Providentia

Indonesian Police Officer Believed Dead in 2004 Tsunami Found Alive in Psychiatric Hospital

When Indonesian police officer Abrip Asep went missing during the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, his family naturally assumed that he had died along with the 230,000 other victims of that disaster.   Asep had been on duty in  Indonesia's westernmost province, Aceh, as part of Brimob, Indonesia's Mobil Brigade Corps, when a 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of the island of Sumatra and sent hundred-foot waves to strike the shorelines.  Though  many thousands were known to have died, Asep's body was never found and family members were left with no answers about what happened to him.  While his mother remained convinced that he was still alive, the rest of his extended family concluded that he must have died with so many others.

Until, that is, when photos of Asep were recently shared on a family group chat on social media, apparently by chance.   Recognizing his picture, family members contacted Aceh Regional Police who then learned that he had been in the Zaenal Abidin Mental Hospital in Banda Aceh for the last sixteen years.  "I couldn’t believe it," said one family member talking with the media.  "17 years of no news and we thought that he passed away, we didn’t know he was still alive."   According to doctors at the hospital, Asep had been traumatized by his experiences during the tsunami and was subsequently placed in the hospital though it remains a mystery why his family was never contacted.  

"Even though he is experiencing mental illness due to the tsunami, his family is very grateful to have found him alive," said a spokesperson for the Aceh Regional Police.   Despite his long hospital stay, he is reportedly in good health and has since been reunited with family members.   News about Asep has left other families who lost relatives in the 2004 disaster wondering if more such cases will be found though, so far, none have been reported.

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The Stalker and the Baseball Star

On June 14, 1949, Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus was returning to his hotel room at Edgewater Beach Hotel on Chicago's North Shore when he received an urgent message at the hotel desk, apparently sent to him by a woman identifying herself only as Ruth Ann Burns.   Though Waitkus failed to recognize the name, the message itself was brief stating only that "It's extremely important that I see you as soon as possible.  We're not acquainted, but I have something of importance to speak to you about I think it would be to your advantage to let me explain it to you.  I realize this is a little out of the ordinary, but as I said, it's rather important.  Please, come soon. I won't take up much of your time, I promise." 

Despite having just finished a game between the Phillies and his old team, the Chicago Cubs, Waitkus was curious enough to telephone the hotel room mentioned in the note.  While the woman answering the phone answered refused to say why she wanted to see him, she still insisted that he come in person.  Arriving at the room, he found that the only person staying there was 19-year-old Ruth Ann Steinhagen, someone he had never met before.   After entering the room, he sat down as asked her what she wanted at which point Steinhagen told him that she had a surprise for him.  She then pulled a .22 caliber rifle out of a closet and pointed it at his chest.

According to testimony Steinhagen later provided police, Waitkus jumped to his feet at that point, obviously terrified.  She then told him, "For two years you've bothered me, now you're going to die."  Though Waitkus cooperated when she told him to stand by the window, she then shot him at close range.   The bullet, which passed very close to  Waitkus' heart, failed to kill him instantly but, as he lay on the floor, she then proceeded to hold his hand.  Phoning the hotel detective, she stated "I just shot a man.  There's a long st0ry but I'm not going to talk about it."  The detective, Edward Purdy, immediately rushed to investigate and found her sitting on a bench near the elevators.   He also found Waitkus laying on the floor in her hotel room, the gun on the floor next to him, and immediately called for an ambulance as well as the police.

Phillies pitcher Russ Meyer, who happened to be Waitkus' roommate while they were staying at the hotel, later told reporters  that he had been immediately called by the Phillies' traveling secretary and told about his  badly injured friend.   "I remember them hauling Eddie out to the ambulance," he said in a media interview.  "The only thing he kept saying was, Why? Why? Why?"    Waitkus was taken to Illinois Masonic Hospital where doctors operated to save his life and, despite nearly dying on the operating table several times, managed to remove the bullet successfully.

As for Ruth Ann Steinhagen, she was transferred to the women's lockup at the downtown police headquarters and held without charge while police and reporters tried to make sense of her actions.  As part of their investigation, police took her back to the 12th floor hotel room where she had shot Waitkus and had her act out the entire shooting.  She told them that she had initially planned to stab her intended victim and had placed a paring knife in her skirt pocket before letting him into her room.   When he walked past her and sat down instead, she decided to use the rifle she had purchased earlier instead.   She also said that, after shooting her victim, Waitkus appeared to be smiling as he lay on the floor and she told him, "You like that, don't you?"   Though she reloaded the rifle and planned to shoot herself, she apparently changed her mind and called the hotel detective instead.

So, who was Ruth Ann Steinhagen and why did she shoot a man she had never met?   According to most newspaper accounts, Steinhagen had a fairly unexceptional childhood growing up in Chicago and had lived with her parents until completing business college.  Aside from being a "little more nervous than most girls" according to her mother, she showed no signs of mental health issues until she graduated from school and got a job as a clerk at a Chicago insurance company.   It was also around this time that she first became obsessed with Eddie Waitkus, apparently after seeing him play at her first baseball game in 1946. 

