Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  “I’ve written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do,” Doyle went on, “but my hand has been rather forced by kind friends who continually wanted to know more and so it is that this monstrous growth has come out of what was really a comparatively small seed. The curious thing is how many people around the world are perfectly convinced that [Holmes] is really a living human being. I get letters addressed to him; I get letters asking for his autograph. Letters addressed to his rather stupid friend Watson, and I even had ladies saying that they’d be very glad to act as his housekeeper. One of them when she heard that he had turned to the occupation of keeping bees wrote to say she was an expert in segregating the queen, whatever that may mean, and that she was evidently predestined to be the housekeeper of Sherlock Holmes.”

  It was the summer of 1891, the same year Sherlock began his long run in the pages of The Strand, that Doyle was walking to work one day when he felt himself gripped by an icy nausea. He staggered back home to bed, where he suffered an incapacitating attack of influenza. Only three years earlier, his sister Annette had died of the flu, shortly before Doyle’s growing literary success might have lifted her out of her life as a governess in Lisbon. Now, “weak as a child and as emotional, but with a mind clear as crystal[,] … I surveyed my own life, I saw how foolish it was to waste my literary earnings in keeping up an oculist’s room in Wimpole Street, and I determined with a wild rush of joy to cut the painter [rope] and to trust for ever to my power of writing. I remember in my delight taking the handkerchief which lay on the coverlet in my enfeebled hand, and tossing it up to the ceiling in my exultation.

  “I should at last be my own master. No longer would I have to conform to professional dress or try to please anyone else. I would be free to live how I liked and where I liked. It was one of the great moments of exultation of my life.”

  By the end of the nineteenth century, some of the most eminent scientists in America, Britain, and Europe took part in séances in order to explore psychic phenomena. This is a retouched photo of an 1898 Paris séance in which the famous medium Eusapia Palladino levitated a table. Noted at the top: “without threads.”

  THE ARCHIVES OF TONY OURSLER

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Science of the Unseen

  “No self-respecting scientist believes in the paranormal,” says Kristen Wiig’s character, Erin Gilbert, in the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters. She’s taking the conventional line because she’s up for tenure at Columbia University, where she’s a physics professor. But she loses her job after her villainous dean sees her on social media screaming “Ghosts are real!” after she’s been slimed by the ghost of Gertrude at the Aldridge mansion.

  As a depiction of the problems faced by psychical research, that scene is actually right on the mark. No, not the part where the ghost vomits ectoplasm: Some mediums exude it, but not ghosts, and it’s grayish white, not lime Jell-O green. More to the point: There were scientists a century ago, some of them very eminent, who hoped that science could explain the mysteries produced in the séance room. Unfortunately, they had to endure more than a gentle demurrer from their colleagues; they had to endure outright lies and slander, and one, James Hervey Hyslop, was hounded out of his faculty position at … Columbia University. Really. Were their hopes misplaced? Probably. Science depends on being able to repeat a finding, again and again, before it’s declared true. It’s about controlling the variables. And that is simply impossible in the séance room. Results are never replicable, strictly. The experimenter isn’t in charge. Even the medium isn’t in charge. The spirits decide if and when they’ll come through, and what they’ll do when they get here. Lord Rayleigh, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the gas argon and became chancellor of Cambridge University, also spent nearly half a century sitting with the most powerful mediums of his era; he died in 1919 still unsure of what he’d seen. In the end, he lamented, “We are ill equipped for the investigation of phenomena which cannot be reproduced at pleasure under good conditions.”

  But their hope was understandable, especially given the scientific advances of their day. Science was already exploring the unseen; the dazzling inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were based on research into the submicroscopic world of electricity, radio waves, X-rays, and atoms. Surely some of their newfound theories could explain how a wreath of clematis floated through the air and came to rest on the head of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  Maybe the scientific method couldn’t be applied to séances, but Arthur Conan Doyle and his generation could apply a scientific attitude. That attitude called for an open-mindedness about what we don’t know and keen observation to arrive at something we do know. That was the real strength of spiritualism, said Doyle; the movement was “the most serious attempt ever made to place religion upon a basis of definite proof.… It was founded upon the rock of actual personal observation.”

  Seen in that light, Doyle’s interest in spiritualism was not some baffling quirk of the man who invented Sherlock Holmes. There was no inherent contradiction. It was simply Doyle being Doyle: ever the detective in everything he came across. As his first biographer, the Reverend John Lamond, wrote, “Above all, he could discern the value of evidence.”

  That’s why he welcomed science into the séance room: “Each honest inquiry can only strengthen the cause of truth. The more light, the more understanding,” he wrote in 1920. “But let it be real Science which comes to us, not prejudice and ill will, which judge a case first and examine it afterwards. That is not Science, but the very antithesis of Science.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST scientist to systematically investigate spiritualism was Robert Hare, a chemist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He was famous both in Europe and in America for inventing the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, an early version of today’s welding torch. He was already seventy when spiritualism was sweeping America, and he was comfortably retired after writing more than 150 academic papers. In the summer of 1853, he wrote a letter to his local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, criticizing the “popular madness” of the day. As he explained later in his book Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations, “I had been brought up deaf to any testimony which claimed assistance from supernatural causes.”

