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

by Deborah Blum

  Hodgson began by making a list of old friends and family members of the dead writer. He would invite them, as many as would agree, to come anonymously and check their knowledge against that of the trance personality. Maybe they would confirm that this new spirit guide really was George Pellew. Maybe they would not. As always, the investigative strategy was as interesting to Hodgson as the possible results.

  His investigation of the so-called ghost of George Pellew was based upon a simple idea, with a twist. He would bring more than a hundred visitors, eventually, to sit with Mrs. Piper. Some would be friends of the dead man; some would be strangers to him. But she would be given no relationship clues. No participants would be allowed to tell their names or whether they had any connection to G.P. They would be allowed to improvise personal tests, but they would not be allowed to give any explanation for them.

  One visitor brought a photograph of a building.

  “Do you recognize this?”

  “Yes, it is your summer house.”

  Which it was.

  Another woman placed a book on the medium’s head.

  “Do you recognize this?” she said to G.P

  “My French lyrics,” he answered.

  That was right too.

  Another visitor, a man, simply asked, “Tell me something, in our past, that you and I alone know.”

  As he spoke, Mrs. Piper sat slumped forward into a pile of pillows on the table, her left hand dangling limply over the edge, her right hand coiled loosely around a pencil. Next to her right side, a pad of paper sat on the table. Suddenly, her fingers tightened and she began to write, wildly, filling pages, ripping them off, thrusting them away from her.

  Hodgson moved to the other side of the room. The man began flipping through the pages. He paled and folded the papers. They were too private to read aloud, he told Hodgson.

  But he was “perfectly satisfied, perfectly.”

  “I COULD NOT distinguish anything at first,” G.P told a friend during one of the sittings. “Darkest hours just before dawn, you know that, Jim. I was puzzled, confused.”

  “Weren’t you surprised to find yourself still living?” his friend asked in return.

  “Perfectly so. It was beyond my reasoning powers. Now it is as clear to me as daylight.”

  IT WAS IN the summer of 1893, while still traveling abroad, that William James received an unexpected letter from a colleague at Harvard, a researcher who’d decided to sneak a visit to Leonora Piper, Boston’s most famous medium. The professor had contacted Hodgson using a fake name. Even after the sitting, he’d not offered his real one. Mentally, he’d been snickering as the medium slumped into her trance, as her hand began to write.

  “I asked her barely a question, but she ran on for three-quarters of an hour, telling me names, places, events, in the most startling manner.” Someday, he promised he would tell James what she had revealed; for now, he’d just say it was information not meant to be shared.

  Still, there were a few interesting details that he wanted to pass along. Once again, Mrs. Piper had revealed her peculiar psychometric gift, as if she could read a story from a material object. It made no physical sense, but there it was:

  The professor had brought a single circle of gold, one that once belonged to his dead mother. The ring had been one of two, a set that he and his mother had exchanged one Christmas.

  Each ring had been engraved with the first word of the recipient’s favorite proverb. Long ago, he’d lost the one she’d given him. But the previous year, when his mother died, the ring he’d given to her had been returned to him.

  The professor was holding that ring in his hand during the sitting, hiding the word as he inquired, “What was written in Mamma’s ring?”

  “I had hardly got the words from my mouth till she slapped down the word on the other ring—the one Mamma had given me, and which had been lost years ago.

  “As the word was a peculiar one, doubtfully ever written in any ring before, and as she wrote it in such a flash—it was surely curious.”

  As an educated man, a scientist, no believer in the silly afterlife ideas of the spiritualists, the professor would admit only to being curious, as he explained carefully to James.

  FRED MYERS AND OLIVER LODGE were coming to America. They were to present the latest SPR research at the Congress of Psychical Research. Both were looking forward to visiting Chicago in August 1893, especially because the city was hosting the newly opened World’s Columbian Exposition. Myers’s only disappointment was that, despite his pleas, James refused to cut short his sabbatical to join them, even with the added lure of the new World’s Fair.

