Alfred Russel Wallace and Things That Go Bump in the Night

Posted on 16. Dec, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, Articles

Alfred Russel Wallace is best known for his scientific achievements — collecting and documenting hundreds of new species of “natural productions,” major insights into biogeography, island endemism, and cultural anthropology, and notably, his development of a theory of evolution by natural selection independently of and prior to that of Charles Darwin. But Wallace was also a believer in Spiritualism. This article examines his controversial interest in the existence of an eternal “soul” that lives after physical death, and our ability to communicate with such spirits.

Photograph of Alfred Russel Wallace with an image of a woman he claimed was his dead mother. The photo was created in 1874 by charlatan spirit photographer Frederick Hudson. Wallace declared it genuine, noting “even if [Hudson] had by some means obtained possession of all the photographs ever taken of my mother, they would not have been of the slightest use to him in the manufacture of these pictures.” Critics considered the photo a hoax created using sophisticated (at that time) double exposure techniques.

BOGANI NANI WARTABONE NATIONAL PARK, Sulawesi, Indonesia

Over the grilled fish I asked about spirits.

We were eating lunch in a simple warung outside Bogani Nani Wartabone National Park in north Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia. I sensed that my companions had tales to tell.

Endie’s father was a senior official in the Indonesian customs service. Suddenly he fell ill, and for three years he passed blood in his urine. The eerie thing was that this only happened when he was in Indonesia. When he went for treatment in Singapore, Taiwan, and Belgium his urine was normal, but once he returned to Indonesia the bleeding returned. The doctors were baffled. One day, when it was clear he was dying, her father’s assistant came to the house and announced: “My mother, who is a dukun [shaman or medium] told me to come.”

The younger man, who came from Aceh, a region in north Sumatra with a reputation for strong magic, confessed that he wanted Endie’s father’s job, and to get it had put a spell on the older man. The spiritual tools he used included the boss’s picture, a small kris, some rice husks, palm fibers, needles, and a shroud. By way of explaining his strange admission he added: “My mother says in order to cleanse my soul I must confess that I put a spell on you.”

Endie (not her real name) and her siblings asked her father whether they should take revenge. “No,” he answered. “God will decide his fate.” Her father died three days later. The murderer, if such he may be called, got the coveted job, but was arrested four months later for corruption.

I asked Endie what she made of all this. “I used to not believe in this mumbo-jumbo,” she said. “I do now.”

She asked me what I made of it. “If I believed that the man actually did put a spell on my father, then I would have taken revenge. That’s the Western approach. An eye for an eye and all that.”

Endie shook her head. “No. Let it be. The account will even out by itself.”

* * *

The countries of the Malay archipelago (now Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, and Timor Leste) where Wallace spent eight years, is rife with similar stories of witchcraft, charms, love (and death) potions, demons, ghosts, and spirits. He stayed in villages and in forest huts, and no doubt heard strange stories around the campfire almost daily, like this tale from The Malay Archipelago, Wallace’s classic book about his adventures in Southeast Asia.

I was rather surprised one evening to hear the following curious fact stated; I am inclined to accept it provisionally… A Bornean Malay who had been for many years resident here said to Manuel [an assistant], “One thing is strange in this country [Lombok, an island immediately to the east of Bali] — the scarcity of ghosts.” “How so?” asked Manuel. “Why, you know,” said the Malay, “that in our countries to the westward, if a man dies, we dare not pass near the place at night, for all sorts of noises are heard, which show that ghosts are about. But here there are numbers of men killed, and their bodies lie unburied in the fields … and yet you can walk by them at night and never hear or see any thing at all, which is not the case in our country”… And so it was settled that ghosts were very scarce, if not altogether unknown in Lombock [sic]. I would observe, however, that as the evidence is purely negative, we should be wanting in scientific caution if we accepted this fact as sufficiently well established.

Curiously, this single passage is the only mention of the spirit world in The Malay Archipelago. Odd, because Wallace was traveling in a land inhabited by people who acknowledged that they co-habited with spirits, and enhanced by the fact that Wallace himself was intrigued by psychic phenomena.

* * *

Alfred Russel Wallace learned mesmerism (hypnotism) in 1844, at the age of 21, when he worked with his brother as a land surveyor in the west of England and Wales.

