The Ghost Hunters

by Deborah Blum

  While the Americans hesitated, Hall continued to press his case. He wrote to Oliver Lodge, asking whether the English SPR “would raise any objection to his making some simple physiological tests on Mrs. Piper’s condition in trance.” Lodge also thought this looked like an opportunity. Hall, as an eminent psychologist, founding editor of the American Journal of Psychology, and mentor to James McKeen Cattell and Joseph Jastrow, was capable of winning the field back to their side.

  Still, Lodge wrote, it worried him that James, who knew Hall better, remained so unenthusiastic. Usually decided in his opinions, Lodge opted to go along with whatever James decided was best.

  IN THE WAKE of the SPR’s cross-correspondence study, especially in the receptive coverage by the American press, Hereward Carrington also saw a moment of opportunity. He invited Eusapia Palladino to tour the eastern United States, hoping that this was the right time for her strange talents-as demonstrated in Naples—to convert American skeptics.

  For once, Hyslop and James found themselves in complete agreement. They both thought this an atrocious idea.

  Hyslop warned Carrington, who had left the ASPR to pursue his own investigations, to proceed more cautiously. He reminded his former employee of Eusapias troubled history; he invoked the ease with which Richard Hodgson had exposed her as a cheat. She was untrustworthy, Hyslop said, exactly the wrong kind of medium to parade before skeptics. James also invoked Hodgson’s name in recommending against the project. He predicted that the flamboyant Eusapia would attract the worst variety of newspaper attention—exactly the type of publicity that he thought was most harmful to their endeavor.

  Further, he thought Carrington was being naive if he thought American scientists wanted an honest investigation of the Italian medium. Long and bitter experience had taught him otherwise. James suspected that researchers would see her merely as an opportunity to further discredit psychical research.

  “It would be one thing if the scientists would really investigate Eusapia,” James wrote. “But I have very little faith in the candor of such men, and doubt any important result accruing.” He hoped Carrington would follow his advice: “Let them [the scientists] perish in their ignorance and conceit.”

  If this struck an unusually bitter note for James, it was also the sound of recent experience. He and his colleagues had allowed Stanley Hall to have his requested time with Leonora Piper. They were now reaping the unhappy results.

  Once he’d achieved his object, Hall made it clear that he had never intended to find out whether Mrs. Piper could communicate with spirits. That concept belonged “more to the troglodyte age than our own.” His interest was in debunking her once and for all: “Seriously to investigate the problem of whether discarnate ghosts can suspend any of the laws of matter seems to me not only bad form for any and every scientific man, but an indication of a strange psychic rudiment... that ought to be’ outgrown like the prenatal tail or gills.”

  What Hall had in mind—in the six sittings he’d scheduled—was a clinical dissection of this vestige of superstitious belief.

  Dismissing earlier studies as inadequate, Hall and his research assistant, Amy Tanner, insisted on first retesting Mrs. Piper’s trance state. Hall counted her breaths, measured her pulse rate, timed the whole affair. It took about six minutes for her to drop into trance, he reported. At that point her breathing slowed from more than twenty breaths a minute to fewer than ten. Her pulse fell from eighty-four beats a minute to seventy.

  It was in this state that Mrs. Piper would begin to scribble messages on paper. She resurfaced slowly, some fifteen to twenty minutes of gradual awakening. As the minutes went on, her breathing quickened, her pulse climbed back to normal.

  The trance seemed real enough. But Hall thought he could prove otherwise. He mixed up a spirit of camphor (a slightly toxic compound known for its stinging taste and ability to numb sensation) and dripped it into her mouth. To his surprise, she did not startle awake. But on emerging slowly from the trance, she exclaimed in dismay that her mouth was numb. The next morning blisters covered her swollen lips and tongue. For days she had difficulty swallowing.

  Hall’s next attempt to dismantle Mrs. Piper’s trance involved an esthesiometer, an instrument that allowed him to slowly screw a weight against her skin, testing for the sensation of pressure. He expected that as the pressure increased, it would bring her awake. Again, the experiment failed to disturb the trance. But afterward her hand and arm were pockmarked with red pressure points where the weight had been screwed into her skin. For a time, she feared she’d lost full use of the. hand; it tingled and refused to respond for several days.

