Part 3

The trick depends upon a process of intense concentration, which will later be described in detail. After this concentration, Craig would give to her subconscious mind the suggestion, or command, that it should bring to her consciousness a vision of what Jan was doing. This giving an order to the subconscious mind is much the same sort of thing that you do when you seek to remember a name; whether you realize it or not, you order your subconscious mind to get that bit of information and bring it to you. Whatever came to Craig, she would write it out, and when next she met Jan, she would use her woman’s wits to verify it without Jan’s knowing what was happening. At times it would be very amusing—when he would find himself accused of some youthful misdemeanor which his preceptress was not supposed to know about. In his efforts to defend himself, he would fail entirely to realize the telepathic aspects of the matter.

_5_

Please let me repeat, I am not telling here a set of fairy tales and fantasies; I am presenting a record of experiments, conducted in strict scientific fashion. All the results were set down day by day in writing. For an hour or two every day for the past three years my wife has been scribbling notes of her experiments, and there are eight boxes full in her study, enough to fill a big trunk. No statement in all the following rests upon our memories; everything is taken from memoranda now in my hands. Admitting that new facts can be learned about the mind, I do not see how any one can use more careful methods than we have done.

My wife “saw” Jan carrying a bouquet of flowers, wrapped in white paper, on the street, and she wrote this down. She later ascertained that at this hour Jan had carried flowers to a friend in a hospital in Los Angeles, and she telephoned this friend and verified the facts. On another occasion when Jan was in Santa Barbara, a hundred miles from our home, she “saw” him escorting a blonde girl in a blue dress from an auto to a hotel over a rainy pavement; she wrote this down, and later ascertained that it had actually been happening. The details were verified, not merely by Jan, but by another member of the party. I ought to add that in no case did my wife tell the other persons what she had “seen” until after these persons had told her what had happened. No chance was taken of their making up events to conform to her records. Always Craig kept her cold-blooded determination to know what was _real_ in this field where so much is invented and imagined.

Again, she “saw” Jan preparing to commit suicide, dressed in a pair of yellow silk pajamas; then she “saw” him lying dead on the floor. She was much disturbed—until Jan reminded her that he had been seven times publicly “buried” in Southern California before she met him. Several weeks later she learned that in one of these “burials” he had worn yellow silk pajamas. Jan had forgotten this, but Dr. Frank Sweet, of Long Beach, who had overseen the procedure, remembered the pajamas, and how they had been ruined by mud.

Craig saw a vision of a bride, at a time when Jan, in his room in a far part of the city, was awakening from sleep with a dream about a friend’s wedding. On two occasions, while “concentrating,” she got the impression that Jan and a friend of his had returned unexpectedly from Santa Barbara to Hollywood. In both cases she made careful record, and it turned out to be correct; I have a written statement of the two young men, confirming the second instance, and saying that it could not have been normally known to my wife.

I have also a detailed record—some twenty pages long—of a “clairvoyant” vision of Jan’s movements about the city of Long Beach, including his parking of a car, carrying something over his arm, visiting a barber-shop and a flower-shop, and stopping and hesitating and then going on. The record includes a detailed description of the streets and their lay-out, a one-story white building, etc. Jan had been doing all this at approximately the time specified. He had carried his trousers to a tailor-shop, with a barber-shop directly opposite; he had stopped in front of a flower-shop and debated whether to buy some flowers; he had taken a letter to be copied by a typist, and had stopped on the street, hesitating as to whether to wait for this copying to be done. All these details he narrated to my wife _before_ he knew what was in her written record.

Another curious experience: I took Jan to the home of Dr. John R. Haynes of Los Angeles, to give a demonstration of his mind-reading. Jan said he felt ill, and would not be successful. Only one or two of the tests succeeded. But meanwhile my wife was at home, concentrating, and ordering her subconscious mind to show her what Jan and I were doing. When I returned I found that she had written a detailed description of Dr. Haynes’ home, including a correct ground plan of the entrance hall, stairs and drawing-room, and a description of the color and style of decorations, furniture, lamps, vases, etc., in good part correct. Craig has never been in this house.

Jan goes into one of his deep states—a cataleptic trance, he calls it—in which his body is rigid and cold. He has the power to fix in advance the time when he will come out of the trance, and his subconscious mind apparently possesses the power to keep track of time—days, hours, minutes, even seconds. I have seen him amaze a group of scientists by coming out on the second, while they held stop-watches on him.

But now my wife thinks she will vary this procedure. Jan goes into the trance in our home and Craig sits and silently wills, “Your right leg will come out; you will lift it; you will put it down again. You will sit erect”—and so on. Without speaking a word, she can make him do whatever she pleases.

