Welcome back to DEAD Time. In Stephen King’s 1974 horror novel Carrie, the bullied and abused teenage protagonist gets revenge on her tormentors using telekinesis, or psychokinesis, the psychic ability to move or influence objects using her mind. This month, I talked to a real-life researcher who has studied the phenomenon of psychokinesis for many years. Professor Stephen Braude is a philosopher, author, and parapsychologist, who received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Professor Braude is the author of ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination (2002), The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (2007), and Dangerous Pursuits Mediumship, Mind, and Music (2020). He is also past President of the Parapsychological Association and former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Professor Braude has spent over thirty years studying the paranormal in everyday life, from extrasensory perception and psychokinesis to mediumship and materialization. He is also a professional pianist and composer.

This month, Bloody Disgusting had the pleasure of talking with Professor Braude about his comprehensive work on psychokinesis, including his thoughts on controlled experiments and his most compelling case of PK.

Bloody Disgusting: Your first paranormal experience was in the late ’60s, when you were in graduate school and some friends invited you to play a game called “table up.” Is that similar to a séance and what was that experience like?

Stephen Braude: It’s exactly like a séance. My friends knew nothing about parapsychology; I knew nothing about parapsychology. It was a slow day in Northampton, MA and we had seen the only movie in town. So, my friends said they knew about his game called table up. They had tried it a few times and they thought it was a game, and they said when it worked it was a lot of fun. So, this was in broad daylight in my house at my table. My friends were not practical jokers and I’m not even sure they had a sense of humor. We sat down at the table and concentrated on the words “table up,” we stood next to the table, and eventually it started to lift up under our fingers and spell out answers in response to questions. The funny thing was, because we were all ignorant about parapsychology, we didn’t know that there was a well-established method of doing this. The well-established method was to ask yes or no questions and then have the table nod or rap once for yes and twice for no, and so on. My friends let the table nod once for the letter A and twice for the letter B, and so on, and so not surprisingly, it took forever to get a message.

BD: So, was that a scary experience for you?

SB: It scared the hell out of me, and I didn’t know why really. I didn’t think my friends were playing a joke on me. Because I was ignorant about parapsychology, I knew that superficially at least, it suggested that there was some kind of agency responsible for this. I didn’t know if it was one of my friends doing it normally or paranormally or if I was the cause or what. I knew I couldn’t go to my mentors about this. I was too busy trying to write a dissertation and get my Ph.D. and get a job. So, I literally put it out of my mind until I got tenure many years later.

BD: You’ve done extensive work on psychokinesis, the ability to move objects by mental concentration. Why did you take a particular interest in this subject?

SB: Well, when I got tenure, I remembered that this incident happened back in grad school and I felt if I was an honest scholar and philosopher, I needed to take this seriously. I knew that some well-known philosophers had in fact taken psychical research seriously and I read what they had to say. So, I decided that it was in fact something worth sinking my teeth into. I cranked out a book on the experimental evidence for parapsychology thinking that, like many others, if there was good evidence it would come from laboratory studies. I later changed my mind when I read accounts of large-scale, or so-called macro-PK or psychokinesis. Then I realized that if I was going to investigate this stuff, I was going to really dirty my hands with trying to experience the phenomena myself. PK was much easier to investigate than ESP. I could go with a video camera and at least try to see what was going on, whereas with telepathy or clairvoyance it’s much more hidden of course.

BD: Can you briefly explain the difference between telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis? I think a lot of people might assume these terms are interchangeable.

SB: Telepathy roughly is mind to mind interaction. So, if I think about let’s say Bugs Bunny and then you have a thought and that causes you to have a thought about rabbits or cartoons or Bugs Bunny, that would be an instance of telepathic interaction. Now, if a follower at a distant location causes you to have thoughts about fire or even the knowledge that a certain location is on fire, that would be an example of clairvoyance. In other words, where a physical state of affairs causes you to have a thought without the usual intervening causal chains. Psychokinesis is just roughly mind over matter. The direct cause of a thought directly causing some physical state of affairs. It’s usually assumed that PK is something that affects the world outside your body, but in principle PK could be working on your body. It could be the cause of psychosomatic ailments or self-healings or spontaneous remission.

BD: I’ve read that you’ve received criticism from other parapsychologists for saying there is no such thing as a controlled experiment in parapsychology and that the most interesting cases are conducted outside of a lab setting. What do you say to your critics?

