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They tell you that your nine-year-old son gave them your number. Your heart stops. You tell them that your son has been dead for almost 20 years. They know this, they say. He wants you to come and see him.  What do you do when reality begins to fray around you? Where do you go when science cannot explain your experiences? The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to tackle these very questions and to shine light on the shadowy world of the supernatural. Distinguished members have included prime ministers and Nobel Prize-winning scientists.  But the most prolific of all the SPR's paranormal investigators was a young British naval officer named Tony Cornell. A rationalist and a sceptic he became haunted by a wartime encounter in India that changed everything . Between 1950 and 2010 he became perhaps the world's most prolific investigator of psychic phenomena and paranormal events. 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A member of the UK's Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Cornell's role as an investigator of so-called \"spontaneous cases\" saw him returning time and again to the unsettling spaces that exist just on the periphery of our ordered, tidy, and rational lives, and which we all do our best to ignore: Ghosts. Spirits. Premonitions. Psychic powers. Glimpses of other worlds that throw into question everything we take for granted about life, death, and material existence itself.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This page-turner draws on Cornell's casefiles, which survive as uniquely untapped repository of stories reported by ordinary people, as well as correspondence between some of the great intellectuals of the 20th century--including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Marie Curie. 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