Ghost Hunters of the South

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION The history of paranormal investigations can be traced back to the 1850s during the heyday of spiritualism. In 1848, two mediums from upstate New York, Kate and Margaret Fox, began receiving messages from the dead in their home in Hydesville, New York. Within a decade, they began holding séances for some of the country’s most prominent celebrities, including Mary Todd Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. By the end of the 1850s, hundreds of mediums began holding séances in homes throughout the United States and England. These “home circles” became the nucleus of the spiritualist movement, which held that the soul entered the spirit world immediately after death and that communication with these spirits was proof of the afterlife (Guiley 2000, 362). Ironically, spiritualism inadvertently gave rise to what was to become modern paranormal investigations. Eager to debunk these alleged mediums, a number of scientists began looking into mediumistic communications in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before long, they had exposed many mediums as frauds, especially those who had claimed to materialize spirits. However, a small number of these scientists who had attended séances became convinced that the spirit world was worth investigating. The best known of these scientists, a chemist named William XVII Crookes, began studying the activities of mediums in 1869. He was so convinced that one of them, Daniel Douglas Home, was genuine that he wrote a paper in which he attempted to prove the existence of a “psychic force.” After Crookes’s paper was published in the Quarterly Journal of Science, he was discredited by the scienti fic community (Taylor 2001, 26–27). Two of Crookes’s colleagues, Henry Sidgwick and Frederick Myers, were sympathetic with his plight. Along with Sidgwick’s friend, Edward Gurney, the three men formed an association dedicated to the investigation of the paranormal in London. In 1882, the group became the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), with Henry Sidgwick as the first president. Its founding members included such luminaries as Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and William Gladstone. In 1885, an American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was founded. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research, which concentrated on the exposing of fraudulent mediums, set the standard for ghost research. Both groups exist to this day (Taylor 2001, 27). One of the early members of the SPR, Harry Price, became the most famous ghost hunter of the first half of the twentieth century . Ostracized by many of his colleagues because of his lack of scientific training after joining the SPR in 1920, Price, nevertheless , became one of the first to employ modern technology in his investigations. His ghost-hunting kit appears quaint compared to the high-tech equipment used by today’s ghost-hunting groups: Felt overshoes Measuring tape Tape, electric bells, lead seals, and other items for making motion-detecting tools Introduction XVIII Dry batteries and switches Cameras Notebooks and drawing pads Ball and string, chalk Basic first-aid kit Mercury for detecting vibrations (Wilson 2005, 15) Price’s most celebrated investigation was his probe into the alleged hauntings at the Borley Rectory, known as “the most haunted house in England,” from 1929 until 1947. Borley was drawn to the rectory by stories of the sounds of dragging footsteps and loud rappings and the ghostly apparitions of a headless man and a nun. The large brick house was built in 1863 supposedly on the site of a monastery. According to the legend, in the thirteenth century, a monk had tried to elope with a beautiful novice. After the couple was apprehended, the monk was hanged, and the nun was bricked up alive in the walls of a nearby convent. Price had just started investigating the old house when poltergeist activity ensued. Lights flashed, bells rang, and objects flew through the air. Price was particularly interested in written messages that began appearing on the walls and scraps of paper. In 1937, after the rectory was abandoned, Price rented the house for a year and recruited forty researchers to assist him with documenting the investigation. To instruct assistants on the proper way to conduct an investigation, Price wrote a handbook in which he explained what to do and how to use the equipment (Hauntings 65–66). Before Borley Rectory was finally torn down in 1947, Price published two books detailing...