Ghost Hunters: A Guide to Investigating the Paranormal

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I enjoyed the read despite so-called historical inaccuracies. Anachronistic as some elements may have been, it is for the author to have some poetic license and as much of the text is from Sarah Grey's manuscript written decades after some of the events in the story, it for sure could easily be explained away on this basis.

I wanted to give this book 3.5 out of 5, because 3 seems miserly considering I did enjoy most of it, but I'm not quite at 4. It has some printing mistakes, missing letters, mis-spellings etc, which I mention for those of the grammatically pedantic persuasion, but this didn't overly bother me. However, I did find it somewhat long-winded and ponderous at times. The fact I've been interested in Borley since I was a child meant I ploughed through the first section where Sarah meets Harry and (eventually) becomes his secretary, but I really, really wanted them to get to the damn haunted house :). And when they got there, I was a bit disappointed that the experience wasn't more meaty. The Main Character - Our main character here goes by the name of Sarah, and is a Victorian woman who goes against the norm of the society when it comes to things like wanting a career and working for herself. She is strong-willed, and dedicated to her employer. In the end, I didn't even mind the romantic attraction she seemed to share for him (which felt a little out of place at first.)This is historical fiction, a well researched story. Its focus are Borley Rectory, allegedly the most haunted house in England, Harry Price and his fictional assistant Sarah Grey. If you're a fan of spooky tales, of things that go bump in the night, of gothic fiction, detective stories, or hell, if you just fancy a good old yarn around a camp fire that will keep you wondering from start to finish, give this one a go. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a five from me, and it's found its way on to my favourite books shelf; I'm sure it will for you too. I think the knowledge that Borley Rectory was a real haunted place and Harry Price was a real ghost hunter makes this book extra special. The author has taken some liberations with the story. This is not a true story, but there are some truths in the story. Sarah Grey has never existed, she is based on a secretary that worked for Harry Price a while. But still, it's really fascinating to read this book and I was intrigued by Harry Price and can fully understand why Sarah Grey was too. Even though as I understand it the Harry Price in this book was more charming than the real one.

The "ghost" was slightly interesting, at least, but she wasn't nearly strong enough to carry the rest of the tale, or possibly, the tale would have been served a great deal more by glossing the early debunking stuff and focusing on the manor entirely. Blum counters this positive portrait of a remarkable medium with the more ambiguous and disturbing portrayal of Eusapia Palladino, a rough-around-the-edges Italian medium who was often caught "cheating" during her seances, but also seemed to manifest some genuinely puzzling phenomena (including the first reported instance of "ectoplasm"). The two mediums similar and yet, in many ways, contrasting reputations and fates and Blum skillfully uses these two women as a means to structure the second half of her study. This is an first rate account by Deborah Blum of the emergence of a growing curiosity and serious research project regarding the existence of life after death, the possibility of communication with spirits, as well as the existence of mental telepathy. The parties involved were a group of well respected scientists and psychologists in the US, as well as the UK, in the late nineteenth century who formed the "Physical Research Society." It is hard to arugue with the respectibility of William James and Harvard as well as several other educated and determied participnts. In addition to their quest for knowledge and proof of an afterlife, they also set out to uncover the scam artists who were plentiful at the time. The work went on diligently for years by dedicated, educated people on both sides of the Atlantic, though many of their contemporaries spent a great deal of effort trying to dismiss any interest in this subject matter as pure folly. Those nay sayers and detractors made it their own mission to portray any of the documented findings in a negative and dismissive light. I thought this was an okay novel. The thing that made it quite good was the fact that it was based on some reality, although the characters did enjoy some embellishment for the sake of the story. Obviously, a lot of research had been put into the novel, and for that, I can give it good props. In the United States, William James led the charge at the helm of the American Society for Psychical Research, but his investigations seemed no more fruitful than those of his British counterparts. By 1886, Blum wrote, “their annual report… had degenerated into a list of exposures of professional practitioners.” Their experiments dismantled spiritualist claims one after another, and many members began to conclude that mental illness lay at the heart of ghost sightings.I came to this book knowing nothing about the subject matter but as a keen student of history and Ghosthunters did not disappoint. It started too slowly for my liking but then I found it to be drawing me more and more into the story and caring about Sarah Grey, the mysteries surrounding the haunted Borely Rectory and the strange larger than life Harry Price. This to me is a very British story. It tells of eccentricity as one man and his enterprise creating a laboratory invested in solving the paranormal mysteries of the day and of ages past. He is a showman and a self-publicist operating in a very clipped, very precise world but he is also very much part of this world. He is also a very British boffin conjuring up new devices to unmask mediums who are magicians and other paranormal fraudsters. It is also a very British story to have a situation whereby a man's qualifications and his integrity can be called into question in an area where belief is usually suspended. There are also undercurrents of secrets that must not see the light of day and repressed love that cannot be. All these events are seen from the reflection of Sarah Grey and in truth it is more her story and how events impact and how Harry impacts upon her.

