Louisa E. Rhine

Louisa Ella Rhine (née Weckesser, 1891–1983) was an American botanist and parapsychologist, born in Sanborn, New York, the eldest of nine surviving children of an Ohio truck farmer and his Mennonite wife. She trained as a scientist alongside her future husband, J.

B. Rhine, the two meeting as graduate students in botany; she earned a doctorate in the field. After marrying in 1920, the couple relocated in 1927 to Durham, North Carolina, where J.

B. Rhine founded the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. While her husband became famous for card-guessing experiments into extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis, Louisa Rhine took a different path within the same enterprise.

At her husband’s suggestion, Rhine began in 1948 to study the large body of unsolicited letters the Duke laboratory had accumulated — eventually some thousands of accounts of apparent telepathy, premonition, and apparitions sent in by ordinary members of the public.

Rather than treat these as proof, she catalogued and analysed them as a phenomenology: what kinds of people report such experiences, in what forms (intuition, dream, hallucination), and whether foreseen events could be averted.

Her findings appeared in books including Hidden Channels of the Mind (1961) and ESP in Life and Lab (1967). By the time of her death she was widely described as the “first lady of parapsychology” and the foremost student of spontaneous psychic experience.

Her work is, like the field’s, contested in its conclusions; its lasting value lies in the careful, sympathetic mapping of reported experience.