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PARANTHROPOLOGY: JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE PARANORMAL VOL. 2 NO. 2
In Memory of Stan Gooch
(1932-2010)
Robert M. Schoch & Oana R. Ghiocel
Stan Gooch passed away on 13 September 2010
in a Swansea (South Wales) hospital at the age of
seventy-eight. Born in London to working-class
parents, and spending most of his days in
England and Wales (although at one point he
traveled to the Middle East for several months),
on the surface Gooch’s life may not seem
particularly exciting. It was his remarkable
intellectual journeys that distinguished him as a
person and wherein lies his legacy. In relative
isolation Gooch studied the elements of human
personality, the conscious and unconscious mind,
paranormal phenomena, the mental/psychical life
of Neanderthals, and the impact of Neanderthal
culture, beliefs, and biology on modern humans
(Gooch firmly believed that modern human
ancestors, Cro-Magnons, interbred with
Neanderthals). He authored many books,
including Total Man (1972), Personality and
Evolution (1973), The Neanderthal Question
(1977), The Paranormal (1978), Guardians of
the Ancient Wisdom (1979), The Double Helix of
the Mind (1980), Creatures from Inner Space
(1984), and Cities of Dreams (1989). However,
Gooch never gained the popular audience,
critical acclaim, or monetary remuneration that
he had hoped for. Indeed, Gooch became
convinced that the establishment was
deliberately ignoring him and, as he stated in one
interview, somehow the scriptwriter of life had
not written into Gooch’s life either wide
recognition or financial success. By the late
1980s he had all but given up his studies and
writing, and went into seclusion, only to
reemerge with one last book, The Neanderthal
Legacy, published just two years before his death
(primarily a short summary of his earlier works).
In the end, Gooch did entertain the thought that,
just perhaps, after his death his contributions
might be widely acknowledged. This may still
prove to be the case.
Gooch’s lifework defied the conventional
categories of his time, and even ours today. It did
not easily and neatly fit into any of the accepted
academic disciplines. He was trained as a
psychologist; but he had a strong interest in the
paranormal, which he accepted as having a
genuine basis, a stance frowned upon by most of
his fellow psychologists. Yet Gooch was not a
classical parapsychologist either, and he
disdained many of the, to his mind, boring and
unrealistic (divorced from a meaningful
emotional and cultural context) laboratory
experiments as espoused by the likes of J. B.
Rhine and the experimental parapsychologists
(see Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008). Gooch was an
experienced trance medium in the classic séance
sense, and he had many personal paranormal
experiences to draw upon as he developed his
theories. In some ways, Gooch was more of an
anthropologist and ethnographer than a
psychologist or parapsychologist, but rather than
study exotic or traditional societies deep in the
heart of Africa, in the jungles of the Amazon, in
Central Asia, or in the outer reaches of the Far
East, he focused on two cultures: 1) that of his
contemporary British society, and 2) that of the
ancient Neanderthals.
The full range of paranormal experiences
—a partial list includes poltergeists hauntings,
visitations by incubi and succubi, demons,
stigmata, telepathy, mediumship, spontaneous
human combustion and paranormal fire, psychic
healing, alleged past lives, hypnosis, and
multiple personalities—constituted the material
Gooch explored. He had a keen and critical
mind; while he was meticulous and unrelenting
when it came to detecting and exposing fraud, he
was always careful to follow the narrow path
between blanket skepticism and dismissal of real
phenomena on the one hand and naiveté and
gullibility on the other hand. He inveighed
against throwing out the baby with the bathwater,
and he soundly criticized the academics and
scientists who refuse to acknowledge the
overwhelming evidence for paranormal
phenomena. Although he trained as a medium,
Gooch rejected the concept of discarnate entities,
ghosts, spirits, elementals, and the like as
separate and distinct beings unto themselves. He
did not view paranormal phenomena as
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