The Society for Psychical Research census of hallucinations

Record summary

The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, organized investigations into apparitions, telepathy, mediums, and related claims. Its Census of Hallucinations gathered reports of waking experiences involving absent or deceased persons, later published in Phantasms of the Living in 1886. This is important for comparing haunted-place testimony with ordinary perceptual and social experiences, because the investigators attempted classification and statistical treatment. The material remains self-reported, retrospectively collected, and vulnerable to selection, memory distortion, and leading questions.