The Ghost Hunters

by Deborah Blum

  Psychical research was clearly costing William James academic prestige and political capital among his fellow scientists. Privately, he confessed some regrets over it. Publicly, James responded as if he didn’t care. He wrote back to Science, characterizing Cattell’s position as a childishly simple argument that “mediums are scientific outlaws and their defendants are quasi-insane,” going on to suggest that the magazine’s readers might prefer more intelligent, sophisticated criticisms. For the discriminating reader, James recommended Sidgwick’s dissection of the G.P. case, which could be found in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

  Continuing that acerbic exchange, Cattell dismissed the opinions of nonscientists, and especially those belonging to the SPR, which he said was doing active harm, encouraging people to cling to the mysticism of the past. The role of science, he said, was not to pander to superstition but to help eliminate it. And when a leading psychologist such as William James failed to live up to that role, he could be held personally responsible for holding back progress itself “I believe that the Society for Psychical Research is doing much to injure psychology,” Cattell concluded. “The authority of Professor James is such that he involves other students of psychology in his opinions unless they protest. We all acknowledge his leadership, but we cannot follow him into the quagmires.”

  James could handle vitriol like this with ease. He replied mockingly that he enjoyed Cattell’s “amiable persiflage” and feeble attempts at insult. It bothered him, though, that he could not persuade his peers to see the value in psychical research. Further, both Hodgson’s report and the SPR response conformed to scientific principles. Hodgson had offered a theory and the supporting evidence for it. His SPR colleagues had reviewed it, criticized it, and demanded more substantial evidence.

  James himself tended to side with Sidgwick in terms of the report’s shortcomings. He didn’t deny that G.P provided some startling moments; but the personality also showed the same “vacancy, triviality and incoherence of mind” that so often plagued the spirit messages from Mrs. Piper and, indeed, those from all mediums. Hodgson’s attempt to excuse such meanderings by extreme difficulty of communication struck James as inadequate, as he made clear, again writing in the SPR journal, “Mr. Hodgson has to resort to the theory that, although the communicants probably are spirits, they are in a semi-comatose or sleeping state, while communicating, and only half-aware of what is going on and Mrs. Piper’s subconscious is then forced to fill in the gaps of whatever they say.” This seemed at best an imperfect cover story. Even worse, the explanation discounted the best sittings in an effort to excuse the poorer ones. What about those apparently pitch-perfect days? Did the spirits suddenly wake up? Did Mrs. Piper’s hearing improve? Could she briefly understand the ghostly communicators better?

  If Mrs. Piper didn’t cheat—and no evidence yet existed that she did—then it was still unclear to James how she accessed the information revealed in her trances. He continued to believe that she possessed some exceptional power; he continued to have no idea exactly what that power might be.

  “If I may be allowed a personal expression of opinion at the end of this notice,” James said, “I would say that the Piper phenomena are the most absolutely baffling thing I know.”

  DESPITE THE DOUBTS of his colleagues, mostly thanks to his reputation as “an expert in the art of unveiling fraud,” as the Saturday Review put it, Hodgson’s latest Piper report received exactly what Columbia’s Cattell had feared, serious attention.

  At the Review, famously hostile to psychical research, the editors wrote to acknowledge that Hodgson’s account of G.P provided strong evidence in favor of survival after death. Still, the Review emphasized, it was unclear exactly what survived, whether it was a soul, a spirit, or merely some sort of imprint of a personality. As the editorial noted, “So far as we can see, all that is proved is that some record of the life on earth is laid up in some unearthly archives, and that under some circumstances, this record is accessible to the minds of the living.”

  G.P.’s knowledge of his life on Earth, especially his previous relationships, seemed remarkable. But the “spirit” continually failed to provide any real detail about life after death. His descriptions, “while free from the nauseous sentimentality mingled with Swedenborg which forms the bulk of so-called spirit communications,” were either vague or comfortably Christian, adding nothing new to the knowledge of immortality.

