Paranormal Investigations
In 1918 W.T. Allison, a professor of English at the University of Manitoba and a close friend of T.G., returned from a visit to American medium Pearl Curran. He passed on his interest and enthusiasm for spiritual communication to T.G. This may never have amounted to more than a passing interest had not fate intervened. In 1919, one of T.G.’s twin sons, Arthur, died at the age of three, a victim of the Spanish flu. T.G.’s daughter Margaret attributed the family’s lifelong search for life after death to this event. Her father’s grief was profound; her mother, having read Frederic William Henry Myers's book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, encouraged her husband to investigate the phenomenon.
T.G. started with the use of Ouija board and experiments with mental telepathy with his United Church minister, Reverend Daniel Normal McLachlan. The family’s first medium was their Scottish nanny, Elizabeth Poole. She started out by using the Ouija board, but moved on in 1920 when the family was introduced to table tipping, where a table would stop tipping when the “correct” letter was pronounced aloud, somewhat akin to the Ouija board. This led to investigations into telekinesis, or the movement of physical objects through mental exertions. By now T.G. had established a separate room on the 2nd floor of the house which was to be kept locked at all times when it was not in use. T.G. wanted to investigate paranormal phenomena such as rappings, psychokinesis, ectoplasms, and materializations under scientific conditions that would minimize any possibility of error. A red bulb in the centre of the room provided light. A bank of about a dozen cameras were focussed on the side of the room where activity was to take place, their shutters open, waiting for Hamilton to set off a flash in order for them to all take photos at the same time. A three sided wooden cabinet that T.G. constructed open on one side was used in the telekinesis experiments, where Mrs. Poole would charge a small table by laying her hands on it, causing it to move from the cabinet.
By 1928, Mrs. Poole introduced the Hamilton family to two Scottish sisters-in-law, Mary Ann Marshall (1880-1963) and Susan Marshall, also known as Dawn and Mercedes. These two women became regular mediums at the Hamiltons’ “home circles.” The family would invite friends and members of the community to participate in their séances. Many of the persons who attended the home circles were also doctors and businessmen, such as celebrated lawyer Isaac Pitblado and Rh blood specialist Dr. Bruce Chown. The first table rappings and table tiltings of “Elizabeth M,” as Mrs. Poole was known, were followed by clairvoyance, trance states, automatic writing, visions, then the manifestations of materializations, wax molds, bell ringing and finally in 1928, ectoplasms. As a spiritualist Hamilton believed the ectoplasms to be materializations from the spirit world. He photographed the ectoplasm and Lillian took notes of what occurred in the 2nd floor room in Hamilton House. Margaret also served as recording secretary for many of her father’s experiments.
At first T.G. and Lillian’s investigations into the paranormal were held in secret. But T.G. went public in 1926, delivering a lecture on his research on telekinesis to the Winnipeg Medical Society. From that time until his death, Hamilton delivered eighty-six lectures and wrote numerous articles published in Canada and abroad. His fame spread and the Hamilton family’s work became known in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Americans Mina Crandon, the medium known as “Margery,” and her husband L.R.G. Crandon, all travelled to Winnipeg to participate in the Hamiltons’ séances. Among those who worked with Dr Hamilton were Ada Turner and her adopted son Harold Turner. Harold or "Norman" as he is called in the Hamilton records was interviewed by Norman James Williamson about his experience with the Hamilton group in 1982. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, came to Winnipeg as part of a cross North American tour in 1923, he attended one of the Hamiltons’ home circles. Even after his death, the Hamiltons tried to contact Conan Doyle by mediumship. In 1935, T.G. Hamilton died suddenly of a heart attack. His wife Lillian and his daughter Margaret continued his work. Lillian and her son James Drummond produced a summary of T.G.’s work in the book Intention and Survival, published in 1942. When Lillian died in 1956, her daughter Margaret carried on. She wrote a series of articles in 1957 for Psychic News in England. These thirteen articles were collected in a booklet and also circulated to daily papers throughout Canada. Margaret later produced a second edition of Intention and Survival in 1977; a third edition came out in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Glendenning Hamilton