Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  Yes, Hodgson had made a name for himself. So it might have been an ominous moment for spiritualism when he landed in Boston in 1887, having been sent by Sidgwick to be chief investigator for the American branch of the SPR; he assumed from the start that Mrs. Piper was a fraud. He went to his first sitting with her on May 4, 1887, revealing neither his name nor his reason for being in America. It was curious, very curious, that this simple Boston lady knew so much about his life back in Australia. Actually, she didn’t; as noted above, she would awake from her trances recalling nothing. It was her control, “Phinuit,” who did the talking. Phinuit claimed to be a French doctor who died about 1860; he spoke in a gruff voice, freely mixing English with French, Negro patois, and Yankee slang. (He delighted in slang, once cheerfully repeating a sitter’s expression, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”) He would diagnose diseases and prescribe herbal remedies. But mostly he would relay messages from the other side.

  Hodgson’s notes from his first sitting with Mrs. Piper read, in part,

  Phinuit began, after the usual introduction, by describing members of my family.

  “Mother living, father dead, little brother dead.” [True] Father and mother described correctly, though not with much detail. In connection with the enumeration of the members of our family, Phinuit tried to get a name beginning with R, but failed. [A little sister of mine, named Rebecca, died when I was very young, I think less than eighteen months old.]

  “Four of you living besides mother.” [True]

  Phinuit mentioned the name “Fred.” I said it might be my cousin. “He says you went to school together. He goes on jumping-frogs, and laughs. He says he used to get the better of you. He had convulsive movements before his death, struggles. He went off in a sort of spasm. You were not there.” [My cousin Fred far excelled any other person that I have seen in the games of leap-frog, fly the garter, &c. He took very long flying jumps, and whenever he played, the game was lined by crowds of schoolmates to watch him. He injured his spine in a gymnasium in Melbourne, Australia, in 1871, and was carried to the hospital, where he lingered for a fortnight, with occasional spasmodic convulsions, in one of which he died.]

  Phinuit described a lady, in general terms, dark hair, dark eyes, slim figure, &c, and said that she was much closer to me than any other person: that she “died slowly. Too bad you weren’t with her. You were at a distance. It was a great pain to both of you that you weren’t there. She would have sent you a message, if she had known she was going. She had two rings; one was buried with her body; the other ought to have gone to you. The second part of her name is–sie.” [True, with the exception of the statement about the rings, which may or may not be true.]

  The lady’s name was Jessie, a fact later revealed by Hodgson’s biographer, Alex Baird. She was the one true love of his youth, but their relationship had to end in 1875 because her parents objected to his reluctance to embrace their Methodist faith. (No wonder he ran off to Cambridge.) In his second sitting, Phinuit said Jessie was good friends with his sister, and his sister told him about her death. In his sixth sitting, Phinuit said Jessie’s left eye is brown, but her right eye has a spot of light color in the iris. Hodgson asked Phinuit how he knew about the eye. Phinuit said she was standing right there, showing him.

  Oh, and Phinuit said Jessie wanted to be sure he kept that book of poetry he’d given her and that her family returned to him after her death. Hodgson said nothing. But the book, Tennyson’s Princess, was on his shelf in his Boston apartment.

  Who was Phinuit, and how did he know these things? William James suspected that Phinuit was a secondary personality buried in Mrs. Piper’s subconscious and this secondary personality had telepathic ability—the ability to read the minds of sitters in front of her. But if that were so, how did it know things the sitter didn’t know? In one sitting, Phinuit told Hodgson that his sister back in Australia would soon be giving birth to a fourth child, a boy. That came true. But Hodgson didn’t even know his sister was expecting.

  The only other explanation, of course, was outright fraud. Mrs. Piper didn’t seem as if she had the means to hire spies to find out all this stuff. But just to be sure, Hodgson hired detectives to trail her and her husband and make inquiries. They found nothing, but when she found out about it, she upbraided Hodgson, and then James, telling them respectable people didn’t have detectives following them around town. It was humiliating. She threatened to quit the research program. James tried to make light of it; he implored her to see its “comic side.”