Saying of him that "he reminds me of everybody, especially my father,"  she soon began collecting every newspaper clipping she could find about his sports career.  Eventually having hundreds of pictures of Waitkus in her collection, she alarmed her parents by spreading these pictures out on the floor in her bedroom or on the kitchen table where she stared at them for hours.   Having learned of his Lithuanian background, she also began teaching herself words in that language as well as steadily eating baked beans because he was originally from Boston.  Many details about the full extent of this obsession would not come out until years later.  

When her parents attempted to intervene, including having her seen by two different psychiatrists, Steinhagen retaliated by moving out of their apartment into a nearby rooming house where she could be alone with her pictures.  She also continued going to baseball games where she could see Waitkus play.  As her mother would later relate,  Steinhagen had watched him walk by near where she was sitting and "almost fainting,"  But her obsession with Eddie Waitkus hardly ended there.   In her confession to police, Steinhagen admitted that she began planning to kill Waitkus almost immediately after he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1948.  

Though she told her mother and friends about her plan to shoot Waitkus with a gun she planned to buy, they were naturally alarmed but took no action as they refused to believe that the gentle girl would be capable of carrying out this threat.   It also helped that Waitkus was no longer in Chicago and everyone  assumed that her obsession would subside in time since she could no longer see him play on a regular basis.   Instead however, this forced absence apparently made her obsession even stronger.   The shooting would take place not long afterward.

During Steinhagen's trial, newspapers were filled with stories about "Baseball Annie" (their nickname for her) along with staged photographs of her writing at her prison desk with a framed photograph of Waitkus propped nearby.   As you might expect, newspapers also carried numerous sympathetic stories about Eddie Waitkus' long recovery and eventual return to baseball.    Testimony heard at the trial included a court-ordered report prepared by the chief of the Cook County Behavioral Unit.  Along with concluding that Steinhagen was "deranged" at the time of the shooting,  the report also included numerous memorable quotes from what she told her doctors when interviewed.   At one point, she admitted, "As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy, and I knew I would never get to known him in a normal way...and if I can't have him, nobody else can.  And then I decided to kill him."

To nobody's surprise, Steinhagen was eventually declared not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to a psychiatric hospital.  After three years however, she was declared sane enough to be released into the community.   Though Waitkus and his family vehemently opposed her release, he still declined to press charges against Steinhagen and she was never retried for her crime.  Details of her later life are surprisingly sketchy except that she lived quietly in Chicago until eventually dying in 2012 at age 83.    It likely says much about how obscure she had become by then that news of her death only came out months later.  Not even the morgue attendants recognized her name.

As for Eddie Waitkus, he eventually returned to play during the 1950 season and helped the Phillies win the National League Pennant that year.  He also named Best Comeback Player of the Year by the Associated Press.  But friends insisted that he was never the player he once was and his career in baseball only lasted five more years.  According to his son, Eddie Waitkus, Junior in a 1988 news story, there was a bright side to the shooting, however.   "While recovering from the shooting, my dad met my mother.  Had it not been for this horrible event in his life, my sister and I would probably not be here."   But the trauma also had a significant impact on Waitkus' personality and he acquired a new paranoia about meeting new people .  He would also rarely discuss the shooting and how close he came to death except with family members.

In 1952, Bernard Malamud published his now-classic book, "The Natural"  which was largely based on the Steinhagen case.   The book was later made into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford as "Roy Hobbs" who is shot by a deranged fan played by Barbara Kersey and, naturally enough,  this renewed interest in the long-ago case though (mercifully, Waitkus was already dead by this point).   If the still-living  Steinhagen had any comments to make about the film, they do not appear to be on record.

While some newspapers in 1949 carried editorials warning about the dangers of "celebrity worship",  there didn't appear to be any meaningful change in the security surrounding celebrities as they interacted with fans.  It would take many more years and many more cases involving violent fans before security details became common for celebrities whenever they were out in public.  Still, for better or worse, that 1949 shooting meant that the age of the celebrity stalker had arrived...

Astra-Zeneca Panic Leads to Bizarre Symptom Reports

Despite early reports concerning the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine codeveloped by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, the news that many European countries have suspended or delayed rollouts due to safety concerns.    While only a handful of cases of patients experiencing blood clots after receiving the vaccine have been reported,   widespread panic among potential vaccine users has led to many either refusing the vaccine or else reporting  symptoms that seem more due to placebo effects than actual side effects.   

