Spiritualism, Superstition and the Supernatural During the First World War
Founded in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is the world’s first and largest organisation for the scientific investigation of what we would call the paranormal today. During the First World War, the SPR’s biggest case was the investigation of the Angels of Mons. Important members during the war years included Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
War Poet Rupert Brooke died during the First World War. The mystic Aelfrida Tillyard claimed to have paranormal experiences in which she was visited by his ghost or spirit in dreams and received communications allegedly from Brook via automatic writing.
Sir Oliver Lodge’s London Speech on the Great War and Evil In November 1914, the eminent scientist and member of the Society for Psychical Research, Sir Oliver Lodge, gave a talk about ‘Science and Religion’ at the Browning Hall in Walworth, London. The hall was crowded with more than a thousand people. The Mayor of […]
The Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller on Predictions of the First World War It was psychologically to be expected that the terrific strain of the most terrible of wars should produce widespread emotional disturbance in the populations subjected to it, and that this, again, should lead to an apparent recrudescence of many primitive beliefs and practices. So […]
Wartime Revelations of a Ghost Hunters’ Dining Club The Ghost Club was a private, but not quite secret, dining club that met in London to discuss ghosts, naturally. Sir William Crookes, one of the leading lights of the Society for Psychical Research, was President of the Ghost Club throughout the duration of the war. According […]
Controversy surrounding the Angels of Mons legend prompted the Society for Psychical Research to launch an investigation. Assistant Research Officer Helen Woollgar de Gaudrion Verrall (later Salter) was given the task of collecting and weighing the evidence in the case of the alleged angels at the Battle of Mons: had it been a supernatural intervention to save the British Expeditionary Force, or had it been something else?
Investigating the Paranormal During the First World War All of these strange signs and portents did not go unnoticed. The popular press reported some of them, the Spiritualist press almost all of them. Nor did they go uninvestigated. At the outbreak of the First World War there already existed an organisation for the investigation of […]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Prophecies and Premonitions of the First World War A month before Britain declared war on Germany, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published an astonishingly accurate description of how the war would develop in a new and previously unimagined way. Author Envisages Unrestricted Submarine Warfare ‘Singularly prophetic.’ The short story ‘Danger! Being the […]
Angels in the Trenches: Spiritualism, Superstition and the Supernatural During the First World War The mechanised slaughter of the First World War brought a sudden and concentrated interest in life after death, living in spite of death and trying to predict, or even influence, when the merciless killing would end. People asked, can one communicate […]