  “Your letter rec’d, bristling as usual with ‘points’ and applications,” James wrote back to Myers, from Italy where the James family had happily settled for the summer. He was unmoved by Myers’s persuasions. He had no new evidence to present. Further, as he warned Myers, in the case of their controversial line of work, James worried about making too vigorous a push too soon. “What we want is facts, not popular papers, it seems to me, and until the facts thicken, papers may do more harm than good.”

  As a compromise, though, James had asked Hodgson to give a brief report on his Piper results at the convention. There were so few good mediums—at least, he and his fellow investigators tended to eliminate most as fraudulent—that Mrs. Piper now stood out like the only flower left in a denuded garden. That was one of the issues Hodgson wanted to raise—the need to find mediums before they sold out to the demands of the profession.

  As it turned out, Myers and Lodge were so fascinated by the World’s Columbian Exposition that Hodgson—after making his speech—ound himself dragged across the white-marbled landscape of the fair, from the huge, glass-walled Fisheries Building to the tiny Chinese pavilion, with its heavy furniture carved with the shapes of lazy, coiling dragons, to the glittering technology exhibits. Hodgson felt that he’d seen “nearly all of the World’s Fair that I care to,” as he wrote to Mrs. Piper.

  He missed her, he said. He also missed being in the thick of work. He’d been hearing from his associates that the G.P sittings were still going astonishingly well. They were much more interesting to him than the marvels of the exposition. He couldn’t wait to get back.

  THE JAMES FAMILY returned to Boston in early September 1893, newly invigorated by their lingering summer in Italy. The very air of Cambridge, the brick and stone of Harvard, seemed “surcharged with vitality,” James declared enthusiastically.

  It didn’t take long for that sense of euphoria to wash away. Despite the sizzling pace of technological advances—kinetoscope movies were playing in New York, Henry Ford had just built his first car—America was stumbling through an economic recession. Five hundred banks and thousands of businesses had failed over the summer. James was forced to sell stock to meet living expenses. He and Alice talked of selling their big house on Irving Street in Cambridge.

  In Italy, he’d started dreaming of early retirement. He could feel that fantasy evaporate along with his good mood. His profession of psychology seemed “paltry and insignificant,” his colleagues mired in laundry lists of laboratory details. And psychical research seemed too dependent on a single, if phenomenally baffling individual, Mrs. Piper.

  James worried that no other medium offered comparable results. Even if there were another Mrs. Piper somewhere, the psychical research group had not found her, or him. They’d hardly looked. The very few dedicated investigators were preoccupied with other, more substantially rewarding work. He worried about Mrs. Piper, too. The SPR had agreed to, pay her $200 a year to guarantee that she accept no fee from any other source. She was earning her money, James acknowledged, but the very act of taking payment sullied her in his estimation. Her character seemed weaker to him, he told Hodgson.

  The general character of academic scientists displeased him as well. He’d invited eight colleagues from Harvard to observe Mrs. Piper, telling them of recent extremely positive developments. Five refused, one informi
ng James that even if something happened, he wouldn’t believe it. “So runs the world away!” James wrote. “I should not indulge in the personality and triviality of such anecdotes were it not that they paint the temper of our time.”

  The return to the United States had soured James’s outlook—not just toward his American colleagues and peers but toward the rest of the world as well. Sometimes he couldn’t help but wish that all of them—the psychical researchers and their opponents, the prejudicial naysayers—would just go away and leave him alone.

  He was still in that funk a month later when a letter arrived from the irrepressible Fred Myers, inviting William James to become president of the British Society of Psychical Research. Invitation was hardly the word. The letter was more in the nature of a summons. “The first reason is, of course, your position as a psychologist,” Myers explained. All of the SPR’s most interesting scientific ideas—telepathy, subconscious communication, the mental state of mediums—were rooted in the new science of psychology.