In the United Kingdom, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) routinely monitors potential side effects of new medications and vaccines through Yellow Card reports submitted by medical doctors, health agencies, and by members of the public.  Common reactions such as headaches, fevers and muscle pains which typically go away on their own continue to be reported in up to ten percent of users while more serious symptoms, including blood clots, sepsis, and stroke have yet to be associated with vaccine use.  Along with these documented side effects, people who have been vaccinated are also reporting significant changes in their lives despite no real evidence that they are vaccine-related.   This includes forty-five reports of post-vaccination crying or screaming, four reports of eyes changing colour, seven reports of either growing or losing teeth,  thirty-nine people reporting losing weight after the vaccine (and three saying they've gained weight).   More common symptoms include flatulence (102 reports) or simply "feeling abnormal" (558 reports).  And some reports are even more bizarre, including two reporting post-vaccination retirement, five blaming the vaccine for being bitten or stung by an insect, one blaming the vaccine for becoming a smoker, and another implicating the vaccine in a failure to stick to a diet.  

A statement released by the MHRA addresses many of these unusual reports.  "'The Yellow Card scheme is a mechanism by which anybody can voluntarily report any suspected adverse reactions or side effects to the vaccine. 'It is very important to note that a Yellow Card report does not necessarily mean the vaccine caused that reaction or event. 'We ask for any suspicions to be reported, even if the reporter isn’t sure if it was caused by the vaccine. Reports to the scheme are known as suspected adverse reactions (ADRs). Many suspected ADRs reported on a Yellow Card do not have any relation to the vaccine or medicine and it is often coincidental that they both occurred around the same time.  The reports are continually reviewed to detect possible new side effects that may require regulatory action, and to differentiate these from things that would have happened regardless of the vaccine or medicine being administered, for instance due to underlying or undiagnosed illness. It is therefore important that the suspected ADRs described in this report are not interpreted as being proven side effects of Covid-19 vaccines.'

While health agencies have since concluded that there is no evidence of the AstraZeneca vaccine causing blood clots or other adverse reactions, at least one country, Denmark, is maintaining the rollout ban, at least for now.   It will likely be a while before the AstraZeneca vaccine becomes as widely trusted as its less controversial alternatives.

 

The Xhosa Prophecy

How dangerous can a prophecy be?  And what happens to a prophet who turns out to be wrong?  The story of Nongqawuse and the prophecy that led to the deaths of thousands of her fellow Xhosa in the mid-19^th century is an important chapter in the history of skepticism despite being so little known outside of South Africa.

Even in the early days of British colonialism in southern Africa, the various tribes that made up the Xhosa nation were one of the largest ethnic groups in what would eventually become the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa.   Though apartheid policies still lay in the future, the Xhosa were largely shut out of most businesses and depended on their cattle herds and crops for food and trade.  Despite a major outbreak of cattle lung sickness that had struck the Xhosa cattle herds between 1855 and 1856, the economic disaster that would devastate Xhosa society came from another direction entirely.

According to historical records, the Xhosa girl at the centre of the crisis that would follow is believed to have been born in 1840.   After losing both of her parents at an early age, Nongqawuse was raised by her uncle , Mhlakaza, a prominent spiritualist, and her childhood appeared otherwise normal .   

Everything changed in the spring of 1856 when Nongqawuse and her friend Nombada went to fetch water from a nearby river.    After returning,  the fifteen-year old Nongqawuse told her uncle that she had met the spirits of two of her ancestors who were using her to relay an important prophecy to her people.   The prophecy instructed them to destroy their crops and kill their cattle as a sacrifice to the ancestors who would rise up and drive all the white settlers from the sea.    After the settlers were gone, the sun would turn red and a new golden age would come for the Xhosa.  

There was already racial tension brewing among the Xhosa, who blamed the British for the lung infections that kept decimating their herds.   At the same time,  their food crops had been hit by a new infection that killed the corn before it ripened.  Believing the infections were caused by witchcraft,  the Xhosa turned to traditional remedies as a way of saving themselves.    Prophets and healers offering miraculous cures became commonplace although none of them would have the impact of  Nongqawuse and her prophecies.  

Whatever her reason for making the prophecy (and who inspired her to make it),  Nongqawuse’s strange message likely would not have gone much further without her uncle’s endorsement.   While the two girls were ridiculed at first, they went back a few days later and claimed to have received the same message.  When her uncle went with them, he reportedly saw nothing though his niece relayed the message from the spirits to him.    Convinced that his niece’s message was genuine, Mhlakaza dedicated himself to the prophecy and even began killing his own cattle.  

Eventually, he managed to persuade the local chief, Sarili ka Hintsa, about the coming golden age.   The prospect of eliminating the white settlers who were already taking all the best land was definitely appealing and Mhlakaza’s reputation helped as well.    There was also considerable anger about the recent defeat that the Xhosa had experienced during a frontier war that had ended just three years earlier.    Along with that humiliating defeat, the growing culture clash between the European settlers and the Xhosa contributed to a tense situation.  Sarili decided to set an example for his people by killing his own cattle and destroying his crops.  Though likely horrified at the potential for disaster, his subjects had little choice but to follow that example.  

