New Books and Media

For twenty-five years, Ralph and Juliette Pressing were at the heart of American mediumship. "Psychic Observers" is the story of the Pressings and their newspaper. The 1930s and 1940s were an age of unprecedented interest in mediumship and extraordinary claims to unique phenomena. Ralph and Juliette Pressing knew everyone who was anyone in the American Spiritualist movement and wrote about all the great mediums. Through the Psychic Observer, the medium's names acquired a star-like quality. A glamor was attached to the mediums' names, who became the 'must sit with;' sensation of the day. The author's research identified one hundred and sixty-four direct-voice and trumpet mediums. The sensational séance reports in the paper were consumed by an avid readership that made the Psychic Observer a national American newspaper.

The book " Psychic Observers " describes a movement in its heyday. The Psychic Observer and the American Spiritualist movement were assailed on all sides by controversy. Journalists, police, courts, and psychic researchers, hounded the Spiritualists, wrote scandalous articles, raided their séances, charged them with fortune-telling, and hauled them before the judges. The Psychic Observer were there, reporting, defending, going to law, engaging lawyers, and syndicating their articles worldwide. An extraordinary book, deeply researched, revealing fascinating new insight into the twentieth century American the Spiritualist movement

From the publisher's website: In the current creative scientific turmoil perhaps it is time to consider the possibility of a model in which clairvoyance, instead of being an anomaly, is a fundamental feature of the universe. Scientific “theories of everything” are now emerging that can accommodate anomalous phenomena such as clairvoyance.

This is the central theme of The Mind at Large which presents a unique dossier documenting one clairvoyant’s contribution to detective work in Poland. Compiled over more than 20 years by the Polish clairvoyant Krzysztof Jackowski, this dossier was verified by a young Polish police sergeant Krzysztof Janoszka, who wrote a diploma thesis on the use of psychics in police work in order to draw attention to the phenomena demonstrated by Jackowski. Janoszka is the co-author of this book.

What makes this dossier particularly interesting is the clairvoyant’s claim that it is the dead who provide him with the information about their fate. Such a claim does not sit easily within his own culture, but his evidence makes an important contribution to research into mediumship and the age-old question of survival that has been researched for more than a century in the English-speaking world.

Further information at the publisher's website: White Crow Books. 

From the publisher's website: Beginning in her early childhood, the world-famous trance medium and grande dame of parapsychology Eileen J. Garrett had numerous encounters with an entity she called the "Noble Stranger." When she asked his identity one day, this mysterious figure responded, "You may call me Lucifer."

Call me Lucifer: Dialogues with a Noble Stranger, features Garrett's writings about her encounters with this Noble Stranger, and reflections on her intellectual "duels with her Devil." The book includes extensive verbatim transcripts of Lucifer's communication with Garrett, together with Lucifer's Compendium of Guidance.

Further information at the publisher's website: Afterworlds Press.

Review by Melvyn Willin.

From the back cover: The essays in this volume are a wonderful and varied collection of personal insights into individual spiritual awakenings and the resulting transformation in the lives of scientists and academics. Scholars share the experience of their own spiritual awakening and journey, including encountering challenges to their credibility in academia, if they shared these experiences. Their comments about transformation in values, beliefs, and approaches toward life are very moving, expressing a deep inner wisdom and connection, not only with humanity, but with the earth and cosmos.

Review by James E. Kennedy

From the publisher's website: Reports of paranormal experiences vary tremendously, but are often associated with ghosts, haunted houses, and otherwise eerie circumstances. There exist both classic and modern texts on ghosts and haunted or possessed people, places and spaces; many discuss traditional ideas regarding such phenomena or utilize now-outdated research in highly academic and technical ways.

This book offers a very different approach in reviews provided by a leading-edge research program devoted to who has ghostly experiences and why. With new insights both global in scale and multidisciplinary in scope, this collaboration by five researchers uncovers consistent evidence that anomalous experiences represent a very real “Haunted People Syndrome”—a term describing anomalous experiences that manifest recurrently to the same percipients and are interpreted as “ghostly”—with implications for future research across academia. The participation of new citizen scientists (the field investigators and researchers among us) is invited in furthering the exploration of paranormal mysteries. Photos and figures illustrating concepts and models are included, as is a glossary.

Further information at the publisher's website: McFarland. 

From the publisher's website: Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of “primitive cultures” that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.

