Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Tell me about the spook chair.
Well, go back a bit, I'm the only person I know of who has held both major psychic fellowships for doing psychic work in the United States.
One was at Harvard, and that was the Hodgkins Fund. Hodgkins was a parapsychologist who came over from England, a good friend of William James.
And he and William James investigated the medium of [???] among other things. And when he died suddenly, William James
got together with [???] and established what was called the Hodgkins Fund which was supposed to be... it was administered by Harvard
for people to do psychical research. When I was at Harvard in the 50s, I was given that fund by the Psychology Department. I didn't ask for it,
they gave it to me looking for an unembarrassing way to find someone to do something with it that won't embarrass them.
They didn't want any psychics, no psychics or parapsychology. So I was given that and that's how we did, how I did my first book on water witching.
That finances my studies on water witching. And when I came to Oregon, I had learned the... I knew about the Thomas Welton Stanford Chair for Psychical Research,
that's the official title, at Stanford University. Thomas Welton Stanford was the brother of Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate who created
Stanford University, who Stanford University was named after. His brother went to Australia and made himself a fortune there in Australia.
While in Australia he became a spiritualist, in other words he attended seances and believed in spiritual mediums... he was a big supporter of it.
In those days he got very seasick when he got in the boat, so he knew he wasn't going to be able to come back to the United States, but he had a big
fortune, so he decided to leave it to his brother's university, Stanford University, and he decided to leave it for psychical research.
Now, the president of Stanford University was what today would be a wonderful skeptic. He was, trying to think of his name... he was a person who was the
first to expose that [???] in California, showed that they're really frauds and how they work. He was the president of Stanford University, and he
wasn't too keen on having all this money for psychical research, so he sent his lawyers, very clever lawyers, to Australia to convince
Thomas Welton Stanford that in the United States we don't call it psychical research, we call it psychological research.
Which there was some truth to it because some people confuse the two. And as a result the money was left to psychological research. And at
that time Stanford Psychology Dept. suddenly had a grant, an amount of money that in total eclipsed the combined research money for all the other sciences
at Stanford. Psychology was one of the riches departments in the world, and they still are. They are still one of the top psychology departments of
all time, they still are. And part of that is because they had that psychic research money. Now they had some guilt because they realized, they knew
that was supposed to be for psychical research so they set aside a little bit of the money to set up a chair for psychical research. And the first man
they appointed was a man named Coover. And Coover, for his first few years, he did psychical research, investigated mediums and stuff.
And he found it all... he became a big skeptic. I still have his book which is this thick which he wrote. But for the rest of his time... I think he retired in '38 [unintelligible]
So by the time he retired, he was not doing any psychical research, but the parapsychologists were very upset because they knew this money was
supposed to go to psychical research but Stanford wasn't spending it that way. Stanford didn't want to do this in the Psychology Dept. They didn't
especially want to get involved in psychic stuff. But they decided when Coover retired, instead of a new chair, they would set up a visiting position. So every year they
would bring in a new person to hold that chair for the year. And that began... but they would bring in just regular psychologists who would do
psychophysics and stuff like that. The parapsychologists created a big clamor, so they tried to bring in people who would do something
that could be considered relevant to parapsychology. Well, this went off and on, sometimes they didn't do anything with it. I was having a sabbatical coming up in
about 1982, I think, and I was thinking of that chair. So I called Gordon Bower, the chair of the Psychology Dept at Stanford. And I said, "Gordon,
can you tell me what's happened to the Thomas Welton Stanford Chair for Psychical Research?" Without any further todo, he said,
"Ray, if you want that chair, it's yours. [laughs] You have it!" So I went the next year and held... then they called it the
Spook Chair, and I held the Spook Chair for a year.
That's great. OK, let's end...
... at Stanford
Yeah, I was one of the few people who was allowed to see the collection of aports that Thomas Welton Stanford deeded to the university.
They are paper mache arrows and stuff like that that were reported during seances in Australia. He sent them all to Stanford.
They have it, but they don't want anyone to see it because they're so embarrassed by it. They keep them in a vault underground at
the library deep down underground. And I was able to see it while I was there.