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

by Deborah Blum

  As THE YEAR 1895 moved forward, civilized behavior—as James noted ruefully—seemed to be rapidly going in the opposition direction.

  Italy was fighting in Abyssinia; the Chinese and Japanese were battling over the island of Formosa (later called Taiwan); in Cuba, citizens had risen in an attempt to shake off Spanish rule. The United States was quarreling with Britain over colonies in South America. The question of the precise border between Venezuela and British Guiana had become so heated that President Grover Cleveland threatened war against the United Kingdom.

  “Well, our countries will soon be soaked in each other’s blood,” wrote James to Myers. “You will be disemboweling me, and Hodgson cleaving Lodge’s skull.” Joking aside, James loathed Cleveland, whom he considered a posturing hothead, a leader too impatient with diplomacy, too eager to spill someone else’s blood. “All true patriots here have had a hell of a time,” James complained, feeling that support of Cleveland’s warmongering didn’t really speak well of his countrymen either. “It has been a most instructive thing for a dispassionate student of history to see how near the surface in all of us the fighting instinct lies.”

  The joke about Hodgson braining Lodge was also, unfortunately, rather too close to reality. The Cambridge sittings had fractured the usual sense of unity among psychical researchers, diluting their comfort in being a small band of Davids working to overcome an army of scientific Goliaths.

  Henry Sidgwick had taken Hodgson’s position and refused to publish the few positive observations from the Eusapia sittings. With Nora’s support, Sidgwick declared that the woman was an obvious fake, and he was weary of giving her free publicity. “It has not been the practice of the SPR to direct attention to the performances of any so-called ‘medium’ who has been proved guilty of systematic fraud,” he wrote. “In accordance, therefore, with our established custom, I propose to ignore her performances for the future, as I ignore those of other persons engaged in the same mischievous trade.”

  Myers and Lodge remained angry with Hodgson, who they thought had destroyed any chance of decent experimental work. They hadn’t in the least appreciated his gullible act. Hodgson had deliberately baited a trap, knowing that Eusapia always cheated if given the opportunity, Lodge said.

  As far as Richet and Ochorowicz were concerned, the Cambridge sittings had been nothing more than a deliberate attempt to make Palladino look foolish, and consequently an attempt by their erstwhile British and American colleagues to make the two of them look foolish as well. They planned to continue studying her more objectively, without such “help.”

  The debacle had done nothing for the reputation of psychical research in the United States. Donations had dropped, and James was now paying Hodgson’s salary out of his own pocket; so far it had cost him $300. “I fear the Eusapia business may prove a blow to our prosperity for a while,” James told Sidgwick, “although Hodgson’s withers are unwrung.”

  The lesson of the Palladino affair—the only lesson agreed upon by the investigators, anyway—was that the Italian medium possessed a genuine gift for causing trouble.

  “THE PRESIDENCY OF the Society for Psychical Research resembles a mouse trap.”

  So began William James’s farewell address, at the end of 1895, after two years of transatlantic presidency. He was gladly turning the mousetrap over to William Crookes who had accepted in advance. A good decade of solid scientific work had restored Crookes’s sense of invincible self-confidence, and his attitude toward the importance of psychical research.

  In recent years, Crookes had invented the radiometer, to measure particles in light; he would later invent the spintharoscope, which counted the alpha rays emitted by radium. He’d continued refining his Crookes tubes as well; they would prove useful not only in Thomson’s experiments with electrons but also in the study of Roentgen rays (later to be known as X-rays).

  Crookes’s virtuosity with instruments kept him constantly in demand; most recently he’d collaborated with Lord Rayleigh, investigating a mysterious element in the atmosphere. Rayleigh’s longtime interest in atmospheric studies had led to the isolation of the gaseous element that Rayleigh named argon, from the Greek word argos, “idle.” Argon was a passive kind of gas, basically inert, which made it hard to tease out of the frothing chemical soup around it. But Crookes had done a spectrographic analysis that caused argon to glow like fire against its background; he’d labeled more than 200 lines of light associated with the gas. For his contributions to science, Queen Victoria would confer a knighthood on Crookes in 1897.

  With his reputation for science and sanity more than restored, Crookes now chose to declare that he still believed in the supernatural. He stood by his earlier investigations of D. D. Home, he said, and he stood by his convictions. In accepting the presidency, he had only one new goal. He wanted to convince his fellow scientists to try for a little more humility, to let go of their “too hasty assumption that we know more about the universe than we can possibly do.”

  William James also spoke of the need for humility in his address-but in psychical research itself. While his colleagues had definitely made progress in establishing telepathy and crisis apparitions, they had yet to find a mechanism that would explain them, that modus transferendi that Sidgwick longed to discover.

