Sad Letters to the Lab

Thursday, October 1st, 2009 Posted in Letters to the Lab | 2 Comments »

I've written before about the many sad letters that would arrive at the lab every day.  Every time I read one I wondered how the scientists would manage to come up with a compassionate response to them, or if they ...

Harold Scharper and Why I Loved Reading the Letters

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 Posted in Letters to the Lab, People in Parapsychology | No Comments »

One day while going through the Parapsychology Lab archives, I came across this November 9, 1946 letter to J.B. Rhine from Harold A. Scharper, a returning WWII soldier who was now a paraplegic writing from the Vaughan Veterans Hospital, in Hines, ...

Exorcist To-Do

Saturday, April 11th, 2009 Posted in Ghost Stories, Letters to the Lab | No Comments »

In one of the chapters in Unbelievable, I talk about the actual case that inspired the book and movie The Exorcist. I had intended to try to track down Dr. Mabel Ross, the child psychiatrist who examined the boy ...

Sad Letters

Thursday, April 9th, 2009 Posted in Letters to the Lab | No Comments »

I've written before about the thousands of letters received at the lab. Many of them were so sad. People sometimes wrote for help the lab couldn't give, like finding missing children or for assurance that the voices they heard ...

H. L. Mencken

Friday, April 3rd, 2009 Posted in Letters to the Lab | No Comments »

From time to time I would come across these scathing, blistering, mean (but sometimes funny) assessments of J. B. Rhine which were written by essayist, journalist, critic, etc., H. L. Mencken. Mencken apparently couldn't stand Rhine, although he was ...

Letters to the Lab - Table Rapping and Science

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 Posted in Letters to the Lab, People in Parapsychology, Science Experiments | 2 Comments »

I'm going to have an ongoing series called Letters to the Lab, I've decided. There are just so many filled with interesting stories, sad stories etc.   There was one from Barbara Brown, Rhine’s correspondent from Riker Laboratories. Barbara Brown would ...

From the Letters in the Parapsychology Lab Archives

Monday, March 30th, 2009 Posted in Letters to the Lab | No Comments »

The letters received at the Lab gave me such an amazing picture of the people in this country, both good and bad. Seventy-five foreign students from twenty-two countries had come to Duke in the summer of 1954 to enroll in various ...