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Further experiments with the Icelandic medium Hafsteinn Bjornsson
... may diminish the motives of both the medium and [the deceased] communicator for communicating" (Stevenson, 1968:336). Stevenson himself, therefore, with his colleague Erlendur Haraldsson, introduced a variation on proxy research in which the sitter was present, but visually and acoustically isolated from the medium, and the experimenter sitting with the medium was blind as to the identity of the sitter (Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1974). Ten sitters participated. ...
... and two additional sitters ranked their reading #2. 7 Unfortunately, more recent studies like that of Haraldsson and Stevenson (Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1974) have not been as successful, producing results that were either not signifi cant (Jensen & Cardeña, 2009, O'Keeffe & Wiseman, 2005, Schwartz, Geoffrion, Jain, Lewis, & Russek, 2003 or only marginally signifi cant (Beischel & Schwartz, 2007). A colleague and I recently conducted some research involving proxy sittings that was successful. ...
... 2) Stevenson (1968) had suggested that the presence of the real sitter might increase the motivation for a deceased person to communicate, and in Saltmarsh's study (1929) results were better when the sitter was present than during proxy sittings. Can we examine this question of motivation, yet keep the methodological advantages of proxy studies, by somehow combining proxy and non-proxy sittings, either in different sittings as Saltmarsh did, or simultaneously as Haraldsson and Stevenson (1974) did? ...
The study of mediums was part of a larger program of psychical research, begun in the late 19th century, intended to examine specifically whether human personality survives bodily death, and more generally whether the brain produces mind or consciousness, as most scientists since the late 19th century have assumed. Although a vast amount of high-quality research resulted from that effort, the study of mediumship was almost completely abandoned during the latter half of the 20th century, primarily because of the impasse reached over whether the phenomena are best-interpreted as attributable to deceased agents or to living agents. In this paper the author examines some types of mediumship research that have been considered particularly important for the survival question: cross-correspondences, drop-in communicators, and proxy cases. She argues that a revival of research on mediumship, particularly with proxy sittings, could contribute importantly to present-day psychical research and, perhaps ultimately, move us beyond the current impasse.
Keywords: mediumship--survival--proxy research--cross-correspondences--drop-in communicators
... We chose to emphasize aspects of Stevenson's work with spontaneous ESP experiences because we feel that this part of his legacy to parapsychology is sometimes forgotten in the emphasis on his survival-related studies, particularly those with children who claim to remember previous lives. This may be the case in part because, with one exception (Stevenson, 1992), Stevenson dropped ESP experience research early on, moving in later years to focus instead almost exclusively on reincarnation and other topics with implications for the question of survival of bodily death (e.g., Greyson & Stevenson, 1980; Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1974; Stevenson, 1975 Stevenson, , 1984b). It goes without saying that Stevenson was an important figure—one may say a leader—in the study of spontaneous ESP between 1960 and 1970. ...
... In addition, he developed rating scales to study spontaneous cases (Stevenson, 1965b; Stevenson, Palmer, & Stanford, 1977). 2 This is not to say that Stevenson was against experiments or that he did not conduct experimental work. For example, he was involved in experiments with medium Hafstein Bjornsson (Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1974) and psychic Pavel Stepanek (Pratt et al., 1968). He also conducted studies of psychic photography () and discussed both criticisms of (Stevenson, 1967) and testimony about () experiments. ...
In 1959, in his first paper about parapsychology, ''The Uncomfortable Facts about Extrasensory Perception,'' published in Harper's Magazine, Ian Stevenson referred both to spontaneous cases and to experiments as primary sources of evidence for the existence of ESP. He summarized aspects of the work of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), as well as the work of J. B. Rhine and his associates at Duke University. In the same year Stevenson visited Rhine and had a conversation with his wife, Louisa E. Rhine, about spontaneous case research. As Stevenson wrote years later: After the conventional morning coffee with general conversation about parapsychology, Louisa Rhine led me into a side room for a private conversation. There she explained to me her belief that nothing substantial could ever be made of reports of individual cases. In her view, they were all worthless as scientific evidence. In my article in Harper's Magazine I had mentioned individual case reports and wrote that at least some of them deserved the attention of investigators. Louisa Rhine generously hoped to save me from futile endeavors. Her warning came too late. Some of the reports I read by the earlier psychical researchers of what were then called ''spontaneous cases'' had deeply impressed me. (Stevenson, 2006: 14) One of us (CSA) remembers Stevenson saying some time in the 1980s that, while he listened respectfully to L. E. Rhine, his polite silence did not mean she had convinced him of her views. Stevenson instead became a specialist in the study of spontaneous cases. In this paper we will discuss his work with spontaneous ESP experiences, relying on his publications that appeared in print from 1960 on.1
... Despite Gauld's indication of the need for better mediumship evidence, a true revival in scientific mediumship research did not occur until some 24 years after the publication of the 1977 Handbook of Parapsychology (although mediumship research and research in closely related areas did indeed occasionally get published in the intervening years 13,14,17,27,32 ). Two groups were responsible for the first efforts to bring rigorous experimental design to bear on the matter of whether mediums provide accurate and anomalously received information about deceased persons. ...
