Rhine Research Center

The Rhine Research Center is an American non-profit organisation devoted to parapsychological research and public education, and the direct institutional successor to J. B. Rhine's original Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. Under its own mission statement, the centre describes its purpose as advancing the science of parapsychology, providing public education, and fostering a community for those with a personal or professional interest in psi.

Founding

Rhine began his experimental work into extrasensory perception in the early 1930s, joining Professor William McDougall at the newly founded Duke University in 1927 and establishing the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in the East Duke Building by 1935. Duke provided Rhine a salary and lab space but no direct funding for his research, which instead came from outside grants.

When Rhine reached Duke's mandatory retirement age in 1965, he left the university and, with the help of benefactors including Xerox founder Chester Carlson, established an independent non-profit organisation, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), based in buildings on Buchanan Avenue directly across from Duke's East Campus. Carlson's gift took the form of a multimillion-dollar matching endowment that would go on to fund much of the centre's operations for decades.

For the next three decades, FRNM served as parent body to the Institute for Parapsychology, its research arm, and Parapsychology Press, its publishing arm — continuing to issue the Journal of Parapsychology, founded by Rhine in 1937.

Rhine resigned as director in 1973; neither his resignation nor his death in 1980 affected the ongoing work of the institute he had built. In 1995, on the centenary of Rhine's birth, FRNM was renamed the Rhine Research Center in honour of Rhine and his wife, Louisa E. Rhine, whose own research had focused on collecting spontaneous, real-world psychic case reports rather than laboratory testing.

The Levy affair

In the summer of 1974, Walter J. Levy Jr. — a medical graduate in his mid-twenties who had risen quickly to become director of the Institute for Parapsychology and Rhine's expected successor — was exposed as having fabricated data in an ESP/psychokinesis experiment involving rats. Colleagues had grown suspicious at how consistently strong his results were and secretly wired his recording apparatus to detect tampering, catching him manually interfering with the equipment to manufacture positive outcomes.

Confronted with the evidence, Levy admitted to falsifying the study in question but maintained that his other, already-published research was sound and had been independently replicated elsewhere; he resigned shortly afterward. Rhine himself wrote in the following issue of the Journal of Parapsychology that the single confirmed violation nonetheless cast reasonable doubt over all of Levy's work during his time in the field. The case remains one of the most significant confirmed instances of fraud in the organisation's history, and one frequently cited by critics of parapsychology as a whole.

Later leadership and mission

Rhine's eldest daughter, Sally Rhine Feather, went on to sit on the centre's board and direct much of its research and public programming, continuing her parents' work and providing what colleagues described as a living connection to the institute's founding. Feather is also credited, alongside researcher Charles Brier, with first identifying the "checker effect" — an anomaly in which the person first checking a psi experiment's results appears to influence the outcome — in a 1968 study.

John Kruth was hired by the centre in 2009 at Feather's urging and promoted to executive director in 2011, a period during which the organisation leaned heavily on the aging Carlson endowment to stay afloat before that fund was eventually depleted.

Under its modern mission statement, the Rhine Research Center describes its purpose as advancing the science of parapsychology, providing public education and resources, and fostering a community for those with a personal or professional interest in psi, alongside its original research work into ESP and psychokinesis. The centre also maintained the Alex Tanous Research Library, a collection of more than 3,000 volumes of parapsychological and occult literature — among the five largest collections of its kind in the United States — established with support from the Alex Tanous Foundation of Portland, Maine.

Recent history

The centre operated from premises on Campus Walk Avenue near Duke University for nearly 25 years before closing in 2025; as of the most recent available information, it has not yet secured a new physical location.

EERIE Files assessment

RESEARCH ASSESSMENT

DISCIPLINE

Parapsychology

RESEARCH TYPE

Institutional research organisation — experimental and archival (ESP, psychokinesis, spontaneous case collection)

PRIMARY CLAIM

That psi abilities such as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis exist and can be demonstrated under controlled scientific conditions

KEY RESEARCHERS

J. B. Rhine; Louisa E. Rhine; Sally Rhine Feather; Walter J. Levy Jr.; John Kruth

ORGANISATION

Successor to the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory; independent non-profit since 1965

ACADEMIC STATUS

Contested — parapsychology is regarded by most mainstream scientists as lacking reliable empirical support, and the centre's own history includes a confirmed case of researcher fraud

SIGNIFICANCE

The Rhine Research Center is as close as this field gets to an establishment institution — nearly a century of continuous, deliberately scientific attempts to test claims this archive otherwise documents anecdotally. That makes both its findings and its failures unusually instructive: the Levy affair stands as one of the clearest, best-documented cases of fraud ever caught inside a parapsychology lab, while the centre's survival for sixty years on donor goodwill says almost as much about enduring public appetite for these questions as any single haunting file does. Its 2025 closure, with no new premises yet found, is itself a small case study in how fragile even the most established parapsychological institutions can be.

See also

• J. B. Rhine
• Extra-Sensory Perception (1934 book)
• Journal of Parapsychology
• Parapsychology

External links

• Wikipedia — Rhine Research Center
• Psi Encyclopedia — Rhine Research Center
• Rhine Research Center — About Us