Skeptics Being Evasive About Recent Miracles

Critics of the supernatural often object to paranormal claims that occurred in the more distant past, since there's no ability to question the witnesses, consult the larger number of records that tend to be available with more recent events, etc. But they often provide poor responses to the evidence we do have for those more distant events, which raises questions like how much these skeptics actually need the larger amount of evidence they're asking for and how sincere their objections are.

Another way of addressing the line of objections I'm focused on here is to look at how these skeptics handle more recent miracle claims. How much interest do they show in asking the witnesses the relevant questions and examining the evidence involved in other ways?

A New Enfield Poltergeist Documentary Next Month

Apparently, it's the one that's been discussed for a few years now. It's set to appear on Apple TV+ in late October. Here's a Reddit thread about it. And a short description here explains, beneath a photograph from the documentary:

"By rebuilding the 1977 Hodgson home and casting actors to synchronize performances with real audio, the series plunges viewers back into this incredible story of two hauntings: the haunting of the youngest Hodgson daughter, Janet, and the haunting of the main paranormal investigator and father figure, Maurice Grosse."

I had a brief email exchange with one of the individuals who was working on the documentary a couple of years ago. And I had a discussion about it with one of the people interviewed for it after the interview. I've also seen some comments Melvyn Willin and Douglas Bence have made about the documentary at different stages in its production. But I don't know a lot about it. I want to watch it, and I'll probably post about it here if it's worth commenting on, which it probably will be.

For those who don't know, I've done a lot of work on the Enfield case and have a large collection of articles on it here. Here's a page with some recommendations about how to begin studying the case.

The Poor Quality Of Skepticism

The Twitter account of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) recently linked a video of a presentation by Chris Roe, former president of the SPR, about the poor quality of skepticism of the paranormal. It's worth watching. There's a lot of valuable material in it.

Where should Enfield research go from here?

This is the last of my monthly posts on the Enfield Poltergeist, though I intend to continue posting about the case periodically as circumstances warrant it. There's another Enfield documentary on the way, and I suspect there will be more around the time of the case's fiftieth anniversary in 2027. I expect to post about those. But this marks the end of the monthly posts I've been doing for most of these past six years in which I've been writing so much about Enfield. I want to offer some concluding thoughts here and outline what direction I think future work on Enfield should take.

Enfield Material At A University Of Cambridge Web Site

The University of Cambridge hosts an archive for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). There are listings of the contents of that archive available online. Go here and run a search with the term "Enfield" to find some results that are relevant to the Enfield Poltergeist. The material is old in one sense, but new in another. It's archived material that's been around for a while, some of it for close to half a century. But some of it hasn't gotten much attention yet, as far as I know. For example, on the page here, we read the following about Cambridge's archived material related to Anita Gregory's doctoral thesis that discusses Enfield:

Video Of The Charlton House Haunting Apport

Sometime within the last few years, I read an interview with Melvyn Willin in which he commented:

A BBC Video Diary programme wanted to film Maurice [Grosse] attending an investigation. ASSAP organised one such event at Charlton House and a cup was caught exploding in a darkened room on video in a locked room with a camera man, Maurice and one other investigator witnessing it. BBC Radiophonic Workshop tested the sound patterns and concluded that it was NOT the sound of a cup being broken in the usual way and further experiments failed to replicate the circumstances. It seemed to implode rather than explode.

In my tribute to Maurice Grosse that I posted a couple of years ago, I linked some videos of the opening segments of that Video Dairies program. To my knowledge, the second half of the show, which includes the material Melvyn refers to, wasn't available on YouTube at the time. But the full program was recently put up, which I saw linked on the Twitter account of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Go here to see the beginning of the relevant segment of the program. The event in question happens at 32:12. After the event, you see some discussion of what happened among the people there at the time and a discussion among some members of the SPR's staff. (Including an argument between Grosse and Mary Rose Barrington, accompanied by a cup-throwing experiment in the SPR's facility!) There's then some intervening material on other subjects, so you can go here to see the remainder of what's relevant to the topic of this post.

