Dr. Alan Gauld, a retired Harvard-educated psychology professor at the University of Nottingham, is well known in parapsychology for his discussions of various topics, among them survival of death, poltergeists, and the history of psychical research.
Regarding the latter, he is the author of “The Founders of Psychical Research” (1968), a book that influenced me, and that to this day remains what I believe to be the best discussion of the early work of the London-based Society for Psychical Research, by those such as Frederic W.H. Myers and Edmund Gurney.
Although I had corresponded with Gauld before, I believe I first met him in a conference hosted by the Society for Psychical Research in Bournemouth, England, in 1994. It was great meeting someone whose work I had admired and followed closely for years. In the last decade, as I started to write about historical aspects of dissociation, and hypnosis in general, I have had occasion to cite Gauld’s “A History of Hypnotism” (1992) repeatedly, a work that, like his other books, has become a standard.
Gauld is a past president of the Society for Psychical Research. He was granted the Outstanding Career Award by the Parapsychological Association, and the Myers Memorial Medal by the Society for Psychical Research.
Carlos Alvarado: How did you become interested in parapsychology?
Alan Gauld: So far as I can remember, my interest in things psychic began when I was about six.
It originated not from any precocious interest in science, philosophy, or religion, but probably from watching an early Walt Disney cartoon in which Mickey Mouse and his friends, as ghost hunters, were given a somewhat trying time by a group of “lonesome ghosts” in search of amusement.
Intrigued, perhaps, by these mischievous spooks (as I recall, their antics also figured now and again in “Mickey Mouse Weekly”) I not long after ventured with various friends of about my own age on an excursion to a reputedly haunted building nearby. It was a largish place, still under construction, and my part in the enterprise finished when I climbed several feet up some scaffolding, fell off, and cut my head.
The undignified end to my first psychic investigation did not, however, quash my interest in the subject, although during the ensuing war years that interest was somewhat distracted by the London “blitz.”
After the war, it emerged again in somewhat more serious form, encouraged by the fact that my mother had a longstanding interest in such matters (and had something of a reputation herself for possessing “psychic” gifts). The consequence was that, during the post-war years I acquired and read various old and new books on the subject, proposed (successfully) before the school debating society “that this house believes in ghosts,” and retained my interest during my military service. In my first week at Cambridge, in 1952, I sought out the secretary of the Cambridge University SPR and signed up.
Membership made a huge difference to the extent and nature of my involvement in the subject. The CUSPR (founded in 1906, but now alas extinct) arranged regular lectures by well-known psychical researchers, many of whom I got to know (several lived in Cambridge), and organized experiments and investigations.
