The Ghost Club and nineteenth-century psychical investigation

Record summary

The Ghost Club was founded in London in 1862 and associated with gentlemen interested in apparitions, haunted places, and spiritualist phenomena. Although its early records are fragmentary and its later history is often conflated with twentieth-century organizations, it offers a specific institutional lead for studying how elite networks collected and circulated haunting reports. The club matters comparatively because membership, anecdote, secrecy, and social status influenced what counted as evidence. Its activities should be reconstructed from period notices and archival material rather than modern summaries.