Phantasms of the Living

This massive 1886 two-volume work was basically the birth certificate of serious telepathy research. Three Society for Psychical Research members combined controlled experiments with 702 real-world reports of people sensing a distant loved one's crisis or death. The numbers are striking: over 17,000 card-guessing trials produced successes beating chance at odds of less than one in fifty million. They also showed that hallucinations coinciding with someone's actual death happened far too often for coincidence. One blemish: the Creery family experiments were later exposed as involving secret signals. Still, this book set the evidential standards shaping every telepathy debate since, directly feeding into the modern ganzfeld controversy.