The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [109]
Certainly, he and his fellow investigators didn’t understand it. And from the vantage point of his Boston office, Ochorowicz wrote, Hodgson couldn’t possibly understand it either.
Faced with such divisiveness in the ranks, bombarded by angry and opposite opinions, Henry Sidgwick made a judicial decision. The investigators would simply start over.
This time, they would test Eusapia on their terrain. The British SPR decided to bring the Italian medium to England, as they had with Mrs. Piper. Further, they would train for her visit. They began practice sittings at the Myers’s house in Cambridge, trying different ways of holding hands and feet. Myers was particularly impressed—and secretly amused—by Henry Sidgwick’s newfound skill for dropping to the floor, his white beard trailing over the carpet, while he anchored Nora’s feet in place.
Hodgson wasn’t impressed all. He fired off an immediate demand that they bring him to England as well. He didn’t mean to be rude, but he was sure that without him they would get it wrong again.
EUSAPIA HATED CAMBRIDGE.
Everything was cold—the climate, even in this so-called summer of 1895, the oh-so-polite conversation, and the self-contained British personalities. She was a warm-blooded woman, hot in nature. In middle age, she was discovering that the occult could really steam her up.
She tended to wake from trances hot, sweaty, and, well, aroused. Several times, she’d tried climbing into the laps of the male sitters at the table. In England, the men had a distressing tendency to stand up in response, rather than take advantage of the opportunity.
They wanted her to be comfortable so that she would be in a receptive state of mind for the seances. Evie Myers took Eusapia shopping, allowed her to cook Italian meals in their kitchen, listened smiling to all the medium’s chatter, although Evie herself spoke only a few words of Italian and had no idea what Eusapia was talking about. Evie also photographed the stubby Eusapia, who demanded to be draped in Sidgwick’s austere academic cap and gown.
“Sidgwick has to flirt with her,” Myers wrote to James, but he begged James to keep that part a secret. “This is not for Philistine ears.” Nora, serene as ever, came by regularly to translate for Evie and to write letters home in Italian for Eusapia, who had never learned to write.
The Myerses’ eight-year-old son, Leo, was recruited to play games of croquet with the medium. She enjoyed it, standing on the smooth green lawn, catching pale rays of northern sunlight, slamming around the bright-colored balls. But Leo complained to his parents that she cheated every time.
Nevertheless, Eusapia fell into an ill-tempered sulk, which carried over into the sittings. Exhibiting an indifference toward the whole enterprise, she refused to be tied in place, sometimes wouldn’t allow her feet to be held, yanked her hands away from confining grips. Little happened. Once or twice a table tipped. A few trinkets skittered across a mantel.
The most interesting result occurred during a visit from Lord Rayleigh, who had brought with him a friend and fellow physicist, J. J. Thomson. The tall thin Thomson and shorter, stockier Lord Rayleigh made a remarkably good pair of observers. Both men would win Nobel Prizes in physics within the following decade, Rayleigh for his work in atmospheric chemistry and Thomson for his elucidation of atomic structure.
At this moment in Cambridge, though, they were sitting in the Myerses’ library, watching Eusapia with ironic detachment. As they sat, suddenly the curtains billowed out before a closed window. Thomson went over to measure; the fabric had blown out two and one-half feet, by his calculation. The medium sat some feet away, eyes shut, a faint frown on her face.
Rayleigh walked over and put his hands against the