Investigations and Controversy

The Society's most consequential early inquiry concerned the Theosophical Society. In 1884 the SPR sent a young Cambridge graduate, Richard Hodgson, to India to investigate reports of materialized letters and other physical phenomena associated with Helena Blavatsky. Hodgson's 1885 report, based partly on letters implicating Blavatsky and her housekeeper Emma Coulomb in fabricating the messages, concluded the phenomena were fraudulent and called Blavatsky one of the most accomplished impostors in history. The verdict shaped the Society's reputation for rigor for a century, though in 1986 the SPR's own handwriting expert Vernon Harrison published a detailed critique of Hodgson's evidence, arguing the case against Blavatsky had not been proven to the standard Hodgson claimed.

Beyond Theosophy, the SPR conducted a landmark statistical Census of Hallucinations in the 1890s, investigated telepathy experiments and mediums including Leonora Piper, and later analysed the cross correspondences, a set of interlocking automatic writings produced by several mediums after Myers's death in 1901 that some members read as evidence of his survival. The Society survived the general professional retreat from psychical research in the mid twentieth century and continues today, publishing the peer reviewed Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and maintaining an archive and the online Psi Encyclopedia, while taking no institutional position on whether the phenomena it studies are real.