Featured stories about ASPR supporters.

Mary Jayne Gold

Mary Jayne Gold was living in Paris in 1940 when the German army invaded France. After fleeing to Marseille, she used her plane and her personal fortune to help rescue thousands from the Nazis — sheltering refugees, organizing escape routes out of France, and helping finance the Emergency Rescue Committee, which enabled some 2,000 people to evade the Gestapo. Among those rescued were the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, the artist Marc Chagall, the writer Hannah Arendt, and the Nobel Prize–winning physician Otto Meyerhof. Her memoir was edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and her story inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic. A supporter of the ASPR, she left a large bequest to the Society upon her death.

Chester Carlson

Chester Carlson was an inventor who became enormously successful after he created the Xerox machine. He became fascinated by psychic research after his wife began having psychic experiences, and he and his wife then experimented by sending drawings to each other psychically while in different rooms. He was very interested in the question of survival. He was also interested in the effects of altered states of consciousness, such as meditation, to psychic events. He became a major supporter and funder of the ASPR.

He brought Dr. Karlis Osis to the ASPR as head of the research department, and helped fund Osis’s cross cultural studies of deathbed visions in the United States and India, as well as other investigations into psychic functioning involving meditation and out of body experiences. Chester Carlson served as a trustee on the board of the ASPR from 1964 until 1968. His substantial contributions allowed the ASPR to purchase its building at 5 West 73rd Street in 1966, where it remained for more than half a century.

Dan Aykroyd

Dan Aykroyd has been a great friend and advocate of the ASPR. The ASPR is extremely grateful to him for his support and his public promotion of the Society. He always had a great interest in psychic research and the ASPR, and grew up surrounded by ASPR journals. He was born into a family with deep ties to Spiritualism. His great-grandfather belonged to the Lily Dale spiritualist society, and he corresponded with Arthur Conan Doyle about spiritualism. Dan Aykroyd’s father, Peter Aykroyd, was a long-time friend and supporter of the ASPR. During his lifetime he offered the Society valued counsel. He published a book called A History of Ghosts about the Aykroyd family’s historical connection to the Spiritualist movement.

When Dan Aykroyd wrote Ghostbusters, he was inspired by the family’s strong interest in Spiritualism.

Dan Aykroyd is an actor, comedian, screenwriter, musician and producer. He was an original writer and member of Saturday Night Live and won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series (1977). He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Driving Miss Daisy (1989). He has written and starred in many movies, including The Blues Brothers (1980), and Ghostbusters (1984). In 1992, Aykroyd co-founded The House of Blues, a chain of music venues, which became the second largest live music promoter in the world. He co-founded a brand of high-end vodka called Crystal Head Vodka. He also owns part of several wineries in Canada.