The Ghost Hunters

by Deborah Blum

  His fellow scientists fell short of such scrupulosity, he thought—especially those investigating spiritualism. While traveling in the United States on an 1886 lecture tour, he’d become particularly irate with the ASPR’s apparent insistence on exposing every medium that passed before them. He was even angry with William James, who, despite his qualified support of Leonora Piper, had helped discredit some of the more popular physical mediums in Boston.

  It seemed to Wallace that the scientists were missing the point of parlor seances and the bedazzlements in which professional mediums dealt. He didn’t deny that floating furniture and slate writing were trivial. But he thought such demonstrations were “the only means of compelling attention to the subject, and this is more particularly the case with those imbued with the teachings of modern science.”

  Wallace complained that scientists were impossible to please. If they observed physical effects, they characterized them as fraud. If they were asked to study telepathy or other mental demonstrations, they responded that it wasn’t worthwhile, since there was no measurable physical effect. He knew that even the SPR leaders considered him too gullible. Oliver Lodge said that the self-educated Wallace lacked the objectivity he might have gained from formal scientific schooling. More charitably, Fred Myers thought Wallace too fundamentally decent to comprehend the base dishonesty of the medium trade. “There are natures... which stand so far removed from the meaner temptations of humanity that those gifted at birth can no more enter into the true mind of a cheat than I can enter into the true mind of a chimpanzee.”

  But Wallace took the position that his critics should first accomplish something. “I think your constant allegation of fraud on mere suspicion unreasonable & unscientific,” he wrote James, angry at the latter’s dismissal of some of Wallace’s favored mediums. “You ask for facts & proofs on our side but offer only suspicions on yours.”

  THE TWO FAT volumes of Phantasms of the Living were at the printer. Its publication date was set for October 1886. Not soon enough. Too soon. Everyone concerned suffered nervous jitters.

  Sidgwick worried that no one would read it. Then he worried that people would read it and “select the weak stories to make fun of.” Then he worried that such selections would diminish the book’s influence. “It will have one advantage—hard to get in these days—that there never has been a book of the kind.”

  Gurney worried over the volume’s imperfections, “the monotonous assortment that calls itself a cumulative proof.... It is a ragged affair. Things that have taken days of dull inquiry will look no better than if they had been picked up in 3 minutes.” Still, he wrote to James, “to be sincere I am glad to have done with it, & feel sure that the time, being my time could not have been better spent. And life, which has been for many months a petty fever, will now assume its more normal ditch-water aspect.”

  Myers worried that they would fail to make people think. Despite Sidgwick’s cautions and admonitions, he’d maintained his challenge to organized religion. But he had shifted his primary attack. Religious dogma was irritatingly, willfully blind, Myers thought. But scientific dogma was worse. He sought to counter efforts by traditional researchers to marginalize the work of psychical research. “We conceive ourselves to be working (however imperfectly) in the main track of discovery,” he wrote, pointing out that the SPR’s investigations had already repelled “the crazy wonder-mongers.” The difference was that he and his friends did not choose to limit scientific scope—or to define reality—within the narrow boundaries that the “ruthless hand of science” allowed. They hoped to persuade the research community to be more intellectually adventurous and “to lay the foundation-stone of a study which will loom large in the approaching age.”

  Science’s tight rein on reality, Myers said, reduced the universe to a large machine and people to small ones. Scientists declared human free will to be an illusion, and emotions like love to be vestigial instincts. “Our vaunted personality itself is seen to depend on a shifting and unstable synergy of a number of nervous centres, the defect of a portion of which may alter our character altogether.” Research was stripping people of complexity and the world of promise and reward, he argued. “The emotional creed of educated men is becoming divorced from their scientific creed.”

  Given that scientists did not yet know everything—at least, so Myers believed—he deemed it far too soon to declare questions of immortality and spirit off limits to rational men. If scientific leaders were to be honest, they would acknowledge that they didn’t hold a monopoly on the important questions of human existence. Rather than discouraging those questions, they would seek to help answer them.

  As well as issuing a sweeping challenge, though, Myers could also offer some very specific ways in which researchers might join the investigation. The SPR offered some conclusions and some theories on which to build:

  1. Telepathy, by which Myers meant the transfer of thoughts and feelings from one mind to another—was a fact in Nature.

  2. Phantasms, by which he meant impressions, voices, or figures of the dead and dying, were seen by their friends and relatives with a frequency beyond chance.

  3. Telepathy might explain these phantasms, since clearly they represented action of one mind on another. The “second thesis therefore confirms, and is confirmed by the first.”

  To borrow a historical analogy, Myers compared launching a new science to geographical exploration at its most world-changing. He invoked the explorers Magellan and Columbus, feeling their way through unknown waters, “ploughing through some strange ocean where beds of entangling seaweed cumber the trackless way.”

  The seaweed itself might “foreshadow a land unknown”; the peculiar patterns of crisis apparitions might lead to a far more detailed understanding of communication at time of death. If Columbus could stumble into America by such a way, adventurous researchers too might blunder their way into another world.

