Some Directions for Mediumship Research
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
What if one of the best tools for testing whether mediums actually talk to the dead got tossed aside too soon? Emily Williams Kelly thinks so. She argues that researchers gave up on mediumship studies not because the evidence ran dry, but because they got stuck in a philosophical debate: is this survival after death, or just super-powered psychic reading? Her solution is beautifully simple -- proxy sittings, where a stand-in sits with the medium instead of the real person seeking a reading. This removes the chance the medium is just picking up cues from whoever is in the room. The historical results are remarkable: in one controlled study, real sitters' scores were over twelve times higher than random guesses across nineteen sessions. A modern follow-up with nine mediums and forty sitters hit statistical significance at p less than .0001, meaning the odds of it being pure chance are vanishingly tiny. Kelly makes a compelling case that proxy sittings deserve a serious comeback.
Research Notes
Presented at a 2005 Parapsychology Foundation conference. The author (Emily Williams Kelly, DOPS, UVA) is married to Edward F. Kelly and previously published as Cook [Kelly]. Provides the strongest modern argument for reviving proxy-sitting research, central to the survival vs. super-psi controversy (#7). Key bridge between historical SPR mediumship work and the modern Windbridge/DOPS programs.
Arguing that abandoning mediumship research due to the survival/super-psi impasse was a self-inflicted wound on psychical research, this essay reviews three historically important types of mediumistic evidence: cross-correspondences, drop-in communicators, and proxy sittings. Detailed case studies from the 1920s-1930s demonstrate that proxy sittings with Mrs. Leonard and other mediums produced highly specific veridical information unknown to the proxy. Saltmarsh's controlled study found real sitters' scores over 12 times higher than controls across 19 proxy sittings, and Kelly & Arcangel's modern study with 9 mediums and 40 sitters yielded p < .0001 using global scoring. Proxy sittings are proposed as the most productive direction for renewed research.
Related Papers
Companion
Also by these authors
More in Mediumship
Intuitive Assessment of Mortality Based on Facial Characteristics: Behavioral, Electrocortical, and Machine Learning Analyses
A Mixed Methods Phenomenological and Exploratory Study of Channeling
People Reporting Experiences of Mediumship Have Higher Dissociation Symptom Scores Than Non-Mediums, But Below Thresholds for Pathological Dissociation
Neuroimaging during Trance State: A Contribution to the Study of Dissociation
The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study
📋 Cite this paper
Kelly, Emily Williams (2010). Some Directions for Mediumship Research. Journal of Scientific Exploration.
@article{kelly_2010_some,
title = {Some Directions for Mediumship Research},
author = {Kelly, Emily Williams},
year = {2010},
journal = {Journal of Scientific Exploration},
}