The Ghost Hunters

by Deborah Blum

  For instance, if a person were exposed to a particular poison—say, a bee sting or jellyfish tentacles—most would react the same way with each exposure. A sting would hurt, yes, but the victim would experience the same kind of swelling and pain with the first sting and with the tenth. A few individuals would become more tolerant, developing a kind of immunity to reaction. “The most remarkable case of this tolerance is to be seen when opium or morphine are used. People who take morphine injections need stronger and stronger doses for the morphine to take effect,” Richet would explain. Others would become more sensitive with each exposure, so that if they were bitten or stung again—or gave themselves repeated injections—their body would overcompensate, even to the point of a lethal reaction.

  Richet’s multiyear inquiries into those varied responses—done partly by exposing dogs to repeated injections of jellyfish toxins—would open the way to the medical profession’s understanding of anaphylactic shock. The work would also win him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1913 and a reputation as a world-class scientist long before that. Many of his colleagues wished that a scientist of Richet’s caliber would abandon the peculiarities of psychical research. But his reputation made him—and his protégé—difficult to ignore.

  MEDIUMS WERE PECULIAR creatures; there was no denying it about even the best of them. How could they not be? They spent hours of their time surrounded by people desperate to talk with the dead. They fell into trances reputedly inhabited by ghosts. They agreed to be hogtied by investigating scientists. Skeptics mocked them; journalists parodied them; former friends feared them. One had to wonder why anyone would choose to become a medium.

  The sad and strange story of the Fox sisters was a case in point. Neither had become wealthy by pursuing such a career. Both had died paupers’ deaths in the early 1890s—Kate at the age of fifty-two, Maggie at the age of fifty-five. Kate’s body, reeking of old dirt and cheap gin, had been found on a sidewalk. Maggie had died in a tenement house in lower Manhattan, virtually alone.

  Many in the spiritualist community had never forgiven the Fox sisters for their betrayal. Isaac Funk, of Funk & Wagnall’s publishing house, expressed the widely held opinion that Margaret, especially, had betrayed the faith to feed her bad habits: “So low had this unfortunate woman sunk that for five dollars she would have denied her mother, sworn to anything,” he wrote. But there were still those who believed that the Fox sisters had once been gifted, had been betrayed themselves by all those who used them for financial gain and promotional purposes. More than ten years after the Fox sisters died, schoolchildren playing in the abandoned cellar of the old Fox “spook house” found the complete skeleton of a man hidden behind a crumbling wall; apparently that of the murdered peddler they had first claimed to hear rapping. “Repeated [earlier] excavations failed to locate the body and thus give proof positive of their story,” reported the Boston Journal, calling the discovery a reminder that not all about the Fox sisters had been false.

  And a neighbor who stayed with Maggie Kane during the last week of her illness, in 1893, later told a curious story. The dying medium had been almost unable to move, crippled by rheumatism and weakened by fever. She mumbled constantly, asking questions of some unseen spirit in her rasping voice. As she spoke, knockings often sounded in the room, in the wall, the floors, the ceiling. There was no place to hide a rapping device. The tenement room had no window, no closet, just a dresser, a table and chair, and a narrow cot with a ragged mattress. Upon her cot, the medium “was as incapable of cracking her toe joints as I was,” the woman reported.

  “One day, as Mrs. Kane felt somewhat improved, she unexpectedly asked for paper and a pencil. She had a small table standing by the side of the bed. Placing the paper I handed her on the table she began to write feverishly and kept this up till she had filled some twenty pages with rapid scrawling. I did not know what she was doing until she had finished and handed me the pages. I found that she had written down a detailed story of my life.” The woman’s mother had died earlier that year, apparently without writing a will. The message scribbled by Maggie Fox Kane not only claimed that a will existed but gave directions to it, in a desk at the home of some friends.

