THE PLAUSABILTY OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY: Higgypop asks if Parapsychology has given credence to the Paranormal.

The Zancig’s last work, Crystal Gazing, The Unseen World: A Treatise On Concentration was published only a few years before Julius’ death in 1929.

names, with extensive lists of men’s and women’s names correlating to numbers within the couple’s minds. On stage, this system would appear to be little more than inane talk between the couple, but would produce astounding results, implying they indeed had powers beyond human comprehension. A mazingly, the death of Agnes in 1916 aged 59, did not signal the end of the Zancig’s performance. Julius remarried a Brooklyn schoolteacher called Ada and revived the mentalist act, much to Ada’s resistance. The newly-weds managed a year in performance before Ada’s hatred of the stage led Julius to hire a man named Paul Vučić (Paul Rosini) under the name ‘Henry’ to join him on stage. However, this partnership was also not to last as, at the advent of the US joining WWI, Vučić joined the army and Julius was forced to search for a new partner, with a great memory. Julius didn’t have to look too far, as the teenage son of famous magician Theo ‘Okito’ Bamberg was poised to step into the vacated position. David Theodore Bamberg went on to perform with Julius under the snappy name ‘Syko the Psychic’. In this role, he acted as a blindfolded medium ‘divining articles from the audience, solving mathematical problems, and ending with an impressive book test.’ Bamberg went on to achieve immense fame in the magic world as Fu Manchu, presenting some of the most elaborate and popular illusion shows the world had ever seen. However, when returning to the States from a prolonged stint in places such as South America, Spain, Portugal and the West Indies, he had to rename himself Fu Chan in order to avoid a lawsuit!

The couple retired from their extensive touring programme in the 1920s but settled in America and continued working under the occult and magic umbrellas. Reportedly, the pair worked as professional tea leaf readers, palmists, crystal ball seers and astrologers for private clients, eschewing their public audiences. In their time, the Zancigs – in their many forms – were some of the most famous mesmerists, being household names across continents. They created one of the most complex code systems in performance history and have never been bettered. Yet today, they’re little more than footnote in a magician’s biography.

References

Katie X

The code was bafflingly complex and remains known by professional magicians today as one of the most complex communication systems between two people. In the intervening years, many magicians, such as Robert Nelson in 1940, have attempted to create their own Zancig codes, but none have been able to match the complexity of the Danish couple’s vocabulary.

Between 1900 and 1926, the Zancigs published several books under the name ‘The Zancigs’, (or as Prof. Zancig and Mdme. Zancig) most relating to palmistry and fortune telling using cards. In 1907, Julius wrote ‘Two Minds With But a Single Thought’, a work that professed the psychic connection between the couple and popularised the phrase within their work. Quite brilliantly, when Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy fame) was asked by those creating his fan club for an official motto, he offered a spoof of the Zancig’s tag line, ‘Two Minds Without a Single Thought!’

W. W. Baggally, Telepathy: Genuine and Fraudulent, Marlowe Company (1919) p.61 Ivor LL. Tuckett, The Evidence for the Supernatural: A Critical Study Made with “Uncommon Sense”, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & co., LTD.(1911) p.120 Will Goldston, The Truth About the Zancigs. In Sensational Tales of Mystery Men. London (1929) Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, Harper Brothers, (1924) p210 Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, Harper Brothers, (1924) p210 W. W. Baggally, Telepathy: Genuine and Fraudulent, Marlowe Company (1919) p.57 W. W. Baggally, Telepathy: Genuine and Fraudulent, Marlowe Company (1919) p.61 Laura G. Fixen, The True Secret of Mind Reading as Performed by The Zancigs, Diamond Dust (1912) Online resource via archive.org David Bamberg Illusion Show: A Life in Magic. David Meyer Magic Books. (1991)

THE PUZZLING PERPLEXITY OF THE PARANORMAL

The Comfort and Confidence of Not Knowing

By Amy L Bennett, Full Dark Paranormal Explorers

If there’s anything Full Dark would want to impart on anyone interested in the paranormal and even to others within it now, it would be to find comfort in not knowing: a sense of peace in unanswered questions and endless possibilities. No closure to an investigation, no conclusions drawn with definitiveness, no crutches of dogma to carry from one haunted location to another, wash, rinse, repeat. The confidence of not knowing when it comes to the paranormal can be terrifying to conceive, but once attained can be straight up bliss. Okay that’s a bit much, but it’s at least a hell of a weight off one’s shoulders, mentally. If you need weight off your shoulders physically, fix your posture. I get it, we’re human, so we’re hardwired to want reasons and definitions and facts. Those are our controls. What other control in the universe do we have besides what we know, irrefutably for certain? What we know and sling around, just in comments sections is astounding after 30 years of the internet’s existence. We use facts to refute, to play devil’s advocate, to debunk, to prove or prove wrong, to explain and define and quantify our entire world, let alone in the paranormal. That’s really difficult to break away from or even compartmentalize in some way. When it comes to the strange and unexplained, the most profound thing I’ve learned over nearly two decades running after ghosts is that I have no choice but to leave the control and feeling of knowing to the wind. At the very least I have to leave that sense of knowing at the door when I head out to investigate.

