by Colin Wilson
A new impetus came from an Irish professor of physics, William Barrett, who taught at the Royal College of Science in Dublin. Like Alfred Russel Wallace, Barrett had become interested in ‘mesmerism’, and when he was staying with a friend of County Westmeath, he persuaded some of the village children to subject themselves to hypnosis. Two proved to be excellent subjects, and with one of these Barrett observed what Wallace had experienced with his schoolboy two decades earlier, ‘community of sensation’. When his friend placed his own hand over a lighted lamp, the girl snatched hers away as if afraid of burning. When he tasted sugar, she smiled; when he tasted salt, she frowned. She also proved to be able to read Barrett’s mind. The sceptical Professor Carpenter had explained such phenomena by saying that people under hypnosis become abnormally sensitive, so they can recognise almost undetectable sounds or smells. But that would not explain how this girl could hold against her head a book containing a playing card, and describe the card exactly,
Barrett wrote a paper about the case, and sent it to the British Association in London. It would probably have been ignored, but it happened that Wallace was chairman of the committee that decided which papers to publish. He threw his weight behind Barrett, and although the committee eventually overruled him, Wallace made sure that Myers saw the paper.
By this time, Barrett had found another case that excited him—the family of a clergyman called Creery, who lived at Buxton, in Derbyshire. Creery’s daughters were unusually good at playing a favourite party trick called the ‘willing game’, in which a person went out of the room while the others decided what he ought to do; when he came back, everyone had to try to ‘will’ him to do it. In Barrett’s presence, Creery’s four daughters demonstrated the ‘willing game’ again and again, with hardly a single failure.
Barrett met Myers and his fellow ‘psychical investigators’ in London, and suggested that they ought to form a society for investigating these mysteries. Myers and Gurney were dubious; they felt they were already doing their best. But Barrett’s enthusiasm prevailed, and the result was the formation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which met for the first time in February 1882. Its original members were the ‘Cambridge group’—Myers, Gurney, Sidgwick (and his wife Eleanor), Balfour, Barrett, Rayleigh and Wallace. Soon they were joined by distinguished Victorians such as Tennyson, Gladstone, J. J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron), Mark Twain, William James, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), John Ruskin, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the painters Frederick Leighton and G. F. Watts.
The Society had no objection whatever to sceptics, for its aim was to bring the methods of science to bear on the ‘psychic world’, and try to prove or disprove it once and for all. One result was that Myers and Gurney accepted with pleasure the services of a sceptical post-office employee named Frank Podmore, whose original faith in spiritualism had been badly shaken in 1876 by the trial and subsequent flight of a ‘slate-writing’ medium named Henry Slade. (The anti-spiritualist Sir Ray Lankester had managed to grab the slate before the ‘spirits’ had had a chance to get to work, and found a message already on it. In spite of strong evidence in his favour, Slade was found guilty on the curious grounds that writing by spirits was a violation of the laws of nature, so he had to be a fraud.) The three-way collaboration produced the classic Phantasms of the Living (1886) which took four years to compile. The Society also produced a vast Census of Hallucinations, which showed that one person in every ten had experienced some kind of hallucination.
Now, at last, it should have been possible for the ‘spirits’ to win over the great majority of the British public. We have seen that mediums like Home, Mrs Hayden and Mrs Guppy had no problem convincing scientists once they were given a fair chance. In fact, the Society did some very impressive work, establishing the reality of apparitions, telepathy, clairvoyance and out-of-the-body experiences beyond all reasonable doubt. This early work culminated in Myers’s masterpiece, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
But, astonishingly, all this did little or nothing to influence public opinion. The vast audience that had bought The Night Side of Nature and Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World could not be bothered to read huge works full of signed statements and detailed examinations of the evidence. And sceptics such as T. H. Huxley and Sir Ray Lankester felt there would be no point in reading them anyway, since anyone who could believe in such nonsense must be a gullible idiot.
Regrettably, there was another factor that prevented the public taking the SPR seriously. In its first two decades, a whole series of ‘exposures’ provided the sceptics with all the ammunition they could wish for; the result was that, by about 1902, the Society had become a kind of joke, rather like the Flat Earth Society.
One of the most damaging of the ‘exposures’ had taken place in 1880, two years before the Society was formed. The medium Florence Cook, with whom William Crookes had worked, was caught cheating by Sir George Sitwell—father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. Florence was a ‘materialisation medium’. She sat in a cabinet with drawn curtains in a dimly lighted room, and after a few minutes, a figure in white would emerge from the cabinet and talk to people in the audience. The ‘spirit’ called herself Marie, and claimed that she ‘materialised’ herself with substances taken from the medium’s body. As she passed by Sitwell’s chair, he grabbed her and held her tight until someone produced a light. Then it was found that ‘Marie’ was Florence Cook in her corset and petticoat; Florence’s other clothes were found in the cabinet.