And so, in 1856, the Great Cattle Killing began.   During the thirteen months that followed, hundreds of thousands of cattle were killed and all the crops were burnt.    Though approximately 15% of the 70,000 Xhosa living in the Eastern Cape at the time refused to take part, they were largely condemned by the ones who did.   A common nickname attached to them was amagogotoya (stingy ones).   Nongqawuse continued hearing the “voices” of the ancestors telling her that all of the cattle needed to be destroyed since they were tainted by the Europeans.   As for the British settlers themselves, they watched the cattle killing helplessly (and some historians suggest that they quietly encouraged it).   Though one prominent missionary, Charles Brownlee, tried to counter Nongqawuse’s prophecy, he was largely ignored.

Acting as his niece’s spokesman, Mhlakaza took the bold step of providing a specific date for when the prophecy would be fulfilled (Nongqawuse  had been carefully vague up to that time).   According to Mhlakaza,  the ancestors’ promise would be fulfilled on the first day of the full moon.  He assured them that the sun would turn red and the believers would be rewarded for their faith.   Not only would all the cattle be replaced by new cattle more beautiful than ever, but new fields of crops ready to harvest would appear as well.   The dead warriors would all come back to life and a new era of youth and beauty would begin. 

When the full moon came and went with the sun being the same colour as ever,   Mhlakaza managed to provide a new date for the prophecy, this time on the first day of the new moon.    To ensure that people believed in the prophecy, Mhlakaza even organized demonstrations where he would point out to the sea and show them the heads of the New People bobbing out of the water (he was the only one who could hear their message).   Some believers even claimed to hear the invisible cattle and goats.  As each date failed, he and Nongqawuse tried to place the blame on the nonbelievers who had refused to destroy their cattle and crops.   Finally, after repeated failures,  Mhlakaza set a final date of February 18, 1857 when the ancestors would definitely appear. 

After that date came and went,  Sarili and his subjects had completely run out of patience though the Xhosa who had destroyed their cattle and crops had much bigger problems by then.   With the loss of their main source of food,  they had no way of avoiding mass starvation.   For all that Sarili and Mhlakaza shared most of the blame for the coming catastrophe, Sarili insisted on laying all the blame on Nongqawuse.  

Knowing that she would likely be killed if she remained, Nongqawuse fled to the British for safety and they placed her in protective custody on Robben Island.  She would stay there for years before being quietly released.  In the meantime,  mass starvation set in among the Xhosa with over 40,000 deaths and thousands more being forced to leave their ancestral lands to find work in the nearby Cape Colony.   According to some accounts, thousands of vultures could be seen overhead as they were drawn to the countless human and animal corpses.   There were also documented cases of some Xhosa turning to cannibalism.

The British colony governor,  Sir George Grey, took full advantage of the mass starvation.  Though he had warned Sarili against the cattle killing and also provided food to the starving Xhosa afterward, it was hardly enough to avoid the mass starvation that would last for years.   As the refugees began flooding into the Colony, Grey ordered the colonists not to offer any help to the starving Xhosa unless they agreed to sign binding labour contracts.   He also imprisoned many of the Xhosa chiefs on the pretext that they were planning war against the colonists.    The total population of Xhosa living in the Eastern Cape dropped and the Governor eventually seized much of their land to be used by European settlers.  More than 600,000 acres of land fell into British hands as a result of Grey’s actions. 

While Nongqawuse  survived,  her uncle was one of the casualties and much of the blame for what happened fell on her.    No reliable details of her later life are available but she was believed to have changed her name after her release from custody and moved far away from the village where she had lived to avoid being killed.   She is believed to have died in 1898 though details about her later life are scarce.  

The Xhosa prophecy and the resulting famine is one of the most horrifying examples of mass hysteria in the past two centuries.  It is also a graphic example of the devastating power of belief when it is allowed to override common sense.

Posttraumatic Growth and Depreciation in Chronic Pain

 Chronic pain can disrupt everyday life and shatter beliefs about the world. Shattered beliefs may be rebuilt, either positively or negatively, leading to posttraumatic growth (PTG) or posttraumatic depreciation (PTD). According to a transdiagnostic emotion regulation perspective, these phenomena are associated with coping strategies and emotions related to the body, self, others, and the world. Because PTG and PTD can coexist,  a new study published in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy compares different profiles of rebuilt beliefs based on emotions, emotion regulation, and psychopathology. People with chronic pain (N = 1,577) completed online self-report questionnaires evaluating PTG and PTD, trauma-related emotions, and reactions regarding pain (guilt, shame, mental defeat, injustice, feeling discounted, sensitivity to pain traumatization, sense of body–self unity), difficulties in emotion regulation, coping strategies, and psychopathological symptoms. The resulting profiles illustrate four ways to experience potentially traumatic and life-challenging circumstances: no disruption, ambivalence, growth, and distress. Differences were found regarding trauma-related emotions and reactions, levels of comorbid psychopathologies, and emotion regulation. The authors  conclude that considering trauma as a genuine dimension of chronic pain experience could provide an important framework to better address the resources and trajectories of people with chronic pain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Debunking the "Miracle Cure"

The popular name for it is the "Dhammika Paniya."