... Despite Gauld's indication of the need for better mediumship evidence, a true revival in scientific mediumship research did not occur until some 24 years after the publication of the 1977 Handbook of Parapsychology (although mediumship research and research in closely related areas did indeed occasionally get published in the intervening years 13,14,17,27,32 ). Two groups were responsible for the first efforts to bring rigorous experimental design to bear on the matter of whether mediums provide accurate and anomalously received information about deceased persons. ...
Background and purpose: Mediumship is the ostensible phenomenon of human-mediated communication between deceased and living persons. In this paper, we perform a meta-analysis of all available modern experimental evidence, specifically from 2001 to December 2019, investigating the accuracy of apparently anomalously received information provided by mediums about deceased individuals.
Methods: 14 papers passed our selection criteria, for a total of 18 experiments. Both Bayesian and frequentist random effects models were used to estimate the aggregate effect size across studies.
Results: The overall standardized effect size (proportion index), estimated both with a frequentist and a Bayesian random effects model, yielded a value of .18 (95% C.I. = .12 - .25) above the chance level. Furthermore, these estimates passed the control of two publication bias tests.
Conclusions: The results of this meta-analysis support the hypothesis that some mediums can retrieve information about deceased persons through unknown means.
... Despite Gauld's indication of the need for better mediumship evidence, a true revival in scientific mediumship research did not occur until some 24 years after the publication of the 1977 Handbook of Parapsychology (although mediumship research and research in closely related areas did indeed occasionally get published in the intervening years 13,14,17,27,32 ). Two groups were responsible for the first efforts to bring rigorous experimental design to bear on the matter of whether mediums provide accurate and anomalously received information about deceased persons. ...
Background and purpose: Mediumship is the ostensible phenomenon of human-mediated communication between deceased and living persons. In this paper, we perform a meta-analysis of all available modern experimental evidence up to December 2019 investigating the accuracy of apparently anomalous information provided by mediums about deceased individuals.
... piper's sittings shows that a third of the communicators had died violently (Hodgson, 1892(Hodgson, , 1897(Hodgson, -1898. In 1972, when I was an observer at over forty sittings with the Icelandic medium Hafsteinn Björnsson, I noticed a high incidence of violent deaths among the communicators (Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1974). Regrettably, no systematic record was kept of the relative number of violent deaths among direct communicators, except for one séance. ...
Personal encounters with the dead are reported by 25% of Western Europeans and 30% of Americans. Three hundred thirty-seven Icelanders reporting such experiences were interviewed at length. Ninety percent of them reported sensory experiences (apparitions) of a deceased person; 69% were visual, 28% auditory, 13% tactile, and 4% olfactory. Fewer than half of the experiences occurred in twilight or darkness. In half of the cases the experiencer was actively engaged or working. Disproportionately prominent were apparitions of those who died violently and crisis apparitions observed close to the time of death of the person who was perceived, although in the majority of cases, the percipient did not know diat the person had died. Reported mode of death and the identity of the deceased persons were verified by checking official records. A fair number of collective experiences were reported, some of which were verified by other witnesses.
... This experiment established under controlled conditions the paranormality of Hafsteinn's mediumship, at least in this experiment. Further experiments with Hafsteinn that I conducted with other coexperimenters, however, were, with one exception, nonsignificant (Haraldsson, Pratt, & Kristjansson, 1978). ...
