Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  “I then directed her attention to the place from where the article had been taken, and thus discover what I had lost, and she soon found out what I had lost. She first said jewelry; and when I asked her what kind, she answered, a brooch. I enquired then what it was like; to which she gave a wonderfully accurate answer: she said it looked like amber surrounded with white.”

  Asked what had happened to the missing jewelry, Mrs. M. continued, Dawson described the thief in such detail “no artist could have painted a more perfect resemblance; and it was a servant whom I never suspected.”

  If not for the gift of Dawson’s paranormal powers, a flustered Mrs. M. insisted, she would have fingered an innocent washerwoman once on her household staff. The real culprit was a soft-spoken, fair-seeming woman who had a slightly troubling habit of rummaging about when she thought no one was looking. The clairvoyant saw the stolen item in “a queer place like a cellar with lots of other property—silver spoons and other things; but a cloud came and she could see no more.” Dawson was certain the former servant kept the case in which the brooch was stored at her own house, in a trunk. And there were diamonds in it. At first, Mrs. M. was confused. She had a lot of jewelry to remember. Soon she realized “there were two diamond chains fastened to a small diamond ring, separate from the brooch, but for the purpose of attaching to it, and wearing as a locket.”

  The thief had pawned the brooch for a trifle and stashed the diamonds, which Mrs. M. had completely forgotten until the psychic jogged her memory. After Mrs. M. assured Dawson she didn’t want the delinquent punished, the clairvoyant instructed her not to notify the police. The pincher would only clam up. Better to find her instead, and issue this stern warning: Not just God, but people here and now can see the wicked doing wrong when no one seems to be near, and happiness will be impossible unless she repents and confesses. Mrs. M. told the wayward servant precisely that. And the very pleased matron got her jewelry back. Along with a story she dined out on often, tempting Lady Franklin to find out if the clairvoyant’s powers to find lost people and things reached across the world, all the way to the High Arctic.

  Dawson was herself a patient of Dr. Hands, who claimed he discovered the young woman’s psychic abilities by accident, while treating her for heart trouble and fits. Mesmerists often claimed to be able to cure women diagnosed with hysteria, a disorder attributed only to females, whose physicians decided their problem was the rejection of male authority. Hands allowed a few privileged guests to consult Dawson’s paranormal powers. Once the doctor had lulled Jane into a trance, and apparently put her to sleep, the spirit medium embarked on her mental trip and revealed her visions to Sophy. With the gravity required of the psychic voyager, she spoke of crossing a great distance to sea and ice, where she saw a ship beset, with several people aboard. All were gentlemen, one rather old, stout, and dark, with a nice face.

  “Is he quite well, or does he look ill or unhappy?” Sophy demanded.

  “Oh no! He is quite well, and looks happy and comfortable”—which, upon reflection, Dawson saw as slightly anxious. She did not mention that Sir John was also quite dead at that point.

  Sophy asked the ship’s direction and when she might sail home, at which point Dawson’s vision was obscured because “there was a cloud before her.” Another ship was close by. Two others—Could it be Sir James Ross’s search expedition that was then searching the north coast of Somerset Island?—weren’t far from them. The men aboard the first ship were dining on salt beef and biscuits. They wore furs and smelled of brandy. Dawson peered into the nice old gentleman’s cabin and saw two portraits of ladies, which Sophy took to be Lady Franklin’s and the Queen’s. They were in his cabin when Erebus departed England. Jane likely would have had more probing questions, but she was hypnotized in the next room. The medium refused to speak with her.

  “You must tell her all I have told you,” the seer instructed Sophy. “But if she heard me telling it, it would upset her—poor thing—she is very anxious. You stop with her—you are always with her now—you must do all you can to comfort and soothe her. . . —and all will be right. Make your mind easy, all is well, all is quite right.”

