I'm not familiar with the names you mention but I'm going to guess they are decades old, or older? I'd imagine it would be pretty easy back then to expose a medium as a 'fraud' without having to actually back it up. These days it's much harder to do that because everything we say and do is recorded somewhere.

I admit to having my doubts about mediums and I'm sure as hell there are a lot out there that are fake or just very lucky, but I'm also sure there are a lot out there that are real.

I read a book called 'The Afterlife Experiments' and they did some pretty good tests of mediums and it does kinda lend credibility to them having some kind of ability. Though much the same was those mediums were exposed as 'frauds' it's possible the book was written by frauds.

Ultimately it all comes down to faith, the more I read the more I started to believe that some of these people actually are real.

  Harry Houdini was well known as a debunker of fraudulent mediums and he was very good at his job.  One could say that he was obsessed with doing this partly because of personal reasons.   

  He investigated Edgar Cayce and never spoke critically of Edgar after unlike every other psychic he investigated.  If anything, he may have been inspired by Cayce's work because not long before he died he was working on a movie that dealt with a theme of reincarnation oddly enough (reincarnation became a very prominent theme in the Cayce work). 

  The head of the Harvard Psychology department went down to investigate Cayce with the intention of proving him the fraud he thought he was.  After his investigation he told Cayce that he didn't know exactly what was going on but that he knew he was sincere and was providing definite help to people.  He did caution him that some of his associates left something to be desired.  Unfortunately, throughout his life various people tried to use Edgar for their own material gain--even his own father.

  But then again, Cayce wasn't really a "medium" per se.  Even now there are a lot of fraudulent and deceptive psychics out there, but that doesn't mean that all of them are like that.     I'm not sure if you're only talking about mediumship though or speaking generally about psychism as a whole.

heisenberg69 wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2013 at 5:14pm:


The information is a click away on the internet. Spiritualists have no interest in the evidence which shows their mediums were convicted of fraud.

See the books by the magicians Joseph Rinn, Joseph Dunninger and Milbourne Christopher etc which expose the tricks of mediums.

The books by Joseph McCabe and Edward Clodd expose the tricks of the mediums I mentioned. You can find them free online.

I also recommend the book Psychic Mafia by M. Lamar Keene. Keene was a fraudulent medium who duped his séance sitters for over 40 years. His book is a confession of the tricks he used. In the book he explains the tricks of both mental and physical mediums.

Darryl Forests wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2013 at 2:54pm:


Can you really say that? isn't that like saying "there is no such thing as an innocent prisoner" or "there is no such thing as an honest politician", it's an assumption based on our own beliefs and expectations. However I would like to understand the methodology behind you're studies and tests.

Quote:


Piper was exposed as a fraud by three psychologists who had many sitters with her. G. Stanley Hall had proven by psychological tests that her "spirit" controls were herself. And the psychologist Joseph Jastrow discovered some of her trances were fake. She was conscious during them and did cold reading.

Leslie Flint was caught with cheesecloth in one of his séances. He was also caught in fraud by William Rauscher and Allen Spraggett who discovered the spirit voices were not coming independent of him, and they sounded nothing like the deceased "spirits" they were supposed to be, they all sounded like Flint.

There isn't a single "clean" medium on record.

Darryl Forests wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2013 at 10:01pm:


Darryl-

leaving aside Home  (who you don't mention) I've been looking at the Leonora Piper case again. The first thing to say is that it is important to take a balanced perspective i.e. neither an overly credulous or dogmatic, sceptical one. You mention G. Stanley Hall who I would say came in the second category. According to Deborah Bloom's 'Ghost Hunters' - ' Hall made it clear that he had never intended to find out whether Mrs Piper could communicate with spirits. That concept belonged " more to the troglodyte age than our own " His interest was in debunking her once and for all: " Seriously to investigate the problem of whether discarnate ghosts can suspend any of the laws of matter seems to me not only bad form for any and every scientific man, but an indication of a strange psychic rudiment .... that ought to be outgrown like the prenatal tail or gills " (p.303). In other words Hall had already made up his mind before he had met her ! He did however find to his surprise by dipping camphor into her mouth (leaving bad blisters) and an esthesiometer ( leaving her with a damaged hand ) that Piper's trances were no fakes (p.304).

The fact is that many previously-sceptical investigators such as William James and  Richard Hodgson became convinced that she had real mediumistic abilities. She was able to provide information not available by normal means (e.g. 'cold' or 'hot' reading) on multiple occasions.They went to great lengths, such as using a private detective to trail her, to ascertain it. Whether her controls were who they claimed to be or if the information was gleaned via telepathy they were unable to definitively say, but there is little reasonable doubt that paranormality was involved and thus Leonora Piper was no fraud.

I find it strange that sceptics are only too willing to accept the claims of debunkers without questioning the integrity and motivations of the debunkers themselves. To my mind this it is like accepting uncritically the testimony of a witness in a court of law when that witness could be the plaintiff's mother !

Darryl Forests wrote on Jul 26^th, 2013 at 5:39am:


Thanks, will do !