Brad Steiger's back as Christopher Dane, with another sloppy batch of esoteric trivia packaged as some kind of stunning revelation. This time it's the enigma of PSYCHIC TRAVEL, spilled out in 52 quickie chapters variously sourced from Fate magazine, the Society of Psychical Research, the National Enquirer, Jack London, classic books on the subject, unnamed archives, and the pure ether of Steiger's imagination. We're burning this bitch down sector by sector, level by level, so strap in for an artless exploration of one giant nonsense volume!
The nonsense starts with Popular Library's assertion that this is the title's FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK. That's technically true, and the title's not a reprint, but there never was a hardcover edition as you might expect from a declaration like that. It sounds like Popular Library is trying to give Psychic Travel more provenance than it really has! Ditto for the cases within being "completely authenticated" ... at least 20 chapters out of 52 are totally unsourced by Steiger, as we'll see.
It's looking like the only "awe-inspiring" thing about this volume is how much crud Steiger can cram into 192 pages. Here we go ...
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| Sock it to us, Brad ... |
Chapter 1: The Strange Experience of a Woman Who "Died" (page 5). Mrs. Patricia Arliss has a near-death experience (NDE) while under the knife for stomach cancer at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England. She sees her dead mum, complete with both her legs (they were amputated before she died). Steiger provides zero sourcing here.
Chapter 2: An Encounter With a Ghost (7). In 1965 one Lynda Houston astrally projects to her neighbor's house, where she sees Mr. Spiby, the original builder, who's been dead for 25 years! Another unsourced anecdote, and Steiger doesn't even give us a city.
These first two chapters set the scene: we're deep in Tanner F. Boyle's "maybe-fiction" genre, those "true" stories of Fortean wonders that operate as precursors to the modern creepy-pasta. Steiger whipped together another of these volumes as Christopher Dane the prior year with his Possession. "Maybe-fiction" doesn't really tell us anything about the universe, it just titillates with the smug certainty of an unfalsifiable rumor.
Chapter 3: The Star Rover (10). Here's an interesting twist from Steiger, as he recounts Jack London's novel The Star Rover, about a convict who astrally projects to escape his hellish prison. London interviewed ex-con Edward H. Morrell for background about some of the tortures inflicted at San Quentin, and Steiger gets cheeky by claiming that the astral projection was part of this true research! Of course, London added that to the story as a purely fictional invention.
Chapter 4: Help From Another Dimension (13). Steiger's first real nonfiction source is from The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1951) by Hereward Carrington and Sylvan Muldoon. Percy Cole of Melbourne dreams of a doctor and nurse who diagnose him with "mitrial regurgitation" ... he checks it out and really does have a heart condition. This may be a "true" story for better or worse but Steiger simply quotes it as yet another quick hit.
Chapter 5: Astral Travel in War (17). Here's a sturdy reference from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume XXXIV! It's August 23rd, 1944, and an unnamed officer has just been hit by German artillery. He has an out of body experience. Steiger bundles in Ernest Hemingway's own wartime account of a OOBE near Fossalta, as told to Guy Hickock of the Brooklyn Eagle, and notes Hemingway's use of the experience in A Farewell to Arms.
Chapter 6: The Hunger Strike That Produced "Out-of-Body" Experience (20). More maybe-fiction as sick girl Frances Simpson goes on an orange cleanse that, well, produces an out of body experience! Again we don't get any source, and no real facts beyond a date of 1955. Frances scrapes her knee on the ceiling while floating around and the cut is still there after her experience, a perfect maybe-fiction stinger.
Chapter 7: Inventions That Came From Another World (22). Various inventors are inspired in their dreams. Sir Charles V. Boys, Elias Howe, John Carter, David Parkinson, and a few nameless men are listed, and I'm pretty sure Steiger or Warren Smith used at least one of these anecdotes in a Strange volume.
Chapter 8: A Minister's Proof of Life After Death (26). The Reverend L.J. Bertrand is lost and freezing to death in the Alps, and astrally projects to see his climbing students fucking around like dolts and their guide eating the lunch that's meant for the Reverend! He also sees his wife arriving in town and registering at the hotel. The guide and students find Bertrand and save him. No sources from Steiger, though the case is documented in a paper from the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
Chapter 9: "It Was Not Yet My Time" (29). Steiger quotes the National Enquirer, March 2nd, 1969, on the case of one Mrs. Ruby Staley. In January 1938 Mrs. Staley is sick from pneumonia and has a NDE, seeing her dead grandmother and hearing a voice tell her to go back.
