#Roger Luckhurst

[xtruss]

At $9,000, the elaborate Grand Ballroom at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, cost more than three times the price of an entire home in the late 1800s. The Queen Anne-style Mansion was one of the inspirations for author Shirley Jackson’s Influential Horror Novel, The Haunting of Hill House and is one of many historic homes that offer tours. Photograph By Winchester Mystery House, LLC

The Mysterious California Mansion That Spawned a Haunted House Craze

More than a hundred rooms. Stairs leading nowhere. A maze of empty corridors. The eerie Winchester House was one of the first to draw tourists seeking spine-chilling thrills.

— By Roger Luckhurst | October 25, 2023

Soon after the death of Sarah Winchester in San Jose, California, in 1922, the new owners opened her mansion as an attraction for tourists drawn to tales of the bizarre. Winchester was the heir to the gun manufacturer’s fortune, and rumors swirled around her constant home building and renovation. She constructed elaborate extra rooms (more than a hundred), stairs that led nowhere, and empty corridors that turned the house into a bewildering maze.

Was her fortune cursed? Did Winchester build a labyrinth to confound vengeful spirits? Were there séances held in the mansion every night?

The answer was no to most of these questions, but once the famous magician Harry Houdini visited and told the owners to market it as the “Winchester Mystery House,” its commercial career was secure. It has just celebrated its centenary and is still a popular attraction in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can take the “Walk with Spirits” tour, attend a séance, or—new this fall—immerse yourself in creepy “Unhinged Housewarming” evenings.

The mansion was one of the inspirations for Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House—a key gothic novel that portrays a house as a reserve of malignant energy. The famous opening paragraph tells us that the house “stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within.” In the novel a group of paranormal investigators stay in the house, which they only belatedly realize is feeding off disturbed psychic powers that are conjuring murderous, long buried resentments.

Ever since the book’s success—and thanks to Stephen King novels, “true” paranormal TV shows, and found-footage films such as Paranormal Activity—we’ve become attuned to the idea of the Bad Place, the house where past traumas or atrocities have leaked into the atmosphere and then gotten stuck on repeat.

Here’s how Jackson’s book continues to inspire haunted house tourism, and where you can visit other evocative Bad Places.

Set on a lake in Oxfordshire, England, Blenheim Palace made a suitably chilling location for the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House, inspired by Shirley Jackson’s gothic novel. Photograph By Andreas Von Einsiedel, Getty Images

The Legacy of Hill House

In the preface to her bestseller, Jackson confessed the idea for her ghost story had been taken from a bizarre true-life inquiry by the London-based Society for Psychical Research in 1897. The Society (which still exists) formed a Haunted House Committee and sent the dubious “psychic sensitive” Ada Goodrich-Freer to investigate claims of haunting at Ballechin House in Scotland. The book of the investigation, given aristocratic endorsement by the Marquis of Bute, caused all sorts of ructions in the Letters pages of the London Times, with many condemning the naivety of the investigators.

Jackson’s novel was filmed in 1963, to great effect, as The Haunting. Director Robert Wise used Ettington Park Hall in Warwickshire in the United Kingdom for the unnerving exteriors. The Hall was the ancient estate of the Shirley family, stretching back to the Domesday Book, but it was rebuilt in the 19th century in the neo-Gothic style, all pointed arches and polychromatic brickwork. Some claim the Hall actually is haunted, being such an old family pile in Shakespeare country. An elderly Victorian ghost totters around at twilight, while “Lady Emma” is said to glide through the corridors at night. However, as a current 4-star hotel popular with wedding parties, it now doesn’t play up that angle.

Also inspired by Jackson’s book, the 1973 film The Legend of Hell House featured the sharp-angled, baroque details of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. The palace was built by the architect and playwright Sir John Vanbrugh for the British hero the Duke of Marlborough, who had won a famous victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The grand house was the birthplace of the first Duke’s most famous descendant, and another war hero, Winston Churchill.