When self-proclaimed healer Dhammika Bandara announced late last year that he had discovered an herbal remedy that would not only cure COVID-19 but also provide lifelong immunity to the disease, he became an overnight sensation in Sri Lanka. According to   Bandara, he learned how to create his life-giving syrup from a dream in which the goddess Kali appeared to him and told him how to "save the world."    Though all the ingredients remain a mystery, social media suggests that most of them, including honey and nutmeg, can be found in any household.

While cases of COVID-19 had been relatively stable in Sri Lanka for most of 2020, the number of new infections began rising sharply in October.   According to World Health Organization statistics, known coronavirus cases had risen from 3,380 with 13 deaths in early October to 22,988 with 109 deaths by the end of November (latest statistics put it close to 90,000). As a result, COVID anxiety rose to an all-time high in Sri Lanka and left the public strongly receptive to Bandara's claims.

Despite being hailed as an "ayurvedic physician" by his supporters,  there was no real evidence that the one-time stonemason had any actually training in medicine, something that mainstream medical practitioners and ayurvedic healers were quick to point out.  Despite warnings about  Bandara's wonder elixir (which has been officially classified as a food supplement), demand rose sharply when Sri Lanka's Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi openly endorsed him and was even photographed sipping a spoonful of his elixir.  Numerous other government legislators did the same.

All of which led to thousands of Sri Lankans flocking to Kegalle, the town where Bandara lives, while ignoring the country’s social distancing regimen to get their own supply of the elixir.  How many of these miracle seekers ended up being infected as a result of their enthusiasm may never be known.

Granted, Bandara isn't the first miracle worker that Wanniarachchi endorsed.  In November, she dropped a pot of “miracle water” into the country's Kalu river after another self-styled prophet, Eliyantha White, promised that the water he blessed could end the spread of the virus across the country.  She was so confident in this claim that she publicly pulled off her mask after the pot ceremony and insisted she she and her security details would be protected.

Which has led to considerable embarrassment given that Wanniarachchi has recently been diagnosed with coronavirus herself and has since gone into isolation, along with several other government figures who had also endorsed Bandara's elixir.  Even as  the government continues its drive to immunize the country's population,  the suspicion that many people in Sri Lanka have towards Western medicine will likely do little to discourage the quest for miracle cures.

As for Bandara himself, he is dealing with his own legal woes as he faces assault charges after allegedly attacking a doctor who dared to argue with him at his Kegalle home.  Police are still investigating.

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Alfred Russel Wallace and The Medium

Among London’s spiritualists during the late 19^th century, the undisputed queen had to have been Lizzie Nichol Guppy.

Born Agnes Nichol (although she preferred to be called Lizzie when she became an adult) , she would later claim to have been linked to the spirit world all her life (possibly due to being  orphaned as an infant).    After seeing her first spirit at the age of nine, Lizzie found herself besieged by ghosts and quickly became known to a widening circle of friends and admirers  due to her talent as a physical medium.   Along with seeing ghosts, she also became well-known for being able to “apport” physical objects such as fresh flowers and fruit.  Her career began in 1866 when she first apported flowers at a séance attended by various spiritualists who gravely testified that her mediumship abilities were real.   One of the ones attending, whose reputation as a scientist was unimpeachable, was the great biologist (and scientific heretic) Alfred Russel Wallace.

While Wallace was famous for being a co-discoverer of evolution, his fondness for, ahem, unconventional scientific views is not so well-known.   Along  with being an early opponent of vaccination (and lending considerable scientific legitimacy to the anti-vaccination movement as a result) Alfred Russel Wallace was also an ardent phrenologist and spiritualist.    After being introduced to spiritualism in 1865, Wallace began attending séances regularly and this was where he first met Lizzie Nichol.   Though Wallace always considered himself to be a skeptical man of science, he was still heavily influenced by his favourite sister, Fanny Sims, who was an enthusiastic spiritualist.

Not that he and his sister were the only ones dabbling in spiritualism at the time.   From its strange beginnings with the Fox sisters in the 1840s, the spiritualist movement had gained serious respectability on both sides of the Atlantic by the time  Wallace took an interest.   At the height of spiritualism’s popularity, the movement claimed more than 10 million supporters with more than one hundred spiritualist societies around the world.  Even the French court of Napoleon III was conducting spiritualist séances and public mediums such as Arthur Slade and Lizzie Nichol were the darlings of society wherever they travelled. 

For Lizzie Nichol (who became Lizzie Guppy in 1867 when she married her husband Samuel), life was especially good.   Not only was her husband a wealthy man, but she and Samuel traveled the Continent while astounding people with the séances she conducted.  Along with the usual flowers and fruit materialized on request, Lizzie and Samuel also regaled séance-goers with showers of butterflies, snow, and feathers coming down from the ceiling.   When Princess Margaret of Orleans asked for a prickly cactus, Lizzie arranged for twenty of them to fall from the ceiling during one séance in France.   Lizzie was also trained as a mesmerist and healer (Mesmerism was all the rage at the time as well) and even established an “apport post” where personal items could be “mailed” from one house to another using her supernatural abilities.  

