Eileen Jeanette Vancho Lyttle Garrett (14 March 1892 – 15 September 1970) was an Irish medium and parapsychologist.Raymond Buckland. (2005). The Spirit Book: The Encyclopedia of Clairvoyance, Channeling, and Spirit Communication. Visible Ink Press. p. 157. Garrett's alleged psychic abilities were tested in the 1930s by Joseph Rhine and others. Rhine claimed that she had genuine psychic abilities, but subsequent studies were unable to replicate his results, and Garrett's abilities were later shown to be consistent with chance guessing.A. S. Russell, John Andrews Benn. (1938). Discovery the Popular Journal of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press. pp. 305–306 Garrett elicited controversy after the R101 crash, when she held a series of séances at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research claiming to be in contact with victims of the disaster. John Booth, and others, investigated her claims, and found them to be valueless, easily explainable, or the result of fraud.John Booth. (1986). Psychic Paradoxes. Prometheus Books. pp. 164–165. Melvin Harris. (2003). Investigating the Unexplained: Psychic Detectives, the Amityville Horror-mongers, Jack the Ripper, and Other Mysteries of the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. pp. 171–182.
Garrett had four children. She died after a long illness on 15 September 1970, in Nice, France.Rosemary Guiley. (1994). The Guinness Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. Guinness World Records Limited. pp. 132–133.
Biography
During her lifetime, Garrett gave her own birthday as March 17 (St Patrick's Day), 1893. However, census records show that she was actually born March 14, 1892, and that her birth name was Emily Jane Savage.Healy, Joan (1987). “Letter to the Editor,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 54 (806), 1987: 90-92. Garrett published three major autobiographies and many other statements which contradict each other on basic details of her early life. She described an early childhood on a bucolic country estate in Ireland. Research published in 2024 and 2025 showed that this was mostly likely a description of an estate where her uncle worked as a gardener. She also claimed to have been married three times and to have run a teashop and a hostel for wounded soldiers, but there is no evidence that any of this was true; she was employed as a domestic servant and had a child out of wedlock, and for some time had an informal relationship with a man named James Garrett.
Garrett began attending meetings of the London Spiritual Alliance around 1920-1921, using the name "Mrs. Garrett" although she was unmarried. Following a breakup with her domestic partner, her commitment to the Alliance became more serious, although Garrett's account of this period remains confused. In 1930, she claimed to channel the words of Arthur Conan Doyle and the crew of the R101, which significantly raised her profile. In 1931 she was invited to the United States by the American Society for Psychical Research and performed experiments for various psychical researchers in both America and Europe until the 1950s.Helene Pleasants. (1964). Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology with Directory and Glossary 1946–1996. New York: Garrett Publications. p. 118 Garrett was not a proponent of the spiritualist hypothesis and attributed her mediumship not to spirits but to the activity of a "magnetic field".Gordon Lewis. (1987). Confronting the Cults. P & R Publishing Company. p. 168. Garrett wrote "In all my years' professional mediumship I have had no "sign", "test" or slightest evidence to make me believe I have contacted another world." She considered that her trance controls were personalities from her subconscious and admitted to the parapsychologist Peter Underwood, "I do not believe in individual survival after death".Peter Underwood . (1983). No Common Task: The Autobiography of a Ghost-Hunter. George G. Harrap & Co Ltd. p. 56.
The main trance controls of Garrett were known as "Abdul Latif" and "Uvani".Daniel Cohen. (1971). Masters of the Occult. Dodd, Mead and Company. p. 211. In 1934 Garrett voluntarily submitted herself to an analysis by the psychologist William Brown and by word-association tests by the psychical researcher Whately Carington. The tests had proven that her controls were secondary personalities from her subconscious, organised around repressed material.Hornell Hart. (1959). The Enigma of Survival. Rider. p. 138 The psychical researcher Hereward Carrington with his colleagues also examined the trance controls in many séance sittings. They utilised instruments to measure everything from galvanic skin response to blood pressure and concluded from the results that the controls were nothing more than secondary personalities of Garrett and there was no spirits or telepathy involved.Peter H. Aykroyd, Angela Narth and Dan Aykroyd. (2009). A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters. Rodale Books. pp. 74–75.
Garrett regarded her trance controls as "principles of the subconscious" formed by her own inner needs. She founded the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City in 1951.Lawrence Samuel. (2011). Supernatural America: A Cultural History. Praeger Publishers. p. 64.
Garrett founded the Creative Age Press publishing house, which she later sold to Farrar, Straus and Young. She also edited Tomorrow magazine.
Garrett died after a long illness on 15 September 1970, in Nice, France.
