Founding and Early Reorganization

The American Society for Psychical Research traces its founding to a visit to the United States by Sir William Fletcher Barrett of the London Society for Psychical Research, which prompted an organizing committee to meet through the autumn of 1884. The new society held its first meeting that December and completed its formation in January 1885, in Boston, electing the astronomer Simon Newcomb as president, with N. D. C. Hodges as secretary and a slate of vice presidents that included the psychologist G. Stanley Hall and the astronomer Edward C. Pickering.

The Society attracted a respectable roster of American scientists and scholars, most notably the philosopher and psychologist William James, and its early Proceedings covered thought transference, hypnotic phenomena and automatic writing. This first, independent incarnation of the ASPR proved short lived: in 1889 it was absorbed as a branch of the SPR in London, under the direction of the investigator Richard Hodgson, who had recently made his name investigating Helena Blavatsky for the parent society. Hodgson ran the American branch from Boston until his sudden death in 1905, after which the branch was dissolved and, following a year of preparation, reconstituted as a wholly independent American Society for Psychical Research under the Columbia philosopher James Hervey Hyslop in 1906.