For further background about Charlton House and the event under consideration here, read this article at the Occult World web site. I want to quote some comments Guy Playfair made about this incident, then conclude with some comments of my own:

How The Battersea And Enfield Cases Are Similar And Different

The BBC ran a series of podcasts on the Battersea Poltergeist earlier this year. It's gotten millions of streams and downloads and has been widely discussed, and a television series is under development. Comparisons between Battersea and Enfield came up periodically during the podcast series and have often been brought up elsewhere. I want to discuss how the two cases relate.

I've been studying Enfield extensively for a few years now, but I know much less about Battersea. I've read Shirley Hitchings and James Clark's The Poltergeist Prince Of London (Great Britain: The History Press, 2013) and some recent articles on the case, I've listened to the BBC series mentioned above, and I've watched some videos on the subject. Clark's book is good and is the best resource I'm aware of on the case. It had to have taken a lot of time and effort to sort through all of the material involved in such a large and complicated case and to present it so well. I recommend starting with Clark's book, then listening to the BBC series. The podcasts will be easier to follow if you have the background knowledge the book provides, and some of the material covered in the podcast series happened later than the timeframe the book covers.

Unless I indicate otherwise, references related to the Battersea case below will be to the approximate location in the Kindle version of Clark's book. I'll be citing some of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes. I'll designate Grosse's tapes with "MG" and Playfair's with "GP", so that MG23B is Grosse's tape 23B, GP90A is Playfair's tape 90A, and so on.

I'll briefly discuss what I think of the authenticity of the Battersea case, then address how Battersea and Enfield relate and make some miscellaneous comments about the BBC series on Battersea and other issues. To keep this post from being longer, much of what I'll be saying will be summaries of my conclusions. I can expand on the points I'll be making if anybody wants me to.

How To Begin Studying The Enfield Poltergeist

Different people have different interests, so I'll recommend a broad range of resources. You can choose which ones are best under your circumstances (e.g., what sort of balance of written, audio, and video resources you want).

It's helpful to have some background information on poltergeists in general, so you could start with a Psi Encyclopedia article that provides an overview of the subject. A good book on the topic is Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell, Poltergeists (United States: White Crow Books, 2017).

I wrote an article that outlines some of the evidential issues involved in evaluating the credibility of witnesses. It provides many examples from the Enfield case.

It's good to know the layout of the house where most of the activity occurred. You can find an image of a floor plan online here. Look over it before you start studying the case, and have it on hand to consult when needed. If you want a paper copy, you can print the one just linked or find it in the first edition of Guy Playfair's book mentioned below. The latest edition of the book, which I'll be recommending below, doesn't have the floor plan.

After you've consulted however much of that background material you're interested in, watch this BBC television segment from November of 1977 as an introduction to the case. It's about twelve minutes long.

The best documentary is one that aired on Apple TV+ in October of 2023. The second-best one aired on BBC Radio on December 26, 1978. The host, Rosalind Morris, was an eyewitness of some of the events, she interviews a lot of other eyewitnesses, and they're given a lot of time to speak.

If you want some other video documentaries, start with Interview With A Poltergeist, which came out in 2007. Another one aired on the Paranormal Channel the following year. It's not as good, but each has some strengths the other one doesn't have.

I've written tributes to four of the most important figures in the case. Those tributes will give you a lot of information about those individuals, their involvement in the case, and their credibility: Peggy Hodgson, Maurice Grosse, Guy Playfair, and John Burcombe. Those posts provide a lot of biographical information and references to other sources you can consult, but the posts aren't biographies. They're tributes that focus on the individuals' involvement in the Enfield case. Though the post on Peggy Hodgson is the longest, it's the one you should read if you only want to read one of them. She's the most important witness in the case, and she's often been underestimated and misrepresented.

The two books to get on Enfield (as opposed to poltergeists in general) are Guy Playfair's This House Is Haunted (United States: White Crow Books, 2011) and Melvyn Willin's The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes (United States: White Crow Books, 2019). Read them in that order.

For an introduction to skepticism about the case, you could start with Anita Gregory's review of Playfair's book mentioned above ("This House Is Haunted, An Investigation Of The Enfield Poltergeist", Journal Of The Society For Psychical Research, vol. 50, 1979-80, pp. 538-41). You can access the article at the Library of Exploratory Science site. Other skeptical overviews have been written by Joe Nickell and Deborah Hyde, among others. You can listen to a 2017 edition of the MonsterTalk podcast to hear from a few skeptics discussing Enfield.

