ON SPIRITUALISM
In October 1888, on assignment for the Philadelphia Sun, I was in the audience when Margaret Fox, the founding mother of the Spiritualist movement, stood before a packed hall at the Academy of Music in New York and confessed that she had been “instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too-confiding public.” A year later she recanted that recantation, bringing the whole filthy business full circle. One had the sense that it could never have been otherwise, that by discrediting herself as a reliable witness to her own actions, Margaret had achieved what had always been her objective. All she would own to was her invincible capriciousness. The press called her confession “the Death Blow to Spiritualism.” But the Spiritualists ignored Margaret’s call to disarm, and ultimately the founder was abandoned by the religion she created.
Violet Petra never publicly admitted to fraud. There are those who still believe she was the genuine article—a clairvoyant of extraordinary powers. However, near the end, there was a confession of sorts, wrung from her in a paroxysm of sobbing before a solitary auditor in the lounge of a shabby Philadelphia hotel, on a chilly afternoon in November 1894.
I was that auditor.
Fraud has long been one of my interests. Doubtless it began in childhood when, like most children, I experimented with pushing the casual fib to the outright lie. I said I’d drunk my milk when I’d actually poured it down the drain; I pretended to be ill when I was perfectly well; I blamed a little friend for breaking a toy I’d broken myself. I remember these three episodes because my falsity was quickly detected and the consequences were harsh. The devil, my mother adjured me, is a successful liar and his reward is a permanent residence in hell.
In my childish imagination this made perfect sense. For the duration of my effort to carry off the thing-not-true, I had felt I was living in a furnace. I gave up lying and became, in fact and in practice, a seeker after truth, such as I find it. And when I do find it, it is my business to record it for the public benefit. I am that risible hobgoblin of the contemporary male novelist’s imagination: the female journalist.
In the course of my investigations, I’ve closely observed some talented and professional frauds—they abound in our times as in all others—and have even been caught up in the havoc they inevitably wreak upon those weak-minded enough to trust them. Truly accomplished frauds are rare, but there exists a superfluity of ordinary and presumably intelligent people who are eager to court and to credit them.
The perversity of the liar is that he does not, as I did, dread the thought of being caught in the lie. In fact, the likelihood of exposure is for him no more bothersome than a buzzing insect, and his triumph is most complete when the contempt he has always on reserve for those who catch him out can be fully brought to bear.
A constant alternation between contempt and belligerence is essential to the amour-propre of the confirmed liar. He may be said to be driven from the pillar of one to the post of the other, a hectic gauntlet that constitutes for him a simulacrum of identity. As wind fills a sail, the flagrant dispersal of that which he knows to be false inflates his sense of self. His need for an audience is great, for a podium even greater, and it matters not if his auditors be only his family taken hostage at the dining table or a mob of strangers gathered on a street corner; his lies must be broadcast on the first available soil, they must be watered and cultivated and encouraged to bloom into misshapen flowers—not of evil—but of banality and inutility.
FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE CHARISMATIC SPEAKER AND CLAIRVOYANT MEDIUM VIOLET PETRA
I first saw Violet Petra in 1874 at a private gathering in the home of her patron, a banker named Jacob Wilbur, at his well-appointed town house near Washington Square in New York. She was very young, scarcely more than a girl, and her performance, while affecting, only hinted at what was to come. There was a rage for female trance speaking at that time and men of substance were combing the provinces for attractive young women to grace their parlors with prodigies of clairvoyance. Often these sessions began with a display of the speaker’s better than average knowledge of a subject; say, astronomy or Roman history, chosen at random by the assembled guests. It was understood that the speaker’s eloquence was attributable to the intercession of “spirit guides,” deceased know-alls who spoke through her, without her will or even her consciousness. Some of these were historical figures—Ben Franklin was a popular resource, which struck me as appropriate, given his reputation for meddling in the affairs of others and his preference for the company of pretty women. Once the fad for guides got under way, American Indians were much in evidence, presumably chosen for their spiritual purity. These guides served as conduits to the immense, sunny, happy land where the spirits of the dead wandered aimlessly waiting for a summons from the loved ones they had left behind.