  THAT SAME MONTH, something happened, as ordinary in Victorian times as it was tragic, which set in motion a paranormal experience of a higher order: Captain William Coppin lost a daughter to typhoid fever. The family had no connection to Franklin or his crews, but the death of that child would have a significant impact on the search for Erebus and Terror. She was four-year-old Louisa, better known in her Londonderry home as Weesy. Coppin, a wealthy mariner around forty-five years old, had long experience and excellent credentials as surveyor to the Board of Trade and the Emigration Board, which oversaw migration to Britain’s colonies. Born to English parents in Northern Ireland, he grew up living with relatives on Canada’s Atlantic coast, in Saint John, New Brunswick. After working as a ferry captain, running between Londonderry and Liverpool, he built a very profitable shipbuilding company, owned his own shipyard, and employed seven hundred men.

  Coppin had four children of his own, aged two to nine and a half. The captain and his wife shared a home with her sister and his father. Soon after Weesy was buried, Coppin left on business for three months, during which his kids saw a lot of Weesy. Her ghost was always about and especially liked to show up at meals, when a knife, fork, and chair were placed for her at the table so her spirit could enjoy mealtime with the rest of the kids. Louisa’s favorite brother was William Jr., who frequently saw her ghost standing near or against walls of different rooms in their house. When he ran to hug his dead sister, the boy bounced off the wall, sometimes so hard he was left bleeding. By the family’s account, Weesy’s ghost wasn’t the flowing-robe variety or the ghastly phantom made popular by modern-day movie lore. The children described seeing a ball of bluish light. Yet it didn’t appear to any of the adults in the house, at least not that they were aware. At first it seemed adults’ eyes couldn’t pick up what the children’s did. But when the captain returned, and his wife told him of the odd apparition, he soon saw it himself. To occult believers, there was a logical explanation: Coppin had psychic gifts, which he must have passed on to his children.

  In the fall of 1849, when the public was rapt with the deepening mystery of the Franklin Expedition, experts were still pointing to Wellington Channel as the most likely place to find Erebus and Terror. Harriet Smith, an aunt of Coppin’s children, asked his daughter Ann one October day to enquire of Weesy whether she had any thoughts on the matter, whereupon the spirit vanished. Almost immediately, Ann saw a vision of the Arctic on the floor, showing two ships surrounded by ice, almost covered by snow, at the end of a channel. Then another question: How could Sir John Franklin be reached? In a flash, words appeared on the opposite wall in large, round-handed letters some three inches tall: Erebus and Terror, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, and Victoria Channel. The girl acting as a spirit medium shivered, as if touched by the Arctic cold, and clutched her aunt Harriet’s dress.

  As child mediator to her sister’s ghost, Ann drew a map so her aunt could see what Weesy had shown her. It included Victoria Channel, now called Victoria Strait, which was then unknown. The strait, which would become the focus of the modern Franklin search, didn’t appear on any chart of the polar region until three years after Ann’s vision, when John Rae’s discovery of the waterway was reported in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. What’s more, the child had never seen a map of the Arctic before, let alone drawn one. Yet, when the document recording the Franklin Expedition’s troubles was discovered a decade later at Victory Point, the spectral apparition was proven remarkably accurate. Coppin got to work copying the map and recording the details of the ghost story to send in a letter to Lady Franklin.

  It stayed on his desk for half a year while the captain dealt with heart trouble. But in May 1850, the captain and Lady Franklin finally met and he told her the startling details of Weesy’s conveyance. As she listened, Jane
recalled a crucial fact: Sir John had told her that if the expedition got in trouble, he would “go up by the Great Fish River and so get to Hudson Bay Territory.” She believed Weesy had brought the truth. So did the Oxford-educated writer who analyzed the case for Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research. He dissected the written account of Reverend J. Henry Skewes, who took heat from believers and skeptics alike for what many considered a sensationalist book.

  One reviewer with faith in the occult hated Skewes’s writing but was convinced he had a legitimate account of significant supernatural contact. The reverend “refuses to believe in what he calls ‘the commonly accepted modus operandi of the spirit-workings of Spiritualism’ (whatever that may mean), but he believes that his own pet ‘revelation’ came from the ‘unseen spirit world,’” wrote the paranormal expert, identified only as M.A. (Oxon.), a Latin abbreviation for the University of Oxford.

  “So do I: and that is one of the very many that Mr. Skewes evidently knows nothing of, and about which it would become him to write more modestly and cautiously. The fact is, when his book is divested of superincumbent speculation, crude opinion and irrelevant matter, there remains a record of mediumship that is valuable.”