  Their real accomplishment, he thought, was to establish psychical research as a field whose questions merited answers. That success came mainly through the steady work of the British society and its building of theoretical connections between telepathy and apparitions; and, he thought, the work of Richard Hodgson and others, including himself, in doing a case analysis of Leonora Piper. Through that sharp focus on mediumistic powers, James thought they were learning lessons that might be applied in a much wider sense. “If you will let me use the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

  In the case of admitting the supernatural, he continued, “My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such evidence I can see no escape.”

  Given such accomplishments, James then pondered, why had their work been so steadfastly dismissed and belittled? As he saw it, the answer lay not with them but in the nature of nineteenth-century science, its reliance on fixed laws, and its “belief that the deeper order of Nature is mechanical exclusively.”

  A Harvard-educated scientist himself, William James believed in rules; he believed that the scientific worldview provided enormous benefits to humankind. From nineteenth-century science had come vaccinations, a new treatment for diabetes, pain-soothing anesthesia, the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, the newly designed internal-combustion engine, electricity in homes and businesses, and a future filled with the promise of more and better. The benefits of science were unquestionably great, James said, and “our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be correspondingly immense.”

  But to return to the theme of humility, even such a string of successes didn’t mean that scientists held the universe and all its secrets in their hands. The real shortcoming of science in the dawn of the twentieth century, James said, was its rejection of all experiences and insights not generated by the priesthood of science itself.

  In the short term, he thought, such arrogance would allow the research community to establish a new level of power and influence. But in the future, James wondered if those who were now awed by innovation and cowed by superiority would continue to be so malleable. It might be that those so summarily dismissed by scientific leaders might someday dismiss those leaders just as conclusively. “It is the intoleran
ce of Science for such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of their existence or of their significance except as proofs of man’s absolute folly that has set Science so apart from the common sympathies of the race.”

  James warned that future generations of scientists might pay a price for the intolerance of his time, that respect and admiration for research could not continue indefinitely without some respect given in return. He wondered if scientists of the twentieth century would regret the lost opportunity to share in a societal discussion. Some day in the future, James concluded, a more enlightened society would mourn that determined blindness in “our own boasted Science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.”

  9

  THE UNEARTHLY ARCHIVE

  AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY drew closer, gleaming with all the bright sheen of well-polished metal, Fred Myers found himself looking away, back toward his past and his youth. He recalled gentler times, softer days, and the vanished music of Annie Marshall’s voice.

  Myers turned fifty-three in 1896; in the looking glass, he saw a middle-aged man with a silvered beard and a level dark gaze. He was steadier now, more serious in his outlook, more determined to help resolve the philosophical contradictions of the world around him.

  His wife tolerated his psychical obsessions, he knew, but she did not share them. Evie didn’t pretend to be an intellectual or a seeker. Her life turned around their children, her photography, and cherished social functions. She depended, as she told him, on his superior intelligence and strength. Myers didn’t tell her that sometimes he longed to be less of a mainstay He didn’t tell her either that what he missed most from his more impetuous days was another love, a woman with sad blue eyes and a smile like sunlight.

  “Do not allude to all this in any letter,” Myers wrote to James, because “my wife likes to see your letters.” The previous year, when he’d come over for the Chicago meeting, Myers rode the train to Boston so that he could ask Mrs. Piper to try to find Annie Marshall, lost from his sight in the spirit world.

  In another secretive letter, Myers confided in Oliver Lodge: “I do not say that facts unknown to myself were given[,] but facts unknown to Mrs. P were recombined in a manner & with an earnestness which in Hodgson and myself left little doubt—no doubt—that we were in the presence of an authentic utterance from a soul beyond the tomb.”

  Myers asked Richard Hodgson to continue working with Mrs. Piper in search of further proof. It would be easy enough to abandon this ridiculous, hopeless wish to find a dead woman. But Myers, as he told his friends, had a feeling that she was there, just beyond his reach.

  Myers found Leonora Piper fascinating anyway. The hunt for Annie just added to the medium’s attraction as an object of study. The mind of a medium, Myers would argue, offered a rare opportunity to explore the true range of human capabilities.

  He compared Mrs. Piper’s mental manifestations when in trance state—personalities including G.P and Phinuit—to interlocking puzzle pieces that formed a picture of an intricate brain, operating on levels that ranged from waking awareness to “subliminal consciousness.” He’d already published eight arguments in favor of the multifaceted mind, filling page after page in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. But Myers wanted to go beyond mere advocacy of his position; he wanted to explore the potential of such a mind. How might different aspects of the brain, dif ferent levels of its function, influence each other?

  Myers pored over other writings on the subject, sifting them for support. He persuaded the SPR to publish Sigmund Freud’s 1895 paper “Studies in Hysteria” because the Austrian discussed the idea of the subconscious mind. It was the first of Freud’s research papers to appear in a British journal. Freud was just building his reputation as a pioneer in psychiatry at that moment; he would first use the term psychoanalysis in 1896, after ten years of private practice. He had studied hypnosis under Jean Charcot, in Paris, and would later refer to the hypnotic state as one of free association. When the SPR first published his study, Freud had yet to make an impact in London, although his provocative theories were gradually gaining attention. Myers particularly liked Freud’s innovative ways of looking at mental processes. “The fact is,” Freud wrote in “Studies of Hysteria,” “that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria,” that a person had to be understood in terms of their life, their experience, their story, that dismissing them as a pathology was too shallow an approach.