Violet Petra didn’t have a spirit guide at that first gathering in New York. She spoke for fifteen minutes on the subject of magnetic attraction and took a few questions written on scraps of paper and tossed into a hat. I remember one, an inquiry about the health of the questioner’s relative who had recently decamped for California. This traveler, described only as “my niece,” had insisted on making the trip to join her husband, though she knew herself to be in a delicate condition. Violet read out the question to the group in her soft, clear voice, keeping her gaze upon the paper. Her eyes closed, her lips parted, and she dropped her chin upon her breastbone, which caused her dark, waving hair to fall forward, curtaining her features. A long moment passed, long enough for the gentleman next to me to finger his pocket watch and the air to grow thick with anticipation. Then she lifted her face, brushing her hair back with one hand, and I saw the trademark oddity of her left eye, which bulged in its socket, the iris wandering off to one side.
This peculiarity of Violet Petra’s eye was to become part of her myth. According to the brief autobiographical account sometimes appended to her speaking programs, it was the result of her first contact with the spirit world, which occurred when she was nine years old in a meadow near her bucolic childhood home in upstate New York. It was a warm summer’s day, and she was busily gathering clover to weave into a crown. Her older sister, propped against a maple tree with her writing desk in her lap, was composing a letter. Little Violet could hear the crop-crop of her pony grazing near the fence of his pasture. The sun brushed the world with a liquid light outlining each flower in gold, or so it seemed to her. She felt a kiss of cool air against her cheek, once, twice. Startled, she brought her hand to touch the spot. A voice close to her ear whispered her name, a voice she recognized as belonging to her grandmother, which was odd, as she knew her grandmother was far away, at her home in Philadelphia. But here she was, gently summoning her granddaughter by her pet name, which was Viva. The delighted child raised her eyes and for a moment looked into her beloved granny’s sweetly smiling face. In the next moment, with the speed and thwack of an arrow striking a target, a bolt of light sliced into her left eyeball. She was knocked backward by the blow, and sprawled unconscious upon the clover with her bouquet still clutched in her hand.
Some hours later she woke up in her own bed. Her mother rose from her chair nearby, laying her knitting on the side table as, with tremulous lips and moistened eye, she approached her daughter. “Where’s Granny?” lisped the winsome child. “I know she’s here. She called me.”
Late that night a telegram arrived from Philadelphia with the woeful news that Violet’s grandmother, a sprightly widow of independent means and spirit who until that day enjoyed excellent health, had collapsed on the sidewalk outside her town house. Before a doctor could be summoned to her aid, she passed from this life, expiring, speechless, in the arms of a stranger.
I’ve never been able to determine whether this story had some basis in the original trauma that resulted in the peculiarity of Violet’s eye, or was entirely fabricated to take advantage of a condition predating her first experience of spirit communication. Apart from the autobiographical sketch and a
nother carefully documented article that has to do with her accurate prediction of a shipwreck during the war, Violet Petra’s history is a carefully guarded secret. She appeared in Boston, like Venus, full blown from some westerly town she refuses to name. She was, she claims, eighteen at that time, but she may have been younger. Like many of her coreligionists, she has a thorough knowledge of the Bible, which book she holds in contempt. She has a strong background and a keen interest in geology, suggesting to me that Petra is not her real name.
I knew nothing about her that evening in Mr. Wilbur’s lavishly furnished drawing room. When she raised her face to her attentive audience, the alteration in her features—for it wasn’t just the eye; her complexion was deathly pale and her lips dark and tumid—was so striking that I joined in the general intake of breath. She coughed, bringing two fingers to her sternum, as if opening a path from her heart to her throat. When she spoke her voice was deeper than her ordinary speaking voice. It wasn’t an entirely different voice; it wasn’t, as is sometimes the case with female mediums, a masculine voice, but it had a sonorous, humorless gravity, an irresistible authority that held her listeners in her sway.
“Bridget and her baby son have come over,” she said. “They are happy, they send love to Aunt Jane.” She paused while Aunt Jane, who had revealed neither her own name nor that of her niece, burst into tears. “I hear another name,” Violet continued. “It’s Jack. No, it’s Zachary, Bridget is watching over him. All will be well.”
Zachary, the sobbing Aunt Jane testified, was Bridget’s younger brother, a boy of ten who was very ill; in fact, it was feared, near death’s door, and under the doctor’s watchful care.
