Paranormal Hoaxes:Contacting to Death

Psychometry is the ability to be able to relate information and details about past conditions of an object or area normally by being in close proximity or by touching something eg an old toy they would able to tell where it came from and the type of person it belonged to. Psychometry was first coined by Joseph R Buchanan in 1842, he was an American professor of physiology and one of the first people to experiment with it using his students as subjects.

Spirit Cabinets: The cabinets were used during the heyday of the spiritulist movement, and become popular after they were first used by the Davenport Brothers. The 'cabinets' were for eg either an actual piece of furniture, a curtained off part of a room or a doorway. They were used as part of a seance. They would allow the medium to be seperated from the sitter and out of direct view. The audience would be wowed by this as most of the time the mediums hands and feet would be bound, whilst phenomena happened around them.

Psychic Art Also known as spirit art or spirit portraits, it is a form of mediumship. It is a way in which as for some mediums they are able to hear or see the spirit, psychic art is where they are able to communicate with the spirit and represent them in picture form. Even a person who as no previous experience in art may be able to do this.

Pre Cognitive art, is where the drawing is done before an event happens, or meeting with a person who wants help to communicate with the spirit world and proves to be an accurate representation.

Automatic drawing was developed by The Surrealists, as a means of expressing their sub consciousness, by allowing their hand to move freely across a canvas to form a drawing.

A example of automatic drawing was when mediums and psychics started to produce this form of art (became known as psychic art) with the belief that their 'spirit guide' helps them to produce the pictures in a way for the spirits to communicate.

Zenner Cards:

The cards were designed by Psychologist Karl Zener in the early 1930's, they were used to help conduct experiments for extra sensory perception, Karl conducted many experiments along side his collegue parasychologist J B Rhine.

There are 25 cards in a pack and five of each design which are, a hollow circle, a greek cross, three vertical wavy lines, a hollow square and a hollow five pointed star.

In the experiment the pack of cards would be shuffled and the experimenter would pick out a card and the person (subject) would then try to guess which symbol it was, this would continue till all the cards had been used, the results would be recorded throughout the experiment as well as concluded afterwards the results. Different methods have been tried to keep the subject from seeing the cards or gaining anything from the experimenter including sitting in a different room. The average result for the experiment is a correct guess of 5 cards, but it is not unusal for a person with no psychic ability to only score 1 or 2 correct.