If you want to research the case further, see my series of posts here. That material goes beyond an introductory level (e.g., discussing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's audio tapes recorded during their investigation of the case; addressing Anita Gregory's doctoral thesis, which covers Enfield). I reference a lot of articles, books, videos, and other resources along the way, so you can find many more sources to consult there. The page just linked includes descriptions of some of the contents of each post, so you can use Ctrl F to search for what you're interested in, in addition to using a search engine.

Randi's Million Dollar Challenge And The Eisenbud Challenge

James Randi did some good things, and he ought to be getting some positive coverage in the context of his death earlier this week. But the coverage has been far too positive, which is unsurprising in light of the media's biases. You can read our archive of posts on Randi here. While the media give so much attention to Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, keep in mind his failure to meet a challenge in the other direction:

Nevertheless, with his usual bluster, Randi accepted a $10,000 challenge (a considerable sum in those days) to duplicate the Serios phenomena and make good on his claim.

Of course, confidence is easy to feign, and Randi does it routinely in his role as magician. He also cleverly takes advantage of the occasional high-profile case he successfully exposes as fraudulent, by publicizing those successes and creating the impression that he's a generally reliable guide when it comes to the paranormal. So Randi's dismissal of the Serios case was all it took for those already disposed to believe that Serios was a fake, and it was probably enough even for those sympathetic to parapsychology but unaware of Randi's dishonesty....

What the TV audience never learned was that when the show was over and Randi was pressed to make good on his wager, he simply weaseled out of it. To keep that side of the story under wraps, Randi prohibited publication of his correspondence on the matter. That was undoubtedly a shrewd move, because the letters show clearly how Randi backed down from his empty challenge. However, Randi's original letters now reside in the library at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and researchers, finally, can easily confirm this for themselves. When Serios's principal investigator, Jule Eisenbud, died, I was assigned the task of going through his papers. I collected all the material relevant to the Serios case and deposited it in the Special Collections section of the UMBC library. (This includes correspondence, the original photos and film, and signed affidavits from witnesses.)...

But there's no documentary evidence of Randi having even attempted to duplicate the Serios phenomena under anything like the conditions in which Serios succeeded, much less evidence of his having actually pulled it off....

In fact, the history of parapsychology chronicles some remarkable examples of dishonest testimony and other reprehensible behavior on the part of skeptics....

Skepticism is just as glib and dishonest now as it was in 1882 when the British SPR [Society for Psychical Research] was founded. In fact, despite sensible and careful dismantling of the traditional skeptical objections, the same tired arguments surface again and again. And those arguments all too easily mislead those who haven't yet heard the other side of the story or examined the evidence for themselves.

(Stephen Braude, The Gold Leaf Lady [Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2007], 22, 34, 126)

See my post here about how other magicians have misled people about the paranormal.

A Tribute To Guy Playfair

(I'll be making reference to the Enfield tapes of Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair. I'll use "MG" to refer to Grosse's tapes and "GP" to refer to Playfair's. So, MG90B is Grosse's tape 90B, GP87A is Playfair's tape 87A, and so on.)

It was a September 11, 1977 program on BBC Radio that convinced Guy Playfair to get involved in the Enfield case. Part of what he heard on the program that convinced him was the exhaustion that was evident in Maurice Grosse's voice. Playfair would later write, "I knew what Grosse could expect at Enfield. Sleepless nights, a great deal of constant confusion, and at the end of it all the same feeling of utter bewilderment. I had helped research several cases in Brazil…'Let me know if you get really stuck,' I said to Grosse as we left the meeting room of Kensington Public Library. I cannot have sounded very sincere…[A few days later] I happened to hear the [BBC Radio] programme while eating my Sunday lunch. It was dramatic stuff, and Grosse, who had not had a proper night's sleep that week, sounded really worn out….I rang Maurice Grosse and asked if he needed some help. He did, he said. And so, on Monday 12 September 1977, I postponed (as I thought) my holiday plans, and went along to the 'house of strange happenings.'" (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 23, 30) That September 11 radio program is in Playfair's collection of Enfield tapes (GP36B). On the program, Grosse's weariness is obvious, and so is the significance of the case. Grosse later told Playfair, "Well, I mean, if you hadn't have come on the case, it would have been bloody awful for me, to say the least." (MG20Bi, 36:06)

Grosse made that comment in November of 1977, which probably was the most difficult month of the case, largely because of Janet Hodgson's trance states. But even before that, Grosse had been sick for a while, and the poltergeist's embodied voice was to begin the next month, in December, which involved a lot of additional work. So, Playfair's assistance was beneficial on many fronts from the start.