For the recent Netflix series, freely adapted from The Haunting of Hill House, director Mike Flanagan used the Gothic exterior of Bisham Manor in Lagrange, Georgia. This mansion, in private hands, does look suitably Gothic, but is actually less than 30 years old.

In the Mountains of Transylvania, Romania 🇷🇴, Bran Castle markets itself as “Dracula’s Castle,” capitalizing on the brooding setting of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Photograph By Sean Gallup, Getty Images

Vampire Castles and Other Gothic Spaces

For the more adventurous admirer of Gothic novels and haunted houses, Bran Castle in Transylvania, Romania, claims to be the inspiration for the brooding opening section of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Stoker never visited the region, but constructed the vampire’s den from travel books, conversations with his brother who had journeyed in the Balkans, and his fevered imagination.

Bran Castle welcomes tourists, unlike the Villa Diodati on the waterfront of Lake Geneva in Cologny, Switzerland. This was the site where, in 1816, the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and their entourage tried to scare themselves silly by telling ghost stories during a particularly violent thunderstorm. The meeting was to prompt the teenage Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein and Byron’s much put-upon doctor, John William Polidori, to pen “The Vampyre.” Villa Diodati is privately owned, and security fences keep the curious out.

It is not only family manors or rambling country mansions that inspire Gothic vibes. For a time, Detroit’s abandoned factories stood in as symbols of a whole industrial economic and social order coming to an end. No wonder this landscape features in recent horror films, such as It Follows (2013), Don’t Breathe (2016), or Barbarian (2022).

We also seem to be spooked by the husks of prisons or asylums—those sprawling institutions whose ruins haunt us with the death of a certain optimistic belief that a spell of institutional treatment might improve people. The last of these so-called “monster asylums”—such as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Ovid, New York—shut down in the 1990s.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, sometimes turned to the house as a metaphor for the human psyche, a place with lots of secrets locked away in basements or forgotten bedrooms. An avid reader of Gothic stories, Freud argued that the Gothic inspired feelings of the unheimlich. Often translated as “uncanny,” the original German means unhomely, and this gets at precisely what unnerves us about haunted house tales: the irruption of something horrifying or unholy in precisely the location we always thought was the safest space.

The Gothic runs and re-runs this anxiety on an endless loop, trying to shore up our sense of home, knowing all the while that the unhomely always lurks in the shadows of dusty rooms, the creak of staircases, or along the vistas of empty corridors.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Journeys across unfamiliar countryside, spanning the hours of daylight and darkness, under the control of horsemen who know the dangers of the route are a staple of eighteenth-century Gothic. Jonathan Harker is progressively feminised whilst resident at the Count's castle, where he writes letters in the persona of a retiring damsel. This process of feminization, though, arguably begins much earlier than Simmons envisages. It is initiated during Harker's journey, where he experiences not merely a disorientation that parallels that of the abducted Gothic heroine, but much of her acute sensibility also. Dracula, in many respects, revives not merely the convention of powerless abduction but also the vigil of consciousness that characteristically accompanies it in earlier Gothic - the intensity of a gaze fixated upon sublime landscapes capable of offering up a pathetic fallacy to the elation or depression experienced by the perceiving, powerless self. The narrative of Harker's journey playfully balances his preferred (though occasionally shaky) identity as a dedicated, competent, modern professional with a more naive and curious selfhood that is frequently overawed by the novelty of his environment. If Harker is comically obsessive in his documentation of local peculiarities of cuisine and dress, he is less certain in his own personal comprehension both of an alien culture, the conventions of which he has to ascertain in imperfect English from his fellow travelers, and of a regional geography uncharted in word or image, for "I was not able to light upon any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula."

William Hughes, "Dracula's Debts to the Gothic Romance" in The Cambridge Companion to Dracula (Roger Luckhurst, ed).

[readingloveswounds]

Hi there! Hope your day is going well! You've mentioned before you were using trauma theory in your work, would you have any recommended reading about this that you found helpful or useful? Thanks : )

Hi!! I've started off well and I hope your day goes well too!

