The Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum

[Laura]

Haven't read the book yet. I read an article by the author in this month's Fortean Times which I really enjoyed and went looking for more details. Since my own introduction to the "paranormal" was by reading the proceedings of the SPR back when I was about 13, I knew that the field had really gone downhill since then and that the whole New Age crowd were sailing without a rudder if they didn't study these matters.

Anyway, from amazon description:

Synopsis

In Victorian Britain, a group of eminent scientists got together to found a society expressly to prove the existence of ghosts.

The age of Darwin represented the greatest scientific advances known to man. The tension between science and religion was exposed by Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" in 1859, which challenged the basic tenets of belief. Yet, many of those in the forefront of the scientific revolution could not give up the idea of a higher reality. Life after death was the unknown frontier.

Victorian society was full of mediums claiming they could communicate with the spirits of the dead. Baffling psychic phenomena occurred every day at seances: mysterious rappings were heard, furniture moved, ghostly forms appeared, the mediums spoke in the altered voices of the dead with information only their nearest could possibly know. Pyschometry involving locks of hair and watches and children's toys; telepathy; ouija boards; apparitions; astral projection: all were commonplace.

In 1882 the Society of Psychical Research was founded in London to investigate all these phenomena: it was a group led by some of the greatest scientists of the age but its membership also included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, John Ruskin, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Six months later William James, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and the brother of Henry James visited London and went on to set up American branch. Their experiments went on for years.

Many mediums, like the notorious Madame Blavatsky, were exposed as charlatans yet there were some mediums who continued to communicate directly with another world, who despite every rigorous scientific test seemed to prove that souls survived death.

This is the story of this group of forward thinkers: many of whom were driven to the spirit world by personal tragedy, some whose feeling of loss lead to their own suicides. It is the story of the greatest ghost hunt of any age.

Here's a review from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/books … mp;emc=rss

‘Ghost Hunters’: Seeking Science in Séance
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: August 14, 2006

In the late 1880’s, shortly after he helped found an organization to research the supernatural, William James confidently predicted that within 25 years science would resolve once and for all whether the dead could speak to the living.

He — and a handful of other brilliant 19th-century intellectuals — was also fairly confident that the answer would be yes.

And why not? Science had begun to pull back the veil on some of the cosmos’s deepest mysteries. If there were invisible radio and electromagnetic waves, perhaps there was an undetected link between a spirit world and this one.

In “Ghost Hunters,� Deborah Blum’s sympathetic account, these “psychical researchers� are not simply a bunch of smart men (and a couple of women) obsessed with a dumb idea, but rather courageous freethinkers willing to endure the establishment’s scorn. This quirky band, she argues, was more scientific than the scientists and more spiritual than the theologians who ridiculed them.

People like Henry Sidgwick, a classics don at Cambridge who co-founded the British Society for Psychical Research, worried about “humankind stripped of faith.� As Ms. Blum writes, “He shuddered at the empty silence of what he called ‘the non-moral universe.’ � Didn’t the church understand, Sidgwick wrote in his diary, that “if the results of our investigation are rejected, they must inevitably carry your miracles along with them� ?

Nor could Sidgwick and his associates understand how scientists could reject their claims without even bothering to investigate.

Ms. Blum details the supernatural studies of James; Sidgwick and his wife, Nora; his student Fred Myers; and other British and American scholars, including the co-founder of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, and the Nobel-winning scientist Charles Richet. Despite their differences, what nearly all of them shared was the death of a loved one; behind their lofty scientific and moral motives was also the very human desire to reconnect with a lost love.

Ms. Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, can tell a good ghost story, and there were many during this unsettled period of industrialization and urbanization when belief in the occult swept through America. All that’s missing in the tales of dead apparitions, moving furniture and sudden revelations of tightly held secrets is the “Twilight Zone� theme song.

Yet after traipsing from Bombay to Boston, through hundreds of candle-lit séance rooms with their elaborate “spirit cabinets,� where glowing apparitions would appear and objects fly, what the ghost hunters mostly found was fraud.

That is, until William James met Lenora Piper, a tall, respectable Beacon Hill housewife who would settle into her favorite armchair surrounded by puffed pillows and contact dead souls without charging a fee. James met her shortly after the death of his year-old son, Herman. For years Piper was the pet project of the American and British psychical research associations, which paid her a wage to make her less susceptible to fakery (though that strategy would seem to carry its own risks).

They shadowed her movements, interrogated her contacts and shipped her off to Britain, where she would be less likely to have confederates helping her. To test her trances they stuck her with pins, held ammonia under her nose, even put a match to her skin.

