New Books and Media

From the publisher's website:

In the top corner of the window a pale, milky-white wisp is rising almost to the top of our ten-foot ceiling.... I am startled but not afraid....Mostly, I am engrossed; I have never seen anything like this before (or since) and it fascinates me.

Dennis Waskul writes these lines—about his first-hand experience with the supernatural—in the introduction to his beguiling book Ghostly Encounters. Based on two years of fieldwork and interviews with 71 midwestern Americans, the Waskuls' book is a reflexive ethnography that examines how people experience ghosts and hauntings in everyday life. The authors explore how uncanny happenings become ghosts, and the reasons people struggle with or against a will to believe. They present the variety and character of hauntings and ghostly encounters, outcomes of people telling haunted legends, and the nested consequences of ghostly experiences.

Through these stories, Ghostly Encounters seeks to understand the persistence of uncanny experiences and beliefs in ghosts in an age of reason, science, education, and technology—as well as how those beliefs and experiences both reflect and serve important social and cultural functions.

About the Authors:

Dennis Waskul is a Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Minnesota State University Mankato, and has served as president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. He has authored or co-authored several books including Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body (with Phillip Vannini), The Senses in Self, Culture, and Society (with Phillip Vannini and Simon Gottschalk), and Popular Culture as Everyday Life (with Phillip Vannini).

Michele Waskul is an independent scholar with a focus on special education.

Review by Gerhard Mayer

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: Master the skills of leaving the body using logic and reason. Improve self-understanding and achieve personal growth with over a dozen exit techniques. With well-ordered, rational explanations,Demystifying the Out-of-Body Experience describes how and why OBEs work. This is a groundbreaking guide for using OBEs to understand your place in the worlds that exist beyond our daily lives.

Meet spiritual guides, loved ones who have crossed over, and even other out-of-body travellers who want to help you understand who you are and why you are here. Learn communication techniques and memory aids to get the most out of each experience, in addition to tips for creating a program of OBE mastery. Contrary to popular belief, many people have come back from “the other side” and shared their experiences. And now, you can be part of this life-changing exploration.

Perfect for beginners and experienced seekers who want to learn about the non-physical planes in a non-mystical context and want to evolve the condition of their soul. This practical workbook for spiritual transformation is based on the research of the International Academy of Consciousness.

From the publisher's website: The golden age of psychical research produced no greater experimental superstar than the Italian peasant Eusapia Paladino, whose purported physical phenomena--movement of distant objects, levitations, materialisations of human forms--were studied in controlled settings (in the light!) by eminent scientists throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was caught in crude trickery; but even renowned magician Howard Thurston came away convinced that her more spectacular results were beyond human power. This volume collects contemporaneous experimental reports, personal memoirs, eyewitness accounts, discussion of the premises of "spirit mediumship," and criticism by skeptics of the era, including members of the British Society for Psychical Research.

LOST FOUNDATIONS OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH endeavors to provide the interested public with authoritative investigative accounts from the period of research prior to the rise of the statistical approach to parapsychology championed by J.B. Rhine, coming to prominence in the later 1930's.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: Scientific evidence for the continual presence of consciousness with or without connection to a living organism

• Examines findings on the survival of consciousness beyond life, including near-death experiences, after-death communication, and reincarnation

• Explains how this correlates precisely with cutting-edge physics theories on superstrings, information fields, and energy matrices

• Reveals how consciousness manifests in living beings to continue its evolution

Evidence now points to consciousness existing beyond the brain, such as when the brain is temporarily incapacitated, as well as to the survival of consciousness after death. Conventional science prefers to dismiss these findings because they cannot be accommodated by a materialist view of reality. Spirituality and religion embrace the continuity of consciousness and ascribe it to a nonmaterial spirit or soul that is immortal. As such, spirituality/religion and science continually find conflict in their views. But what if there truly is no conflict?

Based on a new scientific paradigm in sync with experience-based spirituality, Ervin Laszlo and Anthony Peake explore how consciousness is continually present in the cosmos and can exist without connection to a living organism. They examine the rapidly growing body of scientific evidence supporting the continuity of consciousness, including near-death experiences, after-death communication, reincarnation, and neurosensory information received in altered states. They explain how the persistence of consciousness beyond the demise of the body means that, in essence, we are not mortal--we continue to exist even when our physical existence has come to an end. This correlates precisely with cutting-edge physics, which posits that things in our plane of time and space are not intrinsically real but are manifestations of a hidden dimension where they exist in the form of superstrings, information fields, and energy matrices.

With proof that consciousness is basic to the cosmos and immortal in its deeper, nonmanifest realm, Laszlo and Peake reveal the purpose of consciousness is to manifest in living beings in order to continuously evolve.

From the publisher: Conan Doyle and The Mysterious World of Light traces the spiritualist career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between the years 1887 and 1920.

Starting with his early psychic investigations in Southsea, it tracks his development from a fascinated dilettante to becoming the committed advocate of a world movement. Throughout these years, Light, a magazine dedicated to the mystical and occult, traced his journey, not least by the letters and articles he wrote exclusively for the magazine. It was and still is the organ of the London Spiritualist Alliance, now known as the College for Psychic Studies.

Every article and letter Conan Doyle wrote for the magazine during this period is here reproduced, often for the first time, as well as correspondence and articles bearing on his own writings.  The book thus tells the story of Conan Doyle's Spiritualism while surrounding his writing with the discussions, debates and controversies of his time.

