Psychology’s Haunted Laboratory: Telepathy, Time Travel, and the Problem with Wanting to Believe
Psychology likes to present itself as the sensible science of behaviour, cognition, memory, attention, emotion, and all the other things that can be measured without anyone dimming the lights and asking whether Aunt Margaret has entered the room.
This is mostly fair. Mostly.
Because tucked away in psychology’s history is a stranger, draughtier corridor: telepathy experiments, dream transmission, children who remembered previous lives, attempts to measure premonitions, and even a paper asking whether the future might somehow influence the present. It is a history full of clever people, bad methods, brave questions, wishful thinking, occasional fraud, and enough academic awkwardness to make the whole field cough politely and change the subject.
Psychology Has Always Had a Weird Cousin
Psychology did not emerge into the world as a perfectly sober laboratory science. It grew up in the same cultural fog as mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, séance rooms, trance mediums, nervous illnesses, religious doubt, and the Victorian suspicion that the mind might be doing something extremely strange behind everyone’s back.
This is easy to forget now, because modern psychology has learned to dress properly. It has ethics forms, preregistration, eye-tracking equipment, reaction-time tasks, and a reassuring fondness for acronyms. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the boundary between “serious psychology” and “psychical research” was not as clean as it later became.
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 to investigate experiences such as telepathy, apparitions, mediumship, and other phenomena that seemed to challenge ordinary scientific models. It was not just a club for people who wanted ghosts to be real, although there were inevitably a few of those knocking about. Its orbit included philosophers, scientists, and psychologists who thought that strange experiences should be examined rather than laughed out of the room immediately. A similar American society formed under the leadership of William James, one of the most important figures in the history of psychology.
That detail is worth sitting with for a moment. William James, author of The Principles of Psychology, was not some marginal occult hobbyist standing outside the department with a haunted tambourine. He was central to psychology’s formation, and even he was drawn toward psychical research. The field’s respectable family tree has more ectoplasm on it than it likes to admit.
The question, then, is not simply why strange people believed strange things. That is too easy. The better question is why serious, intelligent, scientifically minded people kept returning to the paranormal fringe, again and again, as if something important might be hiding there.
J. B. Rhine and the Dream of Putting Telepathy on a Spreadsheet
If psychology’s haunted laboratory has a founding technician, it is probably J. B. Rhine.
Rhine’s work at Duke University helped turn “extrasensory perception” into something that looked, at least from a distance, like an experimental research programme. The Parapsychology Laboratory began at Duke in 1930 after William McDougall invited J. B. and Louisa Rhine to Durham, during a wider scientific interest in testing paranormal claims empirically.
This is where the famous Zener cards enter the story: simple cards marked with symbols such as a star, circle, cross, square, and wavy lines. One person would try to guess the hidden card. Another would record the result. Repeat this enough times and, in theory, you could tell whether someone was performing above chance.
There is something wonderfully bleak about this. Human beings have always wanted evidence that minds can touch at a distance, that consciousness might leak through the walls of the skull, that loneliness might not be the final condition of being alive. Rhine’s answer was: fine, guess the wavy lines, and please do not smudge the data sheet.
That, in miniature, is the psychological impulse. Take the impossible, reduce it to a task, run trials, count hits, argue about statistics, then spend the next century fighting over whether the whole thing was nonsense, evidence, bad controls, selective reporting, or a small but genuine anomaly that refuses to die politely.
Rhine made ESP feel testable. That was his power. It was also the beginning of the problem. Once the paranormal enters the lab, it has to behave like something that can survive method. Most of it does not.
The Medium Who Went to Mars
Before Rhine’s cards, there was a much stranger case: Hélène Smith, the Swiss medium studied by Théodore Flournoy.
Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars examined Smith’s trance states, claimed past lives, imaginary languages, and supposed communications from Mars. The book, published in English in 1900, became a classic case study in the psychology of mediumship and subliminal imagination.
Smith claimed, among other things, to have been a Hindu princess and to communicate with Martians. She produced Martian writing and descriptions of Martian landscapes, which is a level of commitment most modern role-players would quietly respect.
The important point is that Flournoy did not simply treat Smith as a fraud or as a direct messenger from space. He approached the case psychologically. Her performances could be understood through imagination, memory, dissociation, suggestion, and cryptomnesia, where forgotten memories return without being recognised as memories.