As they repeatedly test remarkable mediums and hear overwhelming reports of ghostly warnings of loved one's deaths, these scientists become more convinced than ever that in the vast ocean of fakers, some events truly are supernatural in origin. But they face growing suspicion and ridicule from their fellow scientists and anger from spiritualists who find those they've put on pedestals tumbling down one after another. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book. When I was studying philosophy I first met James – the brother of the author and father of psychology in the US. I wasn’t all that keen on him, but was a bit addicted to Hegel at the time and so found the fact that he had clearly read and understood Hegel something of a treat. Nonetheless, his and Dewey’s pragmatism (or Instrumentalism) was a bit too simple for my tastes. The implicit denial of objective truth also caused me problems.The second was an experiment conducted by Margaret Verrall a friend of Fred Myers. Verrall decided to prove if there was life after death by communicating with Myers. She decided on automatic writing, the phenomena of holding a pen and having a spirit take over and write messages. Over three months she set aside at least an hour every day and waited. After three months of waiting she started writing about other matters. The Setting - It seems obvious to count the setting as a major plus point in a haunted house novel, but there is something undeniably creepy about old mansions in the British countryside. For some reason I'm always more willing to believe in spooky going's on if they're said to be happening in the middle of nowhere and the Borely Rectory fits that description well. Episodes of high comedy in the history of science are rare, but here is one: the investigation of Eusapia Palladino, a tempestuous and erotically charged medium from the slums of Naples, by a sober Cambridge don and his friends in 1895.

This book explains so much about the very real war between religious thought, scientific process, and those of us; who in the famous words of Rodney King ask plainitively, "Can't we all just get along?". It's a very interesting book. There are not many big twists in this book, but still, the story is enjoyable. There are one big secret thing; Sarah Grey's secret that she hides from Harry Price. But, that never felt like a secret. I don't know how it was for others that read the book, but I guessed it right away and then it was just waiting for her to tell him. And, honestly, I thought that she was a bit too cruel to him towards the end when everything was revealed. Although he did treat her appalling sometimes. In the end, one can say that the case of Borley Rectory became something that bound and tore them apart.

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Unfortunately, the tale was a bit on the dull side. From a pure story view, there's absolutely nothing here that hasn't been seen a hundred times when it comes to the intrepid scientific debunker of mystical charlatans or the expected twists that come with tales of this nature. "Is it real or is it hoax?" So often, readers of this kind of trope rely on the strength of the characters and the excitement of the plot to carry us along. This novel merges fact and fiction in an absorbing and evocative ghost story. Harry Price (1881-1948) was a real psychic researcher; a sceptic renowned for exposing fake spiritualists and best known for his investigation into Borley Rectory, called ‘the most haunted house in England.” In this book, an academic is given a manuscript by Miss Sarah Grey, which tells the story of Price’s investigation into Borley Rectory. Miss Grey was a young woman whose father had died in the first world war and who lived with her mother. Like many of her generation, her mother looked for answers in spiritualism, which flourished after the war, capitalising on grief. Sarah and her mother attend a meeting with Mr Price, after which she is fascinated by both him and his work. Before long, she has become his assistant and her life is changed forever. The Victorian era was probably the high-point of belief in spiritualism - who doesn't picture all those fine gentleman and corseted ladies participating in seances, dabbling with Ouija boards, tilting tables and automatic writing? It's probably no coincidence that this peak in belief coincided with the rise of science as we understand it - perhaps this emerging insistence that the universe could be codified and classified and explained also gave rise to some kind of reaction against it, this belief that there were some things beyond explanation? This well-researched book was a wonderful addition to my past readings on the topic of spiritualism and metaphysics, particularly since it tells the story of a group of well-educated people seeking the scientific angle. Blum does not outright state it, but implies that these investigations were most likely abandoned because they were extremely difficult, and also because science itself was becoming increasingly pedantic and reductionist. The final chapter citing Thomas Edison's evaluation of James's interest in psychic phenomena was both telling and sad. He claims that we human beings are essentially machines and that when our gears wear out, only a husk remains. This kind of thinking led to erroneous "scientific" advancements such as counting calories (where all calories are considered equally valid fuel) - wrong; the "stress" theory of ulcers (because no bacterium can possibly survive in an environment as acidic as the human stomach, one of the lowest pH values to be found in nature) - wrong; that baby formula, scientifically created from correct chemical nutrients, is better than breast milk - wrong.