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Here are some insights about abusive relationships from someone that’s been there. Even if you don’t want to admit it, if you are in an abusive relationship then these are truths for you also, as painful as they may be to admit.

1. You are worth more

What starts off as well intentioned forgiveness turns into forfeiting your life for someone who is never going to be capable of being a truly healthy partner. Controlling, abusive partners need help. You are worth more in this life than waiting for their sickness to get better. You are worth a partner that respects you exactly as you are. You are worthy of a partner that does not control you or force you to hide parts of who you are.
What if you even had a partner that was there to be a catalyst – even to your own personal growth in a healthy way? Imagine how far you could go in your life by shedding what is dragging you down. The longer you stay, the more difficult you will find the truth something you believe. Experiencing abuse will eventually rob you of your self-worth.

2. It won’t get better

After every fight you hear promise after promise of how it will get better, and how sorry they are. It won’t get better. Your abusive partner has already shown a lack of respect for you, and that will not improve by putting up with being treated with abuse. Better exists, but not inside this relationship. It took years for them to learn to deal with people in this abusive, controlling, manipulative way. It will take a lifetime for them to unlearn it, and that is only if they want to do the difficult work required with help.
Back to point one: you are worth more than forfeiting your life. The next time you want to fill yourself with false hope that this could change, please read these facts about your future staying with your abuser.

3. This is not your problem to fix

Being the victim in these relationships can cause you to think, “If only I had dressed better, or cleaned the house better, or been more affectionate… then maybe the fight wouldn’t have started.”
You should never think this way. If you had done everything perfectly the fight still would have started. The abuse still would have happened. Your partner is fighting something in themselves not of you, but taken out upon you. Nothing you do or don’t do can fix them or prevent this from happening again. You are not in control of this situation no matter how wonderful you are to them.

4. There is no prize for who survives the worst

Ask yourself, “Why am I hanging on to this?” What do you have to gain? There is no award at the end of years of long abusive relationships except a heart full of regret. Just because you love this person does not give you to right to forfeit the gift of your life.
You are worthy of wonderful, healthy, loving blessings. You are not serving your life’s purpose by putting yourself in this jail, wasting your gifts from being shared with the world, under this person’s control and abuse. Fast forward your life to age seventy. What will you regret most?

5. You can help others

Abuse of all sorts is still hidden in our society and not talked about openly. Victims shield their abusers from judgement by staying quiet and not reaching out to others. It is common to stay silent to even your closest family or friends about abuse because of point 2, above – you are still in denial that it will get better. As victims we dream of the day the pain will end and they will see our worth, so we decide not to tell our family and friends. We fear judgement of our partner, our choices and ourselves.
If you believe everything happens for a reason, then maybe the reason this has happened was for you to overcome this struggle and grow from it so you can help others. My situation was not something I often talked about unless I met someone I recognized as possibly in the same situation. In those cases I always shared my story in private and encouraged them to reach out. There are ways to overcome and transcend this part of life.
No, getting out of an abusive, controlling relationship isn’t easy. It’s scary, difficult and at times you will want to retreat. I personally remember about six months of being in fear for my safety in every way. But staying and giving your life up to this person who has zero value for you is not the answer. Reach out to someone you trust. For more resources about what steps to consider to actually get out this is a great link with a helpline link near the bottom of the article.
Even though my experience with this happened over twenty years ago, it’s still a part of who I am. The experience changed me in a way nothing else could. The most difficult part of the entire thing wasn’t actually the abuse. The most difficult part was letting myself down for not walking away sooner. The most difficult part was forgiving myself for putting up with far less than I deserved. Forgiving myself took far longer than forgiving him.
Remember that when you think about just treading water and just waiting a bit longer to see what happens. Give yourself a chance at life. You are worth so much more!

