The Ghost Hunters

by Deborah Blum

  A few days later, the H spirit flickered back again: “I am Hodgson.... I heard your call—I know you,” he wrote to a young woman sitting with Mrs. Piper.

  “Piper instrument. I am happy exceedingly difficult to come very. I understand why Myers came seldom, I must leave. I cannot stay. I cannot remain today.”

  And then, another two weeks later, on January 23, Alice James and her son Billy came for a sitting. “Why, there’s Billy! Is that Mrs. James and Billy? God bless you! I have found my way, I am here, have patience with me. All is well with me. Don’t miss me. Where’s William? Give him my best wishes.”

  JAMES CONTINUED TO mourn Hodgson’s loss—and the dearth of people to step into his job. Increasingly, he feared for the survival of the small American branch of the SPR. Hodgson had been the only “real worker” in the organization, and the one who best understood the evidence they’d amassed (including twelve boxes of documented Piper sittings read by no one but Hodgson). James could think of no one suited to pick up that monumental workload.

  It was true that James Hyslop—“so good but so impossible”—offered to assume Hodgson’s duties. But that simply would not do, James told the applicant, listing his defects without ceremony: “You lack the discretion that was so extraordinary a gift of Hodgson’s; you are too impulsive; and your enthusiasm leads you to relations with newspapers and the general public that would quickly undo the credit that the name SPR has slowly earned for caution and criticality.”

  Yet James agreed with Hyslop that psychical research should continue. And as the “Hodgson-control” began to flicker in and out of Mrs. Piper’s sittings, it became obvious that here was another opportunity to prove or disprove a returning spirit, much as Hodgson himself had attempted with the G.P personality.

  If he was going to set the standards so high, despite the troubling lack of depth among psychical researchers, if he was determined that the Hodgson-control be studied with the restraint and precision that he demanded, the best investigator—perhaps the only investigator really available—was William James himself.

  MARGARET VERRALL HELD a position as classics lecturer at Newnham College. She was fluent in both Greek and Latin, the wife of a Cambridge philosophy professor, an old friend of the Sidgwicks and Myerses, and, most of all, a woman of tireless patience.

  Since Myers’s death, she’d been pondering his wish to prove immortality. She’d liked him so much, and he’d believed so passionately in survival of the soul, that she wanted someone to make a concerted effort to contact his spirit, if it existed. Finally, as several years passed, as 1905 wound away, she decided to do it herself. As she explained to all those who considered this a strange decision, she felt she’d be letting down a friend if she didn’t at least try. And then, too, after all that time spent in the company of Myers and the Sidgwicks, she was a little curious.

  An organized woman by nature, Mrs. Verrall worked out a careful system for contacting a spirit. First, she chose automatic writing as the best way to converse with Myers. Then she set aside a time in the late afternoon to try to acquire this skill. Then she waited. For three months she sat at her desk daily, holding a pencil against a piece of paper for at least an hour, listening to the mantel clock tick away the time. Day after day, she arose stiff with sitting, the blank tablet mocking her.

  Gradually she became so bored that she quit focusing on the elusive Myers and fell into musing on her work, her garden, her household duties, her family. Lost in that daydreaming haze, she found herself suddenly snapping to attention, the tablet covered with simplistic messages in Greek and Latin—much cruder versions than she usually used—but with the signature “Myers” at the end.

  The scribblings seemed almost meaningless, except for one curious coincidence. Over in Boston, Mrs. Piper’s spirit guide Rector suddenly began reporting conversations with Myers. And on those particular days, the messages, although in English, were often startlingly similar in content to the Greek and Latin notes taken by Mrs. Verrall. Meanwhile, Mrs. Verrall’s daughter, Helen, became intrigued enough to experiment with automatic writing herself. She too discovered that occasionally she’d jotted down a message that was duplicated in notes taken down by her mother or Mrs. Piper.