Hundreds of times she was wrong. But then there were those frequent occasions when she seemed endowed with otherworldly power. One London test devised by the physicist Oliver Lodge was to ask a distant uncle, Robert, to mail an object belonging to Robert’s long-dead twin brother. Piper, fingering the ornate gold watch Robert sent, was able to name the brothers and told a story from their childhood about a near drowning and the killing of a cat that only the twins would have known.

About 10 years ago the popular science writer Martin Gardner wrote an essay titled “How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James. He discussed the way cunning mediums subtly fish for information and the network of professional spiritualists who shared information.

But “Ghost Hunters" is less interested in the sociology of bamboozlement than in giving a respectful accounting of what the participants saw and felt. This approach has benefits, but among its drawbacks are the sometimes credulous reports of telepathy, telekinesis or contacts with the dead.

That is not the book’s only weakness. Shifting the spotlight among the large cast and larger number of supernatural tales often gives the book a jumpy, episodic feel. And it doesn’t leave much room for wider discussion of the links between the psychological and philosophical work that James and others were engaged in, or of the often erotically charged atmosphere of séances presided over mostly by women with few career options in that high-buttoned era.

Ultimately what distinguished James and his colleagues from many of their scientific peers was their humbleness. To think one can divine everything in an infinite universe is an act of extreme hubris. As it turned out, when the 25 years that James thought would settle the issue had passed, he had to conclude that hardly any progress had been made. “I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, he said.

Ms. Blum relates that she too has been humbled by her efforts. In the acknowledgments, she writes, “When I started this book, I saw myself as the perfect author to explore the supernatural, a career science writer anchored in place with the sturdy shoes of common sense. But now, after her historical research and contemporary encounters with people who had ghost stories to tell, she says, though still grounded in reality, “I’m just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness."

And a little humility, particularly in a writer, is never a bad thing.

Noting the dismissive flavor of the latter part of the above review, and the fact that, after 25 years, James concluded that hardly any progress had been made, Blum writes in the Fortean Times piece:

The stature of some of the leading psychical researchers ... helped to give the subject credibility and prominence.

Using their combined clout, for instance, Richet and James were able to convince the Congress of Experimental Psychology to allow an international survey of crisis apparitions to be part of that organisation's programme. Wallace, as chair of the British Association for the Advancement of Science's biology subcommittee, wedges a presentation on telepathy into the association's annual meeting. In 1891, the celebrated American writer, Mark Twain, published an essay in Harper's declaring that the psychical researchers had accomplished what many thought impossible: they had made studying the occult respectable.

Further, Twain said, the SPR pioneers had freed people like himself to speak out on such subjects. He therefore was going to announce his own belief in telepathy, which Twain liked to call "mental telegraphy" after the telegraph. He had tried to publish on the subject earlier, but even his own reputation had not swayed editors. Now, he wrote, the psychical researchers had "succeeded in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done - they have convinced the world that mental telegraphy is not a jest, but a fact, and that it is a thing not rare but exceedingly common. They have done our age a service - and a very great service, I think."

Quite obviously, I'm quoting Twain here because I agree with him. But, equally obviously, his sense of triumph was premature. The community of science did not agree with his analysis; rather, leaders in the research community became increasingly hostile. Some of this was a reaction to the rampant fraud practised by mediums and psychics; some to the continuing lack of verifiable results. Titchener's concern that psychical research was a resource drain and a waste of time gradually became the dominant point of view. Scientific leaders began to actively punish those who pursued paranormal questions.

As Wallace complained - and this was after he'd been recognised as a founding father of evolution theory - a scientist seeking to investigate the supernatural found himself demoted in stature, "set down as credulous and superstitious, if not openly accused of falsehood and imposture". As such treatment intensified, scientists with a reputation to lose began withdrawing from the work. Some very good scientist - JJ Thompson, discoverer of the electron, Marie Curie, the remarkable radiation researcher - flirted with psychical studies and turned away. In the decades that followed, those who did tackle supernatural science found themselves marginalized.

I think, and I suspect few would argue, that world-class science cannot flourish in such a hostile environment. Can anything? In this case, as psychical research fell from grace - with the rise of the industrial, sceptical, mechanical 20th century - so fell funding, publication opportunities and respect. Again, this is not to deny that some excellent and provocative paranormal research was done in subsequent years and that quality work is done today. As with all research endeavours, paranormal studies have benefited from technological advances, from brain-imaging techniques to energy-monitoring devices. Still, they tend to lack the scope, the profile, and even the insight that the Victorian intellectuals brought to the problem.

