Before there was parapsychology, there was psychical research. Emerging and spreading across Western countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychical researchers sought to explore unusual mental phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance but without necessary recourse to the explanations offered by Spiritualism. In the United States, the subject was largely formalized through the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), founded in 1885 as an offshoot of its British counterpart. Under the guidance of the prominent psychologist and philosopher of religion William James—a figure who looms large in this study—the ASPR gathered vast amounts of material from correspondents throughout the United States, much of which the society was unsure what to do with.
It is into the ASPR’s rich and complicated archive that the novelist, poet, and historian Alicia Puglionesi has delved to produce Common Phantoms. Possessing a doctorate in the history of science from Johns Hopkins...
University of California Press