Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After Death

by Deborah Blum

  He hadn’t been willing to step into the dark just then.

  In the morning, though, the squire went out to look for footprints. The ground and paths were frosted with cold. They sparkled in the sun. The glittering surfaces were unmarked, except by the light tracks of a passing hare. There were no marks where he had heard the visitor approach. He couldn’t understand it.

  Only a few hours later, a horrified friend came by to tell them that their neighbor had committed suicide by drinking a glass of prussic acid, a cyanide potion distilled from a dye called Prussian blue. The young farmer had bought the poison that morning, telling the chemist that he needed to kill a dangerous dog.

  It had been waiting for him at home, after he said good night to the squire. Prussic acid poisoning was a terrible death, rackingly painful. The body looked as if the young man had died screaming. The county coroner thought perhaps the death had occurred after ten or so, the previous night.

  As the squire wrote to Gurney, he had no explanation for what happened. He knew only that it had. And just this one time, he emphasized, never before or since. He wanted Gurney to know that he wasn’t a sensitive man, always hearing things and flinching at shadows.

  Gurney checked out the story anyway, compiling statements from the man’s wife, neighbors, the chemist who’d sold the poison. He’d verified even the claims of frosty weather by reading newspaper accounts of the time. It was only then that he put the squire’s story into the credible 5 percent pile. Slowly the pile was growing, though. And in the slim stack of stories there, Gurney thought he was just beginning to see the hint of an outline, the faint form of something that might be real.

  “I think our case is really strong enough to show that the subject ought to be earnestly prosecuted,” Gurney told James. He did agree with Newcomb on one main point, though: They needed to be absolutely, completely clear in their work and their findings: “I feel that every sentence written on these matters ought to absolutely reek of candour.”

  NORA SIDGWICK WAS fairly impervious to insult. But she could have wished that Simon Newcomb had actually read her analysis of ghost stories before deriding it as child’s play.

  Her report had, actually, been so skeptical as to infuriate the British society’s most dedicated spiritualists and believers. Nora had flatly declared that most spooky tales were spun like sugar, thready creations of foggy nights and fevered imaginations, “of such a nature as to justify the contempt with which scientific men generally regard” such reports. Some angry members of the SPR had threatened to quit over her account; as her husband noted with affection, she was completely untroubled by that reaction.

  As Nora saw it, she needed to eliminate illusions and hallucinations and then to decipher the meaning of the few credible stories. For instance, almost everyone who claimed to see a ghost described the dead person as fully dressed. Why should that be? Why should there be “ghosts of clothes,” as Nora put it? One might argue that a ghost represented a dead person’s spirit or spiritual energy, but it was difficult to accept that shirts and skirts also passed into an afterlife. Why would their wardrobe return with them? Why—as Fred Myers somewhat sarcastically said—should the theory of metaphysics encompass “meta-trousers and meta-coats”?

  On the surface, Nora believed that clothes-wearing ghosts were a point against the stories being true. They made no scientific sense. On the other hand, Nora thought that if she could figure out why so many credible witnesses saw them, then she and her colleagues might move closer to understanding why people saw ghosts at all.

  Because the one thing she did believe was that many of the people she talked to did see ghosts—or at least were convinced of the fact. “I can only say that having made every effort—as my paper will, I hope, have shown—to exercise a reasonable skepticism, I yet do not feel equal to the degree of unbelief in human testimony necessary to avoid accepting at least provisionally the conclusion that there are, in a certain sense, haunted houses.” If one accepted that conclusion, she said, then one also needed to ask what, precisely, created that “certain sense” of being haunted.

  WILLIAM JAMES WOULD remember that summer night, the one that found him alone, thinking about a dead child, as darkness barely lit by a “clouded moon.”

  He stood on a Cambridge street, looking up at a bedroom window in a house he had once occupied. The night was quiet and the window was shuttered, tucked under the eaves of the second floor, shadowed by memory.