  “I wrote at once to my brother,” the neighbor said. “He sent a friend to investigate. The family in question said they knew nothing about the missing will but invited him to search the desk and the will was recovered.” The woman was not a spiritualist. She said she could not explain what had happened, but it did make her wonder what lay behind the mythology of the Fox sisters—and the destructive pattern of their lives.

  Theodore Flournoy had certainly wondered about the stresses of being a working medium, about what in their lives might be real and what might be fantasy and wishful thinking. The University of Geneva psychologist directed his fascination with such questions into such a lengthy study that it eventually grew into a full-sized book, published in 1900.

  Flournoy had joined Richet in his investigations of Eusapia Palladino, but the Swiss psychologist was far more interested in another practitioner of supernatural arts, one that he found significantly more credible. For his own case study, Flournoy chose the French medium Catherine Muller, who worked under the pseudonym Helene Smith. The resulting book, From India to the Planet Mars, explored Mme Smith’s multiple trance personalities and examined her strengths and her weaknesses.

  Helene Smith was not a professional medium. She conducted sittings for friends and acquaintances. Like Rosina Thompson and Leonora Piper, she did not charge for her time. Outside of the seances, the medium was a respectable thirty-year-old woman, “beautiful, vigorous, with an open and intelligent countenance,” who was liked and respected by her neighbors and who worked for a business firm where, Flournoy said, her ability and integrity had led to her being promoted to a managerial position.

  Flournoy had first visited Mme Smith anonymously and had been shocked when she began discussing his family, including some events so obscure that he’d had to write to relatives, checking the accuracy of her accounts. He’d been further shocked when the details were confirmed. He tried to find out where she had acquired the information, where she could have acquired it. He found no evidence that she spied on visitors, hired detectives, or used any other obvious methods of cheating. He was left with the notion that she had an unusual talent for telepathy, perhaps comparable to that of Leonora Piper.

  What complicated a consideration of Mme Smith’s abilities was the dubious nature of the trance personalities through which she communicated her extraordinary knowledge. These “spirit guides,” like Mrs. Piper’s Phinuit, seemed extremely unlikely to be the afterlife manifestations of actual people and more likely to have sprung from the depths of the medium’s own mind. A peculiar assembly of characters jostled for supremacy once Helene Smith slid into a trance. They included a kindly Victor Hugo; a hostile military leader, who would become so angry he would pull the medium’s chair out from under her; the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette; a domestically inclined Martian; and the long-ago wife of a Hindu prince.

  Flournoy thought Mme Smith’s trance personalities were both part of and independent from her possible telepathic gifts. That is, her mind might create them as it struggled to cope with processing the thoughts and needs of other people. But the personalities were undoubtedly created from her “subconscious, memories, scruples, emotional tendencies.” He suspected that the characters arose from forgotten experiences in her childhood, resurfacing as the fatherly Victor Hugo or the childish, whispery Marie Antoinette.

  Thus, her most exotic seances might result from a kind of mental embroidery, building a small gift into something more exciting. The Martian and the ancient Indians who came calling in her trances didn’t impress Flournoy as much as the way she could occasionally peer inside a visitor’s head. But most of her visitors felt differently; they were thrilled by this eerie contact with savages and aliens. The trance personalities revealed the mind of the medium; they were evidence of a lonely w
oman seeking attention and respect for a gift that could—especially if unappreciated—become a burden, possibly an unbearable weight.

  “UPON MY WORD, dear Flournoy, you have done a bigger thing here than you know; and I think that your volume has probably made the decisive step in converting psychical research into a respectable science,” James wrote shortly before leaving for the south of France. He hoped that more such case studies could be done and that Hodgson’s work with Mrs. Piper could be expanded to include some of the analysis that made Flournoy’s account so insightful. “Your book has only one defect, and that is that you don’t dedicate it to me,” James joked, adding somewhat gloomily that in his current state of health he would “very likely die with my great Philosophy of Religion buried inside me and never seeing the light, it would have been pleasant to have my name preserved for ever in the early pages of your immortal work.”

