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

by Deborah Blum

  “No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it though. Personally I cannot see any use of a future life.”

  But then, Edison thought the newspaper was asking a dated question, relating to a past time when people believed in a personal God, burned their candles, and kept their faith for an Almighty who spoke to them of morality and decency and a better life beyond this one. Edison saw no evidence of such a supreme being, or such moral behaviors, in this life any more than the next one.

  “Mercy? Kindness? Love? I don’t see ’em. Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of the religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in?”

  If a determined reader continued to the end of that long interview, there was a hint that Edison didn’t see the world as quite such a finished machine as he had indicated at first. Running like a small rough thread of doubt through his polished confidence was the faintest glint of humility.

  “Now I am going to ask you a question,” Edison said to the reporter. “Why are you here for—here on earth, I mean?

  As the journalist confessed in the newspaper article, he had no good answer to that question.

  “Well, there you are. We do not understand. We cannot understand. We are too finite to understand. The really big things we cannot grasp as yet.

  It was exactly the kind of point that William James would have agreed with, the kind of discussion he would have enjoyed. But the newspaper put Edison’s admissions of uncertainty at the end of the story. They didn’t fit neatly into an account of the ways the twentieth century had left dusty notions of faith and spirit behind.

  IT HAD BEEN barely a year since Oliver Lodge had announced, also in the Times, that he and his colleagues had found evidence to link the dead and the living. In the forgotten hopefulness of Lodge’s predictions, in the clear confidence of Edison’s commentary, one could read between the newspaper lines and see, far better than in any light-shot crystal ball, the look of the future.

  Oliver Lodge would continue to argue the case for life after death, through the coming decade and beyond. His argument would turn more personal after one of his sons, Raymond, died in battle during World War I. Nora Sidgwick would maintain her insistence on objectivity, but concede in 1913 that the cross-correspondence studies offered real evidence of “cooperation by friends and fellow-workers no longer in the body.” Charles Richet would continue dividing his time between traditional physiology and unorthodox investigations of the occult, insisting that the best hope in resolving difficult questions was for good scientists to tackle them: “Our duty is plain. Let us be sober in speculation; let us study and analyze facts; let us be as bold in hypothesis as we are rigorous in experimentation. Metaphysics will then emerge from Occultism, as Chemistry emerged from Alchemy; and none can foresee its amazing career.”

  Carrington, Baggally, and Feilding would continue their work as psychic investigators for many years—debunking a number of well-known psychics along the way. Of the three, Carrington would achieve international fame as a psychic detective; the American magician Harry Houdini once called Carrington’s writings on the subject the best ever produced. Carrington and his colleagues, though, would always regret the collapse of their work with Eusapia Palladino, who died in 1918 due to complications of diabetes. They all agreed, though, with Feilding’s assessment, in a letter to Carrington, that her reputation could never have been restored: “The public is what it is, scientific people are what they are, and nothing can be done.”

  James Hervey Hyslop would lead the American Society for Psychical Research—almost single-handedly keeping it in the public view by force of personality—until his death in 1920. His passion for evidence and argument would remain unabated. As he wrote in the year of Palladino’s death, “Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject.” His longtime secretary would later write her own book, James H. Hyslop X: His Book, describing the return of his spirit, distinctive in its crisp personality and outspoken demeanor.

  Leonora Piper would return to work as a medium (and outlive almost all her investigators, dying in 1950 at the age of ninety-three). She would not, however, outlive the debate over matters of life and death, science and religion, a debate that the pronouncements of even the great Thomas Alva Edison could not begin to resolve.

  Among Christians there would be a growing, militant opposition to a reality defined only by secular values—growing in strength after World War I, as many, especially Americans outside of the major eastern cities, longed for a return to prewar innocence. (Warren G. Harding, promising a “return to normalcy,” won the U.S. presidency in 1920.) Fundamentalist creationists would begin their battle against the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the U.S. public schools, a battle highlighted by sensationalistic media coverage of high school biology teacher John T. Scopes’s 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The charge: violating a Tennessee state law banning any teaching that contradicted the divine creation of man as described in the Bible.

  Far from disappearing in favor of scientific materialism, spiritual values would endure and even seem to gain ground in the aftermath of the Great War, even in intellectual circles—as evidenced, for example, by the devout Christianity of twentieth-century authors J. R. R. Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis, both of them battle veterans and Oxford dons.

  In 1926, Everard Feilding would review the very human needs and experiences that kept spiritual beliefs—or perhaps hopes—alive, criticizing both the establishments of science and religion for failing to recognize their importance.