  When challenged by an earnest believer, he visited a few spirit circles, was impressed by the integrity of one medium in particular, and so set out to determine whether the rapped messages “could be made without mortal aid.” He came up with a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption of wheels, weights, and pulleys he named the spiritoscope. He thought it would prove that the tables at séances were tipped by the humans around them. “The result was not as he expected,” said the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in his first writing on spiritualism, The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural, “for however he varied his experiments he was in every case only able to obtain results which proved that there was a power at work not that of any human being present. But in addition to the power there was an intelligence, and he was thus compelled to believe that existences not human did communicate with him.”

  Hare’s first visit from a spirit was that of his father, Robert senior. When the spirit of his deceased sister came through, he asked for the name of their English grandfather’s business partner, who’d died seventy years before. She nailed it. And so, having received these and other “evidential” messages, he became a convert and wrote his 460-page book, Experimental Investigation, which was published in 1855—and promptly scorned by his fellow scientists. “The brave report … led to a disgraceful persecution,” Doyle wrote in his History of Spiritualism. The American Scientific Association “howled down Professor Hare when he attempted to address them, and put it on record that the subject was unworthy of their attention.” The association then turned its attention to a far worthier topic: why cocks crow between midnight and 1:00 a.m.

  Hare’s research should have been lauded, not scorned, said Doyle. He flatly stat
ed, in a 1920 essay, “From the hour of the Hare report there has been no excuse for the human race.”

  Nonetheless, the human race kept coming up with more excuses and turned a deaf ear to the research of Wallace, the chemist Sir William Crookes, and others. In a more organized effort to stop the madness, several British scientists and academics formed the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. They put up their own money to investigate psychic phenomena, they announced, “in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems.” The founders included the physicist Sir William Barrett and the Cambridge philosophy professor Henry Sidgwick; one of the initial members was the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. Doyle finally joined the organization in 1893.

  We’ll let William James take it from here. James, the older brother of the novelist Henry James, played a principal role in establishing psychology as a field of study; he’s widely acknowledged as the father of American psychology. In an essay, “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” he opened on this engaging note:

  According to the newspaper and drawing-room myth, soft-headedness and idiotic credulity are the bond of sympathy in the Society, and general wonder-sickness is its dynamic principle. A glance at the membership fails, however, to corroborate this view. The president is Prof. Henry Sidgwick, known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England. The hard-headed Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another. Such men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and Professor Richet, the eminent French physiologist, are amongst the most active contributors to the Society’s “Proceedings”; and through the catalogue of membership are sprinkled names honored throughout the world for their scientific capacity. In fact, were I asked to point to a scientific journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I think I should have to fall back on the “Proceedings” of the Society for Psychical Research.

  James wrote that in 1892, ten years after the Society for Psychical Research was founded. In another ten years, Balfour would be Britain’s prime minister, and Lodge would be knighted for his scientific achievements. In a little more than two decades, Charles Richet would win the Nobel Prize.

  William James didn’t include himself in the pantheon, but he did play a key role in psychical research. He contributed to the society’s Proceedings, and he was president of the SPR in 1894 and 1895. He was a founding member of the American branch in 1885. But most of all he introduced to the world one of the most remarkable (and most documented) mediums of all time, Leonora Piper. Her mediumship transformed arch-skeptics into true believers. Arthur Conan Doyle devoted ten pages of his History of Spiritualism to her. “Mrs. Piper,” as she was commonly known, was a major milestone in Doyle’s own thirty-year spiritual journey “from the left of negation to the right of acceptance,” to use one of his favorite phrases.

  * * *

  SHE WAS born Leonora Evelina Simonds in Nashua, New Hampshire, in late June 1859—one month later than Conan Doyle. Great mediums are born, not made, and one of her first psychic experiences occurred when she was eight. She was playing outside when she felt something smack her right ear; it was followed by a hiss that turned into the name Sara. Leonora ran into the house, hysterical. She told her mother, “Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but with you still.” She was so upset that her mother, whose sister was indeed named Sara, noted the day and time in her diary. Several days later, they heard from Sara’s husband: Sara had died, unexpectedly, right about the time Leonora ran into the house.

  Leonora grew into a tall, fair-haired, dignified young woman and married William Piper, a Boston shopkeeper, when she was twenty-two. Two years later, in 1884, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Alta. She suffered from abdominal pain afterward, and William Piper’s parents persuaded her to visit a blind healing medium. On her second visit, the medium placed his hands on her head, and she lost consciousness. In a trance, she got up from her chair, went to a table in the center of the room, scribbled a note, and handed it to Judge Frost, an elderly jurist who was waiting his turn for a sitting. When she came out of her trance, Judge Frost told her it was a message from his son who’d died in an accident thirty years earlier. The private message was, he told her, “the most remarkable I ever received.”

