In a darkened room in Boston in 1926, Joseph Banks Rhine was among those gathered around a table watching Mina Crandon attempt to contact the dead. The famed medium was conducting a séance, and Rhine was observing as research. He later reported, in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, that Crandon had used trickery. His claim was attacked by some, including Arthur Conan Doyle, who ran newspaper ads claiming simply “J. B. Rhine is an Ass.”
Rhine eventually founded parapsychology — the branch of psychology dealing with psychic phenomena — and the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. He also once lived in Marshallville and studied at the College of Wooster.
Although Rhine labeled that Boston medium a fraud, he was quite interested in the paranormal. As a University of Chicago student in 1922, Rhine had attended a lecture by Arthur Conan Doyle, the British medical doctor best known for authoring the Sherlock Holmes books. Doyle was touring the country to proclaim proof of communication with the dead. Rhine later wrote, “This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years.”
J.B. was born in 1895 in a Waterloo, Pennsylvania, log cabin to a farmer/schoolteacher/merchant and his wife. A studious, strong-willed child, he decided early on to become a minister. The family moved to Marshallville in 1911 to farm as tenants of the Weckessers, whose daughter Louisa later wrote in her diary “I was surprised to find a farm boy who read books.”
In 1916, Rhine began studying philosophy at the College of Wooster, but the science courses he took led him to question his faith and abandon his plan for the ministry. With World War I underway, Rhine left college to enlist in the Marines. Two years later, he returned to Marshallville, where he married his long-time sweetheart, Louisa Weckesser.
After earning a Ph.D. in botany at Chicago, Rhine taught in the field for two years, in New York and West Virginia, but couldn’t shake his fascination with Doyle’s claim. So he undertook psychology studies at Harvard before moving on to Duke University. It was there that he introduced the term parapsychology and began his research, believing that “Good groundwork should be laid in the lab, so that the scientific community might take parapsychology seriously.” He also began teaching psychology and philosophy at Duke.
Rhine’s initial research was in postmortem survival, the notion that the mind and personality survive the death of the body because, he said, many documented cases of “apparitions of the dying coincided with actual death to a degree significantly beyond chance expectation.” But he soon shifted his research to telepathy (communication of thoughts by means other than the known senses) and clairvoyance (the ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or space), believing that these had to first be understood. Much of his initial research involved scientifically and mathematically analyzing card guessing and dice tossing.
His work led him to found the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke, launch the Journal of Parapsychology and coin the term extrasensory perception, or ESP (acquiring information without the use of the known five senses). In 1934, he reported in Extra-Sensory Perception the astonishing conclusions of his experiments, primarily that “Extrasensory perception is an actual and demonstrable occurrence.” The book drew worldwide scholarly attention and created a public sensation. He gave worldwide lectures, participated in national radio broadcasts, and began contributing the first of countless articles and papers to popular magazines and scholarly journals over the next several decades.
Predictably, his work was also met with skepticism, with some labeling Rhine a publicity seeker, criticizing his methods and ridiculing the notion of a psychologist studying psychic phenomena. Nevertheless, Rhine continued his research, moving into additional directions including precognition (predicting events) and psychokinesis (moving or affecting objects with the mind).
In 1940, he co-authored, with Joseph Gaither Pratt, Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, a comprehensive review of ESP research. Professional response was positive, and the book was assigned as required reading for introductory psychology classes at Harvard. Rhine subsequently wrote eight additional books, three co-authored. In 1957, he founded the Parapsychological Association. He retired from Duke at age 70 but turned around and established the Institute for Parapsychology, later called the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM).
What sort of person makes his life’s work researching the incomprehensible? Sally Feather, one of Rhine’s four children, said her father was a kind man and their home life was exciting, with students and colleagues always visiting, but traditional. She recalled her father saying, “If you were unconventional in one area of your life, you had better try to be conventional in all other areas.”
True to the nature of his research, Rhine’s work didn’t stop with his 1980 death. The FRNM, renamed the Rhine Research Center on the centenary of his birth, remains a world leader in parapsychology research. His Parapsychological Association is still vital, and his Journal of Parapsychology is still in publication. Rhine left this world confident that he had built a body of evidence for the paranormal. Whether one accepts his findings or not, the courageous J.B. ultimately was able to reposition psychic phenomena from the realm of the eerie to the lab.
While the Internet brims with information on Rhine, who is buried in Durham, North Carolina, he seems to have largely been forgotten locally — until now. Is it farfetched to wonder if this profile might have been prompted from beyond the grave?
This article by WCHS board member Dottie Sines was first published in The Bargain Hunter.
