New Books and Media

Phantom Ladies: The New Edition, by Andrew Green

Publication Details: Arima Publishing, ISBN: 9781845498306
Publish Date: February, 2024
Cover of Phantom Ladies

From the publisher's website: Originally published in 1977 Phantom Ladies is an alphabetical, county-by-county guide to hauntings across Great Britain and the first book to concentrate exclusively upon female ghosts. Compiled by veteran ghost hunter Andrew Green (1927-2004) it is now updated for the 21st century by Alan Murdie, Chairman of the Ghost Club.

Further information at the publisher's website: Arima Publishing.

Telephone Calls from the Dead (rev. Ed.), by Callum E Cooper

Publication Details: Tricorn Books, ISBN: 9781914615993
Publish Date: January, 2024
Cover of Telephone Calls from the Dead

From the back cover: There are potentially hundreds of people who have experienced bizarre events of Telephone Calls from the Dead, and much like ghosts, and any other parapsychological phenomena, they appear to be highly common. Once all explanations have been considered, psychological and physical, are we genuinely faced with the reality of contact with the dead and evidence for survival? This question has been asked before, and was investigated back in 1979, in a book entitled Phone Calls from the Dead, written by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless. For many years, this subject has remained dormant, until now.

Mind-Dust and White Crows: The Psychical Research of William James, edited by Gregory Shushan

Publication Details: White Crow Books, ISBN: 9781786772046
Publish Date: January, 2024
Cover of Mind-Dust and White Crows

From the publisher's website: William James (1842–1910) was a leading figure in Western psychology, philosophy, and psychical research. While there is an inextricable relationship between the various strands of James’s work, his psychical research has been unfairly neglected in favor of classics such as The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Read in light of one another, however, James’s “mainstream” writings can be seen as efforts to make philosophical, metaphysical, and psychological sense of his psychical research.

Mind Dust and White Crows bridges the illusory divide, placing James’s widely accepted works on mystical experience, theories of the soul, immortality, and metaphysics alongside his key writings on mediumship, telepathy, possession and other areas of psychical research. The result is a more integrated picture of James’s spiritually-minded writings, transcending the disciplinary stigmas so often imposed on them. Interestingly, some of James’s ideas seem to align with current interpretations of the soul and extended consciousness as derived from quantum physics.

This volume includes many rare articles, including material that has not been previously published in book form. Andreas Sommer’s introduction – written especially for this volume – highlights the importance of James’s work to the history and development of psychical research.

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

Healing and Medicine. A Doctor's Journey Toward Their Integration, by Paul Dieppe

Publication Details: Routledge, ISBN: 9781032610597
Publish Date: December, 2023
Cover of Healing and Medicine

From the publisher's website: Healing is on many people’s minds today. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a host of other disruptions and disasters, many of us feel that we need healing – in our personal lives, for the environment and for our planet. But healing is rarely defined and is not an accepted part of medicine in the West. This book examines the relationship between healing and medicine through the eyes of an academic physician who changed his interests from biomedical research to healing late in his career in medicine. It is based on his experiences and stories of his encounters with patients, practitioners and others for whom healing has had a particular significance, as well as his rigorous research into the subject. A central theme of the book is that modern medicine needs to be more pluralistic in its approach to health and accept that spirituality and healing techniques have roles to play alongside scientific medicine, which currently has its base in materialism alone.

Further information at the publisher's website: Routledge

Review by Ciaran Farrell

Becoming Psychic: Lessons from the Minds of Mediums, Healers, and Psychics, by Jeff Tarrant

Publication Details: Health Communications Inc, ISBN: 9780757324789
Publish Date: November, 2023
Cover of Becoming Psychic

From the publisher's website: Jeff Tarrant was fascinated by the paranormal as a child but then his training as a neuropsychologist turned him into a hardcore skeptic. If something could not be reliably and consistently demonstrated in the laboratory, then it wasn’t real. These rigid ideas were gradually worn away as he repeatedly witnessed and experienced things that simply should not be possible—telekenesis, clairvoyance, telepathy, mediumship, energy healing, and more….This book follows his journey of studying, interviewing, and testing a wide variety of mediums, psychics, and healers as he tries to determine what is going on in their brains when they engage in these supernormal abilities. Readers will get to know these gifted people, exploring what makes them tick and discovering firsthand evidence that this stuff is real.