  Fortunately, James won her over. Luckily, he didn’t have to tell her that Hodgson had been putting ammonia under her nose and pinching her until she bruised to check the genuineness of her trances. Once she passed all these tests, Hodgson arranged to put Mrs. Piper under contract to the SPR in the beginning of 1888. She would give roughly three sittings a week for his research; he would bring in visitors. They would come in anonymously and yield no personal information; he would sit in a corner and glare at them if they did. Once he yelled at a visitor for leaving her wet umbrella in the umbrella stand—because it could be used to carry in a note, you know! Hodgson, already a pretty intense guy, was becoming obsessed. That probably had a lot to do with the nature and quality of the sittings: Some of them were remarkable, and he wanted nothing to mar the results.

  In 1889, Hodgson and James devised another test of Mrs. Piper’s powers. They would remove her to a totally new environment to preclude any possibility of secret spies or talkative servants. Accordingly, she was invited to visit England for three months, beginning in November 1889. She stayed twice in Liverpool with Oliver Lodge and his wife, twice in Cambridge with the Sidgwicks, and twice in London. She allowed Lodge to examine her mail and search her baggage (she was getting used to this). It mattered not: The twenty-one sittings she gave under Lodge’s roof were the most successful of the entire trip.

  On December 24, 1889, only Lodge, his wife, Mary, and a shorthand reporter were present at a remarkable sitting involving a gold watch. Here are Lodge’s notes, later published in the Proceedings:

  It happens that an uncle of mine in London, now quite an old man, and one of surviving three out of a very large family, had a twin brother who died some twenty years ago. I wrote to ask if he would lend me some relic of his brother. By morning post I received a curious old gold watch, which this brother had worn and been fond of; and that same morning, no one in the house having seen it or knowing anything about it, I handed it to Mrs. Piper when in a state of trance.

  I was told almost immediately that it had belonged to one of my uncles—one that had been very fond of Uncle Robert, the name of the survivor—that the watch was now in possession of this same Uncle Robert, with whom he was anxious to communicate. After some difficulty and many wrong attempts Dr. Phinuit caught the name, Jerry, short for Jeremiah, and said emphatically, as if a third person was speaking, “This is my watch, and Robert is my brother, and I am here, Uncle Jerry, my watch.”

  Having thus ostensibly got into communication through some means or other with what purported to be a deceased relative, whom I indeed had known slightly in his later years of blindness, but of whose early life I knew nothing, I pointed out to him that to make Uncle Robert aware of his presence it would be well to recall trivial details of their boyhood, all of which I would faithfully report.

  He quite caught the idea, and proceeded during several successive sittings ostensibly to instruct Dr. Phinuit to mention a number of little things such as would enable his brother to recognize him.… “Uncle Jerry” recalled episodes such as swimming the creek when they were boys together, and running some risk of getting drowned; killing a cat in Smith’s field; the possession of a small rifle, and of a long peculiar skin, like a snake-skin, which he thought was not in the possession of Uncle Robert.

  Lodge checked with Uncle Robert, who confirmed all but the killing of the cat. But another brother, Frank, clearly recalled the cat-killing incident in Smith’s field. These details were
nowhere to be found among Oliver Lodge’s memories, making telepathy inadequate as an explanation.

  The following day was Christmas, and, yes, they did make Mrs. Piper work on Christmas, those scrooges. Twice. When Lodge sat with his brother Alfred, Phinuit announced that their dead relatives were worried about the health of Oliver and Alfred’s sister. Phinuit struggled to get her name; finally, he asked for a pencil, and Mrs. Piper wrote “Nellie.” Phinuit said Aunt Anne wrote it. It was indeed their sister’s nickname.

  She earned her thirty shillings that day.

  “I took every precaution that I could think of,” Lodge wrote many years later in his memoir. All in all, Mrs. Piper’s Christmas visit left him “thoroughly convinced, not only of human survival, but of the power to communicate under certain conditions, with those left behind on the earth.”

