Welcome to Origin Story. This week we’re doing something different: the history of paranormal investigations and what it says about the relationship between evidence and belief.

In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York claimed to be contacting the spirit world. Within a couple of years spiritualism was a popular craze on both sides of the Atlantic, with seances attracting luminaries from Queen Victoria to Charles Darwin. But could it be proven beyond doubt? In 1883, a group of scientists and intellectuals launched the Society for Psychical Research to find out, but from its inception there was tension between the genuine sceptics and the instinctive believers. However many hoaxers they debunked, even the sceptics encountered things they could not rationally explain.

The mass grief of the First World War created a new appetite for spiritualism, spearheaded by the world-famous author Arthur Conan Doyle. Meanwhile in North Carolina, J.B. and Louisa Rhine proposed that these uncanny goings on were not evidence of ghosts but of untapped powers in the human brain: Extra-Sensory Perception. Concepts like telepathy and telekinesis swept through popular culture while scientists explored their potential as weapons in the Cold War.

In the 1970s, Connecticut couple Ed and Lorraine Warren became the world’s star investigators. In the era of Carrie, The Exorcist and spoon-bending celebrity Uri Geller, there was a huge audience for this kind of thing, bringing money and fame to the most prominent spook-hunters. Events such as the Amityville Horror and the Enfield Poltergeist still inspire fascination today, despite the investigators’ extremely dubious methods. Was the truth-seeking mission of the Society for Psychical Research destined to end up as a license for grifters?

How did spiritualism bewitch the Victorian era, including some of its most eminent scientists? Are psychic powers any more credible than ghosts? Why was the creator of the ultra-rational Sherlock Holmes so boundlessly credulous about the spirit world? What can the field of the unexplained teach us about cognitive biases and conspiracy theories? Is it really possible to apply scientific rigour to paranormal phenomena? And why, when almost 150 years of investigations have produced no solid evidence or theoretical basis for them, do so many people still want to believe?

This is a thrilling story of faith, doubt and fraud, featuring Harry Houdini, George Eliot, Marie Curie, Carl Jung, Helena Blavatsky, W.B. Yeats, Winston Churchill and (possibly) the Devil himself. Don’t have nightmares.

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Reading list

Books

• Edward T. Bennett — The Society for Psychical Research: Its Rise and Progress and a Sketch of Its Work (1903)

• Ruth Brandon – The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983)

• Edmund Gurney, Frederic W.H. Myers and Frank Podmore – Phantasms of the Living (1886)

• Renée Haynes – The Society for Psychical Research 1882-1982: A History (1982)

• Oliver Lodge – Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916)

• Roger Luckhurst – The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (2002)

• Ben Machell – Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural (2025)

• Janet Oppenheim – The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (1985)

• Guy Lyon Playfair – This House Is Haunted: The Amazing Inside Story of the Enfield Poltergeist (1980)

• Harry Price – The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory (1940)

• J.B. Rhine – Extra-Sensory Perception (1934)

• Michael Shermer – The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (2011)

• Upton Sinclair – Mental Radio (1930)

Articles

• A.P. – ‘“Amityville Horror” amplified over bottles of wine, — lawyer’, Lakeland Ledger (27 July 1979)

• Angie Barry – ‘The Warren Case Files: Fact or Fiction?’, Criminal Element (31 October 2017)

• Stefan Beck – ‘A Night with The Conjuring’s Ed & Lorraine Warren’, Daily Beast (18 August 2013)

• Paul Byrnes – ‘The Devil Among Us’, Sydney Morning Herald (12 July 2013)

• Casey Cep – ‘Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead?’, New Yorker (24 May 2021)

• Kevin Dolak – ‘The Slippery Truth About “The Conjuring: Last Rites” and Ed and Lorraine Warren’, Hollywood Reporter (10 September 2025)

• Neil Genzlinger – ‘Lorraine Warren, Paranormal Investigator Portrayed in ‘The Conjuring’, Dies at 92, New York Times (19 April 2019)

• Kim Masters and Ashley Cullins – ‘War Over ‘The Conjuring’: The Disturbing Claims Behind a Billion-Dollar Franchise’, Hollywood Reporter (13 December 2017)

• Sean Thomas – ‘What’s Happened to Weird?’, Guardian (14 June 2004)

• Neda Ulaby – ‘The demons in “The Conjuring” movies may not be real — but the family tragedies are, NPR (5 September 2025)

• Neda Ulaby – ‘Who Were the Real Ed and Lorraine Warren of “The Copnjuring” Franchise?’, NPR (9 September 2025)

• Laura Zornosa, ‘The True Story Behind the Netflix Documentary The Devil on Trial’, Time (18 October, 2023)

Films

• Carrie, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and directed by Brian Da Palma (1976)

• The Conjuring: Last Rites, written by Ian Goldberg et al and directed by Michael Chaves (2025)

• The Devil on Trial, written by Chris Holt and directed by Charvi Bajaj (2023)

• The Exorcist, written by William Peter Blatty and directed by William Friedkin (1973)

• Ghostbusters, written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis and directed by Ivan Reitman (1984)

• Late Night with the Devil, written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes (2023)

• Panorama: The Enfield Poltergeist, BBC (13 November 1977)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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