  But his being an American was good, too. Myers felt that James’s nationality would emphasize the society’s trans-Atlantic inclusiveness. The Sidgwicks agreed, he said, and would even waive the requirement that James attend the London meetings; he would simply appoint someone to read any musings from the president. “We trust that you will grant our prayer. We cannot see that it will hurt you; and we see very clearly that it will help us.”

  The timing couldn’t have been worse for James. Didn’t he have enough to trouble him, what with accumulating bills and other work, and colleagues who continued to annoy him? He fired off a hasty refusal, blaming his usual assortment of physical ailments.

  Such excuses carried no weight with Myers. He replied that he was always sorry when friends were not in top form, but it seemed to him that James’s ill health was never perceptible to anyone but William James. Certainly, he, Fred Myers, saw no evidence of frailty. What he saw instead was a rare man, full of wisdom and delight, the perfect SPR president, held back by only one character flaw

  That would be a tendency to give up too quickly. “It seems to me you lack one touch more of doggedness which would render you of even more helpfulness in the world than you are.”

  If his friend were really ill, Myers conceded, he would agree to let him defer his acceptance. That would be a shame, he added, since Myers thought the job could actually improve James’s health and outlook: “Mrs. Piper is all right—and the universe is all right—and people will soon pay more money to the SPR—and an eternity of happiness and glory awaits you.”

  On December 17, 1893, a two-word telegram whistled its way across the Atlantic. Myers read it with gratification, but not surprise. It said only: “James accepts.”

  IT HAD TAKEN cajoling, pleading, and threatening—even for the Master of Turin—but Cesare Lombroso had launched not just one, but a series of scientific investigations of Eusapia Palladino.

  The first was something of a shambles. Led by Lombroso, the team also included a Russian psychologist, two Italian physicists, and the French physiologist Charles Richet. The sittings took place in the private home of a helpful Milan resident, who had agreed to have his house searched in advance and his parlor, to be used for the sittings, locked and sealed after each test.

  But as Richet would tell his SPR colleagues, Lombroso was now so enthralled, the other scientists so unnerved by confronting a medium, and Eusapia so prone to scream like a fishwife when she didn’t get her way that they lost control of the experiments almost immediately. The scientists wanted full light. She insisted on a dim red light in a darkened room, claiming that bright illumination would put off the spirits. They gave in. The researchers asked her to stand, instead of sitting at the tables she planned to levitate, so that her feet were not concealed. She refused, declaring that her legs and knees trembled so violently during levitations that she could not possibly stay upright. They gave in again. And trying to control her hands and feet was like wrestling with a freshly caught squid. She was never still, Richet complained, always twitching her fingers away, wriggling her toes.

  Most of the time, it was impossible to be sure that she wasn’t sneaking a hand away to produce a phantom touch, or nudging furniture with her feet or knees. Most of the time, Richet knew he was observing some rather obvious cheating. But every once in a while, the whole feel of the sittings changed: the sneaky medium disappeared, and a pale, still woman replaced her; the curtains began to shiver, as Lombroso had reported earlier, billowing in that nonexistent breeze. Hurrying to open the draperies, Richet would have sworn that he felt the touch of cold hands, although that could have been his nerves. No one was there, no wire, no body, no anything except empty air between the curtain and the window.

  He could explain away the common cheat. It was the other, more elusive Eusapia who bothered him, the one who sat pinned to her chair while the cold fingers of the supernatural seemed to crawl into the room. As James had complained, there were few real mediums available to psychical researchers. It occurred to Richet that, with patience, Eusapia might offer a chance to study the difference between what was real—and what was contrived.

  He tested her again, without the Italian and Russian scientists, who, he thought, had compromised the earlier observations. Those experiments yielded the same frustrating mix of deliberate fraud and inexplicable event.

  In one sitting, at the Psychological Institute in Paris, he’d brought in several witnesses, including the formidable physicist Marie Curie, who Richet hoped could tell the other observers if there was any sign of unusual energy in the room. He and Mme Curie sat on either side of the medium, each gripping one of Eusapias hands. “We saw the curtain swell out as if pushed by some large object,” he noted. Richet reached up and grabbed the bump behind the fabric. It felt like a hand, but one with sausagelike fingers, much bigger than Eusapia’s “little hand,” and with nothing beyond the wrist itself. He glanced back to make sure the medium’s hands were still secured. Mme Curie assured him that she’d kept an unbreakable clasp on Eusapia’s fingers.