It's interesting to me that Nora Sidgewick, one of the members and researchers of the SPR, was the sister of Arthur Balfour, the guy who gave Palestine to the Zionists. It was with the arising of the Zionist/Jewish control over science that interest in the paranormal was so thoroughly suppressed. Just an observation.

Review from Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/ … ex_np.html

Ghost world

Torn between the spiritual and the rational, William James and the Society for Psychical Research sought to document the supernatural -- and found some spooky evidence.

By Laura Miller

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to answer questions that seemed terribly pressing at the time: Is there life after death? Is the human mind more than a collection of chemical and electrical reactions? Does some kind of divine intelligence inform the universe? Of course, those questions haven't gone away, despite fears on the part of SPR members that scientific materialism would soon become the ruling dogma of Western life.

The "ghost hunters" of the SPR were far from being the conglomeration of kooks you might expect. The society attracted some of the great minds of its era, including American psychologist and philosopher William James. Besides James, the SPR could claim many professors, a pioneering evolutionary theorist, several important physicists, two Nobel Prize winners, a distinguished chemist, the principal of the first women's college at Cambridge and the discoverers or developers of half a dozen essential tools for modern life, from the cathode ray tube to wireless telegraphy.

Deborah Blum's new history of the society's early days, "Ghost Hunters," professes to focus on James' involvement with the group (he's the best known of the initial members), but it's really a broader story. The society was founded by men (and one woman) who felt torn between the spiritual sustenance of religious traditions and the scientific worldview that was transforming their lives and their understanding of the universe -- especially Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They were people, Blum writes, who "craved a refuge from the increasingly belligerent stands taken by both religious and scientific leaders" and "believed that objective and intelligent investigation could provide answers to the troubling metaphysical questions of the time."

Take Alfred Russell Wallace, whose own independently developed theory of natural selection was presented with Darwin's at a London scientific meeting in 1859. Although he continued to study and defend evolution, Wallace decided that its mechanics lacked something crucial. He believed in the soul, and possibly in a divine hand directing some of the evolutionary process (a notion that seems like an early form of intelligent design). "Evidence for such an artful planner could only be found by investigating in the supernatural realm" is how Blum describes Wallace's answer to this quandary. Spiritualism -- from séances to performing mind readers to parlor games like the Ouija board -- was all the rage in Europe and America. Most of it was bogus, but a few examples struck Wallace and other thinkers as their only leads in a quest that was of the utmost importance to humanity.

This project wasn't popular with either clergymen or other scientists. T.H. Huxley, who functioned more or less as Darwinism's attack dog in public debates about evolution, told Wallace, "The only good argument I can see in a demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better to live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a séance." Most 19th century scientists, Blum writes, "felt a personal responsibility not to investigate claims of the supernatural but to debunk them out of hand."

This sentiment was made abundantly clear to the SPR. The society's prominent members suffered professionally for advocating even the most rigorous and skeptical studies of the paranormal, no matter how distinguished they were in their other work. One was hounded out of his professorship at Columbia University, and others were roundly ridiculed and accused of incipient insanity in scientific journals. For this, and not unreasonably, Blum admires their "intellectual courage."

Here, let me interrupt this review to comment on the similarity of the attacks on those who engage in psychical research - no matter how scientific - to the attacks on those who point out that Zionists control American politics and even those from older times who suggested that there was a Zionist plot to take over the world. As Deborah Blum wrote, quoted above: "I think, and I suspect few would argue, that world-class science cannot flourish in such a hostile environment. Can anything?"

So, how is it that this scientific thought control has been imposed?

We see the clues in the above citations: it was purely and simply defamation. As Douglas Reed has chronicled in his book "The Controversy of Zion," and Andrew Lobaczewski has described in his book, Political Ponerology, defamation is the major tool of psychological deviants, and most often, Zionist deviants.

Now, why in the world would deviants want to suppress any valid studies about the so-called paranormal? I can think of several reasons: the first one is that it enables them to control skeptical people with scientific ignorance of such matters. The second one is that it enables them to control credulous believers with religious ignorance. It makes everything black or white: either you are a "rational" skeptic or you are a ditz-head believer.

Back to the review:

But one of the peculiarities of this gracefully written and always fascinating book is Blum's noncommittal stance toward the ideas driving most of the society's research. Does she believe that the handful of well-documented, genuinely mystifying phenomena the society recorded qualify as evidence of the supernatural? You won't learn that for sure from reading "Ghost Hunters." Of course, the very fact that she has written a book about the group and presents their efforts sympathetically suggests she does. Or she might simply be endorsing the idea that scientists should keep their minds open and not dismiss a subject of study "out of hand" -- some of the society's most passionate critics insisted that they'd refuse to believe in such matters even if they could be "proved."