  Shortly afterward, the young Mrs. Piper began granting sittings to friends and family in her suburban Boston home (at that point she and William still lived with his parents in Arlington Heights). The modus operandi was always the same. Shortly after she sat in her armchair, her eyeballs rolled upward and her face became contorted; occasionally, she tore at her hair. Then she began talking in voices quite unlike her own. Usually there was one primary voice—that of the “control,” a spirit who takes over the medium’s body and acts as a gatekeeper in the other world, maintaining order among the other spirits who want to communicate and fending off random low-level spirits who simply want to make mischief. (As Doyle had been warned by General Drayson back in Southsea, there are plenty of “naughty boys” on the other side.) When Mrs. Piper emerged from her trance, the convulsions resumed, much to the alarm of many sitters. Notably, all this took place in broad daylight. Mrs. Piper was strictly a “mental” medium, not a “physical” medium. There was no need for darkness, no need for the medium to sit in a cabinet or behind drawn curtains in a corner of the room. There were no ringing bells or flying trumpets or levitating tables. But sometimes there were messages from dead relatives.

  All the while, Mrs. Piper was clueless as to their contents. As she later described her trances to her daughter Alta,

  I feel as if something were passing over my brain, making it numb.… I feel a little cold, too, not very, just a little, as if a cold breeze passed over me, and people and objects become smaller until they finally disappear; then, I know nothing more until I wake up, when the first thing I am conscious of is a bright, very very bright light, and then darkness, such darkness.… I see, as if from a great distance, objects and people in the room; but they are very small and very black.

  As her reputation grew during the year 1885, and friends of friends came to visit, she granted a sitting to a widow named Eliza Gibbens, who happened to be the mother-in-law of William James.

  Eliza was amazed by the medium’s knowledge of her family members, their names and their lives. So she sent her daughter Margaret to Mrs. Piper with a sealed letter from a friend in Italy. Mrs. Piper, holding the sealed envelope in front of her, described the writer, where she was, and why she’d moved across the Atlantic. That was impressive: Even if she could have seen the letter, it was written in Italian. With Margaret on board, they told her sister Alice, James’s wife. Alice was disconsolate over the recent death of their young son, Herman. Maybe some comfort could be found.

  And so, on a soft autumn late afternoon in 1885, William James and his wife first entered the front parlor of Mrs. Piper’s in-laws. He’d warned Alice beforehand, Don’t tell her our names. Don’t tell her anything, just as Eliza and Margaret had not revealed their identities. As Mrs. Piper sat in her armchair with her head turned sideways, she drifted into a trance and began murmuring names. Niblin became Giblin became Gibbens. Names, more names. Then she asked about a dead child. A boy. A small one. Herrin? No, Herman.

  William James was so intrigued that he came back for eleven more sittings and sent twenty-five other people to see her, all under pseudonyms. Fifteen of them heard, at their first sitting, names of deceased relatives and facts about them that the most brilliant detective couldn’t have uncovered. The following spring, James submitted a brief account to the SPR’s Proceedings. Although he initially assumed that her “hits” were the result of lucky guesses or knowledge of the sitters’ identities, he wrote, “I now believe her to be in possession of a power as yet unexplained.�
�

  James had to move on with his other work; he was, after all, teaching the nascent subject of psychology at his alma mater, Harvard, and he was trying to wrap up his magnum opus, the two-volume Principles of Psychology. So he handed over the primary investigation of Mrs. Piper to the world’s sharpest hotshot in the business of exposing fraudulent mediums: Richard Hodgson.

  Hodgson was the son of an Australian wool importer who’d gotten his law degree in Melbourne but decided not to practice law and instead showed up at Cambridge to study poetry and philosophy. He impressed his philosophy professor, Henry Sidgwick, who decided to send Hodgson on a little mission. In late 1884, Hodgson went to Madras, India, on behalf of the SPR (and on Sidgwick’s own dime) to unmask Madame Blavatsky, the leader of the Theosophical Society. She claimed that spirits wrote messages to her on letters that mysteriously appeared in the tiny drawers of her Indian shrine. Hodgson found out how that worked: The drawers also opened onto Madame Blavatsky’s bedroom on the other side of the wall. As he slipped away from Madras with this and other insights, the shrine mysteriously burned to the ground. The subsequent SPR report called her “one of the most accomplished and interesting imposters in history.”

  Hodgson returned to England and soon tackled yet another spiritualistic practice that was ripe for fraud: slate writing. He angered many prominent spiritualists when he concluded that it was all a con and that “nearly all professional mediums are a gang of vulgar tricksters.” Alfred Russel Wallace was especially peeved and openly wondered when the SPR would get down to actual psychical research instead of scouting for frauds or coming up with an endless array of suspicions when no fraud was found.