your prejudice is against
this idea; and if you are one of my old-time readers, you are a little
shocked to find me taking up a new and unexpected line of activity. You
have come, after thirty years, to the position where you allow me to be
one kind of “crank,” but you won’t stand for two kinds. So let me come
straight to the point—open up my pack, pull out my choicest wares, and
catch your attention with them if I can.
Here is a drawing of a table-fork. It was done with a lead-pencil on a
sheet of ruled paper, which has been photographed, and then reproduced
in the ordinary way. You note that it bears a signature and a date (Fig.
1):
[Illustration: Fig. 1]
This drawing was produced by my brother-in-law, Robert L. Irwin, a young
business man, and no kind of “crank,” under the following circumstances.
He was sitting in a room in his home in Pasadena at a specified hour,
eleven-thirty in the morning of July 13, 1928, having agreed to make a
drawing of any object he might select, at random, and then to sit gazing
at it, concentrating his entire attention upon it for a period of from
fifteen to twenty minutes.
At the same agreed hour, eleven-thirty in the morning of July 13, 1928,
my wife was lying on the couch in her study, in our home in Long Beach,
forty miles away by the road. She was in semi-darkness, with her eyes
closed; employing a system of mental concentration which she has been
practicing off and on for several years, and mentally suggesting to her
subconscious mind to bring her whatever was in the mind of her
brother-in-law. Having become satisfied that the image which came to her
mind was the correct one—because it persisted, and came back again and
again—she sat up and took pencil and paper and wrote the date, and six
words, as follows (Fig. 1a):
A day or two later we drove to Pasadena, and then in the presence of Bob
and his wife, the drawing and writing were produced and compared. I have
in my possession affidavits from Bob, his wife, and my wife, to the
effect that the drawing and writing were produced in this way. Later in
this book I shall present four other pairs of drawings, made in the same
way, three of them equally successful.
[Illustration: Fig. 1a]
Second case. Here is a drawing (Fig. 2), and below it a set of five
drawings (Fig. 2a):
[Illustration: Fig. 2]
[Illustration: Fig. 2a]
The above drawings were produced under the following circumstances. The
single drawing (Fig. 2) was made by me in my study at my home. I was
alone, and the door was closed before the drawing was made, and was not
opened until the test was concluded. Having made the drawing, I held it
before me and concentrated upon it for a period of five or ten minutes.
The five drawings (Fig. 2a) were produced by my wife, who was lying on
the couch in her study, some thirty feet away from me, with the door
closed between us. The only words spoken were as follows: when I was
ready to make my drawing, I called, “All right,” and when she had
completed her drawings, she called “All right”—whereupon I opened the
door and took my drawing to her and we compared them. I found that in
addition to the five little pictures, she had written some explanation
of how she came to draw them. This I shall quote and discuss later on. I
shall also tell about six other pairs of drawings, produced at this same
time.
Third case: another drawing (Fig. 3a), produced under the following
circumstances. My wife went upstairs, and shut the door which is at the
top of the stairway. I went on tip-toe to a cupboard in a downstairs
room and took from a shelf a red electric-light bulb—it having been
agreed that I should select any small article, of which there were
certainly many hundreds in our home. I wrapped this bulb in several
thicknesses of newspaper, and put it, so wrapped, in a shoe-box, and
wrapped the shoe-box in a whole newspaper, and tied it tightly with a
string. I then called my wife and she came downstairs, and lay on her
couch and put the box on her body, over the solar plexus. I sat
watching, and never took my eyes from her, nor did I speak a word during
the test. Finally she sat up, and made her drawing, with the written
comment, and handed it to me. Every word of the comment, as well as the
drawing, was produced before I said a word, and the drawing and writing
as here reproduced have not been touched or altered in any way (Fig.
3a):
[Illustration: Fig. 3a]
The text of my wife’s written comment is as follows:
“First see round glass. Guess nose glasses? No. Then comes V shape again
with a ‘button’ in top. Button stands out from object. This round top is
of different color from lower part. It is light color, the other part is
dark.”
To avoid any possible misunderstanding, perhaps I should state that the
question and answer in the above were my wife’s description of her own
mental process, and do not represent a question asked of me. She did not
“guess” aloud, nor did either of us speak a single word during this
test, except the single word, “Ready,” to call my wife downstairs.
The next drawings were produced in the following manner. The one at the
top (Fig. 4) was drawn by me alone in my study, and was one of nine, all
made at the same time, and with no restriction upon what I should
draw—anything that came into my head. Having made the nine drawings, I
wrapped each one in a separate sheet of green paper, to make it
absolutely invisible, and put each one in a plain envelope and sealed
it, and then took the nine sealed envelopes and laid them on the table
by my wife’s couch. My wife then took one of them and placed it over her
solar plexus, and lay in her state of concentration, while I sat
watching her, at her insistence, in order to make the evidence more
convincing. Having received what she considered a convincing telepathic
“message,” or image of the contents of the envelope, she sat up and made
her sketch (Fig. 4a) on a pad of paper.
[Illustration: Fig. 4]
[Illustration: Fig. 4a]
The essence of our procedure is this: that never did she see my drawing
until hers was completed and her descriptive words written; that I spoke
no word and made no comment until after this was done; and that the
drawings presented here are in every case exactly what I drew, and the
corresponding drawing is exactly what my wife drew, with no change or
addition whatsoever. In the case of this particular pair, my wife wrote,
“Inside of rock well with vines climbing on outside.” Such was her guess
as to the drawing, which I had meant for a bird’s nest surrounded by
leaves; but you see that the two drawings are for practical purposes
identical.
Many tests have been made, by each of the different methods above
outlined, and the results will be given and explained in these pages.
The method of attempting to reproduce little drawings was used more than
any other, simply because it proved the most convenient; it could be
done at a moment’s notice, and so fitted into our busy lives. The
procedure was varied in a few details to save time and trouble, as I
shall later explain, but the essential feature remains unchanged: I make
a set of drawings, and my wife takes them one by one and attempts to
reproduce them without having seen them. Here are a few samples, chosen
at random because of their picturesque character. If my wife wrote
anything on the drawing, I add it as “comment”; and you are to
understand here, and for the rest of this book, that “comment” means the
exact words which she wrote _before_ she saw my drawing. Often there
will be parts of this “comment” visible in the photograph. I give it all
in print. Note that drawings 1, 2, 3, etc. are mine, while 1a, 2a, 3a,
etc., are my wife’s.
In the case of my drawing numbered five, my wife’s comment was:
“Knight’s helmet.”
[Illustration: Fig. 5]
[Illustration: Fig. 5a]
On figure 6, the comment was: “Desert scene, camel, ostrich, then
below”—and the drawing in figure 6a. On the reverse side of the page is
further comment: “This came in fragments, as if I saw it being drawn by
invisible pencil.”
[Illustration: Fig. 6]
[Illustration: Fig. 6a]
And here is a pair with no comment, and none needed (Figs. 7, 7a):
[Illustration: Fig. 7]
[Illustration: Fig. 7a]
On the following, also, no comment was written (Figs. 8, 8a):
[Illustration: Fig. 8]
[Illustration: Fig. 8a]
[Illustration: Fig. 9]
[Illustration: Fig. 9a]
I drew Figure 9, and my wife drew 9a, a striking success, and wrote the
comment: “May be elephant’s snout—but anyway it is some kind of a
running animal. Long thing like rope flung out in front of him.”