Domestic violence, as defined by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence ‘is the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sexual assault, and/or other abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control perpetrated by one intimate partner against another’.
Domestic violence may include physical violence, sexual violence, psychological violence, and emotional abuse. Domestic violence and its forms vary drastically in different relationships, however in almost all situations the abuser tries to maintain power and control over their partner.
Domestic violence can affect anybody irrespective of age, gender, ability, sexuality, ethnicity and race. In fact, in 2001 approximately 15% of the victims of intimate partner violence were men and another statistic by the NCADV stated that 43.8% of lesbian women and 61.1% of bisexual women have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.
It is a commonly held belief that domestic violence only occurs in uneducated, minority or dysfunctional relationships. That is far from the truth. Domestic violence occurs at every level of society regardless of income or educational background with as many as 50% of all couples experiencing domestic violence at some point in their lives.
The following are 13 lesser known facts about domestic violence:

1. Every 9 seconds in the US a woman is assaulted or beaten
2. Everyday in the US more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriend
3. More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime
4. Nearly 1 in 5 teenage girls who have been in a relationship said a boyfriend threatened violence or self-harm if presented with a breakup
5. Domestic violence victims lose nearly 8 million days of paid work per year in the US alone—the equivalent of 32,000 full-time jobs
6. On average 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States — more than 12 million women and men over the course of a year
7. 25% – 45% of all women who are battered are battered during pregnancy
8. Domestic violence does not end immediately with separation. Over 70% of the women injured in domestic violence cases are injured after separation
9. 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female
10. At least 1/3 of the families using New York City’s family shelter system are homeless due to domestic violence
11. 1 in 3 female homicide victims are murdered by their current or former partner every year
12. Victims do not choose to stay in an unhealthy relationship. In fact 65% of abused women are killed when or after they leave their abuser.
13. 76% of femicide victims had been stalked by the person who killed them

It is difficult to determine whether or not a person is abusive when a relationship is at its early stages as domestic violence often intensifies as the relationship progresses. Abusers could seem wonderful and supportive in the beginning of a relationship, however, as time goes on they tend to become controlling and aggressive. Often abuse starts to shows up in minor arguments and quarrels in the form of name calling, possessiveness and jealously. The threat and intensity of abuse often magnify. Many times abusers use intimidation, threat, emotional abuse, economic status, isolation, and blame to gain power over their victims.
It is important to realize that domestic violence does not always manifest itself in the form of physical abuse. Emotional and psychological abuse are just as dangerous and life threatening. Many times misinformation or hurtful myths prevent individuals from seeking timely help. It is important to understand that victims of domestic violence must be supported as much as possible and referred to the right sources as soon as possible. One must never blame a victim of domestic violence nor pass any kind of judgement.

Mother Nature has an awesome reputation. Depending on who you talk to, she’s either wonderful, cruel, awe-inspiring, or horrendously evil. We have a different theory: She’s a practical joker.
A veritable flood of stories have recently featured nature doing stuff that has left our heads spinning. While none of these reports are mysteries, and all of them have rational explanations, they do all seem to have one goal in mind—to leave average laymen scratching their heads and feeling as confused about the world as humanly possible.

10 Wild Smalltooth Sawfish Experience Virgin Births

We all know how sex works. Two people shack up after one too many beers, and nine months and a shotgun wedding later, a little bundle of embarrassment is born. Try telling that to Florida’s smalltooth sawfish. In June 2015, scientists reported that the creatures had started experiencing virgin births. This sort of reproduction isn’t actually uncommon in the animal kingdom. Invertebrates do it all the time, and it’s also been observed in some captive vertebrates. Sharks, chickens, snakes, and Komodo dragons have all been known to give birth via parthenogenesis, meaning that an unfertilized egg became a living creature. What’s weird about this story is that until now, we’ve assumed that the offspring from these virgin births are both extremely rare and wouldn’t survive in the wild. Florida’s sawfish have proved us utterly wrong.
Over the course of nine years, researchers took DNA samples from 190 smalltooth sawfish in the Florida area. They found that 3 percent (or seven of them) were the offspring of a single parent. While still rare, that’s way more frequent than you’d expect. The offspring also managed to survive in the wild, knocking all of our predictions into a cocked hat.

