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

by Deborah Blum

  IN 1898, WILLIAM CROOKES was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, another milestone in his return to mainstream science. Yet, he chose to give his presidential address, that October, on a note of blazing defiance.

  In a speech in Bristol, to a materialist audience, Crookes deliberately returned to the subject of his favorite medium. Almost thirty years after he had published his first controversial account, D. D. Home’s powers seemed to the scientist as compelling as ever. In retrospect, Crookes believed that Home had offered the first real demonstration of telekinesis and therefore confounded the scientific community. The late medium had proved, Crookes said, “that outside our scientific knowledge there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals.”

  Crookes was reclaiming ground from which he had long since retreated, after his unfortunate experience with London street mediums. Still active and productive as a physicist, he had that very year completed analysis of the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen; over the next few years, he would successfully undertake the separation of uranium isotopes and measurement of the radioactive decay process. His accomplishments had returned him to the inner priesthood, as Oliver Lodge had once described it. So, “perhaps among my audience some may feel curious as to whether I shall speak out or be silent,” Crookes said.

  “I elect to speak.... To ignore the subject would be an act of cowardice—an act of cowardice I feel no temptation to commit.” Crookes wanted his fellow SPR members—and the greater scientific community as well—to clearly to understand that he still believed in supernatural powers and in his own experiments demonstrating them. “I have nothing to retract. I adhere to my already published statements,” he said, and he found the more recent psychical research done by others equally convincing.

  He believed in telekinesis; he believed in telepathy; he believed in the possibility that the dead might return. “Indeed, I might add much thereto.”

  Meanwhile, Hodgson’s report continued to fulfill Cattell’s fear that it would have the power to convert the undecided. Even worse, one of the more prominent converts came from Cattell’s own institution.

  JAMES HERVEY HYSLOP was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, a slight man with a neat brown beard, chilly gray eyes, and the faint pallor of ill health, which had dogged him since childhood. The look of fragility was deceptive; he possessed the combative temperament of a pit bull terrier.

  Born in 1850, Hyslop came from an Ohio farm family. He grew up in the tiny community of Xenia, a swatch of fiercely tended fields surrounded by forest. His childhood had been one of farm labor—from caring for horses to breaking away corn stalks after a winter frost—and ultraconservative Christianity.

  His parents belonged to a fundamentalist Presbyterian church and followed its teachings to the letter. The children were required to study the Bible daily—although during the week they could also read certain newspapers and books. On Sunday, the whole family spent six hours attending sermons and memorizing Psalms. “We were not allowed to play at games, swing or whistle, ride or walk for pleasure, pluck fruit from trees, black our shoes or read any secular literature,” Hyslop recalled. He’d followed those teachings faithfully as a child, but as a university student majoring in philosophy, Hyslop became convinced that his father’s faith was at odds with reality. The son still accepted the notion of a deity. He could admit the “force of the argument for the existence of God or some intelligence at the foundation of things.” It was the teaching of Christianity that now seemed to him preposterous—the impossibly simple explanation of creation, the egocentric notion of a chosen people, even the arguments for the divinity of Christ, seemed to Hyslop “fatally weak.”

  Determined not to be a hypocrite, he’d told his parents of his new perspective, proving to his farmer father that, as suspected, a university education led to godlessness. In the following years, Hyslop’s father alternated between ignoring his son and bombarding him with warnings of damnation. Even after Hyslop received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, even after he was hired in 1889 as a professor of ethics and logic at Columbia, he knew full well that in his father’s eyes he was a failure.

  Hyslop fretted that he would never be able to repair the relationship, a loss made even more painful in 1896 when his father died of throat cancer. His father’s death left Hyslop contemplating the rigidity of his opinions. Not about Christianity—nothing changed his mind about that—but about immortality. He began to wonder about survival after death, whether his father lived on in some form, whether he could reach him yet.

  In early 1898, after reading Richard Hodgson’s endorsement of Mrs. Piper, Hyslop realized that he’d found the medium through whom he could pose his questions. He wrote to Hodgson asking for a series of sittings designed to challenge Mrs. Piper’s vaunted talents—and perhaps to resolve his personal dilemma. He proposed to make the challenge as difficult as he could. If it was too easy, it would convince no one, including himself.

  As they arranged it, Hyslop not only attended the sittings anonymously, he wore a black mask over his face. He came masked even though he routinely waited outside a window until Mrs. Piper was in a full trance and Hodgson could gesture him into the room. Hodgson added another layer of protection to protect Hyslop’s anonymity, a code name. Hodgson would refer to Hyslop only as “four times friend,” since he had requested four sittings.

  It was at the second sitting that Mrs. Piper told him that a spirit was newly arrived in the room, and that the visitor’s name was Robert Hyslop. As Hyslop told Hodgson afterward, he didn’t think four sittings were going to be enough.

  THE SPR’s HOPES for convincing scientists that telepathy should become part of standard research had sustained yet another blow—and led William James into yet another public quarrel with one of his fellow psychologists.

