Hereward Carrington

Hereward Carrington (born October 17, 1880, in Jersey; died December 26, 1958) was a British-American psychical researcher and prolific author who wrote more than a hundred books on the paranormal, conjuring, and alternative health.

He emigrated to the United States as a child, joined the Society for Psychical Research as a teenager, and brought to the study of mediums an unusual dual competence: he understood both the methods of psychical research and the techniques of stage magic, which made him alert to the trickery that pervaded séance-room phenomena.

His most famous fieldwork was the 1908 investigation of the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino in Naples on behalf of the SPR. Carrington’s significance lies in his critical stance toward survival evidence.

He concluded that the overwhelming majority of mediumistic phenomena — by his estimate roughly 98 percent — were fraudulent, yet he held that a small, hard-to-dismiss residue (including some of Palladino’s effects) might be genuine, and he remained open to the possibility of consciousness surviving death.

FLAG: his positive conclusions about Palladino and other cases were disputed in his own day and have not been vindicated by later science; he is best read as a sincere, magic-literate investigator whose skepticism was real but whose residual belief in genuine phenomena remains contested.

He founded the American Psychical Institute (1921, revived 1933) to pursue laboratory study of these questions.