Emily Vincent, University of Birmingham ‘…the rooms of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research were thrown open for public inspection’.[1] — Harry Price, Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936) Lab coats, test tubes, and an array of musical instruments are not the typical objects one expects to find when confronting the history […]
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Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (林友樂), University College of London & Wellcome Trust Known in Chinese as ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學), psychical research was introduced into China from Japan in the 1900s and soon took the country by storm. Inspired by such prominent associations as the Society for Psychical Research […]
Dr Brian McCuskey, Utah State University In July 1883, the landscape photographer William Harding Warner announced ‘a new scientific subject’ in the British Journal of Photography. Warner had been experimenting with stereoscopic photography since the 1850s, but he was now working in a different dimension, trying to capture images of […]
Dr Efram Sera-Shriar, Science Museum Group In 1882 the artist and spiritualist Georgiana Houghton published a photobook called Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye. Its aim was simple: to provide a compelling set of photographic evidence that affirmed the veracity of the […]
Dr Efram Sera-Shriar, Science Museum Group When friends and colleagues speak with me about my research on modern spiritualism, I am often asked if I can show them a cool example of a spiritualist artefact, and to their immense disappointment, I usually hand them a piece of chalk. While at […]
Professor Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling Welcome to ‘The Media of Mediumship’, an AHRC-funded project produced by the University of Stirling and the Science Museum Group, in collaboration with Senate House Library. Look closely at the picture below. What do you see? An old camera, once state-of-the-art, now obsolete. Heavy […]