  His third son, Herman, had been born in that room, in January 1884, a child so irresistibly chubby and cheerful that he’d immediately needed a less serious name. James nicknamed him Humster. And now it was August 1885 and Humster had been dead for more than a month, buried in a wicker cradle basket near his grandfather’s grave, marking yet another month in a terrible year. ,

  James’s wife, Alice, had been quarantined with scarlet fever in the early spring. For three months the children—six—year—old Harry, three-year-old Billy, and one-year-old Herman—lived with Alice’s mother in her nearby Boston home. Even after Alice began to recover, even after they washed the bedroom, disinfected it with sulfur fumes, stripped the wallpaper, and repainted the walls, James and his wife worried about allowing the children back home.

  But their littlest boy begged to stay, clung to his mother on visits. Finally James and his sister-in-law, Margaret, removed Billy and Harry to New Hampshire and allowed the baby of the family to stay with his mother. It was a decision made with love, a decision that went rapidly wrong. Alice, still fragile, developed whooping cough. Herman caught the infection, which turned rapidly into a vicious pneumonia. In answer to his wife’s terrified letter, James rushed home to find his youngest son dying, racked by fever and convulsions.

  Herman died in his mother’s bed on July 9. Two days later, they buried him under a small pine tree in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery. William and Alice wrapped a little white flannel blanket around their son’s casket, and when it was lowered into the ground, they surrounded it with flowers and leaves. James confessed later to one of his aunts that he’d always looked down on such rituals. “But there is usefully a human need embodied in any old human custom and we both felt this.” They left their son cradled in wicker, smothered in branches and leaves, and “there he lies.”

  And, yet, on this night in late August, James walked back to their old rental house just to stand there in the hazy moonlight. He mourned the brief flutter of his son’s existence. On the following day, James wrote to a cousin, “It must be now that he is reserved for some still better chance,” some promise beyond life on Earth.

  He had no intention of trying to prove a very personal wish; no plan to consult a medium on behalf of his son. That he ended up doing both, William James would always consider a strange and remarkable coincidence.

  LEONORA EVELINA PIPER was twenty-six years old in 1885. The wife of a Boston shopkeeper, she was slightly chubby, neatly dressed, her light brown hair caught carefully up into middle-class respectability. The Pipers were middle-class respectable. Leonora, her husband William, and their one-year-old daughter, Alta, lived with his parents in a tidy house in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.

  But the neighbors whispered that young Mrs. Piper wasn’t quite as ordinary as all that. She could tell people things about their lives that she couldn’t have known. Sometimes she told them family secrets that they didn’t know themselves. The rumor was that she could hear the voices of the dead.

  According to Leonora’s parents, the first hint of any such ability occurred during her childhood in Nashua, New Hampshire. At the age of eight, while playing in the garden, Leonora felt a sudden, sharp blow on her right ear and heard a sudden sibilant hiss. The child stood shocked as the snakelike sound slowly resolved itself into an S, then the name Sara, then a sentence.

  Screaming, she ran into the house, calling for her mother, holding the side of her head. At first her mother could get no sense from the hysterical girl. Finally, the child stammered, “Oh, I don’t
know! Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but with you still.” She was so upset that she scared her mother, who wrote up the incident, the day, and the time in her diary that night. Several days later, they received a letter from the aunt’s husband, telling them that she had died, on the day, about the time that hissing voice had spoken into the child’s ear.

  Young Leonora (then Symonds) and her family wanted nothing to do with any of it—the whispering voices or the whispering neighbors. There were children celebrated for psychic gifts; the notorious Fox sisters came to mind. The Symonds family had no intention of seeing Leonora become such a freak. They put the eerie little moment behind them and raised their daughter as an upright member of the Methodist Church. She married William Piper when she was twenty-two, and if it hadn’t been for a troubling illness, she might have left it at that, a moment of otherworldly fright in a country garden.