  By early 1906, the three women’s writings seemed to form an unlikely kind of chain letter from the dead. Other lost colleagues appeared. Some notes purported to be from Edmund Gurney, some from Henry Sidgwick. Back and forth across the Atlantic, Nora Sidgwick, Oliver Lodge, and William James began comparing the messages. Taken separately, each woman’s writing seemed a kind of stream-of-consciousness jumble of words and thoughts. Taken together, though, the messages seemed connected, as if ideas were relayed on some circuit impossible to detect. As she admitted to her friends, Nora began to wonder for the first time if her Henry had been wrong, if there was a chance, after all, of proving conversations between the living and the dead.

  IN JUNE 1906, Mrs. Piper received a friendly invitation from Oliver Lodge’s wife, Mary. The SPR wanted her to return to England for a second round of investigations—and, more personally, Lady Lodge would be delighted to see her again.

  Many strategy discussions and letters had preceded this invitation. Nora, Lord Rayleigh, Oliver Lodge, William James, and a new SPR administrative secretary, a slight, dark Cambridge graduate named John Piddington, all debated how to properly study this curious messaging system.

  The invitation came only after the experimental plan was in place. Nora would oversee the Verralls in Cambridge, and Piddington would keep Mrs. Piper sequestered in London. None of the details of the study would be revealed to the three women, only that they were participants in a new series of tests.

  The British Society for Psychical Research, thanks to the determination of Nora Sidgwick and Oliver Lodge, had rebuilt itself with some real success. John Piddington was one of two honorary secretaries; the other position belonged to the Hon. Everard Feilding, a younger son of the earl of Denbigh. At the moment, Feilding—who had a known affection for the more peculiar phenomena—was investigating a candle-throwing poltergeist. The more staid and methodical Piddington seemed a logical choice for the correspondence study.

  Piddington had a businesslike style about him and a fondness for organization. He had helped set up an endowment for the SPR so that it could pay full-time researchers; he’d managed the transfer of Hodgson’s voluminous records to England. To the great appreciation of James Hyslop, he’d transferred some of Hodgson’s responsibilities to Hyslop’s New York institute, effectively merging the American organizations.

  But the cross-correspondence study, as it came to be known, was to be managed strictly by the British SPR. Under that plan, Mrs. Piper would come to England for a series of experiments that began with a rather obvious difference between the two mediums. Mrs. Verrall was a scholar, trained in Greek and Latin. Mrs. Piper had a New Hampshire primary school education and no knowledge of the classic languages. But—and this was the key—the “spirits” in question belonged to men who did know those languages. So if Gurney, Sidgwick, or Myers were actually communicating with Mrs. Piper, they would understand Latin and Greek instructions even if she didn’t.

  Following that logic, the tests would be conducted in the following manner: Piddington would wait till Mrs. Piper was entranced. He would then ask her, or her control, to give a message to Myers. Piddington would then read off a message in Latin, concluding with a request to relay its content to Mrs. Verrall.

  If the message arrived, if they transcended the language barrier, it would be hard to avoid a conclusion that some intelligence greater than that of the mediums was working with them.

  By December 1906, Mrs. Piper and her daughters were settled in London, and once the American medium and Piddington had learned to be comfortable with each other, the work began in earnest.

  In mid-December, during several sittings, Piddington talked to Mrs. Piper’s Rector, asking him to pass along instructions to Myers and his friends. The instructions
were given in Latin, each word pronounced slowly, syllable by syllable, and then spelled out for purposes of clarity.

  Piddington’s message began with a compliment: “Diversis internuntiis quod invicem inter se respondentia jamjudun committis, id nec fallit nos consilium, et vehementer probamus.” (As to the fact that for some long time you have been entrusting to different messengers things, which correspond mutually between themselves, we have observed your design, and we cordially approve it.)

  This polite opening was followed by a request, also in Latin: Could the Myers personality, once contacted through Mrs. Piper, send a signal to another medium (in this case, Mrs. Verrall)? And could he attach to that message a recognition device, some code words or symbols of his choice?

