''The Other Side'' is a book written by
Bishop
A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution.
In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or office of bishop is ca ...
James Pike
James Albert Pike (February 14, 1913–) was an American Episcopal Church (United States), Episcopal bishop, accused heretic, iconoclast, prolific writer, and one of the first mainline, charismatic religious figures to appear regularly on televi ...
with Diane Kennedy about his experiences of
paranormal
Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Nota ...
phenomena following his son's suicide by gunshot in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
in 1966. The book was published by
Doubleday and Co. Inc., Garden City, NY, in 1968 and in paperback, Dell Publishing, NY, 1969.
Pike, an
Episcopalian
Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of the l ...
, was the fifth
Bishop of California. When
poltergeist
In ghostlore, a poltergeist ( or ; German for "rumbling ghost" or "noisy spirit") is a type of ghost or spirit that is responsible for physical disturbances, such as loud noises and objects being moved or destroyed. Most claims or fictional descr ...
activity following his son's death mounted up, he led a public (and for the church, embarrassing) pursuit of various spiritualist and clairvoyant methods of contacting his deceased son in order to reconcile. In September 1967, Pike participated in a televised
séance
A séance or seance (; ) is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word ''séance'' comes from the French word for "session", from the Old French ''seoir'', "to sit". In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, spe ...
with his dead son through the medium
Arthur Ford, who served at the time as a
Disciples of Christ
The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a mainline Protestant Christian denomination in the United States and Canada. The denomination started with the Restoration Movement during the Second Great Awakening, first existing during the 19th ...
minister. Pike described these experiences in detail in the book.
1968 non-fiction books
Books about the paranormal
American non-fiction books
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