Wilson confirmed his early interest in the subject in the opening chapter of The Occult, when he informed us that as a twenty-year-old, living in rented accommodation in London with his wife and young child, forced to work in various dead-end factory jobs – long before the publication of his first book, The Outsider, in 1956 – he read all the books on magic and mysticism that he could find in libraries; not just as an escape from his lot but ‘... because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share.’ By the time he came to write the book, in the late 1960s, he had apparently accumulated a library of over five hundred volumes on the subject. And in his 2004 autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose, he revealed that his interest in the subject went right back to his childhood:
As a child, I had been fascinated by ghost stories. My grandmother was a spiritualist, so I accepted the idea of life after death from the age of six or so.
In the early days of the Second World War, the Sunday People had published a series by Air Marshall Dowding, in which he discussed the after-death experiences of an airman, as relayed through a spirit medium. The next world, the dead airman claimed, was not all that different from this one, except that there were no discomforts; grass, trees and sky all looked much as on earth, but when he tried swimming, the water was not wet, so it felt rather like swimming in cotton wool. I read the series avidly every week.
Our local library in Leicester, St Barnabas, had an excellent section on psychical research, and I read all I could find by Harry Price – The Most Haunted House in England, Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, and Poltergeist over England ...
