by Deborah Blum
In response to a query from England, asking if they’d seen any of Richet’s so-called ectoplasmic forms, Feilding wrote back to Alice Johnson, “Why my good lady, we are getting hands, white & yellowish; heads, profiles & full face; curious black long knobbly things with cauliflowers at the end of them; touches, visible & invisible; hand grasps from within the curtain, one yesterday (12/05/08) which held my hand with such force that I felt the nails.”
All three men finished shaken, puzzled—and convinced.
The phenomena in question were “in themselves, preposterous, futile, and lacking in any quality of smallest ethical, moral or spiritual value,” Feilding said. Both Baggally and Carrington were capable of conjuring up similar effects on a stage, given adequate props and preparation. The investigators were less impressed by the show itself than by an almost tangible sense of magic filling the room, an unnerving impression of a power beyond any of them, including Eusapia herself.
Feilding did not believe that he’d seen spirits at work, rather that he’d witnessed something less definable, “the existence of some force not yet generally recognized which is able to impress itself on matter and to simulate or create the appearance of matter. Thus the demonstrations—blowing curtains and floating tables—might seem rather silly except as a clue to something more, the other power in the room.”
Feilding still believed that psychic investigators needed to “approach the investigation of the phenomena themselves in a light, shall I say, even a flippant spirit. I sometimes think that in this way alone one can preserve one’s mental balance in dealing with this kind of subject.”
But in the same way that Piddington had looked upon Dick Hodgson’s old star anagrams and felt a ghost breathing down his neck, so Feilding found himself sure that he’d seen beyond the ordinary, that Eusapia’s phenomena were “the playthings of the agency which they reveal.” On a rare note of complete earnestness, he recommended that the study of that agency, whatever it was, “is surely a task as worthy of the most earnest consideration as any problem with which modern science is concerned.”
WILLIAM BARRETT HAD been waiting for that conclusion for more than a decade. Since 1895, to be precise.
That was the year that Barrett had written a book on the importance of psychical research, inspired by the moment when Lombroso and Richet had declared in favor of Palladino. Following the disastrous Cambridge sittings, Barrett had quietly tucked the manuscript away: “It seemed wiser... to delay the publication of the volume until more conclusive evidence, one way or the other, had been forth-coming.” As soon as he learned of the results of the Naples experiment, Barrett retrieved his manuscript and sent it to a publisher.
It occurred to him that the timing was even better now. As author, he could stand on a lifetime of scientific achievement. Barrett had been knighted for his work in physics, shortly after Oliver Lodge achieved that honor, and been named a Fellow of the Royal Society. As Sir William Barrett, he believed his opinions would carry greater credibility.
Barrett’s book, On the Threshold of a New World of Thought, rang like a victory cry when it appeared in 1909, declaring that he and his colleagues had proved their case, from the newest results with Eusapia Palladino to more than twenty years of consistent evidence provided by Leonora Piper. “The paramount importance of psychical research,” Barrett wrote, “is found in correcting the habit of Western thought... that the physical plane is the whole of nature, or at any rate the only aspect of the universe which really concerns us.”
His book immediately sold out, rolling right into a second edition. At that moment of multiple successes, Barrett had no doubt that public opinion would carry science along with it and that—despite the fact that they were so outnumbered by their critics—the process of “correction” was finally under way.
12
A GHOST STORY
ON JANUARY 10, 1909, a headline in the New York Times caught perfectly the flicker of hope warming the psychical research community: “Sir Oliver Lodge Gives the Results of a Series of Remarkable Experiments Testing the Reality of Life After Death.”
Keeping with William Barrett’s theme—that proof was at hand—Lodge focused on the cross-correspondence study, explaining that he and his friends had kept the results to themselves until they were confident of what they meant. Only now would Lodge reveal a startling series of exchanges, pieced together over several months during 1907.
On a January morning, Mrs. Fleming, from her home in Calcutta, had written a script that included the names “Francis and Ignatius.” Five hours later in London, taking into account the time difference, Mrs. Piper’s penmanship suddenly changed during an automatic writing session, taking on the distinctive loops of Fred Myers’s handwriting. John Piddington asked immediately whether this was Myers and whether he was consulting with any other spirits. The prompt reply came in the form of two names scrawled across the paper: “Francis and Ignatius.”
A few weeks later, Mrs. Verrall in Cambridge drew three converging arrows. Both she and Nora puzzled over the drawings and decided not to mention them but instead to wait and see if anything related came from London or Calcutta.
The next day, as Piddington worked with Mrs. Piper, she produced a message from Richard Hodgson, saying that as a test, he had given “arrow” to Mrs. Verrall. A few days later, another message, signed Hodgson, reminded Piddington to “watch for arrow.”