The Enfield Poltergeist Investigation Committee Report

A few decades ago, the Society for Psychical Research set up the Enfield Poltergeist Investigation Committee to reinvestigate the Enfield case and produce a report on their findings. Go here to watch a segment of a documentary that provides an overview of the subject. The report has been hard to access, and those who have read it have had restrictions placed on what they can say about it. A commenter in a recent thread asked me whether I've read it, and here's my response. I want to highlight it here, since the topic is significant and since the exchange is buried deep in the comments section of a thread and could easily be missed otherwise.

A Tribute To Maurice Grosse

(I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes. "MG" will refer to tapes from Grosse's collection, and "GP" will refer to those from Playfair's. MG28A is Grosse's tape 28A, GP11A is Playfair's tape 11A, etc.)

In the mid 1990s, Maurice Grosse appeared on a BBC television program, Video Diaries, to tell his life story. You can watch the program here and here. He discusses his background as an artist, his military service in World War II, meeting his wife, his Judaism, how the premature death of his daughter led to his work on paranormal issues, and his work as an inventor and businessman. But I know him mainly from his work on the Enfield Poltergeist. I want to say more about him from that perspective.

Hugh Pincott, who was Honorary Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) at the time when Grosse started on the Enfield case, was one of the contributors to Melvyn Willin's recent book on Enfield. Pincott recalls how Grosse became involved in the case and comments on the controversy surrounding his involvement. Grosse was a new member of the SPR and had been asking them to assign him to a case. After the Daily Mirror started going to the Hodgsons' house to report on the poltergeist that was occurring there, one of their reporters contacted the SPR to send somebody out to help the family:

The Quality Of The Initial Enfield Investigation

Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair have often been criticized for how they went about investigating the Enfield case. You can find a lot of examples in my previous articles, like this one on Anita Gregory and this one on Joe Nickell. I've mentioned some of my own disagreements with Grosse and Playfair, though I have a generally positive view of how they handled the case. They acknowledged that they made some mistakes. Nobody would be one of the lead investigators of such a large and complicated case without getting some things wrong. The quality of their work is often underestimated, though, largely because so many of the relevant details haven't been publicized much. What I want to focus on in this post is the evidence we can gather on this subject from Grosse and Playfair's tapes. I'll use "MG" to designate Grosse's tapes and "GP" to refer to Playfair's, which means that MG99B refers to Grosse's tape 99B, and GP51B refers to Playfair's tape 51B, for example.

Think of the significance of how I just concluded the paragraph above. The fact that we have so many audio recordings related to the original investigation of the case, including recordings of so many allegedly paranormal events, is a testament to the quality of the investigators' work. And I had to distinguish between the tapes and other sources above because there's such a large amount of material outside of the tapes as well. The amount of tapes, signed witness statements, notes, transcripts, and other documentation Grosse and Playfair produced is highly impressive and, in some ways, unprecedented.

I can't be exhaustive, but here are several examples of the quality of their work from the tapes:

A New Book By Melvyn Willin On The Enfield Poltergeist

It should be out soon. For those who don't know, Willin is an archivist for the Society for Psychical Research, and he's known some of the people involved in the Enfield case, including Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair. I haven't read the book yet, but I expect it to be good. You can read more about it here.

More Enfield Audio Digitized

Earlier this year, I wrote about funding a project with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to digitize Maurice Grosse's collection of audio cassettes from the Enfield Poltergeist case. Guy Playfair's tapes have now been digitized as well. I'd like to thank the SPR again, especially Melvyn Willin, who did most of the work.

