Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

The top file is labeled “Goligher, Kathleen.” This file goes with the photo album, which contains photographs of Miss Goligher and her visible ectoplasms, dated 1920–1921. Goligher was the inspiration for the theories and experiments of Dr. W. J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Queen’s University of Belfast. The Golighers were a family of spiritualists—all four daughters worked as mediums—known for their lively séances, held in a tattily wallpapered Belfast sitting room. The sittings unfolded in the typical manner of the spiritualist séance. The medium would disappear behind a curtain or inside a medium cabinet. The lights would be put out—mediums claimed light compromised their abilities and damaged the ectoplasm—and a round of hymns and prayers begun. The medium would fall into a trance and begin producing “demonstrations,” as they are still called today by spiritualists, of the presence and power of whatever spirits he or she had drawn to the room. Most commonly, the spirits would show their stuff by making a table at the center of the séance circle tilt or rise. Since everyone was holding hands, the table appeared to be levitating [21] Often the medium was using her foot to manipulate the furniture. However, Spirit Table Lifting aids were available for $12 by mail-order through the likes of the Ralph E. Sylvestre Company (“our effects are being used by nearly all prominent mediums,” brags the 1901 catalogue). Other helpful items included Telescopic Reaching Rods, self-playing trumpets, and Luminous Materialistic Ghosts (“appears gradually, floats about room and disappears”). without the help of anyone seated in the circle.

While most spiritualists were satisfied with the explanation that it was the energy of their spirit friends that was causing the table to rock and rise, Crawford wanted to know exactly how, and by what scientific principles, the dead were accomplishing this. Following a series of experiments involving scales and pressure sensors, he came up with a theory of bendable ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, which he set forth in embarrassing detail in the 1920 E. P. Dutton hardcovers The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle and Experiments in Psychical Science . (Such was the gullibility of the day that Dutton published five of Crawford’s books without a modicum of queasiness. A 1919 letter in the Dutton archives describes Crawford’s discoveries as being “of such enormous importance to physics that it is not too much to suppose that they may shew the way to a complete upsetting of present ideas and the building of a new theory on the constitution of matter.” [22] They did not, however, shew the way to a new theory on royalty rates. Dutton courteously rebuffed Crawford’s request to double his royalties to 20 percent. )

Applying laws of physics and engineering, Crawford calculated that for tables up to thirty pounds, an unsupported or “true” cantilever was employed. The ectoplasmic rod issues “from the torso” (more about this euphemism to come) of the medium, travels parallel to the floor until it reaches the center point of the table, and then changes direction, rising up in a column of four-inch diameter to meet the underside of the tabletop, where it grips the surface by means of a suction-based grasping organ. (He claimed to be able to hear the suckers”—never a good word choice for W. J. Crawford—“gripping and sliding over the wood.”) If the table weighed more than thirty pounds, Crawford concluded, a supported cantilever was employed by the spirits: It angled down and met the floor, which it used for support, before bending and rising to meet the table.

Crawford attempted to prove the existence of the two types of ectoplasmic cantilevers by setting a pressure-recording apparatus under the séance table. This consisted of two pieces of wood that, when pressed together, would complete a circuit, causing a bell to ring. Crawford describes telling Goligher’s spirit helpers—or “operators”—to begin a series of levitations, first with a true ectoplasmic cantilever and then a supported ectoplasmic cantilever. As he predicted, the bell rang only when the supported cantilever was in use.

Crawford didn’t stop there. He wanted more proof. He wanted the sort of proof he could carry out of the séance room and show to his colleagues. Which brings us to Experiment 4—“Impression on modeler’s clay of bottom of cantilever column”—and to the beginning of Crawford’s tragic demise. Here is Crawford describing the experiment:

I brought a little box filled with soft clay to the séance room, and said to the operators, “You remember some time ago when we were investigating the methods by which you levitate the table, I found that if necessary you could levitate it by putting the bottom end of the columnar part of the cantilever on the floor immediately under the table, so that it forms a kind of prop?”… Answer—“Yes.” “Well, I am going to place this box of soft clay under the table and I want you to levitate the table by this method.”… In a very short time, the table levitated immediately above the clay…. At its conclusion I examined the clay. There was a large irregularly shaped impression on it, the length one way being about 3 inches and the other 2½ inches.

In the Goligher file on the table in front of me is a mounted black and white photograph of a similarly obtained “cantilever” impression. It was not made by Crawford, but by a contemporary of his, a psychic researcher named Henry Bremset, who attempted to replicate Crawford’s experiment at a different séance circle. He filled two shortbread tins with putty, placed them under the séance table, and explained to the medium what he hoped to achieve.

Tin Number 1 revealed, said Bremset in a letter to the SPR, “the perfect imprint of a woman’s shoe.” Tin Number 2 bore the imprint of a stockinged heel, “showing stitch marks of knitting.” The second photo in particular made Bremset feel a little ill. For he recalled that Crawford, in one of his papers, had described an impression that suggested that of “a gigantic thumb with skin, and lines similar to a human thumb [print].” Bremset sent his Tin Number 2 photo to Dr. Crawford, to see how he’d interpret it. The possibility that Bremset’s imprint had been made by a foot in a stocking appeared not to have entered Crawford’s mind. His reply stated that he hoped to prove that the impressions were made by psychic rods that carried the impressions of the area from which they emerged.

Perplexed and concerned, Bremset took a train to Belfast later that week. He describes his visit with Crawford in the SPR letter. “I had a long and earnest discussion with him about the interpretation of the facts as I saw them. He was obviously profoundly disturbed though still clinging to his new theory…. When I parted from him he looked a very worried man…. Not long afterward came his tragic death.”

Crawford drowned himself in the summer of 1920. Though his suicide note stated that his actions had nothing to do with “the work,” hearsay held that the motivating force for the suicide was a profound embarrassment upon realizing he’d been duped.

The real mystery, as far as I’m concerned, is that it took him so long to figure things out. In his book, he has included a photograph captioned “The cantilever method of levitation. A rough cantilever in position.” Yet it unequivocally depicts a strip of filmy white cloth—coming down from Goligher’s lap, dropping a foot or so, and then curving up to the bottom of a small desk. I don’t know anything about engineering, but it’s clear to me that that material isn’t “supporting” anything. It’s just hanging there limply. There’s nothing mysterious or suggestive about it. Crawford’s album contains photo after photo of Goligher with lengths of “the substance” lying on her lap, wadded on the floor at her feet, tied to the table legs, and in every case it’s impossible to mistake it for anything other than ordinary man-made cloth. One photo shows Kathleen Goligher with a pleated bunch of fabric near the neck of her white shirt, and I spent a good minute and a half trying to decide if it was fashion or ectoplasm. Many of the album photos are reproduced in Crawford’s books, but not photos 4F or 5E: Here is Goligher, her standard eyes-closed, medium-in-trance pose abandoned for the moment, openly laughing or grinning.