  Most people, Feilding would write, were “unwillingly children of the time in which they live.” They lived surrounded by new knowledge, inundated by facts; they were told absolutely that such information was the only route to certainty about the universe. They were given no guidance as to how religious feeling, faith, or intuition might fit into that world; they were given less guidance if they experienced a supernatural event—saw a crisis apparition, had a premonition, or simply felt an inner sense of belief in something more. “If but some link could be established between the two, some stepping-stone laid on which they could venture out into the dark stream, their confidence would be restored,” Feilding would insist. And he would mourn the past, grieve for the loss of that moment when he and his friends had thought they might reconcile science and faith after all, and find that elusive path, as faint and as real as moonlight, leading to a universe in which all things were possible.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’VE NEVER HAD premonitions, eerie dreams, heard voices, saw ghosts, or possessed any sense beyond the basic five, and I’ve never wished to acquire such talents. I was always the kid who pushed the Ouija board pointer out of sheer boredom, and to this day, I believe that it would never have moved without a helpful shove.

  So when I started this book, I saw myself as the perfect author to explore the supernatural, a career science writer anchored in place with the sturdy shoes of common sense. In the way that books do—or that one hopes they do—this one changed the way I thought, and definitely altered that sense of perfection. I still don’t aspire to a sixth sense, I like being a science writer, still grounded in reality. I’m just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness.

  What changed? I had the pleasure and privilege of spending three years in the company of genuinely brilliant thinkers—William James and his colleagues who questioned and explored possibilities so acutely that it was impossible not to reevaluate my assumptions. I participated in
a slightly unnerving ESP experiment. I read reports by psychical researchers that I couldn’t explain away. I thought all over again about the shape of the world, about science, about the limits of reality and who sets them, illuminated by history, philosophy, theology as well as science. There were days when I could feel the hinges of my brain, almost literally, creaking apart to make room for new ideas.

  Before I get into specific thanks, I want to first express my gratitude to the many people who, in the most casual and everyday sense, also forced me to look beyond the accustomed horizons of my life. I would like to thank the secretary in my department at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who trusted me with the story of her haunted house. The scientist from Stanford who believed in and practiced ESP, the prenatal care nurse who regularly consulted a medium, the physicist from a Florida university, who fled a ghost-ridden laboratory, the music store clerk who saw a specter, the countless people who told me their stories, once they heard the subject of my current book. Ordinarily, science writers don’t get told personal ghost stories. I suspect that’s because we are regarded, rightly, as an unsympathetic audience. But once I took on this particular subject, I realized—as the people I write about also learned—how strong and true this current of belief and experience runs in our society. I won’t tell you that I suddenly believed in every ominous shadow that loomed in these encounters. But they formed a very curious pattern. I would specifically like to thank my terrific father-in-law, David Haugen, who experienced—and recently told me—the best “crisis apparition” story I ever heard.

  I would also like to thank my editor, Ann Godoff, who believed in this story from the beginning, propped me up through all the worst parts of the telling, and made the work better at every turn. The people at Penguin Press are amazing to work with and I would especially like to thank Liza Darnton and Beena Kamlani, who made me look smarter than I am, and Sarah Hutson. As ever, I am grateful to Suzanne Gluck, who combines being the best agent I know with being one of the smartest and nicest women in my life.

  I would like to thank the patient and welcoming staff of the American Society for Psychical Research, who set me up at a library table in their beautiful brownstone and allowed me to read through letters from the early history of their organization. I would especially like to thank ASPR executive director, Patrice Keane; archivist, Colleen Phelan; librarian, Jeremy Shawl; and former librarian, Grady Hendrix, for their kindness and meticulous research help in this regard. I appreciate the permission to quote from those letters, also the kindly permissions from the British Society for Psychical Research, and its helpful librarian, Willis Poynton; the Houghton Library of Harvard University, with special thanks to Leslie Morris and Peter Accardo at Harvard, the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, and particular thanks to librarian Colin Harris and the Trinity Library of Cambridge University.

  I had a hardworking group of University of Wisconsin students who helped with the research in various stages and I would particularly like to thank Ben Sayre and Rena Archwamety for their help in tracking down nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines; Christine Lagorio, for her study of psychologist Joseph Jastrow; Edna Francisco, Amanda Novak, and Margaret Menge for their investigation of the occult in Victorian times. The University of Wisconsin-Madison provided me both with a sabbatical and summer salary to work on the book and has proved ever supportive of my work as a writer.

