The Spirit Gallery

Whenever I imagine a medium at work, I think of the mediums of the Spiritualist Movement of the turn of the 20th century.  I imagine women and men sitting at old wooden tables talking to the dead.  I also view mediums with skepticism.  I tend to think that in any money making venture there's always an angle and sometimes people stretch the truth for the profit.  I guess I am saying that I think most mediums are full of it and I've never seen a medium that's made me believe otherwise.

Last night however,  I joined medium, Tracy Farquhar, for a spirit gallery at the Lowe Mill and she managed to change my mind.  The Lowe Mill is an old Mill in a minor state of decay.  It has been revamped and turned into an art center.  There are concerts there and many artists have studio space in the Flying Monkey portion of the Lowe Mill.  Beloved Books is in a corner of the Flying Monkey and is one of those last corners of the world that still pays tribute to the written word in the form of purely paper books.  There are no kindles or nooks there.  There are only shelves of old books surrounded by paintings and chairs.

The Spirit Gallery was in Beloved Books and music from the concert below made the floor boards vibrate as the medium spoke.  Dogs barked in the distance and the sound of frolicking people surrounded the darkened book store.   Tracy Farquhar paced in the dark and  said that there were many spirits in the store with us.   She didn't ask any questions.  She just called out a name.  She said there was a Robert or Roger with us  and he was someone's uncle.  She said he died 5 years ago from something having to do with his brain.  She said she saw an old family house by the lake.  She said  Robert/Roger liked fishing.  It was at this point that I admitted that I did have an Uncle Roger who passed five years ago.  He wasn't my favorite uncle so I wasn't overjoyed to talk with him again, but I was intrigued by the accuracy of what she was saying.  She said the family house had just changed hands and that although it was still in the family it wasn't with us anymore.   The house was crumbling.  The foundation was sinking.  There was an old tree in the yard that Roger had buried something he valued by when he was a boy.   Roger saw me as a girl.  I was a little girl to him and he wanted me to remember him taking me someplace.  He also felt bad about some falling out he had with my father.  I thought she was talking about my biological father who had divorced my mother so they didn't talk anymore.  He also said he was worried about a girl, whom the psychic called my daughter.  I told her I didn't have a daughter.  She said it was a young girl who was or had been in school but was leaving because of social problems.  He wanted her to go back to school.  My sister did just drop out of college last semester because of problems with social anxiety, although I didn't tell the medium that.  I tried not to tell the medium much.  She continued to say I had some kind of foot or heal pain and he said I should take care of that. I do have plantar fasciitis and I hate taking care of it because that involves wearing ugly shoes, my nemesis. 

The medium moved on to another spirit and I was left vaguely stunned and trying to figure out how she could have possibly guessed all of that information.  I still can't think of a way,  I am assuming that she did somehow reach the spirit of my Uncle Roger.  I later learned that my step-father and my Uncle Roger had a huge falling out right before he died and that my Uncle had a favorite tree by our old family house where he built a fort and buried his treasures.  The psychic had known things I didn't even know.

The Spirit Gallery ended in many tears and people being reunited with long lost loved ones.  Lots of people were crying.  I was just stunned.  I guess if I believe in ghosts it isn't that much of a stretch to believe in a medium, especially in one who knew more about my family than I do.

The Disgusting History of Ectoplasm

I'm revisiting an older post tonight.  I wrote this post back in the days when I only had one or two followers and many of my posts went unknown.  I wrote this at the beginning of last year and I'm revisiting it, because I just watched Ghost Busters again and the ectoplasm in that movie reminded me of the wonderful and utterly disgusting history of ectoplasm. 

During the time comtemporary to and following World War I there was and explosion in what was then called spiritualism or mentalism. Spiritualism is a religious movement revolving around communicating with the dead via a medium. This explosion was brought on by the massive number of people that died in the war and of sickness during this time period. One of the more bizarre activites that became prevalent in this movement was the expolsion of ectoplasm. Ectoplasm is a term used to define a physical manifestation of the supernatural and it usually came out of the medium's nose, mouth, or ears. The term, defined by Charles Richet, meant spiritual energy externalized by psychics. It was for many years used as absolute confirmation that the supernatural was tangible and proveable.  It was supposed to be the physical remains of a ghostly presence.  Ghosts were there and they were real and the medium could prove it by showing ectoplasm.

Ectoplasm was so believed in that it was featured in respectable scientific journals and it's existance was confirmed by the great minds of the time including William Butler Yeats and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was so believed in that Scientific America sought to do a study on it and offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who could demonstrate the release of extoplasm in front of a scientific panel. This reward lead to the beginning of the end of the scientific validity of ectoplasm.

What was discovered was both revolting and eye opening. Although many techniques and materials have been used by mediums to produce ectoplasm, the medium examined by this panel was found to be storing a sheep gut and fat mixture in a sack in her vagina which she expolsed at the appropriate time to make it appear as if she was expelling ectoplasm. Further research into other psychics revealed many other grotesque techniques for producing this fraudulent material. Some women learned how to regurgitate on demand and swallowed yards of muslin and cheese cloth which they would vomit on command. Others stored materials in their rectum.

Although this story is disgusting. It is more about the disgustingness that is possible within humanity when exploiting the needs of those suffering from the lost of a loved one than the vileness of the actual act. Although I love a good ghost story, it is always amazing to me how much more horrifying live people can be than ghosts.   Ghosts have never been shown to leave real ectopasm, but it is amazing how many mediums were shown to be literally pulling it from there asses. 

The Paranormal Doctor and His Ghostly Cures

For the better part of history,   mental illness was believed to be caused by the paranormal.  Of course,  no one in history would have said it this way.  They would have called it demon possession or spirit possession, but ancient cultures usually attributed the symptoms of psychosis to the supernatural world.  They turned to treatments like trepanning and exorcism to cure  the infected soul.

Beginning with such revolutionary minds as Galen,  this notion began to fade.   A medical model replaced the spiritual model and the medical model has prevailed for  thousands of years in Western society.  None of this seemed to  matter to Dr. Titus Bull.   Dr. Bull practiced medicine in New York in the 20's and 30's and he believed that modern medicine was too short sighted in its approach to mental illness.  He believed that  bipolar disorder, shizophrenia, and alcoholism were all caused by possessing spirits that entered their victims through the base of the brain.   He didn't think these spirits were necessarily evil or demonic.  He just thought they were very confused and lost.   He believed these spirits were the ghosts of the dead that needed help passing over to the other side.  He treated mental illness by helping the possessing spirits cross over.  He even published a book on the topic to help other physicians use similar techniques. In his book, he cites case studies and success stories.  He presents arguements that his ghostly cures are the effective cures.

Dr. Bull practiced during and after the spiritualism explosion of the early 20th century.  Although he was rare as a doctor, taken in context of the times his beliefs make sense.   He is fascinating, however, and sometimes, when I am working with a patient who has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals dozens of times and is completely resistent to all modern medicine,  I have to wonder if maybe he Dr. Bull wasn't on to something.