  When Mrs. Piper returned to Boston with her two daughters in February 1890, she was exhausted from the sittings, the constant scrutiny, and the enforced isolation. She wanted no part of any experiments for the rest of the year. But Hodgson had more than enough material for his next big report to the SPR. Those who were looking for another exposure along the lines of Madame Blavatsky were disappointed: Mrs. Piper’s trances were genuine. As for Phinuit, well, that was fishy; no such doctor’s death could be tracked down in France. So Hodgson, along with James and Richet, attributed his character to a secondary personality. But as-yet-unexplained supernormal forces were the causeways of information. And in his Proceedings report, finally published in 1892, he left the door open with a brief mention of recent research, where nothing other than a hypothesis of “embodied human intelligence” (that is, the survival of human personality) could explain things.

  That’s because of a dramatic change during the sitting of March 22, 1892. A new “control” appeared, a young man named George Pellew, who had been killed a few weeks earlier while riding his horse on the ice in Central Park. He had been a Harvard grad with a law degree who wrote editorials for the New York Sun. He had once met Hodgson and told him that if he died first and was “still existing,” he’d get in touch. At that March 22 sitting, Hodgson brought Pellew’s friend John Hart. Phinuit announced, early on, that “George” was present. Phinuit gave George’s full name, as well as the names of several close friends—including Hart, who was supposedly sitting anonymously. Phinuit then told Hart that the studs he was wearing used to be Pellew’s and that Pellew’s parents gave them to Hart after the funeral. George, through Phinuit, asked Hart to bring some mutual friends, Jim and Mary Howard, to a future sitting, and he described conversations with their fifteen-year-old daughter, Katharine. All this was true, and it was way past telepathy.

  When Jim and Mary Howard came three weeks later, Pellew took over Mrs. Piper’s body and spoke directly.

  George: Jim is that you? Speak to me quick. I am not dead. Don’t think me dead. Give my love to my father and tell him I want to see him. I am happy here, and more so since I can communicate with you.

  Jim: What do you do, George, where are you?

  George: I am scarcely able to do anything yet. I am just awakened to the reality of life after death. I could not distinguish anything at first. I was puzzled, confused.… Your voice, Jim, I can distinguish with your accent and articulation, but it sounds like a big bass drum. Mine would sound to you like the faintest whisper.

  Jim: Our conversation, then, is something like telephoning?

  George: Yes.

  Jim: By long distance telephone?

  George: (Laughs)

  Jim: Were you not surprised to find yourself living?

  George: Greatly surprised. I did not believe in a future life. It was beyond my reasoning powers. Now it is as clear to me as daylight.

  In this and in many sittings over the next few years, George Pellew came across as his full-blown former self. When Katharine attended a sitting, he teased her about her “horrible” violin playing, as he always did. He discussed secrets with Jim. He identified pictures of the Howards’ summer home. He was so domineering as a control that Phinuit complained about him. Out of the 150 sitters who were introduced to him, he recognized the 30—and only the 30—with whom he’d been acquainted in the flesh. This was no secondary personality, and he flatly said so.

  As George Pellew asserted more control, Mrs. Piper’s trances changed. She became more of a trance-writing medium. Several pillows were placed on a table in front of her, and she turned her head to the left so she could breathe. About thirty seconds after she slipped into a trance, her right hand would rise up. Blank sheets were placed to her right, along with four or five soft-lead pencils. Hodgson would place a pencil in her hand and tear off the sheets as she filled them with writing. At times, Phinuit would be communicating via voice while George Pellew sent messages through the hand. In fact, at a sitting in early 1895 Hodgson reported that Phinuit was speaking and George was writing with one hand while yet a third spirit, a deceased sister of a sitter, wrote with the other hand—all simultaneously, on different subjects.

  Phinuit made his last appearance as a “control” in early 1896, and George Pellew gradually relinquished his role the following year. But Hodgson had enough to write “A Further Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance,” three hundred pages of evidence, for the June 1898 issue of the Proceedings. In it, he clearly put himself among the spiritualists: The communicators through Mrs. Piper were indeed the surviving spirits of the deceased. This was an extraordinary moment, especially for the spiritualists like Dawson Rogers of the London Spiritualist Alliance, who remembered him somewhat differently, long ago: “He was a very Saul persecuting the Christians.” As for Doyle, it was the single biggest piece of evidence until the messages delivered through Lily Loder-Symonds in late 1915 cemented his conviction of spirit survival.

