Tag: Parapsychology

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And So It Begins….

You would think that finally getting a book edited, re-written, re-edited, designed, and uploaded for epub platforms would feel like “Well done, mate,” but it’s just the beginning. 

I still remember vividly walking into the Rhine during the Wednesday weekly research meeting and being met with cordial greetings. I was so excited to get started on my psychometry thriller. The very first chapter was already written:

A woman is working late in an office. She rubs her palms nervously along her skirt as she waits for the jump drive to finish uploading a file. The room is dark, with just a few lights on here or there making every corner a possible hiding place for something sinister. As the progress bar reaches one hundred percent, she grasps the jump drive and quickly shuts down the computer she isn’t supposed to have access to. The drive goes into a zippered pouch in her purse as she gets up to leave, feeling a bit less nervous. She wasn’t noticed, it’ll be fine. Echoes of her heels clicking on the polished wooden floors sound like little gunshots. She stops to remove her shoes and continues to the elevator in bare feet. If only she could stop the sound from her rapid heartbeats which seemed, to her, a dead giveaway to her position. She presses the down button, then, again and again, it is taking too long. Was that movement over there? The air conditioner whooshes to life and she jumps at the sound before recognizing it’s benign. The interminable elevator dings its arrival slowly opening its doors in mockery of her desire to be gone. She glances into the car for any other travelers, then enters pushing the lobby button several times to make sure the elevator is aware of her impatience. 

The doors open upon a darkened corridor, wide with shuttered shops and cafes along either side. She glances first down one side and then the other, listening for any movement, footfall, or breath. Satisfied that she is alone, the woman heads to the exit down the corridor to the right. Her walk is more brisk than usual and she fails to mask the sound of her movements. Just this right turn and then the door out of here, she thinks, breaking into a quicker gait. She rounds the corner, in sight of the glass exit doors, when a hand grasps her purse, forcing her to twirl in place. All she sees is a flash of metal, and then wetness oozes down her front. The assailant pulls the purse from her grasp and leaves her to hold her throat together with both her hands as she tries to bring air into her blood-filled trachea. She collapses to the floor. The last thing her ears perceive is the rapidly receding click, click of the murderer’s shoes, and the bang of the exit door. The last thing she sees as her vision tunnels is her outstretched arm with the charm bracelet that means so much to her.  

“Not again!” Violette said, who was grasping the charm bracelet in her left hand. 

That was a pretty good first chapter in my humble opinion, but now I had to learn more about psychometry and how psychics and law enforcement worked together to solve crimes. It wasn’t long after that Sally Rhine Feather said “Elizabeth, once you finish that novel, could you work on one for young people?” And Calliope O’Callahan was born. However, after every meeting I attended, every book and research paper I read, and every talk I listened to, I realized how deeply rich the world of parapsychology is. Like a kid in a candy store, I wanted Callie to have all the abilities known to science, but that isn’t realistic. I was also more interested in the experiences and the effects than in the characters I created. My first completed draft went to a content editor. She looked at the story and found the characters flat and the middle to be quite boring. After I pulled myself off the floor, I learned more about the craft of writing, especially what makes a character’s journey compelling. The next three years were spent on this journey until I felt I had a draft worth sending out to a few interested readers. Their notes were encouraging so off to the second editor it went. 

The next fun part was publishing. I listened to numerous authors and other members of the publishing world compare and contrast self-publishing with traditional publishing. The last few years with Amazon as King Kong has thrown traditional publishing into a tizzy. I won’t bore you with details, but it’s why I went the self-publishing route. Self-publishing is like opening your own business, so I have to absorb the costs and responsibilities of my copyright (book). I am fortunate to have a freshly graduated mass media major helping me with social media, but I enjoy teaching, so I’ll be going to events when that is possible, and I will add those to my website. 

After this six-year trek, I’m a published author, member of several parapsychology organizations, copy-editor for New Thinking Allowed publications and for the Journal of Parapsychology and newly minted member of the board for the Rhine. With these bona fides, I attended a local fan convention called ConGregate 9 in Winston-Salem to speak about parapsychology. Fans love paranormal subjects but have little if any awareness of what parapsychologists study, or that any of these experiences are real. It wasn’t attended by a large number of people, and as an unknown, I didn’t get top billing for my panels, but a con runner needs to think about what the fans want and I needed to keep my mind on the primary goal: get the subject of parapsychology out to a new group of people. It went well, and there was awe, support, curiosity, and vindication, which was very cool. I hope you can attend one of these fan conventions one day, or perhaps a library talk is more your speed, either way, it would be great to meet you to discuss more about your journey into parapsychology.

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J.B. and Louisa Rhine

J.B. and Louisa Rhine

Curious people become scientists. Some people find their original path of inquiry will make a giant curve toward an unexpected journey simply because they had one experience. Dr. Julie Beischel had intended to become one of a plethora of biochemists looking at potential new drugs but an incident with a spiritual medium derailed that idea. She and her husband now run the Windbridge Institute in California where they study mediums’ abilities.

J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa were botanists having both received their degrees at the University of Chicago when they attended a lecture by the author Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only did Doyle write the wildly popular stories about Sherlock Holmes, but he was also an avid believer in the afterlife and the abilities of spiritual mediums to have access to those who had passed on. At that time, in 1922, the Society for Psychical Research studied spiritual and physical mediums, but not using lab-oriented, blinded, and reproducible experimentation. Botanists of the early twentieth century utilized the most robust statistical methods of the time and Rhines decided to apply these to study supernatural abilities. 

