Jan 7, 2025 08:18 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 7, 2025 08:21 PM by Magical Realist.)
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/warner.php
Your belief will help create the fact.
—William James
"Under “Duncan, Helen, Mrs.” in the catalogue of the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, now kept in the University Library, Cambridge, this entry appears: “Sample of Ectoplasm. Material alleged to have been captured from Mrs. Helen Duncan, materialising medium....”
I asked to see “the sample of ectoplasm.” The librarian looked at me strangely; he said, “Are you sure? It’s very nasty.” My response was, “Would you prefer me to look at it somewhere else?” I thought there might be a desk of shame, where I could be supervised and other readers would not be disturbed. He said, “No, but be discreet.”
There was nothing corporeal about the “sample of ectoplasm” when it arrived, in the strict sense of human or animal tissue. Inside there was a folded heap of dressmakers’ lining material, a cheap man-made fiber now yellowing white in color. About four yards had been cut straight from the bolt, with no hems, and the selvedge left plain. It had been washed and ironed, but the creases where it had been crumpled were still marked; the pattern of these showed it had been tightly wadded. There were traces of old blood that the laundry had not erased.
This bulky fabric was the spirit stuff that Helen Duncan had extruded from her body as ectoplasm, which had been “captured”—the metaphor habitually used by spirit investigators—from Mrs. Duncan during a séance in 1939.
Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium who was born in 1898 and died in 1956; her dates reveal how the quest for ectoplasm, the stuff of the other side, the substance of the ethereal body, continued well into the 20th century. Its existence still receives detailed discussion on the web, with the portraits and the stories of its heroic protagonists. Mrs. Duncan was celebrated in her lifetime for the clouds of shining, billowing spirit stuff that emanated from her as she sat in the spirit cabinet, groaning and shuddering as the trance state took hold. A medium’s body became a porous vehicle as the phenomena exuded from mouth, nose, breast and even vagina: she acted as a transmitter, in an analogous fashion to the wireless receiver, catching cosmic rays whose vibrations produced phantoms and presences...."
Your belief will help create the fact.
—William James
"Under “Duncan, Helen, Mrs.” in the catalogue of the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, now kept in the University Library, Cambridge, this entry appears: “Sample of Ectoplasm. Material alleged to have been captured from Mrs. Helen Duncan, materialising medium....”
I asked to see “the sample of ectoplasm.” The librarian looked at me strangely; he said, “Are you sure? It’s very nasty.” My response was, “Would you prefer me to look at it somewhere else?” I thought there might be a desk of shame, where I could be supervised and other readers would not be disturbed. He said, “No, but be discreet.”
There was nothing corporeal about the “sample of ectoplasm” when it arrived, in the strict sense of human or animal tissue. Inside there was a folded heap of dressmakers’ lining material, a cheap man-made fiber now yellowing white in color. About four yards had been cut straight from the bolt, with no hems, and the selvedge left plain. It had been washed and ironed, but the creases where it had been crumpled were still marked; the pattern of these showed it had been tightly wadded. There were traces of old blood that the laundry had not erased.
This bulky fabric was the spirit stuff that Helen Duncan had extruded from her body as ectoplasm, which had been “captured”—the metaphor habitually used by spirit investigators—from Mrs. Duncan during a séance in 1939.
Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium who was born in 1898 and died in 1956; her dates reveal how the quest for ectoplasm, the stuff of the other side, the substance of the ethereal body, continued well into the 20th century. Its existence still receives detailed discussion on the web, with the portraits and the stories of its heroic protagonists. Mrs. Duncan was celebrated in her lifetime for the clouds of shining, billowing spirit stuff that emanated from her as she sat in the spirit cabinet, groaning and shuddering as the trance state took hold. A medium’s body became a porous vehicle as the phenomena exuded from mouth, nose, breast and even vagina: she acted as a transmitter, in an analogous fashion to the wireless receiver, catching cosmic rays whose vibrations produced phantoms and presences...."
