Twentieth Century Work

Under Hyslop and his successors the reconstituted ASPR built a research and publishing program that ran alongside, and often overlapped with, the parapsychology emerging at Duke University under J. B. Rhine. Its most notorious episode came in the 1920s, when the Boston medium Mina "Margery" Crandon became a test case for the Society and for the magazine Scientific American, which had offered a cash prize for a genuine physical medium.

Investigators split sharply: some ASPR figures endorsed Margery's phenomena while the magician Harry Houdini and others accused her of fraud, and the affair damaged the Society's standing and cost it members and staff, including the psychologist Walter Franklin Prince, who left to found a rival Boston Society for Psychic Research. The ASPR nonetheless continued through the century as one of the principal American venues for parapsychological publication and case investigation, maintaining a substantial library and archive in New York. It survived a period of serious financial and organizational strain around the turn of the twenty first century and continues today as a research and education body, publishing case reports and hosting talks on mediumship, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis for a public and academic audience.