Oh boy do I. Let me go pull up my Qual list.

If you only read one article, it should be Radstone's that I'll cite below. She explains the origins, the intentions, and the ethical questions of the field in an extremely comprehensive and comprehensible way. Obviously, it's a little dated and thus can't take into account different moves made more recently, but she pulls up issues that recent work ends up addressing.

Radstone, Susannah. “Trauma theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”. Paragraph 30 no 1 (2007): 9–29.

Below the cut are several more recommendations. I've commented on the ones for which I have something useful to say.

Traditional/Foundational texts

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright, 1961.

Freud, Sigmund. “Screen Memories”. 1899.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Freud Reader. ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989.

With my deepest apologies, I do have to acknowledge that trauma theory is psychoanalytic and particularly Freudian in origin. You do not need to read these, but having at least skimmed them will help you understand what people are referring to in later works. Pleasure Principle is the big one - and is pretty short. There are also some cases from On the Interpretation of Dreams that come up (the burning child, a rat one), but usually those are explained in-text anyway.

Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Caruth is one of the Big Names in original trauma theory - I believe she's currently at Cornell. These texts are what everyone refers to, whether they agree with her or not. I'd definitely give them a look over.

Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Leys approaches trauma theory from a more practical (as in how we practice, medically) angle especially in the start of the book, but she is extremely thorough in discussing the origins of trauma theory - and makes some important/interesting criticisms of Caruth's work.

Laub, Dori; Felman, Shoshana. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Felman and Laub have different academic backgrounds and focuses, which means that this book provides several different approaches and interpretative angles, using trauma theory approaches. I particularly like Laub's concept of the "listener" in the recitation of trauma. (It's worth noting that Laub himself is a survivor of the Shoah, which he discusses in terms of his multiple witness positions in a chapter).

Hartman, Geoffrey. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Study.” New Literary History 26, no 3 (1995): 537–63.

Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Newer horizons

Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. 2008.

Talks about trauma theory approaches particularly in regards to artistic production (film, painting, writing).

Buelens, Gert; Durrant, Samuel; Eaglestone, Robert eds. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. London: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

An edited volume with chapters that address many of the criticisms of original trauma theory! (eurocentrism, logocentrism, for example)

Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.

A lot of trauma theory has a sort of binary victim/perpetrator dichotomy, but Rothberg looks at the 'implicated subject', someone connected but not always a direct participant in traumatic events, which I find very helpful.

Not quite trauma theory but potentially helpful

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller” in The Storyteller Essays. New York: New York Review Books, 2019.

Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

[teachingmycattoread]

Things We've Yelled About This Episode #4.0

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (ed. Roger Luckhurst, Oxford 2008)

You can check out friend of the pod Charlotte's previous episode on Anno Dracula here

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (our episode here)

"If he is Mr Hyde, I shall be Mr Seek." Ch.2 p.14, Jekyll and Hyde

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

Kidnapped!, Robert Louis Stevenson

"In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men." Ch.1 p. 5, Jekyll and Hyde

Dracula, Bram Stoker (our episodes here and here)

Charlotte's video work can be found at CharlotteWithAD on youtube

Queer Street - the editor has "there have been some energetic interpretations of Jekyll and Hyde by 'Queer Theorists', who pick up on instances like this and suggest that the modern understanding of 'queer' as a slang term for homosexuality was already in use in the late nineteenth century. Being 'in Queer Street' was in fact a standard phrase for being in financial difficulties, and is a corruption of Carey Street, where the bankruptcy courts were located."

Politics of disgust - here referring to the (flawed) idea that disgust is a reliable indicator of moral value.

The illegality of pushing a moose out of a moving plane in Alaska (source) . This fun fact turns up in a lot of clickbait listicles but I haven't been able to find anything that actually quotes chapter and verse of the relevant law code, so take this with a grain of salt!

