Myers, F(rederic) W(illiam) H(enry) (1843–1901)

English psychic researcher, classical scholar, and poet. He coined the word ‘telepathy’ and was a founder in 1882 and one of the first presidents, in 1900, of the Society for Psychical Research. His main works include Essays Classical and Modern (1883), Phantasms of the Living (1886), Science and a Future Life (1893), and the posthumous Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). His best-known poem is ‘St Paul’ (1867), and his Collected Poems were published in 1921.

Myers became an indefatigable investigator of the paranormal. He collaborated with Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) and Frank Podmore (1856–1910) on Phantasms of the Living, the first thorough study of ‘crisis’ apparitions – cases in which a relevant apparition is seen by someone roughly 12 hours either side of another's death or encounter with danger. His Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death is an account of 19th-century psychical reseach, dealing with, among other topics, sleep, hypnotism, genius, automatism, and telepathy.