Another incident, quite a long one. I ask you to have patience with the details, promising that in the end you will see what it is all about. I am in the next room, and I hear Jan and my wife having one of their regular evening arguments, because he will not tell her how he does this or that; at one moment he insists that he has told her—and the next moment he insists that he does not know. My wife finally asks him to concentrate upon an object in the room, and she will see if she can “get” it. He selects the gas stove, in which a fire is burning; and Craig says, “I see a lot of little flames.” Jan insists that is “no good,” she didn’t get the stove; which annoys her very much—she thinks he does not want to allow any success to a woman. He is a “continental male,” something she makes fierce feminist war upon.

Craig is suffering from neuralgia in neck and shoulder, and Jan offers to treat her. He will use what he calls “magnetism”; he believes there is an emanation from his finger-tips, and so, with his two forefingers he lightly traces the course of the nerves of her neck and shoulder and arm. For ten or fifteen minutes his two fingers are tracing patterns in front of her.

Then it is time for him to go home, and he is unhappy, and she succeeds in drawing the explanation from him—he has to walk, and his shoes are tight and hurt him. He has to have them stretched, he tells her. She offers him a pair of my big tennis shoes to wear home, and then she scolds him because he has the fashionable notion that white canvas tennis shoes are not proper footwear for eleven o’clock in the evening. Finally he puts them on and departs; and my wife lies down and makes her mind a blank, and orders it to tell her what Jan is doing.

She has a pencil and paper, and presently she is writing words. They are foreign words, and she thinks they must be in Jan’s native language; they come drifting through her mind for several minutes. Next day comes Jan for the daily lesson, and she shows him this record. He tells her that the words are not in his language, but German—which he knows, but never uses. My wife knows no German; except possibly sauerkraut and kindergarten. But here she has written a string of German and near-German words. I have the original sheet before me, and I give it as well as I can make out the scrawl: “ei einfinen ein-fe-en swenfenz fingen sweizzen czie ofen weizen ofen fingen swienfen swei fingern efein boden fienzen meifen bogen feingen Bladen Meichen frefen eifein.”

Some of this is nonsense; but there are a few German words in it, and others which are guesses at German words, such as might be made by a person hearing a strange language, and trying to set down what he hears. Part of the effort seems to be concentrated on getting one expression, “zwe Fingern”—two fingers! You remember the two fingers moving up and down over Craig’s neck and shoulder! And “Ofen”—the argument about the stove! And “bladen”—to stretch shoes over a block of wood. Where these ideas came from seems plain enough. But where did the German come from—unless from the subconscious mind of Jan?

A further detail, especially curious. Jan gave my wife the meaning for the word “bladen”: “to stretch shoes over a block of wood”; I have the memo which he wrote at the time. But looking up the word in the dictionaries, I do not find it, nor can I find any German who knows it. Apparently there is no such word; and this would clearly seem to indicate that my wife got her German from Jan. If so, it was by telepathy, for he spoke no word of it that evening.

It is the fashion among young ladies of the South to tease the men; and Craig found in this episode a basis for tormenting her psychic instructor. He had assured his patient that during the treatment he was sending her “curative thoughts.” But what kind of telepathic healer was it who sent gas-stoves and shoe-blocks into a neuralgic shoulder? Jan, missing the humor, and trying to save his reputation, declared that he hated the German language so greatly, he did not even allow himself to think in it! Germany was associated in his mind with the most painful memories, and all that previous day he had been fighting depression caused by these memories. You see, in this blundering defense, a significant bit of evidence. Jan had really had the German language in his thoughts at the time Craig got them!

I have before me a letter from Jan to my wife, postmarked Santa Barbara, October 19, 1927. He says: “May these lovely Cosmos bring you such peace and contentment as they have brought me.” He has cut a double slit in the paper, and inserted cosmos blossoms and violets. Prior to the receipt of this letter, my wife was making the record of a dream, and here is what she wrote down: “I dreamed Jan had a little basket of flowers, pink roses and violets, shaped like this.” (A drawing.) “He lifted them up and said they were for me, but a girl near him took them and said, ‘But I want them.’” When Jan came to see us again, my wife asked about the circumstance, and learned the following: a woman friend, who had given Jan the flowers, had accused him of meaning to send them to a girl; but he had answered that they were for “a middle-aged and distinguished lady.”

I present here the basket of “pink roses and violets” which my wife drew, and then the spray of pink double cosmos and violets which met her eyes when she opened the young “psychic’s” letter a day or two later. I explain that my wife’s drawing (Fig. 13) is partly written over by the words of her notes; while in Jan’s letter the violets had to be at once traced in pencil, as they would not last. My wife drew pencil marks around them and wrote the word “violet” in three places, to indicate what the marks meant. The cosmos flowers, pressed and dried, are still exactly as Jan stuck them into position and as they remained until I took them to be photographed (Fig. 13a).

