| Title | : | Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1594200904 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781594200908 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 371 |
| Publication | : | First published August 3, 2006 |
James came together with two other brilliant and charismatic thinkers of the day-Richard Hodgson, a converted skeptic, and James Hyslop, a natural grandstander who would often visit mediums unannounced, a hooded mask covering his face-to form the core of the American Society for Psychical Research. They eventually merged with the British Society for Psychical Research, adding to the group the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick and his tiny, ferociously smart wife Eleanor, as well as the mythically handsome Edmund Gurney and others. While studies of ESP and ghostly visitations have occurred since the days of the society, at no other time have scientists of the caliber of James and his colleagues devoted themselves in such an ambitious and driven way for evidence of a life beyond. James and his band of brothers staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity, on one of the most extraordinary (and entertaining) psychological quests ever undertaken, a quest that brought its followers right up against the limits of science.
This riveting book is about the investigation of the ghost stories-the instances of supernatural phenomena that could not be explained away-and it is about the courage and conviction of William James and his colleagues to study science with an open mind. At the heart of the story is the ongoing tension between empiricism and spiritualism-between a way of explaining the world that is grounded in the purely tangible and a way that is grounded in a mixture of the evident and the hidden. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Deborah Blum uses her extraordinary storytelling skills and scientific insight to explore nothing less than the nexus of science and religion. It is a territory as fascinating to us now as it was to William James and his colleagues then.
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death Reviews
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I have to admit this book excited my interests in the studies performed by the Society for Psychical Research (The SPR’s former presidents’ list reads like the Who’s Who in Science). One reason may have been my enormous respect for the works of the father of American psychology William James who presided over the SPR from 1894 to 1895.
Anyone who read my second book on the meaning of existence will understand the my current dilemma. For the longest time I found support for my existential convictions in the works of Camus, Sartre and Nietzsche. Their foundation was further fortified by my believe in the theories of evolution and the development of human societies as defined by the works of Darwin and Diamond.
I don’t tend to accept theories lightly, but this book exposed me to a double-blind study done by SPR in the early part of the twentieth century that still occupies my mind. I still yearn to uncover the reasons behind its results. Done by a few prominent scientists (and without going into the details) the study sowed in me if not doubt then some very good reasons to reevaluate my knowledge and understanding of human consciousness and brain physiology. I feel thrown back into the race for facts that can help me integrate the results with my perceptions of life and existence.
I recommend this book to you if you are firmly established in your existential beliefs as it will offer some overwhelming facts to the contrary. You will need a very full bucket of scientific proof to quench the fire it’ll start. -
This is the oldest of Blum's books that I've read, and it kind of shows in the book. Although it is still well-written, it is definitely not quite as easy to understand as her more recent books. There were some parts that delved way too far into the depths of metaphysics for me, but it was still super interesting and fun. I really loved the journey through the world of spiritualism, mediums and seances. It was a fun read and it weirdly made me with that I could attend a Victorian-era seance!
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In her groundbreaking book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deborah Blum has masterfully retold the story of the birth of spiritualism and the scientific pursuit of “psychical research.” In the late nineteenth century, William James, renowned philosopher and psychologist, and a small group of eminent scientists staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity on one of the most extraordinary quests ever undertaken: to empirically prove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. Deborah Blum artfully retells this story. Along with Raymond Moody’s The Last Laugh, this book should be required reading for any aspiring investigator of the paranormal.
The cast of characters in Ghost Hunters reads like a who’s who of late nineteenth and early twentieth century luminaries. Blum, however, leaves no one out of her narrative. Scientists, theologians, performers, mediums, lovers, poets, working class families, and con men all share the same stage. Biographic surprises lurk behind every page. Even those familiar with the father of pragmatism and psychology, William James, are usually ignorant of his role in the investigation of paranormal phenomenon at the turn of the previous century. Other names appear. Alfred Russel Wallace, the forgotten coauthor of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland), and even Samuel Clemens were all members of the British Society for Psychical Research.
Blum was very adept at laying bare long forgotten antidotes of history. In Ghost Hunters, she approaches her brilliant and influential subjects as they were–human beings who experimented with narcotics, believed they had attained enlightenment under the influence of nitrous oxide, fell in love with their test subjects, and traveled to other continents to interview and test mediums and self-professed psychics. She weaves a detailed picture of a research field under siege by fellow scientists, journalists, and subjected to unending embarrassment caused by fraud and dubious conclusions at a time when England was ground zero in the battle between science and faith.
In the United States, William James led the charge at the helm of the American Society for Psychical Research, but his investigations seemed no more fruitful than those of his British counterparts. By 1886, Blum wrote, “their annual report… had degenerated into a list of exposures of professional practitioners.” Their experiments dismantled spiritualist claims one after another, and many members began to conclude that mental illness lay at the heart of ghost sightings.
