Peter Underwood obituary

Peter Underwood, who has died aged 91, was the author of more than 50 books on ghost-hunting and the paranormal, including the Dictionary of the Supernatural (1978), The Ghosts of Borley (1973, with Paul Tabori) and Where the Ghosts Walk (2013), and was one of Britain’s greatest authorities on hauntings. He brought honesty and challenge to any discussion of the subject, once saying: “I have long thought that 98% of reported hauntings have a natural and mundane explanation, but it is the other 2% that have interested me.”

For two decades he was president of the Ghost Club, and was later life president of the Ghost Club Society and president of the Unitarian Society for Psychical Studies. There was the whiff of the detective about Underwood and it was not surprising that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s daughter Jean usually introduced him as “the Sherlock Holmes of psychical research”.