This is a new release of the original 1931 edition.

Since 1861, more than two dozen persons in several countries have claimed to obtain on photographic plates and film a variety of types of images that could only have been produced paranormally. This essay, chapter 13 of Psychic Exploration, delves into psychic photography and thoughtography. The full volume of Psychic Exploration can be purchased as an ebook or paperback version from all major online retailers and at cosimobooks.com.

This is a work of "systematic parapsychology." The book aims to construct a framework and system of parapsychology, taking a comprehensive approach to the field. The Outline of Parapsychology states that parapsychology has a different philosophical background from the existing science and religions, and posits that pantheism could be the theoretical basis of parapsychology. The book also integrates parapsychology with oriental philosophies and New Age movement thought.

SECOND EDITION. In The World of Ted Serios, Jule Eisenbud, a Denver based psychiatrist and psychical researcher, examined anomalous "thoughtographic" phenomena ostensibly produced by Ted Serios, a Chicago hotel elevator operator who claimed he could mentally produce images on unused Polaroid film. Because "instant" Polaroids were developed immediately, skeptics could not easily attribute success to darkroom chicanery. Eisenbud, a seasoned investigator of anomalous phenomena, conducted thousands of trials with Serios over a three-year period between 1964 and 1967. Hundreds of images were produced as well as so-called blackies and whities-Polaroids that were massively under or overexposed, produced either when the film hadn't been unwrapped or under other conditions clearly ruling out under or overexposure. Eisenbud and multiple witnesses tested Serios in different locations, often under conditions that seemed clearly to rule out fraud-for example, separated at considerable distance from the film or camera. Nevertheless, the images continued to appear, and sometimes they bore striking similarities to sealed "target" images Serios had been challenged to duplicate with his mind. Magician and debunker James Randi, as expected, claimed it was all fraudulent. But despite Eisenbud's substantial financial incentives to magicians to produce the same phenomena under the same conditions, neither Randi or others accepted the challenge. More than fifty years on, Jule Eisenbud's investigation into Ted Serios' thoughtography is one of the most intriguing cases in the annals of anomalous phenomena.

In 1991, the publication of Koji Suzuki's Ring, the first novel of a bestselling trilogy, inaugurated a tremendous outpouring of cultural production in Japan, Korea, and the United States. Just as the subject of the book is the deadly viral reproduction of a VHS tape, so, too, is the vast proliferation of text and cinematic productions suggestive of an airborne contagion with a life of its own. Analyzing the extraordinary trans-cultural popularity of the Ring phenomenon, The Scary Screen locates much of its power in the ways in which the books and films astutely graft contemporary cultural preoccupations onto the generic elements of the ghost story”in particular, the Japanese ghost story. At the same time, the contributors demonstrate, these cultural concerns are themselves underwritten by a range of anxieties triggered by the advent of new communications and media technologies, perhaps most significantly, the shift from analog to digital. Mimicking the phenomenon it seeks to understand, the collection's power comes from its commitment to the full range of Ring-related output and its embrace of a wide variety of interpretive approaches, as the contributors chart the mutations of the Ring narrative from author to author, from medium to medium, and from Japan to Korea to the United States.