Title page of "Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men," by John Harris.
John Harris’ Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men is a great read as we look forward to the Halloween season. Harris’ work is best approached in a kind of smorgasbord state of mind: there is no single through-line argument, rather Harris has assembled a collection of anecdotes and evidence to discuss psychic phenomena of one kind or another including hypnotism, thought transference, and hauntings.
Harris begins his work by citing Sir William Crookes, discoverer of thallium, early pioneer in spectroscopy, and occasional psychic investigator, in what seems like a blatant attempt to give his own work a scientific appeal. Despite this, Harris makes little appeal to provably scientific phenomena in the rest of his volume, preferring, instead, to explain the incidents he mentions by things like “gang[s] of criminal hypnotists” (9).
The volume which has been digitised, from the collections of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, has been annotated, with a reader adding in commentary and even corrections (see page 10 where a name used by Harris has been crossed out and another added). These corrections and annotations may be in the hand of Morton Prince whose bookplate is in the inside front cover; Prince was an American physician specializing in neurology and abnormal psychiatry. Without consulting his papers and finding a library catalog or other documentation it is, of course, useless to speculate as to why Prince may have had this volume in his possession: perhaps he had it because of its possible bearing on psychiatric issues or perhaps he simply enjoyed reading the idiosyncratic collection.
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