A puzzling area of the paranormal is that of psychic detection. One of the most ridiculed talents, how is it possible for people to have knowledge of a crime through psychic means?
Many believers put it down to clairvoyance, but usually even this talent involves a degree of focusing – information comes from someone close to the receiver, or the psychic is concentrating on something in particular.
Neither of these apply to psychic detection. A few case studies.
TERESITA BASA
Forty seven year old Teresita Basa was found stabbed and partially burnt in her Chicago apartment on 21 Feb 1977. Originally from the Philippines, Teresita had worked at the Edgewater Hospital.
A Mrs Chua also worked at the hospital, and one evening shortly afterwards, she went into a trance and appeared to be taken over by Teresita’s spirit.
Before coming out of the trance, she accused a young black orderly called Allen Showery of the murder. Contacting the police, Showery’s flat was searched and Teresita’s jewels were found. Showery confessed to the murder.
DOROTHY ALLISON
On 3 December 1967 New Jersey housewife Dorothy Allison woke from a disturbing dream having seen a possibly Polish boy trapped in a pipe and wearing a green snow suit.
A few days later, she rang the police, who were sceptical. But the fact remained that a Polish boy called Michael had slipped and fallen into freezing water and his body had not been recovered.
Wearing a green snow suit, he had disappeared 2 hours AFTER Dorothy’s dream. Hypnotised, she claimed the boy would be found on 7 February in a car park behind an ITT factory. As the snows began to thaw on that date, the boy was released from a pipe near an ITT factory. Since the case, Dorothy has assisted the police many times.
NELLA JONES
Psychic Nella Jones offered some interesting information concerning the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, while he was still at large. She advised that the killer was called Peter, worked as a long distance driver, lived in an elevated house in Bradford numbered 6, and that on his lorry cab door was a name beginning with ‘C’. Peter Sutcliffe lived in an elevated house at 6 Garden Lane, Bradford. He worked as a driver for Clark Holdings.
Nella contacted the police with this information after a vision. In a further case – the abduction of four year old Simon Jones from Hemel Hempstead in September 1990 – Nella told police that the boy had not been murdered, as everyone thought, but was alive and his whereabouts were connected with a bell and a tunnel.
Two months later Simon was found alive and well in a men’s hostel close to The Bell pub, which was accessed by a narrow, tunnel-like alley.
JACQUELINE POOLE
One of the most impressive cases of psychic detection concerned the murder, in her Ruislip flat, of 25 year old barmaid Jacqueline Poole on 11 February 1983. Sexually assaulted and strangled, police were getting nowhere.
However, the following night, local woman Christine Holohan was visited by an apparition of Jacqueline. Over a number of nights she told Christine of some 120 varifiable facts about herself and the murder, including the name ‘Pokie.’
Christine went to the police, who had already interviewed Anthony ‘Pokie’ Ruark, but he had an alibi. In 1999 the case was reopened, and a jumper Ruark had tried to hide was submitted to DNA testing. It had traces of Jacqueline’s blood and saliva on it. He was convicted in 2001.
A TYPE OF CLAIRVOYANCE
The most appealing answer to such cases is to invoke a form of clairvoyance – in other words, the psychic detective accesses information about the cases from some pool of paranormal information.
The problem with this theory is that it is unproveable. And whilst I do not dismiss it as a possibility, what I want to do is see if any form of social interaction, linked with what we know of the human mind, can provide a glimpse of a more rational theory.
The obvious starting point is cryptomnesia. This is a known ability for the mind to access information from the unconscious the person did not realize was there. In effect, it passed into the mind without realizing it.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
It is a matter of perception – or rather, unconscious perception. What we must ask is: when you sense the outside world, just how much information filters into the mind due to your observation?
In one sense, not very much. You only seem to ‘observe’ that which your attention is placed upon. But the reality is, everything that you are able to hear, see, or even smell enters your mind at some level.
The success of human cognition is our ability to ‘censor’ that which we need for conscious thought, allowing unrequired information to by-pass consciousness. But this information has to go somewhere, and it is most likely the case that it goes into the unconscious unnoticed.
INTERACTION
Taking this into account, just imagine an average person spending a day in the city. He has gone into the city on public transport, he has walked down many busy streets, maybe visited some shops, perhaps even gone to work in a large organization.
In just one day, our average person has experienced unrealized sensory input from perhaps over 10,000 people. If we then take those 10,000 people, and multiply the 10,000 people they have each had sensory input from, then we have a mass of humanity in the millions.
Now suppose two of the people you saw were talking about another person, who you hadn’t seen. Does ‘information’ about this person seep into your unconscious, too? If so, then this interaction of millions of people could place ‘knowledge’ of millions of people in your unconscious every day.
NARROWING DOWN THE ODDS
The reality of the human mind is that it could be so connected to the rest of humanity through unconscious interaction that we possess, in the unconscious, so much information that if it could be tapped, it would constitute a form of clairvoyance.
Of course, it is not just interaction that provides ‘information.’ Media sources such as newspapers, TV and radio must be added to the memory bank of the unconscious. Indeed, cryptomnesia suggests simply scanning a paper is all we need for it to be inputed.
With such a mass of information available to the individual, it is not inconceivable that the mind can begin to make ‘connections’ between a media report, and a person someone else had seen that day.
THE DETECTION BEGINS
Once this process has begun, I suggest the conscious mind places ‘attention’ upon the information available in the unconscious. Bit by bit, other related factors surface, such as one of those millions acting suspiciously, as noticed by a third party.
Once the process has begun, deduction follows attention. And as the mind analyses this information mass within the unconscious, images begin to surface of a possible event or crime.
Is this a possible reality to psychic detection? Once it has happened once, can a person attune their mind to dredging information of other people and events, becoming a ‘serial’ psychic detective?
Of course, the theory is quite unproveable – there are too many social interactions each day to allow analysis. But it gives a strong hint that the answer to much paranormal phenomena may come, not from supernatural sources, but a realization of the vast, communal mind we could possess.
© Anthony North, August 2007
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