In previous chapters, we have seen examples of object movements occurring without anyone touching the objects—these are manifestations of macro (large-scale and visible to the observer) psychokinesis (PK), or “mind over matter.” The movements occurred spontaneously—a houseful of clocks stopped at the time of death, as described by Peter Fenwick; the car clock jumped first one hour and then a second hour for Jeffrey Kane and his wife; my bottle tops flew up with a popping sound in my kitchen. These displays might have been caused by the consciousness of a recently deceased person, as it seemed to those of us who witnessed them, or by the focused minds of the human agents in unusual states of consciousness. And in terms of the question of survival, this distinction is obviously critical. But before moving on to physical mediumship, it is also important to understand that certain macro-PK can be generated by human agents alone, the prime example being those arising in poltergeist cases.

Poltergeists are “outbreaks of spontaneous paranormal physical phenomena centering upon the organism of some particular individual,” according to expert investigators Alan Gauld and A. D. Cornell. Some scientists today refer to the phenomenon as “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” (RSPK), which usually appears to be caused by unconscious psychological disturbances and emotional imbalances within someone in the household, often a troubled adolescent. This person releases stress through a “telekinetic temper tantrum,” as Loyd Auerbach describes it, affecting the physical environment. The most common effects are percussive sounds such as raps, thumps, and banging, and household objects tilting, being knocked over, or hurled across a room. Gauld and Cornell reference five hundred cases from the literature in their 1979 classic book Poltergeists.

What’s important to contemplate is the nature of the force involved. The poltergeist phenomenon often appears to be controlled by an “intelligence which not infrequently seems to organize and direct the various happenings,” Gauld and Cornell say. In some cases communication, such as responsiveness to questions by rapping in code, occurs; the phenomenon seems to exhibit a purpose; and sometimes it focuses on one particular object. In an attempt to understand the nature of this intelligence, the two investigators explored the possibility that in a minority of cases, the intelligence may stem from a discarnate entity, as originally proposed by Ian Stevenson in a 1972 paper titled “Are Poltergeists Living or Are They Dead?” Stevenson  highlights circumstances in which an object is flying through the air and suddenly changes speed; turns at a sharp angle and continues in a new direction; or goes from hurtling through the air to suddenly floating or gently coming to rest. “I think such cases suggest some discarnate agency actually carrying the objects transported or somehow otherwise controlling their flight,” Stevenson writes. “I have not myself been able to imagine how such effects could be produced solely by the unconscious mind of the living agent.” But when objects appear to be recklessly knocked over, which is usually the case, their movements are more likely to be caused by the chaotic energy of the adolescent agent.

Along these lines, Gauld and Cornell’s “discarnate agency hypothesis” proposed that the physical effects and the purposes manifested would be different if discarnate entities were the source rather than human beings. Although rare, a case can be considered as a candidate for discarnate status if the paranormal incidents are not strictly tied to the comings and goings of one particular person or they switch from association with one person to another. If multiple witnesses see the same “phantasmal figure” or “misty shapes” in connection with the phenomena, this would also suggest a possible association with a discarnate entity. And most bizarre of all are the phenomena that “so far as is known exceed the capacities of any living agent,” such as objects materializing in midair, direct voices speaking fluently from the air, or objects becoming animated. Along with Stevenson, the two investigators propose these could be caused by discarnates.

These sorts of phenomena also occur within physical mediumship in a more positive framework, as we will soon see. And as I’m sure is obvious, we do not understand how the process works, regardless of the source of its generation. What’s important to understand is that, without question, objects can move “on their own” propelled by a mysterious force. This is not just the stuff of movies, hoaxing, or fantasy. To the contrary, small groups have conducted experiments in which table levitations and other physical phenomena have been generated through their own focus and intention, and not through eliciting the assistance of any mediums or discarnate agents. These human-generated events can be repeated and documented.

A well-known 1966 paper by K. J. Batcheldor describes a series of eighty sessions in which sitters experienced brisk movements and levitations from a forty-pound table. A six-pound table levitated six feet, beyond the reach of the small group, and other paranormal events were noted. “One cannot push a table into the air, either consciously or unconsciously, when the hands are on top of it,” Batcheldor writes. “When it happened it came as quite a shock.” In 1968, Alan Gauld and three others experienced table levitations so high that the ends of the legs, touched by the sitters, were at or above head level. A few years later, C. Brookes-Smith and D. W. Hunt described their group’s ability to induce “powerful displays of psychokinesis with ostensible levitation and telekinetic phenomena” in a journal paper. The authors describe this ability as “a psychological ‘skill’ which can be acquired through aptitude and experience by virtually all human beings.” Indeed, psychokinesis expert Stephen Braude first became interested in parapsychology, and particularly in psychokinesis, when he experienced table movements in his living room one day with two friends from graduate school. “The table rose under our fingers, all fingers were visible atop the table, and I could see clearly that the table made no contact with our legs or knees,” he says.

