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.

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 began in September 1884, when Barrett met with a Boston committee that included astronomer Simon Newcomb, physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch, and Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James. James was instrumental in getting the society off the ground but, in a decision he later regretted, declined a formal governing role, leaving the ASPR's early direction to figures less sympathetic to psychical claims. Newcomb was elected the society's first president when it formally organised in early 1885.

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. The branch dissolved the following year. In 1906 the ASPR was reconstituted as an independent body under James Hyslop, operating for a time 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, taking a group of disaffected members with him to found the rival Boston Society for Psychic Research, intended as a home for the ASPR's original, more sceptical principles.

Later history and decline

The society saw a resurgence of activity in the 1960s under psychologist Gardner Murphy, but its fortunes declined steadily thereafter. By the 2010s and 2020s, researchers and journalists attempting to access its New York archives reported long silences, unanswered correspondence, and an organisation that appeared to be running down its remaining assets. The ASPR sold its longstanding headquarters in 2024, and by 2025 was widely described as functionally inactive, even as it nominally remains a registered non-profit.

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