9 An Insect Has Evolved Working Gears

You may be familiar with the concept of intelligent design. In short, it suggests that organic life is too complex to have evolved and therefore is evidence of a divine creator. It’s a theory that has led to some heated arguments about what constitutes “too complex.” Apparently, Mother Nature has been enjoying these scientific brawls, because in 2013, we discovered something seemingly designed to reignite the debate—an insect with gears. As hallmarks of the machine age, gears are meant to be unique to humans. Then, they suddenly turned up on juvenile Issus coleoptratus, a tiny hopping insect about 3 millimeters long. Unlike gear shapes that have appeared before on other animals, these gears actually worked. Located on the back legs, the rotating gears allowed the appendages to move simultaneously, causing the insect to hop forward. Even weirder, they featured stuff like rounded corners at the point where each tooth connects to the gear strip, a piece of handiwork that stops the teeth from shearing off. That’s something we’d associate more with bicycles and car gearboxes rather than animals.
No one is suggesting that this is the work of a hands-on creator god. The scientists who found it have a fairly detailed explanation as to how such a mechanism could have evolved naturally. Nonetheless, we’re pretty sure it fits our hypothesis that nature is intentionally messing with our minds.

8 All Mammals Take The Same Time To Urinate

Mammals are a pretty varied group. Picture the smallest Dachshund puppy standing next to the biggest, hoariest old elephant. Then forget that and picture the puppy standing next to a blue whale. That’s how varied our taxonomic class is; we’ve got bladders ranging in size from a few centimeters across to vast tanks capable of holding gallons. Yet, it turns out that nearly all of us have one thing in common: We take the exact same amount of time to pee. The Georgia Institute of Technology study that observed this was so bizarre that it recently won an Ig Nobel Prize. The team watched 28 videos of mammals peeing on YouTube and then went to the Atlanta Zoo and experienced for themselves the glory of watching multiple animals pass water. In addition to observing whether the animals were able to produce streams, jets, or just droplets of urine, they also took note of the duration. They found all that mammals larger than rats take about 21 seconds to pee.
This means that a cat bladder empties in the same space of time as an elephant bladder. As bizarre as this sounds, there is a logical explanation: The bigger a mammal is, the bigger its urethra is. So while a cat may release a few droplets over 21 seconds, an elephant lets loose an uninterrupted gush over the same duration.

7 There’s No Such Thing As Vegetables

Remember when you were younger, and your mom always told you to eat your vegetables? Well, your past self now has the perfect comeback: You could tell her you can’t eat your vegetables because they don’t exist.
This is something that those who study such things have known for ages, but it was only very recently that a BBC Magazine article brought the extent of the confusion to a wider audience. The first problem is that “vegetable” isn’t a biological term. What we lump together as “vegetables” falls under many different categories. As the article puts it, “Radishes and carrots are roots. Botanically speaking, onions and garlic are bulbs. Potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes are tubers. Asparagus are stems. Lettuces are leaves. Cauliflower and broccoli are inflorescences.”
Vegetables have no widely accepted legal definition, either. In the 19th century, the US Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable, but elsewhere in the world, it’s legally defined as a fruit. In 2001, the EU ruled that tomatoes, rhubarb stalks, carrots, and sweet potatoes are all legally defined as fruits if they’re used to make jams or preserves.
Another problem is that in the only other sphere where we use the term “vegetables,” which is cooking, we classify some stuff as vegetables that patently aren’t, such as mushrooms and beans. In short, it’s easier to say that vegetables don’t exist at all.

