It would be no exaggeration to describe Harry Price as the father of modern popular ghost hunting. Paranormal investigators of today, even though they may know little about Price himself, are following the procedures that he used to bring the scientific study of psychical research firmly into the public eye over fifty years ago.

Harry Price was born in Holborn in London on 17 January 1881. His father was a traveling salesman for a firm of paper manufacturers, and after trying his hand at several diverse types of work, Harry entered this line of employment himself, becoming a salesman for the same company as his father. Despite being famous as a ghost-hunter, Price never actually gave up his day job and worked in the paper industry all his life. Evening classes at Goldsmiths College, where Price studied, amongst other things, photography and engineering, gave him practical skills that he later used to his advantage.

In 1908 Price married Constance Mary Knight, and the couple set up their home in the village of Pulborough, West Sussex. The Knights were a somewhat affluent family, and Constance had the benefit of a small trust fund that supplemented Price's income, enabling him to establish what would become the greatest occult library in the world. Price became interested in magic at the age of eight, developing into a competent amateur conjuror, and these skills gave him an insight into the workings of the many mediums that he became interested in before, and especially after, the Great War ended.

Fake psychics and mediums abounded during the 1914-1918 conflict, feeding off the slaughter in the trenches. Price knew many of their tricks and became exceptionally scathing towards Spiritualism, which he described in his writings as being riddled with fraud. He came to the firm decision that, when he was able, he would establish a scientific facility where mediums and psychics who claimed supernormal powers could be tested to prove their claims. At this time, the dawn of the 1920s, the phenomena of the séance room was the area where paranormal study was most heavily focused.

Price's uneasy relationship with organized British psychical research began when he was elected a member of the Society for Psychical Research in June 1920. The SPR had been founded by a group of Cambridge academics in 1882, and its Council at the time that Price joined was made up of members of the upper classes. Although he gave the Society the benefit on loan of his, by then, vast library of occult literature, the class barrier prevented many of his fellow members from treating him as an equal, with the result that he was looked upon in some ways as an embarrassment. Price came onto the paranormal scene when he was nearly forty, and was looking to make his mark in a career in which he was passionately interested. As a person, he had a great desire to be famous, and felt he had a lot to contribute to the subject. Eventually, he made up his own mind that he would reorganize psychical research in Britain on his own terms, and used his contacts in the SPR to gain experience of the scientific study of the paranormal before putting his plans into action.

For more of this article, read Spring 2006 Volume 6, Issue 1 of Ghost! Magazine.