That looked conclusive, although spiritualists accepted Florence’s explanation—that she was in a trance at the time and had no knowledge of what had happened. Sir William Crookes immediately came to her defence. He pointed out that in 1873 a man called Volckman had suddenly grabbed the ‘spirit’ as it walked around the room—in those days, a woman who called herself Katie King. One person present claimed that ‘Katie’s legs and feet had dissolved away and that she had escaped from Volckman’s clutch with an upward movement like a seal’. The audience rushed to the cabinet and found Florence still there, dressed in black, her knots and seals intact. No trace of the white gown in which ‘Katie’ had been dressed was found in the cabinet.
Crookes also described how he had once been allowed to hold ‘Katie’ in his arms at a seance, and found her to be quite solid, like a normal woman. Naturally suspicious, he asked her if he could see Florence in her cabinet. ‘Katie’ agreed, and Crookes entered the cabinet and found Florence in a trance. As far as Crookes was concerned, that was conclusive. As far as the sceptics were concerned, it proved one of two things: either that Florence had an accomplice—perhaps her sister Katie, also a medium—or that Crookes was a liar.
After the Sitwell exposure, an authoress named Florence Marryat sat with Florence in the cabinet, tied to her with a rope; ‘Marie’ appeared as usual and walked out amongst the audience. But Florence’s reputation had suffered badly, and she soon went into partial retirement.
Crookes was undoubtedly deceived by a personable general’s daughter named Rosina Showers. He had no reason to suspect her, for she refused all payment for her seances, at which a figure dressed in white appeared. Crookes had devised a simple test to prevent Florence Cook from cheating; he had made her dip her hands in a coloured dye before the seance, then examined ‘Katie King”s hands. ‘Katie’ passed the test without difficulty. But Rosina’s ‘apparition’ had dyed hands. Crookes allowed himself to overlook this—after all, the ‘spirit’ drew its substance from the medium, and might have borrowed the dye too. But Rosina was unable to keep her secret to herself, and told the American medium Annie Fay that she had cheated. Mrs Fay immediately passed this on to Crookes, who demanded a private interview with Rosina. She confessed her deception, and promised never to do it again. Crookes, in turn, promised not to expose her. This promise was to cause him some embarrassment. Rosina’s mother found out about the secret meeting, and put the worst possible construction on it. Having promised Rosina to keep
silence, Crookes had to endure stoically while Mrs Showers spread scandal among her friends and accused him of being a Casanova who habitually seduced his mediums. It was already general gossip that he had slept with Florence Cook when he was ‘investigating’ her in his own house. Crookes finally decided that psychical research was more trouble than it was worth, and gave it up.
In 1888, there was a double scandal. The four Creery girls, whose ‘will game’ had so impressed Barrett—and caused him to found the SPR—were caught cheating. They had been constantly tested ever since Barrett discovered them, and had become thoroughly bored with it all. They admitted that they had devised various simple signals to aid their ‘card guessing’ games—an upward glance for hearts, down for diamonds, and so on. They insisted that they had only decided to cheat fairly recently, and Myers and Gurney believed them, having made quite sure that the girls could not cheat in their own earlier tests. But no one else believed them.
Then, worst of all, the two Fox girls whose manifestations had launched the Spiritualist movement publicly confessed that they were cheats. By 1888, both were in their fifties, both were widows, and both were drinking too much. People were no longer interested in spirit rappings. Sister Leah, on the other hand, was still doing rather well; she and her sisters were barely on speaking terms. It was Leah, in fact, who had launched the fashion for ‘materialisations’ when, at a seance with Robert Dale Owen in 1860, a veiled white figure had walked round the room. With a supporter like Owen, she could hardly fail. Her sisters, on the other hand, had been badly treated by life. Kate’s children had been taken from her by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as a result of her drunkenness. Margaretta had managed to smuggle them to England, to a guardian, but had been sorely tempted to commit suicide by jumping overboard on the return journey. Her strongest desire was to get her own back on her elder sister Leah. So when she arrived back in America, she took the opportunity of an interview with a reporter to declare that all the rappings had been a cheat. On October 21, 1888, she and Kate appeared on a platform at the New York Academy of Music, and Margaretta confessed that she had made the raps by means of a double joint in her big toe. She went on to demonstrate with a series of muffled raps. They were not in the least like the thunderous knockings that had shaken the bedroom of the Hydesville house, but the audience was willing to be convinced, and Margaretta and Kate were able to share $1,500 between them. The reporter Reuben Davenport, who had organised the confession, went on to write a book called The Death Blow to Spiritualism. Much of the $1,500 was spent on alcohol. In due course Margaretta wrote a recantation of the confession, which she handed to a wealthy spiritualist, who allowed her to live in an apartment he owned. Her alcoholism made her an impossible tenant and he had to evict her. She died in 1895 and was buried in a pauper’s grave, followed soon afterwards by Kate. In retrospect, the most significant thing about her confession is that Kate sat silently beside her on stage. She neither confirmed the confession nor offered to demonstrate how she had been deceiving the public with raps for the past thirty years. The inference seems to be that she agreed to share the platform for the sake of the $750, but refused to go further than that.