6 You Might Secretly Be Two People

Barring occasional philosophical musings, most of us think we know who we are. We have a face, an identity, a DNA pattern, and a mind that all add up into making us ourselves. But how would you feel if scientists could actually prove that you were more than one person? Believe it or not, this has literally happened.
In 2014, Lydia Fairchild was struggling to get money from her children’s dad. She took him to court and had them both undergo a paternity test to prove that he was the father. The test came back with an unexpected shock: Although the results showed that he was indeed the father, they also showed that Lydia couldn’t possibly be the mother.
For Lydia, this was an understandable surprise. She’d carried her sons inside her for nine months and went through the ordeal of giving birth, but there was no trace of her DNA in either of them. While the court assumed that she was scamming to get money, the truth turned out to be far stranger: The children were technically mothered by Lydia’s unborn sister.
To explain this, we need to go back to the womb. In early stages of pregnancy, two fetuses can occasionally merge together to form one body, a chimera. As a combination of two different cell lines, these chimeras can then sometimes carry a genome in their eggs or sperm that are different from the rest of their body. In essence, part of their bodies actually belong to someone else.
While it’s rare for a chimera case to reach such extremes, many of us may well be harboring parts of another person inside us. A study at the University of Alberta in Edmonton recently found that 63 percent of women were harboring male cells inside their brain tissue.

5 Chickens Can Be Made To Walk Like Dinosaurs

Mother Nature sure likes her Easter eggs. Perhaps none are quite so obscure or hard to find, though, as this one about barnyard fowl. In early 2014, scientists at the University of Chile observed that it’s possible to recreate how dinosaurs used to walk using a modern chicken. All they had to do was stick a plunger to its butt. We’re not making this up. These were actual scientists at an actual university who actually wanted to study how T-Rex used to walk. Since every chicken is an extremely distant relative of Jurassic Park’s most famous inmate, they decided that the best way to study it in modern life would be to attach a fake tail to a chicken’s behind.
The experiment was a success. According to their paper (and accompanying video), the team successfully forced the chicken to walk in a more dinosaur-like way. For uncovering this strange little Easter egg that Mother Nature had left lying around, they were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize.

4 Misbehaving Black Holes

On September 24, 2015, the Royal Astronomical Society put out a press release about a supermassive black hole that they’d been studying at the center of a newly observed galaxy. To the team’s surprise, they found that it was too big . . . way too big. Going by current theories, this ginormous black hole was 30 times larger than should have been physically possible.
The idea of a black hole being at the center of a galaxy is nothing new. We’ve known for quite a while that they like to lurk there, presumably to remind the cosmos of the fleeting futility of existence. But they’ve always followed a pretty firm set of cosmic rules, rules that the black hole at the center of nine-billion-year-old galaxy SAGE0536AGN is now flouting. At 350 million times the mass of the Sun, it should be far too big for its parent galaxy. As Dr. Jacco van Loon, astrophysicist at Keele University put it: “This one though is really too big for its boots—it simply shouldn’t be possible for it to be so large.”
Van Loon’s paper also raised the interesting possibility that SAGE0536AGN might not be alone. It could be one of a brand new class of galaxies. We may be forced to rewrite our understanding of galaxy formation.

3 Chimps Have Already Begun The Revolution

2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a good film for a couple of reasons. One is that it told an arguably dumb story and made it genuinely compelling. The other is that it apparently predicted the future. In April 2015, we got the first warning signs that our captive ape cousins are ready to start the revolution. At Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands, a group of filmmakers were flying a drone over the chimpanzee compound. When they got to the top of the enclosure, something surprising happened. A female chimp used a stick to attack the drone, knocking it from the sky. The group then proceeded to rip the drone to shreds.
That in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting, but what came next is. After studying the footage, scientists released a paper that made a terrifying claim: The chimp who attacked the drone had planned it all in advance.
The drone had already done a practice sweep over the compound, when chimps were seen gathering sticks to attack it with. When it came back, they were waiting for it, allowing it to get close before launching their assault. The video of their faces showed that they weren’t afraid. In other words, the stick hit wasn’t just a lucky strike by an animal flailing around in panic, but rather a deliberately targeted attack.
This is pretty much the first time that we’ve ever seen apes plan and coordinate in such a way before. Add it to other reports about chimps developing tools for consuming alcohol, and we, for one, would like to welcome our new primate overlords.

