[Taltarzac725]

I have an open mind about individuals who profess something unique. The mass advertised organized forces are always suspect in my mind.

The ghost hunters researched some of these mediums.

In 1882, three of Butler's contemporaries, Fredrick Myers, Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick, were, like Wallace, dissatisfied with the new dispensation, and decided to see if science itself could show the limits of Darwin's argument. As a target, they chose what today is relegated to New Most Haunted: the survival of bodily death. To investigate this they, and other illustrious characters, started the Society for Psychical Research, which is still going strong, and devoted an enormous amount of time, effort and energy to studying the anomalous phenomena making cracks in mechanistic science's allegedly impenetrable edifice.

Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life after Death is a fascinating, moving and, most importantly, paradigm-challenging account of the lives and work of the many scientists and thinkers who championed the cause of psychical research. These included Nobel Prize winners such as Lord Rayleigh; a future prime minister, Arthur Balfour; a poet laureate, Tennyson; a knight of the realm, Oliver Lodge; and other notables like Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Leslie Stephen, the literary critic and father of Virginia Woolf.