This is where the story becomes more interesting than “woman claims to speak Martian.” The case shows how the mind can generate elaborate worlds and then misrecognise its own authorship. We do not need literal Martians for that to be astonishing. Frankly, the psychological explanation is almost more impressive. The unconscious, given enough cultural material and enough encouragement, can apparently open a badly managed theatre company.
Dream Telepathy, Now With Added Grateful Dead
If Zener cards were parapsychology in its tidy school-uniform phase, dream telepathy was where things began wearing beads.
At Maimonides Medical Center in New York, Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner carried out dream telepathy studies in the 1960s and 1970s. The basic idea was that a “sender” would concentrate on a target image while a sleeping “receiver” dreamed in the laboratory. The researchers then compared dream reports with the target material. The Maimonides Dream Laboratory opened in the early 1960s, with Krippner joining the work from 1964.
This is already odd enough. But then it gets better, because one of the most famous associated studies involved the Grateful Dead.
In 1971, Krippner, Charles Honorton, and Ullman conducted a dream telepathy experiment connected to Grateful Dead concerts. Audience members were reportedly encouraged to act as senders while a sleeping participant elsewhere served as the receiver. The study was later published as “An experiment in dream telepathy with ‘The Grateful Dead.’”
It is hard to improve on this as an image: a sleeping subject, a concert audience, projected instructions, psychedelic music, and a research team trying to find out whether thousands of people could beam dream content into someone’s sleeping mind.
Was it convincing? Not in the way mainstream psychology would require now. But as a cultural artefact, it is magnificent. It belongs to that era when consciousness research, psychedelia, humanistic psychology, and parapsychology all seemed to be sharing the same suspiciously warm punch bowl.
The dream telepathy studies capture something psychology has never fully escaped: the temptation to believe that altered states reveal deeper truths. Sometimes they do. Dreams, dissociation, hypnosis, grief, trauma, intoxication, and sensory deprivation can all reveal things about perception and selfhood. The problem begins when “the mind is stranger than we thought” becomes “therefore Jerry Garcia is a telecommunications system.”
The Premonitions Bureau: Britain Invents Administrative Prophecy
The strangest British contribution to this story may be John Barker and the Premonitions Bureau.
Barker was a psychiatrist who became interested in premonitions after the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in which a coal waste tip collapsed onto a Welsh village, killing 144 people, including 116 children. Reports emerged that some people had experienced dreams or forebodings before the catastrophe. Barker, working with science journalist Peter Fairley, helped create the British Premonitions Bureau to collect and catalogue warnings from members of the public.
There is something almost painfully British about this. Other cultures might have prophets, oracles, shamans, ecstatic visions. Britain created a filing system.
The Bureau asked people to submit dreams, fears, and forebodings before events occurred, rather than after. This was the crucial methodological move. Premonitions reported after disasters are almost impossible to evaluate properly because memory is a slippery little clerk. It edits. It improves. It decides that the vague dream about “darkness” was obviously about a mining disaster because, well, look what happened.
Barker’s hope was that enough submitted premonitions might reveal patterns before disaster struck. In practice, the Bureau collected many claims, found a few that seemed unsettlingly accurate, and prevented nothing. The whole project sits somewhere between tragedy, bureaucracy, magical thinking, and early crowdsourced data collection.
The dark twist is that Barker himself died suddenly in 1968, after some of his correspondents reportedly warned that he was in danger. That is the kind of detail that makes sceptics sigh and writers sit up like dogs hearing cheese being unwrapped.
The Premonitions Bureau is not good evidence that the future can be predicted. It is excellent evidence that humans are pattern-hungry animals who become especially vulnerable to meaning after catastrophe. When something unbearable happens, coincidence feels insulting. Randomness feels obscene. A premonition, however frightening, at least suggests that the universe had a shape.
That may be the real psychological force behind precognition. Not proof. Hunger.
Ian Stevenson and the Children Who Remembered Too Much
Reincarnation research sits in an awkward place. It is less funny than Martian mediumship, less tidy than ESP cards, and much harder to wave away without sounding either gullible or smug.
Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, spent decades investigating children who claimed to remember previous lives. UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies describes these cases as usually involving young children, often between the ages of two and five, who speak about memories of a previous life and sometimes show unusual behaviours, phobias, or preferences that their families cannot easily explain.
