Ghost Hunters: A Guide to Investigating the Paranormal

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Books like this one, either written in support of spiritualism or against it, always follow the same formula. First you are given a series of miraculous tales. You are given time to ooh and ahh. Then some of these tales are completely discredited. 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 Hunters is a fictional memoir of Sarah Grey, assistant to one of the most renowned ghost hunters in all of England, Harry Price. Sarah began working as a model, but changed careers to become a secretary for Mr. Price. While the book was dry in places due to the wealth of factual information provided, I found myself unable to put it down. 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. Mr. Price's character has several sides to him--and none of them match up to any one person's perception of the man. Sarah's character was a bit "over-the-top" and transparent to me, but I can see why the author added her as she made for several additional branches of this story.

In her groundbreaking book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deborah Blum has masterfully retold the story of the birth of spiritualism and the scientific pursuit of “psychical research.” In the late nineteenth century, William James, renowned philosopher and psychologist, and a small group of eminent scientists staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity on one of the most extraordinary quests ever undertaken: to empirically prove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. Deborah Blum artfully retells this story. Along with Raymond Moody’s The Last Laugh, this book should be required reading for any aspiring investigator of the paranormal. 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. When all is said and done, Harry Price turns out to be a character loaded with irony, and the author sets things up so that it isn't up to the last that we discover exactly what that irony entails. The "secret" Sarah carries around with her isn't so earth shattering when revealed, but even with this little bit of drama (a tad bit overdone, imho), she is also an interesting person both with and without Harry Price. There are many side characters who also come to life here -- most notably, the tenants of Borley Rectory, past and present. If you look at my read list you will find mostly romances & mysteries. Many of the authors I read include paranormal elements, or the "woo-woo" factor if you will, since that is the current fashion. William James & his colleagues would be appalled at how all their painstaking, reputation breaking work has become fodder for the mass market entertainment around the world. 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?".

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. The books only diverge at this point. Those in favour focus on the ‘successful’ accounts and say something like, “Although we can never really know, some doubt must always be part of the scientific method and …” Mrs. Piper was the character I found most interesting. She often came off as petulant, but that is because I think that's how Hodgson and others saw her. At one point, if memory serves, James came to his senses a bit and remembered that she was a PERSON. I think it would be interesting to get her POV, but I don't know that she had any letters or journals to draw from. Blum does her best to make this subject interesting. Alas, this is a dry read. Why? Because William James and his cohorts make for an interesting albeit dry read. Also, this book is rather ambitious with quite the scope.

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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. This seems to illustrate why mediums can sometimes be accurate and other times so completely wrong. If the medium does not have knowledge of a particular subject matter or their brain works in a different way to that of the spirit, it's difficult for the message to be sent accurately. 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.

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.

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THE GHOST HUNTERS, by Neil Spring is a fantastic piece of historical-fiction based on the real case of the reputed haunted Borley Rectory. Harry Price sets out to debunk (where possible) the existence of supernatural phenomenon, and attempts to find proof of human manipulations. In this story, we are introduced to the fictional character of Sarah Grey, who becomes Mr. Price's assistant on these journeys, and other efforts to the same end. 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. This excellent piece of popular scholarship has been on my "to read" list for many years and I was glad to finally get the opportunity to read it. Blum, a science journalist by profession, does an excellent job of telling a captivating story about the foundation of the SPR (in England) and the ASPR (in America) at the end of the 19th-century and into the first decade of the 20th, as well as the continual antagonism between the founding figures of psychical research and their more "scientifically minded" colleagues. Several times while reading the book I thought how this story would make a very interesting film. But even aside from Blum's talents as a writer the book showcases her excellent use of scholarly resources (particularly the tremendous amount of archival material she had to wade through to extract this story). What the SPR researchers sought to do was apply scientific methods of research to psychical phenomena; they questioned whether there could be communication with the dead, either through physical manifestations (ghosts, rapping) or verbal ones (automatic writing, trance mediumship). In the late 19th century, Spiritualism was a growing movement, and seances were popular, particularly among those who had lost loved ones in the not long past American Civil War. While most scientists scoffed at the idea of "talking to the dead," this small group of researchers chose to look at the problem scientifically. I have to admit this book excited my interests in the studies performed by the Society for Psychical Research (The SPR’s former presidents’ list reads like the Who’s Who in Science). One reason may have been my enormous respect for the works of the father of American psychology William James who presided over the SPR from 1894 to 1895.