by Colin Wilson
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 21 October 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 eighteen. 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.* 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 eighteen) 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 thirty when Myers met her, not a teenager, as s
he claimed. And she was a pathological liar. Her motivation has never been made clear, but it was probably simply a desire for attention.
The Society sent Miss Goodrich-Freer to the Highlands to investigate the whole subject of second sight; it emerged later that she simply borrowed a manuscript from a folklore-collecting priest and printed his material as her own. Sent to investigate a haunting in Surrey, she told the owners of the house that she had seen nothing, but told the SPR that she had seen a hooded female ghost as she dressed for dinner. That should have made them suspicious, but the attractive and well-mannered Miss Goodrich-Freer seemed above suspicion.
In 1897 she heard rumours that Ballechin House, in Scotland, was haunted, and persuaded a member of the SPR to rent it for her, for ‘shooting and fishing’. Once there, she claimed to have witnessed all kinds of unearthly phenomena — thumps, bangs, ghostly screams, phantom footsteps, and elusive presences. There was a poltergeist that tore the clothes off the bed, and a ghostly nun, who was spotted by Miss Goodrich-Freer in a nearby glen. Oddly enough, guests who came to stay with Miss Goodrich-Freer never encountered the more terrifying phenomena, but they heard ominous bangs and footsteps. Back in London, she proceeded to write her Alleged Haunting of Ballechin House, but was incensed when one of her guests, a certain J. Callendar Ross, beat her past the post with an article in The Times entitled ‘On the Trail of a Ghost’; its tone was sceptical, not to say satirical. A furious correspondence ensued in the columns of The Times, in the course of which it became clear that Miss Goodrich-Freer and the SPR had rented the house under false pretences. Its owner was naturally displeased at the damage to his rental prospects of all this sensational publicity. Myers, who had been a visitor to Ballechin House, naturally felt obliged to support Miss Goodrich-Freer. But when the wife of the owner denounced the SPR in The Times, he hastened to declare that he had long ago decided against publishing his own observations. Another guest who had been at Ballechin with him immediately contradicted him, saying that Myers had definitely expressed his intention of writing about the haunting. Miss Goodrich-Freer herself was enraged by what she felt to be Myers’s unchivalrous desertion. And Mr Callendar Ross expressed the general feeling when he referred to ‘the suspicion and disgust that close contact with the SPR tends to excite’. When Miss Goodrich-Freer published her book on Ballechin, there was still more bad feeling.
The scandal may well have brought on the illness that was to kill Myers in 1901. Miss Goodrich-Freer herself experienced a sudden coldness on the part of other SPR members, and in his review of her book on Ballechin, Frank Podmore came very close to calling her a liar. There is evidence* that she was caught cheating at a table-rapping seance in 1901, and decided to leave England for Jerusalem, where she married a man who was sixteen years her junior — convincing him that she was two years younger than he was … She died in 1931 at the age of seventy-four but continued to lie to the end — her death certificate gives her age as fifty-six.
These preposterous scandals — mediums in their underwear and ghosts with double-jointed big toes — had the unfortunate effect of suggesting that the SPR was a collection of bumbling crackpots. In fact, looking back after more than a century, we can see that its achievement during those first two decades was monumentally impressive. It had set out to answer the question: Can the paranormal be taken seriously, or is it a collection of old wives’ tales and delusions? What undoubtedly surprised those pioneers was the sheer mass of evidence for the paranormal. It must have seemed incredible that one person in ten had experienced a hallucination, and that so many people had seen apparitions of dying relatives or had out-of-the-body experiences. Newspaper scandals about fake mediums may have impressed the public, but what impressed the SPR was that so many mediums were obviously genuine, and that so much evidence for life after death stood up to the strictest examination. When Callendar Ross spoke about the ‘suspicion and disgust’ excited by the SPR, he was expressing the feeling of most healthy-minded people towards a ‘morbid’ subject like psychical research. But morbid or not, it refused to go away. And the Society made it harder to ignore by accumulating a positive mountain of evidence. Phantasms of the Living may be one of the most boring books ever written, but its two thousand pages of cases finally batter the mind into the recognition that this is something that has to be faced.