  Alta Piper, now twenty, was furious. Was this what “real science” was all about? Injuring a woman who was, as ever, trying to be helpful? Alta fired off the accusations to Hall, who acknowledged that perhaps “we went farther than we should” and asked to be allowed to continue the sittings. Alta voted no; she wanted the door slammed in Hall’s judgmental face. But her mother said yes. She was willing to forgive the first painful experiments, and had “no objections to experiments of any sort if they left no bad after-effects,” Mrs. Piper wrote to Professor Hall.

  Leonora Piper was weary of being a mystery, most of all to herself. She clung to the hope that this highly respected psychologist would be able to give her some answers.

  MRS. PIPER’S SO-CALLED spirits were a joke, Hall reported.

  Her primary control, Rector, fished for information and couldn’t tell if it was accurate or not. At one point, Hall invented a dead niece, who then “sent” ghostly messages in later sittings. The so-called Hodgson control was no better, claiming to remember conversations with Hall that had certainly never taken place. Mrs. Piper’s trances seemed genuinely odd, yes; occasionally, she revealed information she shouldn’t have known; but overall, his diagnosis was that a competent doctor, one experienced in mental health, could have cured her years ago.

  “In fine, at the very best, I for one can see nothing more in Mrs. Piper than an interesting case of secondary personality with its own unique features,” Hall said. He could only conclude that people found meaning in her trance utterances because they wanted to find it. He included his colleague William James in that group of self-deceiving dreamers.

  Hall hoped that the rest of society would appreciate the short work that a good scientist could make of even an acclaimed medium. He hoped that people would see it as he did, as a battle of good science against evil mysticism: “Science is indeed a solid island set in the midst of a stormy, foggy, and uncharted sea, and all these phenomena are of the sea and not the land. If there have been eras of enlightenment, it is because these cloud banks of superstition ... have lifted for a space or a season.

  “Spiritism is the ruck and muck of modern culture, the common enemy of true science and true religion, and to drain its dismal and miasmatic marshes is the great work of modern culture.”

  In the interests of honest reporting, Oliver Lodge wrote to Hall and asked to publish his study of Mrs. Piper in the SPR journal. The experiments should be kept in context with the others, Lodge pointed out; “the full moral ought to be extracted from them and they ought to go on record with the rest. In so far as they have been painful, it is the more desirable that they not be wasted.”

  Hall refused. He had other plans for the material, he said, perhaps a book with Tanner on spiritualism itself; perhaps later publication in “some journal,” perhaps a report or two in his own Journal of Psychology. He suspected the SPR, given the chance, would pretty up his findings. As he wrote to Lodge, Hall wanted to be sure that his own inferences, which “are pretty negative,” would be fully included, and he doubted that would happen in any publication edited by believers.

  Lodge sent Hall’s letter over to William James with a terse note: “By this morning’s post, I have received from Stanley Hall a letter, which strikes me as arrogant and unsatisfactory. I enclose a copy and do not wish a reply.”

  AS EXPECTED, Amy Tanner’
s book Studies in Spiritism, published the following year, detailed every fault in the Piper sittings as witnessed by the author and her mentor. But if Tanner’s conclusions were unsympathetic to psychical research, they were not entirely unsympathetic to Mrs. Piper herself. Tanner’s perspectives on the medium and her life as a research subject were, in their way, kinder than any analysis made by the dedicated psychical researchers, including those who believed that Leonora Piper possessed supernatural abilities.

  Even Hodgson had never thought Mrs. Piper intelligent enough to understand her own capabilities, much less the metaphysical questions raised by spirit communication. “Mrs. Piper’s opinion, in any case, is of no value,” Hodgson once told an ASPR member, explaining why the medium looked to investigators for help with a mystery “which she herself had no hope of solving.”