  The argument began after Sidgwick presented some new telepathy work—including a tidy set of experiments with playing cards, done by Oliver Lodge—at the summer’s experimental psychology meeting in Munich. His presentation almost immediately provoked an article in Science, suggesting that the SPR telepathy subjects cheated their way to success, possibly by simply whispering the correct cards to each other. Although the author later admitted that he’d not really proven that case, the article was widely praised by scientists and hailed in a letter from psychologist Edward Titchener of Cornell University, which declared, “No scientifically-minded psychologist believes in telepathy.”

  Once again, James took up the cudgels for his friends and his beliefs. He wrote to remind the readers of Science—and Titchener—that the original author had backed down from his first assurance that fraud alone could explain the SPR results. “Even in anti-telepathic Science accuracy of representation is required, and I am pleading not for telepathy but only for accuracy,” James said, expressing his regrets that Titchener was unable to meet that basic standard.

  Insulted, Titchener replied that he had been accurate. Perhaps the author had backtracked a little, but at least he was a good scientist, as opposed to the slipshod variety found in the psychical research community. Further, the basic point that “ordinary channels of sense,” such as hearing a whisper, could account for so-called telepathic results was by far the preferred explanation.

  Titchener and James had been leaders in American psychology for years. Both had studied under the great German experimentalist William Wundt; both had persuaded their universities to establish their first psychology laboratories. It was true that Titchener’s idea of psychology looked nothing like James’s. He was a founder of structuralist theory—that the mind was composed of structures, such as thought and emotion, just as a water molecule was composed of structures, such as hydrogen and oxygen. He saw no place in the mind for a telepathy structure or a spiritual communication center.

  But out of respect for their long-standing relationship, Titchener also wrote to James directly, trying to explain
his viewpoint, providing an eloquent defense of his own position and of the stance taken by traditional psychologists. “I think that there is a great deal in your general position,” Titchener began. “That is, I think that these topics have been boycotted, and should not be so.” Still, he accused James and his SPR colleagues of constantly claiming persecution as a means of countering criticisms: “A minority is not always or necessarily in the right,” Titchener pointed out. “And, together with many others, I rather resent the airs of martyrdom that psychical research puts on.

  “You are perfectly free to work: you have a lot of big names on your side to back you up; your society is very flourishing. Suppose that Sidgwick and Balfour and the rest had done as much for psychophysics as they have for psychical research! Then there would be English laboratories worth the name.” (Established earlier in the nineteenth century by German physicist-philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner, psychophysics was the study of correlations between psychological sensations and the physical stimuli that trigger them.)

  It was true that Titchener didn’t plan to read SPR studies or conduct his own investigations into psychical phenomena. He would certainly never visit a medium, even Mrs. Piper, due to his “personal repugnance.” If by fairness, James meant that Titchener needed to take a serious look at psychical research, he was afraid that they would never agree. “But I am as keen for fair play as anybody—meaning thereby that you have your right to fight for your side, and that I have an equal right to fight for mine.”

  AS IF TO ANSWER the worrying impression that only one decent medium existed to be studied, in the pages of the spiritualist journal Light appeared notice of a new trance medium, the twenty-nine-year-old wife of a London merchant. At first read, she seemed nothing special. Her spirit guide was reputedly a child, her daughter Nelly, lost years before, who spoke in the soft lisp of a toddler.

  With Nelly came Eusapia-like effects—blowing curtains, flickering lights, the occasional levitations of furniture. The SPR would have ignored her except for one fact: Rosina Thompson didn’t charge for the sittings, and they had agreed to give fair hearing to nonprofessional mediums.

  Fred Myers decided to pay her a visit. And then another, and then another; he would eventually have 150 sittings and persuade the medium to abandon her physical productions and concentrate only on automatic writing. Once he accomplished that, to his surprise and pleasure, Mrs. Thompson produced the kind of results previously only seen with Leonora Piper. Myers wrote them up, in detail, for the SPR journal:

  The professor had come from Holland with a bundle containing a piece of clothing from a dead friend, a young man who after one unsuccessful suicide attempt—slashing his own throat but recovering—had shot himself to death the previous year.

  After Mrs. Thompson had slipped into a trance, he handed her the parcel. He had given neither his own name nor the name of the parcel’s owner. As her fingers closed around it, Nelly’s little-girl voice suddenly spoke:

  “I am frightened. I feel as if I want to run away.”

  She set the parcel down and pointed at it.

  “This is a much younger gentleman. Very studified, fond of study.... He’s not a rich gentleman. If he had lived longer he would have had more.” He was worried about money, depressed, and headachy.

  All this was true, according to the professor from Holland. But it wasn’t enough: “You have not told me the principal thing about this man.”

  “The principal thing is his sudden death.... It frightens me. Everybody was frightened.”

  She described the dead man, that he loved the outdoors, liked to hunt, and wore a round hat with a cord on it. All true again.

  And then:

  “I can’t see any blood about this gentleman, but a horrible sore place: somebody wiped it all up. It looks black.”

  She was talking about the bullet hole. She described the cloth that had been put over his head when he was found dead. But it was the throat slashing that the spirit guide stayed fixed on.