Another embarrassment to organised psychical research was the remarkable Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. She was an illiterate peasant, of large proportions (like so many mediums), who had been discovered in Naples in 1872, when she was 18. She was the most powerful medium since Daniel Dunglas Home. Chairs retreated or moved towards her when she frowned or beckoned them, and hung suspended in the air. She herself could float up into the air and lie there as if on a couch. She had been investigated by the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who had no doubt of her genuineness. But she was a highly unstable character, violent, impulsive and sly. When coming out of trances she would make openly sexual overtures to males who attracted her. And, what was worse, she cheated. The absurd thing was that her cheating was clumsy, and the least competent researcher had no difficulty in catching her at it. Eusapia herself claimed that this cheating was done by hostile spirits, which may or may not have been true (since she was often wide-awake when she did it). Yet her other phenomena were so impressive that there could be no question of cheating. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion found a better explanation of her cheating when he observed her over a period. After seances at which obviously genuine phenomena had occurred—such as musical instruments floating round the room when Eusapia was tied to her chair—he observed that she was violently ill, sometimes for as much as two days, vomiting up any food she tried to take. If genuine phenomena produced this effect, it was no wonder she tried to get away with cheating . . . When Eusapia came to England in 1895, she was tested by the SPR at Cambridge, with the conjuror Maskelyne present. Her English hosts were far less indulgent towards her outrageous cheating than Lombroso had been, and issued a thoroughly unfavourable report. This should have convinced sceptics that the Society had no interest in protecting impostors. It only spread the impression that most mediums were such frauds that no sane person would waste time on them.
In 1888, the Society suffered another serious blow—the death of one of its most brilliant investigators, Edmund Gurney. In June, he went off to Brighton on some mysterious errand, and was found dead in his hotel bed the next morning with a bottle of chloroform beside him, and a sponge bag over his face. An inquest decided that he died accidentally when taking chloroform for a toothache, but there was gossip at the SPR that it was suicide. Gurney had been testing various Brighton youths for telepathy, and had been impressed. One of his ‘telepaths’ had to leave hastily for South Africa as a result of a divorce scandal, and twenty years later he published a confession, declaring that he had cheated consistently. It has been suggested that Gurney found out that he had been hoaxed for years, and that if he was honest about this, it would do even more damage to psychical research.1 Whatever the truth, his death was a serious loss to the Society.
It was not the first time Gurney had been hoaxed. Just as he was putting the finishing touches to the second volume of Phantasms of the Living in 1886, he received a letter from a Portsmouth naval cadet named Sparks, who described how he had been hypnotising a fellow cadet named Cleave. One day when Cleave wondered what his girlfriend was doing in Wandsworth, Sparks hypnotised him and suggested that he should go to see her. When he came out of the trance, according to Sparks, Cleave said that he had gone into the room where the girl was sitting with her little brother; she had stared at him and looked pale as if she was going to faint . . . Two days later, Cleave received a letter from the girl asking whether anything had happened to him, because she had seen him in the room.
This case was too good to miss, so Gurney went to the trouble of getting confirmatory letters from Cleave (who was 18) and from the girlfriend, as well as from two other cadets who claim to have been present. He printed a full account in Phantasms of the Living. Ten years after his death, Myers and Podmore had to publish a note in the SPR Proceedings admitting that Cleave had now confessed to hoaxing Gurney. It was a lesson in not paying too much attention to ‘witnessed’ statements. Yet in another sense, the case vindicated the authors of Phantasms. The hoaxers had all been teenagers. The majority of people quoted in Phantasms are respectable middle-aged citizens, many of them clergymen, and most of them can have had no possible motive for hoaxing the SPR.
In 1898, Myers himself was involved in a minor scandal that brought discredit on the SPR. In the late 1880s, Myers had met an attractive girl named Ada Goodrich-Freer, who claimed to come from an upper-class Highland family and to be clairvoyant. Myers had a keen eye for a pretty girl, and he and the girl were soon convinced that they were soul mates. There is some evidence that they had a love affair. Myers persuaded her to try crystal-gazing, and he felt the results were impressive—she claimed to have located a lost key and a medical prescription, and obtained from the crystal an address she had accidentally destroyed. Myers wrote a paper about it which came out in the Society’
s journal (he called her simply ‘Miss X’). The Society had no reason for doubting such a well-born and refined young lady—after all, why should she lie? What Myers did not know what that the upper-class Miss Goodrich-Freer was actually the daughter of an Uppingham vet, and her name was simply Freer. She was 30 when Myers met her, not a teenager, as she claimed. And she was a pathological liar. Her motivation has never been made clear, but it was probably simply a desire for attention.
