New Books and Media

From the back cover: Discover the legacies of some of the most influential women in the paranormal field. If you’re looking for a celebration of women throughout the history of parapsychology, folklore, and psychical research, then look no further! This book is for you! Sharing the stories of over 35 groundbreaking women in a male-dominated field, paranormal researcher Alex Matsuo excavates the buried legacies of women in the paranormal who were often overshadowed and almost forgotten. From paranormal investigators to parapsychologists to psychic mediums to cryptozoologists, you’ll discover an incredible world where women not only inspired the paranormal world, but set the very foundation for modern-day investigation and psychic practices.

From the publisher's website: During the past five decades, psychologist and parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove has been dialoguing with scientists, academics, experiencers, historians and mystics on the subject of life’s biggest questions, the mind beyond the brain and the nature of reality.

In 2022, Jeff was the winner of the “Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies” prize for an essay demonstrating the best evidence for survival of bodily death. He was no doubt aided by more than a thousand discussions he has hosted and hosts on his YouTube channel “New Thinking Allowed “which continues to expand in subscribers and relevance year on year.

This anthology titled “Is There Life After Death” includes luminaries in the genre such as Eben Alexander, Miranda Alcott, Stafford Betty, Michael Cremo, Alan Hugenot, Leslie Kean, Betty Kovács, Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Vernon Neppe, and a foreword by James Tunne

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

From the publisher's website: This volume reflects on the ghostly and its varied manifestations including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other occur in literature, history, film, and art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate to twenty-first century literary critics, cultural historians, art historians, and linguists. Our collection of essays considers the wider implications of these representations of the ghostly and notions of the spectral to define a series of different, but inter-related, cultural topics (concerned with questions of ageing, the uncanny, the spectral, spiritualism, eschatology), which imaginatively testify to our compulsion to search for evidence of the ghostly in our everyday encounters with the material world.

Further information at the publisher's website: Routledge.

Review by Tim Prasil.

From the publisher's website: In her many books examining NDEs and other extraordinary phenomena, P.M.H. Atwater has, thus far, only revealed bits and pieces about her own life. Now, in Edge Walker, she finally tells us the whole story. This book explores, in great detail, her journey as a near-death experiencer, prolific author, wife, mother, and spiritual human. A courageous trailblazer, P.M.H. has spent her entire life walking between worlds and trying to build bridges between them. Perhaps she sums it up best in her own words: “I’ll be almost eighty-six when this book is published. I leave you my laughter and my life and my books, and a host of questions still to be answered. No regrets. I did the best I could each step of the way.”

From the publisher's website: Parapsychology is a science made controversial by its subjects: extrasensory perception, psychokinesis (mind over matter) and disembodied minds, which imply life after death. Moreover, these parapsychological phenomena (called “psi”) challenge physicalism, the philosophy that everything can be completely understood in terms of physics. This book is a snapshot of the parapsychological field, with essays written by authors of diverse academic backgrounds and experiences. Essays examine parapsychological phenomena from prehistory, through the founding of the science by intellectuals distressed by physicalism, to the postmodern present. It includes both experimental and theoretical evaluations of the phenomena. Parapsychology is a science which may overturn the philosophy which has dominated science since Newton and may inspire curious readers who are disheartened by the consequent denial of the spirit.

Further information at the publisher's website: McFarland.

From the publisher's website: Russell Targ has been successfully teaching people how to tap into their psychic abilities for more than fifty years. This began in 1972 when he cofounded a CIA-sponsored ESP research program at Stanford Research Institute. The program yielded such incredible results as the description of a secret Russian weapons factory in Siberia and the location of several kidnapped US officials, including the ambassador to Iran. The founders also trained six Army intelligence officers to create an Army psychic corps that became known as Stargate. Third Eye Spies will introduce you to the most successful and gifted remote viewers in the world along with the evidence of their psychic abilities. Remote viewing is the opportunity to describe and experience objects and events in the distance, the past, and the future. Targ shares the simple techniques masters of remote viewing use to expand the mind’s eye beyond one’s physical location. With Third Eye Spies, you will be able to step beyond the boundaries of your physical body and learn to live with psychic abilities.

Further information at the publisher's website: Red Wheel Weiser

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.

From the publisher's website: A psychologist's journey to understand one of the most unusual experiences known to humankind: the universal, disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. These experiences of sensing a Presence when no one else is there have been given many names—the Third Man, guardian angels, shadow figures, “social” hallucinations—and they have inspired, unsettled, and confounded in equal measure. While the contexts in which they occur are diverse, they are united by a distinct and uncanny feeling of visitation by another. But what does this feeling mean, and where does it come from? When and why do presences emerge? And how can we even begin to understand a phenomenon that can be transformative for those who experience it, and yet so hard to put into words? The answers to these questions lie in this tour-de-force through contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy. Presence follows Ben Alderson-Day's attempts—as a psychologist and a researcher—to understand how this experience is possible. What is a voice when it isn’t heard, and how otherwise do we know or feel that someone is in our presence? Is it a hallucination connected to psychosis, a change in the working of the brain, or something else? The journey to understand takes us to meet explorers, mediums, and robots, and step through real, imagined, and virtual worlds. Presence is the story of who we carry with us, at all times, as parts of ourselves.

Further information at the publisher's website: St. Martin's Press.

Review by Graham Kidd.

From the publisher's website: When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis. 

Further information at the publisher's website: Berghahn Books

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. 

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.

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