  In conclusion, the magazine raised a point of elegant metaphysics: “The question is not whether something survives death, but whether that is a living something; whether it grows? Time may give us an answer to the question; but it has not been given yet.”

  That unearthly archive—or at least the possibility of something like it—was an idea that William James had considered, hoping that it might solve some of the troubling questions in psychical research.

  It was just the first glimmer of a thought, really, but James wondered whether the energy generated in our lives—with all their passion and grief, laughter and argument—did more than fall to dust. Perhaps life’s energy burned an impression, or memory, a cosmic record of sorts that lingered after the person himself had vanished.

  Perhaps the very objects that we handle could sometimes be energy repositories, absorb some of life’s stray heat, radiate it back out. If so, that might explain the improbable art of psychometry, the occasional flash of insight that a good psychic seemed to get from holding a piece of jewelry or an article of clothing. It might even explain haunted houses, those curious impressions of spirits that tended to repeat over decades, even centuries.

  And perhaps—as the editors of the Review posited—that added up to a different explanation of immortality. Perhaps there was no real life after death; just the occasional echo of what was, sounding briefly in the night and fading away.

  Pursuing that set of ideas, James proposed that most of us never hear the echoes at all. We live sheltered, born with mental buffers—or dikes, as he called them—to protect against such intrusions, to keep life from being too impossibly strange. But sometimes—as with a crisis apparition—that last blast of desperate energy overcomes those barriers so that just for a moment we hear our dying mother’s voice, see the face of a lost friend.

  James had recently evaluated just such a case, the story of Bertha Huse and Nellie Titus, which seemed to capture those possibilities. It was all there, the young woman’s unseen fall into a lake, the body trapped out of view, the dream image of the tragic accident. There had been no conversation in the dream, no purposeful ghost, merely an intense image of the girl’s last moments. Mrs. Titus reported a history of such dreams, flashes of insight caught in the quiet night. Perhaps in her undefended sleep, she was unusually open to those energy surges created by a final moment, allowing her to receive what seemed to be a message from the dead.

  The same explanation might also serve for the medium James knew best, Leonora Piper. Perhaps she was even less well defended from such signals, more prone to picking them up on a frequent basis. Both women might belong to a small group of people born without adequate mental barriers to that cosmic record, so that “fitful influences leak in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connection.”

  BAFFLING PSYCHIC PHENOMENA were something Charles Richet understood well, too well. In the world of traditional science, he knew what he was doing and that his work was good. He was exploring the immune system, probing the mechanism of fever. He was testing treatments for the great killer tuberculosis. In his spare time, he continued to design flying machines—motorized gliders—and test them himself, looping like a crazed moth around his family’s summer home in southern France.

  In the world of psychical research, however, Richet felt curiously on the defensive. From Boston, Richard Hodgson had made him look a fool over Eusapia Palladino. And now from England, Frank Podmore, one of the collaborators on the SPR’s respected Phantasms of the Living, had taken an aggressive stand against telekinesis—supposedl
y one of Eusapia’s talents—basing that position on a recent study of reputed poltergeists.

  Podmore had picked apart eleven reported poltergeist cases in England, concluding that the flying objects and crashing furniture could be attributed simply to girls seeking attention. Often, Podmore sneered, the talents of psychical researchers were not required. Police officers sufficed.

  He provided an example from a British country village, where an agitated couple declared that after their niece moved into their home, doors suddenly rattled in the night, windows crackled, furniture trembled out of place. Frightened, the aunt and uncle called the police. A constable hiding outside a window was able to see the girl tapping on the glass when she thought no one was looking. Another saw her kick off her boot, scream, and claim that the spirits had taken it.

  Almost every poltergeist case in Podmore’s inventory involved a female in apparent need of attention. As he reported in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, there was no reason to invoke the mysterious powers of telekinesis: “Naughty little girls” provided a perfectly good answer, and no one needed to invent a new kind of spiritual energy to explain them.