Since we have devoted so much space to scandals and exposures, it is only fair to look more closely at a cross-section of the kind of evidence that finally convinced those pioneers that they were dealing with reality.
On 21 October 1893, Prince Victor Duleep Singh, a son of a maharajah, went to bed in a Berlin hotel, where he was staying together with Lord Carnarvon. Before switching off the light, he looked across the room at a framed picture that hung on the opposite wall. To his surprise, he saw the face of his father, looking at him with an intent expression. Thinking that the picture might resemble his father, he got out of bed to see; in fact, it showed a girl holding a rose and leaning on a balcony. Prince Victor described the experience to Lord Carnarvon the next morning. Later the same day, he received a telegram announcing that his father had died of a stroke the previous day. The prince had seen his father’s face at the time when the maharajah was lying unconscious after the stroke, a few hours before he died.
On the night of 16 October 1902, the wife of a railway guard woke up about 3 a.m. for a drink of water. She was alone in bed, because her husband was on night duty, and the room was dimly lighted by a gas mantle. As she looked into the water, she saw a clear image of goods wagons smashing into one another, and observed which of them was most damaged. She was worried about her husband, in case he had had an accident. At nine the next morning he returned home, and she told him what she had seen. He told her that there had been an accident on the line that night, and it had happened just as she had seen.
The odd point about this case is that her husband had passed the scene of the accident twice: once at the time his wife had seen her Vision’ in the glass of water, and again four hours later, when his train was on its way back. But when he passed it for the first time, it was dark and he could not see what was happening. At 7 a.m. it was light, and he had then been able to see the scene clearly — as his wife had seen it in the water. Of course, her husband may have seen far more subconsciously than he was aware of seeing. But if this was telepathy, then he had managed to convey to his wife far more than he was aware of seeing.
The next case is perhaps one of the most famous ever recorded by the SPR. On 9 July 1904, the novelist Rider Haggard suffered such a bad nightmare that his wife shock him awake. In his dream, he had seen his daughter’s black retriever dog, Bob, lying on its side among the undergrowth beside some water. Its head was at an unnatural angle, and it seemed to be trying to tell him that it was dying.
The next morning at breakfast Haggard told his daughter Angela about his dream. She was quite unworried because she had seen Bob the previous evening and he was safe and well. It was only later in the day that they learned that Bob was missing. Four days later, the dog’s body was found floating in the nearby river. It had been struck by a train on the night Haggard had dreamed about it. He was able to work out the precise time the accident had taken place — a few hours before he had awakened from his nightmare.
On 19 March 1917, Mrs Dorothy Spearman was in her room in a hotel in Calcutta, feeding her baby son. Her little daughter was also in the room. She felt there was someone behind her, and looked round to see her half-brother, Eldred Bowyer-Bower, standing there; he was an officer in the Royal Flying Corps. He looked perfectly normal, and Mrs Spearman assumed he had been posted to India and come to see her. She told him that she would put the baby down, and then they could have a long talk. But when she had finished tucking in the baby, her half-brother had vanished. Her daughter did not appear to have seen anyone. She learned later that her half-brother had been shot down over the German lines at about the time she had seen him.
On 7 December 1918, Lieutenant J.
J. Larkin, an RAF officer, was writing letters in the billet when he heard someone walking up the passage outside. Then the door opened, and his friend Lieutenant David McConnel shouted ‘Hello boy!’ Larkin turned and saw McConnel standing there, holding the doorknob in his hand. He said: ‘Hello, back already?’ and McConnel replied ‘Yes, had a good trip’. He had been ferrying a plane to a nearby aerodrome. Then McConnel closed the door with a bang and clattered off.
When Larkin learned several hours later that McConnel had crashed that afternoon, he assumed that it must have been after he had seen him. In fact, McConnel had been killed at roughly the same time that Larkin saw him at the door.
