The Ghost Club
This is one of my favorite topics on the
paranormal!
Being an investigator I consider these men our Founding Fathers.
Anyone who is on a paranormal team is doing the same things as these distinguished
gentlemen did. We are all in this to study the paranormal, but at the same time
trying to preserve the field from charlatans.
The Ghost Club was started in 1855 in Cambridge by
a few men from Trinity College. Some of the members through the years you may
have heard of, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter Cushing, Harry
Price, Siegfried Sassoon, Donald Campbell, Peter Underwood, Maurice Grosse Sir
Shane Leslie and Eric Maple.
The only downfall to the 54 years is no woman were
allowed.
One of the clubs first investigations was of the
Davenport Brothers and their “spirit cabinet” hoax. The Davenport Brothers were
magicians and after hearing about the spiritual movement and the Fox sisters
they started to report similar experiences. They built the spirit cabinet to be
used by mediums during a séance. The cabinet would section the medium off from
the crowd to see, sometimes their hands and feet would be bound while they
performed their paranormal phenomena. The ghost club challenged the Davenports
claim to contact the dead.
The club would meet and partake in investigations
of the spiritualism phenomena and talk about ghostly subjects.
They remained active until 1855 when Charles
Dickens died. It wasn’t until All Saints Day in 1882 when the club was finally
revived by the famous medium Stainton Moses and Alfred Alaric Watts. The club
remained exclusive through the years with only 82 members over the 54 years.
The club was an organization of convinced believers in which the psychic phenomena
was a fact, unlike the Society for Psychical Research was grounded in the
scientific belief.
Some of their most notable investigations are The
Borley Rectory and The Ancient Ram Inn.
Now The Ghost Club remained a selective and secretive
organization of convinced believers that believed the psychic phenomena was an
established fact, unlike SPR (Society for Psychical Research) that was founded
around the same time as the Ghost Club, who’s beliefs where more grounded in
the scientific. So, when the twentieth century brought the laboratory-based
research, The Ghost Club’s séance room investigations made them fall out of
touch with contemporary psychic research.
Harry Price, famous for
his Borley Rectory investigations, joined in 1927 along with psychologist Dr.
Nandor Fodor who was infamous as a leading authority on poltergeists, haunting and paranormal phenomena.
But with the attendance falling for The Ghost Club they
closed in 1936 after 485 meetings. The records from The Ghost Club were sent to
the British Museum under the provisions that they would remained sealed until
1962 for confidentiality reasons.
But in 18 months Harry Price relaunched The Ghost Club as a
society dining event where psychic researchers and mediums could deliver after dinner
talks. Price also at this time decided to allow women to join the club. Price
wanted to specify that the club was not spiritualist church or association but
a group of skeptics that gathered to talk about paranormal topics.
After Price’s death in 1948 the actual club was relaunched
again. It went through many changes but did expand its study to UFO’s, dowsing,
and cryptozoology.
The club continues to meet monthly at the Victory Services
Club in London. They still have several investigations a year.