Finally, one medium, who claimed to have received messages from deceased British Society for Psychical Research member Richard Hodgson, ultimately boosted their morale. In one message, the spirit of Hodgson allegedly revealed the name of a woman to whom he had proposed years earlier, but who had spurned his advances. William James contacted the woman, who, to his surprise, confirmed the story. This new phenomenon, known as “cross-correspondence,” continued to yield remarkable results, results that were not easy to dismiss as mere coincidence. James hesitantly concluded that, as evidence of an afterlife, that was as close as they were likely to get.
If there is any flaw in this well researched book, it is that Deborah Blum did not document her sources as thoroughly as she should have. Because this story is so remarkable, she should have made it easier for other researchers to confirm the information she presented. Never-the-less, her years of experience writing about science has given her the ability to weave a wonderful narrative without getting bogged down in technicalities and jargon. When it comes down to it, Ghost Hunters is both entertaining and informative, which is a rare combination these days! -
Interesting subject. Slow and difficult read.
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Very engaging nonfiction
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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book. When I was studying philosophy I first met James – the brother of the author and father of psychology in the US. I wasn’t all that keen on him, but was a bit addicted to Hegel at the time and so found the fact that he had clearly read and understood Hegel something of a treat. Nonetheless, his and Dewey’s pragmatism (or Instrumentalism) was a bit too simple for my tastes. The implicit denial of objective truth also caused me problems.
Books like this one, either written in support of spiritualism or against it, always follow the same formula. First you are given a series of miraculous tales. You are given time to ooh and ahh. Then some of these tales are completely discredited.
The books only diverge at this point. Those in favour focus on the ‘successful’ accounts and say something like, “Although we can never really know, some doubt must always be part of the scientific method and …”
Others basically adopt my view of sports champions – we should wait to give them their medals after they are dead and therefore after we can do an autopsy to determine they had not cheated. It seems only fair. If they want their medals early then they will just have to submit to an autopsy early. And with Spiritualist and their supporters, we should wait until they are dead and can come back to prove ‘life after death’, and if they are in a hurry, well, that too can be arranged.
There are bits of this book I found terribly amusing. The little saying at one point about a woman who had become convinced that the only people likely to be saved were her and her husband George (and there were times when she wasn’t all that sure about George) made me smile. There were also the times when James would say things that also made me smile, but unfortunately not exactly with him. His agonising over why spirits would make the supreme effort it seemed to take for them to make contact with our realm and yet always seemed quite out of proportion with the nonsense they seemed to come off with.
This book is much more sympathetic to spiritualists and spiritualism than I would have thought likely. If I have one prejudice it is that this stuff does not deserve anything more than laughter.
So, it might seem reasonable to expect that I didn’t like this book. Well, it is a strange thing. Parts of this book annoyed me – but not for the content so much as how it was told. I got a bit lost at times as there seemed to be too many stories going on. But this was less a book about the cheats (oh, sorry, spiritualists) and more about those who had been cheated (oh, I mean, their scientific investigators). I did warn you that I was prejudiced.
What is very interesting is the roll call of exceptional scientists who in one way or another gave their names in support of this kind of research. From Wallace (Darwin’s co-discoverer of Evolution) to Arthur Conan Doyle. That I can think of not a single scientist who would be prepared to say that it is remotely likely that spirits can lift tables or move curtains today either proves that there has been a remarkably successful conspiracy to keep this stuff secret or modern scientific methods of detection are somewhat better at spotting fraud than they were at the start of the 20th century.
This book leaves much of what I would take to be the obvious conclusions that need to be drawn from these ‘experiments’ up in the air. This is very much the sort of book that someone of more religious feeling than myself may well come away from reading saying, ‘one just never knows’. Like I said, I found it interesting because of the quotations from some of the greatest scientists of the age struggling to leave even a slither of a door open to religion in any form imaginable. It is sad to watch the delusions of great minds – such a terrible waste. -
Halfway through this volume we come to this line from the 1890 book, “Revelations of a Spirit Medium” by the anonymous author, A. Medium: “thousands of persons earning a dishonest living through the practice of various deceptions in the name of spiritualism.” A. Medium, recommended the scientific community investigate the spirit world but avoid paid mediums. A. Medium mentions that “any street conjurer possesses the tricks to make lights dance in the dark, tables walk in the air.”
And this sums up what happened when Williams James, Alfred Russell Wallace and a cast of other intellectuals spanning across the Atlantic, from America to England, were taken in by clever stage magicians who chose to use their talents for evil. It’s an incredible story of caution that no matter how smart you are, you still have the capacity to be fooled. Especially since the tricks these mediums use are still used today.