  But at Richet’s chateau, washed in light, soothed by the salt-tinged breeze, James felt his spirits lifting, and with them his health. He began spending less time in bed, more time on the chateau’s terraces, wrapped in blankets, tucked into an oversized rocker, letting the day glimmer around him. At Richet’s chateau, James ate fish, artichokes, and the stewed lettuce that was considered a health enhancer. On the veranda, he soaked up the sunshine and admired the surrounding fields of hyacinths and violets (grown for export), and his health improved, “tho with extreme slowness.”

  “I have got to this splendid sunshine and out of door life and everything has taken an upward turn,” he wrote to Hodgson. James looked forward to sharing Richet’s “noble country house” with Myers and his newly discovered medium. And he was eager, already, to feel well enough that he could go home and pick up his discussions with Hodgson about Leonora Piper. “I believe the good days are to come again.”

  Myers proved enjoyable company, although James found the pretty Evie “rather a spoilt child.” He liked Mrs. Thompson, though; she had a quiet dignity that reminded him a little of his favorite Boston medium. In the evenings, he and Myers would disappear with Mrs. Thompson into a small study and test her trance effects.

  “The most unfortunate circumstance is that with Mrs. Thompson as with Mrs. Piper, the most striking evidence of her powers is too private for publication,” James wrote to a friend. The rest of it was the usual tumbled mix of aphorisms and trivia. She had provided a flood of information about a recently deceased friend, but his “spirit” seemed to dwell inordinately on his walking stick and fur collar and his failing mind before death. James again had to wonder why a returning spirit would be so obsessed with such minutiae as collars and canes.

  “We are having the D—l’s own time with Mrs. Thompson, Myers’ medium here, who is the greatest puzzle out,” James wrote to his son, Harry. She induced in him the familiar sense of bafflement, the usual mixture of hope and of doubt. His wife thought he wasn’t well enough for the experiments anyway, that spending hours with a medium—and the usual assortment of complications that entailed—was far too stressful for him.

  It was almost a relief when the group broke up in March. The Myerses left for Paris. Mrs. Thompson happily returned to her London home. The Jameses, too, were preparing to move on, first to visit Theodore Flournoy in Geneva and then to the German spa for William to be “examined and sentenced” by the doctors. “Your mother is extremely rosy and well,” he wrote to his daughter. “She has no complications now that the Myerses and the medium are gone.”

  FOR JAMES HYSLOP, the hard work was just beginning. He’d finished his masked seances in Boston with Leonora Piper and had marveled at some of the results. Back in New York, he set out to double-check, pick apart, verify, or discard every statement made by the “spirit” of his father during those sittings.

  Following up on a seance in February 1900, he wrote, “My Dear Mother: Please to answer the following questions and return this with reply: 1) Have you had a rheumatic trouble either since I saw you, or sometime before? If so, how are you now? 2) Did we have a horse by the name of Jim within your recollection? 3) What became of the horse named Bob?”

  And on another tack: “Did father ever speak to you about my theories being strange? If so, do you remember what they were in particular and how he spoke of them?” Hyslop carefully didn’t mention that the question referred to a comment about Swedenborg.

  He closed with the formality typical of his family. “Yours as ever, J. H. Hyslop.”

  His mother answered every query: She suffered from neuralgia but not rheumatism. They had owned horses of those names; Bob had been put down after Hyslop’s father’s death. And Hyslop’s father had thought that his son’s ideas were very peculiar indeed, especially on the evening that he explained Swedenborg to his bewildered fundamentalist Christian parents.

  “I think he remarked afterwards when we were talking about the conversation that you had some strange ideas,” his mother wrote, signing herself, “Yours affectionately, M. E. Hyslop.”

  The son neatly recorded her answers. He checked them against his own knowledge. “When you remember me to father,” he wrote to Hodgson in Boston, “please say to him that he was right and I was wrong about that incident in regard to Swedenborg.”