Next, a series of three pairs, which, as it happened, were done one
after the other, numbers three, four and five in the twenty-third series
of my drawings. They are selected in part because they are amusing.
First, I tried to draw a bat, from vague memories of boyhood days when
they used to fly into the ball-rooms at Virginia springs hotels, and
have to be massacred with brooms, because it was believed that they
sought to tangle themselves in the hair of the ladies (Figs. 10, 10a):
[Illustration: Fig. 10]
[Illustration: Fig. 10a]
My wife’s comment on the above reads: “Big insect. I know this is right
because it moves his legs as if flying. Beetle working its legs. Legs in
motion!”
And next, my effort at a Chinese mandarin (Figs. 11, 11a):
[Illustration: Fig. 11]
[Illustration: Fig. 11a]
The comment reads: “More beetles, or legged bugs”—and she draws the
mustaches of the mandarin and his hair. “Head of dragon with big mouth.
See also a part of his body—in front, or shoulders” The association of
mandarins with dragons is obvious.
And finally, my effort at a boy’s foot and roller-skate, which undergoes
a strange telepathic transformation. I have put it upside down for
easier comparison (Figs. 12, 12a):
[Illustration: Fig. 12]
[Illustration: Fig. 12a]
The comment, complete, reads: “Profile of head and neck of animal—lion
or dog—a muzzle. Maybe pig snout.”
The above are samples of our successes. Altogether, of such drawings, 38
were prepared by my secretary, while I made 252, a total of 290. I have
classified the drawings to the best of my ability into three groups:
successes, partial successes, and failures. The partial successes are
those drawings which contain some easily recognized element of the
original drawing: such as, for example, the last one above. The profile
of a pig’s head is not a roller skate, but when you compare the
drawings, you see that in my wife’s first sketch the eyes resemble the
wheels of the roller-skates, and in her second sketch the snout
resembles my shoe-tip; also there is a general similarity of outline,
which is what she most commonly gets.
In the 290 drawings, the total of successes is 65, which is roughly 23
per cent. The total of partial successes is 155, which is 53 per cent.
The total of failures is 70, which is 24 per cent. I asked some
mathematician friends to work out the probabilities on the above
results, but I found that the problem was too complicated. Who could
estimate how many possible objects there were, which might come into my
head to be drawn? Any time the supply ran short, I would pick up a
magazine, and in the advertising pages find a score of new drawings to
imitate. Again, very few of the drawings were simple. We began with such
things as a circle, a square, a cross, a number or a letter; but soon we
were doing Chinese mandarins with long mustaches, and puppies chasing a
string. Each of these drawings has many different features; and what
mathematician could count the number of these features, and the chances
of reproducing them?
It is a matter to be judged by common sense. It seems to me any one must
agree that the chances of the twelve drawings so far shown having been
reproduced by accident is too great to be worth considering. A million
years would not be enough for such a set of coincidences.
_3_
Much of the evidence which I am using rests upon the good faith of Mary
Craig Sinclair; so, before we go further, I ask your permission to
introduce her. She is a daughter of the far South; her father a retired
planter, bank president and judge, of Mississippi. The fates endowed his
oldest child with the blessings of beauty, health, wealth and wisdom—and
then spoiled it, by adding a curse in the shape of a too tender heart.
The griefs of other people overwhelm Craig like a suffocation. Strangers
take one glance at her, and instantly decide that here is one who will
“understand.” I have seen her go into a store to buy a piece of ribbon,
and come out with tears in her eyes, because of a tragic story which
some clerk was moved to pour out to her, all in a moment, without
provocation. She has always said that she “gets” the feelings of people,
not by their words, but by intuition. But she never paid any attention
to this gift; never associated it with “psychic” matters. She was always
too busy, first with eight younger brothers and sisters, and then with
the practical affairs of an unpractical author-husband.
Early in childhood, things like this would happen: her mother would say
to a little negro servant, “Go and find Miss Mary Craig”; but before the
boy could start, Craig would know that her mother wanted her, and would
be on the way. This might, of course, have been coincidence; if it stood
alone, it would have no value. But the same thing happened with dreams.
Craig dreamed there was a needle in her bed, and woke up and looked for
it in vain; in the morning she told her mother, who slept in another
room. The mother said: “How strange! I dreamed the same thing, and I
woke up and really found one!”
Of her young ladyhood, Craig told this story, one of many: Driving with
a girl friend, miles from home, she suddenly remarked: “Let’s go home;
Mr. B is there.” Now this was a place to which Mr. B had never come; it
was three hundred miles from his town. But Craig said: “I have just had
an impression of him, sitting on our front porch.” Going home, they
found him there.
Another instance, of more recent date. Shortly after our coming to
California, my wife all at once became greatly worried about Jack
London; she insisted that he was in terrible mental distress. As it
happened, George Sterling had told us much about Jack’s troubles, but
these were of old standing, and there was nothing to account for the
sudden notion which my wife took up on a certain day. We had a lot of
conversation about it; I offered to take her to the London ranch, but
she said she would not attempt to meddle in the affairs of a married
man, unless at his wife’s request. I made the laughing suggestion that
she go alone, in the guise of a gypsy fortune-teller—a rôle which in her
young ladyhood she had played with social éclat. Two days later we read
that Jack London was dead, and very soon came letters from George
Sterling, telling us that he had taken his own life. This, again, might
be coincidence; if it stood alone I would attach no importance to it.
But taken with this mass of evidence, it has a share of weight.
When we were married, seventeen years ago, we spent some time in
England, and there we met a woman physician, interested in “mental
healing,” and full of ideas about “psychic” things. Both Craig and I
were in need of healing, having been through a siege of trouble. Craig
was suffering with intense headaches, something hitherto unknown in her
life; while I had an ancient problem of indigestion, caused by excess of
brain work and lack of body work. We began to experiment with healing by
the “laying on of hands”—without knowing anything about it, just groping
in the dark. I found that I could cure Craig’s headaches—and get them
myself; while she found that she could take my indigestion, a trouble
she had never known hitherto. Each of us was willing to take the other’s
pains, but neither was willing to give them, so our experiments came to
a halt.
We forgot the whole subject for more than ten years. I was busy trying
to reform America; while Craig was of the most intensely materialistic
convictions. Her early experiences of evangelical religion had repelled
her so violently that everything suggestive of “spirituality” was
repugnant to her. Never was a woman more “practical,” more centered upon
the here and now, the things which can be seen and touched. I do not go
into details about this, but I want to make it as emphatic as possible,
for the light it throws upon her attitude and disposition.
But shortly after the age of forty, her custom of carrying the troubles
of all who were near her resulted in a breakdown of health. A story of
suffering needless to go into: suffice it that she had many ills to
experiment upon, and mental control became suddenly a matter of life and
death. In the course of the last five or six years Craig has acquired a
fair-sized library of books on the mind, both orthodox scientific, and
“crank.” She has sat up half the night studying, marking passages and
making notes, seeking to reconcile various doctrines, to know what the
mind really is, and how it works, and what can be done with it. Always
it was a practical problem: things had to _work_. If now she believes
anything, rest assured that it is because she has tried it out in the
crucibles of pain, and proved it in her daily regimen.