So what about that evidence? For all the attention Blum pays to James and his intermittent seriousness about the SPR's research, "Ghost Hunters" is really a tale of two mediums. The first, a Boston shopkeeper's wife named Leonora Piper, was the essence of respectability. The researchers all found her "unguarded, basically uncomplicated, nice." Yet, in a trance state and speaking through "spirit guides" -- or "control" personalities, as the researchers viewed them -- she could deliver "breathtaking" results. She could fully and correctly name the father of a man who was presented to her nameless and with his face hooded. She could tell people where to find things they didn't even realize were lost. Handed a lock of hair by a visitor who didn't know whose head it had come from, she could supply surprisingly accurate information about its source.

The other medium was Piper's complete opposite: Eusapia Palladino, a coarse, illiterate, promiscuous Neapolitan barfly in whose presence furniture flew across the room, curtains billowed without a breeze and strange luminous forms glowed in the air. The trouble with Eusapia (or one of the troubles -- she was an outrageous character) is that, besides being "grubby and distasteful," as Blum puts it, "she always cheated when she could." But on those rare occasions when she could be thoroughly restrained physically (this usually required the efforts of three grown men) in a brightly lit room that had been meticulously searched beforehand, she could still achieve remarkable effects. The SPR's experiments with her were, Blum writes, a "frustrating mix of deliberate fraud and inexplicable event."

Although Eusapia was a law unto herself, she represented a problem that plagued the SPR and other would-be legitimate paranormal researchers: the professional medium. These hucksters charged fees to conjure up the spirits of customers' dead relatives in darkened middle-class parlors or performed astounding feats onstage. They used slates, placed under a séance table, on which supposedly spectral hands recorded messages for the living, or asked questions that were answered by mysterious knocks and bangs. They sat in closed cabinets (to concentrate the "psychic energy") while ghostly figures roamed the room, some touching or even kissing the séance participants.

All of this foofaraw was faked, and much of the SPR's work lay in debunking it. Blank "spirit slates" were swapped under the table for slates with preinscribed messages (derived from research into the visitors' backgrounds). Thumbnails and cracking toe joints supplied the mysterious knocking. Hollow boot heels contained gauze saturated in luminous paint that could be pulled on wires or strings attached to the medium's feet. Even someone whose limbs were being held down by other people, as Eusapia's often were, could devise artful ways of wriggling that would, in the dark, leave two men mistakenly hanging onto just one hand while she used the other hand to overturn the table. In a way, the ingenuity evident in these frauds may place them among the most impressive achievements described in "Ghost Hunters."

The Society for Psychical Research hired skeptics and professional conjurers to investigate popular mediums, including a superhumanly dogged Australian named Richard Hodgson. Hodgson was the bane of the professional medium world. His exposé of the famous occult seer Madame Blavatsky (founder of the Theosophical Society) caused a sensation and infuriated some of the more credulous members of the SPR itself. Hodgson spent a few years chewing up and spitting out every professional psychic he looked into, until the society decided that it would automatically disqualify as a subject of serious study any medium who took money for his or her services. The SPR still kept its hand in, though, polishing its image as a tough critic by occasionally sending its investigators out to debunk a celebrated psychic.

Hodgson met his match, however, in Leonora Piper, and the SPR generally came to see her as their best hope for proving that something that defied conventional scientific understanding was going on. As James put it, in defending himself against a critic, "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are: it is enough if you can prove one single crow to be white." Piper, he explained, was "my own white crow." Hodgson policed Piper's sittings and presided over them like a glowering totem, causing James and others to worry that he kept their "white crow" in a perpetual and damaging "stress state," but even Hodgson grew to believe that she had extraordinary powers.

The society could never quite settle on the source of those powers, though. Even the SPR's most hardheaded member, Nora Sidgwick, felt that their data supported the existence of some kind of telepathy. Nora was remarkable. The wife of SPR's founder and first principal of Newnham, the first women's college at Cambridge, she was also an amateur mathematician whose idea of fun was helping her brother-in-law, physics Nobelist Lord Rayleigh, with astronomical calculations. Her husband, Henry Sidgwick, Blum relates, "considered her the brightest of his circle." At the thought that her job at Newnham might take her away from her SPR duties, he fretted about doing the work himself: "My intellect will be an inferior substitute."

Nora worked on the "Census of Hallucinations," a project that attempted to survey as many Britons as possible with the following question: "Have you -- when in good health, free from anxiety and completely awake -- had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a human being, or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence, when no one was there?" In the more credible accounts of such experiences, it was found that "all of the visual hallucinations occurred within 12 hours of the death of the person seen." These hallucinations were dubbed "crisis apparitions."

