The Problems of Psychical Research

Hereward Carrington approached both the séance room and the laboratory with one question: what, if anything, survives ordinary explanation? This 1921 revised edition gathers his theories and experiments on the mental side of psychical research, favoring telepathy, hallucination, the ouija board, and the psychology of belief over the physical rappings and levitations that drew popular crowds. He weighs each report with care, separating real puzzles from fraud and self-deception, and takes up psychic photography, mind cure, witchcraft, and the testing of claimed phenomena with laboratory instruments. As a working member of the American Society for Psychical Research, he brought early twentieth-century scientific method to accounts of the supernormal. Readers curious about the roots of parapsychology, or about how careful minds handled extraordinary claims, will find him skeptical yet open.