Mike D. said:
TLN,
The first scientist to investigate Mrs. Piper was psychologist William James, who famously referred to Piper as his "white crow." But his studies of her are not generally considered as significant as are those conducted by Richard Hodgson and other later investigators. Hodgson was known in his time as an extreme skeptic with a reputation for exposing fraudulent mediums, and he and other investigators instituted certain controls to guard against fraud on Mrs. Piper's part. Here are some of them: she was trailed by private detectives, her mail was opened and read, sitters were brought to her on the spur of the moment and introduced to her under false names, proxy sittings were held, where people were brought to her seances not only with false names but with the intent of sitting on behalf of others who weren't present at the seances. Mrs. Piper was not informed of the identities of the individuals that the proxies were sitting on behalf of. And some investigators, in order to test the genuineness of her trance, engaged in some rather cruel practices such as cutting, burning, and blistering her while she was in trance to see if she would react.
Mrs. Piper was eventually taken to England where she'd never been and presumably knew no one, and several investigators continued to test her and take the above mentioned precautions against fraud.
Many of the tests of Hodgson and others were written up in great detail in the publications of the Society for Psychical Research. These are now available online and you can go to the Society's website for instructions on how to access them.
If you want to read a contemporary overview of Mrs. Piper's mediumship, I recommend Chapter 3 of Stephen Braude's 2003 book, Immortal Remains. Braude is chairman of the Philosophy Department of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He quotes excerpts from a few Piper transcripts, the longest excerpt being from the "Sutton transcript."
Mrs. Piper's transcripts are not of equal quality, as she seems to have had her off days, as well as days when she produced high quality information. So to really get a feel for what her mediumship was like, both on good days and bad days, one needs to read fair number of transcripts.
Speaking of the "Sutton transcript," my feeling is, if the Sutton case has been reported accurately, that either hot reading or some kind of anomalous cognition are the only two choices for accounting for the quality of the transcript. I think cold reading can be effectively ruled out. If Mrs. Piper hot read the Suttons (who were brought into the seance room and introduced to her using fake names), then she would have somehow had to have had prior knowledge of intimate facts concerning the family life of the Suttons, and also somehow have gained the knowledge to imitate mannerisms and language patterns of the Sutton's deceased daughter.
The entire Sutton transcript can be found in this paper by Hodgson: Richard Hodgson (1898) "A Further Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 13: 284-582. The fact that this one paper by one of the investigators of Mrs. Piper is close to 300 pages long is a hint of how voluminous the original source material on her is.
Mrs. Piper is sometimes referred to in the literature as perhaps the most outstanding medium who has been extensively studied to date. So perhaps anyone who wants to critically examine mediumship would be advised to spend a lot of time on her.
I think Piper's case is complex, and what I know of it so far has not led me to conclude that there is survival of death or that Piper was communicating with the dead. At the moment I entertain a modest belief that she may well have exhibited at times some sort of anomalous cognition that has not been adequately explained. But, of course, that belief could change as I learn more about her. And given the quantity of original source information that is available about her, I certainly have more to learn.
Mike
