PHILIP EXPERIMENT

Opening

In September 1972 eight members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set out to make a ghost. They wrote him a life: Philip, an English Royalist of the 1650s, trapped in a cold marriage, who let his gypsy lover Margo burn as a witch and then threw himself from the battlements of his house. They drew his portrait. Then they sat and tried to see him. For a year of weekly meetings, nothing happened.

In late August 1973 they switched to a jolly Victorian-style séance, with songs, jokes and orders to the table, in good light. Within a session or two they felt raps; within weeks they heard them and the table began careering round the room. "Philip" answered questions in raps for years, mostly in character. The group never claimed he existed. Their claim was that a group of ordinary people could produce physical effects by agreeing on a fiction.

Timeline

September 1972The group meets for the first time, under the guidance of Iris Owen and her husband A. R. G. Owen, a mathematical geneticist who chaired the society's research committee. Sittings are silent meditation, with an observer outside the circle.

September 1972 to summer 1973A year of meditation produces at most a mistiness some sitters report around the table. The group becomes close friends.

Late August 1973After reading the English table-tilting work of Kenneth Batcheldor and Colin Brookes-Smith, they try the new method. The first session gives only a feeling of vibration.

The following sessionsRaps are felt, then heard, from inside or under the table, one for yes and two for no. The table beats time to songs it likes.

About four weeks laterThe table moves on its own initiative, by the group's account, chasing sitters into corners and across a thickly carpeted floor.

January 1974Owen and Margaret Sparrow publish the first report in New Horizons, the society's journal.

1974A professional film of the experiment is shot in a single Sunday. After filming, two witnesses see the table rise about an inch and glide four or five feet, but no adequate photograph is taken. The group performs on a local television talk show and the table climbs onto the panel's dais.

1975A second group creates Lilith, a French Canadian wartime spy, and gets table levitations better than Philip's.

1976Iris Owen and Margaret Sparrow publish the book Conjuring Up Philip.

Autumn 1977The experiment is formally wound up.

Key figures

Iris M. Owen, the society's secretary-treasurer, ran the experiment. Her husband said the credit for its concept and running was hers.

A. R. G. (George) Owen, author of Can We Explain the Poltergeist?, edited the journal and sat in as an observer and guest.

Margaret Sparrow, a former chair of Mensa in Canada, co-wrote the reports.

The sitters are identified in the 1974 paper only by initials: five women and three men, none claiming psychic ability.

Dr Joel Whitton, a Toronto physician and vice-chairman of the society, recorded and analysed the raps acoustically.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is unusually good for séance work: the group's own reports in New Horizons from 1974 onwards, the 1976 book, a professional film, television recordings, and Whitton's acoustic analyses, which he said showed the raps had a different sound envelope from ordinary knocks. What it lacks is an independent control. The sitters' hands were on the table for almost everything.

Whereupon the table immediately tilted, and with all hands on the top of the table, gave a curious little "flip" and landed completely upside down with all four legs in the air.

What was invented: Philip, his biography, his portrait, his house as a haunted site. Diddington, the house in the story, is a real place one sitter knew, and two members photographed it, but the group stated that no such people existed and that they did not believe they had. What was observed: raps and table movements in good light, with hands on or near the table. The table sometimes contradicted the script; twice it denied that Philip had loved Margo.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report: the movement did not begin on the third or fourth sitting after the change of method. Raps came first and the table moved about four weeks later. The 1974 paper says there had been no real levitation, and a later report says the best was about an inch, unphotographed. The earlier version's "table on one leg crossing the floor" and the named sitters "Sue" and "Dorothy" asking the first question are not supported by the group's reports and have been dropped. Whitton was a physician, not a psychologist. The name Philip Aylesford and the dates 1624 to 1654 are as usually given from the 1976 book; the 1974 paper has neither.

Things you might not know

• Santa Claus answered too. At the society's Christmas party in December 1974, a mixed crowd round the table asked whether it was Father Christmas. It rapped yes, and said its reindeer were under the table.
• So did the Artful Dodger. A new group got raps from a character none of them had invented: Dickens's pickpocket, who seemed confused because all the women were wearing slacks.
• The raps sulked. When a sitter threatened to send Philip away, the phenomena almost stopped for the evening, and the group had to rebuild its belief to get them back.
• Philip came to Ohio. In December 1974 four sitters demonstrated in Cleveland for psychologists and physicists, with a heavy antique chess table on castors.
• A house key bent for the National Enquirer. In January 1975 a visiting journalist's key bent slightly during a sitting and, he reported, more overnight.

Competing explanations

Collective psychokinesis. This is the group's reading: a real physical force produced by agreement, which is why the raps hesitated over questions the group had not settled. It has years of consistent reports and some instrumented work. It has no test in which the sitters' hands were kept off the table and the table still moved.

Unconscious muscular action. The ideomotor effect, where small involuntary movements by several people add up, explains table-turning and would also explain why answers followed the group's consensus. It accounts less easily for the reported raps from inside the table, which the group said were not caused by feet, and for the one-inch rise.

Deliberate trickery by a sitter. Nothing in the record shows it, and no one confessed. Without hands-off controls, it cannot be excluded.

Later life of the case

The Philip experiment is still cited as evidence that séance "spirits" can be manufactured, by believers in psychokinesis and sceptics alike. It loosely inspired the films The Apparition (2012) and The Quiet Ones (2014).

Finding

Philip was invented, and the group said so from the first day: no ghost was ever claimed, and the fiction was the point. What they observed was a table that rapped and moved, in good light, for years, but always with sitters' hands on or around it and never under a control that ruled out their own muscles. The experiment showed that a séance personality can be made to order. It did not show how the table moved.

What still will not resolve: whether the raps and movements needed anything beyond the eight people touching the table. Only a test the group never ran, with hands off and the table instrumented, could have settled it.