Posted on 19 May 2015, 5:25

Sky Living TV showed the first of three parts of its serial The Enfield Haunting on May 3rd, after a well-organised publicity campaign that sold quite a few books even before the screening, and generated some good pieces by reporters who had first-hand experience of the original events, notably Michael…

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Posted on 31 January 2014, 17:12

For more than thirty years since the Enfield events ended, Janet, the (then) twelve-year-old who was the focus for much (but not all) of the activity, has done her best to avoid publicity, taking part in just one TV interview and one with a journalist. So I was quite surprised to learn that she had…

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Posted on 02 January 2014, 9:57

‘As a magician experienced in the dynamics of trickery, I have carefully examined Playfair’s lengthy account of the disturbances at Enfield and have concluded that they are best explained as children’s pranks.’ This weighty pronouncement comes from CSI (formerly CSICOP)’s chief hit-man and serial…

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Posted on 11 November 2013, 9:57

Are poltergeists class-conscious? I’m beginning to think they might be.

The past couple of years have seen a remarkable increase in reports of poltergeist activity from all over the world. This year alone I have received news of cases from Argentina, Botswana, Canada, Colombia, Dagestan,…

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Posted on 06 November 2013, 10:29

The Somali-born long-distance runner Mohamed (‘Mo’) Farah CBE (below) endeared himself to the British public by winning two gold medals in the 2012 London Olympic Games and declaring very forcefully that he was running for his adopted country, where he has lived since he was eight, and not for the…

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Posted on 23 October 2013, 10:06

When Hernani (below) founded the Brazilian Institute for Psychobiophysical Research (IBPP in its Brazilian acronym) in 1963, the status of psychical research in his country was much as it had been in England in 1882, when a small group of Spiritualists and Cambridge academics founded the Society for…

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Posted on 13 March 2013, 22:42

Although it is now more than sixty years since Dr Albert Mason cured a disease that was thought at the time to be incurable by any means, using nothing more than hypnosis, as I describe in the first chapter of

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Posted on 27 February 2013, 15:11

When I started to research my first book, The Flying Cow, in the early 1970s, I kept hearing about a famous Brazilian medium of the past named Anna Prado, who was said to have specialized in that rarest and most controversial of all mediumistic activities – materialization. Little was known…

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Posted on 13 February 2013, 21:57

The latest issue (1- 2013) of the excellent Ghost Club Journal contains an interesting piece from club chairman Alan Murdie, who also chairs the Spontaneous Case Committee of the Society for Psychical Research, which records unusual experiences published in the press or sent in by members…

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Posted on 15 January 2013, 21:44

‘The paranormal is bunk’, Richard Dawkins famously declared in the Sunday Mirror (February 8, 1998) in an article written, I suspect, not by him but by the duty hack of the day. We continue to hear similar blanket dismissals today but the Trendy Media Expert (TME) of the time, most recently…

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