Four years later he left for Brazil on his first collecting expedition, during which he spent four years (1848-1852) living among the indigenous people of the Rio Negro. For the first time, he was in a foreign land where he was enveloped in a culture of spirits, ghosts, and demons.

Then it is possible his interest in the occult grew during the eight years Wallace travelled in Southeast Asia (1854-1862). Perhaps the challenge of trying to figure out what wasn’t-meant-to-be-figured-out-using-Cartesian-logic was one of the reasons he stayed in Asia as long as he did.

* * *

I’ve been following Wallace for some 50 years — in the rainforests of Brazil, and through Southeast Asia.

I had a memorable encounter in Borneo with a man-hating female vampire ghost (read the article here) and in Java with the mermaid-inspired mystical Queen of the Southern Ocean (article here). While consulting a medium in Sulawesi, eastern Indonesia, a medium told me he was channeling Moses, who urged me to drop everything and get on the next plane to the Middle East to broker a peace treat. I’ve joined incense-filled healing sessions where evil spirits have been exorcized and heard first person stories of witchcrafts spells by people whom I respect.

Travelling through Java I frequently heard stories about how some Javanese believe that a wavy-bladed kris can be endowed with magic. Such a dagger can fly on the volition of its owner, can take an enemy’s life with no human hand guiding it, and can so intimately represent its owner that there are tales of men who got married by sending their krises to stand in for them while the men were occupied with more substantial matters than betrothal. I heard tales of men trading the soul of a child for the ability to turn into a were-pig, and with it the ability to steal from neighbors. I heard stories of the elusive and reclusive Badui in West Java teleporting themselves from their jungle redoubt to the capital Jakarta. Every day, it seemed, I heard stories that were told with a wink and a shrug but also with a touch of “I don’t want to mess too much with this stuff because what if it’s actually true?”

* * *

Wallace refused to mention the dark arts in The Malay Archipelago. Perhaps he felt that to discuss the occult world of djins and dukuns, pawangs and poltergeists, would have somehow lessened the value of book, and turned it from a scholarly travelogue into a lesser work?

When Wallace returned to England his reputation as a scientist grew, but his interest in the spiritual world was not always well-received by the leaders of the British scientific world.

Just as many people disagreed with Wallace’s views on evolution, many people similarly discounted and mocked his promotion of Spiritualism.

Wallace’s books and papers about Spiritualism (with three chapters of his autobiography devoted to the theme) include extensive correspondence with skeptics. Wallace was continually inviting doubters to attend seances, scolding them if they only came once, and forcefully disagreeing with them if they didn’t believe in the demonstrations of psychic writing, table rapping, apparitions, bell ringing, an accordion playing without human contact, and other psychic phenomena that he felt could only have been achieved through the agency of ethereal spirits.

He was undeterred by the skepticism of some of his learned contemporaries, seemingly repeating Hamlet’s famous comment —“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I thus learnt my first great lesson in the inquiry into these obscure fields of knowledge, never to accept the disbelief of great men or their accusations of imposture or of imbecility, as of any weight when opposed to the repeated observation of facts by other men, admittedly sane and honest. The whole history of science shows us that whenever the educated and scientific men of any age have denied the facts of other investigators on a priori grounds of absurdity or impossibility, the deniers have always been wrong.

As a scientist, Wallace looked for proof of phenomena that could not be confirmed by normal scientific enquiry and therefore could only have been accomplished through the assistance of spirits. He used a reverse argument to convince doubters, aggressively writing to one skeptic whose own observations convinced him that a particular medium was a fraud.

All these facts and many others of like nature have been published … every investigator knows that your failure to obtain phenomena under the test, was no proof of any dishonesty in the medium, or of impossibility of obtaining the phenomena under such conditions. Such tests often require to be tried many times before success is attained. To me, and I believe to most inquirers, it will appear in the highest degree unscientific to reject phenomena that could not possibly be due to imposture, and to ignore the hundreds of corroborative tests by other equally competent observers, and then, after this, to call such observers (by implication) fools or lunatics! [italics Wallace]

Using similar logic, Wallace was impressed by an 1874 photograph of him with his deceased mother, taken by well-known spirit photographer Frederick Hudson (see photo at the beginning of this article).