Chapter 10: Astral Projection in Childbirth (31). Isabel Carenas calls to sister Victoria during childbirth, shocking Victoria and her little terrier in their NYC apartment. From Fate, December 1967.
Chapter 11: Can Drugs Take Us Out of Our Bodies? (34). R. Gordon Wasson, a VP at J.P. Morgan, travels to Mexico for a sacred mushroom trip. He sees visions of his son enlisting in the army and a relative passing away - of course these occur when he returns to the states. Writing in 1974, Steiger isn't able to clue us in that Wasson's trip was secretly funded by the CIA as part of MK-Ultra!
Steiger also describes Dr. Erick-Willi Peuckert of Gottingen University theorizing on the use of "witch's salve" to fly and engage in black magic orgies. Maybe-fiction and parapolitics are melded with classic '70s witchsploitation.
Chapter 12: The Long Journey (38). Mrs. Monica Fisher is another patient in Birmingham Hospital. Her difficult delivery triggers an OOBE and she sees a huge gate, but some huge hands push her back! I wonder if Steiger had a source collecting cases from this hospital. It sounds like something from the Society for Psychical Research, but he's good about citing them in other chapters so I'm not sure. Or maybe he just made it up!
Chapter 13: A Doctor's Encounter With Astral Travel (41). Sir Auckland Geddes reads a case for a 1937 meeting of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh about an anonymous doctor who splits into an A and B personality while astral projecting. The A personality travels while the B personality stays with the body.
Chapter 14: A Prediction of Impending Death (45). Danton Walker, columnist for the New York Daily News, reports on his friend Ella Donaldson and her dream of impending death. She dreams of her friend Patricia's mother telling her Patricia's dead - lo and behold, Ella learns that Patricia and her husband Henry have died of carbon monoxide poisoning in their European apartment!
Chapter 15: The Many Astral Travels of Oliver Fox (49). Another case described by Hereward Carrington, this time from his 1959 book Astral Projection: A Record of Out-of-the-Body Experiences. Oliver Fox experiments with astral projection and molests a random woman while projecting into her room! He also pisses off his fiancee Elsie, who projects herself into his room to prove she can do it too. Steiger mentions that Fox wrote up his experiences in a 1920 issue of the Occult Review.
Chapter 16: A Buffer Against the Tragedies of Life (55). From the July 1st issue of the National Enquirer comes the story of Helen DeDolce of Allentown, PA, who describes a NDE while undergoing an emergency appendectomy. Later, her husband dies but visits her in a vision, and later still she sees a spectral nun just before her daughter dies of leukemia!
Chapter 17: He Wanted to See His Pictures (57). From the British Society for Psychical Research, no case file or journal mentioned. James Dickinson runs a photo studio in Newcastle, England, and J.S. Thompson comes in for his photos. They aren't done yet, so he leaves in a sad mood. Later Dickinson learns that Thompson was on his deathbed the whole time and must have projected to his studio for one last attempt at getting his pictures.
Chapter 18: Dead on the Delivery Table (59). Unsourced story of Mrs. Josephine Hand's rough delivery in a Georgia hospital, January 16th, 1965. She's dead for 12 minutes and undergoes an NDE, floating down a long dark tunnel that opens on a cloud filled sky.
Chapter 19: A Journey Into Death and Back Again (62). A beefy chapter (a whole 5 pages!) taken from Volume VII of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, wherein a Dr. Raynes testifies as to his friend Dr. Wiltse, of Skiddy, KS, who was upon his deathbed when he projected out into his neighborhood in the nude, traveling through the air and on the ground until his path is blocked by a rockfall. Steiger heavily quotes himself ("author Brad Steiger") from the 1968 volume The Mind Travelers as to the meaning of Wiltse's nudity, the familiar neighborhood he traveled through, and the rockfall that blocked further travel.
It's worth checking how many chapters in Psychic Travel are recycled from The Mind Travelers or other Steiger works. This won't be the last time in this text that Steiger quotes himself as if he's another author.