There are around 100 cassettes in Playfair's collection, beginning in September of 1977. The tapes recorded in the Hodgsons' house apparently end in October of 1978, but there are some tapes of radio and television programs about the Enfield case from later years as well. He also recorded a couple of radio programs on Enfield from the first half of September of 1977, including the one that persuaded him to get involved in the case. Playfair's collection has some duplicates of the tapes in Grosse's, and some of Playfair's duplicates are better copies of tapes that have poor audio quality in Grosse's collection. So, the duplicates have proved useful. And much of the material in Playfair's collection isn't found in Grosse's. That includes, to cite a few examples, a recording of the incident in which the poltergeist ripped a fireplace out of a wall it was cemented into, Playfair's conversation with Milbourne Christopher about his visit to the Hodgsons' house as he drove Christopher back to his hotel, and Playfair's visit with Janet Hodgson when she was being examined by Peter Fenwick's team at the Maudsley Hospital.

Alan Murdie wrote Playfair's obituary in the July 2018 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (vol. 82, no. 3). The closing line of the obituary is applicable to Playfair's work on the Enfield case: "Guy’s life was about finding proof and for many of us his findings succeeded in removing many doubts." (192)

I thought of what Hernani Guimarães Andrade, who had taught me all I knew about psychical research, had often said to me while I was working with his research group in Brazil. 'When spontaneous cases come up, we drop everything and go after them. They will not wait for us.' He had made it sound like a moral obligation.

I stopped searching the pages of the classified advertisements for a cheap flight to Portugal, and went indoors. Here was a colleague [Maurice Grosse] who clearly needed help, and I reckoned my holiday could wait a few days….

I rang Maurice Grosse and asked if he needed some help. He did, he said.

And so, on Monday 12 September 1977, I postponed (as I thought) my holiday plans, and went along to the 'house of strange happenings.'…

Of one thing I was quite certain: for nearly four months, the [Hodgson] family had undergone a series of experiences totally inexplicable in terms of presently known science. Incredible things had happened, and Maurice Grosse and I knew they had happened, some right in front of our eyes. But what did it all mean?

The sad part of it was that so few people seemed to be interested in finding out, and how fortunate it was that Grosse had seized upon the case with such enthusiasm, and kept going despite all obstacles. Had he not done so, I hated to think what state the [Hodgsons] might be in by now….

We arrived at Bounds Green underground station just in time for my last train into central London. It was nearly empty until it reached Piccadilly Circus, when it suddenly filled up with lively theatregoers clutching programmes, and talking excitedly about the show they had just seen. I envied them, in a way, though I too was on my way home from the show I had been going to two or three times a week for nearly six months. 'Show' is a suitable word, for it was clear that the poltergeist, whoever or whatever it was, needed an audience, and I had to admit that it had a sense of timing and a control of its audience that any professional actor would envy.

And yet, I thought, as I listened to the happy voices around me, by the time the final curtain comes down at Enfield, if it ever does, then I will have had a lot more to think about than if I had spent a night out in the West End….

I felt I had reached the limit of what I could do, by getting the facts of the Enfield case on record. From now on, it was up to the real experts.

We said goodbye and headed for our respective homes. The Enfield case might have ended, but the search for the explanation of it had barely begun. I hope that this book will encourage others to join in this search.

(Guy Playfair, This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 30, 175, 195-96, 269)

The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes Made More Accessible

Earlier this year, I signed a contract with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to fund the digitizing of their collection of Maurice Grosse's Enfield tapes. The collection consists of more than 100 audio cassettes recorded over several years, mostly from September of 1977 to April of 1979. The tapes were given to the SPR by Grosse shortly before his death in 2006. The large majority of the tapes were able to be digitized, but some were in too poor a condition for it. Other material, though only a relatively small amount, had to be excluded for copyright reasons (e.g., recordings of television and radio broadcasts about the Enfield case and other topics). The digital version of the tapes is accompanied by about 60 pages of notes on the tapes' contents (written by Melvyn Willin of the SPR), including some information on the tapes and portions of tapes that couldn't be digitized.

