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

by Deborah Blum

  James’s desire to both explain the science and to look beyond it made his book on psychology intellectually challenging—and extremely slow going. Already his publisher, Henry Holt, was writing irritated letters demanding to know what was taking so long. And in addition to the textbook, James was now teaching philosophy. He was bothered by headaches, stressed by his drive to do so much so well. He began to obsess on his need for peace, quiet, even a change of scenery. After four years of living with a temperamental husband, Alice didn’t hesitate. She encouraged him to take a break. He was so restless now, she said, she could more easily care for the boys in the company of her mother and sister.

  WILLIAM’S FIRST STOP was at his brother’s elegant London flat. Henry James Jr. was making a name for himself as a writer of style and substance. He’d published a rapid-fire sequence of well-received novels, The American, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and Portrait of a Lady-all in a four-year span. Henry James had achieved a level of acclaim that his brother could only envy.

  William relaxed into the visit. He spent afternoons in conversation at his brother’s clubs, surrounded by an aromatic fog of tobacco smoke. He made occasional calls on scientists. He walked the sooty streets, enjoying Henry’s company. Then he found himself suddenly alone. Back in America, Henry James Sr. was dying. Their mother had died of bronchitis earlier that year, and their sister, faced with this second impending death, felt overwhelmed. She asked Henry Jr. to come home.

  William—the more high-maintenance brother—was to stay in England. “All insist William shall not come,” his sister telegraphed. William debated returning home anyway, despite his nervous state, but had to admit that he probably wouldn’t be an ideal deathbed companion. “How much better it will be to recollect him well than so decayed,” he explained in a letter.

  He wasn’t certain that his father would even recognize him. Henry Sr. had suffered a series of small strokes after his wife’s death. Paralyzed by illness and grief, the old man stubbornly turned his face to the wall and refused to eat. He died on December 18. At the end, he talked incessantly of a vision he kept seeing, of the stern faces of other old men, perched along the edge of a wall, watching as he passed by.

  William, standing by in the smoky fog of London, learned of his father’s death when he read it in the London Standard. He noted, with slight surprise, a burst of grief for his difficult parent—and an accompanying flourish of possibility. As he wrote to his wife, his father’s death made him feel “as I never began to do before, the tremendousness of the idea of immortality. If only he could be joined to mother. One grows dizzy at the thought.”

  JAMES WAS WAITING for his brother’s return, unenthusiastically wrestling with his psychology book, when he received an unexpected invitation from Edmund Gurney to dine with his philosophy club, “the Scratch Eight.” Once a month, Gurney and seven of his friends—hence the group’s name—met to eat and to argue over a different philosophical question.

  As Gurney explained, he lived nearby and was an acquaintance of James’s author brother. He politely presumed on that connection to invite William to the December philosophy dinner. James enjoyed the evening—“I felt quite at home among them”—and his feelings were clearly reciprocated. He was invited to the next meeting of the Scratch Eight. But he especially enjoyed the company of Edmund Gurney.

  His next letter home sang with enthusiasm about this new friend, “one of the first rate minds of the time, a magnificent Adonis, six feet four in height with an extremely handsome face, voice and general air of distinction about him, altogether the exact opposite of the classical idea of a philosopher.”

  Psychical research—and its implications—easily occupied their conversations, continuing in an exchange of letters after James returned to Cambridge in March of 1883. Gurney had accepted greater responsibilities at the SPR and was now honorary secretary. As he confessed to James, he still wondered at the strange enterprise, uncertain if the mysteries the group probed could ever be solved, or should be solved. He wondered, too, whether he was the right person for the quest.

  “I doubt its compatibility, at any rate with my upsettable condition and easily fagged brain,” Gurney admitted. And yet he was aware that the project needed someone of his stronger qualities—determination and intelligence—and who was financially able to devote himself to the work. There were hundreds of candidates for solicitor positions. The same could not be said of persons wishful of exploring the occult.

  The choice, he knew, would require sacrifice. Gurney anticipated “loss of reputation, or rather (since I haven’t much to lose) a gradual positive reputation for being weak in the head.” Yet his doubts seemed petty when weighed against the possibilities.

  In this moment in ontological history, with the aftershocks of the Darwinian earthquake still shuddering across the religious landscape, Gurney saw a chance to calm the tremors, to create a new, integrated worldview. If a scholar could connect science and faith, find the points where they met, a point where perhaps one approach might illuminate the other, Gurney believed that man might be able to make sense of life itself. He might even be able to define when life began—and when it ended. “Risks must be faced, whatever one does,” he wrote, “and I feel no doubt the effort is worth the making.”

  Both the personal struggle and the determination to explore further resonated with James. They were natural friends, he declared, and Gurney agreed. In William James, he recognized a “rare and precious kinship, the kind that made one think that Providence had done one a really good turn.

  “‘Two lost souls!’ you will say,” James wrote later to a fellow philosopher, describing his bond with Gurney and his own growing interest in psychical research. “But that is what remains to be seen.”