She was not content to see psychic phenomena produced by other persons.
Even though authorities warned her that trances might be dangerous, and
that _rapport_ with others might lead to dissociations of
personality—even so, she had to find out for herself. A hundred times in
the course of experiments of which I am going to tell, she has turned to
me, saying: “Can you think of any way this can be chance? What can I do
to make it more sure?” When I said, the other night: “This settles it
for me. I am going to write the story,” her reply was, “Wait a while!”
She wants to do more experimenting; but I think that enough is enough.
_4_
Two years ago Craig and I heard of a “psychic,” a young foreigner who
was astounding physicians of Southern California, performing feats so
completely beyond their understanding that they were content to watch
without trying to understand. We went to see this young man, and
befriended him; he came to our home every day, and his strange
demonstrations became familiar to us. He had the ability to produce
anaesthesia in many parts of his body, and stick hatpins through his
tongue and cheeks without pain; he could go into a deep trance in which
his body became rigid and cold; and I put his head on one chair and his
heels on another, and stood in the middle, as if he were a two-inch
plank. We have a motion picture film, showing a 150-pound rock being
broken with a sledge-hammer on his abdomen while he lay in this trance.
The vital faculties were so far suspended in this trance that he could
be shut up in an airtight coffin and buried underground for several
hours; nor was there any hocus-pocus about this—I know physicians who
got the coffins and arranged for the tests and watched every detail; in
Ventura, California, it was done in a ball park, and a game was played
over the grave.
In our home he gave what appeared to be a demonstration of levitation
without contact. I do not say that it really was levitation; I merely
say that our friends who witnessed it—physicians, scientists, writers
and their wives, fourteen persons in all—were unable even to suggest a
normal method by which the event could have happened. There was no one
present who could have been a confederate, and the psychic had been
searched for apparatus; it was in our home, where he had no opportunity
whatever for preparation. His wrists and ankles were firmly held by
persons whom I know well; and there was sufficient light in the room so
that I could see the outline of his figure, slumped in a chair. Under
these circumstances a 34-pound table rose four feet into the air and
moved slowly a distance of eight feet over my head.
We saw this; our friends saw it; yet, in my mind, and likewise in
theirs, the worm of doubt would always creep in. There are so many ways
to fool people; so many conjuring tricks—think of Houdini, for example!
I was unwilling to publish what I had seen; yet, also, I was unwilling
not to publish it—for think of the possible importance of faculties such
as this, locked up in our minds! Here was my wife, ill, suffering pain;
and these facilities might perhaps be used in healing. If by
concentration and auto-suggestion it was possible for the mind to
control the body, and put a veto upon even a few of its disorders,
certainly it was worth while for us to prove the fact. I could not
escape the moral obligation to probe these matters.
This “psychic” claimed also to possess and demonstrate the power of
telepathy, or mind-reading. He would go out of the room while one of us
selected mentally some object in the room, not revealing the choice to
any one else. The “psychic” would then come back, and tell us to stand
behind him and concentrate our thoughts upon that object, and follow
close behind him, thinking of it. He would wander about the room for a
while, and in the end pick up the object, and do with it whatever we
mentally “willed” him to do.
We saw him make this test not less than a hundred times, in California,
New York, and Boston; he succeeded with it more than half the time.
There was no contact, no word spoken, nothing that we could imagine as
giving him a clue. Did we unconsciously make in our throats some faint
pronunciation of words, and did the young man have a super-acuity of
hearing? Again, you see, the worm of doubt, and we never could quite
decide what we really believed about this performance. After puzzling
over it for a year or more, my wife said: “There is only one way to be
certain. I am going to learn to do these things _myself_!”
This young man, whom I will call Jan, was a peculiar person. Sometimes
he would be open and frank, and again he would be mysterious and
secretive. At one time he would agree to teach us all he knew, and again
he would hold on to his arts, which he had had to go all the way to
India to get. Was it that he considered these forces too dangerous for
amateurs to play with? Or was it merely that he was considering his
means of livelihood?
Jan was a hypnotist; and my wife had come to realize that all illness is
more or less amenable to suggestion. She had had the idea of being
hypnotized and given curative suggestions; but she did not know enough
about this stranger, and was unwilling to trust him. After she got to
know him better, her purposes changed. Here was a fund of knowledge
which she craved, and she put her woman’s wits to work to get it. She
told him to go ahead and hypnotize her—and explained to me her purpose
of trying to turn the tables on him. Jan fixed his eyes upon hers in the
hypnotic stare, and made his magnetic passes; at the same time his
patient stared back, and I sat and watched the strange duel of
personalities.
An essential part of Jan’s technique, as he had explained it, was in
outstaring the patient and never blinking his eyes. Now suddenly he
blinked; then he closed his eyes and kept them closed. “Do your eyes
hurt?” asked his patient, in pretended innocence. “No,” he replied. “Are
you tired?” she asked. “No, thank you,” said he. “What was I thinking?”
she asked. “To hypnotize me,” he replied, sleepily. But Craig wanted
further proof, so she closed her eyes and willed that Jan should get up
and go to the telephone. “Shall I go on treating you?” he asked. “Yes,”
said she. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Excuse me, I have to
telephone to a friend!”
I am telling about these matters in the order of time, as they came to
us. I am sorry that these stories of Jan come first, because they are
the strangest, and the least capable of proof. In the hope of taking
part of the onus from our shoulders, let me quote from a book by Charles
Richet, a member of the Institute of Medicine in France, and a leading
scientist; he is citing Pierre Janet, whose name is known wherever in
the world the human mind is studied. The statement reads:
“P. Janet, a most eminent French psychiatrist, and one of the founders
of the famous Salpetriere school of psychology in Paris, and a careful
and sceptical observer, has verified that a patient of his, Leonie B.,
being put into hypnotic sleep by himself, or his brother (from whom
Leonie in her hypnotic sleep was unable to distinguish him), could
recognize _exactly_ the substance that he placed in his mouth—sugar,
salt, pepper. One day his brother, J. Janet, in an adjoining room,
scorched his right arm above the wrist. Leonie, who could have known
nothing about it normally, gave signs of real pain, and showed to P.
Janet (who knew nothing of the occurrence), the exact place of the
burn.”
Or let me cite the late Professor Quackenbos, of Columbia University,
who wrote many books on hypnotism as a therapeutic agency, and tells of
numerous cases of the same kind. He himself would sometimes go
involuntarily into hypnotic sleep with his patient, and so, sometimes,
would the nurse. Frequently between the hypnotist and the subject comes
what is called _rapport_, whereby each knows what is in the other’s
mind, and suggestions are taken without their being spoken. You may
believe this, or refuse to believe it—that is your privilege. All I want
to do is to make clear that my wife is claiming no special achievement,
but merely repeating the standard experiences of the textbooks on this
subject.
This _rapport_ between Craig and her protégé was developed to such an
extent that she could tell him what was in his mind, and what he had
been doing; she told him many stories about himself, where he had been
and what he had done at a certain hour. This was embarrassing to a young
man who perhaps did not care to have his life so closely overseen; also,
possibly, he was wounded in his _amour propre_, that a mere amateur—and
a woman at that—should be coming into possession of his secret arts.