2 It’s Possible To Give Yourself A ‘Skin Orgasm’

We’ve all experienced it before. That tingling of the skin, that sensation of chills as you listen to a sublimely good piece of music or get to the climax of an awesome movie. It’s a pleasant sensation, no doubt, but few would call it actively orgasmic. In truth, that’s just because we’re the unlucky ones. According to the BBC, some people experience this type of pleasure so intensely that it can be directly comparable to having sex.
The idea seems ridiculous, but apparently it’s just another Easter egg that Mother Nature has thrown out for us to find. Known as a “skin orgasm,” such moments can be triggered by a wide variety of things. For some, it’s a piece of music. For others, a particularly tasty dish, an incredible twist ending to a movie, or even an evocative sound like rustling leaves can do it.
Physiologically, the experience for some people was what you’d expect at the moment of climax. Heart rated increased, faces flushed, goosebumps appeared across the skin, and limbs trembled. It was even suggested that some people become addicted to these feelings, which is why you occasionally meet people who think that there’s nothing wrong with playing “Gangnam Style” five times in a row.
The triggers are different for everyone but usually revolve around taste, touch, sounds, movies, or music. Who knows? You might even have a trigger out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered.

1 There’s A Village Where Girls Spontaneously Turn Into Boys

Physiological sex is supposed to be an immutable biological law. Even if you’re born transgender, your body won’t catch up with your mind without some medical help. The idea that a girl could spontaneously turn into a boy is the stuff of sci-fi novels and cheap erotic fiction. Don’t tell that to the residents of Salinas in the Dominican Republic, though. Their children have been seeming to switch sex for as long as anyone can remember. Unlike some cultures, where women can choose to live as men when they reach puberty but still retain their female bodies, the guevedoces change physiologically. In fact, guevedoce translates to “penis at 12.” This is because of a normally incredibly rare genetic mutation that affects 1 in 90 of the village’s children. It causes abnormally low levels of an enzyme known as 5-alpha-reductase, which is responsible for a penis growing while a male baby is in the womb. For the guevedoces, it doesn’t kick in until puberty.
That means that they’re born looking like girls. It’s only when they hit puberty that they suddenly grow a penis, testicles, and muscles. For some parents, it comes as a complete surprise.
Although we’ve known about the guevedoces since the 1970s, they’ve only recently become big news after pharmaceutical companies noticed that they all had small prostates. This observation has allowed the development of a drug that can treat male-pattern baldness and prostate problems. In short, this one village is full of sex-changing lifesavers. It seems that Mother Nature loves nothing more than to shake things up a bit.

The supernatural is ancient. According to most religious texts, the supernatural predates humanity, and the oldest human societies knew ghosts and ghost stories like they knew their neighbors. From folk religions to the latest horror film, the supernatural has been with us and will continue to be with us in spite of the relatively recent intrusions of secularism and scientific skepticism.
That being said, something novel occurred in the late 19th century. At that time, thanks to the popularization of the scientific method and empirical analysis, many began to speculate whether or not the unseen world could be cataloged and examined like the rational world of everyday life. Some researchers took this task very seriously and began to apply accepted science or textual analysis to such things as clairvoyance, historical ghost stories, and so on. While many used science as a way to disprove all elements of the supernatural, a few became convinced that modern science could not explain away all of life’s mysteries. Still more amateur scientists and seekers after the occult and arcane concluded that the paranormal and the normal coexist—a theory that helped to drive up book sales and the interest of the general public.
All paranormal researchers, from charlatans to earnest believers, have helped to universalize popular interest and inquiry into the supernatural that goes beyond mere campfire tales. Thanks to the proliferation of television shows and documentaries concerning paranormal investigations and the people who conduct them, a shared vocabulary now exists, even for those who are only nominally interested in the topic. Given this cultural visibility, it is only proper that we examine 10 pioneering paranormal researchers from history.

