began in Cottage City, Maryland. The family of a young boy, called in some newspaper reports ‘Roland Doe’, began to experience poltergeist activity. It started with scratching noises from the house walls, and then the boy’s bed began shaking and moving on its own, with similar events occurring at school.
A psychiatrist was called in to examine the boy but could find nothing wrong with him. The family called in a minister who believed that a ghost, perhaps the spirit of the dead aunt, might be involved. Some reports say that a Lutheran minister performed an exorcism or a series of exorcisms, while other reports say exorcisms were performed by a pair of Jesuit priests.
After the movie appeared, new reports surfaced of a detailed diary kept by one of the Jesuit priests of the entire exorcism process. The diary says that the exorcism took place in a hospital, the boy’s reactions to the exorcism were violent and that it took four months for the ‘demon’ to be expelled. Afterwards the boy remembered nothing and the case was quietly buried. The room at the hospital where the exorcism took place was rumoured to be haunted in the years following. Many people who worked near the room continued to report cold waves of air and unusual noises coming from inside the room.
What truly happened in the case remains a mystery. Were there natural or psychological explanations for what occurred in the case? Or was this simply the story of an attention-starved boy tricking the adults around him into believing he was possessed by the devil?
COTTINGLEY FAIRIES
In July 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths claimed they could see fairies in the small wooded creek behind Elsie’s house in Cot-tingley, West Yorkshire. Elsie’s father dismissed their claims, and so one day the girls borrowed his camera to take a picture of them.
The picture, when developed, showed Elsie with a group of fairies dancing in front of her. A month later the girls took a picture of Elsie with a gnome. Elsie’s parents were startled by the photographs, but her father remained unconvinced. Her mother, however, took the pictures to a Theosophist meeting one evening, and soon the photos were published. The girls’ most famous supporter became Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle printed the first two pictures in Strand Magazine in 1920 and three more photos a couple of years later. He then expanded his articles into a book, The Coming of the Fairies. Shortly after, Frances’s family moved away from Elsie’s, and the girls stopped seeing fairies.
In the decades that followed, the photographs were widely circulated and deemed false, and even Conan Doyle himself finally admitted that he may have been the victim of a hoax. It wasn’t until the 1980s, though, that Frances and Elsie admitted that they had faked the photographs to get back at the adults who had told them off for believing in fairies. They said that when Conan Doyle had got involved they didn’t want to embarrass him by admitting that the photos were faked. They also said that as young girls they had actually seen fairies, but that the fairies didn’t like to be photographed.
CRANDON, Mina STINSON [1888–194,1]
This Boston medium, also known as Margery, left a controversial legacy behind her. Opinion is divided as to whether she was one of the greatest mediums of her day or a complete fraud.
Unusually for mediums, Crandon’s early life did not offer any hints of her future psychic power. It wasn’t until her divorce in 1918 and second marriage to prominent surgeon Le Roi Goddard Crandon, who had an interest in the paranormal and set up a psychic home circle, that her abilities began to surface. Soon she was demonstrating remarkable abilities as a medium managed by her control, Walter. Walter was in fact Mina’s brother who had died five years earlier, with whom she had been very close.
Several investigations of Crandon’s power were put together by prominent academics and psychical investigators, including Harry Houdini the magician, who was utterly convinced that she was a fraud. Despite causing bitter controversy, Crandon had many supporters at the American Society for Psychical Research, and a book published in 1925, Margery the Medium by Malcolm Bird, editor of the Scientific American, was very favourable to her.
Mina Crandon appeared to enjoy all the attention she received from press and public alike. By all accounts it wasn’t just her psychic powers that her supporters admired. She was a vivacious and charismatic person who was not adverse to holding séances in the nude and to having extramarital affairs with more than one of her investigators.
When asked on her deathbed if fraud had taken place, she refused to set the record straight. With the hint of a smile and a twinkle in her eye, she is said to have replied, Why don’t you guess? You’ll all be guessing for the rest of your lives.’
CREATIVE VISUALIZATION
Creative visualization is the process by which the creation of a visual image is believed to promote the desired outcome.
Creative visualization is built on the ancient belief in the power of the mind to create what you want in your life. If you think about what you’d like to achieve in your life, you can do just that, as positive images and thoughts attract positive energy. Creative visualization is widely used in business, sport, art, psychotherapy, psychic development, mystical and occult arts and personal self-development.
Imagination has a powerful influence on self-image, and a poor self-image can often mean the difference between success and failure in life. Creative visualization, which seems to be most effective when practised in a relaxed state, can be used to feed your mind positive images to create a better self-image and improve your personal experiences. For example, if you want to develop your psychic awareness, you need to imagine being psychic. If you want to pass an exam, you imagine yourself passing it. Those who practise visualization say it’s important to fill in all the details of your experience so that the image is as real to the mind as possible.
CREWE CIRCLE
The Crewe Circle was a group of spirit photographers based in Crewe, England, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Led by William Hope, the circle claimed to be able to photograph the souls of the dead. Many psychical research organizations investigated the claims, but the most documented are those sponsored by the Royal Photographic Society and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels. Conan Doyle was so intrigued by the Crewe Circle that he wrote a book about it entitled The Case for Spirit Photography (1922).
Over the years the spirit photographs taken by the members of the Crewe Circle have come under detailed examination, and have been dismissed as fraudulent by many, but so far none has been proven conclusively to be a hoax. It is possible that the photos could be spontaneous images of spirits captured on the film plates.
CROISET, Gerard [1909–1980]
Born in the Netherlands, Croiset grew up to become an internationally renowned clairvoyant, highly regarded as a police psychic for his ability to find missing people, animals and objects.
Croiset was raised in foster homes and orphanages and began to experience clairvoyance at the age of six. He dropped out of school at 13 and drifted into unskilled work. The turning point in his life came in 1935 when he was introduced to a group of local spiritualists, and