The trick depends upon a process of intense concentration, which will
later be described in detail. After this concentration, Craig would give
to her subconscious mind the suggestion, or command, that it should
bring to her consciousness a vision of what Jan was doing. This giving
an order to the subconscious mind is much the same sort of thing that
you do when you seek to remember a name; whether you realize it or not,
you order your subconscious mind to get that bit of information and
bring it to you. Whatever came to Craig, she would write it out, and
when next she met Jan, she would use her woman’s wits to verify it
without Jan’s knowing what was happening. At times it would be very
amusing—when he would find himself accused of some youthful misdemeanor
which his preceptress was not supposed to know about. In his efforts to
defend himself, he would fail entirely to realize the telepathic aspects
of the matter.
_5_
Please let me repeat, I am not telling here a set of fairy tales and
fantasies; I am presenting a record of experiments, conducted in strict
scientific fashion. All the results were set down day by day in writing.
For an hour or two every day for the past three years my wife has been
scribbling notes of her experiments, and there are eight boxes full in
her study, enough to fill a big trunk. No statement in all the following
rests upon our memories; everything is taken from memoranda now in my
hands. Admitting that new facts can be learned about the mind, I do not
see how any one can use more careful methods than we have done.
My wife “saw” Jan carrying a bouquet of flowers, wrapped in white paper,
on the street, and she wrote this down. She later ascertained that at
this hour Jan had carried flowers to a friend in a hospital in Los
Angeles, and she telephoned this friend and verified the facts. On
another occasion when Jan was in Santa Barbara, a hundred miles from our
home, she “saw” him escorting a blonde girl in a blue dress from an auto
to a hotel over a rainy pavement; she wrote this down, and later
ascertained that it had actually been happening. The details were
verified, not merely by Jan, but by another member of the party. I ought
to add that in no case did my wife tell the other persons what she had
“seen” until after these persons had told her what had happened. No
chance was taken of their making up events to conform to her records.
Always Craig kept her cold-blooded determination to know what was _real_
in this field where so much is invented and imagined.
Again, she “saw” Jan preparing to commit suicide, dressed in a pair of
yellow silk pajamas; then she “saw” him lying dead on the floor. She was
much disturbed—until Jan reminded her that he had been seven times
publicly “buried” in Southern California before she met him. Several
weeks later she learned that in one of these “burials” he had worn
yellow silk pajamas. Jan had forgotten this, but Dr. Frank Sweet, of
Long Beach, who had overseen the procedure, remembered the pajamas, and
how they had been ruined by mud.
Craig saw a vision of a bride, at a time when Jan, in his room in a far
part of the city, was awakening from sleep with a dream about a friend’s
wedding. On two occasions, while “concentrating,” she got the impression
that Jan and a friend of his had returned unexpectedly from Santa
Barbara to Hollywood. In both cases she made careful record, and it
turned out to be correct; I have a written statement of the two young
men, confirming the second instance, and saying that it could not have
been normally known to my wife.
I have also a detailed record—some twenty pages long—of a “clairvoyant”
vision of Jan’s movements about the city of Long Beach, including his
parking of a car, carrying something over his arm, visiting a
barber-shop and a flower-shop, and stopping and hesitating and then
going on. The record includes a detailed description of the streets and
their lay-out, a one-story white building, etc. Jan had been doing all
this at approximately the time specified. He had carried his trousers to
a tailor-shop, with a barber-shop directly opposite; he had stopped in
front of a flower-shop and debated whether to buy some flowers; he had
taken a letter to be copied by a typist, and had stopped on the street,
hesitating as to whether to wait for this copying to be done. All these
details he narrated to my wife _before_ he knew what was in her written
record.
Another curious experience: I took Jan to the home of Dr. John R. Haynes
of Los Angeles, to give a demonstration of his mind-reading. Jan said he
felt ill, and would not be successful. Only one or two of the tests
succeeded. But meanwhile my wife was at home, concentrating, and
ordering her subconscious mind to show her what Jan and I were doing.
When I returned I found that she had written a detailed description of
Dr. Haynes’ home, including a correct ground plan of the entrance hall,
stairs and drawing-room, and a description of the color and style of
decorations, furniture, lamps, vases, etc., in good part correct. Craig
has never been in this house.
Jan goes into one of his deep states—a cataleptic trance, he calls it—in
which his body is rigid and cold. He has the power to fix in advance the
time when he will come out of the trance, and his subconscious mind
apparently possesses the power to keep track of time—days, hours,
minutes, even seconds. I have seen him amaze a group of scientists by
coming out on the second, while they held stop-watches on him.
But now my wife thinks she will vary this procedure. Jan goes into the
trance in our home and Craig sits and silently wills, “Your right leg
will come out; you will lift it; you will put it down again. You will
sit erect”—and so on. Without speaking a word, she can make him do
whatever she pleases.
Another incident, quite a long one. I ask you to have patience with the
details, promising that in the end you will see what it is all about. I
am in the next room, and I hear Jan and my wife having one of their
regular evening arguments, because he will not tell her how he does this
or that; at one moment he insists that he has told her—and the next
moment he insists that he does not know. My wife finally asks him to
concentrate upon an object in the room, and she will see if she can
“get” it. He selects the gas stove, in which a fire is burning; and
Craig says, “I see a lot of little flames.” Jan insists that is “no
good,” she didn’t get the stove; which annoys her very much—she thinks
he does not want to allow any success to a woman. He is a “continental
male,” something she makes fierce feminist war upon.
Craig is suffering from neuralgia in neck and shoulder, and Jan offers
to treat her. He will use what he calls “magnetism”; he believes there
is an emanation from his finger-tips, and so, with his two forefingers
he lightly traces the course of the nerves of her neck and shoulder and
arm. For ten or fifteen minutes his two fingers are tracing patterns in
front of her.
Then it is time for him to go home, and he is unhappy, and she succeeds
in drawing the explanation from him—he has to walk, and his shoes are
tight and hurt him. He has to have them stretched, he tells her. She
offers him a pair of my big tennis shoes to wear home, and then she
scolds him because he has the fashionable notion that white canvas
tennis shoes are not proper footwear for eleven o’clock in the evening.
Finally he puts them on and departs; and my wife lies down and makes her
mind a blank, and orders it to tell her what Jan is doing.
She has a pencil and paper, and presently she is writing words. They are
foreign words, and she thinks they must be in Jan’s native language;
they come drifting through her mind for several minutes. Next day comes
Jan for the daily lesson, and she shows him this record. He tells her
that the words are not in his language, but German—which he knows, but
never uses. My wife knows no German; except possibly sauerkraut and
kindergarten. But here she has written a string of German and
near-German words. I have the original sheet before me, and I give it as
well as I can make out the scrawl: “ei einfinen ein-fe-en swenfenz
fingen sweizzen czie ofen weizen ofen fingen swienfen swei fingern efein
boden fienzen meifen bogen feingen Bladen Meichen frefen eifein.”
Some of this is nonsense; but there are a few German words in it, and
others which are guesses at German words, such as might be made by a
person hearing a strange language, and trying to set down what he hears.
Part of the effort seems to be concentrated on getting one expression,
“zwe Fingern”—two fingers! You remember the two fingers moving up and
down over Craig’s neck and shoulder! And “Ofen”—the argument about the
stove! And “bladen”—to stretch shoes over a block of wood. Where these
ideas came from seems plain enough. But where did the German come
from—unless from the subconscious mind of Jan?