  From her sixteenth year, Leonora had walked with a slight limp, the result of an ice-sledding accident. Another child’s sled had crashed into her on a snowy hill, damaging a knee and, more seriously, causing internal abdominal bleeding. In the years after, she’d been conscious of a dull ache across her midsection, and now, after the birth of her first child, the pain grew sharper.

  Frustrated by the inability of doctors to diagnose the cause, she visited a clairvoyant, an elderly blind man who claimed that he could contact spirits to aid in healing. When the psychic touched her, she grew almost immediately dizzy. “His face seemed to become smaller and smaller,” she said, and to the shock of the other sitters and the psychic himself, she tumbled to the floor.

  Voices were ringing in her head. She could hear only one of them clearly. She gathered herself up, went directly to a table, scribbled a note, and handed it to an elderly gentleman waiting his turn with the psychic. The gentleman, a Cambridge judge, said it was a message from his dead son, “the most remarkable I ever received.” She went back several more times to the psychic’s parlor, but she found she was becoming the attraction.

  Strangers were now coming to the Pipers’ home and asking Leonora to go into a trance for them. Alarmed, she retreated. She didn’t want to be a medium. She was expecting a second child. She wanted to be a mother and a respectable wife. Still, she had to wonder if this was some God-given gift. Leonora Piper prayed over it. She couldn’t quite bring herself to turn away all the callers. In the late summer of 1885, she let a friend talk her into sitting with a Boston widow.

  The widow was Eliza Gibbens, the mother-in-law of William James.

  As James recalled it, some two months after Herman’s death his mother-in-law came to visit, fizzing with excitement and disbelief. The young Beacon Hill medium had told her about family members, both names and facts, “the knowledge of which on her part was incomprehensible without supernormal powers.” It was so impossible that Mrs. Gibbens determined to investigate further. She sent her daughter Margaret to visit Mrs. Piper the following day with a tougher test, a letter in a sealed envelope.

  Don’t open it, Margaret said to Mrs. Piper, just tell me something about the person who wrote it.

  Reading sealed letters was an easy trick for mediums of the time. They could conceal an alcohol-soaked sponge in a hand or sleeve and surreptitiously soak the paper with it, rendering it transparent—and decipherable—until the alcohol evaporated. They had only to briefly distract the visitor until they could return the envelope and reveal its contents. With a good distraction, most mediums also showed a flair for opening and resealing envelope flaps in time to avoid detection.

  But Mrs. Piper kept things simple that day. She held the letter in front of her. And then she slowly described the writer—where she lived, why she had moved across the Atlantic. Even if she had somehow been able to sneak a look at the letter, Margaret had deliberately chosen from a correspondence written only in Italian, which Mrs. Piper definitely did not know. Margaret Gibbens and her mother decided to tell Alice about their find. She was still so thin and pale after the whooping cough and Herman’s death; like William, she had found it difficult to let the little boy go. Perhaps this would intrigue her, cheer her up a little, perhaps she could ask this odd medium about her lost son.

  “I remember playing the esprit fort on that occasion before my feminine relatives,” James wrote later, “and seeking to explain by simple considerations the marvelous character of the facts which they brought back.” He considered himself something of an expert on psychic performances. He and the Reverend Minot Savage, of the ASPR, had been visiting the more notable mediums of Boston, meticulously attending seance after seance, and learning lessons in what both men considered to be brazen fraud. “This did not, however, prevent me from going myself, a few days later, in company with my wife, to get a direct personal impression.”

  Mrs. Piper met them in the front parlor of her in-laws’ home, offering the couple seats in a pair of stiff wingback chairs. They had not given her their names, and to James’s relief, his mother-in-law and sister-in-law had earlier refused to disclose their identities.

  He’d emphasized to Alice that she must follow strict psychical research rules. They wouldn’t mention any connection with the earlier visits. They wouldn’t provide any information about their family at all. They wouldn’t ask leading questions. They wouldn’t answer such questions, either. They would listen politely and, he predicted, be bored senseless until they returned home for dinner.