The most notorious episode of Lizzie Guppy’s career happened in June of 1871 when Lizzie was supposedly teleported across London unexpectedly after being “summoned” by two of her protégés during a séance.  As Lizzie would later claim, she was writing household accounts in her home when she “instantly precipitated from her home” and landed three miles away where she “came down bump in the middle of a séance –dressed only in her underclothes.”    Eight people reportedly witnessed this episode which the newspapers reported (with only a slight grain of salt).

Working with her husband, Lizzie took advantage of the then-new science of photography to create some of the very first “spirit photographs” and they recruited Alfred Russel Wallace to lend his scientific reputation to  boost their credibility.    On March 14, 1874, Wallace went with Lizzie Guppy to a professional photographer’s studio where he posed to have a photograph taken.   During previous séances with Lizzie, Wallace had received spirit messages from his deceased brother William and had fully expected to see William’s ghost in the picture with him.  Instead, Wallace was astonished to see a female figure holding flowers in two of the three photographs taken (which he personally watched being prepared and developed).   He concluded that the woman looked like his mother (despite the fact that she was still living at the time).   

Convinced that the spirit photographs were genuine, Wallace would later write that “I see no escape from the conclusion that some spiritual being, acquainted with my mother's various aspects during life, produced these recognizable impressions on the plate. That she herself still lives and produced these figures may not be proved; but it is a more simple and natural explanation to think that she did so, than to suppose that we are surrounded by beings who carry out an elaborate series of impostures for no other apparent purpose than to dupe us into a belief in a continued existence after death.”

As all this was happening, Wallace’s son Bertie became severely ill with scarlet fever.  Giving up  on conventional medicine (which had little to offer at the time, to be fair), Wallace decided to try alternative medicine.  And this actually seemed to work, at first.   Bertie improved briefly but then suddenly died on April 24, 1874, just before his seventh birthday.   Devastated by his son's death, Wallace placed all of the blame on conventional medicine and argued that his son might have lived if he had started the alternative treatment sooner.

While he could never talk about Bertie again (in his later autobiography, he would state that he had two children instead of three), his faith in spiritualism seemed stronger than ever.    In that same dark year, Wallace published A Defence of Modern Spiritualism in the Fortnightly Review.  Despite the controversy over spiritualism, Wallace’s article would become one of his most republished ever.   The article was intended to be a defense against the various attacks on spiritualism by arch-skeptic, William Benjamin Carpenter.

While Wallace and Carpenter were both fellow scientists (and former friends before the spiritualist movement split them), Carpenter had a very different view of what was happening in the seances that Wallace attended.   Not only did Carpenter argue that spiritualism was a fraud, he even went so far as to question the scientific judgement of its supporters, including Wallace and Sir William Crookes.   While Wallace’s article was intended to prove that spiritualism was real, it alsoreflected the anger that he felt towards Carpenter and the other skeptics and mainly focused on the idea that men of science could not be fooled.   As he would sternly point out in his article:

Now what do our leaders of public opinion say when a scientific man of proved ability again observes a large portion of the more extraordinary phenomena, in his own house, under test conditions, and affirms their objective reality, and this not after a hasty examination, but after four years of research? Men [with heavy scientific appendages to their names] refuse to examine them when invited; the eminent in the society of which he is a fellow refuses to record them; and the press cries out that it wants better witnesses than Mr. Crookes, and that such facts want [confirmation] before they can be believed?

In other words, spirit phenomena were true and needed no further proof.  He also linked spiritualism to his other passion for phrenology and argued that spiritualism represented a way of linking all mankind into a universal brotherhood.

Despite this passionate defense, Wallace’s article read more like a religious tract than the work of a respected scientist.   The article  helped alienate Wallace from most of his fellow scientists (especially since it was basically a declaration of war against scientific materialism).   He was also notorious for defending mediums such as Lizzie Guppy and Arthur Slade, even after some of them were caught in blatant fraud, by using his scientific reputation to give them added respectability.

Unfortunately for Wallace, his public defense of spiritualism and his scathing attacks on skeptics severely damaged his scientific reputation.  It also drove a wedge between him and his colleagues, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and others, all of whom thought Wallace was far too gullible.    Not only was Wallace targeted by arch-skeptics such as Carpenter, he was also strongly criticized in professional journals.   The medical journal, the Lancet, was especially harsh (largely because of Wallace’s anti-vaccination crusade) and he faced similar abuse for the rest of his life.    Even when Charles Darwin later tried to get a pension for Wallace (who had lifelong financial problems), many of his fellow-scientists cited Wallace’s spiritualism and other anti-science beliefs to resist helping him (they eventually reconsidered, though).   

