In addition to my empirical research, I also write popular science articles on esoteric science and history topics, including X-rated hauntings, witch trials, 4th dimensional spirit entities, hallucinated Pokemon, and fake mind reading technologies.
To date, I’ve also published two books: The first, The Spectacle Illusion, is a popular science book that was published with Thames and Hudson in partnership with the Wellcome Trust: . Written for general readers, the book examines historical and contemporary relationships between magicians, fraudulent mystics, and scientists.
My second (upcoming) book, The Mal-Observation Report is an edited compilation and commentary about historical papers describing a 19th century experimental paradigm where researchers used magic tricks to to simulate spiritualist phenomena.
The Mal-Observation Report
My second (upcoming) book is actually a compilation of archival material. In the late 1800s, SPR-based psychical researchers Richard Hodgson and S.J. Davey published a study describing how they used magic trick methods to simulate seance phenomena for unsuspecting audiences. They collected witness statements that they used to analyze illusions of memory and attention Ironically, this excellent pioneering work has been largely forgotten and unattended. So I teamed up with Marc Hartzman, who runs Curious Publications, and we’ve put together a book that reproduces the key original papers describing Hodgson and Davey’s Mal-Observation experiments. The book also includes a pop-science-y foreward (by me) that details the historical context in which the study was conducted and received, as well as how it relates to subsequent scientific research on attention, memory, anomalistic psychology, and the science of magic. We’ve also included a nice mix of historical images and lists of key texts and resources for contemporary readers.
The Spectacle of illusion
My first popular science book is written for general audiences on the topic of historical and contemporary relationships between magicians, scientists, and fraudulent mystics.
Featuring stories of ghost rapping, mind reading, lethal autopsies, full-body-cavity ghost hunts, death defying stunts, and death...obeying(?)stunts (by which I mean stunts where the performers accidentally died for real, i.e., literally the opposite of 'death defying’).
A selectively honest account of lies about the truth about lies.
With lots of weird pictures.
Review of Conjuring the Spirit World
I was invited by the Society of Psychical Research to write a review on the book Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums (2024).
Magisk Vetenskap [Magical Science]
I wrote an article about our lab’s ongoing research for the Swedish popular science magazine Forskning och Framsteg
View from Elsewhere- Photographic Ghosts of Abraham Lincoln
I wrote a guest column for Source Magazine about the duelling spirit photographs by P.T. Barnum and William Mumler. Mumler presented his image as genuine, while Barnum asserted that both images were genuinely fake.
Two Illusions that Fooled Arthur Conan Doyle
A true story about two (of the many) hoaxes that fooled the creator of everyone’s favorite rationalist superhero detective. Featuring magicians William Marriott, PT Selbit, and Molly Wynter, the incidents together illustrate how hard it can be to ‘rule out the impossible,’ when it comes to questions of human perception, memory, and belief.
Henry Slade (left) sitting with Johann Zöllner
Blinded by Seance
A biographical sketch of "Dr." Henry Slade that was featured in the New Scientist. Slade was an American spiritualist medium who convinced a group of German physicists that he had genuine supernatural powers. He sparked a scientific debate about the nature of reality itself, that I like to think of as the origin point of my own empirical research.
The Strange Case of the Phantom Pokemon
A woman wakes-up to find that she's being attacked by a real-life Pokemon. In this piece, I argue that this is a perfectly normal psychological phenomenon. My argument variously features alien abductions, nightmare demon sheep, Tetris, and vanishing witch nipples.
The Strange Tale of an X-rated Haunting
The true story of one man's valiant efforts to haunt an adult movie showing, and why his experiment actually anticipated developments in cognitive psychology by nearly half a century.