  “When any people want to kill themselves, he goes behind them. He stops them from cutting their throats. He says, ‘Don’t do that: you will wake up and find yourselves in another world haunted with the facts, and that’s a greater punishment.”’

  When Mrs. Thompson woke up, she complained bitterly of the taste of chloroform in her mouth. Myers’s friend told him later that the chemical had been used in the treatment of the young man’s slashed neck.

  “My first sittings with Mrs. Thompson were in no way remarkable,” Myers wrote to James in the fall of 1899. “There was little intimacy in the communications and Mrs. Thompson, as usual, came to herself with no recollection of the experience of the trance-state.

  “But one day little Nelly announced the approach of a spirit ‘almost as bright as God’—brighter & higher, at any rate, than any spirit whom she had thus far seen. That spirit with great difficulty descended into possession of the sensitive’s organism—& spoke words which left no doubt of her identity.”

  Myers would not repeat the words—they were too private and too precious. He would not write the name of the spirit, although he knew that James would guess her identity. “May I not feel that this adoration has received its sanction, & that I am veritably in relation with a spirit who can hear & answer my prayer?”

  He could almost hear Annie Marshall calling him. He found mostly joy in that, and a little fear as well. That shining spirit wanted him closer, it seemed, very much closer. Mrs. Thompson had written it down carefully, a promise that Myers would be reunited with his long-dead Annie—and soon—just on the other side of the dawning twentieth century.

  10

  A PROPHECY OF DEATH

  THE NEW CENTURY came in like sounding brass—a roar in the blood, a clatter in the ears, a triumphant drumbeat of progress. With the calendar turn to the 1900s, overseas phone calls arrived, along with double-sided phonograph records and Kodak’s everyman camera, the one-dollar Brownie. German physicists introduced the idea of quantum theory; Freud published his revolutionary book The Interpretation of Dreams; the Zeppelin airship sailed through its first graceful test flight. And people hungered for news of more; in New York City alone, twenty-nine newspapers were hawked on street corners daily.

  The twentieth-century personality was bright, loud, exhilarating, and, to fifty-eight-year-old William James, exhausting. He’d long fretted about his health, and now he felt depressingly old, a fragile man in robust times. Following a hiking vacation in the Adirondacks, he’d developed symptoms of heart disease. He could walk only a few feet before pain seared through his chest. On the recommendation of doctors—and given a new sabbatical leave by Harvard—James decided to seek medical treatment in Europe. Accompanied by his wife and daughter, he sailed from Boston in June 1900. Despite treatment at a renowned German spa, followed by bed rest at his brother’s home in England, James could not seem to recover.

  Fred Myers also was stubbornly ill. He’d emerged from a nasty bout with influenza only to baffle his physician with a persistent lethargy. Myers didn’t have time to be sick, he told his doctors. He was writing a book on the subliminal self; one he hoped would forge a link between psychical and traditional research. He wanted to get back to it, if he could just find strength to put pen to paper.

  Charles Richet, ever a generous friend, invited both the Jameses and the Myerses to make use of his chateau at Carquerainne, where he thought both men might benefit from the gentle climate of the French Riviera. He assured them that sunshine and sea breezes had been known to cure the most troublesome illness. The patients could recuperate together, Richet pointed out, and Myers could return to his writing as he grew stronger.

  Myers felt a surge of enthusiasm at the prospect. While in France, he hoped to invite Rosina Thompson to conduct a few sittings. He liked the idea of getting James’s opinion of this young medium. It might give him some perspective on her warning that death drew near. Myers sometimes thought that he could hear it closing in, the soft beat of win
gs, the approach of the angel of death, stirring the air behind him.

  THE FRUSTRATING, fantastical Eusapia Palladino had risen from the ashes of her experiences with the SPR, thanks to Richet’s continued championship. Again, she held court as the dominant medium on the European continent.

  More than ever, she presented as an extraordinary specimen—uninhibited, tempestuous, erotic—a vision far removed from the sedate ways of the academic corridor, the neatly controlled setting of the laboratory.

  Not only did Eusapia come out of trances charged with sexual energy, she sometimes seemed to shudder with pleasure while entranced. She claimed that, on occasion, the spirits brought her an invisible lover. A sly smile played across her face as she described, rather graphically, their encounters. She seemed to make the very air sparkle—and not just with figurative erotic energy. During one séance in Genoa, lights glittered overhead like dancing fireflies. One light settled on the palm of an observer, a German engineer; it was cool on his skin, he said, glinted briefly, and vanished even as he closed his hand about it.

  The engineer—like physiologists, psychologists, and others from conventional academia—attended Eusapia’s performances because Charles Richet had made curiosity about her permissible. Richet lent legitimacy to the Italian medium—much as William James’s reputation had given Leonora Piper special status. His colleagues might deplore his interest in the supernatural, but geniuses were allowed their peculiarities, and Richet was a brilliant researcher.

  His ongoing studies of the immune system were a case in point. The innovative French scientist would eventually find it necessary to invent a word for the allergic reactions that he had begun to study. He called the response “anaphylaxis,” from the Greek words ana, “the opposite of,” and phylaxis, “protection,” describing a state in which an organism becomes oversensitized.