Chapter 20: A Marble Staircase to the Other Side (67). Bertram Frace is knocked off a crane at a steel plant outside Trenton, NJ, in 1957, and has a NDE while in hospital in Levittown, PA. He climbs a marble staircase for what feels like days, until the voice of his dead grandmother warns him back down. Now he lectures at a church in Allentown, PA, on NDE. Lots of details but no source from Steiger, though as of 1981 Frace was listed in the directory of ministers of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches.
Chapter 21: John Pendragon and the Etheric Body (69). Steiger dredges up his favorite addled would-be seer, John Pendragon, quoting from the 1968 book Pendragon but leaving off his own co-author credit. Pendragon claims he can project up to over 3,000 miles to visit friends. He also says, “I liken the physical body to a base from which the others operate. I would not say that they permeate each other, since each can act independently of each other.”
Pendragon featured many, many times in Steiger and buddy Warren Smith's old Strange volumes, so what's one more bout of recycled text?
Chapter 23: There's More Than One Way to Go Home (79). In England in 1917 unhappy GI Milton C. Watson dreams of going home - later his sister writes that their brother and cousin heard Milton opening the gate outside their home and then walking inside, just as he had done in his dream. Another super short chapter with no source and not much of a point.
Chapter 24: A Meeting With St. Peter (81). Mrs. Rowene Forrest of Oxnard, CA, is in a coma in 1958 after being hit by a car. She meets a dead school friend, dead relatives, and St. Peter himself. Her dead friend gives her a card to carry "upstairs, to the gate" but St. Peter tells her it's unsigned and to go back. He also tells her no more deaths will occur in their family for 5 years, which comes true as a niece dies by car in 1963. Forrest says whether or not her experience "really happened" or was something that existed all in her head, it helped her cope with her experience and with death. This is another chapter with lots of details but no sourcing.
Chapter 25: The Nocturnal Visitors (84). Another chapter sourced from the Society for Psychical Research, taken from the Journal of the SPR Volume XXXII, 1942. A Dr. L and his wife visit each other astrally. Despite the explicit sourcing this is a nothing of a chapter, pure filler.
Chapter 26: An Astral Trip to Idaho (87). Helen Louise Utter of Wilkes-Barre, PA, dreams in 1913 of visiting her sister's place in Idaho. In 1916 she moves west with her sickly husband Leon and their new child to stay with her sister - of course, she finds her sister's place exactly as in her dream! No source from Steiger.
Chapter 27: Sex That is Out of This World (90). Smut taken from an article by Ryan Master in the March 10th, 1969 issue of tabloid Midnight. Angela Fiorelli, aged 23 of Nice, France, has sex while astral projecting. "While dubious," Steiger asserts that the story is more common than suspected.
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| Some examples of Midnight's content c.1969 |
Chapter 29: The Little Old Lady of Balluchullish (95). A very silly chapter where Mrs. Boulton (no first name) dreams of visiting a Scottish mansion. She and her husband Mr. Boulton (no first name either) travel to Scotland and rent an estate that turns out to be the very same house! Owner Mrs. Beresford had told them it was haunted, and Mrs. Boulton realizes the "ghost" was actually herself astral projecting to the home. No sourcing on Steiger's part and this is classic maybe-fiction melodrama.
Chapter 30: Is There Life After Death? (99). From the January 19th, 1969 issue of the National Enquirer comes the story of John Lowe, a British soldier who has an NDE in Burma when the tank he's riding in hits a mine. Japanese soldiers advance on his shattered body as he watches from above, but friendly forces ride in at the last moment and he's saved. Lowe notes that he had no pain and no fear of death when he was outside his body.
Chapter 31: Astral Projection in the Laboratory (102). Sourced from the November 1968 issue of Fate, Dr. Charles Tart tests astral projection at UC Davis. Two subjects are hooked up to EEG and EKG while they sleep, and numbers are hidden around the room in places they could only see while projecting. Results are inconclusive thus far but Steiger uses a lot of space recounting the experiment.
Chapter 32: "This Body is But a Garment" (110). Another National Enquirer story, from the February 2nd, 1969 issue. Paul M. Vest drowns and watches his body rescued by other swimmers. Like others in this volume, he says he felt no pain and no connection to his body while he was watching from above.