One wonders why the rooms have to be nearly pitch dark. Or why spirits arrive and depart behind a curtain or out of a cabinet. Or why they communicate via rapping on a table or pushing a coaster around a board. Or why a glowing orb or breeze floats across the room. Simple stage magician tricks were deployed against Williams James and continue to be used to date.
Not all happens by deception. Not every medium resorts to tricks. Across these pages there are those claimed mediums and lay-people who truly thought they were communicating with the dead. But they were more than likely mistaking coincidence or seeing agency in otherwise natural, normal occurrences where there was none. Or more often than not, recalling an event long past which has been molded, exaggerated or repainted over the passage of time. Many stories of alleged contact with spirits have a big fish quality. The original story isn’t so grand but years later, the recall and retell molds and changes, painting something more mysterious than what actually happened. At any rate, William James and his peers relied quite a bit on surveys, giving them weight that anecdotal evidence just doesn’t deserve.
The mind is easily fooled. It does it to itself quite often without any help, when it mistakes wind rustling in the bushes for a predator or a coincidence as a precognition. But when a trickster or magician gives your brain an assist, as in the case of those doing magic tricks and claiming help from another world, well it’s all too easy to fall for it when you’re not in on the trick. I, myself, could swear the likes of David Blaine and others are sorcerers of today. They’re that good and lucky for us, they don’t monopolize on the ignorance of our own brains to claim otherworldly powers when they’re just entertaining us.
Seeing the intellectuals of the eighteen-hundreds attempt to validate a spirit world and fail with the mediums of their day, and seeing the same tricks and plays being used today, we can conclude there simply is no evidence of life after death through the study of mediumship or piling up testimonials and stories. Ghost hunting will surely continue just as Bigfoot is still vouched for even though there simply is no evidence at all. On the contrary, all there is are tricks and hoaxes and clever minds outdoing other clever minds. I suspect the search itself has meaning to the seeker. Perhaps if entertainment or just pondering a larger life than the material world is rewarding even if proof of such never materializes, the hunt will continue. -
I'll be honest, I'm more interested in William James than I am in his more popular brother, Henry, because Henry wrote really snooze-worthy books and I have it in my mind that he wasn't all that nice to my BFF, Edith Wharton. I haven't read all that much of James's philosophy/psychology (but I have some of his stuff!), but the concept of him has always fascinated me, probably because Henry gets all the attention. (And then sister Alice gets no love whatsoever; my heart has always gone out to her, poor lady.)
I'm also interested in ghosts and the whatever stuff, so the concept behind this book intrigued me. Similar in a lot of ways to Mary Roach's
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, but focuses more on James himself and his work (and presidency) of the American branch of the Society of Psychical Research. The problem I have with this book, however, is that even though "William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death" is the subtitle, the James portion is intermittent and isn't discussed as much as I had hoped.
I found there was a lot of anecdotal information about a variety of people, and at times I found my interest waning as I don't feel the author was able (or willing) to focus on one or two definitive aspects. Plenty of good history here, so if that's your thing, it's here in truckloads. The author did an incredible amount of research (and, according to her Acknowledgements, had great help) - personally speaking, however, I just wish it had been a little better streamlined.
As a side note, the real history about psychical research is nothing like
this. In case you were wondering. -
Finally found time to read this intriguing book.
This is an first rate account by Deborah Blum of the emergence of a growing curiosity and serious research project regarding the existence of life after death, the possibility of communication with spirits, as well as the existence of mental telepathy. The parties involved were a group of well respected scientists and psychologists in the US, as well as the UK, in the late nineteenth century who formed the "Physical Research Society." It is hard to arugue with the respectibility of William James and Harvard as well as several other educated and determied participnts. In addition to their quest for knowledge and proof of an afterlife, they also set out to uncover the scam artists who were plentiful at the time. The work went on diligently for years by dedicated, educated people on both sides of the Atlantic, though many of their contemporaries spent a great deal of effort trying to dismiss any interest in this subject matter as pure folly. Those nay sayers and detractors made it their own mission to portray any of the documented findings in a negative and dismissive light.
While the book was dry in places due to the wealth of factual information provided, I found myself unable to put it down.
Guaranteed to make you think and think again about whether or not you will accept the concept of "something else" out there, that we cannot measure or prove the existence of given our tools today.
If you happen to read this book, please feel free to email me for further discussion. -
Of course I love history...and this book was so interesting to me. William James is the brother of Henry James. William started a society that was going to prove life after death. This was in the late 1800's. It was so interesting to hear of all the "famous" people of that time who were part of this group. They basically debunked all of the spiritualist's of that time. I really enjoyed it. After reading it, I read Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson, and at the time, didn't know until I read it, that they occur in the same time. A few of the people that are in Ghost Hunters are mentioned in Thunderstruck, one in particular.....
