It might seem odd to review a book on ghost hunting as popular science, but the book's blurb says it is 'A social, historical and scientific exploration of ghost-hunting' - and over the years, ghost hunters have, more often than not, made use of scientific (and pseudoscientific) methods in their attempts to undercover whether there is any reality behind hauntings. 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 commenti...

This is a weird one with a capital W. It really is about auras - or should that be aurae? (The plural surely isn't 'aura' as the title seems to suggest.) I was highly doubtful when someone mentioned this as a popular science book, but they argued 'Plenty of phenomena have been treated with gravity by the sciences without being deemed real in any kind of empirical sense. For example, today we wouldn’t implement any medicine based on the model of the four humours – but it’s important to reckon with that history as part of the history of biology.' Okay, so were this about the dodgy history of the concept that people have auras - invisible coloured glows around them that can be seen by sensitive souls and captured on camera, it arguably is about psychology and history of science. But I'm not sure the book really does this. What does it even mean, for example, to photograph an aura? Jeremy Stolow tells us that when he had his aura photographed, 'expert' Guy ...