  It is my pleasure to thank the writers in my life, especially my husband, Peter Haugen, a busy and talented popular historian, who took the time out of his own work to read and improve this story and to argue with me about metaphysics, refusing to ever let me settle for the easy answer. I would also like to express my gratitude to Kim Fowler and Robin Marantz Henig, who were unstintingly generous in both time and helpful suggestions regarding the chaotic early versions of my manuscript.

  Here’s to my best book friends also: Denise Allen, Pam Ruegg-Morgen, Sue Brown, Julie Hunter, Linde Patterson, Mirriam Rosen, Susan Isensee, Suzanne Wolf, Jody Haun, Jacquie Hitchon McSweeney and Jean Carlson, who cheered me right to the finish.

  And as always, here’s to Marcus and Lucas, who never let me forget what matters most.

  Deborah Blum

  Madison, Wisconsin

  February 23, 2006

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  I WAS FORTUNATE to spend time in two terrific and very different archives: the Houghton Library, at Harvard University, which holds the correspondence of William James (referred to hereafter as Houghton), and the American Society for Psychical Research, in New York (referred to as ASPR), which holds a treasure trove of largely unpublished correspondence and other documents relating to James, Richard Hodgson, James Hyslop, and colleagues, as well as containing one of the best occult libraries in the world. Many of the described interactions in this book are drawn from the archived correspondence in those institutions.

  As a point of reference, letters from and to William James have, of course, also been excerpted and published many times over; the best companion to the original letters at the Houghton Library is an annotated series of twelve volumes, The Correspondence of William James (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992-2004). Some of James’s more noteworthy correspondence on psychical research and the vast majority of his published articles on the subject are contained in two books: Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou, eds., William James and Psychical Research (New York: Viking Press, 1960); and Frederick H. Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers, eds., Essays in Psychical Research (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

  For a general overview of the period and the players, I found the following books most helpful: Frank Podmore, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century (Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963; originally published in 1902 as Modern Spiritualism); Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); Janet Oppenheim’s fascinating book The Other World (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alan Gauld’s wonderfully down-to-earth history The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s highly biased and terrifically gossipy and readable History of Spiritualism, published in 1926 by George H. Doran, New York. I also found the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, edited by Leslie Shepard (New York: Gale Research/Avon Books, 1978), to be a great paranormal trivia resource.

  In cases where information is widely known and found in numerous sources, I have not provided specific references. I have, however, occasionally attempted to give a sense of the range of references used in portraying a particular psychic or psychical researcher. And I have occasionally tried to give additional context to a particular moment in history or to explain a reference itself. I have not provided citations for every brief quote, but only for the longer ones. And as a further point of clarification, I occasionally provide narratives in the book, mostly ghost stories and accounts of sittings with mediums. Although those are derived from documents of the time, to be referenced below, their telling here is my own.

  Prelude

  The first narrative: This story comes from William James’s report “A Case of Clairvoyance,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1907): 221—36. As James noted in the introduction, the research for this report was done in 1898 (interviews were largely gathered by a cousin of James’s wife, Harris Kennedy), and the report should have been published the following year. But due to the financial problems then ongoing in the ASPR, the organization did not resume publishing its journal until 1907, when James Hyslop headed the group. This report was published in the first volume of the renewed journal.

  5: “had been a brilliant scientist”: The British pragmatist philosopher Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, a friend of James, told this anecdote about scientific hostility toward psychical research; it is recounted in “Some Logical Aspects of Psychical Research,” in The Case For and Against Psychical Belief, ed. Carl
Murchison (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University, 1927), 215—28. This book was the result of a conference on the issue; participants also included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Jastrow, and the magician Harry Houdini.

  1. The Night Side

  Biographical information on William James—his character and that of his family, his childhood and the general nature of his upbringing—is widely available. This chapter primarily drew from three books. The first is Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). I relied on it in particular for information on the childhood of Henry James Sr. and for its trenchant analysis of the terrible accident that took his leg (pp. 39-43) and its influence on his further life. My favorite traditional biography is Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), and my favorite intellectual biography is Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Ralph Barton Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938), does a wonderful job of comparing William James to other philosophers of his time.

  7: “like being in the dentist’s chair”: WJ to G. Stanley Hall, Houghton.

  8: “priggish, sectarian view of science”: WJ to James McKeen Cattell, printed in Science, May 4, 1898.

  11: Swedenborg’s life is explored to varying degree in the general books on spiritualism listed in the introduction to this section. In addition, there is an excellent short biography of the Swedish mystic in Eric Dingwall, Some Human Oddities: Studies in the Queer, the Uncanny, and the Fanatical (Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962), 11-68, which was my primary source for the description of Swedenborg’s fire vision as investigated by Immanuel Kant.