Frederic W.H. Myers & The Society for Psychical Research

Nightmare Notebooks
Jan 3
6 min read

Over the years I’ve buried my nose in some very interesting books and have spent a lot of time visiting allegedly haunted locations to try and test things for myself. Unfortunately, many people in the “paranormal investigator” crowd are very much clout chasing goblins and at this point I find doing my own research to be much more fulfilling. In much of my paranormal reading, there’s one name I see pop up quite frequently. The Society for Psychical Research.

Taken from the book, "Mysterious Psychic Forces" by Camille Flammarion

Going forward, I will be using “SPR” when referring to the society.

During the great spiritual awakening of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a surge of con artists and frauds, as well as people who sought the truth. The SPR was founded February 20, 1882 in England and is still active today. The technical history of the SPR is pretty readily available online, so I won't focus too much on that here. They have quite the extensive list of journals and case studies and I think it will take more than one blog post to delve deeper into things, but I will most likely discuss some of the members, founders and cases over future posts. I'm especially interested in their notes on the infamous Enfield Haunting.

“The SPR was the first organisation of its kind in the world, its stated purpose being 'to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.'” (1)

There were initially six areas of study that were to be focused on:

Thought-Transference (telepathy)
Mesmerism (hypnotism)
Mediumship (communicating with spirits of the deceased)
Reichenbach Phenomena (mysterious lights/lifeforce able to been seen by some people)
Apparitions and Haunted Houses (Ghosts and Ghouls)
Séances (Mostly fraudulent get togethers where groups call out to the dead)

Spiritualism - is a system of belief or religious practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, especially through mediums.

One of the most interesting members of the SPR was Frederic W.H. Myers. He was one of the founding members, and also a poet, writer & philologist. An accomplished scholar, he graduated from Trinity College and went on to lecture at the college for many years. He was pretty progressive in his social beliefs, and was an early campaigner for women's rights to vote and their higher education. He became a permanent inspector of schools in 1872, and held the position up until shortly before his death.

In the early 1870's he became interested in spiritualism, which he pursued along side of Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour and numerous others. It is said that he attended a seance where the medium allegedly materialized “a giant hairy hand” out of thin air, which then shrunk down to the size of a child's. This played a key role in what piqued his interest in this spiritualist phenomena.

“In about 1873 – at the crest of perhaps the highest wave of materialism which has swept over these shores – it became the conviction of a small group of Cambridge friends that the deep questions thus at issue must be fought out in a way more thorough than the champions either of religion or of materialism had yet suggested. Our attitudes of mind were in some ways different; but to myself, at least, it seemed that no adequate attempt had been made to determine whether anything could be learnt as to an unseen world or no. I felt that if anything were knowable it must be discovered by simple experiment and observation, using precisely the same methods of deliberate, dispassionate, exact inquiry which have built up our actual knowledge about the world which we can touch and see.” - Frederic W.H. Myers

Colin Wilson, one of my favorite authors & scholars also writes,

“Myers suggested that consciousness could be regarded as a kind of spectrum. In the middle of the spectrum are the powers we know about - Sight, hearing, touch and so on. Below the red end of the spectrum, there are organic processes which we somehow control without being conscious of doing so. But beyond the violet end of the spectrum lie other powers, of which we are almost totally ignorant.” (2)

Many of us have had experiences that make us believe we are capable of so much more than we are consciously aware of. Premonitions, gut feelings, or sometimes simply just knowing something we’d have no way of knowing. These experiences, though personal, can be the start of a person opening up their higher conscious. Everyone is on a different point of that spectrum. Some are sensitive or empathic, and others feel absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, ever. The rest of us are somewhere in between floating in a semi awakened state. But it makes me really think about what is beyond what we can see. Are we capable of telepathy and psychokinesis if we just unlock an unknown part of our brain? I think it's possible. Maybe it’s not all paranormal at all, and is completely natural...a part of us that we've lost over the centuries. I always think about that movie with Bradley Cooper where he takes a pill that unlocks the full potential of his brain. Or the ending of Martyrs. Maybe some things are better left unknown until we're ready. But who is to decide?

Fun fact, Myers was the first to coin the term “telepathy”.

As I did some more digging into the SPR, as with all groups and societies, they had their fair share of disagreements. Initially the SPR worked well alongside the spiritualists but they would shortly part ways, with the spiritualists saying that no amount of testimony would be sufficient to serve as evidence to the researchers, and that the researchers were basically out to prove that everyone was a fraud.

There are many other notable names who were involved with the early works of the SPR including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sigmund Freud & Andrew Lang…but I should note that not everyone was in agreement with the SPR. After their deaths, Myers and other prominent members were accused of being biased in leaning towards paranormal existence. Others were accused of dismissing any evidence that there WAS paranormal existence. Though, more often than not it was accusations of fraudulent behavior that haunted (hehe) former members’ reputations. It is also said that after Myer's death, he communicated through mediums to try and further his work from the great beyond. We'll never really know that one for sure, but I hope to mess with people once I'm in spirit form.

This being said, where do we find the balance? Those of us who have had countless paranormal experiences have no trouble saying that we have proof of the afterlife, but how do our own experiences actually hold up scientifically? They don’t, unfortunately. For some of us, our own experiences are enough, and that’s okay. But it really is a huge bummer when people try and capitalize off “proving” things. Not only do we have TV shows and “documentaries” spreading false information, but even in this day and age we have people who hold fraudulent seances, events, etc. People haven't changed, but our ability to reach more and more audiences has. In reality, most paranormal investigators are just as bad as the fake mediums in the late 1800s. I’ve even been guilty of not speaking up when I know people are faking in the past, or when I know someone is wrong. More often than not I assume that people are either stupid or that they're lying, and that bias has been hard to shake. In many ways it has taken the fun out of being in the field.

Personally, I believe that in our lifetime we will not see the scientific community on board with parapsychology, paranormal, etc. Many of the early studies of the SPR are considered outdated, but there is still much that we can take from it. Perhaps if we continue to approach the paranormal from a scientific viewpoint rather than a sensationalized one, we can at least see progress.

What do you think? Share your thoughts with me and let me know if there's any cases that interest you!

This is a really awesome interview with Terrance Palmer, PhD, who was also a member of the SPR.

Sources & Further reading:

1) Grattan-Guinness, Ivor. (1982). Psychical Research: A Guide to Its History, Principles and Practices: In Celebration of 100 Years of the Society for Psychical Research.

2) Wilson, Colin (1971). The Occult: A History

3) Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. (1992) The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits.