He achieved his bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins in 1897, his Masters at Columbia in 1898 and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1910.
[2][3] McComas was a member of the American Society for Psychical Research, and took interest in exposing the fraud and trickery of mediums.
[4][5] He investigated William Cartheuser and Mina Crandon and concluded they were both fraudulent.
[6][7] In his book Ghosts I Have Talked With (1937), McComas described his experiences in investigating spiritualism.
He found that chance, fraud or malobservation could explain all the phenomena.