GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE
TALKING TO THE SPIRITS
Welcome to our February issue, in which (among many other things) we explore some lesser known areas of spirit communication. The idea that human beings can receive messages from the other side or communicate with the dead is found in virtually every culture and is probably as old as humankind. But what happened when scientific and technological innovation met the then-current Western iteration of such beliefs in the form of Spiritualism makes for a fascinating story. As Chris Josiffe explains in his ‘Little History of Spirit Technology’, rather than new technologies displacing long-standing beliefs in the afterlife, they in fact attracted the attention of both Spiritualists and scientists (often in the same person) who saw in the telegraph or the phonograph new opportunities to put spirit communication on a sounder scientific basis. Even an avowedly sceptical inventor such as Thomas Alva Edison (pictured above) seems to have believed that new wireless technologies offered a way of testing Spiritualism’s claims, and announced in 1910 that he had “been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us…” And on a more artistic note, Alan Murdie examines the strange career of Rosemary Brown, the British housewife who claimed to be channelling new works from such esteemed, but long deceased, composers as Beethoven and Liszt.
THINGS TO COME
Readers may remember Jemima Packington, 61, the world’s only ‘asparamancer’, who claims she can see into the future by tossing asparagus into the air and interpreting how the spears fall ( FT251:20). While her predictions for 2017 were not all accurate (the US under Trump is indeed now seen by many as a “pariah state”, but no other countries have withdrawn from the EU and it's debateable whether the British economy is booming), Jemima has shared her prognostications for the coming year, which include: a record number of Royal births, a string of political scandals (you don’t say!), the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble, the resurgence of the printed book and the US bringing the world to the brink of serious conflict. Watch this space. Metro, 4 Jan 2018.
BEASTLY BEHAVIOUR
Amid the current flood of revelations concerning sexual predators in Hollywood and beyond, we were surprised to come upon a story about abuse of the cryptozoological kind. According to reports, Darrel Whitaker, a 57-yearold hunter from Glenwood Spring, Colorado, claimed a sasquatch attacked and attempted to rape him while he was walking in the woods. The big hairy creature, described as being 8ft tall, emerged from behind a tree and punched Mr Whitaker in the face, knocking him out. “When I regained consciousness, he had already torn my pants and was tearing through my underwear. I stabbed him in the shoulder with my hunting knife, and that made him run away.”
Sadly, the whole thing was revealed by Snopes.com as originally dating from May 2017 and being yet another example of that current bugbear, fake news. www. snopes.com/colorado-hunter-sasquatch/
ERRATA
FT362:8: Rob Gandy wasted no time in spotting the first boo-boo of 2018. In the sideline ‘Wolves Return’ an unfortunate typo shone a whole new light on the legendary founding of Rome: “Rome’s symbol is a she-wolf sucking the infant brothers Romulus and Remus...” Yes, that should have been “suckling”...