Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: psychical research movement, crisis apparitions, willing game, William James, New York, Leonora Piper (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In a compelling tale with resonance for today, Blum evokes a surprising sympathy for her band of tough-minded intellectuals—among them philosophers, psychologists, even two future Nobelists—who, around the turn of the 20th century, pursued the paranormal in an attempt to bridge the gap between faith and science at a time when religion was besieged by the theory of evolution and a new scientific outlook. Foremost in the Society for Psychical Research in America was the brilliant philosopher and psychologist William James, who like the others, risked his reputation in this unorthodox pursuit. Blum unearths the history of their research, their passionate friendships and debates, as well as their private doubts about the meaning of their work. Much of the society's efforts were devoted to exposing charlatans, but even the most dogged of the members, Richard Hodgson, was baffled by Boston's Leonora Piper, a reluctant medium of rare gifts. As Hodgson obsessively studies this medium, the story grows weirder and weirder, but Blum, who was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Award for Love at Goon Park, tells it straight, never overdramatizing the strange events. She achieves deep poignancy at moments that in less gifted hands could have seemed most laughable. The result is a moving portrait of a fascinating group of people and a first-rate slice of cultural history. (Aug. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

When it came to the paranormal, the American psychologist William James manifested what he called "the will to believe" -- not necessarily in occult phenomena themselves, but in their worthiness for rational inquiry. Yet toward the end of a century in which inventors created technologies that reduced the power of time and space (photography and telegraphy) and in which scientists introduced theories that shattered old beliefs (paleontology, evolution), the Harvard professor met with resistance -- and some titters -- when he suggested applying scientific method to mind-reading and spiritualism, two of the late 19th century's most tantalizing fads, along with the possibility of an afterlife and other supernatural questions. These out-of-hand dismissals galled James. As far as he was concerned, writes the science journalist Deborah Blum, "it was past time . . . for science to open its mind." Despite being already overburdened with his academic duties and not in the best of health, in the mid-1880s James undertook the mission himself.

He found ready allies in England, where educated folk tended to be less hostile to the supernatural: No less a figure than Alfred Russel Wallace, who had framed the theory of evolution almost simultaneously with Darwin, took part in séances and tended to believe in spiritual powers, and Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick and his brilliant wife, Nora, were eager to apply polling and mathematics to alleged psychic phenomena. The complementary late-19th-century inquiries by learned men and women on both sides of the Atlantic are the subject of Blum's absorbing but standoffish new book, Ghost Hunters.

The dogged investigators, most of them busy people with other duties to fulfill, gathered case studies, attended séances, designed tests of claimants' veracity, and ran what came to be known as the Census of Hallucinations, which counted apparitions of persons who were found to have died on the very day they made their appearances. According to a method worked out by Nora Sidgwick, Census respondents reported a correlation between apparitions and same-day deaths that was "442.6 times the chance rate of .0723." An impressive result, one might think, but James wasn't satisfied. If the sample had been larger -- say 50,000 respondents, instead of the 17,000 combined in England and the United States -- he thought the statisticians might have had something.

To enhance their respectability, the Anglo-British colleagues tried to reach a consensus on ruling out mediums -- the conductors of séances, in which tabletops rapped on their own, blank slates suddenly bore writing, musical instruments played spontaneously, and wraiths wafted in and out of the room. So many mediums had been caught faking it over the years that they had become an embarrassment, and James, among others, recommended that they be shunned. Nonetheless, a few investigators became virtual groupies for the redoubtable Eusapia Palladino, an Italian medium who might have sprung from the brain of Chaucer. Wild and sexy (she liked to take off her clothes during her spells and often woke up avid to make love), Palladino was a shameless cheater -- except when she apparently wasn't. As one observer summed her up, "I have always said that she will resort to trickery if she can, but if she was carefully watched she still performs the most marvelous acts [e.g., making tables tip] and some of these I can explain only on supernormal grounds."

Leonora Piper, an American, was a more decorous performer. Her modus operandi was to go into a trance, channel a Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit, who supposedly lived from 1790-1860, and, in Phinuit's accented English, amaze visitors with details from their private lives that she was unlikely to have discovered by earthly means. Shy and bemused, Piper claimed to have no idea how she did it, nor did she exploit herself as a money-maker like so many of her peers. Invariably she defeated the efforts of detectives to trace the "natural" methods by which she might have gleaned so much startling information. Yet when Phinuit was asked to speak French, he could hardly get out a word, and French authorities had no record of his existence.