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I tried to finish it. I really did. But it was just so...boring. Really really boring. And the author went for a “I am completely objective and thus not inserting myself into this story” motif, which just leads to huge eye rolling when there are no comments on what is obvious bunk. I know they couldn’t explain how the “medium” had all that info. But there is zero mention of cold reading techniques, or even that the medium, given long days between readings, could have written letters to others who could do research on her behalf. It was all just so annoying. If you want a good book about ghost hunting and death, read “Spook” by Mary Roach.
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GHOST HUNTERS: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death
takes a look at the research done in the late 1800s trying to prove the existence of life after death. The research was mostly done in the United States and Great Britain. The book has a great Index and Notes & Sources in the back.
Deborah Blum is an American journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her science book THE MONKEY WARS. Blum doesn’t say specifically why she wrote this book, but does acknowledge that in her research she experienced an opening of her mind to new ideas.
The first organization of individuals who wanted to study the existence of spirits was the British Society for Psychical Research, started by Henry Sidgwick from Trinity College, Cambridge, Frederic Myers, and Edmund Gurney in 1882. They later added William James, a professor from Harvard University and the founder of the American Psychology Association. This book focuses mainly on James.
Through hundreds of testings of people claiming to have a link to spirit guides or who put on spirit shows, they usually proved them to be fraudulent. Moving tables and ghostly “apparitions” were easy to figure out. Still they searched for proof of real spirits. Spiritualism was quite popular at the time, yet the scientific community gave the researchers little to no support.
Unfortunately, I slogged through the book. The tedious bickering between the main individuals gave me a headache. The narrative jumps around from country to country so often I sometimes didn’t know where I was.
GHOST HUNTERS didn’t convince me that spirits don’t exist. It did put a spotlight on the beliefs at the time.
It’s nice that Blum put this information all together and I would still recommend the book for people interested in the subject. Also recommended:
The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna -
workaday mp3
Read By..........: George K. Wilson
Genre............: History
Publisher........: BBC Audiobooks Sound Library (Unabridged, 2006)
blurb - New York Times
Sunday Book Review
Episodes of high comedy in the history of science are rare, but here is one: the investigation of Eusapia Palladino, a tempestuous and erotically charged medium from the slums of Naples, by a sober Cambridge don and his friends in 1895.
The Cambridge group was from Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, and they trained themselves hard for the task. Their leader, Henry Sidgwick, was a prominent moral philosopher; his wife, Nora (the sister of a future British prime minister), was a mathematician and the principal of one of Cambridge’s first colleges for women. Together the couple practiced how they would hold Eusapia down during seances. As Deborah Blum writes in her fascinating new book, “Ghost Hunters,” Sidgwick developed an impressive skill for “dropping to the floor, his white beard trailing over the carpet, while he anchored Nora’s feet in place.”
Eusapia’s apparent ability to levitate heavy tables, make mysterious winds blow and produce a substance known as “ectoplasm” — a sort of afterbirth of the netherworld — had already convinced some scientists in Europe that paranormal powers were real. But she had been married to a traveling conjuror and would be caught in trickery countless times. Members of the Society for Psychical Research wanted to be sure. But above all, they wanted to believe. If Eusapia was exposed, they would find someone with more impressive powers. Blum’s strange tale shows how and why many British and American intellectuals (including some prominent scientists) ended up on a fruitless but determined hunt for ghosts.
Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, begins in America in the middle of the 19th century. In 1848, the Fox sisters, a pair of teenage girls from upstate New York, demonstrated their skill at eliciting information from spirits at P.T. Barnum’s museum on Broadway. “The Night Side of Nature,” a collection of ghost stories presented as fact, became a best seller. The spiritualist newspapers, of which there were many, claimed two million believers. Table-tilting and spirit-writing were all the rage. By the 1880’s, Sears, Roebuck and other companies were mass-marketing Ouija boards. America itself, Blum writes, “seemed possessed.”
Meanwhile in England, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-presenter of the idea of natural selection with Darwin in 1858, had started visiting mediums and was mightily impressed. He was particularly taken with Daniel Dunglas Home, whose powers, according to astonished witnesses, included the ability to levitate, float out of a window and then float back in. Home, who became one of the best-known mediums in Europe, also floated into high society, marrying a goddaughter of the czar, with the novelist Alexandre Dumas as his best man.
Darwin was exasperated by Wallace’s gullibility and feared that his activities would somehow besmirch the theory of evolution. Wallace, however, suspected that evolution explained only the origins of bodies, and that a supernatural “overruling intelligence” was required to explain mental and moral life. Most of the scientific establishment, on both sides of the Atlantic, disagreed — often vehemently, as in the case of the scientist and lecturer T.H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog” — and asserted that spiritualism was pure trickery that needed exposing rather explaining. But a smattering of eminent scientists remained open-minded or even joined the cause.
