New Books and Media

From the back cover: Be it a frightening childhood encounter, an unexplainable occurrence, or simply a fascination with all things strange and mysterious, the end result is the same; a lifelong obsession with the unseen world of the paranormal. This obsession leads some to spend long, cold nights in abandoned buildings in search of ghosts, while others dedicate their lives and careers to trudging through dense forests on a quest for monsters. And some pick up a film camera in hopes of documenting the existence of both for a viewing audience.

Paranormal investigators and authors Jason Hewlett and Peter Renn have collected the stories and adventures of more than twenty dedicated ghost hunters, cryptozoologists, and filmmakers in this Investigators’ Archive. With it comes a collection of frightening encounters across England, the United States, and Canada, as told by Ciaran O’Keeffe, Paul Bradford, Ken Gerhard and more. Hewlett, Renn and their colleagues also provide insight into investigative techniques and technology, a new, first-person account of the Exorcism of Cindy Sauer, and potential explanations for why hauntings occur. All backed up by eyewitness accounts and historical research. 

Review by Ashley Knibb.

From the publisher's website: More than fifteen years after the famous South Shields Poltergeist case of 2006, and its well-received book, The South Shields Poltergeist: One Families Fight Against an Invisible Intruder Darren W. Ritson brings you Poltergeist Parallels and Contagion, a fascinating revised and updated study of the poltergeist enigma.

After researching other equally bewildering cases – post South Shields – a number of serious thought-provoking hypotheses regarding the aspect of the poltergeist called ‘contagion’ have now been raised. Poltergeist contagion has been seldom discussed or studied by psychical researchers, despite many well documented historic cases making mention of it – that is, until now. During the South Shields case and its subsequent years, Darren W. Ritson and his co-investigator Michael J. Hallowell were also subjected to acts of poltergeist ‘contagion’. Also noted, were astonishing similarities between cases they had investigated.

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

From the publisher's website: Why do people love ghost stories, even when they don’t believe (or say they don’t believe) in ghosts? Is it simply the adrenaline rush that comes from being terrified by a great storyteller? Or is it that such tales give form to our own inner demons?

‘Looking  back  over  nearly  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  serious  therapeutic  work,’ writes Stephen Johnson, ‘I’m  struck  by  how  often,  in  trying  to  explain  my  own  terrifying  mental  states  to  psychotherapists,  I’ve  resorted  to  images or turns of phrase in some of my own favourite ghost stories.’

With contributions from Alexander Pushkin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tove Jansson, Penelope Lively, Flann O’Brien and more, this uniquely curated anthology brings together some of the most chilling – and enigmatic – stories from around the world. 

These guidance notes are intended to provide helpful information and practical guidance to all those who use equipment to support their investigations. They are also intended to help the investigator to obtain the maximum usefulness from their equipment and from the data they collect whilst using it.

Available through the SPR Book Store.

From the back cover: One in ten people claim to have encountered a ghost, yet science refuses to acknowledge their existence. However, it turns out that ghosts are by no means the only, or most mysterious of apparitions. Now, an author with a background in science has sought to uncover the parameters of this bewildering field. In this, he has adopted three principals: 1. to first seek a mundane explanation 2. not accept anything until it has been confirmed by further data, and 3. not to discard any item, but to file it away in case something similar appears later. In this manner, he documents the little known phenomenon of apparitions which can be shown to result from the mind of a third party. From there he moves to apparitions of the living, then to standard ghosts and hauntings, before delving into far more profound phenomena: elves and fairies, plus a variety of even weirder apparitions, some of which are truly terrifying, and others benevolent. These remarkable phenomena are all fully documented, and by the time you finish this book, you will find it hard to reject the conclusion that there exists a whole parallel world of immaterial entities, which is only on rare occasions perceptible to our senses.

From the author's website: Most of us are fascinated by reports of ghosts and spirits, even if we do not believe them. This spinechilling collection of first-hand accounts are likely to unsettle even hardened sceptics. 

Who or what is responsible for the mysterious sounds in a train station’s signal box? A cave explorer has a potentially life-threatening encounter with an underwater ghost. An engineer watches the spirit of a former worker walk straight through two machines and then vanish through a factory wall. 