A further detail, especially curious. Jan gave my wife the meaning for
the word “bladen”: “to stretch shoes over a block of wood”; I have the
memo which he wrote at the time. But looking up the word in the
dictionaries, I do not find it, nor can I find any German who knows it.
Apparently there is no such word; and this would clearly seem to
indicate that my wife got her German from Jan. If so, it was by
telepathy, for he spoke no word of it that evening.
It is the fashion among young ladies of the South to tease the men; and
Craig found in this episode a basis for tormenting her psychic
instructor. He had assured his patient that during the treatment he was
sending her “curative thoughts.” But what kind of telepathic healer was
it who sent gas-stoves and shoe-blocks into a neuralgic shoulder? Jan,
missing the humor, and trying to save his reputation, declared that he
hated the German language so greatly, he did not even allow himself to
think in it! Germany was associated in his mind with the most painful
memories, and all that previous day he had been fighting depression
caused by these memories. You see, in this blundering defense, a
significant bit of evidence. Jan had really had the German language in
his thoughts at the time Craig got them!
I have before me a letter from Jan to my wife, postmarked Santa Barbara,
October 19, 1927. He says: “May these lovely Cosmos bring you such peace
and contentment as they have brought me.” He has cut a double slit in
the paper, and inserted cosmos blossoms and violets. Prior to the
receipt of this letter, my wife was making the record of a dream, and
here is what she wrote down: “I dreamed Jan had a little basket of
flowers, pink roses and violets, shaped like this.” (A drawing.) “He
lifted them up and said they were for me, but a girl near him took them
and said, ‘But I want them.’” When Jan came to see us again, my wife
asked about the circumstance, and learned the following: a woman friend,
who had given Jan the flowers, had accused him of meaning to send them
to a girl; but he had answered that they were for “a middle-aged and
distinguished lady.”
[Illustration: Fig. 13]
[Illustration: Fig. 13a]
I present here the basket of “pink roses and violets” which my wife
drew, and then the spray of pink double cosmos and violets which met her
eyes when she opened the young “psychic’s” letter a day or two later. I
explain that my wife’s drawing (Fig. 13) is partly written over by the
words of her notes; while in Jan’s letter the violets had to be at once
traced in pencil, as they would not last. My wife drew pencil marks
around them and wrote the word “violet” in three places, to indicate
what the marks meant. The cosmos flowers, pressed and dried, are still
exactly as Jan stuck them into position and as they remained until I
took them to be photographed (Fig. 13a).
_6_
As I have said, I hesitate to tell about incidents such as these. They
are hard to believe, and the skeptic may say that my wife was hypnotized
by Jan, and made to believe them. But it happens that Craig has been
able to establish exactly the same _rapport_ with her husband, who has
never had anything to do with hypnosis, except to watch it a few times.
A Socialist “muck-raker,” much wrapped up in his job, the husband sits
and reads, or revises manuscript, while the wife works her white magic
upon his mind. Suddenly his train of thought is broken by an
exclamation; the wife has “willed” him to do such and so—and he has done
it! Or maybe she has been asleep, and come out with the tail end of a
dream, and has written down what appears to be a lot of rubbish—but
turns out to be a reproduction of something the husband has been reading
or writing at that very moment! Hear one or two instances of such
events, all written down at the time.
Colonel Lindbergh has flown to France, but Craig does not know much
about it, because she is not reading the papers, she is asking, “What is
life?” A year passes, and in the mail I receive a monthly magazine, the
_Lantern_, published by Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers in Boston. I open
it, and find an article by a young radical, assailing Lindbergh because
he does not follow in his father’s footsteps; his father was a radical
congressman, but now the son allows himself to be used by the army and
navy people, and by the capitalist press, to distract the minds of the
masses from social justice. So runs the charge; and before I am through
reading it, my wife comes downstairs from a nap. “What are you reading?”
she asks, and I answer: “Something about Lindbergh.” Says my wife: “Here
are my notes about a dream I just had.” She hands me a sheet of paper, I
have it before me now as I write, and I give it with misspelling and
abbreviations exactly as she wrote it in a hurry, not anticipating that
it would ever become public:
“‘I do not believe that Lindberg flew across the ocean in order to take
a ransome from a foreign gov as well as from his own. Nor in order to
induce the nations of the earth to a war in the air.’ Words which were
in my mind as I awoke from nap on aft May 25.”
I should add that my wife had had no opportunity to look at the Boston
magazine, whether consciously or unconsciously. She tells me that
Lindbergh had not been in her conscious mind for a long time, and she
had no remotest idea that the radicals were attacking him.
Another instance: I am reading the latest “book of the month,” which has
just come in the mail, and to which my wife has paid no attention. She
interrupts me with a question: “Are there any flowers in what you are
reading?” I answer, “Yes,” and she says: “I have been trying to
concentrate, and I keep seeing flowers. I have drawn them.” She hands me
two drawings (Figs. 14a, 14b):
The book was Mumford’s _Herman Melville_, and I was at page 346, a
chapter entitled, “The Flowering Aloe.” On this page are six lines from
a poem called “The American Aloe on Exhibition.” On the preceding page
is a discussion of the habits of this plant. While my wife was making
the left-hand drawing (Fig. 14a), I had been reading page 344: “the red
clover had blushed through the fields about their house”; and “he would
return home with a handful of clover blossoms.”
[Illustration: Fig. 14a]
[Illustration: Fig. 14b]
Of experiences like this there have been many. Important as the subject
is, I find it a bother, because I am called upon to listen to long
narratives of dreams and telepathy, while my mind is on Sacco and
Vanzetti, or the Socialist presidential campaign, or whatever it is.
Sometimes the messages from the subconscious are complicated and take
patience to disentangle. Consider, for example, a little drawing (Fig.
15)—one of nearly three hundred which this long-suffering husband has
made for his witch-wife to reproduce by telepathy: a football, you see,
neatly laced up. In her drawing (Fig. 15a) Craig gets the general effect
perfectly, but she puts it on a calf. Her written comment was:
“Belly-band on calf.”
[Illustration: Fig. 15]
[Illustration: Fig. 15a]
While Craig was making this particular experiment, her husband was
reading a book; and now, wishing to solve the mystery, she asks, “What
are you reading?” The husband replies, wearily: “DeKruif’s _Hunger
Fighters_, page 283.” “What does it deal with?” “It is a treatise on the
feeding of cows.” “Really?” says Craig. “Will you please write that down
for me and sign it?”
But why did the cow become a calf? That, too, is something to be
explained. Says Craig: “Do you remember what I used to tell you about
old Mr. Bebb and his calves?” Yes, the husband knows the story of the
half-crazy old Welshman, who thirty or forty years ago was the caretaker
of the Kimbrough summer home on the Mississippi Sound. Old Mr. Bebb made
his hobby the raising of calves by hand, and turning them into parlor
pets. He would teach them to use his three fingers as a nursing bottle,
and would make fancy embroidered belly-bands for them, and tie them up
in these. So to the subconscious mind which was once little Mary Craig
Kimbrough of Mississippi, the idea of a calf sewed up like a football is
one of the most natural in the world.
