The Ghost Hunters

Product Information

Sam Copeland strikes again with Greta and the Ghost Hunters, an irreverent tale about a girl who almost dies in an accident and can now see ghosts. This is historical fiction, a well researched story. Its focus are Borley Rectory, allegedly the most haunted house in England, Harry Price and his fictional assistant Sarah Grey.

If you are looking for quantity, this is your book, told from the point of view of the very Warrens, with 14 interesting and quite different cases...

How to Vote

As they repeatedly test remarkable mediums and hear overwhelming reports of ghostly warnings of loved one's deaths, these scientists become more convinced than ever that in the vast ocean of fakers, some events truly are supernatural in origin. But they face growing suspicion and ridicule from their fellow scientists and anger from spiritualists who find those they've put on pedestals tumbling down one after another. Blum does her best to make this subject interesting. Alas, this is a dry read. Why? Because William James and his cohorts make for an interesting albeit dry read. Also, this book is rather ambitious with quite the scope.

I don't really know why this edition has been published, the original first coming to light in 1989. It wouldn't have been very interesting to the majority of thinking people then, even less now, and there is a 'dated' feeling (if it's possible to say so about 'ghosts') not only in the presentation but in the incidents it purports to present.In her groundbreaking book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deborah Blum has masterfully retold the story of the birth of spiritualism and the scientific pursuit of “psychical research.” In the late nineteenth century, William James, renowned philosopher and psychologist, and a small group of eminent scientists staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity on one of the most extraordinary quests ever undertaken: to empirically prove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. Deborah Blum artfully retells this story. Along with Raymond Moody’s The Last Laugh, this book should be required reading for any aspiring investigator of the paranormal. And that last in the list is the reason for this book. The Warrens are staunch Roman Catholics and everything they see is in the light that shines from Rome. Anything that goes wrong in people's lives is down to the fact that they have lost the true path. Return to it and things might (they don't make any guarantees) get better.

My major problem with the book is the conclusion. It doesn't really conclude! As the original scientists in William James circle die off, the book simply draws to a close. But the real excitement of the book is their research, and the questions which it poses -- which have yet to be satisfied. Thus, you find yourself a bit at a loss, without a nice feeling of "fini" at the end of the book. Mrs. Piper was the character I found most interesting. She often came off as petulant, but that is because I think that's how Hodgson and others saw her. At one point, if memory serves, James came to his senses a bit and remembered that she was a PERSON. I think it would be interesting to get her POV, but I don't know that she had any letters or journals to draw from.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. Sarah's father actually got killed during the war, and you find out at a later stage in the book how and why he died. This book is much more sympathetic to spiritualists and spiritualism than I would have thought likely. If I have one prejudice it is that this stuff does not deserve anything more than laughter. This excellent piece of popular scholarship has been on my "to read" list for many years and I was glad to finally get the opportunity to read it. Blum, a science journalist by profession, does an excellent job of telling a captivating story about the foundation of the SPR (in England) and the ASPR (in America) at the end of the 19th-century and into the first decade of the 20th, as well as the continual antagonism between the founding figures of psychical research and their more "scientifically minded" colleagues. Several times while reading the book I thought how this story would make a very interesting film. But even aside from Blum's talents as a writer the book showcases her excellent use of scholarly resources (particularly the tremendous amount of archival material she had to wade through to extract this story). Greta lives with her grandma, parents, younger brother, and a few ghosts. Her Mother is yoga obsessed and her father tries his hand on poetry. Younger brother is too young to talk and anyways he is always busy playing with lorries. Naturally, Grandma is Greta's best friend. But she talks to the ghost of grandpa and Greta's parents want her to send her to an old home. Greta also used to think that grandma is losing marbles until one day Greta was hit by a vehicle and after that accident now she can also see the ghosts. Her parents are more than sure that Grandma is a bad influence on their daughter.

As she recovers, Greta finds she can not only see the spirits that haunt her ancestral home, she can talk to them - from her Grandpa Woebegone and Percy the poo-pushing plague victim, to the sinister poltergeist in the cellar. Ed & Lorraine Warren, sadly both now are deceased, but when they were alive, they were a married couple dedicated to help people while investigating paranormal events. Ed was a certified exorcist (the only one in USA outside of the Catholic Clergy) and Lorraine was a powerful psychic able to sense things. Both help not only regular people, but also the police and even the army. And while they already been since decades doing that, they were exposed to general awareness when they were involved during the infamous Amityville case. When the ghostbusters come, there is an extremely dim assistant who’s my favourite 🤣 And jokes abound about a “Medium” (“you look like an extra small to me”) and about moving spirits to another erm, “plane”.✈️ When all is said and done, Harry Price turns out to be a character loaded with irony, and the author sets things up so that it isn't up to the last that we discover exactly what that irony entails. The "secret" Sarah carries around with her isn't so earth shattering when revealed, but even with this little bit of drama (a tad bit overdone, imho), she is also an interesting person both with and without Harry Price. There are many side characters who also come to life here -- most notably, the tenants of Borley Rectory, past and present.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. 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? This is an first rate account by Deborah Blum of the emergence of a growing curiosity and serious research project regarding the existence of life after death, the possibility of communication with spirits, as well as the existence of mental telepathy. The parties involved were a group of well respected scientists and psychologists in the US, as well as the UK, in the late nineteenth century who formed the "Physical Research Society." It is hard to arugue with the respectibility of William James and Harvard as well as several other educated and determied participnts. In addition to their quest for knowledge and proof of an afterlife, they also set out to uncover the scam artists who were plentiful at the time. The work went on diligently for years by dedicated, educated people on both sides of the Atlantic, though many of their contemporaries spent a great deal of effort trying to dismiss any interest in this subject matter as pure folly. Those nay sayers and detractors made it their own mission to portray any of the documented findings in a negative and dismissive light. I didn't know before I read the book that Borley Rectory had existed and that Harry Price was a real person. Or rather I have a vague feeling that I have known and forgotten about it and it hit me when I looked up the place and the man himself on the net during the time I read the book. Strange how the mind can forget things. Blum is an author who knows her subject matter and has delved deep into the Victorian period. Scientists interested in proving the possibility of life after death embarked in investigating the phenomena of mediums. The book charts the controversy and conflict caused between scientists interested in the phenomena and those that didn't believe that this type of research was valid.