Against Everyone with Conner Habib

Friends,

This is the fourth episode* in a series called The Spirit-Era and Its Aftermaths in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today, and in fact, being echoed by our own time.

This time, we’re moving closer and closer to our present age, away from the Spirit-Era and into its aftermaths, tracking the ways that paranormal investigations, and paranormal phenomena themselves, changed as they emerged from that era.

And I look into all of the with my guest, journalist ⁠BEN MACHELL⁠, author of the compulsively readable and also illuminating book ⁠Chasing the Dark: A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity⁠.

One thing I’ve noticed again and again in researching and recording this series of episodes is that the so-called esoteric, the miraculous, the paranormal are all common.

Whether it’s a haunting, someone who is able to accomplish a feat of endurance, or the ways in which the world is simply very strange if we just look at it without taking it for granted: these are not aberrant occurrences. We have all experienced them, or heard about someone who has, or have shared stories about them, or have found some evidence for them or theorized about them.

So when we tell stories about the paranormal, we are really just telling stories about the normal world.

In Ben’s book, he takes a long and thoughtful journey following the life and work of paranormal investigator Tony Cornell, a member of the Society for Psychical Research who appeared on TV, wrote books, and even was featured in a computer magazine for building a device to try to detect paranormal phenomenon. But unlike the performative ghost conjurers of the late 19th century or the fakirs in the early 20th, Tony (1924 - 2010) wasn’t trying to create spectacular performance, and wasn’t motivated purely by egotistical posturing as a debunker either. Rather he sought to understand what was really happening in people’s lives.

Through following Tony, Ben depicts a fascinating alternate history of the everyday: people simply living their lives, but then experiencing something they don’t understand and can't explain, something that feels out of place to reality itself. Sometimes the unexplainable isn’t the phenomena, but a feeling, a need to cry for help.

So a picture begins to emerge - the paranormal as the presence of motivators - whether in our own behavior or in furniture and dishes flying through the air that we can’t grasp, that we need help with.

What a change from where the Spirit-Era started, with the frightening glamour of the table rapping spirits and the ectoplasmic bonds of spiritualist gatherings. And what a difference, also, from the spiritual thinkers who sought to create coherent theories. Here, the theories fell away in the face of spontaneous phenomena for which there were no experts. But if there were an expert, Tony Cornell would be the best of them; and his approach was to live with the uncertain, the unknown.

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