SB: I try to explain it more clearly because apparently, I didn’t get through the first time [laughs]. The reasoning is simple. In the case of a laboratory experiment—let’s suppose you’re trying to test PK by having subjects try to influence a random number generator. We can’t go around with a PK meter and see where the lines of force are coming from and experimenters usually assume that everybody connected with a laboratory experiment is going to adhere to a kind of idiotic gentlemen’s agreement where only the official subject uses only the psychic ability being tested for and only at the appointed time when the experimenters gun goes off, so to speak. And they assume that nobody else even remotely connected with the experiment is going to use whatever psychic abilities they might have to mess up the evidential waters, so to speak.

Since we don’t know where the effects are coming from, if an effect is observed it could equally come from the experimenter who very likely is even more motivated for getting a particular result than the subject. And as far as you know, it could come from an onlooker or it could come from somebody living in the trunk of an old Ford truck somewhere in Gary, Indiana, let’s say. In the case of ESP, a blind experiment is going to be blind only for normal forms of information gathering. You can’t set up an ESP experiment blind for ESP, blind for telepathic interaction or clairvoyant access to what’s going on in the apparatus.

You know where else it makes a difference? In ghost hunters. People who have these television shows and go around with fancy equipment and wait for their equipment to register something or other. They assume that it’s coming from some outside agency, and they completely discount the possibility that they could be producing the effects themselves. It’s a hoax. I attended a ghost conference in Chicago a few years ago where the ghost hunters were explaining some of their exploits. I gave a talk, and I laid out my criticism of what they do, and they said, “Wow, I never thought of that.” And then they completely forgot about it again and went back to doing their business. It’s intellectually dishonest in my opinion.

BD: You’ve researched a ton of PK cases. If you had to choose one, what do you consider to be the most compelling case of PK you’ve encountered in your research?

SB: It would have to be what I call the Gold Leaf Lady. This was a woman in Florida whose body would break out instantaneously and spontaneously in a kind of golden colored foil, which actually turned out to be brass. This woman was a well-known psychic; she would help the police solve crimes; she was really good at that. She had only a first-grade education and was functionally illiterate, but when she was in a mediumistic trance she would write out quatrains from Nostradamus in medieval French. And then there was the golden foil.

BD: They tested the foil and determined it was brass?

SB: Oh yeah, large quantities of it were scraped off her body. It didn’t disappear. It appeared on the surface of her skin. It often looked as though she was sweating it because sometimes her skin would glisten a little bit before it appeared. But then in an instant there were well-formed patches of the golden foil. The big mystery of the case is what kind of phenomenon is this; is it a material dysfunction or is it what’s known as an apport, where an object is paranormally moved from one location to another. The woman’s name was Katie. Katie could be going about her business; she could be paying a cashier at a 7-Eleven and suddenly stuff would appear on her face. She had no control over it.

BD: So, she didn’t know what would trigger it?

SB: The case is a real mystery, but I think I understand one aspect of it. I think I understand what we could call the psychogenesis of the foil. First of all, Katie had no apparent psychic abilities until she married her second husband. The marriage was by all accounts a difficult one. What happened at first was that Katie started to experience poltergeist like phenomena. So, objects would move around, rearrange themselves, and appear and disappear. One day, a carving set appeared out of nowhere and Katie’s husband said, “What good is it if it isn’t money?” Then two days later, Katie’s body started to break out in this golden colored foil. So, if you want my pop psychological analysis of this it would be that symbolically the foil satisfies Katie’s husband’s demands for something valuable, but Katie doesn’t really have the responsibility of being the goose that laid the golden egg, which is a heavy-duty responsibility. And it’s also a way for Katie to safely express her resentment and rage towards her husband because he wanted something valuable and Katie was giving him fool’s gold. She was giving him the psychic finger.

BD: You think she was manifesting it.

SB: Yes, she was the agent, but whether it was a materialization phenomenon or an apport I can’t decide. The reason I can’t decide is that all the accounts I know of apparent materializations is that whatever materializes later dematerializes, it doesn’t stick around. But I’ve had large quantities of Katie’s foil analyzed at various places and there is nothing unusual about it.

BD: You witnessed the appearance of the foil on her skin?

SB: Yes. It was really cool [laughs]. She passed away a number of years ago, but this was a case I investigated in the mid-80s initially.

For more information of Professor Braude’s work, including his essays, books, and music, visit his website.