Further information at the publisher's website: Health Communications Inc

The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs, edited by Serena Keshavjee

Publication Details: University of Manitoba Press, ISBN: 9781772840377
Publish Date: November, 2023
Cover of The Art of Ectoplasm

From the publisher's website: In the wake of the First World War and the 1918–19 pandemic, the world was left grappling with a profound sense of loss. It was against this backdrop that a Winnipeg couple, physician T.G. Hamilton and nurse Lillian Hamilton, began their research, documenting and photographing séances they held in their home laboratory. Their extensive study of the survival of human consciousness after death resulted in a stunning collection of hundreds of photographs, including images of tables flying through the air, mediums in trances, and, most curious of all, ectoplasm—a strange, white substance through which ghosts could apparently manifest.

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

The Lady in the Bay Window: A True Story of a Haunted Sheffield Home, by William C. Grave

Publication Details: Independently published, ISBN: 9798862208191
Publish Date: October, 2023
Cover of The Lady in the Bay Window

From the back cover: Welcome to the world of paranormal activity in a residential home. In 'The Lady in the Bay Window,' William C. Grave takes you on a hair-raising journey through 25 true stories of unexplained occurrences in his home. As a sceptic, William never believed in ghosts or the paranormal until he purchased his current residence 18 years ago. Since then, he has experienced a series of chilling events that have left him questioning everything he thought he knew about the world. From sightings of apparitions to strange footsteps and poltergeist activity, William's home has become a hotbed for the supernatural.

The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, by Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland

Publication Details: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN: 9781394195480
Publish Date: October, 2023
Cover of The Substance of Consciousness

From the publisher's website: A singularly powerful and rigorous argument in favor of modern substance dualism In The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, two distinguished philosophers deliver a unique and powerful defense of contemporary substance dualism, which makes the claim that the human person is an embodied fundamental, immaterial, and unifying substance. Multidisciplinary in scope, the book explores areas of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the sociology of mind-body beliefs.

Further information at the publisher's website: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye

Publication Details: Atelier Éditions, ISBN: 9781954957039
Publish Date: October, 2023
Cover of Ted Serios

From the publisher's website: Our thoughts are known to us, and us alone. But for a brief period in the 1960s, Ted Serios (1918–2006) attempted to prove that his inner reality could be documented. Serios demonstrated an ostensibly psychic act termed “thoughtography,” involving the transfer of mental images onto undeveloped Polaroid film. In studies supervised by respected Denver-based psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Serios produced over 1,000 anomalous photographs, a feat that has never been fully dismissed or wholly verified. Existing as an uncomfortable knot in time, the details of the Serios phenomenon can’t be disentangled without questioning the social conditions that produced it in the first place.

Further information at the publisher's website: Atelier Éditions

The Haunting of Borley Rectory: The Story of a Ghost Story, by Sean O'Connor

Publication Details: Simon & Schuster, ISBN: 9781471194795
Publish Date: October, 2023
Cover of The Haunting of Borley Rectory

From the publisher's website: The haunting, sensationally reported in the tabloid press, gripped the nation. It was investigated by Harry Price, a self-made ‘psychic detective’. This was the case that would make Price’s name as the most celebrated ghost-hunter of the age. He recorded the evidence of 200 witnesses to over 2,000 supernatural incidents. This surely confirmed that not only did ghosts exist but, finally, here was proof of life after death. With the tension of a thriller and the uncanny chills of a classic English ghost story, Sean O’Connor brings the story of Borley Rectory to vivid life as an allegory for an age fraught with anxiety, haunted by the shadow of the Great War and terrified of the apocalypse to come.

Further information at the publisher's website: Simon & Schuster.

Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches (rev. Ed.), by Malcolm Gaskill

Publication Details: Penguin, ISBN: 9781802061994
Publish Date: October, 2023
Cover of Hellish Nell

From the publisher's website: One of the last criminal trials using the 1735 Witchcraft Act was, improbably, in London in 1944. The accused was Helen Duncan, a middle-aged Scotswoman. This is her extraordinary story. Helen Duncan - known since childhood as 'Hellish Nell', for her uncontainable nature - was one of the most popular mediums of the twentieth century, holding seances around the country where she was believed to manifest the spirits of the dead.

Further information at the publisher's website: Penguin

Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum, by Owen Davies

Publication Details: Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780198873006
Publish Date: September, 2023
Cover of Troubled by Faith

From the publisher's website: The early nineteenth century witnessed the birth of psychiatry, a new medical science that fundamentally changed how mental illness was labelled and understood. Troubled by Faith explores how psychiatrists not only thought they were agents of modernity but that they could also explain the occult mysteries of the past. They bristled with confidence that, in an era of unprecedented change, unlocking the secrets of the mind was essential to an ordered and progressive society. And a progressive society was one that did not believe in witches, ghosts, and fairies, and did not exhibit excited religious emotions and divine communications. 

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