"Ghost Hunters"

[QUOTE] The member list included some prominent... spiritualist followers. These members professed to agree with the plan for skeptical research. But it now appeared that they hadn’t meant for the word ‘skepticism’ to be taken quite so literally. Many spiritualists remained angry over the perceived negative findings in Nora’s analysis of ghost stories. Some quit in outrage over the exposé of Madame Blavatsky. The mediums in the organization were infuriated [...] It wasn’t just Nora who was antagonizing the membership. Richard Hodgson was back in England, cheerfully adding fuel to this already smoldering sense of resentment [...] There were no spirits in these séances, merely fast hands, hidden devices, distraction— and a wish by those participating to believe in magic. Following hard after the SPR’s earlier exposé, this struck the spiritualists as a gratuitous attack. [...] Even Alfred Russel Wallace was drawn into the fight, taking the side of the spiritualists and making it obvious how far he had fallen from the Darwinian mainstream for the moment. [...] Across that intractable Atlantic, the psychical researchers suffered through no such dramas, but then, their best work was being done in careful secrecy. [– End of quotation. See “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death” (Blum, 2006)]

I absolutely adore Deborah Blum’s 2006 book “GhostHunters”, which chronicles the events surrounding the 1882 formation of the British Society for Psychical research (SPR) (as well as its American branch in 1885), a non-profit organization dedicated to conducting impartial research into claims of the paranormal. Members included Sigmund Freud, William James, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, F.W.H. Myers (who coined the word “telepathy”), several Nobel Laureates, a Prime Minister, and many other note-worthy people. In my judgment (without going into much detail now) “Ghost Hunters” has some flaws in it, but it’s still a great introduction for anyone interested in the history of parapsychology, which is the scientific study of allegedly “psychic” abilities (to the extent that such abilities can be studied empirically). In the tradition of the SPR, identifying as a parapsychologist (or a “psychical researcher”) does not imply either acceptance or denial of the existence of psychic abilities. Instead, it merely signifies that one conducts experiments to test whether these abilities ever occur, regardless of whether the results are positive or negative.

There’s actually a rich history of psychical research carried out during the Victorian Era by otherwise respected scientists and scholars with differing opinions and varying degrees of confidence (or lack thereof). Some were mega skeptics, some were fence sitters, and some were “believers” – although even many of the believers were cynical; in a letter to William James, Edmund Gurney complained that 95% of cases were obvious fraud and that only 5% of cases were “worth” looking into.

Diehard “skeptics” and “believers” alike will enjoy Blum’s book.