It’s strange at first, to deviate from the rigidity and reliability of paranormal definitions and the terms we use make sense of our experiences. The sounds we hear on recorded audio are sometimes very human sounding - full words and phrases, pitch and timbre apparent. But sometimes they are not, and yet we strive in those moments of listening back and analyzing to push that audio anomaly into a human construct. We tend to anthropomorphize the sounds; a simple whooshing noise becomes a human breath. A creak or crack or tap becomes a footstep. In that way, we give human qualities to nonhuman things - sounds, sights, etc. - that we experience through ourselves or our equipment. Pulling away from the immediate need to apply a human origin to our experiences is so difficult because we are human. It’s our ancient lizard brain DNA. Yours and mine both.

“The confidence of not knowing when it comes to the paranormal can be terrifying to conceive, but once attained can be straight up bliss.”

So, what do we do? Hack our own brains. Assess, erase, recode. I truly believe anyone can leave the control of knowing and defining and providing oneself a sense of closure behind them in pursuing the paranormal. Ryan and I have both experienced years of the strange and unusual, indoors and out, in both insignificant and famous locations, and not a single instance of unexplained activity has led us to a direct and irrefutable conclusion about, well, any of it.

Are ghosts:

Deceased people? Maybe.

Conscious nonhuman entities interacting with us? Maybe.

Something with ill intent toward us?

Maybe.

Something defined within a particular religion? Maybe.

Aliens of some sort, physical or incorporeal? Maybe. That is a lot of maybes, but I say them with complete comfort. “Maybe” has never had a soft place to land on an investigation, and we see that within the mainstream TV shows about the paranormal too. Closure is everything in how investigation shows are set up. The business wants to know it’s safe for customers, the family wants to know who’s haunting their house and what they want. The closure you see at the end of a show is only for the world of TV, a tidy ending, and happy viewers ready to move on to the next story. If you’re in the paranormal field and have been out a few times to investigate, you already know this, it’s no secret. No one would want to see a family left frightened and in tears as the investigators left, their promises to help snatched away after a night investigating the home. A network will never create or air that kind of paranormal content, as much as that exact scenario has and will continue to play out in reality. Already it’s hard to break from a need for closure in the paranormal, because the most overt and constant way most people absorb it is full of closure and concisely wrapped investigations. It can make it that much more difficult to find one’s way to the comfort of not knowing and not having answers when we’re primed for results and resolutions at the end of investigations. With so much of the paranormal aimed at us through media, know that I only mention TV because the struggle of seeing the “other side” of it all is very real. So why do Ryan and I think not knowing and not having answers is so worth it in the paranormal? The obvious answer might be “science hasn’t figured it out yet!” and sure, absolutely valid. Absence of evidence doesn’t equal evidence of absence. Nice phrase, but that isn’t the end of it for us. The not knowing, and not defining what we experience has helped us widen every avenue of possibility in our investigations. Where we may capture the sound of a door opening on one of our recorders, and in fact a door somewhere opened without a human hand, we don’t apply humanity to the situation. A human spirit maybe opened that door, and we caught the sound. But maybe a repeated action from years previously was so ingrained in some portion of the atmosphere or environment around it, it just happens now and again when the conditions are right. What are those conditions? (There’s that need to qualify.) Maybe the conditions for a haunting are us, the investigators, maybe they’re our brainwave frequencies altering with our awareness in the dark spaces and late hours. Maybe it’s not us at all. Maybe it’s just the time of night or day. Or not. It keeps our possibilities, and our understanding of our own experiences and interactions, that much wider in scope from that point forward. It’s limitless!

See all those maybes? I love them. I marinate in them. I wrap myself in a fuzzy blanket of maybes and curl into the unknown and the curious and the bizarre because I do not know, and I have found comfort in endless wondering. Comfort in imagining the ways the world around me could play its hand and cause a mystery to fold further into itself. Comfort in possibilities leading to only more questions and the pop and fizzle of my thoughts as they whir through the mechanics of my mind. For every aspect of the paranormal I wouldn’t necessarily want to be true, I have to give them room to exist and be possible. Let’s use demons as an example. No one in my family is Catholic or even very religious, so the concept of demons has never been part of my life one way or another. But are demons still a possibility on the table? Sure, in some way, secular or non, the possibility exists because I have no way of knowing otherwise, and I’m okay with that. Knowing and believing are two different things. I don’t believe in demons, but at the same time, I can’t be certain they don’t exist. My beliefs aren’t facts. Instead, I assess, erase and recode. If demons are taken out of the context of religion, perhaps there is something that exists and is incorporeal that can cause psychic or mental distress to people. Perhaps these things exist, but we just don’t have a name for whatever they are yet. I’m open to it, man. Ryan and I can’t provide quantified or qualified explanations of what’s unknown, and yet we love the endlessness of not knowing. We love the continuous mystery of strange occurrences and happenings and the stories, legends and lore that grow from them. It doesn’t bother us to not have answers, it would bother us far more to have them. Both of us are comfortable in saying “We don’t know,” and if it vibes for you too, let some of the rigidity of the paranormal fall away from your thinking now and again. We wouldn’t want the mysteries of the paranormal figured out or solved, or ground down to definitives, statistics and ticked boxes. We want the mystery, and we love the journey. I don’t know how else to put it besides Ryan and I really feel like leaving all possibilities on the table is a much broader way to approach investigating and experiencing the weirdness of the world (and if you’re a billionaire or an astronaut, beyond this world). We say, “I don’t know” and we’re very confident we don’t know, but damn do we love searching.