Since my wife and I have no secrets from each other, it does not trouble
me that she is able to see what I am doing. While I am away from home,
she will “concentrate” upon me, and immediately afterwards write out
what she “sees.” On one occasion she described to me a little red book
which I had got in the mail at the office. By way of establishing just
what kind of book she had “seen,” she had gone to my bookcase and picked
out a French dictionary—and it happened that I had just received the
Italian dictionary of that same series, uniform in binding. On another
occasion, while making a study of dream-material, she wrote out a dream
about being lost in long and involved concrete corridors—while I was
trying to find my way through the locker-rooms of a Y. M. C. A.
basement, running into one blind passage after another, and being much
annoyed by doors that wouldn’t open.
Dreams, you understand, are products of subconscious activity, and to
watch them is one method of proving telepathy. By practice Craig has
learned to lie passive, immediately after awakening, and trace back a
long train of dreams. Here is one of the results, a story worth telling
in detail—save that I fear you will refuse to believe it after it is
told.
On the afternoon of January 30, 1928, I was playing tennis on the courts
of the Virginia Hotel, in Long Beach, California, and my wife was taking
a nap. She did not know that I was playing tennis, and has no knowledge
about the places where I play. She takes no interest in the game,
regarding it as a foolish business which will some day cause her husband
to drop dead of heart failure—and she declines to be present on the
occasion. When I entered the house, she said: “I woke up with a long
involved dream, and it seemed so absurd I didn’t want to write it out,
but I did so.” Here are the opening sentences verbatim:
“Dreamed I was on a pier, watching a new kind of small, one or two
seated sport-boat, a little water car into which a woman got and was
shot by machinery from the pier out to the water, where she skidded
around a minute or two and was drawn back to the pier. With us on the
pier were my sister and child, and two young men in white with white
caps. These appeared to be in charge of this new sport-boat. This boat
is not really a boat. It is a sort of miniature car. I’ve never seen
anything like it. Short, so that only one or two people could sit in it.
An amusement thing, belonging to the pier. The two young men were
intensely interested, and stood close together watching it out on the
water,” etc., etc.
Understand that this dream was not supposed to have anything to do with
me. It was before Craig had come to realize the state of _rapport_ with
me; she had not been thinking about me, and when she told me about this
dream, she had no thought that any part of it had come from my mind. But
here is what I told her about my afternoon:
The Virginia Hotel courts are close to what is called “The Pike,” and
there is an amusement pier just across the way, and on it a so-called
“Ferris wheel,” with little cars exactly like the description, which go
up into the air with people in them. That afternoon it happened that the
tennis courts were crowded, so my partner and I waited out a set or two.
We sat on a bench, in white tennis suits and hats, and watched this
wheel, and the cars which went up in the air, and at a certain point
took a slide on long rods, which made them “skid around,” and caused the
women in them to scream with excitement. Underneath the pier was the
ocean, plainly visible along with the little cars.
(Footnote, 1962: The hotel and the Pike no longer exist, so do not waste
your time trying to verify all this.)
I should also mention the case of our friend, Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz,
with whom there is a _rapport_ which my wife does not tell her about. My
wife will say to me, “Mrs. Gartz is going to phone,” and in a minute or
two the phone will ring. She will say, “Mrs. Gartz is coming. She wants
me to go to Los Angeles with her.” Of course, a good deal of guessing
might be possible, in the case of two intimate friends. But consider
such guessing as this: My wife had a dream of an earthquake and wrote it
down. Soon thereafter occurred this conversation with Mrs. Gartz. I
heard it, and my wife recorded it immediately afterwards, and I quote
her written record:
“Mrs. Gartz dreamed of earthquake. ‘Wasn’t it queer that I dreamed of
swaying slowly from side to side.’”
“‘I dreamed the same,’ I said. ‘But I was in a high building.’”
“‘So was I,’ she replied.”
Craig calls attention to the word “slowly,” as both she and Mrs. Gartz
commented on this. They didn’t believe that an earthquake would behave
that way; but I pointed out that it would happen just so with a
steel-frame building.
_7_
I come now to a less fantastic and more convincing series of
experiments; those made with the husband of my wife’s younger sister,
Robert L. Irwin. Eight years ago the doctors gave Bob only a few months
to live, on account of tuberculosis. Needless to say, he has much time
on his hands, waiting for the doctors’ clairvoyance to be verified. He
proved to be a good “subject”—the best of all in the tests with Jan. One
day in our home, a series of five tests were made, with Bob holding an
object in mind, while sitting several feet away from Jan. The latter
found the object, and made the correct disposition of it, as willed by
Bob, in four out of the five trials. This included such unlikely things
as picking up a striped blanket and wrapping it about my shoulders.
Bob and Craig made the arrangement that at a certain hour each day, Bob,
in his home in Pasadena, was to take pencil and paper and make a drawing
of an object, and sit and concentrate his mind upon that drawing. At the
same hour Craig, in our home in Long Beach, forty miles away, was to go
into her state of “concentration,” and give orders to her subconscious
mind to find out what was in Bob’s mind. The drawings were to be dated,
and filed, and when the two of them met, they would compare the results,
in the presence of myself and Bob’s wife. If there should turn out to be
a correspondence between the drawings, greater than could be attributed
to chance, it would be evidence of telepathy, as good as any that could
be imagined or desired.
The results were such as to make me glad that it was another person than
myself, so as to afford a disinterested witness to these matters, so
difficult of belief. I repeat that Bob is a young American business man,
priding himself on having no “crank” ideas; he has had a Socialist
brother-in-law for ten years or more without being in the slightest
degree affected in manners, morals, or convictions. Here is his first
drawing, done on a half sheet of green paper. The word “CHAIR”
underneath, and the date, were written by Bob, while the words “drawn by
Bob Irwin” were added for purposes of record by Craig (Fig. 16):
[Illustration: Fig. 16]
[Illustration: Fig. 16a]
And now for Craig’s results. I give her report verbatim, with the two
drawings which are part of her text:
“At 10 o’clock or a little before, while sewing (without effort) I saw
Bob take something from black sideboard—think it was the glass
candlestick. At 11:15 (I concentrate now) I saw Bob sitting at dining
room table—a dish or some small object in front of him (on N. E. corner
table). I try to see the object on table—see white something at last. I
can’t decide what it is so I concentrate on seeing his drawing on a
green paper as it is about 11:20 now and I think he has made his
drawing. I try hard to see what he has drawn—try to see a paper with a
drawing on it, and see a straight chair. Am not sure of second drawing.
It does not seem to be on his paper. It may be his bed-foot. I
distinctly see a chair like 1st on his paper.” (Fig. 16a.)
When Bob and my wife discussed the above test, she learned that he had
sat at the northeast corner of the table, trying to decide what to draw,
and facing the sideboard on which were silver candlesticks. Later he
went to his bedroom and lay down, gazing through the foot of his bed at
the chair which he had taken as his model for the drawing. The bed has
white bars running vertically, as in my wife’s second drawing. The
chair, like Bob’s drawing, has the strips of wood supporting the back
running crossways, and this feature is reproduced in Craig’s first
drawing. Her report goes on to add that she sees a star and some
straight lines, which she draws; they are horizontal parallel lines, as
in the back of the chair. The back of the chair Bob had looked at had a
carved star upon it.
