In the portrait of the IGPP she appears as the woman without whose bequest the institute would not exist – yet Fanny Moser (1872–1953) was far more than a benefactor. She was a zoologist with a doctorate and a deep-sea specialist, one of the first women in German academia at all – and, after a single evening in 1914, became one of the most thorough and emphatically critical investigators of hauntings of her time. Her life joins what rarely comes together: the microscope and the séance, and both with the same rigour.
The natural scientist
Fanny Moser was born in 1872 into one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland: her father was the Schaffhausen watch manufacturer and engineer Heinrich Moser, founder of the firm H. Moser & Cie. and builder of the Moser dam on the Rhine. Wealth would have allowed her a life of society – she chose science. In 1896 she enrolled as the first female student at the University of Freiburg, studied medicine first, then zoology in Munich, and took her doctorate in 1902.
What followed was a serious research career. Moser specialised in siphonophores – those jellyfish-like, colony-forming cnidarians of the open sea – and worked, among other things, on the deep-sea zoological collection of the Prince of Monaco and on material from German South Polar expeditions. She described several species new to science; a cold-water species from Antarctic waters still bears a name she coined. This is the background one must keep in mind when her later turn is so often smiled at: here it was no enthusiast wandering into the supernatural, but a woman who had learned to observe patiently, to classify, and to separate deceptions from findings. In 1903 she married the composer Jaroslav Hoppe; the couple moved to Berlin, and she thereafter also published as Fanny Hoppe-Moser.
The turning point: a séance in February 1914
In 1914, in Berlin, Moser attended a private sitting with a medium and experienced, by her own account, a table levitation she could not explain. For most people that would have remained an anecdote – for the trained observer it became a research question. Characteristic is what she did not do: she became neither a believer nor a professional debunker. Instead she began, over decades, to collect and examine the entire field – mesmerism, hypnotism, spiritualism, occultism – systematically and source-critically, with the same methodological standard she brought from zoology.
The two great books
From this work came two standard books, and their order tells the real story. First the two-volume "Der Okkultismus – Täuschungen und Tatsachen" ("Occultism – Deceptions and Facts", 1935): the title is a programme, and the first half is devoted to the deceptions – Moser sorted out, with evident relish, the fraud, the tricks, the self-deceptions. Only what survived this scrutiny did she allow to count as "facts". In 1950 came her late work "Spuk – Irrglaube oder Wahrglaube?" ("Haunting – False Belief or True Belief?"), a large collection and analysis of haunting cases. This two-step stance – first sort out mercilessly, then take the remainder seriously – is exactly what keeps her citable today, where uncritical collectors have long been forgotten. It is the same rigour that Hans Bender later made his methodological principle.
The Freud footnote
A curiosity in passing that shows how close this family stood to the history of the study of the mind: Fanny Moser's mother, also Fanny Moser (née Sulzer-Wart), is regarded in scholarship as the real model for "Frau Emmy von N." – one of the most famous patients from Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1895), a founding text of psychoanalysis. The daughter, who later surveyed the borderland between psychology and the unexplained, was thus already inscribed – through her mother – into one of the founding texts of modern psychology.
The legacy
Moser died in 1953. Her most consequential step falls in her final years: she gave decisive support to the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, only just founded (in 1950) by Hans Bender – with an endowment and with her scientific estate together with a library of some 2,000 volumes. She thereby laid the cornerstone for what is today the most important parapsychological specialist library in the German-speaking world, and for the financial independence that keeps the IGPP free of state funding. Without the heiress to the watchmaking fortune who became a jellyfish researcher and then an investigator of hauntings, German-language frontier research would look different today.
Her memory is kept alive: for her 150th birthday the IGPP held a symposium in 2023 under the title "Science und Séance", and the IGPP researcher Ina Schmied-Knittel published a biography of the same name – a sign that Moser is now read no longer as a curious defector but as a figure of the history of science in her own right.
Context
Fanny Moser is the living counter-proof to the comfortable cliché that serious science and an interest in the unexplained exclude one another. The same person who classified new deep-sea species dissected the occult fraud of her time as thoroughly as almost anyone – and precisely for that reason took the few hard cases seriously. She thus belongs in the same line of critical natural scientists we trace on this site: people who looked closely instead of believing too quickly or dismissing too quickly. That her bequest carries an entire institute is the finest point of a life between microscope and séance.
Sources: The entry "Fanny Moser (scientist)" in the English Wikipedia and "Fanny Moser" in the German Wikipedia (dates, studies, zoological work, 1914 séance experience, books, "Emmy von N."); Ina Schmied-Knittel, Science und Séance. Die Biologin und Parapsychologin Fanny Moser (1872–1953) (Ergon/Nomos, 2022); Fanny Moser, Der Okkultismus – Täuschungen und Tatsachen (Oldenbourg, Munich 1935) and Spuk – Irrglaube oder Wahrglaube? (Baden near Zurich 1950); on the endowment and library, the institutional history of the IGPP; supplemented by our portraits of Hans Bender and the IGPP.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.