Case file · High strangeness
Mackenzie King's seances
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King sat with mediums from the 1930s and recorded conversations with his dead mother, statesmen and his dogs in his private diaries.
1932 CE · 45.49, -75.83 · status: official
The account
He used table rapping at his Kingsmere estate and Laurier House. The diaries were opened after his death in 1950 and published from the 1970s, revealing the spiritualist life of Canada's longest-serving prime minister.
The researched reading
A sincere private faith, recorded with great care. The séances are best explained by grief, expectation, the ideomotor effect and the mediums of the day.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Perception, memory or mind | 40% | King’s diaries show a grieving, lonely man who expected contact. Table rapping is fully explained by the ideomotor effect, small unconscious movements by the sitters. The “messages” often echoed his own hopes and politics. |
| A cultural story | 20% | Interwar spiritualism was respectable after the losses of the First World War, and King’s practice fits that wider movement. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 15% | Some of the professional mediums he consulted, such as the trumpet medium Etta Wriedt, worked in a field riddled with exposed fraud. King himself was sincere. |
| Undetermined | 15% | The share a generic explanation had beyond what has been shown for this case: it fits many cases like this one, but has not been demonstrated for this one. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 5% | The diaries record his experiences faithfully, but they contain no verifiable information that King could not have known. |
| Something in the surroundings | 3% | Creaks and knocks in old houses can be read as raps. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 2% | Not otherwise relevant. |
Official position: No investigation; the diaries became public after his death and were published from the 1970s.