Doctor Who (wiki)

Jules Verne (writer)

The Time Machine, H. G. Wells

Isaac Asimov (writer)

This meme from Buzzfeed Unsolved:

Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Jules Verne

Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne

Jack the Ripper (wiki)

The unfortunate coincidence of the stage production of Jekyll and Hyde and the Ripper murders (wiki)

Gestalt therapy (wiki)

"Henry James's praise for Stevenson was that 'His books are for the most part without women, and it is not women who most fall in love with them.'..." p. xxvi, Jekyll and Hyde

Dr Jekyll (2023)

Suzie Izzard (imdb)

The Labouchere Amendment (wiki)

Oscar Wilde (writer)

The trials of Oscar Wilde (wiki)

Charlotte is quoting from this article on Crime Reads from 2023

Dictionary Corner; Countdown (1982-ongoing)

"Stevenson also had a friend in John Addington Symonds who was an ardent campaigner for the legal recognition of homosexuality", p. xxvi, Jekyll and Hyde

"In 1887, Stevenson's sense of sheer disappointment that Hyde had already come to be regarded as a 'mere voluptuary' is palpable: 'There is no harm in a voluptuary,' he wrote, 'no harm whatever - in what prurient fools call "immorality."' Hyde, he claimed, was 'no more sexual than another,' and dismissed as impoverished 'this poor wish to have a woman, that they make such a cry about'." p. xxviii, Jekyll and Hyde

Peep Show (2003-2015)

Kill James Bond! (podcast)

The specific episode Charlotte is referencing here is S3E22.5 "Cruising". Preview here and patreon link to full episode here

ACAB (wiki)

“Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority—everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn’t, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.” Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Sins of the City series, K. J. Charles

Brandon Sanderson (writer)

November Kelly on returning to the mothership - this is also from Kill James Bond!, but we haven't managed to track down the specific episode - if you know it, give us a shout!

Blindsight, Peter Watts

Echopraxia, Peter Watts

Countess Boochie Flagrante (meme)

Hogwarts Legacy controversy (source)

Stonewall (website)

Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my actions (meme)

Muppets Treasure Island (1996)

Hercule Poirot; Agatha Christie

Midsomer Murders (1997-ongoing)

Miss Marple; Agatha Christie

Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin; The Murders at the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe

We! Do Not! Talk About! The Orangutan! story from this tumblr post

The Librarian; the Discworld series, Terry Pratchett

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe

House MD (2004-2012)

Beowulf (our episode here)

His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (our episodes here, here and here)

Back To The Future (1985)

The Bodysnatchers, Robert Louis Stevenson

Cat Rating

7/10

What Else Are We Reading?

The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher

Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!, Nate Crowley

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

The Discworld series, Terry Pratchett

Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt

The Southern Reach trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer

[ieidolon]

Roger Luckhurst's introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Dracula says that all the male characters have moments of "hysteria", or what would have been considered hysteria at the time. I don't know about that, though. I don't think we should misgender Quincey Morris just because he's American.

[niftynightmare]

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For other uses, see Telepathy (disambiguation).

Telepathy (from Ancient Greek τῆλε (têle) 'distant', and πάθος/-πάθεια (páthos/-pátheia) 'feeling, perception, passion, affliction, experience')[3][4] is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers,[5] a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),[6] and has remained more popular than the earlier expression thought-transference.[6][7]

The Ganzfeld experiments that aimed to demonstrate telepathy have been criticized for lack of replication and poor controls.[1][2]

Telepath experiments have historically been criticized for a lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no good evidence that telepathy exists, and the topic is generally considered by the scientific community to be pseudoscience.[8][9][10][11]

Origins of the concept

Edit

According to historians such as Roger Luckhurst and Janet Oppenheim the origin of the concept of telepathy in Western civilization can be traced to the late 19th century and the formation of the Society for Psychical Research.[12][13] As the physical sciences made significant advances, scientific concepts were applied to mental phenomena (e.g., animal magnetism), with the hope that this would help to understand paranormal phenomena. The modern concept of telepathy emerged in this context.[13]

