Richard Hodgson (24 September 1855 – 21 December 1905) was an Australian-born psychical researcher who investigated spiritualist mediums such as Eusapia Palladino and Leonora Piper. During his later life, Hodgson became a spiritualist medium himself and believed to be in communication with spirits.

Hodgson was born in Melbourne, Australia on 24 September 1855 to Mr. R. Hodgson, leather merchant of Melbourne. He had completed his M.A. and LL.D. courses in Melbourne by 1877, when he was only twenty-two years old. The doctorate was received in 1878 from the University of Melbourne.

In the 1880s he moved to England to study Mental and Moral Science at St John's College, Cambridge. Two of his lecturers were Henry Sidgwick and John Venn. Sidgwick sponsored Hodgson to study in Jena in Germany, and Herbert Spencer provided a very flattering letter of introduction to Haeckel.

He became a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882. Hodgson joined the American Society for Psychical Research in 1887 to serve as its secretary.

Hodgson was sent by the SPR in 1884 to India to investigate Helena Blavatsky and concluded that her claims of psychic power were fraudulent. His findings became known as the Hodgson Report. Among the phenomena that Hodgson investigated was the supposed miraculous Theosophical letters from the Mahatmas which were said to magically appear over a four-year period in a cabinet in the Shrine Room at the Theosophical headquarters in Madras. Hodgson in his report wrote that the letters were frauds and had been written by Blavatsky herself who had put them in the cabinet from an opening in her bedroom located behind the Shrine room. Although a believer in mental mediumship, Hodgson was a critic of physical mediumship which he said was fraudulent. Some of the mediums that he exposed as frauds were William Eglinton, Eusapia Palladino, Henry Slade and Rosina Thompson.

A. T. Baird author of the book Richard Hodgson published by Psychic Press Limited, London in 1949 is the only biography of Hodgson. Joseph McCabe praised the work of Hodgson in debunking fraudulent mediums but wrote he was credulous on his study of Leonora Piper. J. T. Hackett dedicated his book My Commonplace Book to Hodgson and stated that about one-third of the main quotations in the book came direct from Hodgson.

The psychical researcher Charles Richet with Oliver Lodge, Frederic W. H. Myers and Julian Ochorowicz investigated the medium Eusapia Palladino in the summer of 1894 at his house in the Ile Roubaud in the Mediterranean. Richet claimed furniture moved during the séance and that some of the phenomena was the result of a supernatural agency. However, Hodgson said there was inadequate control during the séances and the precautions described did not rule out trickery. Hodgson wrote all the phenomena "described could be account for on the assumption that Eusapia could get a hand or foot free." Lodge, Myers and Richet disagreed, but Hodgson was later proven correct in the Cambridge sittings as Palladino was observed to have used tricks exactly the way he had described them.

In July 1895, Hodgson was invited to England to Myers' house in Cambridge for a series of investigations into the mediumship of Palladino. According to reports by Hodgson, Myers and Oliver Lodge, all the phenomena observed in the Cambridge sittings were the result of trickery. Her fraud was so clever, according to Myers, that it "must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill."