The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [117]
As he had twenty years before, in his first paper on telepathy, Barrett concluded his report for the SPR with a recommendation. Here was a puzzle, he wrote, toward whose solution a scientific investigation might serve a useful purpose.
RICHARD HODGSON HAD also been thinking over innate abilities, trying to put into perspective the mind of a medium and what it could—and couldn’t—accomplish. Surprising himself and his colleagues, Hodgson announced that he’d been mistaken in calling G.P merely a trance personality of Leonora Piper. After sittings with 130 different visitors, he’d been persuaded of the impossible—that the personality in the room was indeed a spirit, proof that his friend lived on.
Out of that long line of visitors, only twenty or so were friends of the late George Pellew. The rest were strangers, brought in to muddle the picture. All were presented without a clue as to name or background. Yet G.P. had effortlessly sorted through this parade, greeting all his old friends by name except one, a girl who was now eighteen and had been only ten when he met her. She had changed, G.P. told her finally, adding rather rudely that he wondered if she still played the violin as badly as she had as a child. As Hodgson reported, not once in the years between 1892 and 1897 did “G.P” ever confuse a stranger for a friend of George Pellew—or vice versa.
Hodgson found telepathy an inadequate explanation; it could hardly be supposed that all of G.P’s friends happened to be gifted telepathic agents, capable of sharing their thoughts with the medium. Sometimes G.P. talked accurately about friends not in attendance, some living miles away, making thought transference even more unlikely. Hodgson found support from other sittings as well. For instance, messages from people who had apparently died in mental anguish, such as suicides, were consistently confused, almost desperately so. If Mrs. Piper worked by telepathy to create a mental picture of a person lost to suicide, by reading the minds of friends and acquaintances, there was no reason that it would be garbled compared to all the other mind-reading. Time after time, though, messages from suicides remained muddled, miserable.
By contrast, there continued to be occasional sittings that rendered such breathtakingly clear and personal responses that even an observer given to doubt could not avoid that sense of a spirit in the room. In one such sitting, the parents of a little girl, Katherine (nicknamed Kakie), who had died a few weeks earlier at the age of five, came to visit. They did not identify themselves but brought with them a silver medal and string of buttons that the child had once played with.
A transcription of the sitting read as follows:
Where is Papa? Want Papa. [The father takes from the table a silver medal and hands it to Mrs. Piper] I want this—want to bite it. [She used to do this.] ... I want you to call Dodo [her name for her brother George] . Tell Dodo I am happy. [Puts hands to throat] No sore throat any more. [She had pain and distress of the throat and tongue] ... Papa, want to go wide [ride] horsey [She pleaded this throughout her illness] Every day I go to see horsey. I like that horsey ... Eleanor. I want Eleanor. [Her little sister. She called her much during her last illness.] I want my buttons. Where is Dinah? I want Dinah. [Dinah was an old rag doll, not with us]. I want Bagie [her name for her sister Margaret]. I want to go to Bagie ... I want Bagie ...
It was a shock to