His father was a civil engineer, and his grandfather, George Nugent Tyrrell, was the first "Superintendent of the Line" for the Great Western Railway.

Tyrrell was a student of Guglielmo Marconi and a pioneer in the development of radio.

[4] Tyrrell proposed that ghosts are a hallucination of the subconscious mind of a person, to explain collective hallucinations for more than one person, he proposed it as a telepathic mechanism.

"[6] Tyrrell created the term out-of-body experience in his book Apparitions.

[7] A review in Nature for Science and Psychical Phenomena praised Tyrrell for his "obvious sincerity" but suggested the book was "full of flaws" which aroused suspicion of Tyrrell's critical faculties.