I sat three times, always choosing my own position. Each time a second figure appeared in the negative with me. The first was a male figure with a short sword, the second a full-length figure, standing apparently a few feet on one side and rather behind me, looking down at me and holding a bunch of flowers. At the third sitting, after placing myself, and after the prepared plate was in the camera, I asked that the figure would come close to me. The third plate exhibited a female figure standing close in front of me, so that the drapery covers the lower part of my body. I saw all the plates developed, and in each case the additional figure started out the moment the developing fluid was poured on, while my portrait did not become visible till, perhaps, twenty seconds later. I recognized none of these figures in the negatives; but the moment I got the proofs, the first glance showed me that the third plate contained an unmistakable portrait of my mother — like her both in features and expression; not such a likeness as a portrait taken during life, but a somewhat pensive, idealized likeness — yet still, to me, an unmistakable likeness. [italics Wallace]

Wallace declared it genuine, noting “even if [Hudson] had by some means obtained possession of all the photographs ever taken of my mother, they would not have been of the slightest use to him in the manufacture of these pictures.” Contemporary critics, however, scoffed that Wallace was simply gullible and that the ghost-like image was a hoax created by a double exposure.

High-society parlor seances, rich with table-thumping and spirit apparitions, were the rage among Victorian-era luminaries and upwardly-mobile socialites, including the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, and the psychologist William James.

* * *

All this energy in promoting spiritualism — the seances he attended, the friends he met during evenings of table levitations and spectral images, the articles he wrote claiming Spiritualism had a scientific basis, and the letters he sent to convince skeptics — created a repetitive belief loop. Psychologists call this the “illusory truth effect,” in which a person’s opinion and belief is strengthened by continually repeating it and hearing others espouse the same idea.

The majority of people to-day have been brought up in the belief that miracles, ghosts, and the whole series of strange phenomena here described cannot exist; that they are contrary to the laws of nature; that they are the superstitions of a bygone age; and that therefore they are necessarily either impostures or delusions. There is no place in the fabric of their thought into which such facts can be fitted. When I first began this inquiry it was the same with myself. The facts did not fit into my then existing fabric of thought. All my preconceptions, all my knowledge, all my belief in the supremacy of science and of natural law were against the possibility of such phenomena. Every other possible solution was tried and rejected. Unknown laws of nature were found to be of no avail when there was always an unknown intelligence behind the phenomena — an intelligence that showed a human character and individuality, and an individuality which almost invariably claimed to be that of some person who had lived on earth, and who, in many cases, was able to prove his or her identity. Thus, little by little, a place was made in my fabric of thought, first for all such well-attested facts, and then, but more slowly, for the spiritualistic interpretation of them.

Wallace was adamant that spiritual phenomena are “natural.”

I argued for all the phenomena, however extraordinary, being really “natural” and involving no alteration whatever in the ordinary laws of nature.

Wallace saw Spiritualism not as an abnormal phenomenon, but as a highly developed form of psychic evolution that reflects a spiritual “survival of the fittest.”

The organic world has been carried on to a high state of development, and has been ever kept in harmony with the forces of external nature, by the grand law of “survival of the fittest” acting upon ever varying organizations. In the spiritual world, the law of the “progression of the fittest” takes its place, and carries on in unbroken continuity that development of the human mind which has been commenced here.

* * *

In 1865, just three years after returning from Asia, Wallace publicly adopted “spiritualism,” a catch-all phrase that for him included phrenology, the occult, mesmerism, and communication with the dead.

He stressed a duality in which man:

[Consists] of an organised spiritual form, evolved coincidently and permeating the physical body … Death is the separation of this duality, and effects no change in the spirit.

He went so far as to say that the entire raison d’etre for the existence and progress of the material universe involves the cultivation of spiritual beings.

The universal teaching of modern spiritualism is that the world and the whole material universe exist for the purpose of developing spiritual beings — that death is simply a transition from material existence to the first grade of spirit-life — and that our happiness and the degree of our progress will be wholly dependent upon the use we have made of our faculties and opportunities here.

But ordinary people can not easily contact those ephemeral spirits — such communication requires a specialist:

Spirits can communicate through properly-endowed mediums.

And so he sought out such “properly-endowed” individuals, and found himself in good company.

Table-thumping, high-society parlor seances were the rage among the Victorian-era literati and upwardly-mobile socialites, attracting luminaries including the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, and the psychologist William James. French author Victor Hugo claimed spirit conversations with Mozart, Dante, Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Moses, and Jesus, who visited Hugo three times and suggested Hugo create a new religion with the French author as its prophet.