  Yet that was precisely the power that Richet hoped he could demonstrate in Eusapia Palladino. Goaded, he began a new series of experiments, joined by Ochorowicz, a new colleague, a cautious Swiss psychologist named Theodore Flournoy, and a trio of Italian scientists. They were aided by Eusapia herself, who also felt humiliated by the Cambridge experiments and was willing to submit to extreme measures if they would remove the shadows from her name.

  In one brutal series of tests, devised by physiologists from the University of Naples, the experimenters bound Eusapia’s hands and arms with cords. They tied the cords onto iron rings in the floor and dripped lead seals onto the knots. As Richet reported, even after being bound for hours, she was able to summon those odd ectoplasmic hands—“some frail and diaphanous, some thick and strong”—all of which dissolved like mist when touched.

  In a letter to Lodge in the fall of 1898, Richet repeated his conviction that Eusapia possessed some kind of power. It was erratic, yes; uncontrollable, even by her, yes; complicated by her devious nature, yes; but real. Lodge replied apologetically that it sounded intriguing, but he was at the moment overwhelmed by his work in wireless communication. But Fred Myers decided that he was weary of his overcautious colleagues.

  To Richet’s pleasure, Myers agreed to sail to Paris and meet once more with the controversial medium. Enthused, Richet again enlisted the help of Theodore Flournoy. A kindly man and a thoughtful scientist, Flournoy had become more deeply involved in psychical research after striking up a friendship with William James at the experimental psychology meetings. It was Flournoy who wrote to James, describing the Paris sittings. Myers’s presence, he informed his friend, “gave much zest to the first séance because Eusapia was obviously bent on convincing him, after the unfortunate seances in Cambridge two years ago.”

  Richet kept the lights bright, using both an unscreened lamp and a blazing fire to illuminate the room. Flournoy could see “every finger of Eusapia; every feature; every detail of her dress.” The seance was quiet throughout. Again the curtains blew with that odd, invisible wind. Again cloud shapes formed in the room, touching, brushing by, and dissolving like mist around them. By the end of the sittings, “Mr. Myers declared himself convinced,” Flournoy wrote, “and I don’t hesitate to agree with him.”

  Myers returned to England fizzing with enthusiasm, eager to tell the story of the striking sittings in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Unfortunately, at least from his perspective, Richard Hodgson currently served as editor of the organization’s journal. Hodgson flatly rejected Myers’s article. In fact, Hodgson told Myers smugly, he’d commissioned an article evaluating mediums of the day; it was scheduled to list Eusapia “amongst the ranks of tricksters.”

  Myers stormed over to visit Henry Sidgwick, demanding that he overrule Hodgson. Typically-and Myers considered this an irritating trait—Sidgwick instead sought a compromise. He told Hodgson to drop his listing of fraudulent mediums. Such a list, Sidgwick thought, was unnecessarily combative. But he also rejected any article supporting Eusapia Palladino. She might impress Myers and Richet and Flournoy, but Sidgwick thought them too easily won over: “I cannot see any reason for departing from our deliberate decision to have nothing further to do with any medium whom we might find guilty of intentional and systematic fraud.”

  As Sidgwick reminded Myers, the SPR had yet to accomplish its most basic goal, convincing the scientific community to consider telepathy with a little respect. So far their most obvious successes had been outside the halls of academia, in the more welcoming walks of popular culture.

  The effects of psychical research were so visible, across so many venues, that James wondered if they had gained a reputation as the foremost experts on spiritual matters. “This seems to be rather a grave moment for all of us,” James wrote to Lodge. “We are changing places with a set of beings, the ‘regular’ spiritualists, whom we have hitherto treated with a species of contempt that must have been not only galling, but asinine and conceited, in their eyes.” Stories of crisis apparitions regularly appeared in the daily newspapers; special editions dedicated to such stories rapidly sold out. Equally impressive were the creations of fiction writers—ghosts, demons, creatures of the nights—stalking the pages of magazines and books.

