A gentle scholar

Alan Murdie reflects on the life and work of parapsychologist Erlendur Haraldsson

Towards the Unknown

Memoir of a Psychical Researcher

Erlendur Haraldsson

White Crow Books 2021

Pb, 200pp, £11.99, ISBN 9781786770899

Professor Erlendur Haraldsson, who died in November 2020, is a greatly missed parapsychologist from Iceland, a man rightly called “one of the giants of psychical research” by his peers. This book is his last published work, a modest and gentle memoir recalling a dynamic life labouring in this world in order to discover the truth about survival in the next.

Born in 1932 into a workingclass family, Haraldsson propelled himself by sheer intellectual ability into academia. Initially majoring in philosophy, after studying at Freiburg and in Edinburgh, he switched to psychology and then parapsychology, the subject which consumed his principal research efforts for the rest of his life. Never a cloistered scholar, he took a cross-cultural approach to studying anomalous experiences, thus ensuring he was never idle (reports of psi phenomena are always turning up somewhere in the world). Travelling to the USA early in his career introduced him to figures such as JB Rhine, “the father of parapsychology”, Prof Ian Stevenson, the pioneer academic researcher into reincarnation, and clinician Dr Karlis Osis, with whom he collaborated in comparative studies of apparitions seen by the dying. This sent him to India where he later investigated the celebrated mystic Sai Baba, reputedly able to performed almost every miracle attributed to Christ and specialising in materialising prestigious quantities of “holy ash” from thin air. Between expeditions Haraldsson worked as a psychologist with the American Society for Psychical Research before taking up an assistant professorship at the University of Iceland in 1974, achieving full professorship in 1984. Thus secured, he launched national and international surveys of ghost and psychic experiences, eventually spanning western Europe. He investigated reincarnation cases in Lebanon and Sri Lanka before settling into an emeritus professorship on retirement, going on to study and retrieve for posterity accounts of early 20th-century Icelandic Spiritualist medium Indri Indridason.

There is no trace of sensationalism or exaggeration in this personal review of his own life, or concerning the extraordinary phenomena he studied, though the implications are mightily profound. Recalling his long career, he reflects upon being blessed by a remarkable series of fortuitous coincidences and overlaps, eventually blending harmoniously into an almost seamless progress that gives an impression of being preordained. Driven by a conviction that the paranormal is actually normal and coupled with a vital willingness to listen, one understands how this kindly and easy-going Icelandic scholar was able so successfully to connect with people of vastly differing cultural backgrounds.

A poignant epilogue by parapsychologist Carlos Alvarado proclaims how Haraldsson’s personality and writings profoundly influenced his own career; poignant since Alvarado followed his hero into the Beyond soon after writing it, dying himself in July 2021. Thus, generations roll on, but this book will enrich and inspire many younger researchers entering this most profound of fields. ★★★★★