In 1965 Ian Stevenson wrote: ''Among all the cases which seem to provide impressive evidence of survival, a most important group consists of those in which a communicator appears whose existence neither medium nor sitters know anything about at the time of the manifestation'' (p. 65), a phenomenon he christened ''drop-in'' mediumistic communications (e.g., Stevenson, 1970: 53). He argues that if ''subsequent checking verifies the existence of a person and details corresponding with the communicator and his message ... (then) the explanation of the communication as resulting from telepathy between the medium and the sitters breaks down'' (Stevenson, 1965: 47). He goes on to discuss the difficulties in excluding the possibilities of latent subconscious memory (cryptomnesia) and fraud, but he also emphasizes the great importance, when these can be excluded, of purpose or intent that seems to lie behind such ''drop-in'' cases. In the same paper, and again a few years later (1970), Stevenson writes that he is preparing a monograph reviewing some 60 cases of the ''drop-in'' type, mostly from the published literature but some of which had not yet been reported. This planned review of ''drop-in'' cases was never finished, probably because of his increasing commitment to the study of cases of the reincarnation type. He did, however, publish 10 papers on mediumship, eight of them dealing with cases of ''drop-in'' communications or communicators (Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1974, 1975a,b; Ravaldini, Biondi, & Stevenson, 1990; Stevenson, 1965, 1968, 1970, 1973, 1975; Stevenson & Beloff, 1980).
... This experiment established under controlled conditions the paranormality of Hafsteinn's mediumship, at least in this experiment. Further experiments with Hafsteinn that I conducted with other coexperimenters, however, were, with one exception, nonsignificant (Haraldsson, Pratt, & Kristjansson, 1978). ...
... This experiment established under controlled conditions the paranormality of Hafsteinn's mediumship, at least in this experiment. Further experiments with Hafsteinn that I conducted with other coexperimenters, however, were, with one exception, nonsignificant (Haraldsson, Pratt, & Kristjansson, 1978). ...
Dr. Ian Stevenson is a gentle American doctor. He has a way of putting the children and their parents at ease. He brings gifts to the children that he is interviewing, and his gentle, non-invasive style won their confidence. This resulted to many private incidents connected to their previous lives. After 16 years of absence from Lebanon, he returned for another research on reincarnation. He also delivered a presentation and lead a discussion on reincarnation at American University of Beirut.
... La question pourrait sans doute faire débat si son cas n'était étayé par d'autres exemples semblables. Hafsteinn, en l'occurrence, était lui aussi dirigé par un esprit, surnommé Runki, qui fut l'opérateur de toutes ses séances et dont il est fait grand cas dans les rapports officiels des spirites ainsi que dans des travaux plus récents de parapsychologues islandais et américains (Haraldsson, Stevenson, 1974, 1975Haraldsson, Pratt, 1978). Pourtant, Hafsteinn ne parle pas davantage de Runki qu'il ne mentionne même pas dans son autobiographie. ...
Focusing on Icelandic Spiritualism, this paper argues that during 20th century the supernatural experiences moved from a scientist research of paranormality to a religious experience of the supernatural in the innerself. Mediums were the agents of this change. Claiming self-determination and self-authority, they slowly gained a new identity through a set of intimate and personal relationship with supernatural entities. They akso kept a distance with the official spiritualism and explored the path of a mysticism of the “second kind”. By the way, they had in Iceland a great influence on the collective and local representations of the supernatural.
Background: Research on channeling and mediumship is small but growing. However, the terms used for these activities are varied; there is no accepted, coherent framework of terms or definitions for the process or the people involved in receiving information from nonmaterial sources.
Objective: To examine terms and definitions of channeling used across existing, peer-reviewed studies and collate the data into a coherent framework.
Methods: Lexscien databases and Google Scholar were searched for peer-reviewed studies examining information reception from purported discarnate beings of any type.
Results: 92 unique, peer-reviewed studies were included in which 29 unique terms describing the person or the process were identified, defined, and tabulated.
Conclusions: The terms and definitions have evolved over the past 150 years, with new terms being applied in recent decades. Often the same terms are applied to very different processes. Analysis of the processes suggests a possible framework for consideration by future researchers in describing their work.
Growing public interest in the phenomenon of mediumship, particularly among bereaved persons, suggests the need for renewed controlled studies of mediums, both to provide potential clients with criteria for judging mediums and to help researchers learn whether they can produce specific and accurate information to which they have had no normal access and, if so, under what conditions. Two research studies were conducted in which mediums provided readings about particular deceased persons to a proxy sitter. The real sitters then blindly rated the reading that was intended for them along with several control readings. In the first study, the results were not significant. In the second, much larger study the results were highly significant (z = -3.89, p < 0.0001, 2-tailed). The authors discuss 2 possible weaknesses of the successful study and indicate some directions for further research.
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