Englishman William Crookes, the discoverer of cesium and thallium, published “Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena Called Spirituals” in his own periodical, where he claimed to have seen residual traces of genuine supernatural forces. Crooke, a respected scientist, was actually distraught over the loss of his brother, and for this reason attended several séances, where he was convinced he had sensed something. Shortly thereafter, Crookes distanced himself from his article and from spiritualist circles, acknowledging his error, due to the failure to apply the scientific method—that is, the repeated and independent measurement of the effect. Crookes would later discover proactinium in 1897, confirming his scientific bent. In hindsight, he was a victim, ante litteram, of what would be called pathological science, in which scientists, in absolute good faith, use all their acumen to demonstrate the existence of a marginal or improbable phenomenon that attracts and fascinates them (another famous and controversial example is Fleischmann and Pons’s Cold Fusion). Despite this, Crookes is still cited inappropriately by ghostbusters and other spiritualists.