Chapter 33: The Brazen Lady of the "City of Limerick" (112). From Volume VII of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Businessman S.R. Wilmot books passage on the City of Limerick from Liverpool to NYC, 1863. He dreams his wife visits him, and fellow passenger Richard Tait observes Wilmot's wife entering their room and kissing Wilmot as he sleeps! Wilmot's wife says she also dreamt she visited him and describes the steamship.
Chapter 34: "I Shall Never Again Fear Death" (116). No source here as Oleta A. Martin suffers a heart attack on Christmas morning, 1957. She has an NDE and sees robed beings of light on the other side of a huge chasm. Somehow she knows if she crosses to join them she will not be able to come back. She turns back for her daughter's sake and awakens to the doctor resuscitating her. She remarks that she no longer fears death and Steiger emphasizes that this perspective has been occurring across cases, in one of his few analytical remarks throughout the volume.
Chapter 35: A Student's Experiments in Out-of-Body Travel (119). Michael Hanson is a freshman at New College in Sarasota, FL who (say it with me) experiments with out-of-body travel. He flies up into space and meets God, who bellows "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING HERE?" and scares Hanson shitless out of trying any more astral projection. No source from Steiger for this cheeky story.
Chapter 36: Projection at the Moment of Death (121). Mrs. Margaret Sargent is a nurse in Atlanta, GA, who witnesses a dying patient project out of her body as a glowing form. The patient's aura strikes the attending doctor and then reenters her body. She regains consciousness, dying 24 hours later. Steiger doesn't source the story, but when he reused this tale some 30 years later in his 2003 volume Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places (page 157) he credited Hereward Carrington and Sylvan Muldoon's The Phenomena of Astral Projection, already responsible for an earlier chapter!
Here's a small piece of the puzzle, then: Steiger is probably naming most of the sources he used but not bothering to credit individual stories to them.
Chapter 37: Spying From an Astral Perspective (123). From the June 1963 issue of Prediction magazine, a story from occultist G.W. Surya about a German soldier in WWI who could astral project, He offers his service to his superiors but is rebuffed. Too late, they learn he was telling the truth, as the French attack he saw being planned over enemy lines overruns them.
Chapter 39: Experiments With Hypnosis (131). Once more, from Volume VII of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. A Mrs. Sedgewick writes of a Dr. F. and his experiments with hypnosis. "Jane" is hypnotized and instructed to project herself to a room where Mr. Eglington waits. Mr. Eglington gets bored and leaves, however, with a pillow stuffed under the sheets to make it look like he's still there. "Jane" describes seeing Mr. Eglington under the covers - she's astral projected all the way to his room to be fooled by a simple trick!
Here Steiger quotes himself again, this time from some unknown source, saying that clearly this was a case of pure astral projection, because if any clairvoyance had been involved then "Jane" would have seen through Mr. Eglington's ruse. Steiger as Dane reports that Steiger believes that astral projection accounts for the majority of psy phenomena.
Chapter 40: A Word About the Dangers in Astral Projection (134). Some more about Oliver Fox from Hereward Carrington's Astral Projection: A Record of Out-of-the-Body Experiences. Fox lists some dangers associated with, well, astral projection, including madness, premature burial, obsession, and cerebral hemorrhage.
Steiger then quotes himself yet again, this time from his 1971 title Minds Through Space and Time, coauthored with Loring G. Williams, on the threat of spirit possession - when astral projecting, evil spirits may covet your body!
Chapter 42: Where Was Admiral Tyron? (144). Steiger recounts the tragedy of the Victoria and Camperdown collision off of Tripoli in 1893 and adds a pathetic claim to some people having seen Admiral George Tyron at his home in England even as the disaster was unfolding thousands of miles away.
This wouldn't be the last time Admiral Tyron's reckless arrogance has been incorporated into mystery mongering: in his 1977 book of Triangle leftovers From the Devil's Triangle to the Devil's Jaw, Richard Winer asked if some mysterious force may have influenced Tyron to give the idiotic order for maneuvers that put the Victoria and Camperdown on a collision course.