Since the SPR was a relatively new organization and focused mainly in the United Kingdom, it was difficult for J.B. Rhine to find an academic position studying anomalous abilities in the United States. He continued to teach botany and Louisa to teach Latin until, when they had nearly given up hope, J.B. found a home in the newly formed Psychology department at Duke University with like-minded chairman William McDougall — a past president of both the American and British SPR. By 1935, Rhine presided over the Parapsychology Laboratory and worked tirelessly to create rigorous experiments to show the statistical existence of extrasensory perception, a term he made famous in his book “Extrasensory Perception” published in 1934.

Along with developing experiments with her husband, Louisa Rhine became the unofficial curator of the numerous letters sent to the Rhine after J.B.’s bestseller gave those who had experienced anomalous events hope that they were not alone. She published several books about the anecdotal events explained in the thousands of correspondence they received. By 1980, Louisa became president of the SPR, the same year J.B. passed away.

The Rhine Research Center is the oldest parapsychology laboratory in the United States and the Rhines’ methodologies and experiments have been utilized and replicated in labs around the world. It holds the Alex Tanous library filled with hundreds of books on the various subjects parapsychology encompasses. Though it has not been associated with Duke University for many decades, it is located near the campus and attracts many academics from the University.

Sally Rhine Feather

I have had the distinct pleasure to have met and befriended their daughter, Sally Rhine Feather who, in her nineties, is still very active at the Center and who inspired me to write the Calliope O’Callahan novels. The Psy Syndicate is an amalgam of several parapsychology research centers like the Rhine, but I consider the Rhine my classroom filled with very smart, lovely people. 

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Jeffrey Mishlove and “New Thinking Allowed”

My history with parapsychology began when I walked into a weekly research meeting at the Rhine Research facility just off the Duke University campus (please see my post about J.B. and Louisa Rhine). A group of mostly retired psychologists was discussing the most recent article in the Journal of Parapsychology as I sat down at the table. I was unemployed and working as a volunteer at the local museum so I was wearing the volunteer T-shirt at the time. I told the group that I was not a researcher, nor was I interested in being one, and that I wanted to write accurately about parapsychology. Thus began my journey into the deep and vast ocean of books, research papers, and websites involved with the subject. 

I spent as much time as I could in the Alex Tanous library reading from the hundreds of books it has, I took courses and participated in research studies, but I still wanted to learn more. Of course, I surfed the net and landed on the “New Thinking Allowed” YouTube channel where hundreds of videos on subjects ranging from aliens to meditation can be found. I tried to stick to videos on telepathy, dowsing, remote viewing, and mediumship, but the other titles tantalized me enough to delve further into related subjects.

Jeffrey Mishlove is the current host of the channel and he’s been the public face of parapsychology since his original public television show “Thinking Allowed” began in 1986. He migrated to YouTube with the “New Thinking Allowed” in 2015 where he has posted both taped interviews and live stream events several times a week. 

Dr. Mishlove is the only parapsychologist to have received his Ph.D. from an accredited American University migrating from an anomalous psychology interest that had him working with people incarcerated in prison. He wrote two books “The Roots of Consciousness” which was his doctoral dissertation and “The PK Man” about Ted Owens, a talented psychokinetic whom Jeffrey researched. He won the Bigelow Institute essay contest in 2021 with his piece “Beyond the Brain” about survival after bodily death which brings many concepts together into a “bundle of sticks” creating strong evidence for life after death. He is not your run-of-the-mill researcher, rather he is a most knowledgeable and patient interviewer who brings out the most in his guests.

I applied to the New Thinking Allowed foundation to be a volunteer beginning with editing the closed captions on the YouTube channel. Since I suffer from hearing loss and tinnitus, I find accurate subtitling to be important for those in the hearing-impaired community and worked on many videos along with a team of four others. Jeffrey put out a request for editors to work on a book he wants to publish (and hopefully will be) called “Psychic Liberation”, a compilation of a few dozen YouTube transcripts. We worked on this for over two years meeting once every few weeks with Jeffrey to discuss our progress and assignments. I got a chance to look at the first draft of “Beyond the Brain” and found the arguments compelling as did the judges from the Bigelow Institute. I recommend that you go through this multi-media essay for one of the most definitive and thorough arguments for the survival of consciousness that I’ve ever seen. 

Amongst his many distinctions, Jeffrey also managed to win a libel case against The Amazing Randi who had made claims in the Journal of Psychology that Jeffrey did not have a degree in parapsychology and that, if he did, he was obviously incompetent. Had he not won that court case, he would not have been inducted into the various scientific associations that have benefitted from his membership.
Although I have great respect for Jeffrey, you will not see a character based on him in my novels (yet). That being said, if you want to watch some really cool, mind-bendingly informative videos about the esoteric, sign up for the weekly newsletter at NewThinkingAllowed.org.

The New Thinking Allowed Foundation has just released its maiden periodical called “New Thinking Allowed” magazine for Spring 2023. You can find it here. For future releases and interviews, join the New Thinking Allowed newsletter.