People From the Other World

Olcott's investigation into the psychic powers of the Eddy brothers of Chittenden, Vermont, is a classic of Victorian psychic research.

Henry Steel Olcott (Author)

9781108072656, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 May 2011

504 pages, 58 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.8 cm, 0.64 kg

The lawyer and journalist Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) published People from the Other World in 1875. Part 1 of the work is a careful account of Olcott's 1874 investigations into the famous Eddy brothers of Chittenden, Vermont, and their claimed psychic powers. Part 2 is a report into two Philadelphia mediums who claimed to be able to call up two spirits called John and Katie King. The account includes descriptions of séances, healings, levitation, teleportation and the famous Compton transfiguration. Olcott, a founding member of the Theosophical Society and its first president, was a pioneer of psychical research. This work, deeply influenced by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), who he met at Chittenden, is one of his most popular. It offers an important insight into the nineteenth-century fascination with the occult and is a classic example of a Victorian attempt to approach the supernatural with the rigours of scientific investigation.

Preface
Part I: 1. The Eddy family
2. The Eddys as public mediums
3. Personal matters
4. A moonlight seance
5. Portents and marvels
6. Wonders in the Eddy family
7. A chapter of feet and inches
8. Materialization
9. The first seance
10. Many phantom visitors
11. Are they personations?
12. Is it an occult force?
13. Full of strange things
14. The dark-circle
15. Philosophical tests
16. Startling phenomena
17. A chapter of marvels
18. More wonders
19. Germans, Khourds, and Hungarians
20. The dead alive
21. Spiritualism vs. rationalism
22. Spirits as carriers
23. Tests continued
24. Pseudo-investigators
25. The Shakers as spiritualists
26. Summing up
Part II: The Katie King affair
The Compton transfiguration
Miscellaneous
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]