10 William Seabrook

Instead of utilizing a microscope or a serious grounding in the physical sciences, William Seabrook pursued the supernatural in the only way he knew how—as a journalist. Born in Westminster, Maryland, to a former lawyer who became a Lutheran minister, Seabrook claimed that his thirst for the supernatural was inspired by his grandmother, Piny—an opium addict, child of nature, and witch. In all likelihood, Seabrook’s stories concerning his childhood were highly embellished, though something certainly sparked a curiosity in the young boy.
After living a lifetime in just a few years (as a high-ranking member of an ad agency, a member of the French Army’s American Field Service during World War I, and a reporter for the New York Times), Seabrook finally landed on an idea that would make his name synonymous with occult-tinged adventure during his lifetime. After meeting a visiting Lebanese student at Columbia University, Seabrook accepted an offer to travel to the Middle East. Collected together as Adventures in Arabia: Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes, and Yezidee Devil Worshippers, Seabrook’s foray into the Muslim world is most famous today for his statement that the Kurdish Yazidi minority oversees a chain of seven towers dedicated to “broadcasting occult vibrations” in the service of evil.
Seabrook’s next work is his most famous. The Magic Island, an in-depth depiction of Haitian life under the oversight of American Marines, is commonly (and erroneously) known as the book that introduced the word “zombie” into the English lexicon. The Magic Island placed Seabrook as an unlikely initiate into the world of Haitian voodoo. While there, he witnessed previously unrecorded rituals and heard stories concerning undead workers and their aversion to salt. At one point, Seabrook claimed to have seen a real zombie, although he never described it as having any overt supernatural powers. The Magic Island directly inspired the 1932 film White Zombie, which is often considered to be the first zombie movie.
After the success of The Magic Island, Seabrook continued to write strange travelogues that took their readers to the fringes of society. In Jungle Ways, Seabrook graphically details what it’s like to eat human flesh, while Asylum is a highly personal account of Seabrook’s struggles with alcoholism while voluntarily confined to a mental hospital. In 1940, Seabrook published Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, a critical study of the supernatural that ultimately concludes that science can explain away most occult phenomena. Still, such conclusions did not stop Seabrook from personally experimenting with extrasensory perception or from partaking in black magic rituals designed to curse Adolf Hitler.

9 Joseph Banks Rhine

J.B. Rhine left behind such a powerful legacy that Duke University, one of the premiere academic institutions in the US, named their parapsychology laboratory the Rhine Research Center. A botanist by training (with an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago), Rhine was particularly interested in the study of what he termed “parapsychology.” Inspired by a lecture given by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the University of Chicago, Rhine accepted an invitation to join Dr. William McDougall, a renowned psychologist and researcher of the paranormal in his own right, at Duke. While there, Rhine began to contemplate whether or not communication with the dead was possible using the most modern tools available at that time. While preparing for what was set to be a monumental experiment, Rhine and his wife, Louisa Heckesser (also a PhD in botany), wrote an article exposing a fraudulent Boston medium named Mina Crandon. The article, which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, caused Arthur Conan Doyle, a noted disciple of the exposed clairvoyant, to supposedly remark, “J.B. Rhine is an ass.”
For the majority of his life, Rhine’s research and work were devoted to studying extrasensory perception (ESP). He authored several books on the subject and was one of the first people to seriously study it as an academic topic. William Seabrook shared Rhine’s interest, and the two often collaborated on experiments, using Seabrook’s upstate New York farmhouse as a laboratory. Funnily enough, Dr. Peter Venkman (played by Bill Murray) is shown performing a Rhine-inspired ESP test (albeit an unscientific one) at the beginning of Ghostbusters.

