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Plain English Summary
This massive 1886 two-volume work was basically the birth certificate of serious telepathy research. Three Society for Psychical Research members combined controlled experiments with 702 real-world reports of people sensing a distant loved one's crisis or death. The numbers are striking: over 17,000 card-guessing trials produced successes beating chance at odds of less than one in fifty million. They also showed that hallucinations coinciding with someone's actual death happened far too often for coincidence. One blemish: the Creery family experiments were later exposed as involving secret signals. Still, this book set the evidential standards shaping every telepathy debate since, directly feeding into the modern ganzfeld controversy.
Research Notes
The founding text of systematic psychical research, establishing telepathy as a research program and the evidential standards for investigating it. Directly informs the ganzfeld controversy and all subsequent experimental telepathy work. One key experimental series (Creery family) was later found to involve signaling, but the broader evidence base remains historically influential.
Foundational two-volume compendium from the Society for Psychical Research combining controlled thought-transference experiments with a systematic collection of 702 spontaneous cases of telepathic impressions, crisis apparitions, and death-coincident hallucinations. Experimental evidence includes 17,653 card-guessing trials yielding 4,760 successes versus 4,413 expected by chance (p < 0.00000002), plus diagram-reproduction and sensation-transference experiments by Barrett, Guthrie, Lodge, and Richet. A probability argument demonstrates that death-coincident hallucinations occur far more frequently than chance predicts. Concludes that experimental and spontaneous phenomena jointly support the reality of telepathy.
Related Papers
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Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
📋 Cite this paper
Gurney, Edmund, Myers, Frederic W. H, Podmore, Frank (1886). Phantasms of the Living. .
@article{gurney_myers_podmore_1886_phantasms,
title = {Phantasms of the Living},
author = {Gurney, Edmund and Myers, Frederic W. H and Podmore, Frank},
year = {1886},
journal = {},
}