Violet closed her eyes, her head tilted to one side in an attitude of listening. The room grew silent, but for the subdued weeping of the questioner, as all attempted to hear what the medium was evidently no longer hearing. Perhaps thirty seconds passed before she fell back in her chair and opened her eyes, a smile of pure serenity lingering about her lips. “Have I been helpful?” she asked pleasantly, hopefully. Mr. Wilbur’s enchanted guests burst into wild applause.
How wild a guess was it that a pregnant girl on her way to California wouldn’t survive the trip? Or that a child sick with fever would recover? The odds are even, and an educated surmise tips the scale this way or that. In the case of the sick child, his death could be passed off as the result of his dead sister’s calling him home to her. Either way, Violet Petra’s prediction was pretty safe.
Of course, diligent journalist that I am, I spent the following morning tracking down the ailing Zachary, which wasn’t difficult, as the family was eager to give out the glad news that the boy’s fever had broken during the night, that he was cheerful, hungry, eager to be out of bed, and that his full recovery was confidently anticipated by all who loved him.
AMONG THE SPIRITUALISTS
After that first trance-lecture in Mr. Wilbur’s lavish New York flat, I didn’t see or hear of Violet Petra, nor did my thoughts linger upon her, for ten years. During that time the Spiritualist movement flourished until its adherents were so numerous that a confession of orthodoxy was called for and briefly embraced. As Mr. William James has observed, “When a religion becomes an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over; the spring is dry,” and so it was for the quarrelsome Spiritualists. In 1872, failing to achieve unanimity at their national convention, they splintered into diverse camps. And by camps, I don’t mean associations of coreligionists with conflicting views, but actual meeting places, complete with grounds, tents, and cottages, materializing like ectoplasm at a séance on the shores of sparkling New England lakes, and serviced by railroads, restaurants, furniture movers, cleaners, farmers, farriers, florists, resident musicians, photographers, and butchers. No one knew where the spirits of the dead spent the winters, but once the last trace of frost had retreated from the hinterlands, they gathered at Silver Lake and Lake Pleasant in anticipation of their devotees among the living. These camp meetings were so popular that they came to the attention of the press, and so one hot afternoon in August, having boarded the train at Fitchburg, I alighted at Lake Pleasant clutching my valise, and followed the wooden walkway through a shady grove of white pine, past the open-air dance pavilion, and down the sturdy staircase to the wide and welcoming veranda of the gleaming new Lake Pleasant Hotel.
Inside was a bustle of people and a few barking dogs, all evidently acquainted with and enthusiastic about the prospect of long summer days and nights passed in one another’s company. As I approached the desk, the strain of a violin rose above the chatter, weaving a cheerful, countrified ribbon of sound through the general uproar. The mustached clerk greeted me with extreme affability; my reservation was in order and my key at the ready. He regretted that I had requested only four nights; or rather he maintained that I would regret it. “Once our guests arrive, they generally don’t want to leave. You won’t find better company or a more beautiful setting in the state.”
“It is a lovely spot,” I agreed.
“And no end of entertainments,” he continued, folding a printed sheet and pressing it upon me. “Here’s the daily program, and the list of speakers for the week. There’s a band concert at the shell twice a day, and the orchestra in the evening at the dance pavilion. Everyone enjoys the dancing, young and old.”
I opened the sheet and glanced at the headings: “Instrumental Music,” “Vocal Music,” “Illuminations,” “Public and Test Mediums,” “Entertainments,” “Boating,” “Board and Lodging.”
“I had no idea it was so festive,” I observed.
“Well, Miss Grant,” replied the sharp-witted clerk. “You’re not among the Methodists here.”
I smiled knowingly. The Methodist and Spiritualist brethren were notoriously antipathetic, though they have at times shared the same campgrounds. Some years ago their summer meetings overlapped at Lake Pleasant and the results were, especially on the Methodist side, rancorous. “They have given themselves over to Satan,” the Methodist preacher complained to the local newspaper in a letter printed beneath the caustic heading “The Devil Takes Lake Pleasant.” The editor responded that most townspeople preferred the Spiritualist meetings, as “all are welcome at the dances and musical events.” After that, the Methodists retreated, and the Spiritualists virtually owned Lake Pleasant.
