1>🧠⚡ Telepathy: When One Mind Seemed to Reach Another

🧠⚡ Telepathy: When One Mind Seemed to Reach Another

We have spent much of our journey through the nineteenth century sitting beside séance tables, listening for raps in darkened rooms, watching mediums fall into trance, and wondering whether the dead could somehow reach the living.

But another possibility was beginning to intrigue psychical researchers.

What if the mysterious message came from someone who wasn't dead at all?

What if one living mind could somehow reach another?

By the 1880s, investigators were experimenting seriously with what they called thought-transference. In 1882, Frederic W. H. Myers gave the phenomenon the name we still use today:

Telepathy.^[1]

And once researchers began looking for it, they encountered stories that ranged from remarkable to suspicious and sometimes managed to be both at once.

👧 The Sisters Who Seemed to Read Minds

One of the earliest famous cases began not in a laboratory, but as a family game.

In 1880, the Reverend A. M. Creery of Buxton, England, began experimenting with his daughters. One girl would leave the room while the others selected an object. When she returned, she would attempt to identify what they had chosen.

The girls were startlingly good at it.

Eventually physicist William F. Barrett came to investigate. The experiments became more difficult. The girls were asked to identify playing cards, numbers, names, objects, and even characters someone else was thinking about.

In one series, the targets included Peter Piper, Bluebeard, Tom Thumb, and Cinderella.

The girls reportedly got all four.^[2]

Other trials attempted to prevent ordinary signaling by separating the person guessing from those who knew the target.

For the newly founded Society for Psychical Research, the Creery sisters appeared to offer tantalizing evidence that thoughts might somehow travel between minds. Thought-transference became one of the Society's earliest major investigations.^[3]

Then came the problem.

Two of the sisters were caught using a secret signaling system.

Suddenly years of extraordinary results were thrown into doubt.

But even that did not completely settle the case. The method of signaling that had been discovered could not account for some earlier successful trials in which the person attempting to receive the information could neither see nor hear family members who knew the target.^[4]

Had the sisters cheated all along using methods nobody discovered?

Had genuine results occurred alongside cheating?

Or had investigators simply failed to recognize an ordinary explanation?

The Creery sisters left psychical researchers with something considerably less satisfying than proof.

They left them with a mystery.

And a warning.

🍋 Could You Send Someone a Taste?

Meanwhile, in Liverpool, businessman Malcolm Guthrie became involved in another series of experiments with two young women generally identified in the records as Miss E. and Miss R.

Some tests involved drawings and objects.

Others became considerably stranger.

The women were blindfolded while another person tasted substances they could not see. The question was whether the women might somehow receive an impression of the sensation itself through thought-transference.

The experiments attracted physicist Oliver Lodge, who personally investigated some of Guthrie's subjects. Lodge became sufficiently impressed by what he observed to report on thought-transference experiments in Nature in 1884.

He believed that, in the trials he had witnessed, conscious collusion and unconscious muscular signaling had been excluded.^[5]

That did not prove telepathy.

Nor did it eliminate every possible ordinary explanation. Taste experiments carried an obvious difficulty: taste and smell are closely connected, making it extremely difficult to exclude every possible sensory clue.

But the experiments raised a wonderfully strange question.

If telepathy existed, perhaps we had been imagining it incorrectly.

Maybe one person did not hear another person's thoughts as words.

Perhaps what arrived was only a fragment.

A taste.

An image.

A feeling.

Something that suddenly appeared inside the mind without any obvious explanation for how it got there.

🌙 When Nobody Was Trying

This is where telepathy becomes particularly interesting to me.

The laboratory experiments were attempts to make telepathy happen.

But outside those rooms were people claiming that something very different had happened spontaneously.

Someone suddenly knew that a loved one was in danger.

Someone felt an inexplicable terror at the same moment something terrible happened miles away.

And occasionally, someone claimed actually to see the distant person.

Myers and other early psychical researchers began considering whether some so-called crisis apparitions, appearances of people experiencing death or extreme danger somewhere else, might represent a form of telepathy rather than an apparition of someone already dead.^[6]

That brings us remarkably close to territory we have already crossed in our paranormal timeline.

A figure appears.

The person seeing it believes someone is standing before them.

But that person is somewhere else entirely.

Was it an apparition?

A telepathic image?

Coincidence?

Or something about the human mind that neither the Victorians nor we have completely understood?

The researchers did not know.

But by the end of the nineteenth century, an old human experience had acquired a new name and a new question.

Two people.

Two minds.

No spoken message between them.

And yet, somehow, one seems to know something that belongs to the other.

Can one mind truly reach another? 🧠⚡

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📚 Footnotes & Sources

1. Frederic W. H. Myers coined the term “telepathy” in 1882, replacing earlier expressions such as “thought-reading” and “thought-transference.” Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia, “Frederic W. H. Myers.” Read source. ↩
2. The Creery sisters were investigated beginning in the early 1880s. Tests included cards, numbers, names, objects, and characters. Balfour Stewart and Alfred Hopkinson reported a series involving Peter Piper, Bluebeard, Tom Thumb, and Cinderella. Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia, “Creery Telepathy Experiments.” Read source. ↩
3. Thought-transference was among the early subjects investigated by researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research after its establishment in 1882. See Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia, “Psychical Research Before 1882.” Read source. ↩
4. The later discovery of signaling between members of the Creery family damaged the case, although investigators argued that the discovered method did not account for every earlier result obtained under more restrictive conditions. Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia, “Creery Telepathy Experiments.” Read source. ↩
5. Oliver Lodge investigated thought-transference experiments associated with Malcolm Guthrie's circle and reported on the subject in Nature in 1884. Oliver J. Lodge, “An Account of Some Experiments in Thought-Transference,” Nature. Read source. ↩
6. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and other early psychical researchers investigated reports in which a person apparently perceived someone undergoing a distant crisis. Such experiences became central to the study of telepathy and apparitions and were later extensively examined in Phantasms of the Living. Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia, “Frederic W. H. Myers.” Read source. ↩