o
Without Feathers
Examining Psychic Phenomena
Approved For Release 2003/04/18
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’ a sampling of Dr. Twelve's most celebrated cases, with his
comments.
Spirit Departure
Apparitions
Mr. Albert Sykes reports the following experience:
“I was
On March
16, 1882, Mr. J. G. Dubbs awoke in the middle
of the night and saw his brother Amos, who had been dead
for
fourteen
years,
sitting
at
the
foot of his bed
flicking
chickens. Dubbs asked his brother what he was doing there,
and his brother said not to W'orry, he w'as dead and was only
in town for the weekend. Dubbs asked his brother what
it
was
like in “the other world,” and his brother said
it was
not
unlike
Cleveland. He
said he had returned
to give
Dubbs a message, which was
that a dark-blue
suit and
Argyle socks are a big mistake.
At
that
point,
Dubbs’s
servant
girl
entered and saw
Dubbs talking to “a shapeless, milky haze,” which she said
reminded her of Amos Dubbs but was a little better-looking,
finally, the ghost asked Dubbs to join him in an aria from
Faust, which the two sang with great fervor. As dawn rose,
the ghost walked through the wall, and Dubbs, trying to
follow, broke his nose.
I his
appears
to
be
a
classic
case
of the
apparition
phenomenon, and
if Dubbs
is
to be
believed,
the ghost
returned again and caused Mrs. Dubbs to rise out of a chair
and hover over the dinner table for twenty minutes until she
dropped into some gravy. It is interesting to note that spirits
have a tendency to be mischievous, which A. F. Childe, the
British mystic, attributes to a marked feeling of inferiority
they have over being dead. “Apparitions” are often associ-
ated with individuals who have suffered an unusual demise.
Amos
Dubbs,
for
instance;
had
died
under
mysterious
circumstances when
a
farmer
accidentally
planted him
along will] some turnips.
sitting having
biscuits with some
friends when
I
felt my
spirit leave my body and go make a telephone
call. For
some reason,
it called the Moscowi.tz Fiber Glass Company.
My
spirit then returned
to my body and
sat
for another
twenty minutes or
so, hoping nobody would suggest cha-
rades. When the conversation turned to mutual funds,
it left
again and began wandering around
the
city.
I am con-
vinced that it visited the Statute of Liberty and then saw the
stage show
at Radio City Music Hall. Following
that,
it
went to Benny’s Steak House and ran up a tab of sixty-eight
dollars. My spirit then decided to return to my body, but
it
was impossible
to
get a cab.
Finally,
it walked up
Fifth
Avenue and rejoined me just in time to catch the late news.
I could tell that
it was reentering my body, because
fell a
sudden chill, and a voice said, ‘I’m back. You want to pass
me those raisins?’
“This phenomenon
has happened
to me
several
times
since. Once, my spirit went to Miami for a weekend, and
once
it was, arrested
for
trying
to
leave Macy’s
without
paying for a
tie. The fourth time,
it was actually my body
that
left my spirit, although
all
it did was get a rubdown
and come right back.”
Spirit departure was very common around
1910, when
many “spirits” w'ere reported wandering aimlessly around
India searching for the American Consulate. The phenome-
non
is
quite
similar
to
transubstantiation,
the
process
whereby a person will suddenly dematcrialize and remateri-
alizc somewhere else in the world. This
is not a bad way to
travel,
although
there
is
usually
a
half-hour
wait
for
* u ”S agc - The most
astonishing case
of transubstantiation
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io
Without Feathers
was
li’.al
of
Kir
.Arthur
Nurnry, who
vanished .with
ail
audible
pop
while
he was
taking
a
bath
and
suddenly
appeared
in
the
siring
section
of the Vienna Symphony
Orchestra. He stayed on
as the
first
violinist
for twenty-
seven
years,
although
he
could
only
play “Three Blind
Mice,” and vanished
abruptly one day during Mozart’s
Jupiter
Symphony,
turning
up
in
bed
with
Winston
Churchill.
Precognition
Mr. Fenton Allcntuck describes the following precognitive
dream:
“I went
to sleep at midnight and dreamed that
I
was
playing
whist
with
a
plate
of chives. Suddenly
the
dream shifted, and
I saw my grandfather about to be run
over by a truck in the middle of the street, where- he was
waltzing with
a clothing dummy.
I
tried
to scream, but
when
1 opened my mouth the only sound that came out was
chimes, and my grandfather was run over.
“I awoke in a sweat and ran
to my grandfather’s house
and
asked
him
if he
had
pians
to go
waltzing
with
a
clothing dummy. He said of course not, although he had
contemplated
posing
as
a shepherd
to
fool
his enemies.
Relieved,
I walked home, but
learned
later
that the old
man had slipped on a chicken-salad sandwich and falien off
the Chrysler Building;”
Precognitive dreams are too common to be dismissed as
pure coincidence. Here a man dreams of a relative’s death,
and
it
occurs. Not everyone
is
so
lucky. J.