Further information at the author's website: Andy Owens. 

From the back cover: Houdini’s crusade against fraudulent mediums brought him into conflict with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the spokesman for Spiritualism. And it pitted him against a rogues-gallery of rascals. Among them were Pierre Keeler, who produced ghostly messages on slates; George Valiantine and his shenanigans in the dark; the escape artist Nino; and the Reverend Mrs. Josie K. Stewart, pastor of the Independent Church of Truth and a master of sleight-of-hand. But his prime antagonist was Margery the Medium. “It is your wits against mine,” she told him. Was Margery a fraud? Did she despise Houdini—or admire him for his astuteness and manliness? And was Walter, her late brother, responsible for Houdini’s death? In this compelling history, the full truth about Spiritualism is at last revealed—by none other than Sherlock Holmes himself!

From the back cover: This book follows the journey of Druze individuals who can remember their former lives and go on search for their previous families. For the Druze, an ethno-religious minority in the Middle East split between different nation-states, such cases and related discourses embody ambivalent bridges between personal, familial, and ethnic identities.

The contributions in this book, presented by Eléonore Armanet, Nour Farra Haddad, Gebhard Fartacek, Tobias Lang, Lorenz Nigst, and Salma Samaha, draw on ethnographic inquiries and illuminate the broad field of Druze conceptions of rebirth and group coherence against the backdrop of everyday challenges and recent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

The book is freely available on the publisher's website: Peter Lang.

This book focuses on an intimate view of a small Physical Mediumship home-circle based on 10 years of transcriptions and audio tapes involved in a unique and special project. The ultimate goal was to fully materialise spirit forms in the light, using a new energy technique with which the Spirit world was excitedly experimenting. Very regrettably, the desired event never transpired completely. Apart from the new highly original format that this book well outlines, a direct line to Spirit was always maintained with advanced souls, predictions were given on the tenuous state of planet Earth and their purpose and wonderful expectations of their project are also skilfully presented in this dialogue.

From the publisher's website: “Parapsychology and Religion” is perhaps the most controversial research area in the psychology of religion. However, in recent decades, psychology of religion has witnessed a growing literature bearing on ontological issues including parapsychological topics such as distant healing and near-death experiences. This book argues that despite the methodological and theoretical controversies that still surround the field of parapsychology, the findings of research on alleged anomalous processes can inform the study of religious/spiritual experiences. Psychological literature on the paranormal is critically reviewed and it is argued that it became less a scientific endeavor and more an ideological program devised to denigrate paranormal believers and experiencers. This volume explores how an open-minded dialogue between parapsychology and psychology of religion might help us move beyond the present ideological disputes and reviewes the complex relations between parapsychology and religion over time as well as their implications for interdisciplinary research on religion and spirituality.

Further information at the publisher's website: Brill. 

From the publisher's website: Glimpses of Another World: Impressions and Reflections of an EVP Operator is Anabela Cardoso’s third work.

Following on from Electronic Voices: Contact with Another Dimension? and Electronic Contact with the Dead: What do the Voices Tell Us? in this book the author shares her thoughts and ruminations on Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC), the phenomena whereby allegedly deceased communicators relay messages and images to the living via radio equipment, televisions, computers, phones and other electronic devices. It’s a subject Anabela has devoted her life to in recent decades.

The communication is both fascinating and mysterious and the wisdom meted out by higher dimension human and nonhuman intelligences is profound. Glimpses of Another World is a memoir and a how-to-do ITC manual rolled into one and essential reading for those pondering the possibility of an afterlife.

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

From the publisher's website: A Quest for Wisdom is a wide-ranging volume which brings together 25 of David Lorimer’s highly acclaimed essays. Among the significant thinkers featured here are many who have shone their light on his path, and which can provide enriching nourishment for readers on their own life journeys. The essays explore philosophy, meaning and spirituality; consciousness, death and transformation; and responsibility, ethics and society. Perceptive and illuminating, they examine the nature of life and death, questions of meaning and purpose, and the challenge of how we can live more harmoniously together. David hopes that readers will be inspired, as Dr Albert Schweitzer put it, in our common task ‘to become more finely and deeply human.’

Review by Gary Lachman.