The Ghost Club

exploring the interplay between science, religion, philosophy, and the paranormal in the late 19th century.

He's General Secretary for the Ghost Club and a member for the Society for Psychical Research.

He has had a lifelong interest in ghosts, UFOs, and psychical phenomena, and is the author of two paranormal novels.

Robert, welcome to the podcast.

I think I'm more on the, uh, part of the human soul all the stuff about consciousness and what it is is really interesting there's a lot about it at the moment isn't there yeah very much and I sort of like the idea of that it could be something that comes from us so when you experience something perhaps it's something projecting from you because my first experience I was 19 sort of perfect age really and experienced poltergeist phenomenon nothing like you know Enfield levels of poltergeist but yeah so I'm sort of torn between those two ideas I think myself

Yeah.

Your general secretary at the Ghost Club, Britain's oldest paranormal research organization.

Can you tell us a little more about it and what sort of work it's involved with?

They all have dabbled in the paranormal in some way.

You know, the Ghost Club being very predominant of a lot of very smart people.

But I think one of the things that I try to relate to and look at are things that have been... documented by multiple different people, just like the scientific method in some aspect, but documented by the same people, the same characteristics, the same classifications.

And I really truly look at that.

So if anywhere is haunted, it's going to be a place like Walton Colliery, a scene of so much sorrow and so many horrific, untimely deaths.

That would certainly be an argument forwarded by the members of the Ghost Club.

Founded in 1862, the group counted Charles Dickens amongst its earliest members – The club met to discuss paranormal phenomena and placed ads in newspapers asking the owners of haunted houses to grant them access to investigate any ghostly goings-on.

The present custodian of the ghost club's archives, its chairman Alan Murdy, says that clear patterns emerge from the records.

When we look at accounts of apparitional sightings, he says, a high proportion could be described as sudden deaths.

Murder scenes, race car tracks, castles and, yes, coal mines, all seem to have more than their fair share of ghost sightings.

October 1926.

At 7pm, under the presidency of Brother A.W. Trebethy, this was the 397th meeting of the Ghost Club at Pagani's Restaurant in central London.

It was also the first ladies' night when women guests were thanked for attending and given an account of the early history of the club, derived from the minutes of the first meeting in 1882, and they reminded of the need for confidentiality.

The First Ladies' Night wasn't simply ghost club members bringing their wives.

A number of women were independently prominent in British spiritualism were invited.

Women involved in psychical research, animal welfare, literature and the aristocratic society.

There was also a considerable overlap between the Ghost Club and the London Spiritualist Alliance .

The President invited several of the guests to describe personal psychic experiences.

He was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the faction of E.A. Waite, whom you may know as one of the creators of the Waite Rider tarot deck, the most familiar version of the tarot deck that exists.

He was also a member of the Ghost Club, and he pursued the esoteric throughout his adult life, meaning that in many ways he's simply a product of his times, this fascination that was occurring at the time, bordering on fanaticism even, even among respectable society, what they used to call good society, high society.

There was this fascination with the occult and the esoteric.

it was a time in which a group of good english gentlemen you know might get together for a sance or discuss mesmerism or ancient civilizations and the mystical truths that they may have known Blackwood was raised in a strict Calvinist household, but upon discovering Eastern philosophy and religion as a young man, he came to surmise that there were truths unknown within the frameworks of conventional Western religions.

This is particularly interesting because Woodfield became an important case in his life.

Underwood later became president of the Ghost Club and wrote extensively about British hauntings.

But he was just 24 when he became involved at Woodfield.

He later called this his first official investigation of a haunting.

But then he also claims that Lord Summer Isle was his favorite role in The Wicker Man.

and um but what's so interesting about dennis wheatley is not only these these fascinating occult connections but he's yes personal friend and colleagues of christopher lee but also happens to be an admitted occultist with direct ties to the city of london uh the secret society which is also known as the ghost club did you see whenever he uh i guess whenever he was uh initially kicked out of school basically is what occurred right Which is strange that just the story of that alone, like he admitted to not really – he was expelled at one point for – I think it was Dulwich College he was studying at at the time.

And he – I believe he mentions something – to that effect as far as like forming a secret society in his introduction to The Devil Rides Out.

And he actually did apparently form a secret society and was expelled from this Dulwich College apparently.

And so it wasn't just Julian Huxley and all of these these figures that are extraordinarily prominent and had had a just a extraordinary effect on the really the kind of.

path of modern society at large and also the the mind control agenda i think what very much came out of tavistock i understand that the tavistock international nodes were set up through the process of the eslen institute west coast version of implementing uh that level of of uh really what was not just ideological subversion utilized, it was almost like an attempt at starting and almost introducing subconsciously into the minds of the vast majority this notion of the New Age framework of the Age of Aquarius.

in in many ways what would be the dawning of a new age in this sort of ideological sense and and i think if you could imagine a world where subconsciously the vast majority embrace internally these principles without knowing it uh which is very much a reflection on this inverted moral doctrine we witnessed today um it feels like we're playing we're sort of eating out of the palm of their hands at this point in terms of the psychological warfare you know engineers and but um but yeah at the very least i do encourage anyone who's interested to go and look into the history of the ghost club and and uh just the various meetings that were logged and things of that nature and also the membership i mean they were involved in seances and things like it and that's what's recorded right which is just uh again always worthwhile and and kind of overexposing yourself to these weird societies.

But I will say in regard to the conflict over the final cut of the film, I thought it was interesting because Christopher Lee, he firmly believed that EMI, which was the studio that absorbed British Lion Films mid-production, was had deliberately sabotaged or destroyed or even hid away the original negative of the film and uh this is when i discovered there was this article from the independent and it's really in the end it reveals the screenwriter himself who was personally friends with christopher lee and collaborated with him on adapting the film as a screenwriter from a novel, Ritual, David Penner to The Wicker Man, he had a devout commitment to paganism and admitted as much.