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

What if a world-renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, a doctor and scientist acclaimed as one of the leading intellects of the time, suddenly announced that he believed in ghosts? At the close of the nineteenth century, to great public and professional astonishment, William James — the great philosopher, a founder of the American Psychological Association and brother of Henry James — did just that and embarked on a determined, lifelong pursuit of scientific evidence to prove it.

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.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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 seances 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 seances, 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 seances, 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' 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.

Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[C]ompulsively readable....After reading Blum's mesmerizing account, you might be tempted to dust off that Ouija board. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly

"Blum seems content to relate rather than to analyze; her text lacks analysis. She ends with the patent observation that the conflict between science and the supernatural endures. A useful but oddly uncritical summary." Kirkus Reviews

"[Blum] keeps the story moving and fleshes out each character. Her clearly written presentation of the history, frauds, and personalities involved in this unique slice of Victorian life is recommended for all history of science collections." Library Journal

"The best pages of Ghost Hunters are filled with strange tales of people who seem to know things they should not be able to know....[A] sympathetic account..." Los Angeles Times

"[S]killfully organized and felicitously written, lays out the facts like a good, extended piece of newspaper writing and lets the reader decide." Seattle Times

"Blum's book radiates sympathy for these hapless ghost researchers, because their plight is an old and honorable one." San Francisco Chronicle

When William James and a handful of other brilliant and eccentric thinkers of the time came together to found a society dedicated to finding scientific proof of the existence of the supernatural world, they embarked on what would become a lifetime obsession for them all, and launched the greatest ghost hunt ever undertaken in the history of science.

At the close of the 19th century, William James, the great philosopher, a founder of the American Psychological Association and brother of author Henry James, proclaimed his belief in ghosts and embarked on a determined, lifelong pursuit of scientific evidence to prove it.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin. She worked as a newspaper science writer for twenty years, winning the Pulitzer in 1992 for her writing about primate research, which she turned into a book, The Monkey Wars (Oxford, 1994). Her other books include Sex on the Brain (Viking, 1997) and Love at Goon Park (Perseus, 2002). She has written about scientific research for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Discover, Health, Psychology Today, and Mother Jones. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers and now serves on an advisory board to the World Federation of Science Journalists and the National Academy of Sciences.