The second attempt was the next day, and Bob drew his watch (Fig. 17).
Craig first drew a chair, and then wrote, “But do not feel it is
correct.” Then she drew the following (Fig. 17a):
[Illustration: Fig. 17]
[Illustration: Fig. 17a]
The comment was: “I see this picture. Later I think it is not flower but
wire (metal, shining). The ‘petals’ are not petals but wire, and should
be _uniform_. This is hasty drawing so not exact as seen. What I mean
is, I try to see Bob’s drawing and not what he drew from. So I see no
flower but shape of one on paper. Then decide it is of wire, but this
may be merely because I see drawing, which would have no flower color.
However, I see it shining as if it is metal. Later a glass circle.”
Drawings then show an ellipse, and then a drinking glass and a glass
pitcher. It is interesting to note that Bob had in front of him a glass
bowl with goldfish.
The next day Bob drew a pair of scissors (Fig. 18):
[Illustration: Fig. 18]
The drawings of Craig follow without comment (Figs. 18a, 18b):
[Illustration: Fig. 18a]
[Illustration: Fig. 18b]
Three days later Bob drew the table fork, which has already been
reproduced (Fig. 1), and Craig made the report which has been given in
facsimile (Fig. 1a): “See a table fork. Nothing else.”
One more test between Bob and Craig, the most sensational of all. It is
quite a story, and I have to ask your pardon for the medical details
involved. So much vital knowledge hangs upon these tests that I have
asked my brother-in-law to forget his personal feelings. The reader will
please consider himself a medical student or hospital nurse for the
moment.
The test occurred July 11, 1928. My wife made her drawing, and then told
me about the matter at once. Also she wrote out all the details and the
record is now before me. She saw a feather, then a flower spray, and
then she heard a scream. Her first thought in case of illness or danger
is her aged parents, and she took it for her mother’s voice, and this so
excited her that she lost interest in the experiment. But soon she
concentrated again, and drew a series of concentric circles, with a
heavy black spot in the center. Then she saw another and much larger
spot, and this began to spread and cover the sheet of paper. At the same
time came a feeling of intense depression, and Craig decided that the
black spot was blood, and that Bob had had a hemorrhage. Here is her
drawing (Fig. 19a):
[Illustration: Fig. 19a]
Two or three days later Bob’s wife drove him to our home, and in the
presence of all four of us he produced the drawing he had made. He had
taken a compass and drawn a large circle; making, of course, a hole in
the center of the paper. “Is that all you thought of during the time?”
asked my wife. “No,” said Bob, “but I’d hate to have you get the rest of
it.” “What was it?” “Well, I discovered that I had a hemorrhoid, and
couldn’t put my mind on anything else but the thought, ‘My God, my
lungs—my kidneys—and now this!’”
A hemorrhoid is, of course, apt to be accompanied by a hemorrhage; and
it seems clear that my wife got the mood of depression of her
brother-in-law, his thoughts of blood and bodily breakdown, as well as
the circle and the hole in the paper. There is another detail which does
not appear in the written record, but is fixed in my memory. My wife
said: “I wanted to draw a little hill.” Upon hearing that, I called up a
physician friend who is interested in these tests, and asked him what a
drawing of a hemorrhoid would look like, and he agreed that “a little
hill” was about as near as one could come. I hope you will note that
this particular drawing test is supported by the testimony of four
different persons, my wife, her sister, the sister’s husband, and
myself. I do not see how there could possibly be more conclusive
evidence of telepathic influence—unless you suspect all four of us of a
series of stupid and senseless falsehoods. Let me repeat that Bob and
his wife have read this manuscript and certified to its correctness so
far as concerns them. The comment written by my wife reads: “All this
dark like a stain—feel it is blood; that Bob is ill—more than usual.”
(Note: Bob Irwin died not long afterwards.)
_8_
The experiments just described were all that were done with Bob, because
he found them a strain. Craig asked me to make some drawings for her,
and I did so, sitting in the next room, some thirty feet away, but
always behind a closed door. Thus you may verify my assertion that the
telepathic energy, whatever it may be, knows no difference between
thirty feet and forty miles. The results with Bob and with myself were
about the same.
The first drawings made with me are those which have already been given
(Figs. 2, 2a), but I give them again for the sake of convenience. I
explain that in these particular drawings the lines have been traced
over in heavier pencil; the reason being that Craig wanted a carbon
copy, and went over the lines in order to make it. This had the effect
of making them heavier than they originally were, and it made the whirly
lines in Craig’s first drawing more numerous than they should be. She
did this in the case of two or three of the early drawings, wishing to
send a report to a friend. I pointed out to her how this would weaken
their value as evidence, so she never did it again.
After my wife and I had compared the above drawings, she wrote a note to
the effect that just before starting to concentrate, she had been
looking at her drawing of many concentric circles, which she had made in
a test with Bob the previous day (Fig. 19a). So her first vision was of
a whirl of circles. This turned sideways, and then took the shape of an
arrowhead, and then of a letter A, and finally evolved into a complete
star. As the agent in this test, I wish to repeat that I made my drawing
in my study with the door closed, that I kept the drawing before my eyes
the entire time, and that the door stayed closed until Craig called that
she was through.
I do not find it easy to concentrate on a drawing, because my active
mind wanders off to side issues. If I draw a lighted cigarette, I
immediately think of the odious advertising now appearing in the papers;
or I think: “Will Craig get this right, and what does it mean, and will
the world accept evidence on this subject from me?”—and so on. Several
times my wife has “got” such thoughts, and so we took to noting them on
the record. On July 29, I drew a cigarette, with two little curls for
smoke, each running off like a string of the letter “eeeee,” written by
hand. Underneath I wrote as follows: “My thought: ‘cigarette with curls
of smoke.’ I said to myself these words: ‘she got the curls but not the
cigarette.’” This would appear to be telepathy coming from Craig to me,
for her drawing was found to contain a lot of different curves—a curly
capital S, several other half circles twisted together, and three ???
one inside the other. She added the following words: “I can’t draw it,
but curls of some sort.”
[Illustration]
Again, here is a work of art from my facile pen, dated July 21, and
having underneath my notation: “Concentrated on bald head” (Fig. 20).
[Illustration: Fig. 20]
My wife’s note was: “Saw Upton’s face.” Then she drew a line through the
words, and wrote the following explanation: “Saw two half circles. Then
they came together making full circle. But I felt uncertain as to
whether they belonged together or not. Then suddenly saw Upton’s profile
float across vision.”
July 20 I drew a three-pronged fork, and made the note that I was not
sure if it was a hay-fork or an oyster-fork, and decided it was the
latter, whereupon my mind went off to “society” people and their many
kinds of forks. Craig wrote: “I thought it was an animal’s head with
horns and the head was on a long stick—a trophy mounted like this”—and
she drew a two-pronged fork.
July 17 I drew a large round stone with a smaller stone on top: at least
so I thought, and then decided they were two eggs. Craig drew two almost
tangent circles, and wrote: “I see two round things, not one inside the
other, as in Bob’s drawing of circles. Then the above vanished and I saw
as below”—and she drew four little oblongs, tangent, which might be a
cluster of fish-eggs or fly-eggs.
