Paranormal Investigations – Is There Anybody Out There?

Welcome to Origin Story. This week we’re doing something different: the history of paranormal investigations and what it says about the relationship between evidence and belief.

In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York claimed to be contacting the spirit world. Within a couple of years spiritualism was a popular craze on both sides of the Atlantic, with seances attracting luminaries from Queen Victoria to Charles Darwin. But could it be proven beyond doubt? In 1883, a group of scientists and intellectuals launched the Society for Psychical Research to find out, but from its inception there was tension between the genuine sceptics and the instinctive believers. However many hoaxers they debunked, even the sceptics encountered things they could not rationally explain.

The mass grief of the First World War created a new appetite for spiritualism, spearheaded by the world-famous author Arthur Conan Doyle. Meanwhile in North Carolina, J.B. and Louisa Rhine proposed that these uncanny goings on were not evidence of ghosts but of untapped powers in the human brain: Extra-Sensory Perception. Concepts like telepathy and telekinesis swept through popular culture while scientists explored their potential as weapons in the Cold War.

In the 1970s, Connecticut couple Ed and Lorraine Warren became the world’s star investigators. In the era of Carrie, The Exorcist and spoon-bending celebrity Uri Geller, there was a huge audience for this kind of thing, bringing money and fame to the most prominent spook-hunters. Events such as the Amityville Horror and the Enfield Poltergeist still inspire fascination today, despite the investigators’ extremely dubious methods. Was the truth-seeking mission of the Society for Psychical Research destined to end up as a license for grifters?

How did spiritualism bewitch the Victorian era, including some of its most eminent scientists? Are psychic powers any more credible than ghosts? Why was the creator of the ultra-rational Sherlock Holmes so boundlessly credulous about the spirit world? What can the field of the unexplained teach us about cognitive biases and conspiracy theories? Is it really possible to apply scientific rigour to paranormal phenomena? And why, when almost 150 years of investigations have produced no solid evidence or theoretical basis for them, do so many people still want to believe?

This is a thrilling story of faith, doubt and fraud, featuring Harry Houdini, George Eliot, Marie Curie, Carl Jung, Helena Blavatsky, W.B. Yeats, Winston Churchill and (possibly) the Devil himself. Don’t have nightmares.

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Reading list

Books

• Edward T. Bennett — The Society for Psychical Research: Its Rise and Progress and a Sketch of Its Work (1903)