The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [108]
Nora was then editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. As ever, she was unmoved by emotional appeals. But cold intelligence called to her like a siren song, and Hodgson’s dissection of the Ile Roubaud experiments was both clinical and smart. She published his analysis, unabridged, in the April 1895 edition. She expected to infuriate every person who had been on that island, and frankly, she didn’t care.
Hodgson was ruthlessly to the point: Eusapia behaved like a fraud because she was one. By constantly twitching her hands away and moving them, she could lead two sitters to grab the same hand, freeing her other one. Or she might even trick them into holding each other’s hands. In the dim room they’d allowed her, the investigators couldn’t see what they were holding anyway. Their own less than meticulous records, Hodgson added, contained no proof that they’d effectively prevented her from using such methods. Thus, all their mysterious little stories were meaningless.
Hodgson knew all about medium tricks, and he was happy to share his knowledge in detail: once Eusapia gained even a little mobility, she could levitate tables with secretly attached hooks, move objects, and prod researchers with a collapsible steel rod attached to her knee, all the standard devices of the trade. Those pale hands and projections were probably molded paraffin. She could have rigged the room when they weren’t looking, stringing it with fine twine that would not be visible in the dim light.
And the “inexplicable” wind? Another well-known trick. An inflatable bladder, a balloonlike device that puffed air when compressed. All she had to do was sit on it. As for ectoplasm or ether, please. The very concepts made him want to laugh. Hodgson only wished that his colleagues would start behaving like adult investigators.
As NORA HAD FORESEEN, indignation ran at high tide among the Ile Roubaud investigators. One after another they hurried forward to demolish Hodgson’s case against them.
Richet pointed out that they had searched Palladino, caged her feet, and conducted experiments in light as well as dark. They weren’t so dumb or so blind that they wouldn’t have noticed a rod stretched across the room, Richet said; they probably would have fallen over it when they hurried to investigate a moving object.
Not only that, Myers wrote, Eusapia didn’t wiggle away quite so often as Hodgson implied. Many times they’d had her hands securely locked in theirs. And did Hodgson really. think that Myers wouldn’t notice a hand switch, wouldn’t realize he was suddenly holding Lodge’s “massive, steady, round-nailed hand” instead of Eusapias’s “small, perspiring, quivering, sharp-nailed hand”?
Ochorowicz wrote that Hodgson, not a trained scientist, had missed the point. The most interesting possibility offered by physical mediums such as Eusapia was the rare, occasional hint of a different kind of power, that of telekinesis. Like telepathy, this was a new word, patched together from the Greek words for “far” and “movement.”
After all, Ochorowicz continued, if one medium could extract information from an object—as even Hodgson acknowledged Mrs. Piper seemed able to do—then perhaps another could exert energy on objects, not pulling facts from them but buffeting them with energy, making them move in response.
He cited a particular incident to illustrate that possibility: During one of the sittings, they had wedged Eusapia between Myers and Lodge, shoulders against shoulders, each man gripping her hands. Ochorowicz had then placed himself underneath the table to clasp her feet. A large table, some four feet away, had lifted into the air and turned itself upside down. They’d weighed it afterward. It was a hefty forty-eight pounds, suggesting that a tug on fine threads, had there been any such devices attached, would have accomplished nothing except to snap them.
It was possible, he continued, that Eusapia didn’t know her own