Book Review: Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies

Producing a reference book about the paranormal presents a unique challenge. Various aspects of the phenomenon—under the rubric of “the supernatural”—have been and remain common to virtually all religions. Furthermore, as this work’s “Introduction” notes, “the idea of the paranormal is ubiquitous and inescapable in American culture” and “is entrenched” (xix) throughout most of the rest of the world. Yet the actual existence of the paranormal is in very serious doubt, and authorities in most mainstream disciplines reject it as pseudoscience. As the “Introduction” suggests, however, a new paradigm that sidesteps this “skeptic/believer dichotomy” (xxiii) seems to be emerging.