July 20 I drew two heavy straight lines making a capital letter T, and
Craig drew a complete cross or square X, which is, of course, the T with
vertical arm prolonged. July 14 I drew a sort of jack-lantern. It is on
next page (Fig. 21). I looked at this drawing and thought of the eyes of
M.C.S., and said mentally, “I should have drawn the curves over eyes.”
Afterwards I told Craig about this, and she noted it down on the
drawing. On the reverse side of the sheet she added the following: “I
told U. it was shaped like a half moon with something in center—I
supposed it must be a star, though I did not see it as star but as
indistinct marks.” Her drawing follows, turned upside down for greater
convenience (Fig. 21a):
[Illustration: Fig. 21]
[Illustration: Fig. 21a]
_9_
A new method of experiment invented itself by accident; and makes
perhaps the strangest story yet. There came a letter from a clergyman in
South Africa, saying that he was sending me a copy of his wife’s novel
dealing with South African life. I get many letters from strangers, and
answer politely, and as a rule forget them quickly. Some time afterwards
came two volumes, entitled, “Patricia, by Marcus Romondt,” and I did not
associate them with the clergyman’s letter. I glanced at the preface,
and saw that the work had something to do with the religious cults of
the South African natives. I didn’t read more than twenty lines—just
enough to classify the book as belonging in Craig’s department.
Everything having to do with philosophy, psychology, religion and
medicine is first read by her, and then fed back to me in her eager
discourses. I took the volumes home and laid them on her table, saying,
“This may interest you.” The remark attracted no special attention, for
the reason that I bring her a book, or a magazine, or some clippings at
least once a day. She did not touch these volumes, nor even glance at
the title while I was in the room.
I went into the kitchen to get some lunch, and when it was ready I
called, “Are you going to eat?” “Let me alone,” she said, “I am writing
a story.” That also is a common experience. I ate my lunch in silence,
and then came into the living room again, and there was Craig, absorbed
in writing. Some time later she came to me, exclaiming, “Oh, I have had
the most marvelous idea for a story! Something just flashed over me,
something absolutely novel—I never heard anything like it. I have a
whole synopsis. Do you want to hear it?” “No,” I said, “you had better
go and eat”—for it was my job to try to keep her body on earth. “I can’t
eat now,” she said, “I am too excited. I’ll read a while and get quiet.”
So she went to her couch, and there was a minute or two of silence, and
then an exclamation: “Come here!”
Craig had picked up one of the two volumes from South Africa, and was
staring at it. “Look at this!” she said. “Look what I opened to!” I
looked at a page in the middle of the book—she has the devilish habit of
reading a book that way—and in the center of the page, in capital
letters, I read the words: “THE BLACK MAGICIAN.” “What about it?” I
said. “Did you ever hear of that idea?” asked Craig. I answered that I
had, and she said, “Well, I never did. I thought it was my own. It is
the theme of the ‘story’ I have just been writing. I have made a
synopsis of a whole chapter in this book, and without ever having
touched it!”
So Craig had a new set of experiments to try all by herself, without
bothering her busy husband. She would go to one of my bookcases, with
which she had hitherto had nothing to do, since her own books are kept
in her own place. With her back to the bookcase, she would draw a book,
and take it to her couch and lie down, placing the book upon her solar
plexus, and taking every precaution to make sure that it never came into
her line of vision. Most of the books, being new, were in their paper
jackets, so there was no lettering that could be felt with her fingers.
This, you note, is not a test of telepathy, for no human mind knew what
particular book Craig’s hand had fallen upon. If she could tell anything
about the contents of that book, it would appear to be clairvoyance, or
what is known as “psychometry.”
My books are oddly varied in character. There are new novels, and works
of history, biography, travel and economics. In addition, there are what
I call “crank books”; the queerly assorted volumes which are destined by
donors all over the world to convert me to vegetarianism,
antivivisection, anarchism, Mormonism, Mohammedanism, infanticide, the
abolition of money, or the doctrine that alopecia is caused by onanism.
Believe me, the person who sets out to guess the contents of the books
that come to me in the course of a month has his or her hands full!
But Craig was able to do it. She did it on so many occasions that she
would sit and stare at me and exclaim, “Now what do you make of _that_?”
She would insist that I sit and watch the process, so as to be able to
state that she never had the book in her line of vision. In my presence
she picked out a volume, and, keeping it hidden from both of us, she
said, “I see a blue cover, with a rising sun and a bare landscape.” It
happened to be a volume circulated by the followers of “Pastor Russell,”
and as the preface tells me that 1,405,000 have been sold, it may be
that you too have it in your library. The title is _Deliverence_, by J.
F. Rutherford, and it has a blue cloth cover, with a gold design of a
sun rising behind a mass of clouds and a globe.
On another occasion Craig wrote: “One big eye, with nothing else
distinct—then lines or spikes came around it, or maybe these project
from the head like stiff long hairs, or eye-lashes. Can’t tell what kind
of head—but feel it must be a tropical something, tho the eye looks
human,” etc. The book was _Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, by H. G.
Wells, and in this book is a chapter headed, “The Friendly Eye,” with
the following sentences: “I became aware that an Eye observed me
continually.... It was a reddish brown eye. It looked out from a system
of bandages that also projected a huge shock of brown hair upward and a
great chestnut beard ... the eye watched me with the illuminating but
expressionless detachment of a head-lamp.... Polyhemus, for that was my
private name for the man.”
A long string of such surprises! Craig picked up a book and wrote:
“Black wings—a vampire flying by night.” The title of the book was _The
Devil’s Jest_. She picked up one and wrote: “A Negro’s head with a light
around it.” It is a German volume, called “Africa Singt,” and has a big
startling design exactly as described. She picked up a book by Leon
Trotsky, and wrote the word “Checkro”—which may not sound like Russian
to Trotsky, but does to Craig! And a book with Mussolini on the cover,
wearing a black coat and feeding a lion: she got the shape of the Duce’s
figure, only she labeled him “Black Bird.” And here is a part of the
jacket design of “wings” on the “Literary Guild” books—and below is what
Craig made of it. She added the comment: “Motion—the thing is traveling,
point first (Fig. 22, 22a).”
[Illustration: Fig. 22]
[Illustration: Fig. 22a]
Another volume was described as follows: “A pale blue book. Lonely
prairie country, stretch of flat land against sky, and outlined against
it a procession of people. Had feeling of moving—wheeled vehicle which
seemed to be baby-carriage. This was strange, because country was
covered with snow.” Upon examination, the book proved to be bound in
mottled pale blue boards, title, “I’m Scairt,” with subtitle, “Childhood
Days on the Prairies.” On the first page of the preface occurs the
following: “It was in those days that a company of Swedes left their
beloved homeland in the far North and came to make a home for themselves
and their children on the Kansas prairie.”
Finally, I have obtained the publisher’s consent to reproduce the jacket
design of a recent book, so that I may put Craig’s telepathy alongside
it, and give you a laugh or two. Observe the jolly little tourists, and
what they have turned into! And then the efforts of Craig’s subconscious
mind at French. They taught it to her in a “finishing school” on Fifth
Avenue, and you can see that it was finished before it began (Figs. 23,
23a).
Yet another form of experiment invented itself under the pressure of
necessity. Impossible to have such a witch-wife without trying to put
her to use!
[Illustration: Fig. 23]
[Illustration: Fig. 23a]