Primus inter pares among famous Victorian spiritualists was Arthur Conan Doyle, who mentions his friend Alfred Russel Wallace in The Lost World, and modelled the character Stapleton in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” after him. Conan Doyle, a strong believer of Spiritualism, claimed “an invisible and friendly presence” often provided him with wise advice; he apparently felt that this “presence” was the ghost of Wallace. He wrote:

How I wished that I had the brain of a Russel Wallace and could read more clearly the illuminated page of Nature… His [auto] biography was a favourite book of mine long before I understood the full significance of Spiritualism, which was to him an evolution of the spirit on parallel lines to that evolution of the body which he did so much to establish.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a leading Spiritualist and friend of Alfred Russel Wallace. He modelled the character Stapleton in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” after Wallace, and credited Wallace’s ghost with guiding his writing

* * *

In 1866, Wallace wrote The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural, and in 1875 published On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. Charles H. Smith, a history professor at Western Kentucky University, who maintains an authoritative website devoted to Wallace’s writings and life, notes, with an even-tone: “Wallace’s association with spiritualism has generally been regarded as his greatest intellectual inconsistency.”

Wallace was from a modest middle-class background, and he left school at the age of 14. Yet he was one of the 19th-century’s most accomplished thinkers and he sought acceptance from the high-class British scientific establishment. Although his involvement in the Spiritualist movement threatened his scientific credibility, he never wavered. Wallace was adamant that spiritual phenomena are “natural and [involve] no alteration in the ordinary laws of nature.”

For many people in the British scientific establishment, Wallace’s cheerleading for ghosts jeopardized his much-deserved scientific credibility. It was a brave stance for Wallace, who, on his return from Asia was intent on proving his credentials as a serious scientist. We should remember that Wallace came from a modest middle-class background, he had no formal education after the age of 14 (but still wrote 21 books and more than 600 articles and papers), and had limited access to the éminences grises of the London scientific community. Wallace was a rebel, an independent thinker without social status. He enjoyed expressing his often-controversial opinions, not only regarding his support of Spiritualism but about social issues as widespread as women’s suffrage, minimum wage, the welfare state, food and drug controls, gambling, child labor, and that ever-vexing question, “is there life on Mars?”

But he also wanted to be recognized by the conservative establishment as a serious scientist. That he achieved both objectives is a remarkable achievement. When he died in 1913 he was lauded as “The acknowledged dean of the world’s scientists,” and “One [of the two] most important and significant figures of the nineteenth century.”

On his death in 1913, Wallace was lauded as “The acknowledged dean of the world’s scientists.”

Wallace remained stubborn in pursuit of things that go bump in the night. Carl Jung noted that Wallace’s interest in mesmerism, phrenology, seance, and spirit manifestations merited praise for “having thrown the whole of [Wallace’s] authority on to the side of non-material facts, regardless of…the cheap derision of [his] contemporaries; even at a time when the intellect of the educated classes was spellbound by the new dogma of materialism, [Wallace] drew public attention to phenomena of an irrational nature, contrary to accepted convictions.”

Harry Clements, a Wallace biographer, said: “Unlike [Charles] Darwin, who had no stomach for such social, political and economic polemics, Wallace reveled in them and lost no opportunity in making known his own views, no matter what the risk to his own professional and scientific status.”

* * *

I am an Agnostic Spiritualist. I don’t believe in ghosts, an after-life, or an eternal soul. (But I do acknowledge that there are events, situations and healing practices that we cannot easily explain using Western Cartesian logic.) Nevertheless I am fascinated by people who do believe in such things, and I am carefully curious about the performances of mediums, shamans, and sorcerers who enable such beliefs.

My interest, perhaps, was nurtured by my father, who avidly read the books of American psychic Edgar Cayce.

It therefore seemed only logical that I should try to “speak” with Alfred Russel Wallace’s long-dead spirit. During this quest I consulted mediums in the UK, Switzerland, Indonesia, and Germany, which I document in Dead, But Still Kicking.

Some of the encounters were duds. One encounter was delightfully silly (reminding me of the “crowded cabin” scene in the Marx Brothers’ movie A Night at the Opera) in which three translators were struggling to comprehend archaic Indonesian languages spoken by two mediums who were speaking with Wallace and another two interlocutors who were concurrently commenting on the spirit-messages and explaining to me what was going on.