Martinez, of
Kenncbunkport. Maine, ch earned he won the Irish Sweep-
stakes. \\ him
lie awoke, ins bed had tloated out to sea.
Examining Psychic Phenomena
l r
Trances
Sir Hugh Swigglcs, the skeptic, reports an interesting seance
experience:
We attended the home of Madame Reynaud, the noted
medium, where we were all told to sit around the table and
join hands. Mr. Weeks couldn’t stop giggling, and Madame
Reynaud smashed him on the head with a Ouija board. The
lights were turned out, and Madame Reynaud attempted to
contact Mrs. Marple’s husband, who had died at the opera
when
his
beard
caught
fire. The
following
is
an
exact
transcript:
mrs, marple: What do you see?
medium:
I see a man with blue eyes and a pinwhccl hat.
mrs. marple: That’s my husband!
medium: His name is
.
.
.
Robert. No
.
.
. Richard
.
.
.
mrs. marple: Quincy.
medium: Quincy! Yes, that’s
it!
mrs. marple: What else about him?
medium: He
is bald but usually keeps some leaves on his
head so nobody will notice.
mrs. marple: Yes! Exactly!
medium: For some reason, he has an object ... a loin of
pork.
mrs. marple: My anniversary present
to him! Can you
make him speak?
medium: Speak, spirit. Speak.
quincy: Claire, this is Quincy.
mrs. marple: Oh, Quincy! Quincy!
quincy: How long do you keep the chicken in when you’re
trying to broil
it?
mrs. marple: That voice!
It’s him!
medium: Everybody concentrate.
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Without Feathers
Approved For Release 2003/04/18
:
MRS. mari'i. n: Quincy. arc they treating you okay?
quincy:
Not
bad, except
it
takes four days
to get your
cleaning back.
mrs. makti. ft: Quincy, do you miss me?
quincy:
Huh?
Oh,
cr,
sure.
Sure,
kid.
I
got
to
be
going.
.
.
.
medium: I'm losing
it. He’s fading. ...
I
found
this seance
to
pass
the most
stringent
tests
of
credulity, with the minor exception of a phonograph, which
was found under Madame Rcynaud’s dress.
There
is no doubt that certain events recorded at seances
arc genuine. Who does not
recall the famous incident at
Sybil Seretsky’s, wdien her goldfish sang “I Got Rhythm”
a
favorite
tune
of her
recently
deceased
nephew?
But
contacting the dead
is at best difficult, since most deceased
are reluctant to speak up, and those that do seem to hem
and haw
before
getting
to
the
point. The
author
has
actually
seen
a
table
rise,
and
Dr,. Joshua
Fleagle,
of
Harvard, attended a seance in which a table not only rose
but excused itself and went upstairs to sleep.
Clairvoyance
One of the most astounding cases of clairvoyance
is that of
the noted Greek psychic, Achiile Londos. Londos realized
he had “unusual powers” by the age of ten, when he could
lie
in bed and, by concentrating, make
his
father's
false
teeth jump out of his mouth. After a neighbor’s husband
had been missing for three weeks, Londos told them to look
in
the
stove, where
the man was found
knitting. Londos
could concentrate on a person’s face and force the image to
come out on a
roil
of ordinary Kodak
film, although he
could never seem to get anybody- to smile.
Approved For Release 2003/04/18
:
Examining Psychic Phenomena
-RDP96-00787R000200080005-9
In
1964, he was called
in
to aid police
in capturing the
Dusseldorf Strangler,
a
fiend who
always
left
a
baked
Alaska on
the
chests of his victims. Merely by
sniffing
a
handkerchief, Londos- led police
to Siegfried Lcnz, haud}-
man
at a school
for deaf turkeys, who
said
he was
the
strangler and could he- please have his handkerchief back.
Londos
is just one of many people with psychic powers.
C.
N. Jerome,
the
psychic,
of Newport, Rhode
Island,
claims he can guess any card being thought of by a squir-
rel.
Prognostication
Finally, we come to Aristonidis, the sixteenth-century count
whose predictions continue to dazzle and perplex even the
most skeptical. Typical examples are:
“Two nations will go to war, but only one will win.”
(Experts feel
this probably refers to the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904-05—an astounding
feat
of prognostication,
considering the fact that
it was made in
1540.)
“A man in Istanbul will have his hat blocked, and
it will
be ruined.”'
(In i860, Abu Hamid, Ottoman warrior, sent his cap out
to be cleaned, and
it came back with spots.)
“I
see
a
great
person, who
one
day
will
invent
for
mankind
a
garment
to
be
worn
over
his
trousers
for
protection while cooking.
It
will be called an ‘abron
7 or
‘aprone.’ ”
(Aristonidis meant the apron, of course.)
“A leader will emerge in France. He will be very short
and will cause great calamity.”
(This
is a
reference
either
to Napoleon
or
to Marcel
Lumet, an eighteenth-century midget who instigated a plot
to rub bearnaise sauce on Voltaire.)
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World*
there
will
be
a
place
named
and
a
man
named
Joseph
Gotten
will
become