Episode 1: Moonrise

For millennia, humanity has pursued higher knowing. In antiquity, soldiers and statesmen turned to oracles such as the prophetess at Delphi and pictogrammatic language of the I-Ching. 

Seen from a certain perspective, nearly all religion predates science as the wish to know first causes. In that vein, nineteenth-century séances treat gawkers to floating pianos, viscous “ectoplasm” spilling from the orifices of (mostly female) mediums, and ghostly figures materializing. Even Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln host table-rappings in the White House. Is any of it real? 

One moonlit night at Cambridge University in 1870 a handful of scientists determine to find out. Their efforts become the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which attracts Victorian luminaries such as William James, Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Balfour, Britain’s prime minister. 

Some of the finest scientists and philosophers of the era begin probing the verity of the supernatural.

This signal has been transmitted by SpectreVision Radio

Written and Narrated by Mitch Horowitz

Produced by Jim Perry and Jon McEdward

Original Music & Sound Design by Dean Hurley

Cover Artwork by Jake in Colour

Selected References

The Elusive Science: Origins of Experimental Psychical Research by Seymour H. Mauskopf and Michael R. McVaugh (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) 

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis (Harmony, 1998) 

The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry by Henri F. Ellenberger (Basic Books, 1970)

From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychoanalytic Healing by Adam Crabtree (Yale University Press, 1993)

Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena, vols. 1–4, edited by Eric J. Dingwall (J. & A. Churchill/ Barnes & Noble, 1968)

Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice by Mitch Horowitz (G&D Media, 2023)

Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz (Bantam, 2009)

Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in 19th Century America by Ann Braude (Beacon, 1989)

Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, F.W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, 2 vols. (1886)

“Charles Richet” by C.S. Alvarado, Psi Encyclopedia, London: The Society for Psychical Research, 2015

Archive Clips

JB Rhine | 70 years at The Rhine

Carrie Chapman Catt on Suffragism

Russel Targ on The Case of ESP

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