Chapter 43: Summoned to Her Mother's Deathbed (149). Mrs. Beeda Brown recalls Valentine's Day, 1927, when she was summoned by a mysterious old man to travel to (all together now) her mother's deathbed. Later the family receives delayed news of her mother's passing. No source from Steiger.
Chapter 44: Psychic Dreams or Astral Projection? (155). Steiger quotes an article by S. Ralph Harlow from the September 1969 issue of Fate about two different cases of shipwrecked sailors involving astral projection. Two captains dream of castaways and alter their courses, finding lost men who would have perished without their visions.
Chapter 45: She Saw the Murder of Her Daughter (158). In Lewiston, MA, 1870, Jim Lowell murders his poor wife Lizzie, but her mother Sarah Burton sees the crime from miles away in a vision. Nobody listens to her however, and it takes three years to find Lizzie's body and put Lowell on trial! He's eventually pardoned due to the circumstantial nature of the evidence. The case is documented, but where Steiger got the astral factor is unknown.
Chapter 46: "Tell Them I'm Not Dead!" (161). Dr. Harry M. Archer is interviewed by Frank B. Copley for the August 8th, 1925 issue of Collier's, on the case of fireman Johnny Seufert, who was buried under a collapsed building but called to his wife across the astral plane. She forces rescuers to keep digging until he's found alive, after over 12 hours under rubble.
Chapter 47: I Saved My Son's Life (165). Another Fate reference, from the January 1963 issue: Mrs. Edyth Elizabeth Jonze of Denver, CO, describes her experience in 1927 when she was visited by a spectral black child who took her on an astral journey to find her sick, lost son Elmer in a cabin in a mysterious forest. They tend to him and then Edyth awakens in her own bed. Later she receives word of his location and travels to him through the real world. His feet are amputated, but he's alive. The black child was Jo-Jo, who Elmer had befriended on the road before he tragically drowned - somehow, the child returned from beyond the dead to lead Edyth to her sick son.
Elmer dies just three years later, but Edyth credits Jo-Jo with allowing her to save her son even if only for a time. This is a sad, melodramatic yarn that goes on and on.
Chapter 48: She Lived Two Days in One (172). It's another unsourced anecdote as Mrs. Ted Stoeckel sleeps through her alarm one morning in 1953 and misses work. She stays home to clean instead and returns to work the next day expecting to be sacked - but it's still Thursday! Somehow, she lived one day twice, and notes that she spent the day without feeling hunger or pain. A real trifle of a tale.
Chapter 49: A Soldier's Out-of-Body Experience (175). From Fate, the November/December 1951 issue. Sgt. Ted Snowden is shelled by the Japanese at Guadalcanal in 1942 and has an OOBE. As others have said, Snowden reports that he no longer fears death or the other side.
Chapter 50: Advice From an Astral "Park Keeper" (179). The night of March 25th, 1945, Mrs. Margaret Newby has an astral dream of exploring a park. A park keeper gives her some cryptic advice that she uses to overcome some obstacles in her life. No source, but Mrs. Newby is a practical astral explorer and the story is polished.
Chapter 51: Astral Flight From a Doomed Train (185). William McFarland Campbell is on the train to Sudbury, Ontario, when it derails into an icy river in 1910. His wife Mary is shocked when a spectral vision of William arrives on their doorstep with "fiery eyes like coal" and unable to speak. He leaves his hat behind, and later Mary receives word of the crash and gives him up for dead. Two days later the real William arrives home alive, and when he and his wife check his hat they find his train ticket inside. Somehow, he not only survived the crash but was able to project home to leave an omen for his wife. No source from Steiger.
Chapter 52: When Death Becomes a Trial Run (189). Another reference to Dr. Robert Crookhall and his books The Study and Practice of Astral Projection (1961) and More Astral Projection. Steiger relates a story from The Study and Practice of an atheist Russian who undergoes an OOBE where he's carried by angels, converting him to belief in an afterlife.
That's it! This is the last chapter, and there's no conclusion! This volume was just one of many mechanically separated paranormal meat products Steiger shoveled out over the years, with disconnected anecdotes strung together to fill pages and only the thinnest analytical frame - at some point, Steiger hits his page count and dips, leaving us vaguely dissatisfied and 95 cents poorer.
The purpose of this very long review? Showing how the sausage was made.
Popular Library, 1974
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