Wallace brought the chemist William Crookes, future president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, into the fold. Crookes was the discoverer of thallium — a toxic element that some skeptics alleged had adversely affected his mind — and his work on cathode rays played a role in the discovery of the electron. Not only was Crookes convinced by Home, he was enchanted by Florence Cook, a strikingly pretty girl in her early 20’s who liked to conduct her seances in tight black dresses. While Florence was locked in her spirit cabinet, her “spirit guide” would materialize in flowing, white robes and eat cakes and drink wine while she flirted with Crookes.
Even mediums complained of the fraud that was rife in their trade. So in 1882, Sidgwick and his friends formed the Society for Psychical Research with the earnest intention of investigating supernatural claims. Sidgwick, the son of a clergyman, had abandoned Christianity but feared the moral effects of the decline of religion. His co-founders included his pupil Frederic Myers, another disillusioned clergyman’s son whose interest in spiritualism would markedly increase after his beloved drowned in a lake, and the Cambridge scholar Edmund Gurney, described as having “a mind as beautiful as his face” by George Eliot, who supposedly based Daniel Deronda in part on him. All three men accepted the dominion of modern science; their aim was to imitate its methods and provide rigorous, empirical evidence of a spiritual realm.
This idea, or something like it, evidently appealed to many intellectuals of the day, including Tennyson (who was Britain’s poet laureate at the time), Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain, who were all members of the Society for Psychical Research. It also seized the interest of William James, who served as president of the British society for two years and was involved with the short-lived American version. (Blum’s subtitle is misleading: James is not the main focus of this book.) As America’s pioneer in psychology, he was intrigued by the apparently extraordinary powers of mediums’ minds. But he was also drawn to the evidence they seemed to provide for his belief in “a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental fences.” In 1885, shortly after the death of his 1-year-old son, he visited a Boston psychic named Leonora Piper at the suggestion of his mother-in-law. Although he never quite accepted that life after death had been proved, James was soon convinced that Mrs. Piper (who died in 1950, at 93) knew things she could only have discovered by supernatural means. Like many other investigators, James was prepared to rest his case solely on her startling abilities. -
Just couldn't get into it.
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This well-researched book was a wonderful addition to my past readings on the topic of spiritualism and metaphysics, particularly since it tells the story of a group of well-educated people seeking the scientific angle.
William James, widely recognized as a founding father of academic psychology, is probably the best known name on this team of investigators, but the initial members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) included many accomplished scientists, including: Richard Hodgson, James Hyslop, A. Sidgwick and his wife, Nora Sidgwick (a noted mathematician and dean of Newnham College), Fred Myers, Edmund Gurney, Charles Richet (well known for his work in wireless telegraphy), and Dr. Crookes, whose many inventions included the precursors to x-rays. Those who participated in the research were, for the most part, trained scientists in the fields of physics, astronomy, chemistry, psychology, and biology.
What the SPR researchers sought to do was apply scientific methods of research to psychical phenomena; they questioned whether there could be communication with the dead, either through physical manifestations (ghosts, rapping) or verbal ones (automatic writing, trance mediumship). In the late 19th century, Spiritualism was a growing movement, and seances were popular, particularly among those who had lost loved ones in the not long past American Civil War. While most scientists scoffed at the idea of "talking to the dead," this small group of researchers chose to look at the problem scientifically.
In the process, the researchers spent a fair amount of time debunking fraudulent mediums, from the slate writers at Lily Dale (a popular Spriritualist retreat in upstate New York, still active today) to the world-famous founder of Theosophy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. And yet, despite finding many con-artists, they also found a few genuine examples of paranormal activity beyond explanation. One was the medium Leonora Piper, who lived in Boston, MA. She was a subject of study for nearly two decades, and never once was found to cheat. In a survey of "crisis apparitions," taken in Britain and America, it was discovered that the number of people who had had seen spirits of dying friends or family, when limited to only the stories that could be verified in their particulars, was far above the normal statistical expectations for the surveyed populations. Perhaps the most striking experiments were the cross-correspondance ones, where four individuals, two in England, one in America, and one in India, all received the same messages from one of the researchers who had recently died. The messages corresponded to a specific poem of great meaning to the group, and the communication was further tested by asking questions of the "spirit" in Latin, a language unknown by the mediums who were receiving the messages.
In all, it was frustrating to see this group of learned men and women consistently run up against vicious criticisms from the rest of the scientific community, who refused to participate or even entertain the notion that the work that they were doing had merit. I sincerely wish that some group of researchers had continued this work, which sadly lost steam after most of the main investigators, particularly Hodgson and James passed on. My personal feelings on the subject accord with those of James; I don't necessarily believe in life after death or spirit communication, but I have not ruled out such things, because there are some situations that current science cannot explain fully.
