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

by Deborah Blum

  “If you ever find me getting slack about the SPR, you must pull me up,” she told her assistant.

  Sidgwick considered his wife the brightest of his circle. He was delighted at her latest achievement, but worried that she couldn’t possibly—and shouldn’t—keep up the double pace of college administrator and psychical researcher. Yet how would the organization manage without her? They’d already lost Gurney, whom William James once candidly described as “the worker of the society,” the one best able to get through “drudgery of the most colossal kind.” Sidgwick did not think the group could afford to let Nora go.

  “I fear she may not find time for the work of the SPR, for which I think her uniquely fit—much more fit than I am,” he wrote. “If it turns out that she must sacrifice some of this work, I shall have to take her place; but my intellect will be an inferior substitute.”

  He proved better suited to helping with the social chores of college administration. He served as a reliable companion at official dinners, receptions, and even meetings with students. The ever-serious Nora still had not mastered the art of conversation. Despite practicing on Henry, she found herself reduced to monosyllables during party chitchat. Worse yet, jokes tended to turn her silent. Henry stepped in to fill the gaps. “He could talk nonsense,” she said with genuine admiration, “or subjects.”

  The once awkward Sidgwick had surprised himself and his friends by growing into rather a charming man. Despite his shyness and his stammer—still with him, if less pronounced—he’d learned how to disarm others with his self-deprecating discourse and diffident humor. His gentle wit had even gained a nickname: Sidgwickedness. He was a good listener, a man who obviously considered the opinions of others. Sidgwick became the SPR’s chief diplomat, working to smooth its way to the next International Congress of Experimental Psychology. His formidable task was to dispel resentments still lingering from the previous session, at which some scientists had felt pressured into allowing the touchy subject of psychical inquiry. Sidgwick paid courtesy visits to the influential university psychology departments in Berlin and Paris, assuring scientists there that at the upcoming congress, he planned to organize a small “orthodox” session on hypnotism only. He also tried to make his case that the SPR’s subject matter was not an aberration and that telepathy, as “a law of nature,” should be considered a legitimate subject for science.

  The meetings with French and German scientists didn’t exactly encourage him. He encountered rigid resistance from what he called “stubborn materialists, interested solely in psychophysical experiments on the senses.” They weren’t in the least impressed by Henry Sidgwick, a philosopher whose whole experience in experimental techniques was with telepathy.

  “Water and fire, oil and vinegar, are feeble to express our antagonism,” he said gloomily to Nora.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK of a gray and blustery March, a dying Alice James asked her brother Henry to cable her good-byes to her family in America: “Tenderest love to all farewell. Am going soon.” The next day, Henry cabled again: “Alice just passed away painless.”

  To Henry’s annoyance, William promptly wired back to ask if their sister was really dead. She could, after all, have slipped into a trance state: “her neurotic temperament & chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance-tricks to play themselves upon.”

  Henry had been every day to the sickroom to comfort his beloved sister. “My patient Henry,” she called him. He was not in a mood to put up with his older brother’s transoceanic speculations. “If you were here,” the novelist snapped back, “you wouldn’t have thought your warning necessary.”

  “What a relief!” William replied, sobered. Their sister was at peace, the “task” of her life completed. For this once, for the sake of Alice and for a peeved and grieving Henry, the eldest James sibling dropped the subjects of trances and spirits in favor of a simple good-bye.

  “GOD (OR THE UNKNOWABLE) bless you,” James wrote to Hodgson, referring to Huxley’s agnostic ideals.

  As the summer of 1892 approached, the James family prepared to sail for Europe. Harvard had granted William another sabbatical leave, and he intended to use it for a good year of travel, study, and visiting friends. This time his wife and children would come with him to the Congress of Experimental Psychology. But they would also visit his brother in England and go to France, Switzerland, Germany, and any other place that might appeal to them.

