The Creery Children Telepathy Tests

Record summary

The Society for Psychical Research investigated the Creery children in experiments involving alleged thought-transference, including concealed targets and guessing procedures. Early reports treated the results as promising, but suspicions of cueing and cheating eventually undermined confidence in the family demonstrations. The case matters because it shows how experimental design, child participants, observer enthusiasm and procedural leakage affected nineteenth-century telepathy research. Researchers should compare the original reports with later commentary and the investigators' changing conclusions.