  Richet tried another experiment, laying pieces of smoked paper on a table some distance away from the medium. Pale hands appeared and pressed against the paper. When he picked up the paper, the dark film of smoke had worn off in places, as if a finger had been rubbing at it. Eusapia’s hands remained clean, untouched by smoky residue. Those creeping hands, what to do with them? How to define them?

  Out of his growing frustration, Richet invented a new word for the phenomena—ectoplasm, cobbled together from the Greek ecto, “exterior,” andplasm, “substance.” “C‘est absolument absurde, mais c’est vrai!” Richet exclaimed, deciding, like Lombroso before him, that he required reinforcements.

  RICHET’S FAMILY owned a tiny island in the Mediterranean, just off the French Riviera, tucked amid three famously beautiful islands called the Isles of Gold. Ile Roubaud was a rocky scrap of land, scrubbed by light and polished by water. Only three buildings occupied the island. The Richet family summer cottage, though not large, bristled with towers, turrets, verandas, and porches. Nearby stood a lighthouse and a simple cottage for the lighthouse keeper.

  The simplest route there was to sail through the French government’s salt lagoons, where the dried layers of sea salt were prepared for sale. The salt ponds gave the voyage to Ile Roubaud a slightly unreal feeling, a passage through a landscape of almost blinding white where the sun dazzled on the crystal layers rimming the water.

  Beyond, across a blue sparkle of sea, lay the small island, encircled by pinwheeling seabirds. Richet thought it the perfect place to run tests on a troublesome medium. He would search her, isolate her on the island, and then he would see what happened to her so-called powers in the luminous light of Ile Roubaud.

  In the summer of 1894, Richet invited a small party to join him for the grand experiment. His guests—and witnesses and collaborators—were Fred Myers, Oliver Lodge, the Polish psychologist Julien Ochorowicz, and Richet’s personal secretary, wh
o would be there to take notes.

  Lodge remembered the journey to Richet’s island as something of a comedy of errors. Traveling by rail to the Mediterranean coast, he and Myers disembarked at one station to have a quick drink. The train left without them. They caught up with it in Avignon. But Myers wouldn’t leave that ancient city without touring the Palace of the Popes and the famous crumbling bridges over the Rhone. Finally they reached the coastal spa city of Hyeres. With some difficulty, the pair hired a boat and made their way past the white glimmer of the salt lagoons, guarded by soldiers installed to protect the government’s lucrative monopoly on salt sales, apparently bent on preventing the theft of a single white crystal.

  “The salt monopoly has curious results,” Lodge noted in his diary. “It appeared that the peasantry were forbidden to take a bucket of water out of the sea.” The French soldiers returned the stares of the voyaging English-men; the air was filled with the dry creak of seagull voices overhead. Lodge feared that this was going to be a very odd visit.

  In that, he would be proved absolutely correct.

  THE INVESTIGATORS wedged themselves like tinned sardines into the family cottage. Lodge shared a bedroom with Richet. Myers occupied a child’s bedroom and slept folded into a very small bed, which he claimed to share with a family of flies. Ochorowicz bunked on a balcony. Lodge traded places with Ochorowicz for a while, but “found the only other occupant was a mosquito, who woke me up punctually at five every morning.” Eusapia had a room to herself, a respectable distance from the others. Richet’s secretary commuted in from Hyeres for the tests.

  The summer heat parboiled the island. The air steamed around them. Most afternoons, Richet sought escape in his small boat, trolling for fish and the elusive breeze dancing over the cooler waters. Lodge and Myers shed their usual sober dress and spent the days in their cotton pajamas, clambering over the rocks and occasionally dousing themselves in the sea.