I highly recommend this book. -
I love the Victorian period. It was a time of great invention and creativity. I've always loved stories about the paranormal so I was sold on this book when I read the blurb. If you're interested in spirits and mediums this is a must read. Well written and researched Blum looks at the history of the Society of Psychical Research and its key membership. Through their personal stories and obsessions there are many questions raised.
Blum is an author who knows her subject matter and has delved deep into the Victorian period. Scientists interested in proving the possibility of life after death embarked in investigating the phenomena of mediums. The book charts the controversy and conflict caused between scientists interested in the phenomena and those that didn't believe that this type of research was valid.
While there were many fake mediums during the Victorian period, there were some that could not disproved. The scientists researching mediums faced a quandary, at what point was there irrefutable proof as to life after death? And how could life after death be proven when the phenomena of mediums was so unreliable? Tests could not be replicated even with mediums who had proven to be accurate. The scientists undertaking this research developed many thesis that make for fascinating reading and provide food for thought. The book focuses on the medium Leonora Piper and her work with the Society of Psychical research. There were two things that I found most fascinating about this book.
When Fred Myers, a scientist with the SPR, passed over he made contact through Leonora Piper. During a seance when he was questioned about life after death he presented answers that tied in with Christianity thought of God. SPR concluded that the medium mediates the message. That is whatever messages are sent by a spirit are interpreted by the mediums' thought processes and experiences.
This seems to illustrate why mediums can sometimes be accurate and other times so completely wrong. If the medium does not have knowledge of a particular subject matter or their brain works in a different way to that of the spirit, it's difficult for the message to be sent accurately.
The second was an experiment conducted by Margaret Verrall a friend of Fred Myers. Verrall decided to prove if there was life after death by communicating with Myers. She decided on automatic writing, the phenomena of holding a pen and having a spirit take over and write messages. Over three months she set aside at least an hour every day and waited. After three months of waiting she started writing about other matters.
On the other side of the world the SPR had contacted Myers through the medium Leonora Piper. On the days that there were messages from Fred, Verrall wrote messages that replicated the conversations Myers had with Piper. This makes me wonder if anyone could contact with spirits if they put the time into it. Do we all have the ability to get in touch with the paranormal? Or is it that the spirits are so eager to make contact that they are clamouring for anyone to speak to?
While I still don't know if I believe in life after death, I do believe that there are many mysteries in the world that we are ignorant about. That there is a world we can see and perhaps a world we cannot. Ghost Hunters is a fascinating read and one that will turn your ideas about life and death on its head. -
Ok, it took me forever to read this book because it was so chocked full of information. I recommend this to anyone who wants to think deeply. Alot of head nodding & head scratching went on whilst reading. Paranormal concepts I got, but famous people & what they did triggered faint memories of science class tests. I'm in awe of the dedication of these super smart people of the (I think) Gilded Age who managed to endorse, fund, & study several causes &/or ideas simultaneously.
If you look at my read list you will find mostly romances & mysteries. Many of the authors I read include paranormal elements, or the "woo-woo" factor if you will, since that is the current fashion. William James & his colleagues would be appalled at how all their painstaking, reputation breaking work has become fodder for the mass market entertainment around the world.
This book explains so much about the very real war between religious thought, scientific process, and those of us; who in the famous words of Rodney King ask plainitively, "Can't we all just get along?".
Some fav quotes: (pg213) William James in an 1896 address to the Philosophical Club of Yale & Brown Unis, "we are doing the universe the deepest service we can" when we keep our minds open to what we do not know for sure, to what we have no idea how to prove.
Same page: from the collection "The will to believe"; "Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things", & religion says that the best things are eternal, "an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all." James suspected that many scientists dealt with the challenge by denying religious precepts entirely without asking themselves which intellectual pitfall was the greater evil: Better risk loss of truth than chance of error. James argued that the pursuit of truth, even when it might seem illogical by the rules of science, was always worth the risk.
Another great quote (pg 264) by W James: "Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other & untidy." Speaking about Mr. Myers acceptance of the complexity of the cosmic environment, "although we may be mistaken in much of the detail, in a general way, at least we become plausible."
One more, (pg 258) from the author,
William James had no such hopes, nor any fondness for this rational future that so many of his academic peers eagerly anticipated.The survival theory, he wrote, ignored the fact that civilizations come & gone had also been arrogantly sure that they possessed the one TRUTH above truths. He thought it a mistake to dismiss ideas of history simply because they didn't fit current scientific methodolgy. -
The Victorian era was probably the high-point of belief in spiritualism - who doesn't picture all those fine gentleman and corseted ladies participating in seances, dabbling with Ouija boards, tilting tables and automatic writing? It's probably no coincidence that this peak in belief coincided with the rise of science as we understand it - perhaps this emerging insistence that the universe could be codified and classified and explained also gave rise to some kind of reaction against it, this belief that there were some things beyond explanation?
