Weird People

During the first half of the 20th century it was the ambition of many psychical investigators to be the first to discover what they believed to be a genuine medium. To experiment with whatever particular psychic ability the person claimed to possess, to attempt to develop the ‘psychic facilities’ and test them in accordance with their own ideas, and then submit the medium and the results to the world. In this, Harry Price, later to become famous for his Borley Rectory investigations, was no different to any other investigator of psychic phenomena at the time.

A Natural Psychic?

When Stella C came into Price’s life he was tired of false mediums and shams. On a day early in 1923, he was travelling home by train from London to his Pulborough home, and found himself sitting opposite a charming and attractive young woman, ‘a typical English girl’ as he was to say later. This was the 22 year-old Dorothy Stella Cranshaw. She had been born in 1900 in North Woolwich, London, the daughter of a charcoal burner, and was at the time working as a nurse in a London hospital. Price had a pile of newspapers and magazines next to him, and Stella, having nothing to read, asked to have a look at his copy of Light, a magazine concerning psychic phenomena.

In the conversation that followed Stella displayed a mild, merely objective interest in psychic matters, though she did have some puzzling experiences to relate. She told Price that sometimes whilst sitting in a quiet room on a calm day, with the windows closed, there would be a breeze and small objects such as match-boxes would move around in the air, accompanied by raps and flashes of light. She said that these ‘breezes’ almost always occurred when there were flowers around. She was extremely fond of flowers and occasionally, when she was seated at a desk with a vase of flowers on it, there would be a gentle breeze which fanned her cheek and made the flowers bend in the vase.

Psychic Abilities Tested

Price was naturally excited at the discovery of someone who apparently possessed mediumistic / psychic abilities, and persuaded her to take part in a series of sittings. Stella had previously been present at only one séance in her life, when she was eleven years old, and then had to be taken out because of a fit of giggling. The first of the three series of sittings (in 1923, 1926 and 1928) began in March 1923 at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research.

Numerous physical phenomena are alleged to have occurred, including raps, flashes of light, messages, levitations of tables and other objects, the violent destruction of furniture and on one occasion, an instance of precognition, were recorded over the five-year period. The original records of these remarkable sittings are now held in the Harry Price Library at the University of London.

Security in the Séance Room

The circle of sitters was carefully chosen by Price, and included Eric J. Dingwall, at the time Research Officer of the Society for Psychical Research, and Eileen Garrett, a gifted Irish medium. It was Price who also made meticulous arrangements that the room be as fraud-proof as possible. Throughout the sittings the medium herself would be carefully monitored and her hands and feet controlled by other sitters. The door of the séance room was always locked and the key removed.

Various ingenious apparatus, many designed by Price himself, were used at various times during the sittings to aid in secure full-proof testing of the medium’s psychic abilities. One of these was a specially-designed double table (consisting of an outer and an inner part). The inner table had a shelf almost the same size as the top, and this shelf was surrounded on all sides by fine mesh gauze, so that the only access to the enclosed space was through a trap door in the top of the table, which could be opened easily from within but not from the outside.  A selection of musical instruments were placed on the protected shelf, and thus sealed off, should have been practically impossible to play by any normal means.

However, a mouth-organ and autoharp were played several times during different sittings, often accompanied by flashes, crackling noises and blue lights in the vicinity of the medium.

Another of Price’s apparatus used was the ‘telekinetoscope’. This consisted of an electric telegraph key in a brass cup, connected to a red light under a tightly sealed glass shade. A soap bubble was blown over the cup covering the telegraph key and covered by a glass shade. Only when the telegraph key was pressed would the red light flash on. The whole device was placed on the shelf inside the double table. During the sittings the telegraph key was repeatedly pressed, though at the end of the séances the soap bubble was still unbroken.

A further device, called a ‘shadow apparatus’, consisting of a battery and lamp in a metal box, with a telephoto lens as a projector and a ruby filter to direct a pencil of light onto a luminous screen, was used to reveal the shape of whatever manipulated the bell or the trumpet inside the double table. When the light on this apparatus was switched on, the shadow of whatever was moving the objects would be shown on the screen. One of the results of an experiment using this device was quite remarkable.

To quote the sceptical Eric J. Dingwall (who was present): ‘When the red light was switched on under the table I lay down on the floor and looked through the passage towards the luminous screen. From near the medium’s foot, which was invisible, I saw an egg-shaped body beginning to crawl towards the centre of the floor under the table. It was white and where the light was reflected it appeared opal. To the end nearest the medium was attached a thin white neck, like a piece of macaroni. It advanced towards the centre and then rapidly withdrew to the shadow.’

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