This should have spelt the end for everything from dowsing to Ouija boards, yet to this day they remain devoutly held beliefs for many. Summing up his findings for the British Medical journal in 1894, he robustly dismantled the spiritualist presumption that spirits were the cause of automatic writing by stating bluntly “there is no need nor room for the agency of spirits, and the invocation of such agency is the sign of a mind not merely unscientific, but uninformed.” Mercier’s investigations showed that the only curious phenomena at play was yet another variant of the ideomotor effect. His particular bugbear was automatic writing, the supposedly supernatural “channelling” of writing from a remote source. Mercier had spent a great deal of time debunking trance mediums, painstakingly dismantling their claims.
SEANCE BOARDS PROFESSIONAL
This made him highly unpopular with spiritualists of the era, some of whom –such as Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle – believed that Houdini himself had spiritual powers, a claim which irked the proud professional Houdini no end.Īnother individual not taken in by the passion for spiritualism was Charles Arthur Mercier, a psychiatrist with precious little time for nonsense. Houdini had something of a passion for debunking frauds, and took a delight in exposing trickery using his expertise in the subject to detect bogus claims.
Many of the popular trance mediums of the era used unadulterated showmanship to improve their audience numbers famed medium Mina Crandon performed her séances nude, and allegedly secreted ectoplasm from her vagina before being debunked by renowned magician and escape artist Harry Houdini. The discovery of the ideomotor effect demonstrated that there was no mystery underpinning the eerie happenings of late 19 th and early 20 th century séances – merely the heady mixture of delusion and occasionally, outright fraud. That same year, the term “ideomotor” was introduced by physician William Carpenter to describe this very phenomenon. More than this, Chevreul discovered that once the person holding the rod was made aware of this reaction, the movements ceased and could not be reproduced. In his 1854 paper on the subject, he turned his attention to table-turning, divining rods and magic pendulums, demonstrating how involuntary and subconscious muscle reactions are the cause of ostensibly magic movements. Chevreul was steadfastly opposed to charlatanism. This conclusion was supported by the meticulous parallel experiments of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. Such demonstrations of spiritualism convinced many in high society that a new force, perhaps a mystical one, was behind the haunting messages. Seemingly ethereal whisperings would soon appear from the void as the table tilted towards the imprinted letters. In table turning, the alphabet was inscribed on a table, upon which all participants laid their hands. In the mid- 19 th century, the growing spiritualist movement had begun to experiment with ghostly messages transcribed by table-turning, a precursor to the modern Ouija board.
Our fascination with words from beyond the grave is nothing new. While there is no evidence that we can truly communicate with the dead, phenomena like the Ouija board and automatic writing can truly give us a fascinating insight into our own psychology, and serve as a reminder that we can all too easily fool ourselves. A good scare can be a bonding experience, and in this spirit many of us have dabbled with Ouija boards, either in earnest or jest - perhaps even getting slightly phased by the apparent disembodied messages, sometimes surreal and foreboding, emanating from the board. In the run up to Halloween, many of us are open to a frightening supernatural adventure.
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