Psychical researcher Eric Dingwall criticized SPR founding members Frederic W. H. Myers and William F. Barrett for trying to "prove" telepathy rather than objectively analyze whether or not it existed.[14]

Thought reading

Edit

In the late 19th century, the magician and mentalist, Washington Irving Bishop would perform "thought reading" demonstrations. Bishop claimed no supernatural powers and ascribed his powers to muscular sensitivity (reading thoughts from unconscious bodily cues).[15] Bishop was investigated by a group of scientists including the editor of the British Medical Journal and the psychologist Francis Galton. Bishop performed several feats successfully such as correctly identifying a selected spot on a table and locating a hidden object. During the experiment, Bishop required physical contact with a subject who knew the correct answer. He would hold the hand or wrist of the helper. The scientists concluded that Bishop was not a genuine telepath but using a highly trained skill to detect ideomotor movements.[16]

Another famous thought reader was the magician Stuart Cumberland. He was famous for performing blindfolded feats such as identifying a hidden object in a room that a person had picked out or asking someone to imagine a murder scene and then attempt to read the subject's thoughts and identify the victim and reenact the crime. Cumberland claimed to possess no genuine psychic ability and his thought-reading performances could only be demonstrated by holding the hand of his subject to read their muscular movements. He came into dispute with psychical researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research who were searching for genuine cases of telepathy. Cumberland argued that both telepathy and communication with the dead were impossible and that the mind of man cannot be read through telepathy, but only by muscle reading.[17]

Case studies

In parapsychology

Edit

Within parapsychology, telepathy, often along with precognition and clairvoyance, is described as an aspect of extrasensory perception (ESP) or "anomalous cognition" that parapsychologists believe is transferred through a hypothetical psychic mechanism they call "psi".[50] Parapsychologists have reported experiments they use to test for telepathic abilities. Among the most well known are the use of Zener cards and the Ganzfeld experiment.

Types

Edit

Several forms of telepathy have been suggested:[7]

Latent telepathy, formerly known as "deferred telepathy",[51] describes a transfer of information with an observable time-lag between transmission and reception.[7]

Retrocognitive, precognitive, and intuitive telepathy describes the transfer of information about the past, future or present state of an individual's mind to another individual.[7]

Emotive telepathy, also known as remote influence[52] or emotional transfer, describes the transfer of kinesthetic sensations through altered states.

Superconscious telepathy describes use of the supposed superconscious[53] to access the collective wisdom of the human species for knowledge.

Zener cards

Edit

Main article: Zener cards

Zener cards

Zener cards are marked with five distinctive symbols. When using them, one individual is designated the "sender" and another the "receiver". The sender selects a random card and visualizes the symbol on it, while the receiver attempts to determine that symbol telepathically. Statistically, the receiver has a 20% chance of randomly guessing the correct symbol, so to demonstrate telepathy, they must repeatedly score a success rate that is significantly higher than 20%.[54] If not conducted properly, this method is vulnerable to sensory leakage and card counting.[54]

J. B. Rhine's experiments with Zener cards were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results such as the subject being able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues.[55] Once Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring subjects.[56] Due to the methodological problems, parapsychologists no longer utilize card-guessing studies.[57]

Dream telepathy

Edit

Parapsychological studies into dream telepathy were carried out at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York led by Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman. They concluded the results from some of their experiments supported dream telepathy.[58] However, the results have not been independently replicated.[59][60][61][62] The psychologist James Alcock has written the dream telepathy experiments at Maimonides have failed to provide evidence for telepathy and "lack of replication is rampant."[63]

The picture target experiments that were conducted by Krippner and Ullman were criticized by C. E. M. Hansel. According to Hansel there were weaknesses in the design of the experiments in the way in which the agent became aware of their target picture. Only the agent should have known the target and no other person until the judging of targets had been completed, however, an experimenter was with the agent when the target envelope was opened. Hansel also wrote there had been poor controls in the experiment as the main experimenter could communicate with the subject.[64]