Nevertheless, in some of these seances (for lack of a better word) I experienced several dramatic moments of insight and a few startling revelations that left me wondering “what if…”

One example: June-Elleni Laine is a UK-based medium who not only speaks with spirits but produces psychic drawings of the dead people with whom she communicates — she calls it automatic drawing. When I booked a consultation with her I identified Wallace simply as “Alfred” and did not give her any of his biographical details. Her “conversation” with Wallace offered several stunning moments of insight, but at times her channeling seemed to reflect her own philosophy that was different from what I had expected Wallace to espouse. At the end of the session I asked to see the pastel portrait she had been drawing during our session. Here’s her image of “Alfred” and a comparison painting of him.

In June-Elleni’s version, which resembles a police sketch, she’s got his abundant beard right, and the slightly thinning hair. But I pointed out that she hadn’t given Wallace the spectacles he wore throughout his life. “They’re there. Look closely,” she explained. “Alfred mentioned them to me, but I wasn’t aware at the time that I was drawing them.”

And indeed, her drawing shows the faint outline of glasses with thin wire frames.

* * *

What to make of all this mumbo-jumbo?

I tried, several times, to contact my father, who died in 1974. I never got through. Maybe I was calling on his poker night, or he had travelled to an obscure other-world where there was no psychic cellphone coverage (as when I deliberately go to a tiny isolated Indonesian island to escape the irritations of daily life?). To their credit, the mediums in such unsuccessful attempts apologized and refused payment. “You can’t just make contact with a particular spirit like you might with a stranger on Facebook,” one medium explained. “Connection is not a sure thing.”

Or, as Alfred Russel Wallace put it:

If there be a spiritual world, if those whose existence on earth has come to an end still live….What more natural than that they should wish…to give some message to their friends, if only to assure them that death is not the end, that they still live, and are not unhappy. Many facts seem to show us that the beautiful idea of guardian spirits is not a mere dream, but a frequent, perhaps universal reality.

Most people, it seems, consult spirit mediums as a way of dealing with the sorrow of mourning.

In most Western cultures traditional grief counseling focuses on the client’s acceptance of separation and integration of loss, an Elizabeth Kubler-Ross view of dealing with death. Your mother’s gone, departed. Yes, grieve, but then get on with your life.

A medium, however will offer an alternate scenario that promotes an ongoing relationship between the living and the deceased. Your loved one is still around. No need to think of her death as a definitive break. She is watching over you. Such a “continuing bonds paradigm” can be beneficial to people suffering from the death of a loved one. Almost inevitably, the medium will close a session with comforting thoughts and platitudes — Your sweet granny wants you to know she is happy and in a good place. Don’t worry about her. She wants you to get on with your life and be amazing. And she loves you very much. Tears often ensue.

LINGUISTIC DENIAL OF DEATH

Consider the terminology to describe the death of the physical body.

Richard Nordquist, professor emeritus of Rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University, describes such terms as phonesthemes, in which a particular sound suggests a certain meaning.

The no-nonsense terms are “dead,” and “death.” Say them aloud. The harsh, abrupt, explosive term “dead” emits the irreversible finality of a tympani roll followed by the clash of the cymbals, the story’s over “whoosh-thwack-thump” of a guillotine. Your granny’s gone. Get over it.

But other, softer terms are frequently offered. The commonly used euphemistic fluffy terms “passed away” (say it aloud) or “crossed-over” emit a message of optimistic ambiguity — just maybe, I hope – I hope — that implies just-cremated grandpa is still around, in some form, somewhere, somehow.

This “passed away” verbiage is in common usage by countless people who do not follow a formal religion. But the concept of an after-life is also the meat and potatoes of the strategy used by most religions that promise an everlasting and blessed soul. In effect, the believer is making a bet, a deal, an insurance policy with religious leaders based on trust, for such an agreement can never be proved. Do the right things in this life, donate money to the church/temple/priests, pray (intently, with your eyes closed and with great fervor), follow the sacred rituals, read the holy texts, (sometimes) kill the infidels, and you will be rewarded with eternal life in a celestial country club in the comfy bosom of a generous deity.

Three of my books explore Wallace’s practice of Spiritualism and my modest attempts to communicate with spirits.