When the Society for Psychical Research celebrated its centenary in 1982, the balance sheet appeared against which every serious discussion of mediumship research has had to measure itself since: "Mediumship and Survival: A Century of Investigations" by Alan Gauld. Not a book of revival, not a hatchet job – but the rarest thing of all: an academic psychologist in sovereign command of a century of archival material, laying both scales of the balance openly before the reader. Anyone who wants to read just one book on the question of whether mediums really make contact with the dead still does best to read this one.
The man behind the book
Alan Gauld (1932–2024) was perhaps the most credible voice the field ever had: with a doctorate from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he taught biological psychology and neuropsychology at the University of Nottingham throughout his career – a brain scientist, not a parlour occultist. He served the Society for Psychical Research as editor of its Journal (1965–1970) and as president (1989–1992); for his life's work he received the SPR's Myers Memorial Medal and the Parapsychological Association's award for outstanding research contributions. His books became standard works of several fields at once: The Founders of Psychical Research (1968) for the early history, A History of Hypnotism (1992) for the history of hypnosis – and Mediumship and Survival (1982) for the survival question. Readers of this blog have met him already: as one of the six authors of Irreducible Mind.
A century in one volume
The book sifts the best of the archives of the British and American SPR – and its structure is a curriculum of the whole discipline: the great trance mediums Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard (familiar from Oliver Lodge's "Raymond" case), the "drop-in" communicators, the question of purpose and personality in the communications, the nature of mediums' controls, the super-ESP hypothesis in theory and data, obsession, reincarnation, memory and the brain, out-of-body experiences and apparitions of the dead. Gauld gives special weight to the methodologically hardest experimental arrangements of the Leonard era: the proxy sittings, in which an uninvolved stand-in went to the medium, so that mind-reading of the sitter drops out as an explanation – the proxy knew nothing about the deceased himself.
Gauld's speciality: the uninvited guests
The most original chapter deals with a phenomenon Gauld himself researched like no one else: "drop-in" communicators – deceased persons who announce themselves at sittings although no one present knows, seeks or expects them. Their evidential force lies in the motives: where nobody knows the dead person, neither wishful thinking nor the sitters' memories can supply the information. Gauld analysed the preserved records of an English home circle of the years 1937–1943 and published the cases in the SPR Proceedings in 1971. The best known: "Harry Stockbridge", who introduced himself as a second lieutenant of the Northumberland Fusiliers, killed on 14 July 1916. Verification in military records confirmed name, rank, unit and date of death – including details that were scattered or not to be found at all in the printed sources. The Icelandic counterpart was supplied by Erlendur Haraldsson and Ian Stevenson with the case of "Runki" (Runólfur Runólfsson): a gruff communicator kept demanding his missing leg through the medium Hafsteinn Björnsson for years – parish registers confirmed the man, drowned in 1879, and a femur was indeed found walled up in the house of one of the sitters.
The honest referee: super-ESP
What makes the book a standard work beyond its treasury of cases is its treatment of the strongest counter-hypothesis. If telepathy and clairvoyance exist – and the SPR archives suggest they do – could a medium not assemble its hits from the minds of the living and from scattered documents, rather than from the dead? Gauld takes this "super-ESP" hypothesis more seriously than most proponents and most sceptics: he concedes that it can hardly ever be excluded on logic alone – and shows at the same time where it overstretches: in cases combining purposeful agency, intact personality and knowledge drawn from several sources known to no single living person, the "parsimonious" alternative would have to assume a practically omniscient, perfectly role-playing faculty for which there is no evidence anywhere else. His conclusion is of disarming modesty: neither side can close the case – but a hard core of cases remains in which the survival reading is the simpler one. It is the same weighing we know from the cross-correspondences – where the communicators themselves had tried to outmanoeuvre super-ESP experimentally.
The honest counter-side
This book, too, has limits, and Gauld names them himself: it rests on historical archival material, not on his own experiments under modern laboratory conditions; the quality of the old records is uneven, and the great age of the trance mediums was already past in 1982. But whoever concludes that the material is therefore finished overlooks two things: first, the documented core cases – proxy sittings, drop-ins – have to this day not been explained away methodologically, merely gone out of fashion. And second, research has picked the thread back up: the Windbridge studies and the EREAMS investigation test mediums today under blinding protocols that directly continue Gauld's methodological standards.
Context
Alan Gauld never let go of the theme of his century: at nearly ninety, he delivered a late work on the golden era of the trance mediums with "The Heyday of Mental Mediumship: 1880s–1930s" (2022) – two years before his death in December 2024. Together with his chapter in Irreducible Mind, this closes a circle of more than five decades of scholarship. Mediumship and Survival remains its centre: the book one gives to sceptics because it embellishes nothing, and to believers because it wipes nothing away. Its lasting standard is its tone – the conviction that one serves a great question best by letting the files speak and keeping one's own voice low.
Sources: Alan Gauld: Mediumship and Survival: A Century of Investigations, Heinemann (in association with the SPR), London 1982; paperback Paladin/Granada 1983; biography of Alan Gauld: Psi Encyclopedia of the SPR, psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk, and SPR people page, spr.ac.uk; Alan Gauld: "A Series of 'Drop-in' Communicators", Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1971); Erlendur Haraldsson, Ian Stevenson: "A Communicator of the 'Drop-in' Type in Iceland: The Case of Runolfur Runolfsson", Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 69 (1975), pp. 33–59; Psi Encyclopedia article "Drop-In Communicators", psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk; Alan Gauld: The Heyday of Mental Mediumship: 1880s–1930s, White Crow Books 2022; supplemented by our articles on Leonora Piper/William James, Oliver Lodge's "Raymond", the cross-correspondences, Irreducible Mind, Windbridge and EREAMS.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.