Harry Price, Give Us a Sign

Harry Price (17 January 1881 - 29 March 1948) was a complicated man. Price was a well-known psychic researcher and ghost hunter during his days. In the 1920s the world was full of mediums, seances and ghost sightings after so many deaths during World War I and the Spanish Flu Epidemic. He was best known for exposing a celebrity spirit photographer as a fake and earning the wrath of Arthur Conan Doyle who was a Spiritualist.

I say Price was a complicated man because while he made a career out of exposing fake mediums and ghost sightings his methods were occasionally suspect and several have claimed he faked his own reported real ghost sightings. The truth is out there somewhere.

You can find out more about Price on a website dedicated to him called Harry Price: Ghost-Hunter, Psychical Researcher & Author. It's possible to spend a good hour wandering around the site and following all the ghostly links. He really is interesting. So interesting, in fact, that a TV movie was shown in Britain last December about his life. It's also called Harry Price: Ghost Hunter, but though I've tried, I can't locate a way to watch it yet. Let me know if you discover a link or where I can purchase it.

While Price didn't give us an answer on whether ghosts exist, he did leave us one very important thing- or rather 13,000 important things. The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature is housed in the Senate House Library at the College of London. According to the library, the Harry Price Collection contains:

Nearly 13,000 books, pamphlets, and periodical titles, some rare, on all aspects of magic: conjuring (from legerdemain to scientific recreations), witchcraft and the occult, prophecies, abnormal phenomena such as ghosts, mediums and spiritualism, scientific phenomena such as animal magnetism and eighteenth-century work on the automata, and psychical research. The books date from 1472 to the twenty-first century with emphasis on the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries.

Next time I'm in London, I'm making a stop here. Thank you, Harry Price, on the anniversary of your death, and if you're out there give us a sign.