In the end, 17,000 Britons and 7,100 Americans (as well as people in other countries) were surveyed for the census. The positive responses were strenuously winnowed down to people who could have had no prior knowledge or suspicion of the death, who showed no trace of "dreams or delirium" and whose accounts could be verified by at least one other person. The usual response to premonitions of a loved one's death is that people often think of friends and relatives and simply forget about all the times when the person doesn't turn out to be dead later on. The SPR tried to zero in on actual hallucinations reported by people who had no other history of uncanny experiences. When Nora ran her statistical calculations on the results, she found that crisis apparitions occur more often than could be attributed to mere coincidence.

Of course, the survey wouldn't hold up to the statistical standards of today's pollsters, but it was a heroic effort to bring some quantifiable order to the mysteries of these surprisingly common ghostly tales. But what did it mean? Nora Sidgwick and some other members thought that all of the phenomena the SPR investigated were telepathic in nature. The crisis apparitions, for example, might result from some wild burst of telepathic force triggered by the trauma of death. Even mediums who seemed to be channeling secrets from the dead were probably picking up the information from other people in the room who knew the deceased.


Other SPR members believed that the spirits of the dead really could speak through mediums like Leonora Piper. This faction was most excited by a complicated three-way psychic relay between Piper in London, a classics lecturer who practiced "automatic" (spirit-directed) writing in Cambridge and (strangely enough) a sister of writer Rudyard Kipling who also did automatic writing in Calcutta, India. Instructions communicated via Piper in Greek and Latin (she knew neither language) seemed to have been understood by the entities communicating via the classics lecturer and the lady in India. This led some researchers to conclude that the disembodied spirits -- deceased SPR leaders, no less -- were using the women as conduits.

Some, like James and Sidgwick, were never quite persuaded that the society's research pointed toward an afterlife. All James was sure of was that the scientists who condemned him and his colleagues for their efforts were prejudiced in their refusal to even consider investigating the matter. It's true that, as depicted by Blum, the SPR's foes seem extraordinarily vehement, obsessive and vindictive. But it's also true that few people in this account come across as sufficiently "objective," which is what James promised the SPR would be. [Note: This last seems to be the obligatory defamatory "dig".]

Henry Sidgwick, Nora's husband, pursued his studies of the supernatural in part because he feared living in a "non-moral universe." "Without religion," as Blum puts it, "without a Deity promising punishment and reward -- Sidgwick wondered what would bind people to principles of honor and decency." His co-founder, Frederic Myers, harbored a desperate, lifelong love for a woman who had committed suicide, and much of the "evidence" he recorded later on involved communications with her from beyond the grave. (His wife, who only learned of this after his death, refused to allow anything about it to be published.) When the fate of the human race or your own poor broken heart hangs in the balance, it's hard to be objective about anything. [Note: Another obligatory dig. Being concerned about ethics or having a broken heart does not make a person necessarily non-objective. This is just pure defamation.]

It's also hard to puzzle through the evidence for yourself when by necessity so much is left out of "Ghost Hunters." As a rule, uncanny true stories become less and less astonishing the more you learn about them. Even the SPR is a little whitewashed here. Blum makes no mention of the notorious Ballechin House affair, which occurred during the period she covers in her book. In that fiasco, some society members rented what was reputedly "the most haunted house in Scotland." During the course of their stay, one excitable lady claimed to see apparitions of nuns on the property (not usually part of the house's reputed hauntings, but spectral nuns are a common fixture in British ghost stories). Doubt was cast on her reports and later the whole expedition was ridiculed by one of the participants in the London Times.

The Society for Psychical Research wasn't fatally damaged by these and other scandals. In fact, it continues to this day, and counts luminaries such as philosopher Henri Bergson and British Prime Minister A.J. Balfour among its former presidents. Yet somehow, it hasn't gotten any closer to its goal or to achieving scientific respect. (The problem that the phenomena it studies can't be reliably replicated is, as Blum notes, the chief stumbling block.) James believed this was because "nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other and untidy." Later, he declared, "I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor. I am willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is my truth, as I now see it."

It's easy to see this bravura stance as courageous when we know the defiant scientist is right -- and especially when he writes as well as William James, using rhetoric that calls up echoes of Galileo and Darwin. To my mind, the more appropriate coda is Leonora Piper's plain-spoken statement on the bizarre trances and cryptic utterances whose repercussions dominated her adult life: "My opinion is today as it was 18 years ago. Spirits may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know."