8 George Estabrooks

In the early 1940s, Dr. George Estabrooks made a startling claim. The chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, who was then working with the US Army during World War II, asserted that, “I can hypnotize a man—without his knowledge or consent—into committing treason against the United States.”
Before becoming an expert on hypnosis, Estabrooks was a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Harvard who penned several articles about the application of clinical hypnosis and its effects on human behavior. In 1943, Estabrooks collected together his experience, research, and thoughts on the subject in order to write Hypnotism, a foundational text concerning the various uses of hypnotism. Before long, the US government took an interest, and Estabrook was called upon to participate in experiments involving hypnotism, which were overseen by military intelligence.
In a 1971 article for Science Digest, Estabrooks not only claimed that using hypnotism as part of intelligence gathering was dangerous, but he also highlighted several strange occurrences that happened while he performed hypnotism on US service members. Undoubtedly, Estabrooks’s early hypnotism experiments, as well as his belief that hypnotism could be used to manipulate minds on a long-term basis, influenced the CIA’s MKULTRA thought control program.

7 Rufus Osgood Mason

A former seminary student who became the assistant surgeon for the US Navy during the Civil War, Rufus Osgood Mason later began a second career as a famous researcher of parapsychology and unusual phenomena. Mason’s specific areas of interest were telepathy and hypnotherapy. Mason wrote about the former in 1897’s Telepathy and the Subliminal Self, while he covered the latter in 1901 with Hypnotism and Suggestion in Therapeutics, Education, and Reform.
One of the founding fathers of paranormal research, Mason was a respected and contributing member to England’s Society for Psychical Research, an organization that still exists today. Many of Mason’s research methods and hypotheses continue to influence those who study ESP, hypnosis, and other avenues of parapsychology and metaphysics.

6 Karlis Osis

Latvian-born Karlis Osis is notable for being one of the first men in his field (psychology) to have obtained a PhD with a dissertation that explicitly focused on ESP research. Inspired by the “deathbed visions” first studied by British physicist and founder of the Society for Physical Research William Fletcher Barrett, Osis, along fellow parapsychologist Erlendur Haraldsson, conducted a research survey that lasted from 1959–73. When it was finally published by the American Society for Physical Research, Osis and Haraldsson claimed that deathbed visions occurred in 50 percent of the studied population in the US and India.
Later, Osis and Haraldsson published At the Hour of Death, a more in-depth study of deathbed visions. Almost immediately, this study was called into question, with Terence Hines, author of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, claiming that Osis and Haraldsson misrepresented their numbers and even reported information that was obtained secondhand.
Osis’s interest in deathbed visions led him toward examining life-after-death scenarios and the possibility of communicating with the dead. Before passing away in 1997, Osis served as the president of the Parapsychological Association and investigated numerous claims of ghost and poltergeist activity.

5 Peter Hurkos

If Peter Hurkos is to be considered a paranormal researcher, then he must also be recognized as an entertainer. A native of the Netherlands, Hurkos became famous for displaying his ESP powers live on television. As such, the so-called “Psychic Model of the 20th Century” presaged later TV mediums like John Edward and “Long Island Medium” Theresa Caputo. Hurkos claimed to have acquired his “gift” after falling from a ladder and suffering a traumatic brain injury sometime around 1941. From there, Hurkos was brought to the United States by fellow researcher Andrija Puharich, a medical doctor who primarily dealt with matters of parapsychology. For almost three years, Puharich tested Hurkos’s supposed ESP abilities in a laboratory environment.
After convincing Dr. Puharich, Hurkos began to work as a psychic and was employed by several police departments. Hurkos claimed that through his abilities, he could name killers or find victims. When these claims were put to the test, such as in the case of the “Michigan Murders” of the late 1960s, they often failed, thus leading many to believe that Hurkos was a sham psychic.

