James H. Hyslop

James Hervey Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D, (August 18, 1854 – June 17, 1920) was an American psychical researcher, psychologist, and professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University. He was one of the first American psychologists to connect psychology with psychic phenomena. He had initially planned one section of it to be devoted to the study of abnormal psychology and another section to psychic research, believing, as he said, that "at certain points the two fields tend to merge and at others they are widely separated". He believed that through her he had received messages from his father, his wife, and other members of his family, about which he reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (London, 1901). However, Frank Podmore wrote that Hyslop's séance sittings with Piper "do not obviously call for any supernormal explanation" and "I cannot point to a single instance in which a precise and unambiguous piece of information has been furnished of a kind which could not have proceeded from the medium's own mind, working upon the materials provided and the hints let drop by the sitter."

Beginning in 1907, he worked with different mediums to investigate spirit possession and obsession.

In 1913, Edwin William Friend was employed by Hyslop as his assistant and with help of Theodate Pope became the editor for the Journal of American Society for Psychical Research. Friend was sent articles that were to be published in the journal but instead decided to write his own articles. In response, Hyslop repossessed the editorship of the journal and both Friend and Pope resigned from the ASPR in 1915. On May 1, 1915, both Friend and Pope set sail on the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania with plans of forming a new psychical organization with cooperation from the British Society for Psychical Research. On May 7, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Three days after the loss of the ship, Hyslop held séance sittings with the medium Mrs. Chenoweth in an attempt to contact Friend.

In 1916, Hyslop wrote that the whole case for Pearl Curran's mediumship was based on fraud. Hyslop in the Journal for the American Society for Psychical Research claimed that Curran had known people from the Ozarks who spoke a dialect reminiscent of Patience Worth and Curran's husband had studied Chaucer and educated her on the subject. According to Hyslop the case of Patience Worth was "a fraud and delusion for any person who wishes to treat it seriously." Hyslop also accused Casper Yost and the publisher of his book Henry Holt of knowing about the fraud but covering it up to increase sales of the book. In the Mirror articles appeared by Emily Hutchings and Yost defending Curran against allegations of fraud. In response, Hyslop wrote a letter to the Mirror which claimed he had been told of Curran's knowledge of Chaucer by a "scientific man" who had heard it from Mr Curran himself. In 1906, Hyslop criticized the famous experiments of Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner with the medium Henry Slade and pointed out eleven possible sources of error. Psychical researcher Hereward Carrington described Hyslop's criticisms as "very fine".

In a review for the Journal of American Society for Psychical Research in 1917, Hyslop wrote that various occurrences of levitation could have been faked by trickery. He also reviewed the psychical researcher William Jackson Crawford's experiments with the medium Kathleen Goligher and suggested that reported physical phenomena in the séance room could be unreliable.

Personal life and family

Hyslop's twin sister, Sarah Luella, died when she was four months old. His three-year-old sister, Anna Laura; and his four-year-old brother, Charles both died of scarlet fever when Hyslop was ten. According to Fulton Oursler the photograph was a fake. Weyde had taken a photograph of Hyslop before his death and had a plate in his possession that had never been developed.

For some time after his death his research assistant and longtime secretary, Gertrude O. Tubby, received what she believed were communications from Hyslop through many mediums in the United States, France and Britain. "I find it difficult to assume that I am dead," he allegedly said to Gertrude, through the medium, Mrs Chenoweth (1920). Messages such as this, frequently containing apparent cross references to one another, were published in her collection entitled James H. Hyslop - X His Book: A Cross Reference Record (1929).

Psychologist Joseph Jastrow criticized Hyslop's book Enigmas of Psychical Research as he was not "in any scientific sense investigating the residual phenomena of psychology" but searching for "another world" beyond the realm of science.

Physiologist Ivor Lloyd Tuckett criticized Hyslop's interpretation of Piper's mediumship and gave an example of a mistake her control had made which was alleged to be the spirit of Hyslop's father. The control when asked if he had remembered a "Samuel Cooper" responded that he was old friend in the West, and that they used to discuss philosophy on long walks together, but the statement was proven to be false. Tuckett came to the conclusion that Piper's controls were fictitious creations and her mediumship could best be explained without recourse to the paranormal.

Science writer Martin Gardner described Hyslop as "gullible and ignorant of magic". According to Gardner, Piper's trance control failed to guess correctly what Hyslop's uncle died from and took twenty séance sittings to guess his uncle's name. Gardner also wrote that "Hyslop had been introduced to Mrs. Piper by Hodgson, who could have provided the medium with all sorts of facts about him."

Psychologist H. N. Gardiner (1920) stated, "Hyslop cared little about style; what he cared greatly about was thoroughness" and, indeed, the cases reported in his bulky reports were described down to the minutest detail so that the facts could be studied. He felt "that the American public did not like brevity, but wanted full measure and overflowing in the discussion of any subject".

In the preface to Gertrude Ogden's book James H. Hyslop - X His Book: A Cross Reference Record, physician Weston D. Bayley wrote that "Professor Hyslop, had, with wonderful persistence, patience and precision, placed on record a vast amount of experimental material, fully accredited and exactly sustained in accordance with the standards of evidence. His data, together with his detailed commentaries and observations, are a matter of public record. What he thus accomplished is his greatest monument; and no marble shaft could be more imperishable."

Joseph McCabe has written that "Professor Hyslop, who in 1915 wrote me most critical letters about Spiritualism in general and the credulity of Sir Oliver Lodge in particular, became in his later years an enthusiastic Spiritualist and much less critical writer."