Frederic William Henry Myers

You can go to my website, stephanashwartz.com, and see the movie.

And it proved that it was not electromagnetic in nature, which is what most people thought at the time, hence words like telepathy, which was coined in 1887 by Frederick Myers because they originally thought it was some kind of signal that was being sent, and it's not.

And you hear all kinds of people talk about it in terms of energy, and it's not that either.

it's an information phenomena.

The foundation text is Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, FWH.

Myers and Frank Podmore, published in 1886 by the Society of Psychical Research.

Two volumes, more than 700 documented case studies.

And their proposed explanation wasn't ghosts at all.

But what I can't really explain is the objection applies to every single use of phantasms of the living.

All 700 of them.

It applied in 1886, and Gurney and Myers knew it applied, which is exactly why they went and canvassed 17,000 people looking for a base rate.

You can't make a family write down the time.

Of course, we have a hundred and forty year history of the journals and proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research that looked into this question since 1882 and for the decade or two before that even additional research.

Another example would be Frederick Myers who wrote the great book, Human Personality and Survival of Bodily Death.

It was published posthumously after Myers died in 1901.

But then people thought, surely if anybody is going to communicate after his death it would be Myers.

So, many automatic writers reached out to try and communicate with Myers.

People in different continents, England, India, the United States.

It appeared as if Myers was expressing willful intent to prove his existence by creating what are known as the cross correspondences, where it would be like a puzzle.

The puzzle only made sense when you put the pieces together.

So it was really a time of despair.

During the 1870s, Frederick Myers, who was one of the founders of the SPR, wrote that it was a time of despair.

William James himself said he was in such despair that he considered committing suicide when he was in medical school.

So the Society for Psychical Research were formed

And more and more reports of ghostly phenomena are appearing in the newspapers, so by the end of the 1800s, a number of psychologists, early physicists, philosophers, they form together and create the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and then an American branch in 1884, 1885.

And these are really big figures, people like William James, noted psychologist, Henry Sidgwick, Frederick Myers, and this starts everything off really.

Their initial surveys of the general population are massive.

I mean, remember the time again.