Considering the increased level of eccentricity facilitated by residence among the like-minded, I climbed the stairs and turned the key to my small but comfortably furnished room. If one person in a crowd of skeptics falls on the floor and declares that the spirit of Black Feather has a message for Mrs. Green, he may be presumed mad and carted off to an asylum. But if all the bystanders agree that Black Feather is as reliable as the newspapers, then the message will be duly delivered to Mrs. Green, and it won’t be long before someone else receives a message from Black Feather, or White Arrow, or Pocahontas, and the circle will begin to close out anyone who doesn’t find recourse to dead Indians a perfectly legitimate practice. There I was, unpacking my blouses in a sunny room in an efficiently run hotel booked solid with pleasure seekers who, on a summer day dedicated to the salubrious pastimes of boating, singing, dining, whist playing, and dancing, would find time for a séance or a session with the spirit photographer. I gazed from my window at two women seated on a wooden bench shaded by towering pines: a white-haired dowager with hooded eyes and a hawkish nose, engaged in feverish conversation with a plumpish matron in a billowing white lawn dress, the bodice trimmed in pink satin, languorously fanning her face, which was partially obscured by the wide brim of her straw hat. Farther down the dirt-packed lane, an elderly man with a flowing white beard, his plain farmer’s flannels covered by a long striped linen apron, pulled a wagon laden with colorful vegetables toward a cluster of bright summer cottages fronting on the lake. It didn’t look like an asylum, nor did it resemble a religious community, but it was, in my view, surely a little of both.
When I had unpacked my valise and hung my apparel in the wardr
obe, I took a seat at the writing table and perused the program, which I noted was professionally printed on good-quality paper. There was a long list of speakers’ names and a short one of “Public and Test Mediums,” most of whom were men. Some qualified their listing with their specialties. There was Mr. Cyrus Walker, Slate Writing Medium, and Mrs. J. J. Spence, Clairvoyant Physician, and Dr. Charles Hodges, Magnetic Healer. I’d done a little research in preparation for my assignment, and some of the names were familiar to me.
My editor would be satisfied with a lively description of the scene, but my curiosity was aroused, and I had in mind a longer, investigative piece, something I might offer freelance to a journal—I knew of a likely one—devoted to debunking all things unscientific.
But how, exactly, might I best carry out my investigations? Should I fake an illness and seek the services of the “clairvoyant physician,” or simply appear at a test séance as what I was, a skeptic requiring persuasion? How close was the community, how incestuous the chatter among the practitioners? Upward of five thousand visitors were expected through the season; should I seek anonymity in the crowd or declare my intention to herald the glories of the Spiritualist movement to the world at large?
At length, noting in the column headed “Board and Lodging” the possibility of dining at the Lakeside Café, I made up my mind to do nothing more investigative than seeking out my supper. It was too warm in my room and lakeside dining might include a breeze.
This dining establishment consisted of a tent with low wooden sides and a wide, planked floor. The canvas on the lakeside, raised to form an awning, gave the diners a view of the various boating parties gliding on the smooth water. The tables were set with clean linens and vases of wildflowers, and the ceiling strung with Japanese paper lanterns that were not yet lit, as the sun was still low in the western sky. Though several groups were already seated, the room was by no means full. A young woman in a starched apron showed me to a table near the water. I ordered my food—there was no menu, only a few choices, fish or roast beef, two soups, potatoes or green beans—and settled myself, glancing about at my fellow diners. A breeze, as I had hoped, rustled among the lanterns, but it was stale and damp, like a human breath. I could feel my hair frizzing along my forehead and at the nape of my neck. At the table nearest me, an elderly couple earnestly spooned up soup as if engaged in a competition to empty their bowls. Beyond them, his back to me, a gentleman with wavy silver hair and wide shoulders stretching the seams of a striped linen jacket laughed abruptly. I leaned out past the soup-eaters to take in his entertaining companion, a young woman I could see only in profile. She was small and willowy, dressed in an odd, vaguely Grecian gown of white crepe, her heavy dark hair bound in a topknot and pierced by two large white feathers. She gazed at the man, who was dabbing his napkin to his lips in an attempt to stifle his laughter. Her own lips were slightly parted, her eyebrows lifted, her expression hesitant, as if she had not expected to provoke hilarity.
The Ghost of the Mary Celeste Page 12
