The cover of the Observer Magazine of 29 October 1967 obeyed the law that whenever there’s a question in a headline the answer is always no: ‘Are the dead trying to get in touch?’
Which is not to deny the lengths they went to to appear open to the idea. ‘The extraordinary thing about ghosts is that we still don’t know whether they exist,’ wrote Paul Ferris. ‘Half a century ago, the dead walked at fashionable seances. More important, the supernatural was a nut serious investigators felt they could crack.’
Ferris tried to draw a line between the writings of the Rev CL Twaddle – sorry, Tweedale – whose News from the Next World included chats with Stradivarius and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and ‘the more credible spirit messages,’ but it was hard going.
The writer attended demonstrations of ‘flower clairsentience’, ‘psychic portrait-painting’ and clairvoyance. Then there was the medium who said: ‘I have a lady here, sending her love to you, saying she played the piano… I see a jar of honey. And didn’t your father keep a horse or something?’
Spiritualists had been ‘infuriated’ by Alan Whicker’s TV programme about spiritualism, Is There Anybody There?, because he included some crackpots. One publication mentioned that ‘occasionally the body of a medium has entirely disappeared, only to reappear, leaving him none the worse for his remarkable experience’.
As the saying goes: it pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. ‘I attended three sittings with mediums at the Spiritualist Association and heard nothing of consequence,’ reported Ferris. ‘One of the private sittings produced an hour of pure rubbish… and messages from or concerning Arthur, Alice, Gordon, Mary, Francis, Peter, Jean, Bill, Fred, George and David’. Or playing the percentages, as Alan used to say.