  Tanner didn’t claim to see an intellectual, but she did see a woman trapped and isolated by the mediumistic side of her life: “She hides from the general public as much as possible,” she wrote. As a longtime medium, Mrs. Piper had given up all traces of the friendly little girl from New Hampshire. She was suspicious of strangers. She tried to conceal her work from her neighbors, asking sitters to enter and go upstairs quietly, watching at the door so that visitors didn’t even sound the doorbell.

  “She was brought up a Methodist, but when her parents moved to a town where there was only a Congregational Church she attended that. She would like to have some church connections,” Tanner wrote, “but seems to feel that probably she would not be welcomed in any church on account of her work as a medium. Here too she is isolated.”

  Mrs. Piper had filled her life instead with her family, with art and music, and with the outdoors, becoming “unusually fond of nature and its beauties.” But that hardly balanced the more than twenty years in which she had been singled out, made into a freak, given up hours of her life to trances and tests, demanded by psychical researchers seeking that elusive crack in the wall between the living and dead.

  If Tanner and Hall concluded that Leonora Piper had grown a tangle of secondary personalities, who could blame them? Both James and Lodge had already raised the possibility, particularly the concern that the often-domineering Hodgson might have inadvertently induced some of them. They had long suspected that the equally domineering control, Rector—who, unlike Mrs. Piper, could stand up to Hodgson—arose from her subconscious as a direct defense against the investigator.

  Amy Tanner also wondered if the Mrs. Piper of 1909 was a worn-down version of a once more talented medium. If so, she thought, the investigators might be partly to blame. But she also pointed out that Mrs. Piper’s powers, whatever they were, had been strongest during earlier times of poor health.

  During the period when the medium suffered severe abdominal pain, eventually diagnosed as an ovarian tumor, her readings had been extraordinarily impressive. G.P had appeared during the worst of that illness, including the time when Mrs. Piper was recovering from the surgery. He had faded away only as her health returned. Tanner speculated that perhaps in a physically fragile state Mrs. Piper became more of a mental conduit: “That is, the facts in the case seem to point to the theory that the mediumistic power is encouraged and, perhaps in the beginning, caused by nervous shock.”

  In her way, it seemed, Dr. Amy Tanner was raising the possibility of the decline effect, the recognition that no psychic, even the best one, lasted forever.

  SAILING ACROSS THE Atlantic to New York, Eusapia Palladino decided to hold a seance to alleviate her boredom. Passengers gathered round, clamoring to talk with their dead relatives. A woman fainted to the floor as lights winked in the air.

  Onboard journalists cabled the story of the carnival-like spectacle to New York, where Hereward Carrington immediately received offers from music hall managers to host Eusapia. Deep in debt on the venture, Carrington quickly accepted the most lucrative among the invitations.

  “Poor Carrington had to promise her enormous pay, and to raise the money he had to give sittings to every idle rich person who asked for them, hoping to invite some serious experts gratis with the surplus,” James wrote to Flournoy with some sympathy.

  Hyslop felt no sympathy at all, only alarm. Everybody knew that Eusapia had to be tightly managed, or she resorted to cheating. As far as Hyslop could tell, this tour promised none of the control and all of the opportunity for her to make a complete fool of herself, and of psychical researchers as well.

  Although he had refused money to Carrington earlier, Hyslop now anted up for a stenographer in an effort to at least make records of the sittings. He also did his best to lower expectations for Eusapia’s visit, warning newspaper and magazine reporters that this was an exhibition rather than a scientific project. Hyslop wished she’d stayed in Italy. He wished he was still giving interviews about the cross-correspondence studies. He had an idea that their small set of credible findings was about to disappear in the uproar of an ectoplasmic circus.

  A former colleague of James, Harvard psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, was among the first scientists to wangle an invitation to observe Eusapia. He was chosen to attend one of those select seances that Eusapia was giving to wealthy donors.

  Munsterberg and James had once been good friends, and James had helped arrange the German scientist’s move to Harvard in the late 1890s. He’d also endorsed Munsterberg as president of the American Psychological Association in 1898.

