BY ROGER K. MILLER
Marbles and Lego pieces from out of nowhere zoom across the room and drop to the floor, scorching hot. Coins and stones drop out of the air. Sofas levitate and tip over. Beds, tables and chests of drawers spin on the spot and fling themselves about. Iron fireplaces wrench themselves out of the wall. Room lights flash on and off, doors slam, brand-new flashlight batteries drain mysteriously. Dogs bark in completely dogless rooms. And preteen girls -- always a staple of supernatural situations -- are flung out of bed by unseen hands, gutturally growling horribly vulgar, un-girlish words.
In the world of ghostly investigation, England's "Enfield poltergeist" from the 1970s is one of the more spectacular cases. Its manifestations were observed by more than two dozen highly credible witnesses. And, like all of the occurrences in these two new books by journalistic ghost hunters, it defies, at one and the same time, both doubt and rational, scientific explanation.
One book is historical, the other mostly contemporary; one is resolutely skeptical and neutral, the other skeptical but willing to be persuaded, because there just is too much weird stuff in the world. Each is intelligent, informative and, in its way, entertaining.
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former science journalist and now an author and professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her Ghost Hunters is the heavyweight of the two, scrupulously researched along historiographical lines.
Will Storr vs. the Supernatural, by freelance British journalist Will Storr, is breezy and more free-form; Storr flits from site to site (mostly in Britain but also in the United States) and phenomenon to phenomenon, hoping to rope a ghost or otherwise nail down the supernatural. Its saucy yet serious manner is reminiscent of fellow Briton Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures With Extremists of a few years back.
The real center of Ghost Hunters is not, as its subtitle suggests, William James, the American pioneer in psychology and researcher in the paranormal, but Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife and mother and paranormal phenomenon. Her astounding capacities as a medium captured the attention of not only James but a crowd of 19th century scientists.
James, brother of the novelist Henry James, is central to the tale in that he was a leading name among several scientists who risked their reputations to search for scientific proof of life after death. But they might not have been able to endure the ridicule and persevere if, among the dozens of frauds working the spiritualist con, they had not come across a handful of remarkable people like Piper whose apparently supernatural powers -- to engage in metal telepathy and/or to summon the "spirits" of the deceased -- staggered the imagination.
By the mid-19th century, interest in extrasensory powers and other expressions of the supernatural was widespread. The topic attracted great names. When the British branch of the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, Mark Twain -- anguished for a quarter-century by a recurring dream about his brother's death -- joined. James was a founder of the American branch of the SPR in 1885.
The SPR's most indefatigable exposer of frauds was the Australian-born Richard Hodgson, but on Leonora Piper he broke his lance. Hodgson was finally won over when he was visited by a deceased friend through Piper in a session that, in Blum's account, is mind-boggling. "After sittings with 130 different visitors, he'd been persuaded of the impossible -- that the personality in the room was indeed a spirit, proof that his friend lived on."
Storr's researches have him associating with people who deal in such arcane wonders as apparitions, mysterious light globules, knocks, disembodied voices, and generally things that go bump -- and worse -- in the night.
A serious impulse lies behind his pursuits (though his seriousness about the impulse seems questionable). A lapsed Roman Catholic, he wonders: If all this supernatural stuff is not bogus, then the implications can be cosmic and frightening. What if his agnostic, basically pagan outlook is all wrong?
Much of what he comes across is genuinely spooky and, like the phenomena in Ghost Hunters, completely inexplicable. Perfectly reasonable, ordinary citizens have what can only be described as eye-popping supernatural experiences, and the explanations that zealous doubters give for dismissing them are less believable than the events themselves.
Not that some of the "ghost hunters" don't sound bogus. Based on little apparent training and no other authority than their own self-certainty, they set up shop as clairvoyants and parapsychologists ("We're actually scientists," one asserts).
With a perfectly straight face they intone twaddle like, "Lightning does not travel in straight lines unless it's called." We scarcely need the psychiatrist Storr interviews to tell us that more than a few of these ghost hunters are doing it to achieve a sense of importance with others -- and with themselves.
Conclusions? As we know, James and his colleagues never "proved" anything to science's total satisfaction. Neither has Storr, either to science's satisfaction or his own.
Blum's book, skillfully organized and felicitously written, lays out the facts like a good, extended piece of newspaper writing and lets the reader decide. Yet she cannot suppress a sense of wonderment that makes her say that writing the book "changed the way I thought. . . . I'm just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness."
Storr sounds more decisive and less gullible than when he started. He concludes bluntly that there is no such thing as an independent source of evil; if there is a battle between good and evil, it takes place in our heads. Yet ghosts exist, he says, and there is evidence of something following death. Fear of that unknown, he believes, creates faith (in its most inclusive sense), because "faith is for the frightened."
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/b ... 22.article
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