The lost Messiah: secrets on psychical research emerge from a stack of forgotten documents - Notes On A Strange World

A strange and bizarre story emerged recently when some private documents were opened to the public a few years ago. However, as odd as this story will sound, even stranger is the fact that nobody has since talked publicly about it and you are very likely the first ones to read about it.

It all started when former secretary and president of the Society of Psychical Research (SPR), William Henry Salter, died in 1969 and it became known that he had left two sealed trunks of documents in the custody of Trinity College, at Cambridge. The trunks, containing letters, memoirs, and transcripts of seances, were to remain unopened until 1995.

When the time came, nobody, not even officials of the SPR, seemed to pay much attention to the bequest. I know only of one person who was biting his nails, waiting for 1995 to arrive: friend and historian Gian Marco Rinaldi. He requested information from the Trinity College Library and they sent him a detailed catalogue of the 140 items included in Salter's deposit.

The Forgotten Cross Correspondences

It turned out that the deposit included privately printed books with complete transcripts of seances held in the early 1900s with a group of mediums sometimes known as the Verrall's group. This group, which included friends of the original founders of the SPR, claimed to receive automatic writing messages from departed souls such as Frederic W.H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and Henry Sidgwick.

The group (named after Margaret Verrall, the first medium to say that Myers had communicated to her from the hereafter), was involved in a largely forgotten experiment called Cross Correspondences. The idea was that the dead founders of the SPR were best suited to devise an experiment that would undoubtedly prove the reality of survival after death. The various mediums of the Verrall's group (Mrs. Verrall, her daughter Helen, Mrs. Holland, Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Willett, Mrs. King, Mrs. Piper, and the Macs' family) thought they were independently receiving messages from the same entities.

Proof that such messages were from the same spirits could be deduced by cross references that could be found inside the various, independent messages. Usually these references were not clear and direct, but needed to be deciphered and put together like in a puzzle. Obviously this procedure opened the experiment to serious criticism; however, many at the SPR believed that absolute proof in support of survival after death had been obtained.

Since Cross Correspondences have long ago been abandoned by psychic researchers and no longer studied, one might wonder what Salter had put in his papers, what was so important that it had to remain secret for ninety years after the end of the original experiments.

The catalogue obtained by Rinaldi specified that in the deposit there were 6,438 pages of seance transcripts and analysis of such transcripts; 4,446 printed pages of further analysis and comments; a few other thousands pages of manuscripts, diaries, notes, indexes and letters all related to the Cross Correspondences experiments and the manuscript of Salter's Reminiscences of the Society for Psychical Research, written in 1955/56.

It was quite a lot of material to go through, even for the most dedicated historian. However, this is exactly what Rinaldi set up to do, requesting time and again copies of material from Trinity College.

Reminiscences of Psychical Research

There are no big revelations in Salter's Reminiscences, only some stories, mainly of a private nature, that today are mere curiosities, interesting probably only to students of the history of psychical research. For example, the puritan nature of the early SPR is discussed. Eric J. Dingwall, one of the great investigators of the past, in order to be named Research Officer, was induced to marry the woman with whom he was living. Having done this, he was nonetheless soon fired from his job at the Society when he published some anthropological work on ancient erotica, considered by some Council members as obscene.

Another investigator, Theodore Besterman, was traveling the Americas in 1936 on behalf of the Society in order to meet psychics (such as Brazilian medium Carlos Mirabelli), and to visit J.B. Rhine's parapsychological laboratory in Durham, North Carolina. Along the way, he met an American widow and fell in love with her. Besterman, however, had a wife in England and he simply wrote a goodbye letter to her. Again, the Council of the SPR considered this an offense to the Society and fired him, losing one of their best investigators.

There are also stories of secret affairs, some of a homosexual nature, and sad episodes of alcoholism and drug abuse which are best left forgotten.

Salter's comments on some famous mediums of the time are revealing: he considered Margery a fraud and details an episode in which she and her husband, Dr. Le Roi Crandon, were caught in trickery at a 1929 stance in an SPR room. He also hints at the fact that Dingwall had quite a soft spot for Margery. "On one of his visits to America," writes Salter, "Dingwall had thyroid trouble which Crandon successfully treated, and out of gratitude for that and even more because he had fallen for Margery, he defended her through thick and thin until the Dudley exposure, which he could not explain away."