The individuals explored in this book combined those two beliefs in one - they believed in both science and spiritualism; they believed that the former could explain the latter, and that an ordered, rational universe didn't necessarily preclude the existence of the immortal soul and life after death. Probably at no point in history, before or likely to come, were so many eminent and respected men of science involved in the hunt for ghosts, telepathy, telekinesis, mediums, spirit communications, ectoplasm. Professors, authors, knights of the realms, Nobel prize-winners, men like William James, Sir Oliver Lodge, Charles Richet - these were no cranks or credulous fools.
This book will not convert the skeptics or shake believers. There is enough evidence, enough inexplicable occurrences, to make even the most rational reader have a few doubts - and the author herself admits that she came to this book as a woman of science and went away...a little less certain. It may not change anyone's mind, but I found this a fascinating read, of a time when science was just as certain it had all the answers as it is now. And yet the questions still remain... -
I had high hopes for this book but when it takes me more than a week of reading to get 100 pages into it, the author has not done their job or engaging me as a reader.
The story of William James really should have been the story of the British start of the Psycical Research Society since a majority of Blum's story took place there. She combined the significant physical, scientific, and research-based science progress in with the search for the paranormal. Combine all that backlog of historical scientific breakthroughs with ghost stories, mediums, charlatans and too much hopping back and forth between major scientist and you have a very boring and difficult to follow book.
If the book gets better as it goes along, I would be very impressed by the person who finished it. -
I found out about _Ghost Hunters_ after reading the masterly biography of William James by Robert D. Richardson. Richardson does not shy away from James's lifelong interest in what I will call Spiritualism but it is only a part of William James's extraordinary career. However, Blum's book is dedicated to the subject and William James is just one of many eminent scientists who belonged to psychic organizations and studied and challenged and puzzled over psychics. The book goes on a bit too long, but there are some intriguing stories here and Blum treats the subject with respect - which surprised me. I kept waiting for her to say something like" wasting their energy" but she doesn't. Her afterword explains this.
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It's been a long time since I've read a work of non-fiction as courageous and as moving as this one. In daring to tell the stories of William James and his fellow researchers and their insistent refusal to concede absolute knowledge to an arrogant and ideologic post-Darwinian scientific template, Blum reveals herself cut from a similar (if not altogether same) cloth as James, Hodgson, the Sidgwicks and others: fearless, humble, relentlessly curious, and an intellectual giant, perhaps, for being all three.
Re-read in October 2012. -
This was a bit of a tedious read, the author doesn't really use any enthusiasm while describing the life and work of these scientists. It wasn't a bad book though I suspect the reason has more to do with subject matter and less to do with the authors ability. All of the researchers and their opposition were so compellingly interesting that I found myself reading on even though it felt as if the story were being read to me by a monotone character like Ben Stein. I'll give it a 4 out of 5 but the author is not one I'd look for in the future.
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This non-fiction book focuses on Harvard psychology professor William James and his interactions with various 19th century scientists and philosphers who tried to document legitimate paranormal activity. Blum made me care very deeply about these men (& women!); their stories were so compelling that I had a hard time putting the book down. Anyone interested in Victorian scholars, 19th century Spiritualism, or studies of the paranormal should check this one out.
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Meticulously researched account of scientist William James, brother to
Henry James, who set out to scientifically research paranormal activity. Though he and his fellow scientists mostly uncovered frauds they did find a few things they couldn't explain. This was a fascinating topic though it was occasionally bogged down from the number of characters and the jumping around to explain all their stories. -
Fascinating stuff! It is a bit academic, but Blum is an excellent and trustworthy author.
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This fascinating and hard-to-put down volume (although I was a bit unnerved while reading it at night) follows several scientists who spent much of the 19th century (and a bit of the 20th) trying to reveal whether there was a scientific basis for many supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, telekinesis, communication with spirits, and haunted houses. In the process, they debunk many fraudulent claims (including Madame Blatavsky and the Fox sisters), but they can't quite explain away all the reports they collect.
As they repeatedly test remarkable mediums and hear overwhelming reports of ghostly warnings of loved one's deaths, these scientists become more convinced than ever that in the vast ocean of fakers, some events truly are supernatural in origin. But they face growing suspicion and ridicule from their fellow scientists and anger from spiritualists who find those they've put on pedestals tumbling down one after another.
My major problem with the book is the conclusion. It doesn't really conclude! As the original scientists in William James circle die off, the book simply draws to a close. But the real excitement of the book is their research, and the questions which it poses -- which have yet to be satisfied. Thus, you find yourself a bit at a loss, without a nice feeling of "fini" at the end of the book.
I think that structuring the book differently might have alleviated this problem. For example, had the book followed fewer people, focusing more on their narratives, it might have felt more "over" when the people at the center of the story die. Or having the final chapter or two follow more recent follow-up studies on the same topic.