An interview with Deborah Blum:
http://www.madisonmagazine.com/article. … _id=225408

Ghostly Encounters
Pulitzer Prize-winner Deborah Blum's new book explores the science of the supernatural

By Shelby Deering

Deborah Blum, a journalism professor at the UW--Madison and professional science writer, has recently published her fifth and much buzzed-about book Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. Blum, a professor since 1997, has an extensive and impressive writing career that includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today. Her series on the ethics of primate research, Monkey Wars (which was later turned into a book), won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Ghost Hunters has been attracting a great deal of local and national attention because of its controversial take on the science of the supernatural. Madison Magazine sat down with Blum recently in her Vilas Hall office to discuss the success of her latest publication and to ask the question everyone seems to be asking her these days: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Madison Magazine: So tell me all about your latest publication, Ghost Hunters.

Deborah Blum: The book is about the best ghost hunt in scientific history. It's the only time that world-class scientists have been involved in trying to understand the supernatural. Today when we look at people who study the paranormal, we tend to think of them as sort of "fringe." But at this particular time, you had people who won the Nobel Prize, people who pioneered wireless radio were involved, you had William James who was the leading psychologist and philosopher. And so, the book really started by saying, "If this is the best ghost hunt in the history of science, what did it find?" The book is about their hunt and then it's also about how we define reality. What's the nature of reality?

MM: What was the catalyst that initially compelled you to write this book?

DB: I had stumbled on some stuff about William James when I was working on my earlier book [Love at Goon Park], so that kind of got me started looking into it. And then I found this one report that James had done in which a young girl disappeared one morning. I read it and I thought, 'That is so creepy, that is so cool, and I would really like to look at what's behind those kinds of things.' So it was that story that really got me going. Even when I did the book proposal, I started with this story.

MM: Ghost Hunters is a far cry from the more scientific books you've written in the past, like Monkey Wars and Sex on the Brain. What are some differences that you found in writing a book about the supernatural, something that you can't really see or touch, as opposed to writing on scientific, more tangible things?

DB: Well, that's an interesting question! It's been interesting because this is the first book that I've done that has not been reviewed by a single science publication. Everything else has been reviewed by Science, reviewed by Nature, but this one has been reviewed by Entertainment Weekly. And in The New York Times it's gotten reviewed a lot, but it's the most invisible book in science. The weird thing about it is I wrote it like a story and it's much more narrative than anything I've done. Goon Park was a little narrative, but this I wanted to tell it like an unfolding story. I wrote it in a much more narrative style than anything I've ever done. It's really interesting but hard to do. Real scientists would not call any of this science. But when I was writing about the work that [the ghost hunters] considered science, I wrote it like I would real science. I wrote it in a way that tried to explain that I thought they were really smart ideas. So, I didn't try to make fun of what they did. The one thing that people keep saying after they read the book is, 'Well, what do you believe?' And I tell them, 'I'm not trying to tell you what I believe, but what I did want to do was write this in a way that you could get to the end of the book and see why these people thought it was real and why they followed it for twenty-five years and didn't say, 'Oh, this is all fraud and hocus-pocus.' That was like the thing I was determined to in the book was make readers see why it was so credible to the people who did the work.

MM: Were there any similarities in writing a scientific book and doing this book?

DB: There's a lot less science in this book. There's nothing technical about this book at all. I had the real pleasure of telling a story about science in which I don't have to go into technical explanations of anything. What it does do, if you look at it that way, is make you think about 'What is science? What does science choose to study and not study? What do we decide is scientifically worthwhile?' And I did want people to get that out of the book. I did want people to be able to say, 'Does science always make the right decisions?'

MM: Ghost Hunters has been getting some great reviews. In a review from the Washington Post: "Ghost Hunters contains a wealth of lively and provocative reading." It got a great review in O Magazine and in other publications as well. How do you feel about all of this? Excited? Surprised?

DB: It's fun for me because I've said to my friends, 'I've broken out of the nerd category.' So when O did it and when Entertainment Weekly gave it an 'A,' I thought, 'This is great for a science writer like me.' So I've really enjoyed it. The other thing that's been interesting, because I've been doing a lot of promotional radio stuff, is all of the different people I've heard from. It's again really different from my usual circle. So I feel like it's a book that allows me as a science writer to look at something in a different way. And yeah, I love attention (chuckles).

MM: Why do you think there are so many different varieties of people that are interested in the book?

DB: I think that we'd all like to know if ghosts are real, right? And we'd all like to know what life after death might look like, if you get that. And also, I think it's really the questions, because [the book] is about possibilities. One of the things I've thought is that science makes the world a very small and limited world in a lot of ways. Because it has to work by these rules or it's not real. And so, I think sometimes people feel boxed in by the rules of science. What are the possibilities beyond the scientific box? I think that appeals to people. And then for me, this is something that I hadn't thought about until after I did the book: If you believe that we're really talking about natural abilities that we haven't uncovered yet, like telepathy, what it also says is, 'We're a lot more interesting than we give ourselves credit for.'

