Theresa Cheung - The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World - The Ultimate A–Z of Spirits, Mysteries and the Paranormal

Mina Crandon appeared to enjoy all the attention she received from press and public alike. By all accounts it wasn’t just her psychic powers that her supporters admired. She was a vivacious and charismatic person who was not adverse to holding séancesin the nude and to having extramarital affairs with more than one of her investigators.

When asked on her deathbed if fraud had taken place, she refused to set the record straight. With the hint of a smile and a twinkle in her eye, she is said to have replied, Why don’t you guess? You’ll all be guessing for the rest of your lives.’

Creative visualization is the process by which the creation of a visual image is believed to promote the desired outcome.

Creative visualization is built on the ancient belief in the power of the mind to create what you want in your life. If you think about what you’d like to achieve in your life, you can do just that, as positive images and thoughts attract positive energy. Creative visualization is widely used in business, sport, art, psychotherapy, psychicdevelopment, mystical and occultarts and personal self-development.

Imaginationhas a powerful influence on self-image, and a poor self-image can often mean the difference between success and failure in life. Creative visualization, which seems to be most effective when practised in a relaxed state, can be used to feed your mind positive images to create a better self-image and improve your personal experiences. For example, if you want to develop your psychic awareness, you need to imagine being psychic. If you want to pass an exam, you imagine yourself passing it. Those who practise visualization say it’s important to fill in all the details of your experience so that the image is as real to the mind as possible.

The Crewe Circle was a group of spirit photographersbased in Crewe, England, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Led by William Hope, the circle claimed to be able to photograph the souls of the dead. Many psychical research organizations investigated the claims, but the most documented are those sponsored by the Royal Photographic Society and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels. Conan Doyle was so intrigued by the Crewe Circle that he wrote a book about it entitled The Case for Spirit Photography (1922).

Over the years the spirit photographs taken by the members of the Crewe Circle have come under detailed examination, and have been dismissed as fraudulent by many, but so far none has been proven conclusively to be a hoax. It is possible that the photos could be spontaneous images of spiritscaptured on the film plates.

Born in the Netherlands, Croiset grew up to become an internationally renowned clairvoyant, highly regarded as a police psychicfor his ability to find missing people, animals and objects.

Croiset was raised in foster homes and orphanages and began to experience clairvoyanceat the age of six. He dropped out of school at 13 and drifted into unskilled work. The turning point in his life came in 1935 when he was introduced to a group of local spiritualists, and over the next few years his reputation as a psychic and healer grew. In 1945 Croiset volunteered to be a test subject for the parapsychologist Willem Tenhaef from the University of Utrecht. Tenhaef was so impressed by Croiset’s ability that he began to mentor him, and introduced him to police work. In the years that followed Croiset became famous for his help in solving crimes all over the world. His passion was finding missing children.

Croiset never accepted payment for his psychic readings, but he did accept donations for his healing clinic where he treated thousands of clients. He was able to diagnose a person instantly on seeing them. Perhaps his most famous contribution to the field of parapsychologywas to popularize the chair test. In this test, chairs in a room would be numbered, and Croiset was able to predict successfully who would sit in a selected chair a month or so before a meeting took place.

Sir William Crookes is perhaps best known as a ground-breaking chemist and physicist who discovered X rays and explored the existence of subatomic particles such as the electron. For much of his life he was also deeply committed to spiritualism. He served as president of the Ghost Clubof London for a while and took a great interest in the cases investigated by this organization. During his own investigations Crookes believed that many times he did in fact witness the materializationof human forms, and he also studied and photographed teleplasm and ectoplasm.

Published posthumously in 1926, Crookes’s work, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, is still considered required reading for any serious student of the subject.

Patterns, typically circle shaped, that appear mysteriously in the middle of grain fields in the middle of the night. The grain inside the circles is usually crushed as if knocked down by force. No tracks have been found leading to these circles, resulting in the belief that some paranormalforce must have been involved in their creation. Some crop circles have been exposed as hoaxes, but others remain unexplained.

Crop circles have been reported all over the world, including in the USA, but they began appearing in southern England in the 1970s. They vary in size from about 10 feet to 200 or even 300 feet in diameter. They aren’t always circles but can also appear in elaborate formations and patterns. They are always immaculate and cleanly made.

Natural forces, such as violent or freak weather patterns, stationary whirlwindsor the effects of irrigation have been put forward as theories, but all these fail to explain the more complex patterns, which often resemble pictograms. There are those who believe some intelligent life force is trying to communicate with humankind, while others believe extraterrestrial forces must be at work. The mystery remains unsolved.

A method used extensively in the early twentieth century to test the powers of mediums. The correspondences were made up of the same or similar information allegedly from discarnate entitiesdelivered to mediums while they were in a tranceor through automatic writing.

It is difficult to explain how these messages occur, and many psychical researchers believe they provide good evidence to support the case for life after death. Others believe that the mediums draw the information from their own unconsciousor from others using telepathyor clairvoyance.

Between 1900 and 1932, cross correspondences were studied intensively by the Society for Psychical Research, in particular, by Frederick Myers. Myers believed that human life might continue after death and that finding evidence for it required the help of the dead - in fact, the dead would have the best idea for how the living could discover this evidence. He stated that producing this evidence would require a group effort on the part of several spiritsrather than just contact with one spirit.

Cross correspondences were produced during Myers’ lifetime by several mediums. Words spoken under trance and written during automatic writing sessions by mediums sitting at the same time but in different locations showed similarities to one another. But it was after Myers’ death in 1901 that cross correspondences became more frequent; a message delivered to one medium would be undecipherable until combined with a message from another.