  Before he left, James wanted to make sure that the American part of the Census of Hallucinations was ready. The tireless Nora had sent him a “skeleton paper” so that he could see her methodology and an outline that he could use, showing how to organize the American cases along similar lines. He left her correspondence in Hodgson’s room along with his “hallucination book,” containing a fair number of analyzed crisis apparitions, and two boxes of unanalyzed cases. He feared it would be up to Hodgson to finish the analysis and was sorry to leave so much work.

  Hodgson was also polishing the final draft of his Piper report. James hoped that, using Nora’s guide, the ASPR secretary could largely “fill in the blanks” for Mrs. Sidgwick and turn the whole pile of ghostly accounts around in a month or so. But he knew that the reports, like all human experiences, were complicated and undeniably messy. “Heaven help you anyhow,” James offered ruefully. “You’ll be troubled with duplicates and ambiguities enough.”

  If only there were more Hodgsons, thought Sidgwick. It wasn’t just that Nora was so busy. In addition to her Newnham administrative chores, she was also finishing a study countering claims that higher education was unhealthy for women. He, meanwhile, continued developing his utilitarian philosophy; James was traveling on sabbatical; Podmore remained a busy postal inspector; and Myers, a school inspector. Lodge worked away on the physics of wireless communication. Charles Richet, who had always devoted the bulk of his time to physiology research, had now taken up a hobby, building a glider in which he could pinwheel through the air around a family chateau.

  “No one is saying—as Hodgson in America—‘Psychical Research is the most important thing in the world; my life’s success and failure shall be bound up in it,’ ” Sidgwick mused in his diary. “Yet I am convinced that only in this temper should we achieve what we ought to achieve.” It was only through the day after weary day of Hodgson’s kind of work that the unexpected suddenly revealed itself

  In the midst of a sitting with a young married couple, Mrs. Piper, lost in a trance, talking in her deep Phinuit voice, had demanded that the watching Hodgson leave the room. This needed to be a private conversation.

  “I want to talk to you about your Uncle C.,” Phinuit said, unusually gently for him, according to notes taken by the woman.

  “Is he in the body?” the woman asked, although she knew perfectly well that her uncle was dead.

  “No,” said Phinuit.

  “How did he die?”

  “There was something the matter with his heart and with his head. He says it was an accident. He wants you to tell his sister.... He begs you for God’s sake to tell them it was an accident—that it was his head, and that he was hurt there (makes motion of stabbing heart), that he inherited it from his father. His father was out of his mind—crazy.”

  The control, the medium, one of them was somehow describing the woman’s family in Germany. As the sitter wrote to the ASPR, her grandfather had been mentally disturbed after falling from a horse and injuring his head. He’d remained half-crazy for a good three years, until his death in 1863. His oldest son, her uncle, had committed suicide, thirteen years after his father’s death, in “a fit of melancholia” by stabbing himself in the heart.

  The family was ashamed of his insanity and the unpardonable suicide. Her family never spoke of it. Only two people in America, besides her husband, even knew the story, and those two people lived nowhere close. “It is absolutely impossible that Mrs. Piper got at the facts through information derived from these persons.”

  Hodgson published that accoun
t, and accounts of many of the earlier sittings, in his first report on Mrs. Piper in the June issue of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. He knew that there was an audience waiting to hear what the famed debunker of psychics would say, an audience wondering if he would expose her as he had Helena Blavatsky, or if he would declare that he now believed in talking to the dead.

  Hodgson managed, neatly, to disappoint expectations.

  He admitted Mrs. Piper’s trance to be genuine. He’d put it to every test that he could reasonably conduct. He’d put ammonia-soaked cloth under her nose, dumped spoonfuls of salt, perfume, and laundry detergent into her mouth, pinched her until she bruised, all without provoking a flinch. Mrs. Piper sometimes complained of bruises, but often she was unsure how she’d acquired them.

