American Society for Psychical Research

This article is about the American paranormal research organisation founded in 1884.For its British counterpart, founded two years earlier, see Society for Psychical Research.

American Society for Psychical Research

TYPEPsychical research organisation

FOUNDED1885, Boston, Massachusetts

FOUNDERSWilliam Fletcher Barrett, Simon Newcomb, William James, G. Stanley Hall

KNOWN FOROldest psychical research body in the United States; investigations of Mina "Margery" Crandon

STATUSLargely inactive

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The American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) is the oldest organisation in the United States dedicated to the scientific investigation of psychic and paranormal claims. Founded in Boston in 1885 following a visit from British physicist William Barrett, it modelled itself on the Society for Psychical Research in London, though the two bodies have followed largely independent, and at times conflicting, paths.

Founding

The push to establish an American counterpart to the SPR followed Barrett's 1884 visit to Boston; the ASPR formally organised in January 1885, with astronomer Simon Newcomb elected as its first president and psychologist G. Stanley Hall among its vice-presidents. Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James was closely involved in getting the society off the ground, though its early leadership drew from a wider circle of Boston-area scientists and scholars.

Absorption and reconstitution

Financial strain led the ASPR to become a branch of the London SPR in 1889, its research work carried out largely by Richard Hodgson until his death in 1905, after which the branch was dissolved. Following a year of preparation, the ASPR was reconstituted as an independent body in 1906 under James Hyslop, initially operating out of his New York residence, and it has remained based in New York since.

Margery and the Prince resignation

The ASPR's most notorious episode centred on Mina "Margery" Crandon, a Boston medium investigated by the society's research director, Walter Franklin Prince, through the 1920s. Prince concluded Crandon was fraudulent; the ASPR board did not agree, and in 1925 appointed Scientific American writer J. Malcolm Bird — a Margery sympathiser — as co-research officer alongside him. Prince resigned in protest, joined by other disaffected members including psychologists Gardner Murphy and William McDougall, and together they founded the rival Boston Society for Psychic Research, intended as a home for the ASPR's original, more sceptical principles.

Later history and decline

The Boston Society for Psychic Research merged back into the ASPR in 1941. Gardner Murphy later served as ASPR president for roughly two decades, bringing renewed prestige and recruiting notable researchers during a period when laboratory parapsychology, led by J. B. Rhine at Duke University, had become the field's cutting edge.

The organisation's finances deteriorated substantially in subsequent decades: net assets fell from roughly $3 million in 1991 to a reported negative $7.5 million by 2015, driven in part by accumulated mortgage debt against its longstanding townhouse headquarters at 5 West 73rd Street, acquired in 1966. A foreclosure action was initiated in 2020, and the building was sold at a court-ordered auction in 2023, with the sale formally recorded in June 2024 for $11.75 million — an amount reported to be less than the ASPR's outstanding debts, leaving no surplus for the organisation.

By late 2024, the ASPR's listed address had become a rented mailbox at a shipping company on Columbus Avenue, and independent researchers attempting to contact the organisation or access its archives reported long silences and no functioning staff contact beyond a phone number. The society's website nonetheless continued to accept paid membership fees ranging up to several hundred dollars through late 2025, alongside a December 2024 fundraising appeal describing the organisation's archival holdings — reportedly including correspondence from William James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Harry Houdini — as secure. Researchers Tom Ruffles and Barry Conrad have separately called on the New York Attorney General's Charities Bureau to investigate the organisation's finances, and launched a public petition urging intervention to preserve its archives.

Relevance

Whatever its present state, the ASPR's archive and back catalogue of published Proceedings and Journal issues remain a significant primary source for the history of American psychical research, documenting more than a century of investigations into mediumship, apparitions, and thought-transference — the same territory much of modern parapsychology continues to work.

See also

• Society for Psychical Research
• Walter Franklin Prince
• Boston Society for Psychic Research
• Medium

External links

• Psi Encyclopedia — American Society for Psychical Research
• Skeptical Inquirer — The Demise of the American Society for Psychical Research