Ghutiari Sharif (p. 51): A tiny suburb in the hinterland of South 24-Parganas, Ghutiari Sharif boasts a mazaar or dargah of Pir Ghazi Mubarak Ali Sahab, rumored to have kept wild tigers as pets. According to legend, sometime in the seventeenth century, this village, then part of the Sunderbans, was hit by a severe drought for several months and it was only due to Ghazi Sahab’s meditation that the rains finally arrived. The residents were saved but the great man paid with his life.

Eglinton-shaheb (p. 54): William Eglinton (1857–1933). “Of all the famous mediums in America and Europe of those days, Mr. Eglinton was supposed to be the best and the most reliable. He acquired a worldwide reputation as a psychical and materialising medium… While in Calcutta, Mr. Eglinton gave demonstrations of his wonderful super-normal powers in the houses of some European and Indian gentlemen. [Of these,] the following are worth mentioning: Spirit writing on slate, on white paper and blank card, materialisation of spirits, levitation (i.e. floating in air), apport (i.e. passing through solid substance), and conveying of letters between London and Calcutta in a moment.”—Mrinal Kanti Ghosh, “W. Eglinton, The Famous Medium” in Life Beyond Death (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1999).

William Stead’s Borderland magazine … Miss Julia’s spirit (p. 55): William Thomas Stead (1849–1912), British journalist, editor, and publisher who founded the periodical Review of Reviews (1890). After becoming increasingly interested in spiritualism, he founded the spiritualist quarterly Borderland in 1893. Stead claimed to be in receipt of messages from the spirit world and, in 1892, to be able to produce automatic writing. His spirit contact was alleged to be the departed Julia A. Ames, an American temperance reformer and journalist whom he met in 1890 shortly before her death. In 1909, he established Julia’s Bureau, where inquirers could obtain information about the spirit world from a group of resident mediums.

W. Stainton Moses (p. 55): William Stainton Moses (1839–1892), an English cleric and spiritualist medium. His automatic scripts began to appear in his books Spirit Identity (1879) and Spirit Teachings (1883). Also the author of Psychography (1882) and others.

Richet (p. 55): Charles Robert Richet (1850–1935). Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1913. Known for his investigations into the physiology of respiration and digestion, as well as epilepsy, the regulation of body heat, and a wide array of other subjects, including parapsychology. In 1891, he founded the Annales des sciences psychiques. As a scientist, he was positive about a physical explanation for paranormal phenomena and coined the term ectoplasm in 1894.

Crookes (p. 55): Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), a British chemist and physicist who worked on spectroscopy. A pioneer of vacuum tubes, he invented the Crookes Tube in 1875, and the Crookes Radiometer. Late in life, he became interested in spiritualism, conducting experiments with the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home and attesting to the veracity of the ghost of Katie King, materialized by lady medium Miss Florence Cook.

Meyers (p. 55): Mrinal Kanti Ghosh’s Life Beyond Death has a mention of F. W. Meyers, so it is safe to assume that this is the same Meyers being mentioned. Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901) was a poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research and believed that a theory of consciousness must be part of a unified model of mind derived from the full range of human experience, including not only normal psychological phenomena but also a wide variety of abnormal and “supernormal” phenomena.