  To her the trance was entirely otherworldly. She said it began “as if something were passing over my brain making it numb; a sensation similar to that I experienced when I was etherized, only the unpleasant odor of ether is absent.” She said the room began to chill and the people in it to shrink. Light faded until the room was black. When she woke, her hands and arms tingled. She could see the occupants of the room again, but only at a distance. She often emerged exclaiming, “Oh, how black you are!”

  Her trance personality, the impossible Phinuit, was, Hodgson judged, obviously anything but what “he” claimed. Hodgson had never found evidence that the French doctor existed in reality. After Phinuit claimed to have been born in Marseilles, Hodgson had persuaded Charles Richet to go through birth records in the port city. Richet found nothing. Hodgson—along with Richet and James—declared the so-called doctor a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper.

  The consensus was that Phinuit was a coping device, a subconscious way for the medium to protect herself against whatever mental battering took place in her trance state. As a fictional character and a mental buffer, the doctor made a kind of strange sense. As a spirit, he made no sense at all. But then, neither Hodgson nor James was convinced that Mrs. Piper did commune with spirits. They had yet to find what would qualify as undisputed proof of that communication.

  Out of her trances came extraordinary personal insight. But it was muddled, tangled with vaguely Christian notions of life after death, ambiguous messages of cheery goodwill, and rather pointless conversation. The theory “of spirit control, is hard to reconcile with the extreme triviality of most of the communications,” James complained. “What real spirit, at last able to revisit his wife on this earth, but would find something better to say than that she had changed the place of his photograph?”

  For the real believers, the positive note came in the report’s rather cryptic close, promising that other results, would be forthcoming. “Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which materially strengthen the evidence for existence of some faculty that goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, and which certainly [on its face] appears to render some form of the ‘spiritistic’ hypothesis more probable.”

  Hodgson, it seemed, had chosen to end his report on a cliffhanger.

  “BETWEEN THE DEATHS and apparitions of the dying person and the living a connexion exists which is not due to chance alone. This we hold as a proved fact. The discussion of its full implications cannot be attempted in this paper; nor, perhaps, exhausted in this age.”

  Writing late and early, on gorgeous June mornings and damp July afternoons, Nora had finished the report of the Census of Hallucinations. Sidgwick planned to give a preliminary presentation at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology in August 1892.

  Six countries had participated—England, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and the United States—and each group’s findings had confirmed the others’ work. The British census was the largest—17,000 surveyed—and the American study, coordinated by James and Hodgson, was second, with 7,123. All concluded that death-day apparitions occurred in startling numbers. The American survey found that these “ghosts” occurred at 487 times the rate predicted by chance. The British calculation was 442.6 times chance.

  Both groups used a statistical formula worked out by Nora. Employing the British figures from the Registrar-General, she calculated that the chances of any one person dying on a given day were 1 in 19,000. The possibility of a given single event, such as a recognizable “hallucination” of a certain person, occurring on that same day was also one in 19,000. So for every 19,000 deaths, there should be only one such occurrence.

  Out of their 17,000 respondents, 2,272 had claimed to have seen such an apparition near the time of death. The British SPR had winnowed this down to 1,300 by removing all reports in which dreams or delirium were noted. They then winnowed further to a narrow window of time. Only eighty of these sightings had occurred within twelve hours of death. They winnowed again, throwing out all cases in which there was chance of prior knowledge of when the death was expected, such as that of an elderly or ailing relative. They then removed from their list any ghost story that relied on only one person’s claim.

  Thirty-two cases were left, and by Nora’s calculation, that was a big number. At a rate of 1 out of 19,000, they should have seen .0723 instances among the 17,000 surveyed. Instead, they had 32 cases with solid evidence behind them, which was 442.6 times the chance rate of .0723. Hodgson had used the same statistical process to arrive at the American numbers.