  After several sittings, Rector replied to Piddington: “We have in part understood and conveyed your message to your friend Myers and he is delighted to receive it so far as he has been able to receive it.” Several weeks later, in early January 1907, Rector seemed to think that Piddington might need some reassurance as to the delay: “Hodgson is helping Myers with his translation.”

  Two weeks later, Rector said he had a communication from Myers: “I should like to go over the first and second sentences of our Latin message.... I believe I can send you a message which will please you if I understand it clearly.”

  By this time, Piddington had given further thought to the idea of a recognition device. He had a more specific suggestion, again conveyed in Latin: Could Myers please ask the medium at the other end to draw a circle and triangle as part of her response?

  That night, Mrs. Verrall wrote: “Justice hold the scales. That gives the words but an anagram would be better. Tell him that—rats, star, tars and so on. Try this. It has been tried before. RTATS. Rearrange these five letters or again t-e-a-r-s ... s-t-a-r-e.”

  Five days later, she wrote: “Aster [a star] ... the world’s wonder, And all a wonder and a wild desire/the very wings of her.... but it is all much the same thing—the winged desire, the hope that leaves the earth for the sky... Abt Vogler for earth, too hard that found itself or lost itself—in the sky. That is what I want, On the broken sounds, threads.”

  She closed the message with a circle and a triangle.

  On February 11, Rector delivered another message from Myers, one that gave some clues as to what he was trying to do. He told Piddington that hope, star, and Browning were all important in Mrs. Verrall’s script.

  With that, Nora Sidgwick realized that all those ramblings about stars made actual sense. Myers was ever a lover of poetry—and “Abt Vogler” was a poem written by Robert Browning. It was a tale of a musician, included in that same 1864 book that featured “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.”

  Nora hurried to find it among her poetry books:

  And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,

  As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:

  Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,

  Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star.

  “The mystic three,” wrote Miss Verrall on February 17, “and a star above it all / rats everywhere in Hamelin town / now do you understand?” She had been drawing as well—a crescent moon, a star, and a winged bird. Her illustrated message was signed “Henry.”

  Mrs. Verrall now wrote down a message, signed from Myers, saying that he was worried that Rector did not know the poem so familiar to the rest of them: “I am most anxious to make Rector understand about the name of that poem.”

  Some weeks later, while entranced, Mrs. Piper carefully wrote the words, “Abt Vogler.”

  “Now, DEAR MRS. SIDGWICK, in future have no doubt or fear of so-called death, as there is none, as there is certainly intelligent life beyond it.”

  Mrs. Verrall was writing messages, purporting again to be from Myers.

  “Yes, it’s a great comfort,” Nora replied.

  “Yes, and I have helped proclaim it for you all,” the Myers script continued, explaining that he had chosen the Browning poem because it best fitted his own life, wandering the stars. He had more to say, but it was so incredibly frustrating getting even the smallest shred of a thought across. Myers hadn’t realized in life how difficult it would be—even between old friends—to reach through the drawn curtains of death.

  “You must patch things together as best you can. Remember we do not give odd or singular words without a deep and hidden meaning.”

  MEANWHILE, Piddington found himself fixated on the sequence of recurring words in the messages, the repetition of star, rats, arts, stare. They reminded him of anagrams, which had been one of Richard Hodgson’s favorite recreations. Hadn’t Mrs. Piper written earlier that Hodgson was helping with the translations? And hadn’t Mrs. Verrall made a reference to anagrams?

  Piddington wrote to ask William James if there were any papers in Hodgson’s effects, those still remaining in Boston, that contained anagrams. James’s oldest son, Harry, who was co-executor with his father of Hodgson’s estate, obligingly sifted through the personal papers remaining.

