Eckhard Kruse's Pages
Physical Mediumship
Research on Physical Mediumship
Séances? Establishing contact with discarnate entities in the darkness? Spirit voices, apports and ectoplasm...? - It is not too long ago when I would have regarded such 'physical mediumship' as unbelievable stories from the past or subject for uncanny movies. All those alleged phenomena seemed to be so far off from our everyday experience and what science claims to know about our world.

But apparently, a simple rule seems to be true also with regard to this topic: The biggest skepticism and resistance comes from those people who do not know anything about the thing - let alone have they made their own experiences. So, let's have a closer look what can be learned about physical mediumship. With each of my numerous visits to physical séances my perspective changed slowly but steadily. Skeptical curiosity changed into fascination. Now I am convinced unbiased scientific investigations of séance room phenomena can be very valuable and exciting.

I have also put together a playlist on Youtube on physical mediumship with some of my (English) interviews/talks and documentary videos.


  • Since 2021, numerous experimental séances have been conducted with Kai Mügge using a variety of techniques, such as infrared illumination and infrared cameras. The experiments are documented in a series of shorter videos. Further information can be found here.
  • One of the big challenges for research on physical mediumship is that many phenomena are occurring only in low-light conditions or in complete darkness. Rather than reiterating the common demand of psi researchers to install infrared cameras as prerequisite for any type of research, here a different approach is taken, using audio recordings. With an appropriate setup of microphones and some postprocessing, it is possible to get some interesting information about what is going in the darkness, such as the localization of direct voices and the identification of same/different speakers using forensic voice analyses.
  • For basically every medium who is holding public séances today, there are people who are absolutely convinced of fraud, while others have no doubts to witness authentic phenomena. Gary Mannion is one of those disputed mediums, recently with a strong tilt towards 'fraud' after the release of a video secretly recorded during a séance. I had the chance to do extensive experiments with him in more than 50 séances. I documented some of the results in a scientific article which strongly challenge conventional explanations of fraud or trickery: Experiments with Gary Mannion, Techniques and Results.
  • Not physical mediumship, but somewhat related: The Ouija board is a popular technique for allegedly communicating with the spirit world. A technical test setup and research results are presented here.

 
Publications
Publications in English (more publications in German)
  • E. Kruse: Seven reasons to research physical mediumship - even if you think it's all nonsense. Paranormal Review, The Magazine of the Society of Psychical Research, Issue 82, Spring 2017.
  • E. Kruse: Audio signal processing to investigate alleged paranormal phenomena in mediumistic séances, IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, Volume 33 Issue 2, February 2018, pp. 52-56.
  • E. Kruse: Camera-Based Tracking System for Ouija Research. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 33. 255-276. June 2019. Open Access - download here


Questions / comments? Feel free to send me an e-mail: