by Deborah Blum
Since he was already a known critic, Carrington registered at his Lily Dale hotel under the name Charles Henderson. To his surprise and amusement, he discovered that the mediums of Lily Dale specialized in old-fashioned performances—slate writing, cabinets, and materializing spirits—which told him to set his expectations very low.
In short order, Carrington caught one medium busily switching slates, another smuggling confederates into a cabinet. His favorite moment—as reported in the New York Times—occurred when the lights accidentally came on during one cabinet seance, and a young female spirit, “instead of melting away,” darted panic-stricken, gauzy skirts flying, back into the cabinet.
Hyslop’s complaint was that the newspapers seemed more fascinated by the scams than by the excellent investigation. The Times headlined Carrington’s report “Ingenious Frauds at Lily Dale Séances.” He wished it had been presented as “Brilliant Investigation by Psychical Researchers.”
PORING OVER THE cross-correspondence scripts, Nora’s assistant at the SPR, a Newnham College graduate named Alice Johnson, suddenly remembered a peculiar letter received from India a few months earlier.
The unexpected correspondence came from Alice Kipling Fleming, a sister of writer Rudyard Kipling and a longtime secretive psychic. For years, Mrs. Fleming, the wife of a British army officer, had been troubled by an uneasy sense of the occult. She did her best to keep her feelings secret, though, because her family disliked the subject.
“It puzzles me a little,” Mrs. Fleming wrote to Miss Johnson, “that with no desire to consider myself exceptional I do sometimes see, hear, feel or otherwise become conscious of beings and influences that are not patent to all. Is this a frame of mind to be checked, permitted or encouraged? I should like so much to know. My own people hate what they call ‘uncanniness’ and I am obliged to hide from them the keen interest I cannot help feeling in psychic matters.”
Mrs. Fleming had read Myers’s book Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, and it had inspired her to begin surreptitiously experimenting. After a recent afternoon of automatic writing, she’d found some lines that concluded with the signature “Myers.” They included some remarkably specific direction to send the text to Mrs. Verrall in Cambridge.
Mrs. Fleming didn’t know Mrs. Verrall, didn’t know if the directions were real, doubted whether any part of the message was authentic—but it was precise enough to make her feel that she should do something. She decided to hand off her scripts to the SPR: “Will you forgive me for troubling you with the writing? I do not like to suppress it as it gave me the impression of someone very anxious to establish communication, but with not much power to do it ...” If they did choose to use her work, Alice Fleming asked Miss Johnson and her friends to protect her by using a false name. They did. In SPR publications, she was known only as Mrs. Holland.
When she took a second look at the scripts from India, Miss Johnson found that the so-called Myers had given Mrs. Fleming a near perfect description of rooms in Mrs. Verrall’s house. But even more curiously, she’d written other details that suggested that Mrs. Fleming had unwittingly been pulled into their cross-correspondence experiments.
ON APRIL 17, 1907, Mrs. Piper suddenly began fumbling for the Greek word for death. “Sanatos,” she wrote, haltingly. “Tanatos.” Then several days later, it came out right: “Thanatos, thanatos, thanatos.”
Death, death, death.
One day earlier, Mrs. Fleming had mailed a script from India that read in part, “Maurice, Morris, Mors.” The last was Latin for death; it seemed to Miss Johnson that their India correspondent was reaching for the counterpart to Mrs. Piper’s thrice-times death. And Mrs. Fleming continued, “And with that the shadow of death fell upon him and his soul departed out of his limbs.”
A week later, Mrs. Verrall wrote, “Pallida mors” (Pale death), and then, “Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fails and I am ready to depart.”
THE CROSS-CORRESPONDENCE experiments filled hundreds of pages. Not all connected so neatly; not all even made sense. But enough did; enough of those flares of similarity brightened the pages that the investigators saw only two meaningful choices. They must either accept a pattern of exceptional coincidences or accept that they were reading mental messages sent and received by both the living and the dead.
Almost all the psychical researchers reached the latter conclusion. They wished, of course, that the spirits could do a better job of getting their precise message across, that the results would be more exact, that the proof would be more convincing to their critics. They were told, as the correspondence continued, that the spirits wished, in turn, that their human contacts would do a better job as well.
“Back in the old despondency,” read one passage, taken down by Alice Fleming and signed “Edmund Gurney.” “Why don’t you write daily? You seem to form habits only to break them.”
Mrs. Fleming told Alice Johnson that the complaint spilled out after she had been too busy to spare time for automatic writing. “If you don’t care to try every day for a short time, better drop it all together. It’s like making appointments and not keeping them,” the Gurney message continued. “You endanger your own powers of sensitiveness and annoy us bitterly.”
Some of the messages signed by Myers seethed with frustration: “Yet another attempt to run the blockade—to strive to get a message through—how can I make your hand docile enough—how can I convince them?
“The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulties of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass—which blurs sight and deadens sound—dictating feebly—to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary.
“A terrible feeling of impotence burdens me.”
WILLIAM JAMES WAS a retired professor now, having taught his last class at Harvard in January 1907. At the age of sixty-five, he seemed noticeably thinner and grayer, but he assured his many well wishers that he planned only to slow down a little, to put more time into his work as a philosopher.
Of course, James also spent many of his newly liberated hours in the company of the self-proclaimed spirit of Richard Hodgson. His desk stood stacked with piles of transcripts, records of the sittings held before Mrs. Piper left for England to do the cross-correspondence work.
He was sifting, analyzing, fuming: “It means much more labor than one would suppose, and very little result,” he wrote to his brother, Henry. “I wish that I had never undertaken it.”
Encounters with the Hodgson control veered between a presence so real that James remembered breaking out in a chill during the sitting and, at the other extreme, tedious hours with what appeared to be some peculiar creation derived from Mrs. Piper’s interpretation of the masculine personality.
The Hodgson control tended to announce himself with the unfamiliar heartiness of a campaigning politician, exclaiming, “Well, well, well! I am Hodgson. Delighted to see you. How is everything? First rate?”
Hodgson had never talked like that in his life.
Yet the glad-handing usually gave way to a familiar friendliness, as if the ghost—if it was such—had to pull free from Mrs. Piper before emerging as himself.
The spirit Hodgson teased his old close friends, turned quiet and serious with those he knew less well. One woman had told James that she and R.H. “were such good friends that he was saucy toward her, and teased her most of the time,” which was exactly as the control treated her, “absolutely characteristic and as he was in life.”
Another former friend left his sitting feeling dizzy and shaken. After the irritating greeting period “came words of kindness which were too intimate and personal to be recorded, but which left me so deeply moved... it had seemed as though he had in all, reality been there and speaking to me.”
James was determined to be as ruthless an investigator as Dick Hodgson had ever been. Emotional responses were all very well, but they weren’t facts. And facts didn’t count until they’d been dissected into piece
s and every fragment examined.
In one sitting, the Hodgson personality had asked a friend to destroy some letters written to a woman and hidden in his desk. “Look for my letters stamped from Chicago. I wouldn’t have them get out for the world.”
Unable to find the letters, which had apparently been shipped to England already, James had demanded further information about the woman in question. Came the response: “There was a time when I greatly cared for her and I did not wish it known in the ears of others. I think she can corroborate this. I am getting hazy. I must leave.”
When he returned, the spirit Hodgson added another detail. The last time he’d seen the woman, “I proposed marriage to her, but she refused me.”
James had never heard a word of this from Hodgson when alive. He doubted the claim. Nevertheless, he wrote to the woman in question, receiving an answer that he hadn’t expected: “Regarding the utterances of Mrs. Piper, I have no difficulty in telling you the circumstances on which she may have founded her communications. Years ago, Mr. H asked me to marry him, and some letters were exchanged between us which he may have kept.”
Holding her letter, James felt a leap of euphoria. In this secretive part of Hodgson’s life, it seemed possible to demonstrate “the return of a ‘spirit,’ proven by extremely private knowledge.” The trick, of course, was in the privacy of the knowledge. Carrying through with his resolve to investigate thoroughly, he interviewed a dozen of Hodgson’s friends. None knew of the relationship, but one did tell him that Hodgson occasionally consulted with Mrs. Piper’s Rector on his private life. So there was a possibility, admittedly slim, that Mrs. Piper knew about the hidden letters and the failed proposal. She showed no signs of knowledge, but perhaps it was locked away in a “trance memory.” On that slim possibility—and he knew some would consider it slim to the point of being meaningless—James found he could not quite declare for proof of spirit communication. He admitted, though, that by such standards one might never find acceptable proof. “It would be sad indeed if this undecided verdict will be all I can reach after so many years,” he wrote to Flournoy.
WITH JOHN PIDDINGTON consumed by the cross-correspondence experiments, many of the SPR’s other endeavors fell to Everard Feilding, a forty-year-old aristocrat with a quick intelligence, an irrepressible sense of humor, a love of odd causes, and—since the drowning death of his twin brother in 1906—a serious interest in the possibility of survival after death.
Feilding had found his Christian faith shaken by the tragedy, the consolations of his church unconvincing. The alternative offered by modern science—German biologist Ernst Haeckel ascribed the notion of soul to “plasma movements in the ganglion cells”—struck him as even less sustaining. With clergy decrying science and scientists denying religion, Feilding had turned to psychical research as the last hope for a man of rational faith. At least, he felt, this was a group trying to make some sense of the world, displaying prejudice against neither flesh nor spirit.
Despite that underlying seriousness of purpose, Feilding sincerely enjoyed the comedy that seemed ever to color psychical research. In shredding the reputation of a physical medium working in London, he wrote, “He promises good conditions, and gives them; so good, in fact, that his fraud is perfectly obvious. It is though having told you that a spirit would appear in full daylight from the next room, I presently were to emerge thence, dressed in a white sheet and a mask, and say I was your grandfather.”
Feilding admitted to having a wonderful time questioning the medium’s manifested spirits, even pretending to recognize them:
“What! Sidney Parry!”
(It was really quite like him but Sidney Parry isn’t dead.)
Great emotion and assent.
A few other words from me, ending with, “But my dear fellow! When did you pass over?”
The spirit, Feilding reported to his colleagues, fled the room. He’d envied the muscular, energetic nature of its stride.
He’d seen nothing to convince him that spirits existed or that mediums could contact them. But the theater was so good, the fraud so entertaining, that Feilding couldn’t persuade himself to abandon it.
CHARLES RICHET HAD renewed his request to Nora Sidgwick that the SPR take another look at Eusapia Palladino. Nora kept repeating that she wanted no further contact with the grubby and distasteful Eusapia. The British psychical researchers were busy with the cross-correspondence studies, which Nora thought far more promising than the parlor trickery of levitating tables.
But she liked Richet and admired his persistence. Neither Richard Hodgson nor her husband was there to dissuade her. Perhaps, she thought, it wouldn’t hurt to take one more look. And in that case, Nora thought, the irrepressible Everard Feilding was just the man for the job.
Feilding—after a strenuous discussion about investigations that wasted one’s time—agreed to visit the notorious Eusapia. But he demanded reinforcements for his trip to Naples: a talented amateur magician named Wortley Baggally and the skeptical investigator Hereward Carrington. The visit was scheduled to begin in late November 1908. None of the three rejoiced in the mission.
Baggally had agreed to go only because Feilding was a friend, but he insisted on announcing in advance that he believed Eusapia to be a fraud. Carrington was depressed by the whole assignment; he had “never seen anything that he was unable to account for by trickery,” and he usually finished such assignments convinced that he was a better conjurer than the person under investigation. In turn, Feilding had made it clear to Nora Sidgwick and to Oliver Lodge that he would do the job, but he expected little more than the usual clumsy deceit—and perhaps a few good laughs.
Resentfully, the three investigators planned their campaign. They set up camp in the small Hotel Victoria in Naples, taking adjoining rooms so they could stand watch together. They decided to use Feilding’s room for the tests and to prepare it themselves.
First, they hung four bare lightbulbs from the ceiling, all clustered above the chair they had designated for Eusapia. Two of the bulbs burned brilliantly, and the others shed a softer light. The combined effect was of sitting under a small sun.
Eusapia meekly accepted their conditions, making only two requests, that the preparations include a small wooden table and that a pair of curtains be hung across a corner. They could procure them, or she would lend her own. After talking it over, they decided to use her curtains and table. It would give them an early chance to catch her cheating. But the curtains turned out to be thin, nearly transparent black cashmere, and the table a rimless thing of fir wood, about two and a half feet tall, with a plain circular top. They hung the curtains across a corner of the room, to simulate a cabinet.
She asked them to provide some objects that the “spirits” might use in play. Those they bought themselves: a pair of tambourines, a guitar, a toy trumpet, a tin whistle, a toy piano, and a china tea set. Each day, they would hide different objects behind the curtains, changing them without notice.
Feilding admitted that some might criticize these arrangements as too obliging, that they should have insisted on novel effects, seances without her usual curtains and levitating objects. His answer was that they wanted to study Eusapia in standard conditions.
When they were finally ready, two of them stayed in the room to keep guard; another went down to the hotel lobby to meet her, making sure that she entered the test room alone.
Some mornings, Eusapia arrived apparently uninterested. She would rather gossip, rattle away until she “had tired herself out with her own conversation.” Eventually she would begin to yawn. This was a favorable symptom, Feilding said, “and when the yawns were followed by enormous and amazing hiccoughs, we knew it was time to look out, as this was the signal for her falling into a state of trance.”
The next day she might stomp silently into the room and tumble into trance, complaining of fatigue. On those days, they usually sat with nothing to watch but the minutes ticking away. They kept notes anyway—good day or bad—
for eleven sittings, each man recording his own impressions, tracking who was holding her hands, her feet, her knees, who was above the table, who was below it.
The curious thing, Feilding noted, was that they got some of their best effects when they were holding tightest. Not that she didn’t often try to wiggle away, especially on her bad days. But if they weren’t sure of her, they simply wrote off the results.
On good days, though, they weren’t sure what to write off.
With all the lights blazing, with Carrington gripping her hands and Baggally draped across her feet, the little table floated two feet off the ground and hung there. “No precautions we took hindered [the levitations] in the slightest,” the investigators reported. “She had no hooks, and we could never discern the slightest movement of her hands and knees. We very often had our free hands on her knees, while her feet were controlled either by our feet or by one of us under the table, and were generally away from the [levitating] table legs, a clear space being discernible between her and the table.”
The curtains blew toward them when she stretched out her hand, swirling like smoke: “There was no attachment to her hand as we constantly verified by passing our hands between her and the curtain. Nor would any attachment produce the same effect, as the curtain was so thin that the point of attachment of any string would have been seen.”
Lights glimmered overhead: a steady glowing turquoise, a yellow streak, a “small, sparking light like the spark between the poles of a battery.” Invisible objects solidified in the air, poking and prodding the researchers. Sometimes they formed into “more or less indescribable objects; white things that looked like handfuls of tow [fibers of flax], stalk-like bodies which extended themselves over our table, shadowy things like faces with large features, as though made of cobweb.”