MM: But on the flip side, there was also a review of the book in The New York Times that said one of the book's weaknesses was "Shifting the spotlight among the large cast and larger number of supernatural tales" which gave the book "a jumpy, episodic feel." If you could rewrite the book, what would you do differently?

DB: That's a good question. It does have a large cast and a lot of stories. And you know, right now I wouldn't rewrite it at all. But five years from now, I might look at it and say, 'Okay, I could lose that.' But at the moment, I think it works really well. I admit that it has a large cast of characters. I dropped about a good third of them writing the book. It was originally a much larger cast. There's just too many good stories, too many events. Some of the people I've heard from have said, 'Well, you just mention this medium,' and I say, 'This medium didn't fit in my story.' I worried about that going in and I feel like I worked really hard to deal with it, but I don't think it's "jumpy and episodic." I think it actually flows pretty well. Do I think it's perfect? Well, no. No book is. I never write anything I think is perfect.

MM: In a nutshell, describe your background.

DB: You know, I think of myself as a mainstream science writer. I'm the daughter of a biologist. I did my undergrad in journalism and anthropology and my masters degree here at UW-Madison in the environmental reporting program. And I've been a working science writer since 1982. Past president of the National Association of Science Writers. Won a Pulitzer, all this stuff. And actually, I think those are all things that made me a really good person to write about the supernatural.

MM: Out of all the books that you've written, which one is your favorite?

DB: I think this is the best-written book I've done. Love at Goon Park is more personal for me because it's about relationships and childrearing, so there are parts of it that I love. But, I love them all. They're all like children. Books are like children. You see things that you like about them and things that you don't. But they all to me are a different part of who I am as a writer, where I'm going.

MM: Apart from your own books, what is your favorite book of all time?

DB: Oh my gosh … well, let me preface this by saying that I believe that good nonfiction writers have to read a lot of fiction to learn the art and craft of storytelling. And the one book that I've hauled around with me since I was in high school is Pride and Prejudice. I love Jane Austen and despite the fact that my husband and my friends don't, I defend her to all comers. It would have to be her; she's just a part of my life.

MM: What's next for you?

DB: When I wrote this book, my agent loved this book. And she was like, 'You've finally learned how to write,' which is sort of an insult … but I'm writing a book on poison and murder, I have a contract. So Suzanne, my agent, said, 'You know, that poison book you've always wanted to do … ' And I was like, 'What poison book?' But I had, way back when, wanted to write a murder mystery that had to do with poison. So she said, 'Just write a few pages, write a four-page proposal.' So I did. Penguin Press bought it just a couple weeks ago. I haven't got all the stories I need because I only wrote a four-page proposal, but there's this period right when science was first figuring out how to catch poisoners. And then you find poisoners coming back and finding ways to get around the tests. And I really want to look at that cat-and-mouse game. There's about three really amazing forensic scientists that were sort of developing the art of catching poisoners. And I want to look at them, track the poisoners, and tell these murder stories.

SD: And lastly, the question that's been on the minds of anyone who's read Ghost Hunters…do you believe in ghosts?

DB: You know, I don't believe in blood-spattered, chain-clanking ghosts. But here's what I think is the equally interesting question: Why do we see them? And to me, I know people who will tell you stories when you know they saw something. That's the question. That really was what brought me to the point that said, 'It's a shame that science won't look at this.' Because people do see these things, and I would like to know why. And I do believe that people see them, even though I haven't myself.

Find Deborah Blum's book Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death at local retailers or amazon.com.

Another review:

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/b … 22.article

Supernatural
Two journalists take different approaches to ghost-hunting

October 22, 2006
BY ROGER K. MILLER
Marbles and Lego pieces from out of nowhere zoom across the room and drop to the floor, scorching hot. Coins and stones drop out of the air. Sofas levitate and tip over. Beds, tables and chests of drawers spin on the spot and fling themselves about. Iron fireplaces wrench themselves out of the wall. Room lights flash on and off, doors slam, brand-new flashlight batteries drain mysteriously. Dogs bark in completely dogless rooms. And preteen girls -- always a staple of supernatural situations -- are flung out of bed by unseen hands, gutturally growling horribly vulgar, un-girlish words.

In the world of ghostly investigation, England's "Enfield poltergeist" from the 1970s is one of the more spectacular cases. Its manifestations were observed by more than two dozen highly credible witnesses. And, like all of the occurrences in these two new books by journalistic ghost hunters, it defies, at one and the same time, both doubt and rational, scientific explanation.

