ABSTRACT
I have described before (Chapters 6 and 11) how in 1972 the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set up a group who ‘invented’ the fictitious ghost Philip. The idea was that several normal people acting in concert might achieve the same sort of psychic power that one medium could command. They would, of course, have to achieve the right sort of closeness and ability to relax with each other. In the event, the group consisted of eight people, none of whom claimed any psychic ability, and none of whom acted as leader. The Society hoped to turn an unpredictable personal skill into a repeatable group technique: one of those ‘recipes which always work’. So far, it seems not to have done so. No system of organizing a group into one with psychic powers has yet been published. Unusual 178psychic ability continues to remain the rare and valuable possession of single individuals. Such people are often known as ‘mediums’; the word implies a channel through which some sort of spiritual influence can easily flow. One of the people who helped to start the spiritualism movement, Kate Fox herself, later became an important medium.