It sets his belief in the context of his powerful imagination which created the iconic Sherlock Holmes, his indefatigable energy which made him such an effective missionary and all against the backdrop of the Great War, which was a powerful impetus for his public declaration of faith in 1916.

For the question of how the creator of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes also came to believe in ghosts, this book holds the fascinating answers.

The introduction can be found here

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: In Prometheus & Atlas, Dr. Jorjani endeavours to deconstruct the nihilistic materialism and rootless rationalism of the modern West by showing how it was grounded on a dishonest suppression of the spectral and why it has a parasitic relationship with Abrahamic religious fundamentalism. Rejecting the marginalisation of ESP and psychokinesis as "paranormal," Prometheus & Atlas makes the case that psi is only "super Natural" insofar as our reductive modern scientific models have occluded Supernature for practical purposes. At the same time, Jorjani calls for a conscious recognition of the superhumanly empowering archetypes of Prometheus and Atlas, which he argues have unconsciously driven the daring scientific exploration and discovery of all those cultures that adopted and adapted the cosmopolitan promise of the Hellenic heritage. Embracing the Promethean and Atlantic spirit, and a reach for a fiery fusion of the horizons of the Eastern and Western worlds, would mean the dawn of a new age and an integral society wherein the modern barriers between Science, Religion, Politics, and Art have been dynamited.

Reza Jorjani, PhD is a native New Yorker and Iranian-American of Persian and northern European descent. After receiving his BA and MA at New York University, he completed his doctorate in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Jorjani currently teaches Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

From the author’s introduction:  ‘Towards the end of 2014, I published a pamphlet in which I listed strange stories told to me over the past seventy years by people living in or near Helmshore in east Lancashire.  The pamphlet quickly sold out, but more importantly it brought a rich crop of other experiences and confirmed my belief that I had barely scraped the paranormal surface of the locality.

‘This booklet records a wide variety of strange encounters; and I leave it to the reader to suggest explanations or to admit that this subject deserves to be taken seriously and more thoroughly explored.’

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher's website: As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire world changed. Woollacott’s journey through years of meditation has made her question the reality she built her career upon and has forced her to ask what human consciousness really is. Infinite Awareness pairs Woollacott’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, she breaks open the definition of human consciousness to investigate the existence of a non-physical and infinitely powerful mind.

From the publisher’s website: Psychic phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (‘mind over matter’) have been reportedly experienced by people from all walks of life. But are these phenomena real? And how could they possibly fit into our knowledge of the human brain? In this monograph, Bryan Williams examines some of the latest findings to emerge from efforts that parapsychologists have made to explore how psychic phenomena may be linked to brain functioning. Although they do not yet lead to a fully working theory, these initial findings do point to possible brain correlates that could be a focus for further study using advanced brain wave monitoring and functional neuroimaging techniques.

Bryan Williams is an affiliate with the Psychical Research Foundations. He was a co-recipient of the 2008 Eileen J. Garrett Scholarship Award offered by the Parapsychology Foundation in New York.

Further details can be found on the Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research’s website:

http://www.aiprinc.org/

Review by Robert A. Charman.

From the publisher's website: St. Joseph of Copertino began having mystical visions at the age of seven, but it was not until he began practicing his faith as a Franciscan priest that he realized the full potential of his mind’s power over his body—he was able to levitate. Throughout his priesthood St. Joseph became famous for frequent levitations that were observed on hundreds of occasions and by thousands of witnesses, including many skeptics. Michael Grosso delves into the biography of the saint to explore the many strange phenomena that surrounded his life and develops potential physical explanations for some of the most astounding manifestations of his religious ecstasy. Grosso draws upon contemporary explorations into cognition, the relationship between the human mind and body, and the scientifically recorded effects of meditation and other transcendent practices to reveal the implications of St. Joseph’s experiences and abilities. 

From the publisher’s website: Ghostology is simply the study of Ghosts. It is not just about ghost hunting, neither is it is about parapsychology.

The study of ghosts – Ghostology – is not trying to capture apparitions on camera, although that is sometimes a part of it. It is not trying to record the sounds and the voices of the deceased or of spirits, although that too is a part of it. Ghostology is the holistic study of a fascinating aspect of our humanity, a shared human experience that dates back to the earliest civilisations and is common to all of them.

Ghostology is not a “How to guide” for those seeking to investigate ghosts but it provides an up-to-date consideration and a discussion of the many methods and techniques that will prove helpful to anyone interested in the subject, for those who actively seek ghosts or who are merely interested in discovering more about this fascinating subject.

About the author

Steve Parsons is an Investigator & Researcher of Ghosts, Hauntings and related human experiences.

Author of numerous published articles and works on Ghosts, Ghost Hunting & related subjects, cited and referenced in many more!

In front of camera presenter and behind the camera advisor on numerous paranormal documentary shows for UK and overseas broadcast networks including; The Discovery Network, National Geographic, The BBC, ITV etc. Also Canadian, Japanese and US TV networks. Appeared and advised on popular paranormal ‘edutainment’ shows for UK & overseas TV including Most Haunted, I’m Famous & Frightened & Paranormal Investigation Live. Hosted & co-hosted radio shows for broadcasters including the BBC.  Co-host of popular international weekly radio show Ghost Chronicles International.

An extract from Ghostology can be read here

Steve Parsons’s website

Review by Tom Ruffles