  Some wrote to terrify, as did Ireland’s Bram Stoker in his 1897 story of the evil undead, Dracula. Others spun satire. Oscar Wilde, who like Stoker was Dublin-born, had some years earlier published “The Canterville Ghost,” a short story in which an American family discovers that its rented British mansion is haunted. The realization occurs after several days of trying to remove bloodstains from the library floor, only to have the horrid spots continually reappear.

  After three days of scrubbing, as Wilde cheerfully wrote, “Mr. Otis began to suspect that he had been too dogmatic in his denial of the existence of ghosts. Mrs. Otis expressed her intention of joining the Psychical Society and Washington [their son] prepared a long letter to Messrs. Myers and Podmore on the subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous Stains when connected with Crime.”

  Novelist Henry James Jr. also liked to spin ghostly tales, not surprisingly, considering who his father had been and who his brother was. Henry had published his first thriller in 1868, some twenty years earlier. In that creepy little tale, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” the ghost of a man’s first wife kills the second wife, who happens to also be her scheming sister. More memorable, at least for Henry’s brother William and the other SPR members, was “Sir Edmund Orme,” which had been published as a magazine serial in 1892. The ghost of the title recalled the late Edmund Gurney, who had relatives living in London’s Orme Court. The Edmund of James’s rather vengeful tale had committed suicide when the woman he loved proved unfaithful. The story was set in Brighton, where Gurney had died.

  Henry James confessed that he got the idea for his most famous ghost story while visiting Henry Sidgwick’s cousin, Edward White Benson, who held the exalted position of archbishop of Canterbury but who was also a self-proclaimed ghost story addict. The archbishop held “ghost evenings” in his library, for friends to meet and tell tales, fueled by a good fire and plenty of alcoholic spirits. Benson’s ghost evenings spawned many a literary venture. (His nephew, the famously satiric novelist E. E Benson, was hailed for authoring some of the scariest stories of his time.) The story that Henry James began drafting after an evening of spectral tales at the Bensons was published in 1898 and was titled “The Turn of the Screw.”

  James started the story at a “ghost evening,” narrated by a guest at a house party, one of a group enjoying an evening of spooky stories told around a fire. Most creatures of the night evoked in such stories are presented as if real. In James’s artful hands, the ghosts were, instead, hauntingly ambiguous, evocative of all the unknowns that troubled his brother
William.

  In “The Turn of the Screw,” a young governess secures a lucrative job caring for two children whose father often travels on business. Slowly, she perceives that the house where they live is haunted. The ghosts are silent, shadowy, but she comes to believe that they have come to carry away the children. She tries desperately to protect the young boy and girl. In the end, she fails. One child is hunted down by a vengeful spirit and dies in the arms of the governess.

  Or so it might seem. But the interpreter of these threatening ghosts is the governess herself. The reader becomes aware that the spirits may exist only in her mind, and that the alternate story is of two children unfortunate enough to be put in the care of a psychotic young woman. Did she frighten her young charges to the point that one of them suffered heart failure—and died in her arms?

  “Henry James has written a forceful story of country-home life,” Myers wrote to Lodge that fall of 1898, in an ambiguous description of his own. Myers had no problem accepting the idea of ghosts. Such images permeated the SPR’s records of crisis apparitions. The problem, the difference, was that the specters in James’s story—if such they were—seemed imbued with a goal. “True ghost stories,” Myers said, tended to be brief visions or sensations that flickered and vanished. They were startling, perhaps, but never really purposeful.

  “Instead of describing a ‘ghost’ as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of persistent energy,” Myers said. There was nothing in science to show that energy had a conscious purpose. The evil Count Dracula, the vengeful ghosts imagined by Henry James—these fictional manifestations bore little if any resemblance to what the SPR investigators had so far glimpsed.