  In 1898, James Hervey Hyslop took the place of Richard Hodgson as Mrs. Piper’s chief investigator. The son of a stern fundamentalist Presbyterian farm family in Xenia, Ohio, Hyslop was a professor of logic and ethics at Columbia, having previously taught at Lake Forest, Smith, and Bucknell. And he had been estranged from his late father, Robert, because of his doubts. In his first sitting with Mrs. Piper, Hodgson introduced him as his “four times friend” who’d requested four sittings. Even though he’d waited outside until Mrs. Piper was in a trance, he came in wearing a black mask over his face. In the second sitting, Mrs. Piper announced that a new spirit was in the room: Robert Hyslop. Over four sittings, Hyslop said the ghost of his father described 205 incidents, of which 152 were verified. But never mind the numbers: “I talked with my discarnate father with as much ease as if I were talking with him, living, through the telephone.”

  Hyslop and Hodgson worked amiably together for the next several years, right until the day Hodgson dropped dead on the handball court of the Union Boat Club. It was December 20, 1905, and he was only fifty. Mrs. Piper had a dream that night; she was entering a tunnel and a figure raised his hand to block her way. The hand looked like Hodgson’s. The morning paper brought the news of his death.

  A month later, a message came through during a sitting with Alice James and her son Billy. It was Hodgson. “Is that Mrs. James and Billy? God bless you! I have found my way, I am here, have patience with me. All is well with me. Don’t miss me. Where’s William?”

  By February, Hodgson was communicating with Hyslop through Mrs. Piper; they were “keeping up a conversation at their accustomed level through the mouth and hand of this entranced woman,” Doyle wrote. “It is a wonderful, almost an inconceivable situation, that he who had so long been examining the spirit who used the woman, should now actually be the spirit who used the woman, and be examined in turn by his old colleague.”

  Mrs. Piper returned to England in late 1906 for more séances with Oliver Lodge. At the eighth sitting, Hodgson announced himself, and Lodge said, “Very glad to see you.” Hodgson gave a characteristic reply: “Here’s ditto.” And then he asked, “Do I understand that Mrs. Piper is in England?”r />
  In 1909, G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University, asked William James for permission to have six sittings with Mrs. Piper. Granted permission, he and his assistant Amy Tanner promptly got to work. When Mrs. Piper was in trance, they dripped camphor into her mouth to see if she was faking the trance. No, she didn’t wake up, but the next morning blisters covered her mouth and tongue. Next, he placed an instrument on her arm that slowly screwed a weight against her skin. Again, the trance was not disturbed, but her daughter Alta was, when her mother lost the use of her arm for several days. All this so that Hall could triumphantly announce that Mrs. Piper’s spirits were a joke and that spiritualism was “the ruck and muck of modern culture.” In pursuit of his ideology, Hall had physically abused Mrs. Piper.

  After the Hall episode, Leonora Piper had seen enough science.

  She continued with private sittings but kept a low profile. When Arthur Conan Doyle came to America in 1922, she traveled to New York to hear him speak at Carnegie Hall and went backstage afterward, along with a hundred other well-wishers. She was among “the few whom I really welcomed … a gentle, elderly woman.”

  Elderly as she was, she was active psychically into the 1920s and beyond. In 1925, Sir William Barrett, a physicist and founder of the SPR, was about to have tea with a family friend, a Mrs. Jervis, who had recently visited America and sat with Mrs. Piper. He wrote to Mrs. Jervis telling her to come to tea on May 28, but he died on May 26.

  In mid-June, Mrs. Jervis got a letter from Mrs. Piper. She wanted to pass along a message from Sir William: “Tell Mrs. Jervis I am sorry I could not keep the appointment.”

  The public had begun to wonder: How could Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s most rational sleuth, have been suckered into the silliness of spiritualism?

  PICTORIAL PRESS LTD. / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Some Splendid Starry Night”