Phantasms of the Living

Phantasms of the Living is the Society for Psychical Research's own founding study, written jointly by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers and Frank Podmore, collecting and analyzing reported cases of telepathic hallucinations and crisis apparitions, images of a person seen at the moment of their death or crisis at a distance. As the founding text of organized psychical research it is the correct primary source for how the society itself first approached and categorized this class of reported experience. Its limit is the one later psychical researchers themselves raised, the case collection method relies on retrospective witness testimony gathered after the fact, which is inherently harder to verify than a controlled experiment, so a claim treating any individual case as proven telepathy should be read as the society's own contemporary evidentiary standard rather than a modern controlled result.