This novel presents itself to you as an account written by one of the lead investigators during that time, and is treated very much like a diary written after the fact. The lead narrator is constantly foreboding events that have yet to happen, and adding suspense and build up throughout. All the while, keeping the reader semi-clueless about the whether or not the events that are unfolding are real. So what about Sarah? I liked her quite a bit, but not enough until after she had left Henry the second time did I really get attached to her. And that was well past the half-way point of the novel. So could the debunking really carry the novel? No. Not really. They were mildly curious oddities, and I've watched tons of b-movies, read lots of silly tales, and I've even read a lot of the greats within both sides of the issue, from Manly P. Hall to Madame Blavatsky, and this novel just kinda... moved along.

I believe this is a first book, and to be fair I did think it improved as it went along. The character of Harry Price was well drawn - a really mercurial personality. I'm going to investigate more about him. Sarah, the ex glamour model (??) never rang true for me. In fact many times I could have cheerfully slapped her. Blum counters this positive portrait of a remarkable medium with the more ambiguous and disturbing portrayal of Eusapia Palladino, a rough-around-the-edges Italian medium who was often caught "cheating" during her seances, but also seemed to manifest some genuinely puzzling phenomena (including the first reported instance of "ectoplasm"). The two mediums similar and yet, in many ways, contrasting reputations and fates and Blum skillfully uses these two women as a means to structure the second half of her study. I am very glad to be able to say, though, that the book did improve. As the story went on, it did become less of an account of "bumps in the night", flying bars of soap and heaving tables and turned into some much more subtle and chilling. It is actually difficult to say more without giving away some of the secrets of the book. But it is worth reading that first section for the sake of the ending. Mr. Price's character has several sides to him--and none of them match up to any one person's perception of the man. Sarah's character was a bit "over-the-top" and transparent to me, but I can see why the author added her as she made for several additional branches of this story.

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This book is an imaginative account of the haunting of Borley Rectory, apparently "the most haunted house in England" and the investigation of it by ghost hunter, showman, charlatan - make up your own mind which - Harry Price. Set between the 1920s and the 40s, it takes us to a world where the relatives of those who fell in the First World War are exploited by false(?) mediums. The mediums who are in turn turn hunted down by the indefatigable Price. But Price has a problem. He is being supported and his "laboratory" accommodated by the Spiritualist movement, whose pet mediums he keeps debunking. So it may seem very convenient when an opportunity arises to investigate a serious haunting. Will Price, and his assistant, Sarah Grey, encounter something much darker and much nastier than they expect? The Victorian era was probably the high-point of belief in spiritualism - who doesn't picture all those fine gentleman and corseted ladies participating in seances, dabbling with Ouija boards, tilting tables and automatic writing? It's probably no coincidence that this peak in belief coincided with the rise of science as we understand it - perhaps this emerging insistence that the universe could be codified and classified and explained also gave rise to some kind of reaction against it, this belief that there were some things beyond explanation? Blum does not outright state it, but implies that these investigations were most likely abandoned because they were extremely difficult, and also because science itself was becoming increasingly pedantic and reductionist. The final chapter citing Thomas Edison's evaluation of James's interest in psychic phenomena was both telling and sad. He claims that we human beings are essentially machines and that when our gears wear out, only a husk remains. This kind of thinking led to erroneous "scientific" advancements such as counting calories (where all calories are considered equally valid fuel) - wrong; the "stress" theory of ulcers (because no bacterium can possibly survive in an environment as acidic as the human stomach, one of the lowest pH values to be found in nature) - wrong; that baby formula, scientifically created from correct chemical nutrients, is better than breast milk - wrong. My father had meant the world to me. He was a terrifically busy man, of the most highly respected barristers in west London. Work, for him, had been a matter of survival."

The second was an experiment conducted by Margaret Verrall a friend of Fred Myers. Verrall decided to prove if there was life after death by communicating with Myers. She decided on automatic writing, the phenomena of holding a pen and having a spirit take over and write messages. Over three months she set aside at least an hour every day and waited. After three months of waiting she started writing about other matters.

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Basic premise is girl goes to work for parapsychology professor in the late 1920s, early 1930s. He's trying to prove it's all bunk. She's not sure and is in love with him. In the United States, William James led the charge at the helm of the American Society for Psychical Research, but his investigations seemed no more fruitful than those of his British counterparts. By 1886, Blum wrote, “their annual report… had degenerated into a list of exposures of professional practitioners.” Their experiments dismantled spiritualist claims one after another, and many members began to conclude that mental illness lay at the heart of ghost sightings. Neil Spring's 'The Ghost Hunters' tells the tale of one of the most haunted houses in the entire of the UK, Borely Rectory. The house has been featured in many ghost stories before this and was famously the object of an investigation by the Society of Physical Research, around which this novel is based. I came to this book knowing nothing about the subject matter but as a keen student of history and Ghosthunters did not disappoint. It started too slowly for my liking but then I found it to be drawing me more and more into the story and caring about Sarah Grey, the mysteries surrounding the haunted Borely Rectory and the strange larger than life Harry Price. This to me is a very British story. It tells of eccentricity as one man and his enterprise creating a laboratory invested in solving the paranormal mysteries of the day and of ages past. He is a showman and a self-publicist operating in a very clipped, very precise world but he is also very much part of this world. He is also a very British boffin conjuring up new devices to unmask mediums who are magicians and other paranormal fraudsters. It is also a very British story to have a situation whereby a man's qualifications and his integrity can be called into question in an area where belief is usually suspended. There are also undercurrents of secrets that must not see the light of day and repressed love that cannot be. All these events are seen from the reflection of Sarah Grey and in truth it is more her story and how events impact and how Harry impacts upon her.

So, it might seem reasonable to expect that I didn’t like this book. Well, it is a strange thing. Parts of this book annoyed me – but not for the content so much as how it was told. I got a bit lost at times as there seemed to be too many stories going on. But this was less a book about the cheats (oh, sorry, spiritualists) and more about those who had been cheated (oh, I mean, their scientific investigators). I did warn you that I was prejudiced.

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This seems to illustrate why mediums can sometimes be accurate and other times so completely wrong. If the medium does not have knowledge of a particular subject matter or their brain works in a different way to that of the spirit, it's difficult for the message to be sent accurately. This is absolutely not a horror book, more a mystery would I say. A paranormal mystery book. Despite dealing with a house that is said to be haunting was the book never scary to read. And, it could feel a bit long sometimes. I can honestly say that if Sarah Grey and Harry Price had not been so interesting to read about had this been dull to read. But they give the book life.