American Society for Psychical Research

The American Society for Psychical Research traces its founding to a visit to the United States by Sir William Fletcher Barrett of the London Society for Psychical Research, which prompted an organizing committee to meet through the autumn of 1884. The new society held its first meeting that December and completed its formation in January 1885, in Boston, electing the astronomer Simon Newcomb as president, with N. D. C. Hodges as secretary and a slate of vice presidents that included the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and the astronomer Edward C. Pickering.

The Society attracted a respectable roster of American scientists and scholars, most notably the philosopher and psychologist William James, and its early Proceedings covered thought transference, hypnotic phenomena and automatic writing. This first, independent incarnation of the ASPR proved short lived: in 1889 it was absorbed as a branch of the SPR in London, under the direction of the investigator Richard Hodgson, who had recently made his name investigating Helena Blavatsky for the parent society. Hodgson ran the American branch from Boston until his sudden death in 1905, after which the branch was dissolved and, following a year of preparation, reconstituted as a wholly independent American Society for Psychical Research under the Columbia philosopher James Hervey Hyslop in 1906.

Under Hyslop and his successors the reconstituted ASPR built a research and publishing program that ran alongside, and often overlapped with, the parapsychology emerging at Duke University under J. B. Rhine. Its most notorious episode came in the 1920s, when the Boston medium Mina "Margery" Crandon became a test case for the Society and for the magazine Scientific American, which had offered a cash prize for a genuine physical medium.

Investigators split sharply: some ASPR figures endorsed Margery's phenomena while the magician Harry Houdini and others accused her of fraud, and the affair damaged the Society's standing and cost it members and staff, including the psychologist Walter Franklin Prince, who left to found a rival Boston Society for Psychic Research. The ASPR nonetheless continued through the century as one of the principal American venues for parapsychological publication and case investigation, maintaining a substantial library and archive in New York. It survived a period of serious financial and organizational strain around the turn of the twenty first century and continues today as a research and education body, publishing case reports and hosting talks on mediumship, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis for a public and academic audience.