Thus there was a progressive increase in the distance between them for each series, but this seems to have made no difference in the result. In each, as the attested record shows, Miss Ramsden succeeded in getting, completely or in part, no fewer than two out of every five of the messages her co-experimenter tried to “telepath” to her. Such a proportion is clearly too high to be explained away on the theory of chance coincidence, and this theory is rendered still more untenable by the attendant circumstances which the record reveals.
On one occasion Miss Miles, who is an artist, had been busy in the afternoon painting a model’s hands. She thought of this when evening came, and determined to endeavor to impress Miss Ramsden with the idea “hands”. In her post-card, written at seven o’clock the same evening, Miss Ramsden stated that of several ideas which had come into her mind at the experiment-hour the “most vivid” was “a little black hand, quite small, much smaller than a child’s, well formed, and the fingers straight. This was the chief thing.
Similarly, having noticed at a meeting in London a curious pair of spectacles worn by a gentleman seated near her, Miss Miles, on returning home in the early evening, wrote down the word “spectacles,” with the idea of “telepathing” it to Miss Ramsden. The latter’s post-card entry for that evening noted that “spectacles” was “the only idea that came to me after waiting a long time.”
Again, while on a sketching expedition to an English village, Miss Miles was much amused by an adventure with a large white pig. She selected this pig as the subject of her next telepathic communication, the result of which Miss Ramsden, writing as almost always on the night of the experiment, thus reported:
“You were out of doors rather late, a cold, raw evening, near a railway station; there was a pig with a long snout, and some village children. It was getting dark.”
On the other hand, in several instances Miss Ramsden’s impressions contained much which Miss Miles had not consciously sought to convey to her. And this brings us to what is unquestionably the most important feature of the experiments.
As was said, about two out of every five messages were correctly received, in whole or in part. But it frequently happened in the case of the seeming failures, that while Miss Ramsden did not get the ideas which Miss Miles was endeavoring to send to her, she did get ideas relating to people, things and events much in Miss Miles’s mind at that moment, or which had been more or less in her mind during the day of the experiment.
To illustrate, Miss Miles once tried to make Miss Ramsden think of “pussies, or cats.” What Miss Ramsden did think of was “a manuscript, pinned by a patent fastener in one corner.” And, oddly enough, Miss Miles had spent a good part of that afternoon reading to a friend from a manuscript “fastened together,” as the friend has testified, “with a patent fastener.” Similarly, during Miss Miles’s visit to the English village above mentioned, Miss Ramsden’s report for one experiment ran:
“First I saw dimly a house, but I think that you wish me to see a little girl with brown hair down her back, tied with a ribbon in the usual way. She is sitting at a table with her back turned and seems very busy indeed. I think she is cutting out scraps with a pair of scissors. She has on a white pinafore, and I should guess her age to be between eight and twelve.”