Dead Chess Grandmaster Plays Victor Korchnoi

The man in the photo on the left, above, is Geza Maroczy, a Hungarian chess player, once ranked third worldwide (around 1900), who died in 1951. On the right is the reknowned contemporary chess grandmaster, Victor Korchnoi.

Recently, I have joined the British Society for Psychical Research; and, to my delight, upon receiving the most recent issue of their Journal, I found the lead article by Wolfgang Eisenbeiss and Dieter Hassler titled, "An Assessment of Ostensible Communications with a Deceased Grandmaster as Evidence for Survival." The story contained therein, I believe, ranks among the most remarkable ever recorded in the 150 year history of research into human survival after death.

The game was set up by coauthor Eisenbeiss, a Swiss asset manager and amateur chess player with a deep interest in mediumship, who had developed a long-standing relationship with Robert Rollans, a medium who specialized in automatic writing. Eisenbeiss asked Rollans if he could make contact with a deceased chess grandmaster who would be willing to play a game with a living grandmaster -- for purposes of proving the reality of survival. Though this process, contact was ostensibly made with Geza Maroczy. Victor Korchnoi was then invited to play a match, in which the moves of Maroczy would be specified through the automatic writing of Robert Rollans (who had no knowledge whatsoever of chess).

The game was conducted through the mail. It began in 1985 and lasted almost eight years. (The game was slowed down due to the travel schedules of both Korchnoi and Robert Rollans.) Maroczy resigned after move 48.

Korchnoi's comment about the quality of this match, given at the 27th move was: During the opening phase Maroczy showed weakness. His play is old-fashioned. But I must confess that my last moves have not been too convincing. I am not sure I will win. He has compensated the faults of the opening by a strong end-game. In the end-game the ability of a player shows up and my opponent plays very well.

The article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research goes on to detail many other pieces of obscure, validated information provided during the course of this experiment, that provide additional evidence that the automatic writing communicator was indeed the deceased Maroczy. The authors claim that the private details provided by Maroczy through automatic writing were determined, after careful historical research, to be 94% accurate.

The case is an outstanding one because the afterlife communications not only demonstrated a knowledge of facts and events -- but also a unique, and very rare, skill. While fraud cannot be absolutely ruled out in this case, it does seem highly unlikely (unless you believe survival to be impossible, in which case fraud would be the only conceivable explanation).

The authors conclude as follows: Until such a case can be replicated elsewhere, it is our view that this is a strong case of its type, suggesting -- albeit to the materialist-scientific standards not proving -- survival and demonstrating the utility and pertinence of the survival hypothesis.