Fabricating Philip Aylesford

As we’ve discussed before, the original Ghostbusters movie owes no small amount of its iconic status to how low-key based it is.

One underappreciated aspect of the film is its subtle takedown of parapsychology.

In case you didn’t know, parapsychology is a pseudoscientific field for nerds who feel a deep need to deconstruct ghost stories but lack the intellectual rigor for theology.

At the same time, they crave the perceived clout of getting post-nominal letters. So they give academic institutions money to declare them experts at applying the scientific method to metaphysical phenomena whose causes are prior to and unquantifiable by empirical science.

That’s pretty much all the background you need to delve into today’s exploration of the high strangeness surround the Philip Experiment.

The experiment, conducted by Toronto parapsychologist Dr. A.R. George Owen and psychologist Dr. Joel Whitton, sought to create a fictional character– a ghost– through a deliberate methodology and subsequently communicate with them through a séance.

The research team consisted of Dr. Owen’s wife, Iris, an industrial designer and his wife, a heating engineer, an accountant, a bookkeeper, and a sociology student … the experiment itself is a compelling slice of paranormal history, a microcosm of our communal desire for there to be something– anything– after death.

The research collective settled on a character named Philip Aylesford, referred to as Philip throughout the bulk of the experiment. His fictional history was a smorgasbord of real history and mendacious fabrications. Per the experiment, Philip was born in England in 1624, served in the military throughout young adulthood, and was subsequently knighted at sixteen. Philip was serving in the English Civil War– where the Parliamentarians and royalists went to war over issues of England’s governance and record on religious freedom– when he met and later became a close ally for Charles II, king of Scotland, England, and Ireland until his deposition in 1651, and later King from the 1660 Restoration until his death in 1685. Philip, though, never had a chance to see much of Charles’s rule, having fallen in love with a Romani girl. She was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. Despondent, Philip died by suicide in 1654. He would have been thirty years old.

The group worked tirelessly to contact their invention, their fictional Philip, hoping that by sheer belief in him, they could, in effect, will Philip to exist, will and make contact with some kind of spiritual entity. These attempts proved unsuccessful. Dr. Owen then changed the experiment conditions, altering several key environmental variables– dimming the lights, for instance– to more closely resemble a conventional séance, an attempt to communicate with spirits whose earliest roots are perhaps best dated to the early French metaphysical tradition. After Dr. Owen made these changes, participants reported phantom breezes, vibrations, vocal echoes, and a rap, rap, rap sound whenever questions were posed to Philip. The table was said to tilt and move about the room without human contact. Aggregate audio, visual, and participant accounts documented the phenomena, though Philip was never said to have appeared to the participants.

So the extensive historical research that went into fabricating Philip Aylesford came up with a back story that included war, betrayal, a torrid affair, a wrongful witch burning, and “religious freedom” as an unquestioned good.

Why do secularist historical reconstructions always read like Anita Blake fanfic? No lie, I’ve read Vampire: The Masquerade character bios that are more grounded than Philip Aylesford’s life story.

The study, naturally, was immediately criticized for its tenuous adherence to the scientific method, including (but not limited to) a lack of a control variable, ambiguous data analysis, and the methodological veracity of a séance itself. Similar experiments were thus conducted, a sort of paranormal replication, with ghosts named Lilith and Humphrey. And while participants in those conditions similarly reported supernatural phenomena in the room, the results were nonetheless inconclusive.

Principally, critics point to both confirmation bias– the participants interpreted phenomena as evidence of Philip to confirm existing beliefs that Philip was real– and the ideomotor effect– the phenomenon used to explain Ouija boards whereupon the human body makes subconscious, involuntary movements, much like a hypnic jerk, suggesting the movement of the Ouija’s planchette when it’s really not the case– to explain witness accounts of a presence in the room.

Because naming your fake phantom Lilith is 100 percent normal and carries no cultural or occult baggage whatsoever. (Christopher Lloyd excepted.)

The accusation gets made a lot, but it’s obvious these guys were LARPing by that point.

Participants in the Philip Experiment were said to be quite adept, quite lucid in their attempts, at carrying on conversations with their imaginary guest. New fictional entries in those most pivotal moments of Philip’s ostensible life manifested throughout dialogues, the participants actively involved in– and sometimes actively grieving– the horrors of Philip’s life. Philip revealed abuse, trauma, and even cruel treatment at the hands of his first wife, emblematic, perhaps, not of Philip’s own mythos, but the congenital anguish of the participants themselves and the way that ghosts are both conduits and effigies of our own pain.

That scientific study sure descended into autoethnography fast.

Check out Bedtime Stories‘ video on the Philip Experiment:

If no one else is gonna say it, you know I will …

It’s demons, bro.

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