_6_

As I have said, I hesitate to tell about incidents such as these. They are hard to believe, and the skeptic may say that my wife was hypnotized by Jan, and made to believe them. But it happens that Craig has been able to establish exactly the same _rapport_ with her husband, who has never had anything to do with hypnosis, except to watch it a few times. A Socialist “muck-raker,” much wrapped up in his job, the husband sits and reads, or revises manuscript, while the wife works her white magic upon his mind. Suddenly his train of thought is broken by an exclamation; the wife has “willed” him to do such and so—and he has done it! Or maybe she has been asleep, and come out with the tail end of a dream, and has written down what appears to be a lot of rubbish—but turns out to be a reproduction of something the husband has been reading or writing at that very moment! Hear one or two instances of such events, all written down at the time.

Colonel Lindbergh has flown to France, but Craig does not know much about it, because she is not reading the papers, she is asking, “What is life?” A year passes, and in the mail I receive a monthly magazine, the _Lantern_, published by Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers in Boston. I open it, and find an article by a young radical, assailing Lindbergh because he does not follow in his father’s footsteps; his father was a radical congressman, but now the son allows himself to be used by the army and navy people, and by the capitalist press, to distract the minds of the masses from social justice. So runs the charge; and before I am through reading it, my wife comes downstairs from a nap. “What are you reading?” she asks, and I answer: “Something about Lindbergh.” Says my wife: “Here are my notes about a dream I just had.” She hands me a sheet of paper, I have it before me now as I write, and I give it with misspelling and abbreviations exactly as she wrote it in a hurry, not anticipating that it would ever become public:

“‘I do not believe that Lindberg flew across the ocean in order to take a ransome from a foreign gov as well as from his own. Nor in order to induce the nations of the earth to a war in the air.’ Words which were in my mind as I awoke from nap on aft May 25.”

I should add that my wife had had no opportunity to look at the Boston magazine, whether consciously or unconsciously. She tells me that Lindbergh had not been in her conscious mind for a long time, and she had no remotest idea that the radicals were attacking him.

Another instance: I am reading the latest “book of the month,” which has just come in the mail, and to which my wife has paid no attention. She interrupts me with a question: “Are there any flowers in what you are reading?” I answer, “Yes,” and she says: “I have been trying to concentrate, and I keep seeing flowers. I have drawn them.” She hands me two drawings (Figs. 14a, 14b):

The book was Mumford’s _Herman Melville_, and I was at page 346, a chapter entitled, “The Flowering Aloe.” On this page are six lines from a poem called “The American Aloe on Exhibition.” On the preceding page is a discussion of the habits of this plant. While my wife was making the left-hand drawing (Fig. 14a), I had been reading page 344: “the red clover had blushed through the fields about their house”; and “he would return home with a handful of clover blossoms.”

Of experiences like this there have been many. Important as the subject is, I find it a bother, because I am called upon to listen to long narratives of dreams and telepathy, while my mind is on Sacco and Vanzetti, or the Socialist presidential campaign, or whatever it is. Sometimes the messages from the subconscious are complicated and take patience to disentangle. Consider, for example, a little drawing (Fig. 15)—one of nearly three hundred which this long-suffering husband has made for his witch-wife to reproduce by telepathy: a football, you see, neatly laced up. In her drawing (Fig. 15a) Craig gets the general effect perfectly, but she puts it on a calf. Her written comment was: “Belly-band on calf.”

While Craig was making this particular experiment, her husband was reading a book; and now, wishing to solve the mystery, she asks, “What are you reading?” The husband replies, wearily: “DeKruif’s _Hunger Fighters_, page 283.” “What does it deal with?” “It is a treatise on the feeding of cows.” “Really?” says Craig. “Will you please write that down for me and sign it?”

But why did the cow become a calf? That, too, is something to be explained. Says Craig: “Do you remember what I used to tell you about old Mr. Bebb and his calves?” Yes, the husband knows the story of the half-crazy old Welshman, who thirty or forty years ago was the caretaker of the Kimbrough summer home on the Mississippi Sound. Old Mr. Bebb made his hobby the raising of calves by hand, and turning them into parlor pets. He would teach them to use his three fingers as a nursing bottle, and would make fancy embroidered belly-bands for them, and tie them up in these. So to the subconscious mind which was once little Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi, the idea of a calf sewed up like a football is one of the most natural in the world.

Since my wife and I have no secrets from each other, it does not trouble me that she is able to see what I am doing. While I am away from home, she will “concentrate” upon me, and immediately afterwards write out what she “sees.” On one occasion she described to me a little red book which I had got in the mail at the office. By way of establishing just what kind of book she had “seen,” she had gone to my bookcase and picked out a French dictionary—and it happened that I had just received the Italian dictionary of that same series, uniform in binding. On another occasion, while making a study of dream-material, she wrote out a dream about being lost in long and involved concrete corridors—while I was trying to find my way through the locker-rooms of a Y. M. C. A. basement, running into one blind passage after another, and being much annoyed by doors that wouldn’t open.