By the time of Wallace’s death in 1911, spiritualism had largely lost its appeal and the 1870s represented the peak of the spiritualism craze in most countries.  Mediums such as Lizzie Guppy faded into obscurity as more prominent mediums came on the scene and professional debunkers became more successful in catching mediums committing fraud.  To his dying day however, Wallace stayed loyal to spiritualism and his scientific reputation was still strong enough to win new converts to the cause.

While Alfred Russel Wallace continues to be remembered as one of the discoverers of the evolution, his less popular crusades have been largely overlooked.  If nothing else, the strange fascination he had with spiritualism should serve as a reminder that even supposedly hardheaded scientists can get into trouble when dabbling in areas outside their own expertise.

Dowsing For Murder

It began with a brutal double murder on July 5, 1692 when  a wine merchant and his wife were killed in the cellar of their shop in Lyons, France.   Since the money known to be in the shop was missing, authorities concluded that the couple had been robbed and murdered using the bloody billhook that had been left behind.  Unfortunately, forensic science was virtually non-existent at the time and the magistrates had no idea about who might have committed the crime.

Rather than letting the crime remain unsolved however, the magistrates were urged to consult Jacques Aymar.    Though actually a stonemason, Aymar had become fairly famous in the area for his skill as a dowser.   Still known as "water witching" in some parts of the world, dowsing basically involves the using of a "witching" or "dowsing rod" to locate underground sources of water or buried treasure by passing the rod over the ground (think of it as a supernatural version of a metal detector).  While dowsing had largely faded into obscurity by the 17th century, at least in France, local stories about Aymar’s success in locating other lost items quickly spread.

But his greatest fame came from his apparent success at solving crimes.   Several years earlier, Aymar had reportedly used his dowsing rod to track down a thief who had stolen some clothes in Grenoble, France.   Not only did his dowsing rod identify the thief, Aymar reportedly tracked down where the stolen goods were hidden.  According to another story, Aymar had used his dowsing rod to locate the body of a murdered woman and implicated the woman's husband (who promptly fled the parish).  

Feeling that they had nothing to lose (and under considerable pressure to solve the double murder), Lyons magistrates asked the Procureur du Roi to test Aymar and see if he could find the murderer.   Not shy about gaining more publicity, Aymar insisted that he could solve the crime if he and his dowsing rod could be taken to where the murder happened.   In the wine shop,  he carefully dowsed the crime scene and concluded that three men were involved in the murder.   After gaining his impression of the killers, he left the wine shop and began tracking his prey across town.    Following some impressive guesses, he began wandering into the countryside pointing out spots where the killers had slept, ate, etc.    

Although Aymar convinced some of the skeptics, the Procureur General demanded that he be tested further.   The local comptrollers, who likely had a vested interest in proving that Aymar was genuine, conducted several tests in which he allegedly "found" the murder weapon where it had been hidden.   Since the available account fails to provide many details, it is hard to decide how rigorous the testing actually was.  

I any event, Aymar passed all of these tests and was assigned a team of archers to help him arrest anyone who might be implicated by his dowsing.    Following a lengthy search,  his dowsing rod led him to a jail in a neighbouring town where, after securing permission to test the inmates, identified one prisoner as being involved in the murders.    The prisoner, a 19-year-old hunchback who had been arrested for stealing at a local fair, vigorously denied committing the murders or ever visiting Lyons.   While Aymar offered to search for the other two killers, the hunchback prisoner was taken to Lyons for further interrogation.

Given that torture was still allowed in 17th-century France, that interrogation included a lengthy session on the rack and the prisoner was "persuaded" to confess.   Not that he admitted to the actual murders, just to being a servant to the other two killers who were still at large.    Aymar's attempt at locating them failed to turn up any leads and he concluded that they had fled the country.   On August 30, 1692, the hunchback was broken on the wheel in the Place des Terreaux in the heart of Lyons.   While there was no physical evidence linking the condemned man to the murders for which he was executed, his confession was deemed to be proof enough.

With the reputation Aymar gained after the Lyons case,  the Prince de Conde took a personal interest in proving whether or not he was genuine.    After ordering him to Paris, the Prince arranged a new series of tests that would be far more rigorous than anything that had been tried on him before.   In one of these tests, five holes were dug in a garden.   One hole contained gold, one contained silver,  silver and gold were placed in a third hole, copper in the fourth, and the fifth hole contained nothing but stones.  Aymar failed this test miserably.

The Prince then sent Aymar to Chantilly to discover who had been stealing trout out of the ponds in a park.   After carefully investigating with his dowsing rod, Aymar implicated one of the park's keepers who emphatically denied the theft.   Seeing that Aymar was convinced of his guilt, the hapless keeper promptly fled (he likely heard what happened to the hunchback).    To test Aymar further, the Prince arranged for a peasant, selected more or less at random, to be brought in as a suspect along with a young boy who was supposedly the keeper's son.   When Aymar confirmed that they had both been involved in the theft,  the Prince had all the proof he needed.   Since the peasant and the boy were chosen at random (and the boy had not even been in Chantilly when the theft occurred), Aymar was sent away in disgrace.  