  In one of the boxes, Harry James found a sheet covered with Hodgson’s cramped scrawl, which he mailed to London. It was a practice for an anagram, and it read:

  RATES

  STARE

  TEARS

  TEARS

  TARE

  ARE ST

  STARE

  A REST

  RESTA

  STAR

  TARS

  RATS

  ARTS

  TRAS

  “I confess that when this came into my hands I felt as I suppose people do who have seen a ghost,” Piddington said, shaken out of his usual calm by that creased sheet of notepaper.

  REV. MAY PEPPER continued her career as a star of the New York media and the bane of James Hyslop’s plans for restoring scientific credibility to psychical research.

  Traditional psychologists had shown no interest in Hyslop’s institute, scuttling his plans to integrate their work with his less orthodox interests. But thanks to John Piddington’s intervention, he’d gained sanction to rename his research institute the American Society for Psychical Research and build on the old organization’s foundation.

  Hyslop had barely started a new round of fund raising and assurances that psychical research was a meaningful science when Pepper went on trial for using her “spiritualistic gifts” to bilk a wealthy industrialist out of home and fortune.

  Since her temple days, Mrs. Pepper had married an ardent follower, Edward Ward Vanderbilt, a widower who’d made a fortune in the wholesale lumber business. She’d resigned her pastorate and moved into a large house in Brooklyn, “one of the handsomest in the Bedford district,” according to the New York Times.

  The reverend, her elderly husband, and her spirit control, an Indian child she called “Little Bright Eyes,” planned a simple and happy life together, she told reporters—a life enlivened by occasional private seances. But not if Vanderbilt’s daughter could prevent it; she had demanded a formal hearing into her father’s sanity.

  At the hearing, witnesses revealed that Mr. Vanderbilt had given Little Bright Eyes gifts of candy, clothes, and cash, illustrating, as the Times gleefully noted, that “girls in Spookland, as here, have a weakness for bon-bons and caramels at 80 cents a box, that they can find use for wearing apparel and can cash checks.”

  The spirit also exhibited a talent for giving very specific instructions to Mr. Vanderbilt. Letters produced in court revealed that through Bright Eyes, his dead wife had told Vanderbilt that she wanted the widower to marry May Pepper and, of course, to provide her with a comfortable home. “Bright Eyes is so good to me,” ran one such note, “that it behooves me to do all in my power to make her Medy’s [medium’s] life brighter and happier.”

  The letters were delivered through automatic writing by May Pepper herself, who insisted that she never knew what her hand wrote while she was lost in a trance. Any wrongdoing, Mrs
. Pepper-Vanderbilt told the court, was due to the spirit’s mischievous nature. A medium could not be held responsible for the morals of the ghosts that possessed her.

  When the case had been fully presented, the jury agreed unanimously with Vanderbilt’s daughter that her father had lost his mind. No one could miss the corollary—that only lunatics wasted their time believing in ghosts and well-meaning spirits.

  As Hyslop saw it, his only choice was to fight fire with fire, to show that his organization could expose frauds with the best of them. As May Pepper needed no more exposure—or publicity—he selected another target, equally high-profile in its way.

  First, Hyslop hired a full-time investigator for the ASPR. His choice was Hereward Carrington, a soft-spoken young Englishman with a reputation as both an amateur conjurer and psychical skeptic. Carrington’s first assignment was to visit the western New York community of Lily Dale, billed as “the most famous and aristocratic spiritualistic camp in America.”

  A mere scrap of a town about sixty miles south of Buffalo, Lily Dale contained little more than a railroad station, a few hotels, a scatter of white-painted houses, and an assembly ground. Nothing out of the ordinary except that the Church of Spiritualism owned it all. Only mediums registered to the church could become full-time residents of Lily Dale. Believers said that such a concentration of spiritualist power drew ghosts to the town the way a magnet summoned iron filings.

  The hotels, the mediums’ parlors, and the wooded grounds—supposedly haunted—were open to any paying customer seeking advice, communication with the dead, or just a demonstration of unearthly powers. During the summer months, Lily Dale hosted some 500 visitors daily, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghost world. As Hyslop put it, “Such places simply invite investigation by the claims that they make.”