Hereward Carrington

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Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) was a British-born American psychical researcher and author who spent a long career investigating mediums, hauntings, and the claims of spiritualism — and who, more than most of his colleagues, came down on the side of believing some of what he saw. He was born in St Helier, on the Channel Island of Jersey, in October 1880, and emigrated to the United States as a child in 1888; he was raised there, settling eventually in New York. He joined the British Society for Psychical Research young, around 1899, while still in his late teens, and made the study of the paranormal his living. In 1907 he joined the American Society for Psychical Research as well, working for a time as assistant to its leading figure, the philosopher James Hyslop. He took a doctorate from Oskaloosa College in 1918, and across roughly five decades turned out more than a hundred books — an output so large that it is part of what his reputation has had to answer for. He died in Los Angeles in 1958.

The work that made his name was the investigation of physical mediumship — the séance phenomena of moving objects, rappings, and materializations that fascinated the late Victorian and Edwardian world. Carrington was unusual among psychical researchers in that he had trained himself in conjuring; he understood how a fraudulent medium produced effects, and he exposed a number of them. His breakthrough book, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, Fraudulent and Genuine (1907), was in large part a manual of how false séance effects were contrived — slate-writing, table-turning, trumpet mediumship, materializations, sealed-letter reading, spirit photography — and it named exposed operators such as Henry Slade and William Eglinton. He reckoned that something like ninety-eight per cent of the phenomena he had examined were fraudulent. Harry Houdini, no friend of spiritualism, judged it about the best book ever written on the subject. That craft knowledge of deception was the foundation of everything Carrington claimed: a man who knew the tricks, and therefore claimed the standing to say when something was not one.

The standing cut both ways. His most famous case was the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, whom he tested at Naples in 1908 alongside Everard Feilding and W. W. Baggally — three sitters chosen for their familiarity with conjuring method — and judged, with them, to have produced effects they could not account for as trickery. The joint report appeared in the Society’s Proceedings the following year, and Carrington arranged Palladino’s tour of the United States in 1909 and 1910. The verdict divided the field, and remains contested: skeptics held that Palladino cheated whenever the controls slackened, and that Carrington, having staked his reputation on her, saw what he wished to see. The detail of those Naples sittings belongs to Palladino’s own story; what matters to Carrington’s is the posture it fixed him in. Having built his authority on detecting fraud, he had spent it endorsing phenomena as real, and the same expertise that made his exposures persuasive made his endorsements suspect. He insisted he had no theory to defend and that he had never witnessed anything he considered undoubtedly spiritistic — yet his published conclusions repeatedly affirmed more than his colleagues thought the evidence could bear. He is the type-case of the fraud-expert turned guarded believer, and the unease of that position is the heart of his career.

His writing reached well beyond the séance room. He wrote on telepathy and apparitions, on the survival of death, and — at length — on the physiology of fasting, promoting prolonged fasts, a raw and fruitarian diet, and notions of a vital energy animating the body; he went so far as to reject the germ theory of disease. The British Medical Journal faulted these claims for want of evidence, and Nature dismissed the work as unscientific. The output was uneven by any measure, ranging from careful case reports to credulous compilation. He founded a short-lived American Psychical Institute in 1921, a laboratory that ran about two years, and reconstituted it in New York in 1933 with his wife, Marie. He investigated the Boston medium Mina “Margery” Crandon during the 1920s — an episode later cited against him, since his entanglement with the case and a possible financial dependence on the Crandons were held to compromise his judgment. He ran word-association experiments with the medium Eileen Garrett to probe whether her trance “control,” Uvani, was a separate being, concluding the data pointed to mental entities independent of the medium’s control. And with the American spiritualist Sylvan Muldoon he produced The Projection of the Astral Body (1929), built around Muldoon’s accounts of leaving his body at will; the book became a standard reference for later writers on out-of-body experience, less for its evidence than for its detail, and Carrington followed it with a sequel in 1951.

His standing among historians is mixed by design of the field itself. Psychical research set out to apply the methods of science to questions science had set aside, and Carrington embodied both halves of that ambition and its difficulty: genuinely rigorous about fraud, yet willing to affirm conclusions the available evidence could not secure. Critics from Paul Kurtz to C. E. M. Hansel read the Palladino endorsement as naïveté at best, and the arc most accounts trace runs from rigorous fraud-buster toward increasingly credulous compiler. He is read now less as an authority on the phenomena than as a witness to the moment when the séance room and the laboratory briefly shared a table — and to how hard it proved to keep them apart.

→ Related: Eusapia Palladino · W W Baggally · Everard Feilding · Astral Projection · Out Of Body Experience · Harry Houdini