Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [124]
John’s unbridled enthusiasm for knockings and table-turnings led to arguments with his wife. Susanna remained scornful of darkened-room mumbo-jumbo; it offended her respect for reason and restraint. She also shared much of Catharine’s uneasiness about an activity which suggested that God was a sort of celestial doorman, rather than a primal creative force. And she must have found the exchange of family secrets which it often involved most upsetting—she didn’t want the whole of Belleville knowing about her row with Agnes, for instance. When she heard that the spirit of a notorious local philanderer had appeared at a tea and table-moving party soon after his death, she snapped that she was surprised he had even got as far as heaven, since “he had a number of illegitimate children while in this world.” While John watched tables rock and listened to spirits moan on Queen Street, Susanna remained in the stone cottage on the wrong side of town, disgruntled by her husband’s absence. She had always been able to handle physical distance between them, but the psychological separation from her beloved John unnerved her.
Then, early in 1858, an event occurred that dissolved even Susanna’s scepticism. She and John had had “several sharp mental conflicts … which grieved me much,” she explained to Richard Bentley. One evening when John strode off to yet another seance, Susanna stomped upstairs, threw herself into the button-back chair in her bedroom and “wept very bitterly, over what I considered the unpardonable credulity of a man of his strong good sense. As I was sitting alone by a little table …I suddenly laid my right hand upon the table, and feeling very angry in my own mind at all spiritualists, I said tauntingly enough, ‘If there be any truth in this doctrine let the so-called spirits move my hand against my will off from this table.’ You would have laughed to have seen the determined energy with which I held my hand down to the table, expecting the moon that was then shining into the room to leave her bright path in the heavens as soon as that my hand should be lifted from that table. You may therefore guess my surprise, not to say terror, when my hand became paralyzed, and the fingers were slowly wrenched up from the table, and the whole hand lifted and laid down in my lap. Not dropped nor jerked suddenly, but brought forward, as if held in a strong grasp and placed there.”
It is easy today (although perhaps too glib) to explain this phenomenon away as auto-suggestion, and to assume that Susanna’s need to share John’s beliefs and be reunited with her husband overwhelmed her doubts. But for a nineteenth-century woman, it could only have meant that there was a disembodied presence in the room that had grasped her hand. Susanna was shaken. She slowly rose and went downstairs into the empty dining room. She found the “Spiritoscope” that John had invented—a wood-and-brass contraption that allowed spirits to spell out words quickly. Up to then, she had always ridiculed the Spiritoscope and refused to touch it. Now, with nobody looking, she put her hands on it and asked, “Was it a spirit that lifted my hand?” The Spiritoscope spelled out, “Yes.” Susanna asked, “What spirit?” The contraption spelled out “A friend,” and then, “Thomas Harral.” Susanna was amazed; she had no idea whether her old mentor was alive or dead. But soon, through the agency of the Spiritoscope, she was conversing with Harral, who, unknown to her, had died in 1853.
In subsequent nights, with a devoted John looking on, there were further exchanges with the disembodied Harral, and additional ones with another character from Susanna’s past, “my dear friend Thomas Pringle, the abolitionist from whose house I was married,” who had died in 1834. The spirit of Pringle apparently