The digitizing of the tapes is important for a lot of reasons. Any backing up of that sort of material is valuable, especially now that the tapes are about 40 years old. And putting the content in a digital format makes the tapes far more accessible. Researchers no longer have to travel to England to access the tapes in a particular facility. Using a digital file on a computer is much easier than rewinding, fast forwarding, tracking time, and such with cassettes, especially when you know that the cassettes are so old and so susceptible to breaking down. With the passing of time, more witnesses involved in the Enfield case will die, memories will fade, and records will be lost. Better use can be made of those resources if people have more access to the Enfield tapes sooner rather than later.

Decades ago, as negative a critic of Enfield as Anita Gregory referred to the potential evidence for the case in these tapes and the need to study them more. (See pages 184-85 of her doctoral thesis found here.) Though he's skeptical of Enfield, Chris French commented in a documentary that he expects there to always be interest in the case. It will be discussed for generations to come. We don't even know that the phenomena have stopped. The family who moved into the house after Peggy Hodgson's death in 2003 reported ongoing paranormal events, which caused them to move out.

I've only listened to a small minority of the audio so far. I intend to write posts about the contents of the tapes as warranted.

We should be grateful to the SPR for preserving the tapes, producing a digital version, and making copies of it available to researchers. I especially want to thank Melvyn Willin, who helped with the project from the start and saw it through to completion. Most of the work, including the digitizing of the tapes, was done by him.

The tapes wouldn't exist if Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair hadn't gotten involved in the Enfield case and done so much work on it, including the production and preservation of so many tapes. During a BBC radio program on Enfield earlier this year, Richard Grosse, Maurice's son, commented on how enthusiastic his father was about the Enfield case and what he'd captured on tape. That enthusiasm was still evident in a documentary he participated in just before his death. The case and the tapes deserve further study.

A Response To Anita Gregory's Doctoral Thesis On Enfield

Abbreviations

JSPR = Journal of the Society for Psychical Research

SPR = Society for Psychical Research

THIH = Guy Playfair, This House Is Haunted (United States: White Crow Books, 2011)

For the background to this post and an explanation of why her thesis is important, see here. You can download the thesis here after registering with the site. I'll be responding to her thesis in hyphenated sections. If you aren't interested in the topic covered in one section, you can move on to another by following the hyphens. You can also use the Ctrl F feature on your keyboard to find what you're looking for.

A Poltergeist On Video

I recently had an email exchange with Stewart Lamont about his 1978 coverage of the Enfield Poltergeist for the BBC. His team captured some of the poltergeist phenomena on film, and that video is the only one to have done so that's extant and available to the general public. What I want to do in this post is discuss the history of Enfield videos in general, quote some of Lamont's comments to me in our email exchange, and add to what I've said before about the contents of Lamont's video. One thing I want to do is say more about the poltergeist knocking that occurs in the video, particularly some evidence for it that I haven't seen anybody else mention.

Since the release of The Conjuring 2 last year, YouTube has been inundated with people looking for videos about the Enfield case. Lamont's video has been widely viewed in that context. If you read some of the YouTube threads, you'll see that Lamont's video has also been widely cited by skeptics as a justification for their rejection of the authenticity of Enfield.

The use of the video by skeptics is nothing new, but the degree to which it's being used by them is. In the 1980s, Bob Couttie referred to the Lamont video as something that "many sceptics regard as highly evidential [against Enfield]" (Forbidden Knowledge [Great Britain: Lutterworth Press, 1988], 64). In the 1990s, Mike Hutchinson wrote:

Too Skeptical To Be Reasonable

Here are some of Guy Playfair's comments about a report on the Enfield Poltergeist that he and Maurice Grosse delivered to a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). This occurred on March 29, 1978:

He [Grosse] kicked off with a very concise and factual account of the case to date, summarising the types of phenomenon we had observed or recorded from eye-witnesses under seventeen headings. These included knocks, movement of small and large objects, interference with bedclothes, appearance of water, apparitions, levitation of persons, physical assaults of several types, automatisms, psychological disturbance, equipment malfunction and failure, the passage of matter through matter, unidentifiable voice phenomena - both embodied and disembodied, and spontaneous combustion.

While he was reeling off this list, I looked around the audience. Some, like Professor [Hans] Bender, were listening intently, while elsewhere I saw a number of raised eyebrows. Clearly, this was a bit much for some SPR members, who had never witnessed anything paranormal all their lives.