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It caused me great sorrow to learn of the passing of my esteemed colleague and friend of many years, veteran British psychical researcher Mary Rose Barrington, who died in the morning hours of Friday, Feb 20th. The saddening announcement did, however, not come entirely unexpected: a few months ago, Mary Rose felt forced to resign from a parapsychological discussion group on the Internet due to her failing eyesight which was a major blow to her as communication with colleagues was significantly reduced, and on later phone calls she announced more than once that the time for her to go would come soon.
We came to know another in the early 1990s when I attended the SPR Annual Conference held at Nottingham. The lectures were interesting and so were the discussions of several topics, for instance the sittings with Eusapia Palladino at Naples, which, in the person of Mary Rose, found a staunch defender of their genuineness. When I mentioned that not long ago I was shown the Kluski moulds at the Institut Mtapsychique International in Paris, Mary Rose became very aroused, and, as I learned only later, travelled to Paris at her earliest convenience to view these unique pieces with her own eyes.
Yet physical mediumism was not the only topic within the field she was interested in. Take ESP as another example: on the famous Polish clairvoyant, Stefan Ossowiecki she published a book together with Zofia Weaver and Ian Stevenson. She suggested an analogy between retrocognition and remote viewing as the remote viewer goes to a certain defined place in space while the clairvoyant goes back to a certain point in time, both of them experiencing the situation like observers physically present at the spot. She saw crisis telepathy as cases of kappa-telepathy (in the sense of the original Wiesner-Thouless psi model) and deducted that such psychic processes impacting on other people necessarily have an implicate aspect of force by which reasoning she arrived at kind of dual-aspect monism (while she acknowledged that substance dualism could be defended as well). So, it was rather jokingly-she was a charming, very witty yet thoughtful and humorous person-when she posed the (rhetorical) question whether she would see the pony she possessed in her...