National Paranormal Day has no confirmed founder. The May 3 date coincides with the death of Charles Fort (May 3, 1932), the American researcher whose compilations of unexplained phenomena gave the field its intellectual foundation. The observance first appeared on social media and holiday calendars between 2009 and 2013.
CHAPTER 01
The academic turn
In 1882, a group of Cambridge-educated academics founded the Society for Psychical Research in London, the first organization dedicated to investigating psychic phenomena using scientific methods. The SPR studied telepathy, mesmerism, mediumship, apparitions, and haunted houses. Its founding members included Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, and Edmund Gurney.
In 1930, J.B. Rhine brought the inquiry to the American university system. At Duke University, he founded the Parapsychology Laboratory and developed the Zener card test: a deck of 25 cards with five symbols (circle, cross, wavy lines, square, star), used to test whether subjects could identify hidden cards at rates exceeding chance. Rhine published his findings in "Extra Sensory Perception" in 1934. His work was controversial but brought laboratory controls to a field that had relied on anecdote and séance.
