As long as you don't look for hard science in this book, it's genuinely interesting. Alice Vernon is not a science writer, she's a lecturer in creative writing, and has a loose feel for history of science: she describes William Crookes as a chemist, a somewhat limited view, and calls Eleanor Sidgwick 'an eminent physicist' - as far as I can tell, Sidgwick only briefly assisted with some experiments at the Cavendish in her youth, spending far more time on psychic research. Vernon always seems surprised that those looking into hauntings should use methods similar to science, at one point commenting on a ghost hunter's book: 'Indeed, if you flick quickly through the book, you come across diagrams and charts that wouldn't be out of place on a classroom board during a lesson on Newton's laws of motion.' This isn't exactly leading edge scientific work. Biologists also might cringe at her assertion 'The hierarchical structure of atoms [in a Spiritualists attempt to rationalise the afterlife] is reminiscent of Darwin's theory of evolution, which argues that organisms often become more sophisticated over a period of time.' It really doesn't.
However, this doesn't stop the book being interesting, in part in the way that significant scientists like Crookes were taken in by mediums and others (in his case, in part it seems due to romantic inclinations). Over the years, scientists have proved themselves easily manipulated by tricksters in a way that stage magicians rarely are - perhaps not surprising, but still engaging. As Vernon traces ghost hunting from a Victorian pastime, often driven by Spiritualism, to modern ghost hunters with their pseudo-scientific devices we get a fascinating tale of gullibility and ways we can see what we want to see if it reinforces our beliefs.
Vernon's own viewpoint is primarily sceptical, though the way she tells the stories can drift into relaying what someone says they experienced without questioning the evidence to back it up. As the old saying goes, data is not the plural of anecdote. Vernon veers between examining ghost hunting in terms of searching for what is actually happening at a location, and in terms of just looking for ghosts, despite acknowledging that the latter approach inevitably biases observation. At one point, sadly, classic humanities lecturer biases creep in, when we are told that poltergeists are either the result of colonialism or living in under-funded council houses (and quite possibly all the fault of Margaret Thatcher).
I would have liked to have seen more on the psychology of ghost hunting - mentioned in a loose way, but not really going into enough depth on the importance of things like conformation bias, cherry picking and pareidolia (our tendency to see patterns and hence people etc. where they don't exist). All too often, we get a description of an event that simply says what was reported without digging deeper. Vernon is sometimes too sympathetic to the sources of phenomena, rather than emphasising the importance of scepticism.
I became interested in ghosts as a child by reading the old books on Borley Rectory by 1940s ghost hunter Harry Price, whose work at Borley ('the most haunted house in England) is inevitably covered here, though rightly pointing out the many oddities in his work and the likelihood he primarily saw his research as tabloid journalism to make money. Vernon nicely provides the backdrop not only to this, but the whole field through to the present day. An entertaining read on a topic that teeters on the border between science and self-deception.
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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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