Dreams, you understand, are products of subconscious activity, and to watch them is one method of proving telepathy. By practice Craig has learned to lie passive, immediately after awakening, and trace back a long train of dreams. Here is one of the results, a story worth telling in detail—save that I fear you will refuse to believe it after it is told.

On the afternoon of January 30, 1928, I was playing tennis on the courts of the Virginia Hotel, in Long Beach, California, and my wife was taking a nap. She did not know that I was playing tennis, and has no knowledge about the places where I play. She takes no interest in the game, regarding it as a foolish business which will some day cause her husband to drop dead of heart failure—and she declines to be present on the occasion. When I entered the house, she said: “I woke up with a long involved dream, and it seemed so absurd I didn’t want to write it out, but I did so.” Here are the opening sentences verbatim:

“Dreamed I was on a pier, watching a new kind of small, one or two seated sport-boat, a little water car into which a woman got and was shot by machinery from the pier out to the water, where she skidded around a minute or two and was drawn back to the pier. With us on the pier were my sister and child, and two young men in white with white caps. These appeared to be in charge of this new sport-boat. This boat is not really a boat. It is a sort of miniature car. I’ve never seen anything like it. Short, so that only one or two people could sit in it. An amusement thing, belonging to the pier. The two young men were intensely interested, and stood close together watching it out on the water,” etc., etc.

Understand that this dream was not supposed to have anything to do with me. It was before Craig had come to realize the state of _rapport_ with me; she had not been thinking about me, and when she told me about this dream, she had no thought that any part of it had come from my mind. But here is what I told her about my afternoon:

The Virginia Hotel courts are close to what is called “The Pike,” and there is an amusement pier just across the way, and on it a so-called “Ferris wheel,” with little cars exactly like the description, which go up into the air with people in them. That afternoon it happened that the tennis courts were crowded, so my partner and I waited out a set or two. We sat on a bench, in white tennis suits and hats, and watched this wheel, and the cars which went up in the air, and at a certain point took a slide on long rods, which made them “skid around,” and caused the women in them to scream with excitement. Underneath the pier was the ocean, plainly visible along with the little cars.

(Footnote, 1962: The hotel and the Pike no longer exist, so do not waste your time trying to verify all this.)

I should also mention the case of our friend, Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz, with whom there is a _rapport_ which my wife does not tell her about. My wife will say to me, “Mrs. Gartz is going to phone,” and in a minute or two the phone will ring. She will say, “Mrs. Gartz is coming. She wants me to go to Los Angeles with her.” Of course, a good deal of guessing might be possible, in the case of two intimate friends. But consider such guessing as this: My wife had a dream of an earthquake and wrote it down. Soon thereafter occurred this conversation with Mrs. Gartz. I heard it, and my wife recorded it immediately afterwards, and I quote her written record:

“Mrs. Gartz dreamed of earthquake. ‘Wasn’t it queer that I dreamed of swaying slowly from side to side.’”

“‘I dreamed the same,’ I said. ‘But I was in a high building.’”

“‘So was I,’ she replied.”

Craig calls attention to the word “slowly,” as both she and Mrs. Gartz commented on this. They didn’t believe that an earthquake would behave that way; but I pointed out that it would happen just so with a steel-frame building.

_7_

I come now to a less fantastic and more convincing series of experiments; those made with the husband of my wife’s younger sister, Robert L. Irwin. Eight years ago the doctors gave Bob only a few months to live, on account of tuberculosis. Needless to say, he has much time on his hands, waiting for the doctors’ clairvoyance to be verified. He proved to be a good “subject”—the best of all in the tests with Jan. One day in our home, a series of five tests were made, with Bob holding an object in mind, while sitting several feet away from Jan. The latter found the object, and made the correct disposition of it, as willed by Bob, in four out of the five trials. This included such unlikely things as picking up a striped blanket and wrapping it about my shoulders.

Bob and Craig made the arrangement that at a certain hour each day, Bob, in his home in Pasadena, was to take pencil and paper and make a drawing of an object, and sit and concentrate his mind upon that drawing. At the same hour Craig, in our home in Long Beach, forty miles away, was to go into her state of “concentration,” and give orders to her subconscious mind to find out what was in Bob’s mind. The drawings were to be dated, and filed, and when the two of them met, they would compare the results, in the presence of myself and Bob’s wife. If there should turn out to be a correspondence between the drawings, greater than could be attributed to chance, it would be evidence of telepathy, as good as any that could be imagined or desired.