  Hyslop found it difficult to express in writing that sense of personal recognition. The turn of phrase, the expressions chosen, had been so like the way his father talked. One evening, Hyslop’s “father” had said, “Do you remember what my feeling was about this life? Well I was not so far wrong after all. I felt sure that there would be some knowledge of this life, but you were doubtful, remember you had your own ideas, which were only yours, James.” To an outsider, it might sound a vaguely encouraging statement. But Hyslop couldn’t count the number of times that his father had told him that, “You have your own ideas.... He meant that I was the only one of his children who was skeptical, and this was true.”

  Over four sittings, Hyslop said the “ghost” of his father had described 205 incidents, of which 152 were true, 37 unverifiable, and 16 false. And while the tally was reasonably impressive, he doubted that it conveyed his own bone-deep assurance that “I talked with my discarnate father with as much ease as if I were talking with him, living, through the telephone.”

  Mrs. Piper’s seances could be a heady experience, leaving one overconfident of opening the doors to immortality. Hodgson warned Hyslop to think of this as a temporary euphoria. Before he became too enthusiastic about accessing the occult, the philosophy professor needed to spend some time on the professional medium circuit.

  Hodgson sent Hyslop to check out the cozy little Occult Bookstore, on New York’s West Forty-second Street, and observe the working mediums there. A few evenings later, Hyslop was seething with outrage. “And the effrontery of the whole business is one of the most amazing things I ever met,” he wrote to Hodgson, although he found himself as annoyed by the “fools who fell for the scam—and paid to hear such nonsense!” as he was with the con artists themselves.

  The scam was a variation on the old sealed-envelope ploy. Sitters were asked to write their questions on small blank pieces of paper and wad them into tight, tiny pellet shapes. These crumpled balls were heaped on a table, in plain sight, usually placed in a brass bowl or tray. Mediums appeared to barely approach the pellets, perhaps brushing them with a fingertip, no more.

  As Hodgson had warned him, and as Hyslop rapidly confirmed, if one simply kept one’s eyes on the mediums’ hands, the whole show revealed itself—pellets were palmed, substituted, scanned. Distraction was the key. One famous pellet reader simply lit and relit his cigar, using the motion to palm the pellets, holding the match each time so that it illuminated the message, dropping the pellets back in the dish.

  During one sitting, Hyslop became so exasperated that he put a pellet on the table, then declared that he was embarrassed and ripped the paper to shreds, then announced that he’d changed his mind and asked for a spirit opinion on the message anyway. Naturally, as he told Hodgson sarcastically, the sitting w
as a failure.

  “It is rather amusing about the pellet that was torn up,” Hodgson wrote him. But after all, genuine psychics didn’t need to rely on such showy demonstrations. “It is almost a sure thing, when the writing of names and questions on pellets come into a sitting, that there is fraud.”

  Hyslop found himself in complete sympathy with Hodgson. He agreed that the commercial medium trade was a scummy business. And he agreed that Leonora Piper was a different entity altogether.

  Determined, as always, to be honest in his opinions, Hyslop wrote an essay for Harper’s, firmly making his case for communication with the dead. Coming as it did from a Columbia University philosopher, the piece attracted considerable attention. “Horribly written,” William James commented, “but makes a stronger case for spirit return than anything I’ve seen.”

  After researching and analyzing his Mrs. Piper sittings, Hyslop had considered and discounted the possibility of fraud or trickery. He’d been unable to find even a hint of evidence that Mrs. Piper had gone visiting Xenia, Ohio, sent detectives there, or made any inquiries whatsoever. In a community so small and close, he would have heard about that immediately.

  That left Hyslop with two possible explanations for such uncanny knowledge making its way into Mrs. Piper’s trance state: “omniscient telepathy and discarnate spirits.” After reviewing the evidence, he could see no reasonable answer but spirit communication. To start with, many of the facts Mrs. Piper provided about his family were unknown to him at the time. She could not have read his mind for things he’d didn’t know. As he’d ruled out a secret intelligence system, the best remaining option, he then concluded, was that his father’s spirit had been in attendance.