Chasing the Dark

A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity

Tony Cornell spent his life probing the very edges of reality and paranormal activity. A member of the UK's Society for Psychical Research (SPR) from the post-war era to the dawn of the 21st century, Cornell's role as an investigator of so-called "spontaneous cases" saw him returning time and again to the unsettling spaces that exist just on the periphery of our ordered, tidy, and rational lives: Ghosts. Spirits. Premonitions. Psychic powers. Glimpses of other worlds that throw into question everything we take for granted about life, death, and material existence itself.

This is a gripping and page-turning narrative drawing on decades of Cornell's casefiles, which survive as a huge and uniquely untapped repository of stories reported by ordinary people, as well as correspondence between some of the great intellectuals of the 20th century - including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Marie Curie. Award-winning journalist Ben Machell mines the extensive archives of the SPR for the first time to reveal the untold history of the secretive organization, and to understand our ceaseless fascination with the unexplained.