Discovery Lab Answers

Rosemarie Pilkington is an independent scholar whose PhD in Psychology (Consciousness Studies) was earned at Saybrook Graduate Institute under Stanley Krippner. Her profile on ESP-Nexus is at Rosemarie Pilkington.

Her research record spans empirical work on children’s ESP, oral-history documentation of parapsychology researchers, case analysis of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), and historical reconstruction of physical mediumship. The sections below work through each dimension in turn.

Experiments

Pilkington’s primary empirical contribution is her doctoral dissertation on children’s ESP, completed at Saybrook Graduate Institute under Stanley Krippner. The sources retrieved confirm it as her core experimental work but do not supply protocol details or outcome statistics beyond that characterization ^[1].

Her oral-history anthology series — gathering first-person accounts from practicing parapsychologists about their research methods, findings, and priorities — constitutes a second substantial line of work, though it is documentary rather than experimental in design.

Her 2015 interview with Felicia Parise ^[5] is a detailed primary-source document in its own right: a structured interview conducted on August 6, 2013, exploring Parise’s career as a research subject in dream telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and precognition experiments at Maimonides Hospital and other institutions. Pilkington framed Parise in her 2006 book as “A Mini Kulagina” and pursued the interview as a follow-up to that historical account.

Her book reviews and case analyses — including reviews of Guy Lyon Playfair’s account of the Enfield poltergeist ^[4], Haraldsson and Gissurarson’s study of Indridi Indridason ^[6], and a book on a documented RSPK case ^[1] — function as critical scholarly engagement with primary investigations rather than experiments she ran herself.

Her book The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof: The Enigma of Séance Phenomena (Anomalist Books, 2006) reconstructs the 1930s Bindelof séance group in New York through historical sourcing, surveys physical mediumship cases (including Franek Kluski and Indridi Indridason), and covers twentieth-century psychokinesis research including Soviet work on Nina Kulagina and Felicia Parise’s laboratory PK experiments.

Methodology

Pilkington’s methodological approach is primarily historical reconstruction and oral documentation rather than controlled laboratory experimentation. Her dissertation on children’s ESP represents her engagement with empirical protocol design, but the retrieved sources do not detail its specific design, randomization procedure, or blinding method.

In the Parise interview ^[5], her method is structured qualitative interviewing: she draws on her prior published account of Parise (from the 2006 book) as a framework, then pursues first-person testimony about laboratory conditions — including the physical controls experimenters applied (checking for hidden magnets under fingernails, examining Parise’s mouth for concealed objects) and Parise’s own account of how she developed and eventually discontinued PK activity.

Her RSPK work applies case-comparative analysis: she identifies typological patterns across geographically and historically distinct outbreaks, preferring the term “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis” over “poltergeist” to emphasize a psychokinetic rather than spirit-agency framing. She notes that outbreaks frequently center on adolescents under emotional stress, and that phenomena appear to be influenced by the emotional states of investigators and sitters present.

For The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof, her method is archival and testimonial reconstruction — drawing on surviving records of the Bindelof group’s 1930s sittings and situating them within the broader physical mediumship literature.

Data

No structured quantitative evidence was retrieved for this question, so no effect sizes, hit rates, z-scores, or p-values are available from the sources in hand.

What the sources do establish qualitatively:

• Pilkington’s dissertation examined children’s ESP as its primary empirical focus; no outcome statistics are present in the retrieved passages.
• The Parise interview ^[5] documents that Parise participated in laboratory PK experiments at Maimonides Hospital under experimenters including Monte Ullman, with physical controls (magnet checks, object searches) applied during sessions. Parise described developing PK ability by mimicking Nina Kulagina’s emotional state after viewing film of her. The interview records that Parise eventually ceased PK work, citing both the physical toll and sustained skeptical pressure. No trial counts or effect measurements appear in the retrieved passages.
• Pilkington’s book reviews [1, 4, 6] engage with the empirical records of other investigators’ studies (the Enfield case investigated by Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair; Haraldsson and Gissurarson’s Indridason investigations; RSPK documentation) rather than reporting Pilkington’s own outcome data.

The retrieved excerpts do not contain outcome statistics for any study Pilkington herself ran; readers seeking quantitative data from her dissertation or any laboratory work she conducted should consult those primary sources directly.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published criticism directed specifically at Pilkington’s own experimental or analytical work. Her book reviews and case analyses do engage with the problem of fraud in physical mediumship — she acknowledges in The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof that the persistent possibility of fraud is a recognized challenge for physical phenomena research — and the Parise interview ^[5] records that skeptics attempted to demonstrate PK effects through sleight-of-hand, to which Parise’s recorded response was that replicating an effect by trickery does not rule out the genuine phenomenon. These are positions within the literature rather than published critiques of Pilkington’s methodology or conclusions by named critics. No critique meeting the attribution requirement appears in the retrieved sources for this question.