Published by Anomalist Books (San Antonio and New York) in 2006, the book carries the ISBN 1933665637. It is organized into three parts: Part One (twelve chapters) covers the Bindelof case itself; Part Two (eight chapters) surveys physical mediumship from the Fox Sisters through Franek Kluski and Indridi Indridason; Part Three (seven chapters) covers twentieth-century developments including Soviet research on Nina Kulagina, Felicia Parise’s PK work, thoughtography, and Kenneth Batcheldor’s group methodology. An appendix titled “So You Want To Do It Too?” addresses readers interested in attempting group séance experiments. The book is dedicated to “the two Gilberts”, a reference to Gilbert Roller and, presumably, a second person of that name significant to Pilkington.¹

The Bindelof sittings took place in an informal domestic setting in 1930s New York. The participants were teenagers, and the phenomena were not observed under controlled laboratory conditions. Pilkington’s reconstruction relies on Roller’s first-hand testimony gathered over decades of friendship, supplemented by whatever contemporaneous documentation survived. The book’s chapter titles indicate the range of phenomena discussed: “A Shot in the Dark,” “Trumpet for a Dead Man” (referring to the trumpet levitation phenomenon common in physical mediumship), “See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me,” and “The Portrait”, the last apparently referring to an anomalous image production event. Pilkington notes a parallel between Roller’s experiences and those of other RSPK-adjacent figures: like Tina Resch and the Polish teenager Joasia Gajewski, Roller was reportedly “attacked” by flying objects during some sessions.⁴¹ The evidential weight of the Bindelof case rests entirely on retrospective testimony; no contemporaneous instrumental records are described in the available material.

Chapter 14 covers D. D. Home, widely regarded as the most thoroughly investigated physical medium of the nineteenth century and notable for never having been caught in fraud despite decades of public sittings. Chapter 15 covers Sir William Crookes, the chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society who investigated both Home and Florence Cook (the medium associated with the materialized “Katie King” figure, covered in Chapter 16). Pilkington’s treatment draws on the historical record of these investigations rather than presenting new empirical data. The evidential status of the Crookes investigations remains contested in the scholarly literature: Crookes’s methodology has been criticized for insufficient controls against medium deception, while defenders argue that his scientific training and the conditions he imposed were more rigorous than critics acknowledge. Pilkington’s position, consistent with her stated middle-ground stance, is that the fraud hypothesis does not adequately account for all documented observations.¹

Pilkington’s Chapter 20 on Indridi Indridason predates the 2015 Haraldsson and Gissurarson monograph by nearly a decade. When that definitive scholarly treatment appeared, Pilkington reviewed it for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, noting it as the second major book (after Zofia Weaver’s treatment of Franek Kluski) to make previously inaccessible evidence available in English. Indridason (1883–1909) was a farmer’s son from rural Iceland who began producing phenomena, table movements, levitations, direct voice, simultaneous dual-voice singing, and apparent materializations, after being introduced to séance experimentation around 1905. Pilkington’s review notes that some of his phenomena resembled RSPK outbreaks in their violence, and that he was reportedly dragged bodily across floors and nearly pulled through a window by unseen forces. The authors of the 2015 monograph compare him to D. D. Home; Pilkington’s earlier chapter in Bindelof situates him within the same tradition of physical mediumship she surveys across Part Two.⁵

Chapter 23, titled “A Mini-Kulagina,” covers Felicia Parise, a laboratory technician at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn who worked in the same institution where Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, and Charles Honorton were conducting dream telepathy experiments. After Ullman returned from the USSR with film of Nina Kulagina moving objects and deflecting compasses, Parise, unlike most colleagues who were skeptical, believed Kulagina was genuine and undertook a sustained effort to replicate the effect herself. After considerable practice she reportedly succeeded in moving small objects under conditions that included distance controls. Pilkington’s chapter was written without direct contact with Parise, who had become a very private person. In 2013, Pilkington located Parise and conducted a formal interview, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2015, which provided first-hand corrections to inaccuracies in the published record and direct testimony about the physical toll the PK work exacted.²

Chapter 26, “The Impact of Kenneth Batcheldor,” covers the British psychologist whose group-sitter approach to table levitation and physical phenomena became influential in the field. Batcheldor’s methodology emphasized the role of belief, expectation, and group dynamics in facilitating physical phenomena, a framework that sits between purely psychological explanation and straightforward psi attribution. Pilkington treats Batcheldor’s contribution as methodologically significant because it offered a reproducible protocol for generating physical phenomena in group settings, in contrast to the unreliable and investigator-dependent phenomena of individual mediums. The chapter’s placement at the end of Part Three, just before the epilogue, suggests Pilkington views Batcheldor’s approach as pointing toward productive future directions rather than merely cataloging historical curiosities.¹

The book is cited or referenced in at least three of Pilkington’s subsequent published pieces in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. In her 2015 interview with Felicia Parise, Pilkington notes that Chapter 23 of Bindelof was written without direct contact with Parise and that the interview was intended to correct and supplement the published account.² In her 2019 review of Terje Simonsen’s survey of the psi field, she recommends Bindelof as a corrective to Simonsen’s inadequate treatment of macro-PK phenomena.³ In her 2023 review of the Polish poltergeist case, she draws an explicit parallel between Joasia Gajewski’s experiences and those of Gilbert Roller, citing the 2006 book directly.⁴ This pattern of self-citation across a seventeen-year span suggests the book functions as a reference anchor in Pilkington’s ongoing engagement with physical phenomena research. The book also connects to her Enfield poltergeist review, where she uses the term RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis) consistently, the same framing she employs throughout Bindelof.⁶

When Pilkington reviewed the Haraldsson and Gissurarson monograph on Indridi Indridason in 2015, she described it as “the second important book to be issued recently about spectacular, relatively unknown physical mediums, the evidence for whom would be inaccessible to English-speaking people if it were not for the translations of the original material by their authors”, the first being Zofia Weaver’s treatment of Franek Kluski.⁵ This framing positions The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof as a complementary rather than competing work: where Weaver and Haraldsson/Gissurarson translate and analyze primary source documentation for specific mediums, Pilkington’s book provides a synthetic overview that connects individual cases to a broader interpretive framework. The book’s appendix, “So You Want To Do It Too?”, is unusual in the literature for directly addressing readers interested in attempting group séance experiments, reflecting Pilkington’s view that the phenomena are potentially reproducible rather than confined to rare gifted individuals.¹