Further information at the publisher's website: University of Pittsburgh Press.

From the publisher's website: There have been important mediums and researchers throughout the history of psychical research in many parts of the world, but the period from the 1880s to the 1930s saw a coming together of outstanding scientific minds in Europe and the USA who probed the phenomena of mental mediumship with a diligence, intellectual discipline and degree of enthusiasm not encountered on such a scale before or since. This period saw the establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in Britain (1882), followed swiftly by the American Society for Psychical Research (1884), which resulted in close collaboration between people who, apart from their intellects, also had the financial means and the time to devote to the subject.

In this book Alan Gauld, whose works on mediumship, psychical research and psychic phenomena have become classics in the genre, offers important insights into aspects of the early days of mediumship research that over the years have largely gone off the radar. Here we see the great names of psychical research as real people in personal relationships, and we learn about the informal beginnings of serious investigations and explore their cultural context.

The Heyday of Mental Mediumship is destined to become Gauld’s magnum opus.

Further information on the publisher's website: White Crow Books. 

From the publisher's website: Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists is a philosophical argument demonstrating why the existence of an afterlife is beyond astronomically likely and hence empirically certain. It explains how we have every rational reason to think that people who have near-death experiences are not only telling the truth, but the book also argues that near-death experiencers are thoroughly justified in knowing that they visited the actual afterlife. 

Further information at the publisher's website: Iff Books

From the publisher's website: You don't have to 'be religious' to believe there may be a life after death!

The Medium and the Minister explores psychical and religious approaches to the possibility of an afterlife. The tensions and conflicts between these two approaches and the heated controversies they have generated are illustrated by a number of case studies. These focus on the challenges posed by psychical research and spiritualism to orthodox religion as the ultimate authority for information and teaching about the afterlife. Prominence is given initially to the campaigns of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge which aimed to publicise the psychical evidence and to the Church’s reaction to them. Later developments and initiatives to try to reconcile the opposing positions are then examined in the light of further psychical research. The issues raised are shown to be still highly relevant to current beliefs and attitudes and to the question of what might constitute evidence for life after death.

Further information at the publisher's website: 6th Books.

Review by Melvyn Willin.

From the publisher's website: Renowned esoteric writer Gary Lachman has been recording his own precognitive dreams for forty years. In this unique and intriguing book, Lachman recounts the discovery that he dreams 'ahead of time', and argues convincingly that this extraordinary ability is, in fact, shared by all of us.

Dreaming Ahead of Time is a personal exploration of precognition, synchronicity and coincidence drawing on the work of thinkers including J.W. Dunne, J.B. Priestly and C.G. Jung. Lachman's description and analysis of his own experience introduces readers to the uncanny power of our dreaming minds, and reveals the illusion of our careful distinctions between past, present and future.

Further information at the publisher's website: Floris Books.

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.

From the publisher's website: "Join Brandon Alvis and Mustafa Gatollari, stars of the hit A&E television show Ghost Hunters, as they reveal the real story behind six of their most compelling and terrifying investigations. Within these pages, you will discover the shocking secrets of the Grey Lady at Indianapolis's Athenaeum, a self-manifested haunting at Ohio's Madison Seminary, and the guilt-ridden entity at the Worley Hotel in Pampa, Texas. You will discover the critical historical details of each location as well as the full story of the investigations, exploring important events that have never been previously revealed. The authors also include their groundbreaking classification system for ghosts and hauntings that is transforming the field of paranormal studies into a true scientific discipline."

Review by Ashley Knibb.

This book is a study of how people collaboratively interpret events or experiences as having paranormal features, or as evidence of spiritual agency. The authors study recordings of paranormal research groups as they conduct real life investigations into allegedly haunted spaces and the analyses describe how, through their talk and embodied actions, participants collaboratively negotiate the paranormal status of the events they experience. By drawing on the study of the social organisation in everyday interaction, they show how paranormal interpretations may be proposed, contested and negotiated through conversational and embodied practices of the group. 

The book contributes to the sociology of anomalous experience, and explores its relevance  to other social science topics such as dark tourism, participation in religious spaces and practices, and the attribution of agency. This book will therefore be of interest to academics and postgraduate researchers of language and social interaction; discourse and communication, cultural studies; social psychology, sociology of religious experience; parapsychology, communication and psychotherapy.

Further information about the book here: Springer.