Peter Underwood obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/peter-underwood

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Peter Underwood, who has died aged 91, was the author of more than 50 books on ghost-hunting and the paranormal, including the Dictionary of the Supernatural (1978), The Ghosts of Borley (1973, with Paul Tabori) and Where the Ghosts Walk (2013), and was one of Britain’s greatest authorities on hauntings. He brought honesty and challenge to any discussion of the subject, once saying: “I have long thought that 98% of reported hauntings have a natural and mundane explanation, but it is the other 2% that have interested me.”

For two decades he was president of the Ghost Club, and was later life president of the Ghost Club Society and president of the Unitarian Society for Psychical Studies. There was the whiff of the detective about Underwood and it was not surprising that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s daughter Jean usually introduced him as “the Sherlock Holmes of psychical research”.

He was born in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, son of Eli Underwood, a metalworker who founded a small chain of hardware stores, and his wife, Edith (nee Baldwin), the daughter of a prosperous farmer. Peter was educated by a tutor and at a local private school.

His interest in “the other population” took root early. His maternal grandparents lived at Rose Hall, Sarratt, Hertfordshire, a mill that was said to be haunted, and Underwood was fascinated by the idea. “People called at the house and asked whether they could see the haunted room,” he told the BBC. “My grandmother would ask me to show them and tell them the ghost story – which I did very much tongue in cheek.” He began to take notes of ghost stories he heard and then to seek out people who claimed to have experienced ghosts, “but little did I think that much of my life would be spent studying ghosts and haunted houses.”

His military service, in the Suffolk Regiment, during the second world war, was curtailed in 1942 by illness, but he retained a deep interest in visiting old battle and airfields. Before the war, he had joined Dent, the publishers, in Letchworth, and at its end he moved to the firm’s London offices. In 1947 he joined the Society for Psychical Research and in 1951 helped revive the Ghost Club, founded in 1862, becoming its president in 1960. In 1971 he decided to leave Dent to devote himself full-time to paranormal research.

Over the years, Underwood probably heard more first-hand ghost stories than anybody else in the world. His Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971) attempted to compile a comprehensive list of reported hauntings in the UK. He was present at many seances, exorcisms and experiments in precognition, clairvoyance and hypnotism. In 1973 The Ghosts of Borley was published, about the rectory in Essex reputed to be the most haunted house in Britain, and the case with which Underwood’s name was most often associated. The strange sights and sounds reported at Borley were investigated several times over the years, including by the BBC. Underwood was also a co-author of The Borley Rectory Companion (2009).

Underwood had no doubt about the reality of ghosts. In a debate held last year in Cornwall, What Is a Ghost?, he had this to say: “What we call ghosts means different things to different people. Some of them are spirits of dead individuals. These may be ghosts that some people appear able to contact and communicate with. But not all ghosts fall into that category. And there are different reported ghosts and ghostly happenings that leave their mark on rooms or furniture.”

In his autobiography, No Common Task: The Autobiography of a Ghost Hunter (1983), he wrote: “Oh, is there life after death, you ask? Well, to tell you the truth I don’t know, but I do know that to live in the hearts and memories of those we leave behind is not to die.” Underwood had just started a second volume of his memoirs. It would have made fascinating reading. He had met and known people as different as Dennis Wheatley and Colin Wilson, Dennis Bardens, a fellow ghost-hunter and the first editor of Panorama, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who published as Q. And he expertly captured the aura of haunted locations.

Peter had long been intrigued, too, by the mystery of the Jack the Ripper murders, and was an avid collector of publications on the subject. He brought together wide-ranging material to do with the crimes in Jack the Ripper – One Hundred Years of Mystery (1987). He was a prolific broadcaster and made guest appearances on shows from Start the Week to The Big Breakfast. In 1975 he featured in the BBC series The Ghost Hunters. He continued writing and researching to the end of his life.

In 1944 he married Joyce (nee Davey) and for many happy years they lived at Bentley in Hampshire. Joyce died in 2003. Underwood is survived by his son, Chris, and daughter, Pamela, seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

• Peter Underwood, author and investigator, born 16 May 1923; died 26 November 2014