The Ghost Hunters

by Deborah Blum

  The reception by the science community included some less enthusiastic appraisals. Stanley Hall, head of psychology at Clark University and one of the more disgruntled former members of the ASPR, wrote to the author to praise “your magnificent book.” But to others, Hall complained that there was a little too much William James in it for his taste. And the pioneer of the European experimental psychology movement, William Wundt, was coolly dismissive: “It is literature. It is beautiful. But it is not psychology.”

  Fred Myers had nothing but praise for James’s “big and good book.” More than a publication, however, he saw The Principles of Psychology as an opportunity. In an exuberant letter, Myers wrote to acquaint James with that opportunity, to make sure he realized that there was no other SPR member “on the whole so well situated as you for the successful pushing of the inquiry.”

  “I believe that with a view to (a) the good of mankind (b) even to your ultimate fame, it is essential that a main part of your energy shall henceforth be devoted to these SPR inquiries,” he added.

  Even across the wind-scoured miles of the Atlantic, James wrote back, he could recognize in Myers’s letter the voice of a “despot for psychical research.” Graciously demurring, he countered that Myers himself was far more useful to the cause. His British colleague possessed a gift for ensnaring others in his enthusiasms. “Verily you are of the stuff of which world changers are made.”

  Although not prepared to devote himself to the subject, James agreed that his position—“Professorship, book published & all”—provided “a good pedestal for carrying out psychical research effectively.” As he assured Myers, he had no intention of wasting the platform. James had that year also published in a popular magazine an essay favorably comparing psychical research to other fields of science. To the readers of Scribner’s, James had extravagantly praised his colleagues, naming Henry Sidgwick “the most incorrigibly and exasperatingly critical and skeptical mind in England.” He also praised the SPR publications: “Were I asked to point to a scientific journal where hard-headedness and never-sleeping suspicion of sources of error might be seen in their full bloom, I should have to fall back on the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.” The group’s work he described as cautious, meticulous, and wonderfully puzzling. In that assessment he included the British investigations of hallucinations and hypnosis, as well as Richard Hodgson’s detailed analysis of Leonora Piper.

  The medium and her daughters had with great relief returned to Boston earlier in the year. After taking some months to reestablish her household, she had only recently permitted séances to resume. Hodgson, James wrote, “is distinguished by a balance of mind almost as rare in its way as Sidgwick’s,” capable of accepting that supernatural events could be verified and equally capable of shredding pretense of such occurrences. “It is impossible to say in advance whether it will give him more satisfaction to confirm or to smash a given case by its examination.”

  James admitted that the psychical researchers had yet to prove the existence of supernatural beings or powers. He thought, however, that they’d made a credible start toward that goal. He also thought that reading the SPR journals would lead any reader to conclude that mainstream scientists were wrong to dismiss and denigrate such work. In perhaps his strongest criticism of those scientists to date, James wrote in Scribner’s that in its determined orthodoxy, scientists had come to seem a mirror image of those clergymen who insisted on only one way of seeing the world: “Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a cult.”

  EARLY IN THE SUMMER of 1891, William James’s sister, Alice, wrote from her London home to warn her brother that doctors had discovered a tumor in her breast. He wrote back immediately, with his own unique idea of encouragement and advice.

  Like all the James children, Alice had long been prone to ill health, the same “neuralgia and headache and weariness and palpitations and disgust” that were often William’s companions. Perhaps more than any of them, she suffered from miserable bouts with depression, what William called the “nervous weakness, which has chained you down for all these years.”

  He wrote, “I should think you should be reconciled to the prospect [of death] with all its pluses and minuses. I know you’ve never cared for life and to me now at the age of nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in all of us.” He assured Alice that for all her weaknesses, she also had amazing strengths—“fortitude, good spirits, unsentimentality”—in the midst of grief and illness. His work with Mrs. Piper, with “enlargements of the self in trance,” as he put it, encouraged him to believe that some people might achieve their best potential after death. He hoped his sister would find comfort in that: “When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure there will be an explosion of liberated force and life until then eclipsed and kept down.” James imagined his sister’s entrance into the other world as something dramatic, a shock of energy and light.

  “It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but my dear little sister, if one has things present to one’s mind, and I know they are present enough to your mind, why not bring them out?”

  In late July, James received a letter from his sister’s companion, Katherine Loring, telling him that the cancer was malignant and spreading. Alice was sedated with morphine; she’d asked Loring to reassure her brother that the pain was not terrible. She also wanted him to know that whatever the future held, she was not unhappy with herself or her life: “when I am gone, pray don’t think of me simply as a creature that might have been something else.”

  In late September, spurred to do more than share musings on life and death, James arrived in London. Alice teased that it was her “mortuary attractions” that had coaxed him across the ocean. Gradually, though, her first burst of cheerfulness faltered. “She talks death incessantly,” he wrote to his wife. “It seems to fill her with positive glee.”

