SCOLE EXPERIMENT

Opening

From January 1993 to November 1998 a séance group met in the cellar of a rented farmhouse at Scole, in Norfolk, in complete darkness. Robin and Sandra Foy hosted, and two local mediums, Alan and Diana Bennett, went into trance. The group reported moving lights, touches, voices, materialised figures, objects arriving from nowhere, and images on films brought in unopened. Spirit communicators, speaking through the mediums, set the conditions.

From October 1995 three senior members of the Society for Psychical Research, Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison and David Fontana, sat with the group 36 times. Their 452-page report, which filled the society's Proceedings in November 1999, concluded that at least some of what they witnessed was paranormal. Other members who visited disagreed sharply. The investigators asked for infrared cameras or enough light to see by. The group, citing the spirits, refused.

Timeline

April 1990Robin Foy, a former RAF pilot, founds the Noah's Ark Society for Physical Mediumship.

1991The Foys move to Scole. Early sittings in 1991 and 1992 produce little.

January 1993A seven-member circle, the New Spiritual Science Foundation, begins sitting. Phenomena increase from October 1993, once the Bennetts become the trance mediums.

1994The SPR's then president, Archie Roy, helps found PRISM, a joint body with Spiritualists, through which the group comes to investigators' notice.

1995Three founding members leave. The remaining four continue as the core group.

October 1995 to August 1997Keen, Ellison and Fontana attend sittings, individually or together. Ralph Noyes, the original third investigator, withdraws after two.

1996Members of the public are admitted at £50 a sitting.

November 1998The group holds its last sitting, saying the spirits have told it to stop.

November 1999The Scole Report is published in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, volume 58, with critics' dissents in appendices and the authors' replies.

2001Keen publicly challenges critics to produce evidence of fraud.

Key figures

Robin Foy (1943 to 2022), organiser and chronicler, author of Witnessing the Impossible (2008). Sandra Foy, his wife.

Alan and Diana Bennett, the trance mediums.

Montague Keen, journalist and SPR council member, principal investigator. Arthur Ellison, emeritus professor of electrical engineering. David Fontana, psychologist.

Tony Cornell, SPR investigator, the sharpest internal critic.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is the Scole Report itself, the group's newsletter The Spiritual Scientist, Foy's later book, Grant and Jane Solomon's The Scole Experiment (1999), and the films and apports. The films, many supplied by Polaroid, which sponsored the group, showed inscriptions, diagrams and faces. The mediums were never searched or held, most equipment was the group's own, and video was rare and not generally released.

No doubt there may be people who think all or some of the evidence is fraudulent. If so, they have yet to publish or provide the authors of the Report with a shred of hard evidence to support that view.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The demand for infrared or light came from the SPR investigators themselves, under pressure from colleagues, not only from outside sceptics. The investigators' sittings ran from October 1995 to August 1997, not the whole 1993 to 1998 span. The phrase "film that fogged" understates the claim: the group said the unopened films carried images.

Things you might not know

• A 1944 newspaper arrived. Among the apports was an apparently new Daily Mail of 1 April 1944, reporting the conviction of the medium Helen Duncan. Cornell called it a buyable replica; Keen said it was letterpress on wartime newsprint.
• The images had sources. Some texts and pictures that appeared on sealed film were traced to published material, including a possible copy of a well-known portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Some visitors were not asked back. Robert Morris and John Beloff saw very little together, and the group barred them from sitting together again. Maurice Grosse said he was excluded for suggesting a poltergeist source.
• Lights on sticks. Cornell argued that the moving lights could be reproduced with LEDs on rods or threads.
• The sceptic was polite. Richard Wiseman, who never sat with the group, called the report very impressive and confined his criticism to the darkness and the lack of infrared.

Competing explanations

Genuine physical mediumship. This is the view of Keen, Ellison and Fontana, based on 36 sittings and phenomena they judged impossible to fake under the conditions they saw. It rests on their observations in the dark.

Fraud by one or more sitters. Cornell, Donald West and Alan Gauld pointed to how specific events could have been produced. None made a specific charge of fraud, and no one has produced direct evidence of it.

Sincere misperception in darkness. Suggestion, unnoticed contact between sitters and the difficulty of locating lights and sounds in the dark could account for much, without anyone cheating.

Later life of the case

Scole remains the most detailed modern investigation of physical mediumship, cited by survival researchers and criticised in the same breath. A television documentary, The Afterlife Investigations, followed in 2010. The Foys moved to Spain in 2006.

Finding

No fraud was ever shown at Scole, and the investigators were experienced and sincere. But the phenomena were produced only in total darkness, with unsearched mediums, the group's own equipment and every control subject to the spirits' veto, and the one request that could have settled it, infrared, was refused. The events remain unexplained because they were never tested.

What still will not resolve: what the lights and films were. Without a recording made under the investigators' own control, the report cannot be checked against anything but its authors' testimony.