In the 1970s, a group of eight Canadian researchers decided to create a fictitious “spirit” communicator, a thought-form they called an “imaginary ghost,” through intense concentration and focus over a period of time. They fabricated the persona of a seventeenth-century British knight they named “Philip Aylesford,” who had an affair with a Gypsy girl. Every detail of his imaginary life was visualized and discussed by the group over a period of months, as if he were a real person.

Led by George Owen, who had previously taught genetics and mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, the group sat together beginning in 1972 and engaged their “Philip” personality through table movements, followed by unexplained raps coming from inside the table. Philip communicated by giving one knock for yes or two for no. He was able to answer questions correctly only if they pertained to the fictitious history created by the sitters that was known to them. Otherwise, he could not reply. Yet he developed into what seemed like a full personality, with likes and dislikes, reactions and opinions. All of the physical effects were caused by a force created by the imaginations and focus of the human participants, which evolved and eventually inexplicably demonstrated intelligence, preferences, and independence. William G. Roll, Oxford-educated parapsychologist and psychologist from the University of West Georgia, made the somewhat amusing comment that “to judge by Philip the poltergeist can be domesticated.”

It may be hard to accept such reports until you experience this yourself. I was fortunate to have that opportunity. In 2015, Stephen Braude invited me to be part of a small team, under his supervision, which would document table levitations and possibly more phenomena facilitated by Kai Muegge, a German physical medium. I had met Kai previously and had experienced the phenomena of his sittings in a more relaxed setting, so he welcomed my participation. Steve had conducted a successful study on Kai’s phenomena in 2013 and published the results in a leading journal. This time, he wanted to see if he could improve on some of those results by introducing stricter controls. Robert Narholz, a documentary filmmaker, would participate and our goal was to film a full table levitation in red light with the latest advanced low-light cameras.

We went to Hanau, Germany, where Kai lives, in October 2015. During our first sitting, five of us sat around a plastic garden table, 33.5 inches in diameter and 28 inches high. At Kai’s suggestion, Steve and I each tried to lift it and make it rise straight up while the tabletop remained horizontal. We had our hands and knees pressed upward against it from under the table, but it was impossible to do so. “Any movements we could produce resulted in table movements that felt obviously different from the way ostensibly genuine levitations feel—namely, slow, buoyant, and weightless and not as if pushed,” Steve wrote in his journal paper about the sessions. “Levitated tables seem to float.”

During the sessions, the lights were off and the music turned on, with a low red light nearby to be activated as needed. Like many other mediums, Kai believes that darkness facilitates the phenomena and that it is much harder to achieve results in the light (more on this to be discussed later). We were careful to make sure Kai was “controlled” during the sittings, meaning that someone on either side of him held his hands and touched his legs with theirs at all times to confirm that he was in no way physically influencing the movement of the table or any other phenomena. I was controlling Kai for most of the time on his left side. We inspected the round plastic table thoroughly to make sure there was no hidden contraption lodged within it that could cause independent movement.

Once we got started, sitting with our hands or fingertips resting lightly on top of the table, we experienced a lot of table tilting, and erratic circular movements. Sometimes the table would tilt sharply to  one side on two legs and then loudly bang the two raised legs back onto the floor. Our hands were barely touching it. But it was the longer, more relaxed levitations—with the tabletop horizontal and not tilted—that really stood out. One of them lasted about fifteen seconds. The table rose at least two and a half feet straight up, and while suspended in the air, it swayed and dipped, gliding as if rocking on waves in what seemed like a swimming motion. It was as if it had suddenly become light and fluid, floating effortlessly, almost “alive.”

In addition, we heard some strong raps on the wall a few times, which sounded like something knocking quickly in rapid succession. A bell hanging from the ceiling rang strongly once. All the sounds were recorded. These physical phenomena occurred completely on their own while we were anchored to the table with Kai controlled—much to our delight.

Before beginning the next sittings with the cameras, Steve, Robert, and I cleared the sitting room of anything unnecessary and thoroughly inspected every inch of the space and its contents. Steve locked the doors leading to the outside and kept possession of the keys. This ruled out any possibility of an accomplice entering the room or for any apparatus for raising tables to be present.

We continued to experience more levitations, some between two and three feet off the ground, including one with that remarkable back-and-forth “swimming” motion. Once, Robert pressed down on the table in front of him to see whether it would go down. He was sitting across from Kai, and if Kai was somehow lifting it from his side, the table would have yielded to Robert’s pressure. “It was spongy, like pushing down on a spring,” Robert told me. “It did not feel at all as if someone was forcing the table up from one side only, but rather, as if it was lifted by a force applied uniformly to the whole table, from beneath.” Unfortunately, Robert did not capture our best levitations on camera, with the table going straight up, due to problems introducing the light quickly enough at the right moments. But all of us were able to see the levitated table when the red light was switched on.

On one side of the room, we had rested a large, flat circular drum leaning against the legs of a chair out of anybody’s reach (with the “focus objects” shown in the diagram). While I was controlling Kai, we heard a loud bang come from the drum in the pitch dark. Afterward, we observed that its position against the chair had not changed. I got up and hit the drum moderately with my hand, and we all agreed that the resulting sound was significantly softer than it was during the sitting. Even so, the rather light pressure I put on the center of the drum easily knocked it from its position. How could this more forceful, much louder bang have left it intact in its position? What was it that hit the drum, and how did it generate this sound?

