History
The rampant fraud and trickery in Spiritualism and spirit photography led to their demise and the hey dey of Spiritualism was over by the end of 1920, although it does continue to exist in varying degrees in the US, the UK and Latin America. In 1888, Maggie Fox herself, accompanied by her sister Kate, publicly announced that their powers had been a fraud. She recanted the confession in 1889, probably due to the fact that she had killed her golden goose with the confession.
The SPR included such individuals as Arthur Balfour, William Gladstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. It investigated over 700 paranormal incidents and produced a 2,000 page study published in several volumes as Phantasms of the Living in 1866. The publication convinced many that ghosts were real, even skeptics and scientists. However, even though convinced of the reality of ghosts, most scientists responded with what amounted to, “Okay. They exist. So what?” But not all.
By the 1930’s, psychical research had moved away from séances in Spiritualists’ parlors and the anecdotal “evidence” gathered there and into the laboratory. One early experimenter was J. B. Rhine, who first made familiar the use of card- guessing and dice- rolling to validate ESP. Thomas Alva Edison was supposedly fascinated by spirit photography and believed that if spirits could be caught on film, they could also be recorded with auditory equipment. He announced that he was working on just such a device in 1920, but left no device or plans for such a device when he died in 1931. In 1936, Attila von Szalay, working with Raymond Bayless, experimented with a record cutter and player in an attempt to capture voices on phonographic records. In 1938, he captured what he believed to be the voice of his dead son. Eventually, his experiments yielded both male and female voices, whistles and rappings. In 1956, he began experiments to capture voices on electromagnetic tape and the study of EVPs was born. Von Szalay and Bayless published their work in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1959.
Today, belief in ghosts has again gained wide spread acceptance. Many people have ghost stories of their own to tell, and those who don’t have their own stories know those who do. Thanks to television shows such as Ghost Hunters and the vast resources of the internet, the topic has gotten a lot of exposure. And so we’ve come full circle again, from belief to unbelief to belief. Now, however, we hope to back up belief with evidence, not just anecdotes.
D&A Paranormal Investigators