Frank Podmore

Born in 1856, Frank Podmore was an English writer and one of the best-known members of the Society for Psychical Research. He studied at Oxford and became closely associated with the late-Victorian effort to examine reported psychic phenomena in a serious, organized way.

Podmore is especially remembered for his careful, doubtful approach to spiritualist claims. Rather than accepting séances and apparitions at face value, he looked for ordinary explanations such as fraud, suggestion, or mistaken memory. That habit made him an important counterweight within psychical research, even while he remained deeply interested in questions like telepathy and hallucinations.

He also wrote beyond psychical research, including historical and biographical works connected with social reform and radical politics. Podmore died in 1910, but he remains a notable figure in the history of attempts to test extraordinary claims with patient investigation rather than easy belief.