There are many examples of Lang's keenness to assert that psychical research and anthropology were part of the same investigative impulse and needed to share methods and evidence. However, as Lang laments in his preface to the second edition of The Making of Religion (London: Longmans, Green and Co.,1900), it was a struggle convincing either psychical researchers or anthropologists of this. Anthropologists were on the whole dismissive of contemporary accounts of such experiences as evidence, and psychical researchers doubted the evidential value of historical accounts. Nevertheless, across a wide selection of his work – from his serious anthropology through to more popular works such as Cock Lane and Common Sense (London: Longman's, Green and Co.,1894) and again and again in his journalism – Lang makes the case for the relation between the two. The selections here cover the range of places in which Lang made this argument.

In ‘The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories’ we see Lang constructing a position distinct from, and challenging to, not only anthropologists and psychical researchers, but also folklorists. Here stories, rather than just being examples of Tylor's ‘survivals’, are valued for their links to experience and practice, for what can they tell us about the material reality of cultures widely dispersed historically and temporally. Here and in the following piece, ‘Superstition and Fact’, we can see Lang developing ideas on both supernatural phenomenon and that relation to anthropology that will finally lead to the position set out in The Making of Religion.

The ‘Preface’ to Cock Lane and Common Sense is from the second edition, published in 1895, in which Lang responds to critical responses to the first edition from both sides, from anthropology and from psychical research. His sense of being between two camps which want little to do with each other is clear here, as it is in the later ‘Preface’ to the second (1900) edition of The Making of Religion. As is often the case in Lang's work, here he explicitly eschews the idea of constructing theories based on the evidence he presents. The subsequent chapters of Cock Lane and Common Sense pile up the evidence for universal experience of certain supernatural phenomena, but Lang does not account for this, rather he just asserts it as evidence, and that it needs to be noted by both anthropologists and psychical researchers.