  He stayed two weeks before returning home. Alice was nauseated by the morphine. He recommended hypnotism to counter that, patiently teaching Loring how to induce a hypnotic state. But his sister fought the very idea. She considered hypnosis part of William’s psychical nonsense; it reeked of their father’s mystical ways and clutching spirits. She hadn’t found his metaphysical promises reassuring in the least. “I hope,” she confided to her diary, “the dreadful Mrs. Piper won’t be let loose upon my defenseless soul.”

  IN THE DECEMBER 1891 issue of Harper’s, Mark Twain published a personal endorsement of the science of the supernatural. Twain began by declaring that the Society for Psychical Research had accomplished what many said could not be done. It had made the study of the occult a respectable endeavor.

  Further, Twain said, the SPR pioneers had freed people like himself to speak out on such subjects, in this case, on telepathy (which he liked to call mental telegraphy). He had tried to write about it earlier, he said, figuring that his own reputation would be enough to sell such a piece. But his editor had flatly refused to glorify the occasional “coincidence” as telepathy. Now, he wrote, the hard workers of the SPR had “succeeded in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done—they have convinced the world that mental telegraphy is not a jest, but a fact, and that it is a thing not rare but exceedingly common. They have done our age a service—and a very great service, I think.”

  Twain’s intention was to offer his own evidence to support their work, in particular his personal experiences with telepathy. He told of a visit to Washington, D.C., which involved a very late arrival. He knew that a good friend was also planning to be in the capital; but “I did not propose to hunt for him at midnight, especially since I did not know where he was stopping.”

  Although it was late, Twain found himself restless. He went out for a walk, drifted into a cigar shop,
and stayed for a while, “listening to some bummers discussing national politics.” Suddenly his friend came back into his mind, with startling specificity. If he left the shop, turned left, and walked ten feet, his friend would be standing there. Twain immediately walked out the door and turned left. There was his friend, standing on the edge of a street corner, chatting with another man, delighted to see Twain stepping up to join the conversation.

  “In itself the thing was nothing,” Twain commented. “But to know it would happen so beforehand, wasn’t that really curious?”

  The essay went on to catalogue other such events: of many times thinking of one friend or another and writing a hasty note, only to find that the friend had written to him at nearly the same time. Of hearing his wife suddenly mention an event that had just crossed his own mind. Of two writers almost simultaneously coming up with the same idea for a story; of two inventors creating a similar device in almost the same month. He proposed that telepathy could even account for scientists such as Darwin and Wallace developing their insights into evolution during a similar time period.

  “We are always mentioning people, and in that very instant they appear before us. We laugh, and say, ‘Speak of the devil’ and so forth and there we drop it, considering it an ‘accident.’ It is a cheap and convenient way of disposing of a grave and puzzling mystery. The fact is it does seem to happen too often to be an accident.”

  Twain proposed that most people pick up the occasional thought from someone else, casually, telepathically, without conscious awareness. They simply underestimate or deny their own ability. “While I am writing this, doubtless someone on the other side of the globe is writing it too. The question is, am I inspiring him or is he inspiring me?”

  The following month, an inspired response appeared in Scribner’s, an article titled “The Logic of Mental Telegraphy,” by which the author, Joseph Jastrow, clearly meant the illogic of Mark Twain.

  Jastrow, of the University of Wisconsin, had been one of the first members of the ASPR and one of the earliest dropouts. Most of the former ASPR members now preferred to ignore their old association. But a few, notably Jastrow and his mentor, Stanley Hall of Clark University, wished instead to dismantle it.

  Hall, founder of the American Journal of Psychology, wanted to cut psychology clean of any link to the theological study of behavior. Jastrow, a former Hall student who’d founded the psychology department at Wisconsin, was a pure researcher to the core, a noted experimentalist in the field of visual perception. He’d earlier been responsible for those ASPR experiments that discredited the claim that mediums possess a rare sensitivity to magnetic fields.

  Both Jastrow and Hall felt that mere withdrawal from the psychical research society wasn’t enough, that they were obliged to atone for their earlier sins by exposing its wrongness. They worried that adopting their peers’ more lofty approach—ignore it, and it will go away—meant waiting too long to weed superstition out of science.

  As for the demonstrable existence of telepathy, wrote Jastrow furiously in Scribner’s, “nothing could be farther from the truth.” If Mark Twain perceived that he lived in a world too full of coincidences, he could be excused. He was only a writer, a former journalist at that.

  In the late nineteenth century, Jastrow explained, with so many people connected by telegraph and telephone, traveling on fast trains and steam-boats, people crossed paths as never before. So did their thoughts and ideas. It was hardly surprising that some thoughts occurred simultaneously; it was a natural response of people receiving information at nearly the same time. Jastrow described Twain as a typical spiritualist, insisting on the supernatural explanation when an ordinary one would do: “He detects mysterious laws of fortune and freaks of luck ... and utterly refuses to believe the general doctrine of chances, because it is not obviously applicable to his particular case.”

  There was one little coincidence involved in writing his essay. Jastrow had read Twain’s article while on a cycling tour of New Hampshire. Stopping at a library to consult a road atlas, he had seen the latest issue of Harper’s and been so outraged that he went right to his hotel and wrote to the competition, the editor of Scribner’s, proposing a counter article. As soon as Jastrow completed the trip and collected his mail, he discovered that the editor had simultaneously sent him a letter, asking for a response to Twain’s telegraphy article.

