{ tHE HAUN t ED}


séances, where people reported seeing furniture levitate and spirits write mes- sages. Mediums traveled the country and the world supposedly facilitating com- munication with the dead. The admission from the Fox sisters, in 1888, that for 40 years they had been


cracking their toes and knee joints to produce the knocking sounds they said were spirits, did little to derail the burgeoning spiritualist movement. Instead, it galvanized a faction that had been growing in step with the movement: those who sought to prove the existence of the paranormal by using scientific methods to weed out the frauds. Many in the faction were intellectuals and academi- cians, all fascinated with the paranormal, in search of hard data to explain the unexplainable. Calling their new field parapsychology, and focusing mainly on the role of the human mind in unexplained phenomena, these first researchers were the predecessors of today’s paranormal investigators. Meanwhile, such phenomena were becoming stranger. During sittings, medi-


ums began producing a substance from their noses and mouths, supposedly ma- terial evidence of the spirit world, which researchers called ectoplasm. The ecto- plasm occasionally assumed a human shape or contained images of people. In a 1932 photograph of the medium Mary Marshall, a giant white blob descends from her nose; wedged in the middle, like a piece of food in a beard, is the face of avid spiritual- ist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had recently died. Over the years, the most


egregious fakers were outed, but by then parapsychol- ogy was well established, albeit on the periphery of the mainstream scientific community. Horror movies about hauntings and pos- sessions have been popular for decades, but it wasn’t until recent years that the interest began to shift from being terrorized by ghosts to actively seeking them out. There are no globally ac-


cepted guidelines about what constitutes good investigating. As the number of groups has grown, the scene is at risk of feeling like the era of old-time medi- cine shows, with most investigators positioning themselves as the experts and everyone else as quacks. Nor are the parapsychology field and a related field, anomalistic psychology, eager to associate themselves with the current craze. Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and editor of the Skeptic magazine, wrote in an e-mail: “I suspect that most serious academic researchers … would share my view that, by and large, these amateur groups do not really know what they’re doing. … Despite all the trappings, it isn’t science.” Sally Rhine Feather, daughter of founding parapsychologist Joseph Rhine, says


it is “the beginning of a science … the beginning of organization. Hopefully, with enough effort, [investigators will] set those standards.”


14 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | June 20, 2010


Before the team left Labenz’s house, Tommy Hopper, and his wife, Alice, who live a couple of blocks from the Claremont Town Hall, stopped by. The Hoppers had brought a copy of the 1919 schoolhouse photo and some stories of activity in their own house: the occa- sional sound of something big falling off the wall in the dining room and break- ing; unexplained smells, such as flowers and tobacco; cold hands on their necks. “I’m not a believer in spiritual things,”


said Hopper, 47, a big, weather-beaten man. “Never have been; never will be. But there are things in that house I can’t explain. You never sleep alone in that house.” It was getting close to sunset. War-


field, his curiosity piqued, had decided to take the team through the Hoppers’s house before setting up at the town hall, and we drove over to their snug wood- frame cottage, which had been in Hop- per’s family for years. Warfield and his team shined their flashlights around the


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