Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard mcclained smith. For the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the show. In this week's episode, where Darkness Plays, we touched briefly on the supernatural theories of the eminent Sir William Barrett.
Sir William passed away in nineteen twenty five, roughly forty years previously, however, he had been a founding member of a fascinating collective known as the Society for Psychical Research, counting among its early members such luminary figures as Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and John Ruskin. The Society had been established in an attempt to legitimize the investigation
of paranormal phenomena. Rather than dismiss reports of strange occurrencies that might not tally with conventional wisdom, the Society made it their mission to approach each case impartially adopting a strict scientific method with each investigation. You might say they
were nothing less than the original Ghostbusters. The Society for Psychical Research had been established in response to a peculiar craze that was sweeping the Western world, a craze that had its origins in a small wooden house in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York. In eighteen forty eight, two sisters named Kate Margaret Fox claimed to have made contact with the spirit of a dead man. The sisters alleged that the spirit had communicated with them through a series
of knocks and bangs. In short, they professed to have made contact with a poltergeist, and in so doing inadvertently created a movement that would come to be known as spiritualism. As news of the Fox sisters incredible claims spread, it wasn't long before everybody, from the Romanovs to Queen Victoria were conducting seances in an attempt to replicate the apparent
communications with the dead. Inevitably, as the movement's popularity increased, so did the number of bogus mediums, psychics and clairvoyance, ever ready to take advantage of a gullible public. For the Society of Psychical Research, it was these charlatans that posed the biggest threat to what they believed was an
otherwise perfectly legitimate area of study. It wasn't until eighteen eighty six that the society established itself with the publication of what is now considered the first classic text of Paris psychology, titled Phantasms of the Living. The book was the work of three Oxbridge graduates, the psychologist Edmund Gurney, the poet Frederick Myers, and author and founder of the
Fabian Society, Frank Podmore. The fascinating book, which can be found online, provides an exhaustive study of the paranormal taking in witchcraft, dreams, hallucinations, telepathy, and of course, the Poltgeist phenomena.
In conclusion, the authors believed that rather than describing the workings of the spirits of the dead or paranormal phenomena was merely the result of extrasensory perception, or, as Frederick Meyer's notes, instead of describing a ghost as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define
it as a manifestation of persistent personal energy. The trio, who also went by the brilliantly titled Committee of Apparitions and Haunted Houses, soon caught the attention of controversial newspaper editor William Thomas Stead. Stead, a pioneer of investigative journalism, is perhaps most well known for a series of articles published in the Palmar Gazette exposing the dark underbelly of
Victorian society and its proclivity for child prostitution. The articles not only helped to raise the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, but are also considered to mark the birth, for better or worse, of something we now take completely for granted, the power of the media to influence public opinion. As a commentator on popular culture, Stead had grown increasingly interested in the spiritualist movement, and so it was to him that the society turned for their next extraordinary venture.
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slash Unexplained podcast today to get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. This time a team consisting of Frederick Myers, Frank Podmore, Eleanor Sedgwick, and Alice Johnson, the Society Secretary set about compiling the data for what would become known as the Census of Hallucination. Just as an aside as was regrettably standard for the time and in many cases still is, the contribution of women was often criminally undervalued, but this was certainly not the case in
the Society for Psychical Research. Eleanor Sedgwick in particular, was a very highly regarded member of the Society and would later be elected its first female president in nineteen o eight. After six years of hard work, the Census of Hallucination was finally completed and the results were published in eighteen ninety five by William Stead in the pall Maw Gazette.
What the data revealed was nothing short of astounding. After collating the responses of over seventeen thousand participants, they found that as many as ten percent of respondents had experienced some form of waking hallucination. After further cross checking and verification, the team concluded that of the seventeen hundred reports that remained, at least two percent claimed to have experienced a hallucination
that revealed information they were highly unlikely to have known before. Furthermore, many of the people who claimed such experiences had recently suffered a profound moment of crisis, suggesting that such occurrences may make the mind more receptive to such an experience. Although of course the validity of the research is wide
open for debate, it remains a fascinating document. The Society for Psychical Research continues its work today, as ever, employing the because of science in its tireless investigation of paranormal phenomena. For the original Committee of Apparitions and Haunted Houses, their fates, however, were somewhat more tragic. Edmund Gurney had stated much of his reputation on his investigations into the existence of telepathy.
In the spring of eighteen eighty eight, he discovered his assistant, George Albert Smith, had in fact faked many of his successful results. Broken hearted by the deception, Gurneus believed to have taken his own life in the June of that year. In nineteen o seven, Frank Podmore was forced to resign from a senior position in the Post Office due in large part to the revelation that he was gay. Shunned by his family and friends, Podmore later drowned in the
town of Malvern in nineteen ten. Neither his family or any members of the society are believed to have attended his funeral. For William Thomas Stead, his fate was sealed as one of the two thousand, two hundred and twenty four passengers of the maiden voyage of the Titanic, sinking beneath the freezing waters of the North Atlantic Ocean on the morning of April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. And as for Frederic Myers, he died a peaceful death in Rome in
nineteen oh one, or so was thought. Surely before his death, the classicist Myers had informed his friends of his intentions to prove the existence of life after death by contacting them from beyond the grave. One such friend was the world renowned physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. Not long after Myers passed away, Sir Oliver was contacted by a medium. She had a message for him. She said, it's from a
man called Frederic Myers. What ensued over the course of several years was a series of messages of supposed that be relaid to mediums all over the world, none of whom had previously met. The obscure, highbrow illusions and snippets of Latin verse contained in the messages meant little on their own, but when piece together were found to form a cohesive set of communications, known as the Cross Correspondences, it is considered by many a compelling proof of life
after death. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes. Feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter at Unexplained Pod. Now it's time to
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