The Hamilton Files

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

THE last twenty-five years have seen a remarkable growth of general interest in the area of human behaviour and experience labelled “paranormal,” as evidenced by the large number of publications now available, offering not only personal accounts of genuine psychic experiences, but also scientific reports outlining both quantitative and qualitative studies of physical and mental psychical phenomena, such as materialisations, telepathy, clairvoyance and other types of extrasensory perception.
Judging from the printing history of many such books they have appealed to a wide reading audience. No doubt there are numerous good reasons for this commendable state of affairs. I suggest that one important factor has been the cumulative effect of the work of qualified researchers who have been investigating quietly for many years, experimenting, observing and evaluating their results. And today, more than one hundred years after the first serious and objective scientific inquiries were undertaken in the 1850s by trained minds such as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, as a result of those efforts, a large body of factual information relating to psychic phenomena has been amassed.
These have served to underline the importance of, and the need for discovering, the mental and spiritual components of man. This challenge is presently being met by universities in various parts of the civilised world where there are now departments established specifically for the study of parapsychology, only recently recognised by orthodox science as a legitimate scientific discipline. And so while there are great numbers of people who still ridicule and deride, there is, at the same time, a growing number who are genuinely and deeply interested in the progress of this young science.
In view of this changing climate, I feel the moment opportune to offer a detailed report of one particular type of paranormal phenomena, deep-trance automatic writing. This was received in abundance and studied in great detail and with extreme caie by my parents, Dr. and Mrs. T. Glen Hamilton, of Winnipeg, Canada, during their investigations of the psychic faculties of two remarkably gifted ladies, Mrs. Elizabeth Poole and Mrs. Mary Marshall.
My father died in 1935. Even though he gained international recognition during the last six years of his life, it is highly unlikely that any who may read this present account will ever have heard of my parents. Nor will they have had the opportunity to examine any of my father’s published articles, nor to have read our book Intention And Survival.
In order that I may offer a suitable introduction to this essay, in this opening chapter I propose to give a brief survey of his work as a public servant and as a medical doctor; a resumé of events which led to the discovery of our mediums; a short outline of their psychic development and of my father’s experimental methods; and a comprehensive tabulation of the paranormal phenomena he observed and recorded.