In some of my early writing on telephone anomalies (see “Phone calls from the Dead”, FT405:30-35), I stumbled across the book They Knew The Unknown by Martin Ebon,1 who produced many popular works on psychic phenomena. This particular book focused on well-known public figures – typically scientists – and their links to psychical research. My main interest was Ebon’s coverage of Thomas Edison and his interests in Spiritualism and contact with the dead (see FT363:30-37), but it also provided insights into many other figures and their links to the field, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Dickens.
When the Covid-19 lockdown began, my reading tended to biographies of figures of interest to me throughout my life. This included parapsychologists, of course – I worked my way through the life of JB Rhine in Denis Brian’s The Enchanted Voyager2 and read the personal memoires of Walter Franklin Prince3 – but also actors and singers who have, in some way, struck a chord with me over the years. What jumped out at me was that in each of these autobiographies there was at least some mention of significant anomalous experiences of clear interest to parapsychology. Here, I’ll share just a few of those accounts.
TALK SHOW GHOSTS
Before I read these life stories, I’d also come across a few television interviews that produced examples of exceptional experiences that stood out for me. The first was with the singer Sting (Gordon Sumner). In 2009, the and many other news outlets carried reports of Sting’s ‘ghost confession’. Sting later discussed this in numerous interviews, such as one on in 2019 in which he talked about encounters in his purportedly haunted“Yeah, you would wake up in the morning and everything had been reorganised in the kitchen, furniture was in a different place, bottles were smashed, plates were smashed on the floor. And one night I woke up and I saw Trudie [his wife] standing in the corner with our child. And I was wondering why she was staring at me, and then I reached over and there was Trudie [indicating the bed next to him]. She went ‘Who’s that?’ [pointing to the woman in the corner]. And we both saw this woman and a child in the corner of the room. Then we found out that it used to be a pub called The Three Ducks, in the 17th century, and I don’t know what happened there, but it was a very weird atmosphere. Then when I sold the house, it kept being resold every few months. I liked the ghosts. I enjoyed their company. But I was very sceptical about it.” Host and audience greeted all this with nervous laughter, although they appeared respectful of Sting’s revelations. Fallon related having been in buildings with spooky atmospheres or reputations and creating a calm mindset by saying out loud to any putative ghosts: “Hey I’m cool, I’m good with you guys, you can do whatever. Haunt me. Have fun, it’s your place. Right?”
