New Books and Media

From the publisher's website: During the years 1994-'97, depth psychotherapist Maureen B. Roberts experienced a series of fatefully impactful Dreams. The first involved Formula One racing legend Ayrton Senna, while the final Dreams featured Princess Diana. In July 1994, another powerful, precognitive Dream foreshadowed Maureen’s relationship with prominent Australian science fiction author Damien Broderick (who coined the term virtual reality). While they spent relatively little time together, for almost two years they corresponded regularly. These letters from the author, which amount to a colourful banquet of scholarly, anecdotal, personal, and psychospiritual reflections, shed light on how this unusual relationship became a challenging, mutually educational, yet eventually conflicted ‘dance of orbiting twin stars’ - one of the key images in the Dream. This uniquely intriguing book should appeal to lovers and students of science fiction, depth psychology, soul healing, transformational spiritual experiences, dreamwork, and philosophy (as the ‘love of wisdom’).

Further information at the publisher's website: 6th Books.

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.
 

From the publisher's website: From lunar spirit travels to prospective hospital studies, Afterlife Research traces the efforts of individuals and groups in the West who, since the late nineteenth century, have sought to investigate life after death scientifically. This book reconstructs a distinctive “scientific culture” that extends from spiritual animal magnetism in the late eighteenth century through Spiritualism, Spiritism, psychical research, reincarnation research, and contemporary near-death experience research. Focusing on three mid-nineteenth-century spiritual animal magnetizers—Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, George Bush, and Petrus Jacobus Siemelink—the book explores the recurring problems and shared solutions that have shaped afterlife research over the past two centuries.

Further information at publisher's website: Brill.

The PDF version is freely available,

From the back cover: Perched high on the wild and windswept Bodmin Moor, Jamaica Inn has inspired generations of travellers, historians, and paranormal enthusiasts. Steeped in legend and surrounded by mystery, it is one of Britain's most iconic coaching inns. Immortalised by Daphne du Maurier's celebrated 1936 novel Jamaica Inn, the building has captivated readers around the world for decades, but how much of its story is fact, and how much is folklore?

In Jamaica Inn: The History, Hauntings and Folklore, Karin Beasant and Lisa Holman bring together years of meticulous research, exclusive interviews, and firsthand paranormal investigations to reveal the most comprehensive account of the Inn ever published.

From the back cover: From psychic mediums and Spiritualist pioneers to researchers, writers, artists, and activists, women have always been at the heart of paranormal history. Yet many of their stories have been overlooked, forgotten, or overshadowed.

In Women of the Paranormal Volume II, paranormal researcher and author Alex Matsuo shines a light on more than forty remarkable women whose contributions helped shape the worlds of Spiritualism, psychical research, folklore, mediumship, occult studies, and the unexplained. Meet the women who challenged societal expectations, explored the boundaries of consciousness, investigated life after death, and dared to ask questions that others were afraid to ask.

Featuring figures such as Marie Laveau, Emma Hardinge Britten, Victoria Woodhull, Eusapia Palladino, Harriet E. Wilson, Georgiana Houghton, and many more, this second volume explores the lives, struggles, controversies, and achievements of women whose influence can still be felt throughout paranormal culture today.

From the publisher's website: This book explores the historical and social dynamics of Spiritualism - a religious movement associated in the popular imagination with nineteenth-century parlour séances and ghost photography. It continues to be practised actively today in Australia, the UK, and USA. The authors draw on their deep fieldwork, interviews, and archival research to analyse Spiritualism's resilience and the enduring popular appeal of mediumship.

There are three key contributions of the book: the first is that the scholarly study of "belief" should be rehabilitated. The authors propose a model of belief as a dialogue between claims to truth and commitments to institutions supporting those claims. The second is women's agency in Spiritualism. From the movement's beginnings, strong female leaders have decisively shaped its religious and political profile. The third is the need to analyse Australian Spiritualism as a distinct variant of a transnational Anglophone family of ritual practice.

Further information at the publisher's website: Manchester University Press.

