The Unseen

AFTERWORD

The Unseen was inspired by the work of parapsychologist Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University from 1927 to 1965. The history of Rhine’s ESP experiments has always fascinated me; I can still get a thrill just from seeing the Zener card symbols on a page. As the daughter of scientists and educators, I am drawn to the idea that such an elusive thing as ESP could be scientifically proven. And as a thriller writer I know a good story when I see one.

Though The Unseen contains some factual circumstances, I have of course embellished the real-life history in all kinds of ways, and will take a brief moment here to delineate the facts from the wild ravings of my imagination.

Dr. J. B. Rhine (1895–1980) began his scientific career studying botany, earning advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, but after a brief stint of teaching he switched fields to study psychology at Harvard under Professor William McDougall, a colleague of celebrated philosopher and psychologist William James. In 1927 McDougall was named the head of the new Duke University psychology department in Durham, North Carolina, and Rhine and his wife and colleague, Dr. Louisa Rhine, moved to Duke with him.

In the psychology department at Duke, Dr. Rhine began his soon-to-be world-famous ESP experiments using Zener cards, and psychokinesis experiments using automated dice-throwing machines. Rhine’s intention was to use rigorous scientific methodology to test and prove the existence of ESP, and Rhine and McDougall coined the term parapsychology to describe the study of paranormal psychological phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis.

Rhine’s work led to the establishment of a dedicated parapsychology laboratory at Duke, headed by Rhine, in 1935. Over his thirty-eight years at Duke, Rhine tested thousands of students for ESP ability, using the Zener card method depicted in The Unseen, and employing the new science of statistics and probability to analyze the results. Dr. Rhine identified test subjects who were able to predict the cards with an accuracy far higher than statistical chance, which led him to conclude that ESP really does occur.

In 1934 Rhine published his findings in his monograph, Extra Sensory Perception, which was published in several editions in many countries, and which made Rhine internationally famous. He is now credited with almost single-handedly developing a methodology for parapsychology as a form of experimental psychology.

In the late 1940’s Dr. Louisa Rhine began to collect reports from all over the world of spontaneous psi experiences, further contributing to our understanding of clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, and crisis apparitions.

In 1957, William Roll, a parapsychology researcher who studied at Berkeley and Oxford, joined the staff of the Duke parapsychology lab, and he and Dr. Rhine’s longtime assistant and researcher, J. Gaither Pratt, conducted field studies of reported poltergeist occurrences, including the famous Seaford, or “Popper” case in 1958. Roll developed the theory of “Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis,” RSPK, to explain poltergeist phenomena; that is, that the random movements, noises and breakages characteristic of a poltergeist manifestation are not the work of ghosts or spirits, but are caused by a human agent, usually a prepubescent child or a teenager, who consciously or unconsciously was projecting mental energy outward to cause the movement of the objects.

As in The Unseen, the Duke parapsychology lab did close down completely in 1965, when Dr. Rhine reached the age of mandatory retirement, and seven hundred boxes of original files from the lab really were stored in the basement of Duke’s Perkins Library on the Duke campus, and have only recently been made available for public viewing. It was the idea and the existence of those boxes that crystallized the story I wanted to tell.

However, from there my story diverges completely from reality, in more ways than one. There is no such person as Dr. Alaistair Leish, or the nefarious Dr. Richard Anton, nor are they based on anyone in real life. There is no such place as Dr. Anton’s Parapsychology Research Center.

The parapsychology lab files that exist at Perkins Library have been neatly catalogued by librarians; you will not find petrified cans of peanuts or Sen-Sen breath mints in the boxes.

North Carolinians may be able to guess the house that was my model for the Folger House; on the other hand, there are many such houses tucked away in forests in the South, houses which may or may not be haunted, but which most definitely feel as if they should be.

Finally, there was never a Folger Experiment, and certainly not ever one sanctioned by Duke University, the parapsychology lab, or any of its administration, faculty or staff, or that caused the closing of the parapsychology lab.

I based the poltergeist manifestations depicted in the book on the kinds of manifestations that have been reported over centuries, in countries all over the world. There has never—to my knowledge!—been such a concentrated attack as the one I portray in the book (despite the interesting embellishments of incidents that you can find in some supposedly factual reports), but I have tried throughout to be true to the spirit of the—well, spirit.

Reports of actual poltergeist investigations are maddening to read because there is never any real explanation. There is no restless, departed ghost who brings crucial information to a loved one or demands retribution. There may be fraud, there may not be. Inexplicable things happen and remain frustratingly inexplicable… and thus all the more seductive.

It is the very mystery of the phenomenon that enthralls.

For those interested in reading further in the field of parapsychology and on the work of the Rhine Lab, I highly recommend Dr. Sally Rhine Feather’s The Gift, an illuminating study of real-life ESP occurrences, which also details both her parents’ work in the field; and William Roll’s The Poltergeist, for detailed accounts of his poltergeist investigations while at the Duke parapsychology lab and after. Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters provides a fascinating historical perspective of the work of the American Society for Psychical Research and the British Society for Psychical Research to find scientific proof of ghosts and psychic phenomena, and Colin Wilson compiles some of the most entertaining poltergeist stories in his book Poltergeist! (among others). Tony Cornell’s book Investigating the Paranormal is a useful study of fieldwork.

For further information on current studies, and for an extensive bibliography of parapsychological topics, I recommend The Rhine Research Center’s Web site: http://www.Rhine.org/.