  Despite that consistency, James worried that the numbers remained unconvincing. He felt dissatisfied with the U.S. census. It lacked the numerical weight of the British one; as he wrote to Nora, “our census has been a terribly slouchy piece of work and comparing it with yours makes me blush throughout.” He blamed himself; he’d paid scant attention to the weight of the stories until late in the research. Only while reading and verifying the reports had he discovered—as Edmund Gurney had done during the work on Phantasms—the compelling pattern they contained. By that time, he confessed to Nora, he had let the correspondence fall in arrears and run out of time to corroborate many of the cases.

  James wished they’d been able to round up the 50,000 recommended by Gurney, to overrun their critics with the power of their numbers. But maybe such a coup wasn’t vitally important to the cause. Maybe a single census, no matter how substantial or indisputable, would never win credibility for the SPR. Perhaps it was only the slow and gradual process of survey upon survey, census upon census, which could win over the doubters.

  “I never believed and do not now believe that these figures will ever conquer disbelief,” James wrote in a letter to Henry Sidgwick that accompanied the American report. “They are only useful to rebut the dogmatic assurance of the scientists that the death warnings are chance coincidences.” The psychical researchers would conquer disbelief when they could also reveal what those death warnings, those unexpected apparitions, really meant in terms of life and death and Huxley’s unknowable God.

  8

  THE INVENTION OF ECTOPLASM

  THE WINTER OF 1892 howled across the Atlantic coast of North America like an ill-tempered spirit, spitting snow across the landscape. In hard-hit New York, where a seemingly perpetual crystalline haze veiled the air, horses struggled along Fifth Avenue, heads down against the wind, wading through a treacherous mire of slush over ice.

  George Pellew, a thirty-two-year-old philosophy student and writer, was among that season’s many victims. He was riding along an icy path in Central Park one bleak February day when his horse lost its footing. Pellew died in the resulting tumbling fall.

  Dick Hodgson came down from Boston for the funeral, mourning another friend gone too young. The Australian had been on a lecture visit to New York when he’d met Pellew, an outspoken skeptic on the subject of psychical research. Hodgson enjoyed a good argument, and they’d struck up a friendship, as much because of Pellew’s prickly stance as in spite of it. On his subsequent visits to the city, the pair would meet for beer and talk, occupying a tavern table for hours while they debated immortality and the odds of life after death.

&nb
sp; The prospect of floating around after death as some ill-defined energy field or specter seemed to Pellew an unlikely idea, even a ludicrous one. Hodgson had agreed, to a point. He was willing to concede that spirit life was improbable, yes, but not impossible.

  A few months before his death, Pellew had made a half-joking promise. If Hodgson was right, Pellew was willing to prove it. If he died first, he would return and “make things lively.” He would make himself so obvious, Pellew threatened cheerfully, that his friends wouldn’t be able to deny him.

  Hodgson had laughed.

  THE BITTER FEBRUARY gave way to a bitter March. Then, five weeks after the fatal accident in Manhattan, a new voice interrupted one of Mrs. Piper’s trances. The personality identified itself as George Pellew. Soon, and persistently, this new presence would alter the very nature of a Piper sitting.

  Although G. P—as Hodgson came to call the personality—manifested himself at first as a voice, he preferred to communicate through automatic writing. Early on came a few bizarre and hectic trances in which Phinuit answered one question verbally, while the medium’s right hand wrote G.P’s answer to another on a paper tablet. Gradually, though, the familiar Phinuit began to fall silent. When Hodgson asked a question, the medium’s only response would be the scratchy sound of her pencil (pens were never used because of the need to continually dip them in ink) moving across a page.

  It was G.P’s arrival that provided the concluding note of optimism to Hodgson’s report on Mrs. Piper. Hodgson wasn’t convinced that this new personality was a spirit. Perhaps it was no more than another peculiarity of Leonora Piper’s subconscious. But unlike the dubious Dr. Phinuit, G.P claimed to be someone Hodgson knew personally. That fact offered a realm of possible tests to determine who or what—if anyone or anything—was communicating through the baffling medium.