Not an answer to your question, but one of the books I really loved as a teenager was Too Many Ghosts (Paul Gallico), in which the hero investigated alleged supernatural phenomena in the hope that he would find a real ghost one day but in the meantime he was not going to have anyone scammed/scared/etc by crooks. I was mostly fascinated by the various methods used to produce the phenomena. I didn't like the sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable, in which he takes on fake spiritualists, quite so much, but it was just as interesting.