For interesting details about the Enfield case, see Fortean Times67, 166 and 219. (Feb 2007) where there is an article about Maurice Grosse who passed away in October of 2006. He was considered to be one of Britain's greatest living ghost hunters who saw his job as simply to conduct field research in a scientific manner, collect evidence, and publish the results in a scientific format. This he did, but still was stalked mercilessly by the defamers.

Back to the review:

One book is historical, the other mostly contemporary; one is resolutely skeptical and neutral, the other skeptical but willing to be persuaded, because there just is too much weird stuff in the world. Each is intelligent, informative and, in its way, entertaining.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former science journalist and now an author and professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her Ghost Hunters is the heavyweight of the two, scrupulously researched along historiographical lines.

Will Storr vs. the Supernatural, by freelance British journalist Will Storr, is breezy and more free-form; Storr flits from site to site (mostly in Britain but also in the United States) and phenomenon to phenomenon, hoping to rope a ghost or otherwise nail down the supernatural. Its saucy yet serious manner is reminiscent of fellow Briton Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures With Extremists of a few years back.

The real center of Ghost Hunters is not, as its subtitle suggests, William James, the American pioneer in psychology and researcher in the paranormal, but Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife and mother and paranormal phenomenon. Her astounding capacities as a medium captured the attention of not only James but a crowd of 19th century scientists.

James, brother of the novelist Henry James, is central to the tale in that he was a leading name among several scientists who risked their reputations to search for scientific proof of life after death. But they might not have been able to endure the ridicule and persevere if, among the dozens of frauds working the spiritualist con, they had not come across a handful of remarkable people like Piper whose apparently supernatural powers -- to engage in metal telepathy and/or to summon the "spirits" of the deceased -- staggered the imagination.

By the mid-19th century, interest in extrasensory powers and other expressions of the supernatural was widespread. The topic attracted great names. When the British branch of the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, Mark Twain -- anguished for a quarter-century by a recurring dream about his brother's death -- joined. James was a founder of the American branch of the SPR in 1885.

The SPR's most indefatigable exposer of frauds was the Australian-born Richard Hodgson, but on Leonora Piper he broke his lance. Hodgson was finally won over when he was visited by a deceased friend through Piper in a session that, in Blum's account, is mind-boggling. "After sittings with 130 different visitors, he'd been persuaded of the impossible -- that the personality in the room was indeed a spirit, proof that his friend lived on."

Storr's researches have him associating with people who deal in such arcane wonders as apparitions, mysterious light globules, knocks, disembodied voices, and generally things that go bump -- and worse -- in the night.

A serious impulse lies behind his pursuits (though his seriousness about the impulse seems questionable). A lapsed Roman Catholic, he wonders: If all this supernatural stuff is not bogus, then the implications can be cosmic and frightening. What if his agnostic, basically pagan outlook is all wrong?

Much of what he comes across is genuinely spooky and, like the phenomena in Ghost Hunters, completely inexplicable. Perfectly reasonable, ordinary citizens have what can only be described as eye-popping supernatural experiences, and the explanations that zealous doubters give for dismissing them are less believable than the events themselves.

Not that some of the "ghost hunters" don't sound bogus. Based on little apparent training and no other authority than their own self-certainty, they set up shop as clairvoyants and parapsychologists ("We're actually scientists," one asserts).

With a perfectly straight face they intone twaddle like, "Lightning does not travel in straight lines unless it's called." We scarcely need the psychiatrist Storr interviews to tell us that more than a few of these ghost hunters are doing it to achieve a sense of importance with others -- and with themselves.


Conclusions? As we know, James and his colleagues never "proved" anything to science's total satisfaction. Neither has Storr, either to science's satisfaction or his own.

Blum's book, skillfully organized and felicitously written, lays out the facts like a good, extended piece of newspaper writing and lets the reader decide. Yet she cannot suppress a sense of wonderment that makes her say that writing the book "changed the way I thought. . . . I'm just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness."

Storr sounds more decisive and less gullible than when he started. He concludes bluntly that there is no such thing as an independent source of evil; if there is a battle between good and evil, it takes place in our heads. Yet ghosts exist, he says, and there is evidence of something following death. Fear of that unknown, he believes, creates faith (in its most inclusive sense), because "faith is for the frightened."

 

[Gimpy]

I had a chance to pick this up the other day, but I hedged. Instead I saved the money and picked up Ponerology. Still moving through it a bit at a time.

Have you had a chance to read through this one yet? I would like to hear your thoughts on it, before I put it on my wish list.


Gimpy