ectoplasm

• “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Schrenk-Notzing, Charles Richet (who coined the word ectoplasm) plus numerous other investigators worldwide spent extensive time and money analyzing the exploits of many channellers and mediums.”

  Dan Aykroyd: About Ghosts

• “Most engineers are right-handed, and the brain ectoplasm seeps across into the writing: we find that “experimentalists” on the one hand, and “metrical-obsessives’, on the other (hand), are almost always right-handed.”

  By the Numbers : Christian Bök : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

• “Eva C Carriere, a medium who had originally used her real name, Marthe Beraud, until she was exposed, claimed to be able to produce large quantities of a strange, otherworldly substance called ectoplasm, which was thought to be produced by the bioenergy of the spirits.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Secret Life of Houdini

• “Or it may take the more material form of the exudation of a strange white evanescent dough-like substance called the ectoplasm, which has been frequently photographed by scientific enquirers in different stages of its evolution, and which seems to possess an inherent quality of shaping itself into parts or the whole of a body, beginning in a putty-like mould and ending in a resemblance to perfect human members.”

  The Vital Message

• “Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves 'heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.”

  Spook by Mary Roach: Book summary

• “Burroughs is fond too of the word "ectoplasm," and the beings that surround Lee, particularly the inimical ones, seem ectoplasmic phantoms projected on the wide screen of his consciousness from a mass séance.”

  Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

• “You know that there was something like 100,000 Jewish survivors (scroll down to 1946) after world war two but that now there are 350,000 of them because they are reproducing through some kind of ectoplasm precipitation process.”

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

• “(One of my sons considered "ectoplasm" the ugliest word he knew.)”

  The Globe and Mail - Home RSS feed

• “ectoplasm" from his mouth-by carving words into corpses 'flesh, or, more precisely, by carving whole paragraphs of sinister nonsense that ran up and down their limbs and torsos, filled their cheeks and the backs of their hands.”

  PopMatters

• “When we hear accounts of “primitives” talking this way, we dismiss them as superstition because we interpret ghost or spirit as some sort of material ectoplasm, when in fact they may not mean any such thing at all.”

  Simon & Schuster: The 7

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