Blum has a wonderful eye for what the novelist Evan S. Connell calls "the luminous detail." Nora Sidgwick, Blum tells us, was struck by the fact that "everyone who claimed to see a ghost described the dead person as fully dressed. Why should that be? Why should there be 'ghosts of clothes?' " But Blum's way with her fascinating material is a bit bloodless. By the end, the reader wants to ask the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (for her 1992 reporting on primate research), "So what do you think about all these weird goings-on?"

Periodically, she cites a skeptic. For example, she paraphrases a telling observation by T.H. Huxley, the eloquent champion of Darwinism: "He did not doubt that a talented conjuror . . . could fool even a talented scientist." And, indeed, some years after James's death in 1910, the most effective foil of mediums and psychics proved to be Harry Houdini. Hovering over the whole era, perhaps, is David Hume's devastating formula for judging miracles, which seems equally applicable to the claims of mind-readers, mediums and the like: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." In other words, faith aside, which is more likely: that Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes, or that the source for the evangelists' story simply spaced out on the mountain that day? That a repeating cheater like Palladino goes straight every once in a while and performs a true wonder, or that we just haven't figured out how she manages her latest sleight of hand? Perhaps Blum's title, with its echo of the movie comedy "Ghostbusters," hints that she lines up with Huxley and Hume. But ultimately, she signs off leaving us in doubt.

In the end, this may not matter. Most readers will probably come to her book with a mind already made up one way or another on the range of supernatural phenomena. In any case, for believers and agnostics alike, Ghost Hunters contains a wealth of lively and provocative reading.

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143038958
• ISBN-13: 978-0143038955
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #660,876 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story of Heroes, August 3, 2006

By	C L (Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Hardcover)

Ms Blum has written a wonderful story of a heroic group of people, scientests who believed that science should explore and, if possible, test the supernatural. They endured ridicule and scorn from other scientests who believed that science should deal only with what could be seen and heard and from religious leaders who believed that scientests should leave the supernatural to them. Year after year, this group of people worked brutally hard, exposing so many fraudulent claims of supernatural occurences that you could understand if they just gave up. But, they found a few examples of the unexplainable that could not be disproven by scientific methods, and these examples are fascinating. If you are unsure about life after death and the supernatural, you will still be unsure after you read this book, but you will have a lot to think about and, also, you will be aware of some brilliant, determined people who formed a scientific organization that survived its critics and still exists today.

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Perfect 10!, September 11, 2006

By	Michael E. Tymn (Kailua, Hawaii) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Hardcover)

If five stars were not the limit, I'd give this book a more perfect 10!

My first awareness of this fascinating book was an e-mail from a friend who knew of my interest in the paranormal, especially spirit communication. I replied that I had not heard of the book and was not particularly interested in "ghost hunting." By the title of the book and without knowing the subtitle, I had assumed that this book was about modern parapsychologists visiting haunted houses with gadgets designed to detect "ghostly" cold spots and energy fields. I assumed wrong.

When, a few weeks later, I saw the subtitle - "William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death" - I immediately knew the book was about the pioneering psychical research of yesteryear. It is a subject very dear to me. In fact, I have written often on the subject and had recently completed my own book, "The Articulate Dead: Bringing the Spirit World Alive" (due for release by Galde Press later this year or early next year).

Noting that Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and journalism professor, I had more or less anticipated a contemptuous treatment of the subject matter. Since journalists generally tend to ape mainstream scientists in superciliously smirking, snickering, sneering, and scoffing at the paranormal, I assumed Blum would find much caustic humor in the pursuits of educated and reputable men (and one woman) who dared stray outside the bounds of scientific fundamentalism. I assumed wrong again.

As the subtitle suggests, Harvard professor William James, remembered more for his contributions to psychology and philosophy than psychical research, was one of the early leaders in scientific research aimed ultimately at determining whether consciousness survives bodily death. The research was prompted by advances in science - advances that seemed to relegate religious dogma and doctrine to mere superstition. "Could any God - Christian or otherwise - survive in an age where religion feared science and science denied faith?" Blum expresses the sentiments of Frederic W. H. Myers, another pioneering researcher. "It was into that divide that Myers saw psychical research bravely marching. The goal was to bridge research and religion, to show that they were not incompatible, that one could even explain the other."