  GURNEY HAD AN IDEA about MarkTwain’s dream vision. He and Myers had been talking about what one might call the ordinary occult, experiences that unpredictably shadowed people’s lives. They were interested in dreams and premonitions as well as the haunts and spooks that reportedly inhabited the waking world.

  They proposed to treat such accounts—from Twain’s dream to Catherine Crowe’s tales of ghostly footsteps—as cumulative, as pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, broken and scattered, needing to be reassembled into a picture of ... well, they weren’t sure what it would show, but Gurney and Myers thought the image would somehow convey a greater truth.

  As William James would emphasize, such stories arose in every book of human history: “No matter where you open its pages, you find things recorded under the name of divinations, inspirations, demoniacal possessions, apparitions, trances, ecstasies, miraculous healings and products of disease.” Supernatural events seemed to string together like a message, a secretive code that so far remained undecipherable.

  The SPR ran newspaper ads soliciting personal stories of encounters with the otherworldly. Gurney spent hours each day sifting through them, replying to personal accounts of apparitions, asking for confirmation, witnesses, documents. “I have been tremendously busy all winter,” Gurney wrote to James in early 1884, explaining his recent lack of friendly correspondence. By his own calculations, Gurney had written something like sixteen hundred letters in the past two months, fifty-five already that day, aside from his quick note to James, which was for pure pleasure: “I wish you were not severed by the intractable Atlantic.”

  It was addictive work, despite the tedious clerical demands. Gurney found himself almost unable to think of anything else:

  One lives in a whirl of sporadic interests & small excitements—whether A will answer this question satisfactorily, and B that, whether C’s mother really died the night he saw her appear at a distance, or a night or two earlier, so that he might have heard the news between-&c&c&c,

  I find it difficult, almost impossible very often, to sit down & read anything, & feel as if I was not improving but rather the reverse. It is a bore that there are not more hours in the day, & more Energy to be got out of one’s “grey matter” between w
aking & sleeping.

  Even across the dark, glimmering distance of the ocean, James found Gurney’s enthusiasm infectious. Psychical research “is as worthy a specialty as a man could take up,” he wrote back encouragingly.

  There was no assurance, of course, that Gurney would be able to assemble the puzzle into something connecting this world and the next. But at least he was making an effort to study the pieces. James was increasingly persuaded that for religion and its moral convictions to remain a center of Western culture, its teachings needed a new foundation, built on both traditional theology and the newer realities of the scientific universe. He failed to understand why more intellectuals—humanists and scientists alike—weren’t actively working toward that link, as Edmund Gurney was trying to do.

  Theologians and religious leaders, James wrote to a fellow philosopher, mostly resisted the idea that faith, in light of modern science, should include “belief in new physical facts and possibilities.” Not all churches could be judged as one, of course, but James found himself dissatisfied with so many aspects of Victorian religiosity. The Catholics, steadfast in faith, seemed to him determined to pretend that scientific discoveries were meaningless. At the other end of the spectrum, however, he deplored the “bloodless pallor” of the Unitarians’ careful open-mindedness. “Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God,” he complained.

  A few religious leaders, such as James McCosh, president of Princeton University, were attempting to integrate evolution into their teachings. McCosh proposed that the Darwin-Wallace theory served “to increase the wonder and mystery of the process of creation,” and thus was a tribute to God’s powers. Others were at least acknowledging the geological issues, the increasing evidence that life arose and changed gradually over millions of years. Most scholars now suggested that when the Old Testament prophet Moses talked of “days,” he meant “ages.” But many clergymen still rejected evolution outright, as the devil’s path to a “might makes right” society, taking the position that since God had to be right, science had to be wrong.

  As James wrote to a fellow philosopher that year, “I confess I rather despair of any popular religion of a philosophic character & I sometimes wonder whether th[e]re can be any popular religion raised on the ruins of the old Christianity?” He wished that his own community of science was working to reduce such hostility. Instead, researchers tended to imply, if not declare, that those who clung to Christian beliefs simply lacked the intelligence to understand the rational view of life. It seemed to James that scientists were missing an opportunity to be included in a discussion that could well shape the future. “Are the much despised ‘spiritualists’ and the Society for Psychical Research to be the chosen instruments of a new era of faith?” he asked. “It would surely be strange if they were, but if they are not, I see no other agency that can do the work.”

  At James’s invitation, the charismatic William Barrett arrived in Boston in September 1884, en route to a science conference in Montreal. He was there to explain the psychical research being done in Europe—and to encourage the Americans to surpass it. With the blessing of the Sidgwick group, Barrett hoped to stimulate interest in a psychical research organization in the United States that would complement the British one.

  Squeezed in among scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Harvard’s Divinity School and area churches, Barrett described the research projects of the British Society for Psychical Research. He explained the SPR’s goal—to explore those “remarkable phenomena, which are prima facie inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis” and which had yet to be credibly investigated.

