PARANORMAL RESEARCH: Life After Death
Although Harry Price considered himself a psychical researcher, he was perhaps the first paranormal researcher. Price did not use planchettes or Ouija boards to conduct his investigation, he used technology found in any science laboratory like microscopes, racks full of chemicals and test tubes, recording equipment, and state of the art cameras.
Unsurprisingly, modern paranormal researchers copy Price’s methods in their ghost hunting exploits. Paranormal researchers are today’s manifestation of spiritualist and psychical researchers. Instead of tables, planchettes, spiritoscopes, Ouija boards, and photographic plates; paranormal researchers use voice recorders, digital cameras, temperature guns, electromagnetic field detectors, and electronic spirit boxes. These devices have gained notoriety from their use on popular ghost-hunting TV shows.
Similar to Victorian spiritualism, paranormal research has flourished as a form of entertainment media. Ghost hunters operate as if they are conducting a scientific experiment. In truth, they’re methods have little to no scientific validity. Paranormal researchers use scientific devices to gather “evidence” that confirms their beliefs. This “evidence” is normally a recording of a mouse shuffling that sounds like a demon telling them to die, or a picture of a piece of dust that is the spirit of a Victorian child. The alleged evidence picked up by devices has no scientific correlation with the existence of ghosts, but they presented in popular TV shows as unarguable proof.
Seeing as there are so many similarities, not only in their subject of study but their methods and devices, what is the difference between psychical and paranormal research? Paranormal research culture developed in the 1990s, in part due to the internet allowing people with niche interests to connect.
Fascinatingly, most professional and amateur paranormal researchers, and casual ghost-hunting TV show watchers, have no idea about Victorian spiritualism, psychical research, or even Harry Price. The Society for Psychical Research still exists in in London, but in a survey done among paranormal researchers, only one person belonged to their organization.
Despite their lack of connection, paranormal research developed eerily similar methods and techniques to psychical research. The answer is in the nature of studying the ghosts. When the Victorians were confronted with the increasing materialism of their world, they turned to the strange and magical, calling back the folklore and superstitions they cast off with industrialism. They combined the spiritual with the technological to create objects of wonder capable of communicating with the past and the world beyond them. However, these devices did more than communicate with spirits, they provided entertainment for the curious and the skeptical, they advanced science’s understanding of how the brain works, and provided the basis for legitimate inventions. As the books in this collection reveal, spiritualism and psychical research are just one culturally specific example of people trying to understand the unexplainable.