Twilight Shadows (North) Paranormal

 

Ectoplasm

 

What exactly is ectoplasm?  It is a word that I became aware of quite early on in my childhood.  I purchased a book about ghosts at my junior school book week.  In it, the book described that some physic mediums could conjure up this stuff called ectoplasm and it would seep out of holes in their bodies (mainly mouths or noses) and it would sometimes form faces or hands.

 

This fascinated me.  It also horrified me.  What if it started to seep from me and I didn't know about it or couldn't stop it?  Did it hurt?  What on earth was it and how did people discover they could produce this stuff in the first place?

 

The word ectoplasm comes from the words Ektos, meaning "outside", and plasma, meaning "something formed or moulded.  It is a whitish substance that allegedly extrudes from the mouth, nose, ears or other orifices of the medium during a séance.

 

The phrase ectoplasm was first used in the late nineteenth century by French psychologist Charles Richet, who recorded the phenomenon in his own research with the ectoplasm-producing medium Madam d’Esperance.  It is reported to smell like ozone.  (a sweet, clover like smell), to be either warm or cold to the touch and to appear either light and airy or sticky and jelly-like, with a structure that varies from amorphous clouds to a net like membrane that can transform into limbs, faces or bodies of ghosts or spirits.  If exposed to light the ectoplasm is said to snap back into the mediums body which is said to cause discomfort, pain or injury.  Many believe that this substance to be the matter that composes your astral body and is the basis of all psychic phenomena.

 

When mediums were first conjuring up ectoplasm during séances , it would often be in the shape of a hand or sometimes a hand and an arm which was called a pseudopod.  Pseudopods could often move like a real arm or hand. They could hold things, pick things up, and move things around. They shook the hands of those people taking part in the séance. Some of these ectoplasmic formations looked very realistic, while others looked nothing like human hands or arms. This could be because some mediums were better artists than others.  Many of these pseudopods were proved to be fakes created by the mediums before the séances. These ghostly hands felt ice cold when touched. Many mediums were caught creating their own, fake ectoplasm by using thin strips of muslin, egg white, mixtures of soap, chewed paper or gauze. Because of this you don't hear much about ectoplasm much these days but some that have witnessed this paranormal substance for themselves have said that it moves like it's alive and changes its' shape at will.

    

Perhaps those mediums that were caught using fake ectoplasm were not completely fraudulent. What if the substances were moving and changing in unexplainable ways, it could have been actually been controlled by spirits?  Or, even by the mediums own telekinetic abilities. The substance was man made but it might have been guided by some other means.

 

The Danish medium Einer Nielsen was investigated by a committee from the Kristiania University, Norway in 1922.  It was discovered in a séance that his ectoplasm was fake. Unbelievably, Nielsen was also caught hiding his ectoplasm in his rectum. Perhaps the most well-known ectoplasm-producing medium was Mina Crandon.  Famous photographs from the 1920s show Mina with long strings of ectoplasm streaming out of her mouth, ears and nose and even between her legs.  Mina was known worldwide for producing ectoplasm during her séance sittings. She produced a small ectoplasmic hand from her stomach which waved about in the darkness. Her career ended however when biologists examined the hand and found it to be made of a piece of carved animal liver. Walter Franklin Prince described the Crandon case as "the most ingenious, persistent, and fantastic complex of fraud in the history of psychic research."

 

In experiments in the early 1900s, medium Marth Beraud was said to produce masses of white or grey material during a sitting.  She was thoroughly examined beforehand by a German doctor, Baron Albert von Schrenck-notzing, to confirm that she wasn’t hiding anything; The Baron described Berauds ectoplasm as sticky icicles that ran down her face and onto the front of her body where they assumed faces or shapes.

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Research into ectoplasm was conducted well into the twentieth century and analyses of small pieces of ectoplasm did in some cases, although not all reveal fraud, with the use of substances such as muslin, toothpaste, soap, gelatine and egg white.  Magician Harry Houdini once said that he couldn’t believe superior beings would allow the production of such disgusting substances from the human body.  Interest in ectoplasm has since declined but some modern mediums are still said to produce the phenomena.

 

One theory of ectoplasm is that when it forms after or during the meeting of the medium and the ghost, it is really being created by the spirit of the medium by forming on his or her skin to give the ghost enough strength to completely materialize. Another theory on this strange substance is that it might come from the ghost itself and is the substance of its life force caught in the middle of its’ dimension and our own.

 

So, is ectoplasm real or fake?  My guess is that ectoplasm is fake.  A parlour trick popular back in the early 1900s when spiritualism was at its height.  Never the less it is a fascinating subject which has hundreds of pictures readily available on the internet of physical mediums producing ectoplasm for all to see.  If you study the pictures, they look obviously staged and fake.  I guess back in the day when photography was fairly new, these images would have seemed amazing and conclusive evidence.  Viewing them now however, the tricks that most mediums used glare out at you like a red arrow.   I will continue to read up on this phenomenon however.  It would be interesting if a modern day medium would step forward to demonstrate the materialisation of ectoplasm.  Unfortunately though, now a day, the more celebrity medium is more interested in possession’s and cold reading so this is unlikely.

 

J Wicheard ©

 

 

Information sourced from The Element Encyclopaedia of Ghosts and hauntings by Theresa Cheung and the paranormal wikipedia