Stevenson’s approach involved collecting children’s statements and comparing them with details from the life of a deceased person. A later review notes that Stevenson began researching such cases in 1961 and aimed to document exactly what children said, then assess whether the details could be matched to a specific deceased individual.
This material is difficult because it occupies the uncomfortable zone between “probably not reincarnation” and “still rather odd.” Children say strange things. Families interpret. Cultures provide scripts. Adults ask leading questions without meaning to. Memory is not a recording. At the same time, some cases are detailed enough to be genuinely unsettling, especially when they involve young children making specific claims before adults appear to have had much chance to build a story around them.
The psychological interest does not depend on proving reincarnation. These cases raise fascinating questions about memory, identity, family narrative, cultural expectation, childhood imagination, grief, and how adults respond when children say things that sound impossible.
A child saying “I used to be someone else” is not only a paranormal claim. It is also a small explosion under our ordinary assumptions about personhood. We prefer children to be developmental projects, not metaphysical interruptions.
Helmut Schmidt and the Attempt to Haunt Randomness
By the time parapsychology moved from cards and dice to machines, the weirdness became colder.
Helmut Schmidt pioneered experiments using electronic random number generators to test psychokinesis, the idea that mental intention might influence random physical systems. Some of his work also explored retroactive psychokinesis, where participants were said to influence random events that had already been recorded. The claim appears in published discussions of pre-recorded targets and retro-psychokinesis experiments.
This is one of the most beautifully deranged ideas in the whole cabinet: not only can the mind influence matter, but perhaps it can influence matter backwards, like a ghost editing yesterday’s spreadsheet.
Schmidt’s work moved paranormal research into an era of machines, probability, and electronics. No more medium in a dim room. No more card table. Now the mind was supposedly whispering to randomness itself.
Again, mainstream psychology and physics were not persuaded in any settled way. But the idea is revealing. Psychokinesis is often imagined as bending spoons, moving objects, or theatrical hand-waving. Micro-psychokinesis is stranger and more modern. It imagines consciousness not as a dramatic force but as a tiny bias in probability.
There is something very twenty-first century about that, even when the experiments are older. The paranormal becomes a nudge. Not a thunderbolt, not a levitating table, just a slight statistical wobble. A ghost with a p-value.
Daryl Bem and the Paper That Made Psychology Look Nervously at Itself
Then came Daryl Bem.
Bem was not a fringe nobody. He was a respected social psychologist. That is what made his 2011 paper so explosive. Published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Feeling the Future” reported nine experiments involving more than 1,000 participants and tested for “retroactive” influences by time-reversing familiar psychological effects. In plain English, the studies asked whether future events could affect earlier responses.
This sounds absurd. It also passed peer review.
Bem’s paper included experiments on precognition, retroactive priming, retroactive habituation, and retroactive facilitation of recall. The logic was not “Madame Zelda predicts your uncle’s bunion.” It was more unsettling: take standard experimental psychology paradigms, flip the timeline, and see whether the data still produce a statistically significant effect.
The response was ferocious, and rightly so. Many researchers saw the paper less as evidence for psi and more as evidence that psychology’s statistical habits were dangerously permissive. If normal methods could produce evidence for precognition, perhaps the problem was not time travel. Perhaps the problem was the methods.
Follow-up work failed to provide reassuring support. Ritchie, Wiseman, and French published three preregistered unsuccessful attempts to replicate one of Bem’s effects, retroactive facilitation of recall.
This is why Bem’s paper matters even if you think precognition is nonsense. It became part of the wider replication crisis conversation. It asked psychology a horrible question: how many ordinary-looking findings might be built on the same flexible methods that allowed “the future affects the present” to get through?
In that sense, Bem may have accidentally done psychology a favour. Not by proving psi, but by making the field stare at its own machinery and mutter, “Oh no.”
Fraud, Wishful Thinking, and the Problem of the Beautiful Result
No haunted laboratory is complete without fraud.
Samuel Soal, a British parapsychologist, was once associated with some apparently impressive telepathy findings. Later analysis suggested serious manipulation of records, and his case became one of the major fraud scandals in parapsychology.
Fraud matters here, but not because it lets us dismiss the whole history with a pleased little slap of the hands. Fraud is psychologically interesting because it often grows in the soil of desire.
