Adventurings in the Psychical

by H. Addington Bruce

“On March 1 the only cut flowers in my drawing-room were in two blue china jars on the mantelpiece; the flowers were large single daffodils. On the ledge of the window ... were three pots of growing yellow tulips—the only flowers near any window. The day was dull in the morning, but about twelve the sun came out and it was warm; it rained heavily in the afternoon.”

There was no “cross-correspondence” in the writings of the two scripts for this or the next two weeks—the experimenters wrote only once a week—but in the scripts of the week following Miss Johnson found a curious coincidence—the presence of notes of music. Only once before or since, she testifies, have notes of music appeared in the script of either Mrs. Verrall or Mrs. Holland. In Mrs. Holland’s script of that same date, March 22, there was also a reference to “the ivory gate through which all good dreams come.” Mrs. Verrall, it was learned, on March 19 or 20, had been reading Virgil’s passage in the “Æneid” about the gates of horn and ivory. She had been reading Dante, too, in the original Italian, the first time she had read anything in Italian for months; and, oddly enough, Mrs. Holland’s script for March 22 contained a sentence in Italian.

Later scripts were characterized by even more striking correspondences, and—which is not without interest—on more than one occasion the “controls” issued warnings against placing faith in Eusapia Paladino. For instance, on December 1, 1905, the Myers control wrote through Mrs. Holland: “There may be raps genuine enough of their kind—I concede the raps—poltergeist merely—but the luminous appearances—the sounds of a semi-musical nature—the flower falling upon the table—trickery—trickery.” And the Gurney control added: “Her feet are very important—Next time can’t Miss J. sit with the sapient feet both touching hers—Let her fix her thoughts on the feet and prevent the least movement of them.”

As American investigators have since discovered, Eusapia’s feet are indeed important.

These first experiments were followed by others, in which, besides Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Verrall, all four of the other mediums mentioned above took part, and again suggestive cross-correspondences were secured. Besides which, having been induced by the results of the Verrall-Holland experiments to study more closely earlier scripts stored in the Society’s archives, Miss Johnson discovered what seemed to be similar cross-correspondences that occurred before any experiments of this kind were undertaken. I can give only one or two illustrations. August 28, 1901, Mrs. Forbes wrote a message purporting to come from her dead son Talbot, to the effect that he had to leave her in order to control another “sensitive,” and through her obtain corroboration of Mrs. Forbes’s own automatic writing. On the same day Mrs. Verrall wrote in Latin of a fir tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and a suspended bugle. The latter was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir trees grown from seed sent to her by her son. These facts, according to Miss Johnson, were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.

In another case Mrs. Forbes wrote, on November 26 and 27, 1902, references, absolutely meaningless to herself, to a passage in a book which Mrs. Verrall had been reading on those days; and the references also applied appropriately to an obscure sentence in Mrs. Verrall’s own script of November 26.

But undoubtedly the most impressive cross-correspondences were obtained in a series of experiments extending from November, 1906, to June, 1907, and involving concordant automatism between Mrs. Holland, in India, and Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall, and Miss Verrall, in England. A full report on this series is given in the October, 1908, issue of the Society’s Proceedings. The plan followed was to suggest to the controls of Mrs. Piper—in her case the alleged “spirits” of Myers, Sidgwick, and Hodgson—that they transmit to one or more of the other automatists some test word or message. There were many failures, but there were also many seeming successes.

January 16, 1907, the Myers control promised that it would, as a proof of its identity, cause Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Verrall to sign a piece of automatic writing with a triangle drawn within a circle. A circle with a triangle inside it actually appeared in Mrs. Verrall’s script of January 28, while a script from Mrs. Holland exhibited several geometrical figures, including a circle with a triangle outside it. February 6 the same control said that it had just been referring, through Mrs. Verrall, to a “library matter,” and investigation showed that half an hour earlier Mrs. Verrall, writing at her home in Cambridge, had begun a script in which the word “library” occurred three times—the only time during the period of the experiments that “library” was mentioned in her automatic writing or in Mrs. Piper’s trance statements. The Myers control again, on February 11, announced that it had given “hope, star, and Browning” to Mrs. Verrall, and her script showed that this was correct. February 12 the Hodgson control declared it had been trying to impress the word “arrow” on Mrs. Verrall. Her script for the previous day, when received at the Society’s offices in London, proved to be decorated with a drawing of three arrows.