Other members of the French government decided to test Aymar as well.   One of them, the Recorder of the King's Council, smashed a window in his house and called for Aymar to find the valuables that had supposedly been stolen.   Not only did Aymar report that the thief had entered through the broken window, he also indicated another window that the thief had used to leave.    Since no robbery had actually happened, that was enough for Aymar to be kicked out of the house as a fraud.   After several other humiliating failures, Aymar left Paris and returned to Grenoble.

While Aymar's reputation for accuracy had taken a serious hit due to his failures in Paris, he was still famous enough to be used in other cases, including the notorious anti-Huguenot campaign to root out religious heretics (no word in the record on how successful he was there).   After that, he faded into obscurity with no details of his later life being available.   Though Jacques Aymar helped popularize dowsing to France,  his success as a crime-solver seems largely limited to the Lyons case.   Even there, whether he actually identified the right man or not is debatable at best.

According to Sabine Baring-Gould in her classic book, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages ( which is still a must-read),  dowsers seem particularly vulnerable to self-deception, especially since the actions of the dowsing rod are largely influenced by unconscious motor actions.   In her own examination of the Aymar case, Baring-Gould was perhaps more charitable than modern skeptics would be and suggests that he may have genuinely believed in his own dowsing ability but that this confidence faded when subjected to actual rigorous testing.   The history of dowsing is filled with examples of dowsers using anecdotes as proof of their success while failing completely when investigated by actual skeptics.  

In Aymar's case, what distinguished from virtually all other dowsers who tried and failed to prove their abilities was the fate of the man he identified as being guilty of the Lyons murder.   Though the prisoner he identified confessed to the crime, the fact that his confession was extracted by torture makes it completely worthless as evidence.    While dowsers have come and gone since Jacques Aymar's time, they largely confined themselves to less ambitious tests such as finding water or precious metals.   

For the most part anyway.    Not that long ago, a controversy over the use of dowsing tools to detect landmines arose leading to the bizarre decision by security forces in Iraq to purchase the devices for use in protecting troops.    That people are still relying on dowsing to make life-or-death decisions centuries after Aymar's debacle demonstrates the need to be more vigilant in protecting people from the harmful consequences of sheer gullibility.

How Does Stress Affect Cognition in Older vs. Younger Adults?

Does acute stress differentially alter cognitive functioning in older versus younger adults? While older adults may be better at handling stress psychologically, their physiological systems are less elastic, potentially impairing the cognitive functioning of older adults after a stressor. In a study published in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers examined cognition following an acute stressor among older (n = 65; ages 60–79) and younger (n = 61; ages 25–40) adults. Participants were randomized to complete the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) in one of three conditions: (a) negative feedback, (b) positive feedback, or (c) no feedback. Participants reported mood states and appraisals of the speech task and we measured cortisol via saliva throughout the study. After the TSST, participants completed standard cognitive tasks to evaluate cognitive flexibility, problem solving, and short-term memory. Results showed that after the TSST, older adults took longer to solve problems compared with younger adults, though they were able to solve the same number of problems. Older adults showed less cognitive flexibility compared with younger adults in all conditions, a finding that was partially exaggerated in the positive feedback condition. There were no age-group differences in short-term memory; however, for older adults greater perceived resources and positive affect were associated with better memory performance. In sum, older and younger adults were both affected by acute stress, and older adults were not more (or less) vulnerable to the effects of stress on cognition, though they did show stronger associations between self-reported affective states and memory performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Indian Woman Attempts Suicide Following Sexual Assault by "Witchdoctor"

Police in the Indian state of Gujurat are investigating after a complaint was laid against a man described as a "witch doctor" by a woman alleging that he had sexually assaulted her repeatedly as well as blackmailing her and assaulting one of her relatives.   The woman, who can not be named publicly due to Supreme Court guidelines protecting sexual assault victims,  is a 29-year-old pharmacist living in the Gujurat city of Amedabad.  She stated that she first approached the man, the accused, Anand Vaghela, two years ago after her husband left her.   Vaghela, who had been introduced to her by a cousin, then promised that he could help her with "tantric rituals" that would ensure her husband's return to her.   

While carrying out the rituals, she then began chatting with Vaghela  on WhatsApp after which he allegedly took her to different hotels in the city where he repeatedly raped her and, after taping the abuse  with his mobile phone, blackmailed her in to paying Rs 2.50 lakh (approximately 2,311.50 in U.S. dollars).   When she attempted to avoid him, he then began stalking and harassing her and even threatened to kill her family.   As part of his intimidation campaign, she also attacked her brother a year ago though no arrest was made at the time.   The harassment led to her attempting suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills she obtained at work.   While she survived the attempt, it led to her being hospitalized on March 5 and she then filed the complaint.  

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