‘The Ghost Club' of 1862: a ‘Secret Society' of "Brother Ghosts."

Reaching as far afield as Australasia, The New Zealand Herald reported on May the 23rd 1931, ‘The London Ghost Club: Dining with the dead. Secrets of 50 years! If one were in a certain Street in the West End of London on a certain evening every month, he would see between 30 and 40 prominent men – doctors, barristers, businessmen – going to a fashionable restaurant to have dinner, and to gloat over eerie and fantastic stories of ghosts. No-one who associates with these men in ordinary life ever knows what goes on in the private dining room in this restaurant on the first Wednesday of every month. The diners leave their everyday personalities outside, and for several hours abandon themselves to a psychic orgy. They call themselves The Ghost Club. For 50 years they have been in existence, and no-one has yet revealed anything of the strange and carefully guarded proceedings. They are under an oath of secrecy not to divulge what transpires at these dinners. In the quiet of this private dining room many a tale too gruesome for publication is told, and these are all taken down by the Secretary with the solemnity of a coroner presiding over his court. The rules forbid publication of the stories. They are all stored away – many volumes of them – in a house in Kensington. The rules of The Ghost Club are as such; 1. That the club be called The Ghost Club. 2. That it meet, as a rule, on the first Wednesday of such months as may from time to time be decided in accordance with general convenience, provided that the November meeting shall take place on All Soul’s Day, on whatever day of the week that may fall. 3. That it be the purpose of the Club to unite minds that are directed to the study of psychical subjects, it’s proceedings being regarded as strictly Private and confidential among its Members.’ The Ghost Club is still in existence today, though its members do not quite reach the heady heights of former members such as Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Ghost Club is the oldest para-psychological organisation in the world. It was established in 1862   but, according to the Club themselves, ‘has its roots in Cambridge University where, in 1855, fellows at Trinity College began to discuss ghosts and psychic phenomena.’ It launched officially in London in 1862, although another given date is that it was formed in 1882 by Alaric Alfred Watts and his friend William Stainton Moses. At the height of the burgeoning Spiritualist movement in the Victorian 1800’s, seances and other experiments to attempt to contact the dead had become hugely popular and it was at this time that the world’s oldest and most esteemed yet little heard of club, The Ghost Club was formed. The club had some of the most famous literary and cultural figures of the time, and several Sirs and Lords. It was an all-male club, and perhaps even termed a ‘Secret Society.’  Members call each other ‘Brother Ghost’ and on every All Soul’s Day, the names of all members, both dead and alive are read out. The Ghost Club is still going strong to this day and members never leave; technically, they can’t. After death, members are still considered to be members. By joining the Club, they would remain ghosts in the afterlife, they believed. Old members included famous World War II poets Siegfried Sassoon and W. B. Yeats, and several Nobel prize winners. Chemist Sir William Crookes was a member and he used his laboratory to test the levels of ‘psychic force’ of mediums. Ernest Wallis Budge, the curator of the Egyptian artefact rooms at the British Museum, was also a member. The archives of the hand-written notes of every meeting of The Ghost Club were first kept at the British Library, then moved to be stored at Cambridge University library.  Roger Luckhurst for Oxford University Press says, ‘The most intriguing member for me remains Thomas Douglas Murray, the society gentleman who was known to have been cursed by a mummy he purchased a coffin lid of a malignant Priestess ...