  But their friendship had eroded over differences in personality, philosophy, and attitudes toward psychical research. Munsterberg possessed an orderly and applied view of psychology. The philosophy of it didn’t appeal to him as much as making it a useful science. He researched eyewitness testimony with an idea toward improving criminal investigations; he studied the ways in which doctors could use psychology to help patients, such as encouraging them to believe that they were getting well.

  As James moved deeper into metaphysical questions of philosophy, Munsterberg responded with disdain and accusations that his colleague was turning away from real science. He’d disliked the books James published since retirement, Pragmatism in 1907 and A Pluralistic Universe in 1909. Both of them discussed philosophy’s potential to explore truth and reality in a way that science—even good applied science—could not.

  The philosophy of pragmatism had gained a following among young philosophers who saw it as way of shedding nineteenth-century romanticism for twentieth-century realism. Among other things, James’s philosophy raised the idea that real-life experience might be as important to interpreting life as scientific absolutes: “On pragmatic principles,” James explained, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”

  Munsterberg made a point of mocking James’s new philosophy when he spoke publicly. He was so antagonistic that James’s wife, Alice, began taking the attacks personally. Alice would barely speak to Munsterberg—she was “pure ice,” as her husband described it—when she met their former friend at Cambridge social events. James himself wrote to Munsterberg in dismay: “Were it not for my fixed belief that the world is wide enough to sustain and nourish without harm many different types of thinking, I believe that the wide difference between your whole Drang in philosophizing and mine would give me a despairing feeling.... I am satisfied with a free wild Nature; you seem to me to cherish and pursue an Italian Garden, where all things are kept in separate compartments, and one must follow straight-ruled walks.”

  Like so many in the American psychology community, Munsterberg deplored James’s detour into psychical research, and felt compelled to respond and protect the profession from the taint of such pseudoscience. When Carrington issued him an invitation to one of the first sittings with the infamous Italian medium, Munsterberg accepted with pleasure—and an agenda.

  He seated himself next to Eusapia at the December 18, 1909, seance, holding her left hand and with her left foot resting on top of his polished shoes. He did not try to hold her foot down; she quickly slipped out of the
shoe and wiggled her foot backward to move a small table behind her. Another guest grabbed her toes; she began to screech and halted the seance. Munsterberg promptly contacted the New York papers, claiming that he arranged for the medium to be caught cheating. When the other sittings with American-based scientists proved equally disastrous, Munsterberg told the New York Times that the gullibility and susceptibility of the previous investigators explained, entirely, her reputed ability to do magic.

  “There is no limit to his genius for self-advertisement and superficiality,” James fumed to Flournoy. “Mendacity too!”

  In a follow-up article for the Metropolitan Magazine, titled “My Friends, the Spiritualists,” Munsterberg lamented the delusions of otherwise intelligent men, naming Ochorowicz and Richet as spiritualists in the most credulous sense, and, as James wrote, in another angry letter to Flournoy, attempting to “insinuate that I also am one.”

  The irritating thing, Flournoy replied, was that all of these cheats had been demonstrated before; anyone who knew Eusapia knew that she liked to cheat when she could. “Fraud with the feet, which Munsterberg allowed to take place (if indeed he didn’t intentionally encourage it in order to support his preconceived ideas) does not explain the innumerable other happenings which occur when she is controlled in all 4 limbs, and the séances take place in sufficient light.”

  Agreed. And yet James feared that Hyslop’s warnings had been proved correct, that nothing good would come of this particular expedition. “Eusapia’s trip to the U.S. will simply have spoiled her, and discredited everyone else,” he predicted. His own reputation had suffered already. An editorial in the Times made that more than clear in its concluding sentences: “We are not so much concerned about Eusapia Palladino as we are about the psychical researchers.... The time has almost come when to be a psychical researcher is to confess unsoundness of judgment.” - The editors seemed to question the judgment of two people in particular, both of whom were named in the editorial: Hereward Carrington—who should have known better than to bring over this ludicrous fraud—and William James, who should have known better throughout his career.