American Society for Psychical Research

Hmm.

And then he published his observations in the Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research.

He wrote that she was very intelligent, she was very bright, she had a very sunny disposition.

[gasps] What?

He was a materialist just for the most part at that time, and he didn't have time to really study her.

So they arranged for Richard Hodgson, who was teaching in England at the time, to come over and manage the American Society for Psychical Research, and primarily, his job was to study Mrs. Piper, which he did for eighteen years.

According to the records, he sat with her on the average of three times a week for eighteen years.

He started as a debunker.

And this other personality somehow got hold of the information telepathically and was feeding it back to the sitter, the person sitting with her.

So that was a real stretch.

The thing that really changed Hodgson on this and changed others, including Sir Oliver Lodge, was in 1892 when a spirit who had been named George Pellew, P-E-L-L-E-W, he was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research.

He was a journalist and a lawyer as well.

His own father-in-law, Gardiner...

Hubbard was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research.

And think about what Bell had actually done.

He'd taken the human voice, the very thing a medium claims to summon from the dead, and made it travel invisibly through the air.

It started almost by accident.

In 1958, the American Society for Psychical Research announced an essay contest.

The prize was for the best paper on mental phenomena that might say something about whether a person survives death.

Stevenson had been reading about reincarnation, and he'd noticed something.

For instance, no police, media, or clergy who visited the house during the alleged events reported witnessing anything unusual, despite the book's dramatic claims.

Investigators from the American Society for Psychical Research, a real organization, been around since 1884.

They spent a night in the house and reported finding no evidence of a haunting.

George and Kathy Lutz maintained until their deaths that their account was true, but no independent evidence has ever corroborated it.

he had become chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Virginia in 1957.

The following year, the American Society for Psychical Research announced a contest in honor of William James for the best essay on, in quotes, "...the topic of paranormal mental phenomena and their relationship to the problem of survival of the human personality after bodily death." basically reincarnation, right? So Ian, who had said, he had said when he interviewed for the chairman position that he had an interest in parapsychology, had been intrigued by the concept of reincarnation, and in his readings had come across reports of individuals claiming to have memories of previous lives or apparent memories of former incarnations, as he called them.

The reports came from a number of sources, such as books, magazines, and newspapers.

Ian analyzed 44 of them as a group in a paper that won the contest and subsequently published in 1960.

You know? So, anyhow, in 1963, Ian took a sabbatical so that he could write the first of a number of books on the cases that he had investigated.

He completed the manuscript and returned to work.

As the American Society for Psychical Research... was preparing to publish it, a man who had assisted Ian as an interpreter in two or three of the cases in India was accused of fraud in other work of his.

This caused concern that he had cheated in his interpreting work and the publication was delayed.

Unlike many mediums of the time who required a darkened room, Tickner was known to see and hear spirits in broad daylight.

According to an article published by the American Society for Psychical Research, Tickner had actually been scientifically tested and was found to possess a unique degree of ultraviolet and infrared vision, meaning he could quite literally see frequencies outside the normal human light spectrum.

When he worked as a trance medium, Tickner had two main spirit controls.

His first was a Union veteran of the Civil War named Colonel Horace Clark Lee, who had come through to speak on spiritual subjects.

Born in 1865, he had spent his life in the railroad industry, eventually becoming the general manager of the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha Railway Company before moving to New York City to run the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company.

Edwin often sat with John Tickner to receive beautiful, comforting messages from his late wife, Elizabeth, and his daughter in spirit, Louise, as well as old colleagues from the railroad days.

But one evening, an exchange took place between Edwin Winter and John Tickner that was so utterly remarkable it was published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

Edwin Winter and John Tickner were casually speaking about a mundane business matter when Tickner suddenly stopped.

kind of coming from him.

And like early in the 70s, he spent some time at the American Research, American Society for Psychical Research.

Psychical

Research.

And also like he was doing all of this at ASPR with the then director, Carlos Osis.

What is ASPR?

Oh, the American Society for Psychical Research.

Right, psychicals.