Appendix A:
History of Paranormal Research
Since the dawn of primitive cultures, human beings have questioned what happens when they die. The idea of “spirit” goes back to early man, who became consciously aware of his mortality and wanted to know if getting mauled by a sabertoothed tiger represented his finite end. Consciousness gone. Kaput. Nothingness.
In 1871, England’s first professor of anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor, published Primitive Cultures. In it, Tylor explains the theory of “animism,” which he defines as the belief in spiritual beings. According to Tylor, the belief in spirit began with early man’s attempt to explain basic bodily and mental conditions such as sleeping, waking, trance, or other unconscious states, dreams, illness, and death. He believed that primitive man pondered these things and developed the idea of a soul or spirit separate from the body, which was then extended to animals, plants, inanimate objects, heavenly bodies, and deceased ancestors.
This led to primitive faiths, which in turn led to spiritual rituals. Some early cultures began to believe that the spirit wanders away from the body during periods of unconsciousness such as sleep, or that after death the spirit lingers near the body of the dead person. It was a common practice of groups holding such beliefs to pacify the ghosts of the dead by offering food, clothing, and other objects these spirits might find useful in the afterlife. These types of rituals still exist in many cultures today. In fact, the practices of ancestor worship and the mourning rites of many modern civilizations most likely originated in this newfound belief in the spirit world.
As civilizations and technology developed, however, it was no longer acceptable for people to simply believe in ghosts. Scientists and skeptics began to question how exactly it was that spirits existed, and of course, whether this could be proven scientifically. These inquiring minds focused on psychic phenomena, or psi, which refers to events that appear to contradict physical laws and suggest the ability to send or receive messages without the use of the five senses. These processes include extrasensory perception (ESP), the acquisition of information without using the known senses. ESP is comprised of telepathy, the transfer of information from one person to another without using any of the known channels of sensory communication; clairvoyance, the acquisition of information about places, objects, or events without the mediation of any of the known senses; and precognition, the acquisition of information about a future incident that couldn’t be anticipated through any known related process. Along the same lines as precognition is retrocognition, the purported abstract transfer of information about a past occurrence. Another fascinating manifestation of psi is psychokinesis, which is the direct influence of mind on physical objects or events without the intervention of any known physical force.
The organized, scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena officially began with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882. It was the first organization established to examine these abnormal occurrences using scientific principles. In its early days, the SPR focused on the explosion of “extravagant paranormal claims … related to the spread of the new religion of Spiritualism.” The American Society for Psychical Research was founded a short time later in 1885. Its mission has been “to explore extraordinary or as yet unexplained phenomena that have been called psychic or paranormal, and their implications for our understanding of consciousness, the universe, and the nature of existence.”
In 1927, the pioneer of contemporary parapsychology, Joseph Banks Rhine, founded the parapsychology lab at Duke University and began his seminal extrasensory perception (ESP) experiments. He coined the word “parapsychology,” the actual discipline that seeks to investigate the existence and causes of both psychic abilities and life after death using the scientific method. Due to Rhine’s somewhat successful mental-telepathy experiments, the great majority of psychical studies in the last fifty years have occurred in laboratories and focused on ESP. You see, in order for something to be deemed “scientific” and worthy of study in the scientific community, it must be observable, empirical, measurable, and repeatable. Most metaphysical incidents don’t comply with scientific protocols, but Rhine’s experimental methods held the promise of supplying repeatable demonstrations. This has been a mixed blessing, because although psi research creates a pathway to understanding the human mind, the repetitive forced-choice procedures studied in laboratories fail to capture the kinds of ghostly experiences people report in everyday life. They also preclude consciousness-after-death possibilities.
This conundrum brings up the obvious question: How does ESP tie into ghostly encounters, if at all? Are ghosts manifestations of our psychic abilities, or can spirits of the dead (souls) actually manifest themselves in our earthly realm in tangible ways? Either way, the sobering truth remains that after more than a hundred years of research conducted by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet, we’re no closer to understanding the nature of spirit than our sabertooth-dodging brethren. However, in recent years, the growing number of paranormal researchers willing to leave the confines of the laboratory and venture out into the field where the real action occurs has yielded a strong body of evidence in favor of the existence of various types of ghostly peculiarities.