Article from Haunted Musuem
Paranormal Investigation
There is no doubt that the practice and faith of Spiritualism literally created the need for paranormal investigation. It would be because of the claims of the Spiritualists, about their contact with the spirits of the dead, that the need for scientific investigation of such claims would come about. Spiritualism not only created celebrities in the form of the mediums who profited from it, but it also made legends of the men who came along to question their claims. They were men like Houdini and Harry Price, who were hated by the Spiritualists for their debunking of the fraudulent mediums. These men did not investigate the Spiritualists because of their lack of belief in the possibility of ghosts, but because of the need to question the evidence that was being presented. Their scientific investigations would set the standard for ghost hunters to come and would establish the need to question the evidence of ghosts, ruling out all of the possible explanations for the activity before accepting the idea that the phenomena could be real.
Spiritualism was unfortunately riddled with cases of deliberate fraud. It was easy to fool the thousands of people who were looking for a miracle and many of the mediums and practitioners began lining their pockets with the money they had swindled from their victims. This is not to say that all of the Spiritualists were dishonest. Many of them were good and kind people who truly believed in the honesty of their faith --- and there do remain a handful of mediums and cases today for which no explanation has ever been found.
Regardless of the good intentions of some Spiritualists, the movement was soon under the scrutiny of investigators. Many of them were merely interested in exposing the cases of fraud, while others were intrigued enough to take a closer look at the reported phenomena associated with the séances. It would be from here that many of the early ghost hunters got their start. If not for Spiritualism, it is likely that paranormal investigation would not have advanced as far as it has today. But it was not an easy start....
Psychic investigation began just shortly after the birth of Spiritualism. By the 1850’s, science had managed to challenge the hold that religion maintained on society, offering a new version of the truth for people to examine. Mixed into this time period was Spiritualism, with its alleged proof of life after death, and the public became fascinated by it. Not long after though, many of the practitioners of this new faith were exposed as frauds and a division formed between those who believed in Spiritualism and those who did not. The scientific establishment, resentful over the fact that they had managed to break the hold that religion had on society only to lose their footing to Spiritualism, encouraged the debunking of mediums and had a blatant disregard for anything that even hinted at the supernatural. In spite of this, there was a small number of scientists who had taken the time to attend séances and who believed that there could be something to the strange phenomena that was being reported. They decided to try and apply the laws of science in investigating these reports.
By the late 1800’s, there were a number of scientists who investigated the claims of mediums. Perhaps the best known was Sir William Crookes, a eminent chemist. From 1869 to 1875, he investigated a number of mediums, including the famous Daniel Douglas Home. After witnessing a number of Home’s séances, he became convinced that the phenomena he saw was genuine and proved the existence of a “psychic” force within the human body. Crookes wrote a paper on Home and tried to have it published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London but it was refused. He then used his considerable influence to have it appear in the Quarterly Journal of Science instead. Needless to say, it caused an uproar in the scientific community and both Crookes and his work were discredited.
Two scientists who watched Crookes’ plight with sympathy were Professor Henry Sidgwick and Frederick Myers. They firmly believed in the possibility of supernatural phenomena. Myers had attended an 1873 séance conducted by Charles Williams, where he had felt the hand of Williams’ spirit guide, John King, melt away to nothing while he was still holding it. It was experiences like this one, combined with the attacks on Crookes, that persuaded Myers, Sidgwick and a friend named Edmund Gurney, to form an association of people who were interested in investigating the paranormal. Among the group’s first members were future British prime minister Arthur Balfour, his sister Eleanor, Lord Rayleigh and Stanton Moses.
One of their first investigations was of a medium named Henry Slade in 1876. By that autumn, Slade and another medium were charged and found guilty of deception but this did not deter the group in their search for genuine phenomena. Over the course of the next six years, the group continued their inquiries and soon found themselves mixed in with a small number of Spiritualists and interested individuals who were also attempting to conduct investigations of the paranormal. Finally, in 1882, a committee was formed with Sidgwick as the president, which became the Society for Psychical Research. The initial membership was mostly made up of Spiritualists and friends of the Sidgwick group like Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain and William Gladstone. They formed six research committees to investigate hypnotism and clairvoyance; telepathy; sensitives; mediums; ghosts and hauntings; and records and archives. The members of the SPR could then devote their spare time to investigating whatever subjects interested them.
