Book Smart

Stories about paranormal experiences don’t surprise Blum. “I’d tell people I was doing the book and they’d respond by telling me their own personal encounters with the supernatural. I’d never had anything like that happen before as a mainstream science writer. It adds up to a fascinating pattern,” she says.

However, Blum adds that she is a complete neophyte to the paranormal.

“I’ve never seen a ghost, had a premonition or had any psychic insights,” she says. “I figured when I started the project I would be a perfect person to do the book.”

That book chronicles “the best ghost hunt in the history of science,” she says, the efforts of a coterie of early 20th century intellectuals to quantify the paranormal and render the perception of ghosts in scientific terms. She says that their methods persist to this day in the infrared sensors and magnetic resonance detectors used by latter-day spiritualists.

Blum says that now, as in the original Victorian day, at issue is and was the tension between empirical science and religious faith.

“The book covers the years between 1880 and 1910, the post-Darwinian era when many people were trying to resolve their doubts and fears about our moral future,” she says.

The originals found a leader in American psychologist William James, whose brother Henry, the novelist, scored quite a supernatural coup of his own with his novella “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). William James’ Society for the Psychical Research in America threatened to compromise his reputation. “I hadn’t realized before this book how much time and energy James put into his psychical research. As you get into it, you begin to see how much he risked in doing it, and how much he lost in professional respect,” Blum says. “I really learned to appreciate how much courage and determination it took on his part.”

Initially, in the 1880s, James predicted that by the turn of that century science would resolve once and for all whether the dead could communicate with the living. He also was fairly confident that the much-awaited answer would be yes. However, the researchers mostly found wanton fraud, although they did conclude that about 5 percent of reported incidents were legitimate.

To date, science has failed to establish evidence on its own terms of life after death; nevertheless, scores of people remain convinced that it is a fact.

Blum thinks this belief is perfectly reasonable, in perhaps a paradoxical way.

“Science sets limits on the world. It’s a very defined system of measuring what’s real. I think many people tend to feel trapped within those limits. They want the world to be larger, more interesting, more unexpected. And that’s not unreasonable.

“And it may not be wrong, either. After all, what is reality, and who holds the power to define it?”