On the 28th May 1960, at precisely 7:40pm, AD Cornell valiantly attempted to ‘haunt’ a cinema audience who were sitting down to enjoy an X-rated film. Before emerging from the shadows, Cornell draped himself in a white muslin sheet, the fabric covering him from head to toe. He then emerged before the unsuspecting audience and was bathed in the light of projector. He moved in front of the screen, from the left edge to the right edge and back again. For Science!

Cornell, a Cambridge-based parapsychologist, was conducting experiments in “apparitional experiences”. In his reports, he tacitly accepts the contentious premise that the spirits of the dead may literally walk among us as physical apparitions. His experiment did not directly address this question. Rather, he tried to artificially induce the experience of seeing ‘real’ ghosts, so that he could observe how people reacted to this unexpected and apparently paranormal experience.

Cornell’s reports have previously been aired in Mary Roach’s Spook and Richard Wiseman’s Paranormality, and as an experimental psychologist studying human attention, I found them intriguing. My own research into how people perceive illusions has led me into rather unusual historical rabbit holes related to magicians, psychologists, witches, and ghost hunters. But Cornell’s simulated haunting initially seemed to be unlike anything I’d previously encountered. His methods were… unorthodox and his conclusions were dubious. However, by the time I finished, I had come to the delightfully absurd realisation that his designs had (inadvertently) anticipated developments in cognitive psychology by nearly half a century.