  Jastrow was a meticulously honest man. He told that story himself, included it in the article. But he cautioned the reader not to make anything of it. His mind had not communicated with that of the editor. It made perfect sense that they might both happen upon the same notion when seeing Twain’s article. It could happen thrice over, and he would think no different.

  SIDGWICK MIGHT BE hardheaded, Hodgson obsessive, Jastrow hostile in approaching the occult. None of them was armed, however, with all the cold, bare facts reported in a new insider expose of spiritualism, published in 1890 by an author known only as “A. Medium.”

  Thoroughly impressed by it, Hodgson would spend years trying to find the anonymous author of Revelations of a Spirit Medium, but to no avail. A. Medium never surfaced to face the hundreds of spiritualists enraged by this perceived betrayal. Revelations was a manual—albeit a very funny one—on how to gull the gullible.

  Take, for instance, the eerie lights that sometimes graced seances. A. Medium had a recipe for that: Take an empty two-ounce cough syrup bottle and fill it one-fourth full with water. Cut the heads off about one hundred parlor matches, drop them in the water, and cork the bottle. Once the phosphorus had dissolved off the match heads, remove the floating bits of leftover pine from the resulting brownish muck and recork the bottle. In a dark room, when the cork was removed and a little air let into the bottle, it would become “a beautiful yellowish luminous shape.”

  “Try it, reader,” wrote the author. “You will be astonished at the results you can obtain from a bottle of this ‘cough mixture,’ a white handkerchief [draped over the glowing bottle] and a dark room.”

  If a reader wanted to able to handle hot coals—as D. D. Home had sometimes done—A. Medium had a formula for that too: one-half ounce of camphor, two ounces of aquavitae (filtered water), one ounce of quick-silver (mercury), and one ounce of liquid styrax (a natural solution of myrrh), shaken well, spread over the hands, and allowed to dry. You could then “hold your fingers in the blaze quite a while without any bad effect.”

  The writer offered tips for materializing spirits. There were shoemakers who would fit shoes with hollow steel heels for only $20. A. Medium advised filling one heel with fine white netting, to be draped over the body, and the other with an assortment of cloth masks “with which to transform your own face a dozen times.”

  The book recommended a stash of faces painted on cardboard, which could “peer” through the curtains of a cabinet. It told of, but did not endorse, the practice of one female medium who had painted a baby’s face on one of her breasts and pushed it out between cabinet curtains to be kissed.

  A. Medium found the joint-cracking explanation of the Fox sister’s rapping phenomena ridiculous “in view of the fact that there are much more simple methods.” You could sit at a table with your hands resting on top and your thumbnails just touching. “Press them together tightly and slip them a little a time. You will find every time you slip them, one against the other, quite a loud ‘rap’ will be heard.” Books, slates, knees, and heels could all produce rapping sounds as well.

  The book presented tips for almost every possible result produced by a physical medium. And that was its point. A. Medium professed weariness with fraud, with the “thousands of persons earning a dishonest living through the practice of various deceptions in the name of spiritualism.” The author still considered himself a believer. He expressed a certainty of life beyond the grave, of seeing friends in an afterlife, and “more than likely” a physical return to Earth. But for this, A. Medium would not require the help of professionals who were cheats, frauds, drunken men, wome
n “no better than a common prostitute.”

  In the end, A. Medium made the same recommendation that the SPR had been making for years: Investigate the spirit world, but avoid paid mediums. Remember that any street conjurer possesses the tricks to make lights dance in the dark, tables walk in the air.

  THE AMBITIOUS CENSUS of Hallucinations was coming together, but slowly. The SPR’s best statistician, Nora Sidgwick, now had another demanding job, principal of Newnham College.

  Both Nora and her husband had worked to see this new, all-women college established at Cambridge. So had Nora’s family, including brothers Gerald and Arthur Balfour, who had donated money to see Newnham built. The college’s chemistry laboratory was named after another Balfour brother, Francis, who had died in a mountain-climbing accident. As soon as Nora was offered the appointment, Henry Sidgwick knew that his wife would accept and throw herself wholeheartedly into the job.

  It would have been uncharacteristic of her, however, to abandon the unfinished Census of Hallucinations just because she had new responsibilities. Nora left for her office early each day, dressed in her favorite simple black, her hair pulled back, exuding calm. She looked much the same—still neat and composed but undeniably tired, her husband thought—as she came home each evening, only to return to the census.

  “If you ever find me getting slack about the SPR, you must pull me up,” she told her assistant.

  Sidgwick considered his wife the brightest of his circle. He was delighted at her latest achievement, but worried that she couldn’t possibly—and shouldn’t—keep up the double pace of college administrator and psychical researcher. Yet how would the organization manage without her? They’d already lost Gurney, whom William James once candidly described as “the worker of the society,” the one best able to get through “drudgery of the most colossal kind.” Sidgwick did not think the group could afford to let Nora go.