Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,32

day, the English royal family is partial to psychical research, although very little of this is ever published. Less secret is the case of Canada’s late Prime Minister William Mackenzie King. According to Life magazine, which devoted several pages to King, he “was an ardent spiritualist who used mediums, the ouija board and a crystal ball for guidance in his private life.” It is debatable whether this marks King as a spiritualist or whether he was merely exercising his natural gift of ESP and an interest in psychical research.

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I myself receive continual testimony that ESP is a fascinating subject to people who would not have thought of it so a few years ago. Carlton R. Adams, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy retired, having read one of my books, contacted me to discuss my views on reincarnation. John D. Grayson, associate professor of linguistics at Sir George Williams University, Montreal, Canada, said, “If I lived in New York, I should like nothing better than to enroll in your eight-lecture course on parapsychology.” Gerald S. O’Morrow has a doctorate in education and is at Indiana State University: “I belong to a small development group which meets weekly and has been doing such for the last two years.” A lady initialed S. D. writes from California, “I have been successful in working a ouija board for eight years on a serious basis and have tried automatic writing with a small but significant amount of success. I have a great desire to develop my latent powers but until now I haven’t known who to go to that I could trust.” The lady’s profession is that of a police matron with a local police department.

A. P. gives a remarkable account of ESP experiences over the past twenty years. His talents include both visual and auditory phenomena. In reporting his incidents to me, he asked for an appraisal of his abilities with ESP. By profession A. P. is a physician, a native of Cuba.

S. B. Barris contacted me for an appraisal of his ESP development in light of a number of incidents in which he found himself capable of foretelling the result of a race, whether or not a customer would conclude the sale he was hoping for, and several incidents of clairvoyance. Mr. Barris, in addition to being a salesman in mutual funds, is an active member of the United States Army Reserves with the rank of Major.

Stanley R. Dean, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Florida, is a member of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on transcultural psychiatry and the recent coordinator of a symposium at which a number of parapsychologists spoke.

Curiously enough, the number of people who will accept the existence of ESP is much larger than the number of people who believe in spirit survival or the more advanced forms of occult beliefs. ESP has the aura of the scientific about it, while, to the average mind at least, subjects including spirit survival, ghosts, reincarnation, and such seemingly require facets of human acceptance other than those that are purely scientific. This, at least, is a widely held conviction. At the basis of this distinction lies the unquestionable fact that there is a very pronounced difference between ESP and the more advanced forms of occult scientific belief. For ESP to work, one need not accept survival of human personality beyond bodily death. ESP between the living is as valid as ESP between the living and the so-called dead. Telepathy works whether one partner is in the great beyond or not. In fact, a large segment of the reported phenomena involving clairvoyance can probably be explained on the basis of simple ESP and need not involve the intercession of spirits at all. It has always been debatable whether a medium obtains information about a client from a spirit source standing by, as it were, in the wings, or whether the medium obtains this information from his own unconscious mind, drawing upon extraordinary powers dormant within it. Since the results are the main concern of the client, it is generally of little importance whence the information originates. It is, of course, comforting to think that ESP is merely an extension of the ordinary five senses as we know them, and can be accepted without the need for overhauling one’s greater philosophy of life. The same cannot be said about the acceptance of spirit communication, reincarnation, and other occult phenomena. Accepting them as realities requires a profound alteration of the way