The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [100]
Thirty-two cases were left, and by Nora’s calculation, that was a big number. At a rate of 1 out of 19,000, they should have seen .0723 instances among the 17,000 surveyed. Instead, they had 32 cases with solid evidence behind them, which was 442.6 times the chance rate of .0723. Hodgson had used the same statistical process to arrive at the American numbers.
Despite that consistency, James worried that the numbers remained unconvincing. He felt dissatisfied with the U.S. census. It lacked the numerical weight of the British one; as he wrote to Nora, “our census has been a terribly slouchy piece of work and comparing it with yours makes me blush throughout.” He blamed himself; he’d paid scant attention to the weight of the stories until late in the research. Only while reading and verifying the reports had he discovered—as Edmund Gurney had done during the work on Phantasms—the compelling pattern they contained. By that time, he confessed to Nora, he had let the correspondence fall in arrears and run out of time to corroborate many of the cases.
James wished they’d been able to round up the 50,000 recommended by Gurney, to overrun their critics with the power of their numbers. But maybe such a coup wasn’t vitally important to the cause. Maybe a single census, no matter how substantial or indisputable, would never win credibility for the SPR. Perhaps it was only the slow and gradual process of survey upon survey, census upon census, which could win over the doubters.
“I never believed and do not now believe that these figures will ever conquer disbelief,” James wrote in a letter to Henry Sidgwick that accompanied the American report. “They are only useful to rebut the dogmatic assurance of the scientists that the death warnings are chance coincidences.” The psychical researchers would conquer disbelief when they could also reveal what those death warnings, those unexpected apparitions, really meant in terms of life and death and Huxley’s unknowable God.
8
THE INVENTION OF ECTOPLASM
THE WINTER OF 1892 howled across the Atlantic coast of North America like an ill-tempered spirit, spitting snow across the landscape. In hard-hit New York, where a seemingly perpetual crystalline haze veiled the air, horses struggled along Fifth Avenue, heads down against the wind, wading through a treacherous mire of slush over ice.
George Pellew, a thirty-two-year-old philosophy student and writer, was among that season’s many victims. He was riding along an icy path in Central Park one bleak February day when his horse lost its footing. Pellew died in the resulting tumbling fall.
Dick Hodgson came down from Boston for the funeral, mourning another friend gone too young. The Australian had been on a lecture visit to New York when he’d met Pellew, an outspoken skeptic on the subject of psychical research. Hodgson enjoyed a good argument, and they’d struck up a friendship, as much because of Pellew’s prickly stance as in spite of it. On his subsequent visits to the city, the pair would meet for beer and talk, occupying a tavern table for hours while they debated immortality and the odds of life after death.
The prospect of floating around after death as some ill-defined energy field or specter seemed to Pellew an unlikely idea, even a ludicrous one. Hodgson had agreed, to a point. He was willing to concede that spirit life was improbable, yes, but not impossible.
A few months before his death, Pellew had made a half-joking promise. If Hodgson was right, Pellew was willing to prove it. If he died first, he would return and “make things lively.” He would make himself so obvious, Pellew threatened cheerfully, that his friends wouldn’t be able to deny him.
Hodgson had laughed.
THE BITTER FEBRUARY gave way to a bitter March. Then, five weeks after the fatal accident in Manhattan, a new voice interrupted one of Mrs. Piper’s trances. The personality identified itself as George Pellew. Soon, and persistently, this new presence would alter the very nature of a Piper sitting.