At week’s end, Piddington received a letter from Nora Sidgwick, for the first time telling him of the arrow scripts at her end. He decided not to mention it to Mrs. Piper. The following day came a slightly impatient message from Hodgson, “Got arrow yet?” Piddington waited two months before letting the medium know the answer to that question, wanting to be sure that he didn’t influence the results himself “Whatever the agency is that effects the coincident phenomena, it is not a force that is working blindly and mechanically, but with intelligence and design,” Lodge said, promising more to come as the cross-correspondence tests were still ongoing, and still continuing to produce surprising linkages.
“Not easily or early do we make this admission,” he emphasized, but Lodge was now willing to commit himself publicly, to say that he was communicating with the spirits of his old friends, that on the other side, the messages were sent “with the express purpose of patently proving their known personalities,” that it would be soon impossible to deny such proofs of immortality.
William James’s mood was chillier. He was writing up his analysis of Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson personality into a formal report for the SPR. The self-proclaimed spirit still seemed troublingly ambiguous to him, and he worried that his uncertainties might dampen the feeling of confidence rising from the cross-correspondence work.
James’s health was faltering again, draining him of optimism and energy. While resting-relaxing at Chocorua, reading in his Cambridge home library—he felt comfortable enough. But with even mild exertion his heart clutched painfully in his chest.
He barely stirred from home while he struggled to make sense of what had been real, and what had not, in the shadowy reappearances of Richard Hodgson.
The Hodgson spirit or personality or control, whatever one wanted to call it, seemed sometimes a believable ghost, other times an uneven recreation shaped by the medium’s mind and memory. But when believable, it could be downright eerie.
William Newbold, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania and a longtime friend of both James and Hodgson, had come to sit twice with Mrs. Piper, maintaining an attitude of easy skepticism with some difficulty.
“I heard you and William discussing me. I stood not one inch behind you,” the Hodgson-control said during Newbold’s second visit.
Sitter: William who?
Hodgson personality: James.
Sitter: What did William James say?
Hodgson p.: He said he was baffled, but he felt I was talking at one moment, and then at another he did not know what to think.”
(Perfectly true of my convers
ation with Newbold after his sitting with Mrs. Piper a week previous-WJ)
Sitter: Did you hear anything else?
Hodgson p.: Yes, he said I was very secretive and careful.
“Did you hear him say that?”
“He did. He said I was [keeping information back].”
“I don’t remember him saying so.”
“I tell you, Billy, he said so.”
Newbold related this exchange to James, leading to a discussion of the conversation in question. The Pennsylvania psychologist remembered that James had expressed puzzlement over the on-off nature of the Hodgson personality. He didn’t recall any mention of Hodgson’s secretive nature.
But James did.
He’d told Newbold that sometimes the Hodgson personality seemed to be protective of what he knew, refusing to answer questions, in a way that brought back the living Hodgson’s obsessive demands for secrecy.
That neurotic sense of privacy had colored the sittings, making it more difficult for James to verify information. But Hodgson had been a complicated personality in his lifetime; should anyone have expected him to become an easy man after death?
The impression of a strong-willed and opinionated Richard Hodgson—again, as he was in life—resounded during a sitting with James’s wife, Alice. She’d asked, “Do you remember what happened in our library one night when you were arguing with Margie [her sister]?”
Alice James had hardly finished the sentence before the medium’s arm shot forcefully out, one hand forming a fist, shaking the clenched fingers angrily into the air. “Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn’t help it. She was so impossible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn’t help it.”
James and his family had laughed over that incident. The explosive response had come during a family dinner, when Hodgson and Margie Gibbs were both invited, and James’s sister-in-law gave an admiring description of a slate writer she had seen in California. Hodgson—who never could abide slate writers—had become so exasperated that he’d leapt loudly to his feet to challenge her, his fist waving under her nose.
The private jokes, intimate details, embarrassing recollections that the sitters asked James not to mention—in an era not yet much removed from the buttoned-up repression of the Victorian age—left a powerful impression. “More than this—most of us felt during the sittings that we were, in some way, more or less remote, conversing with a real... Hodgson,” James wrote in his final report on the Hodgson control.
Reading the transcripts of a sitting was always a poor substitute for attending one. James had heard many scientists express doubts about seances after they had read an investigator’s report. He felt that without personal experience it was difficult, if not impossible, to understand the event. He could try to describe it, that overwhelming sense of intimacy “when your questions are answered, and your allusions understood; when allusions are made that you understand, and your own thoughts are met... when you have approved, applauded or exchanged banter, or thankfully listened to advice you believe in, it is difficult not to take away an impression of having encountered something sincere in the way of a social phenomenon.”
But put plainly, the best writer in the world could not convey that shock of personal recognition.
Even so, and for all those extraordinary moments of connection, there were also extraordinary disconnects, ones that seemed to James anyway, to dispel any certain conclusion. The Hodgson personality—simply called RH. in James’s report—could not accurately describe his own childhood in Australia. Neither could he accurately describe his personal life. When asked to name some of his friends at the Tavern Club, men that he had played pool with, gone swimming with, R.H. gave six names, only one of whom belonged to the Tavern Club, and never showed any awareness of that error.