4 Frederick Bligh Bond

Like others on this list, Frederick Bligh Bond was born into his calling as a paranormal researcher. As the cousin of Sabine Baring-Gould, an Anglican priest and the writer of Onward, Christian Soldiers (who also composed such tomes as A Book of Ghosts and The Book of Were-Wolves), Bond probably felt a genetic attraction to the strange and inexplicable.
An architect by training and education, Bond was hired to manage excavations in and around Glastonbury Abbey in 1907. Unknown to his employers, Bond was deeply interested in spiritualism, a then-popular religion that involved mediums, seances, and other forms of communication with ghosts. Furthermore, Bond was under the belief that Glastonbury Abbey, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monastery from the seventh century, had been built according to the precepts of sacred geometry and therefore provided an unlimited well for contact with the dead.
Although Bond was fired after the Anglican Church got wind of his interests in the 1920s, his excavations at Glastonbury Abbey are often considered to be the first instance of psychic archaeology, or the method of using clairvoyance in order to discern certain historical truths about an archaeological site. As Bond recounts in his book, The Gate of Remembrance, his thoughts about Glastonbury Abbey began after he started practicing automatic writing.
In later life, Bond became a member of the American Society for Physical Research as well as the Ghost Club and even became an ordained priest in the Old Catholic Church of America.

3 Sir William Crookes

The most accomplished scientist on this list, Sir William Crookes is best known for several inventions, such as the revolutionary Crookes Tube (an early type of vacuum tube) and his radiometer. Less known about Crookes is that he was a spiritualist who applied his knowledge of physical and chemical science to the study of ghosts and other phenomena. After examining several mediums, such as the frequently discredited Catherine Fox, Crookes declared that they were legitimate and insisted that certain mediums really could communicate with the deceased. At the height of Crookes’s interest in the paranormal, he joined The Ghost Club, the Society for Physical Research, and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Unfortunately, owing to his poor eyesight and his desire to believe in the tenets of spiritualism, Crookes was duped by false mediums on several occasions.

2 Harry Price

A ghost hunter extraordinaire, Harry Price made a career out of exposing fake psychics and spiritualist mediums. Influenced by the “Great Sequah,” a traveling hocker and snake oil salesman who visited his native Shrewsbury, Price began researching the paranormal at the young age of 15. According to his biography, Price’s first ghost hunt occurred when he and a friend stayed overnight at an apparently haunted manor house. During the night, the pair experienced some of the hallmarks of paranormal activity—disembodied footsteps, mysterious shapes, and inexplicable noises. Afterward, Price began to purchase and collect books on magic and conjuring, both of which would remain lifelong obsessions. A successful self-promoter, Price was well-known for giving film interviews and performing ghost hunts in front of cameras. When not debunking men like “spirit photographer” William Hope or medium Eileen J. Garrett, Price undertook public investigations like the Brocken Experiment, which attempted to call forth black magic elements on the centenary celebration of Goethe’s birthday.
Of all of Price’s cases, his investigations at Borley Rectory, often called the most haunted house in England, are the most famous. According to some sources, Price’s ghost hunt at Borley Rectory conjured up some frightening poltergeist activity.

1 Montague Summers

Although he was born in the late 19th century, Montague Summers thought of himself as a medieval witch hunter and vampirologist and was dedicated to chronicling the dark forces of the Western world. No action is a greater indication of this belief than Summers’s decision to translate the 15th-century witch hunter’s manual Malleus Maleficarum into English in 1928. An Oxford graduate who originally hoped to become an Anglican priest, Summers eventually left for Roman Catholicism after feeling blocked from attaining higher orders due to his interest in the occult, Satanism, and pederasty. After converting, Summers claimed to be an ordained Catholic priest and began to diligently write about the supernatural. Some of his more popular works include Witchcraft and Black Magic, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend, and The Vampire: His Kith and Kin.
A noted expert on the history of the supernatural in Europe, Summers gained a reputation as a steadfast eccentric who paraded around 1920s England in a black cassock and biretta. In spite of mockery by the press at the time, Summers’s publications (which, to be fair, are more fiction than non-fiction) greatly helped to lend credence to the idea that folk legends and paranormal topics were worthy of academic study