Myers appears to have been motivated, Blum observes, by a feeling that science was reducing the universe to a large machine and people to small ones. Other scholars and scientists were similarly motivated. "He was an educated man; he understood and even appreciated the arguments for a purely mechanical universe," Blum describes Edmund Gurney, one of Myers' research associates. "Life lived as a cog in a cold, godless, indifferent machine, however, had come to seem to him unbearable."

The research was primarily with mediums. "Mediums were peculiar creatures; there was no denying it about even the best of them," Blum explains. "How could they not be? They spent hours of their time surrounded by people desperate to talk with the dead. They fell into trances reputedly inhabited by ghosts. They agreed to be hogtied by investigating scientists. Skeptics mocked them; journalists parodied them; former friends feared them. One had to wonder why anyone would choose to become a medium."

The most credible and intriguing of all mediums was Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife, who was discovered by James and studied for some 18 years by Richard Hodgson, an Australian who was recruited to head up the American Society for Psychical Research. Hodgson had a reputation as a debunker of fraudulent "mediums," but became convinced that Mrs. Piper was the real thing, what James called his "white crow," the one that proved all crows weren't black.

The researchers were often frustrated by charlatans as well as by their arrogant scientific colleagues who assumed the subject was too absurd for educated men. One such haughty professor was James Cattell of Columbia University. He sneered at his fellow professor, James H. Hyslop, when Hyslop became interested in psychical research, and when Hyslop published articles that strongly supported non-mechanistic theories, Cattell tried to have him fired. In his defense, Hyslop, noting scientific efforts to find a species of useless fish to support Darwin's theory, asked "why it is so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?"

Other researchers, including Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection theory of evolution, William Crookes, a brilliant chemist and physicist whose invention led to the X-ray, Oliver Lodge, a pioneer in electricity and radio, and William Barrett, a Dublin physicist knighted for his scientific work, came under attack by their peers when they dared report on evidence that did not fit into the post-Darwin scientific paradigm. "Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name," James lashed out as the cynics, "and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow `scientific' bounds."

While some of the researchers, including Wallace, Crookes, Barrett, Lodge, Hodgson, and Hyslop were able to satisfy themselves that a spirit world exists, and, concomitantly, that consciousness does survive bodily death, James was more guarded and would remain warily perched on the "fence" separating believers from non-believers, seeing that position as the only way to reconcile the differences between science and religion. Moreover, James recognized the difference between the subjectivity of proof and the objectivity of evidence. "The concrete evidence for most of the `psychic' phenomena under discussion is good enough to hang a man 20 times over," James once admonished the scientific fundamentalists.

The closing chapters of the book deal with the famous cross-correspondences - messages coming through different mediums in different parts of the world, which in themselves meant nothing but when collected by the researchers formed coherent messages. The best of these messages were said to have come from Frederic Myers after his death in 1901. Hodgson also began offering convincing messages through Mrs. Piper after his death in 1905.

In the end, it is a matter of what James called the "will to believe" versus the "will to disbelieve."

Blum examines the work of the psychical researchers with respect, objectivity, and understanding. She apparently spent three years researching the subject. I thought I knew the subject pretty well from over 10 years of study, but I learned a lot from this book. As I consumed the book over mochas at Starbucks, I delighted in my initial false assumptions and continually marveled at the accuracy and detail of the stories as well as at Blum's prolific writing.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The History of a Quest, September 25, 2006

By	Mark Newbold (Pittsburg, KS United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Hardcover)

An excellent, insightful and poetic book that provides historical insights into the founding and early years of both the Psychical Research Society in the UK and its American counter-part. Moreover it's a biographical study focusing on William James as the personal lens by which to view the lives and dedication of the initial founders of these organizations and the pioneering work they began. The historical/biographical efforts along these lines has been sorely needed for sometime. Nothing in contemporary parapsychological literature quite compares to Ms. Blum's work.
This is a complex and admirable psychological study of these remarkably brilliant men and women that questioned those existential questions of the survival of death in a rigorous scientific manner for the first time. Driven, passionate and personally tragic for many of the original founders, this offers a glimpse into the social forces that sent these men on their search for that "otherness" beyond the mundane world.
This work also offers a brief but excellent overview of the "cross correspondences" one of the strongest, on-going and too little known experiments that offers what some including myself believe to be one of the best cases for personal survival of death we have available.
This is one volume that should be on the bookshelf of anyone intrested in Parapsychology and it's history.