  Myers saw nothing shallow or simple about the human mind. He frequently compared the range of human consciousness to the light spectrum, in which visible light constitutes only one small part, while other regions—from the ultraviolet to the infrared—do their work in ways that we cannot see but may sense and respond to anyway. Using that image as an illustration, he offered his own theory proposing that ordinary consciousness, which he sometimes called “supraliminal,” constituted only a small part of mental abilities, the part focused upon helping us function in our daily lives.

  Beneath that “waking self” ran the other “streams of consciousness,” currents of mental activity just as invisible as the heat-rich radiation of the infrared region of light and just as potent. Myers proposed that some part of the subliminal, or subconscious, mind was also purely about internal function—managing digestion, the thump of the heart, the whoosh of the lungs. Other “streams” of subliminal consciousness, though, might be used for external functions—processing social communication signals such as facial expression or subtle body gestures. At other levels, the subliminal mind might operate even more subtly, even telepathically. “I suggest, then,” he wrote, “that the stream of consciousness in which we habitually live is not the only consciousness which exists in connection with our organism.”

  Perhaps, Myers added, these “other” consciousnesses could help explain what appeared to be mental aberrations: hypnotism, hysteria, inexplicable fears, crisis apparitions, and dreams. Perhaps even as people varied greatly in their waking intellect, so too did they differ in their subliminal intelligence. Perhaps there was even a balance to it; those brains most capable in the material world did less well in the subliminal realms—and vice versa.

  That dichotomy, Myers proposed, probably held true for most people, including himself The average person’s brain focused entirely on handling life’s obvious challenges, allowing little scope for developing telepathic skills, or any talents beyond the five senses. The few that did exercise their brains in such areas—perhaps developing a skill in subliminal communication—might find that it cost them in other areas, organized their mind in a way that left them with less potential for an academic style of intelligence. Such people might even appear peculiar in the everyday sense. They might be prone to trances, subject to developing odd trance personalities. Those with a strong subliminal life might, fairly or unfairly, be considered abnormal. They might become mediums. Such a one might become a Leonora Piper.

  THESE Days, William James found ideas like Myers’s more interesting, or at least more original, than those put forward by his fellow practitioners of scientific psychology. His dissatisfaction spilled into a letter to Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, assessing the field of psychology as stodgy and depressingly lacking in innovation, especially for such a young science.

  He cited the University of Wisconsin’s James Jastrow as an example. Jastrow, who had been so argumentative about psychical research, did some good experimental work, James wrote, but he had “a narrowish intellect ... and uncomfortable peculiarities of character.” James hadn’t quarreled yet with Edward Titchener at Cornell University, but the man was unoriginal in his thinking and “although from Oxford, quite a barbarian in his scientific and literary manners and quarrelsome in the extreme.” The best psychologist at Yale was shallow; the University of Chicago had one promising psychologist, but he was too young to have done anything interesting.

  James admired James
McKeen Cattell of Columbia University for his ef forts to pioneer human intelligence testing. But Cattell’s closed-mindedness on the subject of psychical research frustrated James, especially when the Columbia professor publicly chastised James for his support of the field. Recently, Cattell,had compared the SPR’s work to a swamp, incomprehensible through the murk of superstition.

  Cattell heightened his aggressive stance after reading a copy of James’s farewell address as president of the SPR. In an essay in the Psychological Review, which Cattell had founded, the New York scientist expressed his dismay that a respected psychologist such as William James could be so fooled by the shoddy evidence and inadequate experiments offered up by his fellow psychical researchers. As Cattell put it, there could never be real evidence for the supernatural because evidence could not exist for a fantasy. Stung, James replied to the Review that his critic clearly hadn’t bothered to read the work: “The concrete evidence for most of the ‘psychic’ phenomena under discussion is good enough to hang a man 20 times over.”

  James was angry enough to add that such prejudice seemed unfortunately characteristic of the whole profession. Cattell’s objections were typical of those raised by traditional researchers: shallow on their face, and, “shallow by further investigation.”

  In an 1896 address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities, James further challenged the claim that the world could—or should—be understood only by application of logic and material evidence.

  By taking refuge in “snarling logicality” James said, by insisting that the only believable god was one who meekly appeared when asked to prove himself, a person might “cut himself off forever from his only opportunity to make the gods’ acquaintance.” In terms of material logic, James said, it appears easier to disbelieve what cannot be proved. But by doggedly persisting, by remaining open to belief—in gods, deities, higher powers, purpose—we allow for opportunity. We keep our minds open to what we do not know for sure, to what we have no idea how to prove. In this, James said, it may yet turn out that, as believers, “we are doing the universe the deepest service we can.”