Books: Who You Gonna Call?

It's not hard to understand the vogue for spiritualism that developed in the late 19th century. With religion under serious challenge from science, the afterlife--which religion affirmed and science scoffed at--became a subject of nervous fascination. Respectable people held parlor séances. Celebrity spiritualists like D.D. Home even made house calls. In 1869 three witnesses in a London residence reported that Home levitated, floated out a window and drifted back in through the window of another room.

It was all spine-tingling fun. But was any of it real? A handful of scientists and scholars brave enough to risk their reputation entered the field to find out. In her fascinating new history, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Penguin; 370 pages), Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prizewinning science reporter, tells the story of their decades-long effort to establish whether supernatural forces were more than sideshow illusions. They never came to firm conclusions, but their struggle to connect the dots makes for a captivating and even poignant tale.

In 1882 a trio of scholars formed the first serious investigatory body, the British Society for Psychical Research. Its purpose: to subject psychic phenomena to something like scientific testing, conducted with an open mind but a skeptical spirit. Three years later, an American society was formed along even more stringent lines, with membership consisting of scientists, not scholars. The best known among them was philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry and one of the enduring figures of American intellectual history.

James and his colleagues were always unmasking frauds, but a few clairvoyants performed feats they could not explain away. The most unnerving was Leonora Piper, a Massachusetts housewife who seemed sincerely perplexed by her powers as a medium and showed no interest in exploiting them. Time and again, while in an indisputable trance state, she told visitors details of their lives that seemed impossible for anyone but their dear departed to know.

To the end, Piper remained an enigma no skeptic could fully penetrate. But even she would not be accepted as conclusive proof of a supernatural realm. As the years went by, the psychic researchers themselves passed on to the next world. Predictably, spiritualists reported that some of them started sending back "messages" from beyond to old friends. Or perhaps even that was just another spiritualist charade. In the field of psychic research, the Big Questions always ended in the realm of the Big Maybe.