The best results came from the trance personality’s knowledge of relationships and experiences that Hodgson had shared with people sitting in the room—making telepathy a better answer than spirit communication, suggesting that the medium might be picking up information from her visitors. And, James emphasized, even these were not the best ever sittings with Mrs. Piper. Along with R.H. came “so much repetition, hesitation, irrelevance, unintelligibility, so much obvious groping and fishing and plausible covering up of false tracks... the stream of veridicality [truth] that runs through the whole gets lost as it were in a marsh of feebleness.”
In Mrs. Piper’s trances, James had often seen hints of the supernatural, the blown spark of unearthly powers glinting beyond his reach—but that was less so with R.H. The Hodgson personality, James thought, was not as strong as the irascible Phinuit, the serious-minded G.P., or even the dictatorial Rector. James still believed that some force, some power, was attempting to communicate in these sittings. But, he concluded unhappily, “if asked if the will to communicate be Hodgson’s or be some mere spirit-counterfeit of Hodgson, I remain uncertain and await more fact.”
NORA SIDGWICK WAS as fragile in appearance and as tough in mind as ever. As the newly named SPR president, she ruffled her colleagues by agreeing with William James that psychical researchers still must travel over “considerable ground” before they could assume they were conversing with spirits.
She believed that the society had made a powerful case for telepathy—in Mrs. Piper’s sittings, in observations, and in other experiments, possibly including the cross-correspondence work. As Nora put it, “few people who looked into the evidence we [already] have, thoroughly and without prejudice, would fail to be convinced that telepathy is a fact.” The difficulty was, as ever, to overcome prejudice, especially among scientists.
“We must not altogether blame men of science for feeling this prejudice. It is a kind of self-defense,” Nora said. As she saw it, science relied on a carefully defined and validated set of guidelines, which, among other advantages, prevented researchers from chasing wild ideas down dark and peculiar alleys. Frankly, Nora admired such practical efficiency. She reminded her colleagues that the scientific process worked incredibly well, beyond most people’s wildest expectations.
In that very year of 1909, German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich devised the first modern chemotherapeutic drug, a breakthrough treatment for syphilis; wireless communication—which had won Marconi and Ferdinand Braun (but not Lodge) the Nobel Prize—was so well established that it now served as the primary communication method for oceangoing ships; American Leo Hendrik Baekeland unveiled Bakelite, a plastic resin that did not soften when heated, launching the modern plastics industry; a small biplane had been flown across the English Channel; and the success of moving picture technology had inspired producers to build “studios” in a tiny southern California community called Hollywood.
Science proved its power and worth every day, Nora said, and for many educated people it had replaced religion as the most believable way to explain the world. Yet in any belief system, she pointed out, there was a risk of blindness, especially when it became unquestioning belief. “Danger only arises when the scheme becomes a system of dogma which is master instead of slave,” Nora said.
Consider, for instance, the insistence of scientists that no observation or experimental result is proven unless it can be reliably repeated. Obviously, there were exceptions to that in nature—no one claimed that a shooting star could be replicated. And yet researchers used their set methods to deny everything the SPR wanted to study, which was also, by nature, spontaneous, erratic, and unpredictable—including the telepathy results.
Under identical conditions, the SPR investigators achieved apparently perfect mental coordination on one occasion, and absolutely nothing on another. “This is one of the difficulties which make patience and perseverance such essential qualities in psychical research,” Nora acknowledged, “and it is one of the difficulties which we hope further study may reduce.”
As an illustration, she gave the history of a small experiment she’d tracked over the past several years. Two women, who lived in different villages some twenty miles apart,
had been daily noting certain impressions or events, trying to send them telepathically to the other, and also mailing postcards recording what had been sent and what had been received.
The postcards illustrated a typical hodgepodge of success and failure. Participant A had attended a tea at which a village woman had worn the oddest pair of spectacles. She decided to send the ideas of the spectacles that day. She received a postcard from participant B complaining that she’d spent the day thinking about spectacles.
On a bright fall day, participant B had been told a lively story by a friend, a tale of a big white hog with an unusually long snout. Amused, she sent a card in the afternoon mail telling of the pig. Participant A sent a postcard that same day, which talked of a cold, wet evening and a pig with a long snout.
“The setting you see was wrong,” Nora noted, “but the pig turned up all right.” She doubted that a traditional scientist would see the pig and the spectacles as evidence. But she did. She regretted that scientific “dogma” blinded intelligent people to such possibilities.
G. STANLEY HALL, president of Clark University, an ASPR dropout and for many years an outspoken critic of psychical research, had surprised Mrs. Piper’s supporters by asking for sittings with her. Hall offered assurances that his intentions were only to do good science. And yet William James did not quite believe him.
Hall had written to both Hyslop and James, asking help in scheduling time with the medium. James inclined toward denying the request. He considered Hall “a crank,” a rigid and unforgiving man, and a somewhat vindictive scientist. Hyslop countered that psychical research would never advance by denying mainstream scientists access to its best study subjects.
