From Ghosts to Palestine
Many 19th century women turned to occultism and spirituality as a way to escape the patriarchal bent of the major religions of the time. An example of this is Ada Goodrich Freer. Born in 1857, Ada Goodrich Freer was a British psychic, poet, and folklorist. 
Orphaned at a young age and fostered by an aunt who ran a girls’ boarding school, little is known of Freer’s early life other than that she was a very talented student. Much of what is available are stories she told about herself. For example, Freer claimed she had psychic premonitions and phantasmal experiences from childhood, an ability inherited from her fictitious noble Scottish ancestors.
In 1888, she joined the Society for Psychical Research and gained fame and acknowledgement as an expert on the occult phenomena. She served for many years as co-editor of William Stead’s magazine Borderlands, a publication devoted to spiritualism and the occult. In pursuit of information on second sight, she collected folklore in Scotland.
The body of her work was her extensive writing on spiritualism, crystal gazing, automatic writing, hypnotism, folklore, and hauntings published in Borderlands and similar journals under the pseudonym, Miss X. A member of the Society for Psychical Research, Freer investigated several hauntings only to be dismissed from the group when she was accused of fraud. She became a medium, but was accused of cheating.
She moved to Jerusalem in 1901, where she met her husband, Dr. Hans Henry Spoer, a minister. During this period, she published numerous books including Inner Jerusalem, In a Syrian Saddle, Some Jewish Folklore from Jerusalem, and Things Seen in Palestine.
The following excerpt is from the Hauntings chapter of her book Essays in Psychical Research published in 1899 under her pseudonym, Miss X.
We talk and write so much about ghosts and hauntings that at first sight it seems curious that we know so little about them. But there are certain obvious impediments to the study of these—one might say, of all psychical phenomena. The material, however, plentiful, is not to be commanded: ghostly visitations are seldom continuous, though now and then one hears of a ghost who keeps an anniversary. Personally, I regret that I know none such; but in most cases you may watch for a score or a hundred nights without seeing anything. Not that this proves there is no ghost: indeed, in all probability, he will come back on the twenty-first or hundred-and-first night and remain till the night preceding your return.
The theory of haunting, invented by Mr. Podmore, is one I think, of frequent, but by no means of universal application. He thinks the story of a haunting is begun by some subjective hallucination on the part of a living person, which lingers on in the atmosphere, and is transported to the next occupant of the room or house in question.
It appears, however, that there is in most cases very little ground for attributing the phenomena to the agency of dead persons, but, as we have said, in the great majority of cases they are unrecognized, and in these cases, if they really represent any actual person, there is often no more reason to suppose the person dead than living.
The caution is not superfluous. The more absolutely that we believe in the reality of occult phenomena, the more jealous we are of that which is spurious, counterfeit, or even doubtful—the more we feel the significance of that saying of Tacitus, ” Truth is established by investigation and delay.” We hesitate over nine tenths of the stories which reach us, in proportion as we believe unhesitatingly in the significance of the tenth.
As a matter of fact, the public seems to have been singularly reticent in confiding its stories of hauntings to the Society for Psychical Research, or the officials of the Society have been as singularly reticent in confiding their information to its members. The interest of the subject of haunted houses was acknowledged by the early appointment of a committee of inquiry, which was, to say the least, unfortunate as to its results.