  The only opinion that really mattered was Jane’s. She took the Weesy revelations very seriously but was careful not to spread that around. She had too much to lose if the press portrayed her as a nut. Lady Franklin spent some eight years trying to get searchers to concentrate on the places Weesy’s ghost had charted. She met discreetly with Coppin more than thirty times to discuss the revelations, according to Skewes, president of Liverpool’s Mental Sciences Association. Among many questions raised was whether Ann saw words on the wall, or simply initials that adults later filled in with great meaning. Skeptics also asked why Weesy would neglect to mention a fact one might expect a ghost to bring up: Franklin had been dead for upwards of two years. Skewes’s handling of the whole story only fed criticism that the reverend’s book was sensationalist and unscientific piffle.

  One reviewer, writing as the controversy still roiled in 1889, was so indignant that he attacked Coppin as “a remarkable man, a particularly successful shipbuilder, and the spoilt child of presentiments, coincidences, and benignant interpositions of Providence in his affairs generally.” Chipping away at the story, the reviewer seemed suspicious that Lady Franklin’s estate couldn’t produce the original chart drawn according to Weesy’s description. But there are large gaps in Jane’s carefully kept records, which some suspect as evidence that they were culled after her death to protect her reputation. Skewes further undermined his case by writing “with pitiful want of command of English as she ought to be written.” The furor forced a new edition of Skewes’s book, which included more supporting evidence. That included letters among Coppin, Lady Franklin, and Sophy that showed Jane was willing to put more faith in the spirit of a dead girl than the assembled wisdom of Britain’s polar veterans.

  “It is a question capable of being judged by anyone who will give sufficient attention to it,” Lady Franklin wrote to Coppin in June 1850, “and my own impression of its necessity is so great that were all the Arctic authorities collected together in one body against it (which, however, will never be the case), it would make no difference at all in my opinion. You who have other grounds for judging this matter will not wonder at my impressions, and may, perhaps, see that they came from a higher source than those which are founded on mere reasonings.”

  While Jane told trusted experts like Scoresby that she thought the search should focus farther south, in the area closer to King William Island, she didn’t dare let on that the information came from the ghost of a toddler. She confided only in a close circle of trusted allies. One was the Admiralty’s influential second secretary, Captain W. A. B. Hamilton, who met with Coppin and promised to inform the Lords in charge of the Royal Navy. She also told Charles Dickens and tried to persuade him to write an account in his new weekly magazine, Household Words, which sold 100,000 copies at its peak. A positive story from the era’s most popular writer would have given the ghost story great credibility. But Coppin objected, insisting that “the hallowed memories of home life must be kept inviolate.” Coppin didn’t want to risk career-destroying ridicule. Even though Dickens was good with a ghost story, the captain had good reason to be wary: A regular column in Household Words mocked the paranormal under the headline “Latest Intelligence from Spirits.”

  Another psychic named Emma L. offered her own insights on the search. Captain Alexander Maconochie, who was Sir John Franklin’s private secretary in Van Diemen’s Land, set up that contact through mesmerist Joseph W. Haddock in Bolton, near Manchester. He had discovered Emma’s clairvoyant powers after hiring her, at age twenty, as a domestic servant, whereupon he used her to try his hand at mesmerism. She solved some theft and missing-persons cases, which The Zoist reported on, and her fame as the woman known as “the Bolton clairvoyant” spread. Maconochie used his good offices to get the Admiralty to assist with handwriting samples from Sir John, his officers, and the commanders of search expeditions in the hope Emma might connect them. Haddock obtained Arctic charts from the navy so he could refine his questions and better understand her replies. He also got a lock of Sir John’s sparse hair to improve the clairvoyant’s chances of distant contact.

  During one of her out-of-body trips to the Arctic in the fall of 1849, Emma marked the time between Bolton and Franklin’s ships, which allowed a calculation of longitude. It placed Erebus and Terror in northwestern Hudson Bay, where they never were. She later spotted Sir John in other places farther west, even though he was dead by then. After reading a letter from Maconochie, describing the visions for newspaper readers, Sophy concluded, “perhaps even more strongly than my aunt, that there was a diseased imagination, or even excited nerves, at work and therefore her statements should not be depended upon.”