I think the book is appropriate for anyone over 14, so long as they don't get creeped out easily. It's rather clean and might stimulate some interesting conversations. I think, actually, a lot of teenagers (who are often curious about supernatural phenomena) will enjoy the details in the book about how to tell the difference between a fraud and someone who is either the real-deal or less-obviously playing their audience. ;) However, there are a few dry spots, and like me, they might find the end inconclusive and less than satisfying. -
Note: I am not American so I don’t know William James or his brother, Henry James, at all.
If part of the motivation for this book was to show that a science writer can write sympathetically about spiritualism and psychical research, then tick that off. However, no matter how sympathetic the writing (or maybe because of it?), I’m not sure what to make of this book.
Is it just a historical account of spiritualism in the 19th to 20th century? Because then I feel like its ending lacks something like “here we are today.” Blum had a postscript in “The Poison Squad” that related Harvey Wiley’s fight to the social and political challenges faced in the US today, so why not the same for this one?
Or is it about William James? But despite the title being “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death”, William James only periodically comes into the story, and a large bulk of his appearance is at the end of the book. As the large cast of characters came and left on the pages, I kept wondering when William James was going to make his dazzling debut and push the boundaries of psychical research.
Unlike in “The Poisoner’s Handbook” or “The Poison Squad”, William James doesn’t seem like much of a main character, so I’m not sure that drawing my attention to him had any positive impact on the story. I remember Gurney, Hodgson and Nora Sidgwick much more than I remember William James.
But maybe it’s meant to get you to question your stance on spiritualism/psychical research by presenting cases like Eusapia Palladino and Leonora Piper? But while I was interested in their stories, I don’t think there was ever properly and data presented that would kind of show how odd or unusual their guesses or powers were. I’m not convinced that there was anything spiritual or supernatural about Palladino and Piper’s stories. But, I would have liked to have read some proposals, or conjectures, on how they could have done what they did.
I don’t regret reading the book, but at the same time, I wish I could have left the book with a stronger image of what it was meant to be about. -
Blum does her best to make this subject interesting. Alas, this is a dry read. Why? Because William James and his cohorts make for an interesting albeit dry read. Also, this book is rather ambitious with quite the scope.
At times, it feels like a soap opera about a bunch of old white dudes who are constantly bickering. There may be a good reason for that. I think they were a bunch of old white dudes who were constantly bickering. In a situation similar to today, some of the characters in this book were so freakin' dogmatic. So very my way or the highway. At least William James and many of his compadres in paranormal research--not that they would've used the word paranormal--knew that there was no harm in studying. That's a lesson we could learn today.
Mrs. Piper was the character I found most interesting. She often came off as petulant, but that is because I think that's how Hodgson and others saw her. At one point, if memory serves, James came to his senses a bit and remembered that she was a PERSON. I think it would be interesting to get her POV, but I don't know that she had any letters or journals to draw from.
Nora Sidwick is another interesting character, although she needs to chill with the whole "Why would a ghost wear clothes?" thing.
At the end of the day, nothing is solved. Why? Because I don't think we can solve these matters. From a writer's standpoint, one interesting thing I gathered from this book is the idea that even a good medium has a shelf life. Further proving my suspicion that nothing in this world is black or white, mediums like Eusapia Palladino seemed to have some kind of power but supplemented it with cheating. This makes me wonder about Alma Fielding, too.
Anyhoo, it's an interesting read, but it's a SLOG. Lots of good information. Lots of old dead white guys. Don't think there was a single person of color up in this book which is interesting in and of itself. -
I was so excited to start this book, imagining what an interesting story it would be, especially given the Victorian love of ghosts, seances, and mystics. I can say I was equally as disappointed while reading it and very glad to reach the end.
The book gets mired down with a huge cast of people, including the regular members of the organizations, people who join and leave or join later, and some their varying critics, not to mention the mediums who are studied, all of whom are in a number of different locations. It is very difficult to follow and I found that very distracting to what is going on. A list of people and who they were at the start of the book, to be referred back to, would have been enormously helpful.
I also found that the book basically dwelt on the attitude of other scientists to the study of the supernatural and only at the very end touched a bit upon what was discovered and what was concluded. The two organizations researching the supernatural, one in England and one in the US, regularly published newsletters and articles and their individual members wrote books. Yet this was rarely touched upon except where it invoked a reaction from someone in the more mainstream scientific community. Which was not very enlightening, as the critics invariable always had the same arguments, and it just introduced another person into an already full cast of characters.
In the end, I think someone would pick up this book because they would be interested in what was discovered and what conclusions were made about life after death (as well as the passing reference to studying a rambunctious ghost), rather than over 300 pages of how stuffy and closed minded Victorian era scientists could be.