For centuries, people across the world have reported encounters with the same mysterious figure: a woman dressed in white, appearing on lonely roads, in ruined castles, and among ancient landscapes. Beginning in Pembrokeshire, Wales, this book follows the trail of one of history's most enduring apparitions. But is the Lady in White a genuine ghost, or has her story become something far stranger a viral memory embedded deep within human consciousness? Blending folklore, eyewitness accounts, history, and paranormal investigation, The Lady in White, a Ghost or a Viral Memory? explores whether we are witnessing a restless spirit, or the power of a legend that refuses to die.

Review by Peter G. Maxwell-Stuart.

From the back cover: Forget everything you think you know about hauntings. For centuries, poltergeist activity—unexplained knocking, moving objects, electrical disturbances, and unsettling household chaos—has been blamed on spirits or unseen entities. But what if that explanation is only scratching the surface? In Poltergeists: A Grounded Investigation into Real Cases, Psychology, and the Forces Behind the Phenomenon, psychic medium and paranormal investigator Kevin Paul moves beyond fear-based narratives to explore what may actually be driving these experiences.

From the back cover: What if the so-called "psychic abilities" are just part of being human?

Phoenix of the Heart is the gripping origin story of the Psi Games, the : groundbreaking "Psychic Olympics" that blend competition, science, and! play to explore intuition, consciousness, and the extraordinary power of the human mind.

This book mixes ancient wisdom, modern research and a daring vision for humanity's future, challenges everything we think we know about the boundaries of human potential. At the heart of it is the phoenix. It is a symbol of awakening, of transformation, of the emergence of consciousness beyond fear and limitation.

From the publisher's website: Paranormal researcher Ashley Knibb takes readers on a chilling, deeply personal journey through more than a decade of ghostly encounters, unexplained phenomena, and life-altering revelations at a historic English pub. The Royal Oak, located on the outskirts of Swanage, is no ordinary pub - those within whisper strange tales of apparitions, vanishing objects, and eerie sensations that blur the line between the seen and unseen.

Further information at the publisher's website: 6th Books.

Review by Peter McCue.
 

From the publisher's website: The Psi Enigma: When Anomalous Experiences Transcend the Everyday World explores one of science’s most fascinating frontiers: the study of psi phenomena including telepathy, precognition and mind– matter interactions.
While these phenomena remain controversial, recent research suggests current scientific paradigms may be too narrow to account for them. Professor Thomas Rabeyron draws on psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and physics to introduce the groundbreaking Orpheus Model – the first comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding psi.

Further information at the publisher's website: Routledge.

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.

From the publisher's website: When attorney-turned-psychic Nancy du Tertre traveled to St. Petersburg to train with Russia’s most renowned psychokinesis experts to learn how to bend metal with the mind, she discovered, that instead they were bending her mind. Her surreal descent into a strange world of Russian psychic training resembled both a Cold War science experiment and a psychological thriller.

In The Cult of the Occult: Falling Down the Russian Rabbit Hole, du Tertre takes readers deep into a shadowy Institute where the promise of learning to move objects with the mind is tangled with something far more sinister. The Institute keeps du Tertre and her fellow American colleague in a state of total isolation, locked in rooms for hours, deprived of meals, bathroom breaks, and often sleep, lied to about the training, blackmailed, and deliberately confused. At the center, is Roza, the mercurial second-in-command to the founder of the Institute, the so-called “wizard,” Vadim Medvedev. Roza’s method alternates between friendliness and heartless cruelty – classic prisoner methods used for interrogation and brain-washing.

Further information at the publisher's website: White Crow Books.

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.

From the publisher's website: P. M. H. Atwater draws upon decades of scholarship, personal experiences, and testimonials to explore connections between near-death experiences (NDEs) and alien contact. She shares research from pioneers of alien contact, including Greta Woodrew, Leo Sprinkle, and John Mack. She also tells the story of her own NDEs and their revelations of her past lives.

Further information at the publisher's website: Bear & Company.

Review by Nemo C. Mörck.