An attempt to replicate the experiments that used picture targets was carried out by Edward Belvedere and David Foulkes. The finding was that neither the subject nor the judges matched the targets with dreams above chance level.[65] Results from other experiments by Belvedere and Foulkes were also negative.[66]

Ganzfeld experiment

Edit

When using the Ganzfeld experiment to test for telepathy, one individual is designated as the receiver and is placed inside a controlled environment where they are deprived of sensory input, and another person is designated as the sender and is placed in a separate location. The receiver is then required to receive information from the sender. The nature of the information may vary between experiments.[67]

The Ganzfeld experiment studies that were examined by Ray Hyman and Charles Honorton had methodological problems that were well documented. Honorton reported only 36% of the studies used duplicate target sets of pictures to avoid handling cues.[68] Hyman discovered flaws in all of the 42 Ganzfeld experiments and to access each experiment, he devised a set of 12 categories of flaws. Six of these concerned statistical defects, the other six covered procedural flaws such as inadequate documentation, randomization and security as well as possibilities of sensory leakage.[69] Over half of the studies failed to safeguard against sensory leakage and all of the studies contained at least one of the 12 flaws. Because of the flaws, Honorton agreed with Hyman the 42 Ganzfeld studies could not support the claim for the existence of psi.[69]

Possibilities of sensory leakage in the Ganzfeld experiments included the receivers hearing what was going on in the sender's room next door as the rooms were not soundproof and the sender's fingerprints to be visible on the target object for the receiver to see.[70][71]

Hyman also reviewed the autoganzfeld experiments and discovered a pattern in the data that implied a visual cue may have taken place:

The most suspicious pattern was the fact that the hit rate for a given target increased with the frequency of occurrence of that target in the experiment. The hit rate for the targets that occurred only once was right at the chance expectation of 25%. For targets that appeared twice the hit rate crept up to 28%. For those that occurred three times it was 38%, and for those targets that occurred six or more times, the hit rate was 52%. Each time a videotape is played its quality can degrade. It is plausible then, that when a frequently used clip is the target for a given session, it may be physically distinguishable from the other three decoy clips that are presented to the subject for judging. Surprisingly, the parapsychological community has not taken this finding seriously. They still include the autoganzfeld series in their meta-analyses and treat it as convincing evidence for the reality of psi.[69]

Hyman wrote the autoganzfeld experiments were flawed because they did not preclude the possibility of sensory leakage.[69] In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%. This hit rate is statistically significant with p < .001. Participants selected for personality traits and personal characteristics thought to be psi-conducive were found to perform significantly better than unselected participants in the ganzfeld condition.[72] Hyman (2010) published a rebuttal to Storm et al. According to Hyman "reliance on meta-analysis as the sole basis for justifying the claim that an anomaly exists and that the evidence for it is consistent and replicable is fallacious. It distorts what scientists mean by confirmatory evidence." Hyman wrote the ganzfeld studies have not been independently replicated and have failed to produce evidence for telepathy.[73] Storm et al. published a response to Hyman claiming the ganzfeld experimental design has proved to be consistent and reliable but parapsychology is a struggling discipline that has not received much attention so further research on the subject is necessary.[74] Rouder et al. 2013 wrote that critical evaluation of Storm et al.'s meta-analysis reveals no evidence for telepathy, no plausible mechanism and omitted replication failures.[75] A 2016 paper examined questionable research practices in the ganzfeld experiments.[76]

Twin telepathy

Edit

Twin telepathy is a belief that has been described as a myth in psychological literature. Psychologists Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell have noted that all experiments on the subject have failed to provide any scientific evidence for telepathy between twins.[77] According to Hupp and Jewell there are various behavioral and genetic factors that contribute to the twin telepathy myth "identical twins typically spend a lot of time together and are usually exposed to very similar environments. Thus, it's not at all surprising that they act in similar ways and are adept at anticipating and forecasting each other's reactions to events."[77]