  Leonora Piper settled herself into a fatly stuffed armchair, leaning back into a nest of pillows. They began talking about the weather. It had been an unusually gentle autumn. Late-afternoon sunlight glazed the room. Her eyes began to drift shut. Her head turned sideways against the pillows; a faint tracing of goose bumps rose on her skin. She would always describe the sensation of slipping into a trance as like descending into a dense and chilly fog.

  Her voice seemed to deepen a little. Mrs. Piper began repeating the names she had given to Alice’s mother and sister. And then she began fumbling for other names, mumbling them, getting them not quite right. “The names came with difficulty and were only gradually made perfect. My wife’s father’s name of Gibbens was pronounced first as Niblin, then Giblin,” before the right name was fumbled out. It was as if she couldn’t pronounce the words at first, or couldn’t quite hear them right.

  As Mrs. Piper added details to the names, James, as he later wrote a friend, became increasingly uneasy. It could be that the young psychic knew everyone in his wife’s family on sight. She could be incredibly lucky in guessing about the domestic life of strangers and their relatives. Or it could be that most improbable, scientifically impossible conclusion—that this woman “was possessed of supernormal powers.”

  Before coming out of her trance, Mrs. Piper did ask about a dead child. But that too could be an easy guess. Many couples had lost children to illness. He watched the medium’s entranced face, her closed eyes, and the slight frown between them. It was a boy, she said, a small one. Herrin? Herrin ? No, she would finally conclude the boy’s name sounded more like Herman.

  “PEOPLE WHO FLY into rages are such a bore,” Nora Sidgwick remarked to her husband in the fall of 1885. “I really think the spiritualists had better go.”

  The British psychical research society maintained a policy of allowing all interested parties to join. The member list included some prominent mediums and some of their more devout spiritualist followers. These members professed to agree with the plan for skeptical research. But it now appeared that they hadn’t meant the word skepticism to be taken quite so literally.

  Many spiritualists remained angry over the perceived negative findings in Nora’s analysis of ghost stories. Some quit in outrage over the expose of Madame Blavatsky. The mediums in the organization were infuriated by Henry Sidgwick’s distaste for professional practices. Most of them would no longer even speak to him. Sidgwick had learned from reading the spiritualist newspaper Light, that its editors were conducting an angry crusade against an Encyclopaedia
Britannica decision to have Nora write the article on spiritualism. “And we had fondly thought they would be pleased!” he noted in his diary. They had assumed that spiritualists would admire dedicated researchers taking an interest in the occult, sorting out the legitimate phenomena from the fraudulent. Instead, it seemed that the churches of spiritualism were not so different from the churches of Christianity. To his perception, neither could tolerate evidence contradicting what they wished to believe.

  It wasn’t just Nora who was antagonizing the membership. Richard Hodgson was back in England, cheerfully adding fuel to this already smoldering sense of resentment. This time, Hodgson wasn’t investigating a specific medium but a specific practice. He had decided to take apart the practice of slate writing.

  Hodgson liked the direct approach. For this occasion, he’d persuaded a young conjurer to begin holding slate-writing seances, following the principles employed by some of London’s more acclaimed mediums. The conjurer in question, S. J. Davey, was a frail man, slight and bookish. Plagued by ill health, he had learned to wile away his resting hours by practicing magic tricks. An SPR member who had visited a number of mediums, Davey had been depressed to recognize his own well-practiced conjuring methods enlivening the séances. He was delighted to team up with Hodgson, who had a very specific plan in mind. It involved Davey as performer and Hodgson himself as “manager.”

  As they set it up, Hodgson would schedule performances, inviting sitters to witness the amazing talents of his friend. Davey would do the rest. As a team, Hodgson and Davey held more than twenty memorable “séances” in which Davey caused messages to appear on the surface of locked slates, the answers given with amazing precision. When Hodgson wrote, “What is the specific gravity of platinum?” the responding message was a scientifically accurate snap: “We don’t know the specific gravity.”