The First World War centenary led to a huge spike in international publications about every aspect of the conflict on both the military and home fronts. Some of the most original and groundbreaking work to appear in the last decade has been concerned with the social and cultural aspects of the war. Falcon’s insightful study of the relationship between spiritualism, psychical research, and the emergent social sciences of the mind during war time successfully joins up several fields of well-established, scholarly enquiry regarding faith, belief, preternatural experiences, and scientific enquiry. By drawing the debates about a Victorian “crisis of faith” and a “crisis of evidence” into the feverish milieu of war-related prophecies, apparitions, and spirit communications, Falcon contributes to a growing literature that overhauls the old, engrained idea in First World War scholarship that the War led to an explosion of “unmodern” or “superstitious” beliefs and emotions. As other recent research has shown, there was nothing backward or “primitive” in the public and intellectual engagement with the supernatural or the “weird”: it was a thoroughly modern cultural reaction.

Falcon prefers to use the term “supernormal” rather than “supernatural” or “preternatural” to describe the phenomena that psychical researchers and social scientists investigated. He explains that “supernormal” pertains to “a cluster of practices, assumptions, questions, hypotheses, theories, language, and concepts that surrounded debates about spiritualism and psychical research” (17). The term is applied carefully and effectively throughout the book, and, in the Conclusion, Falcon sketches out how after the Second World War the investigation of the supernormal gave way to the “paranormal,” which includes, by way of contrast, a range of phenomena that were not of interest to early parapsychology.

Across five chapters, Falcon provides an engaging blend of analysis, context, and case studies. The book begins with spiritualism, situating its cultural influence and development before, during, and after the War, with a focus on the prophetic aspects of the movement. There were strong millenarian voices and the likes of Arthur Conon Doyle expressed hopes of a coming spiritual revolution born from the conflict. Chapter 2 explores battlefield experiences and the notion, expressed at the time, that the conflict represented a unique psychic laboratory. Falcon provides a fascinating analysis of the published supernormal experiences of Canadian soldier Bill Bird, who claimed to have had his life saved in battle by the intervention of his brother’s ghost. But Bird was also a prolific creative writer who challenged “realism,” and while one can wonder about aspects of his war memoirs on the Western Front, Falcon convincingly suggests that Bird’s writings are actually a valuable example of the “enchanted psyche” found in such spiritual war literature.

Ghost sightings on the battlefield were surprisingly rare, much to the disappointment of psychical researchers, but there were many examples reported of possible telepathy and crisis apparitions. The classic example of the latter is the mother who saw the vision of her son at the very moment of his death in battle. Such experiences had been reported over many centuries and in many cultures but now was the moment they could be studied scientifically. Falcon draws upon a series of first-hand examples of telepathic communication and premonition dreams collected by the Society for Psychical Research to explore not only the nature of evidence but also what he calls the “transcendental Imperial British character and community” (156). The final two chapters turn to the matter of spiritualism through studies of the séance room and spirit photography. Most of the historiography of the First World War concerned with religion, belief, and memory has focused on the idea that there was a great upsurge in popular engagement with spiritualism fueled by the promotional work of the likes of Conan Doyle and Oliver Lodge. Look at what many mediums were actually paid to do by the general public and you find they were often divining the future of those still living and not putting people in touch with the dead. But, in keeping with his thesis, Falcon rightly focuses on the bereaved who sought communication with the spirits released on the battlefield, and maps out a landscape of feeling, mourning, and memory. Spirit photography at first helped people navigate this landscape but as the exposés of fraud piled up after the War so too did the questioning of evidence more broadly.

Drawing upon a range of archival sources as well as the voluminous relevant published literature from the period, Falcon has cast valuable new light on some familiar subjects. Haunted Britain will be welcomed by First World War historians exploring faith and religion, and also by those interested in the wider cultures of science and spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.