The Ghost Hunts of George Albert Smith: Mesmerist & Film Maker

The life and times of George Albert Smith are not particularly well known. Despite working for several years as a stage hypnotist and psychic, the owner of a popular pleasure park and then eventually a pioneering inventor and filmmaker, there are few who could reel off a biography based on nothing more than a name. Perhaps even more obscure, however, was his time spent as a ghost hunter for the Society for Psychical Research, which, whilst a relatively short career in comparison, was no less groundbreaking, when he took tenancy of a haunted house for more than a whole year in order to investigate the reported phenomena.

SOURCES

Gray, Frank (2019) The Brighton School & The Birth of British Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK.

Gray, Frank (1998) Smith the showman: The early years of George Albert Smith. Film History, Vol. 10, No. 1, Cinema Pioneers (1998), pp. 8-20. John Libby & Co., Sydney, Australia.

Hall, Trevor (1964) The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney. Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, London, UK.

Blackburn, Douglas (1883) Thought Reading Extraordinary. Light, No 86, Vol II. London, UK.

Smith, George Albert (1884) Report on a Haunted House at Norwich. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol I, 1884-5. London, UK.

Podmore, Frank (1890) Phantasms of the Dead from Another Point of View. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol VI, 1889-90. London, UK.

Gauld, Alan & Cornell, Tony (1979) Poltergeists. White Crow Books, London, UK.

Sussex Advertiser (1879) Suicide By Hanging. Sussex Advertiser, Sat 5 April 1879, p2. Brighton, UK.

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