During the early 1970s, a group from the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set out to see if they could make a ghost.
First they dreamed up a fictional character, then invented a background to go with him. The character was named Philip and lived at the time of Cromwell, in a house called Diddington Manor. He fell in love with a beautiful Gypsy woman named Margo and subsequently had an affair with her. When his wife found out, she took her revenge by accusing Margo of witchcraft. Margo was tried, convicted and burned at the stake. Philip, mad with grief, committed suicide.
There actually was a Diddington Manor and pictures of it were obtained by the group. The rest of the story was fiction. Philip never really existed. But that didn’t stop him haunting.
The group held a series of séances with photographs of the manor placed around the room while they concentrated on the fictional Philip. For several months nothing happened. Then a rap was heard. The group set up a code and communication was established. Sure enough, the communicating ‘spirit’ turned out to be Philip, claiming the life history they had invented for him.
As the séances continued, the fictional Philip continued to behave exactly as séance room spirits have always behaved. He caused raps and brought through such a richly detailed description of the Cromwellian period that the group actually double checked to make sure they’d not somehow based Philip on a real life character. (They hadn’t.) Later, the Toronto experiment was duplicated by other groups. One of them dispelled any lingering doubts about the fictional nature of the spirit by communicating with a talking dolphin.
Although Philip was a step removed from the sort of visible ‘spirit’ appearance reported by Alexandra David-Neel, he did manage to produce physical phenomena like raps and table turning, which suggests the psychological mechanics of the two experiments may not have been all that different. But if certain persistent accounts are to be believed, the techniques used for creating ghosts went far further in Tibet than they ever did in Canada – and generated a valuable spiritual lesson in the process.
One of the most fascinating stories involves a mythic creature called a Yidam, a tutelary deity in the Tibetan pantheon ... read more ...
