April 22

The Man Who Taught J. B. Rhine

Walter Franklin Pierce
via Songs of Patience Worth

Today is the birthdate, in 1863, of Walter Franklin Prince, the only American, other than William James to be elected president of the Society for Psychical Research in London. He was also a PhD (Yale), Episcopal minister and founder of the Boston Society for Psychical Research. 

Prince started out as a minister, but through church social work was led to study abnormal psychology, eventually becoming director of psychotherapeutics at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in New York. At this point fate stepped in, in the form of James H. Hyslop, who recruited Prince to fill the post of research officer of the American Society for Psychical Research. It was in that capacity he became friends with noted investigator Hereward Carrington, and eventually, Harry Houdini. He was with ASPR for eighteen years, until the society was taken over by spiritualist supporters of the medium Mina Crandon, who, Prince was convinced, was a fake. At that point he resigned and formed the Boston Society for Psychical Research.

While Houdini, Carrington and Prince were all relentless in exposing fraudulent mediums, unlike Houdini, Carrington and Prince were convinced that some psychic phenomena were real. One case where Prince wasn't really sure either way became his best known investigation.

Pearl Curran in 1919
via St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Beginning in 1912, a young housewife named Pearl Curran received a series of messages through the Ouija board from someone named Patience Worth. By 1919 the board became superfluous, Pearl receiving pictorial visions directly, accompanied by Patience Worth's voice. Although Pearl had an indifferent education and read little, she and Patience authored several books and much poetry, considered classics of her day. Prince wrote a thorough account of his investigation of this phenomenon in 1927. 

He also investigated one of the first recognized cases of multiple personality and contributed much to the establishment of parapsychological research as a scientific endeavor. Most importantly, he advocated using laboratory work, with controls, to garner results that could be interpreted statistically. J. B. Rhine referred to Prince as "my principal teacher in psychical research." Indeed, Rhine's initial interest in parapsychology had grown from his investigations of mediumship with Prince at Harvard in 1926.

Prince was the author of The Psychic in the House (1926), The Case of Patience Worth (1927, his best known work), Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences (1928) and Enchanted Boundary (1930).