Fifty Years of Psychical Research


Book Description

An in-depth history of psychical research and spiritualism, accompanied by period illustrations. Is spiritualism a religion or a racket? How does it differ from psychical research? What went on in the world of séances, mediums, and the scientists who investigated them in the early decades of the twentieth century? This fascinating account, first published in the 1930s, brings to life an era when spiritualists gripped the public imagination and researchers fought to determine what was and wasn’t real. Fifty Years of Psychical Research is part of The Paranormal, a series that resurrects rare titles, classic publications, and out-of-print texts, as well as publishes new supernatural and otherworldly ebooks for the digital age. The series includes a range of paranormal subjects from angels, fairies, and UFOs to near-death experiences, vampires, ghosts, and witchcraft.




Fifty Years of Psychical Research


Book Description

This is a new release of the original 1939 edition.







A New Science of the Paranormal


Book Description

Mainline science rejects the paranormal because it cannot be proven by the classical methods of controlled experiments. But sciences such as geology, astronomy, and anthropology also don’t rely on laboratory testing for repeatable results. Moreover, psi concerns consciousness, which is by definition nonquantitative. "Psi researchers must stop acting like science’s poor relations," says author Lawrence LaShan, "limiting themselves to controlled experiments such as analyzing statistics of people guessing cards being flipped in the next room" This provocative book outlines the principles of making a real study of the large, exciting events — clairvoyance and precognition; mediumship and spirit controls; psychic healing — that would bring mainline science into and revitalize the whole field. "And the issue is not just academic," says LeShan. "The old, materialistic worldview has not worked. Psychic research," he argues, "can transform our sense of reality itself to offer a new and more hopeful picture of ourselves and of the world."




Essays in Psychical Research


Book Description

The more than 50 articles, essays, and reviews collected here for the first time were published by James over a span of some 25 years. The record of a sustained interest in phenomena of a highly controversial nature, they make it amply clear that James's work in psychical research was not an eccentric hobby but a serious and sympathetic concern.










Dictionary of the Supernatural


Book Description

An A to Z of Hauntings, Possession, Witchcraft, Demonology and Other Occult Phenomena... The entries cover all known (and some very little known) organisations, individuals, periodicals, terms of reference, and significant cases, events and incidents relevant to the subject. Under each entry there are notes on other appropriate books and further reading.







Through a Glass, Darkly


Book Description

2018 ASJA Award-Winner in the Biography/History Category Is it possible to make direct contact with the dead? Do the departed seek to make contact with us? The conviction that both things are true was the cornerstone of spiritualism, a kind of do-it-yourself religion that swept the Western world from the 1850s to the 1930s. Prominent artists and poets, prime ministers and scientists, all joined hands around the séance table. But the movement's most famous spokesman by far was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose public quarrels with Houdini over the truth of spiritualism made headlines across the country. Known to the world as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle had undergone what many considered an enigmatic transformation, turning his back on the hyper-rational Holmes and plunging into the supernatural. What was it that convinced a brilliant man, the creator of the great exemplar of cold, objective thought, that there was a reality beyond reality? Though most modern sources make Conan Doyle out to be a kindly but credulous old fool, and though the spiritualist era was rife with fraud, Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains take a closer look. They reexamine the old records of trance mediums and séances, and they discover that what Conan Doyle and his colleagues uncovered is as difficult to dismiss now as it was then.