Clairvoyance tests
Garrett took part in "clairvoyance" tests. One of the tests was organized by Joseph Rhine at Duke University in 1933 which involved Zener cards. Certain symbols that were placed on the cards and sealed in an envelope, and participants were asked to guess their contents. She performed poorly and later criticized the tests by claiming the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and that she could not perform clairvoyance to order.Jenny Hazelgrove. (2000). Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars. Manchester University Press. p. 204.
The parapsychologist Samuel Soal and his colleagues tested Garrett in May 1937. Most of the experiments were carried out in the Psychological Laboratory at the University College London. A total of over 12,000 guesses were recorded but Garrett failed to produce above chance level. In his report Soal wrote:
In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we fail to find the slightest confirmation of Dr. J. B. Rhine's remarkable claims relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did she fail when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed equally when four other carefully trained experimenters took my place.Samuel Soal. A Repetition of Dr. Rhine's work with Mrs. Eileen Garrett. Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XLII. pp. 84–85. Also quoted in Antony Flew. (1955). A New Approach To Psychical Research. Watts & Co. pp. 90–92.
The experiments of Rhine and the Zener cards used in the 1930s were discovered to contain procedural errors and flaws, the results have not replicated when the experiments have been conducted in other laboratories.Charles M. Wynn, Arthur W. Wiggins. (2001). Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends...and Pseudoscience Begins. Joseph Henry Press. p. 156. "In 1940, Rhine coauthored a book, Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years in which he suggested that something more than mere guess work was involved in his experiments. He was right! It is now known that the experiments conducted in his laboratory contained serious methodological flaws. Tests often took place with minimal or no screening between the subject and the person administering the test. Subjects could see the backs of cards that were later discovered to be so cheaply printed that a faint outline of the symbol could be seen. Furthermore, in face-to-face tests, subjects could see card faces reflected in the tester’s eyeglasses or cornea. They were even able to (consciously or unconsciously) pick up clues from the tester’s facial expression and voice inflection. In addition, an observant subject could identify the cards by certain irregularities like warped edges, spots on the backs, or design imperfections."Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 122. "The procedural errors in the Rhine experiments have been extremely damaging to his claims to have demonstrated the existence of ESP. Equally damaging has been the fact that the results have not replicated when the experiments have been conducted in other laboratories."James Alcock. (2011). Back from the Future: Parapsychology and the Bem Affair. Skeptical Inquirer. "Despite Rhine's confidence that he had established the reality of extrasensory perception, he had not done so. Methodological problems with his experiments eventually came to light, and as a result parapsychologists no longer run card-guessing studies and rarely even refer to Rhine's work." Science writer Terence Hines has written "the methods used to prevent subjects from gaining hints and clues as to the design on the cards were far from adequate."Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. pp. 119–120. Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones wrote "the keeping of records in Rhine's experiments was inadequate. Sometimes, the subject would help with the checking of his or her calls against the order of cards. In some long-distance telepathy experiments, the order of the cards passed through the hands of the percipient before it got from Rhine to the agent."Leonard Zusne, Warren Jones. (1989). Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. Psychology Press. p. 158.
Controversy
On 7 October 1930 it was claimed by spiritualists that Garrett made contact with the spirit of Herbert Carmichael Irwin at a séance held with Harry Price at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research two days after the R101 disaster, while attempting to contact the then recently deceased Arthur Conan Doyle, and discussed possible causes of the accident. The event "attracted worldwide attention", thanks to the presence of a reporter. Major Oliver Villiers, a friend of Brancker, Scott, Irwin, Colmore and others aboard the airship, participated in further séances with Garrett, at which he claimed to have contacted both Irwin and other victims. Price did not come to any definite conclusion about Garrett and the séances:
It is not my intention to discuss if the medium were really controlled by the discarnate entity of Irwin, or whether the utterances emanated from her subconscious mind or those of the sitters. "Spirit" or "trance personality" would be equally interesting explanations – and equally remarkable. There is no real evidence for either hypothesis. But it is not my intention to discuss hypotheses, but rather to put on record the detailed account of a remarkably interesting and thought-provoking experiment.Harry Price. (1933). Leaves from a Psychist's Case-book. Gollancz. p. 132
In 1978, paranormal writer John G. Fuller wrote a book claiming that Irwin had spoken through Garrett.John G. Fuller. (1978). Airman Who Would Not Die. Putnam Publishing Group. This claim has been questioned. Magician John Booth analyzed the mediumship of Garrett and the paranormal claims of R101 and considered her to be a fraud. According to Booth, Garrett's notes and writings show she followed the building of the R101 and she may have been given aircraft blueprints from a technician from the aerodrome.