Spirits, shamans and sceptics

When Professor Braude, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Maryland, told colleagues about his interest in psychical research, he was shocked and astonished by their reactions. They were angry and scornful and accused him of pandering to unreason. It would be the ruin of his career, they threatened. What is wrong with these people? he asks. Is it cowardice and fear of the unknown, or are they wilfully dishonest in ignoring his findings and persecuting him for drawing attention to things they do not want to hear about?

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

That is the first of the mysteries displayed in this book. The others are centered upon notable characters in the history of ‘parapsychology’, as it is called here, beginning with the spectacular Daniel Dunglas Home. For 25 years from the 1850s, the ‘heyday of spiritualism’, this dapper little fellow entertained and baffled his followers with a flow of amazing effects. At his séances the forms of dead people appeared and were recognised and embraced by those who had known them, while items of heavy furniture floated around like feathers. Many of Home’s greatest feats were witnessed only by his admirers, but he was also investigated by sceptical scientists including the eminent physicist William Crookes. Under the most stringent conditions they could devise, he continued to produce miracles. Solid mahogany tables spun round and rose into the air, despite the efforts of weighty scientists to hold them down, and musical instruments came to life of their own accord. In one of Crookes’s experiments an accordion, placed in a wire cage below Home’s desk, floated upward and played ‘a well-known sweet and plaintive melody’.

How sweet the Victorians were with their love for spirits and their innocent gullibility. Home, with his genteel manner and agreeable manifestations, was the sort of trickster everyone wanted.