The Koestler Bequest and Founding

Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian born writer best known for the novel Darkness at Noon, had a lifelong interest in psychical research and left a substantial bequest in his will to fund a university chair in parapsychology in Britain, stipulating that it be held at a university of good standing. After Koestler's death by suicide in 1983, alongside his wife Cynthia, his estate approached several British universities, and the University of Edinburgh agreed to establish and house the chair, becoming home to the only endowed professorship of parapsychology in the United Kingdom.

The university appointed Robert L. Morris, an American psychologist who had trained at J. B. Rhine's Institute for Parapsychology in North Carolina and built a reputation for methodologically careful, skeptically minded experimental work, as the first Koestler Professor of Parapsychology from December 1985. Morris used the position to recruit additional staff and postgraduate students, forming the Koestler Parapsychology Unit as a working research group within the university's psychology department rather than leaving the chair an isolated position, and the Unit quickly became a training ground for a new generation of researchers including Deborah Delanoy, Caroline Watt and Julie Milton, several of whom went on to lead parapsychological research programs of their own elsewhere.