  IN SUPPORT OF Myers’s call to action, Gurney cited the best evidence so far assembled for both telepathy and crisis apparitions. In support of thought transference, he reviewed all the work; from Barrett’s early studies to some rather neat new work he’d done himself on the telepathic transmission of sensations, such as taste.

  Gurney had set up a testing lab in which one taster and two “recipients” each sat in a different room. The sender in one room tasted what he or she was given, with no foreknowledge of what it would be. Immediately after, each recipient in his or her individual rooms was asked to describe it. Gurney simply listed some of the results.

  Powdered nutmeg

  Response from two different recipients:• Ginger

  • Nutmeg

  Powder of dry celery • A bitter herb

  • Something like chamomile

  Worcestershire sauce • Something sweet, also acid, a curious taste

  • Is it vinegar?

  Bitter aloes • Something frightfully hot

  • It is a very horrid taste

  Gurney proposed that shared perceptions came from a transfer of mental energy. He likened it to the transferred vibrations from one tuning fork to another. He didn’t know yet—nobody did—how that transfer occurred or what form of energy might carry a thought from one person to another.

  The mind was so clearly an unreliable instrument—not predictable, not consistent—that it tended to complicate all efforts to make sense of telepathy. Sometimes the “transfer” was pitch-perfect, sometimes it was nonexistent. Sometimes it was as if they were measuring one thought in two heads; sometimes it was as if the experimenters were testing two different species on two different planets. Some people seemed adept at sending and clumsy at receiving, some the opposite. Some had no talent at all for the exercise. Some exhibited an almost terrifying awareness of the thoughts in someone else’s head. Some people called nutmeg ginger. Worcestershire sauce became vinegar. Some of their drawing examples were close copies, some borderline. A sender drew a profile of a man with a beard; the recipient drew a man�
��s profile, but beardless. A downward arrow turned into a shooting star. The name C-L-A-R-A became C-L-A-R-V.

  What mechanical system, what physical method of transmission, Gurney wondered, could possibly explain such a wildly varied range of results? His speculation was that the solution lay in the slightly wrong answer. Perhaps the information might be sent in one form, but it could then be altered—bent even—by the mind of the receiver. A man might try conveying the taste of Worcestershire sauce to a woman. The woman might have always been unusually sensitive to the vinegar that was part of the sauce ingredients. He sends a complex taste; she keys into one aspect, and Worcestershire sauce becomes vinegar.

  It was, he thought, like a thousand everyday conversations: Henry and Nora Sidgwick talking about their garden, her mind calling up images of glorious roses and starry lilies, his mind flinching from memories of pollen-dusted air and hay fever miseries. The same subject filtered through different experiences—even between two people who knew each other well. Why should anyone expect the sharing of a thought to be easy or predictable?

  The wonderfully complicated ways that two minds might interact also came to intrigue—and even obsess—Gurney’s colleague Myers. Pondering the way the mind works below its conscious level, the way it adjusts and personally tunes the information it receives, Myers would come to believe that conscious thoughts and responses are influenced by information stored in the “subliminal mind,” a concept that would later be called the subconscious.

  The more detail-oriented Gurney focused for the moment on how such mental exchanges might explain puzzles in telepathy—and in crisis apparitions as well. His idea was, as Myers had proposed earlier, that crisis apparitions might be created telepathically. In a last burst of energy, dying or desperately ill persons might send their thoughts flying toward a friend, a family member, someone held in their mind during their final moments.

  Blazing with intensity, those thoughts might reach the minds of people normally impervious to telepathic energy. And in the mind of the receiver, that personal contact might be also be altered, transformed by memory and emotion into a voice in the night, an image, the touch of a hand. His theory, thus, might well provide the answer to Nora Sidgwick’s earlier objection to “the ghosts of clothes.”

  Why do we see apparitions as clothed, when cloth is clearly inanimate, a material without any chance of an afterlife? The most likely answer, Gurney thought, is that our own mind puts clothes on the ghost. We receive an impression of our dying mother; that image becomes wrapped in memories, tangled in them, dressed by them. She appears in her favorite Sunday outfit, feathered bonnet and all. Or our father appears clothed as he always was, on the way to the office; watch chain gleaming across the gray wool of his waistcoat.

  Gurney’s favorite of many examples that he saw favoring this interpretation came from a London woman recalling a vision in August 1884.

  The lady was out for a drive in an open landau when she saw an old friend walking down the street. She was startled because she had thought her friend was vacationing by the seashore. She was further surprised that her friend wore a favorite sealskin jacket. She knew the warm jacket well, but it seemed odd attire in the hazy warmth of a summer day.

  She called out a greeting to her friend. To her additional surprise, the woman did not answer; indeed, her head stayed slightly turned away. “For the next 10 minutes or so, I was puzzling to think what could have brought her back to London,” and why she had behaved so. The woman wished she had asked her coachman to turn around so that she could have caught up with her friend. When she got home, she called the butler to inquire if she had a visitor and was told no. She wondered if her friend had gone to her sister’s home instead and sent a servant to find out—but she was not there either. Three days later, she saw in the London paper that her friend had died at the seashore, on the day that she saw her in the street.