Parapsychology is vulnerable to fraud because the desired result is so emotionally powerful. Proof of telepathy would mean minds are less separate than we feared. Proof of precognition would mean time is not the prison it appears to be. Proof of life after death would turn grief into a waiting room. The incentives are enormous, even before money, fame, or professional status enter the picture.
But fraud is only the crude version of a wider problem. More often, the issue is not someone cartoonishly faking data while twirling a moustache. It is motivated interpretation, flexible analysis, selective reporting, leaky procedures, weak controls, retrospective fitting, and the soft human tendency to notice the hits while letting the misses slide quietly into a drawer.
This is the real danger in paranormal research: not that people are stupid, but that people are meaning-making machines. Give us enough noise and enough hope, and we will begin to hear music.
Why Did Psychology Keep Going Back?
It would be easy to finish by saying: psychology studied weird things, weird things mostly failed, now we are sensible. Sadly, history is not that tidy, and neither are people.
Psychology kept going back to telepathy, precognition, mediumship, altered states, and survival claims because those topics sit directly on top of the field’s deepest questions.
Where does the mind end?
Is consciousness sealed inside the individual?
Can memory exceed the brain?
Why do people experience presences, visions, voices, warnings, and uncanny coincidences?
How much of ordinary life is shaped by expectation, suggestion, and interpretation?
What do grief and fear do to perception?
When does open-mindedness become gullibility?
When does scepticism become cowardice dressed as intelligence?
These are not silly questions. Some of the answers offered by parapsychology may be weak, but the questions themselves are not trivial. They point toward the edges of psychology: selfhood, agency, consciousness, memory, social belief, death, and the need to feel that reality is not as brutally closed as it sometimes appears.
The paranormal keeps returning because human beings keep having strange experiences. Most of those experiences probably do not require paranormal explanations. But dismissing them too quickly can be its own kind of intellectual laziness. People hear voices. People sense presences. People dream of the dead. People feel dread before bad news. People experience coincidences that seem personally addressed to them. People misremember. People confabulate. People also suffer, grieve, hope, panic, and build meaning under pressure.
A good psychology does not need to believe every ghost story. But it should understand why ghost stories are so hard to kill.
Simply Put
The paranormal history of psychology is not embarrassing because it contains weird questions. It is embarrassing because it exposes how badly psychology wants two incompatible things.
It wants to be a hard science, clean and respectable, with proper measures and no suspicious velvet curtains. But it also wants to understand human experience, and human experience is full of oddness. Not just error, not just superstition, but oddness: dreams that feel more real than waking life, grief that makes the dead feel present, gut feelings that seem to arrive before evidence, memories that behave like fiction, bodies that respond to belief, and minds that produce whole worlds when left alone in the dark.
The lesson is not “telepathy is real.” The evidence does not justify that. The lesson is also not “everyone involved was ridiculous.” Some were. Some were careful. Some were naïve. Some were brilliant. Some were probably far too impressed by their own statistical furniture.
The better lesson is that psychology’s weird history shows the field at its most human. It wanted to measure mystery without being swallowed by it. Sometimes it failed. Sometimes it learned something useful by accident. Sometimes it built a machine for detecting ghosts and discovered a problem with methodology instead.
Which is, frankly, very psychology.
The haunted laboratory is still there. It has changed shape. Today it looks less like a séance and more like debates about consciousness, anomalous experiences, psychedelic therapy, predictive processing, AI personhood, simulation theory, near-death experiences, and whether subjective experience can ever be fully explained from the outside.
The ghosts have updated their branding.
And perhaps that is the most useful way to treat psychology’s paranormal past. Not as a freak show. Not as proof that the impossible is true. As a warning, a curiosity, and a reminder that the mind is strange enough without pretending we have finished understanding it.
Psychology does not need to believe in telepathy to learn from the people who tried to test it. It only needs to remember why they were tempted.
Because under the cards, the dreams, the Martian alphabets, the premonition files, the reincarnation cases, and the time-reversed experiments is one very ordinary human wish:
Please let there be more going on than this.
And if there is not, please at least let us understand why we keep hoping.
references
Duke University Libraries. (2020). Early studies in parapsychology at Duke.
Knight, S. (2019). The psychiatrist who believed people could tell the future. The New Yorker.
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