A 1993 study by Susan Blackmore investigated the claims of twin telepathy. In an experiment with six sets of twins one subject would act as the sender and the other the receiver. The sender was given selected objects, photographs or numbers and would attempt to psychically send the information to the receiver. The results from the experiment were negative, no evidence of telepathy was observed.[78]

The skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford has noted that "Despite decades of research trying to prove telepathy, there is no credible scientific evidence that psychic powers exist, either in the general population or among twins specifically. The idea that two people who shared their mother's womb—or even who share the same DNA—have a mysterious mental connection is an intriguing one not borne out in science."[79]

Scientific reception

Psychiatry

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See also

Notes

Further reading

External links

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[djohnhopper]

BOOK LIST: Gothic by Roger Luckhurst. You can never have enough Gothic. I should know, I've been scooping it up for decades. It's dark, it's fun, it's decadent, its gloomy, and always entertaining.

[thoughtportal]

The Palace of Dreams is a novel set in the Ottoman empire but used by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare to reflect on the totalitarian state. Lea Ypi has been reading the novel which was banned two weeks after publication in 1981, but it had already sold out. Matthew Sweet looks at this and other examples of fiction exploring dreams, power and bureaucracy from Kafka to Dickens and Gospodinov. This Bulgarian novelist won the 2023 International Booker prize for his novel Time Shelter, which New Generation Thinker Mirela Ivanova has been reading. Also joining the conversation is Roger Luckhurst, Professor at Birkbeck University London who studies literature, film and cultural history.

[grlhannibal]

Roger Luckhurst: Gothic: An Illustrated History (2021)

[aliteraryprincess]

Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst. It’s stunning!

What’s the best work of nonfiction you read this year?

who wants to try a booklr game? it's an experiment.

since it's the end of the year, I will start my asking an end of the year book question and then when you reblog, answer the question and then add another book question for other rebloggers to answer.

those are the only rules, everything else is open to interpretation!!

my question: what was your favorite fictional romance you encountered in books you read in 2022?

[ancientegyptdaily]

Professor Roger Luckhurst talking about “unwrapping parties” in the 19th century.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Yet the form of Dracula has something to do with its posthumous revival, an ingenious construction of different kinds of textual fragments, diaries, newspaper reports, phonographic transcriptions, log books, and other data. Within the text, that modern girl Mina Harker [...] emerges as the organising secretary who creates, shuffles and organises this "mass of typewriting", reducing diverse details into equivalent informational bits that can be sorted by the hapless men around her. Mina is a kind of embodied search-engine herself, with sailing times and train timetables at her fingertips. She even becomes a kind of occult communication device herself, a new-fangled two-legged telephone, able to dial up the Count from afar once she is in mesmeric rapport. She sends in weather updates, travel reports, and neatly summarises scientific information findings on the 'criminal mind.' It is having more efficient information systems than the Count that in the end defeats the vampire threat. In contrast, Dracula relies on blue books and civil lists in his mouldering library to learn the institutional contours of the British state he sets out to infiltrate. 'Vampirism is a chain reaction, and can therefore only be fought with the techniques of mechanical text reproduction,' Friedrich Kittler observes. The novel is therefore, in his reading, 'the written account of our bureaucratization.'

Roger Luckhurst, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Dracula

[cannibalguy]

Virus apocalypse – 28 DAYS LATER (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Virus apocalypse – 28 DAYS LATER (Danny Boyle, 2002)

A highly contagious virus, originating in human exploitation of captive animals, leads to the complete collapse of society. Pretty far-fetched, huh?

Do you remember back in the good old days, let’s say 2019, when “post-apocalyptic” was just a genre, a metaphor, rather than a feature of every evening news bulletin? The…

[scalar]

for Goncharov, one might say, is nothing more than an emanation of sifted documents, a conjuration of the archive........

[rhys-tranter]

Entering the Labyrinth of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining | https://rhystranter.com/2017/03/21/rogerluckhurst-stanleykubrick-theshining/ 

[baiwu-jinji]

I don’t know how to process this sentence