  Paranormal sources were literally all over the map with their search tips. Useful leads were as rare as the South African quagga caged up at the London Zoo. Most psychic revelations about the fate of the Franklin Expedition were either too fuzzy to judge or too farcical to believe. A clairvoyant from London claimed from her trance that she had just passed another psychic from Liverpool in midair while astral traveling over the Arctic. By sheer accident, spectral intervention, or even sleight of hand that no one managed to see through, the information that Coppin’s young daughter learned out of thin air was by far the most accurate. But who could be sure? What began quietly as a child’s spectral vision in a Northern Ireland home was lost in the noise of what sounded to skeptics like spiritualist mumbo jumbo. Staid Arctic experts easily dismissed it all. Coppin petitioned the government to launch a search to the area on his daughter’s map, but “all the arguments of the anxious Captain were but paper pellets on the hide of the rhinoceros,” Skewes wrote.

  Admiralty Lords loathed the letters from Haddock. The men at the helm of the world’s greatest navy weren’t accustomed to taking advice from magicians. Pestering them to take Emma’s clairvoyance seriously, Haddock pointed out that her descriptions of officers she saw on various Arctic expeditions were “strikingly correct.”

  “Strikingly correct certainly—a perfect transcription of the description I wrote,” retorted one Lord. Another was more blunt in his marginalia’s assessment of the notion that spiritualists could find the lost Franklin Expedition when brave explorers found nothing but dead ends.

  “Humbug!” he wrote.

  JANE NEEDED to get nearer the Admiralty. She had to find a close perch to watch the adversary and plot better ways to get around the men standing in her way. She moved from an upper-class neighborhood lined with Georgian townhouses and took a suite of apartments at 33 Spring Gardens, next door to the seat of imperial naval power. Over the centuries, it had been a park for royals strolling from nearby Whitehall Palace, the site of a stable to house their horses, a refuge for aristocratic debt dodgers, and a quiet garden for people toiling in
the Admiralty offices. By the time Lady Franklin needed a place from which to put more pressure on her missing husband’s bosses, it was a posh enclave favored by politicians and civil servants.

  The apartment became a comfortable bunker. Friends called it “The Battery.” Jane spread out maps of the known Arctic, consulted experienced explorers on the latest rumors and theories, ruminated on her own thoughts about the best plans for more searches, and wrote to allies and the Admiralty, feverishly trying to get some results. When James Clark Ross told her a rumor was making the rounds that she had relocated to pressure the vaunted Royal Navy leadership, she told him the family home was simply too crowded with relatives and assured him dryly that, “if the great folks at the Admiralty think I am here for interfering purposes, they do my insignificance too much honour.”

  There was another, darker reason behind her move out of the five-story home she had shared with Sir John at Bedford Place. The all-consuming focus on finding him was splitting the only family Lady Franklin had left. With power of attorney from her husband, she could spend every last penny of the Franklin fortune if she chose. Her father, sister Mary, and her husband John Simpkinson feared Jane was hell-bent on spending herself into poverty. They leaned on her to stand aside and let the Admiralty do what it knew best. Eleanor also turned against her stepmother, agreeing to marry without telling her. That left one ally whom Jane could really trust: Sir John’s niece Sophy, whose devotion to her aunt was unshakable.

  In Lady Franklin’s defense, Sophy declared that she “is honoured and respected and sympathy for her has been expressed and conveyed to herself by all ranks, from the Queen down to the lowest of her subjects—and this notwithstanding the most shrinking anxiety to avoid notice, or comment or observation.” Caroline Fox, an old Quaker friend of the Franklins, was worried the relentless stress would break Jane. “Poor Lady Franklin,” Fox confided to her diary. “She is in such a restless excited state of feeling. . . . She spends most of her days in a room she has taken in Spring Gardens, where she sees all the people who can tell or suggest anything.” She, like many who only saw Jane as a distraught woman, a widow lost in denial, severely underestimated her strength of will, stamina, and intelligence.