  He warned his audience to expect ridicule if they took up his challenge. But that was true, Barrett, said of most new sciences. And yet given a chance, alchemy had developed into chemistry, and the star mappers of the past had become the astronomers of today. Barrett believed, and he would repeat this throughout his long career, that “sooner or later psychical research will demonstrate to the educated world, not only the existence of a soul in man, but also the existence of a soul in Nature,” and he hoped that the Americans would also see the golden promise of that ambition.

  LABORING IN CAMBRIDGE, Henry Sidgwick had formed one solid conclusion: that he was a terrible psychical researcher.

  Everything seemed to flatten out when he appeared; knocks faltered, raps halted, spirits faded away. He always seemed to “paralyze the phenomena,” he told his colleagues, and, depressingly, they agreed with him. He’d racked up hour after hour observing nothing happen. “I’m going to a haunted house,” he wrote gloomily to Myers on a properly dark fall afternoon, rich with shadows. “Where I shall see no ghosts.”

  The fault belonged to him, Sidgwick wrote in his diary; he lacked the skills of his fellow investigators. Nora was more talented an observer, Myers more tireless, Gurney more acute in his judgment. No wonder they were doing more interesting work. But Sidgwick did have a few strengths he thought he could bring to the cause. He wrote them down too: He believed in justice. He was fair-minded. He was a good listener. And when he looked with satisfaction at his colleagues, Sidgwick had to note another talent: the ability to recruit excellent people. In point of fact, he’d recently persuaded another philosophy student to join their ranks, a cheerful cynic named Richard Hodgson, and he thought it might be one of his best actions to date.

  Hodgson was a big, burly, vigorous man with a fresh, ruddy face and a shock of sandy brown hair. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1855, the son of a wool importer, he’d considered becoming a lawyer, graduating from the University of Melbourne with a law degree—but decided practicing law didn’t seem intellectually stimulating enough. He decided, instead, on graduate work at St. John’s College, Cambridge, choosing the school because his favorite poet, William Wordsworth, was an alumnus. Hodgson had read nothing better than Wordsworth’s lyrical odes to nature, the poet’s assertion that “One impulse from a vernal wood/may teach you more of man/of moral evil and of good/than all the sages can.” He hoped, eventually, to hear and learn from nature as Wordsworth did. In fact, he scheduled time for it in his daily plans. Hodgson was—as Sidgwick had noted—ever disciplined in his habits, always determined in approaching his goals.

  He got up at 7:30 every morning. He had breakfast at 8:00 a.m.: “one raw egg in one half pint milk, one slice of bread, one and a half cups of tea.” He read till nine, worked on essays and letters until noon. He had bread and tea for lunch. He lounged and read “fiction or light poetry” till 3:45. He played lawn tennis until dinner. He went to a gym where he boxed three times a week, or fenced, or worked out with dumbbells. At 9:00 p.m. he had a supper of bread, eggs, and tea. He read poetry until bedtime, usually by 11:30. He allowed himself one cigarette before sleep. “Regularity for the organism is everything,” he wrote his best friend in Australia, a fellow law student named James Hackett who had decided to remain there and become a lawyer.

  Only nature and poetry, his two abiding loves, could cause Hodgson to slip a little from his standards of activity. “I do enjoy a leisurely walk home from lecture these days,” Hodgson wrote to Jimmy Hackett. “The sunlight goes right through me.” He read Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson; he snuck in some hours to write his own doggerel verse, which betrayed a lurking, ironic sense of humor and a keen interest in ongoing debate over Darwinian evolution:

  The Bishop knows better; for Huxley and Tyndall

  Have shown him that man goes away like a fly;

  And seeing the soul’s such a regular swindle,

  He’ll eat and he’ll drink and tomorrow he’ll die.

  We’ll prove you and I by a laudanum potion

  The body is just what we always have thought her

  A middling arrangement of molecule motion

  Amm
onia, and carbonic acid and water.

  Hodgson worried about Hackett’s lack of mental stimulation, mired in the dull practice of the law. He promised to write his friend about all the interesting philosophical questions that came up at Cambridge and the personal ones. “Thy brain shall not be dormant while I live, O Jimmy!”

  HODGSON KNEW he lacked the proper philosophy student’s attitude, which he described as sitting at the professor’s feet, and he knew he annoyed Sidgwick. “I was rather amused,” Hodgson wrote home, “because he seems a goodly fellow and I thought I detected a feeling that he had better be rough with me with the intention of diminishing my confidence.”

  But in this, he underestimated his philosophy professor. Sidgwick saw in the young Australian much more than an inflated ego. He saw a smart, decent, hardworking man—and a natural investigator. He’d been looking for someone like Hodgson. He had a project in mind, the SPR’s most ambitious investigation to date.

  As had so many others, Richard Hodgson found himself persuaded by Henry Sidgwick. By December 1884, the young Australian scholar was in Bombay, India, on an expedition financed by his philosophy professor, in pursuit of an elusive but influential psychic.