  The story had the same elements of so many other crisis apparitions, but, for purpose of the argument, Gurney wanted to focus on that unlikely sealskin coat. He suspected the detail had come right out of his correspondent’s mind, that she had received a “telepathic impression” of her friend and filled it out, adorning her friend with that familiar fur. In other words, he said, it is our own mind that creates the look of the apparition, adds to it out of our own experience: “One percipient may hear his parent’s voice; another may imagine the touch of his hand upon his head; a third may see him in his wonted dress and aspect; a fourth may see him as he might appear when dying ... others may invest the disturbing idea with every sort of visible symbolism, derived from their mind’s habitual furniture and their wonted trains of thought.”

  The traditional scientist would counter, Gurney knew, that every apparition could be explained as coincidence. Dreams and daydreams, images of a friend or relative, frequently flitted through everyone’s consciousness. Such images might randomly occur at the time of a crisis, and if so, they would be far better remembered than those lacking such dramatic narrative. The dreams and the voices would take on an undeserved sense of mystery and power, as one might argue about Twain’s dream of his dead brother.

  “The question for us now,” Gurney said, “is whether these coincidences can, or cannot, be explained as accidental. If they can, then the theory of telepathy—so far as applied to apparitions—falls to the ground.” But if he could prove, with statistics for instance, that “the same sort of startling coincidence is again and again repeated,” far beyond what reasonable chance would predict, then he thought he could counter the objection.

  Gurney’s other name for crisis apparitions was “hallucinations of the sane.” Almost everyone interviewed described these events as one time only. Almost everyone was uncomfortable or unhappy with the fact that they’d seen a dead woman while driving in the street, heard a deceased friend’s voice. Most of those interviewed insisted that they were not superstitious, loathed spiritualism, and were baffled by the experience.

  The question that needed to be answered, then, was how often did rational people, in the course of their everyday lives, find themselves caught up in such a hallucination? Clearly some kind of survey was needed, a census of hallucinations, which was exactly what Gurney proposed. He had done some preliminary sampling, randomly mailing out questionnaires and receiving 5,705 answers to the question, “Since January 1, 1874, have you—when in good health, free from anxiety and completely awake—had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a human being, or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence, when no one was there? Yes or no?”

  Twenty-three persons during those twelve years had reported a “visual hallucination.” This might seem small, Gurney said, but based on the adult population of Britain and the number of deaths, he calculated the random chance of such a vision was perhaps a trillion to one. That made 23 positive responses out of 5,705 people seem a rather startling preliminary result. Emphasis on preliminary; Gurney thought only a much larger census, with perhaps ten times as many people, would eliminate statistical doubt.

  The survey, inadequate though it was, also yielded another interesting correlation. All of the visual hallucinations occurred within twelve hours of the death of the person seen. If Gurney also analyzed the 702 crisis apparitions recounted in Phantasms of the Living, more than half of them, 401 to be exact, appeared near the moment of death, and another 25 occurred toward the end of a fatal illness.

  Questions and obstacles jostled for room in his thoughts. There were cases when a group of people reported seeing a crisis apparition. Did a dying person really have the energy to send out multiple messages? And if haunted houses were ever proved to exist, it would be hard, not to say impossible, to argue that a momentary flash of connection could account for a ghostly presence seen by many people, over and over again, for many years. For that, one would have to prove psychometry, the idea that the traumatic energy of a death could permeate an object or a place indefinitely. The intrinsic weirdness of the work seemed
an obstacle in itself.

  “The peculiarity of the subject cannot be gainsaid and must be boldly faced,” Gurney wrote. “For aught I can tell, the hundreds of instances may have to be made thousands. If the phenomena cannot be commanded at will, the stricter must be the search for them; if they are exceptionally transient and elusive, the greater is the importance of strong contemporary evidence.” But even without that, he could feel himself slipping into certainty—that peculiarity was simply characteristic of the way that the dead said their good-byes.

  PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING’S 1886 publication placed it in the midst of another tumultuous, hectic, forward-thinking year. In Paris, Louis Pasteur founded his medical institute; in New York, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated; in Tokyo, the Imperial University was completed. A sense of perpetual notion, of a life “chopped up by multifarious things” weighed upon William James.

  He and Alice had decided to buy a retreat in Chocorua, New Hampshire, “a bit of land on a lovely lake in New Hampshire, with a mountain 3500 feet behind it, and 90 acres of land, oaks, pines, etc., brook, water, house.” It had cost a hefty $750, but he thought the investment in contentedness worth the price. James needed a getaway place; he was constantly stressed, headachy, and nervous. His book on psychology had still to be completed; he was expanding his interest in philosophy; and he and Alice were expecting another child. They wondered if they might not also need a new, larger home in Cambridge.