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Trevor H. Hall
Trevor Henry Hall (1910–1991) was a British author, surveyor, and sceptic of paranormal phenomena. Hall made controversial claims regarding early members of the Society for Psychical Research. His books caused a heated controversy within the parapsychology community.Hövelmann. Gerd H; Truzzi, Marcello; Hoebens, Piet Hein. (1985). ''Skeptical Literature on Parapsychology: An Annotated Bibliography''. In Paul Kurtz. ''A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology''. Prometheus Books. pp. 449-490. Career Hall was born in Wakefield, England. He served as a major in the British army during World War II (1939–45) and became a senior partner of V. Walker and Son (chartered surveyors) (1945–80). He was the vice president of the Huddersfield Building Society (1958–80). He had a deep interest in magic and mystery. Hall was a student in psychical research at Trinity College, Cambridge (1954–56). His knowledge of conjuring and magic helped him discover the tricks of mediums, many o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trevor H
Trevor ( Trefor in the Welsh language) is a common given name or surname of Welsh origin. It is an habitational name, deriving from the Welsh ''tre(f)'', meaning "homestead", or "settlement" and ''fawr'', meaning "large, big". The Cornish language equivalent is Trevorrow and is most associated with Ludgvan. Trevor is also a reduced Anglicized form of the Gaelic ''Ó Treabhair'' (descendant of Treabhar), which may derive from the original Welsh name. As a surname People * Claire Trevor (1910–2000), American actress *Hugh Trevor (1903–1933), American actor * John Trevor (other), various people * William Trevor (1928–2016), Irish writer * William Spottiswoode Trevor (1831–1907), recipient of the Victoria Cross Fictional characters *Steve Trevor, in the DC Comics, 1970s television series and 2017 film ''Wonder Woman'' As a given name People *Trevor Ariza (born 1985), American basketball player *Trevor Bailey, English cricketer * Trevor Bauer, American baseball ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asa Briggs
Asa Briggs, Baron Briggs (7 May 1921 – 15 March 2016) was an English historian. He was a leading specialist on the Victorian era, and the foremost historian of broadcasting in Britain. Briggs achieved international recognition during his long and prolific career for examining various aspects of modern British history. He became a life peer in 1976. Early life Asa Briggs was born in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1921 to William Briggs, an engineer, and his wife Jane. He was educated at Keighley Boys' Grammar School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA (first class) in History, in 1941, and a BSc in Economics (first class) from the University of London External Programme, also in 1941. Military service During the Second World War, from 1942 to 1945, Briggs served in the Intelligence Corps and worked at the British wartime signals intelligence station, Bletchley Park. He was a member of "the Watch" in Hut 6, the section deciphering Enigma mach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georgess McHargue
Georgess McHargue (June 7, 1941 – July 18, 2011) was an American writer and poet. Biography McHargue was born in New York City. After working at Golden Press, she became an editor at Doubleday. She had a long career working as an author; she published 35 books including children's fiction and nonfiction works on archaeology, history, mythology and paranormal studies. She also wrote about folklore and the occult. She was nominated for a National Book Award for ''The Beasts of Never'' (1988) and she wrote many reviews for ''The New York Times Book Review''. McHargue eventually moved to Groton, Massachusetts, where she edited reports on archaeology and history for the Michael's Institute for Conservation Archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum and for their historic preservation company Timelines Inc. Her book ''Facts, Frauds, and Phantasms: A Survey of the Spiritualist Movement'' (1972) was a skeptical study of spiritualism. The book exposed fraudulent mediums and was descri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Levitation (paranormal)
Levitation or transvection, in the paranormal or religious context, is the claimed ability to raise a human body or other object into the air by mystical means. While believed in some religious and New Age communities to occur due to supernatural, miracle, miraculous, psychic, or Energy (esotericism), "energetic" phenomena, there is no scientific evidence of levitation occurring. Alleged cases of levitation can usually be explained by deception and fraud, such as Magic (illusion), trickery, illusion, and hallucination. Religious views Various religions have claimed examples of levitation amongst their followers. This is generally used either as a demonstration of the validity or power of the religion, or as evidence of the holiness or adherence to the religion of the particular levitator. Buddhism * It is recounted as one of the Miracles of Buddha that Gautama Buddha ''walked on water'' levitating (crossed legs) over a stream in order to convert a brahmin to Buddhism. *Mil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gordon Stein
Gordon Stein (April 30, 1941 – August 27, 1996) was an American author, physiologist, and activist for atheism and religious skepticism. Biography Stein was born in New York to Jewish parents, and from an early age took an interest in science. He earned degrees in psychology and zoology, a doctorate in physiology from Ohio State University and master's degrees in Management and Library Science from University of Rochester, Adelphi College, and the University of California at Los Angeles. He was an author of books for secular humanist and rationalist publications, he also was a critic of claims of paranormal phenomena. Stein was an outspoken atheist and publicly debated Christian apologists such as Greg Bahnsen. He served as editor of the '' American Rationalist'' and was the librarian of the Center for Inquiry, which houses both the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). Stein died of lung ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Dunglas Home
Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced ''Hume''; 20 March 183321 June 1886) was a Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will. His biographer Peter Lamont opines that he was one of the most famous men of his era. Harry Houdini described him as "one of the most conspicuous and lauded of his type and generation" and "the forerunner of the mediums whose forte is fleecing by presuming on the credulity of the public." Home conducted hundreds of séances, which were attended by many eminent Victorians. There have been eyewitness accounts by séance sitters describing conjuring methods and fraud that Home may have employed. Frederick Merrifield. (1903). ''A Sitting With D. D. Home''. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 11: 76–80. Quoted in Joseph McCabe. (1920). ''Spiritualism: A Popular History from 1847''. Dodd, Mead and Company. pp. 110-112. A Mr. Merrifield w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greenwood Publishing Group
Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG) was an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which was part of ABC-Clio. Since 2021, ABC-Clio and its suite of imprints, including GPG, are collectively imprints of British publishing house Bloomsbury Publishing. The Greenwood name stopped being used for new books in 2023. Established in 1967 as Greenwood Press, Inc., and based in Westport, Connecticut, GPG published reference works under its Greenwood Press imprint; and scholarly, professional, and general-interest books under its related imprint, Praeger Publishers (). Also part of GPG was Libraries Unlimited, which published professional works for librarians and teachers. Both of the latter became stand-alone imprints of ABC-Clio, in 2008–2009, after its purchase of GPG. History 1967–1999 The company was founded as Greenwood Press, Inc. (GPI) in 1967 by Harold Mason, a librarian and antiquarian bookseller, and Harold Schwartz, who had a b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Gauld
Alan Gauld (born 1932) is a British parapsychologist, psychologist and spiritualist writer best known for his research on the history of hypnotism and mediumship. Biography Gauld was born in Portland, Dorset. In the late 1950s, he attended Harvard University. He obtained an M.S. in 1958 and a PhD in 1962 from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He taught psychology at the University of Nottingham and was the President of the Society for Psychical Research from 1989 to 1992. Gauld has generally been skeptical of physical mediumship. He has claimed that ectoplasm materializations seem to "smack very strongly of fraud and conjuring", such as made from cheesecloth or net curtain. He states however that he believes there is genuine evidence for movement of objects during séances including the phenomena produced with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home. This is in opposition to other researchers who have declared that Home was fraudulent. He has criticized the Scole experiment, a series ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Albert Smith (film Pioneer)
George Albert Smith (4 January 1864 – 17 May 1959) was an English stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, inventor and a key member of the loose association of early film pioneers dubbed the Brighton School by French film historian Georges Sadoul. He is best known for his controversial work with Edmund Gurney at the Society for Psychical Research, his short films from 1897 to 1903, which pioneered film editing and close-ups, and his development of the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor. Biography Birth and early life Smith was born in Cripplegate, London in 1864. His father Charles Smith was a ticket-writer and artist.Hall (1964), p. 92. He moved with his family to Brighton, where his mother ran a boarding house on Grand Parade, following the death of his father. It was in Brighton in the early 1880s that Smith first came to public attention touring the city's performance halls as a stage hypnot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas Blackburn
Douglas Blackburn (6 August 1857, Southwark – 28 March 1929, Tonbridge) was an English journalist and novelist, who worked in the Transvaal and Natal between 1892 and 1908. He has been called "the great chronicler of the last days of the Boer republic." Telepathy experiments During 1882-1883, Blackburn with George Albert Smith took part in a series of experiments that were claimed to be genuine evidence for telepathy by members of the Society for Psychical Research. Blackburn later made a public confession of fraud, stating that the results had been obtained by use of a code. Blackburn's ''Confessions of a Telepathist: Thirty-Year Hoax Exposed'' appeared in '' The Daily News'' and the ''Journal of the Society for Psychical Research'', 1911. It was re-printed in ''A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology'', 1985.Blackburn, Douglas. ''Confessions of a Telepathist: Thirty-Year Hoax Exposed''. In Paul Kurtz Paul Kurtz (December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012) was an America ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edmund Gurney
Edmund Gurney (23 March 184723 June 1888) was an English psychologist and parapsychologist. At the time the term for research of paranormal activities was "psychical research". Early life Gurney was born at Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames. He was educated at Blackheath and at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1866, where he took fourth place in the classical tripos and obtained a fellowship in 1872. His work for the tripos was done, said his friend F. W. H. Myers, in the intervals of his practice on the piano. Dissatisfied with his own executive skill as a musician, he wrote ''The Power of Sound'' (1880), an essay on the philosophy of music. He then studied medicine with no intention of practising, devoting himself to physics, chemistry and physiology. In 1880 he passed the second M.B. Cambridge (medical science). In 1881 he began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn. In relation to psychical research, he asked whether there is an unexplored region of human faculty transcen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eric Dingwall
Eric John Dingwall (1890–1986) was a British anthropologist, psychical researcher and librarian. Biography Born in British Ceylon, Dingwall moved to England where he was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge (M.A., 1912), and the University of London (D.Sc., PhD). He wrote popular books on sexology. He became interested in paranormal phenomena in 1921 and served from 1922 to 1927 as a research officer for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Dingwall was described as an eccentric by those who knew him. Having developed his skills as a librarian at Cambridge University Library while an undergraduate, in 1946 he joined the Library of the British Museum as a voluntary assistant, but from 1947 was promoted to Hon. Assistant Keeper in the Reference Division, cataloguing private case material of erotica, magic and the paranormal. He co-edited the four-volume set ''Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena'' (1967–68). The set was described in a review as of considerable historic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