These phenomena might have been examples of a “domesticated poltergeist” created solely by Kai with the help of the group’s focused desires and intentions. This is how it seemed to me, and this certainly was Steve’s perception. However, Kai said there were “spirit controls” making it happen, and he asked them to perform throughout the sessions and talked to them regularly, even sometimes scolding them for not delivering. He threatened to end the session and warned them not to be afraid of the camera. Was he actually talking to himself while somehow making these unexplainable things happen?

In January 2016, I asked Steve Braude—who has studied Kai Muegge extensively and is arguably the leading expert in the world on macro-PK—for his thoughts:

I think it would be hasty to conclude that there was only one agent. Some of the participants felt tense enough for the emotions to have yielded a poltergeist effect. Kai may well have been the repository of most of the tension and the likely (paranormal) cause of the drum thwack and some other phenomena. But the table movements are particularly ambiguous. In the final séance we were not getting much table activity until I made the suggestion that we talk about the weather and tell jokes. Now, does that show that Kai’s PK  “force” was inhibited by the group until we got our minds off the job, or does it show that getting our minds off the job left several of us free, collectively, to influence the table? No one has a clue. I do believe there’s little reason to suppose that discarnates caused any of the phenomena, most of which seemed too closely tied to the psychodynamics of the occasion.

As for what exactly it is that could make any of those effects occur, I can’t say anything helpful except to note that if it’s PK, we don’t know what that is. We didn’t feel cold breezes like those reported with some other mediums prior to object movements. So we can’t make any moderately conservative appeals to more familiar sorts of energy transfer. We can only appeal to the mystery of PK. And even then, we don’t know if the different effects all had a similar cause. We don’t know if there’s any lawlike connection between whatever can ring a bell, hit a drum, raise a table, or make lights appear. We don’t know a thing about whether the various phenomena classed as PK share any underlying nomological unity.

As Steve implies, not much science has been applied to the study of PK. However, one fascinating study on the acoustics of paranormal rapping sounds, like the ones we heard in Hanau, establishes the truly unexplainable nature of these “otherworldly” noises. In a 2010 paper, scientist Barrie G. Colvin reported results from his examination of ten recordings of genuine poltergeist raps made from 1960 to 2000. He compared them with the waveforms of raps produced normally on the same materials. By measuring the amplitude of the sound waves on a computer program, which also indicates the strength of the sound, he obtained diagrams of the waveforms. The pitch of the sounds was also determined.

For normal rapping sounds, such as a knuckle tapping on a wall, the amplitude is at its strongest point at the moment the knuckle hits the wall—at the instant the sound begins—and then decays quickly. In the ten poltergeist raps Colvin studied, the loudest part of the sound was not at the very beginning. Instead, the sound started relatively quietly and gradually built to a maximum before it decayed, and the decay took longer.

The famous Enfield case of 1977 in North London was extensively documented by experienced investigators. They recorded mysterious raps along with some similar, normal raps on the bedroom door with the same equipment (a reel-to-reel device at 15/16 inch per second), providing ideal data for comparison. The diagrams show the striking difference between the sounds. Colvin showed that this difference between normal and poltergeist raps was consistent for all ten cases, with the same anomalous characteristics in all the unexplained raps.

Colvin concluded that the rap-like sounds caused by poltergeists seemed to not be actual raps at all. Instead, they “appear to involve the relatively slow buildup of a stress within a material, culminating in an audible sound when the level of stress reaches a specific magnitude. The reasons and physics of this mechanism are unknown…” He states that no one has been able to produce sounds with similar waveforms to those of the  unexplained raps, even when attempting to do so. His theory is that the anomalous raps originate from the vibration of molecules inside something like a table, and not from something striking the surface, which creates a very different sound. The waveforms more closely resemble seismograms from earthquakes, the only waveform of this type that is produced by normal means. The loud bang on Kai’s drum might have been generated this way—from inside the drum—which could explain why it didn’t fall over. Even though the vibration was strong, it might have affected the drum in a way we don’t understand.

It’s hard to communicate how magically thrilling it is to feel a levitated table swim, to hear a bell ring and a drum banged with no human agent involved. The mystery of it evoked my deepest curiosity. Such events are important for our investigation here not because they relate to the survival of consciousness beyond death, but because they establish for the reader that these physical phenomena really do occur. They have been reliably documented time and time again, by qualified, skeptical observers in situations where hoaxing or faulty observation can be ruled out. Objects are moved and sounds made by some force we don’t understand—a force that sometimes seems to act with intelligence. A first step to understanding physical mediumship—which in contrast may offer evidence for survival past death—is to recognize the reality of macro-PK. The reader’s mind should now be able to expand to accommodate the more elegant, refined, and even beautiful events of genuine physical mediumship.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW6pVFOpE6Q